This Must Be the Place: A Novel (12 page)

The few pieces he’d already seen had suggested as much, but they proved the exception, not the rule. His first thought upon seeing the perfectly folded rows of clean white and cream panties and matching bras—with a few garishly lacy pieces jammed together in the corner like an aberrant splotch of plumage—was that he had opened her roommate’s underwear drawer by mistake. But no. Beatrice the busty voice major had a single; she had no roommate. What she did have—a compulsively tidy drawer of cotton underpants and full-coverage beige bras—flustered Arthur but didn’t stop him from snapping two dozen hastily composed photos before Beatrice, dripping and humming, returned.

It wasn’t until he developed the film that he understood what he’d felt standing over Beatrice’s underwear drawer, which, in the fantasies that occupied the majority of his waking life, had once existed as a teeming mass of black and red lace and strings and straps whose purpose and function he had yearned to explore as a conquistador yearns for undiscovered country. It was a more sophisticated and wholly unexpected emotion that took Arthur as he pinned the dripping photographs up to dry. They weren’t the most beautifully composed shots he’d ever taken, but he had aced the assignment: none of them looked like underwear.

They looked like snowy fields. Freshly pressed hospital linen. Blank canvas. Scoops of silken ice cream. And the twinge of disappointment Arthur thought he should have felt at discovering the full-coverage cotton girl lurking beneath Beatrice’s cabaret exterior vanished. What took its place was a genuine tenderness and another kind of intrigue—for another person, a real person with the capacity to surprise him, not merely live up to his wildest fantasies and expectations. He got an
A-plus on the assignment and maintained his artistic integrity (and girlfriend) by refusing to reveal the original subject of the pictures.

The photos turned out to be stronger than Arthur’s relationship with Beatrice, which combusted in less than a month over irreconcilable differences (Arthur thought it was perfectly reasonable to prefer a midnight show of
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
to a kegger at the fraternity that required every pledge class to kill a chicken, and Beatrice disagreed). When he brought his portfolio home over spring break and his father saw the pictures of Beatrice’s underpants—and the A-plus they had earned his son—he clapped Arthur on the back. His parents framed two of them and no one ever suspected they were anything more salacious than fitted sheets. If he could trick his parents into decorating their family room with pictures of his girlfriend’s panties, then truly he had found his calling.

Which only made the opinion widely held among his art-department friends harder to refute: that he was batshit crazy for wanting to move to Hollywood—which he did, batshit crazy or not, two and a half years after graduation. He knew as well as they did that all the serious photographic art was going on in New York City. Didn’t he want to take serious pictures, and make serious art, in a city that was
closer
? And didn’t he know that Los Angeles, choking on paparazzi, was where good photography went to die? He had shrugged off their disbelief with the assurance that he knew exactly what he was getting into; of course he didn’t want to spend his life hounding celebrities for blurry money shots, but he wanted to be a portrait photographer, like Dorothea Lange, Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon. Of all the things and places he’d observed, faces fascinated Arthur the most, and what better way to worship the subtleties of the human face than by taking pictures of it for a living, in a town where all everybody did was look at one another?

Plus—and Arthur couldn’t explain this to his friends and his family without hurting their feelings—he needed to leave. He had grown up in and around Boston, but it had never felt like home to him. He knew there was more—or, at least, there was
other
. As soon as he had enough money to make the trip, rent a place, and live on long enough to find a job, he went. He couldn’t grow up to be like his grandfather, who had
never left the house in Somerville where he’d been born—who didn’t know how the dirt sounds when it crumbles over the edge of the Grand Canyon, had never eaten hummus or seen a camel anyplace but a zoo, had never heard blues played below the Mason-Dixon line, where it just sounds better. Of course, Arthur’s grandfather was perfectly content knowing that he didn’t know and hadn’t seen as much as he possibly could, but Arthur wasn’t. He never could have imagined Amy’s face—the way the hard lines of her nose and her jaw worked together instead of against each other—if he hadn’t seen her for himself, if he had never left the place where he was born. He hadn’t even imagined he would ever love anyone enough to marry her before he met Amy.

And now he didn’t remember who that person had been. The Arthur Rook who dropped a large cardboard box of pots and pans and sheets and towels and pillows and an iron his mother insisted he would want, just trust her on this, at the FedEx in Harvard Square—the Arthur whose brother threw a going-away party the Saturday before his flight with red Jell-O shots and illegal Cuban cigars and a surprise appearance from some of his college friends, two years gone from his life and already grown far apart—the Arthur whose parents both took the morning off work to drive him to the airport, only to stand beside him while he processed his itinerary and then wave from the other side of the security checkpoint—that Arthur Rook hadn’t existed in almost seven years and would never exist again.

And the other Arthur—the Arthur in love with Amy and Los Angeles, who went into elementary schools on picture day and told kids to say
flatulence
, which only worked with the smart third-graders and then grades five and above—who took freelance head shots on the side and was skeptical when his boss told him the entire studio was going digital and then so sad that it meant he’d be getting rid of the darkroom and Arthur would have to find someplace else to process his prints—who ate dinner with Amy, who slept with Amy, who had an occasional fight but nothing big with Amy, who stayed in on Friday nights and got up early Saturday mornings to go for a run with Amy—that Arthur Rook was gone.

In his place was a new Arthur, an Arthur who dreamed and ached and couldn’t see.

The morning after his first supper with the other tenants, Arthur woke up muddled with guilt and still full. He had reentered society for two reasons, both self-interested: he had smelled Mona’s meat loaf cooking, and he had realized that it was time to take the next logical step in his investigation.

It was time to use Mona.

