Bill Pronzini: The Vanished

I arrived a few minutes before nine, and Cheryl was not there as yet. I sat at the bar and drank a beer and watched the door. I kept going over in my mind what I was going to say to her; I wanted it to be just right, completely open, completely honest.

A beer-company clock over the backbar said that it was 9:02 when she came in through the door.

She stopped when she saw me, holding a small black purse in front of her at the waist. She was wearing a suede coat and she had a dark scarf tied over her hair. I stood up and went to her, and we looked at each other like two timid children in a dark playground. I said, ‘Do you want to take one of the booths in the back?’

She nodded, and we went along parallel to the bar and down the cement steps into the circular area. There was not much of a crowd this early on a week night, and we found a place at the far end, before one of the fireplaces.

A waitress came around and I asked Cheryl what she wanted; it was a gimlet. I ordered another beer, and the waitress went away. Cheryl took off her coat and unknotted the scarf, tossing her head slightly; the right side of her face was to the wood fire in the brick kiln, and the flickering light gave her hair the impression of burning, like the streak of red-gold fire a setting sun puts across the surface of a clear-day ocean. She wore the same white-and-lavender sweater she had had on that afternoon.

Our drinks came quickly. Cheryl raised her glass and looked at me directly for the first time, over the rim of it. I stared into her eyes, but it was too dark, even with the fire, to see all or any of the things I had seen there earlier. I wanted to tell her she was very lovely, but I did not know how she would interpret it; it was the right thing to say, and it wasn’t. You said those same words to a girl you were interested only in seducing, without strings, to a girl you thought no more of than a quick lay, a quick coming, a quick good-bye.

‘Well,’ she asked at length, ‘do you want to talk about Roy Sands?’

‘No,’ I said honestly, ‘I want to talk about you.’

‘You told me you wanted some help in your investigation.’

‘And you told me you didn’t know anything.’

‘I don’t. Roy and I went out together a couple of times, and he came to the house now and then before he and Doug went to Germany. I really don’t know him that well.’

‘All right, then. Now we can talk about you.’

‘Why do you want to talk about me?’

‘I want to know you.’

‘I see.’

‘I hope you do, Cheryl.’

She raised her glass again and drank from it, looking away. ‘I suppose you’re going to tell me you fell in love with me this afternoon. You looked into my eyes there at the door, and you fell in love with me just like that.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Love at first sight is a lot of hooey. But there’s attraction at first sight, a kind of immediate fascination. That’s the way I feel about you-and maybe, a little, it’s the way you feel about me.’

Cheryl was silent for a time. Then, slowly, she said, ‘We’re two strangers-two adults. It’s silly, this kind of thing.’

She was starting to admit it now, to me as well as to herself. ‘It’s not silly,’ I told her. ‘It happens-it happened today. And we don’t have to be strangers very long. That’s why we’re here, isn’t it-why I asked you out and why you accepted? The real reason? To become something more than strangers?’

‘I… don’t know. Maybe it is.’

‘It is, Cheryl. Listen, the simplest way to start it off is by being open and frank with one another. So I’ll tell you some things about me. All right?’

She did not answer, and so I went on with it before I could change my mind. I said, ‘There was this woman, and I was in love with her, the first time I was ever really in love, an old bachelor like me. I asked her to marry me three or four times, but she always said no, with regrets. She’d been divorced a couple of times, and she said she was afraid of trying again, afraid of having to go through another divorce because the first two had been pretty rough on her. But she wanted security, her own kind of security, and I know she would have married me if it hadn’t been for my job. She didn’t like that, anything about it. She said it was foolish, a losing proposition, a childish fantasy-world of cops and robbers, and she kept after me to give it up. We argued about that, and about some other things, and finally she gave me an ultimatum: the job or her, take your choice. One or the other, but not both- never both.’

I got a cigarette out and put fire on it, and I could feel Cheryl’s eyes on my face. She would be trying to determine if what I was telling her was straight goods or just a fine old polished line, and that was all right; the answer was the right one.

She said softly, ‘And you chose your job.’

‘Yeah,’ I answered, ‘I chose my job. I had to do it that way, because even though I loved her, I couldn’t quit doing the thing I’ve done all my life, the only thing I care about doing, the thing that motivates me and keeps me alive.’

‘This all happened recently, didn’t it?’

‘Almost three months ago.’

‘Have you seen her since you… made your decision?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘It wouldn’t be any good any more, for her or for me. It’s over and it’s dead and I keep telling myself that’s the best for both of us; but I keep thinking about her and wondering why she couldn’t have understood the way it had to be for me. That’s all it would have taken, just for her to understand.’

Silence formed and built between us. I had a grittiness far down in the back of my throat, but I was not sorry I had told Cheryl about Erika; except for Eberhardt-a close friend on the San Francisco cops-and his wife, she was the only person I had talked to about it. It had been festering inside me like pus gathering in a deep sore.

Cheryl drank what was left of her gimlet, set the glass down, and then turned slightly in her chair to look into the dancing flames inside the kiln fireplace. I smoked, watching her face, the set of her small jaw, the wisp of hair that curled like something spun by Rapunzel on the shoulder of her sweater.

She said, ‘You must be a very lonely man.’

Coming from someone else, those words might have been sharply painful; but from her, they served only in filling me with a sense of warmth and relief. We were all right, I knew that suddenly. It really was going to be fine between us.

I said, ‘Sometimes. Sometimes I am.’

‘It’s a terrible thing, to be lonely.’

‘Yes.’

‘But it’s worse to be hurt. Do you know what I mean?’

‘I think I do.’

‘I’ve been hurt a lot of times, in a lot of ways,’ she said in a faraway kind of voice. She was still staring into the fire, and the fluctuating shadows were deep on her face, hiding her eyes. ‘I’ve been deceived and used and slapped around, always giving and never receiving. If you’ve been hurt that way, enough that way, you reach a point where you can’t take any more hurt, and you’d rather be completely and forever alone than to be hurt even the littlest bit again. Can you understand how that is?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘It was Tom, my ex-husband, that did it for me. I loved him, I thought he was everything good and sweet in the world, the one really wonderful thing to happen in my life. I gave him everything I had to give or knew how to give-emotionally, physically. I gave him everything and he…’

She stopped, abruptly, and held her hands extended, palms outward toward the fire, as if warming them, as if warding off something cold and dark manifesting itself in the canyons of her memory. For a moment I thought she would not go on, and then she began talking again, so softly I had to lean forward to hear her.