With the hammer he pried a nail from a floorboard in the corner and held it between his thumb and forefinger. He pressed the point of the nail to the web between his toes. He inhaled, raised the hammer, and struck. The nail pierced the skin and entered the floorboards.
“Ma,” he said, but that wouldn’t get him anywhere. So he called: “Oh God,” and this is when he saw the man watching him through the window.
9
They pushed through a crowd of people to get in. The new club was red and black, a checkered floor, velvet booths along the walls, flat faces looking daringly at hers. It was like walking into a playing card. She held on to Mister Clover’s wrist; he yanked her though the throng to the back where it was less crowded, where they found a nook and stood, bobbing to the thrumming—you couldn’t quite call it a song. The band was four chubby guys on a vaulted stage, long hair, wristbands, the singer’s words impossible to make out though you could tell from the veins in his neck he meant them something awful.
They watched the crowd. A few girls had kicked off their shoes. One was applying lipstick to a man’s mouth. People danced sloppily, bravely. It was a new club, with newfangled décor, but it smelled like every club she’d ever been to, the same smoke and sweat and beer. You couldn’t hide that. You couldn’t cover that up with paint or heart decals. The music quieted a moment, and in the lull she thanked Clover again, and told him how much she liked him.
“You’re so—” For a moment she couldn’t think of the word. “So different.” It wasn’t the word she meant, wasn’t a good word, for what did different mean? Nothing. It only had meaning when you explained what he was different from, and she wasn’t about to do that. She wanted to say something else. She told him that she found him handsome.
“Quit with the Clover, yeah? You should call me Joel.”
“I didn’t know that’s your name.”
“Yes,” he said. “It is.”
The music picked up again.
Clover—Joel, but the name did not suit him—placed a glass of something in her hand. She drank it. Then a different man put a bottle of beer in her hand, and she drank that too. Everyone was laughing. Clover held the camera up to his face. She smiled; she raised her glass to the camera. She smiled and pictured them living together, far from her cottage, in his clean apartment that would have plush carpet, houseplants, a long-haired cat. He’d make fresh-squeezed juice. He’d make pancakes. He’d take pictures of them, Paul too. Paul liked to see pictures of himself.
“Stop with the smiling—I want to see Dark Goldie. I want to see Goldie Without Her Locks.”
She stopped smiling.
“That’s right. Yes. I want Goldie Who Knows.”
She tried to make her face know.
“I like you a lot,” she said.
“Raise your arms now, yeah? Put your hands behind your head.”
She did. His camera flashed.
She said, “A lot.”
“Look over that way—what a beauty. Yes, raise your chin.”
She did.
“Close your eyes a little, like you’re sleepy.”
She did, she was.
“I’d like to be alone with you.” She wasn’t sure he heard, so she said it again.
“You’re a true beauty,” he said in return. “The rarest sort.”
Next he snapped her at a table of men in cowboy hats; they were game—they played the doe-eyed fools, mouths gaping, she the queen, pious among them, chin high, arms over the backs of the chairs at her sides. “That’s it, that’s it, yes sir!” Clover, squatting, froggy, captured it from many angles. Afterwards the men returned to their taut, upright bodies, while she collapsed more deeply into herself, shoulders slumping.
Then he wanted her to lie on top of the bar, provided the bartender approved. Would she be up for that? A rose or at least a carnation between her teeth?
“I don’t know,” she said.
“You’ll look like Marilyn Monroe,” he shouted, and walked off.
One of the cowboy hats was talking to her, his hand touching her waist, pulling her toward him. She kept trying to turn and find Clover. She didn’t want to lie on the bar but had told Clover she was up for anything. She wanted to please him. She wanted to be in McFee’s catalog, to model their merchandise, wanted for people to see her glossy and proper.
“You want to take a look at her?” the guy in the cowboy hat was saying. He was talking about a car. She kept turning to find Clover—for a moment he was lost in the crowd—but there he was, right there, standing next to the bar and talking to a man in rubber pants, and she saw that they were touching each other’s lower backs, and that the man’s hand was sliding down onto Clover’s ass, and that Clover laughed. Then they kissed each other. The kiss started out like a joke, a goof, but it didn’t end that way.
