by Deb Caletti
“Afternoon Delight,” my God! Oh, mighty Rose Hill Royals, give us a score! Both of those inconsequential songs conscientiously remain there, awaiting my need of them. Why, then, why does this magical, powerful entity that’s our very own brain hold out on the most critical things? How does the most vital stuff slip through its Vulcan starship efficiency? Or is it actually there, maliciously hiding somewhere in all those gnarled, twisty crevices? Sneaking out for a bit of that sadistic, tip-of-the-tongue taunting? It’s your own brain. It should be on your side. So often it’s your very own self that betrays you, that’s the thing.
“Did he change his clothes when he came home after the party?” Detective Vince Jackson asks.
“I don’t remember,” I say. “I assume so. I went straight to bed.”
Definitely I watch too much TV. When Detective Vince Jackson called that morning to ask me to come to the police station, I imagined us in some frighteningly blank room, empty of everything except a desk and two chairs and a microphone. There would be a hidden camera up by the ceiling and one of those two-way mirrors with a bunch of people watching on the other side.
Do you need a lawyer? my mother had asked. I’d phoned her in a panic to tell her that Detective Jackson wanted to speak with me.
Of course I don’t need a lawyer.
She watches too much TV, too.
We sit at Detective Vince Jackson’s desk. There are other desks around, with other officers and detectives. Phones are ringing. His desk is a mess. There are stacks of file folders and papers, and there’s a coffee cup with an American eagle on it and a cardboard burger container from Jack in the Box. He asks my permission to record our conversation. His memory is terrible, he says. He’s taking notes, too. He taps the end of his pen while he waits for me to answer. That part is like TV. He leans back in his chair, and it makes a terrible sound, like a squawking bird.
“You’re sure he came home with you?”
“Yes. Of course.” I don’t like his sarcasm, not at all.
“But you can’t remember if he changed his clothes, took off his shoes, his tie …”
“No tie. They’re very casual. Software guys—no ties, even for parties. No suits. A sports jacket, rarely.”
“His wallet is gone. His phone is gone. Keys. Briefcase?”
“He doesn’t use one.”
“So, wallet, phone, gone. Everything he was wearing the night before is gone. Far as you know, he could have left again in the night?”
I don’t like that idea, him leaving that night. It’s possible, though, isn’t it? He could have just walked away, or someone could have met him right outside, picked him up. It seems a more urgent act, a desperate getaway.
“I guess. But it wouldn’t have been unusual for him to put on the same clothes the next day. On the weekends, he just throws on whatever’s draped over the chair.”
“But you say you didn’t hear him that morning. You didn’t hear him on the phone, hear the door open, anything?”
I shake my head. “Nothing. I’m so sorry.”
“The toilet flush?”
“No.”
“Are you always such a sound sleeper?” Tap, tap, tap.
I don’t respond. I feel helpless. I feel a million miles of desperation inside. It stretches out like the most lonesome, dusty road, with no gas station for miles.
“I’d like you to go through his closet thoroughly and give me an inventory of what might be missing. Anything. A gym sock, whatever.”
“Okay.”
“Obviously we’re still trying to determine if he left of his own accord.”
“What have you found? Have you found out anything?”
“His phone’s off. Hasn’t been used since that night. Neither have any of his personal bank cards.”
I already know this. I’ve called the phone company, and the bank, too. I’ve called every day. Still, when he says it, the news hits. Something about it is permanent, ominous. It feels like suicide. But it could also mean a solid plan, a plan developed over months, when a second marriage proved as disappointing as the first, when that particular failure would have been too disgraceful or just too much trouble to face.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Keller.”
I don’t know what it means, this apology. Is he delivering some news, death news? Is he telling me something his experience told him was true right now, this minute, without any closet inventory or further investigation? Detective Vince Jackson reaches into a large desk drawer and shoves a box of Kleenex toward me. It’s true. I’ve been crying. This is what the apology is for.
