She laughed and pointed a finger at me. “That’s not what you told Donald. There’s no reason anymore not to tell the truth I’d appreciate it as an old friend—tell me the truth just this once.”
I could not remember what I told Donald nor was I sure what the truth was, the combination making me uneasy. I told the only truth I knew. “I don’t like being interrogated,” I said.
“Is that because lying makes you uncomfortable?” she asked.
After our first five intermittently blissful years together, Molly tended to put the most unflattering interpretations to the motives for my behavior. It didn’t help that she was at times (not that I ever admitted it) disconcertingly on the mark. It’s hard to live with someone so relentlessly intuitive. Eventually I confessed the worst, usually through the evasions of denial.
Caught up in nostalgia, I said to her, “When I was living with you, you were the only woman I ever loved.”
“Liar,” she said, and turned her face away so I wouldn’t notice that she was almost crying. I could tell that she wanted to throw something at me and I left the room to save her from her worst instincts.
45th Night
When Donald wasn’t interviewing for his sex book, he gave private classes in Self-Confidence and Public Speaking to corporate executives on the rise. In the interest of continuity and contributing to the upkeep of the house, Molly suggested that I take on Donald’s students until the prodigal managed his return.
I let it be known that self-confidence and public speaking were not areas of my expertise, but Molly said in the larger context that hardly mattered. She said self-confidence should be everyone’s expertise and she gave me a book Donald had written on the subject called, “You Are The Best You Even If You Don’t Know It,” which I found difficult to penetrate though I read almost every word, dozing from time to time but managing to get the pages turned. I had a sense of accomplishment when I finished the book, let myself believe I was ready to take on whatever came my way.
I had taught some over the years, but I had never imagined myself teaching Donald’s subject.
I tried different approaches. With my first client, a shy stutterer in his early thirties, who had inherited his hated father’s business, I did most of the talking, invented an expertise for my character that of course had no basis outside of the imagination’s presumption. After listening to twenty minutes or so of my inspirational prattle, the client got up from his chair and walked to the door.
“Is there a problem?” I asked.
“Please,” he said, speaking with more fluency than he had when he came in. “You sound just like my father.” I suppose I knew what he meant. In any event, I had been so full of myself during my encouraging talk, his walking out on me was a crushing blow.
I took the opposite tack with my next client, kept silent through most of the session while the man, a baby-faced hotshot executive still in his twenties, famous for his mercurial rise in the movie business, recited his shortcomings. At the end of the hour, he asked me my opinion on what he had been saying.
Having mostly tuned out through most of his tiresome recitation, I said that I mostly agreed with his assessment.
“Then why does everyone else in the world think I’m so great?” he said with unexpected belligerence.
“I can’t imagine,” I said.
“I get what you’re doing, man,” he said. “It’s brilliant, man, but I hate that kind of low-rent psychology. Totally hate it. I don’t have to take shit from anyone, man, and that includes you.” He was a small man but he stood in front of me, stood over me, with his fists balled. “When I feel this way, I want to kick someone’s ass.”
I played the hand dealt me. “Aces, man,” I said. “That’s precisely the response we were looking for.”
Later, after super-brat left, prancing out on the balls of his feet, I reported to Molly that I was getting the hang of the self-confidence racket.
“I was listening in,” she said, “and let me be the first to tell you, you have a long way to go to fill Donald’s shoes.”
When she said that, I realized that I was at the time actually wearing a pair of Donald’s shoes, which aside from pinching the small toe on my right foot, were a near perfect fit. “I’m open to pointers,” I said grudgingly.
“You have to be tougher with them,” she said. “Let them know who’s calling the plays.”
I let her remark echo in my head, listening for murmurs of irony, but I heard none. “Is that right?” I said, a further prodding.
She continued in her sternest manner. “I’ll assume that’s a rhetorical question,” she said. “Didn’t you read Donald’s book? You have to teach by example, Jake, show them from the way you handle yourself the virtues of self-confidence.”
“Fuck off,” I roared at her.
Eventually, when she returned to the den after her composure had been restored, her tears dried, she said with unmediated dislike, “Well, maybe you’re not as hopeless as I thought.”
For a flickering moment, my confidence soared off the charts.
And so I made my long delayed move, which led to a hectic chase around the apartment, chairs and tables flying in our wake, everything that had been together coming apart, questions and answers, unexpressed feelings, pages of a long discarded uncompleted manuscript.
46th Night
And then one morning Molly went to the drugstore for some unspecified items and didn’t return. Confident to the point of insentience, I waited three days without undue concern, with barely diminishing expectation, expecting her to walk through the door at any moment.
On the fourth day, I accepted the possibility that she might not be coming back.
On the fifth day, with a sense of urgency, I gave up the house to search for her, armed with the only head shot of her I could find. It was the bruised photo that lived in my wallet and was, by unreliable estimation, thirty years out of date.
When I showed the photo to our local druggist—we actually had two local druggists—he said he couldn’t be sure and that he was a man made uncomfortable by uncertainties.
