The Missing Person

Fifteen

When I got back to my mother’s the condo was silent except for the hum of the air conditioner and the muted cries of sun-dazed children playing in the yard next door. I went to my room and lay down on the bed, looking at Eva’s paintings. On the dresser was the junk my mother had removed from my grimy clothes, and I sighed and made to throw it away. Loose change, a bottle cap, a matchbook, scraps of paper: the negligible archaeology of my summer. One slip of paper turned out to be the flyer from Blue Butterfly Yoga. Harold was probably in class right now, breathing deeply. I glanced at the schedule, to see whether he might in fact be there, and only then did I notice that the name of the skinny, uptight instructor was Lincoln Kent.

I sat down on the bed and puzzled this through. I’d had the sense that Harold was hiding something, and while Kent wasn’t a particularly unusual name, the yoga instructor looked about the right age.

Moments later I was driving the now-familiar route to Santa Fe, the Shangri-la billboard still promising a lush green future, though a corner of it had begun to peel away, revealing the old ad beneath. I saw a car stopped on the shoulder, and a man peeing beside it, with nowhere to hide in the open landscape and no shyness about it, either.

Harold answered the door wearing a long linen tunic and matching beige pants. His eyes were bloodshot, and his red face was crisscrossed with wrinkles and broken capillaries.

“Advanced Ashtanga,” Harold said agreeably, and stepped aside. “Would you like to come in?”

Standing in his white living room, I wasn’t sure what to say next. A glass of white wine was sitting on the coffee table.

“Can I get you anything?” He didn’t seem at all disturbed that I’d just shown up, unannounced, at his house. “Maybe a drink?”

“Okay,” I said.

He rubbed his hands and nodded, looking pleased. Any drinking companion at all was probably fine by him. He went into the kitchen and came back with another glass of white wine. It was barely noon, but I shrugged and took a sip.

“Lincoln Kent,” I said. “He’s Eva’s son, isn’t he?”

“Well, aren’t you the detective,” Harold said.

I guessed he was being sarcastic, and chose to ignore it.

He sat down on the couch and gestured for me to do the same, giving me another up-and-down look. I had the distinct feeling that he approved of the sundress I was wearing. I rolled my eyes and sat down at the far end of the couch. “Why didn’t you tell me?” I said. “And pretend not to remember Eva in the first place?”

“Because it isn’t really any of your business,” he said. “You call my house, then show up asking all kinds of questions. Some people like their privacy, and I don’t know anything about you.”

“I’m not doing anything terrible,” I protested. “I’m just trying to learn something about an interesting painter. How bad can that be?”

“I don’t know,” Harold said. “How bad can it be?”

“Is Lincoln your son?” I asked.

Harold sighed and took a leisurely sip of wine before setting his glass down again. He was shaking his head slowly, though whether in denial or disbelief at my nosy questions it was hard to say.

I decided to ask another. “What happened to Eva Kent?” I took a long swallow of the wine he’d poured for me. It tasted expensive. I put the glass down and turned my knees toward him.

He leaned back and laid his arm across the back of the couch. “Well, Eva had that postpartum thing you were talking about. We all thought she’d snap out of it but she kept getting worse. I was giving her a solo show at the Gallery Gecko, a big deal. We got all excited about it — you know, hanging the paintings just right. Little Linc was maybe a year old.”

He chuckled, fondly, and sipped his wine, on the verge of another reverie.

I suspected this was a pose designed to keep me in his living room for as long as possible; it seemed less lecherous than desperate, and I wondered just how alone he was. “So then what?” I said.

“Right. Anyway, after this depression thing Eva’d been painting these crazy pictures. She thought she could see into the future. Her work was always real sexual, but after the baby it got kind of distorted, and people started freaking out. The pictures of her and the baby — well, they didn’t seem right. This only egged her on, of course. She liked controversy. Or at least the attention.”

“What happened to those paintings? Did you sell any?”

“No, I didn’t,” Harold said. “Because the night before the opening, after we finished hanging the show, she left Linc at home and burned the whole gallery down with a can of gasoline and a book of matches. She hated herself, I think that’s why, but of course nobody knows.”

“Jesus H. Christ,” I said. “So most of her work is gone?”

“I thought all of it was,” Harold said. “And I’m not sure how your dad got hold of the ones you have. But it really was tragic. She had talent, and everybody knew it. You could just tell she was working on a whole different level, if you—”

“I know what you mean,” I said sincerely.

“Anyway, they put her in some kind of home. First they’d tried letting her live on her own, but she stopped taking her drugs and ran away to California — which is when she sent me that picture you saw. Then they got her back and stuck her in a place in Albuquerque, and she never painted again. Not that I know of, anyway.”

“And Lincoln?”

“Farmed out to various relatives and whatnot. Under the circumstances, I don’t know how he grew up to be so normal. It must be all that yoga. I go to his classes all the time. I like to keep an eye on him. Sometimes we have lunch.”

