by David Gates
One thing she does know how to do: after the water’s cut off, she drains the pipes into a saucepan, opening the little valves under the sinks in the kitchen and bathroom. She goes out to the woodshed for a jug of antifreeze, flushes the toilet and pours half the jug into the bowl. A rich, sick green.
She goes back up to the bedroom for the electric radiator, which weighs a ton and you can’t get a decent grip. So she sort of walks it: lift one end, swivel, lift the other end, swivel. The stairs aren’t that bad, but then there’s the whole rest of the way, and it feels like she’s already done something to her back. She’s just about in tears: quarter of eight in the morning, and alone in this cold house with this thing. Then she gets an idea. In the dining room there’s a hooked rug Willis’s grandmother supposedly made. She drags it into the front hall, wrestles the radiator onto it, lays it on its side and pulls the rug like a sled. This big triumph that no one will ever know about.
By the time she gets the radiator set up in the closet and comes back out to the kitchen, the coffee’s lukewarm. She drinks it, standing up, in three foul-tasting gulps. She reaches around and tries to massage her back, then spreads her legs, bends at the waist and slowly lets her hands sink toward the floor. She feels the top half of her body ratchet down in little jumps as the muscles relax. Her breasts swing out disagreeably and her fingernails touch the floor. She feels the pull in the backs of her thighs. Her knuckles touch the floor. She really should get back into doing yoga. Do it in the morning, when Carol does hers. Right, in all that free time while you’re fixing breakfast, dressing for work and getting the kids ready. The backs of her wrists touch the floor. This is probably doing absolutely nothing for her back except making it worse.
She straightens up slowly. Maybe it’s her imagination, but she thinks it feels better.
By now it must be eight o’clock. Time to do this.
She decides she might as well call the Preston Falls police, since that’s where they pay property taxes. Though it’s sort of right wing even to think about your property taxes. And actually Willis pays them: they agreed that the expenses up here would be his thing. She looks up the number and dials. The man who answers says, “Police department, good morning.” The good morning strikes her as hilariously weird.
“Yes, hi,” she says. “This is Jean Karnes, K-a-r-n-e-s? We, ah, have a place on Ragged Hill Road? I don’t know if I should actually be calling you or the state police or what, but maybe you can help me?”
“Go ahead,” says the man.
“Well, I’m not sure, but I think my husband may be missing? He had been on leave of absence from his job and he was supposed to be back at work this morning, and I finally came up last night to check on him because I hadn’t heard from him and there’s like no sign of him. But the weird thing—”
“Say you came up?”
“Yes, from—where we live, down near New York City.” She feels funny about saying “Westchester” to these people. “So this is your weekend house, ma’am?”
“Yes. But he’d been staying up here by himself since Labor Day. Sort of getting some work done on the house.” The white spiral cord on this telephone is absolutely grimy.
“And when was the last time you spoke to him?”
“I’m not sure, exactly,” she says. “It was some time ago.”
The silence of male exasperation.
“I’d say it was several weeks,” she says.
“Uh-huh,” he says. She takes this to mean that he understands they have marital problems, like all people with weekend houses. “Well, all’s I can tell you, you can come down, make out a missing persons and we’ll put it on the computer.”
“So I should come down there?” she says.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Do I need to bring anything?” she says. “A picture or anything?”
“I guess if you want to bring one.”
She goes to the sink to rinse out the mug, but of course nothing comes out of the faucet. This policeman’s attitude—or is she overreacting?—makes her spend an extra ten minutes looking in drawers and cupboards for pictures, whether he wants them or not. But their picture-taking has fallen off in the last few years. Her picture-taking, actually, since Willis never bothered unless you came right out and asked. Finally, in a basket crammed with old letters and bills, she finds an envelope of pictures from their first summer up here. Willis aiming the garden hose at seven-year-old Mel and four-year-old Roger in swimsuits. Front of house. Back of house. Side of house. House from up on the hill. Jean at the hibachi, smirking, holding up a hot dog on a long fork. (What had gotten into her?) Ah: Willis with chainsaw; he’d been cutting sumacs to give a better view of the stone wall. This would do. He was slimmer then, less gray in the temples, but it’s got the basics: eyebrows grown together, eyes set deep, cheekbones he’d have to gain even more weight to bury entirely, lower lip so much fatter than the upper. The mouth that looked giving rather than taking, which just goes to show you. Fine, she’ll give them this. She sort of likes that it will mean absolutely nothing to them.
