Lonesome Lies Before Us Read online

  He had thought he was done with music, retired, and had said as much to Jeanette. His hearing was failing, and he knew he had no chance of making a comeback as a recording artist. He was too old, and alt-country singer-songwriters like him, already on the periphery, had been hurled into the abyss. The industry had changed. Everything had fallen apart. The only way musicians could succeed in the business today was by touring, and he had never been good on tour, and it would be impossible for him to tour now.

  Yet something had happened to him this spring. He had gone on a spiritual journey of sorts. It had begun during Lent with reading the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins and, after a detour, had ended unexpectedly with his writing music again. A few songs here and there. He didn’t think anything would come of it, so he’d kept quiet about it. But as the songs accumulated, he thought he might be able to produce one more album, one last album, which he could perhaps self-release, floating it out into the world, without fanfare, as a swan song. Once he began toying with the idea, he was anxious the work wouldn’t be any good or he wouldn’t be capable of finishing an entire LP, so he’d stayed mum. Now, with the album nearly complete, he was facing another, more practical problem: finding the cash to release it. He knew that Jeanette—Joe as well—would be upset learning he was making music again, squandering away what little money he had saved to rebuy musical equipment, so he’d delayed telling them. If he couldn’t figure out a way to put out the album, he would likely never tell them.

  In his bedroom, he gathered the paper scraps from this afternoon, then went across the hall into the second bedroom, the only part of the house that was not drywalled. The walls here, oddly—maybe it had once been an office or a den—were wood-paneled, but not with the usual knotty pine veneer. This was real wood, western red cedar, eight-inch clear tongue-and-groove. A while back, Yadin had torn up the shag, looking to create higher-frequency reflections, and had uncovered wide maple plank, which he had left untreated. Together, the cedar and maple produced a wondrous acoustical alchemy—bright and warm. His only other alteration had been to nail a piece of bent plywood over the window, stuffing the cavity behind it with fiberglass, to muffle street noise and act as a curved deflector. Otherwise, he hadn’t had to do anything else to turn the room into the perfect home recording studio.

  He sat in a straight-backed chair at his worktable—a salvaged door, cantilevered from the wall with industrial shelving brackets—on top of which were an old TASCAM four-track cassette recorder, a Grace preamp, and two studio monitors. Microphones and stands and amps surrounded the table. Lying on the floor were effects units and cables. On the walls, from pegs, hung several guitars, both acoustic and electric. A snare drum kit was in one corner, a keyboard in another.

  He read through the paper scraps and copied lines into a spiral-bound notebook. He took down one of his guitars and strummed some chords.

  This guitar, a 2008 Martin D-21 Special—it was okay, nothing really special. He had gotten it off eBay for relatively cheap. It had a solid tone with good bass and crisp treble registers, but the mid-range was a little thin. It just didn’t compare with his vintage 1957 D-21, which had had Brazilian rosewood on the back and sides. That guitar had been sweet and clear, meaty, with a sublime sustain and just enough overtones so everything came out rich and lively. With all guitars, but especially Martins, the more you played them, the better they sounded. He used to leave his old D-21 in front of a stereo speaker, the bass full on, and pump music (black metal was the most effective) at it all day while at work, vibrating the guitar’s spruce top to mature it, make it really resonate. He had loved that D-21. He’d had it for over fifteen years. Even with a crack along the pickguard, it had been worth well over six thousand dollars. In the sixties, when the Brazilian government put an embargo on timber shipments, Martin had switched to East Indian rosewood, so older Martins were prized. But a few years ago, desperate for cash, he’d had to let the guitar go for a quarter of its value.

  He had begun playing guitar at thirteen, on an Eko Ranger VI dreadnought that his father had left behind, along with a cache of LPs—mostly canyon rock, bluegrass, and outlaw country albums. Yadin had been into punk at the time, and had found his father’s taste in music corny, the way he’d become mawkish listening to records, muttering, “Goddamn,” occasionally even weeping.

