Heidi Julavits - The Vanishers

And yet. In a strange way, I suspected I owed Alwyn; I did feel guilty that I’d never experienced even an unconscious curiosity about her.

I approached her mother’s table.

“Pardon me,” I said. “Are you the Breck Girl?”

She smiled that smile that accompanies blushing, but this woman, she did not blush.

“I’m sorry to disturb you,” I said. “But I was wondering if I could get your autograph.”

I handed her my paperback, flipped to a blank end page.

“You’re not disturbing me,” she said. She cast a glance toward the door through which her husband had exited.

I scrutinized the magazine photo of Alwyn’s mother, the one she’d autographed for the waiter. She was posed as Alwyn had described her, the photo really a photo of the back of a woman’s head, her face obscured in a way that suggested it was better left unseen.

“Would you like to sit?” she said. “I’ve been abandoned by my grumpy dining companion.”

“Wrong side of the bed?” I offered.

“But what are the odds,” she said, “of his getting it wrong every single day?”

I sat. She inspected me in the way that older beautiful women inspect younger women, check-marking the areas in which she managed to succeed, despite predating me by thirty years, in being more ravishing.

“And you live where?”

“New York City,” I said.

“Ah,” she said. “I once read an interview with a man who could see into the future. As a Jewish child in thirties Germany he intuited that the world was going to hell, and pushed his parents to move the family to New York. The interviewer asked him, ‘So was that your first paranormal experience?’ ”

She chuckled.

“I always want to ask people who move to New York that question. ‘Was that your first paranormal experience?’ ”

“It wasn’t,” I said. “If you’re asking.”

“I don’t think I was asking,” she said.

She searched the room for a waiter. I was about to lose her. Her energy was terrier-like and distractible; it was easy to imagine Alwyn’s childhood as a vain daily struggle to hold this woman’s attention for longer than an eye-blink.

I considered confessing to her that I knew her daughter, but suspected that this would snap our exchange to an immediate close.

Instead I inquired if she’d ever heard of a phenomenon called psychic attack. I told her how I was being attacked by my former mentor, a woman named Madame Ackermann.

“How fascinating,” she said. “And how does one know that she’s being psychically attacked? Is there a blood test?”

“Often people have no idea,” I said. “Often people are sick for years, and visit every conceivable Western and Eastern doctor, and then they commit suicide.”

“So weakness is a sign,” she said.

“More like unexplained aches and pains,” I said. “Rashes. Exhaustion. Loss of hair, pigmentation, appetite, hope.”

“Maybe these people are simply depressed,” she observed.

“Chicken and egg,” I said. “Are they sick because they’re depressed? Or depressed because they’re sick?”

“Depressed people,” she said, “are a bore.”

I took this as a warning.

“And this ‘Madame Ackermann,’ ” Alwyn’s mother said. “You’re hiding from her here?”

“Sort of,” I said.

I told her about Dominique Varga, and how we were both searching for her. I thought perhaps, since her daughter had written her college thesis about Dominique Varga, that the name might spark some recognition. It didn’t.

“So you’re not in any real danger,” she said, “save the danger of losing a race to find a possibly dead person.”

“Well,” I said. “That’s ignoring the fact that I’ve been physically debilitated by Madame Ackermann for over a year.”

“Which is maybe not Madame Ackermann’s fault,” she said. “Maybe your ‘debilitation’ is stress related. I’d be stressed, too, if I were wasting time at a spa when I had work to do.”

“Yes,” I said, “except—”

“Your generation is always so quick to blame other women for its problems,” she interrupted. “You girls and your ideological penchant for matricide. Kill the mother. Kill the mother. No wonder you’re all so lost.”

“Some of our mothers killed themselves,” I said.

“I’m sure it’s comforting to think that,” she said.

She focused on the serrated skyline of firs ascending the slope beyond the windows.

“I’m assuming you don’t have any children,” she said.

I confirmed that I did not.

“No one ever admits that a mother’s greatest heartbreak is when she begins to see her child as the embodiment of her own worst self. Literally, it is as if her worst self — that shameful part she’s able, most days, to quarantine — has been loosed upon the world and refuses any longer to take orders from her.”

“Your daughter’s probably too old to take orders from you,” I said. “Not that you’re old,” I added.

“I scarcely know my daughter,” she said. “She lies to me about tiny things, insignificant things. She’ll say ‘I’m studying math’ when she’s studying film. She’ll say her favorite color is blue when really it’s green. It’s far more insulting than if she had a secret worth concealing.”

A waiter making coffee rounds refilled our cups.

“I’ve been chosen to participate in the therapy designed by Dr. Kluge,” I said. “I … read in the tabloids that you almost married him.”

She didn’t quite roll her eyes, but she might as well have.

“Kluge,” she said. “He recently hit on me in a hot tub in Gstaad. He also seduced my daughter once. You probably didn’t read that in the tabloids. Or maybe you did.” She sighed. “There are no boundaries these days.”

“Your daughter slept with your ex-fiancé?” I said. This news surprised me, until I realized it did not surprise me at all.

“This was how I tried to retard his hot tub advances. When you remind a man that he’s slept with your daughter, most decent ones will desist in their efforts to have sex with you. But not Kluge. I broke his heart when I refused to marry him.”

“But how could you?” I said. “How could you marry a man who did that to your daughter?”

“My daughter had nothing to do with my decision,” she said. “I don’t blame him for what he did.”

“Because you think your daughter instigated it?” I asked.

She sighed weightily.

“If you met her you’d understand,” she said. “My daughter can only ‘manipulate’ a man for whom she is a stepping-stone to greater things.”

She blotted her eyes with her napkin. Because she pitied Alwyn? Because she was ashamed of her?

I had no idea. Perhaps, to her mind, there wasn’t a difference.

She autographed the air, signaling to the waiter that she wanted her check.

She was done with me.

What was more insulting, I wondered: to be lied to about little things, or to be entrusted too quickly with personal disclosures and just as quickly discarded?

The waiter hurried over with her check.

“Well,” she said, “I hope you enjoy your stay.”

I tracked her as she exited through the dining room, pausing to examine her reflection in the mirror behind the host stand. She didn’t pretend she was doing anything but.

“I’m so glad I got to meet you in person,” I said before she was beyond earshot. “All these years I thought you were an ugly woman with a face that needed hiding.”

I tried to steal her teaspoon — this woman, she interested me now — but the waiter had swept the table of every object of psychometric use, right down to the pepper mill.

I’d failed even to get her signature. When I turned to the page that I’d asked her to sign, I saw that she’d left it blank.