She unplugs the space heater in the kitchen, which it was dangerous to have left on all night, and feels the air start to get cold immediately, as if the place just can’t wait to get back to being an empty house out in the middle of nature. She goes upstairs, glances into his study to make sure everything’s turned off, then checks in the bedroom. Might as well bring Emma along. And how about that Pilgrim’s Progress, to play around with that funny lettering? Forget it: she’s got enough on her plate. She takes a last look around the kitchen. She should hide the boombox and CDs; incredible how much money you’re looking at in a stack of CDs. But you know? You get tired of cleaning up after boys. Still, there’s one thing: that mug of her father’s. She just can’t abandon that up here, little as he loved it. She finds a plastic grocery bag, wraps up the JOE mug and sticks it in her purse.
She should have warmed up the Cherokee, but by the time she gets to Quaker Bridge Road the needle on the temperature gauge is up to the first little mark and she can turn the heater on. The morning sun is bringing out the green of the fading grass and giving the bare trees long, sharp shadows. She passes poor little house after poor little house, each with a giant satellite dish in the yard. Pumpkins and tree ghosts have never looked so pagan to her: right down from barbaric times. She could never have lived up here. Not that she’d ever been asked.
She tells the post office lady she left her key at home and could she have the mail for Box 324. No problem. On the one hand it’s nice that people up here are nice, but it’s like anybody could just waltz in and ask for your mail. This lady’s beauty-parlor perm looks odd with that mannish blue postal service sweater, but it must be cold working in here. She comes back and flops four bundles with rubber bands around them on the counter. “I guess you hit the jackpot.”
“I guess so,” Jean says. “Well, it can’t all be bills.”
“There you go.” So Jean has struck the requisite Preston Falls note: wry stoicism with a hint of self-deprecation.
She goes over to the chest-high table, slips off the rubber bands and starts throwing junk mail and catalogs into the wastepaper thing. She never knew they had so many hardware stores and lumber companies up here. A couple of things marked PERSONAL AND CONFIDENTIAL: IMMEDIATE RESPONSE REQUIRED, from a post office box at Cooper Square Station—probably some bogus contest. Sales at Grand Union. Full-color circulars from Ames, with all this seventies-looking type and layout; apparently they’re trying not to intimidate rural people.
She takes the rest out to the Cherokee—bills, bank statements; but, again, not a single letter—and she starts the engine so she can run the heater. The most recent phone bill, postmarked October 26, says THIS IS A FINAL DISCONNECTION NOTICE: total amount overdue $157 and change. But no long-distance calls on the statement. The one postmarked September 26 shows calls to Etna, New Hampshire (his mother), Rutland, Vermont (that lawyer?), Chesterton, New York, and New York City. Two e
lectric bills. Two American Express bills (neither one has new charges) and one Amexgram, that thing they send when you haven’t paid: his balance is six hundred-odd dollars. Two MasterCard bills, balance of nine thousand and change; the October bill has some snippy little thing about his minimum payment. SECOND NOTICE from Allstate Insurance; Willis registers the Cherokee and his truck up here because the premiums are lower, which she’s always thought was dishonest.
She rips open the bank statement postmarked October: a balance of $12.17, no canceled checks, no ATM transactions and a five-dollar service charge. The September one shows a balance of $17.17, with a single cash withdrawal: 9/18, $400, New Baltimore Service Area, New York State Thruway, plus a $1 ATM fee.