  He had been a Goodrich tire sales rep for the Midwest region, and was continually being transferred. Three or four times a year, he had moved the family along Interstate 80—Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio—sometimes hauling Yadin, his younger brother, Davey, and their mother east, sometimes west. With all the relocations and their father gone so much, there were predictable problems, Yadin and Davey missing him, their mother lonely and resentful. The infrequent times he was home, there were fights, accusations of cheating. The boys, a year apart, sequestered themselves in their own world. They rode BMX bikes and flew kites and built model airplanes. They chased frogs and dug for worms. They tied makeshift flies and pretended they were fishing in Montana; they skateboarded inside drainage pipes and pretended they were surfing in Hawaii. Mostly, they played baseball together. Yadin had a good arm, Davey a beautiful swing, and every day during the summer, they fungoed balls into the dying light of dusk.

  But when they were living in Elyria, Ohio, and his brother was ten, Davey began to feel listless. He looked ashen and sickly and couldn’t bring himself to go outside anymore. He was diagnosed with aplastic anemia. In Cleveland, doctors performed biopsies on Yadin to determine whether he could be a bone marrow donor for Davey, but his tissue wasn’t compatible, and Davey died less than four months later. The next year, Yadin’s father took off on a road trip and never returned. After another year, Yadin and his mother embarked on their own itinerancy, mainly in the Mid-Atlantic and South, as she pursued a training program and then jobs as a phlebotomy technician, a vocation spurred by all the times she had witnessed lab techs botching Davey’s blood draws, not finding a vein and having to jab him over and over. She vowed that would never happen to another kid—not on her watch.

  Left on his own most evenings, Yadin began picking through his father’s LPs. The Stanley Brothers’ Mercury recordings, Bill Monroe, Vern Williams, Red Cravens. Then Mickey Newbury, Emmylou Harris, Chris Hillman, Clarence White, Linda Ronstadt, John Prine, Lightnin’ Hopkins, and Doc Watson. The musicians who most interested him, however, the two who destroyed him, were Townes Van Zandt and Gram Parsons. Listening to “Waiting ’Round to Die” the first time, Yadin was immobilized by Van Zandt’s nasally, high lonesome voice, curdled with so much hurt. The same went for Parsons’s “Hot Burrito #1,” his aching warble, pleading for help.

  All these songs about longing, regret, and betrayal, about broken hearts and belated apologies, about drinking, cheating, and leaving, about the lonely road and cheap motels and drifters, dreamers, outcasts, and the forlorn—they changed Yadin in ways he could not express yet could feel. After listening to them, his brain seemed to process things differently, the light now tinted and heavy. The songs were depressing and desolate, but they somehow gave him solace. He felt adrift in a world he didn’t understand, a world that did not, in turn, understand him, and the songs validated those feelings. There were musicians—grown-ups—who felt this way, too, and they not only evoked the sorrow and bewilderment and loneliness inside him, they reveled in it, they even kind of celebrated it. They made those emotions grander, more mys terious, as if there were a deeper truth and purpose to them. He wanted to know how these songwriters did it—make pain into something beautiful. He wanted to do it himself. He began practicing the guitar and singing and writing his own songs to the exclusion of all else. He never finished high school.

  In his studio, he played an intro on his guitar, accenting chords with hammer-ons and pull-offs and some walkups and walkdowns, then sang:

  Lonesome lies before us

  Whatever place we’re in

  We search this world for memories

  Unfinished, that never
end

  Distance always owns us

  And what it was to be free

  The distance always showed us

  Our own frayed reverie

  I’m not ashamed that I miss you

  I’ve got my same old sins

  I look for you in all the spaces

  I always wished we’d been

  People were often confounded by Yadin’s singing voice, considering how soft-spoken and taciturn he was in conversation. It was a high baritone, big, commanding, splintered with husk and yearning. To unsuspecting listeners, it was a voice that belonged to a natural frontman, a heartbreaker, someone who ferried hidden vulnerabilities that drew women, even when they knew he wouldn’t stay. It was a voice that belonged to someone better-looking.

  He scratched a few more words into his notebook, and began to sing again.

