Know Your Beholder: A Novel (7 page)

“Learned that word from my husband. Good with words. Bad in bed.”

“Dingo ate my baby.”

“Put that heaping plate of low-cal lentils down, cowboy, I’ll follow you out.”

But it really probably went like this:

“I’m Dennis.”

“I’m Sheila Anne.”

“You looked marooned at the salad bar.”

“Oh, I’m just being vague and noncommittal. There are too many options.”

“The variety of croutons alone.”

“It’s all just so complicated. And is that supposed to be blue cheese or ranch?”

“I’d bet my baked potato that it’s ranch…I gather from your lanyard that you’re with the hospital. I’m from AstraZeneca.”

“Is that a new addition to our solar system?”

“It’s a pharmaceutical company. It would appear that I’ve lost my lanyard.”

“Maybe it’s down at the other end of the salad bar, deeply recessed in that tub of cottage cheese and pineapple bits.”

“I’m one of the reps. This is part of my new territory. Illinois, Indiana, Iowa. Do you live in Decatur?”

“I live in Pollard. Southwest down Route Forty-one. Two-lane highway, lots of nice arable fields to take in. Corn. Cows. Silos. What about you?”

“I live in New York.”

“City?”

“The Big Apple, yep.”

“Never been.”

“Instead of corn, cows, and silos, we have skyscrapers, pit bulls, and the smell of salmonella in August. I’m actually originally from Colorado. Little town called Yuma, about two hours northeast of Denver.”

“What lured you east?”

“The job.”

“They bring you all the way out to New York City so you can work in the Midwest?”

“They fly me out here once a month. Put me up in decent hotels, rent me quality sedans.”

They smile. He reveals his white, nonbleached, staggeringly irresistible teeth.

Sheila Anne’s larger upper lip dimples up adorably.

“Mind if I join you?” he asks (finally).

“Not at all,” she answers.

And then they finish filling their plates with low-cal, colorful salad bar selections and sit together at an imitation oak, poorly padded, ass-cheek-hardening booth and talk about things like the Wellness Profession and the pros and cons of socialized medicine and why maybe the French and the Swedes have figured it out and the insane hours doctors put in for the good of mankind and how fluorescent hospital lighting makes one look and eventually feel bloodless as a macadamia nut, which can be generally counterintuitive to healing, and how the cafeteria fare at Decatur Memorial has actually improved quite a bit since they brought in the new eco-friendly food services company.

And over his medium-rare porterhouse steak, in between graceful but without a doubt masculine mastication, Dennis Church, in his lightweight, well-tailored spring/summer business suit, tells the sea-foam-green-eyed beauty across from him about the loneliness of traveling and how low-down and just plain weird it is to have your only companions be your company-bought MacBook Pro and your tricked-out company-financed smartphone, and how sometimes he wishes he lived a simpler life, in a small town with like a Little League diamond and a swimming hole and a barbershop with one of those swirling red-white-and-blue barber poles and ceramic Nativity scenes erected on the lawns of churches during the holiday season and a really high-quality miniature golf course with a windmill that’s so big it almost looks real and a shopping mall with an authentic food court and a grade-A Fourth of July fireworks display at the local speedway and a lima-bean-colored water tower with the town’s name featured in black majuscule letters.

And in between his words, Sheila Anne imagines her life in New York. The faster metabolism it would educe and the taxicabs and the inconceivable volume of humanity teeming on actual boulevard-sized streets and wide cement sidewalks and sluicing bike messengers and the unspoken rules of engagement on subway cars and the new urban way of walking and the learned skill of avoiding insane encephalitic homeless people with swollen carbuncular faces and leaky eyes and Pilates at dawn and bartenders who can knock your socks off reciting Shakespearean soliloquies while shaking the daylights out of a martini and high-speed elevators and crammed espresso bars and the yeasty sweet smell of Broadway theater lobbies.

