Lost Girls

chapter 43

That night I go through the usual contortions, paper rufflings, and brow furrowings at my desk in a half-hour show of work before pushing back the chair and panning my eyes around the room. The wallpaper of words and faces now so familiar, I can note daily changes in the individual pages: an air pocket enlarging under Ashley's chin next to the door, a tear through ''Search Area Expanded: Exhausted Police Admit Desperation'' that flaps in the radiator's rising air. The Lady's face pushing out from the flat light of the bedside lamp.

At this point it's my habit to fix my sights on the only other interesting object within view. The thermos. But tonight it's impossible to look at, sitting beside the bundle of wet hair that even now drips the water it was pulled from into a widening puddle around it. What I need to do is fit my substance to my surroundings. Coke is fine for sharpening the passing imagery of downtown hustle, but up here it just makes the grotesque more apparent. What's required is a good, old-fashioned depressant. What I need is a drink.

Down I go to the old Lord Byron Cocktail Lounge where it's burlesque night again, the stage lit watery blue although currently empty, the room occupied by a sparse distribution of anesthetized onlookers.

''Double rye-and-ginger, please,'' I tell the bartender as I settle on a stool at the bar. While he pours I look over at where I sat on my first visit, a corner dark enough not to see a hand held by another's on the tabletop or a leg touched beneath it.

''Excuse me,'' I ask when the bartender returns. ''I'm just wondering if you have a certain dancer working tonight.''

''Yeah, we have a certain dancer,'' he says, and nods behind him at a round woman with hair dyed the color of turnips wearing a cotton housecoat and high heels strapped to swollen feet. ''Only got the one tonight.''

''Then maybe you can tell me the name of a young woman who was in here a few weeks back. Long hair, just came in that one night. Local girl.''

The bartender looks at me, then down at his own hands that lie on either side of my drink. Hands gray from rinse-water bleach, the skin riddled with bloodless cracks.

''We don't much deal in names around here,'' he says. ''Girls like that are better off without names, don't you think?''

I give a slight nod of thanks, pick up my glass, and take a long gulp. Four stools down from me the only dancer of the evening pushes herself off her seat and pounds over to the stage while a new tape is clicked on, and through the speakers' hiss comes the acoustic guitar opening of ''Stairway to Heaven.''

''Oh, yeah!'' someone shouts out from the darkness at the side of the stage as Turniphead heaves herself up the small set of stairs that elevate her onto the stage. ''Oh, yeah!'' to the pointless grin that appears on her face, the hands that stroke over shifting hips as she stalks the stage's perimeter. ''Oh, yeah!'' to the breasts that awaken beneath the housecoat's loose folds, to the flash of dimpled ass afforded by an awkward lift of terry cloth. When the heavy-rock second half of the song kicks in, the housecoat drops in a lumpy ring around her feet and the patrol continues, now in glaring, wobbly nakedness.

Clomps to the edge and pulls up a furry white rug, shaking it flat. With some difficulty she bends over at the waist to undo the straps on her high heels, letting each of them fall with a strained grunt. Looks my way for a moment and summons a smile of invitation before lowering herself to her knees on the fake polar-bear fluff.

I try to do the courtesy of returning her smile but cannot. Cannot take my eyes from the different parts of her rolling around on the rug and then coming together to be wrapped up inside it. That's when the sadness comes. A sorrow that exceeds the spectacle before me, shot directly into the blood, swift and paralyzing. ''Oh, yeah!'' the call goes out when the fingers go down, a parted flash of inside shown to the drunk and afflicted outside.

''You want another?''

The bartender's voice to my left but I can't turn to respond. Somewhere above me Robert Plant delivers the lines that, if played backward, say something about Satan leading everybody to hell.

''Hey, pal, you want another of these?''

''No more,'' I say without turning, holding my hand over the empty glass. When the song ends the audience provides a dozen smacks of applause and rises up to the bar, having decided it might do them good to have another before the next show.

