Lonesome Lies Before Us

by Don Lee

  “I had a scholarship to art school once,” Jeanette told her.

  “You did?”

  “I wanted to be a photographer. Documentary photography.”

  “Like Cindy Sherman or Jeff Walls?”

  Jeanette had never heard either name. “I have to go,” she said. “I’m behind schedule. I’ll come back and do your room in an hour and a half.”

  “Do you still take photographs?” Mallory asked.

  “I sold all my camera equipment years ago.”

  “It’s never too late.”

  Jeanette stood up from the dining chair. “We’re just people, you know. We don’t ask for much. Just a good job where we’re treated decently and have some security. We’re just trying to make a living, but it’s hard, harder than you could ever imagine. None of us can afford to be romantics. It’s something you would never understand. One of your handbags could equal someone’s wages for an entire year. All the things you have in your closet and bathroom, staying a week at this hotel, it’s pocket change to you. What could you possibly know about easing anyone’s pain?”

  11. How My Light Is Spent 4:05

  Wednesday afternoon, Yadin and Joe ate quickly. They were carpeting Livingston’s Insurance Services on Sutter Road in town, and they’d staggered their lunch breaks with Esteban and Rodrigo to save time. They sat in desk chairs—ergonomic and nicely padded, with casters and soft rubber arms—in the small parking lot out back, where they had cleared away the contents of the office. As a matter of respect, Joe usually prohibited the crew from lounging on a customer’s furniture, but he had tweaked out his back this morning, and he was stiff and aching.

  “I might take tomorrow off,” Joe said.

  “That bad?” Yadin asked. Joe had never missed a day since he’d begun working for him.

  “Jeanette gave me a gift certificate to Coastside Shiatsu for Christmas. If I can get an appointment, I might go. We’ve just got that little boat job, which should take no time, and the estimate for Mortensen. You can handle that for me, can’t you?”

  “Sure,” Yadin said. “That’d be a good contract.”

  “Maybe, maybe not. He’s fussy. And cheap,” Joe said. “I told you if the council votes to outsource, I’ll need to lay someone off. I decided it’ll be Rodrigo. We can make a go of it as a three-man crew. If we get bigger jobs, we can call him in as a temp or find someone else.”

  “Rodrigo has a family.”

  “So does Esteban.”

  “Adelina might be losing her job at New Harvest.”

  “It’s fucked, having to let either of them go, but I don’t have a choice.”

  Joe was eating from a bento box identical to Yadin’s. Jeanette had given the boxes to both men as birthday presents, years apart. Today, Joe’s was sectioned off with bite-sized pieces of boneless fried chicken, cucumber salad, radishes, and rice. No complaints or requests to trade so far this week. He had a stockpile of Jeanette’s prepared meals remaining.

  “Last time I pulled my back,” Joe said to Yadin, “I got an MRI, and the doctor told me I’ve got a condition, a degenerative disc.”

  “When was this?” Yadin asked. “You didn’t say anything.”

  “I haven’t said anything to anyone, not even Jeanette. I was hoping it’d just go away.”

  “Can you do PT for it?”

  “Eventually I’m going to have to stop working altogether,” Joe said.

  “What would you do then?” Yadin asked, feeling awful for Joe. At the same time, he tried to quell his own distress. He assumed Joe would shut down Wall to Wall, and he would lose his job. Then he would never have the money for his album, refi or no refi.

  Joe told him about Julie being pregnant, moving to San Diego, building an addition for Julie and Andy, maybe getting a dog, and leaving Wall to Wall to Yadin if he and Jeanette were to get engaged.

  “You’re serious?” Yadin said.

  “This is a year down the line I’m talking about, not right away. Don’t put me in the grave yet.”

  “I don’t know what to say, Joe. I’m honored.”

  “You’ve been first-rate on the job. You’ve done good. You turned your life around, got out of debt, paid me back. That took a lot of work, a lot of character.”

  “You talked to Jeanette about this?” Yadin asked.

  “Couple of days ago.”

  “What’d she say?”

  “I guess I caught her a little off-guard, but she came around to the idea.”

  “She did?” That was before, of course, Jeanette had learned about Mallory and the album and Yadin’s other assorted dissemblances. He was relieved to have confessed everything to her, finally, but afterward he had not done what she had demanded, and he didn’t know if this meant now that he and Jeanette were no longer a couple.

  “You’ve thought of it, haven’t you?” Joe said. “Getting married to her?”

  “To tell you the truth, Joe, I’ve never gotten the sense she wanted more—you know, with us. It’s never felt like she’s wanted to change the routine we have, or that she’s capable of doing anything different. That’s why I’m surprised to hear you say she came around.”

  “I know she comes off as cold,” Joe said. “She had a lot of life in her, a fire under her, when she was a kid. I don’t know where that went.”

  “Did you ever meet Étienne?” Yadin asked.

  “Why would I have ever met him?”

  “Not even after they got engaged?”

  “What are you talking about?” Joe asked. “They were never engaged. It was a fling. He was some sort of Don Juan or something, a slick little douchebag, but she let herself get carried away and got knocked up by him. She told you they were engaged?”

