What Comes Next

TWELVE The Mysterious Disappearance of Curtis Parks

HIS FIRST STOP was at a residence hotel on Twenty-third Street, where he spent two sleepless, exhilarated nights, charting the course of his new life, hallucinating the best and worst of its possibilities. Then, a piece of luck, he was given the key to a place off Perry Street, an apartment of a friend of a friend, an actor who was on the road with a show and would be gone, if the trip was successful, for at least six months. He whistled to himself as he watched the scraggly beginnings of a beard in the full-length bedroom mirror, the reflection of a new man.

The war, going on without him, uninfluenced by his move. He divorced himself from it, no longer responsible.

Lonely living alone, his third day in the world, Curt phoned Rosemary. Since her midnight call, the night she was attacked in the park, he had been obsessed with winning her back — his sense of loss, the extent of it, the barometer of his affection. His sense of himself in the balance.

In his vision of the future, he saw Rosemary running toward him as in the fade-out of a movie, unable to contain her joy, as it had been in the early days with them. He phoned in exhilaration, his voice flying to her. He had separated from Carolyn, he announced, and wanted to see her. In a faint voice she said she didn’t think it was a good idea.

He pleaded. She said no, no, absolutely no, she couldn’t.

“The hell with you,” he said, and hung up, then called back and apologized, but it made no difference.

He suspected that she had given him up for the one who just recently had been a guest in his house, the student he had done so much for and gotten so little from in return. He didn’t want to think about it. Christopher was a thing of the past.

It was painful to take, though he took it well, better than he had planned. Necessity was justice, he told himself. He had earned her loss, needed it to go on. Their relationship had come of a bad time, had been determined by terms no longer in effect. The old no longer mattered — the past dead. Beyond what had already been, she had nothing to offer him, a strange sad girl with greater capacity for pain than for pleasure. If dead to the fact of her, the idea persisted. The Lady Rosemary of his loins. He missed what he didn’t have, a man surrounded by death.

He was a phoenix emerging from his own ashes. The new improved Curtis Parks. Trying to recall what he had wanted to do and not done — the possibilities of himself he had given up, given away — during the dead years of his marriage. Unable to remember.

After talking to Rosemary, he went to a movie on Forty-second Street — Some Came Running, with Frank Sinatra — and fell asleep, sitting down, somewhere in the middle. He woke during the coming attractions of a spy film (a body falling from a closet with a knife in its back), in love with everyone — moved by the pleasures of his dream. Wanted to embrace the sleeping hag next to him, but embarrassed to, went home to his new home to sleep.

His loneliness gnawing at him, he made a date with an Oriental-looking Jewess of about thirty, top-heavy, a high-school French teacher he had met in the peace movement, recently divorced. Their first night together, with a minimum of preliminaries, he took her to bed in her own apartment, which was just what he needed. It was the best sex he had had in a long time and, grateful, Curt stayed on, long after the time he arranged with himself beforehand to go. After a while — Curt was dozing off — Carol rolled on top of him and they made love again, his pleasure in the act even greater than it had been the first time. No doubt, he told himself, struggling to get a little sleep, he had struck gold here. What a marvelous girl this was — loving, skillful, taking her pleasure without the fraud of empty endearments. A little later they made love again. Carol slept pressed against him, her mouth at the hollow of his ear, her breath … Curt, exhausted, unable to sleep.

In the cold light of early morning, out of the shadows of a dream, he awoke, Carol blowing in his ear (Not again, he thought, feigning sleep). The fever of need reached him even in exhaustion. And so, dreaming of sleep, he occupied her again, assaulted the cave of her treasure, a celebrant of life, dying slowly to the music of her motion. She sang his name to him — Curtis, Curtis, Curtis, Curtis, Curt — a concert of recognition. So that’s who he was.

Before leaving, he asked her if she liked movies. Not knowing what was expected of her, she said yes, she liked some movies, good ones, foreign films. They made a date to go that night and he went home to sleep.

It’s not easy for a man with a puritan conscience to stay in bed during the day without some pang of anxiety. In his fitful wakings, an FM radio playing softly in the next room, the very qualities that had pleased Curt most about Carol began to trouble him. If she had gone to bed with him so easily, on the thinnest acquaintanceship, clearly — how inexorable logic can be — she did the same with other men. It made him jealous just to conceive of it. How vulnerable she was to the betrayals of the flesh. He went into the living room and turned up the radio, took a brief shower to cool off, and went back to bed. What was she doing at the moment? he wondered, and had to stop himself from calling to find out. Did she know who he was, what kind of man he was going to be?

