The Missing Person

Eleven

David Michaelson served me coffee. When I stumbled into the kitchen and saw him in a red-striped bathrobe, smiling at me, I realized I’d almost forgotten he existed.

My mother was sitting at the table with her coffee, her short hair unmussed by sleep. “Look what the cat dragged in,” she said in an even tone.

“I’ve been with Wylie,” I said, as if this excused everything, and took the cup from David’s large hand. After the relentless grunge of recent days my mother’s place seemed unbearably clean and orderly; I practically had to squint to look at it. Even the utensils sparkled alarmingly.

“How is old Wylie?” David set his own cup down on the table, sat down opposite me, and met my gaze without any sign of awkwardness. “I felt real bad about the way things ended last time. There’s no reason we can’t have a civil discussion about environmental issues. No reason at all.”

“David,” my mother said.

He smiled at her, pleasantly, then turned back to me, gesticulating in a lawyerly manner, his elbows on the table. “But if people just storm out every time there’s a disagreement, well, civility doesn’t stand a chance, now does it?” His reasonableness was making me queasy, or maybe it was the triangle of curly chest hair his bathrobe exposed when he leaned forward. I focused instead on my coffee, which was simultaneously bitter and enjoyable. It felt good to wake up and drink coffee in a normal cup, in a normal kitchen, with no hangover at all.

“David,” my mother said again.

“Well, does it stand a chance?”

“You’ll be late.”

Lifting his meaty wrist, David checked his watch and nodded.

“You’re right,” he said, “as always,” and then he winked at me. I squinted back. He left the table, lumbered out of the kitchen, and disappeared. My mother finished her final sip of coffee and stood up. “I’d better get ready too. By the way, someone called for you this morning before you were up. I didn’t even know you were here, of course.”

“Who?”

“Angus. Wylie’s friend. If that’s what he is.”

“Angus called here?” Saying his name in front of her felt weird.

“At seven. He said he’d be out of town for a few days but that you shouldn’t worry. He said he’d be working.” Her emphasis on “working” made clear how little she believed this statement.

“He’s a plumber,” I said.

“I see.”

“Have you ever even met him?”

“No,” she said. She cleared the dishes and I followed her into the kitchen. “But Wylie used to talk about him all the time. Back when he actually talked. So you like him, do you?”

“Not exactly. It’s more like — I can’t seem to leave him alone.” She turned to face me, and the look in her eyes was unexpectedly mild.

“Well, that’s how it is sometimes,” she said.

David Michaelson reappeared in a gray double-breasted suit and cowboy boots, presenting himself to us with open arms. “I’m in court today,” he told me. “Gotta look shiny and new.”

“Good,” I said faintly.

He pecked my mother on the cheek — like a dutiful husband — winked at me again, then left. My mother changed into her sensible travel-agent clothes and left, too. I felt tremendously happy to be alone.

After roaming through the house for a while I came to her bedroom. She hadn’t neglected to make the bed, and even the pillows beneath the covers were arranged to geometric perfection. I thought about passing out on the floor of Wylie’s unfurnished apartment, with my brother sprawled beside me. It seemed highly unlikely that we were her actual children. But on the bureau, next to her small jewelry box, were pictures of Wylie and me in the grip of goofy, soft-cheeked adolescence, complete with rolled eyes and acne. And there, visiting family in Chicago, were all four of us, skyscrapers looming behind us, the wind lifting our hair.

Finding the red-striped bathrobe hanging inside her closet, I wondered how often David stayed over, and what he told his wife when he did. In my last snooping spree I hadn’t noticed any conspicuous male clothing, and none was apparent now. There wasn’t even an extra toothbrush in the bathroom; but maybe he toted one with him, or maybe my mother shared hers. Some things were impossible for a person to contemplate and still want to live.

I went out in the Caprice, determined to see the house I still thought of as home, and drove through endless residential neighborhoods toward the bare mountains. The dead air of mid-July rendered the city flat and even. I listened to country music and tapped my fingers on the vinyl steering wheel.

Though two years had gone by since I’d seen the house, and though I’d lived through those years and recorded their passing, I was nonetheless shocked to find that the place did not look the same. It had been repainted a cotton-candy pink, first of all, and the people who lived there now had fixed to its exterior several gigantic plastic butterflies who were mounting an attack in a zigzag pattern, seemingly aimed at my old bedroom window. On the front door hung a wreath made of braided wheat and blue-checked Indian corn. I felt sure that somewhere in the vicinity, lurking, there were garden gnomes. The driveway, freshly asphalted, spread dark crumbles across the bordering expanse of our old lawn.

