The woman was crying, and Fiona managed to make eye contact with Arnaud, who gave a small shrug. The man picked up his own half-empty glass and poured his remaining water into the woman’s. He checked that the waiter had his back turned, and then he wiped the glass with his napkin and shoved it into the woman’s purse.
The woman whispered in French, a protest, and he whispered back. Was this how they furnished her apartment, one pilfered dish at a time? The woman stood, miserable, and picked up her purse. They left quickly.
“Wow,” Fiona said. Her whiskey was gone.
Arnaud folded the paper, shook his head. “Some women are very stupid.”
“Excuse me?”
“What, you think she’s a genius?”
“You don’t know what it’s like to be with someone manipulative.” Though really, she didn’t know either. Damian had been older, sure, and he often turned professorial, lecturing and pontificating, but he never manipulated her.
Damian had supported her finishing school that year after the baby was born, and when Fiona had class she’d drop Claire off with a bottle at his office, where she was the little princess of the sociology department. She’d come back two hours later to find the room full of grad students cooing over Claire, holding a rattle for her. Damian was never anything but solicitous; the marriage’s failure was her fault, entirely. She’d offered once that if any new girlfriend called her up, she’d testify to his character, explain how she was the one with commitment issues. How her heart was too battered for anything like real love. When he got together with Karen, Fiona had repeated the offer. “It’s okay,” he said. “She knows.”
Arnaud said, “I see this all the time. What do you think I investigate? Half of it involves, okay, not-so-genius women in trouble with a man. I turn down jobs every week from guys like that who want women followed.”
Fiona told herself not to yell at Arnaud, whose assistance she didn’t want to lose. She said, “I’ve known men in that situation too. Men manipulated by women. Or by other men.”
Arnaud looked at his phone. “She texted.”
“Oh,” she said. “Okay. Okay.” And suddenly she was all nerves again. She tipped the chair back getting up, had to grab the table’s edge, nearly tipped that over as well.
* * *
—
Under other circumstances, it might have been an adventure. Watching for neighbors, scampering inside. But it was terrifying, nauseating. In the worst case, they’d find something horrible. Fiona didn’t believe Kurt would hurt Claire, but did you ever know a thing like that? She remembered something her own mother had told her one of the last times they’d really talked, right before Nico died. Fiona had been blaming her for not standing up to her husband, for letting him kick Nico out. They were in the hospital cafeteria. Her mother said, “You’ll never know anyone’s marriage but your own. And even then, you’ll only know half of it.”
The apartment was dingy and poorly furnished. A dead-rat-in-the-wall smell, rotting sweet. A big, divided room with an unmade bed at one end, a threadbare blue couch at the other. A small kitchen area, two empty bowls in the sink.
Arnaud had made her promise not to touch anything, and so she stood, helpless, in the middle of the place, turning circles as he explored. “The other closet is coats,” Arnaud announced, “but this one is dresses.” He stood at an open door near the bed. “You recognize any?” If she did, they’d have to be from Claire’s freshman year or earlier. She’d completely given up on the idea that Claire lived here with Kurt, but it couldn’t be ruled out. Maybe the woman with dark hair was just someone Kurt was having an affair with! She stood at Arnaud’s side and peered in. Pastel colors, which Claire hated. Nothing familiar. But there were sundresses and cocktail dresses in here. Not Hosanna clothes.
Arnaud held a whole dress out from the rack, the way you would at a store.
“Way too long to be Claire’s,” she said. This thing would drag on the floor. And there were no toys around, no child’s bed.
There were bills for Kurt Pearce on the small coffee table, and an empty greeting card envelope addressed to a Marie Pearce.
“Marie. She could be French,” Fiona said.
“Sure. Could be from New Zealand for all we know.”
Fiona looked in the bathroom. A medicine cabinet missing a door. Nothing abnormal inside, no antipsychotic drugs. Vitamins, ointments. A packet of birth control pills. The Hosanna did not believe in those.
