American Purgatorio (2 page)

To normalize the situation, or to normalize my own discomfort, I began talking to the man, mentioning conversationally that I'd lost my car, telling him about the gas station and about Anne's disappearance. I didn't go into much detail but I had a desire to speak, so I did. “I can't find my wife,” I said, but the man didn't look up. Or rather, he did look up, but his look didn't acknowledge me. I couldn't tell if that look was directed at me, or at something beyond me, something in the soft hills of New Jersey. And because I wanted to create some fellow feeling I turned and surveyed those same hills, and when I couldn't determine what part of the landscape he found so compelling I turned back. The man was staring, not so much
at
me as through me, so that I had the sensation, not of being seen, but of being seen through. And it wasn't that I was afraid of the man; if you had asked me I would never have mentioned fear. But I
was
afraid. Of my own transparency. What was unbearable was to not exist, and although I knew I existed, I attempted to prove that existence, to get some acknowledgment from the man that his world and my world were at least a little synonymous. But before that could happen, the man, in his khaki slacks and yellow jacket, started walking, and he continued walking, past me and along the pedestrian walkway. I wanted to stop him and say something about our common experience—“Nice view” or “Some river”—and in this way manufacture a degree of fellow feeling. But instead I straightened up, stepped away from the railing, turned, and walked back to New York City.

I caught the subway to Brooklyn, walked down the tree-lined street to my house, and I could tell Anne wasn't home because no lights were lit. And that's all right, I thought, she's probably out shopping, at our local market, a co-op market, and I walked inside, turned on the lights, and waited for her to come home. I listened to a telephone message from Anne's mother asking us to call her back, but I didn't call back, partly because Anne was the only person I wanted to talk to, and partly because I heard in her mother's slightly distraught voice the desire to believe that everything was fine—thereby indicating that something wasn't fine—and the hope that if she believed it enough, everything would be.

Which was also what I was doing. I could accept the events that were happening as long as they meant what I wanted them to mean. While I waited for Anne to come walking in through the front door I tried to go about my normal life, to do what I normally would do, but I couldn't remember what that was. I sat in my kitchen, our kitchen, with the little cactus plant by the sink. I sat in what I thought was my old familiar chair, trying to find its familiarity. I sat in a variety of ways—legs crossed, legs spread, legs up on the arm of the chair—trying to find the familiar position that would restore my familiar life, so that I could then live it. I was waiting for normalcy to return, and not just waiting, I was searching for that normalcy, and so I walked upstairs and went to sleep. I should say I went to
bed,
because sleep never came. I lay in bed, naked and slightly cold, the blue comforter pulled up to my neck, eyes wide open, staring at the uneven ceiling.

And Anne did not come home.

That night I woke, not from a dream, because I wasn't sleeping, but it was like a dream. In my mind I could clearly see a man—actually several people, men and women—getting into a car, my car, and driving away. I didn't know who they were, or remember who they were, but lying in bed, wide awake, I could see them. All night I watched a variety of permutations on the same basic story, a repetitious sampling of various people forcing themselves into the car, forcing Anne into the back seat or the front seat, and then the car driving off. To change these images, or control them, I tried to imagine a scene in which Anne uses some arcane martial art to subdue her assailants. When other thoughts intruded I pushed them away, fighting the unwelcome thoughts, trying to maintain the thoughts I wanted, the thoughts of Anne's superior power and cunning. These positive thoughts, however, were constantly shifting and moving, running ahead of me and getting away from me. I was chasing, in my mind, the images I
wanted
to see, and at the same time avoiding the unbidden images that were coming after me. And eventually catching me. By morning I'd seen the scene, or thought it, so many times it became embedded into my reality.

In an effort to clear my mind I went to the upstairs front room, which was my room. I was going to sit on my antique rug and try to watch my thoughts for a while, or maybe watch my breath and forget about my thoughts. That's when the telephone rang. I walked down to the phone and listened for the message. It was Anne's mother asking Anne to call her back. Still trying to preserve the illusion of normalcy, I deleted the message, wrote it in the tablet we kept—a tablet made from leftover change-of-address postcards—and started boiling water for coffee. I made my coffee, buttered my toast, and sat at the kitchen table with my cup of coffee and plate of toast because that was my routine, and I wanted to preserve my routine—nothing like routine to dull the mind—although sometimes routine can sharpen the mind, like an execution or a knife.

