The Missing Person (4 page)

“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.

Three

Wylie as a kid was chubby and pale, with a shock of fine dark hair that was always falling in front of his eyes. One day, I remember, we were playing together in the front yard. Maybe we were six and four; it was before my mother went back to work. Wylie and I had just learned about April Fools' Day and were smitten by the prospect of pulling our own hilarious pranks, so I told him to lie down in the dirt and stay very, very still. I ran inside yelling my head off that Wylie was hurt. Our mother was in the kitchen drying dishes, and she threw her towel down and raced outside toward his small prone body.

But Wylie was too excited to wait, so he stood up and started jumping up and down. “It's a joke, Mom!” he shrieked. “April Fools' Day!”

She stopped in the driveway with her hands still reaching out toward him, then slowly let them drop. Her green dress had a full skirt, and with her apron on she looked like a pioneer woman confronting some early, primitive danger to her family. A hot and sickening feeling advanced from my stomach to the back of my throat. When she shook her head and went back inside, Wylie turned to me for explanation. “Why wasn't it funny?” he said.

That afternoon in my mother's condo I made myself a drink and sat in the cool living room, the glass sweating in my hand. I had no idea where Wylie was, or how to find him, and I felt tired and homesick for Brooklyn, my apartment, the psychic, those weird sickly kittens in the pet-store window. Michael stopping by late at night. When I first moved to New York for grad school, I had the sense that everyone there belonged to a club I'd always wanted to join, and Michael was inside the velvet ropes. People spoke to him at openings, with one or two others standing a few feet away, hoping to be invited into the conversation. Even sauntering across campus he was a star. Late at night, in some bar in TriBeCa, artists would sit at our table, drinking and laughing, and when Michael laughed at them, at some bald categorical statement or self-promotional ploy, they didn't seem to mind. I loved it when he talked about their work with me in private, evaluating its place in the river of art history that flowed cleanly through his mind. And I loved hearing him lecture in class; even now, my memories of the seminar room, the drone of the projector, his voice the soundtrack to every slide, were both drowsy and erotic.

Growing up, I'd gone to the art museum in Albuquerque all the time. I'd take the bus there after school and spend the late afternoon wandering through its deserted exhibits and historical dioramas, its paintings of local scenes by local artists. The art wasn't very good, but I didn't care. The lights were always dim and the air conditioning pumped on and off, regular and rhythmic. It was peaceful, the hush and stillness of it, the suspension of life outside. Sometimes it seemed that the main reason I decided to study art history was to gain the license to wander quietly through rooms, looking at pictures on the walls. Maybe not the best reason, but there it is.

It was Michael who made me think that this impulse was significant. Who wouldn't want a person like that to fasten his eyes on you, to compliment your work, to tell you your ideas were interesting and your eye for art acute? Which is exactly what happened, and how all the flirting began. Then, in a swell of urgency after my father died, I threw myself at Michael, and he caught me; we went from flirting to fixture. Out on the town on his arm, I was recognized as his current “companion” and knew it. Can an experience feel degrading and like an honor at the same time? Yes, of course it can. And the fact that I suspected I would be discarded eventually, that perhaps I'd even chosen him for this very reason, didn't make me feel better when it came to pass.

A latch clicked and my mother stepped through the door, dropping an enormous tote bag on the table in the front hall.

“Any word from your brother?”

I shook my head and she nodded, her shoulders sagging a little. Before I could say anything else she went into the kitchen and almost immediately set to work fixing dinner. I put my drink down and joined her, and before long she was giving me intricate details of a trip she was planning for a client, who for some reason wanted to visit every single country in South America.

“You wouldn't believe how long this takes. These places don't have faxes. They don't even have
phones.
I'm making reservations by letter, and they send back some dog-eared piece of paper that says, ‘Everything okay, come now, pay later.' They must attach the note to a mule or something, then the mule trots down a dirt road that eventually leads by the post office. I do believe that mules are involved in these places, Lynn. I'll just be pleased if Dr. Trujillo comes back alive.”

