Lonesome Lies Before Us Page 21
Siobhan, however, would not be a sheriff’s deputy. She would be offered a part-time position as a “community service officer,” responsible for parking enforcement and traffic control. “It’s better than nothing, I suppose,” she said. “Mish and Greg have to take early retirement. But what the hell. It means I’m going to be a goddamn meter maid.”
She began to cry a little, and Jeanette put her arm around her.
“I’m okay,” Siobhan said. “I’ll be okay. Don’t tell anyone till it’s official, okay? I wasn’t supposed to say anything.”
“I promise,” Jeanette said, although she intended to notify her father that his contract would be voided. “You have any idea how the council’s leaning with the library?”
“What do you mean? They stopped discussing that months ago,” Siobhan said.
So she didn’t know about LMS’s revised submission, or Gerry Lowry’s alleged machinations.
“Hey, I’m curious,” Siobhan said, “where does Yadin know that actress from?”
“What?”
“You know, Marion Wicks.”
“Mallory Wicks?” Jeanette asked.
“Yeah.”
“What are you talking about? He doesn’t know her.”
“Is this about your confidentiality policy?” Siobhan asked. “Forget that. I saw him with her yesterday at the Centurion. Didn’t he tell you? Security called us because they thought he might be a stalker or something, but it was pretty obvious to everyone in that lobby they used to be very good friends.”
Yadin was the man Mallory Wicks had been making out with in the lobby yesterday? The dude in the hard hat? It wasn’t possible.
“They have some sort of connection through country music?” Siobhan asked.
Jeanette nodded. “They know each other from Nashville,” she said, as if privy to everything.
She wanted to flee. Yadin had lied to her, never revealing that he knew Mallory Wicks and that he intended to see her. He’d concocted the whole thing about his van. Yesterday, while she and Joe were at the cemetery, did Yadin take the hotel elevator upstairs and have sex with Mallory Wicks in her suite—the very suite Jeanette had cleaned this morning? Music was the only way they could be acquainted, but when, how? She didn’t think Yadin had ever been to Nashville. Jeanette wondered what else he had been withholding from her. Was he an inveterate cheater? Had he indeed been sleeping with Caroline all along?
She was a fool. She had believed he’d be faithful to her, he’d never leave her, and here he was, fucking a Hollywood star.
But Jeanette stayed in the sanctuary until the end of rehearsal. She didn’t want Siobhan or anyone else in the choir to catch on how oblivious she had been, how she had been so easily duped. Already Siobhan must have gossiped to someone in the church that Yadin had kissed Mallory Wicks.
When they finished the rehearsal, she sat in her car and tried calling Yadin. He did not respond. She hung up without leaving a message. Was he at the Centurion with Mallory Wicks that very moment, naked on the Rivolta Carmignani sheets, rutting into her on the Sealy Posturepedic Plush? She couldn’t go to the hotel—she’d be fired for disturbing a guest—so she drove to his house, the only other alternative. She got lost, making a wrong turn, it had been so long since she had been to his decrepit shack, but she finally found Las Encinas Road and spotted his van there, parked in front of a Mercedes convertible, newly waxed and spit-shined.
She tried the door, which was locked. She knocked, then banged. Nothing. They were likely in his bedroom, too absorbed in their lovemaking to hear her. She had a key to his house—Yadin’s backup in case he was ever locked out—and she fetched it from the glove compartment of her car and unlocked the door and hurtled inside to his bedroom. There was no one there, the pillow, blanket, and sheets on his tiny twin bed neatly made, but she heard music from his den and stepped across the hallway and shoved open the door. Yadin was sitting in a chair, strumming a guitar, and Mallory Wicks was standing beside him, playing a violin, microphones angled before them, a profusion of instruments and cables and equipment covering the floor and hanging on the walls and standing in every corner.
“What . . . ‚” she said. She was stupefied by the sight of them playing music together in the den—almost more so than if she had caught them in flagrante in bed.
Bewildered, she turned around and walked out toward her car, and Yadin followed her.
“Wait, Jeanette. Wait.”
They stood on the crumbling sidewalk in front of his house. “What are you doing in there?” she asked. “When’d you get all that equipment?”
