by Lydia Millet
He knew the sister, and the brother who’d been in jail, but he didn’t see either of them yet. Lynn’s parents were long gone.
But wait: Nina. She stood in a corner of the yard under a trellis with some white-flowered vine, a small, beaded purse over one shoulder and a glass held out in front of her. It was connected to her but also separate, less drink than personal shield. Her face was void, like someone had poured it out. She was a realtor; Lynn had met her while they were shopping for a house for Lordy. It had been a disaster, since Lordy decided, out of sight of any of them, to plunge into the house’s deep lap pool. They found him just in time. Lynn had to give him CPR.
No idea what to say, but he got his own drink from a table. Then he was walking along a pebbled path to where she stood staring, absentminded.
“Nina.”
“Oh. Ry.”
They stiffly embraced, separated, then stood there with their drinks. Sipping, maybe, more often than they strictly needed to. He wasn’t sure whether he should offer condolences—the loss was both of theirs. Were you supposed to measure the losses against each other, give condolences according to whose loss was greatest? He’d known Lynn for longer, and worked with him and spent more time, but she was the girlfriend. Position of privilege. Always implicit: friendship was secondary. The world of couples was one that you were in or out of, and he was out. Always had been.
Even when he was seeing someone, a rare event, he never entered that enclosed world. Couples established themselves with lines you couldn’t cross. They were each other’s barricades.
She and Lynn, though, had been good company together. No private jokes to show how intimate they were. Attentive to the third wheel, both of them. She was tough in some ways, at times a little paranoid, but smart. And devoted to Lynn. He would’ve liked her for that devotion alone.
But she was crying now, her nose and eye makeup running, so he took her arm and led her to a stone bench under a tree. They faced away from everyone—people were beginning to trickle in, emerge slowly through the back door, speaking in low voices. She fished around in her bag. Tissue. Off to their right the fountain made its sound, but it wasn’t like nature or streams. It made him think something was leaking. Somewhere a pipe had broken under the surface, and slowly, unseen, dark waters were rising.
“Sorry. I thought I’d keep it together in public,” she said, shaking her head. “Sorry. Embarrassing.”
It was easier to be with someone who didn’t expect him to act at ease, less lonely to stand beside someone sunk into their own well. His well wasn’t far off, and from the bottom of one you couldn’t see into the other, but at least you knew it was there.
Usually after ten minutes he would have slipped away to a private space, a bathroom or bedroom. In such places his custom was to look at himself steadily in whatever mirror he could find. It calmed him down to see his reflection, because it could be anyone’s. You’re not so different, you’re just a guy—a quiet guy who plays bass. They can’t see through your skin to the alarm you feel when their eyes rest on you. See? Fear is invisible.
“I had a win,” she said, when she finished dabbing at her face. She was mumbling.
“Uh. Pardon?”
“I had a way in.”
Still he could barely hear her.
“A way into the world. For the first time. He was my only way in.”
He wasn’t sure what she meant. This gray area, this stretching grayness that was the unspeakable quality of feeling, could only be captured by rhythm and melody.
“People say, you know, time will help heal it,” she went on. “It won’t be so acute. That could be true. It has to be. No one can live like this.”
She was in her well and thought she’d never get out. And he had to admit, it was distinctly possible. A nurturing-type person would probably cluck like a chook and reassure her, but he didn’t have that in him. He could barely say regular things.
He’d rather tell her the truth, anyway: a well was deep and true and had its own cylindrical perfection. It gave good shelter because its walls weren’t thin; they were as thick as the earth was round. When you were in a well the walls went on forever.
From the solitude of a well, if you were fortunate, you could look up now and then and see a circle of sky. That circle might as well be the world, or the span of a life in it—clouds passed in the blink of an eye, no matter how immense they were. Stars greater than the sun shone down, as small as pins, from infinite remove.
Course, you couldn’t say hard things, not when times were already hard. He knew that much. Only music could cross the divide. The brain’s hard wiring, probably, how music resonated—said everything while saying nothing at all. But he preferred to think of it in less scientific terms. Music, the hard currency of the soul.
