The Disappearance

by Philip Wylie

  Paula’s face was puzzled; she turned to her husband. “Yes, Bill. What do we think?”

  “Search me!”

  “Haven’t—either of you two—ever imagined it might be just like this?” Edwinna saw their heads shake. “I have. Often. It was a daydream. I always told myself, this is a penance. We asked for it; if we stick through it—keep our hopes quiet—then, some afternoon, they’ll put us back the way we were.”

  “‘They’?” Paula gently repeated.

  “He. It.” The young woman waved a leisurely hand toward the blue sky and the topaz sun. “Up there.”

  Gaunt’s eyebrow cocked. “I didn’t know you were a Believer, Edwinna. In anything.”

  “I learned to be.”

  “In what?”

  “Me.” She said it almost demurely. “In me being able to do things.”

  A plane throbbed over the house, a small plane hurrying through the azure atmosphere as if its pilot had discovered there in the sky the evidence of some urgent business that needed his attention on the ground.

  “I wish I’d thought of this,” Paula presently said. “Because I’d have some idea of—how to take it. I haven’t any! I’m just—hopelessly stunned. We probably ought to do something. Listen to the radio. See if it happened to everybody.”

  “I did,” Edwinna answered. “Hester is. It happened. The radio sounds like New Year’s.”

  “And we should go over and see Bella and Jim. How strange it’ll be to see Jim!”

  Paula said.

  Gaunt shook his head wordlessly.

  “I just put in a call,” Edwinna continued. “Before the whole world tries to use the phone. Before the operators cave in, or walk off duty, or whatever they will do. For Charlie.”

  Both parents glanced quickly, in amazement. Paula said, “You called Charlie?

  Good Lord, Edwinna! What for? Certainly not because he’s behind on Alicia’s—”

  “—money?” Edwinna did not speak for a moment. She did not even meet Paula’s eyes. But finally she said, “What a bitch, what a perfect bitch I used to be! Mother, you know I didn’t plan to ask for money! You remember! Everyone must! That’s why it happened! I called Charlie to tell him to come here.”

  “Here!” Paula repeated. “Did you? But—”

  “He’s Alicia’s father, for one thing. He’ll want to be with her awhile now. He may even want to be with me.” She said it humbly. “He was a nice guy. I loved him, once; and half ruined him. I thought I was just a glamour-puss, for sale to the best bidder.

  I didn’t think I had even a bad temper! I thought he was weak and that was unfair. And I thought the world was mean. I never tried to help Charlie. I didn’t know what I had to try with. Now”—she raised her eyes at last to her mother’s—“I do know. I ought to be quite a wife, for any guy! And I picked him first, after all. In some ways, some very important ways, Charlie was a man!”

  Paula saw her daughter’s tan arms stippled by the memory of ecstasy. “What about Billy?”

  Edwinna grinned. “What about him? We’re divorced. I wasn’t his type. I want peace. I want kids. I want home. I want Charlie, if he’ll have me again. And I bet I can persuade him to!”

  “I bet you can!” Paula was sure.

  “I always did like Charlie,” Gaunt said. It was his only contribution to the discussion. Edwinna kissed him for it.

  He wrinkled his nose. “I don’t exactly understand what you mean—but I enjoy the way you say it.”

  “Ask Paula.” His daughter smiled. “Ask her about herself too. Ask Paula what it means when a mother wants a boy and a father, too, but you’re a girl, so she calls you Paula because you didn’t turn out Paul. Then, when you marry, you pass it along.

  Edwinna. And Theodora. Ask her.”

  Gaunt blinked worriedly.

  But he saw the two women exchange glances of understanding. It wasn’t one of Edwinna’s acid cracks; it meant something real and acceptable to his wife.

  The door chimes sounded. Twice: for the front door.

  “I’ll go!” Edwinna hurried.

  “Her date,” Gaunt suggested.

  Paula lay back on the grass and looked at the sky. “Come here, Bill. Kiss me.

  Really kiss me. You haven’t yet.”

  He leaned over her. “If I really did I’d start a scandal.”

  “So what?”

