The Missing Person

by Doris Grumbach

  Reuben expected Butts to be full of eager energy for the search. He was surprised by his diffidence, his boyish uncertainty, his willingness to follow whatever directions were issued to him. His greeting of Reuben was reserved, and then he withdrew into himself as they drove to Fullerton. He was silent during the trip, allowing Reuben the private leisure for further elaboration of his fantasy.

  Arnold was on the telephone in the living room when they arrived. Olivia showed them in. Arnold, a drink in one hand, walked about the enormous room talking animatedly to someone in New York, as it turned out. Privately, Reuben thought this was not the proper demeanor for an occasion of such gravity.

  “Not before the weekend,” Arnold was saying as they came in.

  “Any news?” asked Reuben as Arnold circled back to the phone table and hung up.

  “What? Oh no. That was about something else.”

  Reuben stared at Arnold Franklin, unable to believe that he could be concerned in any matter at this moment except the whereabouts of Franny. For six days he himself had been absorbed in the search. He had achieved a new, almost haloed vision of her. He acknowledged to himself now that he had never before been quite so happy, so single-mindedly in pursuit of an ideal, so knightly in his self-image. He was worried about her, certainly, but even more worried about finding her. To whom would she return when they found her? Not to him, surely. But in the interim, while they waited and searched, she was, somehow, his—partly his.

  The three men pulled their chairs closer to the coffee table. Arnold refilled his own glass. Dempsey took a long squirt of seltzer water and some ice, a choice that made him seem still more boyish to the others. Reuben said he wanted nothing. Absurd as it seemed even to him, he had been eating and drinking very little this week, as if to preserve himself in a pure, ascetic state if he should be called upon to act. In his lovesick eyes, he, Dempsey Butts, and Arnold Franklin were now trysting Arthurians about to embark on a search for the Holy Grail … oh crap.

  Dempsey listened carefully as Arnold Franklin “filled him in”—he had asked to be told all the details of Franny’s disappearance and the places they had looked thus far. Arnold left out all reference to his personal disillusion and weariness with her. This omission succeeded only in raising, in Reuben’s mind, doubts of Arnold’s innocence in the matter.

  Dempsey was not deceived. He had lived with Franny long enough to know that blame for her disappearance could not easily be assigned, especially not fastened on any man with whom she might live. As for Arnold, his deletions were part of the defense he was building, the shifting and reassignment of motives and blame, his preparations for ultimate departure. Witness for the defense deponeth.…

  Arnold began a long narrative, full of dead ends, dumps explored, leads to nothing, as well as a minute history of previous escapes and disappearances.

  “Ever since I married Fanny, I’ve been through this sort of thing, regularly,” said Arnold. “Any suggestions, Demp?”

  “About where she might be, do you mean, Mr. Franklin?” Dempsey almost said “sir,” but stopped himself in time.

  “Arnold, for god’s sake, Dempsey.” He sounded weary. At this moment, Dempsey’s respectful air seemed hard to bear. It made him feel old.

  “Well, I remember a place in North Hollywood, I think it was, where … where she used to go when she was low. This was some time ago, of course.” Dempsey’s reticence had grown in proportion to Arnold’s outpourings. He found he couldn’t add “when I first met her.”

  “Maybe she’s been there recently. She likes familiar places,” he said.

  Rubin was on his feet. Arnold stood up more slowly.

  “Well, let’s go,” he said.

  Dempsey was tired, disheartened by having had to listen to Arnold Franklin’s story about his past with the woman he had loved.

  Unexpectedly, even to himself, he said: “Do me a favor, Mr. Franklin.”

  “Sure, what?” Arnold was searching in a hall closet for a jacket, but he was aware of Dempsey Butts’s low, strained-sounding sentence through the muddle of tweeds and furs.

  “Don’t keep calling her Fanny.”

  As they drove through the streets, it turned out that Dempsey had only a dim idea of where the place was. For a time he could not remember its name. Suddenly it came to him. He brought it out in a voice that rang with triumph, as if this memory might be a giant step toward finding her: “Castellano’s it was called!”

  Arnold drove Franny’s red convertible up and down what seemed to him to be the same streets, without finding Castellano’s. They had decided to give up when Dempsey saw a familiar corner.

