by Jim Gavin
We started going to the beach every day. I always took the freeway to LAX and then drove down an empty road that curled around the back edges of the runways. There were sand dunes and wildflowers and silver jets roaring over our heads and when we got to the end we could see the ocean. It was nice arriving at the beach around four o’clock, with people clearing out and the evening swell rolling in. Karen was a strong swimmer and never got cold in the water. She didn’t own a women’s bathing suit. She wore a dark T-shirt and a pair of board shorts that I had lent her. Under the board shorts, she wore men’s briefs. She always wore men’s briefs, because she considered women’s underwear to be frilly and absurd.
“Don’t worry,” she said, snapping the elastic band against her salty skin, “I don’t have a cock.”
Sometime in late July, after we had bodysurfed for a couple hours, I came in, exhausted, and waited for her on the strand. It was almost dark when she ran out of the water. She sat down beside me, shivering, and for a long time we watched seagulls poking around the lifeguard tower. Farther up the coast I could see lights crowning the palisades and I thought, now, now is the time to kiss this cockless woman.
“Can I kiss you?”
“Yes,” she said, with a look of resignation that, for the next two months, would never quite leave her face.
Later, at Del Taco, we had the conversation wherein the two parties recount their version of the courtship. She had wanted me to kiss her the whole time. For some reason, this knowledge was more satisfying than the kiss itself.
“This isn’t going to work,” she said, dipping her quesadilla in Del Scorcho sauce. “I hope you understand that.”
A few nights later we had seedy proletarian sex in the back of my delivery van. We were parked behind a Kragen Auto Parts. In a gesture toward civility and romance, I brought condoms and a clean blanket. I spent a long time tracing the scars on her knees and elbows, while we detailed our sexual history. My drab list of monogamies held no interest for either us.
When it was her turn, she said, “What do you want to hear about first—rapes or abortions?”
She was my angel! In reality there was nothing that harrowing, but she considered herself the chief of sinners. She had been a skater in her youth, a parking lot rat, an honorary boy, watching her skater friends filming their failed attempts to pull off moves. When she was fifteen she started sleeping with an older boy, and the rest of her comrades looked deeply betrayed. Their goofball demeanors vanished and they started treating her with unbearable deference. She moved on to guitar players and when she was twenty-two she snuck backstage at a Dinosaur Jr. show and gave a blow job to a member of one of the opening bands. She told me about this part of her life with rote precision, as if I were a stranger she would never see again. Once again, I got the sense that she was testing me, waiting for me to look disgusted and go away, but she had grossly overestimated her own depravity. Her exploits would’ve constituted a single weekend for some of the people who came through the castle. Instead, all I could think about were the later years, after the skaters and musicians, when she was alone in her hometown, heartbroken, paralyzed, her life drifting away, watching TV with her alcoholic father, and it was this pristine vision of spinsterhood that I wanted to save her from. I was twenty-three years old.
• • •
I wasn’t around the castle much. Javier and Gilbert were excited for me and wished me the best. Nathan didn’t seem to notice that I was gone. One afternoon, as I was sitting on the couch, feeling dreamy and spent, Mark walked into the apartment and threw a lemon at my head.
“When do we get to meet your crone?” he asked.
I told him to fuck off and the next day he pawned my dulcimer. I miss those days. Nothing like that happens anymore.
Karen needed money. She called her old music school and they were glad to hear from her. They had contacts in the L.A. area, and promised to keep her in the loop on any other opportunities. Because it was summer, she could tutor kids in the afternoons and still work her night shifts. I picked up extra shifts and registered for classes, once again, at Cal State Los Angeles. I started slowing down whenever I saw a “For Rent” sign in the window of a nice apartment. For a couple weeks we saw less of each other, and the less we saw of each other, the more we wanted to be together.
“I miss you,” she said one night over the phone, sounding disappointed in herself.
“Let’s get a place.”
I was down at the liquor store. Sunset was choked with evening traffic; I could barely hear her, but I knew she was laughing at me. I didn’t care that we had only known each other for a couple months. I kept imagining us on a nice couch, listening to records.
“You wouldn’t want to live with me,” she said.
“Yes, I would.”
“I’m a mess,” she said. “I’m better off living alone.”
“No one’s meant to live alone. I won’t let you.”
Tired of the van, we took over Maria’s master bedroom, upstairs. Her husband had carved the four-poster bed himself. A giant crucifix hung over the dresser. We would spend hours in bed, talking and staring at the bronze Christ. On some evenings, when Karen didn’t have to be anywhere, she would sit down and play the piano. This was the only time in my life that I listened to classical music. Nocturnes, she said, sounded best on a Bösendorfer. Maria always requested Chopin, which Karen played in a trance. Sometimes I’d take Maria out to the back patio to get some fresh air, and the music sounded even better from a distance. In those moments there was a shape to the summer heat; I felt like I was discovering something that had always been around me, but that I had never noticed before.
