Lonesome Lies Before Us

by Don Lee

  “I’m sorry, Mary,” Jeanette had said, “I have to go,” and hung up.

  What could she have told Mary? That everything was falling apart, and she was on the verge of having another nervous breakdown? That she intended to seduce her minister?

  After checking in, she had phoned Franklin, asking him to meet her at the Holiday Breeze and giving him the room number. He had asked what was wrong, and she’d only replied that it was urgent she see him. He simply accepted this, not probing further, saying he’d be there within an hour, which reassured her that she wasn’t acting without a tendril of reciprocity. There was something between them. They were drawn to each other. They both felt it, and Jeanette thought it essential that they acknowledge it now.

  She wasn’t exactly sure what she was expecting to happen today. Would they have sex? Although she was willing to, she thought, actually, it’d be better if they didn’t and chose to proceed slowly. Maybe they’d kiss a little on the bed, losing themselves in a surge of ardor, before they composed themselves and made plans. Mariposa was a hundred seventy-five miles away. It was perverse to think this, Jeanette knew, but the best thing that could happen would be for the city council to vote to privatize the library. Everything would be much cleaner, then, Caroline and the children gone. Franklin could continue his part-time ministry in Rosarita Bay, Jeanette could continue at the Centurion, becoming a floor supervisor. They could let their romance develop. They could get to know each other, have dinners in her bungalow, eventually spend nights together.

  She was sweating lightly. She turned on the air conditioner. She dampened a hand cloth and wiped her armpits and applied antiperspirant. She did her makeup—including lipstick—the way Anna had shown her, and fixed her hair. She didn’t own many clothes that were not plain. From her closet at home, she had pulled out the plum-colored wraparound jersey dress with a V-neckline that she had worn for Julie’s wedding, along with the high heels, and she changed into them now, and then waited.

  Franklin, as promised, knocked on the door in less than an hour—like her, always punctual. “Are you okay?” he asked.

  “Come in,” she said.

  He took a step inside and looked around the room. “So this is it, the famous—or infamous—Holiday Breeze.”

  Jeanette closed the door behind Franklin and asked, “Do you want a glass of wine?”

  “It’s a little too early for me,” he said. “You sure you’re okay? What’s going on? Why’d you want to meet here?”

  “Let’s sit down,” she said.

  He glanced from the bed to a stuffed chair—the only two choices. He took the chair.

  Jeanette went to the bureau, on top of which was a boxy old TV, a two-cup coffeemaker, a plastic ice bucket on a tray, and a bottle of Merlot that she had opened and left to breathe. After pouring herself a glass, Jeanette walked around to the other side of the room, closer to Franklin, and settled down on the edge of the mattress. To her chagrin, she discovered that she was too short for the height of the bed. If she wanted to maintain this pose, she would have to lean back on it while keeping her legs straight, both feet flat on the carpeted floor. Yet it was too late to reposition herself. It’d look childish to scoot up onto the bed and have her feet dangling in the air.

  “What’s going on?” Franklin asked once more.

  “I wanted to talk to you,” Jeanette said. “Are you still planning to go to the council meeting tonight?”

  “Yes.”

  “What are you going to do? What are you going to say?”

  “I haven’t decided yet,” Franklin said. “Maybe I’ll direct all my questions to Lowry first. I’ll ask him why he made such a one-eighty on LMS, if a little payola had swayed him, and when he denies that, maybe I’ll ask him if the privatization’s motivated by anything else.”

  “Don’t do it,” Jeanette said. “Don’t say anything. Don’t even go.”

  “Why not?”

  He was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt and hiking shoes, and she noticed mud caked on the outsoles. “What would be the point?” she asked. “It wouldn’t accomplish anything. Don’t you see? You’ll just embarrass yourself. Let her go, Franklin. Just let her go.”

  “Without putting up a fight?” he asked. “Just let her go to Mariposa with my kids?”

  “Do you really think your marriage can be saved? You said she hasn’t had sex with you in three years. She’s probably been having this affair, maybe with Gerry Lowry, for a long time.”

  “Not ‘probably’ or ‘maybe.’ Definitely,” Franklin told her.