“I should go talk to his family,” she said. “He made me his executor. We were going to—we hadn’t told anyone yet, but we had agreed to get married.”
“Oh,” he said. He almost added Congratulations. Stopped himself. Lynn hadn’t mentioned it, but it made sense.
“It wasn’t going to be a big thing, just a small ceremony,” she said. “But he wanted to be organized. He had a will. I don’t. I don’t own much, so what’s the point.”
“He had the house,” said Ry, nodding. His father had left it to him. House, bike and gold record.
“He wants—wanted the house to go to his siblings,” she said. “To sell. I guess none of them wants to live in it. I’ll be—it’s going to be my job to sell it for them.”
“You don’t have to,” he offered. “It might be easier—someone who’s not—”
“I know. But I want to. To look out for them. You know? They don’t know much about real estate.”
The phrase real estate made the conversation everyday. They were two people talking about real estate.
She felt it too, he thought. Almost ashamed. Or maybe he was reading too much into it. She dabbed at her eyes with the tissue.
“OK,” she said. “I’ll go. Do I look—?”
“Fine,” he said, though there were still faint eye-makeup tracks.
She smiled at him, small smile. Reached out and squeezed his hand. Then walked away, purse over one shoulder, holding the drink.
Missed Connections, he thought. It was a section in Craigslist. People who saw each other on the bus. Or at a restaurant. As far as he could tell all connections were missed.
Or all his, anyway. He’d read an email recently, he shouldn’t have but it was over his sister’s shoulder, half by accident while he was helping her troubleshoot on her computer. She was divorced and dating some guy—she constantly had to hire babysitters so she could go out with him. When she ran low on cash Ry was the babysitter. All Ry knew about him was that when they first met he liked her for her English accent. She had to break it to him that the accent was Australian. She said he seemed kind of disappointed.
The email was from the guy. “Thanks for the hours of deep connection,” it said. Did that ring true to her?
It didn’t ring true to him.
Was it enough to think you had a “deep connection”?
Maybe it was. Maybe that was all that counted, in the end. Maybe illusion was everything.
Unexpected sight at the back door: a fake leopard-skin hat. Beneath it, Lordy, facing the floor. He rarely looked up, in public. Now he was shuffling along in a black suit and shoes Ry had never seen before—glossy loafers. Tassels. He usually wore tailored shoes in some vegan fabric, slip-ons. No laces. He didn’t like laces; he claimed he couldn’t tie a bow. He never learned, he said. These couldn’t be leather—impossible. Even in his expensive SUV, whose high-end package came with all-leather upholstery, he had insisted on vinyl seats. The day they’d picked up the car from the dealership, after a long wait, it turned out the steering wheel had leather trim on it.
But since Lordy would never touch the wheel himself they’d been able to conceal it from him. Lynn went so far as to complain about the textu
re of the grip, grumbling to Lordy that when his hands sweated the vinyl was slippery beneath them.
When it came to Lordy, Ry was sometimes unsure how to proceed but Lynn had been confident. Lynn hadn’t been above a white lie.
Now the job of white lies would be all on him.
So vinyl loafers. And who had driven him? Maybe he’d walked. He liked to walk, and because he didn’t drive he often walked for miles.
Ry approached quickly, from the side. Best not to pop up suddenly in front of Lordy: it could make him jump.
“There’s lemonade, if you’re thirsty,” he said. Lordy didn’t touch spirits. That was how he put it, when they were offered to him. “I never touch spirits,” he’d mumble.
“Lemonade,” repeated Lordy, but at the same time shook his head. His eyes darted. That meant he had no interest in a drink. With Lordy you had to read the signs, not listen to the words.
Behind him a young kid Ry’d never seen before struggled to push a cart with equipment on it, an amp and keyboard and loops of cable.
“What’s this?” said Ry.
