The Great Believers

by Rebecca Makkai

  “Did I buy any drinks? On this flight?” His speech was slightly slurred.

  “Oh. You’ve been asleep.”

  “Fuck,” he said, and leaned his head back so far his Adam’s apple pointed at the ceiling.

  “Something wrong?”

  “I left my wallet at the bar.” He whispered it, as if saying it aloud would make it true. “At O’Hare.”

  “Your whole wallet?”

  “Big, leather thing. You haven’t seen it, have you?” He peered, suddenly inspired, into his magazine pouch, and then into Fiona’s. “Fuck. I got my passport at least, but fuck.”

  She was horrified for him. This was the kind of thing she would have done herself in her wild days. Left her purse at some club, found herself on the wrong side of the city with no way home.

  “Should we call the flight attendant?”

  “Nothing she can do.” He shook his head, bewildered, his curls hitting his beard. He let out a short, bitter laugh. “Fucking alcoholism, man. Fuck me. Fuck.”

  She couldn’t tell if he was joking. What alcoholic spoke about it so openly? But at the same time, would you say it if it weren’t true?

  She said, “Do you have friends in Paris who can help?”

  “There’s someone I’m supposed to stay with for the weekend. I don’t think she’s gonna put me up longer than that.”

  And suddenly it hit Fiona: This was a scam. This was his sob story. She was supposed to look at him with maternal concern, to hand him a hundred bucks and say, “Perhaps this will help.” If she were his age, he’d have tried to seduce her on top of it.

  She said, “What a nightmare.” She made her face empathic, and then she turned her magazine page. She could’ve said, I’ve got bigger problems than you, buddy. She could’ve said, There are worse things to lose.

  When the cabin lights turned off, Fiona curled her body toward the aisle, settled into her thin pillow.

  She’d never sleep, but it was nice to go through the motions. She had a million decisions to make in Paris, and the past week had been a frenzy of panicked planning, but for these eight hours, she was mercifully unable to do a thing. Being on an airplane, even in coach, was the closest an adult could come to the splendid helplessness of infancy. She’d always been irrationally jealous when Claire got sick. Fiona would bring her books and tissues and warm Jell-O water and tell her stories, wishing to trade places. Partly to spare her daughter the pain of illness, but also to feel mothered. These were the only times Claire would accept Fiona’s doting, the only times she’d curl up in Fiona’s lap to sleep—her body emanating fever-heat, the soft hair around her forehead and neck curling and sticking to her sweat. Fiona would stroke her hot little ear, her burning calf. When Claire got older, it wasn’t the same—she wanted to be alone with her book or her laptop—but she’d still let Fiona bring her soup, let her perch on the edge of the mattress for a minute. And that was something.

  * * *

  —

  She must have slept a bit, but with the time change and the cabin lights and their flying against the sun, she wasn’t sure if half an hour had passed or five. Her seatmate snored, cheek to shoulder.

  The plane lurched, and a flight attendant came through to touch all the overhead bins with two fingertips. Everything secured. Fiona wanted to live on the plane forever.

  Her neighbor didn’t wake till breakfast was served. He ordered a coffee, miserably. “What I want,” he said to Fiona, “is a whiskey.” She didn’t offer to buy him one. He pulled up the window shade. Still dark. He said, “I don’t like these planes. The 767s.”

  She bit. “Why not?”

  “Yeah, in another life, I used to fly these. One of my many previous lives. I don’t like the angle of the landing gear.”

  Was this another part of the scam? The beginning of his bad-luck tale, how he lost his job and maybe his wife too? He didn’t look old enough to have had previous lives, or a previous life long enough to fly a plane this big. Didn’t you need years of experience?

  She said, “It’s not safe?”

  “You know, it’s all completely safe, and it’s all completely unsafe. You’re hurtling through the air, right? What do you expect?”

  He seemed sober enough not to vomit in her lap, or put his hand there. Just a little loud. Against her judgment, she kept talking to him. It was something to do. And she was curious what he’d say next, how the scam would unfold.

