The Realm of Last Chances (23 page)

Her mother’s assessment seemed so cynical that for a while Kristin couldn’t forgive her. Strangely, it was easier to forgive Mrs. Connulty. The last time she ever saw her, in the checkout line at Food Giant the year before her mother found her in the snow, they spoke as if none of this had ever happened. Kristin’s father had died several years before, and Tom Connulty had long since returned to PP&L’s home office in Allentown. Sarah Connulty’s grocery cart held only a small sack of red potatoes, a head of lettuce, a package of spaghetti noodles, some ground beef, several cans of cat food.

“How are you, honey?” she’d asked.

“I’m fine,” Kristin said, because at the moment it was true. She and Phil had just bought a nice house in California, he’d gotten early tenure, and she’d become an associate vice president. They were happy. She enjoyed each new day. “And you?”

“I’m all right,” Mrs. Connulty said. She’d lost her figure, but the flowing skirt she wore hid her vast bulk from view, and her hair was still dark and thick and beautiful. “I think of you all the time,” she said. “Your mom keeps me up-to-date.”

She held her gaze and might have said more had Kristin not
reached out and wrapped her arms around her. “I love you, Mrs. Connulty,” she said, her own means of finally, irrevocably, letting it go.

Now she was lying in bed, in a musty room where the accumulated dust on the coverlet made her sneeze each time she crawled under it, and a man who could have gone to jail for embezzlement was asking her if she could possibly overlook academic mischief. This time last year, if someone had dared to ask a similar question, she wouldn’t have dignified it with an answer. Misconduct was misconduct, and it came with a price tag. “I didn’t say that,” she responded.

“You said she might not pay with her job.”

Using her elbows, she leveraged herself into a sitting position, the headboard against her back. She watched him admiring her breasts. To her great bafflement, guilt was not an altogether unpleasant sensation; it brought with it a sense of expansion, as if you were still who you thought yourself to be as well as someone else you never knew existed. “If we’re to keep coming here,” she said, “we’ll need to wash these bedclothes.”

“I’ll take them home this evening and clean them and bring them straight back. I should’ve done it before now. You deserve a clean bed.”

“Eventually we’ll be discovered. You know that, right?”

“I prefer to look on the bright side. Tonight I’m here with you.”

“I prefer to do the same thing. But remember the bright side’s got a flip side.”

“I know that all too well,” he said.

An octagonal clock hung on the wall closest to the four-poster. She always looked at it when they entered the room, and she turned to it again now. But the absence of light left the black hands indistinct. She saw only the face, which the night rendered gray.

“see what i was saying?”
Dave, the ex-cop Cal had met at his neighbor Vico’s house, was sitting in his living room and displaying the third finger of his left hand.

Cal leaned over to get a closer look. The last joint was bent, and it hooked toward his pinky. “How’d it happen?” he asked.

“One night, my first or second year on the force, me and my partner get called to this domestic disturbance. Somebody’s neighbor’s heard a hell of a racket, some guy’s screaming his wife’s a cunt. Next thing the neighbor knows, glass is shattering and furniture’s going over, and it sounds like somebody’s getting the shit beat out of ’em. Now, in that kind of situation, which is still very much in progress when Esposito and yours truly show up, we don’t knock but once. And in this case knocking wouldn’t do any good anyway. Somebody in there’s getting a royal ass kicking, so I say one, two, three, and each of us puts a shoulder to the door.

“In the hallway, this guy’s going at his wife with all he’s got, and she’s got a busted lip, but her fingernails must be at least three inches long, and she’s giving as good as she’s taking. Her old man’s bleeding from his cheeks, neck and forearm where she’s sunk those claws into him. But they’ve got a kid that plays football, and his dad’s put his helmet on for protection so he can keep at it.

“Since Esposito’s smaller than me, he goes after Catwoman, and before he pins her arms she does some interesting etchings on his jaw. This leaves the helmeted fuck for me. When I reach out to grab him, my finger gets caught in his face mask and bent sideways. Next morning the damn thing’s purple and I can’t straighten it out.”

“You didn’t have it looked at?”

Dave shrugged. “What kind of cop goes to the doctor for a broke finger? Besides, how was I to know someday I’d have a chance to play the mandolin?”

