by Jim Gavin
“Where’s Maria?”
“Maria’s asleep.”
“Are you a nurse or something?”
“No,” she said. “I’m nobody.”
I didn’t know how to respond to this statement. She didn’t say it offhand; she seemed to mean it. In Los Angeles this was a rare thing to confess.
“I’m just sort of here at the moment,” she said, opening the front door.
“Do you know Maria?”
“She wants to sell her piano,” she said. “I saw her ad in the PennySaver. That’s why I’m here.”
“You’re buying her piano?”
I sounded skeptical. It was a beautiful old piano and this woman wore old navy-blue corduroys and a ragged white T-shirt. She was tall and athletic-looking, with broad shoulders and long bony fingers. Sweat dripped off the end of her nose and I could tell she wasn’t wearing deodorant.
“No. It’s an old Bösendorfer. I just wanted a chance to play it. That’s all.”
“I thought that was a record.”
“You’ve got a bad ear,” she said. “Maria’s nuts. She said I could come by whenever I want to play.”
I held up a disposable tin container full of meat loaf and macaroni. “Can you give her this when she wakes up?”
“Sure.”
Footsteps echoed in the tiled hallway. Maria came into the vestibule, leaning on a cane. Because she couldn’t walk up the stairs anymore, she now slept in one of the smaller first-floor bedrooms, on a single.
“You stopped. Why did you stop?” Maria saw me at the door. “Brian, come in! Have you met Karen?”
We shook hands. Her long bony fingers were rough with calluses.
“She plays the piano,” said Maria.
Maria kept the curtains closed, even in July, and it was dark and stuffy inside. I followed her through the living room. Everything was covered in dust. On one wall there was a framed black-and-white photograph of Maria Recoba and her late husband, Gabriel. The photo, taken fifty years ago in Buenos Aires, captured the aristocratic bearing that was still noticeable in Maria, even when she was slicing her meat loaf with a plastic knife and watching game shows. She told me the first day I met her that she wanted to hurry up and die so she could be with Gabriel again. They didn’t have any children. She wore the same dress every time I saw her. She was haunting her own house.
“Why are you selling your piano?” I asked her.
“For the money.” She pointed to one of those tasseled Victorian lamps that look like a jellyfish. “I’m selling that too. I’m selling everything. I’m making a donation to Blessed Sacrament and then I’m going to die.”
“Are you selling the house?” I asked.
“I plan to die in this house,” she said, turning for the kitchen. “Let’s have lunch.”
“I should get going,” said Karen.
“No,” said Maria.
There was nothing to eat but the meal I delivered and some apples that a neighbor had picked out of Maria’s backyard. She ate all her meals at a little portable table in the kitchen. The dining room table, an ornately carved slab of oak, was buried under piles of laundry. We divided up the macaroni and meat loaf and drank tap water. Karen took an apple in her hands and snapped it cleanly in half. I had never seen anyone do that before. I was amazed. I wanted to open the curtains so I could see her face.
“I don’t know anything about classical music,” I said.
“I can only play a few things,” said Karen. “I’m not some classical freak.”
“Someone eat my spinach,” said Maria.
“We should open the windows,” I said.
She started to say something, but choked a little on her meat loaf. She held up her hand to indicate that she wasn’t going to die at this particular moment. “Go play something, Karen.”
“I should go home.”
“Where do you live?” I asked.
“Play something,” said Maria. “Just for a little while.”
We followed her back into the living room and Karen sat down obediently on the dusty bench. She turned a page in the book and took a deep breath. She never stopped or made a mistake. It was such hard work playing the piano. I had no idea it was such hard work. Maria sat down on a couch and fell asleep almost immediately. Karen came to the end of a section; her head dropped, like she had just been given terrible news, and then, slowly, she lifted her hands off the keys. She turned and seemed surprised that anyone else was in the room.
“That was great,” I said, and for some reason it sounded cloying and false, like I had already made up my mind to compliment her before she had played a single note.
