It Will Come to Me (20 page)

Only Daphne was listening, reposed and alert, her head slightly tilted, like a cat attending to a rustling in the bushes. This must have been the way, Ruth was thinking, that she listened to her three daughters, photographs of whom were displayed in silver frames on a silver tray on the teak sideboard, along with other family pictures. She turned to look at them more carefully. There was Pru, the eldest, in hiking shorts, heavy pack on her back, turning to smile down at the photographer from the rocky summit of a wooded trail. Here was Sarah as an eight-or nine-year-old in a Halloween witch costume, and a very tall and slightly awkward Ellie at a school dance in a floral empire-waisted dress that looked like an altered version of something Daphne might have worn in the late sixties. The grandchildren were shown at various ages and in various attitudes. Here was Daphne with a newborn in her arms, a Madonna once removed. Her beauty, Ruth was thinking, was of the kind that seemed to have a moral
dimension, or perhaps even a moral origin—as if a lifetime of loving thoughts had purified her face from within. But no, Ruth remembered. That was not possible.

“… to serve and stimulate society …” Celia was reading. “… to promote cross-cultural competencies …”

If Daphne had a green thumb for gardening and child-rearing, Ruth supposed that she, Ruth, had a black one, a puckered thing that blighted everything she touched. And yet even this familiar line of thinking failed, somehow, to depress her this morning. Instead, watching Daphne, she felt—was this another odd trick of her aging brain?—that Daphne's beauties and virtues had somehow rubbed off on her a little, as if the ability to admire had in some primitive and magical way become the power to appropriate.

But something was happening. Celia was no longer reading and Devorah had turned a dark and mottled shade of red. She was shaking her head violently and Daphne was looking alarmed. In near unison, Devorah was saying, “I'm sorry. I'm just not comfortable,” and Celia was saying, “Oh for Christ's sake, Devorah, come off it,” and Tony Del Angelo, having broken eye contact with Gideon Calloway, was jumping to his feet and shouting, “Hey! Hey!
People!
Can we get a little perspective here?”

S
o I guess it was a waste of your time,” Ben was saying. He'd been about to say “your valuable time” but his internal censor, ever vigilant these days, stepped in. He was mildly irritated that all weekend Ruth had refused to listen to his arguments in favor of attending the dean's task-force meeting—made entirely in the interests of her well-being and against his natural inclination
to oppose anything Mitten-Kurz had proposed—and then turned around this morning and decided to go. But this was not the moment to provoke a squabble. They were on their way to Eusebio Martinez's office and in a moment he was going to have to maneuver around a line-straddling rattletrap pickup truck in order to get into the lane for the exit. If that was the right exit. He wasn't sure. Martinez's old office had been five minutes from the Lola campus on a verdant street in the Museum District. His new office was in a remote part of town near the secondary airport. (Ben wondered: How on earth did Isaac make his way there? By bus? Did Martinez pick him up? Did he make house calls at the dumpster behind the Cosmos Coffeehouse?)

“It wasn't entirely a waste of time. I talked to Daphne before it got started and I asked her if she knows Martinez and she said—”

“Quiet a minute,” said Ben. “I need to concentrate.” He'd swung drastically to the right to give the wobbling pickup the widest possible berth, but the driver took that as his cue to step on the accelerator and to weave even more wildly, forcing Ben to veer into the breakdown lane. The exit was fast approaching. “Is that the exit we want? Should I take it? I think I've
got
to take it.”

“I don't know,” said Ruth, her hand flying to her throat. “How should I know?”

He took it. It was wrong. Something about the angle of the exit ramp told him so. “Oh no,” he said. “Oh
no!
I think this is wrong. I know this is wrong. Is this wrong? Does this look wrong to you?

“It looks like every other exit,” said Ruth. And it did. In view was a stretch of access road lined by car dealerships, fringed blue banners flapping in the wind above them.

“Where's the map?”

Ruth rummaged in the glove compartment. Sliding his eyes in her direction as he pulled off the ramp onto the access road, he watched as she flipped through a stack of maps, eliminating Southwestern United States, Oregon, the five boroughs of New York City, Minneapolis. “We want the central Spangler one?” said Ruth.

“Yes.”

