by Toby Devens
“Fleur,” I said. “Fleur! Damn!” But she’d clicked off as the SUV behind me cut around my right fender in a shrieking arc. I flipped the driver the bird, but she’d already taken off, oblivious. Too late. Too damn late.
Chapter 32
Just when I thought I’d never get rid of that last Ziploc of leftover turkey, November bowed out, December blew in, a certain Englishman’s Saab got parked in my space in the Waterview garage, and I was in his arms. At last. Three weeks without Simon had left me hungry for him. And not only for his artful lovemaking. I would have been happy just to sleep in his arms after the rare luxury of enough time together.
He’d promised me three-quarters of a day and a long night before he had to head down to Washington on Sunday for the tea dance honoring his funding foundation. “Let’s just do whatever’s fun in your home town,” he’d said, leaving the scheduling up to me. Fun for Simon was catching the traveling exhibit of Neo-Impressionists at the Walters Art Museum and I’d bought concert tickets for the Baltimore Symphony’s evening performance. After that, we’d have supper in a restaurant where the crab imperial was to die for. Then he’d whisk me home to bed and bliss. That was the plan.
At the museum, we strolled hand in hand, just another couple out for a Saturday afternoon with the clock not ticking. In the East Gallery, I backed off as Simon drew closer to peer at the perfectly arranged points of a Seurat. Suddenly, the way the painting before me cohered from a distance, I saw our big picture: this extraordinary man had come into my life and brightened it, added vivid color and a splash of excitement. And if not a lot of the relationship made sense close up—our demanding schedules, inconvenient geography, and the huge gap in our backgrounds—from the grander perspective, it worked. He made me grandly happy. Swamped by a wave of tenderness, I moved in, reached out, and stroked the boyish back of his neck.
He whirled around and smiled. “Come closer, Gwyneth, you need to see this. The precision of the light fractioning is absolutely scientific. Amazing, yes?” On the upswing of my nod, he pressed his lips against my forehead. “I love being here with you,” he said and drew me to him, which is how I felt his cell phone vibrate against my hip.
“Not now,” he moaned. He gave me a look of desperation and retreated a few steps. “Yes,” he barked into the phone before he even checked the ID window. “It is, indeed.” His voice changed as if someone had buttered it. Straining to listen, I heard, “Actually Baltimore. Ahh, understood. About an hour’s travel. Yes, happy to. No, no, no problem. Don’t trouble yourself over it. Plans were made to be changed, as my dear old dad used to say. Not at all. See you then.”
“Gwyneth,” I saw his Adam’s apple bob as he clicked off. “We seem to have hit a snag.” He flattened his lips to a thin stripe of disappointment.
“Jesus,” I said. “Don’t tell me. The honeymoon is over.”
His hand was already on my shoulder and he steered me to the stairs as he talked a steady stream. “My granting foundation. They’re all in D.C. for the Brubaker event tomorrow and they pulled an ad hoc committee together to meet this afternoon. They want to grill me about my projects. Have no choice, of course. Vital for me to defend them. My work depends upon their funding.”
I almost said, “How about I go with you? I’ll find something to do in D.C. and at least we’ll have the night together.” I’d strung the words in my head, but didn’t say them. I’d accepted scraps from Stan for twenty-six years. Never again.
A man who had honed multitasking to a fine art, Simon didn’t break stride while taking the pink granite stairs at a clip, buttoning his coat, and telling me, as I panted to keep up, “I’ll call you, but I can’t say when. Knowing this crowd, we’ll be working into the night. I’ll be lucky if I can grab a few hours’ sleep. May not touch base until tomorrow.”
I thought of the Seurat we’d just seen. A female bareback rider poised on one foot atop a white horse as it raced around a circus ring. The gutsy woman was smiling, no less. Or maybe she was gritting her teeth.
At the bottom of the stairs, Simon turned and saw my face. It couldn’t have been pretty. He stopped dead in his tracks. “Gwyneth,” he said. “You’re endlessly patient, tolerant beyond the call of duty. I wouldn’t do this if it weren’t essential to my lab. I can’t risk offending my major funding source.”
His funding source. Unarguable.