The last time I’d been here was a week after the funeral. A couple of days later my mother explained, briskly and undebatably, that she saw no sense in waiting and would be packing everything up and moving. I’d said fine, there was nothing I wanted anyway, and she smiled tightly and said she doubted this was true. Seeing the house now made me realize how much work it must have been for her and Wylie, and how drastic her resolve to break with the past. I wondered if this was when Wylie had decided to empty his apartment of its possessions, when he saw all of ours in moving boxes.

Instead of walking to the front door with the wreath I went next door to the Michaelsons’. At least their house still looked the same; shrubs formed a geometric ring in front of their door, and a basketball hoop hung above the driveway. Their yard, formerly a lawn, was now hard-packed dirt, which I guessed Wylie would’ve approved of. I rang the doorbell.

It was Donny, I was almost positive, who opened the door, wearing long surf shorts dotted with miniature surfers, each catching his own personal wave. Barefoot and shirtless, he was holding a tall glass of milk that had given him a faint white mustache. “Hey,” he said. “Come to check out the old neighborhood, huh?”

“I guess so.”

“I always wondered how come you guys never come by.”

“You did?”

“Well, not, like, literally always or anything.”

I looked at him. “You’re Donny, right?”

“Yeah, you can remember ’cause I’m taller.”

“Right,” I said, not bothering to point out that Darren wasn’t there for comparison’s sake. “Can I come in?”

He glanced quickly behind him, then stepped back from the door. “Um, okay. Can you wait in here for a sec?” he said, and disappeared into a long, dark hallway, where I heard him murmuring to someone whose voice was too soft to make out.

The living room looked like the home of much younger children, with a baseball mitt on the couch and a soccer ball in the corner. An open box of Pop-Tarts was sitting next to some comic books on the coffee table.

Donny strode back in.

“Yup, the old ’hood. Let’s go into the backyard, okay?” he said, leading me out through the sliding patio doors to the back. “The people who live next door to us now are super nice. They’re real religious. They’ve got a sweet garden back there, too.”

I looked over the fence at the yard where Wylie and I used to play. On summer nights we sometimes slept back there in a tent. Now it was divided into neat rows of squash and tomatoes. The Michaelsons’ yard, by contrast, had been let slide. The lawn had faded into dirt splotched with a few patches of yellow grass, and the only sign of life was a battered picnic table under the shade of a pine tree, where Donny and I sat down.

“Remember when we were little, and you and Wylie always played those weird games in your backyard? You pretended you were savages or something.”

I didn’t remember, but nodded anyway.

“Darren and I watched you sometimes. We thought you were total freaks,” he said, shaking his head in a fit of nostalgia. “No offense or anything. Hey, can I get you a glass of milk? Or a soda?”

“I’d take some water.”

“You got it,” he said. He padded inside, and I went back to the fence, hoping to look into our old house through the rear windows, but the glass threw back sheets of glare. I remembered one cookout we had, when Wylie got overexcited and poured a bottle of barbecue sauce right on top of his head; my father reached over with a paper napkin to wipe off his face, and none of us could stop laughing. The paper napkins kept sticking to Wylie and the more my father wiped the worse it got, until they both had to give up and take showers.

From the Michaelsons’ house came the sound of shattering glass, followed by “Shit!” Donny said something else, but I couldn’t hear what. I went inside and saw him standing with a broom at the far side of the kitchen, sweeping up some shards.

“I’m a total klutz,” he said apologetically. “I’ll be just a sec with your water.”

I could hear a woman moaning down the hall, in a bedroom that, in our house, had belonged to Wylie. The door was open, and while Donny took care of the dustbin I walked inside.

Although I couldn’t summon any specific memory of her from childhood, I knew it was Daphne Michaelson. She was sitting in an armchair reading Vogue, moaning softly to herself as she turned the pages. Her finger- and toenails were painted a brilliant shade of red, her brown hair fell in stylish waves to her shoulders, and her pale skin was dusted to an elegant beige. She was wearing a pink dress and brown slingback pumps, and she looked like a million dollars.

“Oh, excuse me,” I said. She crossed her legs and smiled at me, stopping her moaning, and wagged her right foot up and down in its pump. “I used to live next door?”

“I have a permanent wave,” she said, in a not unfriendly tone, but then turned back to the magazine.

Except for the armchair, the room was mostly bare of furniture. Lining one wall, floor to ceiling, were wooden bookshelves that looked homemade, filled completely with hundreds upon hundreds of Vogue magazines, their thick white spines neatly tapped into place.

“Do you remember me?” I said. “My brother, Wylie, and I used to live next door. With our parents. Arthur and Marie Fleming.”

