The Missing Person

Twelve

I followed Harold Wallace into a back room. His blue eyes were crisscrossed violently with blood, but his hair was neatly gathered in a ponytail, he was again wearing expensive, loosefitting clothes, and overall he seemed more alert than the last time. On the phone he’d been annoyingly mysterious, refusing to explain what he’d remembered until I arrived on his doorstep, and this morning he’d offered me coffee, tea, and even a plate of bizcochitos before I suggested, politely, that we just get down to business.

“Well, here we are. My office. The nerve center of the entire operation,” he said. If this was true, then the operation was in a lot of trouble. The small bedroom — underneath a stack of books and loose papers, barely visible, was a single bed — had been buried beneath years’ worth of bureaucratic detritus. Several filing cabinets stood half-open, their drawers stuffed beyond capacity with manila folders. Framed paintings and prints were leaning against every available surface.

“It’s a system I devised myself,” he said. “I know it looks strange, but it works for me.”

“How long have you been retired?”

“Oh, I’m not really retired. I still sell work from home. Yes, I’ve still got the eye, if you know what I mean.” He eyed my chest. I caught his bloodshot gaze and shook my head, and he shrugged and turned away, his smile hinting that it was mostly done out of habit anyway.

“So you remembered something,” I said.

“After you left, I got to thinking about what you said about the child, and I remembered a girl who got pregnant and kind of disappeared. She was a wild one, that girl. Anyway, a few years later, she sent me a photograph of herself. A look-whatyou’re-missing-out-on sort of thing, if you—”

“I know what you mean,” I said.

“So I just have to go through these files and look for it. Maybe you’d like to sit down? This could take a while.”

I cleared a spot for myself on the bed and sat down to watch as he withdrew files, examined them, muttered to himself, then moved on to the next handful. Of course he could have done this before I came over, or left me alone to wade through the files myself. But he either meant for me to witness all his hard work or simply wanted company; watching him rifle through stacks of dog-eared manila folders, every once in a while glancing at me over his shoulder, I suspected it was the latter. Humming as he worked, Harold seemed perfectly happy to devote the entire morning to the search.

Actually, I felt more or less the same way. The night before, when I’d gotten off the phone, my mother was in her bedroom with the door closed, and I slunk off to my room feeling guilty and agitated. If she was going to run around with a married man whose wife was mentally ill, then she had to expect people to comment on it from time to time. That’s what I told myself, but still I’d stayed awake for hours, thinking that I’d made my mother cry.

I thought about my father too, wondering if Harold could possibly be right about him knowing Eva Kent. Maybe he was driving back from the labs in Los Alamos one day, stopped for lunch, and got lost — people always do in Santa Fe. Say he went into the Gallery Gecko to ask directions, and there she was, sitting beneath one of her paintings and luring potential buyers with her brittle talk and strange, striking looks. She was the kind of woman who talked people into things, and my stammering scientist father was an easy mark who found himself glued to the tile floor in the small gallery’s close, hot air. Eva told him her name and demanded to know his. “Arthur?” she said, smiling ferociously. “So do people call you Art?” At this point, my scenario ground to a halt. It was impossible to imagine my father falling into step with Eva, in whatever form it might’ve happened. Then again, I never would have imagined my mother with David, either, and this made anything seem possible. All parents, I thought, are mysteries to their children.

“How’s it going over there?” I asked Harold.

He was sunk in thought over an open file, its manila wings vibrating in his trembling hands. “Here,” he said, and handed it to me.

Inside, there was a photograph of Eva Kent standing on a beach somewhere, smiling, in a swimsuit and a sarong. The date on the white border read 1982. There was no child with her. Her body was heading toward middle age, spreading and sagging slightly. Her hair had been cut and layered, and its dark strands, waving in the breeze, were sticking up above her head like antennae. There was a kind of wild excess to her smile, as if she were uncomfortable, or drunk, or mentally unbalanced. Her arms and legs looked badly sunburned.

