America Was Hard to Find

by Kathleen Alcott

  Wright stretched the cord as far as it could go, almost to the dresser, and pulled out with one hand the pants he’d placed there two hours before. It was a habit he’d developed as a child, no matter how short the stay. He had used the soaps and the hand towels, read the laminate brochures propped up on the nightstand, even consulted the cheap Bible. The dyed blue carnations, set out at continental breakfasts, he’d turned into boutonnieres. Shower caps he collected in case of rain. He had wanted his suitcase to be heavier, he told her, when she found it full of parking lot gravel.

  “Ansel Adams.”

  “Why is he in hell?”

  “How egregious to think you could make a mountain more beautiful than it already is, how boring. Only a straight man.”

  “I miss you already, Braden.”

  “Vincent Kahn.”

  Wright was silent now, leaning against the foot of the bed with feet touching the bureau, feeling where the imitation wood would snap if he pressed hard enough.

  “Why’s that.” The fun was gone from his voice, the laugh all absorbed by fear.

  “For the cold bath he gave you, babe. I read that letter. How much do you think you deserve? Is the answer nothing? Is the answer whatever anyone else can afford, no matter what it costs you?”

  “Okay, okay, Braden. What exactly is it you want me to do?”

  “Are you listening carefully?”

  “Yes.”

  “I want you to gather up your shit, your little lavender satchels and whatnots, and I want you to return your key and pay your bill. And then I want you to come home.”

  “I promise to call soon,” he said, and hung up. His things on the dresser were small and useless, and he cleared them with one swipe of his hand.

  15.

  OHIO, 1986

  The sign on the freeway for the restaurant, an Irish pub, white curling text on a brown backdrop, showed up sooner than he thought it would, but there it was, O’Malley’s, two miles, Ye Olde Spot.

  Right off the highway, Vincent Kahn had said. Most convenient for you.

  His temperature had ranged about wildly, near shiver to near fever. In his rearview Wright ran a comb through his hair, an act so unfamiliar to him that he thought he looked like a cartoon doing it, a dog trying to pass as human. He walked the parking lot of the strip mall with the sort of panic that is quick and bright, all silvery angles of movement. Carrying a plastic bag from the pharmacy, a woman leashed by four children emerged from a chain drugstore, looking like the kind of person who has never cried in her life. A teenage couple, sitting on the released tailgate of a truck, blew smoke in the direction of anyone who passed, the sleeves of their hooded sweatshirts warped from always being pulled over their hands. The smells coming from the restaurant were almost identical to the smells coming from others in the franchise, a town over, a state, and his plastic watch, a find from a quarter machine, something Braden had called Mr. Little Clock, told him he was two minutes early. When he passed through the automatic doors of the restaurant there was a sign that said WAIT TO BE SEATED and he walked right past.

  Vincent Kahn was not in the restaurant and he waited ten minutes in a booth. Above the bar hung photos with the same sepia wear, a dirty child pushing another in a wheelbarrow, a one-room house at the edge of a cliff. In a frame in front of the cash register, a sallow piece of fabric was embroidered ERIN GO BRAGH. After the second time he asked the waitress to recite the specials but did not order she rolled her eyes and smeared a hand through the bangs she had sprayed so they arched up.

  “I’m sorry, Kelly,” he had said, reading her tag, but somehow speaking her name was a breach of contract, another loophole in American etiquette he would never understand.

  On the table the evidence of Vincent’s not coming mounted, four straws whose wrappers he’d removed, a children’s color-by-number he’d completed quickly with the provided crayons in only greens and blues, the yellow-brown plastic pint glass empty of water.

  “Policy,” Kelly was saying, standing above him. “Federal, or whatever. Half hour with no order, and I have to ask. Waiting for someone, or what?”

  It was his humiliation that spoke for him, wanting him to hear how stupid it sounded in the world of other people so that he could make the necessary correction, choose a life that made sense.

  “I’m waiting for Vincent Kahn.” His hands lying faceup on the table, he heard the radio fill the silence, a DJ saying the name of the song that had just played like it was the ultimate painful coincidence. That’s Bob Seger, with “Still the Same.”

  “The space guy?” She was waving a hand over her turned shoulder, already on her way out of their interaction. “He goes to the other one.”