“I’m looking for an older version of this woman,” I said.
“I understand,” he said, “but as students of aging have discovered, no two people grow older in exactly the same way.”
I had never known him before to be so exacting. “Did you see anyone like her?” I asked. “Anyone remotely resembling her?”
“Oh that’s a different question altogether,” he said. “If it comes to that, I’ve probably seen a lot of women like her.”
I couldn’t imagine what he meant, but I persisted in my questioning. “Did a woman resembling her come in three days ago at about this time of day?”
When I handed him the photo again, he glanced at it briefly and then slipped it into a drawer under the counter.
“It’s not impossible,” he mumbled, and turned to a woman who had just come in with a prescription to be filled.
“If you don’t mind, I’d like the picture back,” I said and then repeated in a louder voice when he continued to ignore me. And then repeated again.
Under the guise of waiting on his other customer, he pretended that I was invisible and without voice.
I found that intolerable.
My patience as always on short leash, I stepped behind the counter to reclaim the photo of Molly which, stuffed into an oversubscribed drawer, had attached itself to a random condom. While I was trying to detach the condom, a storewide alarm went off.
The blast of sound unnerved me. The photo with the condom hanging from it like an appendage held delicately between thumb and forefinger, I ran from the store.
I noted a police car coming down the street and I ducked into a phone booth, where I hung out in a debilitating crouch until two cops emerged from the police car, completed their business in the drug store and drove off. During this extended period, I worked at liberating the condom from the photo with limited success.
When I enter
ed the second and larger of the two local drugstores, there was a cop already there, browsing among the mouth washes. I couldn’t turn around and leave without attracting the wrong kind of attention.
I picked up a package of aspirin and then in another aisle a nail clipper from a low shelf only to discover the oversized cop standing behind and above me. “I use my teeth,” he said.
It took a moment for the context to fill itself in. “That’s very funny,” I said.
“Of all the opportunities out there for a man of my size,” he said, “there were only two that attracted me, police officer or late night TV host.”
“And which did you choose?” I asked, the question escaping the restraints of better judgment.
His eyes turned mean. “Didn’t your mother ever tell you,” he whispered, “never to get sassy with a man carrying a gun?”
“It was meant as a joke,” I said. “Like you, I also wanted to be a stand-up comic.”
“You’d never make it with that joke.” He had his hand now on the butt of his gun, seemed unappeased. “You’re not the condom thief, are you, there’s an all points alarm out for, eh?”
I looked at him in disbelief, wondered if I could make it out the door before he could unholster his weapon.
“Are you the perp who goes from pharmacy to pharmacy, stealing party hats?” he asked. “Have I got your number, Jack, or what?”
“Not at all,” I said with the over-earnest conviction of a poor liar.
“Don’t get so worked up,” he said, cackling. “I was just pulling your middle leg. I had assumed, stupid me, that you knew the drill.” He took something off a shelf—a box of condoms perhaps—and stuffed whatever it was in his jacket pocket and made a hasty exit.
A woman working the checkout, no one I’d ever seen, before beckoned in my direction, and it took awhile for me to realize that it was me she was requesting. “Are you the guy looking for his wife?” she whispered to me when I approached.
“She’s no longer my wife,” I said, “but yes.”
“I thought you were the one,” she said, shielding her mouth with her hand. “Two men came in just as she was paying her bill and she went off with them. I don’t believe… It didn’t look to me like she wanted…”
When she stopped in mid-sentence, I realized that someone who disapproved of this conversation was standing behind me.
It was the owner of the store, the pharmacist Dr. Andsons. “Is there a problem?” he asked.
“What do you mean by problem?” I said, taking the crumpled photo out of my pocket, the condom still hanging to it by a thread. “Have you seen this woman in the last few days?” I asked.
“Who wants to know?” he said, looking everywhere but at the picture itself. “I’ll tell you this, I may have seen that rubber in its prior life. If I didn’t sell the nasty things, I wouldn’t allow them in the store. What’s the condom got to do with the woman, as if I couldn’t guess?”
“Forget the condom,” I said. “There’s only a circumstantial connection.”
“That’s a line that’s made the rounds.”
I held one edge of the picture while he held the other, studying the photo with an almost frightening intensity. “This is my picture,” he said. He tried to kiss it but the condom got in his way and he drew his head back in disgust. “This woman, Alma, disappeared from my life twenty-five years ago. What’s your connection to this, Bo.”
“This woman has nothing to do with you,” I said. “This is a picture of Molly, my former wife Molly. She left the house three days ago to go to the drugstore and I haven’t seen her since.”
“She never liked the name Alma,” he said, still clutching his corner of the photo. “She thought it too arty-farty. It was her one fault. So that may explain the change of name, okay? Whatever she chooses to call herself, I still miss her. Hell, I’d take her back in a nanosecond.” He tugged on the photo and came away with the attached condom half of it. His elegiac moment was replaced by self-righteous anger. “I’ll give you thirty seconds to get your keester out of here before I call the police,” he said, and started counting. I let twenty seconds elapse before making my exit.