  At the door, trembling and disheveled, one black braid fallen and her small son’s hand clenched firmly, stood Kate West. Edwinna’s eyes were anxious. “Kate, this is no time to call.”

  “I’m scared! I found Georgie. I found myself home again! I want to see Paula.”

  “Not now.”

  “I gotta!”

  “Look. I’ll walk home with you. But you’re not going to bother Dad and Mom right now.”

  Paula heard the voice, recognized it, sat up.

  “What’s wrong?” Bill asked.

  “Kate West.”

  “You’re white as a ghost, Paula! For heaven’s sake! Kate was probably startled-came over to be reassured! She’s a helpless little person, after all—”

  Paula glanced incredulously at her husband and nervously walked toward the porch. This was a crisis precipitated cruelly soon. To reject Kate, to send her away, would be inhumane. Yet, to accept Kate would be to expose Bill to possible confessions or recriminations or accusations. Paula listened to the low-pitched altercation clearly and she knew, after another frantic moment, what she would have to do, irrespective of cost.

  Edwinna shrugged and unlatched the screen.

  The young woman and the child crossed the porch and walked on the front lawn.

  They stopped.

  “Paula! I was frightened!”

  The Gaunts were standing now. He thought: Here is still another woman. How beautiful she is! How innocent seeming! How desirable! What a marvel the mere being of woman is!

  His wife’s shock seemed incomprehensible, almost mean. It referred, he realized, to things that had happened which he did not know about. And there would be, in years to come, many such sudden, surprising episodes.

  “Hello, Kate! Don’t be frightened. We’ve gone back to where we were. That’s all.

  Hello, Georgie-Porgie.” Paula ruffled the little boy’s hair.

  Kate said, “Yes. I realized. But I had to come over, Paula! Higgie isn’t home yet.

  I’ll be so glad to see him.” Her young, high breasts moved with her sigh. “And I felt so sorry about you.”

  “It’s all over.” Paula spoke with desperation. “Let’s forget it. Let’s be just neighbors, as we were. Two sets of married people living near each other, fond of each other.”

  “But I am fond of you, Paula! That’s why I came with Georgie. Really fond of you. That’s why I feel so ashamed. I mean, it wasn’t your fault we got—mixed up. It was mine. Maybe it was my sisters’ fault.”

  “Can’t we just skip all that, Kate?”

  The young woman looked warmly at Bill Gaunt. “I’m so glad! You’re the first man I’ve seen, so far, except passing in cars!” She smiled. “And Byron, of course. He’s just sitting still, under a cabbage palm!” She turned to Paula again. “I couldn’t bear it if I thought you wouldn’t forgive me. After all, we only—”

  Gaunt saw his wife’s dark Bush. She looked at the ground. She looked despairfully at the trees. She looked, at last, toward him. “Kate lived with us, Bill. You might as well know now. There were no men, Bill. A lot of women had crushes on each other. Some of us didn’t appreciate how masculine we’d always been until the fact was practically out of hand. I had to send Kate away.” Her eyes begged.

  The philosopher looked at his wife with disbelief. What surprised him was not the statement she had made; it was the anxiety that accompanied the statement. His hand went into a pocket. He fished out matches and a cigarette, moved his gaze down to them and put them back. He gazed at Kate and slowly smiled, walked up to her and took her chin in his lean hand. He lifted her face and kissed
her lightly. Then he kissed Paula.

  “Lord,” he said, “women get upset by the smallest things!”

  Paula began to sob.

  Gaunt swung Georgie up on his shoulder. “Come on,” he cried. “We’ll all walk Kate back home! Maybe Higgie will be there by now.”

  Higgie was there.

  On the way back along the root-riven, jungle-arched street they encountered Jim, Bella, Gordon and Sarah, emerging from their yard.

  Jim was marching solemnly. His head was up and his eyes flashed. He looked like a prophet at the moment of vindication, a martyr stepping forward for his reward, a soldier just decorated. And Bella wore her whole and perfect smile.

  They stopped wordlessly. Soon they shook hands.

  It was not enough.

  They kissed each other.

