Lonesome Lies Before Us

by Don Lee

  It was a relief, really, to be out of the music business. He was glad to be done with it. He was satisfied with his life in Rosarita Bay—quiet and anonymous, with no ambitions other than to make an honest living and have a roof over his head and be with Jeanette and her family. He’d been certain that he would never return to making music again. That was why the emergence of the new songs had been such a surprise to him.

  A month ago, in late April, he’d been driving past Chávez Field and had seen a Little League game in progress. Idly, he had parked and climbed into the stands to watch the game. It was several days after the end of Lent, and, ashamed and bereft, he was convinced he had failed in his spiritual exercise. He had stopped going on walks. He was no longer trying to pray. He planned to return the dictionary, academic book, and field guides to the library. He had all but given up.

  The Little League game was between the Lions Club Twins and the R. B. Feed & Hardware Tigers. As a kid, Yadin had been an avid Detroit Tigers fan. Davey, too. Together, they had ridden the high of the Tigers winning the AL East in 1972, tumbled to heartbreak when the team lost in the LCS, then were stuck in the muck for the next four years, during which the Tigers were unable to rise above .500, true misery coming in 1975, when the team lost over a hundred games. The following season offered some hope, or at least some entertainment, with the debut of The Bird, Mark Fidrych. Yadin and Davey had loved the pitcher’s antics, how he’d get on his knees to manicure the mound, smoothing it out with his hands, the way he would talk to himself and the ball. But before the end of the season, Davey would die, and Fidrych would be long gone by the time Detroit finally won the World Series in 1984, Kirk Gibson the star of that squad.

  Yadin still followed the Tigers, though for Joe’s sake he was trying to become a Giants convert. He had watched every playoff game with Joe last year, when the Giants had won the Series for the first time since moving to San Francisco. But Yadin couldn’t seem to get invested in the National League. All of his history was with the American League—the rivalries, the grittiness of the players and stadiums.

  At the plate, a kid from the Lions Club Twins took a long, hard, looping swing, releasing his top hand from the handle of the bat as he rotated, which caused him to lose his balance and stumble out of the batter’s box. He whiffed, struck out. When had they begun teaching Little Leaguers to hit like this, as if they were man-sized pros? Davey’s swing had been short and quick and compact, and he had kept the barrel of the bat flat through the zone as long as possible. Not much ever got by him. After contact, he’d pronate and supinate his forearms, rolling his wrists, with both hands remaining on the handle, so he wouldn’t lose any speed or control or power. It had been a sweet lefty stroke—not unlike Kirk Gibson’s—even at ten years old.

  “You didn’t have any holes in that swing,” Yadin whispered aloud, then, silently, he continued in apostrophe: You would have made the high school team for sure, maybe gotten a scholarship to college. Who knows, maybe you would have made it to the show.

  For the next few days, he kept talking to Davey—first Davey as a boy, then Davey as the young man Yadin imagined he would have grown up to be, handsome and kind. He imagined Davey living with him in his apartment in Michigan and attending Kalamazoo Central High School, Derek Jeter’s alma mater, and becoming a walk-on second baseman at the University of Michigan. He imagined Davey being drafted in the twenty-first round by the Orioles (alas, not the Tigers) and playing single-A ball with the Aberdeen IronBirds, the Delmarva Shorebirds, and the Frederick Keys before tearing the ACL in his left knee. He imagined that afterward Davey would have returned to college and gotten a job in supply chain management in the pet food industry, developing just-in-time delivery systems for Proctor & Gamble, rising to be an executive for Iams in Mason, Ohio, outside of Cincinnati. He would have married a former collegiate tennis player named Sissy who was now an assistant tournament director for the Western & Southern Open, and who—lithe and fast—could still kick Davey’s ass on the court. They would have had four kids, Mickey, Dustin, Margot, and Rose, and two dogs and a cat, Oscar, Neon, and Popcorn, all of them living together clamorously in a five-bedroom, six-bathroom colonial with Brazilian cherry floors and an in-ground pool on four acres—bustling with barbecues and backyard touch football games and movie nights—to which Yadin was always welcome.

