Middle Men (5 page)

It was a happy time and I couldn't wait for it to end.

•  •  •

I knocked. Maria Recoba lived alone on a hillside in Los Feliz. It was an old Spanish Revival house. From the street it looked
very grand and elegant, with bright stucco facades and arched windows, but the rosebushes along the brick walkway were dead, long dead, and piled on the front steps were several years' worth of new phone books. I knocked again. Usually, if someone wasn't home I would drop their meal off with a preassigned neighbor, but Maria was always at home. I was going to leave but then I heard a record playing, something classical on piano. This time I pounded on the door. The record stopped and a moment later the judas window in the front door opened. A stranger stared at me. She seemed young but I saw streaks of gray in the black hair that fell across her face. Her cheeks were red and glistening with sweat.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “I didn't hear you.”

“Where's Maria?”

“Maria's asleep.”

“Are you a nurse or something?”

“No,” she said. “I'm nobody.”

I didn't know how to respond to this statement. She didn't say it offhand; she seemed to mean it. In Los Angeles this was a rare thing to confess.

“I'm just sort of here at the moment,” she said, opening the front door.

“Do you know Maria?”

“She wants to sell her piano,” she said. “I saw her ad in the
PennySaver
. That's why I'm here.”

“You're buying her piano?”

I sounded skeptical. It was a beautiful old piano and this woman wore old navy-blue corduroys and a ragged white T-shirt. She was tall and athletic-looking, with broad shoulders and long bony fingers. Sweat dripped off the end of her nose and I could tell she wasn't wearing deodorant.

“No. It's an old Bösendorfer. I just wanted a chance to play it. That's all.”

“I thought that was a record.”

“You've got a bad ear,” she said. “Maria's nuts. She said I could come by whenever I want to play.”

I held up a disposable tin container full of meat loaf and macaroni. “Can you give her this when she wakes up?”

“Sure.”

Footsteps echoed in the tiled hallway. Maria came into the vestibule, leaning on a cane. Because she couldn't walk up the stairs anymore, she now slept in one of the smaller first-floor bedrooms, on a single.

“You stopped. Why did you stop?” Maria saw me at the door. “Brian, come in! Have you met Karen?”

We shook hands. Her long bony fingers were rough with calluses.

“She plays the piano,” said Maria.

Maria kept the curtains closed, even in July, and it was dark and stuffy inside. I followed her through the living room. Everything was covered in dust. On one wall there was a framed black-and-white photograph of Maria Recoba and her late husband, Gabriel. The photo, taken fifty years ago in Buenos Aires, captured the aristocratic bearing that was still noticeable in Maria, even when she was slicing her meat loaf with a plastic knife and watching game shows. She told me the first day I met her that she wanted to hurry up and die so she could be with Gabriel again. They didn't have any children. She wore the same dress every time I saw her. She was haunting her own house.

“Why are you selling your piano?” I asked her.

“For the money.” She pointed to one of those tasseled
Victorian lamps that look like a jellyfish. “I'm selling that too. I'm selling everything. I'm making a donation to Blessed Sacrament and then I'm going to die.”

“Are you selling the house?” I asked.

“I plan to die in this house,” she said, turning for the kitchen. “Let's have lunch.”

“I should get going,” said Karen.

“No,” said Maria.

There was nothing to eat but the meal I delivered and some apples that a neighbor had picked out of Maria's backyard. She ate all her meals at a little portable table in the kitchen. The dining room table, an ornately carved slab of oak, was buried under piles of laundry. We divided up the macaroni and meat loaf and drank tap water. Karen took an apple in her hands and snapped it cleanly in half. I had never seen anyone do that before. I was amazed. I wanted to open the curtains so I could see her face.

“I don't know anything about classical music,” I said.

“I can only play a few things,” said Karen. “I'm not some classical freak.”

“Someone eat my spinach,” said Maria.

“We should open the windows,” I said.

She started to say something, but choked a little on her meat loaf. She held up her hand to indicate that she wasn't going to die at this particular moment. “Go play something, Karen.”

