The Three Cadenzas
Nicholas LaRocca
Logatelli was telling the boys in sales, “So this buddy of mine, Paul, his father and his mother are driving. They’re out somewheres. No biggie. Way out west on Jog Road, you know, of a Sunday, a nice day, his wife’s lookin’ pretty—good lookin’ woman, name of Honey, and she’s in a dress, and maybe they’re headin’ to church, because life’s ironic, and you don’t always know the details. Anyway, it’s Sunday and they’re drivin’, so whatever, and Paul’s father—his name’s Mark—he says to her, ‘I’m feeling kinda tired. I don’t know. Just tired. Got some bad fatigue going.’ And she says, ‘You want a cup of coffee?’ you know, real nice, like a woman’ll say it. Or you know, whatever—whatever she said. I don’t know what she said. It’s not the point. So he says, ‘Can I pull over a second?’ Real gentle. He spoke real gentle to her, Paul tells me. Was a true gentleman all his life. And Honey says, ‘Sure. Are you okay?’ ‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘I just wanna pull over for a second. It’s okay.’ And he’s already pulling to the right.
“So he makes a right turn, and he takes them down this road to where it ends for now—over where they’re gonna do the Jog connection, on Lake Ida? This is way out west. Anyway, they’re over there, side of the road, quiet road now, got a development behind them, and they’re facing this clearing—I been out there a few times myself, since Paul told me all this—and past the clearing is Jog, so it’s kind of weird, civilization and banks and Walgreens and cars flying by, and in front of them is this, like, little pocket of nothing where a road ends for no good reason. He says to her, ‘I just wanna close my eyes.’ Calls her baby or whatever. Sweetie. I don’t know. Her name is Honey. So he can’t call her that. Then he says, ‘I’ve had a really good life with you. I want you to know.’ I mean, he says that.
“He puts his head back. Chin up.” He did an impression of Mark, waved his fingers along his neck like a man shaving. “She says, ‘Okay, honey. Rest for a second.’ But now she’s turned in her seat, see? She’s thinkin’, Something’s wrong. She says, ‘Mark. are you okay?’
“And he’s gone. An aneurysm. Took him right out.” He clapped his hands. “Puts his head back, closes his eyes, never opens ‘em again.
“And I mean, she’s sittin’ right there, this woman, a little younger than Mark, fifty or so, and he’s not moving. So she starts to shake him, you know. She’s screaming, ‘Baby, wake up! Baby, wake up!’ Or whatever she’s calling him. Baby or honey—maybe she calls him honey, which might mean something, ‘cause it’s her name. I don’t know. Point is, she’s wild. He’s gone. She takes his pulse. It’s really faint. She doesn’t know CPR. This a woman hasn’t driven herself anywhere in fifteen years. Had Paul when she was nineteen, had that kind of life. Tucked in and neat. Sent Paul to college. Did things right. What does she know from CPR? I mean, that was their marriage—everywhere together. One car. Bad customers, you know, for us. Anyway, by the time the paramedics get there, he’s already at the Pearly Gates.”
Timmy had listened closely. It was a rainy day, the latest of a long string of rainy days, and the old adage that the public came to where the cars were hadn’t held up. Ted Pate, the G.M., who had been listening to Logatelli’s story from the edge of the hallway behind them, had co-opted some months back, “'Neither rain nor heat nor gloom of night’ will keep them away, boys, now that the recession is over,” and Timmy, listening to Logatelli’s story with his eyes half-closed at 2 pm on a dragging Sunday, wanted to ask Pate his confidence level now. It had been nineteen days since the rains had started, thirteen since anyone had sold a Kia, a good weekend since they’d shaken hands with a customer at all—a woman named Meredith, a very pretty woman about Timmy’s age (as Logatelli had told the story, Timmy had transposed this Meredith into the car, to play Honey). Timmy had been Meredith’s point person; he was next man up in the queue when she came in to the dealership, wearing a beige dress with a big baby blue purse thrown over her shoulder and holding a dripping black and white umbrella. But it was just that her Bluetooth was malfunctioning. She’d thought she might get a whole new car if the deal was right. “You don’t need to do that,” Timmy said, and sent her over to Service. She sat two hours with “nothing to do and no plans,” sat in the same armchair Timmy was seated in now; ever since Meredith had sat in that armchair, it had taken on a special symbolism to him; he ran his finger along the top whenever he passed it. He came up to her about an hour into her wait and said, “Look, don’t tell anybody you were ready to turn in. These guys are sharks. If you really do decide to turn in early and go for something new, I can get you a good deal. We’ll do it patiently. I’ll take care of you.” He gave her his number. “I prefer Tim, but everybody calls me Timmy.”
He winked. Girls ate it up when he winked. So he did that a lot. And Meredith had smiled. Maybe she’d drop him a text today, ask a friendly question about the 2018 line. Man, that would be something. That would just about cure the doldrums, clear skies or not.
Before the story, he’d been sending texts out left and right, trying to stay awake. The rain, the inactivity—he wanted to curl up in bed until the rain stopped and the world dried up. He was out of rehab over a year, and nine Tuesdays ago, he’d finally gotten the green light to move out of his halfway house into a crummy apartment all his own up Federal Highway, a studio with a kitchenette and a troubled, mildewed bathroom in a squat, four-unit strip of apartments built sideways along 3rd Street. His background check had flagged him as too risky for finer places, and this area was effectively a slum: a hodgepodge of duplexes and ratty two-story apartment buildings and garbage-frontaged bungalows side by side for three blocks along a railroad tracks downtown.
