The Year She Disappeared

by Ann Harleman

  His dark glowing skin, like the definition of skin. His otherness.

  Intermittent as he was, Laurence nevertheless saved her. She no longer woke before dawn to a world withdrawn into grayness and grief like a fishhook in her heart. The fragments of old songs, the ghosts of old photographs, the no-longer-clearly-remembered smell and feel of Tod—these things ceased to pursue her. Grief was driven out by longing. Memory was replaced by desire. It was almost like the old days in Italy, with Jack. She felt, inside, as if she were thirty again and just beginning. At times she was seized by a sort of celestial restlessness—such a burning, fizzing sensation in her midriff that she thought she would levitate. For God’s sake, Mother, act your age, Alex said. But which one?

  There were signs. Nan ignored them. If you observe too carefully, previous love affairs had taught her, you find out beforehand exactly how you will be hurt. There was Laurence’s swift style of leave-taking, an emotional economy he seemed to expect her to admire. (It did not escape her notice that he sometimes, while they embraced at parting, looked at his watch behind her head.) There was the avuncular cheerfulness he adopted when comforting her for the lack of himself. Meagher by name, meager by nature, was how Deenie characterized him.

  Once they were at the Other Place, Seattle’s trendiest restaurant. At the end of dinner, while they lingered over decaf cappuccino, a short, dark man (Gypsy? Indian?) strolled from table to table, his arms full of quivering dark-red roses like beating hearts. Nan caught his glance and he came toward her; but when he arrived at their table Laurence, without a break in his speech about global warming, waved him away. Nan felt shamed. She had told the Gypsy with her eyes that she was the kind of woman men bought flowers for. Laurence’s peremptory arm said not.

  At last she tired of being the one who loved most. She picked fights with Laurence, because in the sweet aftermath of making up she felt pursued again. They fought about the Italian goatskin gloves he had specially made, like a prima ballerina’s toe shoes, to preserve his smooth, dark hands. They fought about whether to have salmon for dinner, standing with their bare feet—two white, two black—in the clear cold fish-smelling Pacific and watching the sun sink far out in the water. Nan never knew whether the Last Fight was simply that—one too many—or whether she’d chosen the one unbroachable issue that everyone has. It was the first and only fight in which Laurence lost his usual Apollonian calm, stopped lobbing facts at her and simply shouted. The image she retained, after all these years, was of the two of them in her bedroom, naked in a widening white swirl of feathers like the snowstorm inside an old-fashioned paperweight turned upside down.

  You have no idea who I am! Laurence is shouting. You don’t see what my work means. No—it’s worse. You do see. (An expression of complete and utter horror crosses his face.) And you want me to abandon it, for you. For you.

  It’s a soap opera speech. She flings another pillow at him. It breaks, like the first one. More feathers swarm between them, thousands of them, iridescent in the moonlight, blown here and there by a warm summer wind through the open windows. Around them, between them, the air is full of a spiraling storm of white, like snow so wild it seems to come at once from the sky and from the ground.

  Which is sadder—to stop being loved, or to stop loving? Which is the greater loss?

  Goddamn him! Nan said out loud, night after night, alone with a glass of forbidden brandy in the room where, now and then, a stray feather floated up from under the bureau. Goddamn fucking black bastard!

  After some months of this, she came to see that she’d endowed Laurence with virtues there was no reason to suppose he had, and then gotten angry because he didn’t have them. And not only that. Really what she missed was not Laurence but the woman she had been with him. Had she reached that age, then? When the mere rising up of feeling is so greatly to be prized, that it doesn’t matter whether the feeling is pleasure or pain? To feel—just to feel. Not to not feel.

  Deenie sent her a book called Men Are Just Desserts. Gabe and Alex took her to see cheerful Italian movies in which matriarchy triumphed. Gradually it became, first undeniable, then acceptable, that Laurence had been the last of her lovers. And finally there she was, still essentially Nan, her heart not broken, though certainly bent. Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Grief, Acceptance.

  |

  Now she realized, pacing down Benefit Street in the cold night, Walker’s arm a lovely weight across her shoulders: Laurence wasn’t, after all, the Last Lover.

