The Missing Person

by Alix Ohlin

  Angus’s hat was on the passenger side, neatly folded in half along its sweat-stained brim. I crammed the Sinatra tape inside it and threw them in the back, where I wouldn’t have to think about either one.

  On the streets of Albuquerque, young guys in lowriders with family names calligraphed on the back windows were cruising around, bass lines pounding from their stereos, staring harshly at drivers whose cars bore different family names. Skateboarding kids were taunting children on foot. I noticed huge, disheveled crows hanging out on all the power lines and stray dogs meandering down the dirt alleys, skulking against walls and crossing streets heavy with traffic. At an outdoor coffeehouse a homeless man was busing people’s tables, whether they were done or not, then begging for change. Everybody I saw was suntanned and squinting.

  My first stop was the university library. I wanted to look up the artist of my father’s paintings—as I’d come to think of them, even though I couldn’t remember him ever talking about them—and see whether there was any information about Eva Kent’s life and work. At the computer I went through the usual rituals—my father’s name, his book on the screen—before proceeding to my scholarly tasks. There was a reassuring familiarity to the stacks of torn scrap paper by the terminals, the useless stubby pencils, the Library of Congress classifications. I was in my element, or as close to an element as I had.

  I rummaged through the sections on New Mexico artists of the later twentieth century, flipping through journals and small-press books and leaflets for any sign of her name.

  Two hours of looking yielded exactly one item about Eva Kent, a 1978 magazine article about a show at the High Desert Gallery that contained none of her work. But scattered throughout the article were pictures taken at the opening-night reception: men in mutton-chop sideburns, women in dirndl skirts and turquoise squash-blossom necklaces. Everybody was smoking and looked drunk. One black-and-white photo showed two men laughing their heads off on either side of a lithograph; behind them, frowning slightly, was a woman. The caption read: “Ernesto Salceda, Bruce McGee, and Eva Kent.”

  She had parted her long, black hair down the middle—a habit she must have adopted years earlier, because the part had widened to reveal a stripe of scalp. She had a substantial, commanding nose and a wide, tight-lipped mouth. She looked like someone who’d never spent a day lying on a couch eating ice cream in her entire life. Also, there was one other thing: she was unquestionably, enormously pregnant, but she didn’t carry herself like any pregnant woman I’d ever seen, at least anyone who was that far along. She didn’t have her hands clasped beneath her belly or resting above it, wasn’t sitting down or leaning back to compensate for the additional weight. Instead she was leaning forward, rather daintily, and frowning at the lithograph, ignoring the two men beside her, a cigarette burning in her right hand.

  I sat for a while looking at the picture, turning possible events over in my mind. Eva Kent had a child, then painted the reverse pietà. As a portrait of motherhood, it was less than idealized, that picture of hers. From The Wilderness Kiss to The Ball and Chain wasn’t exactly a sentimental journey, and I couldn’t help wondering what had happened to her later. Since there were no other references to her after that opening in 1978, it occurred to me that maybe she’d stopped painting after having the child. I could do something with that, though it would be better, for what I had in mind, if something really bad had happened to her—a greater tragedy than the feminine mystique, that is. This was cynical, but no less true. Suzanne’s surrealist had died young of his brain tumor, whose side effects supposedly accounted for the more egregious imagery in his work.

  I thought back to the night Michael and I wrote the abstract for my dissertation. The artists I was researching showed in alternative spaces and staged performance art, embracing the female body in all its sexuality and powers. They celebrated the vaginal imagery in O’Keeffe’s flowers and made a heroine out of Frida Kahlo. My project was supposed to reexamine this time period using the very modernist terms these women had worked so hard to defy. Michael thought it would make a big splash, but felt that I had to find the right kind of artists, and not performance artists, to elevate and promote.

  “You need a Georgia,” he’d said. “You need a cult of personality.”

  “Greeting cards in the making,” I’d answered lazily, trying not to fall asleep. “Coffee mugs and calendars.” We were in bed in his apartment, on a quiet Saturday evening, and Marianna was at a conference in Denmark. Those were the most peaceful nights I ever spent in New York: half-asleep and half-awake, books on the blankets, the noise of the city far away below us.