She kept this up all through dinner preparations. I thought about how people say travel broadens the mind, and what this meant for my mother, who was expert at organizing its every feature but never, ever went anywhere herself. She'd barely been out of town since I was in high school. There was something either heroic or insane about it. I set the table for our tidy, well-balanced meal: baked chicken, green beans, and rice. When my mother offered me a glass of milk, I laughed and shook my head.

“What?” she said.

I shrugged. “This is nice,” I told her. I never cooked in Brooklyn and had almost forgotten people still did. I assumed the world had completely gone over to takeout. My mother sat down opposite me and smiled.

“So, how long have you and David been going out?”

She set her fork and knife down without touching her food. “Well, I wouldn't call it that, Lynn.”

“What would you call it?”

“We enjoy each other's company.”

“So, how long have you and David been enjoying each other's company?”

She cut her chicken into neat geometric pieces, took a dainty sip of milk, and carefully wiped her mouth with her napkin, an act of stalling so obvious as to be almost a parody of stalling. “A while,” she finally said.

“I see. Where does he live, anyway?”

“Still in the same place, next to our old house.”

“Oh.” I looked at her, but she was intently focused on the task of spearing a green bean evenly on the tines of her fork. “What happened to his family?”

“Nothing happened to them,” she said piously, then ate her bean and moved on to the next one. “Donny's still in high school, and Darren got a hockey scholarship to a college in Connecticut. They're both lovely boys, and David is justly proud. They both talk to him regularly. Darren calls home every Sunday evening at seven o'clock sharp.”

“Yeah, well,” I said, “that sounds great. So, excuse me for asking, but what's the deal with his wife? They got divorced?”

“No, they didn't.” Her voice was tight and even.

“You're kidding.”

“I'm not kidding.” She kept on eating, one green bean at a time, the chicken in its orderly pieces.

“You're kidding,” I said again.

“What did I just say?”

“You're having an affair with a married man.”

“David's wife is very ill. She's confined to the house. We enjoy each other's company, and accept the situation, and I expect you to accept it too.”

“You're kidding.”

“Stop saying that.”

“Mom,” I said. She raised her eyebrows at me, and I opened my mouth but said nothing. Fortunately, I had chicken to fill the void. We sat in confused silence, cleaning our plates as if our lives depended on it.

When we finished, she cleared the table and took everything into the kitchen. “Lynnie, you do the dishes,” she said. “I'm going out.”

“It's eight o'clock.”

“I know what time it is.”

“Where are you going? To see David?”

At this she turned, her eyes narrow, and the look she gave me was frightening but familiar. It was the same look she'd given me in high school when I came home with my hair dyed green, and closely related to those she'd offered when I was in college in Pennsylvania, talking about feminist art all the time, hatching plans to move to New York and referring to Albuquerque as a cultural backwater.

“You've been here exactly one day,” she said. “Don't start telling me what to do.”

“You tell
me
what to do all the time.”

“That's completely, one-hundred-percent different,” she said. I did the dishes, feeling irritable and put-upon. Afterwards, I went out into the suburban night. The air was warm, and the moon rose pale and low and clear above a gray bank of clouds. The enormous cockroaches that terrified me as a child scrambled scratchily across the sidewalks, great hordes of them glistening in the streetlights. For the second time that day I drove my brother's car to his apartment, though now the streets were neon-lit. The same cars as before were parked outside his building, amid a jumble of bicycles and skateboards. Wylie's door stood ajar, held open by a brick, and yellow light fell onto the landing. That's where the smell hit me: dried sweat, old clothes, and a crush of bodies, the smellable ideology of water conservationists. I held my breath and walked inside, straight into Angus Beam.

“Hello, Wylie's sister,” he said, his smile as wide as ever. “I'm glad you joined us.”

“I told you before, my name's Lynn.”