  “Where,” he said, shadowing her across the carpet, three steps unfolding in the time he’d usually take one, and she said something he couldn’t understand, named the same interstate he could hear now over the sound of the baseball game. “Four miles,” she said, both hands running from the base of her scalp to the hairline, trying to give further volume to her flammable cloud of hair.

  In the foyer where more framed photos covered the walls, he hoisted the brick of the phone book, attached by cord to the booth, and found the number he needed. The voice was as bored as Kelly had been with the mention of the name, Vincent Kahn.

  “We don’t take messages from fans,” it said.

  “Could you just tell me if—”

  “Not at liberty to say.”

  “Could you just tell him I’m on my way?”

  16.

  There is no traffic, there is no obstacle. Wright hits eighty on the brief stretch of four-lane highway with his body singing, all gestures perfect, the blinker turned on with just a pinky, the foot lifting off the gas when he reaches the exit in an elegant wave to the future. The downgrade of speed is perfectly even. His chin when he changes lanes ticks over his shoulder like a dancer’s.

  At the restaurant where he comes once a week Vincent takes the last bite of what he always orders, corned beef and hash. The light is the same, smoky and bluish through the stained glass that ribbons the windows. There’s no watch on his wrist, no clock he can see, but he knows that forty minutes have passed. That this is a skill other people don’t have, to feel the hour slivering by the minute, has escaped his memory. He could be locked away in the dark for days and know exactly.

  It’s a bigger one, its own parking lot. Wright breezes through a foyer much the same, curving like a C to avoid a cluster of bodies who seem related, all smelling of dairy and sweat, all terminating around six feet in the same red hair. For five, they all say, when a hostess who is mostly the gum in her mouth asks how many. The photos above the bar are identical but arranged differently, the cash register with ornamental typewriter keys just like the other. He sees Vincent Kahn immediately, a person like any other person, a bald spot that looks as greasy in the light as the plate in front of him, empty but for a precisely folded napkin.

  The person coming toward him has a look he’s never liked, a glance that’s wide but unfocused. There’s a smell, too, new sweat on old, blue-green dime-store soap, tobacco’s mean loiter on the body. He uses his hair in the same way she did, a curtain that gives him a dishonest advantage, an unmanaged part of himself that predicts many others. What was beautiful about her was never different from what was frightening.

  Saying his name, pointing to himself as he comes down the carpeted aisle, Wright is aware of a vague impulse to raise both his hands, as though to communicate he is not armed. In pleated denim and a shirt so stiff it seems to hover outside his body, Vincent Kahn stands up and squints like someone trying to pretend he has not been asleep.

  The boy’s handshake is barely that, his eyes the same blue as hers, a color you couldn’t trust for how it took on the surroundings. Before, writing that letter, taking that call, he believed there was something he might ask the boy about her. Now he sees the distance as precious and fought for, remembers that in knowing her his life had nearly lost its fo
cus. Airplanes he let her fly, sleep he went without. His mouth tightens, his mind does.

  Wright explains the matter of the mix-up as quickly as he can, the details all spliced with the word sorry. Vincent Kahn makes a small gesture with his wrist, the pillow of his palm turning out, as though screwing in a lightbulb.

  “I already ate, but you should feel free,” Vincent says.

  As the boy orders, apple brown betty, CeeCee who always serves him writing this down in enormous, bubbly blue letters, the cap of the pen shot through as it always is with splinters, Vincent looks at his face. The bridge of the nose, the spacing of the teeth, the length of the philtrum. He believes it’s important to consider them separately, apart from any instinct, apart from any feeling, all of which say no. The dessert is on the table in a minute, less, and now he considers the way the fingers hold the fork, the way the hand moves its fingers.

  “Thirty-five hours from San Francisco, something like that?”

  “I added some. I wanted New Mexico, I wanted to pass back through Texas. I used to live there.”

  Wright adds this as a kind of test, to see how closely Vincent Kahn read, to try to knit them together more. But the man across from him goes on to discuss roads, to name-check highways and landmarks. He mentions the surprising green of Arkansas; he cuts a hand vertically, from the height of his shoulder to the surface of the table, to indicate some directness of route. The letters seem to have as much influence, at the table between them, as another country, remote in time and weather, ruled by a different system. He tries anyway, his anxiety having reached its exhaustion, no longer compelled by the possibilities of rejection.

