In the end, she goes to the bar on her own. It’s the first one she comes across after she storms out of the office. She’s seen it before, of course—she sees it every time she takes the same route back to her house—but she’s never set foot in it. It didn’t seem like the right vibe, the right crowd. And she was correct, it isn’t. She clashes as soon as she walks in; the beat of her high heels mismatches the mellow bluesiness of the music, her corporate chic a false note amidst all the leather and torn jeans.
But she isn’t a giver-upper. This is the bar she chose to drink in, and she will see it through. She swallows down the flutter in her throat and orders herself a cosmo.
Two sips in, she sees the Jukebox Man sitting in a corner, his lips slightly parted. She only realizes what he is when he takes a drink of water in the middle of a song and the music stalls briefly while he swallows. She watches him slide through his playlist effortlessly and with concentration until she finishes her cosmo, and then she keeps watching. He’s seen her, too. As the hours go by, he makes it past the blues and onto sweeter songs about love and escape and dancing in the moonlight.
When the bartender rings the last orders bell, she asks him if he wants to go home with her. He plays her a song full of yes.
In the morning, she wakes up a minute before her alarm sounds, as always. The Jukebox Man is lying on his side next to her. His eyes are closed, but he’s awake: one of the vinyls in his chest is spinning, but his mouth is shut so she can’t hear the music.
Before leaving for work, she leans over and places a kiss on his lips. Then, she slips a coin into his slot and selects a song about goodbyes and what a good time we had. She does not expect him to be there when she gets back.
At the office, she finds people irritate her even more than usual. Flo and her vapid flirting with the lawyers; Jonathan and his rotting food in the fridge; Sam and their constant tapping of their pencil on the desk. These are her colleagues—sometimes she might even call them friends—but when they ask her for an after-work coffee, she refuses, thinking of her clean bed and her plump comforter. She doesn’t think of the Jukebox Man in it at all.
Yet she pushes her apartment door open slowly, as if the cat she doesn’t own might make a run for it if she’s not careful.
The Jukebox Man is still there, sitting at her kitchen table. He has made dinner: linguini carbonara, a salad of fresh rocket and sun-dried tomatoes she bought last month and forgot about. He even opens a bottle of red and lights candles. He plays them a record of old Italian songs. She doesn’t understand the words, but she knows they’re sad and beautiful.
She asks him if he can speak and he says that he can but chooses not to. He prefers playing songs that convey his mood, instead. “Speaking is so fraught,” he says. “Words never say what I want them to.” He sips his wine and she watches the red slip down the machinery of his throat. “Music is better,” he concludes, and that is the last time he speaks.
They don’t talk about moving in together, but the Jukebox Man never leaves her place. She doesn’t know where he lived before. She doesn’t mind him being around all the time, though, so she avoids questioning him about it, in case he takes that as her wishing him to leave.
At work, people ask her to perform tasks that are outside her duties: sit in on this call, take over that presentation, prepare this report. Normally, she would refuse, but now she shrugs and says “okay,” thinking her colleagues poor, almost pitying them for the lack of poetry in their lives.
She catches herself with music in her head. Some of it is the Jukebox Man’s, and some of it is her own. Nobody knows about the Jukebox Man and how much music envelops her, now. She feels lucky, and a word she hasn’t used since childhood: blessed.
In the mornings, he plays her Pink Martini, and she develops the habit of making him breakfast before she heads to the office, always at the exact same time. She jokes about that, sometimes, about how regular, almost rhythmical, everything about her is, timed down to the minute. “What a pair we make,” she says once. “The Jukebox Man and the Metronome Woman.”
He smiles as she brings a forkful of wilted spinach to her mouth.
“I’m thinking of quitting my job,” she says, and he responds in Depeche Mode.
As weeks of living with the Jukebox Man turn to months, she finds herself drifting further and further away from her colleagues. She goes everywhere with him, and he regulates his music depending on context, dropping it down to a whisper or keeping his mouth shut in places where his constant humming draws odd looks, like the library, or galleries. One Saturday, she even takes him to the farmers’ market, where she used to go with the gang, before.
They glimpse her from afar. Flo, Jonathan, and Sam are getting smoked salmon and Philly bagels in their matching shirts. They stare at the Jukebox Man for a few minutes—the neon linings, the shiny vinyls, the complicated tubing of his ribs—unsure what to do. Then Jonathan raises an arm and waves.
She doesn’t wave back. What would be the point?
She sees them whisper to each other as they walk away.
“You know,” she tells him then, “I never really liked them much.”
He monologues in fado the whole way home.
On Monday morning, her boss calls her into his office and she braces, hair pulled back, skirt smooth, battle face on. He motions her in with his shoulders unusually slumped, his hair ruffled instead of slicked back. He offers her a coffee, then a cookie, then a seat, and fumbles for words until finally she has to ask: “What is this about?”
He sighs and says, “I can see you’re no longer challenged by your job.”
A twinge in her gut, like a finger pulling on her navel. “Are you firing me?”