“Some of it’s hers. We’re re-recording a couple of songs for my album,” he told her.
“What album? You’re working on an album? You told me you quit.”
He started mumbling—a barely intelligible ramble about wanting to self-release one final record and refinancing his house and reading Hopkins and going on a spiritual quest and moving from desolation to consolation.
Not much was coherent to Jeanette, except the depth of his deceptions. “How do you know her?” she asked.
“A long time ago, in Raleigh, we were in a band together,” Yadin said.
“And you never thought to tell me this?”
“It was twenty-three years ago,” he said. “It was a very short-lived thing, the band. We played a few gigs, but never recorded anything together. She was Mallory Wickenheiser then. They made her change her name when she got to Nashville.”
“If it was so short-lived, why was it so important to see her?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “It was just a whim.”
“A whim? You went to the Centurion on a whim?”
“Who told you?” Yadin asked. “Siobhan?”
Jeanette saw Mallory Wicks’s silhouette appear in the living room window for a second, then retreat from view. “You were more than bandmates, weren’t you?” she said to Yadin.
“It was so long ago,” he said. “It wasn’t a big deal.”
“You went out with a country music star,” she said, “and it was no big deal.”
“She was nobody back then,” he said. “We were just a pair of struggling musicians, living in a crappy apartment in the student ghetto.”
“You lived together?”
Yadin winced. “Not even for a year.”
“Were you in love with her?” Jeanette asked.
He looked up at a tree on the next lot. “Maybe a little.”
The admission crippled her. Early in their relationship, Yadin had alluded to a first and only love, but had not volunteered any specifics, and she hadn’t thought to ask for some—she didn’t know why she hadn’t been more curious. “She was in love with you, too?”
“She said she was, but she didn’t mean it,” Yadin told her. “She took off to Nashville and recorded one of my songs as her own. It was almost unrecognizable, after Acuff-Rose got its hands on it, but ‘Beds & Beer,’ her one big hit, that was mine. She stole it.”
“You should hate her, then,” Jeanette said.
“It was a throwaway. I didn’t care about it. I was drunk one night and wrote it as a joke on a pizza box.”
“You should despise her. If anything, you should have gone to the hotel and given her a piece of your mind. But you didn’t, did you?”
“No,” Yadin said.
A dog barked somewhere in the distance. There weren’t many houses on Yadin’s street, which was an access road to a commercial construction and demolition landfill. Bits of broken wood and fluffs of insulation littered the asphalt. “Did you have sex with her yesterday?”
“What?” Yadin said. “Christ, no. That’s ridiculous, Jeanette.”
“Did you go up to her suite?”
“No. We had brunch and took a walk on the coastal trail and then I left for San Bruno. How come you never called me back?”
“That’s all that happened?” she asked. “Nothing else? Nothing I should know about?”
“Nothing else happened,�
� he said.
“You’re lying,” Jeanette said. “I know you kissed her in the lobby.”
“It was the other way around—she kissed me.”
“I heard it was steamy. I heard there was tongue.”
“Who said that?” Yadin asked. “There was no tongue. It was just a goodbye kiss.”
“And then she decided to stay.”
“Purely for the music. She offered to add some harmony and fiddle to a few songs. It’s just two recording sessions. She’s leaving Thursday morning. One more night of recording, and then that’ll be it, that’ll be the end of it. It’ll be years before I can afford to release this thing, but having her on it—the novelty of her name—might let me break even when I do.”
“That won’t be the end of it,” she said. “You’ll go on tour and things with her—appear on TV and radio, get interviewed for magazines.”
“None of that’s going to happen,” he said. “I’m not going on tour. This’ll be my last album, Jeanette. I’m just going to put it out there and retire. No one is ever going to hear another note from me. I’m going to stay here with you and Joe and move on with my life.”
“I don’t like this one bit,” Jeanette said.
“You know I love you. There’s no reason to be jealous.”
“You think this is about being jealous? It’s about trust. You lied to me about everything.”
“I’m sorry, Jeanette,” he said. “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I hid all of this from you.”