  Yadin was completely flummoxed. Why had Jeanette lied to him about this?

  After work that evening, Yadin and Mallory reconvened at his house, and she asked him, “Have you talked to Jeanette? Are things okay between you two?”

  “I haven’t called her yet,” he said. He had been hoping to avoid another confrontation. Now he was at sea. At least his lies had been lies of omission. Hers had been fabrications, intentionally meant to mislead him. But for what purpose? To make herself appear more sympathetic, more tragic?

  “Don’t you think you should talk to her?” Mallory asked. “I think you should.”

  “I will,” Yadin said. “But first we’ve got work to do.”

  They had been making good progress yesterday until Jeanette appeared. Tonight, they would have to rush through the two remaining cuts. Mallory needed to return to L.A. tomorrow for the callback on a commercial she had postponed (“A pill for gas and bloating. Can you believe it’s come to that?”), and they wouldn’t have any more time.

  During this session, Yadin was more receptive to Mallory’s ideas: changing the key and tempo in “Step Away,” taking out the bridge and repeating the chorus in “All the Way from There to Here.” He let her use a tambourine and an egg shaker occasionally for a little percussion, and they juked through the songs, reacting to each other, playing off of each other. They worked swiftly and without respite, and before he knew it, they were done.

  They listened to playbacks of all four songs, and then Yadin took off his headphones. “They’re perfect,” he said.

  “They’re really pretty good, aren’t they?” Mallory said.

  “It’s the album we should have made in Raleigh,” he told her. They nodded at each other, and her eyes welled.

  At the Centurion two days ago, what he had been most afraid of was that she wouldn’t remember him, that she would look at Yadin with only the vaguest of recognitions, thinking him somewhat familiar yet impalpable, speculat ing they might have gone to high school together. And even after he told her his name and invoked Raleigh, and Whisper Creek, and the Siesta Club, and the ten months that they had lived together and had been lovers, maybe she would still barely recall that time, just a bedimmed haze of youthful escapades, nothing momentous, certainly nothing warranting a
place of prominence in the screed of her life. She would regard Yadin with curiosity and pity and even a little fear—sort of a weirdo, wasn’t he, that he had hung on to something so fleeting and minuscule, when really it had just been a fling, she had forgotten, actually, that they had once almost signed a little record deal together, what sort of music had they played again?

  But she had not forgotten. She did remember.

  “Having you on these tracks,” he said to her, “the changes you suggested, it’s made such a difference, Mallory. I want you to have co-writer credit on them.”

  “No, you don’t have to do that.”

  “I want to.”

  She drank her Pappy Van Winkle, then said, “Maybe you won’t after you hear what I’ve done.”

  “What have you done?”

  “The songs we cut yesterday, I emailed MP3s of them to Ronnie, my music manager. He thinks we could get a record deal.”

  Yadin parsed through this, hoping he had misheard her, though he was sure that he had not. “How many times do I have to say this? I’m not interested.”

  “He set up a meeting for us in L.A. with the head of A&R at Mirrorwood, a new unit of MCA Nashville. He loves what he’s heard. It’s for the day after tomorrow. Can you make it down? It needs to be Friday because he’s taking the red-eye to Berlin for a festival.”

  Yadin was flabbergasted. “You are unbelievable. You arrange all this without consulting me? You make a few phone calls, and, just like that, an A&R meeting’s scheduled?”

  “The truth is,” Mallory said, “we’ve been talking to Mirrorwood for a while about doing something with them. We just hadn’t come up with the right material yet.”

  He understood now why she had come to the cottage on Monday, her curiosity about the album. It’d had nothing to do with him. It’d been in search of material. It didn’t escape him, either, that she had said we could get a record deal, not you. Yadin had been about to propose attributing the album to Whisper Creek, but it seemed Mallory was already presuming more prominent billing, if not her name first.

  “I’m not doing this,” he told her.

  “It’s just a meeting. What could it hurt?”

  “You want anything to do with MCA again, after what they did to you?” Yadin asked. “Richard Buckner calls them Music Career Assassins.”

  “Mirrorwood’s different. They’re eclectic,” Mallory said. “Listen to some of their artists. We could get Charlie Peacock or Rick Rubin or maybe T-Bone Burnett to produce. We’d be able to hire A-list session players for a full backing band. Think what this might sound like with lap steel, maybe a Wurlitzer. We could still record analog, like at Sound City Studios on their two-inch reel. Haven’t you always dreamed about the soundboard there?”

  “It’s not going to happen.”

  “This could be your comeback,” Mallory said. “You could be a recording artist again. You wouldn’t have to work as a carpet layer anymore. It could be my comeback, too. I did it all wrong after Raleigh. I made awful choices, terrible compromises, and now I’m remembered as a joke. I hate the person I’ve become. This could be a second chance for both of us. I could be the musician I should have been.”

  “You don’t need me on a record to do that,” Yadin said. He opened the closet door and pulled out a stack of six spiral-bound notebooks, as well as a clear plastic bag of paper scraps and cassettes. “Take whatever you want.”

  “These are all songs?” she asked.

