His mother took another swallow, set her tumbler on the tabletop. “He’s a fraud because he told me he’d put me through college, and told me he’d never met someone so pretty, and that he never wanted to touch another lady on this good green earth and that he’d be honored to have me as his last.”
He asked what was the difference between a fraud and a liar.
She thought about it. “A fraud is someone whose whole being, body and soul, is full of lies, all the organs, the skin, not a pore free of them. A liar is a person who tells stories now and then. You and me, we’re just liars.”
He wanted to lick the wheels of the car, but his mother held him at bay. She was the guard of cake, guard of everything.
“Your father once carved an animal out of my complexion soap. Then he yelled at me when I used it to wash my face. That soap was not cheap.”
“What kind of animal?”
“How should I remember?”
She wore a red dress with a draping cowl-neck, a red-beaded necklace, and cork-heeled sandals. Her perfume evoked baby powder. The heavily plucked brows, teal liner, gave her eyes a slight bulge. She’d been drinking steadily for nearly an hour, growing impulsive, spiteful, knowing.
“Truth number two—I need a cigarette. That’s not the truth. Well, it’s true, but it’s not the one I was getting at. Go in Mama’s purse and grab a fiddlestick, Paul.”
He obliged. It helped to have tasks. It helped when he had a mother whose demands could be met. A friend at school had a chore chart affixed to his refrigerator; Paul longed for such a thing.
He lit the cigarette for her. She took a drag, closed her eyes. “He’ll be here soon,” she said, exhaling, and he heard a flicker of apprehension in her voice. “Mister Clover.”
He returned to his seat across from her.
He wished Mister Clover would ditch them, and he said so. He knew he wasn’t supposed to say it aloud; it was the barest transgression.
“He thinks I could be a model,” said Goldie. “Can you imagine it? He wants to take some pictures.”
“I can imagine it.”
A boy in his class had asked Paul if he’d ever seen his mother nude, and if so could he pick out a crayon that best matched the shade of her bush.
“He’s bringing his camera over tonight. He’s going to take some shots and show them to the manager at McFee’s. They need merchandise models. Can you see that? McFee’s today, Vogue tomorrow. That brings me to truth two.”
“Numero dos,” said Paul.
“Good boy. Dos. Dos is that even though your pops was a louse—”
“You didn’t say louse. You said fraud and dud.”
He wanted to know his father because it might tell him what was inside himself. He suspected some wrongness had been bred into him, and that only by knowing it fully could he stand a chance of escaping it. Fraud, dud, louse. He’d carry these words forever; all his life he’d hold them up to his experiences, one by one, as a person holds a paint sampler to a wall, seeking a match. At ten his instinct was simply to collect the words. At ten he thought: I was born from my mother’s head! He had learned in a book about Athena. He pictured his mother, bulging eyes, bloody brain, his fetal body slipping naked from her cranium onto the kitchen linoleum. Oh he wasn’t stupid. He knew about ovaries and all, just liked this idea better.
He couldn’t picture his father’s face. Supposedly he’d been a man whose modest handsomeness he drank away with Old Grand-Dad. But tonight Paul learned that he’d carved things from soap. It unsettled the account; it made a decent man of the figure scooping Fluff with his fingers.
Dud, fraud, louse.
His mother said, “I’m trying to tell you something here. You want to listen?”
“Wait,” Paul said. “What’s a louse?”
“Like a bug.” He could tell she was getting impatient.
“What kind of bug?”
“I don’t know,” Goldie said. “Like a roach, how’s that?”
“I like roaches.”
“I know you do, Paul. I’m not sure why.”
“I don’t like Beetles,” he said. This was a joke; Beetle was the name of their town.
“It doesn’t matter. Your father behaved like a bug. But my whole drift is that even though he’s a louse, and you’re his flesh and blood, you are not a louse. You need to remember that.”
“I wouldn’t mind being a roach. They live for millions of years. Their shells are armor. They can get into anywhere. I opened a box of cereal once and there was a roach inside. The box wasn’t even opened. How did it do that?”