Most of her clients were in Santa Monica. On my days off I drove Karen to her appointments. Usually I would drop her off and go to the beach or a record store, my two compass points, but one afternoon she asked me to come up and meet the family she was working for. The Teagues lived north of Wilshire in a house with a bright Mediterranean facade. Fountains, pillars, cypress trees. The Teague boys, six and eight, were handsome and earnest, just like their mother, Andrea, who wasn’t much older than Karen. They had become friendly, and Karen often stayed at their house for dinner. As Karen gave the boys their lessons, Andrea showed me around the house and pointed out the kitchen window to the pool, a peferct square of turquoise surrounded by sharp green hedges. It was a picture of the future I wanted. I would live with Karen and we would have a pool.
“You and Karen can come swimming anytime you want,” she said.
“Thanks,” I said, but I knew I didn’t want to swim in their pool.
“She’s been through so much,” said Mrs. Teague, like she was talking about a refugee. For a moment I hated this woman, her dramatic, condescending tone. But then, opening a bottle of wine, she said, “She’s told me all about you, Brian.”
“Really?”
“She says you’re good to her.”
This felt like a letdown, but later, as we sat in traffic on the 10, Karen absently took my hand. The sky had turned pink behind the Hollywood Hills.
“You’re the only thing I’m good at,” I said.
I waited for her to laugh, but instead she curled her fingers into mine.
A few weeks later we drove out to my parents’ house in Pomona. My mom had sounded worried when I told her how old Karen was, but not long after we arrived, I became totally redundant to the proceedings. Karen immediately started telling my mom about her mom, dead now for six years. She talked about her mom’s fight against cancer in the same tone she had told me about the sexual exploits of her youth. Spilling it all out and waiting for my mom to flinch in disgust. My mom, who had lost her brother and several close friends to cancer, never flinched. They talked and talked, and I just sat there, listening as they eventually moved on from the topic of death to the topic of me. They formed an instant consensus about my shortcomings as a human being. My mom pointed to my baggy shorts and T-shirt.
“He walks around like he’s shipwr
ecked,” she said.
“He’s a bigger slob than me,” Karen said, looking thrilled. It was an ambush.
My dad, who had been outside most of the day working the grill, looked at me with sympathy. But I didn’t want it. I had never felt happier. I imagined Karen and my mom running errands together, buying dishes at Target. My mom eventually did this, just a few weeks ago, with another girl, my fiancée.
That night we rented a movie. Karen sat next to my mom on the love seat. My dad sat in his recliner and I had the couch to myself. Halfway through, Karen had fallen asleep with her head on my mom’s shoulder. The next day I called my mom and asked if she could loan me some money for us to put a deposit on a place, but she refused.
“She’s a sweet person,” she said. “But you’re too young to be involved with her.”
• • •
In late August, through the good offices of the mod freak whom Nathan had chatted up a couple months earlier, the Map got a chance to open for Stereolab at the Troubador. I told Karen about it, reluctantly, and she was excited to go. She wanted to meet my friends. When I picked her up, she was wearing a tight black dress. I hardly recognized her. Driving down Santa Monica Boulevard, I started to get knots in my stomach. She had already copped to some youthful starfucking and now, grimly and pathetically, I anticipated her reaction to Nathan. Though not a star, he qualified as some form of cosmic debris. I took a few wrong turns, my goal to make us late for the Map’s set.
“You just went in a circle.”
“I’m a little lost.”
“What’s wrong with you tonight?”
“Nothing.”
“It might be nice if you told me I looked nice.”
I never thought she cared about that kind of thing. I loved that about her.
“You look nice.”
“Fuck you,” she said quietly, in a resigned voice.
I pulled over and we talked. I told her I was worried she would like my friends more than me and that after tonight everything would become tangled and weird.
“I like that it’s just you and me,” I said. “I like being alone with you.”
She reminded me that her whole life, whether she was skating, in a band, or clearing trees after a storm, she was always part of a crew, always the only girl.
“It’s a platonic gangbang,” she said. “Then eventually I feel obligated to pick a body out of the pile. And then everyone hates me for it.”
“Do you like being alone with me?”
“I don’t mind it.”
Nathan was outside the club, interrogating one of the club promoters. I got his attention and he pointed to the marquee.
“They didn’t put our name up,” he said, flicking his cigarette in the gutter like some doomed antihero in a French movie. He started walking back into the club.
“Nathan, this is Karen.”
He gave her a brief nod. “Have you seen Mark? We’re setting up right now.”
I ignored him and we walked inside the empty club. I saw Javier fiddling with his drum kit. I waved to him and he jumped off the stage to say hello.
“Karen, I’m buying you a drink,” he said, taking her by the arm. “They gave us tickets for the bar, so it’s free.”
Gilbert joined us, waving politely to Karen, and we watched people slowly trickle in.
“I’m the oldest person here,” said Karen.
“It’s an all-ages show,” I said.
“Our Aunt Felicia is coming tonight,” Javier told Karen. “She’s probably way older than you.” He looked around the room, stupefied by history. “The Byrds played here.”
Nathan found us and announced that the Map wouldn’t go on until the crowd got bigger. “Where the fuck is Mark?”
“Calm down,” said Javier.
