The Missing Person

by Alix Ohlin

  Then I went back into the motel room and shook Angus awake. “Why do you have this?” I demanded.

  He rolled over, his freckled face creased by the polyester bedspread. “What are you talking about?”

  “A gun. You have a gun. You have wads of cash and a gun.”

  “This is New Mexico. Everybody has a gun.”

  “I don’t have a gun.”

  “You do right now,” he pointed out. “And I wish you wouldn’t wave it around.”

  “Explain this to me.”

  “Fine,” he said. He rolled to his side, quicksilver fast, and he had the gun out of my hand before I knew what was happening. He pointed it at the wall and shot, the gun making a surprisingly docile sound. I walked over to the wall and saw a BB embedded in the brown wallpaper, small and silver as an earring.

  “I’m a peaceful person,” Angus said, “but I spend a lot of time alone in the desert, and going alone into people’s houses. Sometimes it helps to look less peaceful than I am.”

  “Oh,” I said, rubbing my fingers over the bubble of the BB in the wall. When I turned around to apologize, he was asleep and snoring again, the gun dropped to the floor.

  I lay down next to him and listened to the drone of traffic from the highway, the shuffling noises people made as they moved in and out of rooms. The occasional rustle of Angus moving. The rhythm of his breath.

  Nine

  Here’s what I learned in the flat hot days of early July: Angus loved his work. He left each day in the purple van, whistling as he went, his coveralls shining whitely, like movie-star teeth. He came home grinning with exhaustion and scrubbed himself clean with the rough towels of whatever motel we were occupying. In the evenings he washed his coveralls with bleach at a laundromat and folded them carefully. He seemed to get paid well and in cash, with which he paid our room bills. I had no urge to go back to Wylie’s, and Angus, apparently, didn’t mind. He kept whatever he needed in the van, and if he went back to the apartment he didn’t tell me about it. When we craved a change of scene we moved to some new dive, off the highway where the truckers stayed, or downtown, where our shiftless neighbors lounged all day on their balconies, drinking Tecate and watching the cars go by.

  “When the water stops,” Angus told me at night as we lay in the sheets holding hands, “everything stops. And when the toilet doesn’t work, people can’t even stay inside their homes. They stand outside wringing their hands, waiting for the van to come down the street. They never think about plumbing until it goes away, and then—” he laughed—“panic.”

  “So you like the panic, or calming the panic?” I said.

  He laughed again. “Both.”

  I thought about going back to the condo, but couldn’t bear the idea of staying there. I did slink back once, when I knew my mother would be at work, and took the Caprice. Every couple of days I left her messages, also during the day, saying I was fine. The machine always played her cool recorded voice telling me to leave my name and the time of my call, and I assumed, since she never changed this recording, that she wasn’t very upset by my disappearance. She was probably relieved, I thought, after the dinner party and my rudeness to and about David Michaelson, not to see me for a while. I didn’t know where Wylie was, and judging by the way he’d bolted from the condo without turning around when I called his name, I didn’t think he wanted to know where I was, either.

  One day when Angus was off plumbing the depths, as he liked to say, of Albuquerque’s soul, I shook myself free from the spell of cable television and went back to the UNM library to check my e-mail. There was a message from Michael saying exactly what I’d expected.

  Dear Lynn,

  Delighted to hear that you’re having such a terrific time of it in New Mexico; I hope the state’s much vaunted natural beauty continues to inspire. I always knew that given the right topic your talents as a scholar would rise to the fore. It almost makes up for your absence here in Paris.

  I would suggest you collect all available biographical data on this painter of yours, and make the strongest possible case for the lineage and context of the work. Also, work on a detailed formal analysis of the two paintings and relate them to her contemporaries, both male and female. Your final two months of fellowship work should be extremely productive. I look forward to reading your work.

