13 ◆ Joan

JOAN SEEMED TO BE SWIMMING, rather than running, away from home. It was Monday morning, and she was in the pool of the Astrid Hotel once again, watching her reflection move across the ceiling of blue mirrors. She was glad the doctor had gone home. It made everything simpler. Long ago, she had walked from door to door, offering religion to all those who would listen. She remembered traveling dusty roads, white Bible in her hands, red-winged blackbirds flitting from post to post. Like everyone, she wanted something back that she used to have, and it was nowhere to be found.

Her family would wait for her. Joan was operating under the common illusion that the life of those she knew became circular in her absence. Micah would orbit the yard and fall off his bike; Lyris would lie in the grass eating raw cauliflower; Charles would fix something in such a way that it would need fixing again soon. And one day she would return to them, settled and strong, herself again. It is easy to feel resilient in a swimming pool, because your natural buoyancy is all that keeps you from sinking.

The telephone was ringing when she returned to her room. It was one of those weightless hotel phones, so overburdened with lights and information that it seemed to have a life of its own. To pick up the receiver would be an unwarranted intrusion. She lay on the bed, listening to the sound the phone made, an electronic bird call that would fool no birds. It was as if an accident were happening before her eyes and she could not raise a hand.

The phone stopped ringing. Joan got dressed, put her extra clothes in a drawstring plastic bag, and called the laundry department. A woman said she would send someone up. It was seven-thirty. Micah and Lyris would be getting ready for school, brushing their teeth, tying their shoes.

Joan called Charles to say she would come home in the spring. She told him she needed time to think. She had seen movies and TV shows in which this request, once made, was routinely granted. Charles, though, being neither movie star nor concerned TV husband, gave her no time to think.

“The spring?” he said. “What is it, Joan? What has happened? Did you go and find someone new?”

“No,” she said. “Not really. Not in the way you mean. Have I been unfaithful? Yes. Have you? Don’t tell me you haven’t. But this has to do with us and not with anyone else. You stopped believing in me, Charles. You put me off to the side, where I became another person.”

“Oh, Joan.”

“Speak into the phone, honey.”

“That doesn’t sound like me.”

“Let me go, just for a while, let me go.”

“When were you with this man? Are you with him now?”

“He’s gone. I’m sorry if it hurts.”

“Do you know what I was doing last night? Taking a knife out of my neck.”

“That is just how it feels,” she said. “As if a knife has been removed. I love you, Charles. I always will, in my heart. Just please tell Micah and Lyris I will be home in the spring.”

“Where are you going?” he said. “Where will you be?”

“I don’t know yet,” she said. “Goodbye.”

In a little while there was a knock at the door. Joan gave her clothes to a young porter, who waited for a tip. Getting none, he shrugged and walked off.

“Wait,” called Joan. She met the porter in the hall and gave him two dollars.

“Do I seem old to you?” she said.

“To me? No.”

“Well, how old do I seem? Take a wild guess. Don’t worry about my feelings.”

“Thirty-two,” said the porter, and Joan felt better, although the figure sounded rehearsed, as if it had been suggested in the hotel handbook. “When will you want them back?”

“Want what back?”

“Your things.”

“I don’t,” she said. “Clean them, charge it to my room, and after that I don’t care what happens to them.”

“Why not throw them away?” said the porter.

“Good idea.”

“Look, miss —”

“I don’t care about the clothes. Can’t you see that?”

She left the hotel with her suitcase in her hand. There was almost nothing in it, but she did not want to be the sort of woman who begins a new life without a suitcase.

The streets that had been empty yesterday were now very busy. Everyone had somewhere to go, and so did she, although she did not know where. Charles would tell the children, and there would be no going back now. He would tell them at the first chance, and with bitterness. If only she had kept Lyris as an infant instead of having her handed back so late, things would have been different. Yet they all might wait for her. Micah would; he was true-blue. And spring was not far away. It would be winter and then it would be spring. She wondered if she would keep her promise. It was easier to say “I’ll be home in the spring” than it was to say “I won’t be coming home.”

She needed someone to talk to. The person she and Dr. Palomino had seen in the sleeping bag was not in front of the bakery but down the street. He sat with his back to a fence, drinking an orange drink, his long gray hair falling over his shoulders. Long-haired people always struck Joan as wise. She walked up and down the block, crossing and recrossing his territory, working up the nerve to speak.

“Do you mind if I sit down?” she said.

“No,” he said.

She sat down beside him. They said nothing for five minutes.

“Don’t you want to know what I’m doing, with my suitcase?” said Joan.

“Oh, tell me.”

“I’m leaving my family.”

“Don’t.”

“I have to,” said Joan. She opened her suitcase, took out the Bible, and opened it to a place she had marked.

“Let’s keep it short,” said the man.