He lived in the rearmost apartment, and six or seven times a day, seventy feet from his side window, enormous freight engines dragging half-mile-long trains went speeding by, blowing their unsubtle horns. Not far up the road was the crossing at 4th Avenue, where a year prior a minivan had been struck when the gate had malfunctioned. A mother and daughter were killed; he’d heard the story while signing papers with his landlord, the two of them out in the parking lot of the apartment using his landlord’s hood as a desk. And now, every morning and evening on his way to and from work, he passed a crummy shrine to the lives of that mother and daughter: an infrequently reupped batch of flowers; a faded, storm-beaten cross of palm; and an acrylic, sun-dimmed sign reading “Never Forgotten” with a picture of mother and daughter that was too small to distinguish as he passed by, all of it arranged on the pebbly earth beside the gate.
The train schedule was half-clockwork—6:10 PM, 9:40 PM, 6:10 AM, 9:40 AM—and half-variable. Yet invariably, at some late hour, one, two, three in the morning, a train whistle blew, Timmy’s bed shook, he woke from fine dreams, and out his porous window and through his thin walls a freight train could be seen, heard, and felt—seen like a missile trailing a tracer and heard like a Sherman tank rumbling through a living room and felt like two hands around his throat. He would watch the train through his blinds, half-conscious, aware more than anything of the enormous destructive power of the machine, dying a little death inside with the thought of some innocent minivan crossing a tracks, some mother paying attention to her daughter in back, the two of them singing a silly song—and then the obliterating impact, the bodies careening around the interior, force and inertia working to ram organ against skeleton. The mother and daughter pass each other in slow motion. The mother reaches out for her daughter. She touches her daughter’s little arm, and she crawls to where her daughter has come to rest so that they can die holding one another.
“So what are you gonna do?” Timmy asked.
He’d put his phone down halfway through the story, to listen. He’d picked it up again and was flipping through apps, looking for something, anything of interest. The only text he’d gotten was from a friend of his from long ago up in New Jersey, a guy named Argyle who had announced he was really a she. They’d stayed friends after Argyle’s announcement; Timmy knew Argyle was catching hell from virtually everyone else, and he didn’t want to contribute to the guy’s misery. But they didn’t have much to say to each other. Argyle was clingy. His life hadn’t worked out. He’d left college after a violent episode, the details of which fishily exonerated Argyle, by his telling. Now he worked in the Ocean County Mall, folding sweaters at Macys. He lived in his parents’ dim basement. All of the trouble Argyle represented—the cutoff education, the sexual identity he was claiming, the desperately long responses to texts Timmy sent asking “How you doing?”—were Argyle figuring himself out, and doing so at the expense of others. One of these days—in fifteen years, on a particular day—Argyle would turn forty, and he’d be different. Timmy was certain of this. He’d be standing before a cake, a big smile on his face, wearing a Lacoste shirt and talking chummily to the crowd about the way he, not she, used to think it went—it being “life.” Life would pretty much shake out by then. Like going somewhere and coming back: maybe I’m a she; maybe I was wrong.
“What am I gonna do?” Logatelli said. “Ted, did you hear that? Timmy wants to know what I’m gonna do?”
Justin Lopez, across from Timmy, said, “I think he means about Paul—your friend.”
“Is that what you meant?”
“Yeah. I don’t know. I just want to hear some more,” Timmy said.
“You’re not satisfied? What are you, my editor?”
Ted Pate said, “Timmy, did you get those Cadenzas from Federici? Down in Boca?”
“No, that wasn’t me. Billy was supposed to pick those up yesterday.”
“Yeah, but he got sidetracked, and he called in today. You’re low man. It’s on you, kiddo. I thought I texted you. Listen,” Pate said, casually, “I want them front and center, edge of Zone Two. There’s three spots open.” He pointed to indicate Zone Two, which was beyond the waiting area, past the sales floor, out the window on the other side of the front lot, facing Federal Highway.
Timmy got to his feet. The soggy weather made his bones hurt, tensed his muscles, clogged his sinuses. When had the doldrums become a part of his physiology? A good, solid headache was coming on, and he could feel a vague need that didn’t exactly terrify him but touched him like invisible fingertips brushing the back of his neck—meth and coke had been his thing, but his attraction to them had always been subordinate to his desire to have a good time, and there was no good time to be had today. He massaged the bridge of his nose, his forehead. He’d forgotten all about the headache during the story, but now that he had work to do, it returned.
“Tell Federici you’re coming for me,” Pate said. “He’ll get you the keys.”
“He’s in?”
“Would I send you if he wasn’t in? Gas them up and drop them off with Wikensy.”
“Is Wikensy in?” Timmy asked.
“Everybody’s in,” Pate said. “Jesus, the whole world’s in. Let’s not worry about who’s in and who’s out, who’s left, who’s right. I’m more worried about customers—let’s get them in. Speaking of which, what are the rest of you doing? This isn’t story time. Go to your desks, make some phone calls. Be of utility.” Pate clapped. He said to Logatelli, “And you. Chop-chop, Steven King. Sell a car.”
“Funny,” Logatelli said. “I must have missed all the customers.”
“Wikensy’s gonna wash them?” Timmy asked. “It’s raining.”
But Ted Pate, Justin Lopez, Jonny Logatelli—with his sausage lips and sausage fingers and big, hairy knuckles and Berber hair—said “Yes” and “C’mon man” and “Motate, already.”
They got a laugh out of the chorus they made.
Timmy stretched. His shirt came up, his flat, pale belly was exposed, and the feeling was a cool thrill. He wished Meredith were here to see his tummy. “And what’s she gonna do? Paul’s mother.”
“Jesus. Hell if I know,” Logatelli said. He had stood and stretched and was tucking his phone into his pocket. “She’s pretty. She’ll be fine. Too old for you, Timmy-Boy. Too bad. She’s a looker, has some bucks.”