It shocked her now, how little they knew about each other, how little they shared. She had been withholding things from Yadin, too—all the facts about Étienne, for instance—and she didn’t quite know why. How was it that, at this point in her life, she understood so little about herself?
“I cleaned her room this morning,” she told Yadin.
“You did? I thought it got assigned to someone else.”
“What if I say I don’t want you to do it?” Jeanette said.
“Do what?”
“Record with her.”
“That’s kind of unreasonable, don’t you think?” he said. “She’s here. We’re already halfway done.”
“Unreasonable?” Jeanette said. “You were in love with her once.”
“Years and years ago. There’s nothing between us now. We’re completely different people. She’s famous. She’s rich. She lives in a mansion. Our worlds couldn’t be further apart.”
“I don’t care. I don’t want you to do it,” she said.
“You’re really telling me I can’t do it?” Yadin asked.
Jeanette noticed a dozen or so cigarette butts on the ground, all of them flattened within a square foot of each other, the ends smeared with lipstick. “I’m not telling you anything. It’s up to you to decide. You can decide to tell her you’ve changed your mind and there’s no point in her staying in town anymore, or you can go ahead with your recording. You know how I feel about this now, my position, and the possible consequences.” She started walking toward her car.
“Which are?”
“Maybe we break up,” Jeanette said.
“I don’t want to break up.”
“Then tell her to leave,” she said, and drove away.
On Wednesday morning, her assignment sheet still had Mallory Wicks checking out on Thursday, not this afternoon. Jeanette probably shouldn’t have expected Yadin to listen to her, after disregarding her for weeks, but she had hoped that he would. Now what? Did she have to dump Yadin, as she had threatened? It wasn’t, Jeanette realized, despite being furious with him, what she wanted to do.
She considered asking Mary Wilkerson to assign the Miramar Suite to someone else, but then she would have to explain why. It wouldn’t set a good precedent, bringing up a personal conflict and causing a last-minute scheduling change on her first day as a team leader.
“It’s a big step, your promotion,” Mary said. “Are you excited?”
“Yes,” Jeanette said. “I am.”
As she cleaned her first rooms of the morning, Jeanette thought about what she might do to Mallory Wicks’s suite. Pop the sheets. Wipe the floor with a bath towel and hang it up as fresh. Swirl her toothbrush in the toilet bowl. By the time she knocked on the door to the Miramar Suite, however, Jeanette knew that she would do none of those things. She would clean it with her usual meticulousness. “Housekeeping,” she called out.
She propped open the door and walked in. The suite was messier than yesterday. On the dining table were sheets of paper with handwritten notes, pens, a laptop, several bottles that had a vaguely medicinal air, and the suite’s Bose Wave music system, which had been moved from the credenza on the other side of the room. Her violin was in a case on the sofa.
Jeanette began pulling out the bags from the trash cans and twisting their tops and placing them on the floor. As she headed toward the bedroom, she saw that the duvet was dangling rumpled off one edge of the bed. Then she noticed that the French doors were open, and she glimpsed Mallory Wicks on the terrace, wearing a bathrobe and smoking what looked to be a joint.
“I’m sorry, Ms. Wicks,” Jeanette said, resentful she had to be polite. “I thought you were playing golf.” The assignment sheet had specified a ten-forty tee time. “I’ll come back later. I apologize for disturbing you, Ms. Wicks.”
“Wait.” She squashed the joint into the ashtray, and after poking her feet into a pair of Centurion slippers, she stood up, bunched together her bathrobe, and came inside. “We weren’t properly introduced last night, Jeanette. Never mind this ‘Ms. Wicks’ business. Call me Mallory.”
“I don’t feel comfortable doing that in the hotel.”
“I know you’re also not comfortable I’m helping Yadin with his album. I want to assure you, this is strictly a musical collaboration, nothing more.”
“I’ll come back later to clean your room.”
“Do you have a sister named Julie?” she asked. “Was she a golfer?”
“Yes,” Jeanette said, perplexed.
“I remember watching her in the U.S. Women’s Open in Newport, the last major Annika Sörenstam won. Your sister, she finished in the top twenty-five with another amateur, didn’t she? Does she still play golf?”