  “That’s where it is, I think.”

  A large neon sign extended on a wire arm from the building front announced the name of the place: Pico’s.

  “Name’s different, but I’m almost sure that’s it.”

  Arnold parked the car. They crossed the street and entered Pico’s in single file. Arnold and Reuben went to the bar which occupied the entire length of the place. It was shaped like a horseshoe, and the plastic top of each stool was a molded Western saddle. Arnold inspected a stool, bending over to look at the stirrups as though it were not possible to believe in their existence. Disgustedly he climbed into the saddle and ordered a Guiness Stout. Reuben refused to mount. He stood awkwardly beside Arnold. The bartender said they didn’t have anything like that. Arnold settled for an anonymous brand of Mexican beer. Reuben asked for root beer.

  Dempsey had paused at the door. He looked hard into the dark interior. Searching for the outlines of Castellano’s, no, Pico’s, he wondered: Wasn’t there another place called El Chico near here? But the changes in the place disturbed him. Far in the back, where Franny had been that time, her head down in her beery sorrow, there were no tables. Instead, booths made of yellow plastic, decorated with purple Mexican figures sleeping under their sombreros, had been installed. Bright candle-shaped lanterns lit each booth. All the dimness of the old place was gone, there were no dark corners, everything was new, cheesy, overbright. Franny would never come here, he thought. Franny would go to a place full of shadows.

  Dempsey came up to Arnold and Reuben at the bar. “She wouldn’t be here. It’s all new, all changed.”

  “Ask the bartender,” said Arnold.

  “No. He wouldn’t know. He never saw her. It was a fellow at the back of the place who waited on her. He isn’t here now, that I can see. There’s no one back there.”

  “Well, ask anyway.”

  Dempsey said to the bartender, bringing out the words so slowly that he irritated Arnold: “Have you seen a girl, uh, a blond woman here recently … a … a very attractive blond woman …?”

  The bartender threw back his head and roared with laughter.

  “I see a blond dame in here about every ten minutes these days. What was she wearing? A flower in her teeth or somethin’ that I’d remember?”

  Dempsey turned to Arnold. “What was she wearing, Mr. Franklin?”

  “How the hell would I know?”

  They finished their drinks in silence. At the other end of the horseshoe bar a young couple, both dressed in white men’s shirts, were holding hands in the bar, absorbed in each other. Dempsey watched them, thinking, how nice. Then he saw that both of them were men, one with very long hair and heavy lipstick, and the other with a Marine haircut and blue anchors tattooed on the back of his hand. The Marine, suddenly aware that Dempsey was looking at him, waved to him. Then his expression changed.

  “Hey. I know you. You’re Demp Butts, the football player.”

  Dempsey smiled at the grinning young man and then looked away. In a crisis of disgust Arnold climbed down out of the saddle-stool and threw some coins on the bar. Reuben pushed his glass from him.

  The bartender stared at Dempsey. Then, his voice rough with awe, he said, “Dempsey Butts. Really?”

  Dempsey said yes, shook the bartender’s outstretched damp hand with the sincere, automatic single jerk of his wrist he
always used on such occasions, and followed Arnold out of the door. Reuben hit the bar with his fist to get the bartender’s hypnotized gaze away from the door.

  “You would have recognized this woman,” he said hoarsely. “She was very beautiful. Blue eyes, lovely, you know?” He could not bring himself to name her. His adjectives, inadequate as they were, must surely, he thought, evoke an image of Franny Fuller.

  “I guess I would remember her. But I ain’t seen anyone like that. No sirree. Sounds like some movie star.”

  Outside the three men stood close together (a huddle, thought Dempsey), trying to decide what to do next.

  “There’s a place called El Chico …” said Dempsey.

  “That’s this place,” said Arnold, sounding annoyed.

  “No, this is Pico’s,” said Reuben patiently. “What about El Chico? Where’s that?”

  Demp didn’t know exactly, he said. Once again they climbed back into the convertible and started to drive slowly through the decrepit, endless city blocks, searching for a bar that, it finally seemed clear, no longer existed.

