by Phoef Sutton
“I thought she was a ghost.”
“Knock it off. Think about her for once.”
“She’s all I’m thinking about.”
“Oh, that’s obvious. But what good is it doing her?”
“I’m trying to find her.”
“Sure, but you’re one guy and you don’t know what you’re doing. Let the cops look for her. They’ll find her. After all she’s not hiding and she does make a rather distinctive impression.”
Carl sat down on the sofa. He hadn’t changed since yesterday. He hadn’t even been in the house. He’d just climbed out of the car and collapsed into the lawn chair. He wiped his face with his hand; his skin felt like it was coated with a layer of grease.
“What did you find out about the brother?”
“His name is Frank Ackerman, works in his brother’s firm. Don’t get the feeling he’s much of a live wire. More nepotism in action. Oh, and he was also Jesse’s lover for the past two years.”
Carl sat bolt upright.
“Are you sure?”
“Well, you can never know the truth for sure, but when you tap into the secretarial gossip pool you get closer to it than anywhere else.”
Carl was on his feet now, pacing restlessly. “Well, that’s it then. There’s a real motive. Not only is she an invalid, but he resents her for being unfaithful. Sure you don’t want some coffee?”
Carl was heading for the kitchen when Kit spoke. “You know what I don’t like about this? How happy you sound.”
Carl stopped and turned back. “Of course I’m not happy. It’s horrible, but it is a relief to get closer to the truth. I’m getting coffee.”
As he moved he noticed the red light blinking on his answering machine. He played back the message. One from Kit, wondering where he was. Then one other.
“Carl, this is Martin Ackerman. I don’t know what the hell I was thinking yesterday, but I canceled payment on that check. You can choke on it. Try to pull anything like that again, I’ll have my lawyers on you. Fuck yourself.”
Carl started at the machine, bewildered. He didn’t notice that Kit was at his side till he heard him dialing the phone.
“Hello, I’d like to report a missing person.”
Carl’s hand hit the cradle, cutting the connection. “What are you doing?” he asked.
“Well, that’s it, isn’t it?” Kit said. “I mean this whole thing was based on the idea he was paying you for keeping some deep dark secret. Now he isn’t. He was just confused. You got nothing to worry about.”
“Let me talk to the brother first.”
“There’s no point. Nobody’s hiding anything any more. Let the cops find her for God’s sakes, before…”
“Let me talk to the brother!”
“Fuck the brother! What’s the matter with you? She needs help.”
“I’m going to talk to him, I’m going to find out for sure.”
“You want there to be some mystery, don’t you? You just want an excuse to keep her all to yourself, with everybody thinking she’s dead, so you can keep on playing your little teen-age love game.”
Carl walked in silence to the coffee maker and finally poured his cup. “Jesus, this isn’t about me sleeping with somebody,” he said quietly.
“So you haven’t slept with her?”
“No.”
“Fine, lie if you want to.”
“Kit, I just want to make sure he’s not going to hurt her. As soon as I know that, I’ll call…”
“Don’t try to pretend like you’re acting reasonable, Carl, because you’re doing anything but. Now I know you’ve been lonely lately. Everyone’s aware of this depression you’ve been going through…”
“Don’t fucking psychoanalyze me.” He set his cup down with a crack. “And what the hell’s wrong with being depressed anyway? Who made that a crime?”
“Fine, I can’t live your life for you.” Kit got up to go. “You coming into work later?”
Carl looked shocked. “No.”
“Why not?”
“I think this is more important than a stupid TV show.”
“It’s your career.”
“Sorry. I think this is more important than my stupid career.”
“I’m not going to lie for you.”
“Then don’t.”
“I’m not sure Don and Mindy will understand…”
“Then tell them I quit.”
“You can’t quit, you’re my partner.”
“So sue me.”
“Look, I know you’re defensive about the idea of therapy…”
“Just leave me alone.”
Kit settled on the counter, fiddling with his cup, ready for a long talk. “I’m telling you, you’re behaving just like I did before I went into recovery from cocaine. Anger, denial. I just don’t know what you’re addicted to.”