“Is Maria always alone here?” she said, looking at the shriveled little woman snoring on the couch.
“Health aides come by a couple times a week to make sure she’s not pissing herself. And she has friends from church.”
“It’s sad.”
“She has it better than most. A lot of them end up in ratty hotels downtown.”
She finally looked at me. “It’s nice of you to come by.”
“I get paid.”
She got up from the piano. “I should go while I have the chance.”
I felt bad just leaving Maria on the couch, but I didn’t want to be there either. When the front door opened, she sleepily called out, “Tomorrow, Karen.”
“Okay,” she said, but I couldn’t tell if she meant it.
I followed Karen down the walk. Her blue corduroys were so worn it looked like she had sat in powder. She said goodbye and started down the hill.
“Do you live nearby?” I asked.
“Eagle Rock,” she said. “I took the bus.”
I stood next to my delivery van and we looked at each other for a moment, and then a moment too long, and she kept walking.
I got in the van and played with the radio. Then I studied my delivery list, even though I knew it by heart. I could see her walking down the hill. She didn’t carry a purse. She took long bounding strides and didn’t seem to notice the view. It was hot and hazy and the buildings downtown were a ghostly outline. I wanted her to disappear around a corner, so it would be too late. I’d have an excuse for not doing what I wanted. And this is what I wanted: to offer her a ride and spend more time with her and then fuck her and marry her and listen to her play piano. I was twenty-three years old. I waited and she finally turned the corner. I felt sick. A few minutes later, as I drove down Vermont, I saw her at a bus stop, cracking her knuckles.
• • •
“Go back tomorrow,” advised Javier, eating cereal from a Bundt cake bowl that had been left behind by the castle’s previous tenants. The kitchen was small and toxic, but all meaningful conversations took place here. Gilbert, shorter and less effusive than his older brother, leaned against the counter, nodding solemnly. It was midnight and we were listening to “Blues Hotel” on KXLU. For the last hour we had been trying to snap apples in half. None of us were strong enough to do it.
“I had my chance,” I said. “Now it would just be weird.”
“Everything’s always weird,” Javier said, his chubby face serene in the twitching fluorescent light.
“She plays the piano like she’s digging a ditch.”
“Go back tomorrow.”
“She has scratches all over her arms.”
“She probably has cats,” said Javier, with a dark note of apprehension.
Nathan was sitting on the couch with my dulcimer and with a new girl whom he hadn’t bothered to introduce. He never introduced us to the girls he brought around the castle; it was some insidious form of musician etiquette. He was growing out his sandy blond hair, shaggy on top and triggers on the side. Mod was back, again.
“Is she pretty?” he asked.
“Not as pretty as you,” I said.
Nathan laughed, sort of. He always tried his best to seem self-deprecating, but he did it out of some dimly understood social obligation to be modest and likable, not because he actually considered himse
lf an equal to the ghouls he lived with.
The girl looked at me. She had bangs and a thin paisley scarf tied around her neck. She was prettier than Karen, but I felt sorry for her. Her small, delicate hands seemed incapable of real work.
“I’m Brian,” I said. “Did Nathan offer you anything to drink?”
Before she could answer, Nathan strummed the dulcimer, loudly and vindictively. It didn’t matter. If history was a guide, a month from now this girl would still be hanging around with us, playing video games with the Brothers Rincon, going through my records, and generally conforming to the improvident mood of the household, and Nathan would come home with another girl and not introduce her.
“Are we going out?” Nathan wanted to know. It was Wednesday night.
We walked down to our local. Nathan left us immediately and sat down next to a Vulcan-like humanoid replete with black trousers and white belt. He was a somebody who knew everybody. Booking agents, promoters, label people. Nathan, to give him some credit, was always whoring himself on behalf of the band. In this area he had finesse and refinement, an almost preternatural understanding of who was who. Nathan’s girl drifted over to the old photo booth and disappeared behind the curtain. For a long time Gilbert kept looking over to the booth, but he stayed on his stool, nursing his beer. She hid in there most of the night. Mark showed up and bought everyone drinks. Now and then he would take off for a couple days and come back with an unexplained infusion of cash. Javier told him about my exciting afternoon.
