Authors: Mona Simpson
Wednesday was my one day off. I felt like staying home. But I always did. I was two vertebrae systems behind in anatomy. I thought of my grandmother looking down at me, saying, yah yah, you’re like me, aren’t you? My grandmother always did stay home. I thought of her now, maybe for the first time ever, as a woman of my own age. She never went anywhere. So much of my life was making myself. She lived a life without dread. She was alone in the country and raked leaves in men’s heavy clothes, hauling them into three or four huge piles and then setting them on fire herself. She stood by, watching, tall, with white hair. She wore a lumberjack plaid red cap. She made a peculiar sight. Even then, I’d never wanted to go to school in the morning, never wanted to leave that house or the warm car. She had an automatic garage door and something in my chest pressed like a clamshell being forced open, as the wall lifted and exposed us and we rolled going backwards over gravel.
But I’d canceled the detective last Wednesday. I had to go if I was ever going to go.
So I went, in my black velvet dress and sneakers, old pumps knocking in my backpack. I’d bought the golden shoes. I just charged them. They were expensive, so much I didn’t put them on to wear. I carried them home dry and clean in the tissued box. That night I’d tried them. What I didn’t realize until just then, seeing them in the mirror under the whitened, crenellated bottoms of my jeans, was I really had nothing to go with them. I put them in my closet. I knew I’d find use for them later. I believed, absolutely, in that other higher life. I almost brought them with me for tonight but they were still too new. I wanted to save them. Tonight wasn’t enough.
I was on the subway at noon. I couldn’t stand to put on makeup, especially in the morning, so that was in the pack too, in a Ziploc baggie. Getting off at Borough Hall I came out at a wire-fenced segment of what seemed to be a freeway. Cars zoomed by feet away from me. I didn’t know where I was. They kept telling me on the phone it was right across from the court building. This was a busy intersection, ramps and construction. I didn’t see any court building. No columns, anyway. I expected all courts to look Greek. They did at home in Racine.
I tapped the shoulder of a large-backed man at a pay phone, who turned away. I waited until he hung up. “What do you want?” he said.
“Do you know where the court building is?”
“That depends. Criminal or civil? Depends on what you done.” He looked me over, slowly, deciding. My black dress seemed flimsy here, too long, eveningish. There was no good way to explain.
“I’m not going to court. I’m going across the street to 67-42 Tillary Avenue.”
“Oh.” He stared again, trying to decide whether to believe me. Then he just pointed. I passed a laundry with a clock. I was still early. This neighborhood reminded me of the old industrial Midwest. Poor but white. Less than urban. I turned and walked through a market. For no reason. I hadn’t eaten anything but I felt queasy. I’d always liked to just walk through markets and look at food. When I was new here, some nights, I’d go to the bright stores and walk through the aisles. This market had little bananas from the islands. They were dry and sweet. I’d never seen those in the West. I thought of getting some now, but my throat closed. In the market’s refrigerator section, they had the same fancy kinds of pasta and expensive ready sauces posed on the shelves. In poor neighborhoods everything—even the canned soft drinks—had different names. Inca Cola.
I passed a shoe repair store, with a display in its small window—two foot-shaped pieces, one on the right smoothed with a sheet of rubber. The other had the kind of hole that’s bad to look at, a deep hole, layered and ragged at the edges. A hand-printed sign on brown cardboard, pointed
BEFORE SOLE FIX
.
Jim Wynne’s address turned out to be a high-rise building. Names, most of them attorneys, appeared on the listing board. Handy by the courts, I supposed. I was alone in the elevator and glad of it. My hands touched my two earrings. Still in my ears.
I’d imagined a low building, two or four stories, square. I pictured thick Venetian blinds, plain metal file cabinets. A trenchcoat on a wooden peg. No clutter. I wanted an office from the forties showing spare male taste, like a nun’s cell.
This detective’s office was male, but a different way. You could smell him. I didn’t like it. The room had shag carpet and fake wood paneling. Another vague smell of food tinged the air, but I couldn’t place what it was. On a center island, Tina wiggled in her chair, surrounded by necessary machinery. She leaned forward, hair spilling, free to swivel on the four feet of plastic covering the carpet like a nylon stocking over a hairy leg. Her breasts looked like they were made of pure soft fat.