“Listen,” said Joan. “‘For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother . . . And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household.’”

“That’s in the Bible?”

Joan held the book open for him to see.

“I can’t read without my glasses,” he said. “But you can’t go by that. It was a different time. The early church, they were under a lot of pressure.”

“I suppose you’re right,” said Joan. “I don’t believe it’s the word of God anyway. At one time I did, but now I’m not sure.”

“A pack of tall tales, handed down, over generations.”

“And if that’s the case,” said Joan, “then you no more have the right to say ‘I do this because of the Bible’ than you would to say ‘I do this because of —’”

“The Sporting News.”

“I came to this city on business,” said Joan.

“I know.”

“How?”

“The way you’re dressed.”

“Oh, right. But I also — and I see this now, and I saw it before — I was also looking for something to force the issue. To be hypnotized, or fall in love, or be taken hostage in a failed heist, and everything would change. Instead I have to do it myself.”

“Uh-huh.”

“What about you?”

“What do you want?”

“Well, it’s just that you’ve been down, and — I don’t know if this is presumptuous —”

“Absolutely, I’ve been down,” he said. “They once called me a natural at deciphering industrial codes, but I could never forget what the lawyer told me. ‘Succinct answers make succinct depositions.’ Imagine hearing those words, what they would do to a young mind. I wish I could forget them. And they told me I could not join the war effort until I was ready to dress for success. And they said I knew Somoza, but that was another lie. And ever since then I haven’t felt right. What time do you have?”

Joan pulled back the sleeve of her jacket. “Quarter of ten.”

“I’ve got to run.”

They stood. The man rolled and tied his sleeping bag with swift, forceful motions, as if roping a small animal.

Joan walked around until she found a bus depot. Inside, a demonstration of Irish dance was going on, and this made it hard for her to concentrate. She was tired and hungry. The dancers linked arms, stomping the tiles. Joan walked along the ticket counters, looking for the shortest line, the clerk with the kindest eyes. She chose a young woman in a turtleneck sweater.

“I don’t care where I go. I just want to get out of town for a few days.”

“How about Lonachan?” said the clerk. “A lot of people go up there to see what the tornado did. Plus it’s got the effigy mounds and the reform school.”

“When was the tornado?”

“Two summers ago,” the clerk said. “But it’s still damaged.”

“One, please.”

Joan boarded the bus. The engine was running, and it was very hot inside. She sank gratefully into a seat. How many nights had it been since she had slept well? She could not count them, or remember where she had been, or when. Her seatmate was a traveling salesman reading a science-fiction novel called The Woman with Many Arms. He saw her looking at the book and asked the purpose of her trip. Her mouth moved, but she said nothing. He waited. She remembered a church pageant in her youth when she had drawn laughter by nervously repeating the title of the piece she was supposed to say — A Gift at Our House, A Gift at Our House — while outside the church the wind gusted and icicles cracked against the windows. Where was that? Indiana . . . The woman on the cover of the book had four arms, reaching out like the arms of Shiva.

Dr. Palomino took two sack lunches to the Stone City art museum at noon. He was a benefactor of the museum, but he always had a hard time finding his way in. It seemed that you entered through the freight elevator. Oh, this modern architecture, where is it headed? he thought.

Once inside, he looked at the exhibit book but barely registered its contents, because he was thinking about Joan. He believed — in fact, he had read — that promiscuity results from a lack of identity; thus you are always looking for new bodies through which to discover your true self (not having found it in other bodies, grown familiar). And he thought it was true that he was most troubled by lust when he felt it least likely that he would make a mark in his field. However, he was also troubled by lust when things appeared to be going his way. At those times his desire seemed less like trouble than like a generous impulse to share his happening self with the uninitiated. Where was she?

He was standing in a room full of landscape paintings. The artist had a facility for clouds. He had rendered them in shades of blue, violet, and green. They lorded it over the life forms in the paintings — a sharecropper, a mule, a farmer and his little son.

Dr. Palomino thought he had pinpointed the very moment when he had begun to lose the sense of himself that was reportedly the key to a balanced libido. It was at his wedding, many years ago. It was a hot day; later there would be thunderstorms. The ceremony was not long, but given the darkening sky, everyone was anxious to get out of the church. Nonetheless, when it came time to kiss the bride, the doctor did not hurry. A moment of thought seemed worthwhile. He had witnessed other weddings where the bride and groom, in their eagerness to get through the ceremony without making any mistakes, would bump their lips together in a pro forma sort of way, and he wanted to avoid this. And as he studied his bride — her upturned face, her frightened eyes, the interesting thing that her sisters had done with her hair — he heard his own father, speaking in a stage whisper from the front row: “Kiss her, kiss her, for God’s sake.”

