Jim Gavin: Middle Men: Stories

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 himself 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.