Among the Missing (23 page)

Dorrie did most of the talking. She spoke of her life, of growing up in Manhattan. She told long stories about her former lovers and commented on film, on books and politics, and works of art. Trent felt like he was always learning.

This was one of the first things that he noticed about her, even before he was really attracted to her physically—that she could hold forth on any subject. When he was in her class, he’d found himself listening despite the fact that he didn’t really want to be there, fascinated by the way she could stretch a train of thought between some personal experience she’d had and an
abstract idea they were studying, until there was a kind of cat’s cradle between the two.

Dorrie didn’t suffer fools gladly. That was what she said on the first day of her class, and he remembered folding his hands over the syllabus grimly. It was another class he’d have to struggle to earn a C in, he thought, though he never did find out because he’d dropped out of school about halfway through the semester.

That was how they’d met. A few months later, he happened to be sitting in a café near campus, waiting for his shift to begin at the bar when Dorrie passed him, carrying a cup of coffee. He’d nodded at her when she looked at him, the way you do with people you vaguely know, but instead of merely nodding back, she paused.

“Isn’t your name Trent?” she said, and he’d been taken aback that she remembered him.

“Yeah,” he said. She gave him a funny look.

“So what happened to you?” she said. “You disappeared out of class, and I never heard from you again. You just a fly-by-nighter, or what?”

“I don’t know,” Trent said. He knew she was from New York, with that pushy way of talking. “Actually, I kind of dropped out of school.”

“That’s terrible!” she said, and her face grew serious and concerned. “What happened?”

“Just money, I guess,” he said, and shrugged. “I don’t think I’m much of a student.”

A person was behind Dorrie, waiting impatiently to get past her in the narrow aisle, and she glanced behind her; then, as if making a decision, she sat down in the chair across from him.

This was how it started, according to Trent’s version of the story. He didn’t know where her version would begin. He didn’t even know if she thought of it as a story. What would they say, if things continued on? People would ask, and he’d have to say, “Well, actually, I was Dorrie’s student.…” And they’d raise their eyebrows.

David Bender didn’t raise his eyebrows. He was as confident as Dorrie, though less serious. Trent couldn’t get a fix on him. At first, he had a clear impression that David Bender disliked him. But then, when Trent went outside to have a cigarette, David Bender followed him.

“Hey, man,” David said. “Do you have a cigarette?”

Trent handed him his pack, and David Bender took it with a small, secretive smile. “Wow,” he said. “Cowboy smokes.” But he put the cigarette into his mouth, nevertheless, and lit it, gazing at the horizon. “What a place,” he said. “Spooky.”

“Really?” Trent said. He looked out, trying to see what David might be seeing. There were times when he didn’t realize that the place he lived in might be considered strange. It was just prairie—you couldn’t see a tree from Dorrie’s backyard, or another house. A barbed-wire fence separated Dorrie’s property from the cow pastures and fields that surrounded her. It was a place that pioneers had passed through, a hundred years before, not stopping.

“So,” David Bender said. “Tell me about yourself.”

Trent cleared his throat. “What do you want to know?” he said. “I’m a bartender. College dropout. Maybe I’ll finish if I can get the money together. And if I can decide what to study. Dorrie’s probably told you most of the basics.”

“A little,” David said, and he bent down on his haunches to examine a large grasshopper. He picked it up, and it spit a brown substance, what kids in Trent’s grade school used to call “tobacco juice,” from its mandibles. He dropped it.

“Dorrie tells me that you grew up in a trailer house,” David said. “That must have been interesting.”

Trent stiffened a bit. “Not really,” he said.

“I don’t mean to sound snotty,” David said, and he straightened up. “It’s just not something I’ve ever had experience with, except, you know, via clichéd movies and so on. It’s just, in terms of Dorrie, it’s interesting. Your backgrounds are so different.”

“I suppose,” Trent said, and David Bender gave him a disarmingly friendly smile.

“It’s a good thing, I think,” David Bender said. “Dome’s been having affairs with her students for as long as I can remember, but you’re the first one that she’s actually introduced me to. So that must mean something, don’t you think?”

“I don’t know,” Trent said. He crushed his cigarette under his shoe, thoughtfully. He didn’t know that Dorrie had had other affairs with former students. “What do you think it means?”

