Waiting to Vanish

by Ann Hood

  Jams had had a girlfriend in Pennsylvania. Margaret Kildoyle. She was plump but pretty. He used to tell her she looked like Gene Tierney. She was a kind of star in their town, a champion baton twirler who won trophies statewide. She used to toss flaming batons into the air, two or three at a time, spinning in brilliant unison. She smelled, always, like lilacs, and had in her backyard a lilac grove where so many grew that they formed a kind of canopy over a small stone bench. Margaret and Jams used to sit for hours on that bench and kiss, the smell of lilacs all around them. Once she had asked him, “Don’t you even want to put your hand under my sweater? Don’t you want to touch me?” The answer had been no, but he thought that must be the worst insult to someone, to refuse. And so he had done it, sliding his hand over her soft flesh. She had leaned toward him and pulled off her sweater, unhooked her bra. “Finally,” she’d said after they’d made love.

  Then, later, she spoke vaguely of marriage and he’d wondered when he’d left if they were engaged somehow. She wrote to him weekly, talked about taking a train up to Boston to get things settled. When he thought of her, he thought of those flaming batons and her softness under him in the grass, and the smell of lilacs. But that was all.

  He had met a lot of women since he’d arrived in Massachusetts and had dated them once or twice, friends of his cousins and girls he had met at parties. But he felt unmoved by them all, until Cal walked into the store. She both frightened and aroused him. After that second time, he was afraid she’d gone off to teach the Indians and that would be that. He’d imagined Margaret arriving at South Station with her hope chest and trousseau, all white and plump and round-faced, and he was afraid he’d somehow have to marry her, that there was some code of honor involved here that he wasn’t quite sure of.

  But then Cal appeared again, just at closing time, with her friend Vivvie. Vivvie wore large hoop earrings in the shape of a coiling snake, and a cashmere sweater with no bra. Cal, he remembered, was dressed all in black, baggy men’s trousers and pullover sweater with her pearls lying against her collarbone.

  “We need champagne,” Cal said. “Lots of it.”

  “And none of this domestic stuff,” Vivvie said.

  “My whole world is falling apart,” Cal said.

  “Guatemala?” he said, afraid she’d tell him she was leaving that very night.

  She nodded.

  “Tell her,” Vivvie said, “that she doesn’t need to marry a goddam priest.”

  “And Isaac is hitchhiking across the country,” Cal said. “He wants to go all the way to Russia. To Alaska and the Bering Strait.”

  “Tell her if she wants adventure like she claims she does then she should go with him,” Vivvie said. “Tell her she could be one hell of a poet.”

  “Vivvie here is going to London to study,” Cal said. “Everyone is deserting me.”

  “The others are dropping like flies,” Vivvie said. “Missy is actually marrying a dentist.”

  They both doubled over in a fit of giggles over this.

  “An orthodontist, actually,” Cal said.

  He smiled awkwardly, completely enchanted.

  Later, he went with them to Vivvie’s apartment in Brookline, already stacked with packed boxes, and drank three bottles of good French champagne. They all passed out on the floor, on a Japanese mattress called a futon.

  He wondered how long he’d been sitting quietly, lost in memory and breaking the nachos into tiny pieces on the tiled tabletop. Ursula had chewed off all of the lipstick on her full bottom lip and was drumming her fingers against her glass. Jams watched her fingers against the glass, short square nails polished in gloss. She had invited him here for drinks. “You know,” she’d said, “it’s Christmas Eve.” He hadn’t known at all.

  Jams felt like he owed her something, some secret piece of news. She had told him over the months stories about her and her husband. In the car over here just tonight she had said, “You know, his sister told me once that he’s got some kind of brain tumor that makes him violent.” She had whispered the words, given him the secret like a gift.

  “You know,” Jams said, “Cal had this friend. Missy. She was a beauty. Long blonde hair. A perfect smile. Sort of like that model who’s around these days—”

  “Cheryl Tiegs?”

  “No. This one married a big rock star.”

  “Jerry Hall?” Ursula leaned toward him, her face eager.

