Nine Inches: Stories

  EDUARDO LEFT around ten-thirty, but Sims stuck around to polish off the pitcher. Even in retrospect, he found it hard to blame himself for what happened next. He wasn’t flirting with either of his new friends — not even with Olga, who was sitting so close, her knee bumping companionably against his beneath the table — nor did he possess even the remotest hope of getting laid. He was just happy to be there, killing time, postponing the inevitable return to real life. And he certainly wasn’t making a sexual overture when he stood up and announced that he was off to the men’s room.

  “Want some company?” Olga asked.

  “Excuse me?” Sims was pretty drunk by then and wasn’t sure he’d heard right.

  Olga held his gaze. “I asked if you wanted some company.”

  “In the men’s room?”

  “Not this again,” Kelly groaned. “What is it with you?”

  “I’m curious,” Olga explained. “I just want to see what’s it like in there.”

  “It’s really not that great,” Sims assured her.

  “All right.” Olga held up both hands in a gesture of surrender. “If it makes you uncomfortable . . .”

  He heard the taunt in her voice, the junior high challenge to his manhood.

  “I don’t mind,” he said. “You want to go, let’s go.”

  “You sure? I wouldn’t want to put you in an awkward position . . .”

  “It’s a free country,” Sims told her. “You can do whatever you want.”

  Olga flashed a victorious grin at Kelly as she slid out of the booth. Even in heels Olga was tiny, at least six inches shorter than Sims, but he felt like a little boy as she took him by the hand and led him through the deserted restaurant. They turned down a narrow hallway alongside the kitchen and stopped in front of a door marked GENTLEMEN. Sims pushed it open and stepped inside, with Olga following close behind. To his great relief, he saw that it was empty.

  “Welcome.” He gestured at their humble surroundings — the side-by-side sink and urinal, the lone stall with its swinging door, the overflowing trash can, the dingy tile floor. In the eternal contest between piss and disinfectant, the smell of piss had a slight edge. “I wasn’t expecting visitors.”

  “It’s lovely,” she observed. “If I had a men’s room, it would look just like this.”

  “I’m glad you like it.” Sims smiled uncertainly. “But if you don’t mind, I kinda have to use the facilities.”

  “Go right ahead,” she told him. “I’m just a fly on the wall.”

  He could have ducked into the stall, but the dare, as he understood it, required him to use the urinal. He was just drunk enough not to be embarrassed as he unzipped and made the necessary adjustments, turning his body at a slight angle to preserve his modesty. Once he was under way, he glanced over his shoulder and saw Olga standing against the wall beside the hand dryer, watching him with friendly, non-prurient interest. It was a strangely intimate moment, and Sims could feel himself blushing as he turned around and finished his business. Neither of them said a word as he washed and dried his hands, then followed her out of the restroom.

  Kelly was gone when they returned to the table. Sims left a tip, then walked Olga out to her car, a Mini Cooper parked at the dark end of the lot. They kissed for a few seconds, and then he bent her over the hood, tugged her panties out of the way, and fucked her from behind, clutching a fistful of her dark hair to steady himself. They didn’t have a condom, so he pulled out; she turned around and knelt uncomplainingly on the gravel, smiling up at him like a suitor about to pop the question.

  Sims experienced a powerful moment of euphoria in the run-up to his orgasm — it was almost as if his soul had levitated from his body — but it passed too quickly and he returned to himself with a thud, as if he’d fallen from the sky. He thought suddenly of Jackie — Oh, shit! — and then of Heather, standing in front of her daughter’s coffin. Really fucking awesome, Dr. Sims. When he came, it felt like a rush of sorrow, as if he were pumping molten sadness into Olga’s mouth, though she later remarked that it tasted pretty good, a little sweeter than average.

  SIMS REALIZED pretty quickly that the music he wanted to play required an electric guitar. Money was tight — he was paying the condo rent on top of his jumbo mortgage — so he focused on used equipment, checking Craigslist every day, making frequent visits to Rosedale Discount Music and the Guitar Center at the mall, hoping to stumble on a bargain. He came across a few decent instruments in his price range, but nothing that was anywhere near as good as the candy-apple Stratocaster he’d owned back in high school.

