The Art of Vanishing

by Laura Smith

  I spoke to friends about my predicament. “You’re going to have to cut off connections with this other guy if you want to save your marriage,” they counseled me wisely. But it was very hard for me to see Michael as some other guy, faceless, without his own pains and needs. And cut off connection with the only person who seemed to understand me anymore, just as the person who I relied on for unconditional regard seemed indifferent to my presence? Then I would truly be alone, I thought.

  I’m not sure exactly when I began toying with the idea of leaving, but I know the idea struck me with full force one day during a run in Prospect Park. As I rounded the bend for a second lap, an idea occurred to me. What if P.J. and I separated until Christmas? I could go back to Myanmar, report a story I had been mulling over, while P.J. continued his work in New York. I was feeling overwhelmed by the needs of two men and thought some time alone focusing on something other than myself might be just what I needed. Working alone would fortify me with some of that solitary strength I had felt over the summer. It would give us both space to reflect on whether we wanted to continue our marriage. I had a sense that cycling between indifference and pleasantness in New York was not going to help anything. Did one or both of us need to make some grand, sweeping gesture? I considered the idea that we needed to banish ambivalence from our lives, but wasn’t sure how to do that. P.J. and I had plans to go out for drinks at a wine bar that night. I would discuss it with him then.

  —

  During this period, Wilson Follett was often on my mind. I had been so quick to judge him, but now I found myself considering more compassionate interpretations of his decisions. I wondered if Wilson’s behavior could be explained by a desire to avoid a shadow life. Rather than wondering what that new life with a new family in a different place had to offer, he went and found out. Like him, I was feeling the pull of someone outside my marriage. I saw myself not as unfaithful or fickle, but as a person with complicated desires in a complicated situation who was trying simultaneously to do what was right for others and best for myself.

  When a marriage falls apart, it is tempting, especially when affairs are involved, to see the adulterer as the villain and the wronged spouse as the victim. From the outsider’s perspective, the adulterer is marked. Once a cheater, always a cheater, as the saying goes. He is the type of person who cheats, people say, as if there were something corrupt at the person’s core. A married male friend of mine had once gotten drunk and made out with a girl at a bar. It struck me as a relatively harmless mistake, but I was surprised when his wife told me. It did seem out of character. I couldn’t really picture this particular guy going out to a bar, getting drunk, and making out with a random person. He cooks elaborate, healthy dinners with his wife every night, portioning just the right amount for leftovers so that he can bring them to work in Tupperware containers. He undertakes labor-intensive home improvement schemes. He actually has a five-year plan. The couple had gone to therapy, but the one who seemed to be struggling the most with the drunken error in judgment was the husband. His wife told me, “I have to keep reminding him that though this happened he’s still a good man.” He felt tainted.

  I once read an article about “a cheating gene,” which suggested that certain humans are “biologically inclined to wander.”* The author marvels that this phenomenon applies to women too, which struck me as old-fashioned. But despite this apparently biological impetus, 91 percent of Americans find it morally wrong. Cheaters with their cheating natures are forever trapped inside their villainy. Of course, my situation was different than your run-of-the-mill adultery. But as I continued to have contact with Michael, and on some level allow myself to live in and even enjoy my shadow life, I felt marked.

  During Wilson’s affair with Margaret, he had existed in the murky space between one relationship in which he felt remade and one in which he felt undone. At the very least, I found it admirable that he hadn’t drawn the affair out, hadn’t subjected either woman to the ego-withering humiliation of entering into a contest for his affection. He had sought clarity, had refused to live in the shadow space between two loves, and then he had embraced his decision, discarding all that came before. Maybe it was cruel not to give Helen more of a chance. But I began to wonder if perhaps it was not crueler to hold someone in limbo while you decide his or her fate. And what if staying were cruel? There is something unkind about staying when you don’t want to, letting your spouse know that though all feeling has been drained from your marriage you dutifully remained anyway. Every Christmas Eve, every Sunday picnic, every happy moment would have the potential to be poisoned by the lover wondering whether he or she was not your lover, but your captor.

