The Resolutions

by Brady Hammes

  * * *

  —

  HE PASSED INTO CENTRAL ARIZONA, the sun setting behind him, a collection of clouds building up ahead. He was a hundred miles from Flagstaff, where he planned to treat himself to a beer and a nice dinner. Before the trip, he imagined stopping at roadside diners, chatting with locals and documenting his journey through photographs, but thus far his only meal was at the Jack in the Box in Needles, California, where he ate a hamburger while watching a Styrofoam cup blow across an empty parking lot. He’d tried to chat up the gas station attendant in Kingman, Arizona, but the man had little interest in another Californian passing through. All he could see from the interstate were hundred-foot-tall McDonald’s arches and Chevron logos, and he realized he’d foolishly mistaken Interstate 40 for Route 66.

  As he crossed into Arizona, his mind circled back to Renee. He’d tried calling her a couple times, but it went straight to voicemail, which made him think that maybe she was camping. Renee was the most nature-averse person he’d ever met, so it was a little curious that she’d decided to spend the holidays in the high desert. Their shared experience in the outdoors was limited to a hike she and Gavin had done while vacationing in Big Sur. She’d spent the entire afternoon scanning the forest for bears, despite Gavin’s insistence that there were no bears in the Ventana Wilderness. Gavin imagined her slogging through desert scrub brush, regretting her decision to spend Christmas in rattlesnake country.

  Apathetic. That’s how Renee had described him before she’d left, and he knew there was some truth to the accusation. There was a time, maybe five years ago, when his career had been clicking along quite nicely. He’d spent his first four years in L.A. working for pizza on student films and campy horror movies. But then he starred in a low-budget coming-of-age film that won the Audience Award at Sundance. That led to a supporting role in a Danish film that premiered at Cannes. It was while doing press on a hundred-foot yacht in the south of France that it seemed as if he’d finally made it. There was no turning back now, he’d graduated to the next level, the hard work had paid off. But then he spent the first half of the following year auditioning for leading roles he didn’t get. He finally took a job on a CBS procedural to pay the bills, but it was canceled after the first season. His agent at CAA jettisoned him in a cruel display of infidelity. He cashed in on a few commercials before succumbing to the empty promises of Michael Badger, who secured him the role on the flaming piece of garbage he was now fleeing. So yes, maybe he was a little apathetic. Maybe he was a little frustrated with the trajectory of his career. At his age, he was forced to confront the reality that maybe this wasn’t going to happen after all, that maybe he’d already peaked and what awaited him was a slow descent into irrelevance.

  * * *

  —

  GAVIN’S PLAN WAS TO drive through the night, hopefully arriving in Taos by dawn. But as he climbed toward Flagstaff, the snow began falling in earnest and he realized he wasn’t going to make the kind of time he’d expected. The road soon turned white and he worked hard to keep the car in the single track of asphalt carved by the SUV ahead of him. He was doing twenty on the interstate, being passed by semis that sprayed his windshield with a thick wintery paste. His wiper blades had frozen over, and before long it was like trying to navigate through an empty jar of mayonnaise.

  When he arrived in Flagstaff, he stopped at an Olive Garden and ordered fettuccini Alfredo and a glass of cabernet. From his booth by the window, he watched a rising tide of snow build on the hood of his car. He ate slowly, then ordered dessert and coffee. It was now close to nine, and the snow wasn’t letting up. Pressing on meant possibly spending the night in a ditch, so he picked up a six-pack and booked a room at a Super 8. He changed into his pajamas and flipped through the meager selection of channels, finally settling on 60 Minutes, where Anderson Cooper was reporting on the opioid epidemic. Checking to see what time it was in Moscow—11 A.M.—he attempted to Skype his sister, but she didn’t pick up. He hadn’t spoken with Sam in over a month, and he was looking forward to spending some time together back in Chicago, maybe catching a show at the Hideout.