“God,” I say. I blow my nose. A female officer hands Vince Jackson a folder. Behind me, the water cooler glugs as someone pours a miniature cup. I have the feeling that I’m overstaying my welcome. I collect my purse. I stand up.
“Inventory.” He hands me a sheet. It’s a list, to operate as a helpful reminder. Who knew there were such things?
“I’ll get it to you right away.”
But he’s not interested in what a good student I am. He doesn’t care if I’ve always been someone who follows the rules or has never been in a police station before this moment. He turns his attention to the folder he’s been given.
I leave the ringing phones and the business of missing persons and robbed 7-Elevens and bar fights and prostitution behind me. I went to traffic court once.
I should have told him then, I know. I will say I’m sorry for that, right here. I am sorry. I didn’t tell him because I was embarrassed. I wasn’t trying to hide anything. It felt shameful is all. No, I’m not always such a heavy sleeper. The evening—a lot of it had dropped down behind some heavy curtain of haze and forgetting for a very particular reason. I had taken one of those Vicodins that night, before the party. The ones I’d been given after a root canal and never needed. It was a chickenshit move on my part, pure cowardice. I hate those parties. I thought the pill might give me a shot of false confidence or at least take the edge off the social discomfort. Ian wanted me to wear that ridiculous dress, and then there would be all that work chatter I wasn’t a part of and the people who knew him from his previous life, who knew Mary, who knew enough to be able to judge and compare. And there’d be all those women he worked with, too—the smart, sexy women he often told me about when he came home. I’m not one of them. I’m old enough to feel embarrassed in that dress. I’ve never felt beautiful, no matter what anyone has said. I was in the middle of a good book, too, one that I would have done anything to get back to.
I was supposed to show Ian’s coworkers and benefactors and colleagues what a prize he’d won, that’s how it seemed, and I just didn’t feel up to it. I’d be an honorable mention, at best, and I am fine with that, personally. I don’t want to be more. I’m someone who’s unsteady in heels, who wipes off my lipstick the second I get the chance. That’s who I am. He would have told me to stop looking so uncertain, and I was too tired right then, too life-tired, to tell him to shove it.
So I took one of those Vicodins. I had taken one once before, prior to Ian’s office Christmas party. I’d liked the soft, easy confidence it gave me. I had felt magnanimous, the most socially generous I’d been since Yvette Bolo’s slumber party in the sixth grade, when I knew full well that my appearance had raised the event from desperate to nearly normal. My own group of regular friends set me on the top rung of popularity among Yvette Bolo’s weird ones, and that night I was middle-school nobility among Alicia Gess, who wet her pants in the second grade and never lived it down, and Katherine Graves, who had some kind of illness that made her thin and pale and gave her seizures, and Felicity McNulty, who would commit suicide in her senior year.
Of course, at Ian’s Christmas party, I hadn’t also had those two (two plus) glasses of wine. It was stupid, I know. I would never have admitted this to Ian. It was a secret I would have kept to my grave.
That evening, my mother and Abby sit on my bed, with Pollux curled up next to them on the floor. My mother is wearing jeans and an Ea
gles sweatshirt—not the band but the baseball team my nephew, Justin, plays third base for. Abby is back in her pajamas (sensible girl—she prefers pajamas to real clothes whenever possible), and her legs are folded under her. Pollux is wearing what he wears every day: shiny black fur, a classic. Abby holds the inventory sheet from Detective Jackson on her lap, and a coffee-table book of Ian’s acts as a hard writing surface. I can see by the spine that the book is One Hundred Butterflies, by Harold Feinstein. Mary and their daughters had given that book to Ian, and there’s an inscription on the first page in Mary’s hand: Happy Birthday, Daddy! Love, Your Girls. Inside, there are lush photos of the Peruvian Nymph and the Painted Jezebel, the Jungle Queen and the Wanderer, with their thin brittle bodies and jeweled tissue wings. Ian wouldn’t like Abby writing on top of that book. You should have taken it, if you cared so much about it, I silently tell him.