  One afternoon not long after I got back from Canada, I pulled out the file that I kept on Wilson. I spent the day going through his book, his letters, and the letters his family had written about him. I wanted to see what happens when you leave.

  Wilson and Margaret had three children, two sons and a daughter. Their daughter, Jane, who was five when Barbara vanished, would later write, “I almost never heard him talk about his past (even the portion of his past that was within my memory).” And “His worst flaw was his willingness to walk away from uncomfortable situations.”

  In 1947, he abandoned them. Jane was twelve and she wrote him a letter begging him to come home: “We are underclothed. We do not have a good school. Our father is not with us.” They were eating bread, tomatoes, a little meat, but they didn’t have enough food. The boys were taking their anger out on Margaret, who was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. She told Jane that she was losing her mind, which must have terrified the twelve-year-old. “Growing children and a mother need their father,” Jane wrote. “They can live without him, but something important is missing . . . It would be different if their father were dead.” She ended her letter simply, “Come.”

  Jane’s letter so exactly recalled the one Barbara had written when Wilson left. The two half sisters were roughly the same age when he abandoned them. Daughters morphed into new daughters begging him to come home, and his answer was always the same: no. This was the third time he had abandoned his children, but the first two times he had left, he had done so in order to enter into the exact same arrangement: family life, where there was never enough time for writing or the outdoors. After he left Margaret, he didn’t start a new family. Perhaps he was too old (he was in his sixties). Or perhaps he had finally understood something about himself. Though he might have the capacity to love women and children, he was not a family man and could never be happy in a life like that for long. Family hadn’t trapped Wilson. He had trapped himself.

  By 1963, sixteen years after his abrupt departure, he was dying of emphysema. He was living in a spartan room in a boardinghouse in Kew Gardens in Queens. Jane was the only child he was on good terms with. He didn’t have much of a relationship with his sons. He had never been close to Grace, Barbara was gone, and he hadn’t seen Sabra since she was four. By now she would have been nearly forty. At the time of his divorce from Helen, Wilson claimed that Sabra was the one person who had made him reconsider leaving the family and that she “was always much more to me than you thought or than I had any way of expressing.” But he never saw her again, not once, for the rest of his life. Sabra’s second husband told me that when she was in college, she had tried to reach out to her father, but he had demurred. He believed that what he had done was for the best. In one of his many letters to Helen about their divorce, he wrote, “I realize that to vacillate for [Sabra’s] sake, or for anyone’s, would ultimately be the worse for her and me and everyone.”

  He wasn’t entirely alone at the time of his death. He had friends in New York, and he still traveled to Vermont occasionally. He was immersed in his work, finishing his book on editing, Modern American Usage, and writing a critique of the most recent edition of Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary in the Atlantic. He was comfortably untethered from family life but not without conne
ctions. He was separated from Margaret, but still in touch. And though his relationships with his other children were strained, Jane and he corresponded about everything. He read the books she was reading in her college courses so they could write to each other about them. Perhaps love came more easily to Wilson in absentia.

  At the time of his death, Wilson had almost no possessions and very little money. He hadn’t been the literary success he had hoped to be. No More Sea was out of print. Jane marveled at how few papers he had left behind. He had always written letters quickly and didn’t keep the responses. He didn’t keep copies of his own published work, perhaps because it seemed vain and he was contemptuous of fame. It was another kind of vanishing, an erasure of himself from families, friends, letters, and work. And perhaps he was also erasing the people he had loved.

  The sparseness of the end of his life, in terms of both people and possessions, made me wonder if he had ever envied Barbara’s vanishing. She had managed something he could not—had just slipped out from underneath the things that burdened her. I thought again of the end of The House Without Windows, when Eepersip becomes “invisible for ever to all mortals, save those few who have minds to believe, eyes to see.” It now read to me like a death scene.