“Imagine if it were your Women’s Clinic on the line.”
I nodded which was his cue to give me one of his winning smiles, this one tinged with sympathy. “Listen, darling, why don’t you stay? No need for both of us to have our day ruined.”
He had to be kidding.
“Seriously,” he said. “See the rest of the exhibit. I’ll catch a cab to your place to pick up my car.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“Our lives are ridiculous, which is what makes them interesting.”
“I’d take less interesting about now,” I said, ruefully.
“I understand,” he said. “You’re right, of course. I’ll make it up to you, I promise. We’ll do better.” His knuckles brushed placating strokes along my cheek. I leaned against his chest.
Underneath the cashmere V-neck, I could feel his muscles tensing, gearing up for a dash to the exit. Sighing, I backed off.
He gave me a quick kiss, an eye on his watch. “I’m so sorry, but I must go.”
Finally, knowing I was being unreasonable, because it wasn’t as if he wanted to cut our weekend short, wanted to work instead of play, I said grudgingly, “Good luck.”
He was already on the run. “You’re an angel,” he called behind him.
That evening, Simon’s angel, wings clipped, decided what the hell, she’d done Seurat solo, she might as well not waste both concert tickets. It was an all-Russian program, as romantic as borscht, perfect for a solitary woman trying to keep her mind off her vanished weekend, her absconded lover.
I never made it. As I stepped from the Waterview elevator into the lobby, my cell phone went off. At the other end, Sylvie, the implacable island woman, the one who carried my father’s craziness with a gently swaying balance, was hyperventilating. In the two minutes it had taken her to pee, she panted, my addlebrained father managed to figure out the complicated lock I had installed on the front door. He’d vanished into East Baltimore. In December. With night falling.
Dear God.
I swallowed my panic and told Luann, the concierge, I had to go find my father. I said aloud, mostly to calm myself, “What I think is that he walked to the McDonald’s. My father loves McDonald’s. It’s only two blocks down from the house. Or maybe he’s in the 7-11. We buy Slurpees for him at the 7-11. I’ll roll by on my way.”
“He can’t have gone far,” she assured me. “He probably wandered over to a neighbor’s and he’s sitting on somebody’s porch and they don’t even know it.”
“Right,” I said, grabbing any shred of hope along with my car keys. But as I sprinted to the garage, I called the police.
***
Dan Rosetti’s theory is that wandering Alzheimer’s patients take off in search of something. The goal oriented ones hunt for their mothers or their dead spouses or, if they’re in a care facility, for their homes. But Dan says he’s sure that the aimless ones are also searching. For the person they once were. Now isn’t that enough to break your heart?
Mine was thumping like a drum when I turned the doorknob on the Streeper Street house. On the way over, I’d managed to convince myself that my father was already back home sitting safely in his recliner. But no, he was still on the loose and there was only Sylvie on the sofa, nervously wringing a tissue and, next to her, a police officer jotting down a list of places where he may have lighted.
“You know he has Alzheimer’s?” I asked the officer as I tossed my jacket.
Blanchett was her name, a softly
cushioned brown-skinned woman. She said, “Yes, Ms. Needam here told me. With folks like your dad, we don’t wait. We have uniforms out there already combing the neighborhood. And if it’s any reassurance, these are the people we generally find real fast. They never get too far. He has some identification on him, right?”
I nodded. I’d taken away his car when he wasn’t looking, but he’d held onto his license. He also wore a medical bracelet.
We spent some time going over possible leads. I dug out his most recent photograph, which was actually of the two of us taken, as if I needed more immediate pain, on the night of The Treachery, in the kitchen at Crosswinds.
“Why, he’s a sweetie, isn’t he?” Officer Blanchett peered at the photo. “What a nice open smile.”
The damn house was like a freezer. Why in God’s name was the thermostat set at fifty-eight when my father’s old bones needed heat? The tattered Orioles throw he wrapped himself in, winter and summer, was no match for this hollow BenGay-scented cold.