  “With all that, is there really any hope?” Jeanette asked. “How would you overcome all that?”

  “For the sake of the kids, I have to try.”

  “Be realistic about this,” Jeanette said. “Is there really any way you could make the marriage work at this point?”

  He swept his hair away from his face and scratched his scalp. “You may be right,” he said. “But what am I going to do? I’ll have to give up the church and move up there.”

  Jeanette drank from her wineglass, then said, “You could stay here.”

  “How would I see my kids?”

  “What’s in Mariposa for you? You said not much. You love the ministry, don’t you?”

  “It’s the only thing I’ve ever wanted to do,” Franklin said.

  “You could spend part of the time here, part of the time there.”

  “The logistics would be impossible,” he said. “It’s a three-hour drive. That’s if there’s no traffic. What about school? We couldn’t have them attending different schools, splitting up their weeks like that.”

  Jeanette had not been thinking about joint custody, shuttling the kids back and forth between towns; she had imagined the kids living with Caroline, Franklin going to Mariposa every other weekend for visits. “You know what?” she said, another tack dawning on her. “You could stop Caroline from relocating. You could stop her from taking the job.”

  “How?” he asked.

  “Isn’t the priority always about keeping things stable for the kids? Minimizing changes to their routine? My sister’s a family law attorney. She’s told me about this stuff. She could file an injunction for you and make Caroline stay here. She could mediate a separation agreement for you.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” Franklin said. “I could do that. If I can prove adultery, I might even get primary custody.”

  “I don’t know if that would work,” Jeanette told him. “I’m pretty sure California’s a no-fault state.”

  “I’d have to pay child support,” Franklin said. “If she loses her job, the onus will be on me. I can’t afford much as it is. She’d have to find a new job around here, and there’s obviously nothing in libraries.”

  “Maybe she could teach or something?” Jeanette asked. “What about at SVCC? Doesn’t she have a Ph.D.?”

  “ABD.”

  “What’s that?” Her legs were getting tired from propping herself against the edge of the bed. She wished she could somehow cross them.

  “All But Dissertation,” Franklin said. “I guess she could try to teach high school or adjunct at a college, but it’s not that easy, finding a teaching job in this economy, especially in this area.”

  “Let her commute,” Jeanette told him. “That’s what you’ve had to do to Aptos.” It wasn’t optimal, Caroline and the children staying in Rosarita Bay, but they could make it work, Jeanette thought.

  “One of us would have to find another house to rent that’s big enough for the kids,” he said. “You know how much we’re paying now? The rents in this town are outrageous. She should have to move out, not me. She’s the one who blew up the marriage, who cheated. You think your sister could orchestrate that in the injunction? Infidelity has to have some consequences. But courts always seem to favor the woman, don’t they?”

  Jeanette had difficulty breathing. Her chest squeezed. Her legs were cramping. She marveled at how much could happen in a matter of days, how much could chan
ge. She felt as if her entire life hinged on the next few moments. “If you need a place to stay temporarily,” she said to Franklin, “you can always stay with me.”

  “You have a guestroom?” he asked.

  She set her wineglass down on the nightstand and straightened out the front wrap of her dress below the tie belt. “I broke up with Yadin last night,” she told Franklin.

  “You did? Why? What happened?”

  “A lot of things,” Jeanette said. “But maybe it’s for the best. It made me think about us.”

  “Us?” Franklin asked. “You mean the church?”

  “No, you and me,” she said. “You said you’d miss me. I would miss you, too, Franklin. I’ve been thinking, maybe we could see each other.”

  “Oh, God,” Franklin said, fidgeting in his chair in what appeared to be alarm.

  “It doesn’t have to be right away. I know you’ll need time.”

  “Oh, God,” he said again. “I had an inkling, the motel, your dress, the makeup. This is completely my fault. I’m sorry, Jeanette, but I have to be forthright. I don’t have those kinds of feelings for you.”

  “But you must,” Jeanette said.

  “I’m sorry. I don’t,” Franklin said. “At all.”

  She had made a colossal mistake. Mortified, she stood up and bounded to the other side of the bed. “I am so stupid,” she said.