Carl walked to the door and opened it. “Get out.”
“Hey, I’m not the problem.”
“Get out.”
Kit displayed his palms in patient supplication. “I’m trying to be serious.”
“Kit, I don’t want to have to hit you.”
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t know how. But I’m willing to learn.” He crossed to Kit, grabbed his arm and pulled him to the door.
“What are you doing?” Kit was shocked.
“I’m throwing you out.”
Carl opened the door. Kit stood on the threshold, his brow furrowed in irritation. “You know you’re not throwing me out.”
Carl put his hand on Kit’s shoulder and shoved him so that he stumbled off balance. Kit brushed Carl’s hand away with a quick, bug-slapping gesture. “Get your hand off me.”
Carl swung the hand up again and shoved. Kit stumbled out the door, tried to find his footing and tripped on the stoop, flailing back against the railing. He was on his feet again in a second, stepping up to the door. Carl slammed it in his face.
“All right,” Kit called out. “Fuck you. Fuck me for trying to help you. Fuck me!” Kit kicked the door, took a few steps down the driveway, turned back and yelled, “Fuck me!” Then he walked the rest of the way to his car.
Carl leaned against the door, his eyes shut, his hands shaking. This stupid shoving match was the closest he’d come to violence since he was in grade school, and it left the blood pounding in his temples.
Not that any of it made Kit wrong, of course. If Ackerman wasn’t paying him off, Ackerman wasn’t hiding anything. And if Ackerman wasn’t hiding anything, what was all this about?
He should call the police then. He should call Kit and apologize. He should go to work and forget all about this.
He picked up the phone and called Frank Ackerman.
TWELVE
As soon as he set foot in Frank Ackerman’s house, Carl knew why he had felt uncomfortable, so disappointed, in Martin Ackerman’s house. Carl had gone to Martin’s house expecting to find where Jesse had lived. He’d looked for signs of her, traces of her, the scent of the girl he’d known. All he’d found was an interior decorated, see-how-much-money-I’m-making trophy. He hadn’t expected her to grow up that shallow.
But now he knew. That hadn’t been her house. She’d lived here, with Frank. Even if, as Frank told him, she’d only been able to steal a few hours out of the week to spend here, still this was her home.
Here were the sun-filled windows, the honest sloppiness, the colors, the flowers, the knickknacks, the sense of fun. The game boards hung on the walls in place of art, the scattered Cary Grant videos, the old vinyl records and homemade cassette tapes. The smell of Jesse.
Not that she’d had backgammon boards on her walls when Carl had known her. Not that videotapes had even existed back in the pre-home entertainment 70s. But Frank’s Jesse was Carl’s Jesse. His things were things Jesse would have grown to love, if she had grown older…which, of course, she had.
The music scattered about under Carl’s feet in those self-labeled cassettes that fit the picture well
. It wasn’t Jesse’s music from ‘75, but it was music that followed through on that music. If she’d listened to Linda Ronstadt singing “Don’t Cry Now” and actually thought it was cutting edge (or whatever the cutting edge term for cutting edge was back then), it was right and proper that she be listening to Mary-Chapin Carpenter now. Jackson Browne then, John Gorka now. Loudon Wainright then, Jonathan Richman now. Emmylou Harris then, Emmylou Harris now.
But the biggest clue that this place was Jesse’s home was the simplest one; Carl felt at home here.
And Frank, much as he resisted it at first, was one of the reasons he felt that way. Carl didn’t know what he’d expected – someone cold, like Martin? Some easy-to-hate Lothario, who’d corrupted her? Doubtless simple jealous had led him to expect (hope?) to dislike the man.
But from the initial phone conversation, any such expectations had been doomed to disappointment. Frank had invited this stranger to his house to talk about Jesse without suspicion and with at least a good imitation of true hospitality. It was positively un-Los Angelino.
