“I really didn’t want to be alone tonight,” I said.
“I like you, Sam,” she said, as if I’d asked her.
I thought of Michael, and then Olivia, Amanda. I had never before felt so glad not to be making love.
“Sam?” She said it in a whisper.
“Yes?”
“Would you pat my head?”
I petted her until she fell asleep.
CHAPTER
11
JACK PHILLIPS, THE PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR OLIVIA HIRED, turned out to be a man of uncommon good looks, an undercapitalized documentary filmmaker who financed his deadpan movies about gay cowboys, aging tap dancers, and cruise-ship entertainment directors with six months a year in the detective business. Phillips’s office was in Poughkeepsie, on the second floor of an old wooden house in a crime-ridden neighborhood. His dusty bay windows looked out over porch stoops full of idle men, broken Colt 45 bottles, fistfights. Raised in Shaker Heights, Harvard- educated, Phillips felt safe and strangely calm in the chaotic neighborhood, and when he pointed out the garish pink clapboard house across the street to Olivia and said, “The most lucrative crack den in upstate New York,” it was with a discernible sense of pleasure, almost pride. He wore an old, shapeless Brooks Brothers blazer, a threadbare white shirt, a rumpled red tie, and lusterless wing-tipped shoes, and he seemed to take pride in these things, too. He liked to wear the uniform of his class, but in a shabby, somewhat deconstructed fashion, like a rogue prince wearing his crown at a jaunty tilt.
“I don’t really care about that,” said Olivia. “I don’t care about anything, actually. Just finding Michael.”
“Of course, of course,” he said, standing close to her. He was parting the Venetian blinds with his long, tapered fingers. “Well, then, perhaps we better get down to cases.”
Astonishing to realize how little there was to say about someone who had disappeared, even her own son. What did a person amount to, once removed from context? Hair, height, weight, eyes, no scars, no tattoos—whatever faint pattern of habits he had created was already obliterated like sandpiper prints washed out by the next wave. He went from home to school to home, and now that he was no longer doing that he could be anywhere. Olivia recited the bare facts, her voice cracked and dry; yet Phillips wrote everything down eagerly, nodding his encouragement.
“Okay, got it,” he said, when the meagerness of what she had to offer turned to silence.
She lowered her eyes. Her hands were in her lap. “Do you?” she asked.
He smiled at her, leaned back in his old-fashioned swivel chair. The mechanism squeaked loudly. He tapped the trigger end of his ballpoint pen against the edge of his desk.
“Well, it’s a start.” He smiled; if he sensed the depths of her distress, he didn’t let it cause him any undue concern.
Yet his attitude did not strike her as cavalier. It was as if he were watching her go through emotional stages that were predictable to him, feelings he was trained to deal with. Would a doctor gasp and throw up his hands when a patient described the aches and pains of a fever? The trick was to do some good, to solve problems, not empathize with them. If she wanted breast-beating, she could always call Sam, and if she lost track of where he was in his coast-to-coast fool’s errand, she could just sit tight and he would call her.
“Are you going to find my son?” Olivia asked Phillips.
He held her in his gaze. He was confident around women; his good looks, his charm, and a rather low libido meant he always had as much feminine company as he desired. He was the kind of man who came late to dinner, or got absorbed in something and forgot to arrive altogether. He was the kind of man who didn’t ogle women, who didn’t really need women. Olivia sensed his vagueness, his evasiveness, his laconic touch-me-not quality, his self-absorption, and it struck her that to be with a man like that, if only for a short while, would be a little bit of heaven, and a relief from the nearly nonstop ardency of her husband, whose boyish passion and unceasing appetite for physical contact had, after winning her heart, come to exhaust and annoy her.
“Can you start right away?” she asked Phillips.
“Yes, of course.” He gestured toward his notebook, as if to remind her that he had already begun. “But I’ll need to come to your house.”
She raised her chin yet felt herself shrinking back.
“Nothing mystical about it, scout’s honor,” he said. “But it’s always helpful to see the room of the missing person, to see his stuff.”
