by Don Lee
The hiatus, it seemed, had been good for her. She looked healthy, fit, and trim, almost waifish. Yes, like him, she was older now, but her skin was supple and pearlescent, as if it had never seen the sun, and she exuded the sort of luminosity that made it unmistakable she was a celebrity, even in her stretch-polyester golf pants and jacket.
“You came here to play golf?” he asked her. It wasn’t a sport he would have ever predicted for her.
“It’s a terrific layout,” she said. “It could be a championship course.” She had become a bit of a fanatic, she told Yadin, often playing two rounds a day. She had bought a house in Thousand Oaks, just outside L.A., to be next door to Sherwood Country Club, but liked taking vacations to other courses to mix up the routine.
It seemed lonely to Yadin, the idea of Mallory going on these golf trips by herself. “When did you start playing?”
“One of my ex-husbands got me into it. It was the only productive thing to come out of that particular union.”
From tabloid articles, Yadin knew the complete history of her marriages. First had been an actor, who’d been on the receiving end of the woodcarving of the elephant (he’d been an incorrigible cheat). Second had been a singer, whom she met at a Farm Aid benefit concert, where they had shared the stage for “Hallelujah” (that one was actually an annulment, since they were married for only sixteen days). Third had been a venture capitalist (after the actor and singer, she swore off men in the industry). Fourth had been a cable-TV tycoon (according to People magazine, he had been petrified of aging; for fifteen minutes a night, he wore a halo contraption that pulsed electromagnetic waves to his brain in the hopes they would forestall Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s). She had wangled large divorce settlements from the last two men. She would never have to worry about money again.
“You never had children,” Yadin said.
“No,” she said, “just stepchildren,” and he couldn’t tell whether there was remorse in her answer. In Raleigh as a twenty-two-year-old, she had wanted a gaggle of children someday, and Yadin had daydreamed they’d have them together.
She told him she was still on good terms with an ex-stepdaughter who was now a freshman at Kenyon College and an ex-stepson who was in med school at Harvard. The others—younger—never really cared for her.
“And you?” Mallory asked Yadin. “Married? Kids?”
Was there anything freighted in those questions, or were they just two old acquaintances having a casual reunion? It was so very strange, talking to her like this, after obsessing over her for so many years.
“Never married,” he said. “No children.”
“A partner?”
“She works here at the hotel, actually,” he said.
“Really?” Mallory asked. “What does she do?”
He gazed around the restaurant. The Centurion was even more opulent than he had expected, the panorama from their table breathtaking—scorching clear sky, sun glistering the ocean, the blues riotously acute. “She’s in housekeeping.”
“Oh.”
“There’s no shame in it.”
“I didn’t say there was,” Mallory said. “What about you? Are you making enough off your music to . . . ?”
“I think you know the answer to that,” he told her. “I haven’t put out anything new in nine years.”
“I’ve wondered about that. You used to be so prolific.”
“I had some health issues,” he said to Mallory, “then some money issues, and along the way I got dropped by my label.”
“You’re all right now? Your health?” she asked.
“It’s under control. I’m a carpet installer—that’s how I’m making a living these days,” he told Mallory.
“There’s certainly no shame in that,” she said.
“No, there isn’t.”
Their food arrived, his fruit and berries arranged on the plate as artfully as sushi. Mallory pecked at her breakfast, forking very small bites into her mouth, chewing thoroughly and lengthily, setting her utensils down and taking a sip of water before allowing herself another bite.
“It’s called mindful eating,” she said, noticing Yadin’s inquisitive glances. “If you slow down, you’ll consume fewer calories and feel full faster and longer. What sort of diet are you on?”
He recited the things he could no longer eat or do.
“Good God, even to me that seems extreme, and I’ve been on a diet for over twenty years,” she said. “You can’t imagine what it’s like, being scrutinized every minute of the day, every day, everyone feeling they have the right to comment on your weight, your hair, your clothes, every little thing you do and say.”
