I ENDED UP sorry I went.
I’m so sorry to hear that. Can you talk about why?
It was crowded. They had to simulcast it outside in the lobby. Even then, there were people who didn’t get into the building at all. I got in. I’d arrived really early. I was so nervous, all I thought about was what I would say. Then I wound up in this mob. There must have been four or five thousand people.
That might feel overwhelming.
I didn’t care about him. I was there for the audience. I just never guessed how large it would be. I felt like a fool afterward. Like I could have ever spotted someone in that crowd. Or like someone could have ever spotted me.
You were nervous about going and the fact that you went is what matters. Even if the outcome wasn’t what you had hoped.
I don’t know what I hoped. I know what I said I hoped, but did I really mean that? I was terrified it would come true. And then I got there and saw there was no way. And that made me wonder if I’d wanted it at all. If I’d set myself up for a disappointment that I’d actually hoped for.
Why do you think you would do that?
To tell myself I’m doing something.
You are doing something. You’ve done a lot of things, and they’ve all been very difficult things.
Thanks. I think that’s all for today.
That’s all the time you want for today?
Yeah. Thanks. I have to be someplace soon actually. Thanks for listening.
Of course. We can
CLAIRE CLOSED HER laptop. Then she foolishly felt she’d been rude. It wasn’t as if she’d closed a door in someone’s face. Whenever she opened the laptop again, there would be the reminder to tip and rate. Just thinking of it made her open the laptop again to complete the transaction in case, as she suspected, the amount of time she took to tip and rate was kept track of for whatever reason. As usual she clicked “30 percent” and “five stars,” which represented the satisfaction level exactly opposite to hers. Like most economical options, this one didn’t work.
Then she closed the laptop again. Then she reopened the laptop immediately so the screen wouldn’t lock, closed the window inviting her to schedule her next session, and reopened the window to the school’s Facebook page. She played the video of the tribute again. The same way she’d scanned the roiling, roaring crowd that afternoon, while feeling shorter and shorter and smaller and smaller and less and less able to hold her ground and not wind up trampled even wedged in a seat, she now scanned the depths of the video’s frame, feeling as if she saw nothing. Even when she hit Pause to comb over each frozen granule, she couldn’t seem to see a thing.
It hadn’t been the same building she’d gone to almost three years ago. That building, squat and ugly with its bad old ideas about what might seem modern, had apparently already been declared obsolete the day she’d pulled open its doors. The ground had already been broken on its massive replacement. She hadn’t known. There might have been an architect’s model of Our Future Home! on display in the lobby, in fact it seems almost certain there was, but she hadn’t noticed. She hadn’t realized that the building might vanish, that its people might vanish, that she might lose her chance. When she’d left on that day almost three years ago, definitely not having seen an architect’s model of Our Future Home! on display in the lobby as she plunged blindly back out the doors, Claire hadn’t dreamed it might be her last chance. She’d thought okay, today wasn’t her day, but she’d gotten somewhere. She’d stopped short, but she’d gotten somewhere. And another day she’d get farther. And she’d keep getting farther, a bit at a time, until she finally reached there, that place she was trying to go. It never crossed her mind that the building itself, where her answer was housed on some yellowed page or in some squeaky-drawered file cabinet or maybe just in some old person’s wandering mind, could disappear, its ugly gray stones demolished and thrown into Dumpsters and carted off to the beach to become a fake reef for some project with oysters.
The new building where the tribute was held was huge, bright, beautiful, the opposite of the old building which looked like a bunker except for its goofy marquee. The new building stretched out over fake hills that had been built on the site and then planted with expensive-looking native blond grasses. Parts of the building, like the front, started at the normal ground level and were tall as a cathedral while other parts, around the sides, were low and halfway set into the ground with glass sections that opened directly onto little fake meadows of the native blond grasses that eventually rose into curved steps and formed an outdoor amphitheatre. The new building, in its resemblance to a LEED-certified eco-resort located in some northern European paradise like Finland, had actually taken Claire’s breath away through a painful compression of her rib cage and lungs. It felt like a mockery of her perfectly adequate childhood that buildings like this now existed to serve as high schools. Claire had graduated high school only ten years ago but the building made her feel as though she’d graduated in a previous century that had thought a lot less of its children, or maybe had just thought a lot less of the way that it thought about children. This building emanated a smugness that if Claire hadn’t already felt sick with self-doubt would have made her feel sick with disdain.