After a while the club promoter came over and told them they had to start right now. Two other opening acts were waiting to go on. Nathan bravely refused, and the promoter gave the old throat-slash signal to somebody we couldn’t see. Suddenly a bunch of tech guys rose up from the shadows like ninjas and began dismantling their gear. Javier ran over and begged them to stop, but it was too late. Nathan started screaming at the promoter and there was some pushing and shoving. Security removed Nathan from the premises. Karen and I helped them get their gear down from the stage. For a moment I paused and looked down at a few bright faces—curious and devoted kids who had come early to watch every band, even the ones they had never heard of.
Nathan sat on the bumper of his station wagon, crying. The girl who had once disappeared into the photo booth was trying to console him.
“I’m sorry, guys,” Nathan said.
“Maybe you could help us load the stuff,” said Javier.
Nathan looked around. “Where’s Mark?”
The night turned out fine. We went to a couple bars. Aunt Felicia bought everybody a round. I cheered Nathan up by reminding him that Harry Nilsson and John Lennon once got thrown out of the Troubador. Javier went crazy when Karen told him the name of her old ska band. He actually owned one of their old seven-inches. Later we got food at Denny’s. Karen kept her hands folded in her lap and drank her Coke by leaning her whole body toward the straw. After taking a sip, she shivered a little and rubbed her hands on her knees. She whispered in my ear that she missed nights like this, eating in a diner, with everyone telling stories and reaching for the wrong glass of water. Walking home, Karen put her arms around me. We played GoldenEye until five in the morning, at which point Mark came home stoned and shirtless and carrying a guitar that he had stolen from one of the other opening acts. Everyone went to bed. There’s plenty of room on a single for two drunk people, and we slept comfortably.
A month later Karen accepted a teaching job at a music school in Bermuda.
• • •
They needed a new teacher and could pay a generous salary. Despite its paradisiacal qualities, nobody, it seemed, wanted to move to Bermuda. They said she came highly recommended from her old instructors at the Berklee College of Music. They offered to fly her out to meet the faculty and explore the island. She agreed to go, just as a lark, scamming a free trip to a tropical island. She even asked if she could bring her boyfriend along, but they said that wasn’t possible. She had just started to do some recording with the Map. Nathan asked her to play keyboards live, but she refused. The day she left I picked her up at their rehearsal space—an insulated garage somewhere in Chinatown that Mark had found—and everybody wanted to go along. We had to take Nathan’s station wagon to LAX. She promised to bring back souvenirs.
I knew she would take the job. In those last few weeks, when she was around the castle playing video games or listening to records, she would sometimes look at all of us with a terrible sense of recognition, like someone lost in the woods who sees a familiar landmark and realizes she’s been walking in circles. Still, I started to imagine our life together in Bermuda.
A week later I got a letter, postmarked in New London, Connecticut. She was taking the job. She felt horrible and didn’t want to face coming back to L.A. and seeing me. She flew straight home and was now taking care of paperwork before moving to Bermuda for good. For the first couple months she was going to stay with the same family who’d put her up during her visit. She went on and on about the crystal-blue waters surrounding the island, as if this explained everything. At the end she mentioned that we should break up.
If she had just moved back home, or back to New York, or almost anywhere else, I might’ve accepted it, somewhat graciously. But she didn’t. She moved three thousand miles away to a quasi-fantastical island in the middle of the ocean.
In late October she started writing me letters. The envelopes were sky-blue, crisp, and weightless, with a royal postage stamp and a checkered fringe. I still have these letters, not because I’ve been pining for Karen for ten years, but because they are the last real letters anyone has ever sent me. I like the way they feel in my hands. Even then her letters felt antiquated, as if they had arrived fro
m a lost age of steamships and parasols. She asked about the band, my mom, Maria. She wrote long rhapsodic passages about the color of the water and the barracudas she had seen darting among the reefs. She then offered a few words to the effect that she missed me and loved me, that she was lonely and regretted the move, that she hated the British and wanted to leave but they were paying her and she had signed a contract and everything was so expensive in Bermuda she still couldn’t really get ahead and was there any chance I could visit.
I resumed my stewardship of the phone bill and called her. After a three-hour conversation we were officially back together. I told my roommates and we all went out and got loaded. I called her a couple more times and I sent some letters. She couldn’t wait for me to come to Bermuda. There were so many beautiful things she wanted to show me. She was now subletting a studio in Hamilton for $900 a month. I could stay with her as long as I wanted. My phone bill was over $300, almost twice my rent. I wrote Karen asking if she could call me sometimes, but she said she couldn’t afford it. Slowly, I noticed the tone changing in her letters. After some remorse it was obvious she was starting to settle there, hating it less and less. She went on and on about the water. Apparently it was very blue. Now when I talked about visiting after Christmas, she said only if I wanted to, and only if I could afford it. I picked up more shifts at work. Three weeks passed without a letter. Finally, she wrote to say that she couldn’t live in two places at once. There was no return address on the envelope. I thought this was a little too dramatic, like Maria Recoba declaring her wish to die.