  He told her how he used to name every plane he flew, and she told him her daughter used to name everything—toothbrushes, Lego people, the individual icicles outside her bedroom window.

  “That’s wild,” he said, which seemed an overstatement.

  On the runway he asked if she’d been to Paris before. “Just once,” she said, “in high school.”

  He laughed. “So this’ll be different, right?”

  She couldn’t remember much of that trip, beyond the other members of the French Club and the boy she’d hoped to kiss, who instead wound up getting caught in bed with Susanna Marx. She remembered smoking pot and eating nothing but croissants. Sending Nico postcards that wouldn’t reach him till she was home. Waiting in lines at the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower, feeling she should have a more profound reaction. She’d only taken French to rebel against her mother, who believed she ought to know Spanish.

  Fiona asked if he’d been there himself, and then she said, “I guess if you were a pilot—” She’d forgotten because she didn’t believe him.

  He said, “Second best city in the world.”

  “What’s the first?”

  “Chicago,” he said, as if it were obvious. “No Cubs in Paris. You staying Left Bank or Right?”

  “Oh. Between them, I guess? My friend has a place on Île Saint-Louis.” She liked how it made the trip sound glamorous rather than desperate.

  The man whistled. “Nice friend.”

  Maybe she shouldn’t have said it, shouldn’t have made herself sound moneyed and scammable. But because it felt so lovely and warm inside this version of the story, she went on. “He’s actually—have you heard of the photographer Richard Campo?”

  “Yeah, of course.” He looked at her, waited for the rest. “What, that’s your friend?”

  She nodded. “We go way back.”

  “Holy,” the man said. “You serious? I’m a big art freak. I get him mixed up with Richard Avedon. But Campo did those deathbed shots?”

  “He’s the one. Grittier than Avedon.”

  “I didn’t know he was still alive. Wow. Wow.”

  “I won’t tell him you said that.” Really, she had no idea what shape Richard was in. He was still working at eighty, and when he passed through Chicago a few years ago for his show at the MCA, he was stooped but energetic, gushing about the twenty-nine-year-old French publicist who was apparently the love of his life.

  They waited a long time to approach the gate. He asked if she planned to hit the museums with Richard Campo, and Fiona told him she was really there to visit her daughter. It was true, in the most optimistic sense. “And her daughter too,” she said. “My granddaughter.”

  He laughed and then realized she was serious. “You don’t look—”

  “Thanks,” she said.

  To her relief, the seatbelt light dinged off. No time for the guy to ask questions she didn’t have answers to. (What arrondissement? How old is the grandkid? What’s her name?)

  She waited for room to stand. “Your wallet couldn’t be in your suitcase, could it?” She gestured at the overhead bins.

  “Checked my bag at O’Hare.”

  She believed him more now, but not enough to offer money. She said, “I’ll share my cab, if that would help.”

  He grinned, and his teeth were nice. Square and white. “A ride’s the one thing I got.”

  There was space for her finally, and she stood,
knees popping. She said, “Good luck.” And although he couldn’t have known how much she needed it, he said, “Same to you.”

  She hefted down her carry-on. Out the pill-shaped windows, a pink sun was rising.

  1985

  Yale watched, relieved, as a car rumbled down Belden. Someone unlocked the door of the house across the street.

  If he moved faster, it would only take half an hour to get home—but he went as slowly as he could. He didn’t want to walk into an empty apartment, or—worse—find Charlie there, ready to tell him whatever horrible thing had sent everyone out of the house. An emergency call, another death. They might have turned on the TV, seen news from Russia, something so alarming they’d had to run home, make preparations.

  He turned onto Halsted: a long, straight path to his own bed. He looked into shop windows, stood at “Don’t Walk” lights even when he could have crossed. He let people pass. Maybe he expected the whole party to come up behind him, to say they’d gone barhopping and wondered where he’d been.