  “What’s it like there, Davey?” Yadin asked. “Is it nice?

  “Yes, it is,” Davey told him. “You shouldn’t be afraid.”

  He imagined driving down a country two-lane in Montana with Davey, just the two of them, on an extended weekend getaway, the fishing trip they’d always dreamed of taking. Windows open in the car, they would smell the hard red wheat alongside the road, shoots waving and rustling in the wind, the fields—nearing harvest, green turning tawny-gold—running for miles until they met the Little Belt Mountains, ghost-blue in the distance, all under that bound less cerulean, white wisps and pulled puffballs of clouds high high in the sky. They would stop for gas, both getting out and standing beside the pump to stretch their legs, everything so quiet, Yadin aware of the engine tick-tocking, the dust of grain kernels sanding the air, water dripping from a basin in the garage and dinking the cement.

  Back on the road, they would happen upon a station on the radio playing Gram Parsons’s “A Song for You.” Yadin would crank the dial, and they would listen to GP and Emmylou in reverent silence—those harmonies, the fiddle, the hymnal swell of Elvis’s old sideman, Glen D. Hardin, on the Hammond B-3 organ. They wouldn’t utter a syllable even after the song had ended, Yadin turning off the radio, driving another mile before the brothers would simply say, in unison, “Goddamn.”

  They would eat at a roadside diner, a shack, really, sizzles and clangs, cusses and burnt musks emanating from the smoky kitchen, but they would be served wonderful elk burgers, juicy, thick patties topped with caramelized onions, bacon, huckleberry sauce, and a fried egg on a toasted brioche bun, soft, chewy, crunchy raptures of flavor with each bite. Finally, they would arrive at their rental cabin, but would quickly set off again to fly-fish a section of the Judith River known for its rainbows, cutthroats, and cutbows. They would wade and cast and nymph for hours, and wouldn’t catch a damn thing, which would not, really, make a bit of difference to them, just being out there together, brothers, in the sun and in the clear, glinty burbling water, the river currenting by them, surrounded by pines and junipers and cottonwoods that dangled over the banks.

  Returning to the cabin, they would take turns showering and then sit on the porch and drink longnecks and watch the sunset, meadowlarks fluting out warble-whistles. Yadin would grill rib eyes while Davey made broccoli and Yorkshire pudding, popping open a bottle of hearty Grenache. After dinner, they would drink coffee and smoke cigars on the porch—oh, the splashed pinpricks of stars, the click pop chirp of insects, the hooing of an owl, the trembling leaves of aspens—then they would repair inside and arrange straight-backed chairs in the living room, and, facing each other, with Davey on their father’s old Eko Ranger VI dreadnought and Yadin on his vintage Martin D-21, they would play duets of Townes Van Zandt’s “To Live Is to Fly” and “No Place to Fall,” alternating vocals on the verses, joining for the chorus.

  Along with Davey, Yadin began speaking to his mother, to his grandmother, to relatives he never knew he had, to his father. In that club years ago, Yadin hadn’t thought to ask his father’s friend, the Goodrich sales rep who’d told him about his death, if his father had ever listened to his music, or had even known that Yadin had become a recording artist, and he had always regretted not asking.

  These talks with “the other”—wasn’t that how Caroline had phrased it? Was this what she had meant? Probably not. Yet Yadin felt different. Becalmed. Maybe he hadn’t been touched, per se, by God, but he thought he had found a connection to the numinous. There was a movement within him toward what could be called grace, and this gave him comfort. The world around him slowed, but at the same time was in sharp
er relief. He was attentive to things now that he had long ago stopped noticing. Children laughing, birdsong, rain, the wind, his own breath.