  About a month into his search, a sympathetic clerk at the Guitar Center told him about Drogan’s, this under-the-radar shop in Gifford that specialized in repairing and rebuilding vintage guitars. The owner was a legendary figure in the rock world, a former roadie who’d worked with lots of famous people.

  “It’s pretty funky,” he said. “Definitely worth a look.”

  Drogan’s didn’t have a website, but Sims found a listing in the white pages and stopped there on his way home from work the following evening. It was an off-putting place, a low stucco building that could just as easily have housed a machine shop or a XXX video store, squatting between an ugly office complex and a tuxedo rental outlet on a godforsaken stretch of Lake Avenue. There was no signage and only one small window facing the street, nothing to identify the business or suggest that a visitor might be welcome. Sims entered through the side door, startling the guy behind the counter, a middle-aged hipster who’d just taken the first bite out of a monster burrito. He gazed at his visitor in mute apology, eyes wide and cheeks bulging.

  “Jush secon,” he mumbled, his mouth full of beans and guacamole.

  “Take your time,” Sims told him.

  Still chewing, the guy put down the burrito and slid off his stool, wiping his hands on the front of his jeans. He was around Sims’s age, probably early forties, big and soft in the middle, with thinning hair and Civil War muttonchops.

  “Sorry, man. You caught me in flagrante. Don’t get much business this time of night.”

  “I didn’t mean to interrupt your dinner.”

  “No worries.” The guy took a sip of bottled water, washing down his food. “I’m Mike Drogan, by the way.”

  “Rick Sims.”

  They shook hands across the counter.

  “What can I do for you, Rick?”

  Sims hesitated. There were musical accessories inside the display case — strings, picks, capos, tuners, straps — but no instruments in sight.

  “I’m looking for a used electric guitar. Not too expensive. But maybe this isn’t — ”

  “Don’t worry, you’re in the right place.” Mike pointed to a gray metal door, on which the words INNER SANCTUM had been carefully stenciled in black paint. “We keep the guitars in there. It’s easier to control the humidity. Why don’t you take a look while I finish my dinner.”

  Sims glanced at the overstuffed burrito on the counter. It was standing upright, protruding from its foil wrapper like a fat banana from a shiny metal peel. A few grains of rice had spilled from the ruptured tortilla onto the glass below.

  “Where’s that from?”

  Mike seemed pleased by the question. “You know Ernesto’s? Over by the train station? They got this truck that stops by the office building next door, when the cleaning people are there. I basically live on these things.”

  “Looks pretty good.”

  “Best burrito ever.” Mike tugged on a wiry sideburn, pondering Sims with a knowing expression. “You hungry? I could cut it in half.”

  “No, no. I’m not gonna — ”

  “I’m happy to share,” Mike insisted. “I always stuff myself and then I regret it. You’d be doing me a favor.”

  Sims was tempted. He didn’t have any dinner plans, figured he’d stop at Wendy’s on the way home, his last resort on nights like this. Mike’s burrito looked way more appetizing than an industrial chicken sandwich. But it seemed wrong, someho
w, taking food from a guy he’d just met.

  “That’s okay. I’m gonna check out the guitars.”

  “Your call,” Mike said with a shrug. “Just give me a shout if you need anything.”

  •••

  DROGAN’S HAD a limited inventory, maybe twenty guitars hanging on the walls of the Inner Sanctum, but Sims could see right away that it was an impressive collection, one instrument more valuable than the next. There were no price tags, just index cards identifying the year and model, with a concise descriptive phrase scrawled below — 1957 Telecaster (“a true classic”), 1973 Deluxe Goldtop Les Paul (“Jimmy Page Favorite”), 1968 Chet Atkins Nashville (“all-original hardware”). The only one that seemed remotely in Sims’s ballpark was a 1995 Epiphone SG (“reliable Korean workhorse”), with a white body and black pickguard.

