by Barbara Hall
I come in on the tail end of the commotion. Clive is yelling something about how no one in this godforsaken place knows a damn thing about music, and it’s just fine with him, because now he can really pursue his career, and he’s going to call all his students and tell them to take private lessons from him, never to set foot in McCoy’s again. Patrick and Ernest are watching with neutral expressions. Declan is the only one who seems vaguely interested, scratching his long beard, his brow knitted with concern, as if he were the final arbiter, as if he were God.
He does kind of look like God, I find myself thinking. I’m oblivious to Clive’s ranting. I’m not sure why.
Clive finishes up his angry parting speech and nearly bumps into me as he turns to make his dramatic exit. He stares hard at me.
“You’re in on this, too?”
“I’m not in on anything. I haven’t even punched my time card.”
“It was nice knowing you,” he says.
The chimes rattle manically as he slams the door.
“Well, that is what we call that,” Declan says. Then he gets to work on repairing a lute.
Franklin shudders as if caught by a sudden draft. He looks at me, then at Patrick and Ernest.
“Had to be done,” he says.
Ernest just shrugs, to indicate his lack of involvement.
Patrick says, “Why?”
“He was bad for the shop,” Franklin says.
“He had a lot of students,” Patrick says.
“It just had to be done, all right?” Franklin says crankily, a death look in his eyes. He has been very intense and angry since he abandoned the Trailer Park Rogues. He is playing in Jenny’s band now. They are called Moonlight. He denies that he really belongs to the band, but I have caught him making up flyers, and he no longer talks to me about practicing or getting gigs.
I find my time card and punch in. The clunking sound reverberates in the quiet room. There is no other sound but some infernal squeaking and plunking as Declan restores the lute.
“So we’re short a salesperson today,” I say, taking my place behind the cash register.
“We’ll manage. People are dying to work here,” Franklin says. “I get a dozen applications a week.”
“You’d better start sorting through them,” I say. “It’s two weeks before Christmas. We are going to be busy.”
Franklin knows this, and as the realization dawns, he heads off toward the manager’s office to start digging through applications.
“That was exciting,” Ernest says. He picks up a Collings guitar and starts tuning it. Then he breaks into an Allman Brothers riff.
Patrick is staring hard at me. I look at him and say, “What?”
“It was a big mistake,” he tells me.
“So? What do you want me to do about it?”
“Talk to him.”
“Clive?”
“Franklin.”
I laugh derisively, realizing that I sound a little bit demonic.
“Franklin doesn’t listen to me.”
“You’re the only one he does listen to. If you hadn’t been late, you could have stopped it,” Patrick says.
The hair on the back of my neck goes up. “I’m not late. And I couldn’t have stopped it. It’s over now. Let’s move on.”
We move on. There’s nothing left to do. And I can’t help thinking, as I stay busy all day, selling guitar strings and picks and tambourines and lessons (a great gift idea!) to frantic shoppers, that if Dorothy and Hallie come back tomorrow, they will notice the difference, will feel the absence of Clive, will want to know what happened to him, will want some kind of explanation.
But they don’t come back and aren’t coming back, and neither is Clive, and I’m going to have to adjust to all these changes as if I were a grown-up.
When Hallie left, I wanted to sob on someone’s shoulder, like a broken-hearted teenager. But I didn’t. I kept it to myself. I said, Be a grown-up. Now I’m wondering if that was the right choice. Now I’m thinking a grown-up might acknowledge her pain and invite others into it. A grown-up might have fought harder.
But no, just no, I tell myself. The whole point of teaching is that students come into your life for a little window of time. Then they leave. They are supposed to leave. And maybe employees are supposed to leave, too. Just clock out, Leah had said.
Franklin stays hidden in his office all day. The rest of us muddle through, pretending nothing has changed.
Ho, ho, ho.
When I get to my car that night, Clive is waiting for me, leaning against my car, his arms crossed, staring at nothing. He doesn’t have an instrument with him. It’s just Clive, just a moderately handsome twenty-eight-year-old with nowhere to go. He watches me with a crooked smile, as if we are long-lost lovers, discovering each other after years of imposed estrangement.
“How was work?” he asks.
“Clive, I’m sorry.”
He shrugs. “Maybe it’s for the best.”
“You think so?”
His smile fades. His anger bursts through, surfacing first in his eyes, then in his mouth, which is pinched against the vitriol he wants to spew forth.
He says, “It’s bullshit and you know it. Franklin fired me because he hates bass players. I could sue him.”
“Yes, you could. Using the discrimination against bass players clause of the Constitution.”
“I’m glad you think it’s so funny.”
“I don’t think it’s funny. Do you need a ride?”
“Yes,” he says.
I let him into my tired Honda. It’s cold inside. I turn on the heater and the radio. Both are slow getting going. The radio is full of Christmas songs. It takes forever to find an agnostic station that plays the Smashing Pumpkins and Joy Division. Clive looks out the passenger window as I drive down Pico.
“Tell me where to turn,” I suggest.