The following afternoon I go down to give the Lincoln a look-over. It's in as rough shape as I would have expected (the front hood folded in complicated patterns like unfinished origami, the windshield serrated around the edges with glass teeth) but remains unticketed out front of the hotel. It also starts, but with a new sound now warbling up from below the floorboards, a screech of mechanical grief that strikes an identical timbre to that of a Yoko Ono performance from the late seventies. Give the gas a couple of hits to clear the valves and the engine bawls in response as though expressing its concern that I'm behind its wheel once more. Stroke the top of the dashboard to provide it some reassurance and after a time the car lowers its complaint to a weary gurgle.

It's a Sunday morning (the dispiriting clang of church bells to the west, the murmurs and tweets of an externally amplified organ to the east), and despite the sky's burdened clouds, the rain stays where it is for the moment. Roll up Ontario Street and make the turn heading out of town, the wind funneling in through the missing windshield in bites and stabs.

Right onto Fireweed Road and around to its end. Frayed bits of yellow police tape still flapping off a few trunks and the tree that brought the Lincoln to a stop now showing a hacked circle of white flesh, but the place is quiet, returning to itself. While I could just as easily crawl out over the front hood I kick open the driver's side door with my heel and set off on the trail that circles the lake, noting the now familiar landmarks as I pass: Mrs. Arthurs's place, the skeleton of an old sedan tucked among the ferns. It's a long walk, but without the rain less disorienting. The jumble of spruce, birch, and black maples on one side and the lake's scudding brown on the other to let you know where you are.

Take my time, stopping along the path to listen for what the forest would sound like if it didn't know I was here. There's the ridiculous desire to hide in the squelch of fallen leaves and wait for metamorphosis into--into what? Something simple. To live the life of a nut hunter, web builder, berry gulper. To wish never to go back. A man in need of a shave but dressed in clothes exclusively designed in Milan, standing on a mud path passing through a threadbare forest. Making wishes.

I move down toward the lake, every step sending bubbles farting up through the deadfall. When I'm near enough to the water that I can hear it I crouch down behind a low chokeberry bush and look through its hairy leaves. See myself as I would actually appear from the stony beach: a man bundled in a soiled overcoat, peering out white eyed from the bushes. This is what the Lady would have seen had she turned from her daughters bathing in the shallows, her skin puckered from the chill and arms held above her as she wrung out her long hair. She would turn but she wouldn't have to look to know she was being watched. Who was it this time? It never mattered. She'd given up on names a long time ago.

A man with needs, watching from his hiding place. A gentleman this time, perhaps, one who could offer her help, shelter, protection for her children. Or perhaps he could offer her nothing at all. Nothing but the single thing he'd come for, in secret, ashamed at how low he'd allowed himself to stoop and the lies he will later have to tell to those he claims to love. But still he'd come.

And she will let him watch. Let him approach, too, if he has that kind of courage. And if he appears kindly or strong or well off she will send her girls back to their place in the woods and let him speak to her in his lowered voice, although she won't understand the words. But this won't matter either. She's looking for other signs now, the setting of the frame, the light and play of the face that could signal the possibility of truthfulness. Even here in the New World she has no trust of any but her own daughters and herself--no--she's not sure she could even include herself among the truthful anymore. So she'll go with him even if none of the signs are there, and in fact they almost never are. They came only for her silence and her beauty and for the things she will allow. It's not even their brief attention or corner-store gifts that she cares for. It's that after seeing how dark the hearts of men can become she's simply grown too tired to hate them for something so common as this.

I watch her too. Then, when the awareness of the thing exchanged between us finally arrives, I close my eyes and push myself to my feet again, turn, and lurch back up toward the path.

The abandoned cottage, obscured the last time, has even in the few intervening days been largely revealed, the cover of vines, leaves, and creeping shrub now browned and fallen. Slip down to its front deck, where I stand for a moment in the lamenting wind. Everything--the water, the trees, the sky--yielding to a blanketing of winter shadow, a wash of gray you could almost mistake for smoke. It strikes me again that, outside of the dozen or so weeks of overwhelming beauty each year, this country can be ugly as hell.

