The Missing Person (21 page)

Dolores sensed that Arnold Franklin had no desire to speculate further upon where his wife might be. She thanked him and hung up. Poor Arnie, lately become a kind of keeper, with lists of places to check, a telephone exchange for everyone who wanted to contact the Star Franny Fuller.

Dolores picked at the remains of last night's tossed salad and ate a saucerful of cottage cheese. She thought about her loneliness, which usually afflicted her at mealtimes, and destroyed her appetite.
Without Mother here, for whom I care very little, actually, I find I'm lonely … odd
. She thought about Franny.
Is she lonely with Arnie whom I thought she loved? She must be, or she wouldn't retreat the way she does, like a coward in a war who goes backward as an officer urges him forward. So you can be loved and love and still be lonely
. There was some comfort in the realization. Dolores gave it all up: her own isolation, Arnold Franklin's bitter despair, Charlene's disappointments, and Reuben Rubin's curious sweetness, the day's whole accumulation of responses to the savage world of moviemaking. She stretched out on the couch with a glass of iced tea on the floor at her side, wondering with everyone else:
Where has our bonnie girl gone?

At six in the evening Franny sat on a bench in a small downtown park off Hollywood Boulevard. She wore her usual camouflage, a workman's jacket, cap, and pants. Her hair was pushed under the cap. Part of her face was hidden behind large, dark-green sunglasses. Through them she watched a young girl walk toward her down the narrow park path. Franny thought she looked highly colored, blue around the edges, like a poor Technicolor movie. She was small and had an arched, broken-boned nose and no chin at all. Through Franny's glasses, her crinkled yellow hair looked orange. Her straight thin legs had little-girl's knobby knees, she wore a flared white taffeta skirt and a high hat with white plumes in front. Franny wondered what she was:
that outfit? that strapped-on funny hat?
She looked again at the way her face declined sharply from her lower lip into her neck. Franny shivered, terrified at the sight of the missing chin.

The girl carried a silver rod with a small ball at the end. When she was almost abreast of Franny on the bench she slowed down and smirked at her, a generalized, professional smile without recognition. Then she walked on.

During the long afternoon she had spent here Franny had rarely lifted her head to look at anyone or anything. But the young girl caught her diffuse attention: she focused on her, watching her as she passed, seeing her bobbing, jaunty little backside.

Realizing that she was being watched, the girl stopped abruptly, turned, and tossed the silver rod high above her head. She raised her chinless face into the air, half-buckled her legs, and leaned under the rod to catch it with her twisted wrist and thin fingers. To Franny she seemed to be plucking it out of the air, almost magically, as if it had not been she who had thrown it there. It seemed miraculous: Franny watched her as she turned out of the park, her triumphant little backside and blowing orange hair disappearing from her vision.

In a rare moment of understanding, Franny thought she recognized who the girl was: one of those people who knows exactly what she can do and who practices all the time to be able to do it like that. She believed that it didn't matter to the girl that her face fell off to almost nothing or that her hair sprang around her head like Christmas twine.
She catches that silver stick
, Franny thought,
and then she knows who she is and feels fine about it
.

Staring after the girl, Franny's eyes rested on a building, a red-brick school at the edge of the park. She turned on the bench to get a better view of the place. It looked like the schools she had known in Utica, except for the gold cross over the front door. The cross was made of two rows of electric light bulbs, now lit. It glittered garishly in the dusk. The building was squat and square, and seemed to sit heavily against its ribbon of sidewalk.

At the window in the upper-right tier of the building Franny saw the figure of a nun adjusting a shade. First the shade moved up a little over the middle band of the window and then down a little too far. Patiently the blank-faced nun jockeyed the shade until it was exactly even with the middle of the window. The cord with its little circle at the end swayed and then, as though in obedience to a higher will, settled permanently into the exact, geometric center of the middle panel of the middle strip of glass in the window.

Franny saw the nun disappear behind the red-brick wall and reappear at the next window. She went through the same motions there, and at the next window, and then at the next and the next. Like a figure in a Swiss clock she appeared on a methodical stroke to make her small adjustments, and then she retreated.

