by Don Lee
“Hang on,” Yadin said. “How long will you be there?”
He told Mortensen he would return to the center in an hour and a half. By the time he arrived at CCHP, Hanrahan had already finished packing up his office. He had shaved off his half goatee, and the patch of skin where it had been was raw and pallid.
They sat across Hanrahan’s empty desk from each other. “I got a job offer at Fidelity in their assets management division,” he said. “I guess if you’re going to sell out, you might as well go whole hog.”
“I can’t qualify for refinancing?”
“Look, I’m going to be absolutely candid with you,” Hanrahan said. “Forget a refi or HELOC. There’s no point applying to lenders. You’re much more underwater than I realized. You could ask for a short sale or a deed in lieu of foreclosure, but it would be a waste of time. You didn’t hear this from me—all right, who gives a fuck, I’m out of here in ten minutes—my personal advice is to walk away.”
“What do you mean, walk away?” Yadin asked.
“Just that. Stop making your mortgage payments and walk away from the house,” he told him. “It’ll eventually be foreclosed and auctioned, but it’ll no longer be your problem. There’s no sense working so hard to retain the house, making the monthlies, keeping up with the insurance, property taxes, and maintenance, when you’ll never see any of it back. Ever. You’re just throwing your money away, and it’s money you need.”
Yadin felt his cellphone vibrating in his pants pocket. “That house is my nest egg,” he said. “It’s going to be my retirement.”
“That’s a delusion—always has been. More than anything, it’s been your albatross. What if you get laid off? What if you get sick again? You’re one medical emergency away from having to go back on food stamps.”
“It’s the only thing I have,” Yadin said. “It’s the only property I’ve ever owned. It’s the only thing I have left of my family.”
“It’s brutal, I know,” Hanrahan said, “but you can’t be sentimental about this. Save up and try to start over again in a few years.”
“I can’t start over,” Yadin said. “I barely made it the last time. I can’t do it a second time.”
“I’m sorry. You’re going to have to.”
It had been Joe on the phone, livid in the voicemail he left. Yadin drove back to Rosarita Bay, to the harbor. The two Wall to Wall vans were in the marina parking lot. They had a small job on a powerboat, replacing the carpet on the stair treads and in the salon belowdecks.
Joe was standing beside the boat on the dock. “I cannot fucking believe you bailed on Mortensen like that.”
“I’ll go back right now and talk to him. I’ll fix it,” Yadin said. Joe was wearing a new pair of mirrored sunglasses, and Yadin couldn’t see Joe’s eyes, only his own reflection.
“I already went,” Joe told him. “I practically had to suck his fucking dick. He agreed on the Mohawk pin dot, no thanks to you. Meanwhile, Rodrigo and Esteban were here, waiting for you on the clock. I can’t take a day off without everything going to hell? I was going to hand you the business. What am I to think now, huh? Maybe it’s you I should let go, not Rodrigo.”
“I’m sorry, Joe,” Yadin said. “I fucked up. I’ve had a lot of things on my mind.”
“Too bad your job hasn’t been one of them,” Joe said. “Get out of here. I don’t want to see your fucking face again till Monday.”
From the harbor, Yadin drove to Pismo Beach. Dispirited, he sat on the sand and stared out at the overcast ocean. A handful of surfers in wet suits straddled longboards, loitering for waves, while two standup paddleboarders caught rides on ankle breakers.
In all probability, Mallory had been thinking from the start about using him, appropriating the project and songs for herself. Maybe not consciously, but embedded deep in the back of her head, there might have been little tip-taps of ambition pressing her to commandeer the album. That was why she had brought along a portable recorder—to capture digital files that she could email; not, as she had said, to listen to playbacks during the day to keep in the flow of the songs.
