The Missing Person

by Alix Ohlin

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, of course,” he said, staring down at his white carpet for another long moment. “I was doing a lot of stuff those days,” he finally said. “It was a time of experimentation, of pushing boundaries.”

  I nodded. “Yes, I know. I study that period. Experimentation with sexual politics, a push to be frank and honest about the body’s functions and desires.”

  “That’s not exactly what I meant,” Harold said wrily. “More like drugs and drinking . . .” His voice trailed off as I kept looking at him; then he added, “You can imagine the effect of that kind of lifestyle.”

  I had no idea what he was talking about: forgetfulness, or promiscuity, or sloppy personal hygiene? Then I did. If you do a lot of drugs and drinking, you can’t always follow through on the body’s functions and desires. From the darkness of his blush and the fact that he could not meet my eyes I understood that he was telling the truth, and that all his sexual bragging had been just that, an exaggerated fiction.

  “I know what you mean,” I said gently, almost wanting to put a hand on his shoulder. But if Harold wasn’t the father, I thought, then who was? I pictured Eva in my mind, and the vision was nightmarish: she was dribbling a can of gasoline around a room, deranged and leering, insane, while fire trucks howled outside. Putting my father in that picture with her was impossible, and yet I couldn’t stop thinking about it, either. I felt a kind of energy building inside me, a force that swam through my blood like intuition. Fragments turned and spun in my head: the disorienting paintings; Eva’s strange, grinning face; my father, who owned her only surviving work. I remembered the serious and distracted look he always had after a long day at the office, and now in my imagination this look took on a deeper, more romantic cast. All my memories were changing, shifting their forms. I saw an almost logical progression from past to present, from him to me, that was confirmed by the paintings propped against my dresser. The reason I’d felt that jolt of electricity, that lightning-bolt sense of recognition when I’d seen them, had to do the persistence of objects, the power of physical things, which were how the dead could communicate with the living.

  In The Ball and Chain there were slashes of paint on the woman’s body, all shades of red, thick as mayonnaise, raised and bumpy. Some reds had blue undertones, others yellow, some as dark as Daphne Michaelson’s red lipstick. I thought of the way she’d named colors, as if reciting a code. Light is what makes every color, she’d said, and can be both particle and wave—these were such weird statements coming out of her mouth, and not likely something she’d read about in the pages of Vogue.

  It made me wish I’d deciphered my father’s book on the temporal dimension in physics, and I thought, then, of Daphne standing alone at the backyard party, watching my father at the grill, watching the other women from inside the house. It occurred to me that she was trying to tell me something about my parents. She was there, after all, and could’ve seen everything that went on between my father and Eva Kent, between my mother and her husband. She’d identified the slash of red across her own face with a purposeful tone that was difficult to ignore; it was as if she were invoking the slash of red on the face of the woman in The Wilderness Kiss. And that light can be both wave and particle—what did that have to do with lipstick? Maybe nothing. Or maybe she meant that a single person can have two natures—that the father I knew was also painted by Eva Kent.

  “What institution is she in now?” I asked Harold.

  “It’s right by the yoga studio,” he said. “Linc rented that studio so they’d be close. He’s a good kid, visits her all the time. Enchanted Mesa, I think they call it. Don’t know where they come up with these names. There’s nothing enchanted about the place, I’ll tell you.”

  “Probably not.”

  “I guess you’ll be going,” he said, “now that you know the story.”

  He walked me to the door, looking defeated and sad. Before I could think too much about it, I leaned over and kissed his wine-sweetened lips. He accepted the kiss with a kind of stunned grace. “Thanks for your help, Harold,” I said. “I mean it.”

  “You’re welcome,” he said calmly. As I drove away I could see him watching me and leaning, as if swooning, against his front door.

  It was late afternoon when I got back to Albuquerque, the day windless and harsh. Children and dogs were splashing in pools, shirtless men bent over the hoods of their cars, joggers with skin tanned the color of chocolate milk. In a city park, under elm trees, an extended family was having a barbecue, heat from its coals funneling up through the air, and the bright trash of chip bags and soda bottles scattered around them. There was only one person I urgently needed to see.