  He walked much farther than he needed to, beyond his own corner. He looked into each bar he passed—opening the door when the windows were mirrored or painted black—scanning for Charlie, for Fiona, for any of them.

  In one dank entryway, a man leaned on a cigarette machine, his hand down the fly of his jeans. “Hey,” the guy said. He was wasted, his voice full of slobber. “Hey, gorgeous. I got a job for you.”

  At the next bar, a nearly empty one, a TV on the wall was for some reason showing 60 Minutes instead of porn or music videos. The giant stopwatch, ticking down. No nuclear war, at least. No breaking news.

  Yale’s legs were tired, and it was late. At the police station he stopped and walked back down the other side of the street, all the way back to the corner of Briar. He turned down it and looked for lights on the top floor of the three-flat. There were none.

  He didn’t go in. He walked, slowly, a block and a half east to the small blue house with black shutters, the shiny black door. Most of the houses on this street were as large as the structurally unsound one-time mansion that contained Yale and Charlie’s apartment, but Yale had always loved this little one that stood sandwiched between stone giants. Compact and tidy and not too glamorous, which was why, ever since he’d noticed the “For Sale” sign out front, he’d been entertaining the wild question of whether he and Charlie might be able to afford it. Who on earth ever bought a house? But maybe they could. To own a piece of the city, to have something that was theirs, that no one could kick them out of on any pretext—that would be something. It might start a trend! If Charlie did it, other guys who could afford to would follow.

  He looked back up the block. No Charlie, no crowd of drunken revelers. This was as good a place as any to wait. Better than the empty apartment. He stepped closer to the sign, so he wouldn’t look like a creep.

  They could have parties where people gathered on the porch to smoke and talk, where they’d grab more beer from the kitchen and bring it out and sit right there on a big wooden swing.

  He wanted, suddenly, to scream for Charlie, to call into the city so loudly they’d all hear. He pushed his foot hard against the sidewalk and breathed through his nose. He looked at the beautiful house.

  Yale could memorize the real estate agent’s number—the last three digits were all twos—and call this week. And then this wouldn’t just be the night they didn’t go to Nico’s funeral, the night Yale felt so horrifically alone; it would be the night he found their house.

  He was getting cold. He walked back up Briar and up to the apartment. Everything was dark and still, but he checked the bed. Empty, the blue comforter still bunched on Charlie’s side. He wrote down the agent’s number before it fled his mind.

  It was seven o’clock, which explained his growling stomach. He should have filled up on abandoned hors d’oeuvres before he left.

  And suddenly he had a new theory: food poisoning. He’d been a little sick, hadn’t he? It could have hit everyone else harder, sent them carpooling to the hospital. It was the first reasonable story he’d come up with. He congratulated himself for not taking a deviled egg when they came by.

  He made a double cheese sandwich—three slices of provolone and three of cheddar, brown mustard, lettuce, onion, tomato, rye bread—and sat on the couch and bit in. This was a better version of what he’d lived on at Michigan, at the campus snack bar where burger toppings—including cheese—had been free. He’d stick two slices of bread in his backpack in the morning, then load them up at noon.

  He dialed Charlie’s mother. Teresa was from London—Charlie’s slightly faded accent magnified, in her, into something glorious—but she lived in San Diego now, drinking chardonnay and dating aging surfers.

  She said, “How are you!” And he knew from her lightness, her surprise, that Charlie hadn’t called her from a hospital or prison cell tonight.

  “Good, good. The new job is perfect.” It wasn’t unusual for Yale to call Teresa independent of Charlie. She was, as she knew, his only mother in any real sense of the word. Yale’s own mother was a former child actress who’d tried to settle down in small-town Michigan, then ran off when Yale was three to act again. He grew up watching her on the sly, first on The Guiding Light and then on The Young and the Restless, on which she still made rare appearances. Her character, it seemed, was too old for regular storylines now, but her character’s son, who actually looked a bit like Yale, was still central; so she’d come back to weep whenever the son was kidnapped or had cancer.