Of course, Yadin knew that feeling well, believing throughout his music career that he was being eyeballed and judged, becoming self-conscious to the point of reclusion.
“Apparently, though,” Mallory told him, “I’m no longer relevant enough to be scrutinized. I haven’t had a paparazzo follow me in I don’t know how long. It’s an indication of how far I’ve fallen. I’m old news. I can’t even get myself invited to the Pebble Beach Pro-Am. Hardly anyone recognizes me anymore. A few people will think I’m familiar and ask if we went to high school together. That’s what I like about places like this, partly why I go to these posh resorts on golf excursions. Here, I’m still treated like a VIP. You really stopped drinking and doing drugs?”
He nodded.
“Did you go to rehab?” she asked. “Or AA?”
“No.” In truth, it had not been very difficult for Yadin to quit. He had only gotten wasted when he had to perform. Otherwise, he could go weeks without a drink.
“You used to be legendary on show nights,” Mallory said.
“Not in any way that was helpful,” he said.
“Do you remember how much coke we used to do? I miss those days. Everything was so simple then. It was just about having fun and playing music. What we did was pure.”
It had been, to Yadin, magical—the best year of his life.
“Are you working on any new material?” Mallory asked.
He had been waiting all morning for her to inquire, waiting for a propitious moment to hand over his cassette. He just wanted her to listen to the songs and tell him if they were any good, yet it felt like an immense thing to ask of her, fraught with abrasions from their past. “I’m pretty much done with a new album,” he said.
“That’s great. What type of stuff? More electronica? Black metal?”
He was dumbfounded that she knew about his side projects. “You really have been following my career,” he said.
“I still have those tapes somewhere.”
“If you can’t find them, I have stacks of leftovers in my bedroom,” Yadin told her.
They finished eating, and Mallory wanted to take a walk and smoke a cigarette. She asked the waitress for the check, and when it was placed on the table between them, Yadin reached for his wallet, but Mallory waved him off—a quick flick of her fingers—and charged the meal to her room.
Going through the lobby, she stopped by the concierge’s desk and requested a late checkout of an hour or two.
“I’m going to try to get in at least nine more holes before I have to hit the road,” she told Yadin. “Don’t you miss the road? I used to love being on the road.”
The road was glamorous, Yadin thought, when you had a five-star hotel awaiting you at the end of each night.
On the coastal trail, a northwest breeze was ruffling, which made it pesky for Mallory to light her cigarette. He didn’t think smoking was allowed on the trail, which was part of the state park system. A middle-aged couple on the path stared at her belligerently, but they said nothing, and neither did Yadin. One did not cavil to a woman who looked like Mallory.
She began walking south on the trail. “So what is it you’re working on?” she asked. “You’re being so coy.”
“Simple, quiet stuff,” he told her. “No frills, just slow, raw songs.”
“Are you going to look for a
new label?”
“No label’s going to pick me up at this point.”
“I don’t know about that,” Mallory said. “What do your people say?”
“What people?” He kept to her right side as they walked so he could hear her better.
“Well, your manager, for one.”
“He dropped me, too,” Yadin said. “I’m going to self-release the album.”
“Wouldn’t that be risky?”
“I don’t have much choice in the matter.”
He noticed rows of chairs set up before a gazebo on the lawn of the hotel. A wedding? The coastal trail here was wide and paved concrete, winding alongside the sandstone bluffs, and as they went farther along, it became more crowded with joggers and dog walkers. Everyone kept staring at Mallory’s cigarette.
“Don’t sell yourself short,” she said to him. “There are a lot of new indie labels that have come up recently. They might not have much promotional power, but at least they have distribution channels.”
“I’ve made up my mind on this. I’m going to do it myself.”
“What about a producer?” she asked.
“You’re looking at him,” he said.
“Well, where are you going to record the album, then? I’m assuming there’re no studios in this town.”
“I put together a studio in my house. I’ve been recording the songs analog on four-track cassette.”