“Lynn.” He shook my hand and held on to it. He was wearing a faded T-shirt with a million tiny holes in it, as if he'd been attacked by kittens. Up close, his skin was covered with light freckles that disappeared from view when you were farther away—pointillist pigmentation. There were even freckles on his eyelids.

“Angus Beam,” I said without thinking, “you should stay out of the sun.”

He laughed. “Why is that?”

“Your complexion. You're extremely vulnerable.”

“You're sweet to be concerned,” he said. “I always wear a hat.”

He stood aside and made a grand welcoming gesture. I remembered what my mother used to say when Wylie and I came in after playing outside all day: “Here they are, the great unwashed.”

The great unwashed were gathered all around me in Wylie's apartment. The men wore khaki shorts, bright T-shirts with equally vivid logos in contrasting colors, and hiking boots with thick socks bunched halfway up their calves. The women wore dresses of flimsy, multicolored Indian fabric and their hair in long, loose ponytails. In fact there was hair everywhere, on chins and armpits and legs. From their belt loops or backpacks dangled Swiss Army knives, leather pouches, water bottles, lidded coffee cups. They looked like they either had just come back from camping or were prepared to set off at a moment's notice. A few people glanced at me and smiled inconclusively. Others conferred in twos or threes, whispering urgently or nodding fast as they consulted notepads and maps. I couldn't believe how many people had crammed themselves inside this one room. It was very hot. I was breathing through my mouth and hoping that it wasn't too noticeable.

In the back of the room, behind the kitchen counter, I thought I glimpsed Wylie. It was hard to tell in the swarm of people, and his back was turned, but he had the right slouching, skinny build and the right dark, floppy hair. I hadn't imagined there could be circumstances in which I might not recognize my own brother. Wylie, if it was him, was talking to a middle-aged Native American man with thick glasses and long, braided hair, his large hands sporting several bulky turquoise rings.

Angus Beam walked to the kitchen counter, turned around, and smiled. An automatic silence fell over the room. “I don't believe in rhetoric or public relations,” he said, “but I believe a small group of individuals has the power to make real changes. So let's skip the speeches and get started.”

A soft, satisfied whimper rose up from somewhere in front of me and I realized that a woman in the crowd was breast-feeding her baby. Otherwise the room was quiet. The man with glasses crossed his arms. Hidden behind his broad shoulders and large head was the one I thought might be Wylie. When we were little, Wylie and I spent hours trying to develop our telepathic powers, guessing which cards were being held up, picking numbers between one and ten. Wylie, I thought now, it's
me.

Angus Beam looked around the room, smiling. “Time is of the essence,” he said, raising his hands. “Sprinkler systems, this wall. Forestry, other side. Fuel economy, to the back. Gerald, you're with me, in the bedroom. Report on plans in half an hour.”

The crowd nodded like a small, obedient congregation. The person who might have been Wylie and the middle-aged man—Gerald, apparently—headed to the back, out of my sight, as people clotted into groups and started talking. Sweat gathered on my forehead and armpits and trickled down the small of my back.

“I can siphon the gas out of a Ford Explorer in under ten minutes,” said a man close to me.

“And then where do you put it?” a second man asked.

“It just has to be removed. One less SUV on the road, even if it's temporary.”

“No, that's useless. You have to show the gasoline somewhere, in quantity. Or all the stranded SUVs.”

A man next to me unrolled a blueprint and began pointing at it with a dirty fingernail. At his feet a brown lump I'd thought was a backpack uncurled itself and stood up, revealing itself as a dog.

“A revegetation campaign,” he said. “Guerrilla horticulture. We go to people's houses and rip out, like, the California plants, right, and put in native vegetation. Free xeriscaping— those people will thank us later, man.”

“Sure they will,” somebody else said.

The noise level in the room throbbed and rose. I heard “industrial-agricultural complex” and “ranching subsidies” and “ecological catastrophe.” The dog, a skinny brown thing with protruding ribs, shook itself and padded into the kitchen.

“REM,” a man's voice said. “It stands for Radical Equality Movement. It covers animals, plants, and humans. Everything.”