It wasn’t Sylvie’s fault, I reminded myself. He was my father. I needed to be here more often checking up on things, not in bed with Simon or getting my nails done at the Istanbul. Holding Kat’s hand and excising carcinomas from patients in peril were acceptably noble activities, but the rest were no excuse. And because of my neglect, my selfish preoccupations, my father was wandering around without a coat in the cold of winter somewhere, who knows where. I bounded up, going for my jacket.
“The Marines have landed!” A familiar voice turned me around to see Fleur leading a rag-tag battalion from the kitchen, a motley and beautiful crew that quickly filled up the small Streeper Street living room. My old flame/new friend Harry Galligan and Mark Silva, president of the local chapter of FRESH. Tracy, my manicurist, who rushed to hug me. Quincy Dickerson, Fleur’s shop manager, was doing his Queenella LaBella act at an AIDS fund raiser, but his main squeeze—a butch fireman named Brendan—showed up carrying a huge flashlight and a bag of Starbucks coffee.
And there was Dr. Dan Rosetti, his hand on the shoulder of a stunning young woman who vaguely resembled the ponytailed little girl perched on her mother’s lap in the photo on Dan’s desk. “My daughter Chrissy. She’s been through Outward Bound. Chrissy’s great to have in a search party.”
When I got her alone, I gave Fleur a hug. “I don’t believe this. How did you find out about my dad?”
“Well, of course you didn’t call me, not that you have the vaguest idea of what friendship is all about. Luann got a hold of me. I made a few phone calls. With everyone out looking, we’ll make short work of this and maybe you’ll be able to salvage some of your big weekend with Simon.” She cocked her head to get a view of the hall behind me. “So where is he?” Then she read my eyes. “Oh my God, he’s not here. Please.” She held up a halting hand, impossible to ignore.
Fleur’s palms are as big as a man’s and she wears a size 10 ring. “Don’t give me the crap about his being British and how the governess raised him and the shitty way he was treated at Eton or whatever. Prince Charles would be out there with a flashlight tonight. For your information, Dan Rosetti was supposed to be on his first date with Connie, which he postponed to be here for you.” She clucked exasperation. “Of course, your wonderful Simon…”
“…doesn’t even know about my father going missing,” I finished her sentence. “We were at the Walters when he got called to a meeting in D.C. With his primary funding source.”
When she curled her lip, I said, “Do you know how hard it is to pull in money these days? Ask me who I’d go off with if I had a choice between a wild night with Simon or a couple of hours pleading the Clinic’s case before the president of the Franzblau Foundation.”
She drew a sigh so deep it threatened to pop her bra. “All right, forget Simon. You’ve got a pack of people out there ready to tear this neighborhood apart. Let’s go find the only man in your life you can count on.”
“Who doesn’t have two coherent brain cells to rub together. Figures. My poor lost father.”
It was only when she reached up to wipe the tears from my cheek that I realized I was crying and maybe not just for him, maybe for his poor lost daughter who, in spite of herself and everything her mama said with the belt in hand or the hanger raised, had loyal friends who came through for her like her daddy did.
Now that I knew I was crying, I let myself sink into sobs. “What if he got hit by a car? What if he got mugged? There are junkies out there who will kill for a dollar or two.”
“Not for Monopoly money,” Fleur answered.
My thready voice spiraled out of control. “Like they look. They shoot first, then they take your wallet.”
“Come on, pull it together. You’ll have time for crapping out when everyone is home safe and sound.” Fleur would make a great prison matron. She spun me around and pushed me along, roughing me up a little when I hesitated. “You’ll feel better when you’re doing something. Get going.”
***
Chrissy mapped out our routes and organized us into bands. Dan, Mark, and Tracy. Fleur, Harry, and Brendan. Chrissy and me. Sylvie stayed back to take calls or just be there in case my father ambled home. The cops had already searched door to door on the block and combed two more in each direction, but we fanned out hitting the high spots along the main drag, Eastern Avenue, and the side streets. Chrissy and I stopped off at a tavern my father used to frequent when too much beer and not the ravaged connections between his brain and his legs made him stagger. We checked out the all-night laundromat, the Greek restaurant where my mother once waved a knife at the waitress for not enough lamb in the moussaka, and the animal hospital where my father, Rolfe, and I carried Snookie, the family mutt, in a bedsheet after she got hit by a car. That happened forty-three years ago, but Dad talked to my dead Aunt Margie so I hoped maybe he’d gone back to pick up Snookie.
