The Missing Person (10 page)

“Why don't you take a bath and get dressed, Franny, and then we'll go find something to eat?”

“What time is it?”

“About one, I think.”

“In the morning?”

“Yes.”

“I'll go pee, and get some clothes, and then we can find a place.”

“Franny, don't you like being clean?”

She seemed to be considering the question gravely.

“No, not really.”

“Okay, then. Get dressed.”

But it never got to that. Franny came out of the bathroom and said she wanted to stretch out on her bed for just a minute, to rest, “and then we'll go.” Demp lay down beside her because he could no longer keep a distance from her after all those hours of wanting her and waiting for her to wake up, and loving her.

She turned her bare, lovely body toward him, and he made love to her in a tender, almost boyish fashion. She lay still and let him do what he wished. He moved gently, even quietly, afraid of frightening her or hurting her, feeling instinctively that she could be hurt, or frightened, during this act. She watched him, listening to the rising sounds of his delight in her. When he was finished and had pulled away, she rolled over on her side so she could see him better. Now he lay still, his eyes half-shut, his legs sprawled and loose, used up and astonished at what he had just been permitted to do.
Demp Butts, with
her,
my God
.…

A few minutes later he had recovered. He sat up to look at her, his round eyes and narrow, sunburned face just above hers, breathing in the acrid smell of her body and the remains of his semen.

“Don't leave me, Demp,” she said. Her bright eyes were opened wide. “I don't care what you do, but don't leave me alone.”

“Only until I can square things with the team,” he said. “Then I'll be back. Nothing could keep me away. But I've got a contract. I've got to let them know where I am. Then I'll be back.”

“Tonight, Demp. Not tonight.” Her voice was high and thin. He could not bring himself to say, the sooner the better for him.

He stayed the rest of the night and the next day and then the next and the next. They lived together in the bedroom as though it was the only room in the house. The room began to feel like a sheltering hut in the forest. They finished the grape juice which by now was half gin because Franny kept saying it needed to be watered down. Then Demp went out, using her white Cadillac, and bought food and cooked it for them. She ate very little of it, but he finished everything he had cooked. She drank the new bottles of grape juice and chewed childishly on the replenished zwieback for which she seemed to have a craving and ate some of a quart of ice cream, covered with chocolate sauce he had found in the cupboard. She would not touch the steak or canned vegetables or broiled tomatoes he had fixed.

“Don't you ever eat anything but those dog biscuits and ice cream?” he asked at the end of the fourth day. By now time had stopped dividing itself into days and nights, into mealtimes and times to sleep. The draperies permanently drawn, life had become continuous, slowed down only by the short naps she took. But she insisted he stay awake while she slept so he lost even his customary sense of mutuality with the rest of the human race. For long periods he thought he was the only person awake in the world and then, when he slept, the only one sleeping. The act of eating meals was uniquely his, too.

Her gratitude to him for his presence was profound. Like children, they set up a ritual in which he played the nurse and she the patient. They played house in the bedroom and bathrooms. They made love or rather, he made love to her. She seemed to permit him entry into her only to guarantee his continued presence, but she took no active part in the ceremony.

Finally he persuaded her to take a shower with him. Afterward he dried her with a huge towel as she sat immobile on a fur-covered stool, her eyes half-shut. He chose a robe from a walk-in closet crammed with clothes, and she put it on. He brushed her hair, fed her with small bits of food when she would not make the effort to eat herself, and then made her lie down when he wanted to make love to her. After each act of love she rewarded him with her charming, warming smile, and a touch, a brush of her fingers to his cheek. Except during the sexual act she never came closer to him of her own accord than to touch him, momentarily, with her fingers. When she permitted him to, he slept.

He noticed the ends of her fingers—blunt and red; she bit her nails until they disappeared into the angry flesh at the tip of her fingers. He wondered aloud at this. She told him it did not matter. The make-up people pasted false ones on if they needed to photograph her hands. Or they used someone else's unbitten fingers for close-ups.

