Search Party (16 page)

Does everyone have a screw loose now? Robert asked himself, as he always did soon after the arrival of his sons and whomever they had in tow. And if he said a word, they thought he was nuts. Worse, now he had an official status: post insult.

“This I can't do,” he said.

“Robert, you can do it.” Martine had the straight black hair swinging against the neck that he associated with artists and with Frenchwomen, loose shorts, though it was cold early April, one arched foot out in front of her in a canvas sandal. The foot was very smooth, as if she had put hand cream on it instead of on the chapped hands, and had slim, fierce toes ending in dark red toenails. “I think that Alan's beautiful drawing comes from you. Yes! I sense this.”

Robert paused to turn over this evidence that Alan had never said anything about his abilities. “I can't relearn at this stage,” he said petulantly. “I'm a draughtsman. I'm almost seventy.”

“So?” said Alan, not even arguing—when Robert was still a few years away from seventy.

Martine scooted closer to Robert. “I am thirty-nine.” She pressed the darkly tanned skin in the V-neck of her shirt. “And I have this year learned to weld. You will like my pieces, I think. They are new, they are very, very big, almost industrial. For the engineers! For you! I am waiting only for you to see them. I want you to see also what I am doing in oils.” She made a fist. “Very big. Not like those little acrylics you have liked before.” He liked the way she said
ac-reelics
, as if they were something floating and beautiful. He saw someone fishing, casting over smooth water. He could not remember Martine's paintings at all.

Going along with her, he produced a drawing of the woodstove. “Matisse!” said Martine, watching him while the onions sizzled. “But no, no,
absolument
, no shading.”

“Engineers!” cried Alan from the kitchen. “They can't leave anything out.” Robert was getting tired of the word
engineer
, too, in the mouths of his sons, suggesting as it did an old crackpot bound to some disagreeable, repetitive act.

The latch rattled and Billy and Lupe stood in the doorway rubbing their eyes. Lupe's hair was even more askew.

“Billy!” cried Martine, jumping up. “And here, here is Lupe!” First she kissed Lupe on each red cheek, and then Billy. Alan did the same. “I have seen this dress you are making, Lupe!” Martine said. “This color! Very beautiful! The color of the lobster.”

Lupe gave a shout of laughter. “Three lobsters! I'm doing the bridesmaids too. It's the old two-way taffeta from the fifties. Come and see—they're long, floor length. In my case, not all that long. See the sleeves? See the sort of bustle, all those gathers? Mine's the only one that has that. Chic,
non
?”

“Ah,
oui!
”

“And what's this?” She stood in front of Robert's drawing. Martine had taped it to the wall with the ones from Alan's childhood. “Is this yours, Martine, so fierce?”

“It's mine,” Robert said.

“You all draw, in this family.”

Did Billy draw?

To the thumps Lupe made situating herself, the sewing machine responded at length with a gentle, syncopated purr Robert could feel in his feet. He was suddenly weary. Wood smoke had made his eyes heavy, wine in the afternoon had brought on the yawning, unstoppable once it got going. He waved Alan, coming with the bottle, away from his glass, and leaned over to take a book from the floor. But when he had it in his lap his hands went slack, his head hummed, right in front of them he could feel sleep overtaking him.

He was giving a presentation. He and Loretta were at a banquet. He had the slide carrel but the slides were not there. “Oh, no,” he whispered, as if his heart would break. He heard Loretta clump heavily down the stairs to find them and he waited in front of the audience for a long time, until finally everybody got up
to leave and the banquet tables were being cleared—he was very hungry and had not been served even one of the rolls he could smell in the covered baskets—when he woke with a jerk, covered with sweat. “I had a dream!” he said plaintively, in the empty room. It took a while for his pulse to slow down.

He couldn't tell how much time had elapsed, but the four of them were in the kitchen. An echo of whispering hung in the stuffy cabin. He smelled the bread from his dream and his mouth watered shamelessly. A lid had been lifted, a cloud of fragrant steam billowed out of the kitchen. Billy came in and banged on the frame of the steamed-up front window until he had it open, and to Robert's relief stark, rain-cold air rushed in.

“I've had it with sewing and I hate cooking!” Lupe announced to Robert. “What did you dream?”

“Nothing.”

“Was it a nightmare?”

He didn't answer her. Had he made noises? “How long did I sleep?” he called into the kitchen.

“A while,” Lupe said gaily. “What a place for sleeping! There's that smoky smell in the pillows. I snuggled down, I could have slept a hundred years, except Billy made me get up. Don't worry, you were cool. You don't gag and gasp like Billy.”

“No fair!” Billy shouted from the kitchen.

Alan came in, glass in hand. “It's seven. You fell asleep at four.” He looked at his watch. “Pretty soon we'll have bread.”

“B
UT
look,” said Martine. She held up her spoon and in a second the beans began to move. Very gently their skins rippled in the cold air from the open window and split open. “If I draw this, as I would have before I gave up the drawing,” she said with a scowl, “it will be called a domestic picture. A women's picture.”

“And you will be called a sentimentalist. But me too, if I could paint I'd paint these little pods!” Lupe placed a hand on her heart and began slathering the air with an imaginary brush. “Pods, are you going to burst open and impregnate us?” She investigated her soup bowl. Robert wondered if anything mental went with
the physical defect. “You didn't see
Aliens
,” Lupe said, catching his look. “And now, we ask permission to consume your bodies,” she continued, speaking to her spoon. “Oh, Alan.
Mes compliments!
”

Robert cleared his throat, and asked sternly, “What are you majoring in, Lupe?” She was an undergraduate, Billy had written him.