“Yeah, that’s just what he needs,” Pate said. “A nice, rich fifty-year-old, post-menopausal pussy. This way he can’t get her pregnant.” So Logatelli said, “Can’t get no girl pregnant anyways, boss. He’s firing blanks.” Lopez laughed. So Timmy said, “Hardy-har-har. Prettiest one of the bunch here.” Logatelli said, “Yeah, except we send you the nice girls. ‘Oh, Meredith, is your umbrella wet?’ The sluts we send to Justin.” “Long as we don’t send the nice girls your way,” Pate said to Logatelli. So Logatelli said, as Timmy was walking out to the service bay, where Al Lowson and Trish Freemont were doing paperwork, “I can handle them three at a time. Slip ‘em the old bracciole and change their lives.” “Yeah,” said Ted Pate, as the door was closing and Timmy was moving into the quiet of the bay, “syphilis will do that to you.”
Trish looked up from her call list and stuck out her tongue. So Timmy winked.
He got to take a K900 down to Boca, the nicest car Kia manufactured, a real beauty, a behemoth that handled like a pontoon, but a beauty, with a driver’s seat that massaged his back as he made his way south on Federal. The rain hadn’t so much lightened as it hadn’t gotten stronger, which was good news. This run would take a while, back and forth swapping two K900s and a tiny new model called the Impresario in exchange for three Cadenzas, and if he could make the run without getting poured on and spending the rest of the afternoon at the dealership in Delray Beach smelling like a wet dog, he’d take it. He had the radio on—he’d started to Bluetooth his phone, but he was going to be in the car only a little while, so for the first time since he was maybe twenty, he turned on the car radio and listened to songs chosen by someone other than himself. It was a good feeling, to be in the pocket of some other person’s sensibility. He got Bon Jovi; Drake. They were all over the place on this station. Bruno Mars. U2’s “Where the Streets Have No Name.” That one hit him pretty hard. He recalled the story Logatelli had told. Mark had been at the end of the road.
Imagine thirty years from now, I rest my head on a seat next to Meredith, and I’m alive as I put my head back, and I’m feeling at my core very pleasant about this great life I’ve made. And I die. Right there, the whole shebang just ends.
When he got down to Boca, he had to park in a visitor’s spot and hustle in, ducking. His luck hadn’t held up; a downpour had started, a powerful, sub-tropical parting of the heavens, sheets of rain in dense droplets pounding the roof and splashing off the long hood like little divers. He’d waited a while in the car, listening to the radio—“Time after Time” by Cyndi Lauper; “Live to Tell” by Madonna; “Crazy” by Gnarls Barkley—before he decided it was now or never and got out of the car and dashed into the dry dealership. His shoulders were soaked; he felt a chill in the air conditioning. The next salesman in the queue, a dapper, brown-skinned gentleman, a true Boca sort, with a short, trimmed bowl of kinky, gleaming hair and a silky mustache, said, “You make scurrying look easy, son. Frederick Robinette.” He noted Timmy’s shirt—the insignia of the dealership was stitched on the breast. “You’re here from Delray?”
There were customers in the Boca dealership, seated at tables and peering into high end models on the showroom floor. But there were always customers in Boca.
“I’m swapping. Pate sent me down?”
“Oh, yes. Right.” Robinette brought a finger to his lips. Gently, he said, “You’ll need Mr. Federici.”
“Yes.”
“But he’s out at the moment….” Robinette looked around the showroom and raised his hand—he was tall and handsome and had a voice like butter, professorial and whispery. He shook his hand in the air like a diner calling for a check and a guy Timmy’s age got up from a console halfway across the showroom and hurried over. “Mr. Demosthane, take this young man here—what’s your name?”
“Timmy.” He felt like a boy.
“Take Timmy here to the back. He’s come for Mr. Federici—the three Cadenzas.”
“That could be a while,” Demosthane said. He was dark-skinned with big round eyes and a compacted face.
“Mmhmm,” Robinette said.
“I just need the keys,” Timmy said. “I can find the Cadenza’s on the lot.”
Robintette said, “You don’t understand. Those automobiles are in Mr. Federici’s private copse. He has the keys. He keeps them on his person.”
“Where is he?” Timmy asked.
“You’re curious. That’s wonderful. This is a business about understanding people, and to understand people, one must take an interest in them. Mr. Demosthane, note this, please. Take our man Timmy to the waiting area.” Robinette made a gesture sweeping the two of them away.
As Demosthane was walking Timmy over to the waiting area, he said: “Whims. Mr. Robinette says, ‘Know their whims.’ I think that’s good—to know whims. Right?” And for whatever reason, he thrust out his hand, and Timmy shook it awkwardly as they kept walking, so that they were shaking hands side by side like a photo op of two world leaders.
“But I never got an answer to my question. About where Mr. Federici is.”
“Right,” Demosthane said. “He comes and goes. No one really knows where. The owner knows, but that’s the owner. Mr. Federici only talks to the owner.”
Now Timmy was in another waiting area. They all looked the same: cheap leather furniture and a flat screen. He texted Pate: “Federici isn’t here. I’m waiting on him.” All Pate texted back was, “Fine.” No apology. No, “Sorry. I thought he was in. I’ll get in touch with him.” Which neglect made sense. Pate had too many men on the floor as it was. If someone did come in, if by some miracle someone decided today was the day to buy a new car at the small dealership in Delray rather than this oasis in Boca—all blue-lit and neon-detailed and full of modern consoles—the sales crew would be too chomping at the bit to make the sale. The customer wouldn’t be at ease; the crew would be competing with one another. The whole show of interest would be as sloppy as the weather.
Besides, this was one of those moments when Timmy realized he was needlessly in a rush. Such moments put him off about himself; he sensed a fundamental, lingering immaturity to his personality. Children were always on their way to the next place. Teens fled context to context. His two years in college, he’d watched the clock too often. He’d learned that part of what makes a man is his desire to stay in one place for a little while. A man sees significance in his current surroundings, takes an interest in them. The next thing isn’t the better thing or the point: the point is now.
His phone buzzed in his pocket. He’d figured it was Pate, but the texter was Argyle. “Are you okay?”