For all the time and money she’d spent anticipating this event, she’d less formed a plan than fostered a hope, that if she brought herself here, something would happen. Someone—not Claire—would say something, or do something, or be something, and then Claire would know what to say, do, and be. This hope of Claire’s, if it could even be called that, was characteristically passive and uncertain. As usual, her Listener had undermined her efforts to not be this way by praising her as “courageous and determined” in “creating conditions for change.” The few feeble ways she’d imagined creating conditions for change she gave up on arrival. The office, which she’d known was a long shot but at least gave her someplace to start, wasn’t open. The crowd, which she had expected to resemble an audience at the movies—a couple hundred people sitting still, unsuspectingly allowing themselves to be closely examined—turned out to be a shape-shifting monster with no head or tail, a surging tide of thousands. Worst of all, her goal was still unclear. Even if she homed in somehow, using instinct or magic, what then would she do? Claire remembered the single time she’d broached the idea to her mother, years ago when she’d just started college. Her mother had neither scolded nor cried, as Claire had no reason to think that she would. But their closeness ensured that Claire would feel the vibration of sadness her mother failed to hide. “I always knew you’d want to know, and you should,” her mother had said in a false, strident voice. “Dad and I can’t be everything to you.” “But you are,” Claire had argued, as if the whole discredited idea had been her mother’s to start with. Claire’s hold on the idea had been so tenuous already that she’d been glad, at that moment, for the chance to abjure it. Her parents being everything to her at least was an idea that was robustly, reassuringly true. Claire’s parents had prized her so much, tried so hard, organized their lives so completely around her, that the one thing they’d failed to give her was the reason she craved something more—something so potent, singular, and undefined that Claire was embarrassed to even share with a Listener she paid by the hour her private name for it. The Look: a grail that for all the time Claire spent imagining it, she could still neither see nor describe. Who delivered the Look, what exactly they saw Looking at her, were the urgent details Claire would learn only when the Look happened. She was, however, sure of how it would feel: the electric shock of being recognized, of being herself the object of a quest, the one thing someone else had been missing.
Instead Claire was plunged in this agoraphobe’s nightmare where she lingered not courageously, as her Listener might claim, but because it was impossible to leave. The crowd groaned along like a glacier carrying with it all the squealing and hugging and crying people and her, until the force of it squeezed her into a seat. There the man next to her—he was maybe forty or thirty-five or fifty, she was terrible at guessing people’s ages who were older or younger than her—talked to her with the assumption that she belonged there, saying Wasn’t it so terrible, but Wasn’t this incredible, and Had she heard who was going to be there, until at last he was interrupted by the lights going down and a screen gliding out of the ceiling and the audience roaring like the thing was a fucking rock concert. Projected on the screen, white on black, ROBERT LORD, 1938–2013.
A very highly produced tribute played, managing to take low-quality video and photos and make an asset of how low their quality was. The emotion in the room grew more audible the queasier the colors and the worse the resolution. By the time it was the early 1980s you could barely tell the gender or race or age of anyone in the murky black-and-white photos while the occasional image in color was almost unbearably elegiac, as if not only Robert Lord had expired but also whatever kind of special sunshine had once shone on his students, whatever better air they had once had to breathe. Everyone looked so young and beautiful and glad, although perhaps this was just Claire’s anxiety racing to extract the possibility from each image before it dissolved to the next. At first certain images had elicited particular explosions of applause or cries of recognition but soon enough every single image elicited explosions of applause and cries of recognition until continuous full-throated yelling and continuous flesh-numbing slapping of palms seemed required. Claire must have looked as stricken and enraptured as everyone else. She hadn’t anticipated this additional realm of possibility, photo after photo of Robert Lord midstride amid a changing crowd of raptly attentive kids in dance togs or ridiculous costumes or holding play scripts in front of their faces. But Robert Lord thoughtfully stroking his beard, or retrieving his glasses from the top of his head, or sitting backward on a chair, or demonstrating a dance step, or forming his mouth in an elongated O as a youngish, then less young, then older, then oldish, then decidedly old man with hard creases cut from his nostrils to the ends of his mouth was not what Claire stared at devouringly. What Claire was staring at, her eyeballs burning with the effort, was the ever-changing constellation of kids clustered around Robert Lord. Claire meant to see to the heart of every long-ago young ancient face. She’d had the irrational conviction that she’d never see the video again, that this opportunity was passing so swiftly that if she so much as let herself blink she would miss it. Of course, she’s rewatched the whole thing several times on her laptop, not seeing anything more than she did the first time. The lights came back up and the endless testimonials and live performances began. None of the speakers set off her alarms but even before she’d arrived she had already felt in her gut that it wouldn’t be one of the speakers but a spectator, if one of these thousands at all. She toggled back and forth between absolute doubt and absolute certainty that it had to be one of these thousands. This event was a net that had dredged up possibilities from far and wide and deep into the past—if not here and now, where and when? Claire swiveled her gaze around, trying to scan every face in the crowd. But the crowd was so enormous it seemed not even made out of faces. It was a carpet of life that did not even have individual threads. Not even counting the excluded throng who’d had to settle for the simulcast, crammed in the lobby.