  “Maybe,” he said. “I don’t know. Anyway, I always had a crush on Missy. A real crush.”

  “Christie Brinkley,” Ursula said, smiling. “That’s who she looked like. Right?”

  Jams nodded. “That’s the one,” he said. He wondered if his secret hadn’t been as interesting as Ursula’s husband’s brain tumor.

  “I really did,” he said. “She was a beauty and I had quite a crush on her.”

  He had never said that out loud and he felt a pang of guilt, as if Cal could hear. Or Grammie, who had always mistrusted him slightly. Once, at a party at Missy and Art’s—he smiled at the memory. They always gave great parties, with themes. This particular one was a Hollywood theme, and Missy had written across their picture window in glitter, HOLLYWOOD, just like the sign that hung over the hills out there. There were palm trees everywhere, and a cardboard limousine pressed flat against one wall. Cal had gone as Hedda Hopper. She had worn a big floppy hat and carried a notepad and pen all night. He had dressed as Charlie Chaplin, and practiced walking and swinging a cane.

  Missy had looked the most beautiful he had ever seen her. Weren’t there still photographs around somewhere of her that night, dressed as Scarlett O’Hara, her waist pinched small, her walk a rustle of petticoats and ruffles? He had been hypnotized by her shoulders, bare with the flashing green of the dress beneath them. They were the color of pure cream.

  Jams had followed her into the kitchen when she went to get more ice. She held a clear glass bowl, and dropped the ice cubes into it like precious crystals.

  He had stood in front of her, big and silent, the derby hat and crayoned mustache making him feel both foolish and brave. He would never know what came over him then, if it had been too many vodka gimlets, or the way she tilted her face up to him, the blonde banana curls grazing her collarbones, and she said, “What?” with a lipsticked smile. Whatever caused it, at that moment he touched her bare shoulders lightly and pressed her against the refrigerator, like someone in a bad movie about suburban adultery. The glass bowl full of ice pressed against his chest when he kissed her and he felt the cold right through his shirt.

  He remembered that she had tasted very sweet, like maraschino cherries. Her shoulders felt the way a child imagines clouds feel—soft and velvety. The thing he was remembering now, though, was that Missy had kissed him back, hard. She had tilted her head upward to meet his kiss and opened her mouth easily to let his tongue in. Or was that, he wondered, just a trick of memory? He had, after all, drunk five or six vodka gimlets. Cal even had to drive home that night, he’d had so much to drink. But still, it seemed he could recall the slightest trace of his crayoned mustache across her mouth.

  “Well,” Ursula said, “maybe you married the wrong girl.”

  “No,” Jams said. “That’s not it.”

  “Of course,” she said.

  Jams thought that Ursula was the type of woman who would eat a tunafish sandwich someone had made her even if she hated tuna, just not to disagree or cause trouble.

  “I’m looking for an apartment, you know,” she said. “Or a small house somewhere. I feel strong enough to go it alone.”

  “Really? That’s great.”

  They ordered two more margaritas. Jumbo Goldens.

  He raised his glass.

  “Congratulations,” he said.

  He felt envy, jealous that Ursula was able to leave. During the four months he had been there, she had seemed weak and frightened, always talking about her cruel husband. “The Monster,” she called him. “Enough about him,” she’d say after a long while, “what
about you?” and she would look almost eager to hear another story of misery. On trips they all took, she used to always manage to sit beside him. She knew a lot of facts, about cranberry bogs and unsupported domes. If no one spoke to her, she would rattle them off, always starting with, “I guess you already know this but …”

  “Do you know what else I’m doing?” she asked Jams.

  Jams was thinking, “I can do it too. I can leave there. I’m not sick. My wife left me and my son died and my grandson won’t talk but I am all right.”

  “I’m going on Jeopardy,” Ursula said. “I’m flying out to California right after New Year’s and I’m trying out.”

  “Really?” he said again.

