Waiting to Vanish

by Ann Hood

  “No!” someone shouted in the other room. “You can’t look.”

  “Look,” Daisy said, “I’m in the middle of something. You’ll have to call back.”

  “Can’t we just make arrangements now?”

  “No. I have to think about it.” Daisy hung up the telephone and frowned. Had Mackenzie said she was going to go looking for her mother? How do you look for someone who doesn’t want to be found? she wondered.

  Daisy curled up on the brown corduroy bean bag. She had come to this Christmas party with Allison. It was in one of the newer condominiums in their complex, off of the U-shaped stretch of wooden apartments. The ones down here were all brick, as if the builder had suddenly run out of wood.

  The couple giving the party passed around pictures of a teenaged guru on a laminated card. The guru sat cross-legged, suspended a few feet above a small maroon rug.

  “He’s flying,” the woman, Aubrey, said as she handed Daisy a card.

  Daisy stared at it. It reminded her of the prayer cards that people handed out at funerals.

  “Flying?” she said.

  “Yes. Jonah flies too,” Aubrey said, and pointed to her husband across the room. He was very tall and skinny with a long red beard.

  “Really?” Daisy said. She watched Aubrey shuffle the cards nervously. Her fingers were lumpy with calluses. She was a quilter, and the apartment was full of her quilts. They were draped over the couches and chairs and some hung from the walls.

  “Of course,” Aubrey said, “Jonah can’t fly as high or as far as the guru.”

  “How high can he fly?” Daisy’s nose twitched at the smell of sandalwood incense. She felt like she had been blasted backward in time.

  “About five and a half inches,” Aubrey said.

  Across the room, Daisy spotted Susan. She still had on the makeup from the afternoon demonstration. She had removed her glasses and squinted beneath the dramatic copper eyeliner Daisy had used on her.

  “That’s really incredible,” Daisy said. “Flying like that.”

  “Nothing,” Aubrey said, “is incredible.”

  Daisy watched her walk away, stopping to hand out more cards. She settled back into the bean bag chair. Hadn’t Iris had a chair like this? she thought. Hers had been purple, of course, and vinyl. After a while small pieces of Styrofoam started to come out. She would find them here and there, like mouse droppings. Allison kneeled down beside her. “Having fun?”

  “Let me just double check something with you,” Daisy said. “What year is it?”

  Allison laughed. “They’re all artists.”

  Earlier, a man wearing a shirt covered with tiny mirrors had pressed his nose against hers and said, “Your eyes are yellow.”

  “Artists, huh?” Daisy said. She stretched her legs out and watched the candlelight reflect in colored swirls across the shiny blue spandex. “A guy told me my eyes were yellow.”

  “He says that to everyone,” Allison said. “There’s another guy walking around here reading auras.”

  “Give me a break,” Daisy said. She took a sip of her egg nog. It was thin with a thick layer of froth on top.

  A man with long gray hair stopped in front of them. “You hate me because I fought in Vietnam, don’t you? Admit it.” His hands were tattooed with snakes, curling from his wrists up each finger.

  “Here I am,” Daisy said, “I can do anything I want for five days without worrying about Sam, and I’m at a party full of weirdos.”

  “They’re just in the wrong decade,” Allison said.

  Daisy thought briefly of Alexander’s old dorm room. His roommate had hung a black light poster of Jim Morrison on the wall and an Indian bedspread on the ceiling. He would sit in the corner and carve hash pipes and incense burners out of sandstone.

  “Let’s go to a bar or something,” Daisy said.

  “It’s still too early for that. Let’s just wait a little while longer.”

  “Let’s not stay here all night,” Daisy said. “All right?”

  “Fine. Now I’m going to get my aura read.”

  In front of Daisy, a barefoot woman lifted one foot to her face and pulled at her toes, her knee bent at a perfect angle. The gray-haired man held up his thumb and forefinger into an imaginary gun and shot it at the barefoot woman, over and over.