  Nine

  POPE AND YELTSIN CHAT OF MULCH

  No—that was MUCH. April 7. At the Rock, in a cloud of warm, flesh-filled air (it was midterms), Nan scrolled rapidly through the Pee-Eye to the Personals. No message from Alex. She was surprised to find herself digesting this disappointment with a minimum of pain and rage, or at any rate, a quickness of them.

  Emerging into the April morning, the smoky air of early spring, she realized that she hadn’t really expected a message. In fact, she no longer waited for one. It had been a month now since the terse message that Alex had gone underground. A month! Nan thought. She crossed the street and walked along the gravel path across the Quad, nearly crashing into a girl on a bicycle as lost in thought, apparently, as Nan.

  Striding down Waterman Street past Faunce House, toward the bus stop, she took great gulps of sweet, champagne-tasting spring air. It tickled her throat and made her head as light, suddenly, as her step. The scent of growing things, of buds about to burst. Are flower and seed the same? At some point, but very recently, she’d joined up with spring. At some point, without her noticing, her life had become a seesaw of joys and problems so absorbing that she forgot to blame Alex for thrusting her into it. At some point, her life had become hers.

  There was her new profession, if that was the word, at which she seemed to be more or less succeeding: a second group, sculptors this time, had hired her, on Rat Woman’s recommendation, for Mondays. There was Walker, and sex with Walker—sex at all, something she hadn’t realized she missed, hadn’t allowed herself to miss. And there was Jane. She was happier, lighter—more at ease. Sometimes now, playing Go Fish with Nan in the evenings or eating pizza at Val and Mel’s, she became almost chatty, talking about Mikki’s and the other children there, about helping Val with his drive-by shootings.

  Nan was—she realized, ascending the steps of the bus, choosing a seat by an open window—no longer living according to Alex’s Plan. She was following her own seat-of-the-pants navigational instinct. More of a Divining Rod than a Plan.

  The bus gathered itself, heaved, and turned right. They descended into the gloom of the tunnel that led to South Main Street and the river.

  The problems? As whose didn’t, Nan’s boiled down to two things: money and time. At the gym—her next stop after the Rock—pacing to nowhere on the treadmill next to a man whose sweat-stained stomach supporter had NORM embroidered on it, Nan added and subtracted. Five hundred and sixty-two dollars left in the envelope taped inside Nibbrig’s dresser. Two hundred and fifty untaxed dollars coming in every week from modeling, soon to be increased by another hundred (Mel had found another group that wanted someone “different”). Two hundred to Val’s ask-no-questions dentist for Jane’s new spacer. Four seventy-five a month for the loft (but Val was willing to defer that, or rather, had volunteered Mr. Nibbrig to do so). One sixty a week to Mikki for day care. Food, seventy a week, if she was careful. So, then (pacing faster, upping the glowing orange numerals on the treadmill’s console in some foolish compulsion to keep pace with Norm): twelve fifty a month coming in. Thirteen sixty-five going out.

  In the studio every Tuesday and Thursday night, Nan found plenty of time to ponder this shortfall. The bottoms of her feet ached. If I were a waitress, she thought, I could at least wear orthopedic shoes. Leaning on one leg to create a fluid line while discreetly resting the other, she pursued her calculations. Really, the only expendable item was day care. But things were going so well now between her and Jane; she didn’t know
how crucial to that harmony their daily apartness might be. She didn’t want to jeopardize that; and (Be honest!) that time was the only time that was Nan’s, the only time she had to spend with Walker.

  Circling Deenie’s bedroom in the early April afternoons while Walker made lunch in the kitchen, Nan felt surprised at herself. How far off her past life seemed! How much she preferred the life she was living now, problems and all. Open, not closed; alive, not settled; full of questions. However imprudent it might be (for shouldn’t someone in her circumstances be feeling fear, doubt, dread?), what she was was happy.

  |

  Late-life love. Shouldn’t it be prudent, temperate? (The Four Cardinal Virtues, Deenie’s version: Prudence, Justice, Fortitude, and Boredom.) The old in one another’s arms. Love among the ruins. Shouldn’t it be hedged about with suspicion and hesitancy and partialness?