Frank lived in the Arroyo Seco on the Pasadena side, just under the Colorado Street Bridge. Carl loved driving that bridge. The blonde masonry, the delicate, yet ornate arches, the way the structure curved, gently, to catch the far hill like an oncoming wave, made it one of the most beautiful bridges in the world. John Barrymore had leapt to freedom from this bridge, escaping from his police inspector brother Lionel, in the old picture Arsene Lupin – but in the film the bridge had been in France in that story and, presumably, had spanned water.
A huge expansive freeway crossed the same arroyo at almost the same spot, about twenty feet over, rendering the Colorado essentially obsolete. But for once, beauty survived.
Frank’s house was another piece from the past – a little Arts and Crafts bungalow, just under the shadow of the bridge. But old things, as Carl was soon to discover, were Frank’s passion. “I’m a new-o-phobe,” he said. “If it was made in my life time, I’m very suspicious of it. If it was made since the Ford Administration, it’s got to be shit.”
Carl was pulling into the driveway when he first saw Frank – mid-thirties, wiry, wearing an old t-shirt and jeans and apparently using some bizarre garden tool to trim the Wisteria that entwined the porch. Carl was about to break the ice by asking what the hell kind of clipper that was, when he realized it was a prosthetic arm. Frank’s real right arm ended just below the elbow. Leave it to Kit to fail to mention a detail like that.
Carl was able to pull his eyes away from the hook just as Frank stepped forward offering his left hand to shake. “Excuse the hand,” he said, smiling, “I’d shake with my right but I can’t remember where the hell I left it.” Carl liked him right away.
In the living room, (all cluttered, warm, and Jesse), Marcia Ball was howling on the cassette player, getting all garbled and sour – the tape was being eaten by the machine. Frank pulled the cassette out, black tape trailing behind it, like jellyfish tentacles. “Disemboweled another one,” he said. “Good music always dies young.”
He crossed to his turn table (Carl couldn’t remember when he’d last seen one of those) and put on an old black vinyl Eagles record. He moved the arm in position and dropped it – there was that so familiar and yet forgotten explosion, the ‘pow’ of sound from the needle hitting the vinyl. Then the traveling noises, the hisses and pops and crackles as the needle made its way to the first groove. So much music and the record hadn’t even started yet.
When Carl asked if he ever thought about getting a CD player, Frank shook his head vigorously. “Don’t believe in ‘em. They don’t get scratches. You can’t effect them. They don’t change from you listening to them. There’s no relationship there.”
“When my first girlfriend left me, I was in high school and I just listened to that Beatles song “For No One.” I just listened to it over and over again. Played it to death, as they say. But you really could do that. That song deteriorated, it wasted away. It didn’t just communicate Paul McCartney’s pain, it felt my pain. It got so you had to put a quarter on the arm just to make it play. If I were to put it on for you now, you could still hear the heartache. But the CD? You just hear four guys in a recording studio somewhere.”
He handed Carl a Mexican beer and a lime, saying, “You’re going to have to say something or I’m just going to keep talking. I haven’t seen another human being for two weeks.”
Carl swallowed, wondering if he’d do a better job of bringing up the topic with this Ackerman. “I want to talk about Jesse.”
“Come on.”
Frank didn’t hesitate. He led Carl through the kitchen, past pictures of circus performers and antique magic posters (“The Amazing Morton Wonder Show – Totally different from all other Ghost Shows”), and into the back yard.
A riot of colors out there. Roses blooming wildly in huge human-head sized blossoms. “These were her babies. I mean, they were here long before I moved in, but she turned them into this. She taught me how to cut them back. She was vicious at it. Really, you’d have thought she killed the poor things. But then they came back for her, just like this. Almost violent.
“My bedroom’s down in the basement – very unusual for a house like this to have a full basement – and she used to stand there nude on her tip toes, looking out the ground level window there, trying to spot the aphids, she used to say, when they didn’t know she was looking.” He cupped one of the massive blossoms in his hand. “Best crop she had. She’d have loved it.” His voice trailed off and for the first time, he looked sad.
He shook it off with a quick smile. “So, what did you want to know?”