“When?”
Phillips shrugged. “Now?”
He drove behind her from Poughkeepsie to Leyden. She searched for him in her rearview mirror, but most of the time she could not see him; he was always four or five cars behind, yet keeping pace. Perversely, she sped up, considered a quick turn off of Route 9 onto one of the smaller, left-behind roads, most of them with stodgy, unpronounceable Dutch names. When she came into Leyden, Olivia checked for Phillips in the rearview mirror and did not see him, and as she drove down Red Schoolhouse Road, past the familiar sights that had of late become hideous to her—the lawn jockeys, the swing sets, the clicking plastic propellers meant to frighten the birds from vegetable gardens, the newly seeded lawns, the neighbors’ sleek black Labrador skulking around in his cumbersome electronic collar that gave him a shock whenever he approached the outer limits of the invisible fence—Olivia’s stomach turned, as if she had been stood up, rejected. Where was he? Everyone was disappearing.
Yet as she pulled into the driveway, Phillips was behind her, like something forgotten and then suddenly remembered.
“I thought you got lost,” she said, as they got out of their cars. Her voice was peevish.
“I was right behind you,” said Phillips, with perfect neutrality.
She showed him the house. Room by room, as if she was selling it. He took it all in with a practical eye: the colors she had chosen, the objects, all of the things that were more than things because she had chosen them.
He picked up a carved Christian icon from Guam, showing some saint on horseback, with a primitive-looking dog at his side. “Fabulous,” he said, and then put it back down on the old pine tavern table, in the exact spot. “I once did a movie about Santería. It was really neat, watching these people lose their minds.” His smile was quick, untroubled. He patted the saint’s head, gently, with the tip of his finger.
“I’m in the antiques business.” She had almost said, “I somehow find myself in the antiques trade,” but lost the nerve for the affectation. She was realizing that she wanted to make herself interesting.
Yet he did seem interested. “Really? Why would you do a thing like that? Do you have a store or something? Or do you just sell things out of the house?”
“I work for a chain of stores in the city. I’m what’s called a picker.”
“Picker,” he said, smiling. “Sounds wild. Maybe I’ll film you, one day, when all this is over.”
Olivia smiled back. She was grateful for the casual confidence of that phrase: “when all this is over.”
“Do you want to see Michael’s room? We’d better get this over with, before my daughter comes home from school.”
“Amanda,” said Phillips, remembering.
He followed her up the stairs. She sensed his eyes were not on her—unlike Sam, who still gazed at her ass when she walked in front of him, put his hands on her hips, slipped his fingers into her back pockets. What a relief to be away from that. Nevertheless, it felt strange to be walking toward the house’s intimate quarters with a strange man following her.
The first thing Phillips did when he entered Michael’s room was go to the bookcase and check the spines of his books.
“He’s not much of a reader, is he?” said Phillips, after a quick perusal. “These books seem like they’re for a much younger kid.”
“He used to love to read. But…” She shrugged. “It might have something to do with his father. Sam writes, and he puts such an emphasis—”
“
What does your husband write?”
“Books.”
“What kind of books?”
“I don’t see what that has to do with anything,” said Olivia. She protected the secret of Sam’s writer-for-hire oeuvre as carefully as she had been taught to tell no one of her parents’ adherence to the teachings of Max Schachtman—they feared reprisals from certain conservative elements in the university, and what made it worse was that they now shared their colleagues’ low opinion of socialism, just as Sam would share in the scorn others would heap on books like Traveling with Your Pet and Visitors from Above.
“Maybe your husband wrote something that bugged Michael. I was once going to do a film about the children of writers—a lot of them have problems, especially those who feel their parents use them as subject matter. Or maybe he writes things with a lot of gore and violence. I don’t know. A strong sexual content. Maybe Michael was offended by something in his father’s writing.”