  Walker to Nan: “I would close my eyes and fall backward into your arms.”

  |

  April unfolded. The lurching, uncertain New England spring steadied and took hold. The days grew longer. Days of increasing vegetation, increasingly green. In place of their winter walks, Walker took Nan and Jane for drives in his ancient mouse-colored Volvo. They didn’t sight-see, just took in the green. Little Compton; Jamestown; Westerly. On days when Nan wasn’t modeling, they stayed out till dusk. Violet sky, McDonald’s, games of padiddle with Jane.

  When they broke clear of the city, passing into the wooded stretch of South County, Walker would burst into song. (Oh, no! Nan thought, the first time it happened. He’s one of those.)

  When I left my boyhood home to go to college

  There was one thing I hoped to attain

  It was not a perfect philosophic knowledge

  Nor a pure mathematical brain.

  Gradually Jane picked up the words—Walker’s repertory wasn’t large—and sometimes she joined in. They traveled down the highway in a car full of song.

  ’Twas to wear upon my breast the badge of SIG! MA! PHI!

  With the pride that the Sigs only know

  In self-defense Nan began logging bumper stickers in a notebook she found in the glove compartment.

  WHO PUT A STOP PAYMENT ON MY REALITY CHECK?

  IF YOU’RE PSYCHIC, THINK “HONK”!

  ASSASSINS DO IT FROM BEHIND

  |

  April 21. No message from Alex.

  |

  The last night of April was the first night Nan and Walker spent together. In the early-morning light they woke and turned to each other. Walker was like a boy in his suddenness, eagerness. Now that they’d been lovers long enough to know each other’s bodies, familiarity seemed to heighten desire rather than dim it. This was a mystery to Nan. But then, she thought (Walker’s cock warm and burrowing against her belly), it was mysterious how, at their age, they could do this at all.

  I don’t understand it. But, as Dorothea so often said, understanding is the booby prize.

  Darkness was receding from the room, layer by layer—ultramarine, indigo, navy—lifting and floating away. Soon she’d have to leave, to go and retrieve Jane from Mel and Val’s, where she’d spent (Bless them!) the night. She could see Walker’s eyes, pebble gray, and the pale gleam of his wattle as he turned his head. Gratitude in his face. Walker’s breath circled her throat, pooled in the hollow above her clavicle. Deenie’s bed was wide, the mattress deep and firm. Nan reached up and pulled a pillow under her hips. The bed frame chimed with their movements. Walker’s not-at-all-tentative hands on her made her aware of skin, skin. All-over skin; not being in a skin (a soul imprisoned inside a body), but being skin.

  Afterward—after, as didn’t always happen, they both had come—she said as much. Walker told her that, of all animals, the mole is the most sensitive to touch. “I wish you were a mole. Then anywhere I touched you would be an instant erogenous zone” His fingers traced the silvery stretch marks along her thighs, around her belly. Her whole body was still ticking gently, as if it housed a very gradually slowing pendulum.

  The window by Nan’s head was open. In the early-morning stillness— even the birds had barely begun—came the sound of a piano played, haltingly, somewhere close by, doling out a melody note by note. A child, probably.

  Row, row, row … your boat

  Gently … down the … stream

  Walker gave a replete sigh, which, his lips having just relinquished her earlobe, stirred in the chamber of her ear.

  “I never thought I’d get to this point in my life and have my body answered like—just like this,” he said softly. “After we’re dead, our bodies will remember us.”

  She knew he meant (Walker, more scientist than poet) that molecules had memory. That their molecules, scattered and absorbed into other configurations throughout the universe, would carry some imprint, some sensory residue, of each other. Walker’s, she thought, smiling up into the eaves, would be very clean molecules, smelling of pencil shavings and deer-tongue grass.