Once Mirrorwood understood that Yadin would not tour or do any promotion, the meeting—at least in regard to him—would be over. But he was amenable to the idea of letting Mallory record his songs for an album of her own. He wouldn’t give her anything off Lonesome Lies Before Us, but he’d let her take her pick of the B-sides. It’d be a fitting conciliation for abandoning her in Raleigh, forsaking their contract with Lost Saloon Records. And maybe he’d get enough of an advance to hang on to his house for the time being, and have cash left over for the self-release. He’d eventually receive royalties, too. If her album did well, the payouts would be much bigger than anything he’d garnered over his entire career.
At the library, he borrowed a pair of earbuds from the front desk and plugged them into one of the computers. He looked up Mirrorwood’s roster of artists, none of whom he recognized (all of them were so young), and lis tened to a few of their songs. It was decent stuff, nothing egregiously poppy, more rock than folk but falling within the genre of alt-country, although the promo copy used the terms “roots-infused” and “Americana-based.”
Caroline was in her office, a tiny room in the back of the library, crowded with books in towering piles. Propped up next to her on a chair were graphs on poster boards of patron visits and usage, presumably for her final presentation to the city council tomorrow night that would determine the library’s fate.
“I need some advice,” he said, standing in the doorway.
“And why not come to me for it?” Caroline said, not looking up from the papers on her desk.
“I was a musician once.”
“I know,” she said. “I’ve listened to your albums.”
“You have?”
She set down her pen. “I was curious, so I asked Lane. . . . Forgive me. He knows how to download music for free, and he got all four of your records for me. I listen to them in my car. They’re quite good.”
“I’ve been going through some things.”
“So you’ve said.”
“My interest in Hopkins was related to it.”
“So I gathered.”
“But maybe it wasn’t so much about religion as it was about my music,” Yadin said. “What you told me last month, that Hopkins thought he’d failed as a poet. Is there more to it?”
She swiveled her chair around to face him at the door. She was wearing black nylons and had a run on her left leg, just above the knee. “Hopkins’s best friend, Robert Bridges, thought he’d thrown his life away, becoming a Jesuit and not pursuing his poetry, not seeking an audience—or facing critics. He may have been right. Maybe Hopkins’s real sin was that he had a gift but didn’t share it with the world because he was too afraid. Or arrogant. He was pretty full of himself. He made a big ceremony of burning his manuscripts in a bonfire. He called it the ‘slaughter of the innocents.’”
“How do we have his poems, then, if he burned them?”
“Bridges kept the ones he mailed to him.”
Yadin wondered if Caroline regretted not finishing her Ph.D., if she believed that being a scholar or professor had been her calling. “Do you think Hopkins would be happy, knowing he’s so respected now, knowing his poems have lasted?”
“Of course. Don’t you aspire to immortality?” Caroline asked. She raised both arms high into the air and shimmied her shoulders, a squirmy stretch that diverted and perturbed Yadin. “Don’t you crave adoration? Who doesn’t?”
“I don’t care about that,” he told her.
“No?” She lowered her arms. “Why do you make music, then?”
“I’m not sure,” he said. “To figure things out for myself, I guess.”
“Isn’t it meaningless, though, if no one else hears it? Isn’t the whole point to connect with someone?”
He remembered after a show once, a woman came up to thank him. She told Yadin that she hadn’t spoken to her father in eight yea
rs, but after listening to “Hard to Say,” a song on Yadin’s second album about his own father, she decided to break the silence and call her father. It was the first time Yadin realized that what he did mattered to someone out there, that he could make a difference, even if it was with just one person, and he felt lucky—lucky he could do what he loved, lucky he could put out albums.
Ross, Whisper Creek’s bass player, lived near Minneapolis, where he worked for a Swiss chemical company that specialized in pesticides and genetically modified seeds. Charlie, their drummer, had won a big online poker tournament once and belonged to an anarchist organization. Yadin had had difficulty tracking down Thorton, their lead guitarist, on the Internet, whenever he tried to check up on his old bandmates. It was because Thorton had become a woman. She was now Theresa, a gender therapist. None of them were playing music anymore.