Olivia watched as Phillips picked up a few of Michael’s music cassettes—maybe she would turn into one of those mothers who testified in front of Congress against the music industry, fixing the blame for her son’s disappearance on a bunch of flaxen-haired strangers in leather pants. “He’s indifferent to Sam’s writing. I don’t know that he’s ever read a word of it.”
Phillips nodded at her. His expression was deadpan, neutral, but intrusive.
“But relations between them are strained, yes?” he said.
“What makes you say that?”
“Your husband isn’t here. I have a sense of marital discord. And teenage sons and their fathers—” He held out his hand and then wobbled it back and forth.
Three evenings later, Sharon dropped by for an unexpected visit. She had been teaching a class called Making Fishless Sushi at the Lutheran Home for the Aged. Russ didn’t object to Sharon’s myriad commercial enterprises, but in other ways he was an old-fashioned man and liked a fairly minute accounting of her time away from hearth and home. Since the day Olivia had appraised the Tiffany painting, Sharon had called several times, to see if anything had happened in the search for Michael, to see how Olivia was faring with Sam on the road.
Now, Sharon was harried; she quickly unwrapped her purple scarf and folded it with an uncanny precision. Her dark eyes glittered with excitement. Her voice was quick and high. She allowed Olivia to drag her into the kitchen for a cup of tea, but she had no patience for the boiling of water. Glancing at the kettle on the stove, Sharon shook her head quickly. “Maybe just a glass of water, okay, Olivia? Tap water would be fine.”
“Sharon,” Olivia said, admonishing her, “it’ll take two minutes to boil.”
“Russ goes crazy when I’m late. You may not see this, but he’s very emotional.”
“Most men are. That’s why there are so many of them in prison.”
Sharon brought the glass of water to her lips and drained it in one long swallow. She patted her mouth dry with her palm and then fixed Olivia with a conspiratorial smile.
“Now you have to tell me about Jack Phillips,” she said.
“He hasn’t found Michael. What else is there to say?”
“I think there is a lot more to say.”
“He calls, I’ll give him that. He keeps in very close touch.”
“Jack?”
“Yes”
“Well? You see?” Sharon smiled broadly, a child’s false grin.
Uh-oh, she’s in love with him, thought Olivia.
“He calls to tell me what he’s done, where he’s gone. That sort of thing.”
“He likes you,” said Sharon, with a wave, as if shooing away the spots before her eyes.
“Oh, stop it. It’s all completely businesslike.”
“Of course it is. That’s Jack’s way. Everything businesslike, but in the meantime he has a big erection in his pants.” Sharon sat forward, and with her elbows on the table, slumped her face into her hands. She seemed utterly dejected. She tried to pull herself out of it by smiling at Olivia and then pinging her fingernail against the empty water glass.
“Would you like some more water? Or anything else? Beer, Diet Coke? I have this strawberry-and-lime juice.”
“Russ doesn’t like Japanese women, or Japanese people in general.”
“You’re kidding me,” said Olivia.
“No, I’m not. It’s very common. That’s why Russ likes war. To him, it’s a bunch of guys going out and killing yellow people. Every time America goes to war it’s against Asian people. World War II, Korea, Vietnam.”
“Was Russ in Vietnam, Sharon?”
“No. He has a bad back. But if he had gone, he would have liked it—except for the danger. I know him very well. He would have brought home a yellow ear in his bag.”
Olivia remembered Russ’s appliance shop, with its oversized American flag snapping in the breeze, or, on still days, drooping there like a turkey wattle.
“Look who they dropped the atomic bomb on!” cried Sharon. “Not on the blacks, or the Arabs. On us!” Incongruously, she laughed; the relief of finally saying these things made her giddy. “Russ is always buying me perfume and so I asked him why. He didn’t want to answer, but I asked him over and over, and that’s the night he told me I have a smell. Like fish. I don’t ever eat fish. I don’t even like it, and I don’t think it’s healthy. There are no government inspectors for fish, the way they have for meat. But Russ says I smell like fish. Is it surprising that I liked Jack Phillips so much?”