  Back in college, when Gavin would return home to Chicago for the summer, he used to drive Sam into the city to see shows at the Fireside Bowl, a grimy, all-ages punk venue that smelled of beer and vomit and adolescent perspiration. It wasn’t the kind of place he imagined his sister would enjoy, but Sam was taken by the scene, the band thrashing onstage, the heaving, pulsing crowd. It was the antithesis of ballet, but Sam had the most catholic taste of anyone he knew so her reaction wasn’t completely surprising. They spent the rest of that summer listening to records in the cool dark of their basement before venturing into the city a few nights a week to experience live versions of the music that soundtracked their summer. They’d wander the streets of Logan Square beforehand, nipping at the flask of whiskey Gavin smuggled in his backpack, and then, at the end of the night, catching the last train back to the burbs, sweaty, ears ringing, bodies thrumming with the residue of live music.

  * * *

  —

  GAVIN AWOKE THE NEXT MORNING, filled his thermos with coffee from the motel’s continental breakfast, and was on the road by eight. He followed the signs for I-40 east. The interstate had been cleared overnight and the driving was effortless. He polished off the balance of Arizona and made his way into New Mexico, gassing up in Gallup, then pressing on to Santa Fe, where he stopped for lunch. He was about seventy miles from Taos, which he figured he could do in ninety minutes. After two full days of driving, he was looking forward to his arrival in this quiet mountain town that would be his home for the next week. As he sat in the warm sun of a Chipotle dining room, he checked his phone and found a message from Mariana:

  Call me when you get this. Something came up. Hope you haven’t left L.A. yet.

  * * *

  —

  THE HOUSE WAS A two-story adobe structure at the end of a long gravel road. Ponderosa pines bent with the weight of new snow, and a man, Mariana’s fiancé, Gavin guessed, was clearing the driveway with a snow blower.

  Gavin parked on the street and walked along a path of cleared concrete, lifting a palm in greeting. “Hey there.”

  “Welcome!” the man said. He cut the blower and walked to Gavin, removing his leather work gloves. He extended a meaty, calloused hand and shook with the force of a trash compactor. He was shot through with a blue-collar ethos, the sturdy frame of a guy who spent his days working outdoors. “You must be the actor.”

  Gavin laughed uneasily. “I guess so.”

  “Mariana’s inside,” he said. “Go on in.”

  Mariana greeted him at the door. “Come in, come in,” she said. “I’m so sorry about all this.”

  Gavin removed his shoes at the door and hung his coat on a pair of antlers mounted to the wall. The house had a southwestern modern aesthetic: sharp lines and desert hues, a slightly incongruous mix of local and contemporary art. A few logs smoldered in the fireplace, and a wall of windows looked out at a herd of cattle milling on the valley floor, the uneven peaks of the Sangre de Cristo sparkling above them. “Quite a view,” Gavin said.

  “It never gets old,” Mariana said from the kitchen. “Can I get you something? Water? Coffee?”

  “I’m okay. Thanks.” Gavin wandered into the living room. The coffee table was littered with wedding invitations and playbills. Yellow tulips sprouted from empty wine bottles wrapped in decorative twine, centerpieces he guessed.

  “For some reason, I had it in my head that you weren’t leaving L.A. until this morning. Sorry for the confusion.”

  “It’s cool. So what happened?”

  “It’s kind of a mess,” she said, shaking her head at the insanity of it all. “There was a fire at the theater the night before last. No one was hurt and the damage isn’t terribly extensive, but it certainly throws a wrench in my schedule. The guy who owns the building is a
friend of ours, and he’s hired Jesse to do the renovations, but it’s hard to say how long it’ll be until we can get back in there. So basically, we’re kind of in a holding pattern. We obviously won’t be opening in mid-January like I’d planned. Maybe not at all, though I’m trying to remain optimistic.”

  Gavin smiled and looked out the window. It seemed he’d driven a thousand miles to stare at cows.

  “The house is yours for as long as you want. I’d still like to rehearse just in case we do get up and running. The high school has offered to let us use their theater for rehearsals. I know you’re heading to Chicago in a few days, but I’d love to at least introduce you to the rest of the cast, maybe do some table reads.” She grabbed an envelope sitting on the kitchen counter. “I also have some free lift tickets if that entices you to stay. You a skier?”