Why did he bother to leave seventeen dollars? Obviously to keep his account open. Which meant he took off for somewhere but intended to come back? Or at least to have the option? But maybe it was just that the machine only gave out multiples of twenty: her little girl-detective deduction. New Baltimore. That’s the one just south of Albany, right? But was it even Willis, or had somebody stolen his cash card? But if they’d stolen his cash card, wouldn’t they also have his credit cards? And since there was no activity on those statements … But of course Willis’s MasterCard was pretty well maxed out.
She fastens her seat belt, releases the brake and waits to pull out as a low-slung black car passes by. Going to the post office before the police made sense, actually. Well, so now she’s been to the post office. She so much doesn’t want to do this. The police station, she assumes, is in the town hall, where you always see cruisers parked around the side.
The officer behind the counter looks to be in his twenties; he’s got one of those ultra-neat short haircuts young Christians have, with the perfectly circular cutouts around each ear. Naturally he wears a wedding ring.
“Hi. I’m Jean Karnes?” she says. “Are you the person I spoke to?”
“No, ma’am. That would be Officer Plankey.” The name tag above this one’s badge says ALDEN. “He went out for breakfast. Are you the lady that called about your husband?”
“Yes.”
“Here,” he says, pointing to a waist-high swinging door. “Why don’t you come around this way and have a seat.”
She sits on a metal folding chair at the side of a metal desk with a computer on it. He sits down on the swivel chair and clicks a mouse here and there on the pad, squinting at the monitor. Then he starts tapping at the keyboard. “I brought along a picture,” she says.
He stops tapping, takes the picture from her, looks, puts it on the desk.
He asks for Willis’s full name, address, age, description and occupation, tapping in her answers; then he listens to her story. He doesn’t seem to think it’s weird that Willis’s computer was on—they’ve got one at home, and he’s always forgetting. The broken window? Could be kids; anything missing from the house? Not that she knows of. Well, come to think of it, she didn’t see his guitars. But of course he sometimes hides them, and she didn’t check his hiding places. She tells about the unpaid bills and the cash withdrawal on the Thruway on September 18. He nods. And how long since she’s seen or heard from him? Well, right around then, actually. He looks at her. “You mean around September eighteenth?” he says. Probably, she says. He looks back at the screen, taps a few characters, then, still looking at the screen, he says, “Was this a usual length of time with you and your husband?”
Not until she’s back in the Cherokee does it hit her that she should have told about him getting arrested on Labor Day weekend; she’d honestly forgotten. And it probably had no bearing. Well, so they’ll find out anyway, won’t they, from their computer? But when he asked if Willis had seemed unusually upset—no, “overwrought”—it might have been good to mention that. Instead she said he was a little burned out from work. So now they’ll think she was being evasive.
Well, she’s done all she can do here, yes?
She could drive by the house one more time, just in case his truck is there. Maybe check on the guitars?
No. Enough.
She heads back through the center of Preston Falls, trying to remember the most direct route over to the Northway. Past the old movie theater with its windows boarded up, past the used-furniture place that’s now a pile of bricks with charred boards sticking up, past Winner’s, where the display window has a cardboard cutout of a black cat arching its back. Right: Halloween. At least she’ll be back in time to be with Mel and Roger. She drives past Julie’s Luncheonette, with the hole busted in its plastic sign. Past the one surviving nice old storefront, Howard & Sheron’s, with black-and-gold lettering that still says SUNDRIES and always makes her think of sun-dried tomatoes. She’s a city person; so sue her. Sometimes it depresses her that she’s ended up back in the burbs, even though she’d campaigned for it because of the kids. A blast of wind comes along—whomp—that actually rocks the Cherokee and sends a plastic bag flapping up into the blue sky like a rising witch.
4
The elevator doors open on fourteen and Jean sees Helen, talking on the phone at the reception desk, and the pure white wall with her own smoky Lucite letters spelling PALEY, and she has to say: it’s a relief to be here.
