I parked next to Robin’s truck and climbed to the entry terrace. We decided to under-furnish because stuff can get the best of you and neither of us likes to cull. Daylight is inevitably kind and the oak floors still echo, creating a comforting, musical prelude to solitude.
I called out Robin’s name, got no reply. Changing into sweats, I sorted some mail in the kitchen and drank coffee from the pot she’d left. Walking out back through the kitchen door, I stopped by the rock edge of the fishpond, netted a few pine needles, tossed pellets to the koi, and enjoyed their conditional love. When the slurping ended and the fish began to meander, I continued to Robin’s studio.
She stood over her bench, wearing magnifying eyeglasses and a shop apron with four front pockets. No music from hidden speakers this afternoon. Both of her hands were occupied and her greeting was a brief smile before she returned to the work at hand.
Special concentration required for delicate work: sealing a crack on the face of a 1938 Martin D-45 guitar. Three-hundred-thousand-dollar instrument. The man who’d owned it for seventy-two years had picked it up in a Bakersfield pawnshop and played it in cowboy bars running up and down California’s interior spine. He’d died on stage, ninety years old, smoking Luckies and breathing through a tracheotomy hole. Rasping the first verse of “Amazing Grace” as his heart gave out.
His heirs couldn’t wait to cash in.
The crack was long and threatening to open and not in a good location: treble side of the sound hole, trailing to the bridge, requiring a micro-surgical splice. Robin had spent a week locating the right sliver of Adirondack spruce in Nashville, giving the wood time to get used to L.A.
Today: the operation. I’d walked in at a crucial time.
I kept my distance from the bench and headed for the sagging brocade couch where Blanche — our little blond French bulldog — stretched, decorously inert. I sat down beside her, rubbed her knobby head. She rolled said cranium into my lap, gave my hand a single comprehensive lick, and molded her twenty-pound sausage body against mine.
Robin said, “Not only do you play around with another woman, you flaunt it?”
“What can I say? Charisma.”
She allowed herself a pause for a laugh. Readjusted the magnifiers and peered at the splice. “I’d ask you about your day but I need to focus.”
“Want more alone-time?”
“No, no, just... bear... with me... another... minute.”
Ten minutes passed before she stepped back and assessed the repair. I didn’t mind the chance to decompress.
“Okay, so far so good.” To the Martin: “You rest here and heal up, Daisy.”
“It’s got a name?”
“Orville christened all his instruments,” she said. “His Broadcaster’s named Molly. In the case was a cassette of him singing, back in the sixties. Buck Owens with more bottom. End of an era, none of the old guys are left. Remember how he used to bring her here in that Studebaker? The alleged case.”
Pointing to a soft-shelled black thing held together with duct tape and decals from national parks.
Robin took off her glasses and wiped her eyes. “Somehow Daisy never got hurt.”
I said, “What I remember is him spitting his chaw in the garden when he thought no one was looking.”
“That, too.” She inspected the guitar again. “Fingers crossed.”
I walked over and had a look, trying to locate the repair. “Invisible.”
“Oh, I see it, babe. But not bad.” Removing her apron. “She’s a supermodel, we can’t be having scars. Know what he paid for her?”
“Couple of hundred?”
“Fifty bucks. Now his conspicuously unmusical offspring will profit and it’ll probably go to some trophy hunter who keeps it in a vault.” She wiped her face, then her hands, removed the bandanna from her head, and shook out a wealth of auburn curls. “I need coffee. How ’bout you?”
The three of us left the studio and crossed the garden. At the kitchen door, Robin stopped and kissed me. What began as a peck but ended up a serious lip-lock, her hand shifting from my waist to the back of my head.
When we broke, I looked at her.
“Yes, I can feel you-know-who. And the answer to your arched eyebrow is you bet,” she said. “I need some relaxation and you’re the sedative.”
To Blanche: “Sorry, my little rival. You’ll have to make do with a liver snap out in the hallway.”
After sharing a shower, we went out to the terrace, ate Asian mix and peanuts, and drank. Sidecar for her (“don’t skimp on the XO”), Chivas for me. The sun sank lazily. We stayed there, bathed in burgeoning blue darkness as the day eased offstage.
I’d given Robin the basics Saturday night, after returning from the scene.
She’d said, “Weddings. Everyone’s at their worst. Amazing it doesn’t happen more often.”
I sipped scotch and reached for her hand. Our fingers fit like teeth in a cog. She lowered her head to my shoulder and I breathed in cinnamon and crème rinse and wood dust.
The two of us have been together forever, minus a couple of minor disconnects.
All these years, never formalized with paper.
The topic of marriage has never been taboo but it comes up less often as time stretches. Neither of us pushes the issue. I suppose that’s a type of decision.
I don’t wonder much why but sometimes the question mark slithers into my head.
The best I’ve come up with is we both endured miserable childhoods. Robin’s an only child who needed to learn how to coexist with her mother; my father was a sometimes-vicious alcoholic, my mother chronically depressed, and my relationship with my older sister nonexistent.
Marriage aside, the topic of children never comes up. Despite working with kids my entire adult life, I’m happy the way things are.
Maybe I’m missing the paternity gene.
Maybe the status quo is working too well.
Maybe the reason will always elude me.
Despite my training, I’m not one for introspection. Working with other people’s problems is a great time-filler.
Milo and Rick haven’t tied the knot, either. Recently, they’ve had to deal with not-so-subtle pressure from those who believe the legalization of gay marriage confers obligation.
“Fuck that noise,” Milo had pronounced a few months ago. The two of us at a tavern near the station, celebrating a vicious murderer’s life sentence and booze-meandering to all sorts of topics.
I said, “Do what you want.”
“Don’t I always?” He tossed back his third shot, got to work on the accompanying beer. “Let me tell you about the crap I had to deal with last night. Boring-as-shit dinner party with some of the money people who help fund the E.R. — the things I do for love. We’re talking one of those they tell you where to sit with goddamn place cards. Rick’s like an acre away and I’m stuck with this heiress from Bel Air — ’scuse me, she’s a social justice activist. Weighs around ninety pounds, apparently she substitutes opinions for eating. And one of them is that Rick and I are somehow failing in our social obligation.”
I said, “And there you were thinking progress was about choice.”
He called for a fourth Boilermaker. “Being told what to do is childhood. If my body’s going to seed, least I can get are the benefits of adulthood, right?”