“I’ve always believed in love at first sight,” said Mark, who had the dead eyes of a goat. He was a bass player.
“She’s got gray hair,” I said.
“All gray?”
“Just streaks,” I said.
Nathan finally joined us and Mark bought another round. Gilbert made a little house out of matchbooks and then crushed it with his fist. For two hours I skillfully avoided buying anyone a drink. As we walked home I thought of the girls I had dated, relationships born of proximity and attrition, close friends becoming girlfriends. There was a glacial quality about this that I liked—the endings as slow and acquiescent as the beginnings—but tonight, for the first time, I had a feeling of pure and sudden discovery. I told Javier that I was going back tomorrow.
“Good,” he said, flinging his arm around me. “Even if it’s weird, it’s just weird. That’s all.”
• • •
I worked every other day, so Maria was surprised to see me.
“Did Karen come by?”
“Not yet,” she said, and invited me in.
I insisted on opening up some windows and she finally relented. There was a knock, but when I opened the door, it was another delivery guy. He recognized me and gave me a suspicious look as I stood there in the vestibule. Like any nonprofit organization, our benevolent mission was sustained by a ruthless bureaucracy. There were rules and liabilities. In the past, some delivery drivers had taken advantage of their position, stealing things from kind and demented old folks, and so now, technically, only caseworkers were allowed to enter a residence. I walked with the driver back to his van, telling him exactly what was going on: there was a girl coming by and she played the piano.
The driver didn’t say anything. I could tell he didn’t believe me.
“Maria put me in her will,” I said. “Now I just have to kill her.”
He got in the van.
“That’s a joke,” I yelled, as he backed down the steep driveway.
Over lunch I asked Maria about life in Argentina. Mustaches, bandoliers, I wanted the whole hot-blooded story, but she just shrugged. That was the past and she was heading merrily in the opposite direction. We ended up watching The Price Is Right. A Marine corporal won the Showcase Showdown.
“Good for him,” she said, clapping.
I got anxious waiting and looked for distractions. Since I had never been upstairs, I asked Maria if I could take a look. She walked with me to the foot of the staircase. Halfway up the stairs I turned and looked back. Maria, down below, seemed farther away than I’d expected.
“Tell me if you see him,” she said.
“Who?” I said, and I got a sudden chill, realizing she meant her dead husband. “Don’t say that! You’ll give me a fucking heart attack!”
I apologized for the profanity, but Maria didn’t seem to care.
I walked along the landing. The first room was Gabriel’s office, still neat and orderly, with a bookcase full of hardcover mysteries. I ran my finger along the dusty slats of his rolltop desk. His window looked out on the backyard and the eucalyptus trees rising up from the hillside. Across the hall the master bedroom had a small balcony facing the street. I stepped out and looked around the neighborhood. Birds, trees, telephone wires.
She was walking up the hill.
• • •
The phone in the castle was disconnected, not because we couldn’t afford to pay for it but because after two years of taking the responsibility of itemizing the bill, collecting the money, and sending the check, I gently asked my roommates if one of them could take over, just for a little a while, and when none of them volunteered, I announced that I would never do it again and they would all suffer in a hell of their own making.
During those first couple of weeks, if I wanted to call Karen and make plans for one of our chaste and meandering jaunts, I had to walk down to a liquor store on Sunset and use the pay phone. I miss those days, calling places, not people. I miss the hassle of getting in touch with someone. Karen worked nights at a veterinary clinic. She had the evening shift and then stayed the night, feeding the animals and cleaning their cages. She slept on a cot in the backroom. She made less than I did but didn’t pay rent. This was her new life, and like her old life, it already seemed like a total failure.