Finally, the current principal, a slim, sleek woman in a sleeveless black sheath, took the stage a second time. “As our cherished alumni community, most of you already know that this beautiful building expresses so much of Bob’s vision. Working with our architects and designers, as well as with the Lewis Family Foundation, Bob was hands-on every step of the way, and it is difficult for all of us to lose him just on the brink of this amazing new phase of our school’s history.” Something in her comment had reversed the current and Claire realized that noises in the din she’d thought were hooting or cheering were actually booing. Seeming unsurprised the woman brought her face flush to the mic and her voice boomed out, drowning the others. “The conversation around the Lewis Family Foundation’s bequest, and around naming rights, has engaged our community in a lastingly valuable way. Debate and dissent are the hallmarks of any inclusive community.”
“Bob would have spared us the bullshit!” a male voice called out, and not just Claire’s head but every other swiveled to take in the densely packed tiers of the grandiose space, trying to pick out the heckler.
“And though we can never say that Bob’s death has a silver lining,” the principal shouted determinedly in her mic, “I think I speak not merely for our school administration, and the Lewis Family Foundation, but for all our community when I say how delighted I am that our school’s new name, at the suggestion of the Lewis family themselves, will not be the Lewis School for the Arts, as originally planned, but the Robert Lord School for the Arts.” In the pandemonium of approbation that followed, Claire could barely hear what her seatmate bent close to tell her although his hot breath crawled over her ear.
“Bob would have fucking despised that. Being used as political cover. Y’know?” Claire nodded energetically, and kept nodding energetically as the crowd-glacier slowly reversed direction, first squeezing her away from her seatmate, who seemed to be working up to ask for her number although he had to be, she was now sure, at least twenty years older than she was; then squeezing her through the lobby past enormous images of Robert Lord hung from filaments high in the vault of the cathedral-like space that would bear his name; and finally squeezing her back through the doors, where she might have stopped and reflected but the crowd’s force did not stop, it kept pushing her, down the sidewalk and across the parking lot until she was decisively at its far margins and then no part of it at all.
SHE’D VISITED THE old building almost three years before, on a day in June. She’d chosen the date carefully. She knew as well as anyone who’s ever gone to school that June is the victory lap, with everybody killing time. She’d called ahead for an appointment. She’d said she had questions about the program and repeated herself when the admin in the office asked Was she a prospective student or parent? A member of the press? Acquainted with Mr. Lord? Mr. Lord was very busy.
“I have questions about the program,” she’d repeated. She kept repeating the same six words not out of any courage but because she was so nervous she got stuck in the rut of the phrase. The admin put her on hold for so long that the line defaulted back to ringing again. The different voice that answered seemed completely unaware that Claire had not called that moment, but had been on hold for perhaps fifteen minutes. “Oh, of course, dear,” the second voice said, and gave Claire an appointment, twelve twenty-five on a Friday, presumably lunch hour.
Before the appointment she hadn’t known what kind of man he was. She hadn’t known he was a local celebrity; she hadn’t even known his name. She’d simply needed the head of the program for her own surely uncommon reasons. When the first admin had put up resistance, Claire had not been surprised because she always felt, when she called anyone, that she had to be bothering them. But arriving at the building she understood she’d accidentally been bold enough to ask for its king.
The women in the office traded skeptical looks when Claire said, “I’m here to see Mr. Lord. I have an appointment.”