  In death, we are loved in absentia, but in a way that doesn’t bind. We are liberated from others’ expectations. We exist in mind only. Whoever had written that scene, whether it was Barbara or Wilson, had entertained a death fantasy. Death is the only truly clean escape. It is the departure for which we cannot be blamed, the place from which we cannot be tempted to return. There is no ambivalence in death. We are finally released from the things that dog us. And perhaps most important, we are released from ourselves. If death had been an escape for Eepersip, it had also been one for Wilson’s characters. That was how he envisioned the end of the Teaswiths’ tragic ancestral pattern: at the end of his book, everyone is dead. Death is the only way out. And it was the factor that I hadn’t wanted to consider in Barbara’s case.

  —

  That night P.J. and I sat in the window of a bar looking out on Atlantic Avenue. I told him about my separation idea. His eyes widened with worry. “Is that what you want?” he asked. I told him I didn’t know, but that I just wanted something to change, and the uncertainty had become torturous. He asked what I meant and I explained the Myanmar plan. “But I want to go too,” he said with a smile. I explained that I thought if we were separated, whatever was stuck would become unstuck, that if we really felt like we were losing each other, our indifference would evaporate. And if it didn’t, then maybe we shouldn’t be together.

  We joked about this sort of bizarre fantasy where we were divorced, but still best friends, romantic best friends, we said. We would live in separate houses, perhaps around the corner from each other, perhaps we would even have children and dogs together, and when we were lonely, we would call one another on the telephone, and go out for dinner and talk for hours. As we talked, I stopped thinking of or even looking at the people passing by outside the bar’s window. We recalled the feelings that had driven us to the arrangement in the first place: a sense that marriage was somehow insufficient. We wanted to be more than married, and now the talk of a separation seemed to be literally pulling us closer. We were leaning forward on our barstools, talking animatedly and laughing.

  I told P.J. that if we were separated, there would be no reason to act cheerfully when I didn’t feel cheerful, no reason for me to talk in a forced singsong voice that I hated but at times couldn’t help but speak in now. I was trying a little too hard to be happy, to make him happy. I wanted to plaster over our problems with optimism. But it wasn’t working. “We’ve always been closest when we’re direct,” P.J. said. “Even when it’s sad or hard, even when you say something that pierces me. Right now, I feel close to you.”

  —

  In separation, P.J. and I decided, we could just be what we were: two people who had no idea what they were doing, didn’t really understand their own feelings, and were exhausted from trying. We would be free to feel as shitty as we wanted without the pressure of trying to fix it, or even name it.

  When I was in elementary school, my best friend’s parents got divorced. The mother had been so raw—and so fascinating to me. I was used to adults concealing unpleasantness from their children, but my friend’s mother simply couldn’t be bothered. She was all jagged edges, rage, tears, and occasionally laughter. Friends surrounded her. She was always off to lunch with someone to discuss her situation. She said the word “fuck” within earshot and once came back from dinner smelling like cigarettes. Sometimes at night when I slept over, I could hear her crying on the telephone. It was probably hellish for her, but I remember wanting to spend more time at their house during the divorce, not less.

  I was of course romanticizing divorce and had no real concept of what it was like. But as P.J. and I joked about our imagined amicable divorce (that really sounded basically like a marriage) and continued to talk, I realized we were having fun. “My old friend,” P.J. said, suddenly looking at me, stopping to marvel at what had happened. “Everything is going to be okay,” he said. He told me he didn’t want to separate, but he would if it was what I needed. Knowing that he didn’t want to separate made me not want to separate. We walked home holding hands.

