Men in Black

by Scott Spencer

  “Any news?” she asked Phillips.

  “Nothing worth reporting.” A long pause. She heard the street noise from his apartment. It gave her a strange feeling.

  “Damn,” she said.

  “It’s frustrating as hell,” he said.

  “I’m sure it is.” She noted the coldness in her voice and reached down to pick up the comforter.

  “I just want you to know,” he said, “I’m not going to let you down.”

  “I appreciate that, Jack.”

  “You believe me, don’t you?”

  “I believe you’re doing everything you can.”

  “No. I’m sorry. That’s not enough. You have to believe I’m not going to let you down, you have to believe in me.”

  Oh—of course: he was loaded. He was alone, with a drink in his hand, making calls he would regret in the morning. It made her want a drink, too. And the sense of the glass in his hand and the lonely sound the ice made when he brought the drink to his lips moved her closer to him. They were joined by a bridge of regret; they each regretted the night, this night, night itself. And now the possibility that he had urged Sharon to visit her and speak about him filled Olivia not only with pity but desire. Maybe everything that had happened to her—the mysterious, dispiriting drift of her marriage, the move to this rural nowhere, the gloomy afternoons warming her hands on mugs of Earl Grey tea and looking out of some frost-laced window at the nuthatches hanging upside down in the bare trees while the windows of the house displayed her cameos, her damask, her tarnished treasures and second-tier heirlooms, each piece with a story attached to it like the tag on the toe of a corpse—maybe, maybe it was all leading to this, this moment, to Sam’s tour, Michael’s disappearance, Amanda’s sound sleep, and Jack Phillips’s voice in her ear; maybe it was all one long gesture culminating in the sudden, startling resurrection of her desire.

  “I’ve been to his school,” Phillips was saying. “I’ve talked to everyone he knows. Normally, I can talk to these kids, I’m good at it. I can make them sing.”

  “No one really knows Michael.”

  “Right. That’s the thing. But there was something…” He let his voice trail off, forced her to come after him.

  “What? What thing?”

  “The kids talk about a guy who lives in the woods. Did Michael ever mention anything like that to you?”

  “What woods?”

  “Somewhere, anywhere. In Windsor County. It’s half forest here. Still.”

  “He never said anything about it. Why?”

  “I don’t know. One of the kids in high school said, ‘Maybe he’s with the Tree Man.’ I knew who he was talking about. Every time something happens around here, if no one can explain it, they bring up this guy supposedly living out in the woods. Weekenders come up, a can of peas is missing, it’s got to be the man in the woods.”

  “Is it just a story, or is there someone out there?”

  “I don’t know. I tend to think there is someone out there, and people make up stories about him.”

  “Do you think he’s got Michael?”

  “There’s one thing. All the robberies that have been taking place this past year? Well, suddenly, they’re not as stupid as they used to be. Suddenly, the thieves are taking things of real value—paintings, carvings, stuff worth serious dough. Suddenly, they know what they’re doing.”

  “Michael?”

  “Well, his disappearance does coincide with the rise in the quality of thievery. But you realize, I’m just speculating. It’s a speculation based on a speculation. It’s just talk.”

  “Just talk? Jack, I want to know what you’re doing. I feel as if we’re running out of time.”

  “I look and I look and I look.”

  “Christ.”

  “And then I look some more.” A pause. “There’s one more thing.”

  “Yes?”

  “It’s a little…I don’t know.”

  “What is it?”

  “This Pennyman—I went to see him.”

  “Did I give you his name?”

  “He was reluctant to talk to me. I mean, give me a small break, the guy’s not even a Ph.D. and he’s acting as if his fucking confidentiality is a matter of law. Anyhow, he told me Michael was upset.”

  “Upset? Of course he was upset. That’s why he was seeing Pennyman in the first place.”

  “I realize. But—I don’t know. Maybe I can get more out of him later. But it seems Michael was worried about something specifically about you and your husband.”

  “Really? What?”