  “All over the world,” Jim said in a hushed, dramatic voice. He repeated it, as if the phrase had a near-religious significance. “All over the world! With the scales off their eyes! They are looking at each other, men and women. They see what they are not, that they pretended to be. What they are, that they ignored. There is a passion in the hearts of all, the passion of peace. The passion of self-discipline. The glass they see through is no longer dark. They speak with the tongues of angels and it profiteth all, for they have love.

  The flesh of love, the golden flower and the spirit that abides in the flesh. The flesh that is the temple, defiled in the mind no mote. They are purified, for to them all is pure!”

  “Daddy,” Gordon commanded, “stop talking like the Bible.”

  Bella laughed softly. “He’s trying to say something, dear, that we haven’t words for—yet.”

  Paula looked at a wet handkerchief and put it back in her damp pocket.

  “Just cry,” Bella said. “It washes out. It doesn’t stain.” She laughed again, lightly, self-reproachfully. “I used half a box of Kleenex.”

  “Magic,” Jim murmured. “Sheer magic!”

  Gordon, who had been eying Alicia, exclaimed, “She’s cute!”

  Gaunt chuckled.

  Paula said, “Come over.”

  Jim nodded. “Afterwhile. We’re going for a little stroll. Just the family. We’ll be back.” Paula nodded and the Gaunts watched the family march up the lane. She said presently, “Let’s try to get a call through to Edwin, or a telegram.”

  “Let’s,” Gaunt said.

  Bella ran back. “I’ve got stew, a lot, all made! Remember?”

  “Do you think,” Gaunt asked, “it will be safe to eat, after all these years?” His eyes sparkled. He felt he was beginning to catch onto the new rhythm, the new reality.

  “I’ll fix a salad and dessert. You bring the stew over to our place, Bella.” Paula and the other woman nodded agreeingly at each other and Bella ran back to Jim.

  Paula took Bill’s arm. “Darling, we won’t need to do anything for an hour or so—

  ”

  “I was thinking that.”

  All the round world over.

  As the world turned, as the sun’s curved light drove away the equatorial dark and the arctic dark, men woke and women to find themselves together again. Or near. Or woke without noticing the difference: the lonely few who had continued their solitary ways through the catastrophe. These, in some instances, did not learn for days or even weeks how the great and terrible dimension had contracted, effaced itself and brought a remembering species back to the moment when the sexes had been sundered. When they had begun to discover in hell what they had left undone and what they had done that they ought not. In hell: it is the place where there can be no love.

  Later that evening, Paula and her husband drove toward Miami.

  The Elliots had gone home long after everyone realized that even the most strenuous attempt with the most understanding auditors could not, in anyone evening, convey the events that had occurred. For months these friends, like all friends old or new, would remember a fresh and salient fact, an untold episode, an emotional experience overlooked until then.

  Gaunt had wanted to see how the city was reacting, and so had Paula. Yet neither had wanted to observe so much as to please the other; they had come by the discovery that they shared the same curiosity by such oblique suggestions and queries as are made by every husband and wife and always will be.

  Paula had finally said, “Why don’t we just go look? We’ll be together, still. And we won’t have to stay long.”

  “That feeling of being together,” Gaunt said, as he turned into the jubilant traffic stream on Brickell Avenue. “Everybody has it, I guess. Maybe we’re all afraid that this day is only an interval, a recess.”

  “Who doesn’t think of that?” Paula looked at him in the vague, changing light. “It scares me.”

  “Don’t you have any hunch about it? Any intuition? I do. I think it’s over.”

  She replied quietly. “Well, so do I. In a way. I mean, I think it’s over so long as we don’t go back in the old ruts. If you know what I mean.”

  He hugged her in brief assent. “I was surprised Edwinna wouldn’t come along.

  Jim and Bella would have let Alicia sleep with them.”

  Paula smiled to herself. “You don’t understand a lot of things yet, Bill. Alicia died! For Edwinna this is a resurrection. Redemption. She’s practical and realistic, heaven knows! But she just wasn’t ready to stop looking at the child, even asleep. And then she’s going to keep trying to phone Charlie.”

  Gaunt looked at slowed cars far ahead and turned, suddenly, into the schoolyard driveway. He parked where he had parked long before, on another dramatic night.

