This Must Be the Place: A Novel (38 page)

“My wife,” Arthur said.

Oneida’s mouth opened in a circle.

“I took this picture at Zuma Beach,” he said. “She loved tequila. We were celebrating. I don’t even remember what—she’d probably solved some insurmountable problem at work. We drove down to Malibu and smuggled the bottle under our coats and hid in the dunes and drank and—” Arthur smiled and shrugged. “You get the picture. I took it.”

Mona wasn’t looking at the picture. At all. She was looking at her hands, and then the other side of the room, and then at Eugene, who by
this time was looking right back at her. She jerked her gaze away.
The hell
, Eugene thought;
the hell is going on here?
If Oneida was right and Mona was into Arthur, was this the first she was hearing of Arthur’s wife? And where
was
Arthur’s wife, beyond naked on a beach in a picture?

Eugene let out a long breath. “She’s hot, man,” he said.

“Uh . . . thanks.” Arthur rubbed his face.

Oneida picked up the photograph and examined it, eyes narrowed.

“What’s her name?”

“Amy,” Arthur said.

Oneida slid the picture back across the table without comment.

Eugene, watching Mona now out of curiosity more than lust, saw her body slacken when Oneida handed the photo over. His curiosity raged. He opened his mouth to ask Arthur another question—anything to keep him talking about this mysterious Amy, and where the hell she was—but Mona gave him such a sharp spike of a look that the words died in his throat. Jesus, she had an issue and a half about this broad. Eugene, knowing it was best, for a host of reasons, to stay on his girlfriend’s mother’s good side, shut the hell up.

Arthur pushed the unwanted Cornell bits to the side, clearing the center of the dining room table for the photo of his missing wife, and cracked his knuckles. Mona hugged herself like she was freezing cold, and Oneida crossed her arms on the table and propped her chin on them.

“Pass the glue,” Arthur said. “And the scissors. And the box.”

Their history project was a disaster.

They never had another group meeting. On Thursday, when Dreyer called them to the front of the classroom to present their project, Eugene, Oneida, and Dani stood in a line and read from index cards about Ringo, John, and Paul, respectively, to a sea of snickers and shifty eyes. Andrew Lu refused even to stand up and casually drew a finger across his throat when Eugene began to speak.

Dani came out looking the best.

“Paul,” she said, “was desperate for the whole world to like him. Because of his innate dependence on others for happiness and validation,
fostered by the codependent nature of the group, he never developed a solid sense of self. When he no longer had John Lennon to prop him up, Paul wrote dumb songs about love, racial harmony, and his dog and then sold the entire Beatles catalog to Michael Jackson. In conclusion, we should all be learning to be independent, so that we never make the same unfortunate choices.”

Eugene applauded, as did a few of the authentic Wendys sitting in the back of the room. Dreyer shook her head and said, “Thank you, group four, for that illuminating editorial.”

It didn’t matter, and Eugene knew it. The project didn’t matter. High school didn’t matter one stupid bit. Three things mattered. One: the look on Astor’s face—astonishment passing to gratitude and finally beaming with admiration—when Eugene showed him Arthur’s real fake. Two: the way his stomach soared when Astor drove up in a bottle-green vintage Impala a day later, shouting over the roaring engine, “You like? It’s yours, Gene!” And three: the warm weight of Oneida’s hand in his, in front of Dreyer and Andrew Lu and everyone, in the hallway, in the cafeteria, walking to the student parking lot at the end of the day. Eugene knew he wasn’t the type to peak in high school—yet to think it would get any better than this was dizzying.

It was fair to say he was drunk on good fortune when he told Oneida what his father really did for a living.

They were parked in the field behind his house. The Wendells owned several acres, and Astor had suggested that Eugene learn to drive by barreling around on their own land, where there were no errant telephone poles or mailboxes, pedestrians or police. He had his driving permit and had taken the required five-hour course; he parked in the far corner of the student lot and had pasted a fake parking tag to the inside of his windshield. The sheer awesomeness of Vlad the Impala (as he had dubbed his ride) more than made up for what he lacked in legal licensure.

But what Eugene was practicing that Thursday afternoon in the car with Oneida wasn’t parallel parking or three-point turns. He was honing his skills as the most naturally adept maker-outer in the history of
teenagers: guru of the grope! Inexhaustible, inventive! Surely, no one had ever thought to move his tongue quite in that manner before! If only Oneida weren’t so grave the whole time—she matched him for stamina but she hardly ever smiled, and she only laughed if he tickled her. Which he was doing when she accidentally kicked him in the shin and he rolled away across the Impala’s backseat, laughing and gasping.

“Oh my God, I’m sorry,” she said, a leftover giggle leaking out like a sigh. “Please don’t tickle me again, OK? I kind of have to pee.”

“I have a strict no-peeing-in-the-Impala policy,” he said.

She coughed and popped her elbow out the open window. It was a perfect October day, the sun low and setting the trees on fire. The high grass of the field rustled in the breeze.

“Are you afraid your dad’s going to take the car away after what happened in history?” she asked.