  “It’s my doing,” Franklin said, standing, too, backing up toward the door. “I somehow gave you the wrong impression. I’m sorry.”

  “I am such a fool,” she said. “I’m pathetic.”

  “You wouldn’t have thought it unless there was something I was doing or saying. It was inappropriate, confiding in you about my personal life. I crossed an ethical line. I’ve been terribly remiss. It’s just that I had no one else to talk to. I’m so sorry.”

  How could she have been so delusional? How could she have misread his signals so profoundly?

  Yesterday afternoon at the hotel, Mary had come up to her in the locker room with a green gift bag—striped, metallic. It had had tissue paper wadded and crumpled on the top, obscuring its contents. “This is from Mallory Wicks,” Mary had whispered to her excitedly. Jeanette didn’t look inside the bag until she got home. It was a Nikon D3100, a digital SLR with an 18–55 mm lens. Her tip. There was a card. “Never forget your dreams. All my best, Mallory Wicks,” it said in her cheerful looping script.

  After she had kicked Yadin out of her bungalow, Jeanette had opened her closet and tugged out a plastic bin, which was filled with Kodak 8" x 10" paper boxes. Inside were photos of Joe, Jo, Jeremy, and Julie, and black-and-white prints from Watsonville: portraits of the squatters in Callaghan Park, piscadores in the strawberry fields, and Yolanda and Lauro Aguilar and the other Green Giant workers at Local 912. Many were of Étienne—at the beach, at La Perla del Pacifico, at Elkhorn Slough, at the Starlight Drive-In in his red Alfa Romeo Spider. She sifted through the photographs—they were good, there was something there, she thought for a second—and then she tore them into pieces, one by one. She had been so naive to think that she could be a professional photographer, working for Time or Newsweek. She had never stood a chance. She had been a dilettante. Her portraits were lies—no better than staged tableaus. They caught a convenient moment, but didn’t reveal the deceptions and depravity that people were capable of, nor all the bad decisions and regrets and guilt that could strangle a life.

  “I just want to feel something,” Jeanette said to Franklin. “Why can’t I feel anything? All these years I’ve been going to church, I’ve felt nothing. I want to remember how to feel, but I’m dead inside. I just follow the steps in manuals. I’ve been stuck, and I can’t seem to get unstuck.”

  “It’s okay. I understand,” Franklin said. “You’re going through—”

  “I know people don’t like me. I’m not a lot of fun. I don’t laugh. I seem unfriendly and negative. Stiff. I’ve always thought everyone’s perception of me was so different than the truth. But I think maybe that’s who I’ve become, who I am. An empty, unlikable person.”

  She had stubbornly hung on to the notion that she was special. What, though, had made her believe that? She wasn’t special. She wasn’t important. She had done nothing with her life. She wasn’t anyone who mattered.

  “People like you,” Franklin said. “Everyone in the church likes you. They wouldn’t have voted you president of the board otherwise.”

  “They voted for me because I’ll do all the shit work no one else wants to do.”

  She remembered a sermon Franklin gave recently on grace—its myriad meanings, from being in someone’s good graces to having a grace period on a credit card to the addition of grace notes in music. But in his view, Franklin had said, they encountered grace whenever they gathered in worship, in fellowship, and in kinship. Grace was about relationships in all forms, but most deeply in their connections to family, friends, and partners.

  If Yadin and Joe abandoned her, what would she be left with? A church whose underlying function she could not access; a congregation that would fold, anyway, if Franklin moved to Mariposa. A job as a hotel housekeeper that was measured in QCs and DNDs and Charisma slips, striving for five. A coworker who only respected her for her tricks with tennis balls and Alberto VO5. A dying town she had never been able to escape. A bungalow that she would have to give up eventually, the elderly owners sure to put it on the market someday; the interior of which represented not who she was but who she had yearned to be—a person who was artistic, educated, cultured, worldly.

  “I wish I meant something to someone,” she said. “There’s no one who’d miss me, who’d remember me.”

  “You mean something to a lot of people, Jeanette,” Franklin told her. “Believe me, you do.”

  Yadin had put his life back together, and now he had a second chance. She would give anything for a second chance. Instead, she had come to the stage where there were no more possibilities for her. She could no longer hope to reinvent or resurrect herself. She could only mourn the life she had been unable to create.

