The Tin Horse: A Novel (42 page)

“It’s fine,” I said impatiently. As gracious as he seemed, I reminded myself that this was the man who had talked Barbara into exposing her vulva for his camera. “Mr. Yardley—”

“Alan.”

“When did you take the most recent picture?”

“The most recent …?”

“Where she’s on
that
bench.” I had spotted it among his props. “With her legs open.”

He sighed. “You saw that one? Hmm, I suppose a few weeks ago.”

“Arthur Geiger said he just got that one in his shop last weekend.”

Despite my combative tone, he responded evenly, “That sounds right. It takes a few weeks for me to develop the film, make the prints, and then get them to my customers. Please, why don’t you tell me what you want, and maybe I can help.”

“Did you take that picture last week, after she left home? Did you see her?”

“Oh, and you think I might have some idea where she is! I’m so sorry, no. This must all be a terrible shock for you. I knew Barbara wanted to live on her own, but I was surprised she left so abruptly—”

“How
well
did you know her?” What else had he talked her into?

“No, it’s nothing like that. I don’t get involved with the girls who model for me. Even if I were inclined to, and I’m not, Harumi would never allow it. My wife.” He nodded toward the lobby. “But the girls and I always drink tea and chat a bit first. And they usually talk about why they’re modeling, what they want to do with the money.”

“How much money is it?” I said, thinking of Barbara’s savings account.

“About thirty dollars a session. More if a girl gets a following.”

“Or if she opens her legs?”

“Ah, well. It’s a sordid little business, I won’t insult your intelligence by pretending otherwise. But I do treat the girls with respect. And men being the way they are, there happens to be an excellent market for this sort of thing. Spending a few hours posing lets the girls pay for singing or acting lessons. Or for college. And it lets me afford to do what
I
love.” He gestured toward the desert photos.

Yardley was just a smoother creep than Geiger, I cautioned myself. Still, it was easy to imagine Barbara feeling comfortable with him, confiding in him. His kindness felt genuine and not simply a facade to deflect me. But was he nonetheless
trying
to deflect me with his refined manners and delicate tea and breathtaking photographs? Was he hiding something about Barbara? And was there any way I could pierce the facade and get him to tell me?

“Mr. Yardley, if you could see how this is upsetting my mother, my whole family …,” I said. “If there’s any small thing you remember from talking with her …”

“I wish there was.”

“You said she wanted to live on her own. Did she give you any idea where she might go?”

“I suppose I thought she wanted to get an apartment with one or two girlfriends.”

“Anyone in particular? Did she mention any names?”

“Let me … No, I don’t recall any names.”

Everything he said was plausible: that he’d taken the last photo weeks ago, that Barbara had spoken only vaguely of her plans. But I kept feeling I was being outmaneuvered by a master. Yardley knew exactly how far I was able to go. At five-three and 120 pounds, I was hardly going to rough him up like a tough guy in the movies and force him to talk. Nor was I going to come back with Papa, because then I’d have to show Papa the photos. The police? But would they get involved? And if they did, would an investigation just drag Barbara and the rest of us through the mud?

“Did she ever talk about leaving Los Angeles?” I tried.

“Not that I remember.”

To have come this far, to have found out he’d taken dirty pictures of Barbara and confronted him, and to leave with nothing!

“Alan!” I slammed my teacup onto the table, was gratified by the knock of porcelain against wood. “You saw her last week, I know it! Where is she?”

Even during my outburst, his face remained quiet. (Years later, when my kids’ generation gravitated to yoga and Zen Buddhism, I’d wonder if he had studied some Eastern discipline.) But for the first time that afternoon, he spoke vehemently. “I swear to you, I don’t know where she is. If it’s any comfort, Barbara struck me as a girl who will always land on her feet. I wish I could help you. But I’ll make a promise, Elaine. Unless she’s left Los Angeles, I’m sure I’ll hear from her when she wants to model again. I’ll do everything I can to convince her to contact you.”

“And you’ll take more pictures of her?” I shot back.

He shrugged. “That’s her decision.”