Also in the file were several pieces of paper. One was a yellowed strip of newsprint, a local paper’s review of a group show, with a ballpoint star next to: “One artist of particular promise is Eva Kent, a fiery oil painter with a sure sense of composition and style. Her violent technique contrasts meaningfully with her cool-eyed appraisal of the relations between male and female.” Beneath this was a letter from a gallery in New York, written to Harold, expressing interest in Eva’s work, requesting slides and dangling the prospect of a solo exhibition. I flushed with satisfaction: I wasn’t alone in feeling that jolt of electricity when confronted with her work.

The last item was a letter written on a sheet torn from a notebook, the writing slanted and blocky, almost childlike:

Dear Harold,

Here I am in California. I am feeling a hundred times better. I know you will take care of things.

XOXOXOXOXO

Eva

“What kind of things did you take care of?” I said.

“Oh, Jesus, who knows what that crazy lady was talking about.” Harold took the folder back, shut it, and sat down next to me on the narrow bed, puffing a little. “I’ve been thinking back to those days,” he said. “Eva Kent. The memories come flooding back when you look at this stuff. She was one of the better girl painters, all right. And you know, it was a great time for men when women decided they needed sex if they really wanted to be free.”

“I’m not sure that’s exactly what they decided.”

“It was definitely what some people thought, believe you me,” he said, and smiled. “We’d go up to Madrid and take over some run-down houses up there and stay all night. Eva’d be right there in the mix, always with a different man. She was aggressive, liked to do the choosing and the talking, and it worked well for her, especially with shy, quiet types. You said your dad was a straight arrow, right? Well, maybe that’s how he got the paintings. What do you think?”

I chose not to answer, thinking of my father — who was nothing if not the quiet, shy type — partying with painters in an abandoned mining town on the Turquoise Trail. This made me smile. Harold smiled too, though I didn’t know at what.

“The paintings my father got are really very good,” I said. “So what was the rest of her work like?”

“Which ones are those? Oh, yes, the desert ones. Well, I’m not entirely sure what happened to the other ones.”

“What do you mean you’re not sure? Didn’t you keep records? Isn’t that what this room’s for?”

Harold gazed at me, the file fluttering gently in his hands. “The seventies,” he finally said, “weren’t a time of meticulous filing.”

I sighed. “What happened to her child? I mean, she did have one, right? I found a picture taken when she was pregnant.”

“Yes,” he said, “I remember. After she had the kid, things really weren’t the same for old Eva.”

“What do you mean?”

“She got that thing that women get,” he said.

“You’ll have to be more specific, Harold.”

“After they have kids. You know, they get tired and emotional. As the British say.”

“Do you mean postpartum depression?” I stood up, turning the concept over in my mind. “How bad was it?” Bad as a brain tumor, I was thinking, or a love affair with Diego Rivera?

“I don’t exactly know,” Harold said, shifting around uncomfortably on the bed. “She was definitely on the wacky side there for a while.”

“Who was the father?” I said.

Harold shrugged. “Could’ve been anybody, you know. Anybody at all.”

“What happened to the child?”

“I have no idea,” he said.

“Are you sure? Isn’t there anybody you could ask? And what about her other paintings? Somebody must know what happened to them, don’t you think?”

Harold physically retreated from this volley of questions, leaning back against the wall with the folder pressed against his chest, as if shielding himself from my thirst for knowledge. “I’d have to give it some thought,” he said.

“Okay.” I stood there looking at him, waiting.

“It might take a couple days.”

“Well, all right.”

“You’d come back, wouldn’t you?” he said. “I’m starting to enjoy our little chats.”

“Can I hold on to this picture while you do?”

“I guess so.”

“Think away, Harold,” I said. “You’ve been a tremendous help.” At the front door, I turned around and kissed him on his dry, old man’s cheek, and he beamed.

On the interstate, just past the future site of the Shangri-la golf course, I took an exit and turned back to Santa Fe. There was something suspicious about Harold’s display of going through the files, only to pull out the right one at the exact moment I asked about his progress. The way he’d nodded so quickly and said that the father could have been anybody, and kept insisting that my father and Eva might have known each other. He knew more, it seemed to me, than he was letting on. For the moment I set aside my thoughts about the dissertation, and how I could sell it to Michael, to focus on my father. I felt an almost physical sensation of curiosity, a prickling down my spine, at the idea that I was going to learn something new, that there was a side to him I’d never noticed while he was alive.