To Franny, watching her perform her maneuver on the windows at the first floor of the school—at the door she lowered a full-length shade to the floor—there was something inexplicably wonderful about this vision. The regularity, the completeness, the order; she thought she knew what the nun was feeling each time she disappeared from view: a satisfaction that this piece of action was finished and she could move on to another place and finish that.
Another one
, Franny thought,
of those people who knows what she is doing, and does it exactly and, even more, knows what she is going to do next. Will it all be the same tomorrow
, she wondered,
will she always be this exact and orderly? Does what she looks like have nothing to do with anything she does?

It had grown dark. The lights in the school were now out, the building's windows had the look of some heavy-lidded bird's eyes, dim, partly asleep. Only the electric-bulb cross lit the air in front of the school. Franny took off her sunglasses; evening light returned to the sealed look of the building.

Cold now, Franny was angry at herself for having nothing to do, nowhere she wanted to go. She realized she did not know what there was to think about. She bit at her thumbnail and tore it off in one vicious cut with her shining teeth. For a reason she could not fathom, she felt deserted by the baton-twirler and the nun. The park was empty: only an occasional walker passed her,
on his way
, Franny thought,
to someone at home, maybe to his dinner
. No one gave her more than a glance. No one seemed suspicious of the drab, huddled little figure. The dusk had reduced her to a vagrant.

It was very dark now. Franny thought about the scenes she had watched while, for once, no one watched her. She envied the nun and the baton twirler, thinking how fine it must be to be part of an audience, watching but not watched.

A low red car pulled up and stopped. “There you are, Fanny,” said Arnold, climbing out of the driver's seat of the convertible. “I've been on almost every street in this damned town looking for you.”

“Who's that in the back seat?” she asked him, not moving.

“Keith. He's been helping me look for you.”

Who is Keith
, Franny wondered.
A poet? an agent?
Some friend of Arnie's from New York she didn't know anything about?

Arnold took her arm and helped her up. “Come on. Get in. We'll go home and have some supper.” His tone was soft, as if he were persuading a child.

“What time is it?”

“Almost nine.”

Franny fell heavily into the front seat. Keith said, “Hello, Mrs. Franklin.” Franny did not answer or look at him.

The silence in the car was weighty. Arnold drove, gripping the wheel, sitting forward grimly. Franny put her head back against the blood-red upholstery and closed her eyes.

“Let me off at the next corner,” said Keith. “My car's in Janet Faith's driveway up the street. Only a step.”

“Okay,” said Arnie, turning the wheel with that odd, badly coordinated jerk he used for all his bodily motions, as if he were bolted together at the joints. “Call me tomorrow. My heartfelt thanks for your company.”

“Nothing. Nothing at all.” Keith climbed out of the back seat and then turned back to the rear window. “I hope to see you again.”

Franny said nothing. Arnie said, “Night, Keith.” As they drove away from the curb, Arnie glanced back at Franny. She was awake, pulling a lock of her hair through her clenched teeth.

“Stop that, can't you? Why do you always do that? You know I hate it.”

She stopped. “I know you do. Maybe that's why I do it.”

“What's that supposed to mean? Fanny, tell me: Are you on something? Why didn't you go to work?”

She said nothing. Once again her meager supply of words had given out. She thought she might just have enough energy left to get out of the car and get to the bathroom—her need for that was suddenly intense—but nothing much more. But she knew she was out of any words to say to Arnie—or this Keith.

Her eyes fixed on the strange play of lights on the windshield, she saw Arnie's profile out of the edge of her left eye. His face, to her sight, was full of holes, one at his cheek where a pad of flesh ought to be, and another directly under his eye, a shadowy pit. The bones underneath showed in his face, at his forehead where his hair barely covered his skull, light, fluffy graying hair, about to give out. She remembered the number of times she'd looked at his face and thought that his bones were his brains and so she was able to see his brains when she looked at his head. She believed it hurt him to think:
the way the bones showed. Thinking pushed a face and head into shapes like this so you could tell it was going on there, from the outside
. She thought his skull seemed to be made of the same hard, useful stuff as his horn-rimmed glasses.

