Look at Me

by Jennifer Egan

  “Yes,” Charlotte said. She felt tired. How had she been dragged into a discussion about school with her father—the very thing she’d managed to avoid all summer?

  “Look, Charlotte,” Harris said, more gently. “The fact is, running away from your problems isn’t going to solve them.”

  “Who says I have problems?”

  “Well, obviously you do, or you wouldn’t be switching schools.”

  “That’s circular logic.” Moose.

  He’d been silent so long that the sound of his voice jolted everyone. Harris gawked at him. “You said she can’t solve her problems by switching schools,” Moose explained. “And then you said the fact that she’s switching schools proves that she has—”

  “What the hell does that have to do with the price of rice in China?” Harris broke in.

  Moose went silent. As they all waited for him to resume, a slight dread overtook the table—even Harris felt it—a fear that this rarest of conversational efforts had been snuffed. “I’m sorry,” he forced himself to say. “I interrupted you.”

  Moose faltered, then began again. “Maybe she doesn’t want to be like every other kid in Rockford,” he said in a clumsy rush.

  “I don’t want that, either,” Harris said. “That’s exactly what I want to avoid. By giving her a decent education!”

  Charlotte, a little bewildered by the tempest forming around her, said, “Dad, I’m constantly learning things.”

  “I’m not talking about tropical fish!”

  “Oh, but there’s where you’re wrong,” Moose said, and in an unprecedented spate of enthusiasm he rose suddenly to his feet, knocking his chair backward so that it crashed into the wall and sent a shiver through the plate glass windows. A hush befell the dining room. “I’m sorry, but I have to say this,” Moose told Priscilla, who had hastily righted his chair and was tugging his hand, urging him back down. “She can learn the things that matter by studying almost anything,” Moose said loudly, addressing Harris. “We teach our children blindness! Not to see, not to think—that’s what they learn in our schools. And the world is being robbed by it!”

  Moose had commandeered the room; ungainly, unkempt, yet somehow dashing, the detritus of an old charisma still alive in him. Charlotte listened in awe as her uncle silenced her father, pinioning him to his chair. “What matters is that she think for herself,” Moose declaimed, slicing the air with his hands, “that she question authority! That’s what will make her exceptional!”

  “I gather you hold yourself up as a shining example,” Harris said.

  “Oh, Harris,” Ellen said bitterly.

  “No,” Moose said, the very word an expiration. He dropped back into his seat. “I don’t hold myself up as anything.”

  Harris was fuming. How dare Moose embarrass him—embarrass all of them in the country club dining room!

  “I agree with you, Uncle Moose,” Charlotte said passionately. “I agree with everything you said.”

  “You can agree with him until the cows come home,” Harris said, forcing himself to speak softly. “The question remains: What. About. Your education?”

  “I can study with Uncle Moose.”

  Everyone looked at Charlotte except her uncle, who was gazing into his lap. She wondered if he’d heard. “Mom has your book about glass,” she told him, “and I read the introduction, about how glass windows let in all the light in medieval times and suddenly everyone could see more clearly and it changed the way they dressed and how clean their houses were, and then they got glasses and mirrors so they could see what they looked like for the very first time, and how it—”

  “Charlotte?” Harris announced, in an oddly congratulatory tone. “That’s the worst idea I’ve ever heard in my life.”

  But Charlotte was watching her uncle, in whose averted face a scarlet blush was proceeding toward his neck. Slowly he lifted his head. His eyes met hers for a moment, then skidded away. “Why would you want to study with me?” he asked.

  “I don’t know.” She struggled to find words for the feeling she’d had, watching her uncle silence her father just now. Charlotte felt a sudden, urgent need to be closer to Moose, to have him look at her as he’d done a few minutes ago, with recognition. “There’s something I want to find out,” she said.

  Moose nodded. Then he said, “All right.”