To the right of the sink, a photo of a little girl had been tacked up in a plastic sleeve.
Oh, God. About three years old. It had to be the girl from the video. Had to.
Fiona felt something like an allergic reaction—tight in her throat, her chest—even as she wanted to sing, to grab Arnaud and waltz him around the apartment. Golden curls, eyes—eyes like Nico’s. Not much like Claire herself, who had resembled Damian even as a child: wan, glowering, lips thin and tight. When Damian was her sociology professor, Fiona had imagined his face suggested soul, a life of wisdom dearly earned. She’d never imagined it might come down to genes. But this little girl! She was a Marcus. Nico’s hair had started blond, had grown dark right as he sprang up tall, right as his voice dropped. Fiona grew suddenly shy around him that year, didn’t know how to relate to this strange, giant boy. And really she never learned again how to be his sister, because within a year or two she’d turned into his accomplice, his thief, his occasional mother.
This child: If you cut her hair, if you dressed her in the boy clothes of the 1960s, she was Nico.
With just her good left hand, Fiona pulled out the tack and drew the photo from its sleeve. There was nothing on the back. She wanted to take it. But she couldn’t do that.
“Look,” she said to Arnaud.
He grabbed it by the edges and said, “Ta ta ta ta ta! Don’t get fingerprints!”
Well, what had he been doing, touching everything, then? He laid the photo on the bed and took a picture of it.
He said, “It’s impossible not to get a spot of light.”
“Will you send me a copy?”
“Sure,” he said. “Sure.”
* * *
—
They didn’t find much else. Arnaud said, “Ten years ago, we’d be looking for an address book. Not so easy anymore.”
He opened the cupboard above the stove, rifled through boxes and cans. “What do you think of this?” He held out a brown cereal box on which a cartoon dog leaned over a bowl of chocolate flakes. Chocapic, it was called. The box bragged, C’est fort en chocolat! “Maybe for the little girl?”
“Well,” Fiona said. She didn’t want to let herself get too excited. A man who lived in an apartment like this, she thought, might eat those for dinner. But then she remembered that Kurt had always been a health nut, that the Hosanna Collective believed in biblical grains. He might have left the cult, but it would be odd to rediscover chocolate cereal in your forties. She opened the refrigerator, and although there wasn’t much, it was health food: plain yogurt, bottled green drinks, what seemed to be the French version of Tofurkey.
“Expires next spring,” Arnaud said, still looking at the box. “It can’t be so old. That’s good, yeah?”
The cereal did reignite some small hope, but she didn’t want to admit it.
Arnaud took more photos. Fiona sensed it was for show. What good would a picture of the sink do?
As they left, she fought the impulse to leave something deliberately askew, to bump a lamp or scrawl a question mark on the wall.
“We were never here,” Arnaud said. He turned the lock and closed the door behind them. “Goodbye, Kurt Pearce’s flat.”
* * *
—
Fiona wandered the Marais a long time, feeling awkwardly American here where there weren’t as many tourists. She showed Claire’s photo, with slightly renewed optimism, to waiters, t
o shopkeepers.
She showed it to a scraggy-haired man waiting on a corner with a long, narrow box. He turned out to be a Brit, and she was fairly sure he was stoned.
He looked at the picture a long time, and then he said, “Not everyone wants to be found.”
Fiona walked away insulted, and didn’t feel like talking to anyone else.
She circled back too close to Kurt’s apartment. Here was the place she’d had the whiskey earlier; she stopped to use the bathroom, feeling she had more right to do so here than elsewhere.
When she emerged, she hoped she’d see the fighting couple out on the street. Really, she hoped she’d see just the woman, alone, leaning against a window and crying. Fiona would wrap her up, take her back to Richard’s. She could save one woman, even if it was the wrong woman.
But the street was—as she’d known it would be—empty.
1986
Sunday was the day. Charlie would be working, even if he’d taken Friday off; Out Loud published on Mondays, which meant the paper was put to bed late Sunday night.