“I am not exactly majoring. I am thinking, though, of being a writer. See those notebooks on the bench? Those are my life story. Billy says it's a mem-mwah.”

“Lupe has had quite a life. Several lives, actually,” Billy said, and Lupe flashed a grin.

Robert said, “That would be after you were a seagull?”

“How did you know? I'd have to say yeah, it all started with my birth as a mammal. This bread, Alan—” she said with her mouth full.

“Lupe's done just about everything,” Billy persisted.

“How did you and Billy meet?” Martine said warmly.

“It's funny how everybody wants to know that. Well, it was like, once upon a time a frog came up on land and next thing, she met an emu. OK, it was in the cafeteria at school. You know the ladies who sit on the stool with their press-on nails on the keypad and say, ‘Plain burger?'” She preened her own bitten nails. “That was my latest job. In this country, I receive a special letter in my file, for being able to do these things.”

“In Mexico Lupe broke horses, because she could speak to them,” Billy said gravely.

“Is that so? I believe there was a best-seller on that subject,” Robert said.

“A tonal language, I would think,” said Alan. “Wine, anybody?”

“It has more to do with the breath,” Lupe said.

“In L.A. she was a gang infiltrator for the police department. Girl gangs. Spanish-speaking. She also worked in a couture house in Paris.”

“Now I'm between jobs.” Lupe tore off bread and ate fast, the way she had cut out the dress, and looked up to find them all
observing her. “I'll have to watch out when I get to this point in my memoir, this lull.”

“After dinner you will read to us from your book? I think we would like that,” Martine said, to Robert's dismay. “In the place where you grew up, your parents were . . . ?”

“Parents—no. Place—no, not really a place. I grew up on the road.”

“They were orphans,” Billy said. “They had to keep coming down from the highlands, even crossing the border, into and out of the country.”

“The highlands,” said Robert.

“I do not even know what is your country,” Martine said humbly, leaning forward.

Lupe let go of the spoon with it still in her mouth and twanged it with her thumb. “Guatemala,” she said, removing the spoon with a delicate motion. “My country long ago.”

“She should read it to you!” Again Robert had the feeling Billy might burst into tears. “In the highlands, villages were erased. Farmers had stakes driven into their chests. You won't believe it. Lupe's parents—she saw them shot. She was four years old. They had her hidden in a bag of coffee.”

“Green coffee,” Lupe said.

I don't believe it, Robert thought. He almost said, “How did you see out of the bag?” Villages, stakes, the highlands. Something told him the girl was a child of middle-class professionals, like everyone else in the room. The disturbed, possibly cast-out child. That California voice. The incongruous surname McCann. The way she said “sentimentalist.” The way she had said, “I'm back to being a maid.” He was beginning to pity his son, and fear for him.

“Where exactly were you, on the road, growing up?”

“Sometimes, walking along,” she said patiently, looking not at him but at Billy. “Sometimes”—the black eyes narrowed as she daintily scraped a last spoonful of soup—“I was in the trunk.”

“The trunk of the car,” Billy said.

“If there wasn't enough room,” Lupe confirmed. “Because there were a lot of us. Assunta, the woman who had us, had to
make a getaway from time to time, with shoes and food and so on. And crutches, of course.”

Robert said, “How do you happen to know French?”

“Know French! Ha-ha!
Merci, monsieur
. It's an act, really it's high school French. In high school I was here already. I was in San Diego.”

“And then of course you were in Paris.”

“Yeah, right, in the sweatshop.”

“Lupe is one of those people who . . . who . . . who
picks up
languages,” Billy said, stuttering with pride. “There was no way she could go to college, of course, no money, because of course they had to come . . . come down out of the highlands with nothing.” So much for her being an undergraduate. “I mean, they had nowhere even to spend the night, and once she got here Lupe had to . . . she had to have operations, and sleep in a car, in her casts, and be raped. Don't worry, she is open about it. They were picking fruit, for God's sake.” Billy voice climbed and cracked. “And then she got married!”

“Married,” Robert said. “Is Spanish your native tongue?” The girl had no accent.

“Dad's an engineer,” Alan said.

“Actually, I spoke another language, that I doubt you have heard of. An Indian language. The name McCann—that was the guy I married.”

“Darren McCann,” Billy said, almost as proudly as he had spoken of Lupe. “She was sixteen, he was twenty-eight. What a loser.”

“You met him?” Robert said.

“You can't meet him, he's in jail,” Lupe said. “And Billy, I don't want you to say that. I told you. His family is very good to me.” I'll bet they are, Robert thought.

“I'm sorry,” Billy said.

Robert said, “And the sister who's getting married on Saturday? Was she in the trunk too?”

Lupe looked at him with a little squint. “She was there, yes,” she said.

M
ARTINE
came down the ladder facing the wrong way, forward, so that she had to turn her long feet sideways like an Egyptian on a frieze. “Robert?” she said, though of course it was he, sitting at the desk holding the canvas sewing bag. One side of the lining formed an inner pocket, with a nametag sewn to it. “Lee Ann McCann.”
Lee Ann
.