Her nude at the window, that brought back a little of Carl’s jealousy. But nude aphid spotting? It was hard not to like that. “Well, there’s so much. I haven’t seen her for years.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“She mentioned me?”
“Sure. You always go through that, don’t you? What’s your favorite movie? Your favorite song? Was your first lover kind?”
“What did she say?”
“Annie Hall, ‘Who Knows Where the Time Goes,’ and yes.”
“Really?”
“Are you surprised?”
“To be honest, yeah,” Carl laughed.
“Well, there was that too,” Frank laughed as well, “but she remembered you fondly, in spite of…whatever. I think if you’d given her a call sometime, she would’ve gotten a real kick out of it.”
Carl didn’t answer right away. Why had he never made that call? Because he could never find the words to make it right? Well, now, of course, there was no need. “I always meant to.”
“Well…we all mean to do things.”
And then there was one of those silences Carl hated. It took a special kind of man to let conversation dry up in just this way. Women, he imagined, might hug and cry at a moment like this, though he’d never actually seen that happen. Other kinds of men, Slavs and Italians, you know, the ethnic types, might be able to cry and drink and sing old songs in minor keys. Rednecks might punch each other a few times and then go hunt something. But his type of man, HomoSuburbius, could only sit awkwardly and look for a way to change the subject.
Fortunately, Carl had one easily to hand. “Anyway, when I heard what happened…and what was in the papers so sketchy… you were there weren’t you?” So he’d gotten to the point after all, in only to end an embarrassing moment.
Frank nodded.
So…take the plunge, boy, Carl told himself. “Did it happen like they said in the paper?”
“Did what happen?”
“The accident.”
Frank took another sip from his beer. “Oh. It was no accident,” he said and his smile was as brief as a heartbeat.
THIRTEEN
Carl had to remind himself to breathe while he waited for Frank to go on.
Frank leapt to his feet so suddenly that Carl almost toppled off his chair. “There’s something I have to show you, do you mind?”<
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Back in the kitchen, Frank pulled out a big box containing a half dozen framed photographs.
“I used to want to be a professional photographer, but the industry blacklisted me just because I had no talent, which is very un-American, don’t you think?”
Carl laughed, recognizing his own kind of joke. We must be her type, Carl realized. He could almost see Jesse’s personal ad, “Attractive woman looking for insecure, self-deprecating underachiever with good sense of humor and a love of oral sex.”
“I used to have these up, but…” Frank pulled out a few pictures. Nothing too special from a creative point of view. Just black and white shots of Jesse in front of her roses, her skin blindingly white against the grey roses. A too posed shot of her in cowboy boots leaning on a road sign (potted by the ubiquitous shot gun blast), reading Borrego Springs, the look in her eye just slightly suggestive. Odd, he thought, she looks older in these pictures than she does in life. Remembering her alive seemed strange in this setting and he wondered if Kit was right and she was a ghost after all.
“She really grew into a remarkable person. I wish you could have known her,” Frank said, closing the box. And Carl realized that there was another Jesse he’d never known, never would know. The woman Jesse had become. And that Jesse really was dead, he thought, a sense of loss washing over him.
“But what about the accident?” he ploughed on.
“Well, the boat trip was my idea. She’d always liked sailing, and I thought…Wait.” He stopped and looked up at Carl, concerned. “You know she was sick, don’t you?”
Carl told him he knew, but he gave no details. Some kind of brain disorder, he said. Some kind of amnesia.
Frank went into detail. Describing all the symptoms Carl knew only too well. Carl wanted to stop him, to tell him he didn’t have to go through it all again, but no, not yet. There was more to discover.
“Of course, she forgot we were having our affair. That came early on. That was a bitch…It had taken so long to get there in the first place and then…it was all erased.” He pulled himself up in his chair. “Martin and I were always trying to jog her memory. The doctors told us that was helpless but, well, it was something to do. Otherwise, we’d go mad. And I suppose we’d seen so many TV shows and movies where something, the right piece of music, a conk on the head, brings someone’s memory back, that we just couldn’t believe it was impossible.”