The question Timmy had asked Argyle before he’d left the Delray dealership was “How are you?” The answer he’d gotten back was half a novel long. Timmy read it now for the first time:
… As you say, I’m different. (Timmy had never written that Argyle was different.) I have a black hole inside me, and I stare into the large mirror of my soul-abyss and feel the pulsing need of love I have yet to wholeheartedly express to another. Love has abandoned me. I am forever unfortunate. To be placed; I know nothing. The blackness of my soul is drenched in the blood of the Christ-like figure I don’t know. I beam. Yes, I fold for customers—fold my soul, fold clothes. But they are fuckers who can go fuck themselves. They peer into me and see nothing of the woman I am and the crisis I’m eternally and so very ungratefully in. I feel the unintelligible web of destruction and the trifling chaos of such a clownish figure of tragedy inside me spreading like veins on the legs of an old lady. I am forever dashed from this earth, erased and struck-through like a malignant caucus. The love I seek has left for hurt and pain. Stop the hurt. Love, stop the hurt! I bleed the eternal blood of the basic need for which….
“Argyle,” Timmy texted, “what the fuck are you talking about?”
There was a woman and a little boy across from him, and the boy kept picking his nose and licking his finger and was staring at Timmy.
Argyle was typing. “It’s in what I wrote.”
What Timmy wanted to say was, You know, I very much hate you.
He didn’t write that. Maybe the sentiment was a little much, and maybe he was just peeved that Federici wasn’t here to greet him and keep him moving or that Pate had assured him Federici would be here, which had been a lie—not a mistake but a lie—and Pate didn’t really care whether the “low man” was even on the sales floor, which meant the general manager, in his wisdom, didn’t see sales breaking until the sun came out, whenever that would be. The weather on Timmy’s phone showed clouds and rain the next seven days, and that meant Timmy had to worry about rent, and that meant he was just a guy, a rehabber, an addict, a better sort than Argyle, but not by much.
Had Meredith seen him as so low a man? After she’d left with her Bluetooth fixed, Timmy had lifted her number from the service invoice, and he texted her now. “I have a question. This is Timmy, from Tirico Kia. We met last week. It’s got nothing to do with cars.” He had, in fact, two questions. One was, Would you like to have dinner with me? And there was some wisdom in asking that question rather than the other. But he asked the other: “I want you to be honest. What do you think of me? You met me, we talked for a bit. I know you didn’t form much of an opinion. But you must have formed SOMETHING of an opinion about me. Tell me I’m terrible if that’s what comes to mind. Just, I’d like to know.”
What surprised him was how quickly she came back, but he assured himself, as he waited for her to finish typing (she was typing in fits and starts), that her availability was merely because it was a rainy day. With some optimism, he remembered what she had said in the waiting area, that she had no plans for those hours while her car was being fixed. He couldn’t imagine someone as pretty and decent as Meredith having no plans: surely the world wanted at her. And then what he thought was, is it a natural leap from that person to a woman and her daughter crossing a train tracks? Is the person Meredith is likely to become the one crossing the tracks in a minivan, inches from a brutal demise, or is that the person I’m more likely to be, or Logatelli, or Robinette—or Demosthane, Pate, Federici? Which of us is more likely to die on the railroad tracks, or at the Jog connection?
Not Federici. Federici only spoke to the owner.
In rehab, they used to talk in group all the about accepting your own mortality. But that seemed impossible.
He wrote to Argyle: “If you want to be a woman, be a woman. If you want to be a man, don’t be a woman. Just don’t torture us with the decision.”
Meredith was typing, erasing, typing. This was going to be some message. Meanwhile, he wrote to Argyle, “I’m sitting in a car dealership in Boca Raton waiting on a man. I was pissed that I had to wait, but it’s been pouring here for three weeks and no one is coming in to my dealership in Delray, so there’s no reason to hurry back.” He was typing furiously. The message came in from Meredith, but he kept typing to Argyle, didn’t swap over to her message yet. “And the guy I’m waiting for, for all I know he got a call today saying his wife is dead. Or he’s hurt himself. Or HE’S dead. But the thing is, I’d have to remind myself of that, because really, no one gives a shit until they’re reminded of it. I was listening to music on the ride down here, and it brought me back to the feel of things even before I was alive, when everything was one way and now it’s another. Back then, you didn’t have the choice: you listened to what came on. On and on we march. Try to be happy. But keep your doldrums to yourself, because nobody cares. And don’t go shooting up the place because nobody cares. Suck it up—like a grown man. Or woman. Or whatever you are. Just suck it up.”
From Meredith, he read, “You’re kind, but there’s something missing inside you. It would take a leap on my part, and I’m sorry but there are better men out there.”
Federici didn’t show; Timmy waited another hour, until Pate told him to clear out, head home, better luck tomorrow. “Should I come back to the floor?” he asked. Pate never replied.
On the way home, he crossed the railroad tracks, and—because it was only drizzling, for he wouldn’t have stopped in a downpour—he parked his car along the shoulder of 4th Avenue. He went over to the shrine and wiped off the “Never Forgotten” sign and saw clearly and close up a picture of a mother with a mane of curly red hair and her daughter in Oxfords and a navy blue skirt to her knees, slouched in her mother’s lap on a worn-out couch in front of a bare white wall like a waiting room rather than family room. He texted Meredith, trying to undo the first impression he’d made, knowing he was better than the husband of this mother and daughter, who according to his landlord had settled with the insurance company and the railroad and was a rich man, which meant he could have paid someone to reup the shrine and hadn’t. He asked Meredith whether she understood he was the kind of man to stop here, to pay his respects to these two strangers.
She wrote back, “Good. Good for you. Really.”
He could see down the street to a bend around which his apartment waited. He climbed back in the car.
His phone alerted. He pulled it from his pocket enthusiastically. He really was thinking that Meredith would say something more, something about it being a good thing beyond just for his soul that he’d stopped there, that it meant he had potential. But the text was from Argyle: “I read your little polemic. I mean, honestly, Timmy, who the fuck do YOU think YOU are?”