Then he got to wondering what his wife was doing in his absence. He hadn’t known or cared to know during the years he had lived with her. (And she had tried endlessly to make him jealous, flirting with friends of his in his presence.) Suddenly he found himself obsessed with the idea of calling her. He looked at his six days of beard in the mirror, embarrassed at the poverty of its growth, tempted in his despair to shave it off and start again. He was overcome with a sense of hopelessness. Who was it, the vaguely familiar face in the mirror staring blankly back at him, mouth agape, insinuating knowledge of his situation? They sized each other up, madman and reflection, not enough growth between them to make one decent beard.

With nothing else to do, he phoned his wife. He called her out of the best of intentions (what other intentions could he have?), to give her his phone number in case, in an emergency, she wanted to get in touch with him.

He had only to hear Carolyn’s voice again to remember how intensely he hated her.

“Where are you?” she insisted on knowing, with the possessiveness of a woman who divided the world into the things that belong to her and the things that don’t.

He made up an address and gave it to her.

“I hope you’re enjoying your freedom,” she said, “because when my lawyer gets through with you, you’re not going to have enough money left to breathe the air without it pinching”

“How’s the baby?” he asked.

“Fatherless,” she said quickly. “Is there something else you’d like to know? You don’t care how we are, so why do you ask?”

He couldn’t think of anything to say.

“Your student Christopher called, said he wanted to talk to you about something private. Whatever that means. I told him I had no idea where to reach you. I asked him to dinner…. Well,” she said, impatient with his silence, “do you have a reason for calling, or did you call just to torment me?”

“You? I called to torment myself,” he said, tormented by the fact that he had married her, that he had lived with her for almost nine years, and that in some perverse (and desperate) way he missed her.

“I’d like to see the baby sometime,” he said, suddenly aware of what it meant to him to be a father, how important it was. His daughter, a toddler now, would someday be a woman. He missed her already, felt her loss, knew what it was to lose. “Is it all right if I come over Sunday afternoon?”

Carolyn Parks took a deep breath, withheld the first cutting remark that came to mind, a martyr to his cruelty. “You’ll hear from my lawyer,” she said with transcendent dignity, and, waiting just long enough for him to phrase a reply in his mind — her timing enviably delicate in moments of crisis — hung up.

“Is that the worst threat you can make?” he said to a dead phone. “I’ll see my daughter whenever the hell I like. You narrow-spirited, ball-cutting bitch.” He had a drink of his host’s Scotch, took another shower (beginning to sweat again as soon as he got out), and went back to bed. Regret weighed on his chest. His beard itched. He lay stiffly in a pool of sweat, trying, with his eyes shut, to see some future for himself, some way out of the traps life had laid for him. If he hadn’t been married, or if he hadn’t been married to a woman like Carolyn, would things have been different? Thinking about it, terrified by the notion that his failures may have been his own doing, that he may have chosen Carolyn out of a need to fail, he fell asleep.

He was on a bus going west, a child he had never seen before — immaculate in a brown Eton suit — sitting at attention in the seat beside him. It was raining outside. Heavy winds buffeting the bus. The child’s silent presence disconcerted him. Who was taking care of the boy, where was his mother? A child that age, he assumed, would not be taking a trip like this by himself. When the bus lurched — a heavy gust almost lifting it off the road — the boy grabbed Curt’s hand, hung onto it.

“Who are you traveling with?” Curt asked him, anxious about the child, looking around the bus to see if there was someone he belonged to.

The child looked down, sulked.

Curt turned to look out the window when he felt a small pair of hands over his eyes. “Who is it?” a high-pitched voice asked him. “Who do you think it is?”

“Is it Huckleberry Finn?” Curt asked.

“No,” the child said, giggling.

“Is it the three bears?”

“No-o-o-o,” the child said, “it is not the three bears. It is no bears.”

Curt thought about who it might be. “Is it John Wilkes Booth?” “No.”

“I give up,” Curt said. “Tell me who it is.”