  “I don’t know. But it seemed as if Michael knew something, or heard something, and now he and your husband had to have some kind of reckoning.”

  “What are you basing this on?”

  “Instinct—that’s what you’re paying me for.” He laughed. “May I ask you a personal question?”

  “What?”

  “Are you in bed?”

  “Yes. Why are you asking that?”

  “I don’t know. Your voice. I feel as if I were in bed with you.”

  Scalding blood rushed to her face. Where had such hot blood been stored?

  “Are you crazy?”

  “I don’t know. A little. I thought I could come over.”

  She hung the phone up and quickly pulled her hand away from it, as if the receiver might jump back into her grip.

  She rearranged herself beneath the covers. The cold spring night pressed against the black windows. Her alarm clock was set to go off at seven in the morning and it was already eleven. If she fell asleep this very instant it would give her just eight hours. From now on every tick of the clock took a piece out of tomorrow. Yet: desire. She felt it moving within her, not exactly racing, but stirring, moving in its deep slumber, like a bear disturbed in the depths of its hibernation.

  Soon after, Olivia was out of bed, scowling at the clocks as she passed them on her frantic night rounds. She looked in on Amanda, who slept on her back, her face placid, hands folded around a lily of moonlight. Next, she went down the hall and looked in at Michael’s room; its emptiness was sullen, banal. She closed the door on it hard.

  Downstairs. She hated the look of everything. The faded Persian runners, with their Islamic reds and oranges; the cane chairs pressed against the wall, the kind of chairs that made you not want to sit down. She could not look at anything in the house. The tasteful pictures on the wall— the sepia portrait of Crazy Horse, the dazzling lithograph of the Lusitania torn from an old Harper’s, a credible imitation of a Renaissance Assumption done by a woman named Abigail Waterson, a distant cousin of Emily Dickinson. The correctness oppressed her; everything was so chosen.

  What if she were to call Jack and tell him yes, come over, come over now—hurry? She thought of him in her house, in her body. She thought of the juice of him going into her, and she felt a twist of revulsion and a bone-deep chill of fear.

  She hated the fear within her, abhorred it as something unclean. It was a fear of men, all men; she knew this without being able to say it, felt its justification without being able to defend it. Her father’s petulant silences, his suspicions of academic plots and counterplots. Her several boyfriends’ beseeching need of her, the way they plucked at her clothes, crushed her. Even Sam, though gentle, was fixated on the idea that his life was real and safe only when he was in her arms, making love to her, and his need for her was now oppressive, like caring for a sick person. And Michael: it was the hardest thing to say. The look of him suckling blindly at her bloated breast, his little razor-sharp fingernails, with no earthly use except the infliction of pain, the incitement of hatred—yes, Michael clawed at her, and when he had sucked her dry, he arched his back to get a better look at her and yowled miserably, accusingly.

  She stood in her house, trying to calm herself with deep breaths. There: breathe, just breathe.

  This was not her life, not the life she was meant to have. Her real life was elsewhere, but she had no idea where. She was out of the orbi
t of her destiny, tumbling through space. A fantastic yet pathetic series of accidents, compromises, held horses, bitten tongues had led her into this jerkwater life, this dollhouse without dolls. Where was it written that she would be scouring the countryside for undervalued antiques (often settling for knickknacks)? What was she doing anyhow? What in the hell was going on? What could she have possibly been thinking when she linked her life to Sam’s? She stood at the carved Victorian bookcase, filled with his (and ostensibly her) books, and swept them off the shelves with sudden violence, not even flinching when some of them struck her on their way to the floor.

  Had she really been one of those girls who wanted to be an artist’s wife? How could she have thought so little of herself? What was the deal supposed to be? To pitch in with the typing and wait with him on the edge of the loveseat while he stared at the telephone? Why hadn’t someone taken her aside and whispered in her ear: “You know, you have to have a life, too”? Why hadn’t she thought of it herself—really thought it, not just have it pass through her head? Her mother was ambitious; her mother’s chainsmoking, argumentative friends, her sister had a good career; most of the women she liked and admired had made their way persuasively in the world. Why not her? What did she have to show for her years on earth? One child on the dark side of the moon, another pierced by moonlight on her bed, and a husband on the radio pretending to be someone else? But you see? You see? Even this cold-eyed total excluded her. She was outside the arc of her own accountancy. It was all about Michael, Amanda, and Sam. Surely, there were things in her life outside of her family.