And every other sentence or so Sheila Anne starts to imagine this New York life with
him
, this incredibly magnetic Dennis Church, who has undone the top button of his oxford now and loosened his tie so his impressive, well-shaven Adam’s apple can be free to dance a bit. And although at this point it is an absurd, premature notion because she is very much married and supposedly in love with and spiritually and legally committed to a man she lost her mind over some four years earlier, she lets her imagination run like a wild horse galloping along the cliffs of the Costa Brava, and all she can see is Dennis’s presumably fit, low-fat, highly conditioned body poised over hers, the two of them composed missionary-style in some cheap roadside motel room off Route 41, with great classic soul music like Larry Graham’s “One in a Million You” playing at a volume so perfect that they can inhale the music with the pores of their conjoined bodies and yet also hear each other’s animal pleasure—the wordless mewls and whimpers—releasing into and infusing with Larry Graham’s velveteen baritone and by the end of their meal, which she can’t even remember eating, let alone choosing, Sheila Anne Falbo has decided to give herself permission to fall under the spell of this extremely thoughtful, surprisingly charming, endlessly interesting gentleman with the aquiline nose who is sitting across from her.

Earlier I keyed into the Bunches’ unit. The grief over their missing daughter tinges the air like a spoiled egg. Their apartment is surprisingly neat, with furniture that is as beige as it is simple. I assume their plain living is due more to ignorance than some minimalistic aesthetic choice. They were itinerant circus travelers after all, most likely living out of secondhand Winnebagos and camper-trailers, enduring and adapting to gypsylike caravanning. Perhaps they have yet to experience the challenges of domestic stability and therefore know nothing of the concept of classic American household clutter.

I was surprised by the lack of toys. Aside from a stuffed corduroy cat that was more of a throw pillow than a child’s companion, there was little if any evidence of toddler life. Regarding Bethany, I thought I might find a series of circus-themed photos of her arranged around the living room walls, the sequined trapeze-artist parents thrusting her joyously into the air as celestial big-top lights glint overhead…a clown riding a miniature tricycle over a sawdust floor, little Bethany perched on the handlebars…an elephant standing in the center of a ring of paper lanterns with Bethany cradled safely in its trunk. But save for what appeared to be a wool Navajo blanket hanging above the sofa, their walls were blank.

In their entertainment console, an archaic TiVo’s red light was engaged. I imagined them recording
The Oprah Winfrey Show
, an episode dedicated to the epidemic of Missing Children in the Heartland. The Bunches would view it encamped on their itchy calico sofa, their legs extended on their unremarkable coffee table, as they ate microwaved Stouffer’s.

Mary Bunch keyed in while I was clutching their remote control. I have no idea why I was suddenly holding it, and I was forced to hide it in the pocket of my bathrobe.

“What are you doing?” she asked. Her voice was high and faint and trapped in her nose.

I told her that I’d heard a strange noise in her apartment as I was walking up the stairs. She asked me what kind of noise, and I said, “A sort of scrabbling. There were coons in the attic last night,” I lied.

“Coons?” she said.

“Yep,” I replied. “Scrabbling raccoons.”

She said she was under the impression that raccoons were in hibernation mode.

And I told her that, yes, the majority of raccoons were indeed engaged in deep hibernation mode, but that sometimes it was necessary for a few of them—a brave select few—to venture out for the purpose of foraging for food. I could hear my voice sliding into its higher bullshit register.

“During a blizzard?” she asked, dubious.

“Especially during a blizzard. The stakes are higher. Hunger becomes paramount. They have to refuel.”

“
Whose
apartment did you hear them in?”

I told her in rare cases such as this—in “coon cases”—that I always do a quick check of the other units. “A cursory inspection,” I offered, and explained that I had keyed into Harriet Gumm’s and Bradley Farnham’s apartments too.

She hadn’t blinked yet, and the space between us was acquiring a strange density, like the air before a thunderstorm. Her light-blue ozone eyes appeared to be somehow glued open. I had never noticed it before, but Mary Bunch has freckles. The kind where the pigment appears to have dissolved and settled over the paler layer of skin, more infusion than dusting.

“They’re pretty resourceful creatures,” I added. I breathed through my nose. A trail of cold sweat was running from between my shoulder blades to the small of my back. Time was slowing down. I said, “By the way, how’s your heat been?”

“Our heat is fine,” she replied.

A dollop of embarrassment began slogging through my intestines. “Sorry if I crossed a line,” I finally offered, swallowing the dry mouth. Swallowing twice actually.