“Quaint.” Mallory tossed the butt of her cigarette, which was still lit, and Yadin watched it wobble midair before the wind took it over the edge of the bluff. “You know, there’s software for these things now,” she said. “You should hear what kids are doing these days on their laptops. Never mind laptops—their phones.”
He peered down the bluff, expecting the tinder of dry grass to be ablaze.
“What about backing instruments?” she asked. “Are you going to hire session players to lay down the rest of the arrangements?”
The bankruptcy trustee had only allowed Yadin to keep a small portion of his leftover musical gear, cheaper odds and ends, as tools-of-the-trade exemptions. A little over three weeks ago, when he decided to record the new songs, he spent a frenzied weekend visiting pawnshops and scouring eBay and Craigslist, driving all over the Peninsula and Bay Area to replace his instruments and equipment; sometimes people were willing to give him stuff for free if he just came and got it. He thought he could play everything on the album himself. He was okay on keyboards, he could keep time on snare drum, he was decent on bass. Yet, in the end, he decided against having any backing tracks and didn’t use the majority of the gear he’d acquired—a waste of money that would appall Jeanette if she knew.
“No arrangements,” he told Mallory. “It’s just me—solo acoustic guitar and vocals, two mics, that’s it. Straight to tape, live, no overdubs.”
“I guess that’s what you’ve always wanted, isn’t it?” she said. “Full control. Do everything yourself without having to compromise or listen to anyone.”
“No, that’s not true,” Yadin said, alert to the shift in her tone.
“Isn’t it? Seemed that way to me.”
They returned to the lobby of the hotel, where Mallory picked up a pen and a notepad from the concierge’s desk. “Give me your contact info?” she said to Yadin.
They exchanged addresses, phone numbers, and email. “Will you send me the songs you’ve finished?” Mallory asked. “I’d love to hear them.”
Yadin looked down at her address on the sheet from the notepad. Her handwriting had changed; he remembered it being smaller and narrower. He didn’t know why he was hesitating, why he didn’t simply fish the cassette out of his pocket and hand it over to her, and it occurred to him that maybe her opinion wasn’t what he had been seeking after all, that it wasn’t the real reason he had come. “They still need to be mixed and mastered,” he said.
“I don’t care about that. Send me the raw recordings.”
It didn’t feel right to him anymore. “You’ll have to wait for the finished product.”
“Really?” Mallory said. “I can’t get a sneak peek?”
“No,” he told her.
“But I’m dying to know what you’re doing.”
“You might be the only one,” he said. “But still, you’re going to have to wait.”
“This is very unfair, Yadin. I hate being made to wait.”
“You’ll get over it.”
“Like I had to get over other things?” Mallory asked—that shadow of edginess again. But it seemed to pass quickly, and she said, “I wish we could talk more, but I have to get back to L.A. today.”
“It was wonderful seeing you again, Mallory.”
She hugged him, hooking her arms around his head and bending him down to her height—an old habit of hers that he recalled. She would hang her weight off his neck, tweaking his back more than once.
They released each other for a moment, and then, in front of the concierge, in front of everyone in the lobby, the passersby and staff, Mallory kissed him, a prolonged kiss on the mouth, lips exploratory and on the verge of ardent, and this, too, was viscerally familiar to Yadin.
“It’s funny,” Mallory said after letting him go, “how, after so long, you can still remember the taste of someone’s mouth.”
7. Forgetting Is So Long 5:32
In town, at a flower shop that was open early for Memorial Day, Jeanette bought a premade bouquet of red carnations, white lilies, and blue statice. The arrangement was a little tacky, and the flowers weren’t very fresh, but she didn’t think anyone would mind. The gesture was what mattered. Twenty years ago, her cousin Atticus had been killed in the First Gulf War, and Jeanette had agreed to accompany her father to mark the anniversary with Atticus’s family, with whom she had never gotten along.