  He thought of her rattling things off to him on those bus trips. “I’m sure you already know this,” she’d said once on the way to Fenway Park, “but isn’t it funny that New York is the only state that ends with the letter K?” And damned if he hadn’t missed the entire first inning going over all the state’s names, trying to find another one that ended in K. She had been right.

  Ursula held up three fingers.

  “My New Year’s resolutions,” she said. “Find a place to live. Try out for Jeopardy. Stay away from The Monster.”

  She bent her head. Jams saw that it was the same orange color all the way through.

  “The last is the hardest,” she said. “His name is Jack, you know. I used to tutor him in college. History. I was always pretty good with facts. He was a big football player. All-state and everything.” Even now, years later, saying this made her blush with pride. “I was a nobody and here was this big hunk of a guy, practically famous, and he liked me. We thought for sure he’d make the pros. Pittsburgh paid a lot of attention to him and we were so sure. I’ve got to get over that feeling of not being worthy enough for him. That’s the thing.”

  Jams nodded.

  Then he did something he had tried hard not to do for a long time. He thought of Cal, pushed her image to the front of his mind and forced himself to remember something out of the haze he had put her in.

  Ursula was saying, “His hands are huge. He could kill me with those hands. But I remember them best the way they cradled a football.”

  He thought suddenly, clearly, of Cal’s legs. Beautiful long legs, thin but taut with muscles. She used to ski when he’d first met her. Once he told her that her legs were better than Betty Grable’s. During lovemaking, she’d wrap her legs around his waist and he could feel the muscles in her calves, flexing, clutching.

  “You know,” Ursula said, “he won’t even watch the Super Bowl.”

  Jams tried to set the images out of focus now, but one remained. Cal’s mouth. It had become set, firm and pushed downward slightly. My God, he thought, she’s been so unhappy for so very long.

  “She always wanted to be a writer,”’ he said.

  “What? Your wife?”

  “A poet. People said she was good. Some old boyfriend of hers moved up to Montana and actually got to be quite well known. He writes about wolves and winter. Depressing stuff but you can see him in The New York Times now and then. He used to say she had talent. But you know, you have kids, a family, you get responsibilities.”

  Ursula nodded.

  “It takes a special kind of person,” she said.

  “To me,” he said, “poems are too vague. At least in a story, in a book, people say what they mean.”

  “Yes,” she said, “I feel that way.”

  “My son dying,” Jams said, “was the single most horrible thing in my life. My life ended too with that phone call. I stopped knowing who I was. I had that phone in my hand and this terrible news and I couldn’t figure out why I was sitting in this living room in Rhode Island with this stranger. This stranger who was my wife.”

  They didn’t talk on the way back.

  Ursula drove slowly along the icy roads, bent over the wheel. It had snowed while they were inside the restaurant and the new snow settled on everything like a sugar glaze.

  Jams felt emptied. Dry. He sat straight, his gloved hands folded in his lap, his insides feeling like dead autumn leaves. He thought of Mackenzie and Sam, the two people who were still his family, but they too seemed distant and remote, as far from him as his wife driving around out west somewhere, unreachable. He felt too old for this.

  The car skidded in the parking lot.

  Jams thought of reaching over and grabbing the steering wheel. But he didn’t move.

  Ursula smiled when they parked.

  “I still remember that from driver’s training,” she said. “Turn into the skid.”

  She was proud of herself.

  Jams reached over then and turned off the car, turned the key in the ignition, as if that action meant something. And then he took Ursula’s round face in one of his gloved hands and kissed her. Close up, she smelled like a flowery perfume, like the junior prom, and her freckles blended together. There were so many of them that they actually blurred into her skin, giving it an orange glow.

  The kiss did not wake him. It made him, instead, feel old and foolish, sitting in a baby-blue Volkswagen Rabbit and kissing a freckle-faced woman with orange hair. He sighed.

  Ursula turned her face toward him, having shaped it into a smiling moon. She had taken, he supposed, the sigh for one of pleasure.

  “Thank you,” he said, and started to leave before he remembered they lived in the same place.