“You have to guess,” the child said, kicking him in the leg. “Guess who it is.”

“Is it the three pigs?”

“No pigs, stupid.” Kicking him again.

“Is it … is it Superman?”

“Say it again.”

“Superman.”

“Again.

“Superman,” he yelled, to a chorus of laughter from the seat behind.

“That’s who it is,” the boy said, removing his hands from Curt’s eyes. “It’s the mighty man of steel. You’re a good guesser, all right, when you know the answer.”

He had to go to the bathroom but worried that the boy would think he was deserting him. While Curt was worrying, burdened by an unlooked-for responsibility, his companion took a bus schedule from the seat in front of him and put it over Curt’s eyes. “Who is it now?” he asked. “Answer, buster, or I’ll drill you full of holes.”

“That’s enough.” Moving his hand away.

The child’s face collapsed. He bolted from his seat and ran, bawling, down the aisle, his voice fading like a siren.

“Come back,” Curt said, embarrassed at being stared at. “I’ll play the game.”

The child ran up and back in a mock dance. “It wasn’t Superman, stupid,” he yelled at Curt. “You stupid.” He stuck out his tongue.

The child continued to mock him. “I’ve never seen him before today,” Curt explained to the people around him. “He just happened to be sitting next to me.”

The bus slowed. The driver came down the aisle in a hurry and, picking up the boy from behind, dragged him to the front. Before Curt could protest, the boy was gently booted out of the automatic door of the bus. Curt saw him land in the dust, miles from the nearest town, as if he had been flying, a terrified look on his face, the face receding, getting larger in the distance, frozen in a shriek.

He woke in a sweat with no sense of where he was, the room in motion. What had he done? He had a sense of having committed some unforgivable treachery. In his dream. In his life. Feeling the tremors in his chest with the tips of his fingers, he recognized that it would be more painful than he had anticipated. And it would get still worse. How much more could he bear? And what was he doing on the bus? Where did he think he was going?

He kept his appointment with Carol, although he had been planning all day, even up to the time he left the house to call for her, not to show up, not to risk further involvement. What he really needed was to do something extraordinary, something outside the possibility of anything he had ever — in the darkest fevers of the imagination — conceived of doing. But if he hadn’t conceived of it, how could he know what it was he had to do?

They couldn’t decide on a movie. Which is to say that Curt couldn’t decide — Carol said she would see anything as long as she hadn’t seen it before, as long as it was supposed to be reasonably good, anything within reason, anything. They couldn’t decide.

They sat in The Red Chimney on Broadway and 103rd, trying to come to some decision, compromising. “We can watch an old movie on television,” Carol suggested in desperation, “which is a fun thing to do sometimes. Don’t you think?”

Miserable and lonely, his beard itching, Curt had his heart set on a real movie. “You make the choice,” he said. “Whatever you want to see, we’ll see.” He handed her the Cue magazine as if entrusting his life to her.

She turned blindly through the pages, distracted, bored. “Why don’t we wait until there’s something we really want to see?” she said. “We don’t have to go, do we? There are other things to do.”

He might have been — stung by the coincidence — having the same discussion with his wife.

“What else is there to do?” he asked, the joke on himself — the movie all, or there was nothing. Nothing else he wanted to do. Except move, run, fly, go to a movie. He took the Cue and went through it again as if he expected to find something there that hadn’t been there before. “I wouldn’t mind seeing Torn Curtain,” he said.

She pouted. “I wasn’t crazy about it the first time, Curt. If you really want to go, I’ll see it again, but … Is it really necessary for you to go?”

Who could say what was really necessary? What he wanted was necessary at the moment of his wanting it. “Let’s go back to your place,” he said, swatting her on the behind with a rolled-up Cue. It was something he had never done to a woman before.

“I don’t want to,” she said, hurt at his callousness, but they went.

Not to bed. They watched an old movie on television between commercials. Gregory Peck and Susan Hayward in David and Bathsheba. Curt dozed on the couch during a deodorant ad, which merged for him into the movie, became the movie, Gregory’s peck (his own) odorless, cool, inoffensive.

“Should I turn it off?” she asked, Curt dreaming of Susan Hayward, who was seducing him, trying. “Do you want to sleep, sweet?”

He didn’t know whether he did or not, didn’t know what he wanted — the responsibilities of kingship weighing on him. “I’m watching it,” he said, dreaming his eyes open to watch, wide awake in his dreams.