  Mike had told him it was okay to handle the merchandise, so he lifted the SG from its hanger and gave it a test drive. It was a lot heavier than the Fenders he’d been considering, but the action was light and fast, and the chunky neck fit nicely in his hand. He strummed the chords to “Down by the River,” and finger-picked the intro to “Stairway to Heaven,” which he’d learned in high school and never forgotten. He was working his way through “One Way Out,” the quick, stuttering riff he hadn’t quite mastered, when he noticed Mike standing in the doorway, looking faintly amused. Sims stopped playing.

  “I’m not very good. I’m just getting back into it.”

  “Sounds okay to me,” Mike said. “But you gotta plug that thing in and make some noise. It sounds really sweet through this Marshall over here.”

  At the other stores he’d visited, Sims had refused to play through an amp. There was always an element of performance when you did that, a sense that you were being watched and judged. The only guys brave enough to do it were the ones who could shred like Steve Vai or Eddie Van Halen, the guys who’d been practicing for years in their bedrooms.

  “No thanks.” Sims tried to smile, but his lips felt unnaturally tight. “I’m really not — ”

  “Tell you what.” Mike tossed him a cable. “Let’s just jam a little. Start with an E blues.”

  Sims’s face got hot, as if there were an electrical coil implanted beneath the skin. “I don’t know how.”

  “Sure you do.” Mike took a hollow-body Gibson off the wall and plugged it into a small beige amp. “Just play a one-four-five.”

  Sims shook his head, a stranger in a strange land.

  “It’s your basic blues progression,” Mike explained. “You’ve heard it a million times.”

  He started strumming some chords, and Sims recognized the changes right away, the backbone of every Chuck Berry song he’d ever heard. Just an E and an A and a B. He played along until he had it down, at which point Mike broke off for a solo, improvising some tasty licks while Sims struggled to maintain the chug-a-chug rhythm, repeating those three chords over and over, the old one-four-five. Then Mike showed Sims a pattern he could use to play his own solo, a simple five-note scale. Sims’s fingers were slow and clumsy, but it didn’t matter. The notes were right, and they meshed with the chords in gratifying, sometimes magical ways. He felt like he’d cracked some ancient code.

  “Jesus,” he said. “It’s almost like I know what I’m doing.”

  “You got a nice feel for the music,” Mike told him. “That’s what counts. It’s not about who plays the fastest.”

  He showed Sims a basic shuffle, then added some flourishes. They played a slow blues in a minor key and even took a shot at “Born Under a Bad Sign,” with Mike growling the lyrics over Sims’s slightly erratic accompaniment. Sims felt exhausted and exhilarated by the time they called it a night.

  “I like this guitar,” he said, carefully replacing the SG on its hook. “Can I ask you what it costs?”

  “I’m not sure,” Mike confessed. “Let me check with my uncle.”

  “Your uncle?”

  “He’s the owner. I’m just helping out.”

  “Don’t you have a price list or something?”

  “It’s all in his head,” Mike explained. “I’ll try to talk to him tomorrow.”

  THE SEX with Olga was quick and dirty. It couldn’t have lasted for more than a couple of minutes. When it was over, she straightened her skirt, dusted off her knees, and kissed him on the cheek.

  “See you around,” she told him.

  On the way home, Sims didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about what had happened, or what it meant, because he was pretty sure it hadn’t meant a thing. It was just dumb luck, as if he’d stumbled upon a bank robbery and somehow ended up with a bag of money in his hand. He wasn’t innocent, he understood that, but he wasn’t exactly guilty, either, or at least not as guilty as he looked. He was mostly just concerned with avoiding a scene at home, figuring out a way to get past Jackie without telling too many lies.

  As it turned out, he didn’t need to tell a single one because she’d given up and gone to bed. She barely stirred when he slipped in beside her, just mumbled, That you? and went back to sleep. In the morning she acted like everything was fine, bustling around the kitchen in her robe, making lunch for the twins, giving him the usual rundown of her daily schedule — ten o’clock yoga, shopping at Whole Foods, and then she had to take the boys to the Rock Gym for their climbing class, the later session, which meant that she wouldn’t be able to start dinner until six at the earliest, so maybe it would be better if they did some kind of takeout. It wasn’t until Trevor and Jason went upstairs to get dressed that she dropped the act.

  “What the hell happened last night?”