  She took his arm and held it as support against the icy path. He thought of her on television, on Jeopardy, listing the buildings with the largest unsupported domes. “What are St. Peter’s Basilica, the Capitol, the capital buildings in Providence and Madison, Wisconsin?” She would win big and be happy.

  In the elevator, Ursula pressed the buttons for their floors. His was first, and she wedged herself between the doors. They kept dinging and trying to close, but they would hit her arm, then slide back. She was, he thought, waiting for something and so he leaned over and kissed her again, this time pressing her against him. She was soft in all the places Cal was tight, waist, arms, hips. He thought again of Cal’s legs, wrapped tight around: him, calves straining, and this memory aroused him for just an instant. And in that instant he heard his own breath quicken. It was a moment, a second, of passion. His first in a long time. Then it passed and he freed his grip. Her freckles separated on her cheeks and he shoved her backward lightly so that the elevator door closed with a final, firm ding.

  He looked down. In his hand he held a tube of lipstick, half a roll of Certs, and three pennies, all from her coat pocket.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  IRIS’S FLAT WAS BIG, a sprawling long apartment with rooms opening onto each other. She had shared it with many different roommates, each of whom had left for a bigger apartment, or to get married, or for a better job in a new city. They all left something behind—a framed poster that said “Tanglewood 1982” over a black and brown piano, a lamp shaped like a goose, a batik rug from Jakarta. Iris’s own things reflected the stages she’d been through. She had an oversized purple bean bag chair, a colorless couch, and a large crystal pyramid on a low table. Nothing went together, but it all fell into a lopsided harmony.

  She compulsively dusted the apartment. She stood on chairs to reach the tops of the cupboards and the refrigerator. She ran a cloth over lamps and frames and then polished her crystal pyramid until it glistened.

  Iris was dusting when the doorbell sounded, a long hesitant croak like an old man wheezing. When she looked out the window and down at the street, there was no one there.

  Iris shook her head and climbed back onto the chair. It had been a strange week.

  Yesterday she had received a letter addressed to Cal Porter, in care of Iris Bloom. Iris hadn’t been sure what to do with it. She considered opening the letter. But wasn’t that a federal offense? It did have her name on it, which seemed to make it all right, but there was that “in care of.” Didn’t that mean she should take care of it until she could hand it over to Cal?
That posed a whole new problem. How was she supposed to give it to Cal? From what Iris understood, that whole family had fallen apart since Alexander died. Daisy had told her that Mr. Porter was in jail, or a hospital somewhere. Mackenzie had quit a good-paying job to do freelance stuff in New York. And Cal had up and disappeared. They had even rented the house out. The house being occupied by a different family really got to Iris. That house had become in Iris’s mind a symbol of family, of a home. Like a Norman Rockwell painting come to life. If that was gone, what was left of anything?

  Iris had even called the post office and asked them what to do with the letter.

  “Open it. Keep it,” the woman said. “Just don’t mail it. At least not until after Christmas. We are up to our noses in mail here.”

  “Well, of course you are,” Iris had said. “You’re the post office.”

  The letter sat, unopened, in the hall on a mahogany secretary an old roommate had left behind. She had left several other antiques. An ornate clock that chimed loud and heavy every hour and a lamp with a green tasseled shade.

  Iris’s boyfriend had said to just leave the letter alone. He was also her name therapist, and a stand-up comic. His own name was Lloyd Gray, which had caused him a lot of distress, since the meaning of Lloyd was gray. So, in essence, he was named Gray Gray.

  Iris opened the window and shook out the dust rag. It was an old T-shirt of her last roommate’s, CAMP BEVERLY HILLS, it said in fat pink letters.

  “What a week,” Iris said.

  Just this morning Daisy had called and told her not to be surprised if Mackenzie and Sam came by.

  “In fact,” Daisy had said, “they probably will.”

  “Mackenzie and Sam? Here?”

  “They’ll be in town.”

  “Wait a minute,” Iris had said, “last week you called me up and you were hysterical—”

  “Upset,” Daisy said.

  “Whatever. You couldn’t believe you were letting Mackenzie have Sam for the holidays.”