The Missing Person

Two

Mid-morning I woke to an empty house, my mother gone to work early, at least in my terms; she’d left a note inviting me to lunch. I wandered around the house opening curtains. The sun was plangent and full, striking through the neighborhood’s occasional pines, her street deserted except for a few cars parked neatly against the curb. It all seemed weirdly quiet. Wylie’s old car from high school, a boat-sized, ivory-colored Chevy, sat in the driveway. These days, according to my mother, he’d abandoned gasoline transport and went everywhere on foot or by bike, but couldn’t bear to actually sell the Caprice. The sun had bleached its paint, turning the ivory uneven and mottled as the keys of an old piano, and its wide red-leather interior was peeling and patched in places with duct tape. Nonetheless, it started right up. Despite his politics my brother apparently came back and serviced it regularly.

I drove around Albuquerque for a while, getting used to the feel of things. One-story buildings shedding turquoise paint, dirt lawns parked with old pickups. To the east, the bare brown mountains; to the west, the lone peak of Mount Taylor. Fast-food franchises brightened every block, a rainbow of reds and yellows, their white marquees advertising specials that were always misspelled or missing a letter or two: MIL-SHAKES, ROTBEER, FENCH FRIES. The colored shards of a million broken bottles glittered among wildflowers in abandoned lots and alleys. Every now and then, billowy clouds of grit rose in front of the car. It takes some kind of city, I thought, to make Brooklyn seem clean.

Among the adobes, here and there, stood the green landscapes of rich homes and corporate parks. I drove past the thickly watered emerald of a golf course, where men in festive pants lifted their clubs to the desert sky. Another green spot was the cemetery, where I stopped to look at the square, undistinguished marker I hated. It wore his name, Arthur Fleming, and the dates of his life, primly chiseled letters and numbers that seemed to have nothing to do with the fact that once this person, my own father, had lived in the world, and now did not. I pictured his face, with all its familiar crags and shadows, then shelved it in a corner of my mind, a gesture as physical and as habitual to me as folding clothes into a drawer. In the weeks after he died, I saw him everywhere on the streets of New York — getting on the 6 train at Union Square, buying a donut, waiting in line for a movie, not that he ever actually did any of these things — and knew that I had to put him away in order to keep going on. Now I spent barely a minute in front of his grave. I hadn’t brought flowers or any other gifts, and felt that the moment was lacking in ceremony. Then I got back in the car and headed toward Wylie’s.

On Central Avenue, opposite the low-slung campus buildings, a few summer students sat at the Frontier drinking coffee among the Hare Krishnas and the homeless. A man in tattered, abbreviated shorts, the rest of his body tanned to leather, had taken up a post outside the library, holding up a placard to the passing traffic: I’M A NUDIST AND I VOTE. A woman with an umbrella and many layers of clothing was muttering private endearments to the sidewalk.

Wylie lived on the second floor of a negligible apartment building three blocks from the university. Out front, several old cars sat slumped in the gravel, two of them missing wheels.

I knocked on his door and waited for a good long time. “Wylie, it’s Lynn.” There was no answer, so I knocked again.

A middle-aged woman in a thin housedress opened the door of an apartment below and squinted up at me, the smell of long-standing smoke drifting into the morning air.

“I’m sorry if I—”

“I thought you was from the property management,” she said, and slammed the door.

I knocked once more, without much hope. But as I was leaving, the door opened, and I turned to see a red-haired man standing there in nothing but blue boxer shorts. He had brown, freckled arms and a tanned face, but very white skin in the outline of a T-shirt, so that his paleness seemed to cover him like clothes. He smiled broadly, as if he were delighted to see me, and for some reason this surprised me more than anything. Finally I said, “You’re not my brother.”

“Probably not,” he agreed. He ran a hand through his short red hair, which stood up straight as a field of red grass; then he opened the door wider and stepped backwards. “Would you like to come in?”

The apartment was dark behind him. “Is Wylie here?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Do you know where he is?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Or when he’ll be back?”

“No, ma’am,” he said, smiling widely.

His skin, even his pale chest, had a glow that reminded me I’d been inside an apartment in Brooklyn for most of the past ten months. He was possibly the healthiest-looking person I had ever seen.

“Would you like to come in?” he said again.

I tried to look around him, into the cavelike apartment, but couldn’t see anything. “All right,” I said, brushing past him into the living room. I flicked a light switch, which did nothing. The power was apparently off. Boxer Shorts walked around the room pulling down sheets attached to the windows with duct tape, seemingly Wylie’s favorite design accessory. The sun stormed in, and he turned around, covering his eyes.