  As I looked back on it, that conversation seemed a long way from staring at mediocre paintings in Albuquerque, and I asked myself how I’d gotten from one place to the other. I’d started studying women artists in college, once I’d gotten through the basics of art history and noticed how male-dominated it was. I thought I could understand their anger and defiance; by dealing boldly with their own bodies, they were taking control, asserting their presence. For a while I adopted an angry attitude myself, toward men and especially my father, whose quiet conventionality I saw as a patriarchal crime.

  “I have cramps, Dad!” I’d make sure to tell him. “I’m bleeding.” I wanted to make him uncomfortable, which was never hard. He’d offer me an aspirin and quickly exit the room. During these years we had few easy conversations, and only when I was starting grad school did I stop attacking him—too busy, I guess, defending myself against the onslaught of life in New York. We’d begun, then, to talk about other things, news, weather, anything, like ordinary adults; but he died before things could get fully normal again.

  In the library I went downstairs and sat at a computer terminal, hesitating only a moment before I started to write.

  Dear Michael,

  How’s France? I have exciting news. I believe I have stumbled upon exactly the necessary material for my project. Thank you so much for pushing me into more active research. There is a set of paintings here that I believe to be quite extraordinary, and I feel with them the strong personal engagement you always said was required for the best scholarship. I have come across a female painter who deals with issues of the body with a remarkable mixture of formal skill and ideological heft. Her name is Eva Kent, and I’m researching her other work right now. I think you’ll be pleased. Thoughts on how I should proceed?

  Cheers,

  Lynn

  Whether I really thought the paintings were extraordinary was beside the point; I wanted Michael to think so. I knew him well enough to tell him what he needed to hear.

  I made a photocopy of the picture and left the library. It was almost noon, and at the coffee shop across the street I ordered a chicken burrito with green chile and listened to the fresh-faced students at the table next to mine debate the various merits, as hangover remedies, of bacon and eggs, French fries, and Tabasco sauce. On the other side of me a pointyfaced girl in a peasant skirt was writing furiously in a cloth-bound journal.

  Outside, traffic moved sluggishly from block to block and light to light. A woman with a baby strapped to her chest was jaywalking in between the cars, lightly brushing their hoods and trunks and fenders as she passed; it looked like some ritual benediction, her head canted to one side and a dreamy laxness in her gait. Traffic was slow but it had not in fact stopped, and people were honking. Still, she kept to her serene, peculiar route, and when she got to my side of the street I realized it was Irina.

  I ran outside and caught her by her arm, and she said, “Sister of Wylie!”

  “Hi,” I said.

  “I am so sorry to tell you I have forgotten your name,” she said.

  “That’s okay. It’s Lynn. I’m having lunch, would you like to join me?”

  “But I couldn’t impose.”

  “Please. It’s my treat.”

  “I would like to, then.”

  Inside, she sat down at my table and immediately started nursing the baby, who pulled at
her nipple with loud, aggravated sucking sounds. The hungover students, repulsed, cleared their trays in a hurry. I ordered a cheeseburger and a Coke, at her request, and brought them to the table.

  “So, Irina. How’s everything going? Have you seen Wylie?”

  She shook her head and looked as if she were about to say more, but then became distracted by the cheeseburger. She ate faster than anybody I’d ever seen. Her round, pretty face shone with sweat and happiness, and she kept nodding rhythmically as she chewed. In between bites she licked the juice from all her fingers in turn. The baby also seemed happier, sucking quietly, one little hand curving around her exposed breast. Irina put her hand on the back of the baby’s head. I finished the rest of my burrito and asked if she wanted dessert.

  “Oh, no thank you! But I would happily eat one of those burritos.”

  So I watched her demolish a whole other plate of food, nodding and smiling at me all the while. Her appetite was both impressive and off-putting, like an Olympic event you weren’t sure should actually be a sport. The baby went to sleep, and Irina tucked her breast back into her dress and kept eating. At the end of the burrito I held my breath, but she just picked up the Coke and leaned back, sipping on it with a contented air.