  No one spoke. Even Harris found himself mute. Somehow, he knew it was too late to undo this thing—worse, that he’d brought it on himself. His eyes grazed his wife’s, expecting accusation, but he was relieved instead to find softness there. “Well, I’m glad I made my point,” he finally said, then laughed—a helpless giggle that caught in him and persisted. Everyone looked at him oddly—except Moose, who began laughing, too, a big chesty laugh that seemed to throw its arms around Harris’s like two drunks, their commingled mirth hushing the dining room a second time. Harris dabbed at his eyes. His plan had backfired—completely, unequivocally. What could you do but laugh?

  Ellen smiled at her husband. It pleased her to think of Charlotte studying with her brother, as if having them in each other’s company would somehow bring them both closer to herself. Then her eyes fell on Ricky’s empty chair, and she flinched. “Where is he?”

  “He went outside,” Charlotte said, and turned on Ellen her cool, unreadable eyes.

  “Go get him, Char, if you don’t mind,” Harris said. “We should think about heading home.”

  Charlotte grabbed a handful of chalky after-dinner mints from the crystal bowl near the door and went out. The darkness was sultry, the warm air delicious on her bare arms. She took off her glasses and let the night run together around her. “Ricky!” she called softly into the darkness. She skipped down the concrete steps to the pool, which gleamed a sharp, luminous turquoise. It was empty. “Ricky,” she called again.

  She returned to the golf course, pausing to take off her sandals, which she held in one hand. The grass was fat and cool, prickly under her feet. At some distance she saw flickering shapes, and put her glasses back on. They were in a sand trap, three pairs of shoes lined up along its edge.

  A hard moon poured cold blue light over the golf course. The sand in the trap was damp from the sprinklers, which must have just been turned off. Charlotte reached the edge of the trap and saw an enormous sandcastle splayed in the moonlight. Surprisingly delicate, its turrets accented with little pinecones. The girls were digging a moat.

  “Wow,” she said. “The morning golfers will freak.”

  Ricky lay on his back in the sand, looking up at the stars. “We’re leaving,” Charlotte told him.

  He raised a hand, and she pulled him to his feet.

  The clubhouse gleamed through the dark. Charlotte carried Ricky on her back, his arms around her neck like a possum. She’d given him her sandals to hold, and they bumped against her collarbone. He was even lighter than he looked. “You okay?” she said.

  “Tired.”

  “You’ve been running around.”

  “Remember before?” Ricky said, after a pause. “How tired I was?”

  “Yes,” she said. “But this isn’t like that.”

  He could say or do anything he liked, but people looked at Ricky and imagined him dead. He must feel it constantly, Charlotte thought, must see it everywhere he looked.

  “Am I well?” Ricky asked drowsily, into her hair.

  “You’re well,” she told him.

  Under the portico, the adults were congregating outside the clubhouse doors. Uncle Moose and her father walked together toward the parking lot to bring the cars around.

  “Down,” Ricky said. Charlotte set him on the grass and took back her sandals. As she paused to put them on, Ricky stampeded toward the grown-ups, yelling something, pitching a pinecone at Jessica, who was walking a little ahead with her sister. It hit the back of her skull, and she shrieked. And now came the inevitable laughter, twirling like ribbons into the warm night. Charlotte looked at the sky, its cryptic, heedless promises filling her with
delight. It was already August. In that old orchard where Scott Hess had driven her, the pears must be fully ripe, if not already gone.

  Chapter Four

  As the days after my lunch with Oscar multiplied without a call from him, I turned to wholesale afternoon drinking. A week had passed, I’d left him three messages he hadn’t returned, I’d seen friends in the evenings and found it eerily awkward, as if there were something everyone wanted to tell me, but was afraid to.

  When I had first broached the topic of an alcoholic beverage with Mary Cunningham last October, she bustled about her impressive wet bar and emerged with her favorite cocktail, a daiquiri sweet: an icy, pale green elixir that infused my head with a melting sensation of peace. I had sought out that peace thereafter in further ladylike daiquiris with Mrs. Cunningham and occasional swigs from the wet bar when she was away at the hairdresser. But it was back in New York that my drinking, as readers of charts like to say, spiked; it spiked the warm milk I drank before bed, and gradually my early evenings, when I sipped vodka tonics on my sectional couch and studied the faux-Gothic ruin on the southern tip of Roosevelt Island. One morning I found myself looking for booze at nine-forty-five. There was none left.