“Well,” David Bender said, “it seems that she’s more serious about you. Don’t be threatened. She’s told me a lot about you, that’s all.”

Early on, when David Bender was just a figment of Trent’s imagination, he had built up a whole scenario. He had imagined confiding in David Bender, telling him confidentially that he’d planned to propose to Dorrie. He had the idea that it would be
a kind of bonding moment. The David Bender of his imagination was a lanky, friendly, streetwise kid with a thick New York accent and an angular grin, someone who might have been portrayed by a younger, nonviolent Robert De Niro, someone who would clap him on the shoulder heartily and grin. “Mazel tov,” his imaginary David Bender said. “Dorrie, she needs a guy like you!”

He realized that this was ridiculous. But he was still a bit surprised by the actual David Bender. It wasn’t supposed to be this way, he thought.

Dorrie had spent weeks trying to think of ways to keep David Bender entertained while he visited. There were no restaurants of note and only one movie theater, which consistently played films that Dorrie scorned. “My God,” Dorrie said. “This town is full of twenty-year-olds! What do they do with themselves?”

“Well,” Trent said. “I guess that mostly they drink. That’s why I’m making a living.”

And so it fell to him. As afternoon approached, Dorrie said, “So, what do you want to do today?” And David Bender said, “I don’t know. What is there to do?” And Dorrie looked at Trent helplessly.

He had talked to Courtney about it, but she had been very little help, though she’d offered to sell him some marijuana. “Get him stoned,” she said. “He’s from New York, and he’s going to be expecting a hick town. So what can you do? I’d say, get him good and stoned and then take him out to the bars. Not the college bars, either—the cowboy bars: Green Lantern,
Dude’s, that kind of place. At least it will be something he’ll remember!” Courtney looked at him and smiled in a kind of sleepy, suggestive way—she was attracted to him, he guessed; she wondered what he thought he was doing with a person like Dorrie, expected, perhaps, that it wouldn’t last long.

“If he’s cute,” Courtney said, “bring him in here.” She tilted her head a little, looking at something other than Trent, then bent to fill a bucket full of ice. “Maybe I’ll hit it off with him and end up as your daughter-in-law.”

Trent had been married before, briefly, when he was eighteen. His wife’s name was Brooke, and she was a girl he dated in high school. She had gotten pregnant, of course, and in the beginning there had been all sorts of tortuous debates—abortion or no abortion, adoption or no adoption, staying together or not staying together. It had been harder on Brooke than on him, he thought. She had been the bright one, the one with the academic scholarships, the one who actually had a future to lose, and he felt bad for her.

She was four months pregnant when they finally got married in a little courthouse ceremony. He wore a white shirt and black jeans and a tie he’d borrowed from a friend of his from the track and field team; she wore a modest, oversize blue dress, which came down past her knees. It was the only time in their whole married life that he saw her more or less dressed up—after that, up until the baby was born, she wore sweatsuits, day and night. Her face grew puffy and tired, and she began to suffer from
acne, which she’d never had to worry about before. He remembered the look on her face when the judge had told them they could kiss—a kind of slack, distant stare. Then she recovered herself, and gave him a big smile. They pressed their lips together.

He loved her, he thought. They had been dating since the beginning of junior year, and had done everything together—studying and going to movies and eating their lunches across from one another in the cafeteria—and though nothing spectacular had happened, no skinny-dipping or running hand in hand through the rain or licking food off one another, he thought that they fit together. She had been the first girl he’d had sex with, and, in his mind, everything about her was entwined with the stunning pleasures of the body: her lips, the pink palms of her hands, the hollow of her throat, the line of her pubic hair. He didn’t think he’d ever be drawn to other women, since each part seemed endlessly interesting. A few times, they had watched pornography together, but it hadn’t aroused him. It wasn’t something general that he wanted—a breast, a buttock, a daintily pointed toe—but something specific.
Her
, he thought—Brooke. Her skin, her face, her smell.

