Mystery Girl: A Novel (2 page)

It’s true. I didn’t understand. But I heard. At least I thought I did. Maybe I didn’t.

“I hear you,” I said. “I do. And I’ll find a job. I’m already looking, but I’ll look harder. And the therapy, fine. No problem. Just tell me when and I’ll be there. But don’t leave me. Please. I don’t deserve it.” I dropped to the floor beside her, tried to make her look me in the eyes, her green eyes, always greener when polished with tears. “You promised you’d never leave me,” I told her. “You promised me, no matter what. Remember?” She nodded, weeping now. “Please. Don’t do this. Don’t.”

But she did it, she walked away, dragging the good luggage down the steps, getting into the good car. I guess she wanted to leave me in style. Then I shut the light and curled into a ball on the bed, cradling my heart as if it were a sick baby. How did I feel? I don’t know what to say. Alone. As if in one moment, she had turned herself into a stranger and me into an exile. But I didn’t cry. Why not? Because the only person in the world I trusted to hold me while I cried was gone.

4

THE NEXT MORNING, I
woke up blank, expecting her warm, lumpy form beside me, and had to remember all over again. This kept happening, like an emotional amnesia, forgetting and then remembering: she’s gone. Then I started job-hunting like a madman. I felt a desperate need to show up at our first therapy appointment on Friday holding a job like a bouquet. I scoured the Internet and fired off a dozen résumés. I posted my CV on a local job-hunting search engine site. I called the couple of old employers I could remember and let them know I was available, on the odd chance they’d been up all night wondering. Then, when I couldn’t think of anything else to do, I cleaned the house, just in case she came back.

It was amazing, the mess I’d made. In only twenty-four hours I’d reduced our lovely home to such a state of cluttered, dingy, smelly bachelordom that even I was appalled. Newspapers were everywhere.
The sheets were pulled off the mattress. I’d somehow managed to drink out of a dozen glasses and coffee cups and leave them scattered around. I began to clean in a panic, knowing I couldn’t let myself fall so far so fast, especially since under normal circumstances I’m not really that bad of a slob. She was neater, sure—she’s a girl. But I held down my end. I did the cooking and took out the trash. I did laundry regularly and ran the dishwasher when it was full. But I would never do it on my own. When she left, even just for a night, I fell into a shambles, the very same shambles I’d lived in before she came along, the shambles of single straight guyhood. Because the world of straight men without women, frankly, is a sad, brutal place. It’s a place where breakfast is canned peanuts, and dinner is eaten straight from the frying pan, so you don’t have to wash a plate. It’s a place where everyone has one sheet and one towel forever. Nothing matches. We don’t even know what matching means. To get two socks the same shade of black is a miracle. When you’re sick, nobody cares, even your best friends don’t think to make you tea, you just lie there, febrily sweating and seething, and you have to blow your nose into a T-shirt because there are no tissues, ever, and the only toilet paper is napkins you stole from McDonald’s. You don’t want to live there? Of course not. No one does. Not even us. But, like dogs in the pound or enchanted toads, we can’t escape on our own.

That was where she’d first found me, cast adrift on a salvaged futon in an empty room with a cardboard box as a table, wearing the same clothes I’d been wearing since, well, since the last girlfriend, the one I broke up with when I moved out here to not-write screenplays. Now, as half of a married couple, my hair looked good and my clothes fit. I smelled sweet. Thanks to marriage, I was finally dateable. And we lived in amazing luxury. We had a whole closet full of just towels and linens and extra quilts. We woke up in a sunny house and all our furniture came from the same period. Modern, I think. We’d painted the walls, something that had never crossed my mind before. We owned a vacuum cleaner and had organic stuff in the
fridge, and I don’t mean growing in there. We had all kinds of nice things in the bathroom, too, that I’d rub lovingly on my face and hair and feet. I’d never even considered that my feet, so far away, so lonesome, might deserve to be loved, until she taught me. And I appreciated it, I really did. We all do, believe me, I can speak for the assembly of heterosexual mankind on this. We’re grateful. We know it’s a better life, a more beautiful, sweeter, gentler life. We just can’t help ourselves. Without you we’re brutal, even the best of us, we’re brutal, even if only to ourselves, because to care for yourself, you have to care about yourself, even love yourself a little. And in our land there is no love but you.

