Special Topics in Calamity Physics (63 page)

I stared at him, unsure if he was talking about Marilyn or Hannah.

"S'how it always is." He was setting aside the seat cushion, picking up an ashtray and turning it over, staring at the bottom of it. "You never know if there's a conspiracy or it's just how things unravel, the —I don't know, one of. . ."

"Life's hairball pincurves."

His mouth was open, but he didn't go on, apparently floored by a Dadism I'd always thought kind of irritating (it was a sentence you could find in his
Iron Grip
notes if you were patient enough to sit through his handwriting). He pointed at me.

"That's good, Olives.
Very
good."

I criss-crossed, detoured, fell out of the past.

After two hours of searching, although we'd found no
direct
clue, Milton and I had managed to dig up all kinds of different Hannahs—sisters, cousins, fraternal twins, stepchildren to the one we'd known. There was Haight-Asbury Hannah (old records of Carole King, Bob Dylan, a bong, tai chi books, a faded ticket to some peace rally at Golden Gate Park on June 3, 1980), Stripper Hannah (I didn't feel comfortable going through
that
box, but Milton exhumed bras, bikinis, a zebra-striped slip, a few more complicated items requiring directions for assembly), also Hand Grenade Hannah (combat boots, more knives), also Hannah, Missing Person Possessed (the same folder full of Xeroxed newspaper articles Nigel had found, though he'd lied about there being "fifty pages at
least";
there were only nine). My favorite, however, was Madonna Hannah who material-girled out of a sagging cardboard box.

Beneath a raisined basketball, among nail polish, dead spiders and other junk, I found a faded photograph of Hannah with cropped, spiky red hair and brilliant purple eye shadow painted all the way to her eyebrows. She was singing onstage, a microphone in hand, wearing a yellow plastic miniskirt, beetle-green-and-white striped tights and a black corset made from either garbage bags or used tires. She was midnote, so her mouth was
wide
open— you could possibly pop a chicken egg in there and it'd disappear.

"Holy fuck," Milton said, staring down at the photograph.

I turned it over, but there was nothing written on it, no date.

"It's her isn't it?" I asked.

"Hell yeah, it's her. Shit."

"How old do you think she is?"

"Eighteen? Twenty?"

Even with boy-short red hair, clown-like makeup, eyes wincing due to the angry look crashing through her face, she was still gorgeous. (Guess that's absolute beauty for you: like Teflon, impossible to deface.)

After I found the photograph and looked through the last cardboard box, Milton said it was time for the house.

"Feelin' good, Olives? On your game?"

He knew about an extra set of keys under the geranium pot on the porch, and jamming the key into the dead bolt, suddenly his left hand reached back and found my wrist, squeezing it, letting go (a bland gesture one did with a stress ball; still, my heart leapt, did an agitated "Ahh," then fainted).

We crept inside.

Surprisingly, it wasn't frightening—not in the least. In fact, in Hannah's absence, the house had taken on the solemn properties of a lost civilization. It was Machu Picchu, a piece of ancient Parthian Empire. As Sir Blake Simbel writes in
Beneath the Blue
(1989), his memoir detailing the
Mary Rose
excavation, lost civilizations were never frightening, but fascinating, "reserved and riddle-filled, a gentle testament to the endurance of earth and objects over human life" (p. 92).

After I left a message for Dad telling him I had a ride home, we excavated the living room. In some ways, it was like seeing it for the first time, because without the distractions of Nina Simone or Mel Tormé, without Hannah herself gliding around in her worn-out clothing, I was able to really see things: in the kitchen, the blank notepad and ballpoint pen (BOCA RATON it read in fading gold) positioned under the 1960s phone (the same spot and type of notepad on which Hannah supposedly had scrawled
Valerio,
though there were no exciting indentations on the page I could shade over with light pencil—as TV detectives do so effectively). In the dining room, the room where we'd eaten a hundred times, there were actually objects Milton and I had never seen before: in the big wooden and glass display case behind Nigel and Jade's chairs, two hideous porcelain mermaids and a Hellenistic Terracotta female figure, approximately six inches tall. I wondered if Hannah had just received them as gifts a few days prior to the camping trip, but judging by the thick dust, they'd been there for months.