At around eleven we shambled in with nothing to show for four hours. A new arrival, the WJZ-TV camera crew, had taken over the living room.
My father’s disappearance was the lead story on a slow news night. Eyes smudged with worry, I begged on local television, “Please, please if you see an old man in a brown sweater who seems to belong to no one”—I almost lost it there—“please call the police hotline.”
They flashed a number on the screen over my dad’s photo. Then the anchorwoman said, “That was Dr. Gwyneth Berke, a local gynecologist, whose mentally impaired father is missing in East Baltimore.”
Publicity, but not what Seymour Bernstein had in mind when he encouraged the partners to keep a high media profile.
“You did good,” Fleur said after the TV crew had departed and she’d steered me into the tiny, overheated kitchen for a cup of coffee. “You need to get the word out. Which reminds me, did you phone the kids?”
“Whit’s in the middle of exam week. Drew’s in LA doing that short-term internship at the Hirschorn. I don’t want to make them crazy unless there’s good reason. Or in this case, awful reason. I’ll call them tomorrow if he’s still missing.”
“Yeah, well, speaking of missing,” Fleur peered at me over her cup with lidded tortoise-wise eyes, “have you called Simon?”
He hadn’t phoned me, which meant he was still out there pressing the funding flesh or had collapsed exhausted in his hotel bed. I didn’t want to disturb him.
“Decided against it. Look,” I rushed to preempt her, “I know he’s put in a long, hard day. Even if I caught him, he’d have to drive back to Baltimore, then find his way here. And I wouldn’t want him roaming around.” I waved my hand towards Patterson Park. “This is a tricky neighborhood. He’d get lost out there.”
“Because we’d send him out entirely on his own? Because Baltimore is a jungle, unlike New York, which is...?”
“You’re right, you’re right. But do we really need one more person out walking the streets? And I’m not s
ure what else he could do. Hold my hand, I guess. But I’ve got you for that.”
I dug my toe into a spot in the linoleum that had started to peel. How many times had I asked my dad to let me fix up the house since he wouldn’t hear of moving? But no, he liked the depressing mustard color my mother had chosen for the walls thirty years before and the bizarre collection of clown art she’d hung on them. He’d even refused to let me remove the see-through plastic covers from the living room furniture.
I ran my hand over the Formica kitchen table, sweeping grains of sugar.
“Not ritzy enough for Simon, huh?” Fleur could always see right through me.
“That’s not fair.” I didn’t look up. “He isn’t a snob.”
“Who’s talking about him?”
I felt myself simmer with embarrassment as we both confronted my shameful truth: I was uncomfortable with the prospect of Simon visiting Streeper Street and catching a glimpse of my shabby blue-collar beginnings.
God bless Fleur. She’d skewer me later for being a small-minded, self-hating arriviste. And get no fight from me. But for now, she just threw me a pitying look and gave me a pass, along with a refill on my coffee.
Chapter 33
I spent all night hunting for my father. With Mark. With Dan. With no luck.
At 2 a.m., outside an all-night pharmacy, Mark and I ran into Quincy Dickerson, who’d raced over from his show to join the search. Though he’d ditched the Tina Turner wig and traded the four-inch heels for hip-hop Reeboks, he hadn’t taken the time to cream off the theatrical makeup and I heard Mark emit a disbelieving squeak and watched his irises bloom in the light of the RX sign as he gazed on the remnants of Queenella LaBella.
Quincy winked at him and unfolded a map of Baltimore. “Now here’s what I’ve covered so far. But remember, I’ve only been on the streets a little more than an hour.” He traced a twenty block radius with a magenta-polished fingernail. “I know you’re discouraged, but trust me, it’s just a matter of time before he turns up. Half of Baltimore’s finest is out cruising for him. Right in front of the Polish Home Club, I got stopped by a Charm City cop car fitted out with two very cute uniforms. Just a routine hassle. They thought I was out hustling. Dirty minds.”