Chez Cordelia (11 page)

I tried to pull myself together and work it out sanely, but my mind dragged, as if in shock, and I could only suppose his going out in pajamas before dawn suggested an emergency, a secret emergency involving a friend in trouble. This train suggested Ray Royal, and I thought of kidnap: Ray had lured Danny away … My mind would go no further. I couldn't imagine why Ray would want to kidnap Danny, but I couldn't turn the idea loose. Then Danny's musings on death as the great adventure took hold of me, and I got scared. When I caught myself walking in circles around the sofa, bent over, hugging myself and moaning, I decided I had better take action.

It occurred to me, finally, to call the factory and ask for Danny; failing Danny, I'd ask for Ray. And if they were both missing I would call the police.

The voice of Joe, the day supervisor, gave me back my confidence. If Danny hadn't come in he wouldn't sound so like himself.

“Is Danny around, Joe? Could I speak to him?”

There was a grunt and then a pause, in which my confidence disappeared again. I heard Joe breathe.

“Joe?”

“Delia—I don't know how to say this but Danny quit on me a week ago. Now I don't know why he hasn't told you this, I'm sure he has his reasons, that's between you and him, but he give me notice on October third and his last day was Friday the seventeenth. I haven't seen him since.”

Just the way they do on TV, I shut my eyes and sank into a chair, weak-kneed. Not only hadn't he told me, but he'd gone off to work every morning with his lunch in a brown bag. I felt another fit of moaning coming on, and I suppressed it.

“What about Ray, Joe?” I managed. “Is he there?”

“Sure, Delia, I'll put him on. Look, honey, if Danny's in some kind of trouble—”

“No, Joe. No trouble. Put Ray on.”

“Okay, honey. Will do.”

I heard him bellow for Ray, and then Ray said, “Hello, baby—what's up now?”

“Ray, Danny's gone.”

“Now what exactly do you mean—gone?” he asked.

The mixture of concern and skepticism and a touch of jaunty amusement were just right. I knew he had nothing to do with it, and the void gaped wider. I began to cry.

“He sneaked out of bed at quarter to five and got in a car down on George Street in his pajamas and somebody drove him away.”

I blubbered as I said this, and Ray made me repeat it and asked questions: who was driving? did Danny have anything with him? did I recognize the car? did he leave a note? I pulled myself together and answered them all. I could see that the interrogation was designed to calm me down, but I hoped Ray had a theory he was trying to fit the facts to as well.

“He's been acting really strange, Ray—for weeks, ever since we lost the market. He never told me he quit the factory. He went to work every morning. Where was he all those days, Ray? Where is he now?”

I began to cry again. Ray said not to worry, it was probably just one of Danny's crazy schemes.

“Danny doesn't
get
crazy schemes, Ray,” I said, finally losing all hope. “That's why I married him. He's left me—that's all. Why would he just go off like that? And where? He must have another woman someplace.”

Even as I said this, though, I didn't believe it. I said it because I felt it was what I was expected to say. I had no good reason for not believing it—I just didn't, and Ray didn't either.

“Bull
shit
,” he said, giving
shit
the full, two-syllable Southern treatment. “I'll tell you what, Delia. I admit this is pretty weird. But it may not be all that weird. Let me make a couple of phone calls. I'll call everybody who knows Danny. I'll talk to the guys here and try to get a lead. I'll pick my brain for ideas. And I'll call you back. Okay? You relax—hell, he might be home any minute. And you could—you know—look around for—what? a note? some kind of clue? okay? Just relax, don't worry, take it nice and easy, let old Uncle Ray take over. Eat protein. I'll call you later. You call me if our man Dan turns up.”

He hung up. I had no faith in Ray's methods for finding Danny. I knew in my soul that his disappearance
was
weird, incomprehensible, impossible. I got my list notebook out of my underwear drawer and prepared to make a list. Never had I needed so desperately to organize my life. I intended it to be a list of possibilities followed by a list of practical actions: where Danny might be, and what I must do to either get him back or get along without him. But I sat there listening to the clock whirr and marking the premature sag of the sofa cushions, unable to write a word. All I could think was: we're out of tunafish, and that spurred me to make a grocery list, not in my List Notebook but on a piece from the roll of grocery-list paper that unreeled from a varnished pine holder on the wall. Carefully, I penciled down:
tunafish, hot dogs, Oreos, 2 qt. ginger ale
. I sat looking at it until I heard Elisa come home, and then I gave it to her so she could bring my groceries when she brought Mr. Blenka's.