“You have an appointment?”
“At twelve twenty-five.”
“Did you make it with one of us?”
“I’m not sure. I called—”
“What’s the name of the person you spoke to?”
“I didn’t ask—”
“Did she sound like an older woman?” Claire would have guessed both of these women were fifty or sixty or more. “It must have been Velva,” one said to the other with a roll of her eyes. “I’ll need to call Mr. Lord to make sure he’s here in the building,” she said reproachfully to Claire. “It’s his lunch hour and he’s very busy.”
To hide her flushed face Claire turned to a mosaic of photos encrusting the wall. Young people played trumpet, declaimed, did the splits in midair. Most wore haircuts and clothes of the past. Behind her Claire heard the woman murmuring into the phone and then calling, “Julie!” A bare-midriffed girl appeared and received from the woman a molded plastic comedy-tragedy mask with the word “Visitor” plastered on it in sequins. “Julie will walk you to Mr. Lord’s office,” the woman said, turning back to her screen.
The girl’s sneakers beneath her snug jeans landed flawlessly heel-to-toe as if on a tightrope. After many turns they stopped in front of a just-ajar door and the girl gave Claire the comedy-tragedy mask. “You’re supposed to return this to the office when your visit is over. Do you want me to knock for you?” Now that she’d stopped, Claire could see the girl was very beautiful. Her natural makeup and lovely winged brows appeared professional, the look of an off-duty starlet.
“That’s all right,” Claire said. “I’ll do the knocking.”
“Have you met him before?”
“No.”
“Are you interviewing him or something?”
“Yes,” Claire decided to say.
“That’s awesome,” the girl said, craning her neck very slightly to peer through the crack of the door.
“Thanks for showing me the way,” Claire said and waited until finally the girl went catwalking back down the hall.
“You’re the Claire Campbell who wanted to see me? I’d started to think they had lost you,” he said as he pulled the door open. He shoved it fully closed as soon as she stepped in, turning back toward his desk without shaking hands or otherwise introducing himself. There was a visitor’s chair and she perched on its edge while he bent himself into his own chair, removed a frail pair of glasses from the top of his anvil-like head, folded the glasses, and laid them on his desk. He was not what she’d expected. She would never have admitted it aloud but she’d expected a fey man in a bow tie with a Hello, Dolly! poster framed on his wall. Not this granite-hewn, glowering man with dramatic black streaks in his white, lupine beard. Claire stared at his large, shapely knuckles. She was always surprised to encounter such actually masculine men, with their sword-tip eyes and their brooding brows and, when old, their somehow all the more menacing physical diminishments, as if their power hadn’t been lost but just put in reserve.
“So.” He picked up a pink While You Were Out slip from a pile on his desk, looked at it, and put it back down, without putting his glasses back on. A tic? A performance? “You had questions about our program.” This was the moment Claire had mentally rehearsed so many times: not the stuttering phone call to make the appointment, nor the unintended rivalry at the threshold with bare-midriffed Julie, but this moment of belated disclosure, to this man she’d expected to be so unlike he was. Even more than information she’d expected sympathy. Kindly interest or as much as delight at the prospect of helping her. Why had she thought that would happen? Because she’d thought he’d be gay, and therefore sensitive?
“They’re not exactly questions about your program. I have questions about someone I think was enrolled in it.”
“And who might that have been?”
Claire had worked long and hard on a response to this anticipated question but now the words disappeared from her mind. Instead she fumblingly took out the folder and held out the sheet. He let her keep proffering it while he slowly unfolded the glasses again, put them on, and unfolded a Look at her over their tops. “You’d like me to read this?” he asked, still not taking it.
“That would be great, if you could. I think it’ll be a lot more clear than me.”
“Are you saying your parents misnamed you?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Claire. They named you Claire,” he repeated as she stared dumbstruck at him. She couldn’t fathom how he already knew. That she’d had first one name, then another—but then she saw he didn’t know this. She’d misconstrued him, but it was too late to stop the sensation of having been seen, which instead of being the recognition she always desired took the unpleasant form of a wave of heat under her clothes.
“‘Claire’ means ‘clear,’” he was suffering to explain to her.
“Right! No, I know that. I misunderstood you.”
He let fall one last very protracted Look at her over the tops of his glasses before he took the sheet and read the words she knew by heart.