“Chair!” said Lordy gruffly, so Ry turned and went through the back door. At the kitchen table all the chairs were taken, but Lynn’s sister was carrying platters into the dining room and as she passed he asked if they could spare one. She tapped another woman on the shoulder, and slowly the woman stood. Ry thanked her as he picked up the chair—rickety, but it would have to serve.
Outside Lordy was watching as the kid ran the cable to an outlet on the house’s back wall. He saw Ry and the chair and pointed with an impatient hand to an area beside the triple-tiered fountain, a piece of pavement beneath a mimosa tree.
“There,” he muttered, still facing the ground.
He sat on the chair, plugged the keyboard into the speaker and played a couple of chords, testing. The sound carried well. No eye contact. He didn’t wait for an audience, either.
“Traditional version,” he said. Ry doubted anyone else heard. “English.”
Then he started playing. Even on one keyboard, it sounded like an orchestra. His voice was deep and full.
“Arise, ye workers from your slumber / Arise, ye prisoners of want,” he began.
More guests were filing out the back door, their conversations subsiding. Nina was among them; her hand trembled holding her glass. It was empty anyway so he took it from her and held it himself.
“No more deluded by reaction / On tyrants only we’ll make war / The soldiers too will take strike action / They’ll break ranks and fight no more,” sang Lordy.
Around them the crowds were so thick pushing out of the house, almost jostling, that Ry stumbled forward.
“It’s Lordy,” whispered a teenage girl.
“And the last fight let us face!” shouted Lynn’s brother, the jailbird. He had no singing voice at all.
More of them sang, not shy but lagging, since only the family really knew the words. Lynn had played recordings of the song at family gatherings, and other than the brother they all had good ears.
This wasn’t the kind of thing Lordy usually did. He’d always dismissed the song. “Commie propaganda,” he’d once said to Lynn when Lynn was picking it out on a guitar, though he’d been smiling his lopsided grin when he said it. “White-people shit.” You could never tell what that grin meant: sometimes it was intended gently, fondly; other times it was almost malicious.
And the setting was way outside Lordy’s usual comfort zone. As he sang, and the mourners went along, game for the tribute but pretty much butchering the lyrics, Ry wondered if he’d have to shepherd Lordy out afterward. Lordy was at his best before a performance and at his worst afterward, the exact opposite of Ry, who felt satisfied after he played, a task complete. But Lordy was filled with emotion and often shaky or explosive. Angry at small mistakes, mostly other people’s but sometimes his own—mistakes no one else ever noticed.
When he finished a silence fell. And held. The song had got to them. Lordy was magic.
He made you pay to be near him, though. You paid for the alchemy. No gold without a pound of flesh.
The silence went on until Lynn’s brother shouted “Encore!”
No surer way to piss Lordy off.
But he didn’t pitch a fit. Relief. He just got up and walked back toward the house through the crowd. It parted like the Red Sea.
Lordy had a strong sense of what he needed to do at any given time. Only at the swimming pool had he hesitated. He lacked some basic skills: tying shoelaces, driving, swimming. He’d never learned even a basic front crawl, but that day, he told Ry later, he just really wanted to swim. The blue water had called to him.
“I’m off,” Ry told Nina, and handed her back the empty wineglass.
And he did what he always did: followed the leader.
I KNEW YOU IN THIS DARK
After the service, for the first time since high school, she’d learned part of a poem by heart. It was a World War I poem, written for the dead. They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old. / Age shall not weary them. She wasn’t sure how the minister had chosen it. Lynn wasn’t English or a soldier.
But like a soldier he’d died young.
She dropped the words she didn’t like from the poem and kept the rest. Ran over it in her head when she felt the fast clutch of grief. To the innermost heart . . . they are known / As stars are known to the night.