“I should go home.”

“Where do you live?” I asked.

“Play something,” said Maria. “Just for a little while.”

We followed her back into the living room and Karen sat down obediently on the dusty bench. She turned a page in the book and took a deep breath. She never stopped or made
a mistake. It was such hard work playing the piano. I had no idea it was such hard work. Maria sat down on a couch and fell asleep almost immediately. Karen came to the end of a section; her head dropped, like she had just been given terrible news, and then, slowly, she lifted her hands off the keys. She turned and seemed surprised that anyone else was in the room.

“That was great,” I said, and for some reason it sounded cloying and false, like I had already made up my mind to compliment her before she had played a single note.

“Is Maria always alone here?” she said, looking at the shriveled little woman snoring on the couch.

“Health aides come by a couple times a week to make sure she's not pissing herself. And she has friends from church.”

“It's sad.”

“She has it better than most. A lot of them end up in ratty hotels downtown.”

She finally looked at me. “It's nice of you to come by.”

“I get paid.”

She got up from the piano. “I should go while I have the chance.”

I felt bad just leaving Maria on the couch, but I didn't want to be there either. When the front door opened, she sleepily called out, “Tomorrow, Karen.”

“Okay,” she said, but I couldn't tell if she meant it.

I followed Karen down the walk. Her blue corduroys were so worn it looked like she had sat in powder. She said goodbye and started down the hill.

“Do you live nearby?” I asked.

“Eagle Rock,” she said. “I took the bus.”

I stood next to my delivery van and we looked at each other for a moment, and then a moment too long, and she kept walking.

I got in the van and played with the radio. Then I studied my delivery list, even though I knew it by heart. I could see her walking down the hill. She didn't carry a purse. She took long bounding strides and didn't seem to notice the view. It was hot and hazy and the buildings downtown were a ghostly outline. I wanted her to disappear around a corner, so it would be too late. I'd have an excuse for not doing what I wanted. And this is what I wanted: to offer her a ride and spend more time with her and then fuck her and marry her and listen to her play piano. I was twenty-three years old. I waited and she finally turned the corner. I felt sick. A few minutes later, as I drove down Vermont, I saw her at a bus stop, cracking her knuckles.

•  •  •

“Go back tomorrow,” advised Javier, eating cereal from a Bundt cake bowl that had been left behind by the castle's previous tenants. The kitchen was small and toxic, but all meaningful conversations took place here. Gilbert, shorter and less effusive than his older brother, leaned against the counter, nodding solemnly. It was midnight and we were listening to “Blues Hotel” on KXLU. For the last hour we had been trying to snap apples in half. None of us were strong enough to do it.

“I had my chance,” I said. “Now it would just be weird.”

“Everything's always weird,” Javier said, his chubby face serene in the twitching fluorescent light.

“She plays the piano like she's digging a ditch.”

“Go back tomorrow.”

“She has scratches all over her arms.”

“She probably has cats,” said Javier, with a dark note of apprehension.

Nathan was sitting on the couch with my dulcimer and
with a new girl whom he hadn't bothered to introduce. He never introduced us to the girls he brought around the castle; it was some insidious form of musician etiquette. He was growing out his sandy blond hair, shaggy on top and triggers on the side. Mod was back, again.

“Is she pretty?” he asked.

“Not as pretty as you,” I said.

Nathan laughed, sort of. He always tried his best to seem self-deprecating, but he did it out of some dimly understood social obligation to be modest and likable, not because he actually considered himself an equal to the ghouls he lived with.

The girl looked at me. She had bangs and a thin paisley scarf tied around her neck. She was prettier than Karen, but I felt sorry for her. Her small, delicate hands seemed incapable of real work.

“I'm Brian,” I said. “Did Nathan offer you anything to drink?”

Before she could answer, Nathan strummed the dulcimer, loudly and vindictively. It didn't matter. If history was a guide, a month from now this girl would still be hanging around with us, playing video games with the Brothers Rincon, going through my records, and generally conforming to the improvident mood of the household, and Nathan would come home with another girl and not introduce her.