Baby Evangeline, as she was known in this loving Christian environment where she spent her first months, was born January 1985 to a healthy Christian mother, Caucasian, age sixteen years. Birth mother’s heritage on the maternal side Scotch-Irish, many generations in this region, on the paternal side German, also many generations in this region. Mother’s mother attended secretarial school, mother’s father vocational school, no college attendance in the family to date. Growing up, mother was a healthy active girl showing normal development. Church attendance on and off due to divorce but Christian principles prevailing in both homes. Showed an early aptitude for acting and dancing and was accepted in the region’s leading school for these arts; described herself, at the time of her residence with us, as an aspiring actress. Pregnancy normal, carried baby to full term and normal delivery. Nothing known of the father apart from Caucasian and Christian, good health.
He took much longer to look up from the sheet than it would take even a very slow reader to read it. At last he asked, “And what am I supposed to glean from this story?”
“‘The region’s leading school for the arts’: that’s this school.”
“Is it? It’s not even clear from this scant paragraph what the region is that it refers to.”
“It’s this region.”
“Is it?” He made to pore over the sheet again, even running his finger down each of the lines.
“That’s just an excerpt from my file.” Claire caught herself twisting her hair. “What region it is—the rest of the file makes that perfectly clear.”
“Makes it perfectly Claire.”
“Yes.” She tried to smile. Perhaps that was what he was after, less solemnity on her part, more banter. Already the appointment had become about what he was after. Remotely Claire remembered it was she who was after something. “The question isn’t what region it is or even what school it is, because I know it’s this school—there’s no other school that it could be,” she tried. “The question is, which student was it—of yours. Which student of yours was my birth mother.”
“Is this you, then? ‘Baby Evangeline’?”
“Yes.” Had he not even understood that? There was something shaming in his making her spell it all out. But he was old, she reminded herself, though he didn’t seem old, if old meant befuddled or weak. He didn’t seem that way at all.
He raised his still mostly black and very barbed eyebrows slightly when she said yes and kept them there, in a notched-up position. The longer he held the position the more meanings it seemed to imply. One of the meanings might have been, That’s not what I expected. Another might have been, That’s exactly what I expected. Another might have been, Now I understand why this person is here. Another might have been, I can’t fathom why this person is here. “And what,” he said, his eyebrows still in that notched-up position, “makes you think that your mother was ever my student?”
Claire’s heart rate had been accelerating and now it was accelerated so much she thought it must be audible. Her cheeks had probably turned very pink. Sweat beads prickled her hairline. “Birth mother,” she corrected him. “I know because the file—”
“The file says that she was accepted in the region’s leading school for the arts. It doesn’t say she attended.”
“She did. I’m sure of it.”
“Why? Is that also made perfectly clear, somewhere else in your file? I’m sorry,” he said almost gently, when she didn’t reply. “This must be difficult for you. It must be very difficult, to have so little information about something so important. But even if the young woman described on this page was a student here, and it seems very doubtful she was, I could never confirm it.”
“Why?” Claire said, feeling him willing her out of the room.
“I could never violate a student’s privacy in that way. As a woman, you must understand that.”
Leaving the building, Claire had gotten lost. Or rather, she had never known where she was, and only went further astray. She’d found herself standing in a parking lot from which her car had disappeared, staring down at a hideous thing with two agonized faces and the word VISITOR spelled in hard little circles of metal. Eventually, she’d come to understand that she’d gone out an entrance on the opposite side of the building from where she’d come in. Both doors looked exactly the same.
THE DAY SHE showed her file to Robert Lord, Claire’s mother had been gone just six months. Initially Claire had promised herself she would wait for a year before doing anything with the soft-edged manila folder with its surprisingly few sheets of paper that her father had given her after the funeral, sitting stoop shouldered on the “good” sofa it had always made her mother nervous to have people sit on, and making Claire’s own shoulders stoop with the weight of his arm. “Mom wanted to encourage you,” Claire’s father said. “She even wanted to help. She just never figured out how.” Claire had been crying too much to answer, but she’d known that what he said was the truth. Her mother had never planned to get sick. She’d only been sixty-six when she died. Her mother never having the chance to figure out how to help saddened Claire to the point of her making that promise, but she soon admitted to herself that not touching the file for a year was an empty gesture. The first time she read it, the strength of her grief frightened her. Her one articulate wish was that her mother was with her, that they were reading it together, that her mother agreed that the person described was a friend they both wanted to find.