  I called Oscar again. He was in a meeting (that great modern euphemism), but I left word that it was urgent, then opened the new Vogue to distract myself. The model/hooker/junkie thing was back in play, girls propped like broken puppets against graffiti-scarred walls, snail trails of mascara etched on their million-dollar faces. I never lost interest in which younger girls were getting work, girls with the faces of tree frogs, bison and antelopes. Yet the pictures shimmered with a pollen of newness that I still could not resist; it made me turn the pages in a kind of trance until I had seen every one, at which point the pollen would have vanished as irrevocably as the fabled dust on butterfly wings, replaced by a familiarity that was almost crushing.

  In the kitchen, I managed to unearth an ancient brandy bottle, and poured myself a glass. Hansen, my fiancé, had been partial to brandy, so I kept a bottle around in the assumption that it was one of those things men liked. For all the men who had drunk my brandy since Hansen, it was his memory I still consulted when I wanted to know something about men generally. No one would have been more shocked by his archetypal status in my thoughts than Hansen himself. We hadn’t spoken in more than a decade.

  I drank, staring at the phone in a rising state of outrage. Finally, emboldened by the drenching heat in my chest, I called Oscar again, this time identifying myself as Sasha Lewis of the New York Post. He was on the line in three seconds—I counted.

  “Fuck you,” I greeted him.

  “Pardonnez-moi?”

  “You’re taking calls from the New York Post, but when it’s your oldest client you’re in a meeting?”

  “That was beneath you, Charlotte.”

  “What the hell is happening over there? I haven’t heard a—” My drunken belligerence surprised even me.

  “If you wish to have a business conversation,” Oscar said coldly, “call me in a businesslike fashion.”

  “I have called—and what about?—I told you—”

  “Beep,” he cut me off. “That was my aggravation meter. You’re entering a danger zone.”

  I slammed down the phone, then sat limply on the couch, shocked by my vivid display of desperation.

  I opened my address book and searched for someone to call. I went through it page by page: other models, rich men in various parts of the world; clients I’d worked for regularly over the years. But their calls to me had begun tapering off, and the energy it would require to reel them back into my life felt herculean. Hansen was still under “H”; I’d transferred him from book to book over the years so he always looked current, though surely by now the information was obsolete. Or maybe not; maybe you didn’t move, once you’d settled with a wife and children in a house outside Seattle you’d designed yourself. Why would you?

  My eye fell on a tiny Post-it that I’d added to the H’s: the detective, Anthony Halliday. He had called me again, exactly when he’d promised, but I had avoided calling him back. I wanted no part of his search for Z. Yet the allure of calling a person who actively wished to speak with me was too potent to resist.

  “It’s Charlotte Swenson,” I said, when he answered. “I’m back in New York.”

  He sounded pleased, and suggested paying me a visit. I imagined this: a private detective inside my apartment, looking at my things. “I’d rather come to you,” I said.

  “When?” he asked. “Now? Today?” And the eagerness in his voice was so welcome to my drunken ear, so sweetly beckoning, that it jumped the wall of my resistance, and I agreed to come immediately.

  Before leaving, I had another large glass of brandy and two Pop-Tarts, which I kept around in large numbers because they were easier to make than pie and I considered them dietetic. I wrapped myself in my long alpaca coat and rode down in the elevator. It was 10:30 A.M. and I was hugely drunk, full of joy and purpose and mischief. My only regret was over all the days of my life I’d spent sober. Why, when drinking wasn’t illegal? Why had I deprived myself?

  Outside, the temperature was below zero and tiny splinters of ice swarmed the air and lodged in my poor face, which was still tight and a little tingly from its second operation. I hailed a cab and instructed the driver, an elderly Sikh playing Gilbert and Sullivan tunes on a tape deck, to take me to Fourteenth Street, where I made him idle at the curb before a store that sold bins of winter clothing. I chose a black face mask that covered the whole of my head and neck, and pulled it on. When I returned to my cab, the Sikh promptly locked the doors, refusing to let me inside until I removed the mask. As he drove, I slipped it back on, looked in his rearview mirror and let out a whoop of laughter. The Sikh shook his head.

