Tom Perrotta - Nine Inches

“I’m looking for a used electric guitar. Not too expensive. But maybe this isn’t—”

“Don’t worry, you’re in the right place.” Mike pointed to a gray metal door, on which the words INNER SANCTUM had been carefully stenciled in black paint. “We keep the guitars in there. It’s easier to control the humidity. Why don’t you take a look while I finish my dinner.”

Sims glanced at the overstuffed burrito on the counter. It was standing upright, protruding from its foil wrapper like a fat banana from a shiny metal peel. A few grains of rice had spilled from the ruptured tortilla onto the glass below.

“Where’s that from?”

Mike seemed pleased by the question. “You know Ernesto’s? Over by the train station? They got this truck that stops by the office building next door, when the cleaning people are there. I basically live on these things.”

“Looks pretty good.”

“Best burrito ever.” Mike tugged on a wiry sideburn, pondering Sims with a knowing expression. “You hungry? I could cut it in half.”

“No, no. I’m not gonna—”

“I’m happy to share,” Mike insisted. “I always stuff myself and then I regret it. You’d be doing me a favor.”

Sims was tempted. He didn’t have any dinner plans, figured he’d stop at Wendy’s on the way home, his last resort on nights like this. Mike’s burrito looked way more appetizing than an industrial chicken sandwich. But it seemed wrong, somehow, taking food from a guy he’d just met.

“That’s okay. I’m gonna check out the guitars.”

“Your call,” Mike said with a shrug. “Just give me a shout if you need anything.”

DROGAN’S HAD a limited inventory, maybe twenty guitars hanging on the walls of the Inner Sanctum, but Sims could see right away that it was an impressive collection, one instrument more valuable than the next. There were no price tags, just index cards identifying the year and model, with a concise descriptive phrase scrawled below — 1957 Telecaster (“a true classic”), 1973 Deluxe Goldtop Les Paul (“Jimmy Page Favorite”), 1968 Chet Atkins Nashville (“all-original hardware”). The only one that seemed remotely in Sims’s ballpark was a 1995 Epiphone SG (“reliable Korean workhorse”), with a white body and black pickguard.

Mike had told him it was okay to handle the merchandise, so he lifted the SG from its hanger and gave it a test drive. It was a lot heavier than the Fenders he’d been considering, but the action was light and fast, and the chunky neck fit nicely in his hand. He strummed the chords to “Down by the River,” and finger-picked the intro to “Stairway to Heaven,” which he’d learned in high school and never forgotten. He was working his way through “One Way Out,” the quick, stuttering riff he hadn’t quite mastered, when he noticed Mike standing in the doorway, looking faintly amused. Sims stopped playing.

“I’m not very good. I’m just getting back into it.”

“Sounds okay to me,” Mike said. “But you gotta plug that thing in and make some noise. It sounds really sweet through this Marshall over here.”

At the other stores he’d visited, Sims had refused to play through an amp. There was always an element of performance when you did that, a sense that you were being watched and judged. The only guys brave enough to do it were the ones who could shred like Steve Vai or Eddie Van Halen, the guys who’d been practicing for years in their bedrooms.

“No thanks.” Sims tried to smile, but his lips felt unnaturally tight. “I’m really not—”

“Tell you what.” Mike tossed him a cable. “Let’s just jam a little. Start with an E blues.”

Sims’s face got hot, as if there were an electrical coil implanted beneath the skin. “I don’t know how.”

“Sure you do.” Mike took a hollow-body Gibson off the wall and plugged it into a small beige amp. “Just play a one-four-five.”

Sims shook his head, a stranger in a strange land.

“It’s your basic blues progression,” Mike explained. “You’ve heard it a million times.”

He started strumming some chords, and Sims recognized the changes right away, the backbone of every Chuck Berry song he’d ever heard. Just an E and an A and a B. He played along until he had it down, at which point Mike broke off for a solo, improvising some tasty licks while Sims struggled to maintain the chug-a-chug rhythm, repeating those three chords over and over, the old one-four-five. Then Mike showed Sims a pattern he could use to play his own solo, a simple five-note scale. Sims’s fingers were slow and clumsy, but it didn’t matter. The notes were right, and they meshed with the chords in gratifying, sometimes magical ways. He felt like he’d cracked some ancient code.

“Jesus,” he said. “It’s almost like I know what I’m doing.”

“You got a nice feel for the music,” Mike told him. “That’s what counts. It’s not about who plays the fastest.”

He showed Sims a basic shuffle, then added some flourishes. They played a slow blues in a minor key and even took a shot at “Born Under a Bad Sign,” with Mike growling the lyrics over Sims’s slightly erratic accompaniment. Sims felt exhausted and exhilarated by the time they called it a night.

“I like this guitar,” he said, carefully replacing the SG on its hook. “Can I ask you what it costs?”

“I’m not sure,” Mike confessed. “Let me check with my uncle.”

“Your uncle?”

“He’s the owner. I’m just helping out.”

“Don’t you have a price list or something?”

“It’s all in his head,” Mike explained. “I’ll try to talk to him tomorrow.”

THE SEX with Olga was quick and dirty. It couldn’t have lasted for more than a couple of minutes. When it was over, she straightened her skirt, dusted off her knees, and kissed him on the cheek.

“See you around,” she told him.

On the way home, Sims didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about what had happened, or what it meant, because he was pretty sure it hadn’t meant a thing. It was just dumb luck, as if he’d stumbled upon a bank robbery and somehow ended up with a bag of money in his hand. He wasn’t innocent, he understood that, but he wasn’t exactly guilty, either, or at least not as guilty as he looked. He was mostly just concerned with avoiding a scene at home, figuring out a way to get past Jackie without telling too many lies.

As it turned out, he didn’t need to tell a single one because she’d given up and gone to bed. She barely stirred when he slipped in beside her, just mumbled, That you? and went back to sleep. In the morning she acted like everything was fine, bustling around the kitchen in her robe, making lunch for the twins, giving him the usual rundown of her daily schedule — ten o’clock yoga, shopping at Whole Foods, and then she had to take the boys to the Rock Gym for their climbing class, the later session, which meant that she wouldn’t be able to start dinner until six at the earliest, so maybe it would be better if they did some kind of takeout. It wasn’t until Trevor and Jason went upstairs to get dressed that she dropped the act.

“What the hell happened last night?”

“Sorry,” he muttered. “I had a little too much to drink. I should’ve called.”

To his surprise, she didn’t press for details.

“Are you hungover?”

“Nothing a few cups of coffee can’t fix.”

She managed a tiny smile, but he could see that it cost her something.

“Please don’t do that again, Rick. It’s really disrespectful. Not just to me — to the boys, too. They kept asking me when you were coming home.”

“Don’t worry. It won’t happen again.”

That was it, nothing like the third-degree he’d been dreading. He dropped the boys at school, grabbed a venti latte at Starbucks, and continued on to the Health Plan, wondering if there would be any awkwardness with Olga. It had been a long time since Sims had had drunken sex with someone he barely knew, and he had no idea what sort of morning-after protocol was currently in effect. You were probably just supposed to send a friendly text — Thx!! That was fun!!! — but he was old-school, so he headed straight to the Pharmacy to say hello, only to discover that he’d been let off the hook for the second time that morning.