But he hadn’t counted on that strange old woman, had never intended to make a scene, and he certainly hadn’t counted on the effect Mona’s cooking would have on him. After nothing but sugar cereal, peanut butter, and water for the better part of a week, Mona’s meal hit his system with the intensity of a controlled substance, and for one heady moment Arthur could see again: could see Mona, smiling sympathetically from across the table. He was excited to think Mona’s taking his side against the other tenant—that wizened old woman whose name he couldn’t even remember—meant she liked him. She would talk to him again and she would tell him things about Amy and about the contents of the shoebox. Which stirred his unease, since he had to make sure
he
didn’t tell her too much in return. He couldn’t let Mona see the postcard that bequeathed the best parts of Amy to the one who would know where to look. It would be difficult, but necessary, to get at the truth that Amy wanted
him
—and only him—to discover, and if that meant keeping a culinary genius in the dark, so be it.

Harry was lying beside Arthur in bed, practically spooning him.

“Morning,” Arthur said. Harry sighed.

Arthur smelled sunblock and oranges and sat up, swinging his legs over the side of the bed.

Maybe he was still dreaming.

He stood. He heard a thump as Harry leaped down and Arthur filled his lungs and took a step and then another step. This really did feel like dreaming: his head was light and very far away.

Mona was singing in the kitchen. Arthur heard her as soon as he opened his door, and for a moment it jarred him. But he refused to wake up.

The old hall boards creaked under his bare feet. He wasn’t sure
where he was going, only trusted that he would know when he arrived. The hall was more like a balcony or a parapet: a landing that wrapped around the hollow core of the house on all four stories, connected from floor to floor by short staircases that curled like fruit peels. Arthur had never been in a house like this; it was an optical illusion or an impossible illustration, and it made him feel unsteady and wary and watched.

He passed a large framed black-and-white photograph at the top of the main stairs, of two young men in old-fashioned suits with tight collars and matching silver watch fobs, facing each other in fanatically straight high-backed chairs. Behind one chair stood a woman with a grim expression and dark curly hair.

He looked at the two men. He looked at their faces. The man on the left had thick black hair, a long nose in a pale young face, and a smile that revealed itself only after Arthur had been staring at him for a long time. The man on the right, with the woman standing behind him, had short light hair and a spectacular brush of mustache, and a small notch, like a bite, out of one ear. A fighter, Arthur thought. But he didn’t look unkind; his eyes were tipped at the corners, lifted. The men in the photograph were smiling. The woman looked like someone had just drop-kicked her kitten.

They wore their secrets like their buttons and their chains and their cuff links—too small to see but essential, giving everything its shape and place.

Their cuff links?

Arthur screamed.

The men in the photograph—
MR. DANIEL DARBY
and
MR. AND MRS. WILLIAM FITCHBURG JONES
, as the brass plate screwed into the over-bearing gilt frame proclaimed—wore matching, perfectly round, silver-edged cuff links that Arthur had seen, that Arthur had held in his hands, that Arthur had unwrapped from a piece of yellow tissue paper inside a plastic egg. He would bet every dollar he had ever owned or would ever make that they were ruby-red and heavy and beautiful, and this—this was more than a clue, this meant—he didn’t know what it meant other than that it was something he was meant to see.

“
Mona
!” he shouted. He pulled the picture off its nail and held it at arm’s length and laughed.

“Hey!” Mona’s shout startled him, and he clutched the frame to his chest.

She was standing in the foyer, wiping her hands on a blue and pink towel. Her dark hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and she was barefoot, and she wasn’t smiling her usual smile. She was angry and afraid.

A tiny part of Arthur woke up and was horrified to know none of this was a dream. It never had been. He was freezing cold. He saw what he looked like to Mona: he tried to remember if he had taken a shower that morning (he hadn’t), or shaved (he hadn’t, in days), or put on a shirt, even (he hadn’t—nor had he put on any pants). He stepped away from the wall, still clutching the frame, and Mona, her brow creasing, started up the stairs.

Arthur’s throat clogged as he tried to speak.

Mona froze on the third step. The blue and pink towel hung limp from her hands. “What?” she said.

“I saw—” Arthur tried.

Mona resumed climbing, flicking the towel over her shoulder. She propped one hand on her hip and the other on the banister and glared at Arthur: at his dark blue boxers, his matted chest hair, his rooster legs, as Amy called them. Arthur sniffed and drew farther back. He crossed his arms over the frame, pressing cool glass against his sternum.

“Arthur,” Mona said. “What in the blue
fuck
do you think you’re doing? You steal shit off the wall. You—yesterday, at dinner, whatever
that
was. You’re disrupting my other tenants, one of whom keeps a shotgun under his bed. I live in the sticks but I’m not stupid, so tell me why you’re here, why you’re really here, before I call the state police.” She flipped a cell phone out of her pocket with the elegance of a magician revealing a bouquet of flowers beneath a silk handkerchief.

His hands shook. “Oh, God, no—no no no. There’s no reason to call the police. I’m not going to hurt you.” Everything was shaking now. His teeth began to chatter, and he felt heat rise from his chest to the top of his head. “I’m sorry, I’ll go—”

“I’m dialing,” Mona said.

“No! No, please, I’ll go; I’ll leave right now. I just have to get my cat. Oh—” Harryhausen, who never missed an entrance, came padding down the hall out of Arthur’s open door.

“You have a cat?” Mona said, her voice rising three octaves on the word
cat
.

“Ray Harryhausen.” Arthur pointed dumbly at the ball waddling toward them. Mona stopped dialing at the sight of Harryhausen and stared, thumb frozen over the cell phone’s number pad. Her jaw loosened and hung; her mouth opened.

The cat oozed into a sitting position at the top of the stairs and closed his eyes, spent by the journey down the hall.