  She went into the kitchen, turned on the overhead lights. Too bright. She flicked the switch off and the room settled back into its moony ambiguity. Not quite enough light to see, so she opened the refrigerator and let the twenty-watt bulb inside push its dim glow through the bottle of skim milk standing before it.

  All she wanted was enough light to find the Scotch; was that asking too much? It was in the pine cupboard above the sink. She opened it up. Standing in the first row were bottles of Gallo sherry and Astor Home gin, which Sam used to mix cut-price versions of a drink that Lester Young and Billie Holiday reportedly enjoyed—a Back and Forth, or an Up and Down, something like that. What a pretentious pain in the ass he could be sometimes, though her heart went out to him, too, in a way, that he would actually want to better himself through a drink. As stranded as she felt, she at least did not feel the emptiness that was his, day after day.

  She parted the bottles and found the Dewar’s, and behind that bottle was another.

  Without the ice you could really taste it—the grain, the barrel, the nicotine on the fingers of the old men who bottled it. She poured another.

  She drank quickly, less interested now in reverie than in results. Yes, it was about time to get a little result-oriented here. That word—“oriented.” A vague, irritating memory of Sam pontificating upon it, how with the rise of the Pacific Rim everyone suddenly wanted to get oriented, something like that, nonsense, blather against the anxiety of a still mind. He should have stuck with that meditation teacher. He should have broken the habit of running words through his mind like worry beads, fingering them, darkening them with the oil of his own touch. She hadn’t even bothered to inform him that “oriented” meant finding east, Mecca.

  She was about to leave the kitchen but stopped herself at the threshold, doubled back for the bottle. No sense wearing out the floor going back and forth. Economy of movement had always appealed to her. Her sister once told her of a girl from college who’d stay statue-still during sex and then, just when you thought she was either dead or resentful, she would flick her hips once and have a short, breathy orgasm, comme ça.

  Oddly enough, she remembered nothing more of the night when she finally awakened the next morning. She was in bed, but wearing her robe; the bottle of Scotch was on the night table, touching the phone, as if the two had formed a relationship. And Amanda was at her bedside, looking both stricken and curious.

  “Mom?” she said, shaking Olivia’s shoulder. The thing about drinking too much was that it dissolved the boundaries between soul and shit, and it all mixed together like food some furious infant has mashed upon his plate.

  “Don’t shake,” said Olivia, shading her eyes, though it was barely light in the room. What was that sound? Rain?

  Oh God, what if Michael was out there somewhere, in the rain?

  “I missed the bus,” said Amanda. “You didn’t wake me up, or make breakfast, or anything.”

  “Sorry, sorry.” Her legs ached; her mouth felt like the inside of a vacuum cleaner bag. A sharp smell in the air— pine tar, turpentine, something.

  “Mom?” Amanda’s voice wavered between concern and amusement. There was no question that seeing her mother sacked out so helplessly was an event of some kind.

  “I’ll drive you to school,” Olivia whispered.

  “It’s already started. And you get in more trouble for being late than being absent.”

  Olivia sighed deeply. There was something way off in what Amanda was saying, but it was too complicated to refute right now.

  “Mom?”

  “What.”

  “What happened downstairs?”

  Olivia was silent. She was having no thoughts of which she was aware, yet Amanda’s question disturbed her. It was like the physical equivalent of déjà vu, a bodily sensation familiar yet elusive; she remembered herself doing something but could not say what.

  “Did you write on the walls, Mom?”

  “What?”

  Amanda reached for Olivia’s hand and plucked it off of the satin comforter. Amanda’s hand was icy.

