The Vanishers (12 page)

The Regnor’s bar was located through a windowed protuberance I’d mistaken, the previous day, for a phone booth. I needed a drink, but no bartender materialized from behind the mirrored escarpment of liquor bottles.

I sat two stools over from the bar’s only other occupant, a
vaguely familiar woman who held an unlit cigarette and wore a pendant that resembled a flattened mace. Perhaps, I thought, my mother’s necklaces had looked like this. I hoped so. I fetishized black-and-white photos of women in ladylike clothing and barbaric jewelry. I’d always admired a photo of Sylvia Plath wearing a cardigan and a pendant that is either a gargoyle’s face or a hazardous flower.

“Are you here for the film conference?” the woman asked. She had an Eastern European accent. With her doll eyes blinking from her scavenged face, she resembled a person buried inside another person.

“No,” I said.

“I’m an actress,” the woman offered. “Visiting from out of town.”

I smiled a force field. I was in no mood for talking.

She played with her necklace, balancing it on her pointer finger.

“My mother gave this to me,” she said. “She’s a movie director. She told me I was her muse.”

I squinted at her anew. This, perhaps, explained why she’d seemed familiar to me. No doubt she’d appeared in one of the many foreign films I’d watched since arriving in New York, my apartment located a block from a revival house that insisted on screening films without English subtitles or dubbing. I’d become gifted at extrapolating story lines without the aid of a single comprehensible line of dialogue. These movies also made me miss my psychic forays less, these oblique glimpses into the lives of cinema strangers functioning as a plausible substitute.

“Your necklace reminds me of one Sylvia Plath wore in a photo,” I said.

“The one where she was also wearing the flowered dress and the sweater?”

“Exactly,” I said.

“Sometimes her eyes look blue and sometimes black,” she said. “And what was she thinking with the over-the-head braids? She might as well have tattooed the word
hausfrau
on her forehead, or what little you could see of it under those dustpan bangs.”

“ ‘He tells me how badly I photograph,’ ” I said, quoting from the poem “Death & Co.” Of the many mysteries attending Plath (for example, whether or not she’d meant to kill herself—she’d stuck her head in the oven, true, but had left a note for her neighbor instructing him to “call Dr. Horder,” a note she possibly expected him to find in time to save her), this was the one that most fascinated me—no matter how many photographs I’d seen of her, I had no idea what she looked like. Each new photograph undermined the believability of the others, as though she’d been, even while alive, unwilling to commit to her own face.

“Irenke,” the woman said, failing to extend a hand.

“Julia,” I said.

Finally the bartender appeared.

“Can I get you something?” he asked.

“I’ll have what she’s having,” I said.

“I’ll have what I’m having,” Irenke said.

“Make it two,” I said to the bartender.

“Two what?” he said.

“Whiskey sours,” Irenke said.

The bartender grew very irritated.

“Well?” he said.

“Two whiskey sours?” I said. “Please?”

“All you got to do is ask,” he said gruffly.

Irenke put on her coat.

“It’s so cold in here,” she complained.

“It’s really cold,” I agreed.

“Tell it to the management,” the bartender said.

He throttled up a pair of whiskey sours and placed them both in front of me, as though Irenke weren’t even there.

I slid a sour to her.

We sat without speaking. She snapped beer nuts between her front teeth and shot me sidelong glances when she thought I wouldn’t notice.

“I think we are suffering in the same way,” Irenke said finally.

“Huh,” I said.

“We have both been jilted by people who might have loved us,” she clarified.

“I practice a no-attachment policy with men,” I said. “I’m all business.”

“Oh,” she said. “You’re a call girl?”

“I used to call on people,” I said. “But I was never paid.”

“It’s no big deal to be used by strangers,” Irenke said. “It’s when you’re used by people you know that life becomes unfathomable.”

She announced she had to visit the ladies’ room.

“Need anything?” she asked.

“No thanks,” I said. “Maybe a toilet.”

She examined me at unabashed length.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “Your life is about to get better.”

“It is?” I touched my cheek, always an alienating sensation. The anti-seizure meds numbed my skin; to touch my face was to enter a failed romance between body parts.

“You must have been such a pretty girl,” she said. “We should get her back.”

“Get who back?” I said.

She touched my droopy eyelid with a fingertip.

“The woman who did this to you,” she said.

Her lids flung wider. Suddenly her madness, like the flecks of
lead sifting to the surface of her blue irises, was all that I could see of her.

I shied away.

“Nobody did anything to me,” I said.

“You did this to yourself?” she asked.

“I’ve contracted a virus,” I said.

“Fascinating,” Irenke said. “And how’s that going?”

“How’s what going?”

“Believing that.”

As she dismounted her stool, she knocked my bag to the floor. She shoved the pill bottles back inside. She handed it to me.

“When you’re ready to fight,” she said, consonants blurring, “give me a call.”

I amended my diagnosis. Irenke wasn’t crazy, she was drunk.

“Thanks,” I said.

“You know I’d do anything to help you,” she said, flipping up the collar of her coat. “I owe you that much.”

“You owe me a lot more than that,” I said, humoring her.

“You’re right,” she said. “I owe you much, much more than that.”

There was no point in correcting her drunk’s outsized commitment to our insta-barroom intimacy—we didn’t know each other. She owed me nothing.

“I mean it,” she said. “When you decide you need my help, call on me, call girl.”

