Alix Ohlin - The Missing Person

On I went through the building’s pale hallways. Other people in my program had finagled research opportunities in quaint medieval libraries or internships in plushly air-conditioned museums. Everybody was gone for the summer, and soon Michael would be off to Europe or California or Asia or wherever he was heading with his wife, who was a professor in the anthropology department. The two of them were always jetting off to deliver papers or consultations in exotic locales. I’d met Marianna several times at departmental functions. She was a stoop-shouldered woman given to scarves and shawls and wraps, anything soft to bundle around her angular body — whether to accentuate or to disguise it, I never could decide. I knew she knew who I was. She never gave sign of it, though, only smiled and talked politely about Santa Fe. When anybody in New York heard I was from New Mexico they talked politely about Santa Fe’s galleries and restaurants, its clear light, the pink mountains. The rest of the state was invisible to these people. “I’m from Albuquerque,” I’d say, and they’d smile, picturing the airport. In my head I saw Albuquerque’s potholed streets and sweeping neon strips, and smiled too, glad to be gone.

“Lynn,” Wylie had written recently with digital urgency, another late-night message. “What if we aren’t moving forwards in time? I have decided that progress is a lie.”

During my first year of graduate school Wylie came to visit me in New York: his first, and only, visit to the city. He came off the plane stinking of sweat and pot smoke. My mother had given me orders to take him to the Metropolitan Museum and to a Broadway play. I left him at home one day while I went to the library and when I got back he and Suzanne were drinking tequila in the tiny living room with some Salvadoran waiters he’d met while taking a nap in the park. He never made it to the Met; but for weeks after he left, the phone would ring in the middle of the night, and someone would ask for my brother in Spanish, the sounds of a party ringing and dancing in the background.

I took the subway back to Brooklyn, where the world was overcast and no light glinted on the steel cages pulled down over the closed businesses of my street. The smell of exhaust and food being cooked in the Portuguese restaurant down the block rose and stalled in the air. At home I devoted some serious scholarly time to reading People magazine.

Past midnight, I’d just fallen asleep when the buzzer rang— a loud, old-fashioned buzz that always made me think of fire drills.

Michael came in wearing art-party clothes and an expression of drunken concern. “I wanted to make sure you were all right,” he said, then lay down on the bed, his arm with its silver bracelet flung across my pillow.

“Where’s Marianna?”

“Chicago. No, San Francisco. Are you all right? You seemed depressed today.”

“I have a melancholy temperament,” I said.

“I like your temperament.”

I sat down on the bed and allowed him to hold my hand. This happened once in a while. He’d show up late at night, reeking sweetly of gallery wine and acting sentimental; in the morning, he was still married and we were still broken up.

“And you wonder why I’m confused,” I said afterwards. A yellow line of streetlight poked through the window grate. I could hear the distant crash of traffic. There was no response; he was already asleep. I lay awake for quite a while, picturing a life in which Marianna fell madly in love with one of her students and moved to Prague or Berkeley or somewhere, and I moved into their enormous apartment on the Upper West Side with Hudson River views and book-lined rooms and copper pans hanging over the stove. Then the idea of me living in a place like that made me laugh, and then time passed, until finally it was morning.

He never disappeared in the early hours, like men do in movies. Instead he had to be prodded out of bed and served coffee. He even asked for eggs.

“I don’t make eggs,” I said. “Who do you think I am?”

He laughed, both hands around his coffee cup. No wedding ring, but Marianna didn’t wear one either. They had some kind of agreement.

“Okay, no eggs.” He stretched, running his hands through his shaggy black hair. His glance took in my tiny living room, and the former closets that passed for bedrooms, with something I took for nostalgia. “I’m going to France,” he said. “Want to come?”

“What are you talking about?”

I stood at the window and watched the psychic sit at a table in her window, reach down, and then set something in front of her on the table, staring at it intently. Tarot cards, I thought, or runes. She started to move one hand over the other, rhythmically, as if performing some incantation. After a second I realized that she was painting her nails.

“It’ll cheer you up. Maybe get you excited about work again. In two weeks. I’ve got an extra ticket.”

“Marianna’s ticket.”

“She has to go to Venezuela instead.”

“You want me to go to France using your wife’s ticket.”

“I want to offer you an all-expenses-paid trip to Paris with a man whose company, based on recent evidence, I’m fairly sure you enjoy.”

“Well, when you put it that way, it doesn’t sound so bad.”

“That’s what I like to think,” he said. “So you’re coming?”

“I’ll think about it.”

And I did. I lounged around my apartment for those two weeks, committing several issues of People to memory and thinking about the two of us holding hands as we walked along the Seine by moonlight, et cetera. Then I thought about Melinda, the visiting assistant professor from Costa Rica whose year-long appointment in our department had precipitated our breakup and who I guessed had gone back home. I also thought about New Mexico, the blank astringency of the air and the bleak sunny streets sprawling with gas stations and chain restaurants. Finally I thought about my brother and his fervent midnight e-mails demanding, “How do we live decently in an indecent world?” It was true that I hadn’t received any messages for a while, but knowing Wylie, he was probably just too busy writing his manifesto or picketing butcher shops or getting drunk with waiters or whatever else he did with his time.

In the end, I told Michael I’d meet him at his apartment— I wanted to picture him there, petty in my revenge, waiting for me —and boarded a plane to Albuquerque instead.

Long hours afterwards I stepped into the hushed boredom of the small, clean airport. My mother stood by the gate wearing a blue sundress, her hair clipped and neat; she was smiling broadly, as she always did when she’d gotten her way.

“How was the flight?”

“Fine.”

“How was Minneapolis?”

“I only connected there.”

“But was it efficient?”

“My flight was on time.”

“That’s what I mean,” she said. “They’re very efficient in Minneapolis. I think it’s the cold weather. They have no distractions like we do here.”

“It’s June, Mom,” I said.

We walked through the uncrowded hallways alongside men in cowboy hats and boots embracing their children and wives, their tight jeans cinched even tighter at the hips with large-buckled belts. Passing the airport restaurant, I smelled green-chile stew. I felt like I was on a different planet, in a separate, contrived dimension; a place created for vacations. The air outside was cool and dry, the lights of Albuquerque gleaming on a miniature scale against the blackness of the desert. Everything seemed very small. My mother drove through the familiar streets, past the gaudy neon, the Pop ’n’ Taco, the Sirloin Stockade, then the brown shadows of adobe houses. Pink rays of cosmos and tall, nodding sunflowers bloomed in the yards. Everything was exactly the same, shabby and plain, as if I’d never moved away, as if New York were only a dream I’d had, an ongoing dream every night for years.