Search Party (15 page)

“Yeah, put it there. In front of the window.” Through the pins pressed between her lips the girl employed a sort of singsong, as if she had to go through a calming litany for everyone present, like a coach, or an animal tamer.

“Her sewing machine. Lupe's the maid of honor in the wedding,” Billy said proudly.

“Matron of honor! Don't forget I'm divorced. Or maybe I'm back to being a maid.”

“You're welcome to put the sewing machine on the desk,” Robert interrupted. But he would have to move the piles of books. How in fact would she carry anything? A frying pan, a child? How would she live?

It was obvious. She would get hold of someone to help her. Someone with a conscience, someone weak, a man who could be manipulated. A boy. Billy.

“Here.” Robert got up to move the books.

Billy got there ahead of him. He held up
The Golden Treasury of Natural History
. “Back to school?”

“Thought I'd learn a little something.”

“It's never too late, right, Loop? Dad spent all his life as a structural engineer.”

“Not quite all. Some of it may remain.”

Slime molds are like plants in some ways and like animals in others
. He had found a box of the boys' old schoolbooks in the closet. Paging through them he felt a settling-in, a release of independence, a sinking. While he read he could squeeze the ball. He still had powers of concentration that he could summon, but he didn't want to read fiction or anything from his own field.

“What you do, you get right up in their face!” Loretta said when he went in for his temporary disability. He had gone straight back to the office but he was having to brace himself when Loretta brought in anything new for him to do. “Blueprints,” she would say with a grimace, putting them in his basket. He delayed signing off on anything. With bridges there was no leeway. He no longer had his eye for detail. No one had to tell him he had received an insult. That was what the doctor called the stroke:
insult
. Perhaps that was why he was so full of suspicion. The word was out that his good nature could not be relied on. He would wait until the elevator was empty; he would slump against his office door once he had it shut on all the well-wishing and offers and compliments.

Some agreement had been reached above his head that he was not quite ready, he was going to have to build up to it. A longer leave had to be put through; he went through the formalities but his application snagged on a young man in personnel, whose memo Loretta snatched. “Too simple for the minds down there! I'm going. I'll explain so they get it.” That was the last he heard of the snag; the leave came through the next day.

“Well, hello there!” said Lupe. Two seagulls on the mossy windowsill were peering in as she positioned the machine on the desk. She ducked, disappearing below the sill, and both gulls skewed their heads to see her.

“Would you look at that,” Billy said. “They like you.”

“Sure. Sure they do. I was a seagull in my former life.”

“You were,” Billy said, coming up behind her and beginning to massage her shoulders. “A scavenger, right?”

Lupe laughed; she crossed her arms at the elbow and flapped her hands. Her build was slight, but under the bulky sweatshirt Robert had noticed volume, a slinging back and forth of globes. She had let her head fall back to laugh and Billy bent over it, presumably to press his lips to the red upside-down mouth. Robert could not see exactly what was going on because their backs were to him, but they stayed that way for several seconds.

He couldn't do what he usually did after breakfast, sit down and leaf through the old books all morning until he fell asleep in the chair. The question was whether he was resting up, in this state in which a furious impatience blinked on between long dazes that were like standing at an abandoned bus stop.

“Jeez.” Billy was back to
The Golden Treasury
. “‘The lace-wing fly has to lay its eggs in a special way to keep the first lace-wing flies that hatch from eating up the eggs that have not yet hatched.'” Now Lupe was down on the floor by the window, with her legs out in front of her, mounds of shiny orange material between them. There was no way it could be comfortable to sit like that. She already had the pattern pinned to the material and she was cutting. Orange. Orange bridesmaids. A color to make even a normal person look like a clown. She cut fast, paying no attention to what was coming out behind the shears as they snaked around the pins making a dancing gasp.

“So Dad. A hatchet-footed animal with no head. ‘They use their feet as burrowing tools. Sometimes they pull themselves along with them.' Who am I?”