  Cheers,

  Michael

  This was quintessential Michael, cheerful and dismissive at the same time: the slightly patronizing remark about New Mexico’s natural beauty implying, by omission, its lack of cultural substance. (My first six months in grad school, he’d flirted with me by asking, practically every time we met, whether I liked New York better than Arizona; then he would stand back, his lip slightly curled in anticipation, and wait for me to correct him.) The backhanded compliments suggesting both that he had faith in my talents and that I had yet to actually demonstrate them. The quick forgiveness of my standing him up making clear how little he was hurt by it. His reminder that I had only two more fellowship months left, and no more institutional support after that. And then cheers.

  I gritted my teeth and set to work. I pictured the two desert paintings in my mother’s house, turning the images over in my mind. There was a certain amount of suppressed violence in both paintings. In The Wilderness Kiss, no actual kiss was depicted, yet the painting was clearly sexual; its arrangement of bodies, with the woman’s legs wide open, hinted that something wild was about to happen. The same was true of The Ball and Chain, in which the same woman lay collapsed and prostrate on what seemed to be her own son. They really didn’t seem like paintings a secretary would buy on behalf of her boss, and it was even harder to imagine my father choosing them as an appropriate gift for his wife. Then again, it was the seventies, and maybe things were different then, even in Albuquerque. In any case, I needed to find more about the real Eva Kent, where that violence had come from and what I could make of it.

  I spent the next few days searching for her in online sources, phone books, real-estate listings, school records. It was mind-numbing and time-consuming, but I liked it, even the paper-cut dreariness of it, for the form it gave to my days. I ran into problems, however. There were Kents in Santa Fe and Las Cruces and Albuquerque, and none of them were Eva. Nor did any of them know any Evas. I got hung up on, most of the Kents assuming I was a telemarketer choosing names at random and harassing them.

  “Eva? I told you my name was Ed! Leave us alone!”

  “Is this the collection agency again? I already said we don’t got no money.”

  “I knew an Eva once. Eva Chan. Lovely Chinese girl. Married an army fellow, I believe, and moved to California.”

  In the evenings, flushed with my exertions, I met up with Angus and drank gin and tonics on the balcony of the motel or, if it was too hot, inside the room with the curtains drawn and the ice bucket sweating on the dresser. I insisted on dates and he agreed: we went dancing, to the movies, back to hear Jeanine sing her songs in the lounge. Afterwards we had sex and then I fell deeply asleep, velvet in relaxation, and never once remembered my dreams.

  This went on for almost a week, after which two things happened. First of all, I found a connection to Eva Kent. And second, Angus brought Wylie and me back together again.

  I was in the library looking through the annals of a Southwestern art association, rich with everything I hated about New Mexico: the parochial smallness of it, the manufacture of folk art into tourist kitsch, the white people declaiming about Navajo culture, the hippies raving about the mystical qualities of desert light. This was how an actual place turned unreal. I was getting more and more irritated, shaking my head and frowning and making little clucking sounds with my tongue. A young librarian kept passing by my table and I realized she probably thought I was deranged.

  The pages of the society’s records were first yellow and typed, then purple and mimeographed, the smell of aged reproduction machines still clinging to them. There wasn’t a single reference to Eva Kent. My mind was
wandering, and I’d realize after a few minutes that I had read the same paragraph four or five times.

  In the sunny dusty light I turned more pages and was rewarded, finally, by the fact that the keynote address at the society’s annual meeting in 1978 was given by “local art dealer Harold Wallace,” who spoke on “The Woman Artist: No Longer an Oxymoron,” which I supposed was progressive of him. In a black-and-white photo printed six months later in the society’s newsletter, he looked like a seventies playboy, with long, feathery dark hair, a leather jacket, and a big grin. There was a touch of Peter Fonda about him, and one of his eyebrows arched higher than the other, lending his smile a rakish effect. He had been instrumental, the newsletter claimed, in bringing fame to the artists he represented—but not Eva, I thought— and exhibited at the Gallery Gecko in Santa Fe.

  I went downstairs and checked the phone book. Gallery Gecko was no more, but an address and phone number were given for Harold Wallace, who to my surprise answered on the fourth ring, sounding aged and slightly sleepy, nothing like Peter Fonda at all.