  At our old house the butterflies still climbed across the walls, short of their destination. I rang the doorbell at the Michaelsons’ and waited for a full minute before Donny came to the door, looking as if he’d just woken up, the thick creases in his meaty cheeks reminding me, eerily, of scars.

  “You again,” he said. “Can’t get enough of me, huh?”

  “Right,” I said. “Can I see your mom?”

  “My mom? Why?”

  It was a perfectly reasonable question, and I wasn’t sure how to answer. Because I wanted to know exactly what she meant by “It’s a permanent wave”? This didn’t seem like the right thing to say. I smiled at him.

  “She must get lonely, sitting in that room all the time,” I said. “I thought she might like having visitors.”

  Donny frowned. “I don’t think she really gets lonely.”

  “How do you know?” I said. “Have you ever asked her?”

  “Uh, no.”

  “So you don’t actually know.”

  “I guess not.” He nodded slowly, then stepped back from the door and started down the hallway. Passing the kitchen, I saw Darren standing there; when he saw me, he waved, seemingly without surprise, and asked if I wanted a Popsicle. I shook my head no, and he shrugged good-naturedly. Donny knocked on the door of his mother’s room and let me in.

  “You don’t have to stay,” I said. “I’ll just visit with her for a few minutes.”

  He nodded again, slowly and a bit sleepily, and left.

  Daphne Michaelson was as beautiful and well-maintained as the last time I’d seen her. Her red nail polish looked professionally applied, and her hair shone. She didn’t look at me. She was reading Vogue and nodding sagely at the pictures, as if they were revealing truths she’d long suspected about the world.

  “Mrs. Michaelson,” I said, “What’s the permanent wave?”

  She lifted her head and stared at me, a band of irritation rippling across her face at the interruption.

  “Do you know who I am?” I said. She didn’t acknowledge the question, so I tried a different tack. I looked down at the glossy photos in her lap, where thin and gorgeous women were cavorting in an African savanna, wearing clothes of primitive and dangerous glamour; their lips were black and their teeth pointed and white. “I think those, um, fur-trimmed toga things are pretty,” I said. “Although I think it would be hard to walk around with all those claws and teeth, don’t you?”

  Daphne straightened her posture and smiled at me. “It’s only fashion,” she said in a confiding tone. “It isn’t about the everyday world.”

  “I guess you’re right,” I said.

  “I know I am.”

  “What did you mean about the permanent wave?”

  She smiled at me gently, as if she felt sorry about how dense I was, and I sensed she was going to tell me something important, an answer she’d been waiting to deliver for years. What she said was, “It’s a chemical process for altering the texture of hair.”

  Just then the door opened and David Michaelson came into the cool, dark room. Daphne went back to looking at her pictures, without acknowledging him in the least. I spent a second wishing hard that I was not here, or that he wasn’t. He was wearing one of his cowboy shirts with black jeans and a brass belt buckle. He was not
smiling.

  “Excuse me, Lynn,” he said. “May I see you outside for a moment?”

  I walked out on insubstantial legs. He held the door for me, closed it behind us, and then gripped me by the upper arm, hard, and marched me out of the house and to my car. I felt like a juvenile delinquent with an angry high-school principal. The sun outside was so bright it made my eyes water, and I must have looked for all the world as if I were crying. David stood with his hands on his belted hips, examining my face in a measured, leisurely fashion, like the lawyer he was. He smelled like sweat and men’s deodorant, that fake, pungent musk.

  “Why are you always here?” he finally said.

  “I think ‘always here’ is overstating the case a little.”

  “You’ve been here several times.”

  “I’ve dropped by once or twice to say hello,” I said.

  David snorted at this response, and I couldn’t blame him for it, really. He shook his head and tried again. “Why do you keep coming over to my house?”