  “Ever since I had my baby I can’t stop eating,” she said. “I think I am afraid she won’t be nourished enough.”

  “She looks pretty happy,” I said. In fact the baby’s head was lolling out of the sling, heavy-lidded and drowsing, silvery strands of drool gathering at the corners of her mouth and fluttering gently as she breathed.

  “Yes,” Irina said, and belched. A few strands of her brown hair were stuck to her cheeks with sweat. “You know, when I was a little girl, I never knew there were things like this in the world, like cheeseburgers and burritos. No one ever told me that these things existed. But I think that somehow I knew. Because how else could I have come here, on a sunny day in June, to be sitting with you and eating such a wonderful lunch?”

  I laughed. “That’s a good question.”

  “I think so. Thank you for the food.”

  I told her she was welcome, and asked how she’d gotten to Albuquerque in the first place. I’d assumed she was a student, but then she told me her entire life story, slowly, while sipping her first Coke and then another. She’d grown up in Germany, then France, then Ireland. Her father was a doctor and her mother an artist, and they’d fled Prague in 1968, swearing they’d never go back. Which they didn’t; but neither did they settle anywhere else, and instead they kept shuttling their growing family—Irina was the youngest by far of six and, she suspected, an accident—from country to country, language to language. They turned whatever city they were inhabiting into a little country of their own devising, speaking their own private language, with layers of jokes and family references that grew over the years into a kind of insular dialect. Irina’s older siblings eventually rebelled. One married an Irish woman and settled in Dublin, refusing to speak even a word of Czech; his children were named Patrick and Siobhan. Another brother went back to the Czech Republic and swore that it was the only place he could ever live, though he’d never lived there before.

  When Irina was eighteen, she planned on studying accounting at a local university. But one day she was sitting with her parents in London, where they now lived, and watching the BBC, a nature special called Deserts of the World.

  The camera traveled to Africa, then to Asia, and finally to the American Southwest. It flew over the Chiricahua Mountains of Arizona like a bird. It blew, seemingly on the wind, to White Sands, New Mexico, over miles of glistening white dunes, shifting and forming, the sunset pink and explosive. “What . . . is . . . this . . . place?” Irina said to herself—and she whispered it to me across the table, slow and sibilant, hissing like a fanatic sharing a secret code. “And so I came here,” she said.

  “Because of something you saw on TV.”

  “Because I fell in love.”

  “With a place,” I said, though I meant it as a question, whose answer might encompass her baby. But she just nodded, smiling widely. Her expression was exactly that of a freshly married woman who’d just described how she met her husband. It seemed both ridiculous and plausible to me that she could have moved across the world for the reasons she’d given. All these people—these friends of Wylie’s, and Wylie himself—were motivated by such strange, off-kilter passions. They seemed to do things—leave home, draw plumbing diagrams, move to Albuquerque, New Mexico—just to feel the sway of those passions on their bodies, for the sake of surrendering to them. Irina’s face was flushed, her smile generous. And then the baby woke up.

  Psyche scrunched her face up and howled until we left the coffee shop and strolled through the streets, empty and hushed in the afternoon heat. I realized that we were heading in the general direction of Wylie’s place. My take-charge mood apparently had been left behind at the library, and instead of barging in and asking everybody where Wylie was or how I could find him, I decided to stick with Irina for a while and see if I couldn’t figure it out myself. She bent her head and sang a delicate little song to her baby in what I imagined was Czech. In the resplendent sunshine, with her falling hair and radiant cheeks, she looked like a sacred painting. I thought about the picture of Eva Kent in my pocket, her rigid posture and massive belly and burning cigarette—a motherhood that seemed totally unrelated to this one. I wondered how my father had ever come across her or her paintings in the first place, and what had happened to her baby.