The guy in the cowboy hat was hovering, still talking. When Goldie turned to leave he grabbed her arm, but she yanked it away, freed herself from his grip with a quick jerk, the way you tear off a Band-Aid.
The bathroom was red: lightbulbs, floor, stalls, even the toilets. It gave the women young, febrile skin, which they admired in the mirror as if it were really theirs. She sat on a toilet and blew into her hands. She reminded herself that she was smarter now. Remember that, Goldie. She’d come through a war. All those rooms, that slippery bar, Paul’s dud of a father, all of it was a war. But she’d come through. You need to think of it like that, Goldie: you’re smart now. Smart meant patient. Smart meant careful. She knew better than to get into that car. She knew better than to lie on a bar. And didn’t she know better than to do anything for anyone’s camera? At once she felt sober, composed. Her lips were gummy, and she wiped her lipstick off with toilet paper. How would she get home? She didn’t want to see Clover again. The only person she cared to see right now was Paul. She could call a cab. That would be smart. That was what a person does who has come through a war. She calls a cab. She finds an anonymous person who will do what she wants without question, who will protect her not because she is she but because the rules say so.
10
Thomas was being watched. At first it was not unlike coming to work at the clinic and pushing through a throng of protesters. They carried their signs and sang their songs and imagined that these acts connected them to God. But it was easy to make a sign. It was easy to stand in the cold and sing. What did that require, really? What Thomas did was harder. He took the pulses. He handed those girls their animal crackers. He saw the stuff. Sometimes he assuaged their doubt, even though he wasn’t supposed to. He knew the things to say, and usually they thanked him.
He arrived each day in his scrubs, his face newly shaven, ready for his work, a cup of coffee in hand. The protesters called him names, murderer, Hitler, coward, on and on, fascist, killer, evil-doer, and sometimes even his own name, Thomas, Save Yourself, Thomas. They watched him carefully. Their words were not careful but their eyes were. They watched his steps, they watched his eyes, they watched his throat and hands and shoes and even the steam from his coffee.
He liked to turn to them. He liked to give them a better view of his face, liked for them to see that there was exactly no doubt in it.
The boy in Goldie’s living room had a hammer in his hand and a bloody foot, and he was looking at Thomas.
Thomas was being watched.
He and the boy looked at each other. Blood rushed from the kid’s foot. For a moment Thomas’s heart knocked in that easy, familiar way, but then it began to race. On the boy’s face Thomas saw reflected, very clearly, his own doubt. The boy’s face was not a face anymore but a mirror for Thomas’s doubt.
“Shit,” Thomas said.
The boy’s eyes widened.
A vision flashed through Thomas’s brain. He saw someone with a ladder propped against his apartment building. He saw a stranger peering at his daughter, indifferent to her sheets and toys and sheaths of glossy hair, no doubt, no love, Jade caught beneath this gaze like an orphan. It came so fast, J
ade asleep and observed by a stranger who would never comprehend his indecency.
Blood puddled on the floor. What had the kid done? The nurse in him felt the urge to staunch the bleeding; the nurse wondered about a tetanus booster. But the nurse in him was small tonight. The nurse was all but gone. Thomas cursed. The boy read his lips; the boy cursed back.
Thomas ran. The woods smelled crisply rank, like rotten mulch. Beneath him his feet moved fast, faster. He felt like a boy sprinting from his angry father, that acid rush of stupidity and sickness and helplessness, the way a child knows he’ll have to stop sometime, knows he’ll get caught, must get caught!, but maintains the belief anyway, while he’s running, while he runs, the crazy belief that maybe he can run forever. Maybe? He ran, his lungs burning, snot dripping, the kid’s blood bright in his mind.