Claire’s father had grown up on a farm that his father lost when Claire’s father was in his teens, resulting in a move to the city that had been the catastrophe of Claire’s father’s life. In her childhood, despite her steady lack of interest in nature, he’d often as bedtime stories described to her his favorite places on his childhood farm, the creek and the barn and the shade trees. After Claire’s paternal grandfather’s death, a “farm diary” had turned up in his basement, reams of curling faded yellow paper on which a spidery hand recorded births and deaths of animals, crop yields, and unusual weather events. The day after Claire showed Robert Lord her file, she rose extremely early and went to the print shop, although it was her day off, so that she could finish typing up, printing out, and binding the farm diary for her father. She’d been meaning to do this for literally years. Then she went to her childhood home, from which her father had been threatening to move, and ate a bowl of All-Bran while watching her father page through the all-new, highly legible farm diary, which she had even illustrated with some photos of West Texas pulled off the web. Her father’s mouth formed a tight line as he read, by which Claire knew he was moved to the point of fighting tears. “Thank you, Boo-Boo,” he said after he’d turned all the pages. Claire returned to her apartment and it was still only nine in the morning. She had not mentioned her visit to Robert Lord to her father. In fact, since receiving the file from her father, Claire had never mentioned it to him again. She’d understood that, in telling her about her mother’s regret, her father had been saying far more on the subject than he would have if left to himself. This refusal of her father’s to engage with the subject had never bothered Claire, while her mother’s mere ambivalence about it had agonized her. Nor did her differing reactions to her parents bother Claire, although she recognized how unfair they were.
When an unknown number called, Claire only answered because she was just getting out of the shower and was blind from the steam. The rough voice that asked for Claire Campbell startled her with how familiar and unplaceable it was. She’d been wrapping herself in a towel, her hair a wet nest. No one ever called her at that hour of the morning now that her mother was gone. When she realized who it was her first reaction was to fear that she’d further offended him. How had he gotten her number? Of course she’d left it with the office when she made the appointment, but she didn’t recall this daylight explanation until afterward.
“I regret the way our conversation ended,” he said. He seemed to have to bend his voice into the phone the way a giant might bend his head through a doorframe. “Your surprising me at school as you did left me little maneuvering room. There are strict protocols. You must understand.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, shivering. “I didn’t know where else to find you.”
“I want to help you. But such matters can’t be discussed on school grounds.”
They made a plan to have lunch. A few hours in advance of it, when she was struggling with what she should wear, he called and told her lunch was a bad idea also, as he was a highly recognizable person. “Besides, Sofie and I can treat you to a much better meal here at home than we’d get at Butera’s. And, it will be easier to talk.” The mention of Sofie relieved an unease Claire had not been aware of until it dissolved, so similar was it to so many other species of unease, most predominantly her unease about whether she would get her answer. Preoccupation with the dread irresistible object marginalized every other concern. Now the meal would be dinner. He turned out to live in a rare high-rise with its own underground parking garage that she didn’t see until she’d parked on the street. A somnolent lobby attendant pointed her toward the elevators without lifting his eyes from the horseshoe of tiny TV screens behind which he sat. Her destination was the top floor, eighteen—a novelty in this city of sprawl where Claire had never known anyone to live in a building with more than two floors. Leaving the elevator she gazed a moment out the corridor window at the orange-and-gray dusk before ringing his bell.
Claire imagined Sofie perhaps soft and flossy-haired and submissive; or sleekly haughty and European; or complacently Bohemian in tatty blouse and many strings of clacking beads. Wife of the great man, she could only exist in reaction to him. But what kind of reaction was she? He answered the door in a black turtleneck and black slacks, his still-copious hair like steel wool brushed straight back from the cast-iron face. Claire noticed in spite of herself that the beard had been trimmed. Its black-on-white stripes looked as if freshly painted. The beautiful apartment tempted her to gape with admiration in every direction, an impulse she tried hard to control while running her eyes over the laden bookshelves and dark tapestries, the little wooden tables inlaid with small tiles, the extremely large plants that touched her as she passed with the ends of their rubbery leaves. Classical music was playing. He led her through the labyrinth of European-looking things—Sofie had to be the European option, with a silver chignon and long, papery arms hung with thin tasteful bracelets—to a living room half in darkness from its view of what must be Memorial Park. An open bottle of wine and two glasses sat on a tray. Claire accepted a glass and sat sipping self-consciously. She rarely drank except at workplace holiday parties, and this was better-tasting wine than anything she was used to. She held the stem of the glass tightly pinched. He cupped his glass in an upturned palm, with the stem notched between his fingers. The way he held it bothered her in some indescribable way. He sat opposite to where she perched on the couch and saying almost nothing watched her while she talked as if she had to talk to breathe, about how beautiful the apartment was, and how beautiful the view was, and how unique it was he had one when everyone she knew lived in houses.