  “I’ve never met anybody who knew her—before.”

  “Me neither, or at all. I didn’t know her long.”

  “How long was it?”

  “A year? Less? More.”

  It’s the first lie he’s told in a long time, Vincent, and he does it cutting one shoulder forward, his fingers spread on the plastic in front of him. He knows the answer exactly but thinks of anything else to keep it from his face. A bicycle he’d loved and crashed, brick red with blue fins, age six. The only woman he’d touched in the decade after Elise, friend from the golf course, lights out.

  Wright digs his chin into the corduroy collar of his denim jacket, smelling the salt of the fog on it, feeling the difference of their lives as completely as he would water all around him. He had known they would be strange to each other, he had hoped they would make perfect sense. One more question, he tells himself, and if it goes unanswered it’s no harm—he won’t have any more than he did before. To imagine your mother before she was your mother, he thinks, at the same time he thinks everything else—to imagine your mother before she was your mother is to know the parts of yourself that were never a matter of your will or trying. It was awful to be made of anybody else, and it was all he wanted. The waitress, her denim hip nearly checking the table as she passes by with her platter of baked potatoes, looks back and forth between their faces, two times, four. A table past she stops and turns and opens her mouth to speak, but doesn’t.

  “Were you surprised? By what happened to her.”

  “Surprised is not the word I would use.”

  Looking at the boy’s face, the features and how they work together, he feels the relief of it, something he had to see for himself.

  “Your mother was a gifted person. She could find a reason to learn anything, all California tanagers in the space of an evening, takeoff and landing as fast as most pilots. Always a book. She never wanted to know less than anybody, never wanted it to be said she had not tried. The horse, what was it called—”

  “Lloyd.”

  “She rode it standing up a mile on the bet of a nickel once, sprained her wrist. People thought the proud one was her sister, what was her—”

  “Charlie.”

  “Yes. But she was just as much so and more patient, willing to give up more in the short term.”

  “She flew planes?”

  “And she kept a good secret, apparently. That I knew. Yes, we flew some.”

  “What is the word you would use?”

  “You look like her. Almost exactly.”

  It’s less like hearing the words, you look like her, than eating them. He feels them in his body, parts of himself he’ll never see. Wright understands now that Vincent Kahn won’t speak the underside of it, the answer inside the observation, just name the similarities as he must observe them. The color of your hair, he is explaining, your feet a little bowed, too, sorry for my saying. A scent from the waitress, knockoff Calvin Klein that comes in a spray can, the heft of it right but the last note metallic, sheds her as she speaks. Dessert or I guess you already had some, anything else, just the check. Over the shoulders of the first man on the moon are paper shamrocks ascending and descending in their hang from the ceiling, and Wright focuses on these, the slight movement under the fans. Is it a lie, is it one Vincent Kahn was always going to tell or did it come to him in this booth. Why write. Why come.

  “New York, is it? You’re driving to.”

  The boy’s disappointment looks like hers. Blows don’t land on the face but disappear, almost immediately, into the body. He’s striking, it’s undeniable, absorbent of light in the way the most beautiful women are, and the waitress sees it too, and keeps looking over at them from where she’s spraying down the curving glass case. Leaving his house he had told himself he was prepared for any outcome, a son who would make the rest of his life a long apology, baseball tickets by the ream, sleeping bags and fishing poles piled in the hall. Syndicated television, popcorn on the stove.

  “Welcome to stay tonight, if you need.”

  Why does he want him to sleep there? To make the humiliation longer, starve it until it dies? It’s a false offer, Wright decides, so he takes it, wanting, like his mother did, to push at the flimsiness of a façade. On their knuckles is the same patterning of hair, on their chins the impression of the same thumb.

  “Love to. Follow you in my car.”

  The drive Vincent does without thinking, losing her son behind him at one point and only realizing when he honks. He throws a hand out the window to apologize. But he can’t drive my Ford five blocks to the drugstore, his father’s friend had said. A turn signal is a sound he’s always hated, the clunky two-note stupidity of it. He waits empty minutes behind a station wagon with rear-facing seats. A boy with mucus trails the color of corn stares back, his fingers loose in his lap, his hair very clean.