Why did the kid do that? Who was it meant for? It was like a performance, but Thomas didn’t know who the audience was supposed to be. Him? He didn’t think so. The kid smashed a nail into his foot, and he did it with a kind of swift, flat, total certitude. His face was empty. Where had he gotten that kind of face? Or maybe the kid was retarded? Mongoloid, as Janice’s mother would have said. Maybe there was something wrong with him? All of Thomas’s certitude was gone.
He ran as if chased, nearly fell several times, branches and twigs slapping his skin. “Shit,” he said over and over, until he lost his breath.
Janice’s conviction had baffled him. No, more than baffled—awed him. He had not the faintest understanding how she could pack a bag, kiss the baby’s head (but not him), simply walk away from their sparse life, away from those gossip magazines, from the Polaroids in the sock drawer, the juice cups, their bed. How on earth could she be so certain? It seemed a rare, even a noble thing. Yes, he begged. Yes, part of him begged—clasped her sinewy arm and begged, wept, said all the things you’re supposed to say: Think about the child! I’ll quit my job! I’ll do anything!—even while another part, a smaller part, stood back and watched the spectacle, studied Janice’s face, its complete and hideous peace. She was doing the wrong thing but doing it so surely. She was doing it with perfection. In this she escaped morality. In this she made of submission—submission to yourself, to your wickedest needs—an art. She was far away now. Orlando? Toledo? He had no idea. All he knew was that she had become herself. Of this he had no doubt; in his mind she had become freely and fully and ecstatically herself, as only criminals and saints can be.
Janice’s absence had licensed him to spy on Goldie. That’s what he’d told himself. It was his retaliation. Was this not a way to connect with Janice? Was it not a message to her, wherever she was? But now he only felt disgusting.
He ran toward his daughter, sick with his ugliness, a pain burning his side.
“How much do I owe you?” he said to the babysitter in Janice’s armchair. She’d been sleeping. Her gummy eyes and dappled bosom rose whenever money was mentioned.
She looked at her watch. “Fifteen.”
She saw through him. She knew what he was up to. When he gave her a twenty, when he said “Keep the change,” this confirmed her suspicions. She nodded to herself. He saw her touch the filigree cross at her neck.
“Jade wake up?” he asked.
“No, no. That girl is out cold.”
11
After the guy ran off, Paul picked up the phone to call the police. But he was a smart kid, and before he dialed it dawned on him that he could not report the pervert in the window without revealing that he was home alone, that his mother had left her ten-year-old boy home alone on his birthday while she went to a nightclub. He knew what happened to kids whose mothers got drunk and left them alone at night. They ended up like Eddie VanSay, sleeping in a basement and tied up with fancy scarves by the foster mother who was considered a saint for taking such trouble into her blessed home. Rick Malone didn’t fare better: he got a bunch of black eyes before being shipped off to an institution for kids who make adults do that kind of thing. It was not a wise choice to call the police. He put the phone down. The kids at school, his absent father, Clover, this coward. Perverts filled the world, and he understood that chances were he would become a pervert too.
There was no rubbing alcohol, so he poured gin on his foot. When it stung, he blew on it as his mother would have. He touched a Q-tip to the wound because this seemed a medical thing to do. Then he found gauze among the clutter under the sink, wrapped it around his foot, and put on two socks, all while a pounding heat crept up his leg. He would limp, but not enough to draw attention. He would skip tomorrow’s baseball game. He would hide the bloody socks under his bed. His foot hurt, but not too badly. It beat along with his heart. Finally he was calm. He was proud for the first time. Those other times he thought he’d felt pride, they were not the same thing.