And then, from the VCR in the living room, I ejected a movie,
L'
Avventura
.
It was fully rewound.

"What's that?" Milton asked.

"An Italian movie," I said. "Hannah was teaching it in her film class." I handed it to him and picked up the video box, alone on the coffee table. I scanned the back. "Laventure?" Milton asked uncertainly, staring down at the tape with his mouth pushed to the side. "What's it about?"

"A woman who goes missing," I said. My words made me shiver a little.

Milton nodded and then, with a frustrated sigh, tossed the videotape onto the couch.

We combed the remaining rooms downstairs, but found no revolutionary relics —no drawings of bison, aurochs or stags from flint, wood or bone, no carving of Buddha, no crystal reliquary or steatite casket from the Mauryan Empire. Milton suggested Hannah might have kept a diary, so we made our way upstairs.

Her bedroom was unchanged from the last time I'd seen it. Milton checked her bedside and vanity table (he found my copy of
Love in the Time of Cholera,
which Hannah had borrowed and never returned) and I did a quick tour of the bathroom and closet, finding those things Nigel and I had exhumed: the nineteen bottles of pills, the framed childhood photos, even the knife collection. The only thing I
didn't
find was that other schoolgirl picture, the one of Hannah with the other girl in uniforms. It wasn't where I thought Nigel had put it—in the Evan Picone shoe box. I looked for it in some of the other boxes along the shelf, but after the fifth one, I gave up. Either Nigel had put it back somewhere else, or Hannah had moved it.

"I've lost steam," Milton said, leaning against the part of Hannah's bed where I was sitting. He tilted his head back so it was less than an inch from my bare knee. A strand of his black hair actually slipped off his sticky forehead and
touched
my bare knee. "I can smell her. That perfume she wore."

I looked down at him. He looked like Hamlet. And I'm not talking about the Hamlets enamored with the language, the ones always thinking ahead to the upcoming sword fight or where to stress the line (Get
thee
to a nunnery, Get thee to a
nunnery),
not the Hamlet worried about how well his tunic fits or whether he can be heard in the back. I'm talking about the Hamlets who actually start to wonder if they should be, or
not
be, the ones who are bruised by Life's Elbows, Kidney Punches, Head Butts and Bites on the Ear, the ones who, after the final curtain, can barely speak, eat or take off their stage makeup with cold cream and cotton balls. They go home and do a lot of staring at walls.

"Goddamn miserable," he said almost inaudibly to the overhead light. "Guess we should go home. Forget this stuff. Call it a day."

I let my left hand fall off my bare knee so it touched the side of his face. It had a dampness to it, a humidity of basements. Immediately, his eyes slipped onto me and I must have had an Open Sesame look on my face because he grabbed me and pulled me down onto his lap. His big sticky hands covered both sides of my head like earphones. He kissed me as if biting into fruit. I kissed him back, pretending to bite into peaches and plums—nectarines, I didn't know. I think I also made funny noises (egret, loon). He gripped my shoulders, as if I was the sides of a carnival ride and he didn't want to fall out.

I'd imagine it occurred a great deal during excavations.

Yes, I'd wager quite a bit of money that more than a few hips, knees, feet, and bottoms have rubbed up against royal sepulchres in the Valley of the Kings, hearth remains in the Nile Valley, Aztec portrait beakers on an island in Lake Texcoco, that a lot of fast, rabbity sex transpires on Babylonian-dig cigarette breaks and Bog Mummy examination tables.