  On one of Daisy and Alexander’s first dates they had gone into Cambridge to see a play in the basement of an old church. The actors had pantomimed different situations—war, sex, death. “Experimental theater,” Alexander had whispered to her. At the end, all of the actors took off their clothes and marched in a circle playing toy instruments. Some of the audience undressed and joined them. Daisy had wanted to take off her clothes too, and march with them, playing a tinny kazoo or a plastic harmonica. But as she began to unzip her jeans, Alexander had grabbed her wrist. “Come on,” she’d said. “I hope you’re joking,” he’d said. She still remembered how cloudy his eyes looked right then. Daisy thought, at that instant, that there was something very different about the two of them, something that couldn’t be resolved. And that image of his hand over hers, frozen above her zipper, haunted her. She had sat and watched the sweating bodies parade around her, hip bones, swaying breasts, soft penises, and wondered why she wasn’t getting up there with them. Later, in a traffic jam on the Southeast Expressway, she had unzipped Alexander’s pants and taken him into her mouth. His hand gripped her head, tight and steady.

  A penny fell onto her lap from above. Daisy looked up from the bean bag chair. A man stood beside her. He had silver hair and a thick salt and pepper beard. His eyes were a clear, light blue.

  “For your thoughts,” he said.

  “Actually, I was wondering if everyone was going to take their clothes off and parade around the room playing kazoos.”

  “Kazoos?” he laughed. “Are they?”

  “It’s too early to tell.”

  The man extended his hand. “I’m Willie Forrester,” he said, “and I’ve been watching you for a long time now. I had to meet you.”

  “Daisy Bloom,” she said. She didn’t take his hand.

  “Your drink has been drunk,” he said. She put her glass in his still-extended hand.

  “Willie,” she said, “if you’re going to fill it up, put some real liquor in it. That egg nog is disgusting.”

  “I hear you,” he said.

  She watched him walk away. He was short and solid. His painter’s pants had speckles of black paint all over them.

  “Daisy? I didn’t know you were here.” Susan stood in front of her, blocking her view of Willie. “I can’t see a thing without my glasses.”

  Daisy smiled into the elephants that danced, trunks linked, around the border of Susan’s skirt.

  “You have changed my life,” Susan said. “I’m getting contact lenses and my hair hennaed. I feel like a new person.”

  “Great.” From around Susan’s skirt, Daisy watched Willie come toward her, holding two glasses.

  “How do you know Jonah and Aubrey?” Susan asked her. “From the complex?”

  “No. I’m here with a friend who knows them.”

  “Jack,” Willie said, and handed Daisy a glass.

  She took a long drink of the Jack Daniel’s. “Much better,” she said.

  “Why did you bring her that,” Susan asked, “when there’s homemade egg nog?”

  “Daisy and I prefer the egg nog straight from a carton.”

  “Do you notice anything different about me, Willie?” Susan tilted her head upward for him to see better.

  Daisy thought about standing up so she didn’t have to keep craning her neck to see everyone above her. But she didn’t. She scanned the room for Allison.

  “Daisy did it,” Susan said. “The makeup, I mean. I decided not to wear my glasses. She’s an artist too, don’t you think?”

  Willie looked down at her.

  “I’m a saleswoman,” Daisy said.

  “I think you’re an artist. Only, instead of can
vases, you use skin.”

  Daisy yawned.

  “Remember on Laugh-In they used to body paint Judy Carne and Goldie Hawn?” Susan said.

  “Goldie Hawn wasn’t on Laugh-In,” Willie said.

  “Of course she was. Wasn’t she, Daisy?”

  Daisy struggled out of the bean bag chair. Willie bent to help her up and she steadied herself on his arm. Standing, and with her high heels, she was a good six inches taller than him.

  “You sort of look like Goldie Hawn,” Susan said to Daisy.

  “I think my friend and I are going to listen to some music,” she said. “I’d better try to find her.”

  “Wait a minute,” Willie said. “You can’t leave yet.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because we haven’t settled the question of whether or not Goldie Hawn was ever on Laugh-In.”