The front door pushes open as it did before, the floorboards, bookshelves, and walls shuddering as I enter as though a chill has set upon them. Maybe I've been recognized. That Crane face, no question about it. The mildewed couch, amputated dining table, wagon-wheel coffee table, and every book on the shelves seem to lean in a little closer to get a better look.

''It's me,'' I say, and the silence is like an intimate welcome.

I take a seat on the sofa's thinning cushions, the foam stuffing bulging like yellow custard out of holes in the seams. From here the lake looms through the cracked front window, the intervening growth of skimpy evergreens unable to entirely block the view. The same view as my parents must have had, sitting here waiting for a thunder-storm to pass or meal to be prepared. A small living room but large enough for the playing of cards, board games, or chess. It would have been warm in the summer, of course, although it's frigid today, the collected moisture from the cushion beneath me already creeping through overcoat, pants, and boxers, quickly bleeding toward bare bum.

Step over the garbage on the floor and into the galley kitchen. On the counter there's an empty bottle of aspirin, bag of charcoal, a tourist brochure for ''Bobby Orr's Birthplace: The Home of Hockey,'' and a foam box that once contained a Big Mac (how far must it have been transported before being consumed here, in an abandoned lakeside retreat?). There's also, curling and bubbling next to the single sink, a University of Toronto alumni magazine from 1968. My father's. There beside the more contemporary detritus, in probably the same position it was left, never to be put along with the others fastidiously organized on the bottom shelf in the living room.

That's where I go now to patrol the room's book-lined perimeter. There must be over a thousand volumes, some shelved two deep and other rows with slim paperbacks laid over their tops. Why did he bother to bring them all the way up to this place? It couldn't have been an intellectual's dusty pride because there wouldn't have been an audience up here to show them off to. He must have simply wanted them here. Books were my father's society, the extent of his private life outside of his marriage, the occasional departmental wine and cheese, the son growing up episodically before his eyes.

When I come to a leather-bound copy of The Collected Keats I pull it out from its slot and press it hard against my chest. The promising, mysterious smell of old book fills my breath and I keep it inside me, the cowhide and dampness and ink lingering within like held smoke. Pull it open to the signed title page: Prof. Richard Crane, University of Toronto, March 29, 1962. Inside, various lines and stanzas have been encased by brace brackets with phrases like physical/spiritual unity and beauty-supremacy over death underlined outside them. Pretending to read but really just looking at my father's notes in the margins. The jagged lines of his handwriting, the way the pencil was always kept sharp--is this what he was like? Meticulous, brisk, whittling wood and lead into fine points? The words themselves say nothing, coded references lodged in a professor's brain. Still, I like touching the pages in the same places he must have.

I turn ahead and fall upon ''Ode to a Nightingale,'' the poem I memorized for university. Start to read it off the page but the voice in my ears is not my own but my father's. I can't see him or how he would have sat or stood, don't know whether it was a selection he would use whenever called upon to make a toast or the only lullaby he would have known to put me to sleep. But there's still his voice.

Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget What thou among the leaves hast never known . . .

I try to see the words as my father would have seen them for the first time. Looking not for their meaning but whatever charm came before all of that, the thing that seduced him into a life of language. When the poem is finished I close the book and tuck it into the outside pocket of my overcoat. It feels heavy there, tugs at my shoulder. But it's not going back.

Circle the room one more time, taking another look at all the things that now give rise to vague recognition as things, the collected pieces that distinguish a room from merely bordered space. But soon enough these, too, will go, all the particularity of chosen furnishings, comforts, and entertainments dissolving, falling apart. A building in fast decline without annual visitations from its caretakers, amateur nail-knockers and paint-slappers, without the voices to clear the cobwebs from the corners.

