After I dropped off Lou at his space in Soho, where he was house sitting for an estate now in the courts, I decided to head on home. The more I thought about Alex Goddard, the more I felt frustrated and even a little angry that I'd completely failed to find out any of the things I'd wanted to learn about him. I replayed our interview in my mind, got nowhere, and then decided to push away thoughts of Quetzal Manor for a while and dwell on something else: Sarah, my film, anything.
It was Saturday, and unfortunately I had no plans for the evening. Translation: no Steve. Back to where I started. How many million stories in the naked city, and I was just so many million plus one. It's not a jungle out there, it's a desert.
The truth was, after Steve took off, I hadn't really been trying all that hard to pick myself up off the canvas and look around. Besides, I didn't want some other guy, I wanted him. Added to that, I somehow felt that when you're on the short countdown for forty, you shouldn't have to be going out on blind dates, wondering whether that buttoned-down MBA sitting across from you in some trendy Italian restaurant thinks you're a blimp (even though you skipped lunch), telling yourself he's presentable, doesn't seem like a serial killer, has a job, only mentioned his mother once, and could qualify as an acceptable life's mate. There's no spark, but he's probably quite nice. You wanly remember that old Barney's ad jingle, "Select, don't settle," but at this stage of life you're ready to admit you've flunked out in Love 101 and should just go with Like.
Which was one of the reasons I missed Steve so deeply. He was a lover, but he was also a best friend. And I was running low on those.
Every woman needs a best pal. After my former best, Betsy, married Joel Aimes, Off-Broadway's latest contribution to Dreamworks, and moved to the Coast with him, I was noticing a lot of empty evenings. In the old days, we could talk for hours. It was funny, since we were actually very different. Betsy, who had forgotten more about clothes and makeup than most women would ever know, hung around the garment-center showrooms and always came away with samples of next season's couture, usually for a song. I envied her that, since I usually just pretended not to care and pulled on another pair of jeans every morning. But she shared my love of Asian music.
Anyway, now she was gone and I could tell we weren't working hard enough at staying in touch. She and Joel had just moved to a new apartment and I didn't even have her latest phone number…
Which brought me back to Steve. I'd often wondered why we were so alike, and I'd finally decided it was because we both started from the same place spiritually. In his case, that place was a crummy childhood in New Haven-which he didn't want to talk about much because, I gathered, it was as lonely and deprived as my own, or at least as depressing. His father had owned a small candy store and had wanted all his four children to become "professionals." The oldest had become a lawyer, the next a teacher. When Steve's turn came, he was told he should become a doctor, or at the very least, a dentist.
Didn't happen. He'd managed four years of premed at Yale, but then he rebelled, cashed in his med-school scholarship, and went to Paris to study photography. The result was he'd done what he wanted, been reasonably successful at it, and his father had never forgiven him. I think he was still striving for the old man's approval, even after all the years, but I doubted he'd ever get it. Steve was a guy still coming to grips with things that couldn't be changed, but in the meantime he lived in worlds that were as different from his own past as he could find. He deliberately avoided middle-class comforts, and was never happier than when he was in some miserable speck on the map where you couldn't drink the water. Whatever else it was, it wasn't New Haven…
Thinking about him at that moment, I had an almost irresistible desire to reach for my cell phone and call him. God, I missed him. Did he miss me the same way? I wanted so much to hear him say it.
I had a contact number for him in Belize City, an old, Brit-like hotel called the Bellevue, where they still served high tea, but I always seemed to call when he was out somewhere in the rain forest, shooting.
Do it. Don't be a wuss.
But then I got cold feet. Did I want him to think I was chasing after him? I didn't want to sound needy… though that was exactly what I felt like at the moment.
Finally I decided to just invent a phone conversation, recreating one from times past, one where we both felt secure enough to be flip. It was something I did more than I'd like to admit. Usually there'd be eight rings at his Park Slope loft and then a harried voice. Yes. Steve, talk to me…
"Yo. This is not a recording. I am just in a transcendent plane. And if that's you, Murray, I'll have the contact sheets there by six. Patience is a virtue."
"Honey, it's me. Get out of the darkroom. Get a life."
"Oh, hi, baby." Finally tuning in. "I'm working. In a quest for unrelenting pictorial truth. But mainly I'm thinking of you."
"You're printing, right? Darling, it's lunch hour. Don't you feel guilty, working all the time?"
The truth was, it was one of the reasons I respected him so much. He even did his own contacts. His fervor matched my drive. It's what made us perfect mates.
"I've got tons of guilt. But I'm trying to get past it. Become a full human person. Go back to the dawn of man. Paint my face and dance in a thunderstorm." He'd pause, as though starting to get oriented. "Hey, look at the time. Christ. I've got a print shoot on Thirty-eighth Street at three."
He was chasing a bit of fashion work to supplement his on-again, off-again magazine assignments.