“Excuse the mess,” he said. “I just got up.” He stretched his arms out from his long, pale chest and then went over to a sleeping bag in the corner and picked a pair of jeans off the floor. The jeans themselves were spotted with holes and showed a fair amount of skin.

“You sleep late,” I said.

“I was up late, um, working.”

“And where do you work?”

He squinted at me in the brilliant light. “I work for the good of Planet Earth,” he said.

I burst out laughing. “Yeah, okay.”

I took a clearer look around the apartment. Last time I’d been here, everything was pretty normal: small student desk, small student chair, small student bed. Now the walls were stripped of decoration. There was no furniture anywhere, only sleeping bags and backpacks tucked into corners. A shelving unit against one wall was stacked with wrenches, drills, emergency flares. The place was neat and empty, thoroughly impersonal, like an army barracks.

“So you’re Wylie’s sister? From New York City?” He crossed the room to the kitchen, leaned against the counter and smiled.

“How did you know that?”

He looked me up and down — at my black dress, my black sandals, my black leather purse — and shrugged. “Just a guess.”

“Look, I’m trying to find Wylie. Could you tell me when you saw him last?”

He shrugged again. “Not sure.”

“And you’re not worried about him?”

“Wylie’s a deep thinker,” he said. “He’s grappling with serious issues, and sometimes he needs to be alone.”

“To grapple.”

“That’s what I said, yes.”

There was a weird smell in the apartment — not unpleasant but vaguely acrid, layered, and chemical. I moved a foot or two closer to Boxer Shorts, who was still leaning, pale and shirtless, against the counter. It was coming from him. “I have to go now,” I said.

“Come back anytime,” he said, his broad grin showing very white teeth.

I turned on my heel and left, annoyed. Wylie’d been involved with causes and crusades for years, constantly enrolling in new student groups, petitioning, marching, bouncing from civil rights to homeless rights to animal rights. He could never find the right rights to hold his attention for long. But throughout it all, he’d never gone so far as to disappear.

I was unlocking the Caprice when I heard a voice shout, “Wylie’s sister! Wylie’s sister!”

Boxer Shorts, in his white chest and holey jeans, was running down the building’s stairway. He ran like a soldier, his back rigid, knees high in the air; and although he was going pretty fast, he stopped on a dime in front of me and wasn’t even out of breath.

“People usually call me Lynn,” I told him.

“I didn’t know,” he said. “My name’s Angus Beam.”

We shook hands and stood there for a second, looking at each other, me smelling his weird, chemical scent.

“Was there anything else?”

“There’s a meeting tonight, here, of our group,” Angus said. “I thought you might want to come. Meet Wylie’s friends. See what we’re about.”

I nodded and thanked him, then got into the car. He stood there in the parking lot and watched me back out, which made me uncomfortable. Before hitting the street I rolled down the window and asked, “What are you about, anyway?”

“The meeting’s at nine,” he said, and waved.

After Wylie’s I dropped by the campus to look for him in the biology and philosophy buildings: a long shot, but I felt I should check anyway. It was strange to hear my footsteps echoing in another set of academic hallways, these ones decorated with fake pueblo accents. I found myself walking into the library, where I stepped to a terminal and typed in, by habit, my father’s name.

Fleming, Arthur: The Temporal Dimension in Physics. It was his doctoral dissertation, and only published work, which had sat on a shelf at home. In the acknowledgments he thanked my mother, who was then his fiancée, for all her help, support, and typing, and as a child I’d been fascinated by that; it was hard for me to grasp the idea that my parents had once been students together, living in a one-bedroom apartment in Chicago, drinking wine late at night, my father watching over my mother’s shoulder as she turned his scrawled notations into typescript. What did they look like then? What did they say to each other? The vision was magnetic yet alien, like life on another planet. I’d thought that one day it would come into focus; in the same way, I’d always assumed that eventually I’d be able to read the whole book, decipher its diagrams and equations, resolve it into meaning just as I was learning to read harder, longer words as I got older.

But this never happened. As a teenager, I decided I wasn’t interested in science. I didn’t like math and especially hated physics, and my father’s job was some unknown, boring thing he did for the government in a windowless office. The fact that he was a scientist was one of my many grievances against him, not because he was involved in anything sinister— although for all I knew, he was; I really had no idea what he did at work all day, and often into the night — but because of his scientist’s geekiness, the knee socks he wore with shorts, his taupe-colored shirts that never seemed to fit right, the way he sometimes talked with his mouth full, all his embarrassing habits that potentially incriminated my own awkward teenaged self. After I graduated from high school and left home, this attitude mellowed, and I might even have got around to asking him about his work. Now there seemed no point. Yet it pleased me to think of him living on in the screen’s digital glow, almost as much as the yellowing copy of the book itself in the stacks.