“Someone could take stuff from my own closet and I wouldn’t even know it,” my mother says.
“That green satin vintage dress?” Abby says.
“Ugly bridesmaid disaster, 1960s. Don’t you love it how some words get swankied up to make them sound better? Vintage? Come on! Try old.”
“Substance abuser, addict. There’s another one,” Abby says. “Substance sounds so benign. Like a helpful cleaning product.” I have the irrational thought that my guilt about those pills is leaking into the room. I’ve never had a secret that I wasn’t sure everybody somehow knew. When I lost my virginity at sixteen, I was certain my mother could see it on my face, though she’d just kept on browning beef for dinner, if I recall correctly. And now Abby only stretches out her legs and pets Pollux with her foot. “I love that dress, actually,” she says.
“You do?” my mother says.
“I used it to play movie star.”
“You should have told me before. It’s yours. Next time I see you, remind me. I was going to give it away to the ‘Truck In Your Neighborhood’ people. Hey, you want your grandpa’s old concertina, too?”
“You shouldn’t have said anything,” I tell Abby. Once my mother starts giving stuff away, you can’t stop her. She’ll give you the shirt off her back, as they say, which really happened once when my sister admired a cardigan she was wearing. She’ll do anything for the people she loves.
“What’s a concertina?” Abby asks.
My mother mimes pushing bellows in and out. Hums something disastrous.
“No, that’s okay. Maybe you should give it back to him?”
My mother snorts. She gives her head a shake of disgust. You’re either for her or against her. If you’re for her, the generous heavens open up. If you’re not, you get what’s coming to you. You have to watch your step with my mother, and my father failed to do that, or failed at the end, anyway. Well, he rejected her, and that’s hard to forgive. That little woman in the Eagles sweatshirt is fierce love and ferocious loyalty, all standing guard in front of a vulnerable heart.
I kneel down in front of Ian’s closet. I take out a stack of jeans from the bottom wire basket.
“Check the pockets,” my mother says. It’s more an accusation than a helpful suggestion. I shoot her a look. As I’ve said, she’s never liked Ian. Still, I reach my hand into each one.
“Any missing pairs?” Abby is ready with her pen.
“I can’t tell. I don’t think so.” I try to picture him in his favorites. I have a sudden flash of his ass in jeans, a pair that’s thin and fading at the knees. Yes, they’re here in my lap, neatly folded. I don’t know how many pairs of Levi’s he has. He’s never even worn the black ones. They still have the tag on them.
“Shoes?” Abby prompts.
I look down at the row of them, toes pointed out as if they’re rather wearily waiting at the starting line. He has stiff leather dress shoes, and black boots, and tennis shoes that are old and hunched and still green from cutting his former lawn. He has a pair of those ultra-white-bright men’s running shoes that can look silly paired with calf-high socks. He has more shoes than I do.
“He has more shoes than you do,” my mother says.
“That’s not a crime,” I say.
“Mother, concentrate,” Abby says.
“Running shoes …” I am trying to remember.
“The phone,” Abby says.
“Get it?”
Abby hops up. She abandons One Hundred Butterflies and the inventory of my missing husband’s clothes. She steps over the dog, who decides to follow her out in case something exciting is going to happen that might involve him.
“Every time I answer that phone and it’s not Ian, it kills me,” I tell my mother. I pick up one of the grass-stained shoes. I picture him back in his old neighborhood, wearing them. Of course, if he had stayed there, none of this would have happened. You can drive yourself crazy playing that game.
“It looks like a goddamn Nordstrom Rack in there,” my mother says.