“You Maya?” She seemed very friendly, and like many friendly people she had extraordinarily large teeth. She yanked up a ringing phone.
A floor-length dirty curtain hid most of the one window, but a painted brick wall outside said:
SHORT STAY RATES
. Radio dispatches crackled up from the desk. “Following her from the garage on Lexington and Eighty-one. Entering building on northwest corner.”
Then he stood there. The detective. He was older than he’d sounded on the phone, about—I didn’t know—father age. He showed me into his office and slid behind a desk. He had light hair and freckles on top of a tan. I didn’t think any of the wood in there was real. Clutter balanced on table tops, bookshelves and the window ledge. An old newspaper page on the bulletin board had a picture of my detective with the caption
THE BOGART OF BROOKLYN
. The kidney-shaped coffee table held stacks of legal-looking papers. I sat on the edge of an orange couch.
He leaned back in his chair and stretched his arms up to touch the wall behind him, one fist knocking the plaster. “So what have we got?”
In the newspaper picture he was young, full-lipped, leaning against a lamppost in a sloppy trench coat. It amazed me to see young men, men I could fall in love with, in pictures and then meet them the way they were now. He was still kind of handsome.
“Not much,” I said.
“How old a man would your father be now?”
“Fifty-five.”
“You got a date of birth?”
“I have a year, but not a day.” I didn’t ever think of it until just then, that I didn’t know my father’s birthday. “He’s the same age as my mother. So that’s what, 1931.”
“You have a social security number?”
“No. He’s been immigrated, I mean, my father’s Egyptian, he became a citizen sometime when I was a child, I don’t remember when.”
“ ’31. Awright. We’ll have to yank a date of birth and a social.”
Then he picked up the phone. “Listen, I’m looking for a guy with a very unusual name. I’d like you to run him through computers in several states, uh—” He looked up.
I whispered, “Wisconsin, Colorado, California.”
He said, “Wisconsin, Colorado, California, Illinois and Arizona.”
“And Nevada,” I said. “He’s kind of a gambler.”
“And give me Nevada too. I really got to get this guy.” He was bouncing now on his chair. “So I want you to do everything you can, okay, don’t embarrass me, awright. I want you to pull up a birth date and a social. Hit the gambling areas in particular. The guy’s a gambler so you want to ask around the casinos for debts. I gotta find this guy. So hit the computers and hit the DMVs. Tell you what, you get this for me, I’ll buy you a steak dinner, not that it’s any pleasure to watch you eat. Awright, T-bone at Calabresi’s. What’s this gonna cost me? Ouch. Wait a second.” He palmed the telephone. “Sweetheart, you sure you’re gonna retain us ’cause this’s expensive.”
I waved my arm. “Sure.”
“Awright, can you bring that down a little because you’re cutting way into my profits. Get me a date of birth and grab the social. How long will it take you to hit those computers? Awright, awright. Now the name is—sweetheart, you’re gonna have to spell this …”
I started. He repeated after me into the phone. “M like mountain, O like orchard …”
“Uh-oh. I’m not sure if it’s one or two M’s.” Mohammed. I knew
this looked bad, not knowing how to spell my father’s name, but if I was spending all this money, I was going to be honest. I wasn’t going to lose him because of an M.
“Awright, that could be one M or two M’s and the last name is—” And here he glanced at me again. “This you got to be right on.”
It was my name too for so long.
I said the name and he repeated it and then he hung up the phone. He rubbed the back of his neck. “Dealing with that guy will give you a headache.”
“Sometimes he went by the name of John,” I said. “Over here, I mean.”
“John,” he said. “Awright. John.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“Oh, there’s lots of ways. First I’m gonna see if he’ll get us a birth date and when I’ve got a birth date I can run him through DMV. I found somebody in an hour once with DMV.”
“Really? How’d you do that?”
“Oh, a woman walked in here one day, she’d put up a boy for adoption, long time ago, sixteen years ago. And she knew the birth date and she knew the state he was in and I thought, the kid turns sixteen, what’s the first thing he’s gonna do, he’s gonna take his driver’s test, get a license.” He punched the wall behind him. “Had him in an hour.”