5

I GOT HIS EMAIL
on the fifth day, when I was getting a little desperate. The big therapy session was that afternoon, and I’d been on only two job interviews. They didn’t go well. I wanted to ask, in my follow-up email: Can’t we just forget this ever happened? Please delete. It had taken an enormous amount of effort merely to make myself presentable in the first place. I had to find a clean shirt and unwrinkled pants and do the buttons up right and tuck it in. I had to shave, which was awful. My hands shook from all the coffee, and I accidentally slashed my throat, but the hardest part was facing myself in the mirror. I’d lost weight, burning off my happy husband paunch in a marathon of distress, so I actually looked pretty trim, and my spouse-supervised haircut was top-notch, but there was something terribly wrong with my eyes. I couldn’t blame my interviewers for wanting me gone: these people are trained to give you a firm handshake and a straight look. But when they grasped my clammy, shaky fingers and gazed into my bloody blues, they saw something even I didn’t want to know.

So as I said, by day five, things were getting rough. I sat up,
abruptly, at dawn. I didn’t sleep much during this period, or slept only in snatches, during which I had nightmares that were identical to my waking life: I dreamed that what was happening to me was actually happening, and woke up every hour or so, exhausted.

First I rose and checked my empty email. Next I made coffee. Then, exhausted already, I took a self-pity break on the couch, face down, nose in the crack between cushions, as if sniffing for lost change. What job did I (or she, really) think I could get? By training and nature, I was equipped to do nothing but lie thusly and think deep thoughts. I blamed my hardworking parents for encouraging me to obtain a useless, outrageously expensive, and still unpaid-for education best suited to a minor nineteenth-century aristocrat. I could read philosophy and discuss paintings. Not that I ever did, but I could, if I had to, in an emergency. I could charm elegant dinner parties with witty patter, if anyone ever invited me to one. I could articulate my misery with great precision. If only I had learned to cut hair, or cook, or fix something! The mailman startled me, and I jumped to my feet as a clutch of bills shot through the slot and splattered onto the floor. Rent. Power. Student loans. How much was left in our joint account anyway? Would Lala continue to pay her share? How much did this therapy cost? What was today’s date, anyway?

Spying on the mailman through the curtains, I entertained a brief reverie about his lot: strolling along, out in the air in all weather, with no one watching, making his simple rounds, then returning home to a well-earned, hearty meal served by a loving, buxom wife. How sweet, I mused, to walk around and get paid for it. Yet, as we know, there was something about the mail that drove men to slaughter. Maybe all that endless paper, piling up, like novels no one wanted. All that bad news. I sat back at my desk and rested my aching head on the keyboard.

That’s when I saw it, close up, alongside my nose, an email that had slipped quietly into my box. The search engine had ground up my résumé and spat back a paltry response, one “position” in the
known world that I was theoretically qualified to assume. It said only “Private Detective Requires Assistance,” followed by a phone number. Assist? I could do that, I exulted. Anyone could. I called. It picked up after half a ring.

“Yeah?” the voice of an older woman asked.

“Good morning,” I said in my most chipper and business-ready tone. “I’m calling regarding the ad for an assistant.”

“Wrong number,” she said and hung up. I checked the number and tried again, figuring I’d misdialed. As I mentioned, my hands were a bit shaky. Again the phone was snatched up almost before I pressed the last button.

“Yeah?” It was the same woman.

“Hello, I’m sorry if this the wrong number, but there’s an ad for a private investigator who needs an assistant.”

“Look, fella, I’m a busy woman, all right? I don’t know what you’re trying to pull but I ain’t got time for this.” I could hear other phones ringing in the background and a television’s blare.

“So you didn’t place the ad for a private investigator?”

“Private what?” she yelled over the din. “No. We don’t need no private investigator.”

“No!” I shouted back. “You’re the investigator. I want to be the assistant.”

“You want to be my assistant. Well you can start assisting me right now by shoving the phone up your own ass instead of waiting for me to come do it for you. What?” she shouted suddenly. “What? I can’t hear you. Come in here.” There was a moment of silence while I wondered whether to hang up. “Hold on,” she said, reluctantly, and then covered the phone. I heard a muffled exchange. Finally, someone else got on, a man this time.