Harold’s red SUV was still parked in front of his tidy condo, ready to navigate the ruggedly potholed streets of Santa Fe. I nudged the Caprice behind another expedition-style vehicle — fortunately, all the cars were so large that it wasn’t difficult to hide mine — and rolled down the window. A breeze guided the smell of pine trees into the car. I could hear the tinny notes of an ice cream truck trolling for kids along some nearby street, the half-broken melody sounding sinister and intent. It was just past noon.

Harold came out fifteen or twenty minutes later, wearing a dark-blue shirt over skintight black shorts that glistened in the sun. Over his shoulder he carried a large cloth bag that reminded me of Irina’s baby sling. I trailed him through lunch-hour traffic, wondering where on earth he was going in that outfit. His first stop was a health-food store in a strip mall. I gave him a few minutes, then stepped inside. If he saw me, I planned to act surprised and engage him in polite conversation about the benefits of whole-grain foods. But he was standing at the counter with his back to me, talking to a clerk about bee pollen. The smell of incense hung heavy in the air. Lurking behind a stack of unsweetened cereals and herbal teas, I listened to his querulous, shaky voice.

“I need energy,” he was saying to the clerk, a young woman with a long ponytail and glowing, rosy skin. “I feel so run-down, I can barely get up in the morning. You know what I mean?”

“It sounds as if you have systemic issues,” she told him.

“What do I take for that?” Harold said.

She steered him in the direction of some vegetarian multivitamins, and I went back to the car. Several minutes later he came out bearing a large brown bag, presumably full of systemic cures.

Back on the road, we weaved and dodged and changed lanes and turned corners — I tried to keep right behind him, for fearing of losing him — until he parked at another strip mall, in front of a coffee shop specializing in “locally roasted” beans. Pulling to the curb, I unrolled the window and smelled the burnt, acrid scent of the roasting. There were some elderly people lined up outside, apparently desperate for a jolt of caffeine. But Harold took his cloth bag next door, into Blue Butterfly Yoga. All of a sudden, following an old man with systemic issues to a yoga class, I didn’t feel like much of a scholar. I crossed my arms over the sticky vinyl of the steering wheel, telling myself I was an idiot. Then I saw a woman with long dark hair get out of a yellow convertible and go into the yoga studio. From the back I couldn’t tell how old she was, but I had a passing, insane thought: What if Harold knew a lot more about Eva than he was saying? What if this was her?

Inside, harp music was playing, and pairs of shoes were stacked in a cubbyhole unit in the entryway, exuding an unpleasant aroma. Copies of the Blue Butterfly class schedules were piled on a table and I grabbed one and stuck it in the back pocket of my shorts. On the other side of a blue batik curtain I could hear violent slapping sounds, punctuated by the occasional grunt, as if people were getting paddywhacked back there. I stuck my head around the curtain and saw it was a martial-arts class and that the slaps were people being flung to the floor by their instructor, a tiny young woman with her hair in pigtails. When she noticed me, she smiled brightly — a two-hundred-pound man still groaning at her bare feet — and said, “Ashtanga’s in the other studio.”

I left my sandals with the others and snuck into the back of another room, where Harold’s shiny black butt was now cradled gently on a folded blanket. He was sitting in the lotus position, his back to me. At the front of the room, a thin young man with short brown hair sat with his palms pressed and his eyes closed, humming. Wearing a see-through purple tank top and blue tights, he appeared to be in amazing shape; even the veins that ran along his biceps looked perfect in their contours.

The room was very warm. There were around ten people, including the woman with the long black hair, who was sitting next to Harold. I grabbed a folded blanket from a pile at the back and sat down in the lotus position. My knees cracked loudly, and a bald man turned around to stare. I could hear Harold chanting “Om,” his voice reedy and weak. The instructor raised his stringy arms straight up, displaying twin thickets of armpit hair and some remarkably well-defined abdominal muscles. The woman with the long dark hair released a long, sexual-sounding groan, but Harold paid her no mind. Imitating the instructor’s movement, I swayed to one side, held the position, then swayed to the other. I closed my eyes. It was remarkably easy to follow someone, I thought, and insert yourself into their day. I should do it more often.