“I will,” I said. “And same here. If you ever need my help. Don’t hesitate to call.”

She steadied herself on the edge of the bar.

“Not to worry, Julia,” she said. “There’s no helping me.”

Irenke disappeared through the door, over which an exit sign buzzed. I swear I heard the sound of dirt raining onto a coffin lid. I experienced, or thought I experienced, what might be described as a muscle memory, if the brain could be considered, as psychics
considered it, a muscle—my gray matter straining to interact, for the first time in over a year, with those ulcerations in the astral plane. But then I realized that there was nothing psychic going on here, this was plain old human intuition kicking in—an arguably more useful talent for me to manifest. Because it didn’t require any special talent to know: Irenke was doomed.

My phone alarm beeped. It was time to take my 6 p.m. pills. I swore to myself as I struggled with the tops. My pharmacist refused to give me non-childproof bottles even though I promised her I knew no children.

On the bar I lined up one Dramamine, three ibuprofens, two vitamin Cs, four folic acids, a Voltaren, and two psylliums. Handling pills, even after a year of copious pill taking, still gave me an illicit charge. I did not touch, but often visited, the prescription bottle I’d found in my father’s bedside table when I was seven, a bottle with my mother’s name on it containing a single, half-nibbled pill.

Weirdly, I couldn’t find my bottle of diazepam. I emptied the contents of my bag onto the bar. I checked under the stools, searching the shadows where an errant bottle might have rolled when Irenke spilled my bag.

Then I understood: Irenke had stolen my diazepam. She didn’t strike me as a drug addict, but as something worse—a creepy collector of souvenirs.

Her odd violation tiptoed me to the brink of dissolve again—really, what was wrong with me? If there was one victory I could claim to have achieved over the past thirteen and a half months of illness, it was my refusal—or inability—to wallow. Perhaps, I thought, my unsteadiness could be blamed on the whiskey warming my chest, and its bittersweet reminder of my carefree early Workshop days, when the only schedule I respected, after basking, hungover, on the campus green, was one that landed me each
afternoon in the windowless reading corridor because I liked the packaged butter cookies the librarians served with the four o’clock tea, the silly daintiness of this ritual leavened by the violent death images on the reading corridor walls, painted by a forerunner of the Mexican mural movement.

Such nostalgia left me vulnerable, however, to the understanding that this person didn’t exist, and not only because I’d left the Workshop. I didn’t count my life in days anymore, I counted it in hours. I counted it in pills. That carefree person no longer functioned as the norm from which I’d deviated. As the months elapsed, my old self would be vanished by this new self. It was a mean variety of suicide that permitted you to keep living, and I wanted nothing to do with it.

Your life is about to get better
.

I clinked Irenke’s empty glass.

As I finished the last of my sour, the bar door opened—Irenke, I assumed, returning from the ladies’ room. But no.

Alwyn entered, followed by a balding man in a charcoal muffler.

“
There
you are,” said Alwyn, as though we hadn’t agreed yesterday to meet exactly here.

“This is Colophon,” she said, presenting a drawn man who most resembled, of the famous people I could think of, Virginia Woolf. He wore a gray suit beneath a gray overcoat, and could have passed for an overworked diplomat were it not for the felt beanie on his head.

Colophon announced that he was hungry and needed to eat. He did not appear interested in me, save to discover whether or not I was a fan of gnocchi.

Fine, I thought. We could be mutually indifferent to each other.

Alwyn insisted on charging my bar tab to her room. I left Irenke a napkin note that said, “You vanished. I’m off to eat Italian. I’ll call
on you.” Of course Irenke hadn’t given me her phone number, but I hoped she’d figure that I was drunk and forgot I had no way to contact her. Because the truth was this, I told myself: I was never going to call.

At the restaurant, Alwyn filled and refilled her tiny wineglass with Chianti, and occupied herself by holding the corners of her polyester napkin in the candle flame, watching the fabric wither to a nub. After we ordered our food, she engineered a tiff with Colophon.

“Did you mail the grant application?” she asked.

Colophon confirmed that he had mailed the grant application.

“Because it had to be postmarked by today,” Alwyn said.

Colophon repeated that he had mailed the application.

“You always insist that postmarks don’t matter,” Alwyn said, “but I assure you that the committee is dying for a reason to throw your application in the trash.”

“We’ve applied to Timothy Kincaid’s foundation for a research grant,” Colophon explained. His voice was subterranean and minor-keyed, mellow but not altogether relaxed.

Not that I wanted to sleep with him, but—I could sort of understand why Alwyn did.

“
We
are not trying to get a grant,” Alwyn said.

“I am trying to get a grant and Alwyn, though she does not agree with my Varga theory—that her acts of political and professional immorality were performance pieces meant to critique such political and professional immoralities—will nonetheless benefit from the funding as my research assistant,” Colophon explained.

“Porn is porn,” Alwyn said. “Authorial intent does not make it less porny. That was her point.”

“And what was your authorial intent?” Colophon asked. Then to me: “Alwyn had quite a porn career once upon a time.”

“I don’t know if I’d call it a career,” she said. “More of an inspired hobby.”

“Not so inspired,” Colophon said. “How familiar are you with Dominique Varga?” he said to me, cutting to the chase. Colophon, I’d already registered, was not one for small talk unless it, too, was of the cutting variety.