  “Forgive me,” she said to Franklin.

  “There’s nothing to forgive,” he told her. “You’ve done nothing wrong.”

  “I had too much pride. I shouldn’t have aborted that baby.”

  “What?” he asked. “When did this happen?”

  “If I’d had that child, at least I wouldn’t be alone.”

  “Is that why you and Yadin broke up?” Franklin asked.

  She dropped to her knees and pressed her forearms against the edge of the bed. She clasped her hands together and bowed her head and cried. “Please forgive me.”

  Yadin left for L.A. early in the morning, well before daybreak. He didn’t want to travel on I-5, afraid of the straight-line monotony of the interstate through the San Joaquin Valley, all the trucks on that route, and the chance of his van breaking down on the Grapevine. A few days ago, he had asked Rodrigo to look at his van, and he’d located a gaping crack in Yadin’s exhaust pipe near the catalytic converter. Rodrigo patched it with foil tape, steel wool, a snipped-up Coke can, and stainless-steel hose clamps, but had told Yadin the repair wouldn’t last long. He also thought the problem was elsewhere—something more serious—since the van was still making noise and leaking fumes.

  So Yadin took Highway 101 down, even though it added nearly an hour to the trip, passing through Salinas, San Luis Obispo, and Santa Barbara. Once he reached Ventura, where the highway turned inland from the coast, he hit horrible traffic. He limped along for fifty miles, the van shaking and smoking, until he got to 405 South, then chugged up Sepulveda Pass from the Valley, staying in the right lane but still getting tailgated and honked at until he was able to exit onto Sunset Boulevard.

  From there, he rode the curves and bends past UCLA, Bel Air, and Beverly Hills, surrounded by beautiful palm and shade trees, hedges, flowers, and multimillion-dollar homes, the grass and sidewalks as pristine as at the Golden Gate National Cemetery. It was
clear and warm out, seventy-five degrees, another perfect day in Southern California.

  After five miles, the road abruptly became less residential, and he entered the business district in West Hollywood. Right at the start of the Sunset Strip was where the meeting would take place. Yadin parked across the street and stared up at the building, which was called the Doheny Sunset, a ten-story white concrete and blue glass structure with a restaurant and a bank on the ground floor. Mirrorwood’s suites were on the eighth floor, but he didn’t know which way they faced. The head of A&R could have been gazing down at his van this very moment, curious about the vehicle’s age and condition, which was older, more worse for wear, than any car Yadin had glimpsed since crossing the county line.

  The meeting was scheduled for one o’clock. Yadin had given himself seven and a half hours for the drive and had hoped to arrive in town before eleven a.m., plenty of time to eat lunch and gather himself. But now, because of the traffic, he had less than an hour.

  He needed a restroom. He hadn’t gone since stopping for gas in Carpinteria. He resumed down Sunset Boulevard, past all the music landmarks: the Rainbow, the Roxy, Whisky a Go Go, the House of Blues. He had been to L.A. twice to play in small clubs, but never, of course, in any of these famous venues, which he had never seen before. It was his first time on the Strip.

  Several blocks after the Chateau Marmont, the street turned seedier. Gone were the chic boutiques and restaurants, the billboards, and the pretty, wealthy people. Now there were fast-food joints, strip malls, gas stations, tattoo parlors, fences with barbed wire, and doors with iron bars. There was trash in the gutters, tattered stickers and flyers taped to light poles, graffiti on every surface. He wondered where he could use a bathroom. He stopped at a gas station, and the cashier said the toilet was broken, so he kept driving east. Then, after a block that seemed lined entirely with guitar stores, he spied a library, a small modern building with a pyramidal roof. He parked in the lot and walked to the entrance, and when the automatic doors slid apart, he was assailed with the smell of sweat and urine and cigarettes. Nearly every seat was occupied by a homeless person. The men’s room was locked. He had to ask the clerk at the front desk to buzz him in, and as Yadin opened the door, he was met face-to-face by a man with dozens of pink and purple ribbons twisted into his hair, who shouted at him, “I am the cloud king!”