Well, maybe he didn’t say “For God’s sake.” But he definitely told Dr. Palomino to hurry and kiss the bride, which he did, but even as he did, the seed of doubt was planted. Was he Stephen Palomino, M.D., with ten years of the finest training behind him, the family practitioner in command of all aspects of his life, or was he someone who could not stumble his way through even this most memorized of social rituals without the pathetic coaching of his father?

He had known what he was doing, that was the hell of it. He had been trying to work a variation on the norm, but he knew what the norm was and did not need his father to draw a diagram and wave it before the congregation.

Could this be where his restlessness began?

He looked at his watch. Then he moved on to the next room, which featured paintings of country fairs. A clown in white makeup and a millstone collar held a small monkey before a backdrop of sagging canvas; three women posed half dressed on a stage, their backs to the painter; a woman in a burlap bathing suit stood blankly, with an emerald snake coiled three times around her body. The spectators in the paintings were an odd lot — rural folks with sunken cheeks, leering businessmen, and agitated old women. Only the clown with the monkey had drawn a wholesome audience, but there were not many in it.

The doctor hurried away from the carnival pictures; they seemed to indict him. The next room had so many paintings of hallways, doors, and stairs that you wouldn’t know which way to turn if you had to get out. Several of the hallways featured a crooked portrait of an old man with a long beard and restless eyes. In others, a chalky ghost hovered a foot or so above the floor. These paintings filled the doctor with anxiety.

He went out into the courtyard of the museum and sat on a bench to eat lunch. Joan’s absence might represent a disavowal of their night together. He blinked rapidly, remembering the way she had looked in the light that filtered through the hotel window. Kiss her, you fool, kiss the woman. He felt no rejection and only a little disappointment. But he knew he would keep his distance from here on out. When he saw her, he would make some innocuous remark, nothing that would hurt her, just some commonplace.

He got up to leave. Maybe he’d go shopping. A new pair of shoes always put him in a better frame of mind.

The bus arrived in Lonachan late in the afternoon. The town had a tragic atmosphere, and Joan realized while walking to the police station that the trees had all been sheared off at a height of ten or twelve feet.

“They’re here,” said the sergeant at the front desk, as if he knew her. “Arrived today. The calendars, I mean. We are the ones. The men of the police department. Well, I shouldn’t say men, because there are two women as well. The year 2000 — think of it, where has the time gone?”

He showed her a calendar, turned to a color photograph of himself working, shirtless, on the engine of a pickup. “Not bad for someone who never modeled,” he said.

“You’re Mr. February,” said Joan.

“I know, a nothing month. I asked for September. What do you need?”

Joan had given this some thought. Her best option seemed to be the appearance of having a destination. She knew three things about the town. A tornado from the past could not be a destination. The effigy mounds could be, but they might not be much to look at. That left the reform school. She might even find a job there.

“I’m looking for the reform school,” she said.

“Follow me in your car,” said another officer, dusting the floor of the station with a mop.

Joan explained that she had come on the bus.

“I’ll take you,” he said. “My shift is over, I’m going up there anyway, and I’m tired of hearing about that grotesque calendar.”

He and Joan got into his cruiser and rode through the broad streets of the town. Joan asked where he’d been during the tornado.

“In my basement, under a pallet,” he said. “Where we’re going got it pretty bad, though. Now, you’re aware the school is closed.”

“Oh,” Joan said.

“Six or seven months ago,” said the policeman. “They still have community activities in the gym. Were you one of the graduates?”

Joan shook her head.

“Because every once in a while we still get alumni, come back to see the school. You’d be surprised how successful some of them are. The reason I’m going there is we’re rehearsing a play. The Seagull, by Anton Chekhov.”

Joan sat up straight and turned to him. Her voice surprised her with its hoarseness. “I know that play. Mister, I’ve been in that play. I was Masha.”

“No lie,” said the policeman. “Because guess who I am: Semyon Semyonovich.”

“My hopeless lover . . .”

“‘What terrible weather! Two whole days of it!’”

“‘There are waves on the lake,’” said Joan. “‘Tremendous ones.’”

He laughed and turned the wheel. “Tell me something, because I’m curious. When you were Masha, did you take snuff?”

Joan gave him a look of professional reproach, going back through years, an actress again. “You have no choice if you’re going to be Masha. But you can pretend.”

“I wish everyone thought like you. We’ve got snuff, but our Masha won’t go near it.”

They went into the school, down a dark corridor, and through the doors of the gym. The actors were on the stage, performing a scene. Wooden tables were all around. Joan stood below the footlights as the policeman climbed the stairs. The woman who would not take snuff was asking the writer Trigorin to sign books for her.

And Joan whispered the line with her: “Just put ‘To Masha, who doesn’t know where she comes from or what she’s doing on this earth.’”