“Yes,” he said. “I believe you’re calling to inquire about the position of assistant?”

“Yes, sir,” I said, throwing in the “sir” because this guy’s voice sounded a lot more refined than the lady’s had, not English exactly, but like someone who really knew English.

“Very good. I am interviewing this afternoon. Perhaps it would be convenient for you to come at four?”

“That would be great,” I said, and he gave me the address. He asked my name and I told him.

“Excellent, Mr. Kornberg. I’ll look forward to meeting you then. My name,” he said, “is Solar Lonsky.”

6

THE ADDRESS WAS IN
Koreatown. I found it without too much trouble. On a jumbled street of beaten old homes and newly renovated oddities, their once quaintly shingled walls now slathered with stucco and studded with satellite dishes, the squat bungalow I parked before was distinguished by an air of benign neglect. The white fence was peeling but the trees were old and shady. Their roots broke the curved concrete walk into chunks like thawing ice. On a deep porch, under the shadowing eaves, a diamond of yellowed glass was set in a dark wood door.

I waited until after I parked to put on my jacket and tie, since my wife took the car with working AC and it was getting hot. (Autumn in LA, season of fires and earthquakes and apocalyptic winds, growing only hotter as the real world cools.) I grabbed my leather briefcase, which contained my résumé, a protein bar, and a couple of books that I’d dropped in there to make it look full, (
Portrait of a Lady, Thief’s Journal,
and a volume of Proust). There was a special-delivery copy of the
New York Times
on the walk, so I picked that up and rang the bell. After a moment a slot opened and a very small, very round Korean lady peered out.

“Hello,” she said in a thick accent.

“Good afternoon,” I said. I was planning to continue by saying I had an appointment with Mr. Lonsky, but she shut the peephole. Then she opened it again.

“Warren?” she asked.

“No, I’m not Warren. I’m Samuel. Sam really. Sam Kornberg.”

“You show warrant?”

“Oh, warrant,” I said. “I thought you said Warren. No, no warrant. I still don’t know what you mean.”

“No police?”

“No.”

“Okay.” She smiled and shut the slot again. I checked the address to be sure I had the right house. Was this some kind of very formal, polite crack den? Then she was back.

“Norman?”

“No, not Norman either. I’m Sam.”

“No.” She spoke slowly, for my benefit, as if explaining a simple fact. “You are Mormon.”

“A Mormon? No, I’m not a Mormon. Sorry. Jewish, I’m afraid.”

“Okay,” she said again, still smiling, and shut the slot. I was about ready to give up, but then I heard elaborate bolts shifting and locks being turned, and the door swung back with a sound like a drawbridge being raised. She waved me inside, with that pretty underhand wave Asian women use, and then rebolted the locks behind me, hoisting a heavy wooden crossbar that she could barely lift into place.

The living room was done in middle period old lady, with plastic covers on the white couches and runners protecting the thick, spotless white carpets. White vertical blinds kept out the sun. There were three televisions, all on, two with baseball games, one with soccer. There were also three telephones on the coffee table. In a white upholstered armchair, commanding the view, sat a tiny old white lady, even tinier than the little Korean lady and far more gnarled. She wore red polyester slacks and a pink blouse. Her white hair had a pink tinge to it and she wore giant, round red sunglasses and had very red lips. She was smoking the longest, thinnest cigarette I’d ever seen, grasping it between two red-tipped claws, playing cards clutched in her other hand. The Korean lady sat on the couch
and picked up a hand that had been resting facedown, eyeing her opponent suspiciously.

“You Sol’s friend?” the old white lady asked. She was the one from the phone.

“Well, I’m here to see Mr. Lonsky—”

“Solly!” she yelled, cutting me off. “Sol! Get out here! Sorry about Mrs. Moon,” she went on, addressing me again. “White men in suits make her nervous.”

“Me too,” I said, trying to smile agreeably, although I was starting to wonder about this whole setup. “They rarely bring good news.”

Then another white man in a suit emerged from the interior of the house. At first he was just a shadow, a looming presence in the dark hall, and the sonorous voice I recognized from the phone.