The Missing Person (6 page)

The streets were crowded with traffic, and I rolled down the windows and sighed, asking myself what the hell I was doing. Angus gave me occasional directions and fiddled constantly with the radio, listening to ten seconds or less of every single song, ten words or less of talk. It was basically the most annoying thing ever. I kept glaring at him, which only made him laugh. This went on for fifteen minutes as mothers in minivans cut me off, truckers barreled down on top of me, and packs of teenage girls stared at us and giggled for no reason that I could see. I was sweating a lot and hating it. Finally Angus reached behind him into the backseat of the car, leaning far over to rummage around on the floor, his sweatpanted butt perilously close to my shoulder.

“What the hell are you doing?”

He turned around clutching a fistful of cassette tapes in his hands and sorted through them quickly before sticking one in.

I heard strings.

“The sweet sounds of Frank Sinatra,” Angus said. “They've always been a favorite of mine.”

“Is that right?”

“It is. Take this left on Indian School, please.”

The sweet sounds seemed to calm him down, and he sat looking out the window and mouthing the words. Two crooned songs later I pulled up at a motor lodge on a deserted strip of road. On the sepia-colored sign was a neon martini glass and the word “Cocktails” in a flowing script.

Angus leapt out of the car and opened the door to the cocktail lounge. Inside, through the gloomy dark, I could just make out booths with cracked red vinyl and tables made of dark pressed wood that was supposed to resemble mahogany. It looked like the set of a canceled TV show.

The waitress, a woman in her forties with a devastated face, sat smoking a cigarette on a stool at the bar. She wore a black miniskirt and beige panty hose with no shoes, and she was the only person there. We slid into a booth so small that my knees were touching Angus's. I shifted around and crossed my legs. Angus leaned back and ran his hands approvingly over the vinyl. “I think I'm going to have a martini,” he said. “Would you like a martini?”

“Okay.”

“Jeanine,” he called to the waitress, who had not gotten up. “We'd like two martinis here.”

“Vodka or gin,” said Jeanine, stubbing out her cigarette with what appeared to be total exhaustion. She reached down past the ashtray to where her shoes—black flats—were sitting on the bar, then pulled them on with a grimace.

“Gin, of course,” Angus said. “And a big glass of water for my friend here,” he added, smiling at me. “You know, gin is the canonical martini. If I wanted a vodka martini I'd
say
a vodka martini. To distinguish it from the standard version, right?”

“Olives or a twist,” said Jeanine.

“Olives!” he said. “Olives, definitely.”

“Me too,” I said.

Jeanine nodded and set to work behind the bar.

Angus Beam would not stop smiling. He leaned forward, putting both his freckled hands palms down on the table. His fingernails were ragged and chapped around the edges.

“What's so funny?” I said.

“Nothing.”

“You're smiling like there's something funny.”

“I'm smiling,” he said, “because I'm happy.”

To this I had nothing to say. Jeanine brought the drinks in small plastic glasses, two tiny dark olives, shriveled as raisins, speared on each toothpick.

“I didn't think you'd do this kind of thing,” I said.

“What, go on a date? I just had the impulse. I'm an impulsive person.”

“This is a date?”

“Well. Never mind, if that's not what you meant. Go on.”

“I meant going to a cocktail lounge. Drinking martinis.”

“Why would you think that?”

“I picture you and your friends in some kind of outdoor hut, drinking naturally refined alcohol that comes from, like, hemp or something.”

His eyes widened. “They can do that?”

“Not as far as I know, but I'm not the expert here.”

He winked and mouthed both olives off the toothpick at once. “Listen,” he said, chewing, “I think our world is an ungodly mess. That we live in a society overwhelmed by its own poisonous excesses. That people who don't see the truth of this are blind or stupid or both. But a world in which a man can drink a martini with a beautiful woman on a sunny afternoon—well, that's a world with some redeeming qualities.”

I rolled my eyes. “I guess I'll drink to that,” I said. We clinked glasses and I raised mine to my lips. As I tipped it back the toothpick fell forward and I splashed gin down my chin and the front of my shirt. I flushed deeply and dabbed myself with a napkin. Angus noticed, but pretended not to, and I liked him for it.

