Know Your Beholder Read online

  “During a blizzard?” she asked, dubious.

  “Especially during a blizzard. The stakes are higher. Hunger becomes paramount. They have to refuel.”

  “Whose apartment did you hear them in?”

  I told her in rare cases such as this—in “coon cases”—that I always do a quick check of the other units. “A cursory inspection,” I offered, and explained that I had keyed into Harriet Gumm’s and Bradley Farnham’s apartments too.

  She hadn’t blinked yet, and the space between us was acquiring a strange density, like the air before a thunderstorm. Her light-blue ozone eyes appeared to be somehow glued open. I had never noticed it before, but Mary Bunch has freckles. The kind where the pigment appears to have dissolved and settled over the paler layer of skin, more infusion than dusting.

  “They’re pretty resourceful creatures,” I added. I breathed through my nose. A trail of cold sweat was running from between my shoulder blades to the small of my back. Time was slowing down. I said, “By the way, how’s your heat been?”

  “Our heat is fine,” she replied.

  A dollop of embarrassment began slogging through my intestines. “Sorry if I crossed a line,” I finally offered, swallowing the dry mouth. Swallowing twice actually.

  She was wearing a ski vest over a weather-resistant anorak, accompanied by a gnomic, conical red winter hat and mismatching collegiate jogging pants. The ski vest, puffy and hazard orange, looked bulletproof and gave the impression that she was either a municipal worker or a deer hunter.

  “Can I help you with those?” I asked, pointing to her bag of groceries.

  “I can manage,” she said.

  There was another awkward moment, during which she sniffled back a snot globule and finally blinked. It was as if the blink somehow reset her. She exited into the kitchen with her groceries.

  The warmth of their unit was making my pulse drop and my feet felt incredibly thick. Sweat was now also forming at my temples and soon my beard would start glistening repulsively. Something beyond the embarrassment of having been caught nosing around in one of my tenant’s apartments, something beyond the clammy humors of shame, was overwhelming me. Something sad and heavy and haunted.

  I could suddenly smell freshly cut apples. And Mary Bunch was putting groceries in the fridge. I imagined it filled with doubles and triples of things. Jars of mayonnaise and bottles of ketchup. Four-packs of butter. Eight quarts of whole milk, most of which would never get drunk. A dozen misshapen grapefruit. Overbuying to compensate for their missing child. Little dimple-cheeked Bethany with her baby teeth and her impossibly large blue eyes, her wheat-colored hair.

  Once she knocked on my door. She was wearing only a saggy cloth diaper and holding a dinner fork.

  “Hi, Bethany,” I said.

  The flaxen hair, duck-curling at the base of her neck. Her tiny pink hands. “Fork,” she said, thrusting the utensil high in the air. The word was a perfect note, almost pure oxygen. I wasn’t sure if the fork belonged to the Bunches, if it was mine, or if it was one that had been randomly left in the stairwell.

  “Thank you,” I said, taking it from her.

  She then plugged her mouth with her thumb and headed back down the stairs, all on her own. I remember being vaguely troubled that it was the beginning of December and the Bunches were letting their daughter wander around the house unsupervised, wearing only a saggy diaper.

  When Mary reentered the living room she’d removed the ski vest and anorak and was now wearing a Phish concert T-shirt, too large, probably her husband’s, with a long-sleeved black T-shirt underneath.

  “You think we did something,” she said. “To her.” Her voice was still congested, and I had the strange impulse to go to a knee, to actually genuflect; perhaps out of some expression of abject, confusing shame for trespassing in my own house, or worse yet, for being a completely neutral human who exists mostly in wool camping socks.

  Still standing, I said, “Did something to who?”

  “Our daughter.”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t.”

  Mary Bunch was surprisingly attractive in her Billy Breathes T-shirt, and our proximity, likely tweaked by my recent extended lack of female companionship, felt weirdly romantic. Was there a sudden charge between us? A little ionic landlord/tenant valence? Whatever it was had taken me by surprise.