  Irina had a key. Inside, the shades were drawn and the air was still and close but actually fairly cool. In the kitchen, above the sink, was strung a little clothesline, with cloth diapers, cloth kitchen towels, and plastic bags washed and hung up to dry. It was seriously advanced recycling. Sledge, the skinny brown dog, was curled up in a corner, snoring.

  “Thank you so much for my lunch,” Irina said. “I think, if it is not too rude, I may go lie down a little while with the baby now. You can wait here for him if you would like.”

  “Wylie’s coming here?”

  “I mean Angus.”

  “I’m not waiting for him,” I said quickly, and blushed horribly. Irina smiled and went into the back room off the kitchen as I stood there feeling stupid in every way.

  There wasn’t any furniture, so I sat on the floor. The apartment was very quiet. I could hear my own breathing, along with the dog’s. Then he made a deep sighing noise that wasn’t a sigh; a horrid stench overtook the room, and I hurried outside onto the landing, looking at the street full of falling-down student housing, lawns of sheer dirt, trash on porches, tape on windows. Lacking a cigarette or a magazine or anything to help pass the time, I pulled the photograph out of my pocket and examined Eva Kent’s scalpy part and thick fingers. She wasn’t wearing a wedding ring.

  Then I heard whistling and someone calling my name. Angus came sauntering down the street, his red hair sticking up, his back straight, his shoulders broad and muscular, his grin showing all his teeth. He was wearing yet another decomposing shirt. The instant I saw him, I knew that we’d be sleeping together again; it was a foregone conclusion. “A woman has needs” was actually the very first thought that went through my mind. I sighed. It was getting to be a very weird summer.

  He stopped at the base of the landing and squinted up at me. He was still grinning, and it seemed to be genuine. “I’m so happy to see you,” he said. “I think you have my hat.”

  Six

  After I told Angus that Irina was sleeping, he crouched down beside me and asked if I’d been drinking my water.

  “I know enough to drink water,” I said. My voice sounded surly to my own ears. “That was just a one-time thing.”

  “All right.”

  “It could happen to anybody.”

  “It happened to you,” he pointed out, raising his red eyebrows. I frowned at him, and he shrugged.

  Across the street, a couple of young guys came out from one of the dilapidated houses, one sitting d
own on their porch, the other leaning back into the shade cast by a large pine tree. They opened cans of beer and lit cigarettes, and the smell of smoke wafted across the street to where we were sitting. It seemed like pretty early in the day to be drinking, though I was hardly one to talk.

  “And now I find you sitting out here,” Angus said, “baking in the sun once again, without any sign of water, or even the protection that you yourself pointed out to me is so important. By which I mean a hat.”

  “First of all, I’m sitting in the shade. Second of all, the inside of that apartment reeks from your disgusting pet. And third of all, it’s really none of your business.”

  “My disgusting pet?”

  “That gassy dog.”

  “Oh, the dog,” he said, and waved his hand dismissively. “That isn’t a pet. He just lives with us. Pets are little slaves we maintain to convince ourselves that we can be kind to animals, while every other part of our lifestyle promotes the extinction of animal life. You know what’s the most disgusting part of this pet mythology? Paying hundreds of dollars for a purebred while thousands of strays are killed every year in pounds. Anyway, Sledge can come and go as he pleases.”

  “But you feed the dog,” I said, “and he’s living in your apartment. Isn’t he your pet in practice, if not in theory?”

  He threw back his head and laughed generously, showing the diminishing spray of freckles down his pale neck. “You’re sharp,” he said, “and I like that. You stand outside of things, and observe them, and form rapid judgments. I like that too.”

  This didn’t exactly strike me as a compliment. I felt tired then, and annoyed with myself. “It’s just . . .” I said, my voice dwindling. He leaned closer to hear me, and I could feel, beneath the general heat of the air, the more specific warmth generated by the closeness of his skin to mine. “You know, I keep looking for Wylie, and he won’t talk to me, and I don’t know why. I’m sorry.”

  Angus stood up and pulled me to my feet. We stood there for a second, holding hands, mirrored, swaying a little. “Don’t apologize for anything,” he said.