  Olivia opened her eyes and looked at her right hand, as Amanda held it before her. The sides of her first three fingers were stained dark blue. At first, it meant nothing to her, then it began to, and then she was blank again.

  “Everything’s knocked over, Mom. Maybe we should, I don’t know—call the police?”

  “What time is it?”

  “Mom, I’m serious. Where’s Daddy? Maybe we should call Daddy.”

  “No, that’s okay.” Olivia was silent. There were thick black velvet curtains over the windows of consciousness; no breeze could stir them. If she did not speak—now!— then surely she would fall back to sleep. “What kind of writing on the walls, sweetie?” It was what Sam called her—never mind.

  “Your name, with a face in the O.”

  “You’re—” She stopped herself from saying the rest of it: “kidding me.” “What else?”

  “Swears, in paint. Mom, did you do that?”

  “Is anything broken?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so. The books are on the floor.”

  “Is that all?” She forced herself up on her elbows; her insides fell away, groceries out of a wet sack.

  “The windows were open, and it was real cold when I came down. I closed them, so it’s okay now. But that’s why I thought someone might have snuck in, maybe some teenagers or something. Or Michael?”

  “No, it was me.”

  They were silent, mother and daughter, it was one of those moments that neither of them would shake loose; for a long time it would be a line of demarcation: things happened either before the night the walls got painted or after.

  “Graffiti,” said Amanda.

  “Yes, that’s what it’s called.”

  It had taken her daughter that long to remember the word she wanted. Something inside of her kept snatching away the words she needed, hiding them under things.

  “You know what you should do?” said Olivia. She sat up, leaned against the bedboard. The wood felt cold straight through her nightgown and her robe. “You could go to your room, and read, or color, or do whatever you want to do. I’m going to go downstairs and straighten up a little, and then we can both go to town and have a lovely girls’ breakfast at the Silver Spoon.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay?”

  Amanda nodded but did not mo
ve. Finally, she asked, “Why did you do all that, Mom?”

  “You know how it is when you get real mad and lose your temper? Well, moms sometimes do, too. Just because you get old doesn’t mean you don’t sometimes lose your temper.”

  “But I never paint anything, and I don’t break stuff or throw stuff around.”

  “You used to. We called them temper tantrums.”

  “Yeah, but I was two years old, Mom.”

  “Well, last night, I was two years old.”

  “Are you going to be two years old tonight?”

  “No. I promise. It’s just that, you know, I’m worried about Michael, and I really miss Daddy.” She was a little surprised to hear herself saying this, but as soon as it was out she realized it was true—she missed Sam, she wished he were here at this very moment, to survey the damage she had done, to help her get through whatever was next.

  As soon as Amanda left the room, the telephone rang. Something told Olivia she ought to just let it ring, but she picked it up anyhow.

  “Hello,” said the voice at the other end of the line. “This is Nadia Tannenbaum. Do you remember me? I was a guest at your home last year.”

  “Yes,” said Olivia, her heart pounding. “I remember you.”

  “It’s…it’s very important that I speak to Sam, Mrs. Holland,” said the voice at the other end of the line. “Is he there?” And then Nadia began to weep. “Never mind,” she said, and tried to hang up, but was too upset and failed to break the connection. “Oh, shit,” Olivia heard her say. “Can’t I do anything right?” A few more fumbling noises and the line was dead.

  CHAPTER

  12

  DESPITE OUR COZY, FITFUL NIGHT TOGETHER, AND the haze of animal attraction that still hung over me, Heather was unperturbed when I told her that Ezra had called yesterday and summoned me back to Manhattan to deal with a woman who claimed to have secret knowledge of my identity.

  “Let’s just see what we can do to make the best of your time in New York. I’m still plotting out your West Coast tour,” she said. “We’ve got you Los Angeles, San Diego, Santa Barbara, San Francisco, and then…well, I’m not quite sure. Wouldn’t it be great if we could get right into Denver from San Francisco?”