by Lewis Shiner
“Where are you living now?”
“Inwood. Krupheimer pays the rent, with enough left over for food. Half an hour from Columbus Circle on the A train on a good night.”
“If you don’t have to work, what do you do all day?”
“I play piano. I read. Today I came down to spend the day at the Met and I thought, Zabar’s is just on the other side of the Park.”
“Just a burnt bridge away.” He’d only wanted to keep the ball moving over the net, but he’d put too much power behind it and knocked her façade to bits. Tears ran down both cheeks and her eyes squeezed shut and her nose leaked onto her upper lip. She scrabbled in her purse and blindly threw a few bills on the table and said, “I have to go.”
She was up and headed for the door. “Sallie!” he said.
He caught her in the middle of the crowded café and turned her around and pulled her into his arms. She was sobbing. “I really did it, didn’t I?” she said, wriggling to pull a tissue out of her bag and wiping at her face. “The only man I’ve ever really loved, and I pissed you off beyond any hope of redemption.”
If that’s not what you’ve been waiting for, he told himself, then you’re never going to hear it. Tears and snot and glasses be damned, he kissed her until she dropped the purse and put both arms around him and kissed him back.
The people at the other tables looked like they might applaud. “You idiot,” Sallie said. “Why didn’t you do that twenty-five years ago?”
“I didn’t know you twenty-five years ago.”
“Don’t you dare quibble with me at a time like this. Where’s your apartment?”
There were still no cabs. Magic had limits in New York City. But walking was not so bad, holding her tightly to his side, the umbrella low over both of them.
“I almost jumped you a dozen times,” she said, “when we were working on that first album. I don’t know what stopped me. You were a big producer and I was just a kid, and you were always a perfect gentleman, and I couldn’t bear the idea of you patting me on the head and setting me straight. And my career. My fucking career. I always thought, what if I seduce him and it screws everything up, everything that is so perfect and that I have worked so hard for? And then I went on the road and I thought, I won’t ask, but if he shows up to see me, that will be the sign.”
“I went to see you in Minneapolis,” he said. “I saw how beautiful you were, what a star, and I was so afraid of humiliating myself, I turned around and flew home again.”
“Idiot,” she said. “Idiots the pair of us.”
In bed with her, his most potent fantasy for most of his life, he was suddenly crippled with self-consciousness, even as she seemed in a terrible hurry. After a fruitless half an hour they took a break and opened a bottle of wine and brought it to bed with them. They talked about Skip Shaw and Woodstock and their first meeting at the Bitter End. He watched her extraordinary eyes that still leapt forward, now with extra texture in the skin around them, and she saw him looking and smiled and put her glass on the end table, and he reached across her to do the same, and then it was happening, and as the hormones washed over him he had a thought, a thought that he was sure would seem mundane without the hormones, nevertheless, there it was: as beautiful as her flesh was, the fact that the flesh was inhabited, that this distinct other person that he loved existed within it, that the intimate connection of their bodies could also connect the abstract beings inside—his awareness of that was the most erotic thing of all.
Later, curled inside his arm, she began to fidget. “What’s wrong?” Dave said. “Was it that bad?”
“Idiot,” she said. She sat up and folded her arms. “For twenty-something years you did nothing, and we could have been doing this.”
“I don’t know. I think maybe it was worth the wait.”
“I was so beautiful then.”
“You’re so beautiful now.”
“Southbound boobs and all?”
“I’d follow them to Patagonia. Gladly.”
“All those wasted years.”
“We can’t change that.” He gently drew her back down next to him. “But let’s not waste any more.”
*
When she was little, Madelyn’s father had insisted that Idaho didn’t exist. “What proof is there?” he would say. “Have you ever been to Idaho? Have you ever met anyone from Idaho? Can you offer me a single thread of physical evidence?”
“What about the potatoes, Daddy?”