  Yale had seen his mother exactly five times after the day she left, always when she swept through town with belated presents for the holidays she’d missed. She was a lot like her soap characters: aloof, mannered. Her last visit was Yale’s fourteenth birthday. She took him out for lunch and insisted he have a milkshake for dessert. Yale was full, but she was so vehement that he gave in and then spent weeks wondering if she thought he was too thin, or if it really meant something to her, giving her son something sweet, something that ought to make him happy. It hadn’t made him happy, and Yale still couldn’t see a milkshake without also seeing his mother’s red fingernails tapping anxiously on the table, the only part of her body that wasn’t completely controlled. “It’s going to be so interesting,” she’d said to him that day, “to see what you become.” When he turned twenty, she sent him a check for three thousand dollars. Nothing when he turned thirty. Teresa, on the other hand, had flown into town and taken him to Le Francais, which she couldn’t afford. Teresa would send him clippings from magazines, articles about art or swimming or asthma or the Cubs or anything else that made her think of Yale.

  “Tell me all about it,” Teresa said. “You’re wooing the rich folks, is it?”

  “Partly. We’re trying to build the collection.”

  “You know you have a gift for charm. Mind, I’m not calling you slick. You’re charming like a puppy.”

  “Huh,” he said and laughed.

  “Oh Yale, learn to take a compliment.”

  He managed to keep her on the phone for twenty minutes, telling her about the gallery space, the donors, the university. She told him the rabbits were into her lettuce, or someone was eating her lettuce, and didn’t that sound like a thing the rabbits would do? Yale ran the dust cloth along the television, the picture frames, the antique shaving mirror he kept out here on the bookshelf, the wooden box that housed Charlie’s childhood marble collection.

  She said, “This must be costing a fortune. Is Charlie there?”

  “He’s out,” Yale said, as cheerfully as he could.

  “Well. Tell him his old mum had two sons last she checked, and it’s been weeks since she’s heard from the one she carried.”

  He said, “We love you, Teresa.”

  * * *

  —

  It was the absolute middle of the night, Yale could tell without rolling toward the clock, when he heard
the door and then the refrigerator, when he saw the hall light through his eyelids. He said, “Charlie?”

  There was no answer, so he sat up, swung his feet off the bed. And there was Charlie’s silhouette, leaning against the doorframe. Drunk.

  Yale would have shouted if he were more awake, but he could just barely manage to speak. “What the fuck happened?”

  “I could ask the same.”

  “No, you couldn’t. No, you could not. I go—I go upstairs for five minutes. What the hell time is it?” He grabbed his alarm clock, turned the red numbers toward himself: 3:52 a.m. “What happened to you?”

  “I went out after.”

  “After what?”

  “The raid.”

  “There—the cops came?” It was the first thing he’d considered, but he’d dismissed it so quickly.

  “What? No. After we went to Nico’s.”

  Yale looked around the room, made sure he was awake.

  Charlie said, “Look, I don’t know when you vanished, but by the time we went to Nico’s, you were missing. I hope you had a brilliant time. I hope it was splendid.”

  Yale said, idiotically, “You went to Nico’s.”

  “We raided his apartment.”

  “Oh.”

  “We went— You know how his parents weren’t going to let Terrence back in. But Terrence had a key, and he was—were you gone by then?” Charlie hadn’t moved from the doorway. It seemed to take him great effort to assemble a sentence, even to form consonants. “He had the key and he showed it to Richard, and Richard said we should all go there straightaway. And we did. And Fiona’s going to cover for us. And we got his stuff. Look.” He started unwrapping something from his own neck. Backlit as Charlie was, Yale could only see the long untwisting of it.

  “Is that Nico’s scarf?” He was trying to piece it together. That everyone had abandoned their drinks en masse and walked to Clark to divvy up Nico’s belongings. That they had pillaged, in the best possible way. And he hadn’t been there.