Heidi Julavits - The Vanishers

Then, changing his mind, he said, “I minded a lot. I was very angry with her. She wasn’t one to talk about things, ever. I couldn’t help but suspect that she lost the ring because she didn’t want to marry me.”

“But she did marry you,” I reminded him.

“I suppose,” he said, as if this remained debatable. “But only because she viewed me as good for her health. Our marriage was the medicine she forced herself to take daily.”

I could see Blanche wondering whether or not she should attempt to reassure him about the probably honestly loving intentions of a person she’d never met.

“Well,” Blanche said, opting instead to revert the conversation to me and my problems, “I think you’re lucky, given your lack of qualifications, that you’ve found a job at all. The next step is finding a job you like.”

“I might have a new job soon,” I said. “A man I sort of know through the Workshop wants to hire me.”

As I confessed this I realized: I had no intention of meeting Alwyn and Colophon tomorrow night at the Regnor’s bar. Aside from the fact that any doings with Colophon, and more crucially doings with Dominique Varga, represented a serious health risk, two restaurant outings on two consecutive evenings was a form of exertion for which I’d end up paying.

“He’s a … psychic?” my father asked.

“He’s an academic,” I said.

“Is he,” said my father, more interested.

“He writes about film,” I said.

“Ah,” said my father, less interested.

“What sort of films?” Blanche inquired.

“Art films,” I said. “Made by an artist named Dominique Varga.”

My father’s interest re-upped, but cautiously.

“Dominique Varga?” he said. “The French woman?”

“By birth she’s half French and half Hungarian,” I said. “But yes, I believe she lived most of her life in France.”

“That’s curious,” said my father, who sounded totally incurious, even half scared.

“You’ve heard of her?” I said. I found this hard to believe. My father’s area of professional interest — sinkholes and underground streams produced by the chemical erosion of carbonite rocks such as dolomite — singularly obsessed him. He was uninterested in art, politics, culture, people. While his brain burrowed through rock toward a very specific knowledge goal, mine preferred to warren the air; his brain operated a drill bit while mine launched a thousand aimless kites that tangled strings or bounced along the invisible currents, disconnected and alone. Cognitively, we were the gravitational negatives of each other. Sometimes I wished I had his brain. But only sometimes. He suffered due to his specialized excesses; he just suffered differently from me.

“Your mother knew her,” he said. “When she lived in Paris, I mean.”

“You’re kidding,” I said. “When was this?”

“Eighties,” my father said. “That Varga woman bought a lot of her work. Practically supported her.”

“What kind of stuff did she make?” I asked.

“I don’t know what they’re called,” he said. “Necklaces?”

“Wow,” I said, still too stunned to know what to make of this. “Do you own any of these necklaces?”

“No,” he said, as though it would be unthinkable that he would hide such a thing from me. “She sold it all before she came back to the States. She was somebody else by then.”

“What did they look like?” I asked of the necklaces.

“Very ugly,” he said. “Very … angry.”

He pinched his lips with his thumb and forefinger. He was done with this conversation.

I, however, was not.

“And you’ve met Dominique Varga,” I said.

“Me?” he said. “Never. But I heard all about her. Your mother was quite … taken with her. And not in a good way.”

“What does that mean?”

“She was not a positive influence,” he said.

“Because why,” I pressed.

“She …” He grew uncomfortable. “She was not a nice person. From what I could glean.”

“Mom told you this?” I said.

“No,” he said. “No. Your mother thought she was an inspiring person. A magnetic person. But she did not have your mother’s weaknesses in mind. Or maybe she had them too much in mind.”

“Meaning what?” I said.

My father snapped.

“Because that woman romanticized death . And she made your mother believe that death could be an artistic act. She exploited people who lacked a sense of self — not that your mother lacked a sense of self. I don’t mean that. She lacked … resistance. She lacked resistance to bad ideas. And so she married me because she thought that I could help her, that I could boost her resistance. But I couldn’t do it. I turned out not to be who she thought I was. I failed her, but not for lack of trying. I did try, I tried very hard, though she might tell you otherwise. I assumed she already had told you otherwise. That you knew how I’d failed her. In which case, you did not and you do not need to hear it from me.”

He pulled off his glasses. He pushed his thumb and forefinger deep into his eye sockets.

“Sorry,” he said. “We’ve had a long day.”

“Don’t be sorry,” I said.

“I am, though. Sorry. No helping that.”

He replaced his glasses and stood behind my chair, patting me twice on the head. I tried to reach for his hand, to give it a reassuring squeeze, but he’d already retracted it, shoved it in a pocket.

He struck out in search of, presumably, a restroom.

Blanche tracked him until he disappeared behind a translucent shoji screen.

“He doesn’t hide things from you on purpose,” Blanche said. “He just … thinks he doesn’t need to tell you stuff. Because you can … because you already know it.”

“That’s kind of like assuming you don’t need to tell your daughter about sex because she was raped by her uncle,” I said.

Blanche speared a maki wheel with a chopstick.

“That’s unfair,” she said. “He honestly has had a very hard day. He doesn’t like to leave home. And he’s worried about you. We’re both worried about you.”

She peered around to see what had become of my father. She was also worried about him , and with good reason. My father had an unerring ability, when searching for a restaurant restroom, to fail to return for thirty minutes or more, and later claim to have lost himself in the kitchen.

But moreover my father was a man who nurtured an emotional void that Blanche, in her decision to stay married to him (and to live in the Monmouth house), had long ago accepted as a chasm she needed to navigate rather than one she might someday hope to fill. Because it had mass, this hole; it had a name. Elizabeth. Blanche hadn’t known my mother, Elizabeth, any more than I had known her, but we’d both lived with her, or this void version of her. We had agreed to honor a vacancy we’d never experienced as occupied; we tried our best, but we never fully succeeded, and this kept my father at a distance from us both, the fact that neither of us could miss her the way that he did. Neither of us could share his grief; in this he was alone, and thus whenever my father failed to return from one of his restroom forays, I could see the panic in Blanche’s face, quavering like the thin crust of the earth before it crumbles into a perfectly circular dolomite nothingness: this time he wasn’t coming back to us.

The next morning I had a message from the Belgian-Iraqi woman, informing me that the Showroom was closed for cleaning.

I spent the balance of the day on my couch thinking about my mother and Dominique Varga. What a crazy coincidence! Blanche had said, as she, the lone conversationalist by that point, recounted to my father and me the highlights of our own evening while we shared a cab uptown. This coincidence must signify something important (not that she believed in such things, she insisted, but regardless) — this new job of mine, she said, could prove very meaningful to me.