For three days I sat in the apartment eating tuna salad and hot dogs, drinking ginger ale, eating Oreos. I wandered from the sofa to the balcony and back again until I fell asleep each night on the rough tweed. I never changed my clothes or brushed my teeth. I never turned on the radio or the TV; for some reason I was afraid to make a noise, afraid I'd miss something, maybe—the sound of Danny climbing up the balcony, of his key in the lock, of a whispered message from the dog cookie jar, the cat clock, the plaster head from Greece. I saw no one but Elisa. I told her Danny had gone to Florida because his father was sick, and that I had a cold. My mother called and I said I had a cold and would call her back. I spoke to Ray Royal on the phone every day; he was “making inquiries,” but they came to nothing, whatever they were.

I didn't tell anyone else Danny had gone. Ray half suggested I report his disappearance to the police, but I felt I had no right. I'd seen him leave, he'd gone freely. My husband had left me: that was the plain fact. The incomprehensibility of it turned me around. I'd never wanted anything more than for life to be open and undisguised and honest. That was the kind of life I had created for myself—that, at least, was how I saw it—fighting my way out of the jungle of verbiage and ambiguity and downright falsehood in which I'd been raised, to the clean air where I could breathe. And here I was, with the vines closing over me again. Nothing made any sense. Life was as crazy as a dream or a poem. Unable to make a pattern out of it, my mind wandered random paths, conjuring these disjointed images: Danny and I in the mirror, the sounds Danny made in bed, the freckled skin on the backs of his hands, his blue eyes against blue sky on Billy Arp's pier, the precise look of his feet, his wrists, his pained face when he had the ear infection, his mouth pursed over the leavings of Hector's … Puzzle pieces. He had gone and left me with them. It was the mystery that disturbed me most. I can't stand mysteries, except in books like Horatio's. I can't stand
not knowing
.

It was as if Danny wanted to get at me and knew me well enough to pick out the most effective way—knew me, finally, better than I ever, ever knew him. “Puzzle her, mystify her,” I imagined him cackling to himself, rubbing his hands. But why? The Danny I knew would not torment me that way. Therefore, the Danny who left me was not the Danny I knew. Therefore, why mourn him?

This was the way I instructed myself, but it didn't keep me from mourning. Nor did it erase that horrifying final impression of a carefree Danny jumping lightheartedly into a strange car and driving off without a backward glance. He hadn't been light of heart for months. In my last glimpse of him, he had looked—no doubt about it—like a man who'd just been released.

I told this to Ray. He couldn't figure it out. I'd stopped expecting him to, but his failure seemed to surprise him. “I'd put old Dan down as a model husband out of the
Reader's Digest,
” he said. “I can't understand it.” He thought maybe Danny had indeed gone to Florida to have it out with his parents, but he couldn't explain the secrecy or the pajamas. I thought privately that Danny had gone to Florida to murder his parents. It was hard for me to see Danny as a murderer, recalling his despair over the war and having to kill, but the loss of Hector's could have unhinged his mind—and those mass murderers were always described as gentle, kindly people, the last ones on earth you'd expect to—

This theory got hold of me so hard that I became afraid for George and Claire and wondered if I should call them in Sarasota to warn them Danny was on his way with a gun in a paper bag. I couldn't bring myself to do it. I called my Aunt Phoebe, instead, on the fourth day, and poured everything out. She came and got me and took me up to her house in Middle-town.

I stayed there a month, moping around and helping with the apple picking. There was no word of Danny. The police were informed. And my parents. I wouldn't talk to them on the phone, anticipating satisfaction in their voices. Finally my mother came to see me, and though I scrutinized her sympathy closely, I found it pure. The delicate lines around her eyes were wet with tears. I collapsed weeping in her arms, and then I pulled myself together, and my poor life, too, as well as I was able.

