by Susan Choi
“Is this you, then? ‘Baby Evangeline’?”
“Yes.” Had he not even understood that? There was something shaming in his making her spell it all out. But he was old, she reminded herself, though he didn’t seem old, if old meant befuddled or weak. He didn’t seem that way at all.
He raised his still mostly black and very barbed eyebrows slightly when she said yes and kept them there, in a notched-up position. The longer he held the position the more meanings it seemed to imply. One of the meanings might have been, That’s not what I expected. Another might have been, That’s exactly what I expected. Another might have been, Now I understand why this person is here. Another might have been, I can’t fathom why this person is here. “And what,” he said, his eyebrows still in that notched-up position, “makes you think that your mother was ever my student?”
Claire’s heart rate had been accelerating and now it was accelerated so much she thought it must be audible. Her cheeks had probably turned very pink. Sweat beads prickled her hairline. “Birth mother,” she corrected him. “I know because the file—”
“The file says that she was accepted in the region’s leading school for the arts. It doesn’t say she attended.”
“She did. I’m sure of it.”
“Why? Is that also made perfectly clear, somewhere else in your file? I’m sorry,” he said almost gently, when she didn’t reply. “This must be difficult for you. It must be very difficult, to have so little information about something so important. But even if the young woman described on this page was a student here, and it seems very doubtful she was, I could never confirm it.”
“Why?” Claire said, feeling him willing her out of the room.
“I could never violate a student’s privacy in that way. As a woman, you must understand that.”
Leaving the building, Claire had gotten lost. Or rather, she had never known where she was, and only went further astray. She’d found herself standing in a parking lot from which her car had disappeared, staring down at a hideous thing with two agonized faces and the word VISITOR spelled in hard little circles of metal. Eventually, she’d come to understand that she’d gone out an entrance on the opposite side of the building from where she’d come in. Both doors looked exactly the same.
* * *
THE DAY SHE showed her file to Robert Lord, Claire’s mother had been gone just six months. Initially Claire had promised herself she would wait for a year before doing anything with the soft-edged manila folder with its surprisingly few sheets of paper that her father had given her after the funeral, sitting stoop shouldered on the “good” sofa it had always made her mother nervous to have people sit on, and making Claire’s own shoulders stoop with the weight of his arm. “Mom wanted to encourage you,” Claire’s father said. “She even wanted to help. She just never figured out how.” Claire had been crying too much to answer, but she’d known that what he said was the truth. Her mother had never planned to get sick. She’d only been sixty-six when she died. Her mother never having the chance to figure out how to help saddened Claire to the point of her making that promise, but she soon admitted to herself that not touching the file for a year was an empty gesture. The first time she read it, the strength of her grief frightened her. Her one articulate wish was that her mother was with her, that they were reading it together, that her mother agreed that the person described was a friend they both wanted to find.
Claire’s father had grown up on a farm that his father lost when Claire’s father was in his teens, resulting in a move to the city that had been the catastrophe of Claire’s father’s life. In her childhood, despite her steady lack of interest in nature, he’d often as bedtime stories described to her his favorite places on his childhood farm, the creek and the barn and the shade trees. After Claire’s paternal grandfather’s death, a “farm diary” had turned up in his basement, reams of curling faded yellow paper on which a spidery hand recorded births and deaths of animals, crop yields, and unusual weather events. The day after Claire showed Robert Lord her file, she rose extremely early and went to the print shop, although it was her day off, so that she could finish typing up, printing out, and binding the farm diary for her father. She’d been meaning to do this for literally years. Then she went to her childhood home, from which her father had been threatening to move, and ate a bowl of All-Bran while watching her father page through the all-new, highly legible farm diary, which she had even illustrated with some photos of West Texas pulled off the web. Her father’s mouth formed a tight line as he read, by which Claire knew he was moved to the point of fighting tears. “Thank you, Boo-Boo,” he said after he’d turned all the pages. Claire returned to her apartment and it was still only nine in the morning. She had not mentioned her visit to Robert Lord to her father. In fact, since receiving the file from her father, Claire had never mentioned it to him again. She’d understood that, in telling her about her mother’s regret, her father had been saying far more on the subject than he would have if left to himself. This refusal of her father’s to engage with the subject had never bothered Claire, while her mother’s mere ambivalence about it had agonized her. Nor did her differing reactions to her parents bother Claire, although she recognized how unfair they were.