“You can take the New Yorker out of New York,” he said at last, “but you can’t take New York out of the New Yorker.”
“You’re from New York?”
“I’m from a sleepy little town called Bensonhurst, originally. But I ran away long, long ago, and my travels ended here—where yours began. I want to know about you, Claire. My story is not interesting.”
For a long time she answered his questions. He was very good at asking questions, so much better than the online Listeners. This was what it must be like to have an actual therapist. Even the room, with its intellectual and faintly foreign furniture, seemed like a therapist’s office. Perhaps not the wine. He refilled her glass while she was talking, for some reason, about her father’s being forced into early retirement. She understood without having been told that some code to which he adhered required that he know her before he let her know herself, although he behaved as though his careful rummaging through her life would reveal what she sought after all her own rummaging hadn’t. Each time she arrived at the end of an answer he slid a fresh question beneath the stream of her talk so that despite herself her own talk rippled on, uninterrupted though it was she herself who meant to interrupt, to finally stop answering and to ask what he had to tell her. Then he stood abruptly and said, “We should eat.” Unsteadily she followed him down a corridor narrowed by bookshelves to a small dining room. The table was already set, with two more glasses, another bottle of wine, food already in large shallow bowls. “Ceviche,” he said. “I hope you eat seafood? Sofie is a magnificent chef specializing in foods of her native Caribbean. If not for her I would have given up eating a long time ago.”
“Is Sofie joining us?”
“Sofie? Sofie has gone home for the evening. Did you think Sofie was my wife?” He seemed very surprised that she might have thought this. “Sofie is my sainted housekeeper. I owe a great deal to Sofie, but even if she would have me, which I doubt very much, marriage isn’t an experience I plan to repeat.”
“You used to be married?”
“My most recent wife and I called it off as soon as our boys were grown. Now our boys are both married and seem to like it much better than we did. Perhaps the inclination skips generations.”
This allusion to genetic heritage was Claire’s best opening, yet somehow he kept her from taking it. First with stern attention to her trying the food, as if he expected her not to like it, and would scold her if this was the case. Then the food itself, sitting tentatively in her mouth. She’d never tasted ceviche and until he explained, between his own rapid mouthfuls, she could never have guessed it was raw fish somehow cooked with lime juice. Once enlightened her stomach and tongue seemed to turn cold and stiff as if being heatlessly cooked with juice, too. All her concentration was required to eat with a show of enjoyment. Undeterred by her silence he was now talking animatedly about Caribbean traditional festivals, at the same time as zealously eating. “Carnivaaaal,” he kept saying, leaning hard on the last syllable. “You’ve turned pale,” he said, dropping his fork with a clank in his now empty bowl. “Are you all right?”
“Maybe the wine,” Claire admitted. She’d barely drunk from the new glass he’d poured when they’d sat at the table. She’d kept lifting it to her lips from politeness but when her tongue touched the tart liquid her mouth flooded with warning saliva.
“Some fresh air? I thought you might like the view from the roof. I have a private roof terrace.”