  I quickly fantasized that she was trapped in a bad marriage, that her lack of blinking was in fact a dry-eyed cry for help, that behind her retinas a home movie was playing that featured Mary being emotionally terrorized by her husband, Todd, with his invisible braces and inescapable circus strongman holds, and that I was the only one who could save her. I would invite her up to the attic and we would simply spoon in my boyhood bed. And then I would wash her hair in a basin of water, frontier-style.

  But what about little Bethany? Was she actually alive, being held captive by her parents, gagged and duct-taped, locked in a closet somewhere?

  Mary Bunch’s nostrils were gluey with snot. I got the sense that it was more than just a cold, that she was somehow spiritually congested, that her soul was heavy with some unnameable guilty paste. She wiped her nose with the back of her wrist. I realized that, like me, she didn’t appear to have showered recently. Her face had a film. The hair sneaking out from behind her ears was matted and dirty. I wanted to smell it. I imagined the sharp odor of her unclean scalp embedded deep in the fibers of her gnomic ski hat.

  Finally Mary said, “I saw you speaking to that man yesterday.” I asked her what man she was referring to and she said, “The tall creepy-looking guy with the mustache.”

  “So you were here,” I said. I told her how he’d claimed to have rung their doorbell several times.

  “Who was he?” she asked.

  “A detective,” I replied.

  She said something about how “these people”—I supposed she meant cops—were “relentless.” She asked what he wanted, and I told her how he’d simply asked a few standard questions. “About Bethany?” she asked.

  Hearing her say her daughter’s name was strangely shocking in that it revealed nothing more than if she’d uttered “clock” or “can opener.”

  She said, “What exactly did he ask?”

  “If I’d seen anything out of the ordinary.”

  She started bobbing her head. Tiny little nods. It was almost parkinsonian, this bobbing.

  I was confused, back on my heels, defensive, yet I still had this impulse to pull her close and feel her breasts press into me. Something about our mutual desperation. Or maybe it was just my hormonal loneliness, my proximity to an unwashed woman pheromonally spiking my testosterone. Despite our many respective thermal layers, I was convinced that an old-fashioned breast-to-chest hug would do us both a world of good.

  After her head came to rest, she said that they hadn’t filed a missing person’s report because they didn’t even know what that was.

  “Of course,” I said.

  She said that when they signed the lease they told me how they were “different.” “We’re still getting used to this kind of life,” she added.

  I told her I totally understood.

  “Why did he give you his card?” she asked, and the space between her words had shrunk, her breath had quickened.

  I said I was pretty sure it was standard procedure and that he had given it to me unsolicited.

  Then she asked if she could see the card, and I told her it was up in the attic.

  “What’s his name?” she asked.

  I told her “Mansard” and she asked what kind of detective he was. “Just a regular detective,” I said.

  Her eyes seemed to go soft-focus, and she mouthed his name a few times. Then the head bobbing started again. “Are you gonna call him?” she said.

  “Should I?” I asked.

  Her blue eyes seemed to surge. She regarded me with an attitude I can only describe as ultracontained vitriol, her mouth a small knot of bitterness. “We didn’t know about the
Office of Missing Persons,” she said.

  “There’s no need to explain anything to me, Mrs. Bunch.”

  “Mary,” she said.

  “I mean Mary.”

  “I’m not a librarian.”

  “Of course,” I capitulated yet again.

  “She disappeared while we were shopping,” she said. “Someone took her right out of the fucking Target.”

  Their refrigerator hummed in the kitchen. Hides of snow calved on the roof. Someone in the neighborhood was trying to start a chain saw. Plows scraped by on distant streets. These were epic sounds.

  Then, to change the subject, perhaps cheaply, almost in the voice of another man, someone I’ve never heard speak before, I said, “I don’t mean to have to be a landlord right now, Mary, but you’re almost three weeks late with the rent.”

  “We’ll have it to you in a few days,” she replied tersely.

  Her large, unblinking eyes, their pupils enormous again. This is what grief does to your eyes, I thought. It turns them into doll’s eyes. Grief or sociopathic numbness.

  “Todd’s waiting on a check,” she added.

  “Don’t worry about the late fee,” I offered.

