Look at me: (10 page)

“Am I well?” Ricky asked drowsily, into her hair.

“You’re well,” she told him.

Under the portico, the adults were congregating outside the clubhouse doors. Uncle Moose and her father walked together toward the parking lot to bring the cars around.

“Down,” Ricky said. Charlotte set him on the grass and took back her sandals. As she paused to put them on, Ricky stampeded toward the grown-ups, yelling something, pitching a pinecone at Jessica, who was walking a little ahead with her sister. It hit the back of her skull, and she shrieked. And now came the inevitable laughter, twirling like ribbons into the warm night. Charlotte looked at the sky, its cryptic, heedless promises filling her with delight. It was already August. In that old orchard where Scott Hess had driven her, the pears must be fully ripe, if not already gone.

Chapter Four

As the days
after my lunch with Oscar multiplied without a call from him, I turned to wholesale afternoon drinking. A week had passed, I’d left him three messages he hadn’t returned, I’d seen friends in the evenings and found it eerily awkward, as if there were something everyone wanted to tell me, but was afraid to.

When I had first broached the topic of an alcoholic beverage with Mary Cunningham last October, she bustled about her impressive wet bar and emerged with her favorite cocktail, a daiquiri sweet: an icy, pale green elixir that infused my head with a melting sensation of peace. I had sought out that peace thereafter in further ladylike daiquiris with Mrs. Cunningham and occasional swigs from the wet bar when she was away at the hairdresser. But it was back in New York that my drinking, as readers of charts like to say, spiked; it spiked the warm milk I drank before bed, and gradually my early evenings, when I sipped vodka tonics on my sectional couch and studied the faux-Gothic ruin on the southern tip of Roosevelt Island. One morning I found myself looking for booze at nine-forty-five. There was none left.

I called Oscar again. He was in a meeting (that great modern euphemism), but I left word that it was urgent, then opened the new
Vogue
to distract myself. The model/hooker/junkie thing was back in play, girls propped like broken puppets against graffiti-scarred walls, snail trails of mascara etched on their million-dollar faces. I never lost interest in which younger girls were getting work, girls with the faces of tree frogs, bison and antelopes. Yet the pictures shimmered with a pollen of newness that I still could not resist; it made me turn the pages in a kind of trance until I had seen every one, at which point the pollen would have vanished as irrevocably as the fabled dust on butterfly wings, replaced by a familiarity that was almost crushing.

In the kitchen, I managed to unearth an ancient brandy bottle, and poured myself a glass. Hansen, my fiancé, had been partial to brandy, so I kept a bottle around in the assumption that it was one of those things men liked. For all the men who had drunk my brandy since Hansen, it was his memory I still consulted when I wanted to know something about men generally. No one would have been more shocked by his archetypal status in my thoughts than Hansen himself. We hadn’t spoken in more than a decade.

I drank, staring at the phone in a rising state of outrage. Finally, emboldened by the drenching heat in my chest, I called Oscar again, this time identifying myself as Sasha Lewis of the
New York Post.
He was on the line in three seconds—I counted.

“Fuck you,” I greeted him.

“Pardonnez-moi?”

“You’re taking calls from the
New York Post
, but when it’s your oldest client you’re in a meeting?”

“That was beneath you, Charlotte.”

“What the hell is happening over there? I haven’t heard a—” My drunken belligerence surprised even me.

“If you wish to have a business conversation,” Oscar said coldly, “call me in a businesslike fashion.”

“I have called—and what about?—I told you—”

“Beep,” he cut me off. “That was my aggravation meter. You’re entering a danger zone.”

I slammed down the phone, then sat limply on the couch, shocked by my vivid display of desperation.

I opened my address book and searched for someone to call. I went through it page by page: other models, rich men in various parts of the world; clients I’d worked for regularly over the years. But their calls to me had begun tapering off, and the energy it would require to reel them back into my life felt herculean. Hansen was still under “H”; I’d transferred him from book to book over the years so he always looked current, though surely by now the information was obsolete. Or maybe not; maybe you didn’t move, once you’d settled with a wife and children in a house outside Seattle you’d designed yourself. Why would you?

My eye fell on a tiny Post-it that I’d added to the H’s: the detective, Anthony Halliday. He had called me again, exactly when he’d promised, but I had avoided calling him back. I wanted no part of his search for Z. Yet the allure of calling a person who actively wished to speak with me was too potent to resist.

“It’s Charlotte Swenson,” I said, when he answered. “I’m back in New York.”