The bedroom became a kind of nursery, a timeless, encapsulated place where they lived as loving children. Slowly she seemed to recover. On the last day and night of their marooned life she talked more to him than she had before. They spoke of their careers, he told her about football.

“If I'm still in it,” he said, ruefully.

“Why wouldn't you be?”

“I'm AWOL from training camp for some time now.”

“So am I, from the Studio. There'll be hell to pay, I suppose. What day is this?”

Demp had to go into the kitchen to study a wall calendar hanging behind the door. He came back. “Sunday,” he said.

She was a week late, she said, reporting for the picture. But the first week didn't matter that much. It was mostly fittings and briefing on the part, so she might just get away with it. From under her bed she fished out a soft, bulky book, her script, and began to look into it. The long separation from the world was almost over. Franny, Demp saw, was making small overtures toward return. He knew he was now free to speak of his own plans.

“I can get a train out tonight, or a plane if I'm lucky,” he said.

Her head bent over the typed pages, Franny seemed not to hear. It was always to be this way. As her need and her panic receded she became almost indifferent to her rescuer upon whom, hours before, her very survival seemed to depend. He told her he would be back as soon as his schedule permitted. He told her he loved her, and wanted to marry her. To all his sentences she smiled, as if from a long way off, and said nothing. She was at her white dressing table when he bent to kiss the top of her head, and he realized that she was revived and beautiful in the mirror image that he saw. It was the image he shared with the world. As he got to the door and looked back she was already absorbed in doing something to her face, staring intently at it in a hand mirror. She said nothing more to him. He called a taxicab from a phone in the entrance hall and then walked out to the hedge that surrounded the property to wait for it to come. Standing there in the same clothes he had put on a week ago, he felt curiously unlike himself.

Waiting, he had a vision: he saw a row of starched white shirts on the hooks behind his bedroom door in Prairie City. The sight went away as quickly as it had come, and he was left on the road in Beverly Hills, asking himself questions: What had he done with this week? What would he tell the coach and the team he had been doing? For that matter, how would he explain it to himself, tomorrow? Whom had he saved? He didn't know. And had he lost anything? He couldn't tell that either. He had the disoriented feeling of an amnesia victim slowly groping his way back to identity.

The taxicab came. To his long-cloistered eyes, the driver looked very strange, like a man from another planet. Telling him where he wanted to go was an exertion. The words sounded odd to his ears, as though he was using a language new to his tongue or moving painfully from long silence to unaccustomed speech.

All the way to the hotel, where his bag, he discovered, had been left for him with the bell captain, to the station, to San Francisco, and then out to the camp, he could not shake the eerie feeling that he had returned from visiting the Wizard of Oz or the Castle of the Sleeping Beauty or the Enchanted Forest. Something almost supernatural had happened to him. But he told no one where he had been or whom he had been with. He accepted the disciplinary measures issued against him for his absence, and agreed without protest to pay the large fine. He had a sense that none of it had anything to do with him, Dempsey Butts, the lover of Franny Fuller.

The feeling persisted. He found he was not listening to what his teammates were saying, he could not keep his mind on memorizing the plays the coach was trying to teach him, he was indifferent to the reprimands, the threats, the warnings. Three weeks later, certain he was sealing his fate with the Mavericks, at least for this season and probably forever, he asked for a few days off, went to the station, and took a train to Los Angeles. He was going, he felt, to rescue the enchanted princess in her castle, drawn back there by an invisible silken thread unwound from the magical ball she had given him.

Franny had insisted on a New York ceremony because a series of personal appearances in that city brought her there and then too, she told Dempsey, “My life began there, with Eddie Puritan.”

By the time eight of Demp's friends from the team, players, two coaches, and one of the owners, had assembled downtown at City Hall, it was late in the day. Luxuriating in the numbers and the warmth of the whole gathering, Demp still was consumed with impatience. He sat with Franny, holding her hand, moving from one side of the bench to the other, afraid she would forget he was there. She seemed to have retreated into a daze, aware of what was happening yet not personally involved in it. Demp had the feeling he should be snapping his fingers before her eyes, if only he dared, to keep her awake. In the bleak, brown-painted waiting room which smelled of generations of anxiety and clothing, full now of other nervous couples dressed up for their own occasion, apprehensive and uneasy in these official, decayed surroundings, they all waited for Demp's family to arrive.