“I think I left it in the other car,” she said in a small voice. For what seemed a long while they followed the access road, Ben shaking his head bitterly and muttering under his breath. “We're going to be late, Ruth. We're going to miss him because he won't wait. We'll get there right after he's gone and we won't see him again for another two years.”

“We've got plenty of time,” said Ruth. “You allowed an insane amount of time.” It was true. They had fifty minutes, but in Spangler it was always possible to get lost for hours. “If you take a map out of this car and put it in the other car then we don't
have
the map anymore,” he said. “Ruth.”

“We have it. We have it in
my
car,” she said. “Oh wait. Here it is.” She pulled the map out of the side pocket. Glancing at her face in profile, Ben could have sworn he detected the ghost of a smirk.

Making a jolting right turn into a weedy pothole-strewn parking lot in back of a wholesale nut distributor, Ben parked and spread the map out over the steering wheel, running his finger along the torturous route he'd have to take: back to 201 via 115 in the other direction (how he hated to retrace his steps), then north to the Bojangles exit, then west on Cotton for 4.5 miles and
right on Mary Humphries Boulevard. They had time, but only just enough.

They followed the numbers on Mary Humphries for block after block, both reflecting with a kind of bleak wonderment on how far Martinez seemed to have fallen. This was the part of town the locals called the Wild Wild West; stretches of litter-sprinkled pastureland alternated with patches of tentative settlement—storefront Pentecostal churches, auto body shops, cantinas with crudely hand-lettered signs. They might have been somewhere in the Philippines, Ben was thinking, someplace hot and green and underdeveloped and perhaps outside the reach of the law. At last they pulled into a tiny mall and parked directly in front of a one-story brick building with burglar bars on its windows. He would have found it hard to believe that this was the right address if it hadn't been for the late-model smoke-gray Mercedes parked next to them. They were thirty minutes early.

“I don't think we should wait in the car,” said Ruth. “If Isaac comes along he might just turn around and go back.”

“How's he going to come along?” said Ben. “That's what I don't get. How's he going to find his way out here?”

“Maybe he's in there already,” said Ruth, though she didn't believe that was likely.

To the right of Martinez's building was an outlet store selling sheepskin car-seat covers. To the left was Paperback Exchange, evidently closed, possibly defunct. A few storefronts down was a small Mexican restaurant, empty at this time of day, but open. Ruth ordered a bowl of menudo, Ben the combination platter—a burrito, two tacos, rice and beans, pico de gallo, guacamole. They ate for a while in silence, looking through the smeared window at
the empty parking lot and the road beyond it, where cars passed by at a rate of perhaps one every thirty seconds. Ben got up and rummaged through the bin holding free flyers and newsletters and returned with a copy of the
Spangler Shopper.
“Do you mind?” he said. His reading at the table had always been a bone of contention between them. She shook her head: forbear, she told herself. Let him run his eyes over print if he finds it comforting. After a moment she said, “Hey. That's in Spanish.”

“I read a little Spanish,” said Ben. “You knew that.” He pushed aside a basket of tortilla chips and a jar of pickled nopals to make more room for the paper and returned to his perusal of yard-sale listings and his steady, systematic mastication. Ruth was struggling with a growing sense of irritation. She couldn't help finding it a little unseemly that he would choose to eat a great pile of lunch like that under these circumstances. There had always been something about watching his eyes follow newsprint as his fork conveyed food into his mouth that raised her blood pressure.

She looked around. In the rear it was dark and chairs were piled on tables. The only illumination in the room was natural light from the windows, though she could see orange-and-yellow paper garlands hung in scallops over the service counter in back. Their waiter sat a few tables over, looking through what she took to be the classifieds.

“Ben,” she said. “Do you think he'll be there?”

Ben looked up thoughtfully, as if he'd just now been working this out for himself. “On the one hand,” he said, “it would be odd if he weren't. Martinez must have gone to some trouble to make arrangements to get him out here. Why would he do that if he didn't think he could produce him? On the other hand …” He gave an eloquently skeptical shrug.

“Why would he move his office out here?”

“Rents have gone up in the Museum District,” said Ben.

“But here?” She threw out an arm to indicate the restaurant, the empty parking lot, the pocked road with its weedy verge, the low-rider car just now cruising by with all its windows rolled down. The waiter turned to look at her. For a moment she saw herself as he must have seen her: a kind of Margaret Dumont figure, tall and peremptory and ridiculous, with sweeping gestures.