  “Eva. Eva Kent,” he said. “I’m not sure I remember her. Was she kind of a stout gal, blonde, came from hard-drinking German stock?”

  “I’d guess she was on the thin side,” I said. “Long, dark hair parted in the middle? She made a pair of paintings, Desert I and Desert II, that belong to my family. I’m interested in learning more about her.” I was calling from a sun-blasted phone booth outside the library, and the receiver was hot and slippery in my hand.

  “Well, I’m not too sure,” Harold Wallace said. “There were a lot of those girl painters around in those days. Swarming around, if you know what I mean.”

  “Right,” I said.

  “We had some fun parties with all those girls. Ah, yes. Good times.”

  “Could you check your files or something?” I said. “It’s really kind of important to me.”

  “Files,” he said softly, as if he were about to drift off into either contemplation or a nap. “I’ve got some files somewhere.”

  “Maybe I could come by and take a look.”

  “Well, sure you can,” he said. “Come by any time, sweet-heart.”

  “How about now?”

  “Persistent little thing, aren’t you?”

  “I’ll be there in an hour,” I said, and hung up before he had a chance to refuse.

  I sped north in the Caprice along the parched interstate, which was adorned with the shreds of blown-out tires and flowered crosses marking the scenes of car-related deaths. I passed another billboard advertising the imminent construction of Shangri-la; in this one a man and a woman, their hair blond, their jewelry gold, sat drinking white wine at a bar overlooking a golf course as expansive as a sea.

  Harold Wallace lived in a well-kept adobe townhouse close to the center of Santa Fe, on a street where sunflowers and gladioli bloomed brightly next to desert plants in large pots. Every home wore a decorative ristra, a blue-tile accent, or a Kokopelli door knocker. When I rang the bell I heard him long before he got to the door, a slow rustling, and so I expected someone much more decrepit than the handsome old guy who ultimately appeared. He was wearing a long white shirt over loose-fitting gray trousers and a necklace composed of small, chunky silver beads. With thin gray hair falling to his shoulders, his skin splattered with liver spots and the occasional mole, he looked like an aging actor or a very successful guru. I was wearing shorts and a T-shirt, and for the first time since leaving New York I felt underdressed.

  “Well, I realize I don’t even know your name,” he said.

  The house had been decorated in tones of off-white and white, the scheme relieved by an occasional flash of beige. “Call me Harold,” he’d said, leading me to an off-white couch in a sunken living room and offering me a drink. When I requested water, he left the room and came back with a Mexican blue glass tumbler crowded with ice, lemon slices, and a matching blue straw. He kept looking, without even trying to hide it, at my breasts, and I let him, figuring it might help. I sat with the glass in one hand and my notebook in the other. Reclining opposite me in a wicker armchair, Harold flicked his thin hair over his shoulders, a weirdly girlish gesture, and asked in a broadly patronizing tone what he could do to help me with my “school project.”

  “It’s my dissertation, actually,” I said, straightening up and setting my glass on a bamboo coaster. “I’m intrigued by a pair of paintings that were purchased by my father, and that have your name listed on the backing. Desert I and Desert II, they’re called, as I said on the phone, with subtitles in brackets, painted in the late 1970s.”

  “And you said the name of the girl was—”

  “Eva Kent.”

  “Well, as I said, I don’t remember every painting I ever sold or gave away, especially not from those years. You’re too young to remember, of course, but the seventies out here in Santa Fe— well, you know. It was a good time to be alive and a man on this planet. A little too good, maybe. Sometimes things went a little bit over the top, over the edge, if you know what I mean.”

  “Not really.”

  “Well, maybe your father did. Sometimes paintings changed hands—well, you can see what I mean.”

  I tried to picture my father flirting with girl painters, or at all, and I couldn’t even come close to imagining it. Forced to attend neighborhood parties, he’d retreat to the edges, smiling awkwardly, making the hostess and other women uncomfortable; they’d go over and start conversations on subjects he cared nothing about, sports or community activities or municipal taxes, and he’d nod and smile politely without saying anything in return. Half a drink later, all talk would wither on the vine.