  2. Shades on the Window 3:41

  Jeanette Matsuda stood on the periphery of the huddled housekeepers. It was eight a.m., and two dozen of them were crammed into a basement hallway next to the laundry room, gathered for what was called the forum. Every morning, at every Centurion hotel worldwide, all employees reported for the forum—a fifteen-minute meeting in each department. Ostensibly the point of the meetings was to announce operational matters, but they also served as pep talks to reinforce the Centurion’s core values, with discussions on ways to improve service.

  The housekeepers at the Rosarita Bay Centurion Resort & Spa were usually a voluble crew, but this morning, when Mary Wilkerson, the director of housekeeping, asked if anyone had an issue to discuss, no one volunteered.

  Nervously Jeanette lifted onto her toes and, peeking over the shoulder of a taller girl, surveyed the group. She rarely spoke at the forums, shy about contributing. She’d been on the job only a year, and felt she should defer to the floor supervisors and team leaders. Yet she was among the oldest employees there—thirty-nine—and she knew that if she ever hoped to be promoted, she should pipe up occasionally to show leadership potential.

  “Anyone?” Mary said. “Come on, someone must have something, even if it seems trivial. Nothing’s ever trivial here.”

  To Jeanette’s surprise, Meghan, who was brand-new, barely out of high school, raised her hand.

  “Oh, good,” Mary said. “Yes, Meghan?”

  “There’s something that’s been driving me crazy.”

  “Go ahead. What is it?”

  “My shoes squeak.”

  The group snickered.

  “No, no, this is a legitimate concern,” Mary said. “It’s something that would disturb our guests, so that makes it pertinent. Are they new shoes? Have you broken them in?”

  “I’ve had them over two weeks,” Meghan said. “I can’t exchange or return them. They were on final sale.”

  “You have them on?” Mary asked, and when Meghan said yes, everyone peered down at her shoes, a cheap-looking pair of black oxfords. “Walk around,” Mary told her.

  The girls cleared a path for Meghan and hushed as she marched back and forth on the polished concrete floor. Her shoes indeed squeaked.

  “Do they squeak when you’re on carpet, too?” Mary asked. “Or just on hard surfaces?”

  “All the time.”

  “Then it’s not the outside sole,” Clarisa, a floor supervisor, said. “It’s the inside sole, rubbing against the bottom. Put baby powder underneath the insole.”

  Some girls concurred, swearing by Gold Bond. Others disagreed and suggested going wet, rather than dry, with saddle soap, olive oil, or hand lotion.

  With everyone debating remedies so seriously, Jeanette got caught up in the discussion and, mustering her pluck, said, “This may sound bizarre, but Alberto VO5 might work.”

  “Really?” asked Emily, a team leader.

  “You’d be surprised, the things you can do with VO5,” Jeanette said.

  “They still make Alberto VO5?” someone—Jeanette couldn’t see who—asked, eliciting a round of chuckles, and immediately she regretted speaking.

  Her father had slicked VO5 in his hair for many years. When she was a child, Joe had told her to smear a dab of it to eliminate the cheeping noise in her shoes, and had imparted a dozen other applications for the hair cream: making zippers glide easier, hiding scratches on wood, polishing stainless steel, cleaning grease or paint from your hands, breaking in a baseball glove. “This has more uses than WD-40,” Joe had said. “I don’t know why they don’t advertise it. Talk about stretching your dollar.”

  Other girls chimed in with remedies for the squeaking—silicone spray, superglue—which prompted further debate.

  “All right, all right, let’s move on,” Mary said. “We have a very busy day ahead, one hundred forty-two departures, one hundred fifty-five arrivals. We’ll be sold out this weekend with the equity summit conference, and remember next weekend is Memorial Day, so we need to stay on top of things. Here are our VINPs.”

  She held up page-sized color photos—images culled from the Internet—of the Very Important Noble Persons: two CEOs and several hedge fund managers. “Memorize and address them by their names,” Mary said. “Why do we go the extra mile with these personal touches?”

  “It shows we care,” they chorused.

  “Yes. You are ambassadors of the Centurion brand. We also have one upcoming celebrity VINP. She won’t be arriving until Wednesday, but since word might slip out, I thought I should tell you now. I want to remind you that there should be absolutely no gossip spreading outside the resort that she’ll be here. Understood?”