"Love," I said in my reverie, "can you come over tonight? I promise to make it worth your while. It involves a bubble bath, champagne, roses everywhere, sensuous ragas on the CD. And maybe some crispy oysters or something, sent in later on, just to keep us going."
Then I'd listen to the tone of his voice, knowing he'd say yes but putting more stock in how he said it. Still, he always gave his lines a good read.
"Then why don't we aim for about nine?" I'd go on, blissful. "That ought to give me a chance to get organized. And don't bring anything except your luscious self." The fantasy was coming together in my mind. Thinking back, I realized how much I missed him, all over again…
That was when the phone on the armrest beside me rang for real. For a moment I was so startled I almost hit the brakes. Then I clicked it on, my mind still buzzing about Steve, and also, in spite of my resolve, about the curious runaround I'd just gotten from Alex Goddard.
"Listen, there was a message on my machine when I came in. I've got to go up to the hospital. Right now." Lou's voice was brimming with hope and exuberance. "They said Sarah was stirring. She's opened her eyes and started talking. They said she's not making much sense, but… oh, God."
"That's wonderful." I felt my heart expanding with life. For some reason, I had a flash of memory of her climbing up into the rickety little tree house-well, more like a platform-I'd helped her build in my thirteenth summer, no boys invited to assist. A year later that part had seemed terminally dumb. "I'll meet you there."
I was almost home, but I screeched the car around and headed east. Racing over, though, I tried not to wish for too much. I kept remembering all the stages to a complete recovery and telling myself that whatever had happened, it was only the first step on a very long, very scary journey…
I hadn't realized how scary till I walked into the room. Lou, who had gotten there just minutes before I did, was sitting by her side, holding her hand, his gaze transfixed on her. She was propped up slightly in her bed, two pillows fluffed behind her head, staring dreamily at the ceiling. Three attentive middle-aged nurses were standing around the sides of her bed, their eyes wide, as though Sarah were a ghost. I very quickly realized why. She was spinning out a fantasy that could only come from a deranged mind. Had she regained consciousness only to talk madness?
"Lou, does she recognize you?" I asked.
He just shook his head sadly, never taking his eyes off her face. She was weaving in and out of reality, pausing, stuttering, uncertain of her incoherent brain. Once, when she'd fallen off a swing and got knocked out for a brief moment, she came to talking nonsense. Now she seemed exactly the same way.
"Lights… so bright," she mumbled, starting up again to recount what seemed to be a faraway fantasy, "… like now. Why… why are there lights here?" Her lips were moving but her eyes were still fixed in a stare. Then, with that last, odd question, her gaze began to dart about the room, looking for someone who wasn't present. She settled on me for a moment, and I felt a chill from her plaintive vulnerability. When I tried to look back as benignly and lovingly as possible, I couldn't help noticing how drawn her cheeks were, doubtless from the constant IV feeding, and again my heart went out. "I'm scared," she went on, "but-"
"I'm here, honey," Lou declared, bending over her, his eyes pained. "Do you know who I am?"
"The jade face… a mask," she babbled on, still ignoring him. "All the colors. It's so… so beautiful."
Her hallucination didn't relate to anything I could understand. She clearly was off in another world, like when she was a kid, weaving the lights of the room now into some kind of dream. I touched Lou's shoulder and asked permission to turn off the overhead fluorescents, but he just shrugged me off, his attention focused entirely on her.
His eyes had grown puzzled, as though he wanted to believe she was returning to rationality but his common sense was telling him it wasn't true.
I was having a different reaction. What she was saying was random babblings, all right, but I was beginning to think she was reliving something she had actually seen.
However, she wasn't through.
"I want to pray, but… the white tunnel… is coming." She shuddered, then almost tried to smile. "Take me…"
She was gone, her eyelids fluttering uncontrollably.
"Honey, talk to me," Lou pleaded. He was crying, something I'd never seen him do, something I was not even aware he was capable of. What he really was trying to say was, "Come back."
It wasn't happening. She stared blankly at the ceiling for a moment, then slowly closed her eyes, a shutter descending over her soul.
"She'll be okay," I whispered to him, almost believing it. Her brain had undergone a physical trauma, enough to cause a coma, but some kind of mental trauma must have preceded it. Was she now trying to exorcise that as part of her path to recovery?
The nurses in the room stirred, perhaps not sure what to do. The overhead lights were still dazzlingly bright, and I moved to shut them off, leaving only a night-light behind the bed. Perhaps the lights had brought her awake, but I was convinced what she'd just gone through had tired her to the point that she would not revive again that day.
Then one of the Caribbean nurses came over and placed her hand on Lou's shoulder. She had an experienced face, full of self-confidence. Something about her inspired trust.
