The Missing Person Read Free Page A

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.

    â€œLynn,” 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.
    â€œWhere’s Marianna?”
    â€œChicago. No, San Francisco.
Are
you all right? You seemed depressed today.”
    â€œI have a melancholy temperament,” I said.
    â€œI 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.
    â€œAnd 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.
    â€œI 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.
    â€œOkay, 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