Middle Men (7 page)

That night we rented a movie. Karen sat next to my mom on the love seat. My dad sat in his recliner and I had the couch to myself. Halfway through, Karen had fallen asleep with her head on my mom's shoulder. The next day I called my mom and asked if she could loan me some money for us to put a deposit on a place, but she refused.

“She's a sweet person,” she said. “But you're too young to be involved with her.”

•  •  •

In late August, through the good offices of the mod freak whom Nathan had chatted up a couple months earlier, the Map got a chance to open for Stereolab at the Troubador. I told Karen about it, reluctantly, and she was excited to go. She wanted to meet my friends. When I picked her up, she was wearing a tight black dress. I hardly recognized her. Driving down Santa Monica Boulevard, I started to get knots in my stomach. She had already copped to some youthful starfucking and now, grimly and pathetically, I anticipated her reaction to Nathan. Though not a star, he qualified as some form of cosmic debris. I took a few wrong turns, my goal to make us late for the Map's set.

“You just went in a circle.”

“I'm a little lost.”

“What's wrong with you tonight?”

“Nothing.”

“It might be nice if you told me I looked nice.”

I never thought she cared about that kind of thing. I loved that about her.

“You look nice.”

“Fuck you,” she said quietly, in a resigned voice.

I pulled over and we talked. I told her I was worried she would like my friends more than me and that after tonight everything would become tangled and weird.

“I like that it's just you and me,” I said. “I like being alone with you.”

She reminded me that her whole life, whether she was skating, in a band, or clearing trees after a storm, she was always part of a crew, always the only girl.

“It's a platonic gangbang,” she said. “Then eventually I feel obligated to pick a body out of the pile. And then everyone hates me for it.”

“Do you like being alone with me?”

“I don't mind it.”

Nathan was outside the club, interrogating one of the club promoters. I got his attention and he pointed to the marquee.

“They didn't put our name up,” he said, flicking his cigarette in the gutter like some doomed antihero in a French movie. He started walking back into the club.

“Nathan, this is Karen.”

He gave her a brief nod. “Have you seen Mark? We're setting up right now.”

I ignored him and we walked inside the empty club. I saw Javier fiddling with his drum kit. I waved to him and he jumped off the stage to say hello.

“Karen, I'm buying you a drink,” he said, taking her by the arm. “They gave us tickets for the bar, so it's free.”

Gilbert joined us, waving politely to Karen, and we watched people slowly trickle in.

“I'm the oldest person here,” said Karen.

“It's an all-ages show,” I said.

“Our Aunt Felicia is coming tonight,” Javier told Karen.
“She's probably way older than you.” He looked around the room, stupefied by history. “The Byrds played here.”

Nathan found us and announced that the Map wouldn't go on until the crowd got bigger. “Where the fuck is Mark?”

“Calm down,” said Javier.

After a while the club promoter came over and told them they had to start right now. Two other opening acts were waiting to go on. Nathan bravely refused, and the promoter gave the old throat-slash signal to somebody we couldn't see. Suddenly a bunch of tech guys rose up from the shadows like ninjas and began dismantling their gear. Javier ran over and begged them to stop, but it was too late. Nathan started screaming at the promoter and there was some pushing and shoving. Security removed Nathan from the premises. Karen and I helped them get their gear down from the stage. For a moment I paused and looked down at a few bright faces—curious and devoted kids who had come early to watch every band, even the ones they had never heard of.

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.

During my layover in Boston, I called my mom to tell her I had made it. She too was not a proponent of this trip. She had refused to loan me money for a plane ticket. “What the hell are you doing, Brian?” she asked me for the hundreth time, and I hung up on her.

I boarded a small plane for Bermuda. Sitting to my right, in the window seat, was an older man, a retired banker, who wore a blue blazer with khaki pants and a pair of leather sandals. We talked the entire flight. He went to Bermuda every Christmas to golf and seemed pleased that I was also traveling alone. I told him I was there to do some snorkeling. As the jet came down through the clouds, he let me lean across him and see the island.

“It looks like a hook,” I said.

It was probably beautiful, probably the most beautiful thing I've ever seen—the hills green, the water turquoise—but it was too small and precious to be an actual place with roads and people. It seemed roughly the same size as LAX.

“I usually sail from Hingham,” he said, “but things didn't work out this year.”

We said goodbye on the tarmac, but after I walked out of the terminal and found the bus stop, I heard him calling my name. He was in the backseat of a taxi.

“Are you going to Hamilton?”

“I think so.”

“Get in.”

It was a cloudy evening. Going over the causeway to the
main island, I saw yachts in the harbor and black seabirds rising from the breakwaters. The taxi swerved down narrow streets that were lined with stone walls. The hillsides were green and dotted with pastel houses, each one with a white limestone roof that rose in steps like a Devo hat.

Streetlamps glowed along Front Street. The taxi pulled up next to a hotel and the driver told us how much. The banker got out his wallet.

“Split it?” he said.

“I thought you were treating.”

“I never said that.”

“I would've just taken the bus.”

“The gentleman's waiting.”

“I don't have any Bermudian money.”

“They take American money.”

“I don't have any of that either.”

The banker paid the driver. I got out of the taxi and helped him get his golf clubs out of the trunk. He took a deep breath. “Well, I'm sorry for the misunderstanding,” he said. “I just thought we were a team.”