At noon I headed downtown to my mother’s office. Around me sunlight glinted off lowrider fenders, cholos staring out from behind the steering wheels, their music pounding down the streets. Farther west, slender shadows bordered the boxy, old-fashioned buildings of the tiny business district.

Inside Worldwide Travel, the air was conditioned to a glacial level, and I had to stand still for a second just to readjust. Sweat cooled to ice on my skin. My mother was in her office explaining something to a large, burly man with an equally burly mustache. I sat down in the carpeted lobby underneath a poster of Greece, a bone-white beach against the turquoise Aegean, and waited for her to finish with her customer. I could hear their voices but not what they were saying. Francie Garcia, my mother’s partner, sat talking on the phone behind the glass door of her office. Other phones rang distantly, were answered, rang again.

Francie came rushing out, jiggling car keys and smiling mechanically at the top of my head. “Someone will be with you in a moment,” she said, and then, “Lynn!”

“Francie, how are you?”

She smiled. She was in her late forties but looked younger, with long, curly hair and circles under her eyes. For reasons I never understood she always wore bright blue eye shadow.

“Well, I’ll tell you, honey,” she said, shaking her head and tucking the keys into her large black purse. “At least I have my health.” She said this all the time.

“That’s good, Francie.”

“And how’s life in the big city?”

“It’s all right.”

“You should come by and see Luis while you’re here. He’d love to hear all about New York.” Luis was her son, and around my age. During high school we’d had one disastrous, parentally induced date. “He’d love to see you.”

“How is Luis? Is he married?” This was how I pictured everyone I knew from high school who’d stayed in Albuquerque: living in a prefab house in one of the new West Mesa suburbs, with a brood of children playing on a swing set stuck crookedly into the rock lawn. It was unfair to generalize, but on the other hand, it was generally true.

Francie threw me a sideways look. “Luis? No. I don’t think he’ll ever settle down.”

I wondered what not settling down implied about someone who’d lived in the same town, surrounded by his entire family, for his entire life.

“Listen, honey, your mom’s waiting for you with her friend, so I’ll let you go.” She kissed me on the cheek and left.

I went behind the counter to my mother’s office, asking myself what Francie meant by “friend.” Then, in the moment before she stood up, I saw her blush and knew the answer.

“Lynnie,” she said, “you remember David Michaelson.”

The burly man turned and smiled at me under his mustache. He was wearing a navy-blue suit whose jacket sported Western piping and pockets. He also had on cowboy boots, and it was the boots, for some reason, I remembered first. Before my father died we used to live next door to the Michaelsons. Their two boys, younger than Wylie and me, were sports stars of some kind.

“Hello,” I said, shaking his large hand.

“I invited David to lunch.”

“Good. Great,” I said.

“New Mexican okay?”

“Excellent,” I said, smiling hard.

We left the refrigerated offices and headed down the street to a restaurant, surrounded by the heat and noise of the traffic. Behind me, the thick heels of David Michaelson’s cowboy boots made knocking sounds against the pavement, and I could hear him whistling under his breath, a sprightly, unidentifiable tune. I wondered if the real reason my mother wanted me to come home was to reintroduce me to David Michaelson. I wondered what had happened to his wife and his athletic children.

Inside, we sat quietly as our drinks were served. I’d ordered a frozen margarita, my mother an iced tea. David Michaelson sat back in his chair and took a large slurp of Coke, crunching the ice in his mouth. He was heavier than I remembered; his stomach strained against his light-blue, snap-button shirt and bulged over a square brass belt buckle that was practically the size of my head. With the belt and the mustache and the chest he reminded me of some early, imperious monarch: Henry VIII of the Wild West.

I took another long sip of my drink. “So you’re a lawyer, right?” I said.

“Yes, that’s right,” he said.

My mother smiled at me.

“What kind of law do you practice?”

“Oh, a little of this, a little of that,” he said with a shrug. “Corporate, mostly, but whatever I can get my hands on. A client’s a client, that’s what I like to say.”

“We weren’t sure if you’d remember David,” my mother said.

“Of course I do.”

Silence fell. I didn’t know what to say about the wife and the athletic children. The waitress brought a basket of chips to the table. Half my margarita was already gone.

“What about Wylie?” my mother said. “Did you find him yet?”