“Only recreationally.”
“I thought she had a good pro career ahead of her.”
“She’s a divorce attorney now,” Jeanette said.
“That’s a shame. I’m not very keen on divorce attorneys. I’ve had to rassle with too many of them in my lifetime,” Mallory said. “Could you sit with me a few minutes? I’d like you to hear something.” From her Birkin bag that was on a chair, she pulled out a small black contraption with two silver knobs on the top. “These tracks—well, you’ll hear for yourself. Please. Sit down.”
What if she refused? Jeanette asked herself. Out of spite, would Mallory lodge a complaint against her? Likely not. Jeanette had no reason to stay, yet there was a part of her that wanted to see if she could understand the allure of this collaboration, why it was so important to Yadin. “Hold on a second,” she said.
She shut the door to the suite and sat down on the far side of the dining table. Mallory powered up the black device, its display lighting up blue, and plugged it into a cable that was connected to the Bose system. Music began playing from the speakers—guitar and violin, then Yadin and Mallory singing.
Everyone’s gone now, the darkness rides
The house is empty, rooms still and wide
Gather the glasses, chairs up, move slow
Someone left a wallet, no one we know
Who were these ghosts in our house tonight
And is there a reason, true or tried
I saw you with him in a corner, making pleas
At the same moment my heart said I should flee
If you can convince me that they’re lying
I won’t need you to explain
If you can pretend my heart isn’t breaking
I’ll pretend to feel no pain
“No, I have to go.”
“The sound’s not great with this portable recorder. We fed the mics to Yadin’s old TASCAM for the actual tracks. This was just an indirect recording. But you can tell, can’t you?”
“It’s good,” Jeanette said. Listening to the lyrics, she had experienced a wild moment of panic, thinking Yadin had been writing about her—her infatuation with Franklin—but she realized that couldn’t be the case. It was just a generic love-done-me-wrong ballad, typical for the genre, not much of a departure from the songs on Yadin’s previous albums—just slower, more stripped down. She had to admit, however, that Mallory’s voice and violin accompaniment added a nice dimension to the song, made it brighter and fuller.
“It’s more than good,” Mallory said. “It’s truly special. This is going to be a great album.”
“Why are you doing this?” Jeanette asked her. “What’s in it for you?”
“I just want to help Yadin,” Mallory said.
“Even with you on it, this album will disappear the minute it gets out.”
“It might not. Even so, he’ll have accomplished something. These songs will last.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Jeanette said. “Where has music ever gotten him? He’s already gone bankrupt once.”
“You ask what’s in it for me,” Mallory said. “It’s the same thing that’s in it for him. It’s about producing something beautiful. You listen to a great song, it makes you feel something for once, it reminds you how to feel. For a few minutes, it eases your pain. Having a small part in that, that’s what’s in it for me.”
“You’re getting his hopes up for nothing,” Jeanette said.
“Haven’t you ever had a dream?” Mallory asked.
“What?”
“A dream. When you were growing up, wasn’t there something you wanted to do or be?”
“No.”
“I can’t believe that. There must’ve been something.”
Even without makeup, her hair bedraggled, dressed in a bathrobe, Mallory was still beautiful, but her age was evident. She had lines and wrinkles on her face and spots on the backs of her hands and freckles on her chest from sun damage. Two tendons on her neck were distending into ropy bands. Her skin was losing elasticity. Soon, she’d have a turkey neck, a droopy wattle, and would take to wearing scarves and turtlenecks year-round. She could keep coloring her hair, as Jeanette knew she did from the gray-tipped strands she’d cleared from the drain traps, she could keep getting lifts and tucks and Botox and Dysport injections, as Jeanette knew she did from the puffiness in her lips and cheeks and the stretch and swell around her eyes, she could keep buying every anti-aging cream that came on the market, but they would not stop the creeping inevitability of decline. She would turn old and be forgotten. She looked so small and thin, sitting in the chair, swaddled in her bathrobe, like an emaciated child. Jeanette almost felt sorry for her. There was probably nothing worse than reaching the height of your dreams and then seeing them recede from you.