PART 2
LEONORA
What a day! What a day! Not sunny but wickedly bright, the sky white as snow and silver at the horizon, the tree’s bare branches suggesting the arms of a rich, emaciated matron, all elbows and knuckles, the bark like cashmere. The birds hovered but did not land. Leonora tried to breathe deep, to inhale the silvery air, but its coldness was the cold of a coin placed firmly in your palm while you’re waiting for a bus in the heart of winter. She looked for a long time at that tree. Every other day she’d seen it as any-old-tree, but today it struck her as alive, beautiful, and she wished it were summer and she could climb it. She wished she were the kind of girl who climbed trees. Mostly she read books. She was learning to play bridge, and she knew she’d spend the summer reading and drinking lemonade at the card table with her nana, not up this tree, not up any tree. She knew herself, accepted who she was, but sometimes, it was true, she envied tomboys in bandannas who scrambled up trees, girls with scraped knees who didn’t apply ointment or Band-Aids. This was the tree she’d climb, if she were that girl.
She was freezing, despite her mittens, despite the yellow scarf wound round her neck, despite her boots lined with sheepskin from New Zealand. She tried to breathe deep, to take the air fully inside her head, but she had the start of a cold, a stuffy nose. She walked past the tree, let her mittened hand lightly touch the hump at its base. She and her brother were on their way to school. It was a Tuesday in February.
Her father called this season “showstopping winter.” He was always cold. Like a woman! Women shivered, huddled over coffee, complained about the weather. But in her home, it was her father who took hot baths and wore the afghan like a shawl and was forever cranking up the thermostat against her mother’s protests. It was her father who did the laundry and her mother who paid the bills. Which was funny, wasn’t it? Funny because he was an economist. An economist who doesn’t pay his own bills! He pontificated on the debt of nations while his wife wrote the checks. He loved the cost of things: highways, banks, dams, rails, turbines, aqueducts. Other stuff too, stuff most people didn’t think had a cost, like places, like diseases, like future events that hadn’t even happened yet but might, and what then? As for what they paid for potatoes, as for the price of their dry cleaning, for her allowance, he couldn’t be bothered. He loved newspapers and old books and not shaving. Crumbs in the pockets of his cardigan. Wet brown eyes, a pink nose, fingernails his wife reminded him to clip. In certain ways he called to mind a puppy. He worked late, often missed dinner, missed the children’s bedtimes, and so established a tradition of waking Leonora in the morning. At 6 a.m. he’d creep in softly, open her shades, pull the milking stool to her bed, and read. She woke to his voice each day except Sunday, when everybody slept late.
These days he was reading a long story about a guy who wakes up as a bug. He read her a little every morning. She was glad about it, meaning glad this was a morning ritual—she wouldn’t want to hear that stuff at night. They were at the part where the bug’s mother swats him with a broom. Her father had said, “I’ve been waiting forever to read you things like this. For so long your favorite book was Jenny Has a Bellyache. Remember that drivel? Oh, I didn�
��t blame you, of course I didn’t. You were a child. Books like that teach empathy. But how many times did we read it? Hundreds. Thousands. Now you’re a big girl. We can do the masters, can’t we, honey?”
The Magnificent Ambersons. Sister Carrie. Shakespeare’s sonnets. He took such joy in this ritual, sitting on that little pink stool with his elbows on his knees, holding a tattered paperback in faintly trembling hands. These were grown-up books, important books, and yet he read slowly, grandly, as for a child, just as he’d read Jenny Has a Bellyache. She was unnerved by this new story, by the plight of that hapless, greasy man-bug, but maybe she was more unnerved by the bright and bursting quality of her father’s voice. It was a dark, sad story. That was the point. Why try to disguise it? Her father was a smart man, but he didn’t always understand what she liked. There was a book on his shelf called Know Your Own Daughter. It made her happy to see it there, touched her, though she wondered if he’d ever read it.
Now in the cold February air they walked to school, Leonora and her brother. She was in the sixth grade, he the third. He wore snow pants and sneakers. His too-big parka, unzipped, framed a Mets T-shirt. His hat was jammed in his pocket. She said his name but he didn’t respond, just sniffed the air harshly. She pointed to his hat.
“You’ll catch a cold,” she warned.
He shrugged, made an exaggerated pout, said, “I never get sick.”
“That’s a lie.”
“I like to get sick.”
He spit on the ground, paused to admire the spittle.
The Sweet Relief of Missing Children: A Novel Page 5