Because, after a strenuous dig with your trowel, your pick
-
ax, you've seen that sweaty compatriot of yours from every critical angle (90, 60, 30,1), also in a variety of lights (flashlight, sun, moon, halogen, firefly) and all of a sudden you're overwhelmed with the feeling that you understand the person, the way you understand stumbling upon the lower jaw and all the teeth of
Proconsul Africanus
meant not only that the History of Human Evolution would be transformed, forever afterward mapped with a little more detail, but also that your name would be up there with Mary Leakey's. You, too, would be world renowned. You, too, would be entreated to write lengthy articles in
Archaeological Britain.
You feel as if this person next to you was a glove you'd managed to turn inside out, and you could see all the little strings and the torn lining, the hole in the thumb.

Not that we did It, mind you, not that we had blank-faced handshake sex rampant among America's twitchy youths (see "Is Your Twelve-Year-Old a Sex Fiend?",
Newsweek,
August 14, 2000). We did take off our clothes, however, and roll around like logs. His angel tattoo said hello to more than a few freckles on my arm and back and side. We scratched each other accidentally, our bodies blunt and mismatched. (No one tells you about the frank lighting or lack of mood music.) When he was on top of me, he looked calm and inquisitive, as if he were lying at the edge of a swimming pool, staring at something shiny at the bottom, contemplating diving in.

I will thus confess a stupid truth regarding this encounter. For a minute afterward, lying on Hannah's bed with him, my head on his shoulder, my skinny white arm garlanding his neck, when he said, wiping his drenched forehead, "Is it fuckin' hot in here or is it me?" and I said without thinking, "It's me," I sort of felt—well, fantastic. I felt as if he was my American in Paris, my Brigadoon. ("Young love come like roseth petals," writes Géorgie Lawrence in his last collection,
So Poemesque
[1962], "and like lightning boltheth flees.")

"Tell me about the streets," I said softly, staring at Hannah's ceiling, square and white. Then I was horrified: without thought, the sentence had drifted out of my mouth like a boat Victorian people float around on with parasols, and he hadn't immediately answered so obviously I'd blown things. That was the problem with the Van Meers; they always wanted more, had to dig deeper, get dirtier, doggedly cast their fishing line in the river over and over again, even if they only caught dead fish.

But then he answered, yawning: "Streets?"

He didn't continue, so I swallowed, my heart on the edge of its seat.

"I just meant. . . when you were involved with your . . .
gang—
you don't have to talk about it if you don't want to."

"I'll talk about anythin' with you," he said.

"Oh. Well. . . you ran away from home?"

"No. You?"

"No."

"Wanted
to on plenty of occasions, but I never did."

I was confused. I'd been expecting shifty eyes, words jamming in his throat like coins in a faulty pay phone.

"But then how did you get your tattoo?" I asked.

He turned his right shoulder around and stared at it, the corners of his mouth plunging down. "My older bro, fuckin' John. His eighteenth birthday. He and his friends took me to a tattoo parlor. Total shithole. We both got tattoos, only he royally fucked me, because
his,
freakin' salamander, is
this big"—he
displayed the width of a blueberry in his fingers —"an' he talked me into getting
this monster
motherfuckin' can of worms. You shoulda seen my mom's face." He chuckled, remembering. "Never seen her so pissed. It was
classic."

"But how old are you?"

"Seventeen."

"Not twenty-one?"

"Uh, not unless I fell into a coma."

"You never lived on the streets?"

"What?" He scrunched up his face like he had sun in his eyes. "I can't even sleep on those fuckin' couches at Jade's. I like my own bed, Sealy Posturepedic or whatever—hey, what's with the questions?"

"But Leulah," I persisted, my voice crashing out of my mouth now, determined to hit something. "When she was thirteen she ran away with a-a Turkish math teacher and he was arrested in Florida and he went to jail."

"What?"

"And Nigel's parents are in prison. That's why he has a preoccupation with suspense novels and is vaguely pathological —he doesn't feel guilt and Charles was adopted — "

"You can't be serious." He sat up, looking down at me like I was
loco.
"Nigel feels stuff. He still feels bad for ditchin' that kid last year, what's his name, sits next to you in Mornin' Announcements and second of all, Charles is
not
adopted."