A general shuffling sound made me open my eyes. Everyone else had moved to the sides of the room, where they lay flat on their backs with their legs hoisted up on the walls, and I scrambled to follow. This was a mistake. No way could I get my legs flat against the wall, not without snapping them in half. The instructor moved lightly through the room, touching shoulders, at one point placing a foot on someone’s stomach to flatten it. He had very long toes. When he reached me, sitting there in the lotus with my head bowed and eyes closed, I could hear him pause momentarily before moving on.

The heat now seemed even more intense, and sweat was streaming down my back. The people around me had moved to the middle of the room, where they sprawled on their backs, their legs doubled backwards over their heads and their arms twisted together. I had no idea how they’d accomplished this feat, or for what purpose. Even Harold had managed to contort himself into a semblance of the appropriate position. His T-shirt had slipped up, revealing a broad expanse of his starkly white skin, and sweat was puddled around him. Some people were twisted so far around that they were now looking back in my direction, their cheeks flushed and eyes eerily unfocused, their breathing labored.

The perfect muscles of the instructor were folded in on themselves like origami. “Hold it,” he was saying. “Hold it.”

How he could speak from within the pretzeled confines of his body was beyond me. I couldn’t even make out where his head was. My own legs, though I was trying to extend them over my back like the others, refused to go any higher than my ears, and my stomach was killing me.

“Feel the toxins of the day draining away. From your heart, your liver, your kidneys. From your tongue, your teeth, your throat. Feel everything letting go.”

Throughout the room, the breathing eased and quieted. People were actually taking the opportunity to ruminate while remaining in their positions. My legs mutinied and crashed onto the floor with a slap that broke the mood. The woman I’d taken to be Eva Kent turned her head and stared at me. She couldn’t have been older than I was.

“Close your eyes. Feel the worries of the day leaving your heart.” The instructor’s voice was light and pleasant, with a chime almost, like a musical instrument. “Your heart is a feather in your chest.”

I tried picturing this, and couldn’t. Then I felt a hand touching my knee, and when I looked up, the yoga instructor was kneeling by my side.

“Feel the toxins draining from your system in your sweat,” he said in his chiming voice. Then he hissed in my ear, in a distinctly unpleasant tone, “This isn’t a beginners’ class. Didn’t you consult the schedule?”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I just wanted to check it out.”

“Inside your body purity is emerging,” he said sweetly, still glowering at me, and then whispered, “Level one meets on Tuesdays. Today’s Wednesday!”

“Sorry,” I said again.

“This happens all the time,” he said, no longer bothering to keep his voice down. “It drives me completely freaking insane.”

I stood up. “I’m going now.” Everybody in the room was looking at me, all in various stages of unfurling, like fronds in spring. I gave Harold what I hoped was a nonchalant, vaguely surprised “Oh, you’re here too?” wave. He just sat up and stared at me.

“I don’t know why I bother to make these schedules when nobody reads them,” the instructor said. “This is advanced Ashtanga, for crying out loud. Put your blanket back. Don’t leave here without putting your blanket back.”

I did as I was told.

“Folded!” he said.

The drive back from Santa Fe passed quickly, borne on the tide of my absolute embarrassment — Harold’s face looming always before me, along with the rest of the unfurling yogis. What the hell was I thinking? I wished very much that the whole day had never happened.

I hit town at five o’clock, when Albuquerque’s offices were evacuated as if in a sudden panic. So far as I could tell, nobody in this town ever worked a minute later. Fleeing employees stalled the roads in every direction, one per car, heads lolling in boredom, staring straight ahead. I rolled down the windows and got a lungful of exhaust-redolent air. The two interstates that met in the city arched and crossed, bridges above air, in the center of the sky. Over everything in my view lay the pallor of dust. I exited and drove the back streets instead, recognizing in my desire to keep the car moving, even if the route ultimately proved far longer, a tendency of my father’s. Wylie had it too. Waiting at a red light behind two other cars, I thought I saw the eggplant-colored Plumbarama van drive past in the opposite direction. I made a quick right, but by the time I got turned around the van was nowhere in sight. Probably I had just imagined it.