“Oh they creep me out. Please stop.”
“Some have wings,” he said.
“Clover used to be an exterminator. He’s been lots of things. He was once a housepainter and a guitar teacher. Now he’s an artist, a photographer.” She pressed her tongue against the rim of her glass. “I have a model’s face, maybe, but my hips are too big. That’s truth number—what number am I on? Three. These hips are too big. Do you know what they call these things?” She put down her cup, patted her flanks.
“What?”
“Mama hips.” She laughed brightly, and looked at her watch, and stopped laughing. “He’s late. I did my hair and all. He’s bringing his camera. I made this cake.”
Paul stared at the cake, his cake.
“The car is mine, right? It’s not Mister Clover’s birthday.”
“I told you ten times.”
She had cleaned the house for the occasion. She had baked the cake and shaved her legs to the thighs. The cake looked good, her legs were smooth, but the house looked exactly the same. It was collapsing in its slow, powdery way, outside and in, bricks crumbling, foundation rotting, the roof patched with tar paper. In gaps between splintering floorboards was the dust and dirt from five years of their life here, this mulchy cottage, just the two of them. The floorboard nails had loosened, rose up, caught sometimes on their socks. She paid Paul a dime for each one he hammered down again. He was good with tools, had a certain grace with a hammer—an innate confidence. Women weren’t born good with tools, she didn’t care what Gloria Steinem said. It’s easy to have an opinion when you look like Sophia Loren.
The place was tucked into a wooded area at the east end of town. Once it had been the guest cottage of a stately manor, but when its owners fell on hard times they burned the big house to the ground for the insurance money. This was decades ago. The cottage, by luck of wind, managed to be spared the flames. Its meager charm derived from a stone fireplace, a claw-foot tub, and a massive door knocker in the shape of an owl.
“My face is perfect for McFee’s,” she said, and touched the wave in her hair to make sure it hadn’t faded.
“I’m hungry.”
“Don’t whine.”
He said it again in a deeper, even voice.
In the tiny dining room, a thin robin’s-egg cloth covered the card table. A shelf in the corner held their mismatched dishes, silverware propped in a mug. She had swept each room, scrubbed the kitchen’s peeling linoleum, plucked cobwebs from corners. She had even bleached the bathtub, her favorite place, where she spent hours reading magazines, napping, or writing letters she would never post to the boy’s father. She’d swept and scrubbed, and Paul had hammered errant nails back into place, but even so the cottage looked the same.
“Truth number five,” she said. She poured the last of the gin.
“You’re on four.”
“Four? Fine. Truth four.”
He did not like it when she drank. When Goldie was sober she talked, she talked quite a lot actually, but not like this. Her chest took on a lacy flush, and she ran her index finger back and forth along her clavicle. The local boys wanted to know what was inside her underpants. Their fathers wanted to know what was in her underpants. Paul kicked Mike Fitzpatrick in the kneecap and was suspended for three days when Mike said he’d like to put a dollar in his mother’s underpants.
“Truth four: Mister Clover is the real deal
. He’s a gentle soul. He just might turn out to be the white horse. You have to keep an open mind. Can you do that?”
“I’m hungry,” he said.
“There’s applesauce. Or olives.”
“I’m hungry for cake.”
Goldie wanted a perfect evening. Mister Clover would see that they’d waited. He was bringing his camera. He had spoken about a portfolio. Her face could bare her soul, he’d predicted. He had spoken about cheekbones and the brightness of eyes and he used the word incandescence. In his presence she was nervous and quiet, like an animal stunned by a superior beast.
“Another truth,” Goldie said. “We’re poor.”
“Number five,” Paul said.
“Number five and six and seven, honey.”
Goldie had one hundred and seventy-eight dollars in the bank. She was a grocery clerk at McCauley’s and sometimes babysat a pair of toddler twins and sometimes weeded the garden of the spinster across the road. There was a bowling alley half an hour away; once in a while she helped out there, spraying Lysol into shoes and laughing at the owner’s dirty jokes.
