The Sweet Relief of Missing Children (4 page)

A
t last Clover arrived, shaggy-haired, in fatigue pants and a white dress shirt, Birkenstocks, a camera case slung across his body, a special copper bracelet on his wrist meant to obliterate aches and summon inner peace. His neck was reedy, eyebrows raised. He apologized for being late. The life of an artist, he said, and wound his finger around his ear a few times to mean
crazy, crazy, a crazy life
. Goldie murmured deferentially. He ruffled Paul's hair, sat down with them at the table, tapped his fingers on its edge. He said he loved the place, its cavelike quality. He said it felt like a dark, quiet aquarium. She offered him a drink, gin, beer, bourbon, but he accepted some water.

“I've made a cake,” Goldie said. “It's Paul's tenth birthday.”

Again he ruffled Paul's hair. “Well well,” said Clover. “The big one-oh. You feel different today, man?”

“Not much,” said Paul.

Goldie clapped her hands.

Clover leaned back in his chair, rubbed his gut as if sated. “I'm afraid I can't partake of the cake. I don't do refined sugar.”

“It's just got regular sugar,” Goldie said.

“Sugar, dairy, empty carbohydrates, booze. They cloud the mind,” Clover said. “Plug the bowels. You ever had a colonic?”

Goldie shook her head.

“Best thing in the world. You'd love it. Rids the body of all toxins.” He gestured to the cake.

“Interesting,” Goldie said. The cake now struck her as rude—she felt ashamed, as if she'd told an off-color joke.

“Woman over in Munroe does 'em. Calls herself ‘Sunny.' Sunny put my testimonial on the front of her brochure. You'd be amazed at how good you feel afterwards. Like taking a long swim in an ocean. That kind of pure, open clean.”

“It sounds just fantastic,” she said, but she didn't really know what a colonic was. She had a vague sense it had something to do with the asshole, but probably not, because why would he be talking about his asshole on a first date? She had to remind herself it wasn't officially a date. The date was to come. In the meantime, she would learn about colonics. In the meantime, she would remove the cake. It seemed dumb now, sitting there coated in sugar, an emblem of her ignorance. Goldie stood, gave Paul a warning look, and picked up the cake. She carried it into the kitchen and placed it on top of the refrigerator. When she returned she held three oranges. She set them on the table, said, a little shyly, “Do you do oranges?”

“Oranges I do. Oh yes sir,” and he took a bite straight into one, through the peel. Chewing, the corners of his mouth glistening with juice, he extolled the virtues of orange peel, of bitter foods in general, rose hips, certain medicinal weeds, and then moved on to the pleasure of jumping freight trains (here he turned to Paul and warned him to wait a couple years), nude beaches, and Mapplethorpe, a viciously nasty photographer, and by nasty he meant exceptional.

“Speaking of Mapplethorpe,” he said, “you ready to say a little cheese?” He patted his camera case.

She had been ready forever. She touched her hair. “Do you like what I'm wearing? I can change. I have a black dress, too. Or something different.”

He squinted at her dress, frowned, but said, “You're perfect.”

“The necklace?”

“The necklace we could do without.”

She unhooked the clasp and it fell onto her lap.

It's starting
, she told herself. She stood up. Her head felt slow, heavy, but her heart was going fast. Clover was dashing—it was an old-fashioned word but felt exactly right. He had a kind of vigor and carefree quality she'd never known in a man. Paul's father had been slow. His lazy body with its paunch and bulges never moved like Clover's, never with such fast, confident surges. She'd never known a man to use words like Clover, or one who paid attention to his insides or to weeds or art. She wanted badly to kiss him. She felt slow next to him, and had the sense that a kiss might slow him down, or speed her up, somehow even them out a little.

Clover winked at Paul, who sat in his chair, watching as Clover took his mother's picture, first against the white wall, like a mug shot, just to get going, and then propped on her elbows on the floor in front of the fireplace, then collapsed on the couch, then fully clothed in the empty bathtub. He was an artist. This is what artists did: shots of people wearing clothing in the bathtub, shots of pretty women making ugly faces (“Uglier,” he commanded, “no, uglier”), shots with her hands covering her face, shots of her knees, several of her feet, toenails, which she was glad she'd painted.

“Top-notch,” he whispered, camera flashing, “top, top-notch.” She liked his splayed elbows, wide stance, liked even his remonstrations, which made him seem serious: “Quit the pouting” and “We're not going for Miss America here, Goldie.”