I cruised through residential neighborhoods, at a speed that felt more like walking than anything gasoline-powered. Dogs lay still and panting in the shade of trees. Cats were in hiding. In someone’s yard two small children were playing a game that seemed to involve the simulation of vomiting. As I drove past, one of them lifted his arm and shook his fist at me.

Threatened by children, humiliated by yoga instructors, and sticking sweatily to the vinyl front seat, I finally pulled into my mother’s driveway. Nobody was home. I tossed my sweaty clothes onto a pile and took a quick, cold shower. Then I found a beer in the back of the fridge and sat in the backyard, the sweet relief of alcohol slipping down my throat, the wafting suburban smells comforting me: the charcoal smoke of backyard grills, the first hints of citronella, the gasoline putter of lawnmowers and weed whackers. I was half-asleep by the time a car door slammed shut out front and my mother and David came around the back.

“Hey, it’s Lynnie!” David said, holding out his hand. “We saw that fearsome contraption of your brother’s in the driveway and guessed you were back.”

I nodded. My mother, without meeting my eyes, gestured toward the back door. I held it open for her and she stepped inside, carrying a brown paper bag of groceries.

“You’ll join us for dinner, I hope,” David said.

In the kitchen my mother was making short work of the groceries. Into the crisper flew the broccoli and green beans. Up into cupboards went the cereal. The breadbox, of course, was the destination of bread. Plastic bags, empty, folded, and creaseless, met their fate in the recycling bin she kept beneath the sink. David and I stood on opposite sides of the kitchen, watching her.

“Nobody puts away a load of groceries like your mother,” he said fondly. Crouched down on the floor, rearranging some delinquent items on the lower shelf of the fridge, my mother blushed and glanced at him briefly, a swift, demure look that made me feel like an intruder. I was about to go back outside when she straightened up and held out a bottle of beer in my direction, still not looking at me. I opened it by covering it with the hem of my T-shirt and twisting, which David seemed to interpret as a sign of weakness.

“Let me do that for you,” he said, holding out his large hand.

“That’s okay. I’ve got it, thanks.”

“If you’re sure,” he said. I was already drinking from the bottle. He smiled down at my mother.

“Excuse me for a second,” I said. I walked down the hallway to my room, which in every respect contrasted poorly with the rest of the house: the bed was unmade, the floor littered with clothes that had a faint but unmistakably organic scent. I was becoming one of the great unwashed. Eva Kent’s paintings sat on the dresser, their thick layers of paint as violent and mysterious as ever. I sat down on the bed. In a pine tree just outside the window, a bird — I didn’t know what kind — cackled and squawked. The world was densely populated with things I did not know. There was a soft knock on the door, and my mother came in. She’d changed from her office clothes into shorts and a loose-fitting shirt, and looked comfortable but fatigued, very fine lines etched everywhere on her skin. “Everything all right?” she said.

“Mom,” I said, “I just didn’t have a very good day.”

She sat down next to me, and I remembered how, when I was sixteen, I’d been forced by my parents’ machinations to go on a date with Francie Garcia’s son, Luis. I had a zit on my forehead the size of a quarter and felt monstrous and degraded by adolescence. The date, by mutual consent, was short. I slunk home afterward and found my mother waiting for me on the couch in the living room, with the television on. My father had already gone to bed, and I sat down next to her, furious, undignified, and told her I would never let her do that to me again. Then I leaned my forehead against her shoulder and cried. “If you wait long enough,” she said, “this will all be over, and it will get better. I promise.”

Now, in silence, we sat in her condo with her married boyfriend here and Wylie not here, and I wondered if this was what she’d meant by “better.” Then she put her hand on the small of my back, still not saying anything, and I knew that this at least was true: in this house, on this day or any other, I would never be refused.