What I mean is that my mind felt like a knife. The question—why I was sitting at this table without Anne—felt like the blade of a knife, and to avoid it I turned to my work. Before we'd left on our weekend getaway I'd spread out on the table a number of photographs, pictures of faces of babies. I was cutting out photographs for an article I was editing—for a baby magazine—about a baby's first year of life, and so I sat at the table, drinking coffee and eating toast, looking at the innocent cherubic faces and occasionally looking out the back window to the garden.

It was spring and the plants were starting to grow. One of the things, not the only thing, but one of the things I enjoyed was looking out that old window. It was old and thin, and so the glass of the window had become like a sheet of water, like something fluid that almost seemed to be moving. And actually it
was
moving. The molecules of glass in a window do actually move over time, and instead of the seeming solidity of the glass, I was seeing the fluid. And through this fluid pane I was watching the green beginning of the season, the old maple tree in our yard and the ailanthus trees in the neighbor's yard, and I had in my hand a plate, a forsythia-patterned plate that she'd bought—that she wanted and we both bought—and I was brushing the crumbs into a pile on the plate, then pressing my finger into the renegade crumbs and eating them. In this way I was cleaning the plate.

And when the plate left my hands I didn't feel as if I was throwing it out the window. Not because it didn't feel like throwing, but because it didn't feel like
me.
Not who I thought I was, anyway. Some other me, I thought. And yet it
was
me. I did throw it. And the glass shattered, more than I would have expected, and the plate continued on its outbound trajectory, passing through the window and disappearing into the backyard. I could feel the cold air being sucked into the warm house, or the warm air being sucked out into the cold, either way it had a cooling effect. The cold air that used to be outside was now surrounding me, and although it was getting cold, it wasn't
me
getting cold. I'd had enough of keeping the air out and the cold out and all the things I hated out, and now, like a huge inhalation, I'd taken the outside and brought it in, leaving me sitting there, looking through a broken window. I sat in my chair experiencing the transfer of air, feeling the temperature lowering against my skin, degree by degree, unable or unmotivated to do anything but notice it.

Or maybe I
didn't
notice it. Maybe I didn't feel the cold. Maybe a kind of pride allowed me to sit there and see what I wanted to see, see myself as what I wanted to be. Sitting at the table in the cold air, looking at the baby faces strewn across the table, maybe everything seemed fine or normal. The article I was working on was an attempt to make the difficulty of a baby's first year seem normal, to pacify and reassure and inform the readers (in that order) so as to create a world of acceptable reality and situate the reader safely in that world. A world I knew nothing about, by the way, a world of vomit and diapers that I had only
talked
about with Anne. And in the same way that I was manufacturing information about babies, I was manufacturing a belief for myself. Sitting at that round table I came to believe in what I thought of as a realization: the realization that Anne had been kidnapped. I imagined what had happened, and then talked myself into a belief in this version of events. Which relieved my agitation somewhat, and would have relieved it completely, except that now something had to be done.

I called the police but of course they told me there was nothing they could do. I said I wanted to report a missing person but they told me that their hands were tied, that I should sit tight and that my wife would eventually show up. I called Anne's mother again and again no answer, and although I didn't quite know what it was, I knew I had to do something. So I found some duct tape, gathered together most of the shattered pieces of window, and by taping the broken glass in the approximate location it had been before, I fixed the window, making it, not good as new, but at least, as the day worked its way to its eventual end, there was action and movement, and although I was tired of being in my body, by fixing the window I was able to find a little normalcy. I wanted normalcy and so I interpreted the window breaking as a normal thing, saw the kidnapping of Anne as a normal thing, or at least a real thing. And I would deal with what had happened.