Franny put her head back and closed her eyes. Under her lids she saw, or dreamed she saw, a long window, lit from behind with Klieg lights, and silhouetted in it, a black-robed woman. Only her head appeared odd. From under the tight black wimple, crinkled yellow hair sprang out at all angles. In her hands she held a silver baton. Franny watched the nun raise and lower the baton in slow, funereal rhythm up and down, up and down. The pleasure of recognition made Franny smile in her sleep.

By the time the car came down through the Hills and pulled into their driveway, Franny was profoundly asleep. Arnie carried her to the house and put her down on the curved sectional couch. She curled up to fit its contour, a ball of golden hair, a pure, adolescent profile and exhausted woman's body, her breasts freed, pouring out of her jacket as if they had been spilled from a pitcher. Dead to the world, she moved forward gratefully from the crinkle-haired, baton-twirling nun into a depthless black night, lit occasionally by a flash, on and off, of an electric cross. Arnold stood looking at her for a moment. Then he covered her with the white trenchcoat he picked up from the floor behind the couch, turned out all the lights, and went to their bedroom.

Later, she dreams about an avalanche of blood.
There's just so much moving blood you can stand
. She sees in the dream that being alive is bloodless. It is a secret, hidden in veins deep under the skin. When you're well, a small burst of it might show, like a bruise, but in a hurt place the blood sits, it doesn't move. It's held in a container of creamy flesh.
That much
, she thinks in her dream,
I
can stand
.

But blood showing is death, her life spilling out onto the bed after Jerryboy, life running out of her every month so that when it's over there is less life to count on. She dreams about swallowing the medicine Charlene gave her to make her period come, and then the wire hanger and the blood everywhere. She dreams about being the nun or the baton-twirler with blood spurting out of the ball end of the baton and out of the circle at the end of the cord. Less and less of her all the time, less to act and breathe with, to smile up at men and to appear in public with. Less life with every lost drop.

She dreams she is in New York at the acting school and Patrick and Mollie and Arnie are standing together in a tight little group in a corner of the room looking at her and telling her about a terrible mistake she has just made, like turning the wrong way on the stage, her back to the audience. She hears loud laughter from the darkness just beyond and realizes all at once that there is a right and a wrong way to turn on stage. She grows deadly pale because she knows they are right. She begins to cry. Arnie explains to Patrick that there is no blood under her make-up.

She sits down on a floor—is it a stage?—seeing questions in the faces around her. Or is she asking those questions before she saw them in their tight little group in the corner? What is she doing here on this floor? Why is she so sure she will fail at whatever they might ask her to do?

Suddenly she woke, drenched in sweat. She sat up, gripping the trenchcoat in her wet hands against her chest, remembering little of her dreams. She didn't know where she was, why it was so dark, why the lighted cross, all that remained of what she thought had been her dream, had gone out.

6

The Parish Visitor

It was Thursday, almost the end of a long week of shooting. Franny had worked four days without interruption. Thursday evening Reuben told her: “The rushes look good, Franny. Want to see them?”

She said no, and went home late and was sick on Friday. Arnie was in New York seeing his agent or someone, she wasn't sure who, so she was alone in the house except for Olivia at the other end. She lay on the couch thinking she'd be alone unless she called someone and said she was lonely and alone and would they come over. Through her head ran the old words and the scene:
Red rover red rover the little boys used to say and then tear across the road and knock me down and my vaccination scab bled all over my leg let Roger come over, they'd all shout
.

But she called no one.
It was Saturday when everybody makes plans
, she thought,
to be with their families or girl friends, or someone
. Saturday was always a long day for her when she wasn't on location or working at the lot. The night, when Arnie was away, was always worse. She walked through the endless house until she found Olivia and told her she could go see her husband who got off at four from the hotel where he worked. Olivia said: “What about your dinner?”