“A cripple!” Lupe sang out from the floor, and laughed with what Robert was beginning to see as an absurd merriment.

“Cut it out, Lupe,” Billy said.

“I already did!”

“You know what I mean,” Billy said in a crooning tone that set Robert's teeth on edge. “Listen to this. ‘The softly colored rosebud jelly is pretty at night as well as in the daytime. It shines
in the dark.'” Lupe grinned at him from across the room. “‘This small animal catches its prey with its long tentacles. The tentacles are sticky.' OK. ‘A starfish, let us suppose, comes upon an oyster. It fastens one or more of its arms to each half of the oyster's shell. The suction disk holds its arm tightly to the shell. Then it tries to pull the shell open. At
first
the oyster can hold its own—'”

“Whoo hoo.” Lupe yawned broadly. “I'm done with this part. I'm tired. Why don't we take a nap.”

“So Dad . . .” Billy was apologetic. “What if we did rest up for a while before they get here? Would you mind?”

“Not I,” Robert said, picking up the mugs. “I've been known to take a nap myself.”

“Other room, Loop, that one's Dad's.” Billy followed him into the kitchen. “You know, Dad. I just wanted to tell you something. I don't know if you . . . I just want to say . . . Lupe is the smartest person I've ever met.”

“Well now, that's a compliment all right.”

“And I want you to get to know her.”

“I hope to.”

“Dad? I just want . . .”

“I hope to.”

It was too cold to go outside and stay there. Robert fed the woodstove and put the radio and the fan on for noise and then he went into his room and lay down. He took the sea life book in with him. This was a book that drew his eye; he left it on top of the pile on the desk, where he could glance at the picture on the jacket, of a little open-mouthed fish with eyes on stalks. The fish was hiding in seagrass, in its black eyes a look that stopped Robert no matter how many times he noticed it, of wondering sadness.

He was in bed a good deal anyway, at the wrong times. He wouldn't get under the covers until the night was half over, and then it seemed he never moved off his back until the sun hit him. After that he'd lie half in and half out of sweaty sleep for an hour, two hours, before he got to the window in his pajamas, jaws pried apart by the first of countless yawns. Then he would quickly get
the stove going, and catnap until midafternoon in his chair. Then he would really wake up.

No one would put up with him if he went back to work in this condition, worse than when he left. Soon somebody in the elevator would be saying, “Robert Mallow has come to a complete standstill.”

H
E
thought at first that Alan had hurt himself, but he had merely cut his hair so short the dents in his skull showed, and dyed the stubble an iodine color. After the hug and the kisses on both cheeks, which Alan always imposed with an aggrieved smile, like unwelcome treats, he held Robert at arm's length and said, “So how
are
you?”

“I'm in great shape!” Robert said heartily.

Then came Martine, Alan's second wife, absently chewing her dark lips. She too kissed Robert twice, but she was French-Canadian, from her it was natural, merely a cool touch, faintly scented with resin because she was a painter.

By three o'clock they had carted in half a dozen bags of groceries and finished handing their bags up to the loft. Alan pressed his ear to the door of the bunk room. “They really are asleep in there, aren't they. One of them snores. So what's all this on the floor?”

“The books? The books were packed up, but I got them out. I've been getting a kick out of them. The rest of it—Lupe's stuff. You've met Lupe?”

“Haven't met her yet. Hey, I remember these books! So where were they?”

“In a box in the loft. I went up. I did. I was careful coming down.” He had nearly taken a dive off the ladder with the box.

“
The Book of Knowledge
. So”—Robert was getting tired of this airy “so” of his sons'—“are you acquiring knowledge?”

“Too late for that.” Robert forced a chuckle.

“If we look at our old schoolbooks, for a minute we are seven years again,” Martine said dreamily. “In my grammar was a little blonde girl with a white dog. I thought I would grow to be like
her. I thought it was possible,
voila!
I could be a different little girl, so simple, just turn things a little, a little . . .” She tilted a frame with her hands.