  “I doubt that about him,” I said. “He was kind of a straight arrow.”

  “Well, you would know,” Harold said skeptically. He spent some time staring blankly at a spot over my left shoulder. His eyes were an electric shade of blue, rare and attractive, marred by bloodshot streaks. I let a moment pass, thinking he was formulating some reminiscence; but he was just sunk in silence.

  “I think she had a child,” I went on. “In 1979. If you don’t remember the paintings, perhaps you remember the child.”

  “The late seventies,” Harold Wallace said, “were not a time for children. It may be difficult for you to imagine now, in this age of prudery, but back then it was all fun and sex and singles and swingers. When people had children, they left the scene.” He shook his head and smiled at the rug as if at an old friend.

  “You said you had some files? I’d love to have a look, if you wouldn’t mind. Maybe I could find something to jog your memory.”

  “Oh, yes,” he said slowly, still looking at the rug. “I do have a few files. You’re welcome to look through them if you like, my dear, but you’re not likely to find much. I traded a lot of my paintings for—how shall I put it?—black-market goods and services, if you know what I mean. We all did, as I was saying before. Things you wouldn’t necessarily want on your books.” I sighed and stood up, the image of my father as a seventies swinger still floating through my mind. I pictured him in his glasses and his receding hairline, his shirt opened halfway down his chest, a drink in one hand and a girl in the other. It almost made me laugh out loud. “Well, thanks for your time,” I said.

  Looking up, Harold seemed sad to see me go. “Are you sure you wouldn’t like a drink?” he said.

  “I’m sure.” I scanned the living room. There were no traces of any other person, no family photos, nothing.

  “Tell you what,” he said. “I’ll take a look through those files, and if I find anything I’ll give you a call.”

  “I’d be very grateful,” I said. His expression suggested he was wondering how grateful, exactly, so I gave him my mother’s number and fled.

  At the Route 66 Motel, I flung open the door and kissed Angus full on the mouth. He kissed me back, then gently moved me aside to get at a bag that was lying open on the floor. I saw a flash of metal and leather before he zipped it up. He was wear
ing work boots, but not the white coveralls.

  “What are you doing?”

  He didn’t say anything.

  The room was empty of all our clutter. My own clothes lay neatly washed and folded on the bed, inside a plastic bag from the grocery store. I felt suddenly sick. “You’re leaving,” I said.

  Angus put on his hat and pulled the brim down low on his forehead. His mouth was set in a strange flat line—strange because he smiled so much—and the creases around his eyes sank deeper into the skin than usual. I felt a horrid tingle in my blood, the onset of panic, and I sat down on the bed. He knelt on the carpet in front of me. My skin hurt; it was as if my body was grieving.

  “I want to come with you,” I told him.

  “Lynn Marie Fleming,” he said, “you are an obstinate person.”

  “Can I come or not?”

  “You don’t really want to. It could be dangerous. It could be, well, sublegal. It isn’t really your scene.”

  “I’m so sick of people talking about scenes.” I sounded like a child, even to myself, and I straightened up and looked into his pale eyes. “Tell me the truth. Do you not want me to come because you want to protect me, or because you’re sick of me?”

  There was a flash of freckled skin, and I was lying on my back on the bed, with Angus on top of me, his heart beating, slow and definite, against my chest. I could never figure out how he managed to move so fast.

  “You know the answer,” he said.

  “I’ll drive the Caprice.”

  “Well,” he said, “we could use another car.”

  At Wylie’s apartment, Irina smiled and waved enthusiastically, though I was standing only a few feet away, and I waved back, surprised by how pleased I was to see all of them, not just my brother, even Stan and Berto. They already felt like some kind of family. They were standing around the bare room, waiting, I realized, for Angus to show up. Wylie was slouching against the kitchen counter, and when he saw me he grimaced and said, “What are you doing here?”