There was more to it than that, he knew. You had to live a life beyond fucking, but at the time it didn’t seem all that important. He had never been particularly ambitious, even before Brooke got pregnant, so it wasn’t that hard to adjust his expectations. In his mind he began to build a sort of life—looking at houses, buying baby stuff, finding some sort of trade, like carpentry or plumbing, and it didn’t seem so bad, though he knew that Brooke was scared and depressed by such prospects. Probably, both of them would have ended up unhappy eventually, restless and dissatisfied like the statistics said. There were plenty
of bad examples wandering around town—guys who got their high school girlfriends knocked up and ended up in this dusty speck of a Nebraska town. All you had to do was look at them to see how trapped they were.

In any case, it didn’t turn out that way. As it happened, the baby died. She was born with a severely malformed heart and only lasted a little over a day. Sitting in the hospital, he’d known that the future he imagined was over with. Brooke hardly looked at him. The doctors had drugged her into a kind of calm, and they’d gone together to see the baby.

It was a little girl. They had named her Carol Lynn, for the purposes of the funeral and the headstone, but really she didn’t look human. She was a mammal of some unknown species, attached to a myriad of machines, her mouth full of a plastic tube, surrounded by frowning, bustling nurses. How incredibly tiny she was, his daughter—her skin red and blotchy beneath the lights, a downy, peachlike fuzz on her skin. He found himself staring at the perfectly formed little ear, which was shaped, he thought, a bit like his. He wanted to touch it, but he was afraid he wouldn’t be allowed, was afraid that such a request would seem trivial, childish. Beside him, Brooke swayed a little, making a thick, low-voiced sound. Her female chemistry was in a state of anarchy, preparing for a life that wasn’t going to happen; her breasts leaked milk onto her hospital gown, and her nerve network was full of instincts—he thought—instincts carrying mother-messages through her body, despite the sedation. She breathed from her mouth in long, deliberate inhalations, as if she were tasting air for the last time, and when he touched her, put his arm around her, she flinched, and her muscles tightened. For a moment, he thought she might slap him, but she
didn’t. She was contracting, he thought, as if she might fold herself up into an infinitely small point, and when she looked at him, it was as if he were shrinking, too—she just wanted him to go away, that was all; she never wanted to see him again. She had loved him, or thought she loved him, up to that moment. Then she didn’t.

That was the end of their marriage, more or less. After the little funeral, Brooke moved back home, to her old room. Arrangements were made—there were a few phone calls, and meetings with lawyers, and papers to be signed—but all in all he was surprised at how quickly and efficiently a divorce could be managed. They’d been married a little over six months, and by the end it hardly seemed real. It was more like the ghost of a marriage—a future that had never happened, in which their daughter grew up and they grew old: Trent, an aging plumber with a gut and a way of looking off into the distance; Brooke, throwing herself into the usual frustrated things—community theater or a local writers group or starting her own business; Carol Lynn emerging into a sweet, hopeful, vaguely ambitious teenager, such as they themselves had been. It would have never been anything spectacular, but it didn’t seem, to Trent, to be a bad life. At the funeral, he had the notion that everyone probably thought it was for the best. There was not much crying, and looking out at the bowed heads, the congregants with their hands clasped solemnly in front of them, he felt certain that they all thought that things were returning to their normal state. Now Brooke could go to college as she’d planned before she got pregnant, and Trent could do whatever it was that he thought he was doing. That was it. “The Lord is my shepherd,” everyone
mumbled, “I shall not want.” It was hard not to imagine a guilty sense of relief rippling across their faces, and he turned his head away, looking at the waves of July heat flickering like holograms over the alfalfa fields beyond the cemetery.

Afterward, he didn’t talk to people about it. He moved away from town, traveled around for a while, and finally ended up back in Nebraska, where he thought he might try college to see if it suited him. By that time, he had been silent for so long that it almost seemed like something he was protecting—something unsavory, private, which he would sometimes stir around in his mind when he was deep into a conversation, nudging at it like a sore tooth. There.
There
. Almost glad of the way this unspoken history kept him separate from people.

He knew that if he asked Dorrie to marry him, he would have to tell her. He would have to tell her
before
he asked her to marry him, he thought, everything would have to come out in the open. He thought of this when she had told him the story of her marriage to Robert Bender, when she’d talked about David. She was not a very forthcoming person—which was one of the things he liked about her—and he realized that when she gave him this bit of her history, offered it up to him, it was his duty to reciprocate.