Who is Charlie Conti? (12 page)

‘I’d like to sleep on the beach tonight, you know, under the stars,’ Jeanine whispered into my ear. I knew she was high, but still I was surprised. We had a pretty sweet hotel in the French Quarter and Jeanine got a big kick out of expensive places. Personally I liked the idea. The last thing I wanted to do was throw myself into the crowd of pleasure seekers below, and I knew that’s what we’d end up doing if we stayed in New Orleans. Also I knew the high wouldn’t last forever, and I liked the thought of coming down on a
deserted beach – sitting on the sand and listening to the waves. So we went back inside to say goodbye. Mike and Sean were making out in the kitchen but they stopped to give us another spoonful of giggle juice. We told them we wanted to find a beach to spend the night and they said to go to Pensacola; it was quite far but beautiful. Then we said goodbye to the Curator who was still talking to the parrot.

Back in the hotel room we did another line of blow to sober up from the giggle juice, then we checked out and set off for Pensacola, Florida, by way of Gulfport, Biloxi and Mobile. I guess it was a long way but I like driving at night, so long as I don’t get sleepy. The trees that grew out of the bayous were draped with Spanish moss and appeared ghostly and unreal by the light of a sagging jaundiced moon. I don’t know whether it was these ghostly trees that forced the memory upon me, but I kept hearing in my head a line of poetry that was engraved on the stonework of the school I went to back in Rome. The line kept repeating itself in my head like some crazy mantra –
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai per una selva oscura
– again and again,
nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
…

Anyways, the road we were driving along was built on stilts across the bayous; you never quite knew if you were above water or swamp or real dry land. And then the towns – Gulfport, Biloxi, Mobile – grey nowhere places of abandoned shipyards and disaffected kids draped sullenly around each other, truly a kind of American purgatory.

At Pensacola we pulled off the interstate and onto the two lane coastal road. After ten miles or so the two lanes became a single
lane. Then the single lane became narrower and narrower, with small sandy lanes leading off of it down to different beaches. We followed signs to a parking lot, then continued on foot along one of the wooden walkways to the beach. The night air was as warm as a second skin. It was hard to figure out where my body ended and where the outside world began; it felt like I was flowing into the world around me – you have to remember I was still kind of high from earlier. We lay down on the side of a gentle dune, looking south towards the Gulf of Mexico. The regular sound of breaking waves was hypnotic and peaceful and a profound tiredness began to wash over me. I surrendered myself to it and my limbs sunk gratefully into the warm sand. Jeanine laid her head on my outstretched arm and I guess I just passed out.

When I awoke the sun was already high in the sky. I struggled to open my eyes, they were so gummed shut with sleep. I could see blurry children in bright armbands running this way and that, laughing then throwing sand in each other’s eyes. The sand was whiter and the ocean clearer than I had expected. Beside me was an indentation where Jeanine had slept, but she wasn’t there now. I scanned the beach and then the water but I didn’t see her. I guessed that she’d gone to a bar or a restaurant to put on her make-up in a restroom – she hated being seen without make-up – and so I took off my shirt and lay back down again and covered my face as best I could, and then I snoozed some more.

It must have been mid-afternoon by the time I woke again. The sunlight was less glaring; softer and more golden. There was still no sign of Jeanine. I stretched with animal satisfaction, then went to look for her. I retraced our footprints in the sand back to the Buick which was now no longer the only vehicle in the parking lot. I checked my pockets for the car keys. They weren’t there. I tried to open the car door; locked, of course. I thought back to our arrival in the parking lot during the night – it was only twelve hours ago and yet it already felt like an age. Had I dropped the keys then? More likely they fell out when I was asleep on the sand.

Out of habit I walked round to check the trunk and was surprised to find it unlocked. Jeanine’s bag had gone, as had my laptop case, though thankfully I always kept the laptop itself in the big glove compartment. My own travel bag was still there. I unzipped it and checked inside. The only thing missing was my passport which I always kept in the side pocket. Had Jeanine taken my passport for safekeeping? Or had someone else found the trunk unlocked and helped themselves?

I checked my pockets again, this time emptying the contents onto the shiny hood of the Buick. My wallet spilled out first. I looked inside and saw that all the credit cards were gone. So too was my drivers license, but there were two hundred-dollar bills folded neatly inside. I couldn’t make any sense of that. Whoever had stolen my cards while I was asleep hadn’t wanted my money? I was wondering, too, whether the person who took my credit cards had also taken the stuff from the car. And had I really lost the keys or had someone stolen them? But if they had been stolen, why was the car still here? I didn’t get it.

I decided to return to the dune to look for my car keys. The indentation of our bodies was still clearly visible in the sand; I knelt down and started to sift through the fine white particles. To my surprise I found the keys after just a few minutes searching. Then I sat down to call Jeanine.