He sounded pleased, and suggested paying me a visit. I imagined this: a private detective inside my apartment, looking at my things. “I’d rather come to you,” I said.

“When?” he asked. “Now? Today?” And the eagerness in his voice was so welcome to my drunken ear, so sweetly beckoning, that it jumped the wall of my resistance, and I agreed to come immediately.

Before leaving, I had another large glass of brandy and two Pop-Tarts, which I kept around in large numbers because they were easier to make than pie and I considered them dietetic. I wrapped myself in my long alpaca coat and rode down in the elevator. It was 10:30
A.M.
and I was hugely drunk, full of joy and purpose and mischief. My only regret was over all the days of my life I’d spent sober. Why, when drinking wasn’t illegal? Why had I deprived myself?

Outside, the temperature was below zero and tiny splinters of ice swarmed the air and lodged in my poor face, which was still tight and a little tingly from its second operation. I hailed a cab and instructed the driver, an elderly Sikh playing Gilbert and Sullivan tunes on a tape deck, to take me to Fourteenth Street, where I made him idle at the curb before a store that sold bins of winter clothing. I chose a black face mask that covered the whole of my head and neck, and pulled it on. When I returned to my cab, the Sikh promptly locked the doors, refusing to let me inside until I removed the mask. As he drove, I slipped it back on, looked in his rearview mirror and let out a whoop of laughter. The Sikh shook his head.

The detective’s office was on Seventh Avenue just south of Twenty-fifth Street, inside a seedy brick building whose elevator lurched skyward with an ominous rattling of chains. It released me into an empty corridor lined with doors containing panes of frosted glass where the names of businesses were stenciled: Nelson Watch Repairs; Dr. A. A. Street, Dentistry; Hummingbird Travel Services. None of them showed any visible signs of human occupancy. My steps slapped against the walls. Finally I reached a door that read “Anthony M. Halliday, Esq. Private Investigator.”

A young girl in stone-washed jeans led me through a cramped reception area to the detective’s office, a small disheveled room crammed with hundreds of loose-leaf files, many disgorging their contents onto the floor.

“Petit, don’t make it so complicated,” said the man behind the desk—Mr. Halliday, I presumed—into the blue cordless phone wedged between his ear and shoulder. He raised a finger in apology and motioned for me to sit, which I was able to do only by removing a pile of files from the single extra chair.

“The guy’s a sleazeball, his story’s bullshit, there’s no mystery here,” the detective was saying. “Agatha Christie wouldn’t touch it.”

He looked forty or thereabouts, with a pale, diamond-shaped face and a head of unruly dark hair shot with gray, though its unruliness seemed less a matter of style than the lack of a recent haircut. Dark circles under his eyes: an insomniac. Hard living showed somewhere in his face, though precisely where I couldn’t say. He wore a crisp white shirt straight from the cleaners and a tweed jacket that had spent the past several days tossed over the arm of a chair, or possibly on the floor. I guessed he must be single; a woman would have hung the jacket up.

“Remember, easy on the notes,” he said. “No, writing doesn’t help you think, it’s the other way around … if that notebook gets subpoenaed and you end up frying our guy, I’m gonna be a very unhappy camper …” I stared at him, looking for a shadow self. I’d had glints, nothing clear.

“Okay,
hasta,”
he said, and hung up. Then he looked at me and smiled. “Charlotte Swenson,” he said. “We meet at last.”

“Mr. Halliday.”

“How are you feeling?”

“Better,” I said. “Thanks.”

“You look well.” I sensed his eyes moving over my face, detective eyes, trying to read it. This was not a feeling I enjoyed.

“It helps that you’ve never seen me before,” I said, and discharged a voluble laugh. Uneasiness—distaste, even—strained the detective’s expression, and I smelled my hot, brandy breath and realized he must have, too, in the small room.

“Thanks for coming in,” he said. “I appreciate it.”

“Still haven’t found him?”

He shook his head.

“Any leads?”

He glanced at me. “A few.”

“Such as …?”

“Hey,” he said. “This happens every time we talk.”

“What happens?” I was stalling, waiting for his shadow self to appear. I saw pain around his eyes, but that wasn’t it. That was right on the surface.

“You start interrogating me.”

“Do you think he’s dead?” I asked.

“No, I don’t,” he said. “Do you?”

“How would I know?”

He left the desk and shut the door to his office. Six foot two, I guessed. Brown slacks, scuffed black shoes. A long, awkward stride, as if he were used to larger spaces. “I have a few questions,” he said, resuming his seat and pulling something from a drawer. “And I’d like to tape us, if that’s okay.”