  They walked up the bridge; they could see the center of Miami. Every light in the city seemed to be burning. Every person appeared to be on the streets. The parking yards were solid with cars. But no cars had been allowed in the main thoroughfares: there was no place for them; pavement and sidewalks were thronged with men and women and children. They were moving, milling, parading with linked arms a thousand all together, and dancing where a loudspeaker poured out music. Strangers shook hands, some gravely, some weeping, some hilariously; strangers embraced, strangers kissed.

  Over a big bar a hand-lettered banner proclaimed, “It’s free!” and there were many in the bar. Yet they noticed, as they came down the slope of the drawbridge and mingled with the crowds, that no one seemed to be drunk. No one wanted to blot out this experience.

  An old man grabbed Gaunt’s hand and wrung it. Two young men gravely approached Paula, smiled at Gaunt, said, “Pardon,” and solemnly kissed her. Paula kissed them in return, putting her arms around them, letting them go with a fond look.

  Dancers buffeted them. Old, young, middle-aged, whirling and stamping with the music, eyes bright, bright hair catching the many-hued glitter of electric signs.

  The traffic lanes and parkways of Biscayne Boulevard were packed with people.

  Gaunt thought of Jim’s phrase.

  “All over the world,” he repeated.

  Paula turned starry eyes toward him and nodded. “In the cities we saw burned.

  With the girls and the women we lost. In the cities you saw obliterated.” She squeezed his arm harder. “Look at the park!” For a moment, Gaunt was startled. The long, bleak years had not eradicated all of his self-consciousness.

  As if by public consent, the park had been turned over to lovers, to couples wed or promised, or to strangers met but a moment before, and all these embraced in dusky reaches of lawn where night wind shushed in the palms and light exhaled by hotels across the boulevard was soft and filtered. There were flowers in the park, their colors faintly distinguishable, and the smell of the sea came from the far Gulf Stream.

  Paula turned from the quietude of the throng to Bill. She started to tell him not to frown so disapprovingly. To ask him what else he would have expected-or wanted. But she held her peace and soon she saw his features change from consternation to a calm that was followed soon by a smile.

  “Let’s walk through,” he said. “N
obody will mind. Nobody will even notice us.

  Others are.”

  “Looking for places to stop,” she said hesitantly.

  “So?” He led her into the park and they strolled in the happiness and dulcet laughter, the massive rhapsody. They came, finally, to the sea wall where waves splashed along the bulkheads, slapping, sucking, talking. A policeman stood there, his back to the park and the city, his eyes on the lights in the harbor.

  He said, “Hello, folks.”

  They said hello.

  He said. “Funny. An orgy.”

  Gaunt nodded. ‘‘Yeah.’’ He breathed. “I guess it’s the only happy orgy humanity ever had.”

  The policeman let go of his nightstick, spun it on its thong, and caught it again. “I had orders not to arrest anybody unless somebody was being hurt or making a protest—”

  “And nobody is?” Paula smiled.

  The cop’s head shook. “Nobody. When I get off duty, I’m coming down myself.”

  “I would,” Gaunt said. And they walked away.

  A while later he began steering Paula with evident purpose.

  “Where are we going now?” she asked.

  “Where I went the first night.”

  “Were you downtown then?”

  “Sure.”

  She said, “So was I. Late. All over yonder and out on the Beach the fire was raging.”

  They passed the tawdry, mustard brown arcade, working their way slowly through enchanted multitudes. They climbed the steps. No one was singing in the imitation-Gothic cathedral. The organ was not playing. Connauth was not in the pulpit.

  But lights were on; and people sat, here and there, in the pews. Gaunt stood with Paula at the head of the aisle. He saw again the ugliness of this effort to reassert, in structural steel and Portland cement, the sacred symbols of the Middle Ages. He thought fleetingly of how much brighter and purer Jim Elliot’s “mandala” had been and he recalled Bella’s account, which had so elated Jim, of how she had dreamed what the male world was doing while her husband meditated in his jewel-like “chapel.” Not many persons were in the “cathedral.” Perhaps twenty disturbed-looking individuals and a hundred couples who had obviously come in from the street not to worship but to be apart from the crowd, together.