I flipped open my cell and entered her name. Nothing happened. I tried to scroll through my address book but it was empty. No names. No numbers. I went to calls made and received. It was also empty…

I was really starting to get a bad feeling, like nausea and adrenalin and dizziness all rolled into one. I looked up from the phone and tried to focus on the calm, flat line of the horizon, but the crazy thoughts just kept rushing into my head.

Either the phone had broken or someone had reset my cell to the original factory settings overnight. But why the hell would anyone do that?

Maybe Jeanine had been kidnapped and the kidnapper didn’t want me to be able to get in touch with her? But
all
my numbers had been erased. I realized then that I didn’t have a single one in my head, not even Ray’s. I have a terrible memory for numbers – like most people I always use my phone. But if Jeanine had been kidnapped, then surely the kidnapper would have rung by now, at least if he wanted to make sure I didn’t go to the police. But why would a kidnapper have left money in my wallet? And tampered with my phone? And why were there no traces of a struggle in the sand? How could I have slept through it?

And why would anyone want to kidnap Jeanine anyway?

I returned to the car and unlocked it. My laptop was still in
the glove compartment. I breathed a sigh of relief – it had all my notes from the trip. I sat down in the driver’s seat with the door open, thinking that sooner or later Jeanine would show up. I mean, maybe she’d gone for a walk and forgotten which dune we’d slept in – they all looked pretty similar – but she’d know where we’d left the car and it was the obvious place for her to come back to.

I sat in the car for what seemed like a long time. Young families returned from the beach and bundled colourful inflatable balls and tired kids into the backs of cars before pulling out of the parking lot. I watched the wasps buzzing contentedly around the trashcan which was overflowing with sticky ice-cream wrappers. One of them flew into the Buick and landed on the steering wheel. I thought maybe I should squash it like Ray had done back on the stone table in the unfinished cabin, but I was too scared of getting stung; just as well because then it took off and flew back out the car.

I kept trying to piece together what could have happened during the night. I realized that the kidnap idea was plain crazy. It made no sense. It was an automatic response, a knee-jerk reaction which protected me from some revelation I felt was coming; something painful and sinister I didn’t want to face just yet.

I thought about Jeanine. Maybe she had wanted to end the relationship and thought this would be the easiest way. But that didn’t explain the missing passport, credit cards and laptop case. And anyway, it wasn’t like we were about to get married; it wouldn’t have been so hard to say that she’d had enough. I thought then that maybe it was all a set-up and she had always planned to steal from me, and maybe she’d felt sorry for me and that’s why she left the two hundred bucks in my wallet.

Mine was the last car in the parking lot by the time I decided there was no longer any point in waiting for Jeanine to come back. I guessed I should go to the police, but I was afraid of the questions they would ask. They’d want to know why I was on this road trip. I couldn’t really tell them I was looking for my land and my people; that sounded ridiculous even to me. I thought I could show them my journal, but then I realized how incriminating that would be. And a missing person was serious. I was the last person to see Jeanine so they’d want to search the car pretty thoroughly, and God knows they’d find plenty of traces of blow and all. A rich young kid and his pornstar girlfriend – they’d be a lot more interested in the narcotics side of things than in my stolen telephone and credit cards. And suddenly that’s what it looked like to me – sex, drugs and a girlfriend who’d ditched me and gone off with my stuff.

But why the cell phone?

Maybe she didn’t want me getting in touch with Ray.

I figured that if I set off immediately and didn’t spend any more money, then I’d have just about enough to get back to LA. I could block my credit cards right away from the cell phone and I could get new cards sent to my home address; they’d be there by the time I got back. That way I’d have access to funds within forty-eight hours and it wouldn’t matter that I had no identification, at least it wouldn’t matter for now.

I was sure I’d be able to find out more with Ray’s help back in LA; he’d have Jeanine’s phone number and he might know how to get in touch with her friends. Of course, returning to LA now would mean a premature end to the road trip, but I felt that in the last twenty-four hours I’d gotten to the end of something 
anyhow. I didn’t mind cutting the trip short. To tell the truth, I’d had enough.