  Four days later, I felt the coldness creep back again.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Finding Barbara—someone whose whereabouts had perhaps been deliberately concealed—seemed nearly impossible. But finding Anderson shouldn’t have been. He was, in theory, a regular person, leaving the paper trail that regular people leave. So why couldn’t I find him? Frustrated, I acknowledged the limits of my investigative capacities and sought help. I contacted an archivist at the Smithsonian, Marisa Bourgoin, who had a special penchant for finding unfindable, possibly long-dead people. We talked about doing the same for Barbara, but she agreed that Anderson should be easier to find, so we would start there.

  One morning, I compiled everything I knew about Anderson—when he worked where, the names of the ships he had sailed on, the names of the captains of those ships, the few addresses I had—and sent it off to her and waited.

  The next night, P.J. and I went out to dinner, and when I got home I happened to check my e-mail before going to sleep. The archivist had found Anderson. There were two attachments to her e-mail, both Seattle Times articles.

  In May 1937, Edward A. Anderson got married. He hadn’t told Barbara—he hadn’t been in touch with her in two years. His wife, Wilma Crayne, was much younger, barely twenty-one to Anderson’s thirty-three. The couple lived in Seattle, where Anderson had been living the last time he wrote to Barbara. He continued to work for Foss, despite his insistence three years earlier that he had had enough, and would go on only two more tours, after which he would move to Alaska and live off the land.

  From the very beginning, Anderson’s marriage didn’t go well. He was an enigma to his young wife. According to Wilma, “he seemed to have something on his mind,” but when she asked him what that something was he grumbled, “You wouldn’t understand.”

  On October 5, 1937, Anderson and Wilma got in a taxi to visit Wilma’s mother in Toppenish, a tiny town located on an Indian reservation about 150 miles southeast of Seattle. The couple had a car, but Anderson told his wife he didn’t feel like driving. When the taxi reached Yakima, a mere half hour from Wilma’s mother’s house, Anderson told her that he no longer wanted to go to his mother-in-law’s, that she should go on without him. They went to a hotel in Yakima. Anderson told the taxi driver to wait while he took his wife inside. Inside the hotel room, he began acting strange.

  “Well, you’ll never hear from me again,” he told Wilma, only moments later to contradict himself, saying, “I’ll give you a ring tomorrow.” He rummaged through his shaving kit. When he left, his wife noticed that he had taken his straight razor, leaving the safety razor, shaving cream, and brus
h.

  Anderson got back into the cab and instructed the driver to take him back to Seattle. But about two hours into the trip, at Naches Pass, probably along the scenic U.S. Route 410, which runs through the Cascade Mountain range, he told the driver to stop, and he got out of the car.

  “You go on alone,” Anderson told him, “I’m going to walk the rest of the way.” Naches Pass is about eighty miles from Seattle. The driver protested, but Anderson wouldn’t get back in the car, so he drove off, leaving him on a deserted stretch of highway in the mountains. Pine needles covered the ground. Alpine tundra surrounded him as he walked, with craggy rock faces sloping upward from the road and mountain peaks in the distance. The driver stopped and let Anderson catch up to him to check if he had changed his mind.

  “No,” Anderson told him. “You’ve been paid. Now get out of here and leave me alone.” The cabby drove off, leaving Anderson by himself in the woods. Four days later, Wilma returned to Seattle and discovered that Anderson wasn’t there. The driver had stopped by their address in Seattle and told Anderson’s boss, who also lived there, what had happened in the cab. Wilma called the police. The next day, a search party with bloodhounds convened on Naches Pass. The cab driver and Anderson’s boss came along—Anderson was supposed to have come to work the day before. They found nothing. Anderson had vanished.

  —

  One month later, a man’s body washed up in the chilly autumn surf of Falmouth, Massachusetts, not far from Martha’s Vineyard. The papers in the drowned man’s pocket indicated that he owned a small boat, lived at 66 Ewing Street in Seattle, and was a native of Maine. There was also a banknote for a large withdrawal the man had made around the time of his marriage that May. He was identified as Edward Anderson. He had drowned in an apparent suicide. Barbara hadn’t run off with him. He had been dead for two years by the time she vanished.