“You’re writing and singing for communication, aren’t you?” Caroline said to Yadin. “I don’t think it’s meant to be a private activity.”
He had always been awkward and clumsy. In everything, with everyone. Music was the only thing he’d ever been good at, the only thing that could fill the hole that was inside him.
“They can get a little corny and sentimental, your songs,” Caroline told him, “but they give people a few minutes of propinquity.” Before he could ask, she explained, “Close ness, solace. They’ve done that for me, more than once, when I’ve been crying in my car. There’s a lot to be said for that. I used to struggle with the question of theodicy, how to justify God’s goodness, or even His existence, in the face of all the tragedy that befalls us. But I came to believe that such horrible things can only happen if there is a God, if there is a plan for us, because the alternative would be too awful to bear. Otherwise we’d be utterly lost, to think that all of this is for nothing. I realize that could be specious reasoning, but it’s my solace. Did you know that Franklin and I are probably getting divorced?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“I’ve been having an affair,” she said. “I can understand Hopkins trying to hide from the world. I wish, more than anything, I could do the same.”
They sat in the living room of her bungalow, Yadin on the red velvet couch, Jeanette opposite him in the orange butterfly chair. He told her about the meeting at Mirrorwood tomorrow.
“You’ll never come back,” she said.
“Of course I will. My entire life is here.”
“There’s nothing holding you in Rosarita Bay. You could pack up everything you own in your van and be gone in twenty minutes.”
He shifted his weight on the velvet couch, inadvertently wobbling the adjacent piecrust table and the ornaments arrayed on top of it: an antique crystal match striker, candles, and a collection of white porcelain bird figurines. “I meant you,” he said. “You’re my life here. Along with Joe.”
“The only reason you’re with me at all is Wall to Wall.”
“You know that’s not true.”
“Do I?” Jeanette asked.
“It’s just one day.”
“Are you planning to spend the night there?”
“I’ll drive straight back tomorrow night,” he said, although Mallory had offered to let him stay at her house in Thousand Oaks. “It’s only one meeting.”
“One and done, right?” Jeanette said. “A onetime thing. Just like you said on Tuesday—one more night, and that’ll be it. Only it didn’t turn out that way, did it? You’ll want to keep doing this, make another album with her, just one more.”
“No, that’s not going to happen.”
“She’s doing all of this because she still has feelings for you.”
“Come on, you don’t really believe that,” Yadin said to Jeanette, although deep down, prior to Mallory’s disclosure about Mirrorwood, it was what he had been wondering all week.
“I asked you not to go through with the recording with her,” Jeanette said to him, “but you did it anyway. You didn’t listen to me, and now you’re going to L.A. You’ve already made up your mind about this.”
“I haven’t yet,” he told her. “I wanted to ask you about it first.”
“You’re not asking me,” Jeanette said. “You’re telling me. All those songs about getting your heart broken, miss ing someone, they’ve all been about Mallory, haven’t they? You’ve been pining after her ever since she left for Nashville.”
“They’re about people in general. They’re not about any one person.”
“Tell the truth.”
“Some of them have been about you,” Yadin said, and this was the truth. Maybe he had been carrying a torch for Mallory for twenty-some years, maybe he had collected all those magazines and tabloids about her, maybe he had watched her awful TV shows and listened to her dreadful records, but these recent songs, these apostrophes, were addressed as much to Jeanette as they were to Mallory.
“You’ve never felt that way about me,” she said.
“You’ve never let me,” he said. “I’ve missed you, Jeanette. A lot of times, being in the same room with you, I miss you. You’ve always been so far away. Why did you say Étienne was your fiancé? Why did you say you had a miscarriage?”
“Dad told you.”
“Can you talk about it?” Yadin asked. “I want to know who you are.”
She sat in her orange butterfly chair, her shoulders and legs squashed inward by the wings, her eyes fixed on the leather pouf near her feet. “I don’t want to be alone,” she said.
“I don’t, either.”