She often listened to the music he’d played for her after dinner, drink in hand. She’d doled out most of his collection to the guys in the band, including his hundreds of carefully kept records. It hadn’t been easy to split them up, but the others treasured them: she could tell by the way they handled the grainy cardboard of the covers. For herself she’d reserved only the music he’d played for her when they were together, on his MP3 player and a small shelf of CDs. She kept these beneath a picture of him she’d taken with her phone and printed out at the office, and a votive candle she lit at night.
Bereavement had made her into an audience at work. The clients talked to her more than they had before, not casual conversations but confessions. Some new receptiveness must be coming off her, a helpless openness she didn’t want.
She’d had some doozies lately, client-wise. A magnet for eccentrics. There was a man who told her all about his shameless infidelity as though the telling would absolve him. A buyer from Redondo Beach showed her graphic pictures on his phone of a recent liposuction procedure; someone from out of state, calling to list her boyfriend’s condo, told all about his criminal conviction. There was a seller in Los Feliz who confided that her house was infested with handyman midgets. She was a successful executive at a production company—mostly local and regional commercials—and appeared to lead an otherwise normal life. But she’d had to leave her house, she told Nina, when the midgets grew into regular-sized men overnight. “Seven of them,” she told Nina, indignant. “There wasn’t room for all of us.”
This house—an overpriced wreck near the Hollywood sign—was owned by a woman who claimed to be a vampire and said she could only draw strength from drinking blood.
“I used to be a med sang,” she said, “you know, a medical sanguinarian? But then I got into the lifestyle.” She’d had a boyfriend who let her feed on him, but after that ended—for unrelated reasons, she clarified—she’d gotten used to buying blood online. She kept it lined up in small jars, vacuum-sealed and neatly labeled with the dates of purchase, in her refrigerator, where dark liver and fillets of deep-pink salmon also glistened under Saran Wrap. The freezer was fitted with an actual padlock. They didn’t discuss it.
The vampire house was decorated with paintings of thin, beautiful Goths pierced by knives, their skin white, hair dark, lips red. Snakes twined around them as they lay, or if they stood, fierce wolves crouched at their feet, showing oversized fangs. Crows spread black wings on bare shoulders.
Lynn’s sister’s kids liked vampire shows. Well, the girl liked vampires but the boy said vampires were lame, zombies
better. But there weren’t good zombie shows for kids, so he streamed episodes of The Walking Dead on his iPad on the sly. But he wasn’t sly enough and got in trouble. Lynn’s sister said the zombie-butchering wasn’t healthy. She said it would give him nightmares, then make him want to stockpile guns or take up the crossbow. He said, “What, I’m gonna wake up one day and start hacking off people’s rotting limbs?” The little girl, who was only eleven, avidly watched the Twilight franchise. She was allowed because her mother watched with her and thought the actors and actresses were cute. She dreamed of becoming the undead. That was true love to her: in true love you found an undead boyfriend and, admittedly after some back-and-forth, agreed to be undead for him.
The little girl had asked: “If Uncle Lynn came back from the dead and said he was a vampire now, would you let him bite you?” Yes, Nina had admitted. “Yes, I believe I would.” Bite me. The cold skin wouldn’t be great at first, but she could get used to it.
The vampire didn’t want to show her house without its human-skull candles and refrigerated blood supply. She said at first, with confidence, that another vampire would probably make an offer. Nina had warned her that the vampire community might not be large enough to meet the asking, but the homeowner was stubborn. She said the MSM—which referred to “mainstream media,” according to Siri—had no idea how large the vampire community was. There was a conspiracy afoot to deny its size and power, for the vampire lobby boasted rock stars and captains of industry. Some, the homeowner strongly implied, were household names. They didn’t come out of the closet because of (a) their careers and (b) the fact that it was a secret society.
Nina had said, “I understand, but is there a large vampire real-estate-buying community?”
The vampire said she’d put the word out, but so far no vampire buyers had stepped up.
Without a concept of the future all sense of urgency disappeared. No momentum. That was why she seemed like a patient listener to the clients: she had nowhere better to be. Before Lynn, it was true, she’d had only the vaguest sense of her future, but then the future had arrived. Now it was past.