Early Sunday morning, Kurt’s father picked him up for hockey practice. He greeted Yale stiffly and whispered something to Cecily. The ex was a big man, big with both fat and muscle, in possession of a remarkably uncharming Irish accent. Yale could see the man in Kurt’s upturned nose, wide mouth. He wondered if it was best, in this situation, to come across gay (as in, not involved with Cecily) or straight (lest the man get deranged ideas about Yale’s interest in the eleven-year-old). He tried to act natural, which was probably on the gay side.
He did his laundry in the building’s basement, and then he took the El into the city. His feet, Cecily was right, were slowly dying in those shoes, even with socks. There was slush today on all the sidewalks, and in no time it had soaked through.
It was one o’clock. He walked, with the numb determination he imagined assassins felt, down Belmont, through the door next to the taco place, up the flight of stairs that led to a dentist and an insurance agency and the Out Loud offices. Dwight, who worked out front, looked up and waved. Nothing amiss.
Charlie was in his office talking with Gloria. Yale walked in as he’d done a hundred times and sat in the chair by the door. Gloria gave a little wave and kept talking, didn’t seem to notice that Charlie had stiffened. Yale felt like a ghost, visible only to one person. Only Charlie saw this specter at the door. Only Charlie felt the chill.
Gloria said, “You want me to come back?”
And Yale said, “Keep going! I’m happy to wait.” As if he were dropping off Charlie’s sandwich.
He hadn’t seen Charlie’s face since he’d left for Door County. The last time he’d looked at Charlie, it had been with complete trust.
Charlie hurried Gloria out, said they should meet after layout was done. He shut the door behind her. He said, quietly, “Jesus, Yale.” He looked everywhere but into Yale’s eyes.
Yale knew his own silence was a kind of power. He stayed in the chair, arms crossed. There were at least five things he planned to say, and several answers he intended to demand, but not quite yet.
Charlie went back and sat in his desk chair, and for a moment it looked as if he were going to collapse sobbing. In a way, it would have been the only appropriate thing. But instead his lips thinned, his nostrils flared. He said, “I didn’t know how to reach you.”
“You could’ve called my office.”
“I meant yesterday, or today.”
“What did you want to say?”
Charlie put his elbow on the desk, then his forehead in his hand. “I needed to tell you that Terrence died.”
Yale only stopped breathing for an instant, because it wasn’t true. What the hell was Charlie trying to pull?
“No he didn’t.”
“Actually, he did.”
Was he trying to prove that Yale wouldn’t know if a thing like this had happened?
Yale said, “Sorry, but I was just there. I stayed there, at his place. On Thursday night. He’s fine.”
Charlie’s voice was suddenly patient. “That might be true, but they took him to the hospital late Friday morning. He died Friday.”
Yale didn’t believe him. But then why did he find himself crying? His tears were hot and fat and they rolled silently into his mouth.
Charlie said, “I’m glad you were with him.”
Terrence had looked so sick on New Year’s, had seemed about to go. But not on Thursday. Not on Friday morning. He’d been on the bathroom floor, but that was normal. And Yale had left him there. Yale had kept him up talking, the night before. Yale had tracked germs into his house. He felt like tearing the air around him to shreds. He couldn’t think.
He said, “Where’s Roscoe?”
“Who the hell is Roscoe?”
“The cat. Nico’s cat. Terrence had him.”
“That’s what you’re concerned about? I’m sure Fiona has it.”
Yale said, “I was with him at the hospital on New Year’s.”
“That’s good. I’m glad.”
“Where the fuck were you on New Year’s?”
“Yale, don’t start. The thing is, the service is at three.”
“Today?” How many days had passed? Two? This seemed even less plausible, even more of a horrid joke than the actual death. He said, “Wait. So he what, he called an ambulance on Friday? Or someone found him? What time?”
“I don’t know the details, Yale.”