“Then what?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I don’t get involved in that. There’s so many people. I handle hundreds of cases, thousands over the years. ’S up to them what they do with it.” That made me a little sad. My heel hit something granular, like a paper-covered ant hill: Sweet ’n Low packets, one punctured, on the carpet, next to a book called
B Is for Burglar
.
“See if he has Blue Cross Blue Shield. There’s many ways, all right? Many ways.”
I doubted that my father had Blue Cross Blue Shield. Three things my family never has used: umbrellas, sunglasses and medical insurance. We never did. Any of us. We lived streaking lives, unsheltered.
“But I don’t think he’s going to have any insurance.”
“How old’s your father, ’31, let’s see, you’re telling me a fifty-five-year-old man doesn’t have health insurance, and a guy who’s taught college, a lot of jobs he had, it just comes with them.”
“I know, but he didn’t keep jobs for long. He was more the type to run off with a student or marry a rich older woman, that kind of thing.”
“Kind of a con artist, you’re saying.”
“Yeah, maybe. I don’t know. I just don’t think he’ll have health insurance.”
“Awright, well, we’ll go another way then. Do you know if he ever had any health problems?”
“He had liver problems, I think. He’d had hepatitis once and sometimes his liver swelled. He couldn’t eat fat, I remember.” In Los Angeles, that last breakfast, he’d ordered coffee black and a glass of grapefruit juice.
“That’s good. Hepatitis is good. See, he checks into a hospital, there’d be a record there. Do you know if he has any credit? Bank loan, credit cards, anything like that? You say he’s a gambler. Well, a lot of gamblers are gonna have credit lines around the gambling areas.”
“Bad credit probably. I doubt he has any cards.”
He slapped the wall again, this time with an open hand. “Good. Debts are good! Bad credit is good! Now tell me a place I can start, somewhere he actually worked and was employed.”
“University of Wisconsin at Madison.”
“Now, you’re sure of that.”
“Absolutely sure. He met my mom there.”
“Good, I’ll start there then.”
“And what do you do?”
“Oh, we have ways, we can do a lot of different things, but I’ll call the college and feel around, try and get somebody to cooperate with me, see. I don’t do anything illegal, mind you. What’s your father’s field, his specialty?”
“Political philosophy, I think.”
“So I might say I’m looking for him to contribute to a magazine I’m doing on Egyptian political philosophy, say. I lie. I call it pretexting but I lie. What we really do is lie. You develop your ways. Technique. I’ve been doing this a long time, my intuition and timing, they’re refined. When I started I had talent but I tried a lot of things that didn’t work. There aren’t two people in the country doing what I’m doing, with the sophistication, you know? You’re getting the benefit of experience.”
“Do you think you can find him?”
“I can find him if anybody can. You ask a lot of questions. I like that because I’m good. I’ve been doin’ this for thirty-some-odd years now.” He stood up then, shouting, “Tina, gimme a contract for Ms. Stevenson here, would ya?”
I noticed the holster dropping on his hip, a handgun. He had slim hips. He never asked me how it was I didn’t have my father’s name. I suppose he could have assumed I was married.
He arched back in his chair, arms crossed over his head. I’d always associated arched backs with sex.
“How’d you start in this line of work?” I still had to wait for the contract, I figured I could stay awhile. I wasn’t bothering anybody.
“I was an actor. Trying to be. I auditioned for a part in
0 Mistress Mine
, and I got the part. I was Montgomery Clift’s brother, but he cracked up and so they didn’t shoot the movie. I started this business out of a phone booth. Found I was pretty good at it. I’d sleep in cars, benches, anywhere. I used to be a severe workaholic. Been in it thirty years now.”
That sounded like fun, being a young actor and sleeping in cars and everything. Romance could be urban I guess: ducking under a marquee, staring through big windows into a ballroom, dancing on the pavement outside, pulling up cloth coat collars, sharing a joint or cigarette pulled from a trench-coat pocket inside city rain. Bud Edison and I had been like that—young and in a place. I didn’t have enough of that.
I mostly stayed in my apartment at the desk with my book open under the lamplight. I drank coffee, bit the ends of my hair, memorizing bones. I tried to plan rewards that would not involve calories. Everywhere outside, parties lit windows in tall grim buildings one by one like so many fireflies on a bush.
“Y
OU
MARRIED
?” I said.
“Married sixteen years. Divorced eight.”