And how could Cal have known that when he agreed to go over to Vico’s for a few drinks and a bowl of pasta, he’d run into Dave? If someone had told him what was going to happen afterward, he would’ve begged off.

There had been four of them: him and Vico and Dave and a guy named Jimmy who used to coach football. He’d had a lot to drink—only beer, it was true, but after a while even beer adds up—and by the time they were through with dinner, he had a nice buzz and was virtually defenseless when Vico turned to him and said, “By the way, what kind of music did I hear you playing in the backyard? Country? Celtic? Blues?”

He hadn’t imagined he could produce enough volume for a neighbor with a hearing aid to tune in. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have risked playing on the patio once or twice back before it got too cold. “I guess it’s a little bit of all three,” he said. “Which I suppose means it’s bluegrass, but I’m not real big on labels.”

That was when Dave rapped the table with a meaty palm and said, “You like bluegrass?”

Cal knew immediately that he was in trouble. He’d stepped around the fence into his neighbor’s yard, and now a wall was truly being breached. He took another swig of beer, then held the bottle up to examine it while trying to figure out how to suggest he didn’t know shit about bluegrass, that he was just a bum with a guitar who couldn’t tell Bill Monroe from Bill Clinton. “Harpoon,” he said, studying the brightly decorated label. “This is local, right?”

“My neighbor’s a modest guy,” Vico said. “You should hear him play. Hey, maybe we could have a little music. How about it?”

Cal drained the rest of the bottle. As the beer went down,
something equally bitter was coming up, and to call it anger would hardly do it justice. He was about to stand up and excuse himself, to say he’d had too much to drink and needed to go home and lie down before he got sick and puked all over Vico and his excellent intentions.

But before he could, Dave said, “For maybe thirty seconds, back in 1985, I was no more than this far”—he held his chunky hands about eighteen inches apart—“from Tony Rice and that D-28 that once belonged to Clarence White.” He shook his head. “I knew right then I’d never forget it.” The ex-cop turned to Cal. “You know what I mean?”

This could have gone differently, but instead of leaving, Cal stayed seated. “Yes,” he said, “I do.”

It turned out that Dave had first heard live bluegrass in Everett in his midtwenties. He said Cal probably wouldn’t know about the fellow who’d brought him to the bar, but he was a local guy who repaired typewriters for a living and played bluegrass on the side.

“Joe Val,” Cal said.

Dave grinned and shook his head. “Vico, this dude’s fucking hard core.”

When their host beamed, Cal suspected he was the sort of person who’d always mystified him and made him feel mistrustful. On the surface, it looked like he enjoyed bringing folks together for the simple pleasure of seeing them talk and drink and have a good time. Cal’s father had brought people together too, and they probably thought he enjoyed their company, but he issued invitations only because he wanted something from them. The house had teemed with those he hoped to buy, bamboozle or otherwise fuck over, and he was seldom disappointed. Cal knew that seeing this day after day, year after year, had damaged him. What he didn’t know was how to overcome it. Changing his name hadn’t changed who he was.

He and Dave talked about Joe Val. Cal said he’d never heard
him play live, but he owned a couple of his CDs and admired his work on the mandolin. Dave said he’d met Val the way he had met almost everybody else he knew down in Everett. “He used to drive around in this old beat-up van, and one day he leaves it parked on the street and forgets to lock the door while he goes in to pick up somebody’s Smith and Corona. You don’t leave a vehicle unlocked down in the Dirty E. He comes out of the building, and every fucking typewriter in the van’s been snatched. Me and Esposito knew right where to look, and within the hour we’d recovered all but two of ’em. Joe was so grateful he invited us to hear him play—this is after he’d formed the New England Bluegrass Boys—and he made the house waive the cover. I didn’t even know what bluegrass was, just didn’t have anything better to do that night, but man, it really grabbed me. I went nuts and started buying so many records my wife put me on an allowance. Got to be good friends with Joe, too, and all the guys in his band. That’s how I saw Rice. When Joe was dying, the Boston Bluegrass Union organized a benefit concert, and Tony played with Jimmy Gaudreau.”

He said that some years ago he’d taught himself to play the guitar and had become competent enough to strum chords and pick a decent G run. He’d tried the mandolin as well and still owned a cheap one, but he’d finally concluded he just wasn’t a musician. “Loving it’s not enough, you know what I mean? Sad, but that’s how things go.”