“Potatoes can come from anywhere. Thirty-five states in the US grow potatoes commercially, not even counting this mythical Idaho of yours. They can even come from Ireland. Can your potatoes produce a driver’s license with an Idaho address? Can they show me a passport with an Idaho entrance stamp?” He would then duckwalk into the kitchen and take a potato out of the hanging steel baskets above the counter and shake a finger at it. “If you can prove you’re from Idaho, speak up!”
And now here she stood on the corner of 4th Street and Main in Moscow, Idaho, across from the Garden Lounge. The bar occupied the lower floor of a two-story red brick building in the exact center of downtown, and everybody at the university hung out there, students and faculty alike. She could look left or right and see in the distance where the town ended and the Palouse began, the gently rolling grasslands where the local farmers grew wheat and soybeans and sileage for their livestock. Straight ahead and four blocks away was the University of Idaho campus, which took up a third of Moscow’s land area. It was the second of March, mere days before the beginning of Mud Season, a typically bright, cold afternoon in the process of surrendering to cloudless night. Dirty snow still lay piled on the curb and a restless wind picked at their clothes.
Madelyn was riding high from opening a box of author’s copies of her brand-new book, expanded from her dissertation and retitled Melville and the Other, published by smu Press, an actual, honest-to-God book with her name on the cover. She and Ethan, now going on eight, were en route to a celebratory dinner at the Café Spudnik with Lila Davenport, the Victorian Lit prof who had been her mentor when she first came to Idaho, plus a couple of other faculty, to be followed by a party at the Garden Lounge. She was trying to keep Ava’s decision to stay home from casting a shadow on the evening.
The divorce had been especially hard on Ava, as she’d had to testify at the trial. The fault was entirely Paul’s; left to babysit Ava and Ethan on short notice one night, he’d decided to visit his mistress anyway, leaving Ava and Ethan in the woman’s living room to watch tv while he had noisy sex in the bedroom. Ava, hurt and puzzled, had come to Madelyn the next day for an explanation; Madelyn, clueless until then, had quickly worked out the truth. She’d confronted the woman, a lobbyist for nuclear energy, and gotten a full, tearful, and embarrassed confession. The woman had testified too, and lost her job over it. Madelyn had gotten full custody of both children in time for the move to Moscow.
Ava blamed herself for the divorce, no matter how forcefully Madelyn argued to the contrary. She didn’t want to hear Madelyn blame Paul, which Madelyn understood. She hated tiny Moscow, population 18,000, after the fast-lane rush of DC. And, for the final touch of drama, she’d had a particularly turbulent puberty, her hurt feelings festering in a sea of hormones.
Now that she was 15 she’d begun to reveal herself, in ways not obvious early on, to be her biological father’s daughter: introverted, slightly melancholy, and wild for the opposite sex. Moscow, whether because of the name, or the cheap land around it, or the progressive politics of the university, had drawn a disproportionate share of the counterculture during the seventies. Some of those refugees had found jobs on campus, others farmed, did small engine repairs, worked construction, or found other ways to hold on. Their sons, now Ava’s age, were Madelyn’s worst nightmare: beautiful, well-read, experienced with marijuana, completely unselfconscious about their bodies, precocious sexually and otherwise, and barely supervised. Madelyn had used the last of her credibility to cut her losses, providing A
va with condoms and informing her that whatever she did, it was not to involve her brother in any way, shape, or form.
It was hard enough being a 40-year-old assistant professor. She was not, not, not going to be a 41-year-old grandmother.
She and Ethan were the last to arrive at the Spudnik, to no one’s surprise. Trying to balance the kids, her teaching schedule, and work on the book had left her perpetually out of breath. Lila teased her about her “just-in-time delivery system,” like at Toyota, where parts went straight from the delivery dock to the assembly line; for Christmas she’d gotten Madelyn a nameplate that said “Dr. jit” and Madelyn had put it proudly on her door. It was that kind of a department: easygoing, collegial, supportive, free of the bloodthirsty politics that were legendary at other schools.