The names, even my mother’s, provoked zero reaction from David’s wife. She flipped a slick page with her index finger and shook her head. “They told me not to get a permanent wave,” she said, “but where hair’s concerned I know what I’m doing. I’ve been a student of hair since I was eleven years old.”

Feeling hot breath on the back of my neck, I jumped. Donny was standing behind me, holding a glass of ice water, his cheeks flushed. He jerked his head sideways, to indicate that I should leave the room, and fast, then closed the door after me. Following him back through the house to the backyard, I tried to remember what his mother was like when we were young, but couldn’t come up with a single thing. For all I knew, she could’ve been in that room reading Vogue the entire time; she’d clearly had the subscription long enough, anyway.

Donny handed me my glass of water and we sat at the picnic table, feet scraping the dirt, while I drank in silence.

“So, Lynnie,” he said. “What are you doing tonight?”

“What?”

“Me and my friends are going to catch a movie, probably, if you wanted to come along.”

I stood up. “Oh, jeez. I promised my mom I’d have dinner with her. Thanks for the water, though.”

“Okay, maybe another time then. Hey, do you like miniature golf?”

“I really should get going, Donny.”

He accompanied me around front to the Caprice, opening and closing the door in a gentlemanly fashion, and waved as I pulled away.

I turned the radio up high and took the highway to my mother’s, driving extra-fast. I couldn’t stop thinking about Daphne Michaelson flipping through Vogue and checking out runway fashions from a world she, so far as I could tell, had never encountered. And what on earth did she do during the school year, with both sons away, one for months on end, and her husband at work all day and then — a thought that tasted bad in my mouth — at some other woman’s condo? Her plight seemed to me terrible. Then, from some distant part of my brain, I managed to retrieve a childhood memory: a backyard party at our house one summer night, a flock of people from the neighborhood, adults with cocktail glasses, kids with sparklers and hamburgers. The two Michaelson boys, toddlers, exhibiting athletic prowess even then, leaping over each other gymnastically, landing on their heads and bounding back up. My mother inside in the kitchen, talking with the other wives. My father at the grill, spatula in hand, frowning at the browning pieces of meat. And Daphne Michaelson by herself in the yard, quiet, exquisitely made up, swaying slightly in a flowered dress.

My mother and I got home at around the same time. Before she could say anything, I proposed that we have dinner together, “unless you have other plans,” and she smiled awkwardly and said that sounded fine. I offered to make something, with the caveat that my cuisine extended only to items unwrapped and placed in the microwave. She smiled and said she’d be happy to cook. There was a kind of elaborate diplomacy between us. Actually, I thought, we could have used some form of simultaneous translation to help us communicate, as if we were foreign dignitaries.

“Lynn, could you set the table?” Since you’ve accomplished nothing else useful this summer.

“Sure, Mom.” That’s not fair. I did bring Wylie home, and you made a mess of that.

“Do you like Italian dressing?” At this point I don’t even know what you like, or even, frankly, care.

“Anything’s fine with me.” The feeling’s mutual.

I asked how her day was, and the trials and tribulations of travel-agency life kept us going through most of dinner. A couple who wanted to vacation on cruise ships presented her with a budget of five hundred dollars; another family required a money-back guarantee they wouldn’t come down with food poisoning on a trip to Machu Picchu. Adventure without risk, luxury at economy cost, entertainment without the stress of activities, structure without schedules, and, always, free cocktails: these were the standard demands. Over coffee she asked how my research was going. When I said I’d hit upon an interesting topic for my dissertation, she frowned and said she thought that was already well under way. Probably I’d told her so myself. I explained that this impression was widespread but false.

“It’s those paintings from the old house,” I said. “The ones by Eva Kent? I’m going to incorporate them into my work.”

She looked blank.

“On modernist values in feminist painters of the later twentieth century.”

Now she looked blank but impressed.

“I have a strong feeling about those paintings,” I went on.

“Goodness, those things,” my mother said.

“I’ve been wondering where Dad found them,” I said.

“I told you, I thought probably his secretary. You remember her, don’t you, Mrs. Davidoff? She had terrible bunions. She always asked after you children.”

“I can’t really picture Mrs. Davidoff buying those paintings.”

“Well, maybe not. She was a little severe. Of course I think her feet were giving her an enormous amount of pain. She had surgery eventually, a bunionectomy.”

This gave me pause. “That can’t be a real operation.”

My mother looked offended. “Of course it is.”

“Never mind,” I said. “So do you think Dad could’ve bought them at a gallery? Or did he know any artists?”

“Your father didn’t know anybody except the people he worked with, and us,” she said. “You know that. He didn’t have what you’d call a wide social circle.”

“So where did he get them?”

“Well, sometimes they have those kiosks at the mall,” she suggested.