  “From now on, you wait outside,” said Arnold to Dempsey. “You create too much of a diversion. They don’t listen to what we’re asking about.”

  Arnold and Reuben went into a few places that might once have been El Chico, Dempsey thought. It netted them nothing except a repetition of the Pico experience, unbelieving laughter at their description of Franny, and hasty retreat. During the process Arnold was beginning to feel somewhat vague and loose-jointed from the beers he drank at each stop. Dempsey was growing depressed by the fruitlessness of the search. Reuben was still exalted.

  In the fifth bar Arnold wanted to stop and settle there. Demp, who knew they were getting nowhere, was willing. Reuben was adamant: “No. If Mr. Butts says she knows this neighborhood, there’s a chance someone around here may have seen her.”

  Dempsey admired the director’s determination, but he was too tired after his flight and his sleepless night to go on.

  “Try the Y,” he said. “She once said to me that she stayed there when she went away. I remember that. Although I never knew whether she was making it up or not.”

  “Take the car, Reuben,” said Arnold, throwing him the keys. “We’ll wait here for you.” He ordered two scotches without looking at Dempsey, who made no protest. He was ready for one.

  Reuben picked the keys out of the air, aping the gesture of a skilled shortstop, and left. Dempsey and Arnold drank their scotches in silence. By the time the fourth round had arrived they had loosened up and begun to talk to each other, Arnold in the thick-tongued way he did when he had drunk a lot of alcohol, Dempsey with his usual exaggerated hesitancy in the presence of anyone whose intelligence awed him.

  Absorbed and drunk, Arnold talked of himself and Fanny. Dempsey broke into his story:

  “Why do you always want to call her that?”

  Arnold reddened. “It’s her real name, isn’t it?”

  Demp said: “Well yes, I suppose, but, well, not now. And she hated that name.”

  Arnold nodded and went on with his narrative. When he stopped, Dempsey spoke only of Franny and rarely mentioned himself. Both of them reminisced in low, funereal tones, as though they had come together at a wake.

  Arnold: “Beautiful, god, so beautiful. And so stupid. Profoundly, exhaustingly, everlastingly stupid. Couldn’t find her way to the end of a simple, declarative sentence. A mind like Swiss cheese.”

  Dempsey: “Yes, I guess so. But a lot of the time she seemed well, more distracted, by things inside herself that I couldn’t know about, couldn’t even guess about. So she didn’t hear what was said or see much of what was going on around her. Maybe that’s what made her seem stupid.”

  Arnold: “I started out knowing she was sick. But I was idealistic enough to think I could help cure her. Now I know there’s no way. If I stay around in this ward I’ll catch whatever she has. I’ve got to get out.”

  Dempsey: “Once she told me about a dream she had when she was a little girl. She was standing up in church somewhere, Utica, I guess it was, and she looked down and found she had no clothes on. I suppose lots of people dream things like that. Except it was queer. Franny said she felt glad, not embarrassed, that she had nothing on because she hated her junky hand-me-downs her mother made her wear and she knew even then that what she had underneath was really good, and now, standing there nude in church, everybody would know that, and she could feel good, it being all she had that was hers.”

  Arnold: “God, I must have heard every damn dream she ever had. She told them to me endlessly. I understood most of them. They were obvious. They fitted the whole picture, they were composed according to classic psychoanalytic patterns, fully intelligible and easily interpreted. But in spite of this, she eluded me. I suspect it was because actually she wasn’t there at all, not even when she was telling me her dreams. There was nothing …”

  Dempsey: “Something would come over her in public. Her face would … well, as she smiled and bent her head to the side. Like a magic cloak, something in stories, something that made her shine, put a glow around her. Everyone, even people who didn’t know who she was at first, would turn to look at her.”

  Arnold: “Perhaps. It must have been a cloak like the one Medea sent to Creon’s daughter. When she put it on, it consumed her in flames.”

  Dempsey: “I never heard about that. But I remember I was never unhappy about that glow of hers in public. When I think of it now I remember feeling big in it, bigger than usual, lit up by her. Sometimes now I’m ashamed that it was that way. That wasn’t what you’d call a noble reason for being with her. I took from her, a lot of times.”