Nicholas LaRocca
Logatelli was telling the boys in sales, “So this buddy of mine, Paul, his father and his mother are driving. They’re out somewheres. No biggie. Way out west on Jog Road, you know, of a Sunday, a nice day, his wife’s lookin’ pretty—good lookin’ woman, name of Honey, and she’s in a dress, and maybe they’re headin’ to church, because life’s ironic, and you don’t always know the details. Anyway, it’s Sunday and they’re drivin’, so whatever, and Paul’s father—his name’s Mark—he says to her, ‘I’m feeling kinda tired. I don’t know. Just tired. Got some bad fatigue going.’ And she says, ‘You want a cup of coffee?’ you know, real nice, like a woman’ll say it. Or you know, whatever—whatever she said. I don’t know what she said. It’s not the point. So he says, ‘Can I pull over a second?’ Real gentle. He spoke real gentle to her, Paul tells me. Was a true gentleman all his life. And Honey says, ‘Sure. Are you okay?’ ‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘I just wanna pull over for a second. It’s okay.’ And he’s already pulling to the right.
“So he makes a right turn, and he takes them down this road to where it ends for now—over where they’re gonna do the Jog connection, on Lake Ida? This is way out west. Anyway, they’re over there, side of the road, quiet road now, got a development behind them, and they’re facing this clearing—I been out there a few times myself, since Paul told me all this—and past the clearing is Jog, so it’s kind of weird, civilization and banks and Walgreens and cars flying by, and in front of them is this, like, little pocket of nothing where a road ends for no good reason. He says to her, ‘I just wanna close my eyes.’ Calls her baby or whatever. Sweetie. I don’t know. Her name is Honey. So he can’t call her that. Then he says, ‘I’ve had a really good life with you. I want you to know.’ I mean, he says that.
“He puts his head back. Chin up.” He did an impression of Mark, waved his fingers along his neck like a man shaving. “She says, ‘Okay, honey. Rest for a second.’ But now she’s turned in her seat, see? She’s thinkin’, Something’s wrong. She says, ‘Mark. are you okay?’
“And he’s gone. An aneurysm. Took him right out.” He clapped his hands. “Puts his head back, closes his eyes, never opens ‘em again.
“And I mean, she’s sittin’ right there, this woman, a little younger than Mark, fifty or so, and he’s not moving. So she starts to shake him, you know. She’s screaming, ‘Baby, wake up! Baby, wake up!’ Or whatever she’s calling him. Baby or honey—maybe she calls him honey, which might mean something, ‘cause it’s her name. I don’t know. Point is, she’s wild. He’s gone. She takes his pulse. It’s really faint. She doesn’t know CPR. This a woman hasn’t driven herself anywhere in fifteen years. Had Paul when she was nineteen, had that kind of life. Tucked in and neat. Sent Paul to college. Did things right. What does she know from CPR? I mean, that was their marriage—everywhere together. One car. Bad customers, you know, for us. Anyway, by the time the paramedics get there, he’s already at the Pearly Gates.”
Timmy had listened closely. It was a rainy day, the latest of a long string of rainy days, and the old adage that the public came to where the cars were hadn’t held up. Ted Pate, the G.M., who had been listening to Logatelli’s story from the edge of the hallway behind them, had co-opted some months back, “'Neither rain nor heat nor gloom of night’ will keep them away, boys, now that the recession is over,” and Timmy, listening to Logatelli’s story with his eyes half-closed at 2 pm on a dragging Sunday, wanted to ask Pate his confidence level now. It had been nineteen days since the rains had started, thirteen since anyone had sold a Kia, a good weekend since they’d shaken hands with a customer at all—a woman named Meredith, a very pretty woman about Timmy’s age (as Logatelli had told the story, Timmy had transposed this Meredith into the car, to play Honey). Timmy had been Meredith’s point person; he was next man up in the queue when she came in to the dealership, wearing a beige dress with a big baby blue purse thrown over her shoulder and holding a dripping black and white umbrella. But it was just that her Bluetooth was malfunctioning. She’d thought she might get a whole new car if the deal was right. “You don’t need to do that,” Timmy said, and sent her over to Service. She sat two hours with “nothing to do and no plans,” sat in the same armchair Timmy was seated in now; ever since Meredith had sat in that armchair, it had taken on a special symbolism to him; he ran his finger along the top whenever he passed it. He came up to her about an hour into her wait and said, “Look, don’t tell anybody you were ready to turn in. These guys are sharks. If you really do decide to turn in early and go for something new, I can get you a good deal. We’ll do it patiently. I’ll take care of you.” He gave her his number. “I prefer Tim, but everybody calls me Timmy.”
He winked. Girls ate it up when he winked. So he did that a lot. And Meredith had smiled. Maybe she’d drop him a text today, ask a friendly question about the 2018 line. Man, that would be something. That would just about cure the doldrums, clear skies or not.
Before the story, he’d been sending texts out left and right, trying to stay awake. The rain, the inactivity—he wanted to curl up in bed until the rain stopped and the world dried up. He was out of rehab over a year, and nine Tuesdays ago, he’d finally gotten the green light to move out of his halfway house into a crummy apartment all his own up Federal Highway, a studio with a kitchenette and a troubled, mildewed bathroom in a squat, four-unit strip of apartments built sideways along 3rd Street. His background check had flagged him as too risky for finer places, and this area was effectively a slum: a hodgepodge of duplexes and ratty two-story apartment buildings and garbage-frontaged bungalows side by side for three blocks along a railroad tracks downtown.