This did seem like something she would have enjoyed at some previous time. “Okay,” she said and swaying to her feet followed him again, up a short staircase of tight bends, out a door into the warm wet night air which was always so much more of a shock than the opposite plunge into clean sharp-edged climate control. That always felt like a falling away of exterior weight and returning, refreshed, to oneself, where stepping outside felt like being absorbed by some massive esophagus. The door closed at her back and he turned and in one step had plastered her full length against it, his unseasonal black knit turtleneck scraping the bare triangle of her neckline when he knocked her head back with his, stuffing his tongue in her mouth. He was strong, for a man she would have guessed was older than her father; as she gagged against the taste of masticated ceviche mixed in his saliva he seized her right hand and pushed it inside the front of his pants, past the belt and the underwear waistband. “There,” he rasped, “there.” He scrubbed her hand roughly against the damp noodle of flesh which secreted warm goo but did not come to life. In her panic Claire wished that it would, was conscious of a failure and possible worse consequence if it didn’t. She twisted and broke away, gulping mouthfuls of air as if stuffing her stomach with air would prevent it from hurling its contents. And it worked, she willed down her own vomit, the prospective shame of which was so great that it didn’t cross her mind that her vomit might serve as a weapon. “Oh dear,” he was tutting, with her wedged against the door again while swarming his hands like flesh spiders. “It’s all right … sweet Claire … it’s all right…” Finally getting her footing she kneed him. She missed but he lurched back and then stood glaring stormclouds of scorn.
“We seem to have had a misunderstanding,” he said with admonitory coldness as she heaved, leaning on the door handle as if she’d just come up from swimming a race. “You’ve embarrassed me,” he added as she yanked the door open.
“I’m sorry,” she gasped. Shrugging through the door she rushed back down the stairs. She could barely find the front door again and almost left without her purse; riding the elevator she tried to fix her blouse and skirt and hair with her left hand while looking for something to wipe off her right. She’d only brought a little bag, not her usual tote, and didn’t have any Kleenex. As the elevator counter came to G, she scrubbed her right hand against whatever the fibrous surface was that made the elevator’s interior walls.
In the lobby the attendant did not look up, seemed in fact to make a point of looking down, as she rushed past. She had to pee, so much so she thought she might wet herself there on the street. That was all she thought about, driving back home. How much she needed to pee, how the need stuck like a spear through her brain and her crotch and drove out every other sensation. The next day, she spent close to four hours and two hundred dollars in “talking” it out with a Listener and forming a Plan—several Plans—but the Plans contradicted each other, as did the desires and emotions each meant to process and fulfill. How to talk to her father and how never to talk to her father. How to confront Robert Lord and how to forget Robert Lord. How to demand her answer and how to stop asking or wanting to ask. Obsessed, Claire spent far too much money and earned too many Loyalty Stars. Attempting to wean herself from that habit, she then formed the less costly but in certain ways equally costly habit of constantly checking the school’s Facebook page. In Robert Lord’s frequent appearances there, she sought clues as to what she should do. None of these were decisive and so she did nothing. Three years passed. Many school milestones were posted. One was the death of the school’s longest-serving staff member, secretary Velva Wilson. One was the death of the school’s longest-serving faculty member, Theatre Program founder Robert Lord. Claire went to his tribute and learned nothing new. When a subsequent Facebook announcement explained that the decision to rename the school the Robert Lord School for the Arts had been reversed due to “a credible allegation of sexual abuse from a former student,” Claire finally unfollowed the school’s social media pages.
BUT BEFORE THAT, the day she’d stood sightlessly grasping the comedy/tragedy mask in the hot parking lot—
—at last she understood she must retrace her steps, and going back in and down the main hall, she reentered the office, where it seemed everyone had gone out for their lunch but a dumpy and aged old woman who hadn’t been there before. “Just returning this,” Claire said, proffering the guest pass. The woman jerked back as if frightened.
“My God,” said the woman, whose name tag read “Velva.” “Sweet Jesus. Come closer to me.”
As if in a dream Claire stepped close and the old woman hauled herself onto her feet. She reached a leathery hand to Claire’s cheek. “Why, you must be more than twenty years old.” Her breathy wonder repulsed Claire, frozen under her touch.
“Twenty-five.”
“That’s right,” said Velva in triumph. She sank back in her chair, her gaze feasting on Claire. “What did they name you, sweetheart?”
It was such a strange question! “I’m Claire,” Claire said brusquely and dropping the pass on the desktop went out, the right way this time, to the parking lot holding her car, the door and the key and the pedals of which she attacked with more force than required, leaving the gray stones of that building so far in her wake that it was only when the building was gone, the people she’d met in it dead, Robert Lord’s name given then taken away from the fancy new building expressing his vision that she understood why that old woman had stared in that way all those years ago now.
Are we still recognized if seen by the wrong eyes?
But by then it was too late to go back and say, “Tell me her name.”