When an unknown number called, Claire only answered because she was just getting out of the shower and was blind from the steam. The rough voice that asked for Claire Campbell startled her with how familiar and unplaceable it was. She’d been wrapping herself in a towel, her hair a wet nest. No one ever called her at that hour of the morning now that her mother was gone. When she realized who it was her first reaction was to fear that she’d further offended him. How had he gotten her number? Of course she’d left it with the office when she made the appointment, but she didn’t recall this daylight explanation until afterward.
“I regret the way our conversation ended,” he said. He seemed to have to bend his voice into the phone the way a giant might bend his head through a doorframe. “Your surprising me at school as you did left me little maneuvering room. There are strict protocols. You must understand.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, shivering. “I didn’t know where else to find you.”
“I want to help you. But such matters can’t be discussed on school grounds.”
They made a plan to have lunch. A few hours in advance of it, when she was struggling with what she should wear, he called and told her lunch was a bad idea also, as he was a highly recognizable person. “Besides, Sofie and I can treat you to a much better meal here at home than we’d get at Butera’s. And, it will be easier to talk.” The mention of Sofie relieved an unease Claire had not been aware of until it dissolved, so similar was it to so many other species of unease, most predominantly her unease about whether she would get her answer. Preoccupation with the dread irresistible object marginalized every other concern. Now the meal would be dinner. He turned out to live in a rare high-rise with its own underground parking garage that she didn’t see until she’d parked on the street. A somnolent lobby attendant pointed her toward the elevators without lifting his eyes from the horseshoe of tiny TV screens behind which he sat. Her destination was the top floor, eighteen—a novelty in this city of sprawl where Claire had never known anyone to live in a building with more than two floors. Leaving the elevator she gazed a moment out the corridor window at the orange-and-gray dusk before ringing his bell.
Claire imagined Sofie perhaps soft and flossy-haired and submissive; or sleekly haughty and European; or complacently Bohemian in tatty blouse and many strings of clacking beads. Wife of the great man, she could only exist in reaction to him. But what kind of reaction was she? He answered the door in a black turtleneck and black slacks, his still-copious hair like steel wool brushed straight back from the cast-iron face. Claire noticed in spite of herself that the beard had been trimmed. Its black-on-white stripes looked as if freshly painted. The beautiful apartment tempted her to gape with admiration in every direction, an impulse she tried hard to control
while running her eyes over the laden bookshelves and dark tapestries, the little wooden tables inlaid with small tiles, the extremely large plants that touched her as she passed with the ends of their rubbery leaves. Classical music was playing. He led her through the labyrinth of European-looking things—Sofie had to be the European option, with a silver chignon and long, papery arms hung with thin tasteful bracelets—to a living room half in darkness from its view of what must be Memorial Park. An open bottle of wine and two glasses sat on a tray. Claire accepted a glass and sat sipping self-consciously. She rarely drank except at workplace holiday parties, and this was better-tasting wine than anything she was used to. She held the stem of the glass tightly pinched. He cupped his glass in an upturned palm, with the stem notched between his fingers. The way he held it bothered her in some indescribable way. He sat opposite to where she perched on the couch and saying almost nothing watched her while she talked as if she had to talk to breathe, about how beautiful the apartment was, and how beautiful the view was, and how unique it was he had one when everyone she knew lived in houses.
“You can take the New Yorker out of New York,” he said at last, “but you can’t take New York out of the New Yorker.”