  Down Vincent’s cul-de-sac the trees are young, the houses low, the budget sedans wood paneled. In the windows are naïve craft projects, Popsicle-stick wreaths and Scotch-taped finger paintings, on the lawns miniature stovetops and shopping carts in kid-friendly plastic. The greatest luxury of the middle-class childhood, Wright thinks, right here—life so dependably familiar that the notion of running errands, feeding and being fed, could be reenacted with an imaginative twist. There are no sidewalks, just driveways and curbs, and the fences, slight and cosmetic, suggest there’s never really been a threat to any of this, never anyone who came and did not belong.

  He has a can of hot dogs and cable with a number of channels and a good shower and he names these things aloud to no real response. To supply some sound he turns on the television. The president’s voice is one he likes, an actor’s training yes but a humble measure to it, only the necessary words. He’s heard the address already, three times or four, the Challenger disaster, news stations playing it on loop. After Bisson had removed the lemon from the command module, his point made, he had tossed it to him, backward and underhand, winking over his shoulder. He knew Bisson had seen his life both ways, precious because it was expendable. Her son, listening with a hand cupped to his mouth, is making an expression he can’t read. Some take comfort in seeing their faces in others, he thinks, they spend all their lives looking. It is a way of feeling the world has invited you here. But he was never this way—even as a boy, what he loved above all was the
privacy of mornings, the theater of weather.

  We’ve never had a tragedy like this, the president says, and Wright thinks of Braden, the way he keeps the number of the dead spring-loaded. There’s almost nothing to look at in the room, brown shag carpeted and furnished in muted oranges and greens, but the one framed photo that sits on the stone mantel. A grimacing boy pedals a bicycle midair, hovering a few feet above a pool. A few days before he left San Francisco, Wright had watched him scrawl the latest in glitter on poster board, 16,116. We mourn seven lives, the president says. Jacket still on, fists in his pockets, he laughs, the undeniable punch line of the number. He imagines two thousand crews of seven, men who smiled at him on the street or undid his metal button fly with their teeth, exploding one after the other, the shuttles failing again and again to fly straight.

  “Something funny?”

  “I’m sorry. Probably just exhaustion.” The room where Vincent Kahn leads him is as clean as it is empty. There is a mattress on a box spring, a nightstand with one drawer. He thanks him for the apple brown betty, he thanks him for the bed, he thanks him. With the door closed he examines the few things he can, the pale cotton curtains on pulley, a small, stiff towel on a mounted wooden ring in the connected half bath. The only question he could ask of the room is the drawer, and he resists it. In the living room the address continues, the president speculates on bravery. Because he knows the bed has been made with a precision he cannot replicate, he resolves to sleep atop and climbs on, shoeless. His right hand shoots out on its own, the fingers twist behind the wrist to pull the knob. Like somebody driving, his eyes stay straight ahead as he looks with his body. There’s nothing, he thinks. In a second he turns over and switches hands, places the flat of the left on the pine and scoots it back. A weight there, something with different parts, metal, Velcro, glass. The first thing he does with the watch is turn it over and blow the dust from the face, a bubble of some depth and heaviness. TACHOMETER, the outside ring says, tiny white capitals over numerals that go to five hundred. Circumscribed by the twelve minute markers are three smaller circles, the use of which he can’t guess, going to thirty, going to sixty, going to ten. The doubled band, Velcro, could reach around his wrist twice, and stitched on its inside is a label: plain, official. APOLLO/NASA. When he puts it in his pocket, cool and elegant among the crumbs and pennies there, he says I’m sorry to the alien room, less an apology for what he is doing than an admission of what he has done, the acknowledgment of what he won’t take back. A post office or pawnshop, near here or should he drive awhile, he doesn’t know. He will leave at five A.M., the rooms he passes through dark, the cul-de-sac at dawn taking on a glow piece by piece—the cheap plastic disc swing tied up in the tree becoming bluer, the saliva-worn tennis balls scattered by dogs appearing like Easter eggs under the bare hedges of rosebushes.