He lived in the rearmost apartment, and six or seven times a day, seventy feet from his side window, enormous freight engines dragging half-mile-long trains went speeding by, blowing their unsubtle horns. Not far up the road was the crossing at 4th Avenue, where a year prior a minivan had been struck when the gate had malfunctioned. A mother and daughter were killed; he’d heard the story while signing papers with his landlord, the two of them out in the parking lot of the apartment using his landlord’s hood as a desk. And now, every morning and evening on his way to and from work, he passed a crummy shrine to the lives of that mother and daughter: an infrequently reupped batch of flowers; a faded, storm-beaten cross of palm; and an acrylic, sun-dimmed sign reading “Never Forgotten” with a picture of mother and daughter that was too small to distinguish as he passed by, all of it arranged on the pebbly earth beside the gate.
The train schedule was half-clockwork—6:10 PM, 9:40 PM, 6:10 AM, 9:40 AM—and half-variable. Yet invariably, at some late hour, one, two, three in the morning, a train whistle blew, Timmy’s bed shook, he woke from fine dreams, and out his porous window and through his thin walls a freight train could be seen, heard, and felt—seen like a missile trailing a tracer and heard like a Sherman tank rumbling through a living room and felt like two hands around his throat. He would watch the train through his blinds, half-conscious, aware more than anything of the enormous destructive power of the machine, dying a little death inside with the thought of some innocent minivan crossing a tracks, some mother paying attention to her daughter in back, the two of them singing a silly song—and then the obliterating impact, the bodies careening around the interior, force and inertia working to ram organ against skeleton. The mother and daughter pass each other in slow motion. The mother reaches out for her daughter. She touches her daughter’s little arm, and she crawls to where her daughter has come to rest so that they can die holding one another.
“So what are you gonna do?” Timmy asked.
He’d put his phone down halfway through the story, to listen. He’d picked it up again and was flipping through apps, looking for something, anything of interest. The only text he’d gotten was from a friend of his from long ago up in New Jersey, a guy named Argyle who had announced he was really a she. They’d stayed friends after Argyle’s announcement; Timmy knew Argyle was catching hell from virtually everyone else, and he didn’t want to contribute to the guy’s misery. But they didn’t have much to say to each other. Argyle was clingy. His life hadn’t worked out. He’d left college after a violent episode, the details of which fishily exonerated Argyle, by his telling. Now he worked in the Ocean County Mall, folding sweaters at Macys. He lived in his parents’ dim basement. All of the trouble Argyle represented—the cutoff education, the sexual identity he was claiming, the desperately long responses to texts Timmy sent asking “How you doing?”—were Argyle figuring himself out, and doing so at the expense of others. One of these days—in fifteen years, on a particular day—Argyle would turn forty, and he’d be different. Timmy was certain of this. He’d be standing before a cake, a big smile on his face, wearing a Lacoste shirt and talking chummily to the crowd about the way he, not she, used to think it went—it being “life.” Life would pretty much shake out by then. Like going somewhere and coming back: maybe I’m a she; maybe I was wrong.
“What am I gonna do?” Logatelli said. “Ted, did you hear that? Timmy wants to know what I’m gonna do?”
Justin Lopez, across from Timmy, said, “I think he means about Paul—your friend.”
“Is that what you meant?”
“Yeah. I don’t know. I just want to hear some more,” Timmy said.
“You’re not satisfied? What are you, my editor?”
Ted Pate said, “Timmy, did you get those Cadenzas from Federici? Down in Boca?”
“No, that wasn’t me. Billy was supposed to pick those up yesterday.”
“Yeah, but he got sidetracked, and he called in today. You’re low man. It’s on you, kiddo. I thought I texted you. Listen,” Pate said, casually, “I want them front and center, edge of Zone Two. There’s three spots open.” He pointed to indicate Zone Two, which was beyond the waiting area, past the sales floor, out the window on the other side of the front lot, facing Federal Highway.
Timmy got to his feet. The soggy weather made his bones hurt, tensed his muscles, clogged his sinuses. When had the doldrums become a part of his physiology? A good, solid headache was coming on, and he could feel a vague need that didn’t exactly terrify him but touched him like invisible fingertips brushing the back of his neck—meth and coke had been his thing, but his attraction to them had always been subordinate to his desire to have a good time, and there was no good time to be had today. He massaged the bridge of his nose, his forehead. He’d forgotten all about the headache during the story, but now that he had work to do, it returned.
“Tell Federici you’re coming for me,” Pate said. “He’ll get you the keys.”
“He’s in?”
“Would I send you if he wasn’t in? Gas them up and drop them off with Wikensy.”
“Is Wikensy in?” Timmy asked.
“Everybody’s in,” Pate said. “Jesus, the whole world’s in. Let’s not worry about who’s in and who’s out, who’s left, who’s right. I’m more worried about customers—let’s get them in. Speaking of which, what are the rest of you doing? This isn’t story time. Go to your desks, make some phone calls. Be of utility.” Pate clapped. He said to Logatelli, “And you. Chop-chop, Steven King. Sell a car.”
“Funny,” Logatelli said. “I must have missed all the customers.”
“Wikensy’s gonna wash them?” Timmy asked. “It’s raining.”
But Ted Pate, Justin Lopez, Jonny Logatelli—with his sausage lips and sausage fingers and big, hairy knuckles and Berber hair—said “Yes” and “C’mon man” and “Motate, already.”
They got a laugh out of the chorus they made.
Timmy stretched. His shirt came up, his flat, pale belly was exposed, and the feeling was a cool thrill. He wished Meredith were here to see his tummy. “And what’s she gonna do? Paul’s mother.”
“Jesus. Hell if I know,” Logatelli said. He had stood and stretched and was tucking his phone into his pocket. “She’s pretty. She’ll be fine. Too old for you, Timmy-Boy. Too bad. She’s a looker, has some bucks.”