I tried to call my house to tell Ray what had happened (my home phone was the one number I
did
know), but the phone didn’t even ring; it made a noise like the line had been disconnected. That was weird since the phone bill got paid directly from my bank account. So then I dialled 411 to get a number to cancel my credit cards but I couldn’t use the automated service because I didn’t have the card numbers, so I waited to speak to an operator. I had to listen to an annoying sexless voice on a loop: ‘All our operators are busy right now. A representative will be with you shortly.’ Man, being on hold drives me crazy. I could hear the beeping on my phone as the credit was being sucked out of it. At the same time I was trying to turn the Buick around. I reversed it into some kind of post which I hadn’t seen; there was a horrible crunching noise. ‘All our operators are busy right now. Your call…’
beep… You have three dollars and fifty cents remaining on this Verizon touchtone phone
… ‘will be answered shortly. All our operators…’ I backed away from the post but I must have hit it again, or hit another one I hadn’t seen. I tried to move forward and again I heard scraping metal.
Beep… You have two dollars and fifty cents remaining
… I was sweating now and a drop went into my eye and stung like hell and I felt like my chest was constricting and I was going insane and for a moment I wanted to scream. Then I put both hands on the steering wheel and took a few deep breaths and thought how I’d be able to sort everything out as soon as I got home.

I
PULLED OUT
of the parking lot and bumped along the narrow sandy lane between the dunes. Looking to my right, away from the sea, I saw a little girl on top of one of the dunes. She was wearing a grubby pink dress and holding a doll upside down in one hand. I had a strange sense of watching myself in a film, driving in slow motion past the dune with the girl standing on it. I looked at the girl and she looked at me and the sinking sun in front of me flooded the inside of the car with orange light. The girl was scruffy and bronzed and her brown hair was sun-bleached at the ends. Her eyes looked swollen like she’d been crying and she was sucking her thumb. As I drove past she took her thumb out of her mouth to wave and for a moment the fine curve of saliva between thumb and mouth glinted in the sunlight. I remembered the stringy saliva of
crying children, then suddenly I remembered a story about a girl and a doll that was so sad that I almost felt like crying myself.

My mother’s mother had lived in Naples. She died on the day of my eighth birthday; I don’t remember much about her, except that she had bowls of candied fruit everywhere in her apartment and that she never got angry. She lived on the top floor of a Neapolitan
palazzo
on the Riviera di Chiaia; the whole building had once belonged to my grandparents but they had slowly sold it off as apartments, floor by floor, until, after my grandfather’s death, my grandmother lived by herself on the top floor. The apartment was pretty small but at the back there was a doorway that was the only access onto the flat roof of the
palazzo
. The roof was enormous, as vast an open space as I had ever experienced. It was whitewashed and surrounded on all sides by a low crenulated wall; I was just tall enough to be able to peer between the crenulations at the shimmering blue of the Gulf of Naples. In the far distance the islands of Capri and Ischia seemed to float above the water like spaceships. There was a tap and a hose on that roof and in summer my grandmother did her washing up there. I was allowed to run around as much as I wanted on that whitewashed roof, in the bright sunlight. There was a washing line on the roof where the sheets were hung to dry; I liked to close my eyes and walk beneath the washing line and let the sheets flutter against my face.

When my grandmother was not feeling well enough to get out of bed, then my mother sometimes did the washing. My mother didn’t let me walk underneath the washing line. She said I would make the clean sheets dirty. I resented this; I told her how much I preferred my grandmother, and that I wished my grandmother
were my mother. Then one day my mother told me this story:

‘Charlie, I love your grandmother too, and I know she lets you play with the clean sheets. But let me tell you about something that happened when I was a little girl. It was the night of
La Befana
’ – that’s when Italians give each other Christmas presents – ‘I’m not sure how old I was but we still used to live on the first two floors, where the Paravicinis now live. It was a time when even the rich people in Naples were poor. My father wanted to give me a beautiful present but there were few beautiful things in Naples in those days, at least not for children. So he ordered something from Germany. I unwrapped the present in front of my parents. Inside the wrapping paper was a large wooden box. Your grandfather had to get a hammer to prise open the lid. Inside the box, cushioned by hundreds of balls of scrunched up tissue paper, I saw the most beautiful porcelain doll. I fell in love with her the moment I laid eyes on her; she was the most perfect thing I had ever seen. I played with her all evening and when it was time to go to bed I asked your grandmother whether I could take her to bed with me. Your grandmother said I could, but only if I was very careful. I climbed into bed that night and tucked the doll in as far away from me as possible. I would have loved to hold her but I wanted to be extra careful. I woke up early the next morning because I was too excited to sleep; I wanted to play with the doll before breakfast. But she wasn’t there any more. I looked over the side of the bed and all I could see were shards of broken porcelain. I cried and cried because I had broken the doll I loved, the beautiful porcelain doll which my father had ordered for me from Germany. When your grandmother came in to wake me up and saw what had happened
she screamed at me and lifted me out of bed and laid me across her knees and spanked me until she was exhausted.’

All this flashed through my mind when I saw the crying girl with the doll on the sand dune. It was strange; I hadn’t thought about the porcelain doll since, well, since my mother told me the story on some distant afternoon in Naples.