Down the short hallway to the bathroom. A chocolate fur growing out from the drain in the tub, a shower curtain with a map of the world printed over it pulled from half its hooks. A medicine cabinet that screeches open when I pull the door from its magnetic clip, so full of Wilkinson sword disposable blades, lipsticks, and scattered Band-Aids that half of it falls out into the sink. What surprises me is that it's still here, all the intimate tools of hygiene. Wouldn't they send somebody around to collect this stuff after they died? Then again, who would ever volunteer to drive up here just to bag the toiletries? So it was all quite sensibly left behind, and it's all still here. The leftover miscellany of lives pulled from their habits.

My parents' bedroom, containing a soiled box spring with a black crater in its center. Cheap Bauhaus-copy bedside tables on either side etched with graffiti.

Tony FUCKED Deb here until she screamed like a

CAT--July 24, 1989.

JIM MORRISON IS ALIVE AND LIVES IN

BRAZIL!

Eat the Rich, Then Puke Them Up.

My dick hurts.

I Lov u, Kathy. Do you Luv me 2?

I think of all of these strangers in this room, of Tony and Deb and Kathy wriggling out of jeans and throwing sweatshirts against the wall to look at each other's bronzed bodies in fluttering, kerosene light. Not caring whose bed this might have been in the past, or if they did care it only added to the fun, the idea of screwing in the same place once coldly occupied by Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Normal of 24 Middle-Aged Lane. They would make a point of marking their youth with a show of roughness and appetite. Fill the air with exhalations of pleasure and congratulation that grow louder in turn, pushing through the walls and out into the woods because who else was around to hear? The room sharp with the curdling of semen and cinnamon perfume.

I'm pulling the drawers open on the dresser left in the corner. Nothing in the top two except cigarette butts and rolling collections of mouse turd. But in the bottom drawer something heavy that rattles to the front when I screech it open. Hunker down onto my knees to get a better look. A hairbrush. Old-fashioned black enamel handle inlaid with a swirling plastic meant to look like pearl. The bristles spun together with hair. My mother's.

I don't know this, of course. It's not that I remember the brush itself or can identify the hair as hers. Just as likely to be another woman's. Left behind after the decision that they wouldn't be staying in this too-quiet cottage for another night. But when I bring it to my nose and take in the smell of it--woodsmoke and honey--I don't consider the more likely possibilities. Believe the individual strands I roll between my fingers could only be hers.

Time to get out of here.

But on my way through the sitting room toward the door I find myself instead kicking at the legs of the dining table, wrenching them out from their sockets. Then I'm balling up pages from the pile of newspapers and building a cone in the fireplace, setting the wood in a pyramid on top, lighting a match from the pack Flynn left with me and tossing it into the center. Within minutes it builds into a modest blaze, the furniture varnish sending up a black smoke that smells faintly of licorice. Gold shadows thrown over the ceiling.

I set to work pulling more of the furniture apart. Stack the spokes of the wagon wheel, panels from the top of the dining table and the backs of the kitchen chairs, all of it breaking apart easily if I stand on it in the right places. It's not vandalism if it's yours, and who else's would it be now? Maybe all given over to some executor to look after but they'd long since given up, maybe deciding to sit on the property for a couple of decades and hope for a rise in the market that will never come. So it might as well be mine. The final scraps of my inheritance popping and seething in the blackened hearth.

There's no satisfaction in seeing it go aside from the warmth it gives off. In fact it's this burning that makes the entire cottage feel suddenly animated, revived from a long sleep. The floor creaks as it expands against the foundation, shadows moving at the edges of my sight that could be figures embracing against the wall, running in through the door from outside or rising from the sofa after a nap.

Build up the flames until they arch high into the mouth of the flue, then pull a couple of my father's books off the shelves and sit down at the end of the sofa to read. I limit myself to final chapters. Endings pulled apart from the stories they belong to, some tidy and hopeful, others drifting off enigmatically with people staring out of windows over autumn fields or driving away from gravesite visits. Moments vibrating with significance because they're the last thing we're told. Decisions can now be made, morals drawn, characters designated as villains or heroes or mere comic relief. But I keep myself to the endings so that I don't have to judge, so that all I'm left with is the final moment, expansive and mysterious. And on every page my father's coded marginalia. The brace brackets and arrows of his private thoughts, working to pull all the threads together.