Suddenly—I don’t know where it came from—I became a dragon. “Alan, my sister is eighteen. She’s underage. You’re not going to take more pictures of her. And the ones you’ve already taken, stop selling them.”

Or else?
I could hear him think it. But he said, “All right.”

“The negatives, too?”

“The negatives, too. Would you like another cup of tea while I get them for you?” he said mildly, as if we’d simply been sitting, politely chatting, all along.

“No, thank you.”

He started going through file drawers. And I finally began to grasp how thoroughly Barbara had disappeared. In less than a day, she had quit her job, emptied her bank account—an account she must have built up over weeks or months by modeling—and then vanished. I had figured she’d taken off in an impulsive panic. But an impulsive act leaves loose ends, and if Barbara had left even one loose end, we hadn’t found it. Instead, it was as if she’d calculated in advance how to cover every track. My catching her with Danny had pushed her to leave when she did, but had she planned her escape all along?

Yardley handed me an envelope bulging with photos and negatives. “I
can see why she was so proud of you,” he said. “You just started at USC, didn’t you?”

“That’s right.”

“And you’re going to be a lawyer?”

“She told you all that?” I said, surprised to think that, as Barbara had sipped fragrant tea and talked to this gentle man who invited confidences, some of the confidences were about me.

“As I said, she was proud of you. And envious.”

“Of me?”

“You have such important things ahead of you. College, a career. I’m afraid your sister had found out her glamorous job meant having to slap away men’s hands and soak the bunions on her feet. And she was floundering, as lots of young people do. But having met you, I’d venture to say you know who you are and where you belong in the world.”

“That’s not true!” I protested, not only because I didn’t feel that way at all but to deny his attempt to define me.

“Yes, well, who am I to say?” He gave me a rueful smile. “I’m just a pornographer who likes to pretend he’s some kind of artist.”

PAUL HELPED ME BURN
the negatives one night later that week at his father’s scrap metal lot. But nothing else ended so cleanly.

Papa went back to talk to ticket agents a few more times over the following weeks. And he, Mama, and Pearl, in various combinations, made the rounds of nightclubs; even $130 runs out eventually, and Barbara might have gotten another chorus line job. They started with the posh places, visiting all of them within the first two weeks. But gradually the clubs got seedier and the outings more sporadic. Papa went to the police, too, but, as he had feared, they weren’t going to mount a search for an eighteen-year-old girl who had worked in a nightclub and left home of her own free will.

How many ways can you look for someone who’s determined not to be found? And why keep looking for a girl who had plenty of money, wherever she’d gotten it, and was too heartless even to send a postcard and let her mother know she was still alive? But anytime one of us—Mama, Papa,
Pearl, or I—ventured the opinion that we had exhausted the search and it was time to give up, someone suggested a new avenue to try. Papa spoke to the only private detective we knew of, Ned Shulman, who had an office on Soto, but he was offended by Shulman’s insinuating questions and what he had the gall to charge. Better to spend our money—well, Uncle Leo’s and Aunt Pearl’s money—on ads in the personal columns in Los Angeles and other cities in California, and on the reward offered for information.

We ran the ads for six months, and Papa checked out any responses that seemed promising; the responses trickled in for another year. Several times the police called, and Papa went to the morgue and viewed the body of an unidentified dead girl, a task from which he returned white-faced but forcing a smile, to let us know immediately that the girl wasn’t Barbara.

But time passed. People we ran into in Boyle Heights eventually stopped asking if we’d had any word. We went on. Well, all of us except Mama did.

The rest of us were fortunate to have lives outside the house, but Mama … at least she didn’t spend all day in her nightgown weeping, like a neighbor who’d had to go to a sanitarium. Mama got dressed in the morning. With help from Audrey, especially, she cooked and kept the house reasonably clean. (No wonder Audrey was the one who inherited Mama’s culinary skill.) She took part in conversations. Yet she stumbled through these things as if none of them—none of us—were real to her. One afternoon I was riding the streetcar to Leo’s bookstore, and I glimpsed her walking down Hollywood Boulevard, peering into shops and restaurants. Something told me not to approach her. But I mentioned it to Audrey later and found out that once or twice a week, Mama left home in the morning and didn’t come back for hours.