When I finally got some gin down it filled me with a kind of gorgeous, beneficial warmth, as if I'd been cold without knowing it for days. The room dimmed then, and yellow light flickered in some plastic sconces on the wall. From some crevice of the lounge, music began to play, another crooning torch song, this time by a woman whose voice I didn't recognize. It turned out to be Jeanine, sitting on her stool by the bar, her lips against a microphone connected to a karaoke machine. She stared at our booth and sang in a tuneless, gravelly voice:

I met a man in a hotel bar
He was in from out of town
He said I was cute
I thought he was quirky
He took me out for dinner
And fed me tangerines
He took me for all I had
And left me in Albuquerque.

At the end of the song she nodded and stood up, and we clapped. Into the microphone she murmured quietly, “The lyrics are my own.”

We drank one round and ordered another. We were still the only patrons.

“So,” I said. “Did you grow up in Albuquerque?”

He shot me an amused look. “No, I'm from Brooklyn,” he said. “Flatbush Avenue.”

“You're kidding.”

“I am not.”

“So how'd you wind up out here?”

“You say that as if there's something wrong with Albuquerque.”

“There's nothing wrong with it. It's just the middle of nowhere, that's all.”

“I happen to like nowhere,” he said. “Besides, I found work here.”

“Which is?”

“I'm a plumber. I work for Plumbarama.”

“You fix toilets?” I looked at his fingers grasping the stem of his glass, at the dirt underneath the fingernails, and thought about that odor that surrounded him constantly: the smell of chemicals and ammonia and water.

“Toilets, sometimes, yes. Also sinks, bathtubs, washing machines, drainage systems, septic tanks. Nothing functions without plumbing. Nothing goes forward without leaving waste behind. Plumbing is the circulatory system of the civilized world. It allows us to forget our dirt, our shit and stink. It allows us to pretend. Wash our hands of it, as it were.”

“As it were.”

“But everything in this world has its price, even cleanliness. We can't continue to pump our waste into the waterways without figuring out how to recirculate and clean it. We can't allow First World nations to monopolize gluttonous quantities of water while Third World countries suffer for lack of it. If we don't deal with plumbing, then we aren't confronting the basic reality of our own presence here.”

This made a certain kind of sense, I thought, although it might've been due to the gin. “You think about this stuff a lot, don't you?” I said.

“I guess so. I have time, while I'm unclogging somebody's sink, to consider the larger implications.”

“So how does being a plumber fit in with all your group activities?”

“It's all connected.” He opened his wallet and withdrew a folded piece of paper, an intricate, hand-drawn diagram, rather beautiful, of pipes and arrows overlaid in a complex geometry. There were tanks and tubes and valves and other mechanical forms that I couldn't begin to identify, each labeled with neat, tiny letters going down the alphabet.

“What is it?”

“It's the future of plumbing,” he said, and his eyes held mine in a brief, electric moment before he went on. “Citywide composting toilets. Gray-water usage and flow constrictor fittings and pipes made of recycled plastic. A quasi-steady state system that will restore logic to the human component of the hydrologic cycle. In twenty years, when the Beam model is fully implemented, our current plumbing equipment will seem as grotesque and outdated as the shit-filled streets of the Middle Ages.”

“Wow,” I said.

He nodded and put the paper away. Round three followed with reassuring speed. Jeanine sang a couple more numbers. Angus talked about the ideology of plumbing and ran his hands through his red hair until it was poking out all over. I felt the gin coursing through my veins. At some point—who knows when?—he stood up and threw some loose bills on the table, grabbed my hand, and pulled me to my feet. We waved good-bye to Jeanine and then we were standing in the parking lot of the motor lodge, next to a red pickup truck, kissing like crazy.

Things were soft and warm and endless. The moon shone somewhere behind my right eye. I leaned back against the body of the truck and pulled him toward me until his hips ground against mine. I felt a crucial need to be naked. In the shadowy air of room 102, comforter thrown to the carpeted floor, thin sheets slippery against my skin, I ran my hands over his warm shoulder muscles and down to the small of his back; he touched me everywhere. We had sex, passed out, woke up, had sex again.

When I woke up the second time it was only midnight. This seemed implausible, even shocking, but I guessed that when you start drinking in the afternoon, you open up a lot of extra time in the evening. I peered through the blinds at the parking lot, my stomach quivering and uneasy. A low, lumbering shape I hoped was a raccoon was nosing around the trash can by the ice machine. Music was playing distantly. Angus Beam lay with his cheek pressed into the pillow, his face crumpled and red, snoring lightly, one freckled arm flung over the side of the bed, the fingers grazing the floor. His skin glowed in the dim light like a Renaissance nude's. His smell was on my skin.