When he asked her to lift up the skirt of her dress and sit on the toilet she said, “Really?”

He began to talk about the duty of the subject, the strangeness of real art and the tyranny of received ideas, but then he interrupted himself, sighed, said, “No, not really.”

She liked it very much when, between rolls of film, he commented on the cleanliness of the house. She thanked him. But then he said, “I can smell the cleaner you used today, Goldie. Ammonia, bleach, both are serious health risks. Bad for the kid and bad for the earth. I'll give you some literature on the subject.”

After a while he stopped taking pictures. He drank a glass of water, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He promised he would show the photos to the manager at McFee's.

“Do you think he'll like them?”

“If he has a dot of sense. What do you think, Paul? You think your ma looks hot?”

Paul said that he did. Yes, sure, pretty.

“Hot,” Clover corrected.

“Hot,” Paul said.

“Incendiary,” said Clover, and slapped his thigh.

But what Paul thought was that his mother looked strange, startled, and that her face, which could be so nice, did not look nice now, looked buggy, red, and her neck was tilted unnaturally. Paul thought that Clover said mean things, and said things having nothing to do with his mother but which she took as compliments. For example he said, “They say the eyes are the window to the soul, but I say it's the mouth,” and Goldie said “Thank you,” her voice very soft. Then Clover said, “This isn't some porn now, Goldie,” and she laughed as if flattered. Clover said he'd like to get some shots of her out in the world, among people, with music playing, maybe at that new club over in Milltown? Would she like that? Would she like to go out there with him? She got her coat. She kissed the tip of her son's nose. She whispered he could go ahead with the cake now. She knew, after their talk, he would understand.

H
e had written Janice's name in his margins. He had studied each letter, each little workaday letter, which, placed together in this peculiar arrangement, as if by some enchantment, became her name, became
her.
On their second date she gave him a round piece of sea glass, the wave-polished bottom of a bottle, pale, watery green, a color he could find speckling her irises if he looked hard enough. He looked hard. He prayed that she'd stay, that she'd soften, become nicer, over time. He was willing to give it time.

When she found out she was pregnant she'd threatened to hurt herself.

He said, “You don't have to have it.”

“My mother would kill me!”

“She wouldn't have to know.”

“It'd be all over me. She'd know. She'd read it on me. She'd
know
.”

Her mother was magic, omniscient, cruel, and also the only one Janice could turn to to recover from the world's cruelty. It was her paradox. She wore olive eye shadow, heavy foundation, magenta lipstick—makeup so deeply and evenly applied, so opaque, it reminded him of a coroner's work. It was as though she was already dead and therefore could never leave them—another paradox.

“I want to hurt myself,” she whispered. “I do.”

“No, baby,” he said.

“No baby,” she said.

It was an irony, he thought, that she who so desperately relied on her mother, who knew so well the savage connection to one's mother, would one day abandon her own child. She couldn't herself bear being one, couldn't bear holding the mother's power, for Janice herself wanted no power. She wanted only whim. She wanted only a few naked Polaroids of her mole-speckled body to admire, those cute juice glasses, some Zeppelin to crow along with.

Thomas watched Goldie walk toward the car with the photographer. He was a tall hippie guy. Somewhere on his body was a bell, maybe attached to the strap of his sandal, so he jingled faintly as he moved. All those guys wore bells, little signs of their lightheartedness. He deserved to be punched. Seeing them, seeing the guy's easy loping strides and Goldie's careful, high-heeled totter, the guy's primer-gray car with the feather on its antenna, Thomas wanted to spit. She could do infinitely better! From behind a clot of shrubbery, he watched her gasp a little in the night air, her shoulders rising. He heard her admire the creep's ramshackle car, saw her wait for him to open the door for her, and then open it herself, and climb in. The car puttered down the gravel road. She was gone. She left the kid. She could do so much better.

He moved back to the window. If he couldn't watch Goldie he could watch the boy. It wasn't the same, not at all, but there was still a satisfaction in watching the kid. He held certain clues. It was like getting a look into her medicine cabinet. The boy remained at the table. One of his huge slippers had fallen off. Still his face was blank, his head slightly tilted, like a ventriloquist's doll on a hook at night.

“I'll have it,” Janice had said. “I'll have to have it. I will.”

“You'll be a good mother.”

She winced. “Please don't talk like that. I didn't say I'd be a mother. I'll have it, okay? Can we just leave it at that?”

He didn't know what she meant, where they were leaving it.