I couldn't go back to Colonial Towers. My mother closed up the apartment for me and disposed of my things. I imagined—again, maybe unjustly—the glee with which she turned our furniture over to the Salvation Army. I pictured her hurling the cookie jar down the incinerator, tossing the cat clock from the balcony, breaking the mirror with a can of Dinty Moore stew. I wept for my treasures, but I had stopped by the time my mother returned. She brought me my clothes and my coins and my list notebook and the bookcase full of books. She stored the silver wedding presents in the attic. The rest—neighbors, furniture, rituals, all my loves—disappeared into a void just as Danny did.

My mother called Claire and George, who were alive and thrown into a panic by Danny's disappearance. I believe they hired a private detective, but nothing ever came of it, or of anything. I became, eventually, an official Abandoned Woman, and though I didn't do it then, I'll make my list now.

How an Abandoned Woman Feels

1. lonesome

2. bored

3. depressed

4. pissed off

That just about covers the weeks I spent at my aunt's. My parents wanted me to try college. My aunt wanted me to stay on and work at the orchard. Various modes of therapy were suggested. The trip abroad was revived. What I wanted was to stay by myself in my aunt's little white guest room looking out the window at the apples on the trees. I felt that all my energy must go into my anger and puzzlement and anxiety. There was nothing left over for ordinary life—which had proved so unreliable and uncontrollable anyway that I wanted no part of it.

I was forced back into it, though, by my kind aunt's kindness. She couldn't help it. I looked like the same old Cordelia—how can I blame her for treating me like the old Cordelia? She cosseted me. She tried to jolly me out of it. She was always trying to get me to go places, to abandon my nice cold quiet bedroom. It was her busiest season, but she even took me to the movies. We saw
Paper Moon
and
The Sting
and A
New Leaf
. (She thought only cheerful movies were suitable.) After
The Sting
, we went to the Little Germ. Whit was gone by then—out of my aunt's life too, as far as I knew—and we were served our coffee and doughnuts by a blond woman who reminded me immediately of Claire. I sat across from my aunt and tried to look happier, but she said, “You'll be back on your feet in no time if you just work at it a little bit,” so I knew I must still look as detached from earth as I felt—unable to put my feet firmly down and get going.

She began to talk about her dearest scheme, that I stay on as her helper at the orchard: what fun we could have, going to movies, working the new cider press; she wanted me to help her shingle the roof in the spring, she'd learned to tap-dance out of a book and she'd teach me. I smiled and made suitable faces, as if she were a child. Her trump card was the nice college boys who picked apples for her during the season. She pimped for them shamelessly. I'd met the current pickers, a shifty-eyed boy named Mike who looked as if what he wanted to do was get off in a corner somewhere and masturbate, and a plump-hipped boy named Johnny who, presumably to impress me, had chug-a-lugged the contents of a pint jar of honey.

“I know Johnny would like to take you out,” said my aunt, and I almost gagged on my coffee, thinking of the honey dribbling down his jowls. My aunt put her hand over mine; she had tiny pink fingernails, clipped short, and she wore a garnet ring. (The ring was new, probably a gift from her new Whit.)

“What's wrong, Delia?” she asked me in her gentle voice.

“I'm still married, you know.” It seemed incredible that Danny was gone, forgotten, discounted in such a short time.

“Oh—married,” she said. “Technically, I suppose you are.”

There she would have left it, but I wouldn't. “It's only been six weeks.”

“How long do you plan to give him?”

I didn't know. A year? Another week? Forever? Would I be any more inclined to accept a date with some Johnny in six years than in six weeks? I had no answer.

“You can't carry the torch forever, honey,” my aunt answered for me.

“I'm not carrying the torch!” I burst out angrily. “I just—don't—know—what's—happened to him!” The words came out choked. For once, there was something I didn't want to talk about. Why couldn't my good, perceptive aunt see that? “He could be in trouble, he could be dead, he could be anything. I can't just abandon him!”

She took that up, of course. “Even though he abandoned you.”

“I don't
know
that.” It was the not knowing, the mystery, the puzzle. I had no desire to explain this to my aunt, and for the first time in my life I saw her as part of
them
, the other side, a branch of the family conspiracy that not only didn't understand me but didn't want to.