I was in the car before it occurred to me that I was still drunk and shouldn't be driving. The city streets were wide and empty, though, the white lines like arrows directing me home, and I floated above it all, directing the car from a great and mighty distance, like a ship in space. I was home and in bed in what seemed like no time at all, and fell into unsettling, science-fiction dreams stippled with images so bright they almost woke me up. In one, my father came back to us, older, silver-haired, and confessed that he hadn't died at all; in another, the sun turned from yellow to red, an apocalyptic event signaling environmental catastrophe, and cascaded down toward the earth where, just before impact, it became the red hair of Angus Beam.

My bladder woke me at four-fifteen. I went to the kitchen to down some more water and was leaning against the counter drinking when I heard noises outside, and for a second I just waited, my stomach trembling. Sidling up to the living-room window, I could see a figure in the driveway beneath the jaundiced rays cast by a streetlight. My brother was standing there in the dark, bent under the open hood of the Caprice.

Five

“Hi,” I said.

Wylie jumped about a foot in the air and dropped the dipstick, which clattered loudly against the asphalt.

“Lynnie,” he said, “what the hell are you doing here?”

“I was about to ask you the same question.”

“I'm checking the oil.” He picked up the dipstick and held its tip in front of his face, scowling at it. The oil mark was just barely visible in the wan light. “Have you been driving my car?”

“Maybe,” I said.

He shook his head and turned again to the engine. His dark-blue T-shirt said CAMP KIKOWAWA 1992 on the back. Underneath the worn cotton his scrawny shoulders stuck up in points, and his dark hair hung down in a skinny, knotted braid. I was sure I weighed more than he did.

“What are you doing at home?” he muttered to the car.

“I came back to visit,” I said. “Where the hell have you been?”

“Bisbee,” he said.

“I sent you an e-mail weeks ago telling you I'd be back. I've been looking for you.”

“Bisbee, Arizona.”

“What's in Bisbee, Arizona?”

This question met with a long, irritated pause, during which Wylie reinserted the dipstick, drew it out again, and examined it, scowling all the while. I leaned against the side of the car and waited.

“Bisbee, Arizona,” he finally said, “is what's in Bisbee.”

“I never would've guessed. You're being kind of annoying, by the way.”

“Well, you would know.”

“Wylie.”

“Lynn.”

I crossed my arms. Wylie slid his scrawny body under the car and started tinkering around down there. I sat down in the driveway, my head still swimming a bit in the aftermath of drinks and sex and sleep, and looked up at the sky. The moon was fat and sagging. Far down the block a couple of dogs were barking at it testily from their yards.

Wylie's feet stuck out from beneath the car, the toes of his sneakers pointing and flexing as he shifted his weight. I could hear him grunting. Across the street Mrs. Sandoval's rock lawn gleamed in the moonlight. Near my right hand a cockroach sped across the asphalt, and I shuddered and stood up. Our house was dark, and my mother was in there sleeping.

“Wylie,” I said to his grimy shoes, “Mom really wants to talk to you.”

“I know.”

“Why don't you sleep over?”

“I can't.”

“Just stick around for breakfast. Fifteen minutes, so she can see you. A cup of coffee.”

“I don't drink coffee,” he said.

“Yeah, like that's the point.”

A clanging, rusty sound came from under the car; then Wylie said, “Shit!” and scooted out with oil on his face. “See what you made me do?”

“Sorry,” I said, and laughed.

He gave me a mighty scowl and stood up, then closed the hood of the car and started gathering up his tools.

“Wylie?”

“I can't talk to her.”

“Why not?”

“Because she doesn't understand the kind of life I'm trying to live. She can't admit that I'm an adult making serious moral choices.”

“Those are your actual reasons?”

“Plus she nags me all the time.”

“You could stand it for fifteen minutes.”

He thrust the tools angrily into a backpack and shouldered it. When I touched his arm, he flinched. His skin was darkly tanned, his face drawn, and his wrist was hardly thicker than mine.