He laughs at that. Sincerely, truly laughs. “No, of course not,” he says, showing her his palms. “This is a promotion. I hope you accept.”
She keeps the news from him, and she’s not entirely sure why.
Her boss was right: the job was not challenging for her anymore. But her new responsibilities keep her up at night, counting the shards of streetlight on the ceiling, composing emails and conducting conversations in her head. She’s tired and stressed, and she responds the way she always did, by dividing out her time into little slots that she then proceeds to fill scrupulously and with held breath.
She’s at the kitchen table on a Sunday evening with her nose in court transcripts when he comes up behind her and wraps his arms around her shoulders, playing soft Elvis at her.
“Turn it off,” she snaps. “Can’t you see I’m trying to work?”
He closes his mouth immediately and retreats to the bedroom, records slowing down to a halt in his chest.
She finds him hours later, his mouth still shut, his vinyls spinning quietly to himself. “I’m sorry,” she says, but he turns and faces the window.
She wishes she knew what song he played for comfort, but she doesn’t find it in her to ask.
He starts neglecting himself after that. Spends longer and longer in silence, neither words nor music passing his lips, and he accepts no food.
“You’re scaring me,” she tells him, and so he allows himself to be taken by the hand and deposited in the bath. She fills the tub and washes him carefully, driving the sponge over his curves and glass displays with a light but steady hand, her designer clothes a damp mess. Then, she dries him and takes out all of his records and cleans them one by one while he watches without sound.
She keeps wiping. “You think I like it, this tight-lipped life?” she asks.
At work, they throw her a promotion party. There are bubblies and canapés and everyone is in a good mood. There’s a carpet of music she doesn’t pay attention to. She’s thinking of the Jukebox Man and his playlist, coaxed back into full volume with a slow meticulousness that she didn’t think herself capable of. When people are sufficiently tipsy, ties loosened and heels kicked away, her boss finds her swaying in a corner and approaches. She tenses despite herself.
“I need to apologize,” he says.
She stares at him and waits, unwilling to make this any easier for him.
“For hitting on you,” he says finally. “It was inappropriate.”
“Is this why the promotion?” she asks.
“No,” he replies, something categorical and almost surprised in his voice. “That was because you deserve it. This is because I was a shithead. I’m sorry. I’ll do better.”
Her job keeps her busy and interested, and she gets used to the Jukebox Man’s music constantly on in the background. Until one morning she realizes that he has gone through all of his songs at least twice and is desperately cycling through them again in an effort to get her attention. The lyrics bounce off her, familiar and uneventful. The chords leave her cold. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I don’t have time for this.”
She leaves for work.
That day she lies to him for the first time. She says she has to stay at the office late, to catch up with neglected tasks.
Instead, she goes to an expensive restaurant with her friends that she doesn’t even like. They all order the scallops and she hums quietly along with a music without words. Her friends toast her success. She toasts back.
He starts playing the same song over and over again. At first she thinks it’s a whim, a lover’s squabble that will soon pass.
But the song persists, the music growing distorted, the lyrics hitching more and more. A malfunction. Or a dysfunction, she’s not sure.
She calls in sick and takes him to the doctor. The Jukebox Man sings to her of a boy who wonders if he’s a machine, of girls on the hill, of the cool nights when deserving is a thing one can be ...
The doctor shrugs. “I can’t help you,” she tells her. “I’ve never been taught how to cure a Jukebox Man.”
So she takes him to a mechanic instead. He regards the Jukebox Man and listens to his sorrowful song for a while, his head cocked to the side and his eyes closed. A tear escapes and trickles down the mechanic’s cheek. “He’s afflicted,” he says. “I know how to fix a jukebox, but I wouldn’t know where to start with a Jukebox Man.”
She thanks the mechanic, even though she’s at a loss about what to do. They get into her car to drive back home. The doctor was an hour away, and the mechanic was three more.
Halfway, she feels her eyelids drooping and there is an ache in her knuckles from gripping the wheel. “Let’s get some coffee,” she tells him, so they stop at the first roadside café they find.
She orders them two flat whites and lets him pick the table. He sits in a corner under a naked light. When he opens his mouth and the song spills out, the other patrons turn to face them.
“Please, stop, you’re bothering everyone,” she tells him, but an old guy from two tables over shouts: “No, let him sing!” and the barista tosses her lovely grey braid over her shoulder and pleads, “Yes, let him do his thing.”
She does.
The Jukebox Man sings his song over and over, his head tilted back and his eyes filled with glassy bliss. Nobody complains at the repetition. They even clap every time the song ends.
When she gets up to go, he doesn’t follow. For the first time in a long time, he looks content.
The house feels empty without the Jukebox Man, the silence of her hours an odd thing that she needs to teach herself to navigate again by only the metronome of her own heart. Work keeps her busy. Her friends keep her wined and fed. She drives through that area sometimes, and, when she does, she stops at the café. The Jukebox Man is still there, in the corner, playing his melancholy song, a small adoring crowd at his feet. “Isn’t he a marvel?” someone always asks her, and she always says, “Yes, yes, he is.”