  “I didn’t think you’d mind,” I said slowly, “since you’re always coming over to mine.”

  He breathed in sharply, his mouth open, and I could see his small, even teeth. Glancing away, I saw Donny and Darren watching us through the living-room window. Darren had an orange Popsicle in his hand; Donny grinned at me and waved. I waved back.

  “Is that what this is about?” David said. “You don’t like my relationship with your mother, so you’re coming over here as some sort of revenge?” The words “my relationship” sounded very strange coming from him. “Again, possibly you’re overstating the case a little,” I said.

  He sighed and looked off into the distance for a moment. I thought I saw a glimmer of wetness in his eyes, but it could have just been the glare. “My wife is a very sick woman,” he said. “She doesn’t live in the same world you and I do. But that doesn’t mean she can’t be upset by things. I don’t like for her to be upset.”

  In the house next door, the house where my mother answered the phone on the day my father died, staring at the receiver afterwards for a long time, as though it had grown utterly foreign to her—as if the world itself had grown foreign—a woman opened the front door and walked down the driveway carrying a large plastic cup with its own plastic straw. She opened the door to her SUV and waved in our direction. “Beautiful day, David!”

  “Sure is, Marlene,” he called back.

  I took advantage of this break in the conversation to walk around to the driver’s side of the Caprice.

  David looked at me over the hood, squinting.

  “I care about your mother,” he said, “and you should be better to her. You and your brother both.”

  I was stuck to the ground, paralyzed. What saved me was a blur of orange Popsicle in the window, which somehow reminded me of Angus: the smoothness of his warm skin, its ammonia smell, its sweet, abundant freckles. As soon as I saw him again I could forget all of this existed; I would be calm. Was that a definition of love: a force that can drug you with calm and help you forget all the sandpaper realities of the world? Why not? On the force of this question I was able to get in the car and drive away, leaving all the Michaelsons behind.

  Sixteen

  Almost as much as the condo or Wylie’s apartment or the motel rooms I’d shared with Angus, the Caprice had become a kind of home. Feeling at ease on its cracked vinyl seats, surveying its dark-red dashboard and ivory paint, I’d come to think of it as mine. So when I left the Michaelsons’ I spent a while just driving around the August-dead city, the flowers dry and nodding, the grass in lawns gone halfway to dirt. The white rocks in other yards looked skeletal in the sun, each one a bleached, miniature landscape worthy of O’Keeffe. At an Allsup’s I stopped for gas and a bucket-sized soda, its sweet cold shooting straight to my brain. At the counter, a middle-aged couple was arguing about the nutritional value of the fried, crusty burritos that lay baking under the orange heat lamps, while the teenaged clerk batted her long, fake eyelashes in boredom.

  At a pay phone in the back by the restrooms, I called information and asked if there was a listing for Plumbarama. There was, but the phone rang almost ten times before a man answered.

  “Yeah,” he said. It wasn’t Angus.

  “Is this Plumbarama?”

  “Who wants to know?” he said.

  His voice, growling and a little bit slurred, sounded vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t quite place it. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I must have the wrong number.”

  There was a pause. “I’m sorry too, lady,” he said, then hung up.

  I stood there for a moment sipping from my enormous drink, the sugar singing in my blood, and then called back. This time, the phone rang for almost a full minute.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “Is this Gerald Lobachevski?”

  “Who wants to know?” he said again.

  Now I was sure it was him. In the background, I could even hear faint trills of slot machines and country music. “This is Lynn Fleming,” I said. The only reaction was silence. A boy in a red uniform came toward me swiping a dirty mop over the dirty floor, and I flattened myself against the wall to let him by. “Wylie’s sister,” I added. “I’m looking for Angus?”

  “He’s not here,” Gerald said.

  “Where can I find him?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Can you tell him I’m looking for him?” I said.

  “No.”