“No, I couldn't,” he said, then strode down the driveway, his back slouched under the weight of his backpack. He looked like a thirteen-year-old heading off to school. Above him, the sky had already begun to lighten in preparation for sunrise. Two condos down he turned around. “If you absolutely
have
to drive the car,” he said, “take care of it.”

“Okay,” I said. He kept walking, and a minute later I heard the same angry dogs raise another, accelerated alarm—this time, I was pretty sure, about him.

The sun and my hangover together woke me at seven. For a while I just lay there on my back, looking up at the white ceiling and wondering if everything I remembered from the night before was a dream. Did Wylie really come back? Did I really drink martinis with a man I hardly knew while an aging waitress sang karaoke songs she wrote herself? Did I really have sex in a motel room,
more than once
?

“Oh, my God,” I said out loud. I could feel the night's imprint on my body: the parched throat, the sensitive skin, a few memories in other places. Down the hall I could hear my mother moving around, the fizzle of the shower, and then some dish-clanging in the kitchen. I was surprised I usually slept through this racket.

I found her sitting at the table, tapping her spoon precisely at the dome of a soft-boiled egg.

“Good morning,” I said. She looked tired and wan, I thought, her skin even whiter than her office blouse.

She looked up, dropped her spoon, and made “I'm having a heart attack” motions over her chest. “Isn't this a sign that the world's coming to an end?” she said. “You getting up before noon?”

I poured myself a cup of coffee and watched her scoop out neat spoonfuls of egg and slip them gracefully into her mouth. I'd forgotten how much she liked these rituals—place settings and cloth napkins and square meals. An egg cup next to a slice of toast and a glass of juice: it was like a breakfast commercial.

“So, guess who I saw last night.”

“Someone who kept you out until quite late, that much I know.”

“It was only midnight.” I cleared my throat. “Wylie came by. Late last night or early this morning. I heard him in the driveway and went out to talk with him. He's doing all right. He mostly seemed preoccupied with oil in the car. He really loves that Caprice.”

Relaying this news—even though Wylie came back on his own, and not due to my efforts—gave me a sense of accomplishment I hadn't felt in quite some time. I sat back and waited for the inevitable kudos. Instead, she took her breakfast things into the kitchen and rinsed them in the sink.

“He's been in Arizona,” I added, “but now he's back.”

When she finally looked at me, her face was taut with anger, and her voice came out a whisper. “I cannot believe you let him just stop by and then prance right off. I cannot believe you didn't wake me up, that you didn't strap him down with
rope.
”

“Mom,” I said.

“This is not a gas station.”

“I know.”

“It's not a place where you check the oil and leave after five minutes.”

“I understood what you meant the first time.”

“I am very disappointed in you,” she said.

I sat there staring at my coffee cup. My throat hurt, my head hurt, the hair on my head hurt. I didn't know what to say.

She took her purse and left, just like Wylie had.

Alone, I tried to find comfort in my usual routine—TV watching, ice-cream eating, et cetera—but couldn't sit still. In Brooklyn I'd passed whole days without moving ten feet, but now I roamed around the far reaches of my mother's condo for less than half an hour before deciding I had to leave. I put on my sunglasses and headed out into the day.

Angus's hat was on the passenger side, neatly folded in half along its sweat-stained brim. I crammed the Sinatra tape inside it and threw them in the back, where I wouldn't have to think about either one.

On the streets of Albuquerque, young guys in lowriders with family names calligraphed on the back windows were cruising around, bass lines pounding from their stereos, staring harshly at drivers whose cars bore different family names. Skateboarding kids were taunting children on foot. I noticed huge, disheveled crows hanging out on all the power lines and stray dogs meandering down the dirt alleys, skulking against walls and crossing streets heavy with traffic. At an outdoor coffeehouse a homeless man was busing people's tables, whether they were done or not, then begging for change. Everybody I saw was suntanned and squinting.

My first stop was the university library. I wanted to look up the artist of my father's paintings—as I'd come to think of them, even though I couldn't remember him ever talking about them—and see whether there was any information about Eva Kent's life and work. At the computer I went through the usual rituals—my father's name, his book on the screen—before proceeding to my scholarly tasks. There was a reassuring familiarity to the stacks of torn scrap paper by the terminals, the useless stubby pencils, the Library of Congress classifications. I was in my element, or as close to an element as I had.

I rummaged through the sections on New Mexico artists of the later twentieth century, flipping through journals and small-press books and leaflets for any sign of her name.