She was wearing a ski vest over a weather-resistant anorak, accompanied by a gnomic, conical red winter hat and mismatching collegiate jogging pants. The ski vest, puffy and hazard orange, looked bulletproof and gave the impression that she was either a municipal worker or a deer hunter.

“Can I help you with those?” I asked, pointing to her bag of groceries.

“I can manage,” she said.

There was another awkward moment, during which she sniffled back a snot globule and finally blinked. It was as if the blink somehow reset her. She exited into the kitchen with her groceries.

The warmth of their unit was making my pulse drop and my feet felt incredibly thick. Sweat was now also forming at my temples and soon my beard would start glistening repulsively. Something beyond the embarrassment of having been caught nosing around in one of my tenant’s apartments, something beyond the clammy humors of shame, was overwhelming me. Something sad and heavy and haunted.

I could suddenly smell freshly cut apples. And Mary Bunch was putting groceries in the fridge. I imagined it filled with doubles and triples of things. Jars of mayonnaise and bottles of ketchup. Four-packs of butter. Eight quarts of whole milk, most of which would never get drunk. A dozen misshapen grapefruit. Overbuying to compensate for their missing child. Little dimple-cheeked Bethany with her baby teeth and her impossibly large blue eyes, her wheat-colored hair.

Once she knocked on my door. She was wearing only a saggy cloth diaper and holding a dinner fork.

“Hi, Bethany,” I said.

The flaxen hair, duck-curling at the base of her neck. Her tiny pink hands. “Fork,” she said, thrusting the utensil high in the air. The word was a perfect note, almost pure oxygen. I wasn’t sure if the fork belonged to the Bunches, if it was mine, or if it was one that had been randomly left in the stairwell.

“Thank you,” I said, taking it from her.

She then plugged her mouth with her thumb and headed back down the stairs, all on her own. I remember being vaguely troubled that it was the beginning of December and the Bunches were letting their daughter wander around the house unsupervised, wearing only a saggy diaper.

When Mary reentered the living room she’d removed the ski vest and anorak and was now wearing a Phish concert T-shirt, too large, probably her husband’s, with a long-sleeved black T-shirt underneath.

“You think we did something,” she said. “To her.” Her voice was still congested, and I had the strange impulse to go to a knee, to actually genuflect; perhaps out of some expression of abject, confusing shame for trespassing in my own house, or worse yet, for being a completely neutral human who exists mostly in wool camping socks.

Still standing, I said, “Did something to who?”

“Our daughter.”

“No,” I said. “I don’t.”

Mary Bunch was surprisingly attractive in her
Billy Breathes
T-shirt, and our proximity, likely tweaked by my recent extended lack of female companionship, felt weirdly romantic. Was there a sudden charge between us? A little ionic landlord/tenant valence? Whatever it was had taken me by surprise.

I quickly fantasized that she was trapped in a bad marriage, that her lack of blinking was in fact a dry-eyed cry for help, that behind her retinas a home movie was playing that featured Mary being emotionally terrorized by her husband, Todd, with his invisible braces and inescapable circus strongman holds, and that I was the only one who could save her. I would invite her up to the attic and we would simply spoon in my boyhood bed. And then I would wash her hair in a basin of water, frontier-style.

But what about little Bethany? Was she actually alive, being held captive by her parents, gagged and duct-taped, locked in a closet somewhere?

Mary Bunch’s nostrils were gluey with snot. I got the sense that it was more than just a cold, that she was somehow spiritually congested, that her soul was heavy with some unnameable guilty paste. She wiped her nose with the back of her wrist. I realized that, like me, she didn’t appear to have showered recently. Her face had a film. The hair sneaking out from behind her ears was matted and dirty. I wanted to smell it. I imagined the sharp odor of her unclean scalp embedded deep in the fibers of her gnomic ski hat.

Finally Mary said, “I saw you speaking to that man yesterday.” I asked her what man she was referring to and she said, “The tall creepy-looking guy with the mustache.”

“So you were here,” I said. I told her how he’d claimed to have rung their doorbell several times.

“Who was he?” she asked.

“A detective,” I replied.

She said something about how “these people”—I supposed she meant cops—were “relentless.” She asked what he wanted, and I told her how he’d simply asked a few standard questions. “About Bethany?” she asked.