“Yeah, that’s just what he needs,” Pate said. “A nice, rich fifty-year-old, post-menopausal pussy. This way he can’t get her pregnant.” So Logatelli said, “Can’t get no girl pregnant anyways, boss. He’s firing blanks.” Lopez laughed. So Timmy said, “Hardy-har-har. Prettiest one of the bunch here.” Logatelli said, “Yeah, except we send you the nice girls. ‘Oh, Meredith, is your umbrella wet?’ The sluts we send to Justin.” “Long as we don’t send the nice girls your way,” Pate said to Logatelli. So Logatelli said, as Timmy was walking out to the service bay, where Al Lowson and Trish Freemont were doing paperwork, “I can handle them three at a time. Slip ‘em the old bracciole and change their lives.” “Yeah,” said Ted Pate, as the door was closing and Timmy was moving into the quiet of the bay, “syphilis will do that to you.”
Trish looked up from her call list and stuck out her tongue. So Timmy winked.
He got to take a K900 down to Boca, the nicest car Kia manufactured, a real beauty, a behemoth that handled like a pontoon, but a beauty, with a driver’s seat that massaged his back as he made his way south on Federal. The rain hadn’t so much lightened as it hadn’t gotten stronger, which was good news. This run would take a while, back and forth swapping two K900s and a tiny new model called the Impresario in exchange for three Cadenzas, and if he could make the run without getting poured on and spending the rest of the afternoon at the dealership in Delray Beach smelling like a wet dog, he’d take it. He had the radio on—he’d started to Bluetooth his phone, but he was going to be in the car only a little while, so for the first time since he was maybe twenty, he turned on the car radio and listened to songs chosen by someone other than himself. It was a good feeling, to be in the pocket of some other person’s sensibility. He got Bon Jovi; Drake. They were all over the place on this station. Bruno Mars. U2’s “Where the Streets Have No Name.” That one hit him pretty hard. He recalled the story Logatelli had told. Mark had been at the end of the road.
Imagine thirty years from now, I rest my head on a seat next to Meredith, and I’m alive as I put my head back, and I’m feeling at my core very pleasant about this great life I’ve made. And I die. Right there, the whole shebang just ends.
When he got down to Boca, he had to park in a visitor’s spot and hustle in, ducking. His luck hadn’t held up; a downpour had started, a powerful, sub-tropical parting of the heavens, sheets of rain in dense droplets pounding the roof and splashing off the long hood like little divers. He’d waited a while in the car, listening to the radio—“Time after Time” by Cyndi Lauper; “Live to Tell” by Madonna; “Crazy” by Gnarls Barkley—before he decided it was now or never and got out of the car and dashed into the dry dealership. His shoulders were soaked; he felt a chill in the air conditioning. The next salesman in the queue, a dapper, brown-skinned gentleman, a true Boca sort, with a short, trimmed bowl of kinky, gleaming hair and a silky mustache, said, “You make scurrying look easy, son. Frederick Robinette.” He noted Timmy’s shirt—the insignia of the dealership was stitched on the breast. “You’re here from Delray?”
There were customers in the Boca dealership, seated at tables and peering into high end models on the showroom floor. But there were always customers in Boca.
“I’m swapping. Pate sent me down?”
“Oh, yes. Right.” Robinette brought a finger to his lips. Gently, he said, “You’ll need Mr. Federici.”
“Yes.”
“But he’s out at the moment….” Robinette looked around the showroom and raised his hand—he was tall and handsome and had a voice like butter, professorial and whispery. He shook his hand in the air like a diner calling for a check and a guy Timmy’s age got up from a console halfway across the showroom and hurried over. “Mr. Demosthane, take this young man here—what’s your name?”
“Timmy.” He felt like a boy.
“Take Timmy here to the back. He’s come for Mr. Federici—the three Cadenzas.”
“That could be a while,” Demosthane said. He was dark-skinned with big round eyes and a compacted face.
“Mmhmm,” Robinette said.
“I just need the keys,” Timmy said. “I can find the Cadenza’s on the lot.”
Robintette said, “You don’t understand. Those automobiles are in Mr. Federici’s private copse. He has the keys. He keeps them on his person.”
“Where is he?” Timmy asked.
“You’re curious. That’s wonderful. This is a business about understanding people, and to understand people, one must take an interest in them. Mr. Demosthane, note this, please. Take our man Timmy to the waiting area.” Robinette made a gesture sweeping the two of them away.
As Demosthane was walking Timmy over to the waiting area, he said: “Whims. Mr. Robinette says, ‘Know their whims.’ I think that’s good—to know whims. Right?” And for whatever reason, he thrust out his hand, and Timmy shook it awkwardly as they kept walking, so that they were shaking hands side by side like a photo op of two world leaders.
“But I never got an answer to my question. About where Mr. Federici is.”
“Right,” Demosthane said. “He comes and goes. No one really knows where. The owner knows, but that’s the owner. Mr. Federici only talks to the owner.”
Now Timmy was in another waiting area. They all looked the same: cheap leather furniture and a flat screen. He texted Pate: “Federici isn’t here. I’m waiting on him.” All Pate texted back was, “Fine.” No apology. No, “Sorry. I thought he was in. I’ll get in touch with him.” Which neglect made sense. Pate had too many men on the floor as it was. If someone did come in, if by some miracle someone decided today was the day to buy a new car at the small dealership in Delray rather than this oasis in Boca—all blue-lit and neon-detailed and full of modern consoles—the sales crew would be too chomping at the bit to make the sale. The customer wouldn’t be at ease; the crew would be competing with one another. The whole show of interest would be as sloppy as the weather.
Besides, this was one of those moments when Timmy realized he was needlessly in a rush. Such moments put him off about himself; he sensed a fundamental, lingering immaturity to his personality. Children were always on their way to the next place. Teens fled context to context. His two years in college, he’d watched the clock too often. He’d learned that part of what makes a man is his desire to stay in one place for a little while. A man sees significance in his current surroundings, takes an interest in them. The next thing isn’t the better thing or the point: the point is now.
His phone buzzed in his pocket. He’d figured it was Pate, but the texter was Argyle. “Are you okay?”