  Daisy thought of the Porters. They always played games like that—Facts in Five, Trivial Pursuit, arguing over which river was the world’s longest or which director won the most Oscars. Silly, useless stuff.

  “Who cares?” Daisy said.

  “I do,” Willie said. “I won’t be able to sleep tonight unless I know.”

  “The point is,” Susan said, “she was the sock-it-to-me girl. And they always threw water on her. I think even Richard Nixon threw water on her once.”

  “Tell her,” Willie said, holding Daisy’s elbow so she couldn’t leave. “Tell her Judy Carne was the sock-it-to-me girl.”

  “If I tell her that,” Daisy said, “will you let me go?”

  “Yes.”

  “Judy Carne was the sock-it-to-me girl.” Daisy pulled her elbow free and walked away.

  “The point is,” she heard Susan saying, “Goldie Hawn was on that show.”

  Daisy felt Willie’s eyes on her back.

  She worked her way through the crowd. She recognized a lot of the people from the complex. Most of them looked more ordinary than the earlier guests. Daisy looked out on the patio. A group of people in business suits watched a man in a small sandbox build a sand castle. He emptied dixie cups full of water onto the sand, then shaped the wet earth into turrets.

  Sam would love this, Daisy thought. She remembered a trip she and Alexander and Sam had taken to Cape Cod once. Sam had buried Alexander in the sand, up to his neck. Then, like Frankenstein rising from the laboratory table, Alexander had pushed out of the sand and chased Sam into the water. She felt a pain in her chest at the image. Daisy wondered how she could feel both mad at Alexander and so in love with him. That had always been the problem, she supposed. She had let him stifle her, try to shape her more into what he wanted because she had loved him so much.

  Maybe she had been wrong to let Mackenzie keep Sam. She thought of his bed at home, made up in Garfield sheets. “I never met a lasagna I didn’t like,” Garfield smirked across the pillow. Sam should be home, in his own bed. Daisy remembered how excited she had been when she. had read Jonathan Livingston Seagull, with its wisdom about freedom. Alexander had laughed that she’d read it. “Oh, Daisy,” he’d said, “the things you do.”

  She caught sight of Allison talking to a good-looking blonde man in the corner of the patio. She had on a big navy-blue ski jacket, the tips of her fingers just poking out of the sleeves.

  “Hey,” Daisy said.

  “Hi,” Allison said. “Listen, Brad and I are going to get something to eat.” She looked at the man she was with. He had very pale blonde hair and a tan. “Mexican, right?”

  “Sure,” he said.

  “Great,” Daisy said.

  Allison turned from him slightly and whispered to Daisy. “Could you check the parking lot? Make sure no one’s following me?”

  “All right.”

  “Thanks,” Allison said. She turned back to Brad. “Olé.”

  On her way to the bedroom closet where she had hung her coat, Daisy stopped and refilled her glass. She saw Susan in the kitchen and waved to her, but Susan was squinting intently at someone else. “There was Ruth Buzzi,” Susan said, “and Judy Carne …”

  “Do you want to dance?” a man in a gray flannel suit asked Daisy outside the bedroom.

  Great, she thought. First the party was full of old hippies, now IBM has infiltrated.

  “A little horizontal boogaloo?” the man said.

  “Get lost,” Daisy said. She pushed past him into the bedroom.

  Jonah and Aubrey were in there. They didn’t look up when she walked in.

  “It was nothing,” Aubrey was saying.

  Daisy opened the cluttered closet. It was so large she could walk right inside it, which she did, squeezing between the mounds of coats. She felt for hers amid the layers of Army jackets and Burberrys. Her hand settled on what she thought might be it.

  The closet door opened.

  “It wasn’t like it was a breast or anything,” Aubrey said.

  Willie pushed into the closet and closed the door on Jonah’s voice.

  “I followed you,” Willie said.

  Daisy spilled some of her drink onto the stack of coats.

  “This is a closet,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “My friend doesn’t want to go.” She tried to sip her drink but her arm was wedged between Willie and the coats.

  “I know,” he said. He pressed his glass to her lips. Vodka.