“Are you his father?” I said.

Harold snorted. “God only knows. Well, God, and Eva.”

I stared at him in repulsion.

“Oh, come on,” he said. “I’m just kidding. I’m not his father.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, of course,” he said, staring down at his white carpet for another long moment. “I was doing a lot of stuff those days,” he finally said. “It was a time of experimentation, of pushing boundaries.”

I nodded. “Yes, I know. I study that period. Experimentation with sexual politics, a push to be frank and honest about the body’s functions and desires.”

“That’s not exactly what I meant,” Harold said wrily. “More like drugs and drinking. .” His voice trailed off as I kept looking at him; then he added, “You can imagine the effect of that kind of lifestyle.”

I had no idea what he was talking about: forgetfulness, or promiscuity, or sloppy personal hygiene? Then I did. If you do a lot of drugs and drinking, you can’t always follow through on the body’s functions and desires. From the darkness of his blush and the fact that he could not meet my eyes I understood that he was telling the truth, and that all his sexual bragging had been just that, an exaggerated fiction.

“I know what you mean,” I said gently, almost wanting to put a hand on his shoulder. But if Harold wasn’t the father, I thought, then who was? I pictured Eva in my mind, and the vision was nightmarish: she was dribbling a can of gasoline around a room, deranged and leering, insane, while fire trucks howled outside. Putting my father in that picture with her was impossible, and yet I couldn’t stop thinking about it, either. I felt a kind of energy building inside me, a force that swam through my blood like intuition. Fragments turned and spun in my head: the disorienting paintings; Eva’s strange, grinning face; my father, who owned her only surviving work. I remembered the serious and distracted look he always had after a long day at the office, and now in my imagination this look took on a deeper, more romantic cast. All my memories were changing, shifting their forms. I saw an almost logical progression from past to present, from him to me, that was confirmed by the paintings propped against my dresser. The reason I’d felt that jolt of electricity, that lightning-bolt sense of recognition when I’d seen them, had to do the persistence of objects, the power of physical things, which were how the dead could communicate with the living.

In The Ball and Chain there were slashes of paint on the woman’s body, all shades of red, thick as mayonnaise, raised and bumpy. Some reds had blue undertones, others yellow, some as dark as Daphne Michaelson’s red lipstick. I thought of the way she’d named colors, as if reciting a code. Light is what makes every color, she’d said, and can be both particle and wave — these were such weird statements coming out of her mouth, and not likely something she’d read about in the pages of Vogue.

It made me wish I’d deciphered my father’s book on the temporal dimension in physics, and I thought, then, of Daphne standing alone at the backyard party, watching my father at the grill, watching the other women from inside the house. It occurred to me that she was trying to tell me something about my parents. She was there, after all, and could’ve seen everything that went on between my father and Eva Kent, between my mother and her husband. She’d identified the slash of red across her own face with a purposeful tone that was difficult to ignore; it was as if she were invoking the slash of red on the face of the woman in The Wilderness Kiss. And that light can be both wave and particle — what did that have to do with lipstick? Maybe nothing. Or maybe she meant that a single person can have two natures — that the father I knew was also painted by Eva Kent.

“What institution is she in now?” I asked Harold.

“It’s right by the yoga studio,” he said. “Linc rented that studio so they’d be close. He’s a good kid, visits her all the time. Enchanted Mesa, I think they call it. Don’t know where they come up with these names. There’s nothing enchanted about the place, I’ll tell you.”

“Probably not.”

“I guess you’ll be going,” he said, “now that you know the story.”

He walked me to the door, looking defeated and sad. Before I could think too much about it, I leaned over and kissed his wine-sweetened lips. He accepted the kiss with a kind of stunned grace. “Thanks for your help, Harold,” I said. “I mean it.”

“You’re welcome,” he said calmly. As I drove away I could see him watching me and leaning, as if swooning, against his front door.

It was late afternoon when I got back to Albuquerque, the day windless and harsh. Children and dogs were splashing in pools, shirtless men bent over the hoods of their cars, joggers with skin tanned the color of chocolate milk. In a city park, under elm trees, an extended family was having a barbecue, heat from its coals funneling up through the air, and the bright trash of chip bags and soda bottles scattered around them. There was only one person I urgently needed to see.

At our old house the butterflies still climbed across the walls, short of their destination. I rang the doorbell at the Michaelsons’ and waited for a full minute before Donny came to the door, looking as if he’d just woken up, the thick creases in his meaty cheeks reminding me, eerily, of scars.

“You again,” he said. “Can’t get enough of me, huh?”

“Right,” I said. “Can I see your mom?”

“My mom? Why?”

It was a perfectly reasonable question, and I wasn’t sure how to answer. Because I wanted to know exactly what she meant by “It’s a permanent wave”? This didn’t seem like the right thing to say. I smiled at him.