“If you feel this way about Russ, why don’t you leave him?”
“For who?”
“I don’t know. For no one. And why did you hire a detective to follow him?”
“Japanese pride. To think of people laughing at me.” She drew her forefinger over her throat. “And we have so much between us. Things. Our house, the truck and two cars, a motorcycle, a wood lot outside of town. And our collections—comic books, and the baseball cards are worth sixty thousand dollars. Can you imagine? The paintings. And Russ’s business. If he wants to leave me, then I need time to protect myself. I know you must understand these things.” She gestured somewhat expansively, and it took Olivia a moment to realize the wave was meant to encompass the objects in Olivia’s house.
“There’s nothing here worth very much.”
“But everything is so pretty. And you know how much things are worth. This is your field.”
“Yes, well, I don’t know how I ever got into it. I’m not terribly interested.”
“You’re not?”
“Not really. In fact, I sort of hate it.”
They were quiet for a moment. Olivia was almost conscious of the entire world and her place in it, the curtain that concealed the grand design was about to blow to one side; but then it didn’t, and then it wasn’t really a curtain any longer, it was a wall, and a moment after that the wall wasn’t necessary, because there was no grand design to conceal.
“But weren’t you relieved,” she asked Sharon, “when Jack told you Russ wasn’t seeing anyone?”
“Yes.”
“You see? You still must care.”
“I don’t want to be humiliated. And I didn’t want Jack to see me that way. He might figure if my husband went around behind my back, then there was something wrong with me, or my body, and then Jack would start to lose interest. Not that he was ever interested in the first place,” she added with a laugh.
“I don’t think Jack is terribly interested in women,” said Olivia.
“What a mean thing to say!” cried Sharon happily. “But don’t worry, he’s very normal, and I think you are his type. The model type, with large eyes and long legs, very tall.”
“I’m not tall,” Olivia was going to say, but then decided not to, because she was quite a bit taller than Sharon. “I’m too old for love affairs,” she said instead.
“He doesn’t care about that. Jack is no spring chicken. He’s nearly thirty-eight years old—his birthday’s in July. And what is he doing with his life? He
works as a detective because no one will give him money to make his movies.”
“The people we knew in the city,” said Olivia, “most had to work at various jobs to support their art.”
“To support their art? I thought a man worked to support his family. Oh well, I feel sorry for Jack. He told me about the movies he wants to make. They are all crazy. And then what will happen when he turns forty?”
Impulsively, Olivia reached across the table and took Sharon’s hand. Sharon looked at her frankly. It was one of those fleeting moments when all of the pretense of life is dispelled, but as usual it was not dispelled for long enough to discover what lay beyond it.
“I’m just so happy,” Olivia said, feeling she needed to explain to Sharon why she was touching her, “not to be talking or thinking about Michael for five minutes.”
That night, quite late, while she was in bed reading Wilson’s life of Jesus and realizing that in her exhaustion not only had she read the same page three times but each time she understood less of it, the phone rang, and it was Olivia’s intuition that despite the hour it was Jack Phillips on the other end of the line.
“I’m sorry to be calling so late,” Phillips said.
Olivia drew her knees up, and the satin comforter slipped off the bed. She was wearing an old flannel nightgown, not exactly fresh from the laundry, and turquoise woolen socks. She hadn’t shaved her legs in a while. With the men out of the house, she was reverting to certain bohemian, solitary habits from college—eating irregularly, masturbating, falling asleep with the reading light on, waking in the morning with the goose-necked lamp peering inquisitively down at her, its bulb as intense as an acetylene torch.
“Olivia?” said Phillips, moving tentatively into her silence. “Did I wake you?”
It seemed more than coincidence that Sharon’s visit and Jack’s call were only three hours apart. Were they working together? Maybe. Maybe Sharon was a romantic stalking- horse, the way things were done back in high school, when an intermediary was sent to test the emotional waters. Olivia used to do it for her shy sister: what would you say if Elizabeth asked you to her party?
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