My half-picture in hand, I went back to the house, hoping someone might have returned in my absence, Molly in particular, though I had long since given up being absolute. I would have settled with reasonable contentment for anyone.
47th Night
Anticipation tends to defeat itself. The house was empty on my return but there was a letter concerning Molly waiting for me in the vestibule. It was poorly spelled, mostly ungrammatical and eccentrically punctuated, though its intent was undeniable. The gist of it was, that if I wanted to see Molly again alive and unharmed, it would cost me a hundred thousand dollars in small bills.
This was their sale price, they said, a bargain considering the value of the hostage. They would contact me again (reported a postscript) concerning arrangements for the transfer of the money.
One hundred thousand was a lot to ask for a woman who was no longer my wife. When I looked closely, I noticed the letter was actually addressed to Donald. I gave a sigh of relief until it struck me that in Donald’s protracted absence—he had not left a contact number or forwarding address—the burden of Molly’s safety was in my impoverished hands.
To the best of my memory, I had eight-hundred-twelve dollars and thirty seven cents in my checking account and another two-hundred in one of my socks so if I was going to ransom Molly, I needed to raise ninety-nine thousand or so in short order however it might be done. I tried to be systematic, which had never been my strong suit. There was little chance I could raise that much without resorting to crime and I played out that scenario briefly before rejecting it absolutely. Borrowing seemed the last and least fraught of my limited options, and I wondered if I had any rich friends I hadn’t thought about for a while.
Pacing the hallway, wandering the various empty rooms of the house, accruing desperation like moss, I had a brainstorm. ninety-nine thousand would seem like chump change to Molly’s business exec father. So I phoned Buck, who I wasn’t even sure was still alive from an old number which yielded another and then another. He was in a hospital somewhere in California, a woman with a husky voice told me, and was not expected to return home. He was in the cryogenics ward, though no irrevocable decisions about his future had yet been made.
I took down the hospital number, and knowing it was a longshot, expecting nothing, I got Buck on the phone at first try. “Good to hear from you,” he said, though he had no idea who I was. “How much is this going to cost me?”
I laughed, though I knew he wasn’t joking. “The money is not for me,” I said. “It’s for Molly, your daughter Molly.”
There was a prolonged silence at the other end.
“Are you there, Buck? I’m calling about Molly.”
“Whatever she may have told you about me, it’s all lies,” he said.
“It’s not about what you did. She’s being held for ransom by kidnappers.”
“She’s just a child,” he said. “If you showed yourself in person, old as I am and sick as I am, I’d break you in half. You hear me?”
I explained that I was the one trying to get her released, but he persisted in confusing me with the kidnappers.
“How much would you take to let my little girl go free?” he asked in a bullying voice.
“Buck, I want her free as much as you do,” I said. “The kidnappers are asking a hundred thousand dollars.”
“Would you take fifty?” he asked. “Fifty is a very generous offer.”
“Anything you’d be willing to give would help,” I said, “but to get her released I have to raise one-hundred-thousand.”
“Get a real job, you bum,” he said. “I’m willing to pay forty. Take it or leave it. And I want her back all in one piece. You haven’t removed any parts, have you? I want everything put back in its original place or we have no deal.”
At this point, someone, a nurse perhaps,
took the phone and asked me to identify myself. I said I was a former son-in-law calling about his daughter.
“I can’t allow you to upset him,” she said. “If you told me what you wanted, perhaps I could present the news to him in a way that would disturb him less.”
I wasn’t prepared to discuss the issue of Molly’s ransom with someone I’d never met. “It’s a personal matter,” I said. “It’s also urgent.”
“Is it?” she said. “I’ll give you two minutes to tell me what this is about and then I’m hanging up. Is that clear?”
I lost about forty seconds reviewing my alternatives and then I told her as succinctly as possible the problem I faced. She laughed when I finished my story.
“You’re barking up the wrong tree,” she said. “I hope that’s the appropriate phrase. I’m here to tell you that Henry no longer has any money in his own name. It was all...”
“Henry?” I said, interrupting her. “I was led to believe the man I was talking to was my former father-in-law, Buck.”
“Oh no,” she said. “Henry has been given Buck’s bed. Of course we changed the linen. Buck was frozen two days ago.”
48th Night
Waiting for the kidnappers to get in touch again, I emptied my bank account into small bills. I got a call the next night and a muffled barely audible voice asked if I had gotten the money together. “Not all of it,” I said, which was a major understatement.
I could almost hear the mental machinery grinding on the other side of the line. Finally, whoever it was said, “Maybe you don’t want your wife back in one piece. Maybe you don’t want to see the little woman ever again.”
“When we split up—the truth is, she dumped me—I used to feel exactly that way,” I said.
“We might be able to take a little less,” the muffled voice said, “but then we can’t guarantee the condition you’ll get her back in. How much you got?”
I was embarrassed to tell him. I wasn’t always this broke. It was alimony payments on several fronts that had reduced me to my present circumstances.
Dreams of Molly Page 3