  For which she didn’t thank me. Mary Bunch was about as thankless as an interstate tollbooth attendant.

  “By the way,” she said, “are you planning on shoveling the front steps? Todd almost slipped and fell this morning. It’s starting to get dangerous and we can’t afford him losing any days.”

  “I have someone coming by,” I lied.

  She asked me why I couldn’t do it.

  “Bad back,” I lied again. “But don’t worry, they’ll be shoveled and salted first thing tomorrow.”

  Then, without looking at my hands, she said, “Why are you holding that?”

  I hadn’t even realized it, but I’d removed their TiVo remote from the pocket of my bathrobe. I was squeezing it so hard my knuckles were pearling. I loosened my grip, handed it to her.

  She gently snatched it and wedged it into her armpit. “I think you should go,” she said, her arms folded in front of her, her chin still jutting.

  I found myself wondering how many times she’d fallen into the net while doing trapeze. Twelve? Two hundred? And would it have been a product of bad timing or a missed cue? Her body hurtling through the air as if thrown from the window of a high-speed train.

  The remote fell from her armpit to the floor, and the cover for the batteries popped off and one AA battery rolled across the space between us and kissed my slippered left foot. We froze in recognition of a kind of mushroom-cloud moment. Neither of us would look down.

  I realized I was squeezing my butt cheeks together with all my might, which I surmised was related to my acute dehydration. It somehow felt like the AA battery was now lodged in my rectum.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, hoarse now. “Next time I’ll make sure someone’s home.”

  She uncrossed her arms and then crossed them again.

  Then I bent down, which allowed me to release my butt cheeks, engaged my unfit, atrophying hamstrings, and grabbed the remote, its small plastic battery cover, and the battery. On one knee I negotiated the battery into its correct plus-minus position, clicked the case closed, and rose to hand Mary Bunch the remote, which she accepted with cupped, rigid hands, as if being forced to inherit a piece of unwanted heirloom crystal.

  Up close she had soft, perfect skin, and despite her mucoidal nostrils, her breath smelled like maple syrup and pancakes.

  Later in my room I took a Viagra. Earlier I’d procured a vial of the little blue rhomboidal pellets from my pot dealer, Haggis, who, in addition to the popular erectile dysfunction pill, is now selling Vicodin, Xanax, and chocolate bars infused with psychedelic mushrooms. It seems that when it comes to matters of small-town drug dealing, expansion is more than possible, even during a recession.

  Despite the blizzard, Haggis wore frayed corduroy cutoffs and hiking boots with no socks. I could smell his feet. Oddly buttery, deeply fungal. Like multiplex popcorn and the between-the-toes cheese of masculine decomposition.

  Haggis lives out of his car—a venom-yellow midnineties Nissan hatchback that boasts a suspicious-looking Nevada license plate and many dings and dents. He’d recently fashioned ghetto-style valance curtains from what appears to be the felt hide of a pool table, which he uses to conceal his front and back windshields and all windows. He’s one of those post-post-post-college-aged eccentrics who spring for custom curtains but won’t fix the dents on their car.

  Haggis came up to the attic, and after completing the Viagra transaction, we drank instant Folgers and listened to side A of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours.

  Inspired by his shorts, I offered him my corduroy reading chair. I manned my twin bed, which sort of sags in the middle.

  Our hands were interlaced around kooky gift-store mugs. Mine had a snoozing Garfield the cat on it, the phrase “Anybody can exercise…but this kind of lethargy takes real discipline” splitting at the ellipse, ringing either side of the rim. Haggis’s mug featured the words BEST WIFE IN THE LAND OF LINCOLN in large red letters, which were superimposed over the silhouette of our great sixteenth president’s profile, the profile framed by a cookie-cutter outline of our twenty-first state. A joke gift from Sheila Anne. Given that I am the one who was technically cuckolded, wife now carries with it an ugly, stomach-turning connotation, yet I keep the mug around the same way people who suffer through excruciating toothaches keep extracted wisdom teeth in jam jars.

  We both drank and re-interlaced our hands around our mugs. I think Haggis really appreciated the company.