“You’re not watching,” she said.

“I am,” he insisted. Bathsheba, Susan Hayward, Rosemary, his wife, others, fanning him, the breeze perfumed, tapestries on the wall of a deer hunt — Curt the hunter, also the hunted, an arrow embedded in his navel. His shoes coming off, his socks.

Bathsheba’s kiss. “You can sleep on the sofa,” she said. “Or the bed, whichever you prefer.” Kissing his ear. “Where would you rather sleep?” An arrow grazing his flanks, a flight of arrows.

“Anywhere,” he dreamed himself saying. “I want to see how it comes out.” Awake for a moment — his eyes flickering, open, shut. The light dying.

Carol drifted in and out of the room, a performer in the movie, in his dream of the movie, her presence a necessary violation. He missed her when she was gone. It woke him.

“I think maybe you ought to go home,” she said gently. “This isn’t such a good idea.”

He had trouble for a moment remembering where home was; wherever it was, he didn’t want to go.

Stalling, looking for a reprieve, he put his shoes and socks back on, not sure what Carol wanted from him, not sure he wanted to know. “What time is it?” Aware at the same time that it made no difference.

“Do you know what I was thinking?” she said.

The question was unexpected. “What?” Not caring, curious.

She held his hand. “I was thinking that we hardly know each other and …”

“And?”

“And — you’ll be angry at my saying it — we’re like an old married couple. We really are.”

“That’s crap.”

“You’re very domestic, Curt — you are. Don’t be angry. It’s one of the nicest things about you.”

In his spirit, where it counted, he had already left, shutting the door irrevocably behind him, running down flights of stairs to the undomesticated freedom of the street.

He was finishing the coffee Carol had brought him, forcing it down, something inside him burning, unappeasable.

“Curt?”

It struck him, looking at Carol, who was (her feet tucked under her) watching him, that he missed his wife, missed at least the fact of having a wife, missed something. It was a feeling he often had, with people or without them. He felt alone.

“I didn’t mean what I said,” she said, “before. Forget I said it, Curt.”

Forget what? He was worrying about it, annoyed at himself for misunderstanding, when the phone rang. She took his hand, made no move to answer.

It kept ringing, persisted beyond reason. “You can answer it,” he said, feeling violated by the phone — whoever it was on the other end his enemy.

Whoever it was (it didn’t matter), he was jealous of the man who had the presumption to call his woman, this stranger he had made love to, at twenty minutes to twelve — the fact of the call an intimacy in itself. He eased himself up from the couch, stiff, tired, a man who had been sitting, it seemed, in the same position all his life.

The longer he waited — a matter of decency to say good-bye before he left — the less desirable the idea of leaving became for him. Where was there to go? Yet he had the sense that while he stayed he was missing something that was happening somewhere else. It hurt him to be left out — there was nothing more painful. If he stayed the night, it would be hard for him to leave in the morning, he would hang around out of guilt and obligation. And if he stayed, committed himself to staying, he would be missing something on the outside — the opportunity for some new experience (all that mattered in the history of his life taking place away from where he happened to be).

Impatient, he went into the bedroom; Carol curled up on the bed, her back to him, holding the phone as if it were a love object, whispering into it. She turned, waved to him.

“I’m going,” he whispered.

“Wait,” she mouthed the word, holding out her hand to him.

“I’ll call you tomorrow,” she said into the phone, and, frustrating his sense of having been wronged, hung up.

“Who was it?” he asked.

Carol raised her eyebrows at his presumption, studied the hand she was holding. “A friend,” she said, kissing the palm of the hand as if she were offering it a reward, the hand itself. He kissed her on the neck, her flesh like sour milk. A mole winking at him just above the shoulder.

Curt saw his alternatives — a move was necessary, some move, leave or stay, one way or another. So.

He got up, took a step toward the door, two steps, returned to the bed. “I want to make love to you,” he announced.

“No,” she said. “I want you to leave.”

He had his answer. Yet he had the sense that he could have her if he wanted to, and more than that, that all acts, all possibilities of action, were in the will of his power. And so there was nothing to prove. Freedom lay for him — what a discovery! — in the refusal of action, in the denial of need. “I’ll go,” he said. “It’s late.”