Alan was slipping off his shoes as Robert groped for a pleasant remark about dark hair. “So, what about the art stuff I sent? Bet you haven't unpacked that. Drawing would organize you, you know. Prime you. Free the inner engineer.” Sometimes the tone Alan took with him caught Robert off guard, unaccountably bringing around a gloomy image of himself shedding tears in a darkened school auditorium when a prize for art was not won by Alan. Ann was beside him letting him grip her hand, and Alan, a little boy of eight or nine, was at the end of a special row in the front, of those who might or might not win a prize. He was waiting. They could see it in the back of his head, tilted slightly, pink in its transparent crew cut.

Alan had found work at last, not on some dinner stage this time but as a drama therapist. He was working in a nursing home. At least he had paychecks, new shoes he might have bought with his own money. From his mother he had enough to be comfortable. That was part of the trouble, for both boys. Of course it might attract women. Did attract them.

Alan tilted his chair onto one leg and spun the loose handle on the oven door with his feet. The points he was going to make, he said, were not his own ideas but those of a colleague, a master art therapist. First, no matter how badly off you were, drawing—the following eye, the copying hand—retaught the brain.

Robert wondered briefly how long Alan would hold on to this job if he didn't know when he was making a nervous, bitter face, if he didn't know a certain kind of attention paid to the person you were trying to encourage had the same effect as doubt. Robert knew this from his own physical therapy. He knew the ones who helped the situation and the ones who made you clumsier and raised your blood pressure.

“You smile,” Alan sulked. “I see this every day.”

“I don't smile, believe me,” Robert said, putting up his hands.

Martine wandered around the room just as Lupe had done,
albeit with a lithe, soundless step, inspecting Alan's old framed pencil drawings of crabs and urchins and starfish. “This little boy I see, with his pencil,” she wailed suddenly, “where is he?” Alan didn't answer her. “Robert, what are you doing?” Martine gave his name the French pronunciation. “No, are you sewing?”

“That's Lupe's dress. She's a bridesmaid. Matron.” Robert lowered his voice. “She looks all of twelve, but apparently she's been married.”

A
LAN
snapped the catch of the mess kit in which he had soaked beans all night in their hotel room in Vancouver. He was as pleased with the beans as if he had smuggled them in. At thirty-seven, with plenty of money, Alan still traveled as if he were hitchhiking across Europe. “Sourdough!” He held up a plastic container. Martine was spilling onions, tomatoes, celery, and carrots out onto the kitchen counter.

“I do hike out once in a while for provisions,” Robert said, and she gave him a preoccupied smile as she popped the cloves out of a fat head of garlic. Spices, mustard, brown sugar, vinegar. A ham hock. “It's for the whole weekend,” Alan said sharply as Robert eyed the bottles of red wine, a row going halfway down the counter. “
Et voila!
” Alan drew two gleaming knives out of black sheaths. “I came prepared. Look at this, Martine! Remember these?” He rattled the drawer of battered utensils.

“I did take your advice, as a matter of fact,” Robert said. “Yesterday afternoon. I got out the stuff you sent and I tried a sketch. I put it in the trash.”

Martine threw down her knife, found the wastebasket and dumped it out. She smoothed his crumpled drawing of the rocky point, and looked at it as she might have looked at a burned dinner. “Mmm. We will draw! Robert? Why not? Alan will cook and we will draw! Where is your paper?”

At her insistence, they sat on the floor. Alan set brimming jelly glasses of wine beside them. “Cheers!”

“Somebody's going to have a very big headache,” Robert said.

“For the drawing, energy comes from below,” Martine said firmly, putting a piece of charcoal in his hand and guiding it to the paper with her chapped fingers. “From the earth. The line, you will pull up from the earth. Now color, if you are painting, will come in from all sides, everywhere.”