“Get yourself some applesauce.”
The boy obeyed, trudged into the kitchen. He was wearing pale blue pajamas, the broad-lapelled sort worn by old men, and plush slippers resembling baseball mitts.
They were poor and she was pretty, and there had to be a way to capitalize on beauty that didn’t involve the weary, circular articulation of one’s hips as one stood on a slippery bar above a throng of men in white T-shirts. Pretty people didn’t need to suffer the way she was suffering. Mister Clover had told her so.
2
A Peeping Tom named Tom.
He was Thomas Grant, thirty-nine years old, plain, clean-shaven, a face people tended to ignore or trust unthinkingly. He carried himself like a can collector in a windstorm, luckless and determined. His graying, buzzed hair grew into a widow’s peak. He was a nurse, a “male nurse” as they say (this drove him crazy), at an abortion clinic. His job was to sit with the waiting girls and to make sure they understood the procedure. He would prick their fingers, measure their blood pressure, and, afterward, take their vitals and give them apple juice and animal crackers. To work he wore pale blue scrubs which made him feel feminine, and so on weekends he wore plaid flannel, jeans, and steel-toed boots.
His apartment complex overlooked the strip mall. He was raising his child, Jade, by himself, her mother having departed when the child was four. Now the girl was nine. By all accounts he was law-abiding, decent. He was writing a children’s book about a talking milk bottle. He gave money to the lame and the blind, volunteered to run the bake sale at Jade’s school, and never abandoned shopping carts in the grocery lot. He was a tender, accepting presence at the abortion clinic. In all respects save one, he was a good guy.
Goldie was his undoing. She alone could bring on such urges. He told himself he wasn’t crazy or sick or obsessed, but merely in love. But not merely! Love was the thing. The hardest. The noblest. Though, since he did not feel noble, perhaps it was not love. Perhaps it was awe? He was decidedly in awe, which may be an even more sublime state, he reasoned, more difficult, more demanding. Only Goldie could compel him to telephone the old woman next door, beg her for the third time in a week to watch his child, and to kiss Jade good night in a hurry, to throw on his scarf and gloves, to run the half mile to the cottage where she lived with her son, so he could watch—breathing into his hands so as not to fog the glass—a woman he had never spoken to and never would.
Goldie! What could he possibly have said? The world did not offer the words. Language was a net with holes too big to catch what he could say to her.
He watched their sad domestic life unfold. He watched her primp and putter and snip at the boy who sat before her in uneasy docility, like a member of a corrupt court. She was regal—that was a word he could use. He was in awe, yes, and also terrified of her. He wanted only to watch, not to touch, not to be seen, not to enter. When he watched he could smell distinctly the layers of pine and mud in the air, a bristling underground scent that made him feel dirty and thirsty and also righteous, like coming home from a long hard hike. Here he could have an erection without needing to fondle it, without the gratification of touch. He was only his eyes. Her beauty was sudden and trenchant, an illness one must succumb to.
“Good night, baby,” he whispered to his girl. He drew the blanket to her chin. Her hair was the light red of certain small apples, her nose faintly freckled. Supine in her bed, she could have been advertising cough syrup, stirring hearts. Her round face and muted expression lent her an aspect of sleepy convalescence. She asked him to sing to her, and he did, but the lullaby was fast and far from soothing and all the while his heart raced. His heart was a judge’s gavel, pounding guilty, guilty, guilty, and so he was, and so he let himself run away.
He promised the woman next door, her breath fierce with bourbon, that he’d be back by ten.
She shrugged, said, “Take all the time you need.”