I smiled to conceal my dismay. “Why not?”

He turned on the machine, a small, deadly looking thing that he nudged to the edge of his desk in my direction. “You know when he disappeared,” he began.

“Not really.”

“The first week in August,” he said. “Which is … exactly when you had your accident. Correct?”

“Yes,” I said, and forced myself to meet his gaze. The silence between us felt endless, multigenerational, a silence in which I was fully aware of the earth turning slowly on its spit.

“Coincidence,” he remarked at last.

“The world is full of them,” I replied. I was regretting the brandy. Or perhaps I should have drunk more of it.

Mercifully, there was a knock on the door, and the girl in stone-washed jeans pushed it open. “Tony, I’m so sorry,” she said, “but Leland’s here. He just, like, showed up.”

Halliday looked at the girl, then at me. He seemed briefly immobilized. Then he shut off the recorder, hove a sigh and stood. And as he walked past me from his office, eyes set in the direction of his unheralded guest, I saw it: the enraged shadow. A contortion of anger, like a scream.

Then I relaxed.

Halliday must have taken his guest into the hall, because I never saw the mysterious Leland and heard not a word of their interaction. I waited, listening to a pale bleat of sirens from Seventh Avenue, sounds that seemed filtered through the linty gray light that fell through Halliday’s lone window. I grappled with the urge to leave, to breeze past the detective, “Sorry Tony, had to run!” knowing he wouldn’t be able to stop me. But the gesture seemed craven, overdramatic; an admission. Most of all, I didn’t want to be alone. I wanted to sit a while with this detective, even if it meant answering questions.

I would lie, of course. I lied a lot, and with good reason: to protect the truth—safeguard it, like wearing fake gems to keep the real ones from getting stolen, or cheapened by overuse. I guarded what truths I possessed because information was not a thing—it was colorless, odorless, shapeless, and therefore indestructible. There was no way to retrieve or void it, no way to halt its proliferation. Telling someone a secret was like storing plutonium inside a sandwich bag; the information would inevitably outlive the friendship or love or trust in which you’d placed it. And then you would have given it away.

The detective returned to his office a different man: fretful, preoccupied and possibly afraid, all of which he concealed behind a careless smile. The conversation had been personal, I thought, not business. Who was Le-land? Halliday sat back down and turned on the recorder. “Now,” he said. “Where were we?”

I told him that Z was a Greek, from Santorini, he’d said. Silver wedding band on his left hand. He was one of those people whose physical description required liberal use of the word “medium”: height, build, hair, tan. The overall effect was of a decent-looking European playboy. His one intriguing feature had been his eyes: wide and dark and watchful but also sardonic, as if everything fascinated him and everything, his own fascination included, was somehow ridiculous.

I’d noticed him for the first time at Pollen, a restaurant on the Bowery where the mystical collision of fashion and celebrity had erupted briefly the previous spring. And in a matter of weeks, with a sudden ubiquity that was possible only in a world without memory, Z had become a fixture. He had money, the universal calling card, which he began putting into evenings at certain clubs. He gravitated inevitably toward Mitch and Hassam, the promoters, and soon the three of them were partners in something new, bigger than anything New York had seen in years, or so the rumors went.

“Did you talk to him?” the detective asked.

“He was not a big talker,” I said.

“You had no idea what he was doing there.”

I shrugged. “He was a playboy.”

“But beyond that.”

“I don’t mean to shock you,” I said, “but to some men, the pursuit of women is an end in itself.”

The detective leaned back and smiled. I wondered if the brandy was making me witty, or if this was going to be God’s way of compensating me for the loss of my face.

“You should talk to Mitch and Hassam,” I told him.

“They hired me,” he said. “He walked away with a nice chunk of their change.”

“How much?”

“Twenty-five. The perfect amount, really—enough to make a difference, but not worth chasing after for too long.”

“Then why are you chasing him?”

Instead of answering, Halliday turned to the window. I noticed a silver picture frame aslant among the clutter of his desk. I wished I could see who was in it.

“Thank you very much,” he said, startling me. I sensed his frustration, as if he’d counted on me for something and I had disappointed him. I was sorry.

He came around the desk and saw me to the door. Standing, I revised my estimate: six-one, three inches taller than myself. I hesitated, swaying a little (the brandy), while the cold, empty day barked at me from beyond the walls. “That’s it?” I asked, moving slightly closer to him. “There’s nothing else?”