“How is this happening today?” He was asking the wrong questions. Watching Julian’s production of Hamlet, he’d been struck by Laertes’ response to Ophelia’s death. “O, where?” he’d said when he heard the news. But yes, look, it was right: The details were what you grabbed for.
“Fiona’s organized it.” Of course; that was part of the whole power of attorney thing, dealing with the body. Charlie said, “It’ll be odd if we aren’t there together.”
“Will it.”
“I just mean we shouldn’t burden Fiona with this right now. You can sit beside me. It won’t kill you.”
Yale had never hit anyone in his life, not really hit, but he wanted to right then. He wanted to grab all the gay weeklies from around the country that Charlie hung on those pretentious racks behind his desk and crumple them, one by one, in his face.
But Charlie looked so tired. Blue moons under his eyes.
Yale said, even though he knew it was ridiculous, “Where did you even have this testing done?”
“Yale. It’s positive. I was exposed, and it’s positive. One plus one is two. I’m dead.” He flung out the last word like a hand grenade.
And if Charlie had broken down right then, if his face had crumpled—Yale might have softened, gone around to him, held him in his arms even as he stared out the window conflicted. But Charlie’s face didn’t change.
Yale had come here planning to yell, and the fact that he wasn’t yelling was concession enough.
Charlie said, “Would you please just sit near me at the bloody church so we don’t have to explain this to everyone?”
The thing was, Yale wasn’t ready to explain it either.
“I’ll need a suit. Fuck. Is Teresa in the apartment?”
“I can call and send her on an errand.”
“Yes, please do.”
“It’s at the Unitarian place. You’ve got, what, two hours?” This was the same church where they’d held services for Asher’s friend Brian. A gay-friendly church right off Broadway, and thus—recently—Funeral Central.
Yale said, “I don’t even understand. I don’t get—” And he stopped talking, wiped his face with his sleeve.
Charlie said, “I’m sorry you’re so torn up about Terrence.”
“Okay, Charlie.” Instead of screaming, he walked out of the office. He closed the door, really believing that Charlie would call him back
, chase him down. Had this truly been their first and only conversation since Yale had called him, jubilant, from Wisconsin? He’d talked to Charlie so many times in his head that it didn’t seem right.
And how had he left without making Charlie apologize, beg forgiveness, explain?
He got angrier as he walked. He’d felt deflated in the office, but the cold air, the sun, every step away from Charlie, filled him again with indignation. Charlie had not, for an instant, expressed concern for Yale, for his health.
But then had Yale said, at least, “I’m sorry you’re infected”? Maybe they were both terrible, prideful people. Maybe they deserved each other.
He tried to imagine the kind of man who, faced with the news that his jealous lover was, in fact, making a fool of him and had blithely exposed him to a fatal disease, would say it didn’t matter, would stay calm and supportive and sign up for months, years, of bedside care and devastation. Who would do that? A saint, maybe. A patsy. It had taken ages for Yale to learn to stick up for himself—after those boys on the basketball team tricked him, hadn’t he gamely sat with them at lunch the next day?—but apparently, somewhere along the line, he’d figured it out.
He knocked first to make sure Teresa was gone, and he turned the key slowly. He hated the version of himself that had stood here last, ready to share the details of his amazing trip, oblivious to the coming ambush. He hated that if the Yale from three days ago could see the Yale of right now, he’d misinterpret the scene, think he was coming home from lunch somewhere, a little bedraggled but happy, normal.
Everything was slightly out of place. Teresa’s pillbox sat on the table next to a New Yorker he hadn’t seen yet. A stack of cassette tapes stood balanced on the arm of the couch, as if Charlie had been sorting them or looking up lyrics. Yale found his own mail stacked neatly by the phone. Some alumni thing, a postcard from his cousin in Boston. No utility bills, thank God, or he’d have torn them up, left the scraps on the floor. Yale usually paid the rent, but the apartment was in Charlie’s name; he’d been living here when they met.
The Great Believers Page 25