“Do you want to get married?” she asked.
Startled, he asked, “Do you?”
“I’ve taken you for granted,” Jeanette said. “I see that now. I don’t want to lose you.”
“You mean it?” he asked.
“I know it’s not ideal, the two of us, but I think I could live with that,” she said. “Could you?”
A few weeks ago, Yadin would have been overjoyed, feeling he had finally broken down the bulwark Jeanette had kept shored between them. Now he wasn’t so sure. Had her affection for him changed fundamentally, or was this being prompted by pressure from Joe, coupled with Mallory’s intrusion into their lives?
There was so much color in her home, so much light. There was frivolity. A wooden owl mirror, peacock feathers on the walls, sepia-toned postcards of flappers and silent movie stars with exaggerated facial contortions. Each piece in the bungalow felt as if it held a story, but he wasn’t privileged to the narrative of any of them.
“You’re not saying anything,” Jeanette said.
“We don’t have to decide today, do we?” Yadin asked.
“Get out.”
12. Lonesome Lies Before Us 4:42
The Holiday Breeze in Pacifica had changed management, but not much else. The furniture, the wallpaper, the fixtures, the bedspread—nothing in the rooms had been upgraded since Jeanette last worked there.
She had first gone to another motel down the street, the Sea Plaza, which used to offer hourly rates, but it had been turned into a Best Western. With little recourse, she had entered the office to the Holiday Breeze just after eleven a.m., anxious about seeing her old boss, who had preferred to man the desk himself. Yet he wasn’t there. A sign announced NEW OWNERS, NEW BREEZY ATTITUDE! She asked the woman at the front desk for the half-day rate, and the woman did not balk or flinch. New attitude or not, the Holiday Breeze was still a no-tell motel.
It wasn’t just fleabags that were renting out rooms for the day anymore. The Centurion would soon be doing it, offering a Daylight Rest and Restore package, ostensibly for tourists or golfers on day trips who might want to nap or take a bath. The package would come with access to the fitness center, but not the spa, which would require an additional fee. Jeanette had heard that other luxury hotels were allowing so-called mini-stays as well, supposedly to accommodate travelers with long layovers or businesspeople between meetings. These were euphemisms, of course. Everyone knew that guests who booked rooms for a few hours during the da
y were there for only one reason—illicit sex.
In the Holiday Breeze, whoever had cleaned No. 14—a room Jeanette knew well—had done an okay job. Nothing horrific, no hairs or major blunders, just a gum wrapper underneath the bed and a bottle cap behind the dresser. Nonetheless, Jeanette had higher standards. The first thing she did was strip off the bedspread and fold it and stow it in the closet. The bedspreads were laundered only every three months. She remade the bed, creating a foot pocket. Then she took out a packet of disinfectant wipes from her purse and rubbed them over the TV remote, the light and lamp switches, the alarm clock, the phone, the headboard, and the doorknobs—the spots most likely to be overlooked and collect germs. Afterward, she tackled the bathroom: faucets, sink, tub, toilet, flush handle. There were no water glasses, just disposable cups in sealed plastic bags, which she left untouched. She had brought her own wineglasses.
At seven-thirty this morning, she had called Mary Wilkerson to tell her she wouldn’t be going in to work today.
“Are you sick?” Mary had asked.
Jeanette had not slept all night, and her hands were shaking a little, as if she were strung out, the world feeling jittery and woolly. “No, I just need a personal day,” she had said. She knew it would have reflected better on her to fake an illness or say that her father was laid up, yet she could not lie to Mary.
“Is everything all right?” Mary asked.
“I need to take care of some things,” Jeanette said. “I’m sorry I’m calling so last-minute.”
“I wish you could have told me yesterday, at least.”
“I know.”
“This is really going to jam things up,” Mary said. “I have to say I’m disappointed, Jeanette. This is only your third day as team leader. I was thinking you had a real future with the Centurion Group. If there’s a problem, please tell me. We’re family here, you know.”