  With the other housekeepers, Jeanette nodded and waited for the name of the celebrity.

  Mary brandished a photo of a pretty middle-aged woman with strawberry-blond hair. “Mallory Wicks,” she said, leaking delight.

  “Who?” a girl next to Jeanette whispered. Most of the other housekeepers did not recognize her, either.

  “The actress,” Jeanette whispered back.

  Mallory Wicks, a former country singer, had starred in a prime-time soap opera called City Empire in the mid-nineties, and Jeanette recalled following the undulations of her career (sadly, more troughs than crests) in entertainment gossip magazines.

  “Okay, some of you may not be old enough to remember her,” Mary told them. “I always liked her because we have the same initials. I heard a rumor she’s scouting for a possible film and might use the hotel as a location. Wouldn’t that be thrilling?”

  Jeanette wondered for a second if Yadin would know who Mallory Wicks was, and would be impressed that she’d be at the Centurion. But then she thought better of it. He didn’t keep up with pop culture, and he disdained mainstream country. One of his favorite jokes was that if a commercial country song were played in reverse, the singer would reconcile with his adulterous wife, his runaway dog would return home, his overturned pickup truck would roll back onto its tires, and he’d get sober and released from prison.

  She thought it sad that Yadin had never made any real money from his music career. There was no doubt he’d been very talented, even if his type of music didn’t exactly appeal to her. (She listened to classic rock on the car radio, and that was the extent of her musical indulgences.) Yet in many ways, she was relieved he had quit trying to make music. She knew it must have been agonizing for him, the decision to give it up, and she admired him for his pragmatism.

  “That’s it for today,” Mary said. “What’s our motto?”

  The housekeepers said loudly, “We are noblewomen and noblemen who take pride in serving noblewomen and noble men!” This was, Jeanette and the other girls knew, an awkward poaching of the Ritz-Carlton’s credo (“We are ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen”).

  “Thank you,” Mary said. “I hope you have a splendid and rewarding day.”

  The girls clapped and collected their room assignments. Jeanette’s assignment sheets included several notations from Charisma, the Centurion Group’s global database of guests’ habits and preferences: A VINP, one of the hedge fund managers, wa
s to get handmade truffles and Pellegrino on his welcome tray; a surgeon preferred to be addressed as “Doctor.”

  At the first of her assigned rooms, Jeanette knocked on the door, waited, and knocked again. Once she was reasonably sure there wouldn’t be a reply, she inserted her keycard, cracked open the door, and called out, “Housekeeping,” just to make certain. Hearing nothing, she wedged open the door and positioned her cart in front of the jamb.

  For Jeanette, making the bed was still the hardest part of the job. After stripping the old linen, she laid out a flat bottom sheet (Centurion hotels never used fitted elastic) over the featherbed so each side draped evenly. She tugged on the sheet until it was smooth, and proceeded to fold crisp, precise hospital corners. Then she lifted the king-sized mattress, a custom-made Sealy Posturepedic Plush that was twelve inches thick and weighed one hundred fifty pounds.

  Like her father, Jeanette was short and far from willowy, but she lacked his brawn. It demanded all her strength to heft up the mattress and suspend it long enough to tuck in all the corners and edges. Then she snapped out another flat sheet, yanked out the wrinkles, and constructed the foot pocket—a pleated envelope at the end of the bed so their guests’ feet would not feel squished.

  All the while, she thought about the forum. She worried that mentioning Alberto VO5 had made her appear out of touch, passé, old. She had no idea, actually, if VO5 was still being manufactured. Her father didn’t use it anymore. He had lost a lot of hair over the years, and what remained, he kept cropped in a buzz cut, which Jeanette clipped for him every three weeks.

  She inserted the goose-down duvet into its freshly laundered cover and prodded it over and over until she was able to produce a flat, absolutely unblemished surface. Then there were the six down pillows: two Euros, two kings, and two standards. She karate-chopped them into their cases and layered them in pairs against the headboard. In the middle, she added a small decorative pillow with the Centurion’s trademark colors, burgundy with gold trim, the resort’s emblem of a torch and a rising sun embroidered in the center. She hung a gold scarf over the base of the bed, and finally she was done.