Another shrug. Ben checked his watch, stood, dug out his wallet, and counted dollars for a tip. Ruth looked at her own watch: two fifty-seven. She got to her feet, then sat down again, abruptly. The waiter looked her way again, but Ben was turning toward the door and hadn't noticed. She was awash in a sudden debilitating panic, as if she'd just this minute remembered an exam for which she had no time to cram. For the first time she realized how unprepared for this encounter she was. Ben's air of methodical calm—now he was pausing at the door to refold and replace the Spanish edition of the
Spangler Shopper
—irritated her to the point of fury.

Why hadn't they talked about this? The two of them had always been compulsive hashers and rehashers. Never was a scab allowed to form over a dispute; never was a topic left unaired. They had always discussed everything, exhaustively and exhaustingly, particularly Isaac. They used to confer about him daily, sometimes hourly, but in recent months—years?—a kind of gentle taboo had settled down around the subject.

Ben had been the first to shy away from talk of Isaac—that stoical shrug of his had been a recent development. But she had followed his lead quite willingly. The truth was that Ben had quite naturally begun to give up hope, to turn his attention elsewhere,
and so, a little later, had she. Neither wished to be caught at it, or to catch the other. Their silence was an unspoken collusive agreement that allowed them both to forget.

H
e wasn't here. Ruth knew it even as they walked down the long, dim, carpeted hall, which smelled as hollow as the inside of a tennis ball, and passed what seemed to be the only other occupied office in the building, some kind of import/export enterprise. A handwritten note had been tacked to the door, instructing FedEx to bring packages in through the back. She knew it as they were buzzed into the waiting room, half the size of the old one, windowless and low-ceilinged.

Isaac wasn't in evidence in the sanctum of Martinez's office, or at least she failed to hear his voice or catch any glimpse of him over Martinez's shoulder as he leaned through the door and apologized for keeping them waiting. “I'm just now trying to reach the person who does my conveyances for me,” he stage-whispered, holding a cell phone a few inches away from his ear. “Please make yourselves comfortable. I'll be with you momentarily.”

It wasn't easy to make oneself comfortable in this waiting room, where the outsize, dramatic furnishings of the Museum District office had been uneasily warehoused. The orange leather couch was too long to fit anywhere except diagonally, and the basalt-cube coffee table was separated from the flamboyantly winged side chairs by so little space that they'd had to sidle their way into their seats. And in spite of the acoustic-tiled ceiling and the whirrings of a number of white-noise machines, they could hear every word Martinez spoke.

“What is it that I pay you for?” he was declaiming from behind
the office door. “I ask only that you pick up the client at the designated place at the designated time!” Ruth and Ben glanced at each other. “We might as well just leave,” said Ben. “That's all for our benefit. There's probably nobody on the other end.”

“But why?” Ruth whispered. “What on earth would be the point?”

“To keep the payments coming,” said Ben. “What do you think?” Now he was on his feet, edging his way sideways in the direction of Martinez's sanctum, which had suddenly gone silent. The door opened. “Please,” said Martinez, tucking his chin into his collar like a butler ushering in a duke and duchess, “Professor and Mrs. Blau, come in. I must apologize that there is nobody to greet you. This is only a temporary state of affairs.”

The inner office was as austere as the waiting room was overstuffed—furnished with only a utilitarian metal desk and chair, a foam-rubber couch, and a pair of straight-back chairs. Boxes of files were piled against the far wall, and a single window looked out on yet another parcel of flat Spangler grassland that Ruth found it hard to believe had any more monetary value than a stack of old
National Geographies.
Martinez was wearing a starched white oxford-cloth shirt, cuffed blue jeans with an ironed-in crease, and oxblood loafers polished to a high sheen. His hair, which used to sweep luxuriantly over one eye, had been buzzed into a field of dark stubble in the currently fashionable manner. His chin was all the tinier for it, his damp, rosy lower lip the more pendulous. He looked, Ruth realized, exactly like the waiter in the restaurant a few doors down. A lunatic conjecture formed itself in her mind: Could he be moonlighting? Dashing back and forth between his office and the restaurant via some underground tunnel?