  “I am,” he said. “Skis are in my car.”

  “Great,” she said, feeding another log to the fire. “I’m really embarrassed. I don’t want you to think this is some disorganized hillbilly theater thing we’re running here. This is just about the worst possible thing that could happen. It’s also a little crazy trying to plan a wedding and mount a production.”

  “I get it. I’ve worked on far more disorganized productions, believe me.”

  “Why don’t I show you up to the house, let you get settled?”

  “Sure.”

  The door opened and Jesse entered, stomping his boots on the rug. “Clean drive,” he announced.

  “I’m taking Gavin up to the house,” Mariana said. “You want to come along?”

  Jesse planted himself in a leather club chair by the fireplace and rubbed his hands together in the exaggerated motion of a homeless man over a trashcan fire. “I think I need to sit by this fire and drink two glasses of bourbon before I get up to much.”

  “There’s leftover lasagna in the fridge,” Mariana said, grabbing her keys from a clay bowl on the counter. “I’ll be back in a bit.”

  * * *

  —

  GAVIN FOLLOWED HER JEEP out to the highway and through the historic old town of Taos, a quaint little community that seemed to be constructed entirely of adobe and the positive vibes of Kokopelli. They turned up Highway 64 and wound their way to the base of the mountain. The lifts had powered down for the day, and a mass of exhausted skiers waited for the shuttle to carry them back to their cars. A funk band had set up on the deck of the lodge, jamming out après-ski tunes for a group of laconic skiers with their boots cracked open, beers in hand. They continued up a service road, past a shed housing heavy snow machinery, and finally to a newly constructed house at the end of the road. Aside from some new construction going up a couple hundred yards down the way, it was the only home for a quarter mile.

  “So this is it,” Mariana said, pushing open the front door. “Not bad, huh?”

  It wasn’t large or extravagant, though it did have a hot tub off the deck and a view of the catwalk that funneled skiers to the base. It had the feel of a staged home, fully furnished but not lived in, a rarely visited second or third residence. Mariana explained that it had been built less than a year ago for her friend Nikki, an interior designer who spent most of her time out of the country. She was in Japan for the next six weeks, decorating the home of a Sony VP, and had given Mariana permission to use the house as guest quarters.

  “It’s perfect,” Gavin said, taking in the place. “It’s more than perfect, actually.”

  The sun had disappeared behind the mountains, staining the sky a creamy purple. Gavin looked out the window and saw the headlights from a snowcat printing lanes of corduroy on the mountain. Mariana turned the thermostat to seventy and showed Gavin where to find fresh towels. She warned him he might have trouble getting the Internet up here and that there wasn’t much in the way of television, though he was welcome to dig into Nikki’s record collection, which consisted mostly of old country albums. She’d stocked the fridge with beer and food—a pan of lasagna and a six-pack of local IPAs—enough to tide him over until he had a chance to visit the grocery store. On her way out, she showed him where Jesse had stacked a few cords of firewood, then bid him good night and said she’d check in tomorrow. She disappeared down the road and Gavin was left standing in the driveway, still for the first time in two days, unsure what to do with himself now that he’d arrived.

  He went inside and grabbed a beer, thinking that was a good place to start, then carried his bag to his bedroom and changed into his swimming trunks. He got the lasagna going in the oven, then stepped out onto the patio and removed the lid to the hot tub. A wall of steam splashed his face, like opening a dishwasher, and he grazed his toe along the water’s surface, which was very hot. He scooped a handful of snow from the deck railing and dropped it in the water, a purely symbolic gesture. When the water had reached a tolerable temperature, he lowered himself in and admired the stars, a whole map popping against black.