  Outside glass broke.

  “What are they doing?” Daisy whispered.

  He smelled, a little, like turpentine. In the darkness she caught a flash of silver and turquoise in one of his ears. She put her glass down on something—a suitcase or typewriter case.

  “I think you could be dangerous,” Daisy said.

  “Yes.”

  He put his glass on top of the coats.

  “Come here,” he said. But he didn’t wait for her to move. Instead, he pushed toward her. She felt his drink spill, felt the liquor trickle down her leg.

  Outside, Aubrey said loudly, “Jonah. Don’t.”

  “I want you,” Willie said.

  “Here?”

  Her mind flashed back to the basement in Cambridge, the naked bodies all around and Alexander’s hand keeping hers back.

  “You tell me,” Willie whispered, his hand inside the waistband of her pants.

  “Yes,” Daisy said. “Here.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  WILLIE LIFTED THE GARAGE door open.

  “This is it,” he said, and turned on the light.

  The floor was covered with a large canvas splattered with gray and black paint.

  Daisy shivered in the cold air. She felt goose bumps on her skin.

  “Well,” she said.

  Willie held up a spray paint gun.

  “I use this,” he said.

  Daisy stared at the canvas. She felt him watching her, waiting for a reaction. Once, Mackenzie had shown her a portfolio of her photographs, blurred colorful images matted in white. Daisy had had to stare hard to discern that the purple smudge was a sailboat, the glaring red circle the sun. As Mackenzie explained how she played with the color processing to get that purple, Daisy had wondered why she hadn’t just taken a picture of a sailboat and kept its real colors instead of making this vague, blurry print. She had known that these pictures were considered good and that some had even won awards or had been published, and staring down at the swaying purple strobe-like image that Mackenzie said was a palm tree, Daisy began to feel inferior to the pictures.

  Willie cleared his throat.

  She looked up quickly, pulled her coat tighter around her.

  “Cold, isn’t it?” he said softly, and turned on a quartz heater that sat in a corner. It slowly glowed on, orange.

  “It’s very interesting,” Daisy said, looking back at the canvas.

  They had been together since the party the night before. She kept expecting him to avoid her gaze, put on his worn brown bomber’s jacket, and leave her. Instead, he kept staying. They had made love all night. His beard had scratched her, and left tiny red blo
tches on her shoulders and neck. At noon, he woke her up with a cup of coffee and an omelette filled with sharp cheese and mushrooms and hairy sprouts.

  “You don’t have any food here,” he’d told her.

  “In the kitchen closet,” she’d said, wondering why he was still here.

  “A Spaghetti-o omelette?” he’d laughed. “Forget it.”

  He’d gone to the store and had picked up a few things. The cinnamon raisin toast was warm, and smelled like a home Daisy had never known.

  Afterward, they’d driven here, to the garage where he worked.

  Willie did everything with the excitement of a child. Lovemaking, cooking, painting. “You’ve got to see what I’m working on,” he’d told her. Daisy had talked the whole way over. She was a bad driver, stopping and starting in jerky motions, the pink Caddy hogging too much of the road. Willie had laughed. “Where did you get your driver’s license?” he’d said. “The Sears catalogue?” Alexander had kidded her with the same old joke. She had hunched over the steering wheel, trying to concentrate, but instead had talked even more, telling him about her work. Her work was her confidence, the one thing she did really well. She didn’t tell him about Alexander. Or Sam.

  Willie blew on his hands, held them in front of the heater. Around the corner, three other canvases leaned against the wall. They were as big as the one on the floor, and were draped in fabric.

  Daisy lifted the material from one. The painting beneath it looked much like the first, black and gray paint splattered on it, thick in spots, thinner trickles running down it. In the center was a blob of pale pink, its spidery veins running into, disappearing into, the black around it.

  Daisy frowned.

  “It’s okay if you don’t like it,” Willie said.

  “I don’t get it,” she said.

  “I call that one ‘Heartbeat.’”

  She nodded.

  The pink blotch, she supposed, could be a heart.