Lee - Lonesome Lies Before Us

also by Don Lee

The Collective

Wrack and Ruin

Country of Origin

Yellow

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright 2017 by Don Lee

All rights reserved

First Edition

Permission to quote from the song Picture Cards by Blaze Foley was kindly granted by Texas Ghost Writers Music.

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110

For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact W. W. Norton Special Sales at specialsales@wwnorton.com or 800-233-4830

Book design by Fearn Cutler de Vicq

Production manager: Anna Oler

JACKET DESIGN AND ILLUSTRATION BY ALEX MERTO

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Names: Lee, Don, 1959 author.
Title: Lonesome lies before us : a novel / Don Lee.
Description: First edition. | New York : W. W. Norton & Company, [2017]
Identifiers: LCCN 2017009442 | ISBN 9780393608816 (hardcover)
Subjects: | GSAFD: Love stories.
Classification: LCC PS3562.E339 L66 2017 | DDC 813/.54dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017009442

ISBN 978-0-393-60882-3 (e-book)

W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110

www.wwnorton.com

W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.

15 Carlisle Street, London W1D 3BS

for Jane Delury

I n his teens, Yadin Park had considered himself uglya judgment that was overly harsh, yet, at the time, not entirely unfounded.

To begin with, he had been big. Not obese, exactly, but chunky, ungainly, tall, a couple of slugs over six feet. Since a child, he had yearned to be smaller, less conspicuous, inhabit less specter, but his body always betrayed him. He swelled his shirts. His neck distended. He was pigeon-toed, and his pants buffed where his thighs corraded. His feet were clowns. Then there was his head, which to him felt elephantine. His hair was black and matted in wiry waves and seemed vaguely pubic in origin. His face, he believed, bordered on barbarity, with its hocked jaw, thin, chapped lips, and knob of a nose. Most tragic had been his skin, pocked and gullied with acne, rippling hieroglyphs of teenage sorrow.

Thankfully, as he entered manhood, his appearance mellowed. His body subtly wedged, fat shifting to muscle, and his skin cleared. More than once, women told him he was sexy. Yet Yadin could never purge the image of himself as someone who was grotesque, and, haunted by a host of other wounds, he remained cripplingly shy.

Little wonder, then, that starting out as a singer-songwriter, he was offered publishing but not recording contracts. People loved his songs, they loved his voice, yet he was a dreadful performer, forever petrified onstage. Early on, he did shows with the lights down low, facing the drummer, his back to the audience throughout. Then for a while he employed squinty light installations, akin to eighties Lite-Brites, blinding, glowing yellow pegs that, as he sang, slowly changed arrays, projected onto a screen from behind so that he was silhouetted in the black-dark of the bar or club or auditorium, apprehension pooling as the crowd waited for the stage lights to come up at some point during the set, which he never allowed. Bowing to complaints, he discarded the backlights and grew a beard and wore baseball caps, snug down, and large sunglasses, and annealed himself with various and voluminous anestheticspharmaceutical, herbal, hallucinogenic, and fermented. In the end, this did not, as anyone could have predicted, go well.

He released four albums in his twenties and thirties through a small indie label. Each one sold less and less. He never produced a crossover hit, never scratched the Billboard 200. His music was in the nebulous, uncomfortable classification of alt-country, not quite folk or rock or down-home country. In other words, not at all radio-friendly. Save for a few critics in No Depression and American Songwriter who extolled his songsbeautiful, mournful, anguished, devastatingly sad, they ravedthe media ignored him. At best, he was an underground cult favorite, virtually anonymous. The small indie label became a subsidiary of a major label, the major label merged with an even bigger label, the subsidiary was folded, and the new mega-label dropped him.

Now it was 2011 and he was forty-six, eking out a living as a carpet installer in Rosarita Bay, a town on the California coast that had seen its own vicissitudes, briefly blooming into a hip tourist haven, thenwith the recessionfalling back to seed. He worked for Matsuda Wall to Wall, a small operation with just the owner, Joe Matsuda, and two other employees besides Yadin. They did commercial, residential, marinewhatever they could getbut lately most of their projects were on derelict houses that had been foreclosed and were now, with the glints of economic recovery, being quickly rehabbed and flipped.

This morning they were working on a ranch house in the Spanish Flats neighborhood east of Highway 1. The developer wanted them in and out in one day, and hed opted for a low-pile olefin. He didnt care that the carpet wouldnt last, wasnt very stain-resistant, would flatten and indent and wear out. It was cheap, but would look good enough when the house was shown. He had wanted to stinge out even further with four-pound rebond padding, but Joe convinced him to spend a bit more for the six-pound to defer wrinkling and buckling. It was a crap job, but Joe took pride in his work.

When they ripped up the old carpet, though, they discovered that the subflooring was in bad shape. Much of the plywood was mildewed and rotted and warped, there were gaps and holes, nails protruding and bent. They needed at least another day to do the job properly. Joe called the developer, who refused more time for repairs.

What a prick, Joe said to them.

They did the best they could, Yadin starting on the living and dining rooms with Rodrigo, Joe on the bedrooms with Esteban. They scraped, whacked, scrubbed, swept, and vacuumed. They snipped new tackless strips to size and nailed them down, rolled out and trimmed the padding, stapled the edges with hammer tackers.

Outside, they pulled out the spindles of new carpet from the two blue company vans, whose sides advertised M ATSUDA W ALL TO W ALL . J UST C ARPET ! and, in smaller letters, 100% C USTOMER S ATISFACTION G UARANTEED and N O M ONEY D OWN . They rolled out the carpet in the driveway, measured, notched the corners, rerolled, and chalk-lined the backs before cutting them. They carried the sections of carpet inside and unfurled and knifed them and started gluing them together with handheld irons. They didnt break for lunch until midafternoon, when they had dry-fitted most of the house.

They sat on the tails of the two vans, which were parked on the street with the rear ends facing each other, the doors open. Piles of old carpet were humped on the front lawn. It was gray and chilly, typical May weather for Rosarita Bay.

Joe finished a salami and cream cheese on toasted sourdough, and as he fished into a Ziploc for a second sandwich, he glanced at Yadins stainless-steel bento box.