Two hours of looking yielded exactly one item about Eva Kent, a 1978 magazine article about a show at the High Desert Gallery that contained none of her work. But scattered throughout the article were pictures taken at the opening-night reception: men in mutton-chop sideburns, women in dirndl skirts and turquoise squash-blossom necklaces. Everybody was smoking and looked drunk. One black-and-white photo showed two men laughing their heads off on either side of a lithograph; behind them, frowning slightly, was a woman. The caption read: “Ernesto Salceda, Bruce McGee, and Eva Kent.”

She had parted her long, black hair down the middle—a habit she must have adopted years earlier, because the part had widened to reveal a stripe of scalp. She had a substantial, commanding nose and a wide, tight-lipped mouth. She looked like someone who'd never spent a day lying on a couch eating ice cream in her entire life. Also, there was one other thing: she was unquestionably, enormously pregnant, but she didn't carry herself like any pregnant woman I'd ever seen, at least anyone who was that far along. She didn't have her hands clasped beneath her belly or resting above it, wasn't sitting down or leaning back to compensate for the additional weight. Instead she was leaning forward, rather daintily, and frowning at the lithograph, ignoring the two men beside her, a cigarette burning in her right hand.

I sat for a while looking at the picture, turning possible events over in my mind. Eva Kent had a child, then painted the reverse pietà. As a portrait of motherhood, it was less than idealized, that picture of hers. From
The Wilderness Kiss
to
The Ball and Chain
wasn't exactly a sentimental journey, and I couldn't help wondering what had happened to her later. Since there were no other references to her after that opening in 1978, it occurred to me that maybe she'd stopped painting after having the child. I could do something with that, though it would be better, for what I had in mind, if something really bad had happened to her—a greater tragedy than the feminine mystique, that is. This was cynical, but no less true. Suzanne's surrealist had died young of his brain tumor, whose side effects supposedly accounted for the more egregious imagery in his work.

I thought back to the night Michael and I wrote the abstract for my dissertation. The artists I was researching showed in alternative spaces and staged performance art, embracing the female body in all its sexuality and powers. They celebrated the vaginal imagery in O'Keeffe's flowers and made a heroine out of Frida Kahlo. My project was supposed to reexamine this time period using the very modernist terms these women had worked so hard to defy. Michael thought it would make a big splash, but felt that I had to find the right kind of artists, and not performance artists, to elevate and promote.

“You need a Georgia,” he'd said. “You need a cult of personality.”

“Greeting cards in the making,” I'd answered lazily, trying not to fall asleep. “Coffee mugs and calendars.” We were in bed in his apartment, on a quiet Saturday evening, and Marianna was at a conference in Denmark. Those were the most peaceful nights I ever spent in New York: half-asleep and half-awake, books on the blankets, the noise of the city far away below us.

As I looked back on it, that conversation seemed a long way from staring at mediocre paintings in Albuquerque, and I asked myself how I'd gotten from one place to the other. I'd started studying women artists in college, once I'd gotten through the basics of art history and noticed how male-dominated it was. I thought I could understand their anger and defiance; by dealing boldly with their own bodies, they were taking control, asserting their presence. For a while I adopted an angry attitude myself, toward men and especially my father, whose quiet conventionality I saw as a patriarchal crime.

“I have cramps, Dad!” I'd make sure to tell him. “I'm
bleeding.
” I wanted to make him uncomfortable, which was never hard. He'd offer me an aspirin and quickly exit the room. During these years we had few easy conversations, and only when I was starting grad school did I stop attacking him—too busy, I guess, defending myself against the onslaught of life in New York. We'd begun, then, to talk about other things, news, weather, anything, like ordinary adults; but he died before things could get fully normal again.

In the library I went downstairs and sat at a computer terminal, hesitating only a moment before I started to write.

Dear Michael,

How's France? I have exciting news. I believe I have stumbled upon exactly the necessary material for my project.
Thank you so much for pushing me into more active research.
There is a set of paintings here that I believe to be quite
extraordinary, and I feel with them the strong personal
engagement you always said was required for the best scholarship. I have come across a female painter who deals with
issues of the body with a remarkable mixture of formal skill
and ideological heft. Her name is Eva Kent, and I'm researching her other work right now. I think you'll be pleased.
Thoughts on how I should proceed?

Cheers,
Lynn