From the flower shop, she drove down Main Street past city hall, where she expected to see a banner or sign hanging out front commemorating the town’s veterans, but there was none. Presumably another victim of budget cuts. She had heard that her old office, in which she had spent all those years as the assistant records clerk, had been moved recently to the annex down the block.
Like all cities in California, Rosarita Bay was obliged by law to respond to any and all public requests for documents and information. Most of those records—archived since 1957, when the city had been incorporated—had been handwritten, typewritten, drawn, or printed on paper, and stored in closets and filing cabinets in various municipal buildings. It took hours, often days, and a great deal of guile, to find anything, to answer the esoterica of questions that arose. Jeanette had taken great pride in her ability to track things down, being a sleuth, a detective. She had developed a feel for which person in which department to query and which drawer or file or tub to crack open first. But a new mayor insisted they bring the town’s operations to the modern age and budgeted fifty thousand dollars to have every piece of paper scanned by an outside vendor as a PDF, and for every PDF to be indexed with keywords that could be searched in an electronic management system. Jeanette was trained in using databases and spreadsheets and spent four years working on the project, at the end of which her old position became obsolete.
Joe was waiting for her in the parking lot of Longfellow Elementary School, which was closed for the holiday. He was leaning against his Wall to Wall van, dressed in a suit, the only one he owned. It was black wool, originally purchased for Jeanette’s mother’s funeral, altered several years ago— allowing more room in the waist and chest—for her sister Julie’s wedding.
“Aren’t you going to be hot in that thing?” Jeanette said to him. It was unseasonably warm today.
He shrugged. He had on a pair of sunglasses, wraparound with mirrored lenses, that she had never seen before. “Open,” he said. She pulled the lever to pop her trunk, into which he deposited his mini-cooler. He settled into the front passenger seat, lowering himself gingerly. Clearly he’d aggravated his back again.
“Where’s Yadin?” she asked.
“Beats fuck out of me.”
She tried calling Yadin’s landline, got the answering machine. She rang his cellphone, and he picked up.
“Are you on your way?” she asked Yadin.
“I might be late,” he told her. “I’m having a little van trouble.”
She stowed her phone in her purse and restarted the car.
“What’s up?” Joe asked.
She explained, and added, “He’s going to try to meet up with us in San Bruno.”
“Fat chance of that. Looks like it’s just you and me today, babe.”
For a moment, Jeanette thought about what Franklin had asked her—if Yadin had been canceling plans, failing to show up when he was supposed to, making excuses. Was it at all possible that Yadin was cheating on her with Caroline? Jeanette still could not envision it.
She drove out of the school’s empty parking lot and turned east onto Highway 71. As they began to climb the hill, the sun blinded Jeanette, and she flipped the driver’s-side visor down. Her father didn’t follow suit with the visor on his side. “Those new sunglasses?” she asked him.
“I look cool, don’t I?”
“You have never looked cool in your life.”
“You never knew me when I was young.”
Jeanette had seen photographs. He had been a fetching young man, muscular but not yet barreled. His hair had been quite long then, and he had sported a full beard; he’d favored skintight shirts, hip-hugger jeans with bell-bottoms, and desert boots. In many of her parents’ photos before they got married, her mother, Joanne—or Jo, as she liked to be called—wore a leather headband and a silver pendant of a peace sign.
It had never ceased to amuse her parents, their same-sounding nicknames, Joe and Jo. Whenever someone called out to one of them, they’d chime, “Which one?” and laugh. They gave all their children first names that began with J so everyone would have the same initials.
Jo’s illness and death had changed everything for their family. If she had lived, even just a few more years, maybe Jeremy would not have been reckless enough to land in prison, and maybe Joe would not be drinking himself to sleep every night. Maybe Julie would be closer to her older siblings, and maybe Jeanette would have had a normal life—stopped thinking about Étienne and left town and gone to art school and become a photographer and gotten married and had children and been happy, perhaps with someone like Franklin.