“I went to his place, but he wasn’t there.”

“I don’t like this,” my mother said.

David Michaelson reached over and rubbed her arm, his expression at once sensitive and plastic. I remembered the boys’ names, Donny and Darren, and their sport, hockey. Throughout the arid winters they’d get up at five in the morning and trundle out to the car, lugging enormous duffel bags with their pads and sticks and helmets, as if they were traveling to some distant part of the country, where such materials would be required.

“David thinks we should consider an intervention,” my mother said.

“I thought that was for alcoholics and drug addicts.”

“It’s for anyone in trouble,” he said, then picked up a chip and snapped it cleanly between his teeth. “And your mother seems to think that Wylie’s in trouble.”

“He doesn’t eat, he quit his classes, he lives with nothing— you should see his apartment, Lynnie.”

“I saw it.”

“I thought you said he wasn’t there.”

“Some guy was,” I said as the waitress arrived, balancing plates of enchiladas on a manhole-sized platter. I shoveled some food into my mouth and burned my mouth on the cheese, then gulped down the rest of my margarita in an attempt to ease the pain. The result was horrible, like an enchilada Popsicle, a bad idea for a food item if ever there was one. The waitress asked if I wanted another drink, and I nodded gratefully.

David Michaelson took a long, prissy drink of Coke.

“You should drink some water with that, Lynn,” my mother said. “Or else you’ll get dehydrated.”

“I’ll be fine, Mom.”

“You’ll thank me later if you drink a glass of water right now. You’ve forgotten how dry this climate really is.”

“I know, Mom.”

“Just drink some water to appease me.”

I rolled my eyes and drained half a glass.

“Who was there — that Angus person?”

When I nodded, she leaned forward, ignoring her food. “He’s the person I hold responsible.” Anger lent her eyes a sharp, even light. “You should hear how Wylie talks about him. Or used to talk. He’s changed since he got involved with that whole group.”

“What group?” I said. “Changed how?”

“Wylie used to be. . well, you know how he was,” she said. She began to fiddle with her food, teasing the sauce with her fork. “He had his ideas about the way things should be run, of course. But he was a good boy. I know that sounds like a motherly thing to say. But.”

“What do you mean?” I said. “That he isn’t a good boy anymore? What are you talking about, exactly? Has he turned to a life of crime?”

“You know what she means,” David Michaelson said in an ingratiating tone.

“No,” I told him, “I really don’t. He might not have the loveliest apartment or be going to law school, but besides that I’m not sure I see what’s so wrong with his life.” I started in on the second margarita.

My mother glanced down, wielding her knife and fork as if she were about to commence a delicate surgery; and then the muscles in her face contracted, bringing all her wrinkles into relief, the bones of her face growing prominent beneath her skin. She looked sad and fragile and old. “I wish he’d call me,” she finally said, and took a bite of refried beans.

After lunch I once again shook David Michaelson’s hand.

“Enjoy your visit here, Lynn,” he said, leaning, it seemed to me, on the word “visit.” I swallowed, with some effort, and thanked him. My mother squeezed my hand.

At a red light, the driver next to me sat lovingly picking his nose. The desert dropped away from the highway in pale brown layers, thin shrubs of cactus dotting the ground, dim blue mesas sleeping at the edge of the horizon. The world looked scorched and brittle in the glare of the afternoon sun. As the cars in front of me inched forward, I read from bumper to bumper. WICCANS HAVE MORE FUN, one sticker claimed; I also learned that GUN CONTROL MEANS HITTING YOUR TARGET and IT’S A DESERT, STUPID! I turned on the radio, listened to the weather forecast — hot and sunny and dry for the next week, for all weeks, for the indefinite future — and asked myself where the hell Wylie was.

I parked the Caprice in my mother’s driveway. Without her in it, the condo had the vaguely liberated air of childhood days when I’d stayed home sick from school. Aside from the tchotchkes on the mantelpiece, my mother had mostly stored away the things from our old house, and I wondered what she’d done with it all. Not just the furniture or my father’s books and clothes, but the smaller items: his diploma, say, or the Nambe dish he kept spare change in, and which I always stole from, and which he knew and tolerated. Other knickknacks also had been dispensed with: candlesticks and planters, the flower-shaped clock, even art that used to hang on walls. There was a kind of ruthlessness to her decorating scheme, as if she’d turned her life into a hotel room. But she couldn’t have gotten rid of everything.