“You’re from New York?”
“I’m from a sleepy little town called Bensonhurst, originally. But I ran away long, long ago, and my travels ended here—where yours began. I want to know about you, Claire. My story is not interesting.”
For a long time she answered his questions. He was very good at asking questions, so much better than the online Listeners. This was what it must be like to have an actual therapist. Even the room, with its intellectual and faintly foreign furniture, seemed like a therapist’s office. Perhaps not the wine. He refilled her glass while she was talking, for some reason, about her father’s being forced into early retirement. She understood without having been told that some code to which he adhered required that he know her before he let her know herself, although he behaved as though his careful rummaging through her life would reveal what she sought after all her own rummaging hadn’t. Each time she arrived at the end of an answer he slid a fresh question beneath the stream of her talk so that despite herself her own talk rippled on, uninterrupted though it was she herself who meant to interrupt, to finally stop answering and to ask what he had to tell her. Then he stood abruptly and said, “We should eat.” Unsteadily she followed him down a corridor narrowed by bookshelves to a small dining room. The table was already set, with two more glasses, another bottle of wine, food already in large shallow bowls. “Ceviche,” he said. “I hope you eat seafood? Sofie is a magnificent chef specializing in foods of her native Caribbean. If not for her I would have given up eating a long time ago.”
“Is Sofie joining us?”
“Sofie? Sofie has gone home for the evening. Did you think Sofie was my wife?” He seemed very surprised that she might have thought this. “Sofie is my sainted housekeeper. I owe a great deal to Sofie, but even if she would have me, which I doubt very much, marriage isn’t an experience I plan to repeat.”
“You used to be married?”
“My most recent wife and I called it off as soon as our boys were grown. Now our boys are both married and seem to like it much better than we did. Perhaps the inclination skips generations.”
This allusion to genetic heritage was Claire’s best opening, yet somehow he kept her from taking it. First with stern attention to her trying the food, as if he expected her not to like it, and would scold her if this was the case. Then the food itself, sitting tentatively in her mouth. She’d never tasted ceviche and until he explained, between his own rapid mouthfuls, she could never have guessed it was raw fish somehow cooked with lime juice. Once enlightened her stomach and tongue seemed to turn cold and stiff as if being heatlessly cooked with juice, too. All her concentration was required to eat with a show of enjoyment. Undeterred by her silence he was now talking animatedly about Caribbean traditional festivals, at the same time as zealously eating. “Carnivaaaal,” he kept saying, leaning hard on the last syllable. “You’ve turned pale,” he said, dropping his fork with a clank in his now empty bowl. “Are you all right?”
“Maybe the wine,” Claire admitted. She’d barely drunk from the new glass he’d poured when they’d sat at the table. She’d kept lifting it to her lips from politeness but when her tongue touched the tart liquid her mouth flooded with warning saliva.
“Some fresh air? I thought you might like the view from the roof. I have a private roof terrace.”
This did seem like something she would have enjoyed at some previous time. “Okay,” she said and swaying to her feet followed him again, up a short staircase of tight bends, out a door into the warm wet night air which was always so much more of a shock than the opposite plunge into clean sharp-edged climate control. That always felt like a falling away of exterior weight and returning, refreshed, to oneself, where stepping outside felt like being absorbed by some massive esophagus. The door closed at her back and he turned and in one step had plastered her full length against it, his unseasonal black knit turtleneck scraping the bare triangle of her neckline when he knocked her head back with his, stuffing his tongue in her mouth. He was strong, for a man she would have guessed was older than her father; as she gagged against the taste of masticated ceviche mixed in his saliva he seized her right hand and pushed it inside the front of his pants, past the belt and the underwear waistband. “There,” he rasped, “there.” He scrubbed her hand roughly against the damp noodle of flesh which secreted warm goo but did not come to life. In her panic Claire wished that it would, was conscious of a failure and possible worse consequence if it didn’t. She twisted and broke away, gulping mouthfuls of air as if stuffing her stomach with air would prevent it from hurling its contents. And it worked, she willed down her own vomit, the prospective shame of which was so great that it didn’t cross her mind that her vomit might serve as a weapon. “Oh dear,” he was tutting, with her wedged against the door again while swarming his hands like flesh spiders. “It’s all right … sweet Claire … it’s all right…” Finally getting her footing she kneed him. She missed but he lurched back and then stood glaring stormclouds of scorn.