  “Sorry,” he muttered. “I had a little too much to drink. I should’ve called.”

  To his surprise, she didn’t press for details.

  “Are you hungover?”

  “Nothing a few cups of coffee can’t fix.”

  She managed a tiny smile, but he could see that it cost her something.

  “Please don’t do that again, Rick. It’s really disrespectful. Not just to me — to the boys, too. They kept asking me when you were coming home.”

  “Don’t worry. It won’t happen again.”

  That was it, nothing like the third-degree he’d been dreading. He dropped the boys at school, grabbed a venti latte at Starbucks, and continued on to the Health Plan, wondering if there would be any awkwardness with Olga. It had been a long time since Sims had had drunken sex with someone he barely knew, and he had no idea what sort of morning-after protocol was currently in effect. You were probably just supposed to send a friendly text — Thx!! That was fun!!! — but he was old-school, so he headed straight to the Pharmacy to say hello, only to discover that he’d been let off the hook for the second time that morning.

  “Olga’s not in,” said the assistant, a young Muslim woman in a headscarf. “She called in sick.”

  “I hope it’s nothing serious.”

  “Food poisoning.” The assistant smiled wryly. “Olga gets that a lot. Especially after parties.”

  By mid-afternoon, Sims had begun to wish he’d taken the day off himself. His head was throbbing and his mouth felt parched, no matter how much water he drank. And there was always one more kid to examine, another tongue to depress, another scrawny arm to jab with a needle. And all the while, the sound of his own droning voice.

  How’s fourth grade treating ya? Wearing your seatbelt? Any trouble concentrating? No, that’s perfectly normal. Just a sprain. An ingrown hair. Let me take a look. Try not to scratch that, okay, champ?

  He rallied toward the end of the day and was feeling a little better as he exited the building. It was a sunny afternoon in early April; a fresh, blustery wind swept across the parking lot like a promise of better things to come. Sims was tired and a little distracted — he was debating whether to pick up some flowers for Jackie — so it didn’t even occur to him to be alarmed when he saw the stranger waiting by his Audi: a man, probably in his late fifties, balding and thickly built, wearing a rumpled gray suit.
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  “Are you Sims?” he inquired, the slightest trace of a foreign accent in his voice.

  “I’m Dr. Sims. Can I help you?”

  The man smiled and extended his hand. Even as he reciprocated, Sims felt the first vague inklings of trouble.

  “I’m Yevgeny Kochenko,” the man said, squeezing Sims’s hand with more than the usual pressure. “Olga’s my wife.”

  “What?” Sims laughed in spite of himself. He tried to extricate his hand, but Yevgeny’s grip seemed to be tightening. “Olga’s not married.”

  “You think it’s okay to fuck my wife?” Yevgeny asked in a weirdly calm voice as he crushed Sims’s hand in his own. “How you like it if I fuck your wife? Maybe I fuck her in the ass? How about that, Dr. Sims?”

  Sims flashed back to the night before, trying to remember if Olga had been wearing a ring or had said anything to suggest that she had a husband. He was sure she hadn’t — she’d seemed pretty damn single to him — but even if she had, he would have pictured a much-younger, better-looking man with a full head of hair.

  “You sure you’re married to Olga?” he said, but instead of answering the question, Yevgeny punched him in the stomach and then in the face, and that was just the beginning.

  LUCKILY FOR Sims, there was a fair amount of activity in the parking lot. Several people witnessed the assault and started screaming; two security guards rushed out of the building and intervened before Yevgeny could inflict any irreparable damage. Sims was taken to the ER at Rosedale General, where he was treated for facial lacerations — twelve stitches under the right eye, seven more on the chin — and diagnosed with a mild concussion. The doctor kept him under observation for a couple of hours before letting him go.

  Jackie didn’t say much in the hospital, and she was just as quiet on the way home. She could barely look at him, didn’t seem the least bit concerned about his condition or curious to know why he’d been attacked by a sixty-year-old Russian jewelry-store owner whose much-younger wife worked in the Health Plan Pharmacy. The silence was unnerving, and Sims couldn’t stand it for more than a couple of minutes.