Eight
On the day Gavin lost his job in New York, Daniel was sitting alone in a meth dealer's living room in the outer suburbs of Salt Lake City. He hadn't played a musical instrument of any kind in ten years.
Daniel had lived in this house for a time just after high school, a few miserable long months after he'd driven up from Florida when he'd worked every day for his uncle's construction firm and fretted constantly about providing for a baby who had turned out not to be his and gone for long jogs in the deepening evenings with the neighbors casting suspicious glances at him. The jogs were meant to clear his head but they'd only made him uneasy. Moving through the streets toward or away from this house that he didn't particularly want to return to, wondering what he was going to do about the baby and the girl, feeling in those moments like the only black man in the entire washed-out state.
But the house had been subjected to a gut renovation, and the interior was unrecognizable to him now. The room where he sat was a white rectangle where two stiff gray sofas faced one another under track lighting, a wall of windows looking out over an aggressively landscaped backyard. From the tint of the sunlight he could tell that the glass was one-way, that if anyone were outside on the empty white gravel pathways they'd see only a mirror if they tried to look in. The falling-down wooden fence he remembered from all those years ago had been replaced by a high stone wall. He had the disoriented thought that he was perhaps in the wrong house altogether.
He'd come here to negotiate, but the negotiations hadn't even begun and already he was tired and shaken. Two hours earlier in the Salt Lake City airport the call had come through that his grandmother had died in Florida, and the sense of being in the wrong place was overwhelming. He wanted nothing more than to return to the airport and fly home. He'd been shown in by an enormous unsmiling man who'd told him to take a seat, that Paul would be right with him, but Paul hadn't appeared and it had occurred to Daniel that he might be killed here. He wasn't stupid enough to carry his service weapon— the enormous unsmiling man had frisked him just inside the door— and he felt defenseless without it. Through the mirrored glass the sky held a greenish tint, sunlight weak on the carpet.
He had been waiting for an hour and twenty-two minutes now, and the silence of the house was absolute but he knew it wouldn't be possible to leave. Inside this house there were other people, he was certain of it, other people waiting as silently as he was or carrying out their business on the other side of soundproofed walls. He thought it likely that the man who'd frisked him was standing outside the door. It was possible that he was being observed. He looked around for a camera and didn't see one but that of course meant nothing. Daniel closed his eyes and thought of his children.
Nine
New York City was cold. It was early April, but in the world outside the apartment the rain was streaked with snow. When Gavin wasn't looking for jobs online or handing out résumés he was reading the papers— although not his paper— and everything was wrong: there were stories about people waiting hours to get into job fairs, increasing strains on the food-stamp program. There were suicides and lost fortunes, hungry children and people who had slipped down into new, previously unimagined dwellings: a van in the parking lot of a grocery store in Queens, a boat on the oil-bright surface of the Gowanus Canal, a relative's garage in Westchester County. He understood, reading these stories, how easy it was to sink.
Gavin had never been very good with money. He had several thousand dollars of credit-card debt that he'd been carrying around for a while, and it was growing at a rate that he wouldn't have thought possible. On the day he lost his job he'd already accidentally fallen a month behind on rent, a matter of forgetting to mail a check to the landlord— Karen had always taken care of this— and when his paychecks stopped coming he began paying credit cards off with other credit cards. His checking account balance was dwindling. He had no savings.
All of his friends had either been associated with the newspaper or he'd met them in journalism school. Gavin didn't try to contact them. He was aware that he was a disgrace to his profession. None of them called him, which was unsurprising but disappointing nonetheless. For the first time in his life he had too much time on his hands and he was afraid of it, the empty hours echoing all around him with nothing to think about but failure, so he went out of his way to establish a routine: he spent the day drinking coffee and searching for jobs online or sitting in the park and circling jobs he wanted to apply for in the classifieds, and then in the evening he boarded a southbound F train and traveled deep into Brooklyn to listen to music at Barbès, a narrow sliver of an establishment between a tanning salon and a sandwich shop.
Step inside and it was just another bar, all chatter and shadows and the faint smell of stale beer, but at the back of the room was a window, a red paper umbrella attached to a wall, a doorway covered by a velvet curtain. The window was almost soundproof. From the dark of the bar he would stand and look through into a brighter world, a small room with a lit-up sign that read Hotel d' Orsay and a few rows of people sitting on uncomfortable chairs. Under the Hotel d' Orsay sign musicians set up their instruments, plugged in their amplifiers, milled about drinking beer while the audience stared at them, tested the mikes at their leisure, eventually got around to settling down behind their instruments, and then played some of the finest music Gavin had ever heard.
At Barbès he was at his best, his calmest and least desperate. He'd been obsessed with jazz in high school and listening to it again was like coming home. He'd had a friend in high school with a touch of synesthesia who saw light when he heard music, and he liked to think of this when he listened. He could lose himself in the music for a while and he sometimes felt that he was a part of something that mattered, a witness to evenings that might be written about later on.
He was there for Deval & Morelli's last performance, for example. They were a guitar duo who played the nine o'clock set on Mondays. Their last performance was on a cool night in May toward the end of things, some time after Gavin had run out of cash and had started paying for everything with credit cards. He didn't know if Arthur Morelli and Liam Deval were famous in any widespread, conventional way— there were so many gradations of fame now, it was hard to tell anymore what kind of fame counted and who stood a chance of being remembered later— but he thought they were brilliant and on the nights when they played the room was packed. Gavin went every week and stood at the back so he could duck out easily before the tip bucket for the musicians was passed around. He felt bad about this, but he had no cash anymore.
Arthur Morelli was older, an unsmiling man in his late thirties or early forties who played with a heavy swing. In his solos he wheeled out into wild tangents, he pushed the music to the edge before he came back to rhythm. Liam Deval looked about Gavin's age, late twenties or early thirties, the star of the show: a perfect counterpoint to Morelli, all shimmering arpeggios and light sharp tones. Gavin had never seen anyone's hands move so quickly. His skill was astonishing. Jazz slipped into gypsy music and back again, a thrilling hybrid form. Gavin knew it wasn't new, what they were doing, but it was the first time he'd encountered it live. There was a bassist and occasionally a drummer, one solo each per set but otherwise strictly backup. Everyone was backup to Liam Deval, including Morelli. It was obvious that they were a duo in name only.