“Keep going,” he says.
We hit the beach. He still doesn’t tell me where to turn.
“Where do you live?” I ask.
“I don’t want to go there.”
“Where do you want to go?”
“Home with you,” he says. “I just want to talk.”
“Okay.”
I take him to the trailer park. He doesn’t seem surprised by it. Even as we get out of the car and head to my trailer, he just looks at his feet and grumbles under his breath.
“This is where I live,” I say, unlocking the door to my trailer.
“Fine by me.”
“You’re coming in?”
“I just want a drink or something. Then I’ll call a cab.”
We go inside and he notices nothing. I tell him to sit down, and then I open a couple of beers for us. He sits in one of my two chairs and continues to stare at nothing in particular. I sip my beer, waiting. He holds his, staring.
Finally he says, “How can you stand it there?”
I shrug. “It’s just my job.”
He says, “What will I tell my students?”
“Whatever you want to.”
“I like some of them, you know. I don’t want to leave them.”
“Then tell them to come with you.”
He finally sips his beer and says, “What did you say to Hallie?”
I feel cold suddenly.
“I didn’t tell her anything. She just . . . stopped coming.”
“Why?”
I shrug, trying to appear casual. “Students stop coming. It’s what they do.”
“But you really liked her. You thought she was good.”
“What was I supposed to do? Get a warrant for her arrest? She lost interest.”
Clive looks sad for a moment, then stands, sighs, and sits by me on the couch. I feel every nerve in my body shut down, then come back to life, then shut down again. He is wearing a long-sleeved surfer-type T-shirt and jeans. His hair is short beyond logic, and the goatee on his chin looks like orphaned lint. His six earrings glint under the harsh overhead light. He is youn
ger than I imagined, and I feel nothing for him except that my heart is racing and I feel dizzy.
Leah said it was okay. She didn’t say it was inevitable.
He says, “Pearl, you’re better than all of them put together. I’ve heard you play. Why do you put up with it? Why are you there?”
“I’m making a living. How else can I pay for my palatial estate?”
“You can start a band.”
I laugh. “Violin players don’t start bands.”
“Why not? You’ve got violin, you’ve got me on bass. Those are the hardest instruments to find.”
“I don’t want to be in a band,” I tell him, and it’s true. I never really wanted to be in Franklin’s band, either. I just wanted to be near him. But he wants to be near someone else. I’ve played that tune before.
Clive says, “Well, if you don’t want to be in a band, what do you want to do?”
I shrug and admit the truth before I can stop myself. “I try not to want things.”
He is taken aback by this because he is young and therefore he is all want.
“Well, that’s just crazy. When you stop wanting things, you die,” he says.
“Maybe not. Maybe when you stop wanting things, you figure out how to live.”
I have no evidence of this, but I like the idea.
He is agitated. He shifts in his seat. He says, “What takes the place of want?”
I shrug again. “I don’t know yet. I haven’t been doing this for very long.”
He moves away from me slightly and starts twisting his bottom lip between his fingers. Then he says, “You know what I read once?”
I sigh. I want to say, No, I don’t give a shit what you read once. But I am polite and I have not given up on the idea of sleeping with him.
“What?” I say dutifully.
“That human beings are just mimics.”
“Mimics?”
“Yeah. That everything we do is just an imitation of what we’ve seen other people do. Like there’s no original thought.”
“That can’t be true.”
“Why not?” he asks, looking relieved. Because he doesn’t want it to be true. Who would?
“Beethoven, Mozart, Mahler, to name a few. Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein. They broke the rules. They had original ideas.”
“But this book I read says that breaking the rules is just a form of mimicking. They broke the rules because they saw someone else do it.”
“I don’t believe that,” I say. “There has to be an original rule breaker.”
I’m not actually sure, but I want to keep the argument alive. I am adding wood chips to the fire.
Clive gets excited by my resistance. He sits up straighter and says, “No, listen. In nature, there are all these organisms that imitate other things. There are bugs that look like sticks. Fish that look like rocks. Birds that look like leaves.”
I nod, stifling a yawn. Yawns, I read once, are evidence of being overwhelmed rather than bored or exhausted. “Polar bears are white so that they blend into the snowy landscape. That’s evolution. That’s survival.”
Clive says, “Mockingbirds mimic other birds. They don’t have a song of their own.”
“Right, but the birds they mimic have songs of their own.”
He scratches his goatee. I can see all the pistons firing in his brain. Me, I’m casting glances at my watch. I need to get some sleep or I will be cranky in the morning.
“So it figures,” young Clive says, “that people behave that way, too. There are people who are put on earth to mimic other people. But I don’t want to do that. I want to be original.”
“The mystery of fingerprints and all that.”
“What does that prove?”
“Originality.”
“Oh, yeah,” he says.
“And everybody mimics to a certain degree.”
“Yeah,” he says. “Like Franklin and Ernest. They aren’t really original musicians. They don’t write music. They play covers. They just mimic their heroes.”
“Right.”