Either she was too tired to enjoy it after driving down from Preston Falls, or Halloween really had been dreary this year. (The three messages from Marty Katz on the answering machine in Chesterton didn’t help her mood either.) Roger had wanted to be Dennis Rodman—this would’ve involved a blond wig and blackface, which Jean thought was racially tricky—but luckily he changed his mind and decided to be Frankenstein. (Frankenstein’s monster, Willis would say. But while the cat’s away.) She got him a rubber mask that had the things sticking out of the sides of the neck, and he wore Willis’s arctics, tied around his shins with twine, the toes stuffed with newspaper. Mel was Courtney Love: basically an excuse to put on a hiked-up skirt, fishnet stockings, heavy makeup. Jean wouldn’t let her go to the party all her friends were going to, ostensibly because it was a school night, and really because she’d heard rumors of dosed Hawaiian Punch at the same party last year. So Mel declined to go through the motions of trick-or-treating—she’s stopped eating sugar anyway—and stayed, in costume, in the Cherokee, watching Roger thrust his treat bag at grownups in their doorways, smiling their forced smiles. Next year they’ve got to have a better plan.
Jean left Carol to hold the fort while she took the kids around. But only four trick-or-treaters came to their door the whole night, so they’re stuck with all this candy, plus the bagful of loot Roger collected. Before he brushed his teeth, Jean let him have some M&M’s and a Milky Way from their stockpile, and told him he could start on his own stuff tomorrow, after she’d looked it over. She saw no signs of tampering, but of course with an expert job you wouldn’t. When he went to bed, she noted down everything in his treat bag, took it all out to the garbage can and drove to Rite Aid to buy replacements.
This morning the kids whined and dawdled from the minute she woke them up, and she finally just said, which was really unlike her, “Why are you punishing me?” They both gave good imitations of bewilderment, and probably they were bewildered. She poured Product 19 into their bowls and sogged it down with milk, thinking (stupidly) that if she poured in the milk they would have to hustle. Meanwhile she didn’t even have time to make herself toast; she folded a piece of bread and gnawed at it to keep the coffee from making her sick to her stomach. She did finally get them mobilized and into the Cherokee; she dropped Mel at Chesterton Middle School, then Roger at Mary M. Watson. Watching him safely inside, she began to weep because all she ever did was crab at them and they really seemed to do so much better with Carol. So then of course when she got to the station she had to pull the mirror down and fix her stupid makeup in the parking lot, with a million people looking. No wonder all these men on the train don’t go home until like eight o’clock at night. Though by this afternoon she’ll be longing to be with her children again.
The Paley Group w
as her first job interview when she finally finished Pratt, and she was too stupid then to realize how lucky she was. While every other investment firm was cutting back, Paley had committed to a ground-up in-house redesign. She now knows this was Jerry Starger’s idea, hiring some young designer (on the cheap) to take charge of everything from stationery and brochures to the monthly newsletter to the whole look of the offices. Jean probably got the job because she wasn’t all that young and therefore seemed more trustworthy than some little chickie from Parsons or FIT with a stud in her nose. And things being what they are, it couldn’t have hurt that she was a woman. And okay-looking: not the beauty of the world, she knows, but sort of perky—a word she hates. You can be too beautiful, like Claudia What’s-her-face, the supermodel. (At the newsstand downstairs this morning, Jean saw her on the cover of some magazine: “A Supermodel Who’s Super-Nice.”) You can picture all these men tripping over their shoes and, in the end, not liking you because of it. Jean has an idea Anita Bruno—another of Jerry’s hires—suffers because of her looks. Though on the other hand, if not for her looks she might not be here to suffer, if that’s not too catty. Anyhow, she earned her keep that first year. She came up with the new logo (basically PALEY in this austere lettering) and made sure it got on business cards, letterhead, all the signage. They needed the help: one of the old brochures actually had this crosshatched drawing of two white guys in suits facing each other across a desk, one pointing to something on a piece of paper and the other cocking his head like the RCA dog. She even picked new art for the corridors, getting rid of the giant color photos of sailboats and bringing in these plexiglass-framed constructions of torn-paper triangles, thread and birds’ bones that she’d found at a show in Connecticut.