  Thirty minutes later, the oven’s timer sounded. Gavin dried himself off and went inside. He changed into his pajamas, slid a square of lasagna onto a plate, and planted himself on the couch. Two beers, nine thousand feet, and thirty minutes in hundred-degree water had reduced his bones to saltwater taffy, ground his brain into an alpine sludge. He annihilated his dinner while listening to “Blue Kentucky Girl” by Loretta Lynn, then, on a drunken whim, called Renee. It went to voicemail again. “It’s me,” he said into the phone, to no one. “I’m in New Mexico, in the mountains of New Mexico actually, and it’s very cold here. I came to do a play, but now I don’t know if that’s going to happen. Maybe if you get this, you’ll want to give me a call?” He tapped off his phone. Why was he even calling Renee, who had no interest in him? Loneliness, obviously. Everything had happened so quickly: Renee leaving, meeting Mariana at the party, then packing up his car and driving to a small mountain town.

  Perhaps it was impetuous, certainly a little impetuous, but that’s what happens to a man with no anchors. At thirty-five he should have anchors. He should have a wife, a couple children, a mortgage. At thirty-five his own father had three kids and a job traveling around the Midwest selling insurance, and while Gavin didn’t know what his dad used to do in his free time, he was fairly certain it didn’t involve crossing state lines in the name of community theater. He imagined whatever spare time his dad found outside of trying to provide for a family of five on thirty thousand dollars a year was spent in a far more admirable way, like playing catch with his boys or barbecuing with the neighbors. And if Gavin wanted to go back a generation further, he could examine the life of his grandfather, an Irish immigrant who settled in rural Illinois, working a couple hundred acres of farmland until he keeled over at the age of sixty, a man as familiar with the concept of a vacation as he was with the Internet. But Gavin? His whole life was a vacation, though not a particularly interesting one. Back in L.A., his days were spent sleeping till ten, followed by coffee, a half-assed workout of some kind, lunch, a nap, more coffee, a beer, dinner, more beer, an hour of television, and bed. And now he was here and, with the exception of television, there was nothing to suggest a variation to that routine. There was nothing to suggest his life would be any different.

  SAMANTHA

  SHE HAD A TWO-HOUR WINDOW and while that seemed like enough time to terminate the relationship and still make it back for rehearsal, there was no accounting for the emotional terrorism Ivan was likely to inflict. Last night’s episode had shown that despite his utility as a supplier of narcotics, the collateral damage engendered by their partnership rendered it wholly unsustainable, both to her professional ambitions as well as her health. She knocked twice and resolved to make this quick.

  “Yes?” Irina said, opening the door.

  “Where’s Ivan?” Sam asked, stepping inside. Ivan and Irina, his grandmother, lived a life of controlled squalor in a two-bedroom unit on the top floor of an old Soviet-Bloc apartment complex at the edge of Yaro
slavl. The kitchen was stained with five decades of careless cooking and the bathroom’s shower glass was lacquered with soap scum that Sam once spent an entire weekend trying, unsuccessfully, to remove. But it was the smell that she couldn’t get over. Everything else was just aesthetics, the hallmarks of an unkempt home, but the odor was alive and it burrowed into her nose and stayed there. The place was a sharp contrast to her own apartment, which, though small, was tastefully decorated and regularly cleaned by someone other than herself. With the old woman’s worsening dementia and the boy’s crippling heroin addiction, there didn’t seem to be much hope for the two of them, yet Sam still found herself returning at least once a week. She cleaned, though she knew it wouldn’t last, and she cooked, though she knew it wasn’t appreciated. She did these things partly in exchange for drugs, but also because it provided her with a concrete task for the day, manual labor masking as atonement for the mess she’d made of her own life.

  “Irina,” Sam said again. “Where’s Ivan?”

  “Not here,” Irina said. She wore woolen slippers and a threadbare housecoat, her pockets overflowing with used tissues.

  “When will he be back?”

  “Soon.”

  Sam pulled her phone from her pocket and set the timer. If he wasn’t back in twenty minutes, she was leaving.

  “Pasta?” Irina asked, taking a seat on the living room sofa.

  Last time she was here, Sam had made a spaghetti bolognese, one of the few recipes she’d picked up from her mother. While it wasn’t traditional Russian cuisine, it was at least made from scratch, which was more than could be said of the canned soup that typically constituted Ivan and Irina’s dinner.