  He had written and recorded dozens of B-sides that he wouldn’t be using on the album. “I’d walk into that meeting, and they’d just see a big ugly dude. The first thing they’d want is make you lead vocal and me backup.”

  “You’re not ugly. You’ve never been ugly.”

  “They’d probably cut me out entirely,” Yadin said.

  “I’d never let them do that.”

  “The industry hasn’t changed that much.”

  She paged through one of the notebooks. “My God, we could do three or four more albums. We could keep going for years.”

  “No,” Yadin said. “This is my last album. These are the last recordings I’ll ever make. I’m never laying down another track. I’m quitting music for good.”

  “Why?” Mallory asked. “Why would you quit when you’re on the cusp of something great?”

  “I’m going deaf,” he told her.

  “What?”

  “I’ve already lost something like thirty percent in my right ear, and the left is catching up fast.”

  “Can’t you just get hearing aids?” she asked.

  He took out his hearing aid from his pocket and placed it on the worktable.

  “But you’ve been hearing me fine without that thing,” Mallory said.

  “It comes and goes.” He told her about Ménière’s disease and described the various symptoms he had endured. “My hearing’s only going to get worse.”

  “There must be something that can be done,” she said. “We’ll get you to better doctors, Ménière’s specialists.”

  “I’ve tried everything.”

  “We’ll take you to Stanford, the Mayo Clinic.”

  “You don’t know what I’ve gone through. I spent years going to doctor after doctor.”

  “There’s still time, though, right?” she asked. “You’re saying three, five years, maybe more. You still have time to make more albums. We could get you custom in-ear monitors. And there might be new medical advances down the road. Even if there aren’t, you could still write songs. Beethoven was deaf. He wrote the Ninth Symphony completely deaf. How could you quit? You love music. It’s your life. You’re a lifer, like me.”

  “I want to stop struggling with this,” Yadin said. “I’m so tired, Mallory. I just want to make peace with it. I want to stop being angry, stop feeling sorry for myself, and just accept it.”

  “You’ve struggled because you’ve had to do it alone,” she said. “Maybe nothing will come out of this meeting. Maybe Mirrorwood will laugh us out of their offices. I’ll admit, it’s a long shot, anything happening. But why not talk to them? What have you got to lose?”

  “I have everything to lose—Jeanette, Joe, my job, being part of their family. When I can’t make music anymore, what will I have? Without them, I’ll have nothing. I don’t know what the hell I’ve been doing. I might have lost Jeanette already.” He needed to make things up to her. He needed, somehow, to earn her trust again.

  “Do you love her?” Mallory asked Yadin.

  “She’s good for me. We’re good for each other.”

  “That’s not much of an answer.”

  “It’s enough of an answer for me.”

  “It’s just one day in L.A.,” she said. “You wouldn’t be committing to anything. At the very least, you might walk out of there with a publishing contract for these other songs. The royalties alone for a couple of them, if they did well for someone, could give you some financial security. They offer you an advance, you could self-release your record. Isn’t that possibility worth one day out of your life?”

  He looked at his notebooks, the scraps of paper, the cassettes. “What time is this meeting?” he asked.

  He didn’t say yes, and he didn’t say no. He told Mallory he would think about it, he’d let her know. It was, in terms of his schedule, doable. He wouldn’t be working on Friday. A customer had postponed a job, and Joe didn’t have anything lined up for them until Monday. Yadin could drive down to L.A., assuming his van could handle the trip, listen to what Mirrorwood had to say, and find out what they would demand of him.

  Thursday morning, he went to the Ambrose Senior Residential Center for the estimate. The director, Everett Mortensen, followed Yadin as he took measurements, writing them down on his clipboard. Mortensen only wanted to redo the carpet in the group exercise room and the TV/computer room.

  “You don’t want the entire ground floor to match?” Yadin asked him.

  “That’s not necessary,” Mortensen said. “A close approximation or coord
ination of colors and patterns would be adequate.”

  The existing carpets were worn, spotted with stains, and smelled of antiseptic. All of them needed to be replaced. Going through the center, Yadin saw residents with walkers, wheelchairs, and electric scooters. No wonder Joe wanted to retire in San Diego and live in a guesthouse on his daughter’s property. Anything to avoid this destiny.

  “I was thinking of a loop pattern,” Mortensen said, flipping through a sample book. “But I don’t know if that would be too distracting. What do you suggest?”

  “Maybe pin dots,” Yadin said. “Stainmaster and Mohawk both have nice pin dot patterns.”

  “Pin dots. Do you have samples for those?”

  Yadin’s cellphone rang. On the screen was a familiar number, the main line for the Community Credit and Housing Program in San Vicente. He excused himself and walked out into the hallway.

  It was the counselor, Joel Hanrahan. “Today’s my last day at CCHP,” he said. “I’m moving back to Boston. But I wanted to let you know I went through your file. I’m afraid a refi’s not remotely plausible for you, as I suspected. The situation’s more untenable than that. The next counselor will explain it to you. I just wanted you to know I did my best to try to figure something out for you. I hope you’ll find a way in the future to release your album.”