  Arnold: “Yeah. But gave it all back, I’ll bet. In spades.”

  Dempsey: “I suppose. But that look, that glow, that thing that Franny was …”

  Arnold: “No one could ever give her all she asked for. Not if every able-bodied man of draft age in the Western Hemisphere marched in platoon formation through her bedroom, his pack loaded with gin laced with grape juice …”

  Dempsey: “And zwieback. Is she still on that kick?”

  Arnold: “And zwieback. And the contents of the U.S. pharmacopoeia.”

  Dempsey: “I sometimes wish I’d tried …”

  Arnold: “What?”

  Dempsey: “To … talk to her more. I’m terrible at that. When she said nothing, which was most of the time we were together, I’d say very little. Now I think maybe my silence scared her. Maybe she needed to be told over and over about my feelings for her, all the time, and I could never do that easily. Or do it at all, most of the time.”

  Arnold: “I’ll tell you what she needed, chum. She needed you. Me. All of you. All of me. The whole boy. Nothing less.”

  Dempsey: “Maybe. Even so, I could have …”

  Arnold: “Even so, chum, I never will …” They spoke at once.

  They talked on. Arnold drank more, Demp nursed his drink without any desire to finish it. The bartender wiped glasses with the end of his spotted white apron and began to sweep behind the bar. They paid no attention to these signals. Caught up in their absorbing autobiographies, they never noticed the tense of their revelations and their reminiscences as they talked to themselves and to each other: In their talk, Fanny-Franny had been dead for years.

  Assaulting the fiery hill to free the enchanted princess, Reuben Rubin thinks only in the future tense. He drives slowly through dark, deserted streets, parking the flashy car in front of one dingy, late-night bar or restaurant after another, climbing out wearily to talk to the bartender or the proprietor (Moriarity, Pete, Jack, Fats, Ollie, Papa), climbing back in and setting off again slowly. He fantasizes about the possibility that her inviting look might soon rest upon him, the same look he had directed her to give to that clod, Brock Currier. He luxuriates in the thought that he might be the one to find her, to witness the sudden unfolding of her unbearably lovely smile lighting the air between them as she realizes his love, puts he
r hand in his, fires his whole being with shocks so profound (because of that touch) that he thinks he will never again be immune to any slight motion of hers.

  He is incensed at Dempsey Butts and Arnold Franklin: O ye of little faith. To have had her, and let her go, and not to burn now, as he burns, to have her back, to allow themselves to be anesthetized against her pain by drink.… Reuben drives her car with great care as though it, too, were holy, or perhaps it is that there is something holy in the air within it. He is wrapped in his vision of her, he is Dante searching for Beatrice, Petrarch trying to find Laura.…

  Then he remembers that Butts had said: “The Y.”

  Reuben asks a gas station attendant who is locking up his pumps where the Y is. He gets elaborate directions which, in his enchanted state, he forgets completely when he arrives at “the first light.” He cannot remember whether he was told to go left or right there. Wandering in the direction he thinks he was sent, he comes upon the square yellow-brick building by accident, and feels elated at having found it. Only when he sees a handsome, well-groomed Negro in a brown straw hat come down the stairs and turn onto the street, walking with the jaunty, satisfied stride of someone who has just finished exercising, does he realize that this is the wrong Y.

  The Negro stares briefly at him and then at the car as he passes. Reuben drops his eyes, ashamed of his grubby clothes in the presence of the immaculate Negro. Without energy to start the car again, Reuben sits, following the Negro’s brisk steps as he runs to the corner and, in one nimble motion, leaps aboard a bus that has only half-stopped. The bus lumbers away down the avenue. Reuben reaches up to tighten his gray tie over the open button of his shirt, turns on the ignition, makes a slow U-turn on the empty street, and starts out on the last leg of his quest, to find the women’s Y.

  Franny Fuller had been missing for more than a week when Arnold Franklin gave up the search and went back to the East Coast. At the end he hadn’t been looking too actively. His post had been home, maintaining telephone connection between the house and the searchers in various places in Southern California. He felt military and efficient, like a central figure in an underground alarm center during a war, yet removed from the action: estranged, objective, impersonal.