They waited for almost two hours.

The room grew heavy with heat and breathing. The other couples had, one by one, disappeared into the room marked Chambers and not come back. Outside, newspaper reporters and photographers clamored for pictures of Franny and Demp, but the clerk in charge of the waiting room had been instructed by the city magistrate not to let them in. At five thirty the Butts family still had not arrived. By then Franny was in a state beyond recall. She sat far back on the inhospitable brown bench, her feet pulled up under her, her profile seeming to be carved along the silky grain of her fair skin and tousled blond hair, immobile, looking utterly terror-stricken.

Demp's family had been very late getting to New York on the train which had broken down for hours outside of Chicago. From Grand Central Station they went to the Astor Hotel to change their clothes and then had some trouble getting a taxicab to take them downtown in the rush hour. At quarter to six they arrived at City Hall, sweating in their unaccustomed dark suits and shirts and ties, silent with awe in the presence of the athletes and the Movie Star.

Demp pulled Franny to her feet and led her over to his father. He had carefully planned the introduction and he carried it off well. “Dad,” he said softly, “this is Franny. Franny, this is my father, the Reverend Butts.”

Franny whitened under her careful make-up. Demp had told her that his father was a minister, but until she heard him introduced the fact did not seem to pose any serious threat to her. She stared at him, her brilliant blue eyes wide.

“Hi ya,” she whispered. Demp put his arm around her. “He's a great guy, Franny. Don't let him frighten you. He only looks serious because that's his job.”

Franny managed a smile. The Reverend Butts reached out to pat her shoulder but only managed to reach Demp's arm.

“She's a real beauty, Demp,” he said appreciatively, as though Franny were not there. “You're a real lucky fella. You've really called the right play this time.” Demp could tell his father had rehearsed the speech many times.

Franny did not understand this reference. She had frozen again into an attitude of deep absorption, like a sentinel standing guard who dreams of being somewhere else. She held Demp's hand, desperately trying to find a sticking point for her attention.

“What time is it?” asked Demp of two of his teammates hovering just behind him, their eyes fixed on Franny. In his excitement Demp had forgotten to wear his watch.

“About six.”

“I'll see if I can find the magistrate.”

While Demp was gone his teammates and the Buttses stood around in small whispering groups, like people waiting for an overdue airplane. There was none of the usual premarital gaiety because, at the center of the room, wrapped in visible and impregnable solitude, the bride-to-be kept lonely watch, involved only in communicating with herself. Excluded from her notice, the men in the room did not feel free to approach her, could only look at her, amazed and confused by her beauty, not comprehending her isolation. Like Blake, they questioned fearfully, not so much the object she was as the daring hand that had framed it, the imagination that conceived it. About her perfect body and face there seemed to be something infinite, mythic; it kept men at a distance. Not moving closer to her was a discipline they enforced upon themselves, a religious exercise. They were, they felt, in the presence of a great Mystery.

Demp came back. “He's not here anywhere. No one can find him. They say he may have left the building.”

The magistrate had, a half-hour before. Furious at having been kept waiting for more than an hour and a half (the assigned appointment had been for four), especially by celebrities to whose whims, by virtue of the bench, he felt superior, he had clapped his black fedora to his bald head and stomped out, muttering to the clerk about football players and movie stars. Even an apologetic telephone call, when Demp learned where he was, would not bring him back. There was nothing for everyone to do but leave.

After Demp's half-hearted attempt to set a time for the next day, half-hearted because everyone but the Buttses and Franny knew that his teammates had to leave very early the next day for the West Coast, the players went back to their hotel. Demp had invited them all to a celebratory dinner at the Astor after the ceremony but, once they saw it was not coming off, they left the waiting room discreetly, without mentioning dinner.