The question puzzled Eugene, it was so foolish, so beside the point, so . . . nothing Astor would ever do.

“No,” he said, a little harshly, because she stiffened and crossed her arms. “He would never do that. He’s not a dick.”

“I didn’t say he was a dick.”

“He gave me this car as a reward for something a thousand times more important than that stupid project.”

She blasted him with a glare. “Does this mean you’re finally going to tell me what the hell that was all about on Sunday?”

It was the first time she’d asked for an explanation, and she was unreasonably pissed about it, Eugene thought, considering it was also the first time they’d really been alone together since he kissed her good-bye after they (or, rather, Arthur) finished their project—furtively, on the porch of the Darby-Jones. It wasn’t like he was keeping it from her; it wasn’t as though she could never know. He had always planned on telling her, it just . . . hadn’t come up. He’d been too excited about the car, and too excited about what Astor had said to him when Eugene went home on Sunday, sweaty, heart pumping not from the bike ride but because of the treasure strapped to his back. Racing home not for Sunday dinner but to show off his brilliance to the one person in the world whose opinion mattered most.

Astor was reading a book at the kitchen table, sipping a beer, turning
the pages in the afternoon light. Eugene unzipped his backpack and slid the cereal-boxed Cornell across the table without a word of greeting.

“I read that Cornell built and painted his own shadow boxes and then baked them in the oven to get that crispy antique look. So I thought, why not cut out the back panel and remount it and how would anyone know the difference?” Eugene had spent the bike ride home crafting those lines and was disappointed that they still came out sounding so clunky, so rehearsed.

“You did this.” Astor’s voice was a whisper as he gingerly righted the box. His eyes flicked back and forth, scanning the whole—which Arthur, surpassing Eugene’s greatest expectations, had put his entire self into. He’d papered half the box with a page from the astronomy text—a constellation, Eugene wasn’t sure which one, whose curving form mirrored that of his missing wife, pasted opposite, her hair carried not out to sea but into space. Her body was half-obscured by some wire netting that Arthur had trimmed down like a hedge and painted white, which faded into the swath of white he’d daubed across the bottom. Against the white he’d lined up the four tiny glass jars, open, empty, ready to catch anything that might fall from the heavens—or already full with something that couldn’t be seen. At the base of his wife’s neck, Arthur had pasted a single silver star, a pendant and a distant world.

“You did this?” Astor’s voice was stronger, more excited.

“More or less.” Eugene shrugged. “Does this cover the money I owe you?”

Astor put the box down carefully, stood, and crushed Eugene in his arms. Eugene folded into his father completely and was at first frightened, then amazed, to feel a tear roll down the side of his nose. “You really are my boy,” Astor said, and then they both laughed, just the two of them, in the citrus green and yellow Wendell kitchen. Eugene replayed it in his mind, reliving it exactly as it had happened: his own art, his own triumph, his own father, and his own father’s love, whole and perfect and his.

His to share, to do with as he chose. To tell whomever he chose. Evidence to prove his worth to the world—starting with his wide-eyed girlfriend, sitting at the other end of the Impala’s backseat.

He told Oneida, “I didn’t lie when I said my father was an art forger. He borrows real paintings and copies them, and his friend helps him sell them all around the world to private collectors. I tricked Arthur into making a new fake, a real fake that nobody knows exists, that my dad’s going to pretend to discover.”

Oneida didn’t say anything. She sat very still and stared at him without blinking.

Eugene shook with a cold flood of adrenaline.

Oneida, who still hadn’t blinked, said, “You’re telling me the truth.”

Eugene nodded. If he opened his mouth, he was sure he would throw up all over her.

Oneida pressed the door handle and ran out and around the car, shouting and laughing. “Oh my
God
,” she screamed. “That’s the most
amazing thing I’ve ever heard
!”

Eugene flew out of the car after her, spaghetti-legged and close to fainting. “Shhhhh!” he said, his voice hoarse. “Don’t shout, it’s a secret! It’s a huge secret, you can’t tell anyone ever!”

“I know, I know!” She braced one arm against the hood of the car and laughed hysterically. Eugene had no idea what to do—what her reaction meant or how he was supposed to handle it. If it was possible, he had to convince her it had been a lie—he had lied, it wasn’t true. There had to be a way to get her to stop knowing it, there had to be. Oh, God, it was too dangerous. He saw that now: he understood with a clarity that stung like acid. And everything he’d felt or thought about Oneida Jones shifted beneath him like a landslide, an earthquake, a sinkhole: uncontrollable and unknowable and terrifyingly out of his hands, forever.

She stood upright and wiped her eyes (was she laughing so hard she was crying? Good God, what did that
mean
?). Then she grabbed his hands and said,
Don’t worry, don’t worry, I won’t ever tell anyone, ever; I think it’s amazing!

Stay very still
, Eugene thought:
be cool. Act like you don’t care. Act like you never said a word
. He kissed her and prayed it would make them both forget what they knew.

18
Glad I’m Not There