  The conversation reminded me of the first time I met Angus, a memory that was dramatic and sensual in my mind: the dark, bare apartment, Angus bare-chested and heavy-lidded with sleep. The beginning of things. Angus then was every bit as unhelpful as Gerald was now; all he said was that Wylie had gone to the mountains, to grapple. Maybe Angus had some grappling of his own to do, or maybe his location couldn’t be discussed over the phone.

  “If you see him, tell him I have a plumbing job for him.”

  “I won’t see him,” Gerald said flatly, and hung up.

  I left the Allsup’s and kept on driving. Where do you look in a sprawling city for an eggplant-colored van? Nowhere in particular. I went back to the foothills, where Angus saved me from heat stroke, and drank the rest of my Coke and dozed a little in a shaded picnic area. I was half-convinced that he’d automatically know where to find me, because he had a knack for showing up at the right place at the right time, and half-convinced that I’d never be able to find him again, a possibility that crashed inside me with dread. Inside the park restroom was a scrawl that read, JODI S. WILL SUCK YOUR COCK FOR FREE, ASK AT ALLSUP’S ON CANDELARIA, which was where I’d just been. I thought of the bored young woman watching the burrito argument from beneath her long fake eyelashes, and wondered whom she’d antagonized and how.

  No one was home at Wylie’s. Turn your back on these people for more than ten minutes, I thought, and they completely disappear.

  I tried to think this through, from Angus’s point of view. Say he was looking, what did he know about where to find me? That I was uncomfortable at my mother’s, that I drove around a lot, and occasionally rifled through books at the library. So I headed to UNM, to the fine-arts section, and spotted a redhead asleep in a carrel next to the books on Southwestern art of the latter twentieth century.

  “Hey,” I said, shaking him. “Hey.” I wasn’t even going to pretend I wasn’t happy to see him. He woke up and pulled me onto his lap all in one second. Feeling his skin against mine was like coming home; it was like having questions only he could answer. He kissed me, his hands on the back of my neck. I moved around so I was straddling him. His hands moved down my sticky back, his mouth all over mine. We were jigsawed, meant to fit together, making a whole picture. He tapped on my shoulder, hard, and I leaned back to ask what he was doing. But it wasn’t Angus who had tapped.

  “Excuse me,” a young woman said, “but you can’t do that in here.” A student worker with a cart of books to reshelve, she looked dismayed in the extreme.

  I
reached a hand up to wipe my mouth. My whole face was wet.

  Angus said, “We were just leaving.”

  So it started again: long hours in a motel room, the Nalgene bottle full of gin, the sweet delirium of sex, the TV on low. Midnight found us lying together hip to hip, the sheets disheveled, and Angus said, “We’ve got a real rapport.”

  “If that’s what you want to call it,” I said.

  “We don’t have to call it anything.”

  “True enough,” I agreed, and fell asleep, breathing the smell of his skin.

  Angus woke up laughing, which I’d never seen anybody do. He sat up and put his arms and legs around me from behind, my back to his chest, still laughing.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “I was dreaming,” he said in my ear. “I was dreaming this.”

  It was another hour or two before we left the room. Angus suggested we go past Wylie’s and check in there; they needed to plan their next move, he said, now that the mountain project was over.

  “No plumbing today?”

  “I’m on a hiatus,” he said vaguely, and started the car.

  “You know, I called Plumbarama yesterday, looking for you, but they wouldn’t pass on a message.”

  “You did what?”

  “Called Plumbarama. I didn’t know how else to get in touch with you, short of calling all the motels in town.”

  He was staring at me. “How’d you get the number?”

  “It’s listed.”

  “What did you say when you called?” He looked worried, for the first time that I’d ever seen.

  “Why do you list the number if you don’t want people to call?”

  “Unlisted costs extra,” he said, leaning his forehead against the steering wheel. “Nobody ever calls.”

  “Maybe you should look into advertising,” I said.

  “What did you say?”

  “I said I was looking for you. I said I needed some plumbing done.”

  “You didn’t.”

  “I told him who I was.”

  “Told who?”

  “Gerald.”

  “How’d you know it was him?”