I still awoke every morning in the bed that had been Barbara’s (we had put away the cot) to the fresh awareness of my dual losses, Barbara and Danny. An ache. A moment, depending on my mood that morning, of sadness or worry or anger. But then I went out the door, took the streetcar to USC, and got immersed … not just in my classes but in a lively social world, a group that congregated at “our” table in the student union for passionate political discussions and got together on weekends to continue
our debates, drink cheap wine, dance, and flirt. It was a society in which, to my pleased amazement, I felt deeply at home.

You know where you belong in the world
, Alan Yardley had said. I hadn’t believed him then; how could I, in just my second week at USC, when everywhere I looked, I saw smartly dressed blond girls and beefy, football-playing boys, people who talked about fraternities and sororities and the cars their parents had bought them? It was alien territory in which I’d figured on being a perpetual outsider. But as the overwhelming newness subsided, I discovered quite a few of my classmates who took their studies as seriously as I did and cared what was happening in the world. It wasn’t just the bookish kids with Jewish surnames and glasses, either. A girl in my English class with a sweep of blond hair à la Veronica Lake urged me to come to a forum on the class struggle, and she became a friend.

And toward the end of my second month at USC, Hank Graham asked me out. Hank was the quarterback of the junior varsity football team and also the star of our economics class. He grasped concepts with astonishing quickness; a self-described conservative, he even had the confidence to challenge our New Dealer professor. Sometimes, on the way out of class, he argued with me—not in a bullying way but out of his engagement with ideas. When he invited me to a movie, at first I figured he was joking. He meant it, though. Not that he ever took me to one of his fraternity dances or a party with his friends. He was the first boy I’d gone out with who owned a car, and whether a date started at the movies or a concert (Hank introduced me to chamber music, which became a lifelong love), we ended up parking someplace like Mulholland Drive. He was a gentleman, cajoling but never forcing. At some point, though, I realized he saw me as a sexual adventure, a girl with the fabled licentiousness of the “exotic Jewess.” The idea amused me: Elaine Greenstein, someone’s sexual adventure? And to be fair, the adventure took place on both sides. Hank was the first boy I’d dated since Danny, and I took a fierce pleasure in necking with someone, anyone else; all the better that it was a boy I didn’t love. More than that: as if Barbara had carried the wildness for both of us, in her absence I discovered my own wild streak. Wherever she’d gone, was she now drawn to libraries? Did she pick up books and adore their smell?

Still, it disturbed me to be the Jewess whom Hank hid from his friends.
At least, that was what I told myself when I started turning down Hank’s invitations. (I said I was busy, and he didn’t seem to mind.) But I think something much larger had shifted. I no longer felt a compulsion to get back at Danny.

At first, after that day when I’d caught him with Barbara, my anger and hurt burned as hot as my love. He sent me letters, pleas for forgiveness, daily that first month or so. Just seeing a letter from him made me want to scream. I refused to open the letters and told Mama to throw them away; and then sometimes, weeping and cursing, I’d fish one out of the garbage and read it in spite of myself. Then his unit left for England, and the letters dwindled to two or three a week. And though he still said in every letter how much he loved me and how sorry he was for hurting me, he also told me about being in England and about army life. I knew what was in those letters because I started to read them, even if I still didn’t write back. The moment when I’d opened the door to his room and seen him with Barbara hadn’t stopped haunting me; for years, one thing or another—seeing Mr. Berlov on the street, smelling Shalimar perfume, even hearing a low, intimate laugh—would thrust that memory into my consciousness, and I’d feel as if I’d been sick. But something had changed. I’d stopped thinking about any kind of future with Danny; I was able to read his letters with the part of me that saw him as one of my oldest friends and hoped for his safe return from the war.

Later I’d ask myself how, after loving Danny from childhood, I could so quickly let him go.
Did
I glimpse something in him that day that forever changed who he was for me? On the other hand, maybe everything would have been different if only he hadn’t been leaving the next day—if there’d been time for my rage to soften and for him to approach me in small steps, for us to do a subtle dance of apology and blame and eventual reconciliation.