Jim Gavin - Middle Men - Stories

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 from 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.

A couple weeks before Christmas, Mark agreed to come with me to Maria’s house. She still hadn’t sold the piano. Mark explained to her that if she had papers for it, his guy would advance her a fair sum of money and they wouldn’t even have to arrange to move the piano into his pawnshop.

“He just needs the papers,” Mark said, “and then you get cash right away, while he looks for a buyer.” Mark tickled the keys with his fat, troll-like fingers. “This is a beautiful piano and he says he knows people. For most things he’ll just sit on it, but this is high-end for him and so he’ll actively pursue a sale.”

“The papers are in the bench,” she said.

As I sat down next to her on the couch, dust billowed up from the cushions.

“Maria,” I said, “since I’m kind of arranging everything, I was hoping you could give me a percentage of the sale.”

“The money goes to Blessed Sacrament.”

“I need money for a plane ticket. I’m going to visit Karen.”

She gave us the papers. My cut was exactly the price for a round-trip ticket to Bermuda. I didn’t take a penny more. But two weeks later my supervisor called me into her office. Maria, quite innocently, had mentioned our arrangement to one of the caseworkers. I got fired on the spot.

• • •

A few days after Christmas Javier and Gilbert and the photo booth girl dropped me off at LAX.

“What if you can’t find her?” Javier asked again. He was not a proponent of this trip, which upset me. I was doing something highly poetic, fighting the twin beasts of reality — logic and finance. I wanted to be congratulated.

“It’s a small island,” I said.

“You’ve got no money, man.”

I was bringing twenty bucks and a disposable camera.

“I’ll be fine,” I said. “Karen’s got money.”

“Good luck,” said Gilbert, holding the photo booth girl’s hand. “If you see her, say hi.”

I had never flown before, and Javier’s twenty-first birthday in Tijuana was actually the only time in my life I had set foot outside of California. It was a clear morning and when the plane took off it circled over the ocean. For a moment I could see the entire coastline. Then we turned slowly and flew east over the quilted sprawl of Los Angeles. After five minutes I got over the novelty of soaring through the heavens and fell asleep.