The odd thing was, as I sat in my chair looking at the duct tape repair job, I had no recollection of throwing the dish. As if some force had acted on me. In my memory the dish just seemed to fall, not down but out, at an angle, so that in falling, instead of hitting the floor, it flew like a thing with a mind of its own, into the window, as if trying to fly through the window, like a bird, blind to the pane of glass.

3.

At this point the fellow who was never at a loss was at a loss. I wanted to change something bad into something else, and I attempted to do this by drinking bourbon from a bottle with a faux wax seal, or possibly a real wax seal, it didn't matter because either way, there I was, four o'clock in the afternoon, drinking hard liquor as a way to stop what was happening. Although I normally would have listened to the public radio station, I didn't. I closed my windows, shut my shutters, and pulled a wool watch cap over my ears to quell the sound of the cars outside, preferring instead to concentrate on what was happening inside, my heartbeat for instance. I would have liked, if possible, to excise myself from the outside world, or at least to push that world, with its radios and telephones and honking cars, as far away as possible, to do nothing but sit in the solid wooden chair (what I called my lawyer's chair) looking out the broken window and become like a plant in the garden, my hair growing and my nails growing and that's about it.

Except that I had to do something.

I'd fixed the window. I'd stanched the flow of warm air out of the house but I still hadn't stopped what was happening. I still had to move forward, in some direction, and because I didn't know what that direction might be, the only thing I could think of was to take a nap. Not nap, but lie down on the bed. Doing so, I thought about Anne and how we used to lie on that same bed, warming each other, my legs over hers, or hers on mine, and the sweetness of this memory was something I could only take so long—the fact that it was only memory, that all I had was memory, was painful—and then I got up, made coffee, sat in my lawyer's chair looking across the photos on the table to the empty chair in front of me. I imagined Anne, sitting as usual, her back straight, her feet wiggling, and it took some time before I realized that I couldn't keep talking, in my mind, to an empty chair.

So I walked upstairs and started looking around, first in the bedroom and then in her closet. She had a separate closet and her dresses and tops were all lined up. Stacks of shoe boxes were on the floor, and there were sweaters and scarves and nothing seemed out of the ordinary. It's funny how we sometimes act out the old banal clichés, because as I was standing there smelling the smells of the closet I leaned in and touched my lips to one of her dresses, a silk dress that I'd bought for her and given to her, and although she always said she liked it, she'd never worn it. In a box on the top shelf was her wedding dress, folded in tissue paper.

She had a small room in the middle of the top floor that she called her office. It had a skylight and a desk and I looked in the drawers of the desk. All her tax returns and receipts and operating manuals were filed in orderly manila folders. In the receipt file I found a yellow paid bill for a tune-up, from the Trinidadian mechanics we used. The date on the receipt was just six days earlier. She hadn't said anything about tuning the car, or that it needed tuning, but there was the receipt.

On the floor, in a stack of art books with the names of artists on the spines, one book didn't have a name. It was a sketchbook and only the first dozen pages were written in. More drawn in than written, mainly with geometrical shapes, cross-hatched ovals and polygons. There was writing on the top or bottom of the page, mainly reminders, things like
Call Dad,
or
Make stretchers.
She was an abstract painter, and other bits of writing were along the line of:
notice shades of green,
or
masks of faces on people like masks on baskets,
things that meant something only to her. Mainly there were just blank white pages, which in a way symbolized our life together. Just beginning.

There were a few papers on her desk, some unpaid bills, a folded map, and several postcard invitations to art-show openings. The map was a well-worn map of the United States and when I unfolded it there was a circle drawn with a felt tip marker around New York City. There was a line from New York to Lexington, Kentucky, which was also circled. As far as I knew she didn't know anyone in Kentucky. Or Colorado. The thick orange line followed the main highway to Colorado, where the town of Boulder was circled. The line stopped there, except that another circle, on the West Coast, was around San Diego, California. She was from San Diego. She was born there, which made the circle seem more than merely coincidental. It was her map, it had to be, and the cities she'd circled were … I didn't know what they were, and so I took the map to the kitchen. I'd spread it over the baby photographs on the table, trying to figure out what it meant, when the doorbell rang.