  The irony was not lost on him that he had never really learned to hear, to listen, until this moment, when he was losing his hearing. He rued all those years he had worn earplugs to bed to muffle the sounds of the world outside. Fire trucks. Barking dogs. Car alarms. Crickets. All those noises interested him now. He awoke to them. What he thought, for once, for the first time in many years, was that it was good to be alive.

  “Something’s happening,” he told Caroline in the library.

  “I’m glad.”

  “But I didn’t do it right.”

  “It’s not a test. There’s no right or wrong way.”

  He started writing spontaneously in his notebook. Not reflections or thoughts or prayers. Songs. Very straightforward songs—plaintive, understated ballads, almost subversive in their simplicity, in their nakedness and sincerity. He remembered something Townes Van Zandt had once said: “There’s only two kinds of music: the blues, and zippity-doo-dah.” Then he remembered something Townes’s friend Mickey Newbury had once said: “How many people have listened to my songs and thought, ‘He must have a bottle of whiskey in one hand and a pistol in the other’? Well, I don’t. I write my sadness.”

  That was what Yadin was doing. He was writing the blues. He was writing his sadness.

  One after another, the songs presented themselves to Yadin, and he began to wonder what he should do with them, if anything. Maybe he would record them. But for what purpose? he asked himself. He had neither the desire nor the means to attempt a comeback.

  April turned to May, more songs accrued. He kept thinking about one of Hopkins’s earlier poems, “The Habit of Perfection,” which began:

  Elected silence, sing to me

  And beat upon my whorlèd ear,

  Pipe me to pastures still and be

  The music that I care to hear.

  There was something achingly beautiful to Yadin about Hopkins’s commitment to asceticism and humility, his vow to leave all bourgeois pursuits behind, subscribing, as Caroline had said, to a voluntary silence.

  He decided he would record this one last album, while he could still hear. Not as a comeback, not to try to revive his career, but as a coda, a valediction. A way to leave on his own terms, and say, I was here. Then he would sell all his instruments and equipment and never write another song. This would be his consolation. He would elect silence, and walk into the light.

  When he returned home that afternoon from San Bruno, there was a silver Mercedes-Benz convertible parked in front of his cottage. He got out of his van and saw Mallory on his front steps, smoking a cigarette. Her hair was tied into a ponytail, and she wore large hoop earrings, a blazer with the sleeves rolled up, a black tee, tight capri pants, and ballet flats.

  “What are you doing here?” Yadin asked her. For a second, he let his imagination flood with possible explanations, most of them absurd. “I thought you had to get back to L.A.”

  “I did. I postponed the meeting. I decided to stay another night. Where have you been? I’ve been waiting here all afternoon. Why’d you give me your landline? Don’t you have a cell? Can I use your bathroom? Like, right this minute?”

  He let her in his house. He stood in the kitchen, and through the closed bathroom door, he listened to her pee—a steady, splashy stream that felt, the longer it went on, too intimate to hear—and then to the toilet flushing and the faucet running. She said something to him through the door.

  “You had a date with a WASP?” Yadin asked, for that was what he had heard.

  “What?” she said, the water still burbling as she washed her hands. “No, can I take some of your floss? I’ve got something between my teeth, it’s been driving me crazy.”

  After another minute, she came out of the bathroom and surveyed his living room and kitchen. “I like your decorating scheme,” she said. “Very minimalistic.”

  He was abashed. After everything in the cottage had been pawned or auctioned, he had replaced only the bare essentials, not bothering with décor, just function. But now he was shamefaced, imagining what his house, his circumstances, must look like to Mallory, as if he were as indigent as he’d been in Raleigh before he met her. “Why are you here?” he asked.

  “Curiosity got the better of me,” she said. “I really want to hear the new songs. I’ve told you, more than once, I’m bad at waiting.”

  “Why? Why’s it so important to you?”

  “I don’t exactly know myself. It just is,” Mallory said. “Will you let me hear a track or two?”

  Now that she was in his house, he could not say no. He needed her to confirm for him that this project was worthwhile, that it was as solid as he believed, and Mallory would be candid if she thought he was deceiving himself. He took her down the hallway into his studio.