He jogged, taking a shortcut through the woods to avoid the town center, loving so much the snap of twigs beneath his feet, loving the sense of himself, of his running self, like an inviolable creature, as deserving of these woods, this pace—as deserving of the instincts that propelled him—as the animals crouched beyond his sight. The moon was a dull blade. The stars were incidental and always had been. All that mattered was that he could run, that he had located this awe inside of him, like a rare coin in a pile of pennies. He ran full of lust and authority, ran faster, feeling no doubt, the path slippery with pine needles and rotting leaves. Occasionally a pair of yellow eyes. Occasionally an owl’s hollow bleat, which he might, if he felt bold, mimic.
3
“Are you ready for another truth?”
He knew that her truths were not truths—or they were true but not Truths. She was making them up as they went. She was trying to distract him, soften him by way of disclosures. She had not bought him a proper gift and so delivered these statements in the manner of a gift, as if her candor were itself a gift. What he wanted was the opposite of candor. He wanted the lie of silence and cake. He wanted a serene smile, and for her to take him into her arms, and to feel she had no other need, and for her mouth to stop, just for tonight, his birthday.
“The next truth is that now is the time, Paul. Now, little man, and only now.”
“Time for what?”
“I’m losing my looks,” she said. “Maybe not yet. But I will, and soon. Now is the time to model, if it’s going to happen. Now is the time to find a—”
She was going to say husband, but the word broke apart. It was like a stone that, prodded, turns into sand.
He wanted to lick the frosting from the undercarriage.
“A man,” she said. “That’s all. Just a man. I don’t want to spend my golden years cooped up here alone. I don’t want to be one of those ladies with a book of puzzles.” Her eyes shone, and she bit down on her thumb. She did not want to cry. Her mascara would run. Paul would look at her with his turned-off face, his strange, calm, priestly face. His stillness was masterful, not entirely of this world. She respected it even as it sent waves of fear along her spine. He was not her; he could do what she could not do: he could preserve the boundary between his little self and the world. Why couldn’t she do that? Her own self was bigger, she reasoned, so its boundary harder to manage. But she felt strongly that Paul would never lose this capacity. It was a gift, and she didn’t have it, and her son did. Had she helped him have it? She hoped so. It seemed the greatest of gifts, even though she was dumb to its origins and frightened in its presence. She had borne a child who possessed the ability to shut her out. It was miraculous and sad and right.
“I want a companion,” she said gently, and averted her eyes. “When I get old.”
“But I’ll be here.” He realized as he said it that it wasn’t true. For just a second he’d forgotten that boys leave. When he remembered, he said, “I’ll live down the stree
t.”
“You’ll be in Hong Kong. You’ll be in Hawaii. I met a guy who was once a pimp on Oahu. Most pliant women—that’s the word he used.” She snorted. “No, you’ll be putting out fires or pimping or painting houses or catching fish, whatever boys like you do when the mood strikes.”
He asked what pimping was and she thought for a moment. “A pimp is a person who sells to lonely people what other people get for free.”
“I don’t think I want to be a fisherman.”
“Good for you.”
“Maybe a fireman.”
“Fishermen die young and sleep around. Trust me.”
“A fireman. Here in Beetle.”
“There aren’t any fires in Beetle.”
He gestured out the window, to where the big house once stood.
“There’s nothing worth saving, that’s what I mean. Let it burn.”
He would not look at the cake.
“You’ll be out making your fortune. You’ll be far away. You’ll be searching for whatever ring-a-ding captures you. Maybe there’ll be a war, honey. Maybe you’ll be out killing whoever we see fit to kill. Maybe you’ll be our hero.”
He wished for a war and often told her so.
“A war with China,” he guessed now.
She examined the tops of her hands.
“I don’t think China. Not China.”
“India?”
She yawned. “They say hands give away a woman’s age better than anything else. I’d say the neck, the upper chest.”
She looked at her watch.
“Paul, my little man. Be nice to Mama. Be nice to Mister Clover is what I mean. When you look at Mister Clover, pretend you’re looking at me. What we have here is what’s called a window. That’s an important truth.”
“What number is that?”
The Sweet Relief of Missing Children Page 2