“Did you ever take any lessons?”

“Nah. My work schedule didn’t allow it. And after a while, I lost heart anyway. I know what good sounds like, and it don’t sound like me.”

Cal was still drunk, but he knew what he was doing when he said, “Want to see my instruments? I’ve got quite a few.”

Kristin had gone shopping for winter clothes at the Burlington Mall, so when they stepped into the house, after assuring Vico and the ex-coach they’d return before long, no one
greeted them except Suzy. Dave knelt in front of her, letting her sniff while he scratched behind her ears.

“You got a dog?” Cal asked.

Dave laughed. “Don’t own one. But when I was on the force, every pooch I met was mine. You want ’em on your side.” He stood and looked around. “Nice house. Vico says you’re remodeling?”

“Was,” Cal said, and flipped on the staircase light. “I kind of got off track after the thing at the convenience store.”

“Shit like that takes awhile to get over. Someday, maybe I’ll tell you some stuff I saw being a cop. Some of it’s funny. But most of it ain’t.”

Cal led him upstairs. A few minutes later, they were down on their knees in the room on the third floor, surrounded by instruments. Dave was particularly drawn to the F-5. He ran his hand over the fretboard, letting his fingers linger on the abalone position markers. “This looks just like the mandolin Joe used to play,” he said.

“Wouldn’t surprise me. That’s what everybody wanted back then.”

Dave handed it to him. “Would you mind?” he asked.

Cal had recently begun to suspect he’d never again play for anyone else. Back in California, the audience, such as it was, consisted mostly of people just like him—fairly skilled amateurs who considered Friday nights an opportunity to stretch out with kindred spirits—but around here, the Berklee College of Music disgorged scores of real musicians who could play rings around him in their sleep, and while most of them had to give lessons or sell guitar strings and mandolin straps to earn a living, he’d felt so daunted when he stepped into Elderly Acoustics in Lexington and heard a few of them play that he was reluctant even to pick up a mandocello he wanted to try.

Had Dave phrased his question differently, he would have
demurred. But the request was expressed with such humility that it was impossible to say no. He only wanted to hear something that might remind him of his dead friend Joe Val.

“Okay,” Cal said. He sat on the edge of the daybed, checked the tuning, then closed his eyes and began playing tremolo on the A and E strings, waltzing into “Blue Moon of Kentucky.” He played the A part once and decided to do it a second time, because he’d muffled a note or two and he hated to move on until it sounded just right. What he hadn’t counted on was the aid of a vocalist.

Dave’s voice was a tenor, clear and unaffected. He rolled “moon” and “of” together in the manner of Monroe, and his voice rose a full octave before he let the note go. Like Val, he didn’t bother to pretend he was anything other than a North Shore townie, so “shining” came out “shine-un.” To someone else it might have sounded funny, but just as Cal had always thought a house should belong to the person who built it, he believed music should belong to those who could make it. And in some elemental sense, the retired cop knew how to.

When they finished the chorus, he quit playing. “I like your voice,” he said. Then he offered Dave the mandolin.

The other man had fat lips, tiny eyes and a bulbous nose with huge pores, yet for a moment, as he basked in the compliment, his face was beautiful. “I can’t play it,” he said. “Those chop chords that stretch out over four or five frets—they whipped my ass years ago. It’s a shame, because I’d give almost anything to be able to do what you just did. I swear to God, you sound like a pro. You’re just as good as Joe was.”

Cal laid the Gibson back in its case. “If you’d like to learn,” he said, “I could try to teach you.”

When Dave came for his first lesson, Cal discovered that he actually knew the shapes of the major and minor chords. He just had trouble playing them cleanly, due to that mangled ring finger. “For bluegrass rhythm playing,” Cal told him, “that’s not such a problem. Mostly what you’re doing is damping the strings anyway, to get the barking effect. The mandolin takes the place of a snare drum.” He explained that eventually he’d start teaching him simple fiddle tunes. “Playing those forces you to learn scales. Once you’ve done that, you can improvise over almost any melody. It’s kind of like building a house. First you lay the foundation. Then the walls go up. It’s a good while before you’re installing light fixtures and slapping on paint.”