“Are we going out?” Nathan wanted to know. It was Wednesday night.

We walked down to our local. Nathan left us immediately and sat down next to a Vulcan-like humanoid replete with black trousers and white belt. He was a somebody who knew everybody. Booking agents, promoters, label people. Nathan, to give him some credit, was always whoring himself on behalf
of the band. In this area he had finesse and refinement, an almost preternatural understanding of who was who. Nathan's girl drifted over to the old photo booth and disappeared behind the curtain. For a long time Gilbert kept looking over to the booth, but he stayed on his stool, nursing his beer. She hid in there most of the night. Mark showed up and bought everyone drinks. Now and then he would take off for a couple days and come back with an unexplained infusion of cash. Javier told him about my exciting afternoon.

“I've always believed in love at first sight,” said Mark, who had the dead eyes of a goat. He was a bass player.

“She's got gray hair,” I said.

“All gray?”

“Just streaks,” I said.

Nathan finally joined us and Mark bought another round. Gilbert made a little house out of matchbooks and then crushed it with his fist. For two hours I skillfully avoided buying anyone a drink. As we walked home I thought of the girls I had dated, relationships born of proximity and attrition, close friends becoming girlfriends. There was a glacial quality about this that I liked—the endings as slow and acquiescent as the beginnings—but tonight, for the first time, I had a feeling of pure and sudden discovery. I told Javier that I was going back tomorrow.

“Good,” he said, flinging his arm around me. “Even if it's weird, it's just weird. That's all.”

•  •  •

I worked every other day, so Maria was surprised to see me.

“Did Karen come by?”

“Not yet,” she said, and invited me in.

I insisted on opening up some windows and she finally
relented. There was a knock, but when I opened the door, it was another delivery guy. He recognized me and gave me a suspicious look as I stood there in the vestibule. Like any nonprofit organization, our benevolent mission was sustained by a ruthless bureaucracy. There were rules and liabilities. In the past, some delivery drivers had taken advantage of their position, stealing things from kind and demented old folks, and so now, technically, only caseworkers were allowed to enter a residence. I walked with the driver back to his van, telling him exactly what was going on: there was a girl coming by and she played the piano.

The driver didn't say anything. I could tell he didn't believe me.

“Maria put me in her will,” I said. “Now I just have to kill her.”

He got in the van.

“That's a joke,” I yelled, as he backed down the steep driveway.

Over lunch I asked Maria about life in Argentina. Mustaches, bandoliers, I wanted the whole hot-blooded story, but she just shrugged. That was the past and she was heading merrily in the opposite direction. We ended up watching
The Price Is Right
. A Marine corporal won the Showcase Showdown.

“Good for him,” she said, clapping.

I got anxious waiting and looked for distractions. Since I had never been upstairs, I asked Maria if I could take a look. She walked with me to the foot of the staircase. Halfway up the stairs I turned and looked back. Maria, down below, seemed farther away than I'd expected.

“Tell me if you see him,” she said.

“Who?” I said, and I got a sudden chill, realizing she meant her dead husband. “Don't say that! You'll give me a fucking heart attack!”

I apologized for the profanity, but Maria didn't seem to care.

I walked along the landing. The first room was Gabriel's office, still neat and orderly, with a bookcase full of hardcover mysteries. I ran my finger along the dusty slats of his rolltop desk. His window looked out on the backyard and the eucalyptus trees rising up from the hillside. Across the hall the master bedroom had a small balcony facing the street. I stepped out and looked around the neighborhood. Birds, trees, telephone wires.

She was walking up the hill.

•  •  •

The phone in the castle was disconnected, not because we couldn't afford to pay for it but because after two years of taking the responsibility of itemizing the bill, collecting the money, and sending the check, I gently asked my roommates if one of them could take over, just for a little a while, and when none of them volunteered, I announced that I would never do it again and they would all suffer in a hell of their own making.