The question Timmy had asked Argyle before he’d left the Delray dealership was “How are you?” The answer he’d gotten back was half a novel long. Timmy read it now for the first time:
… As you say, I’m different. (Timmy had never written that Argyle was different.) I have a black hole inside me, and I stare into the large mirror of my soul-abyss and feel the pulsing need of love I have yet to wholeheartedly express to another. Love has abandoned me. I am forever unfortunate. To be placed; I know nothing. The blackness of my soul is drenched in the blood of the Christ-like figure I don’t know. I beam. Yes, I fold for customers—fold my soul, fold clothes. But they are fuckers who can go fuck themselves. They peer into me and see nothing of the woman I am and the crisis I’m eternally and so very ungratefully in. I feel the unintelligible web of destruction and the trifling chaos of such a clownish figure of tragedy inside me spreading like veins on the legs of an old lady. I am forever dashed from this earth, erased and struck-through like a malignant caucus. The love I seek has left for hurt and pain. Stop the hurt. Love, stop the hurt! I bleed the eternal blood of the basic need for which….
“Argyle,” Timmy texted, “what the fuck are you talking about?”
There was a woman and a little boy across from him, and the boy kept picking his nose and licking his finger and was staring at Timmy.
Argyle was typing. “It’s in what I wrote.”
What Timmy wanted to say was, You know, I very much hate you.
He didn’t write that. Maybe the sentiment was a little much, and maybe he was just peeved that Federici wasn’t here to greet him and keep him moving or that Pate had assured him Federici would be here, which had been a lie—not a mistake but a lie—and Pate didn’t really care whether the “low man” was even on the sales floor, which meant the general manager, in his wisdom, didn’t see sales breaking until the sun came out, whenever that would be. The weather on Timmy’s phone showed clouds and rain the next seven days, and that meant Timmy had to worry about rent, and that meant he was just a guy, a rehabber, an addict, a better sort than Argyle, but not by much.
Had Meredith seen him as so low a man? After she’d left with her Bluetooth fixed, Timmy had lifted her number from the service invoice, and he texted her now. “I have a question. This is Timmy, from Tirico Kia. We met last week. It’s got nothing to do with cars.” He had, in fact, two questions. One was, Would you like to have dinner with me? And there was some wisdom in asking that question rather than the other. But he asked the other: “I want you to be honest. What do you think of me? You met me, we talked for a bit. I know you didn’t form much of an opinion. But you must have formed SOMETHING of an opinion about me. Tell me I’m terrible if that’s what comes to mind. Just, I’d like to know.”
What surprised him was how quickly she came back, but he assured himself, as he waited for her to finish typing (she was typing in fits and starts), that her availability was merely because it was a rainy day. With some optimism, he remembered what she had said in the waiting area, that she had no plans for those hours while her car was being fixed. He couldn’t imagine someone as pretty and decent as Meredith having no plans: surely the world wanted at her. And then what he thought was, is it a natural leap from that person to a woman and her daughter crossing a train tracks? Is the person Meredith is likely to become the one crossing the tracks in a minivan, inches from a brutal demise, or is that the person I’m more likely to be, or Logatelli, or Robinette—or Demosthane, Pate, Federici? Which of us is more likely to die on the railroad tracks, or at the Jog connection?
Not Federici. Federici only spoke to the owner.
In rehab, they used to talk in group all the about accepting your own mortality. But that seemed impossible.
He wrote to Argyle: “If you want to be a woman, be a woman. If you want to be a man, don’t be a woman. Just don’t torture us with the decision.”
Meredith was typing, erasing, typing. This was going to be some message. Meanwhile, he wrote to Argyle, “I’m sitting in a car dealership in Boca Raton waiting on a man. I was pissed that I had to wait, but it’s been pouring here for three weeks and no one is coming in to my dealership in Delray, so there’s no reason to hurry back.” He was typing furiously. The message came in from Meredith, but he kept typing to Argyle, didn’t swap over to her message yet. “And the guy I’m waiting for, for all I know he got a call today saying his wife is dead. Or he’s hurt himself. Or HE’S dead. But the thing is, I’d have to remind myself of that, because really, no one gives a shit until they’re reminded of it. I was listening to music on the ride down here, and it brought me back to the feel of things even before I was alive, when everything was one way and now it’s another. Back then, you didn’t have the choice: you listened to what came on. On and on we march. Try to be happy. But keep your doldrums to yourself, because nobody cares. And don’t go shooting up the place because nobody cares. Suck it up—like a grown man. Or woman. Or whatever you are. Just suck it up.”
From Meredith, he read, “You’re kind, but there’s something missing inside you. It would take a leap on my part, and I’m sorry but there are better men out there.”
Federici didn’t show; Timmy waited another hour, until Pate told him to clear out, head home, better luck tomorrow. “Should I come back to the floor?” he asked. Pate never replied.
On the way home, he crossed the railroad tracks, and—because it was only drizzling, for he wouldn’t have stopped in a downpour—he parked his car along the shoulder of 4th Avenue. He went over to the shrine and wiped off the “Never Forgotten” sign and saw clearly and close up a picture of a mother with a mane of curly red hair and her daughter in Oxfords and a navy blue skirt to her knees, slouched in her mother’s lap on a worn-out couch in front of a bare white wall like a waiting room rather than family room. He texted Meredith, trying to undo the first impression he’d made, knowing he was better than the husband of this mother and daughter, who according to his landlord had settled with the insurance company and the railroad and was a rich man, which meant he could have paid someone to reup the shrine and hadn’t. He asked Meredith whether she understood he was the kind of man to stop here, to pay his respects to these two strangers.
She wrote back, “Good. Good for you. Really.”
He could see down the street to a bend around which his apartment waited. He climbed back in the car.
His phone alerted. He pulled it from his pocket enthusiastically. He really was thinking that Meredith would say something more, something about it being a good thing beyond just for his soul that he’d stopped there, that it meant he had potential. But the text was from Argyle: “I read your little polemic. I mean, honestly, Timmy, who the fuck do YOU think YOU are?”