Also easygoing was the unofficial attitude toward alternative lifestyles, perfectly symbolized by the openly lesbian Lila, and by Tony Langer, from Sociology. Tony was the victim of a classic academic marriage bind; the closest school where his wife had been able to find a job was Sacramento State, 825 miles away, a 12-hour drive in the best of weather. As a result they were widely known to have an open marriage, and Tony had confirmed it when he asked Madelyn out. He was in his late thirties, dark, athletic, and bearded, and he allegedly had 1200 pages of an unfinishable novel in his desk, his excuse for spending so much time in the English department. Madelyn, unwilling to become entangled in either the marriage or the novel, had declined the sex while consenting to the occasional dinner and movie, which had the effect of reminding her that she was missing her own sexual prime. Everyone assumed they were sleeping together anyway.
The table was filled out by the department’s latest hire, a blond young writer, and his artist wife, who were both entirely too charming. A couple of plates of antipasto had already made the rounds. Madelyn snagged some marinated mushrooms before they disappeared and poured a glass of wine. She was toasted, a speech was demanded and refused, and dinner was ordered.
“What’s the next book going to be?” Lila asked. She was sixty, large, and had an unselfconscious voice that easily reached the back rows of the Administration Auditorium. She had a trace of a Southern accent from a distant past that she refused to discuss. She was feminist but decidedly not postmodern, and considered Middlemarch to be the pinnacle of world literature.
“Well…” Madelyn said, knowing she should keep her mouth shut, but seduced by the gratifications of the day and the intimate company and the first buzz of the wine, “what I really want to do is teach a graduate seminar on the Literature of the Sixties, and then turn that into a book.”
Lila responded with her trademark squint. “A bit early for that, isn’t it?”
“I don’t think so,” Madelyn said. “I think the election of Reagan was a kind of cultural iron curtain, cutting off the sixties from the history of the future.”
“What about Solidarity in Poland?” Tony asked. “The Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia? Tiananmen Square?”
“We saw what happened in Tiananmen Square,” the young writer said. “The rest—the fall of the Berlin Wall, the so-called end of the Cold War, all the stuff in Eastern Europe—that’s just more of Reagan’s triumph of capitalism. It’s hardly the hippie dream made manifest.”
The discussion quickly descended into the party game of Pick the Syllabus. Catch-22 and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest were elected by universal acclaim; “Howl,” Another Country, Portnoy’s Complaint, and The Bell Jar brought out the swords and knives, to everyone’s immense pleasure, including Ethan’s, who had learned early on that these arguments were categorically different from the ones at the dinner table in DC. His head moved back and forth with the flow of conversation as if he were watching a tennis match.
Even so, by ten Ethan was exhausted and Madelyn called it a night. She accepted a ride home from Tony, who then carried the sleeping Ethan into the house.
The minute she set foot inside, Madelyn heard the absence. While Tony tucked Ethan in, she checked Ava’s room, and the den, and finally found the note in the kitchen.
“Mom,” it said. “Don’t worry. I’ve saved up some money and you didn’t raise no fools, as you have often said. I will be very careful and I will be in touch as soon as I land somewhere. Love, Ava.”
She didn’t permit herself to panic. She called the Chief of Police at home, a perk she’d gained from going to the same church that his family did. As it rang on the other end, Tony stuck his head around the corner and mouthed, “Where’s Ava?”
Madelyn held up one finger and said, “Hi, Nancy, this is Madelyn Brooks. I apologize for calling this late. You know I wouldn’t do it if it weren’t an emergency.”
“Are the kids all right?”
“No. Ava’s run away.”
“I’ll get Jim.”
Jim required no explanation. She read him the note, told him where she’d last seen Ava and what she’d been wearing, said she had no idea where she’d be heading. He said he would call the State Police immediately and get a local officer over to the house “to see what he could see.”
“Thank you,” Madelyn whispered.
“I’m going to say this even though I know you’re not listening. Kids pull this kind of crap every day. Ava’s smart and nearly grown and she’ll be fine. Now I’m going to hang up so I can call the isp.”
She put the phone in its cradle and slumped onto the floor with her back to the dishwasher and hugged her knees.