On a hunch I went into her bedroom and looked in her closet. Her clothes were neatly classified into sections of shirts, pants, skirts, et cetera. Her shoes, too, encased in a long plastic bag that hung behind the door, were divided by category: running shoes, loafers, flats, pumps. She was the Dewey of closet organization. I kept snooping around, feeling guilty about going through her things, though not guilty enough to stop. Somehow this made me feel closer to her than I did when talking to her in person. I kneeled down and looked under her bed, a space filled with large plastic bins. I pulled one out and discovered a mother lode of memorabilia: old report cards of mine and Wylie’s, from kindergarten right through high school; school projects and drawings; homemade Mother’s Day cards spastically coated with paper doilies and glitter. In the next, I found a few items from my father’s office. A geode. One of those stands with a gold pen sticking out of it at an upright angle, a pen I never saw him use. A small framed photo of Wylie and me as little kids, grinning like idiots. Barely able to look at these things, I closed the bin quickly and slid it back underneath the bed.

Yet I didn’t want to stop. I pulled out an even larger, rectangular bin, in which something flat was wrapped in towels and, beneath them, brown paper. Inside were two small paintings that used to hang in the bedroom hallway of our old house in the Heights. Although I’d forgotten completely that they existed, seeing them now was like running into a childhood friend or an old teacher or relative. I recognized their colors and dimensions right away, without thinking, the way you recognize a person’s face.

They were oils, the paint thickly, even crudely applied. Studying them, I was almost surprised my parents had hung them in a house with young children; then again I’d never noticed the content, not until this moment. They were the same size, in matching brown frames. One showed a man and a woman seated across from each another at a dinner table. Both had straight dark hair, and both were naked, straight-backed, their postures less domestic than combative. The composition was awkward, perhaps purposefully so: the table was located on the right side, with nothing to balance it on the left, as if the pair of them were in motion, about to drift beyond the frame. Underneath the blue tablecloth, the woman’s legs stuck straight out and her feet reached the man’s knee; she might have been kicking or caressing him, it was impossible to tell. In the background was not a house but pink, unforested, hulking hills not unlike the ones around Albuquerque. I turned the painting over. Glued on the backing was a typed label: “Desert I (The Wilderness Kiss). 1978. By Eva Kent, rep. Harold Wallace.”

The other picture was more disturbing. The palette of the first was largely blue and green, with the mountains turning pink in the background. It was a pretty scene, however odd, in jeweled colors. This, on the other hand, was ugly, its palette awash with reds and oranges and browns, the paint slathered even more thickly, almost violently. Again it was a man and a woman, naked, this time in a reverse pietà: the woman lying on her back in the man’s lap, his hand touching her dark hair. This was clearly the same woman as in the other painting, but the man — though he, too, had dark hair — was different. His face was round-cheeked and cherubic, babylike, with a happy and wide-eyed expression. The woman, however, was miserable, her muscles tensed with fear, her scowling face turned away from him toward the viewer, as if she knew for a fact that he intended to harm her. Yet his arms weren’t restraining her. She just lay there, limp, with a slash of red at her throat. Due to the roughness of the execution, it was impossible to say what this red was meant to represent; it could have been blood, or clothing, or makeup, or merely some play of light and shadow. The title on the back was “Desert II (The Ball and Chain).” Again 1978, by Eva Kent, represented by Harold Wallace.

If there was one thing I supposedly knew about, it was work by women artists of the 1970s — at the very least, I’d seen a lot of it — but I’d never heard of Eva Kent. I leaned the paintings against the wall, on top of my mother’s bed, and gave them a hard look. This wasn’t garage-sale art or a housewife’s watercolors. Technically the work was impressive; not genius, maybe, but impressive. It seemed to have genuine authority, the force that gives you a shock of recognition and tells you that you’re looking at serious work.

Michael used to describe this feeling in sexual terms. The magic of attraction: just as you can feel a jolt of electricity when you look at a person, so you can feel a jolt of understanding when you look at art. Then again, he used to describe almost every feeling in sexual terms, at least with me, at least for a while. I thought of him now, the smell and hum of his office, his voice telling me to put out or get out. When my old roommate Suzanne found her minor surrealist, she became the golden child of the department. She discovered he had a brain tumor, wrote about the relationship between neuroscience and creativity, and suddenly his work was profoundly interesting to everybody. She curated a major exhibit of his work in Bern, and the show was traveling to New York next summer. I put everything else away and carried the paintings back to my room, leaning them against the dresser, one at each end, a strange couple of couples. Eva Kent, I thought, rolling the sound of her name over my tongue. Neglected Artist, New Mexico Native, Lost Icon. If there was one thing I used to be good at, it was giving Michael what he wanted.