Many years ago Karen Kovac, of New London, Connecticut, had received a full scholarship to the Berklee College of Music in Boston. She finished the program but failed to distinguish herself in any way. She had spent most of her time goofing around in a ska band, playing keyboards. Her advisers thought she would make a great teacher, however, and they helped her get teaching jobs, private lessons that paid well, but she had no passion for it. She moved to New York and lived briefly and disastrously with her boyfriend, the guitarist in her old band. Eventually she moved back home to Connecticut and stayed. She still gave private lessons in the wealthier suburbs but she preferred manual labor. For a long time she worked for the county parks and forestry department, planting trees and clearing wreckage after storms. When her mom got sick, Karen quit her job and became one of those shadow people who dedicate their lives to the ghastly twilight of cancer. Her mom endured two years of brutal treatments, then died. Her father was old and, more often than not, drunk. She had lived at home the last three years, pretending to take care of him, but he was a strong, stubborn man, a retired machinist, who ate livers and kidneys and bathed once a week. He was content to spend the rest of his days drinking and watching TV. He didn’t need her, and she realized she was just hiding from whatever was next in her life, so three months ago she had moved to California. She was thirty-three years old.
Karen talked about her past with a kind of miserable glee. At times the intimacy of her disclosures felt like an elaborate shield, a way of keeping me away from her—I thought of an octopus inking the water—but eventually she stopped talking about her past, and started seeing me, the person in front of her.
Our afternoons were spacious and full of light. Most of the time we just drove around, exploring the hillsides and the empty side streets. I told her about the castle, exotic tales of indolence and vice, but I avoided taking her there. Karen was draped in my royal flag; I had staked my claim and I didn’t want to share her with my roommates, especially Nathan. Instead, we drove around the city, talking and listening to music. It bothered me that she never offered to chip in for gas, but I thought it would ruin the mood if I talked about money. Everything else was great. She had seen Hüsker Dü live an
d we were both obsessed with Lenny from The Simpsons. I remember these things being immensely important to me at the time. She had scars on her knees that I wanted to touch and she remembered little bits of conversation that most people would forget. I thought that was encouraging. Sometimes we hung out at Maria’s house. We would bring beer and Karen would play for a couple hours, until Maria fell asleep, and then we would sit in her backyard, where it was cool in the shade of the eucalyptus trees. One day, as Karen walked along the edge of a stone planter like it was a balance beam, she asked me if I liked my job. She rarely asked me questions, and I always felt excited and full of appreciation when she did.
“I don’t know how much longer I’ll do it,” I said. “Eventually I want to go back to school and make more money. I plan to lead a boring and respectable life.”
“Doing what?”
“I’m not sure. Right now I own a lot of records.”
“That’s not really a career.”
“I wish I could play music,” I said. “Knowing a lot about something you can’t do—it’s like being a eunuch.”
She told me that she had always loved animals and wanted to be a vet. She was excited when she got her new job—it seemed like a foot in the door—but now she was slowly realizing that it would never work out.
“I haven’t taken a biology class since high school,” she said. “I clean up cat poop for a living. I might as well try and become an astronaut.”
All she knew how to do was play piano, and she was only good enough to teach it to rich kids.
“I love listening to you play,” I said. “The stuff you play sounds like what it’s supposed to sound like.”
“I know,” she said. “That’s why I’m so fucked.”
• • •
Karen came to Los Angeles thinking she would get her own place near the beach. She ended up on the east side, in a shabby but not entirely murderous neighborhood. She hated being there and she also hated going out. She had always felt uncomfortable in bars, the expression on her face too hostile to attract friendly people, but not hostile enough, apparently, to repel lunatics. Her first week here she went to see a show by herself at Al’s Bar. Before the first band went on, a man with an Ace bandage wrapped around his head asked if she could drive him to Fresno. “ASAP,” he said, tapping her shoulder. She declined and waited to see who he would ask next, but instead he walked straight out of the bar. She said this type of thing happened all the time. She imagined that whenever she left the house, an all-points bulletin was sent to every freak in the city, who went screaming after her with single-minded purpose. She hadn’t gone out since. She worried that she had come three thousand miles just to become a recluse, again.