I tried to picture Eva peddling her strange nudes outside a food court, and my father interrupting his shopping to speak with her, holding the painting by its frame and nodding his head in appreciation of the couple in Desert I: The Wilderness Kiss. Neither part of this was imaginable. When I was in middle school he almost always came home late from work, and would heat up his dinner in the microwave as I sat at the table and told him about my day. He’d eat straight out of the container, apparently indifferent to what it was, and I often thought I could’ve covered cardboard or mud patties or Styrofoam packing peanuts with tomato sauce and he wouldn’t have noticed.

“I still think it’s possible Bev Davidoff got it somewhere,” my mother went on. “Secretaries used to do that kind of thing. There’s no big mystery about it, Lynn. It was just a gift.”

“But two paintings — a pair?”

“Maybe it was a sale,” she said drily. “Frankly, I’m surprised you’re even interested. You never seemed to care about New Mexican art before.”

“I know,” I said. “Listen, I saw Daphne Michaelson today.”

My mother wrinkled her nose in a gesture I took for distaste and wrapped her hands around her coffee cup. “Did you,” she said. “Where?”

I stared at her. Did she think that Daphne Michaelson was out grocery shopping or hiking in the foothills? Did she have any idea what condition the woman was in? “I went to their house. Well, I went to look at our old house, and while I was there I stopped by the Michaelsons’ to say hello. David wasn’t there but Donny was, and so was she.”

“I see. So what does it look like? The house.”

“It’s covered in giant butterflies.”

“Fake ones, I hope.”

“They look tacky.”

“The people who bought the house seemed very nice,” my mother said in a pious tone. “A young couple with children.”

“How long has she been crazy?” I said. “I don’t remember anything strange from when we lived there.”

“It’s not nice to call people crazy.” My mother stood up and began clearing the dishes. “Donny’s a nice boy, isn’t he? And Darren is, too. When he’s away at school he calls David every Sunday night at seven o’clock sharp.”

“So you’ve told me,” I said. I followed her into the kitchen, carrying the sugar bowl and the rest of the plates.

“I always wondered why Wylie wasn’t better friends with those boys. I know they’re a bit younger, but it’s not that big an age gap.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“No, I’m not. They’re perfectly sweet.”

“They kill frogs for sport.”

“Toads, aren’t they? And he didn’t know that until the other night,” she said, dismissing it with a wave of her hand. Then she filled a sink with water and started doing dishes. I grabbed a towel and took over the drying. For a few minutes we worked together in a harmony I had a hard time puncturing. The condo’s air-conditioning pumped audibly for a moment, then subsided. Outside, crickets sang their shrill, unmelodic song.

“You never answered my question,” I finally said.

“What question was that?”

“About Mrs. Michaelson. How long she’s been like that.” I started putting plates and cups in the cupboard, lining them up in careful rows.

“I’m not sure,” she said after a while. “I do know that her condition doesn’t seem to be worsening. If she takes her medication and avoids stress, she’s fine. David briefly had her in some kind of, you know, residence, but he couldn’t stand seeing her in there. So he brought her home.”

“How much does she understand of what’s going on?”

“You know, Lynn, I’ve never asked her,” my mother said, glancing away and — I suspected — rolling her eyes. She turned off the faucet and drained the sink, then paused for a moment with a sponge in her hand. “Up until ten years or so ago she was really quite lucid. When you kids were young we had no idea. You could talk to her, and she was odd — but within reason, you know.”

“So to speak,” I said.

She ignored me and set to wiping the sink and the surface of the stove, which, I didn’t point out to her, was not dirty in the first place. “But then something happened, with the medication or something. I’m really not sure. Apparently your brain can adjust so the medication’s no longer effective. Anyway, she got worse.” She stood in the sparkling kitchen, looking for something else to clean. When she couldn’t find anything, she put her hands on her hips and nodded, once.

“David will never leave her,” I said. “Doesn’t that bother you?”

“Of course it bothers me,” she said, her voice rough. “It bothers me that you come home for the summer and do your best to ignore me from the minute you get here. It bothers me that my son lives in the same city I do and I’m lucky to see him every two months. A great many things bother me, Lynn, but I try to keep going as best I can.”

This silenced me. A film of tears trembled in her eyes. Then the phone rang, and she stepped away from me to answer it.

“It’s for you,” she said.

Although I’d left him without regret the night before, I found myself hoping that it was Angus, calling from out of town or, better still, from some motel down the street. If he’d come to the door right then, I would’ve run out to the van within ten seconds. But it wasn’t him on the phone; it was Harold Wallace.

“You told me to call if I thought of anything else,” he said. “Well, I just thought of something else.”