I guess I married Mark for rescue, too, but a different kind of rescue. Once again, our dark, buried selves, working from their subterranean lairs. Mark was tough. I knew he’d never take shit from anyone. He saved me from my own lack of bravery by being the dangerous one. His dangerousness perhaps spoke of fearlessness, and fearlessness spoke of power, and being chosen by someone with that power made me feel powerful, too, and oddly, wrongly, absurdly, safe. As I said, we’re not supposed to admit to things like that: our awareness of our own weakness, our sublimation to the most helpless parts of ourselves. Men can, I suppose. Or can’t, for their own reasons. But it’s even worse for women. Feminism was supposed to chase away all of those embarrassing vulnerabilities. At least, you were supposed to be aware that acting helpless was something shameful. So was the tendency to hide your own fear behind the toughness of bad boys, if you had that. I had that. I’m being honest here.
The bad-boy lure … What is it? Is it a caveman thing? A cavewoman thing? A reaction to some archaic evolutionary urge that’s warning you that it’s dark and that people with clubs lurk in that dark, ready to do you harm? Protection can seem like a good idea. Hell, protection feels great. I remember one time when Mark and I were riding a bus after we’d gone Christmas shopping downtown. We had just met. I was nineteen, almost twenty. He was twenty-two. We look so young in those pictures. That day, we were carrying shopping bags. The bus was crowded, and we were standing. The driver shifted gears to go up one of Seattle’s steep hills, and I lost my footing and lurched against this guy. He looked me up and down and said something to his friend in Spanish, which made the friend laugh lewdly. Mark stepped forward then. I swear to God, he puffed out his chest. It was gorilla-like, it really was. Gorillas, you know—they’re mob leaders. Even in the zoo, when they look at you it makes you nervous. Watch it, Mark said to the guy. He snarled it. He snapped like an animal, even though his voice was low. It wasn’t a voice I’d ever heard him use before, not then, anyway. And the guy—he held up his hand in a mean-no-harm way. Hey, he said. Hey. He backed up. They got off at the next stop, and who knows if it was even theirs.
I loved that. I’ve got to say, I did. I sort of love it even now.
Not every woman feels this kind of thrill, I’m sure. Some are probably even offended by that kind of chivalry and machismo. Maybe only some of us are drawn to valor, we who already feel defenseless in the world for whatever reason. When I met Mark, I was emerging from a childhood of divorce and uncertainty, where there’d been crying and upset, where the mighty oak that was my mother had been felled. Long after their marriage was over, the moods under that roof felt dangerous. I wanted out of there. I was a butterfly, thin and transparent, and if you looked, you could see my heart beating.
Mark looked, and he saw. He saw my heart beating, and he saw my jeweled tissue wings. A butterfly wears its skeleton outside its body. Men can love this idea as much as women do, maybe more. They can love to rescue. They can need it as much as we do, propping up their own strength with it, same as we do ours. Being a man, being a woman, being a human being—it all han
gs on such fragile architecture.
I’m especially embarrassed to admit that I loved how Mark smoked cigarettes. It was heedless and incredibly sexy. He wore those jeans and that white tank undershirt. What a cliché, but, God. He had curly black hair and Elvis eyes and he spoke in velvet undertones. He’d smoke while leaning against his car on a hot summer day, and then he’d put out the orange-lit tip with the toe of his boot and it all made me feel safe, ironically or not, subconsciously or not, fated or not, safe, and so I married him. I could blame my age, but even at twenty-two you know when you are hiding things from yourself. Still, Mark and I married right after college, and I licked the envelope closed. There. The rest of my life. So I thought.
It went like this: I wanted him to be larger than me, and so he was. And when he was, I didn’t like it. And when I didn’t like it, I broke the contract. When I broke the contract, the one that said I’d be smaller than him, he lashed out. I’d signed, though—the large print had said, Me, weak. You, strong. But I wanted a caveman only every now and then. You realize this. I wanted to be able to be small but large, too. I wanted to be both. These were the themes of our relationship: Dominance, control. Abuser, victim. It’s what you get when you give up your power, when you don’t realize that your strength is your self-respect. No one has the right to abuse you, sure, but no one should hand over that right, either.
I should have known better is all I’m saying. With Ian. I’d let myself be rescued before, and look what happened there.
“White shirts,” I say. “Blue, black.”
“They all look the same to me,” my mother says.