“But you,” he says, casting a dreamy-eyed look in my direction, “you don’t mimic anyone.”
“Sure, I do.”
“Who?”
“Well, it’s not really a who. It’s a what.”
“What, then?”
I know. Immediately I know. It comes to me, like a vision, but slower. It’s a sound, a voice in my head. And what it says is, You are mimicking a musician. Because you aren’t a musician. You are a teacher.
I don’t say that out loud. Instead I turn to him and look at him and I wait. Because I know he will kiss me. And he does. And then things occur. The two of us confront each other.
We mimic lovers.
CLIVE GETS UP EARLY, just as it is getting light outside. He dresses while I am still dozing in bed. He doesn’t say anything. No one mentions coffee.
I lean up on an elbow and watch him. He looks so young, standing there, ready to depart. He is grinning, as if he’s gotten away with something. But he hasn’t gotten away with anything at all. He has to contend with me now, with that connection, however slim, that we have forged. As he stares at me, I see his smile start to fade. He knows he’s gotten more than he bargained for. And he knows, looking at me, that I’ve gotten less. He wants me to grin back and say something like, Wow. But seeing him want it makes me determined not to give it. This could be a character flaw, or it could be a woman’s natural reaction when a man thinks he’s done all the work.
“I guess there’s a silver lining to everything,” he says. “Even getting fired.”
The trouble with young men is that sooner or later, they say something young. And you can’t retch or even make a face. It’s not polite.
“You’ll find another job.”
He says, “Maybe you could talk to Franklin?”
I laugh. “Oh. Was that some kind of down payment?”
He pretends to look hurt. “No. What are you talking about? No, of course not.”
“It won’t help,” I tell him.
“What?”
“Talking to him. He doesn’t listen to me.”
“Okay. Whatever.”
He opens the door, and more sunlight spills in. I feel nervous.
And I hear myself say, “When will I see you again?”
It’s the death knell. It’s a dirge.
He says, “You have my number. It’s on the roster at McCoy’s.”
I want to say . . . what? Everything. I want to say, Come back here. You can’t do this. Women don’t chase men; men chase women. Don’t run from the natural order of things.
I want to say, You can’t do that to people. You can’t do that to people of my gender. We invest, I want to say, in every physical transaction. What I’ve given you is worth more than a favor.
Except that in his mind, it isn’t. And that’s just a function of age. Sex is cheap when you’re young. Disposable income. When you’re older, it’s a rare, mysterious metal.
He actually winks at me, then goes out and closes the door hard behind him.
I think of Hallie. I think of me saying, “Get rid of it.”
As if our mistakes could be so neatly wiped away.
As if admitting we are wrong buys us anything.
IT WASN’T THE PREGNANCY that made Hallie go away. Not directly.
The pregnancy itself went away, and I wasn’t sure how. She wouldn’t tell me.
I waited until the end of the lesson to ask so it wouldn’t look as if I were some kind of obsessed old maid living vicariously through her sexual drama.
The lesson had gone well. She was playing with much more fire. She was concentrating and finding surprises and even smiling as she moved through the changes. I wondered if it was her secret, all along, that had been interfering with her music.
“So what are we going to do, Hallie?”
“Do about what?”
“What we talked about last time. Your problem.”
She stared a
t me with genuine confusion. Then her eyebrows went up.
“Oh, that.”
“Yes, that. I told you I’d help.”
She waved a hand. “It’s taken care of.”
“What do you mean?”
“I took care of it.”
“But how?”
“I know people. I have resources.”
“Where did you get the money?”
She crossed her arms. “Don’t you think that’s a little bit none of your business?”
“You let me into this. Am I supposed to forget about it now?”
“Yes. You’re supposed to forget about it now.”
“I don’t think that’s possible.”
She ignored me and started gathering her books.
“I think there’s more to discuss.” My tone was not lost on her. She turned her head to the side, the way dogs do when they hear a foreign sound.
“Like what?”
“Like why you were pregnant in the first place. Hallie, you have real talent and you must protect that. You’re obligated to.”
“Are you going to talk to me about God again?”
“I’m not talking about God. I’m talking about birth control.”
“I know,” she said. “I’ll insist on it next time.”
“There shouldn’t be a next time. You shouldn’t be having sex. You’re too young.”
“And you’re too old.”
This stole my breath a little, like a sudden wind. “For sex? Is that what you think?”
“No. To be talking to me about sex. You don’t know what it’s like to be my age.”
“I’ve been your age.”
“Not here, not now. It’s different. Things are different.”
“How are they different?”
“These are weird times, okay? And L.A. is a weird place. And you learn how to survive. You have reasons for doing things. You—”
“Are you talking about bargaining?”
Her smile faded, and she said, “I won’t do it again, okay?”
“Hallie, did you make some kind of bargain? Because that’s something else.”
“You calling me a prostitute?”
“No. I don’t think it was necessarily your choice.”
She laughed. “How could it not be my choice? Do you even know how it works?”
“Yes, I know how it works. It’s not an exchange of favors.”
“What is it, then?”