"I wouldn't let this upset you too much," she said, a lovely lilt in her voice. "What just happened may or may not mean anything. When patients first come out of a coma, they can sometimes talk just fine, and yet not make any sense. They ramble on about things they dreamed of like they were real." Then she smiled. "But it's a good first step. She could wake up perfectly fine tomorrow. Just don't pay any attention to what she says for a while. She's dreaming now."
Lou grunted as though he believed her. I nodded in sympathy, though no one seemed to notice.
I also thought that although what Sarah had said was bizarre, it sounded like something more than a dream. Or had she gone back to her child-state where imaginary worlds were real for her?
Then in the dim glare of her bed light, Lou took a wrinkled blue booklet out of his inner pocket and stared at it. I had to stare at it a moment before I realized it was a passport.
"What-?"
"The American consulate in Merida, Mexico, sent it up to 26 Federal Plaza yesterday, because my name and office address are penciled on the inside cover as an emergency contact. The police down there said somebody, some gringo tourist fly-fishing way down on the Usumacinta River, near where the Rio Tigre comes in from Guatemala, snagged this floating in a plastic bag. He turned it in to the Mexican authorities there, and it ended up with our people." He opened the passport and stared at it. "The photo and ID page is ripped out, but it's definitely Sarah's." He handed it over. "Guy I know downtown dropped it off last night. I'm not sure if it has anything to tell us, but now, I was hoping it might help jog her memory."
I took it, the cover so waterlogged its color was almost gone. However, it must have been kept dry in the plastic bag for at least some of its trip from wherever, since much of the damage seemed recent.
Lou shook his head staring wistfully at me. "I still don't know how she got down there. She was in California. Remember that postcard? If she'd come back East, she'd have got in touch. Wouldn't she?" His eyes pleaded for my agreement.
I didn't know what to say, so I just shrugged. I wanted to be sympathetic, but I refused to lie outright. He took my ambivalence as assent as he pulled out the locket containing her picture, his talisman. He fingered it for a moment, staring into space, and then he looked down and opened it, as if seeing her high school picture, from a time when she was well, would somehow ease his mind.
"This whole thing doesn't sound like her," he went on. "Know what I think? She was being held down there against her will."
My heart went out to him, and I reached over and took the locket for a moment, feeling the strong "SRC" engraved on its heart-shaped face. "Lou, she's going to come out of it. And when she does, she'll probably explain everything. She's going to be okay any day now, I've got a hunch. A gut feeling."
I had a gut feeling, all right, but not that she was going to be fine. My real fear was she was going to wake up a fantasy-bound child again.
Then I handed the locket back. He'd seemed to turn anxious without it. He took the silver heart and just stared down at it. In the silence that settled over us, I decided to take a closer look at the passport. I supposed Lou had already gone through it, but maybe he'd missed something.
As I flipped through the waterlogged pages, I came across a smudgy imprint, caked with a thin layer of dried river clay, that was almost too dim to be noticed.
"Lou, did you see this?" I held it under the light and beckoned him over. "Can you read it?"
"Probably not without my specs." He took it and squinted helplessly. "My eyes aren't getting any better."
I took it back and rubbed at the page, cleaning it. It was hard to make out, but it looked like "Delegacion de Migracion, Aeropuerto Internacional, Guatemala, C.A."
"I think this is a Guatemalan tourist entry visa." I raised the passport up to backlight the page. "And see that faint bit there in the center? That's probably her entry date. Written in by hand."
He took it and squinted again. "I can't read the damned thing, but you're right. There's some numbers, or something, scribbled in."
I took it and rubbed the page till I could read it clearly. "It's March eleventh. And it was last year."
"Hot damn, let me see that." He seized it back and squinted for a long moment, lifting the page even closer to the light. "You're right." He held it for a second more, then turned to me. "This is finally the thing I needed. Now I'm damned well going to find out what she was doing down there."
"How do you think you can do that?" I just looked at him, my mind not quite taking in what he'd just said.
"The airlines." He almost grinned. "If they can keep track of everybody's damned frequent-flyer miles for years and years, they undoubtedly got flight manifests stored away somewhere too. So my first step is to find out where she flew from."
"But we don't know which-"
"Doesn't matter." He squinted again at the passport. "Now we know for sure she showed up at the airport in Guatemala City on that date there. I know somebody downtown, smooth black guy named John Williams, the FBI's best computer nerd, who could bend a rule for me and do a little B amp;E in cyberspace. He owes me a couple. So, if she was on a manifest for a scheduled flight into Guatemala City that day, he'll find it. Then we'll know where she left from, who else was on the plane." He tapped the passport confidently with his forefinger. "Maybe she was traveling with some scumbag I ought to look up and get to know better."
"Well, good luck."
In a way I was wondering if we weren't both now grasping for a miracle: me half-hoping for a baby through some New Age process of "centering," Lou trying to reclaim Sarah from her mental abyss with his gruff love. But then again, miracles have been known to happen.