  “So you chose the attic,” he said. “Cozy.”

  I told him that I felt better having everything going on below me.

  “Like a lordship.”

  “I never thought of it that way,” I said.

  “You’re lording over your subjects, Fran. You’re like a fucking monarch.”

  I imagined actually commanding this kind of status over my tenants. I’d have to start showering and wear jackboots or something. Jackboots and a greatcoat. I could shape my beard into a kingly Shakespearean spade and speak in declarative iambs:

  Come live / with me / and pay / me rent.

  “I dig the stairwell paneling,” Haggis said.

  I told him that I’d been thinking about adding a workout room in the basement. “Treadmill, StairMaster, rowing machine, some dumbbells.”

  “Fitness,” Haggis replied sadly, as far away from the concept of the word as a shipwrecked man from a fax machine.

  I wondered if Haggis was one of those men who doesn’t die a human death, but dissolves like a piece of wood in a barn.

  “Diggin’ the beard, dude,” he offered after a silence. “You’re startin’ to look downright apostolic.”

  Despite his nearly forty years, Haggis hasn’t gone gray and still possesses a boyish, clean-shaven face. His jet-black hair, like my apostolic beard, is wayward and at certain angles looks like a smashed crow clinging to his head. He has the strange habit of absentmindedly stroking his left nipple, over the shirt, in a curiously circular fashion, as if perpetually haunted by a life-altering grammar school tittie twister. His teeth are dim, so dim they’re almost blue. They belie his youthful face and non-gray, unwashed hair.

  Stevie Nicks’s syrupy voice began “Dreams,” the second song on side A but easily the record’s true beginning. I’ve always thought the first track, “Second Hand News,” sung by Lindsey Buckingham, to be an asinine, herky-jerky chest-wiggler better suited for the end credits to one of the Muppet movies. It’s totally beneath the rest of the album.

  “So, Viagra,” Haggis said. “Gettin’ back in the game?”

  “Trying to.”

  “Seein’ someone?”

  I told him I was pretty much just watching Internet porn and whacking off, which was a lazy half-truth. I’ve actually been thinking about my ex-wife and whacking off.

  “I could use a laptop,” Haggis lamented
. “When it comes to lovin’ Old Lefty, I have to rely on my faulty memory.”

  “You’re left-handed?”

  “No, but I like changin’ it up. Makes me feel like I’m gettin’ away with somethin’.”

  It gave me hope that a lost man living in his car could still be blessed with wit and ingenuity.

  After Haggis finished his cup of coffee we said nothing for a while and listened to the rest of side A. “Never Going Back Again” into “Don’t Stop” into “Go Your Own Way” into “Songbird.” I have always loved Stevie Nicks’s voice the most, but lately Christine McVie has been winning me over. Her voice is less bewitching and not as haunted with the troubles of the world, but clearer, stronger. You’re not as fooled by it.

  When side A was over, the wind whistled through the cracks of my attic’s finial window, which made everything suddenly forlorn and remote, like Haggis and I were the only two people left in some shack in the Arctic. In a semi-arthritic three-part move, Haggis wrested himself from my corduroy chair and buttoned his capacious loden coat. His calves peeked out from underneath, pale and bald as freezer-aisle chicken breasts.

  “Hey,” I said, “you know anyone looking for extra work?” I figured one of his clients would be desperate to make a quick buck.

  “Not really,” he replied. “Why?”

  I told him I needed someone to come by every few days and shovel the sidewalk and porch steps. “Salt them down afterward. Just a few times a week. Someone sort of dependable.”

  “I could do that,” Haggis offered, his voice suddenly hopeful, childlike even. “Shoveling’s my thing.”

  I was surprised. He was obviously making good money dealing drugs—enough to finance homemade valance curtains at least—and I presumed he had very little if any overhead since he was living in his dinged-up car.

  “I’d pay you twenty bucks a go,” I offered.

  “Oh, keep your money, bro. God knows my flat ass could use the exercise.”

  “I’d do it,” I said, “but I tweaked my back the other day.”

  “Say no more,” he said.