Tony knelt in front of her. “God, Madelyn, are you okay? What can I do?”
“Is Ethan in bed?”
“Fast asleep.”
She closed her eyes. “A glass of water would be nice.”
He gave it to her and she drank half and said, “What I really want is to get in the truck and go look for her myself.”
“No way. You have to be here if the phone rings, and to talk to the cops. I can go take a look if you want. It would mean leaving you here alone…”
“Would you? Would you just get on 95 South and go for fifteen, twenty minutes, in case she’s hitching and didn’t get picked up?”
“Sure,” he said. He stood up awkwardly and said, “I’ll be back in a while.”
He hadn’t been gone five minutes when the city cop pulled up with his lights strobing. His name was Officer Keating and he was young and ambitious and competent, and he gave Madelyn an unjustified but welcome moment of hope. They took an inventory of Ava’s room and found her wilderness backpack and sleeping bag were gone, along with several days’ worth of jeans and T-shirts and underwear, her waterproof boots, her down jacket, and her Mariners baseball cap. Keating got on his radio and gave the isp the details to add to their description. Also missing was a photo of Madelyn and Ethan, and the thought that she intended to be gone that long provoked a stinging in her eyes. She made coffee while Keating asked her a long list of questions with little obvious purpose other than to keep her distracted.
At 11:30 Tony returned. He shook his head and said, “I went all the way to the 195 merger. Sorry.”
Keating took that as his cue to leave. “Between us and the Sheriff, we’ve got every road in the county covered. If she’s anywhere in the vicinity, we’ll find her.”
Madelyn knew Ava was no longer anywhere in the vicinity. She thanked him nonetheless. Once he was gone she looked in on Ethan, who had apparently slept through the whole thing.
She and Tony sat at the dining room table and drank coffee. “I know you’re thinking you could have prevented this,” he said. “It’s not true. Kids that age, it doesn’t matter how good the home environment is, they’re at the mercy of all these feelings they don’t understand.”
“What I was thinking,” Madelyn said, “was that it’s already below freezing out there and how cold and alone she must feel.”
Tony looked down into his cup, properly rebuked, and Madelyn felt even worse because she had, in fact, been blaming herself, and she didn’t like him being able to read her so easily and didn’t like
that she’d been feeling sorry for herself instead of Ava.
“Christ, I’m sorry,” she said. “Obviously I am not handling this as well as I would like to be. That’s no excuse for scratching your eyes out like that.”
“Well,” Tony said. “It’s not like I have any standing to be lecturing you on kids.”
“I don’t know. You’re great with my kids.”
“Viki and I both wanted them. But it didn’t seem fair to them, with things being… what they are.”
All too rarely, the hand of the kitchen clock ticked forward a single minute. Doing nothing was the hardest part. She had been praying continuously since she’d walked into the empty house, and by the tenets of her shaky faith, that was supposed to count as doing something. It was hard, putting herself in the hands of a deity she could not picture, whose track record for saving children, including his own, was nothing to write home about.
The conversation was desultory and after one am Tony began to nod off. Madelyn put him on the couch with a pillow and blanket and after that it was easier, not having to worry about anyone but Ava. She walked through the past week in her mind, looking for clues and not finding any. Madelyn had proofread, at Ava’s request, a paper for school on Atticus’s “parenting style” in To Kill a Mockingbird, and had not detected any barbs aimed at her. One night Ava had spent an hour on the phone with one of the local farmers’ sons, and when Madelyn had looked in on her, Ava had held the phone at arm’s length and crossed her eyes and stuck out her tongue.
If anything happened to her, those memories would not be bearable.
Finally she too began to drift off. When the phone rang at 3:20 am, she jumped and banged her knee on the table. She ran to the wall phone and said, “Hello?”
“Miz Brooks?”
“Yes?” She sucked in a breath and held it.
“This is Sergeant Travis with the Twin Falls police. We’ve got your girl here.”
“She’s all right?”
“She’s just fine. Pissed off that her adventure is over a lot sooner than she planned.”