Try to keep reading but the light's already fading, the fire big enough to warm a yellow circle before it but no longer bright enough to read by. Check all the pockets, but no. Didn't bring my coke. I've gone all day and until this moment hadn't thought of it, and now that I have I expect at any second to begin the sweating, burn-headed process of becoming chemically upset, but nothing happens. Outside, the dark of early winter evening falls across the glass as a purple curtain.

I dream of my father. Working at his desk with books splayed open on top of each other, holding selected pages to the air. Lifts his head to smile at someone he hadn't realized was there. Walking across the room to where my mother stands against a window stippled with rain. Kisses her once, steps back, raises his hand. Then carefully begins drawing on my mother's mouth with his pen, coloring her red lips blue with ink.

I'm awakened by the cold. The fire now nothing but a circle of papery embers, a single pair of red eyes still glowing out. The room poured full of night. Feel around the floor at my feet for more wood but it's either all been used or is farther than I can reach. The air a vapor of wet smoke that would make you choke if it weren't so cold. Sit unmoving in the dark for a time, a ball in my throat I can't swallow away and the dried crust of sleeping tears below my eyes.

It takes three attempts before I finally get to my feet. Everything held stiff like a plastic doll with movable parts but only if you make them, one at a time.

Must be awake. You can't feel an upturned beer cap screw into the sole of your foot in a dream. You don't bend down to pull it off with a smear of your own blood that you lick from your fingers without thinking, leaving the taste of rust and crunch of sand on your tongue.

Takes half the night to lift my head up straight enough to look out the window, squint down to the scissored line of trees around the body of the lake. No wind and nothing moves. It could be a painting. A flea-market oil canvas where all the colors come from some combination of perfect blue and black. I think of how often Nature presents itself as cheap art, nothing more than the paintings over Holiday Inn beds. Sunsets, distant hills, the subtle degrees of night. It could all just be a picture if nothing ever moved.

Then something moves.

The bloom of fear in my chest before anything else, before I blink my eyes dry to make sure. Something standing, pulling up crooked and pale from the lake's edge. Faceless but facing me. A single blanched figure under the starless dome of night.

Rising up from the weeds that grow out of the sediment along the shore and squishing onto the mud, the thin grass that aprons the jutting stones and roots. Up the slope toward my place at the window, legs brushing through the grass, its shape enlarging with every step. Slow as the scream in your throat that could wake you from a dream if it could find its way out.

So cold.

The sound it makes fractures over the lake, through the woods, the walls, so that it comes from all places at once. A woman's voice that could be a half mile off or whispered in my ear.

When it reaches the top of the slope and pauses in the tall grass that reaches to its waist I shut my eyes hard, think for a moment of escape, of turn and hide. But the order doesn't go out. Nothing works.

The watery slide of bare feet on the deck outside coming to a stop outside the door. Then for a time there's no sound at all.

When I open my eyes I move forward to the window but I can't see around its frame to whatever may be there. Wait for the doorknob to turn, for its hands on my throat, the knowing crack of its laughter. But there's only my own warm air blown blue over the glass.

I'm so cold.

I don't want to. I'd rather wish myself into a dream. But I know I won't do anything now but float away from the window, cast the shadow of my hand across the wall to open the door.

Please.

Standing there. A young woman with long hair smoothed over bare shoulders, water beading down over the perfect white of her stomach. Candied freckles across her chest. Hair covering the whole of her face except for lips puffed blue with cold.

Hold me.

And I do.

Pull her icy skin to me, the bones light within her. Breathe in her skin until I'm full. All of it real as pain. Real as touch, the taste of copper and salt tears on my mouth.

When I stand back she raises her hand and lifts the blond strands away from her face. Ashen, pleading, and something else. Eyes fixed on mine, mouth parted at soft corners. Something like mercy. A face in its shape and features not unlike my own.