  Merrily

  Merrily

  Merrily

  Merrily

  Nan moved her feet, tangled with Walker’s underneath the red-striped woolen blankets and starched sheets. She laid one leg across his groin, curving her foot so that her instep fitted against his thigh. She loved the firmness of his thighs. She lay watching the first light finger the slanting ceiling of their room, where joy seemed to have collected in the eaves. She thought, Even if it never happens so perfectly again, we have had this.

  Life is

  Life is but

  Life is but a

  “It’s May Day,” Walker said. “Let’s celebrate. Let’s go get Jane and have a picnic.”

  The darkening sky emptied. Walker threw the remains of their picnic into the basket while Nan bundled up the rain-soaked blanket. They hurried back to the car in a violent rain squall, gusts of wind against which Jane could barely stay upright. Walker carried her, one arm around Nan as well. When the storm ended, as suddenly as it began, they drove home through evening air that was soft and smoky toward a smudged horizon, clouds lit from beneath by the setting sun. Walker sang, “Far down the highway wet and black.” Nan took the Bumper Sticker notebook out of the glove compartment and began to watch for good ones. The damp, loamy smell of freshly turned earth poured in through the open windows.

  OF ALL THE THINGS I’VE LOST,

  I MISS MY MIND THE MOST

  “Look, Nana!” Jane cried from the backseat. “The sun is eating up the dark.”

  Immediately Nan remembered—heard, really, across a quarter of a century—Alex’s voice. Look, Mama! The moon is eating up the sky. Heard Alex’s laugh, the same husky Dietrich sound that Jane was making now.

  IN GODDESS WE TRUST

  WE HAVE ENOUGH YOUTH—

  HOW ABOUT A FOUNTAIN OF SMART?

  Nan felt Jane’s arms come around her neck from behind, one sharp little elbow digging into her collarbone. She reached up and clasped the small linked hands in one of her own—warm hands, still wet with rain—before she said, “Fasten your seat belt, Sweetpea.”

  Beside her Walker glanced over and smiled.

  It was true, what he was thinking. Jane had grown steadily happier these last few weeks. Winter Jane—sullen, silent—had departed with the last blackened lumps of snow. Each day of April had seen her rosier, looser-limbed, more loquacious. Now, as they swung north onto I-95, Summer Jane’s face grazed the back of Nan’s neck; her rain-damp hair tickled. She hummed into Nan’s collarbone, low and tuneless, a sound Walker called the Vacuum Cleaner Song.

  “Seat belt!” Nan and Walker said, in unison.

  Though the sun had set, the sky glowed blue as noon. Twilight, Walker explained. “It skews the color balance. The Purkinje effect. Twilight increases the intensity of blue at the expense of all other colors.” The air had begun to turn cold. Nan pulled down the sleeves of her sweater and reached to crank up the window.

  “Nana, don’t! The wind is nice. It feels like ice cream.”

  Who c
ould resist? Nan let go of the handle.

  “Knock, knock” Jane said.

  “Who’s there?” said Walker.

  “Poop.”

  “Poop who?”

  “You said a bad word!” Jane dissolved in giggles.

  Nan remembered the joke Alex had loved most when she was Jane’s age, the one she’d told over and over the first year they’d lived in Genoa. She said, “Why couldn’t the sunflower ride a bicycle?”

  A brief silence. Then Jane said, “Give up.”

  “Because it lost its petals.”

  Jane’s and Walker’s laughter, equally deep and husky, filled the car.

  I made her laugh! Nan thought. She turned her head to the open window, sending her pleasure, like a prayer, out into the deepening blue-violet night.

  |

  That night Jane fell asleep halfway through Goodnight Moon. Her skin when Nan bent over her radiated heat. Fever? Nan thought, momentarily alarmed. But her cheeks and forehead felt cool. She was fine—more than fine: she was safe. Happy. Nan pulled the blanket down over one bare foot. Zipper lifted his neat little head from Jane’s pillow, and her closed eyelids quivered: butterfly wings. Suddenly aware that her waiting was more hopeful than watchful—that she was willing her granddaughter to wake up and reach for her, hug her, talk to her—Nan backed away, around the corner of the screen, and put the space of the loft between them.