Middle Men (6 page)

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.

Our afternoons were spacious and full of light. Most of the time we just drove around, exploring the hillsides and the empty side streets. I told her about the castle, exotic tales of
indolence and vice, but I avoided taking her there. Karen was draped in my royal flag; I had staked my claim and I didn't want to share her with my roommates, especially Nathan. Instead, we drove around the city, talking and listening to music. It bothered me that she never offered to chip in for gas, but I thought it would ruin the mood if I talked about money. Everything else was great. She had seen Hüsker Dü live and we were both obsessed with Lenny from
The Simpsons
. I remember these things being immensely important to me at the time. She had scars on her knees that I wanted to touch and she remembered little bits of conversation that most people would forget. I thought that was encouraging. Sometimes we hung out at Maria's house. We would bring beer and Karen would play for a couple hours, until Maria fell asleep, and then we would sit in her backyard, where it was cool in the shade of the eucalyptus trees. One day, as Karen walked along the edge of a stone planter like it was a balance beam, she asked me if I liked my job. She rarely asked me questions, and I always felt excited and full of appreciation when she did.

“I don't know how much longer I'll do it,” I said. “Eventually I want to go back to school and make more money. I plan to lead a boring and respectable life.”

“Doing what?”

“I'm not sure. Right now I own a lot of records.”

“That's not really a career.”

“I wish I could play music,” I said. “Knowing a lot about something you can't do—it's like being a eunuch.”

She told me that she had always loved animals and wanted to be a vet. She was excited when she got her new job—it seemed like a foot in the door—but now she was slowly realizing that it would never work out.

“I haven't taken a biology class since high school,” she said. “I clean up cat poop for a living. I might as well try and become an astronaut.”

All she knew how to do was play piano, and she was only good enough to teach it to rich kids.

“I love listening to you play,” I said. “The stuff you play sounds like what it's supposed to sound like.”

“I know,” she said. “That's why I'm so fucked.”

•  •  •

Karen came to Los Angeles thinking she would get her own place near the beach. She ended up on the east side, in a shabby but not entirely murderous neighborhood. She hated being there and she also hated going out. She had always felt uncomfortable in bars, the expression on her face too hostile to attract friendly people, but not hostile enough, apparently, to repel lunatics. Her first week here she went to see a show by herself at Al's Bar. Before the first band went on, a man with an Ace bandage wrapped around his head asked if she could drive him to Fresno. “ASAP,” he said, tapping her shoulder. She declined and waited to see who he would ask next, but instead he walked straight out of the bar. She said this type of thing happened all the time. She imagined that whenever she left the house, an all-points bulletin was sent to every freak in the city, who went screaming after her with single-minded purpose. She hadn't gone out since. She worried that she had come three thousand miles just to become a recluse, again.

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 shipwrecked,” 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.