“She must get lonely, sitting in that room all the time,” I said. “I thought she might like having visitors.”

Donny frowned. “I don’t think she really gets lonely.”

“How do you know?” I said. “Have you ever asked her?”

“Uh, no.”

“So you don’t actually know.”

“I guess not.” He nodded slowly, then stepped back from the door and started down the hallway. Passing the kitchen, I saw Darren standing there; when he saw me, he waved, seemingly without surprise, and asked if I wanted a Popsicle. I shook my head no, and he shrugged good-naturedly. Donny knocked on the door of his mother’s room and let me in.

“You don’t have to stay,” I said. “I’ll just visit with her for a few minutes.”

He nodded again, slowly and a bit sleepily, and left.

Daphne Michaelson was as beautiful and well-maintained as the last time I’d seen her. Her red nail polish looked professionally applied, and her hair shone. She didn’t look at me. She was reading Vogue and nodding sagely at the pictures, as if they were revealing truths she’d long suspected about the world.

“Mrs. Michaelson,” I said, “What’s the permanent wave?”

She lifted her head and stared at me, a band of irritation rippling across her face at the interruption.

“Do you know who I am?” I said. She didn’t acknowledge the question, so I tried a different tack. I looked down at the glossy photos in her lap, where thin and gorgeous women were cavorting in an African savanna, wearing clothes of primitive and dangerous glamour; their lips were black and their teeth pointed and white. “I think those, um, fur-trimmed toga things are pretty,” I said. “Although I think it would be hard to walk around with all those claws and teeth, don’t you?”

Daphne straightened her posture and smiled at me. “It’s only fashion,” she said in a confiding tone. “It isn’t about the everyday world.”

“I guess you’re right,” I said.

“I know I am.”

“What did you mean about the permanent wave?”

She smiled at me gently, as if she felt sorry about how dense I was, and I sensed she was going to tell me something important, an answer she’d been waiting to deliver for years. What she said was, “It’s a chemical process for altering the texture of hair.”

Just then the door opened and David Michaelson came into the cool, dark room. Daphne went back to looking at her pictures, without acknowledging him in the least. I spent a second wishing hard that I was not here, or that he wasn’t. He was wearing one of his cowboy shirts with black jeans and a brass belt buckle. He was not smiling.

“Excuse me, Lynn,” he said. “May I see you outside for a moment?”

I walked out on insubstantial legs. He held the door for me, closed it behind us, and then gripped me by the upper arm, hard, and marched me out of the house and to my car. I felt like a juvenile delinquent with an angry high-school principal. The sun outside was so bright it made my eyes water, and I must have looked for all the world as if I were crying. David stood with his hands on his belted hips, examining my face in a measured, leisurely fashion, like the lawyer he was. He smelled like sweat and men’s deodorant, that fake, pungent musk.

“Why are you always here?” he finally said.

“I think ‘always here’ is overstating the case a little.”

“You’ve been here several times.”

“I’ve dropped by once or twice to say hello,” I said.

David snorted at this response, and I couldn’t blame him for it, really. He shook his head and tried again. “Why do you keep coming over to my house?”

“I didn’t think you’d mind,” I said slowly, “since you’re always coming over to mine.”

He breathed in sharply, his mouth open, and I could see his small, even teeth. Glancing away, I saw Donny and Darren watching us through the living-room window. Darren had an orange Popsicle in his hand; Donny grinned at me and waved. I waved back.

“Is that what this is about?” David said. “You don’t like my relationship with your mother, so you’re coming over here as some sort of revenge?” The words “my relationship” sounded very strange coming from him. “Again, possibly you’re overstating the case a little,” I said.

He sighed and looked off into the distance for a moment. I thought I saw a glimmer of wetness in his eyes, but it could have just been the glare. “My wife is a very sick woman,” he said. “She doesn’t live in the same world you and I do. But that doesn’t mean she can’t be upset by things. I don’t like for her to be upset.”

In the house next door, the house where my mother answered the phone on the day my father died, staring at the receiver afterwards for a long time, as though it had grown utterly foreign to her — as if the world itself had grown foreign — a woman opened the front door and walked down the driveway carrying a large plastic cup with its own plastic straw. She opened the door to her SUV and waved in our direction. “Beautiful day, David!”

“Sure is, Marlene,” he called back.

I took advantage of this break in the conversation to walk around to the driver’s side of the Caprice.

David looked at me over the hood, squinting.

“I care about your mother,” he said, “and you should be better to her. You and your brother both.”

I was stuck to the ground, paralyzed. What saved me was a blur of orange Popsicle in the window, which somehow reminded me of Angus: the smoothness of his warm skin, its ammonia smell, its sweet, abundant freckles. As soon as I saw him again I could forget all of this existed; I would be calm. Was that a definition of love: a force that can drug you with calm and help you forget all the sandpaper realities of the world? Why not? On the force of this question I was able to get in the car and drive away, leaving all the Michaelsons behind.