Her face was pale. He loved her with unbending passion. He said so. He uttered a few more sentiments, and then she went to the bathroom to be sick again.

T
hey drove along Route 22. On the radio a voice was saying:
The Lord our Savior won't accept excuses. The Lord our Savior doesn't care a lick if the babysitter's got a rack like a
—and he turned the station dial until he found banjo music, cheery bluegrass, and then leaned back, nodding along. “That's sure some strumming.” He whistled through his teeth, darkly, like a cowboy.

“I appreciate this,” she said.

“No need. It's a pleasure. Though I feel kind of bad about your kid.”

“Oh, he'll be fine. He'll put himself to bed. Like I said, he's an independent boy. He likes to be on his own.”

“Good thing to be, independent. There's no better talent.”

“He's wise beyond his years.”

“Yeah?”

“Plus his math skills. He's been asked to be a tutor for another boy—a boy who happens to be in the grade above him.”

“Well now.”

“His scores are very high.”

“People used to say that about me—wise beyond my years. Can't say it's always great fun. I mean it can be a burden. No question it pays off, but wisdom's tough for a kid.”

“They said it about me, too,” she said, but this wasn't exactly true. What they'd said was:
You're too big for your britches, Goldie. You keep up this way and you'll be knocked up at fourteen
. She knew it wasn't the same as wise beyond one's years, but it was the version girls got sometimes.

The banjo slowed. Now someone plucked the sort of tender, sleepy melody she associated with against-the-odds weddings. It felt like a gift, that this sweet song should find this car out here on this road, should find this radio, them—that they were a
them
tonight was itself a gift and a surprise. How, after everything, did she end up in a car with an artist? His wasn't a pickup, or a red Camaro swamped by musky pine deodorizer. It was a piece of shit and it didn't matter; he didn't need a good car to stand for his manliness. Inside it smelled stale, a bit like body odor if she was honest, and it needed paint. He didn't care about paint. His was a life of the mind. A life of the camera. A life of the beauty underneath the beauty, he said. He had called this incandescence. All of it, the ugly car, his words, the tiny bell, made her feel nearly certain that life could find a way to redeem anyone who was remotely decent.

Inside of her she carried, in a small tough nut, her days at the Lady Parade and a few other bad things she'd done. But this nut was small. And around it was everything else: her good smile, her devotion to her child, her style, her hope. Mister Clover had seen these other things. More than that: he'd wanted to take their picture.

The slow, sweet song was winding down. It would end soon. Its slowness had the opposite effect on her body: she became revved up, impatient, her feet tapped a little, her knees shook. She felt a kind of thrumming in her stomach, like having drunk some milk that had begun to turn. She stole a few glimpses of his profile as he drove—he was handsome, if a little pretty. He had a girl's round, pink mouth, but the rest of his face absorbed its femininity—the dark and jutting brow, the fuzzy underchin, the big ears. His hair was uncombed and coarse, gray-brown, long enough to tuck behind his ears.

“Tell me about yourself, Goldie,” he said.

It caught her off guard. She shrugged. “I have a simple life. You saw it.”

“I saw it,” he agreed. “But what's underneath it all?”

“Well, my parents.”

“Yeah, I imagined something like that.”

A misty rain had begun and his wipers squeaked across the windshield. She was silent for a moment. Her father's buddies had called him “Dappy.” He was an electrician who drank alone in the attic most nights, who occasionally came downstairs to hold both of her hands in one of his huge, dry hands and warn her about the ills of the world. But she couldn't really say this, could she? Neither did it seem right to say that her mother, praised always for her vivaciousness, for her ass-length hair and fine, rippling laugh, died when her car left the road in the July of Goldie's eleventh year. The car was found days later at the bottom of a gully. It would be off-putting, certainly, to say this, or to say that for years she thought her mother faked her death, that one day Goldie would come upon her at a bus station or on a busy avenue in some city, would come upon a nervous woman with dyed hair and big sunglasses, and they'd embrace in spite of themselves. She should not say these things, right? But as it turned out she didn't need to say anything, because he started talking again, and this was an enormous relief, for she knew it was basically impossible to say anything about your parents without flattening them out to their saddest parts, without showing the part of you that's just the same.

He said, “My old mum is a playwright. The Valley Players are putting on her show next month. It's called
Winter: A Death in Three Acts
. You should go—it's really tremendous. I helped her edit it. First-rate.”

She said, “Yes, I'll have to check it out,” wondering if this might be a date.