“We seem to have had a misunderstanding,” he said with admonitory coldness as she heaved, leaning on the door handle as if she’d just come up from swimming a race. “You’ve embarrassed me,” he added as she yanked the door open.
“I’m sorry,” she gasped. Shrugging through the door she rushed back down the stairs. She could barely find the front door again and almost left without her purse; riding the elevator she tried to fix her blouse and skirt and hair with her left hand while looking for something to wipe off her right. She’d only brought a little bag, not her usual tote, and didn’t have any Kleenex. As the elevator counter came to G, she scrubbed her right hand against whatever the fibrous surface was that made the elevator’s interior walls.
In the lobby the attendant did not look up, seemed in fact to make a point of looking down, as she rushed past. She had to pee, so much so she thought she might wet herself there on the street. That was all she thought about, driving back home. How much she needed to pee, how the need stuck like a spear through her brain and her crotch and drove out every other sensation. The next day, she spent close to four hours and two hundred dollars in “talking” it out with a Listener and forming a Plan—several Plans—but the Plans contradicted each other, as did the desires and emotions each meant to process and fulfill. How to talk to her father and how never to talk to her father. How to confront Robert Lord and how to forget Robert Lord. How to demand her answer and how to stop asking or wanting to ask. Obsessed, Claire spent far too much money and earned too many Loyalty Stars. Attempting to wean herself from that habit, she then formed the less costly but in certain ways equally costly habit of constantly checking the school’s Facebook page. In Robert Lord’s frequent appearances there, she sought clues as to what she should do. None of these were decisive and so
she did nothing. Three years passed. Many school milestones were posted. One was the death of the school’s longest-serving staff member, secretary Velva Wilson. One was the death of the school’s longest-serving faculty member, Theatre Program founder Robert Lord. Claire went to his tribute and learned nothing new. When a subsequent Facebook announcement explained that the decision to rename the school the Robert Lord School for the Arts had been reversed due to “a credible allegation of sexual abuse from a former student,” Claire finally unfollowed the school’s social media pages.
* * *
BUT BEFORE THAT, the day she’d stood sightlessly grasping the comedy/tragedy mask in the hot parking lot—
—at last she understood she must retrace her steps, and going back in and down the main hall, she reentered the office, where it seemed everyone had gone out for their lunch but a dumpy and aged old woman who hadn’t been there before. “Just returning this,” Claire said, proffering the guest pass. The woman jerked back as if frightened.
“My God,” said the woman, whose name tag read “Velva.” “Sweet Jesus. Come closer to me.”
As if in a dream Claire stepped close and the old woman hauled herself onto her feet. She reached a leathery hand to Claire’s cheek. “Why, you must be more than twenty years old.” Her breathy wonder repulsed Claire, frozen under her touch.
“Twenty-five.”
“That’s right,” said Velva in triumph. She sank back in her chair, her gaze feasting on Claire. “What did they name you, sweetheart?”
It was such a strange question! “I’m Claire,” Claire said brusquely and dropping the pass on the desktop went out, the right way this time, to the parking lot holding her car, the door and the key and the pedals of which she attacked with more force than required, leaving the gray stones of that building so far in her wake that it was only when the building was gone, the people she’d met in it dead, Robert Lord’s name given then taken away from the fancy new building expressing his vision that she understood why that old woman had stared in that way all those years ago now.