  The detective’s office was on Seventh Avenue just south of Twenty-fifth Street, inside a seedy brick building whose elevator lurched skyward with an ominous rattling of chains. It released me into an empty corridor lined with doors containing panes of frosted glass where the names of businesses were stenciled: Nelson Watch Repairs; Dr. A. A. Street, Dentistry; Hummingbird Travel Services. None of them showed any visible signs of human occupancy. My steps slapped against the walls. Finally I reached a door that read “Anthony M. Halliday, Esq. Private Investigator.”

  A young girl in stone-washed jeans led me through a cramped reception area to the detective’s office, a small disheveled room crammed with hundreds of loose-leaf files, many disgorging their contents onto the floor.

  “Petit, don’t make it so complicated,” said the man behind the desk—Mr. Halliday, I presumed—into the blue cordless phone wedged between his ear and shoulder. He raised a finger in apology and motioned for me to sit, which I was able to do only by removing a pile of files from the single extra chair.

  “The guy’s a sleazeball, his story’s bullshit, there’s no mystery here,” the detective was saying. “Agatha Christie wouldn’t touch it.”

  He looked forty or thereabouts, with a pale, diamond-shaped face and a head of unruly dark hair shot with gray, though its unruliness seemed less a matter of style than the lack of a recent haircut. Dark circles under his eyes: an insomniac. Hard living showed somewhere in his face, though precisely where I couldn’t say. He wore a crisp white shirt straight from the cleaners and a tweed jacket that had spent the past several days tossed over the arm of a chair, or possibly on the floor. I guessed he must be single; a woman would have hung the jacket up.

  “Remember, easy on the notes,” he said. “No, writing doesn’t help you think, it’s the other way around … if that notebook gets subpoenaed and you end up frying our guy, I’m gonna be a very unhappy camper …” I stared at him, looking for a shadow self. I’d had glints, nothing clear.

  “Okay, hasta,” he said, and hung up. Then he looked at me and smiled. “Charlotte Swenson,” he said. “We meet at last.”

  “Mr. Halliday.”

  “How are you feeling?”
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  “Better,” I said. “Thanks.”

  “You look well.” I sensed his eyes moving over my face, detective eyes, trying to read it. This was not a feeling I enjoyed.

  “It helps that you’ve never seen me before,” I said, and discharged a voluble laugh. Uneasiness—distaste, even—strained the detective’s expression, and I smelled my hot, brandy breath and realized he must have, too, in the small room.

  “Thanks for coming in,” he said. “I appreciate it.”

  “Still haven’t found him?”

  He shook his head.

  “Any leads?”

  He glanced at me. “A few.”

  “Such as …?”

  “Hey,” he said. “This happens every time we talk.”

  “What happens?” I was stalling, waiting for his shadow self to appear. I saw pain around his eyes, but that wasn’t it. That was right on the surface.

  “You start interrogating me.”

  “Do you think he’s dead?” I asked.

  “No, I don’t,” he said. “Do you?”

  “How would I know?”

  He left the desk and shut the door to his office. Six foot two, I guessed. Brown slacks, scuffed black shoes. A long, awkward stride, as if he were used to larger spaces. “I have a few questions,” he said, resuming his seat and pulling something from a drawer. “And I’d like to tape us, if that’s okay.”

  I smiled to conceal my dismay. “Why not?”

  He turned on the machine, a small, deadly looking thing that he nudged to the edge of his desk in my direction. “You know when he disappeared,” he began.

  “Not really.”

  “The first week in August,” he said. “Which is … exactly when you had your accident. Correct?”

  “Yes,” I said, and forced myself to meet his gaze. The silence between us felt endless, multigenerational, a silence in which I was fully aware of the earth turning slowly on its spit.