  “You weren’t kidding when you said you were doing this DIY,” Mallory said.

  “There’s something about the ambient sound in here,” he told her, “something connected to the wood. You’ll see.”

  He pulled out the straight-backed chair from the worktable for her. He turned on his studio monitors, slid the levels up on his TASCAM four-track recorder, and sorted through the cassettes in the cardboard shoe box on the table for the first track. The tape for the full album was still in the pocket of his windbreaker, but he wasn’t ready to unfurl the whole thing to Mallory yet.

  “That’s the name of the album?” she asked. “Lonesome Lies Before Us?”

  “What?” he said, then realized he had scrawled the title on the shoe box with a Sharpie. “Yeah.”

  She contemplated, then said, “I don’t get it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “There are lies that are lonesome, and they’re right in front of us?” she asked. “In front of our very noses?”

  “What?” Yadin asked.

  “Or there are people, other people, who made lonesome lies in the past, which still affect everything that’s happening to us now?”

  “What?” he said. “No. Lonesomeness, or loneliness, it’s lying before us, laid out ahead of us, in our future, for everyone, no matter what we do.”

  “You might need to change that,” Mallory said.

  “Really?” Yadin said, unaccountably irritated.

  “Wait, isn’t that from a Rodney Crowell song?”

  He found the tape labeled “Shades on the Window,” jammed it into the TASCAM, and punched play. There was a fingerpicking intro in six-eight time, then Yadin singing:

  It’s astray inside of me

  That year so long ago

  When it all came undone

  You’re a ghost so far away

  It’s the same thing every day

  I only see you leaving

  Wherever were you going

  It was never with me

  It was only one for oneself

  I’m outside your house

  There’s only darkness within

  And I can’t see a thing

  Let me into the room

  Show me just for once

  Who you’ve always been

  Let me see where you live

  Part for me just once

  The shades on your window

  Yadin watched Mallory listening to the song, watched her face, and he waited for her to react in some way—to narrow her eyes or cringe or murmur or smile or nod or shake her head. Nothing. She thought the song was hopeless. He had been fooling himself. The whole record was a fiasco.

  When the track ended, Mallory asked, “Can I hear another one?”

  He would let her hear them all, but he could not endure staying in the studio with her while she did. From the shoe box, he picked out the tapes for the rest of the album, stacked them in order, and left Mallory to her own devices.

  He went outside and paced in front of his house for a while, then sat in his van. An eternity. It should have taken Mallory less than
fifty minutes to listen to all twelve songs, but it was more than an hour and a half before she opened the front door.

  She looked to be in a stupor, as if she had been up all night. “Do you want to go somewhere for dinner?” she asked. “I’m starving.”

  “I have some food,” he said.

  He sat her down at his café pedestal table, and, from a plastic tub, he scooped out a salad of Swiss chard, cabbage, garbanzo beans, broccoli stems, cottage cheese, grapes, and almonds onto a plate and a bowl.

  “You sure you don’t want to go out?” Mallory asked.

  “This is easy enough,” he said.

  “To be honest, that doesn’t look too appetizing.”

  “I think you can rough it this one time, Mallory.”

  He fetched the straight-backed chair from the studio and joined her at the table. They poked at their salads, and he gulped from his glass of mineral water, apprehensive, waiting for her verdict on the songs, growing impatient and despondent.

  “The album’s brilliant,” she told him.

  He had never been so relieved, nor grateful. “You really think so?” he asked.

  “I really think so,” she said to him. “They might be the best things you’ve ever written. They tear your heart out. They couldn’t be sadder. It’s a little punishing at times, but there’s something beautiful in that. You’re singing as if it’s the last time you’ll ever get the chance, the last show you’ll ever play. Everything’s tight and focused. There’s not a single extraneous note. Every one of these songs is a gem, Yadin. There’s not a filler or dud among them. Have you let anyone else listen to them?”