“Leenda. Is how you would say it.”
At that, or just after that, she invites me in. Her gestures are direct and forthright and I follow her into her room, an exact replica of my own room except with more clothes hanging on the chairs. As she roots around for a pen and paper I’m watching her, and I notice a lightness in her movements, and in those movements I detect a kind of contentment or happiness. She seems to be at ease. And it’s exactly this ease or contentment that I find inappropriate, or inappropriate vis-à-vis my own world of dis-ease and dis-contentment. In this other person’s — I wouldn’t call it happiness, but her apparent happiness — in the lackadaisical quality of her trust, the seed of my envy is planted. Why does she have the ease and happiness? Why is it hers and not mine? And it doesn’t make sense, but as I stand in the carpeted room, this is the question that’s bugging me. I’m feeling it. Her abundance is creating a lack of abundance in me, a paucity to which I react, not with generosity or understanding, or even healthy competition, but with wormy invidiousness.
My response to her seeming confidence is like Claggart’s response to the goodness and beauty of Billy Budd. It’s a kind of envy in which the goodness and grace of this other person has to be canceled out.
“Take off your hat,” she tells me.
“I’m not wearing a hat,” I say.
“Figuratively, I mean. Relax.”
So I try to seem relaxed. And that works for a while, and we talk for a while, about things, like the color of the car, and the profusion of bugs on the windshield, and all the time I’m talking to her I’m gauging her, waiting for her to trip, figuratively, so I can know whether she’s had a party to play in Anne’s disappearance. I already think she’s had some part in it, but I want proof to make it all clear. Then she’ll be bad and I’ll be good and I’ll feel better. But something about the room, or about her and her apparent honesty, is making me feel worse, and so, once she gives me the piece of paper with the telephone number, I fold it, put it in my back pocket, and then I tell her I have to go.
2
Later that day, through the curtains of my room, I watch the girl walk across the parking lot, but instead of getting into one of the cars, she walks past the cars, to the edge of the parking lot where it meets the circular drive. I leave my room and follow her, staying far enough behind her to avoid obviousness, but trailing her as she walks along the sidewalk. The sidewalk at this section of road is mostly a trail of hard-packed earth, through weeds sometimes and little puddles of water, and I note, at one point, her footprints.
At the intersection of the circular drive and one of the radial streets that feed the university there’s a liquor store and she goes in. Rather than waiting outside, I also go in. Why not? I see her head looking into the refrigerated cabinets and I look at bottles of wine, all the time watching her. She’s buying some kind of juice or fruit beverage and I’m thinking about her, and I’m also thinking about buying a reasonably priced California wine. I wait for her to pay for her fruit drink at the counter, and then, as she exits out the door, I decide to buy a disposable camera. I’m thinking it might come in handy, but when I pay for it, I’m about thirty-five cents short. The man behind the counter, with his combed gray hair, tells me to give him what I have, take the camera, and pay him later. The man insists I take it, and for some reason, looking at the man, and seeing beyond his bristly mustache and bad teeth to the generous smile forming on his cheeks, I do. I thank the man and tell him I don’t need a bag. I hurry out of the liquor store because, like a good tracker, I don’t want to lose my quarry.
But when I get outside, worried that she’s gone off and that I’ll have some catching up to do, I find her instead, standing right in front of me, wrestling with the plastic wrapper on her drink. I watch her for a long moment with a strange sense of pleasure and fulfillment. In a way I enjoy her struggle. I feel lifted by her momentary difficulty, and feeling garrulous, I speak to her. “Having a little trouble?” I say.
She looks up and smiles. “Protecting us from ourselves,” she says, and when she finally gets the plastic removed from the bottle she throws the packaging into the trash and begins walking back to the motel.
That’s where I would be going too, but because I don’t want to seem to be following her, I don’t move. I don’t know if I should be walking with her or not, and so not knowing, I deal with my own packaging, and all the time I’m dealing with it I’m thinking about her, the way her hair fell, or was blown, by the spring winds, across her face, and her collar pulled up against the wind, and her fingers, and her skin, a dark skin or softly tanned skin, and her mouth when she smiled. Standing there, I wish I would have remembered more of her, and other parts of her. I’m already forgetting so much, and I think, If only I had a better memory.
That’s why I turn, follow her tracks, and catch up with her at the edge of a bulldozed field. It’s empty at the moment, awaiting some future construction, and she’s gone out there for some reason, to look around and breathe, and I find myself pulled out there as well, to her.
I say pulled because, although I’m holding my little camera, I couldn’t really have said I had any reason to be following her. We’re standing on the site of the future mini-mall, and nothing is said about the odd coincidence of our seeing each other twice in the same day.
“Are you taking pictures?” she says.
“Yes,” I say, and lift the camera to prove it.
“Of?”
“Landscapes,” I say. “Buildings mainly. And people, if they’re around.”
“Doesn’t look very populated now,” she says, indicating the pallets of cinder block.
“No,” I say, and although I’m looking at her, I’m also seeing everything around her, the light and the air and the leveled dirt.
“Don’t let me stop you,” she says.
“As a matter of fact,” I say, and I ask her if she’d be willing to stand in a picture. “To give scale,” I say. And when she stands and strikes an appropriate pose, I adjust the composition. I ask her not to smile. She doesn’t smile. “That’s perfect,” I say, and then I snap the picture.
“Take another,” she says. “Sometimes the first one … In case I smiled.”
“Okay,” I say, and I take another.
“What about this?” she says, and she puts her foot on a stack of two-by-fours. I take the photo and when we stand together, afterward, she asks me why no smiling.
“So as not to distract from the landscape,” I say.
“How would a smile distract from that?”
“You’re right,” I say. “It wouldn’t.”
And that’s about all we say. We walk together to the motel, just walking along, the wind cool, the sun warm, just walking together until we get to the motel stairway, where we stop. I would like to keep walking, to continue on our common trajectory, and although she seems to enjoy being looked at, and I would like to keep looking, my room is in a different direction. So we start to float apart, like two ice floes slowly flowing in different directions. I want to pull them (the ice floes) together so I say one more thing to her. I tell her she looks like Joni Mitchell.
“Maybe it’s the beret,” she says.
I shrug, and when she turns to go I say, “Who did you say you knew around here?”
“I didn’t say,” she says. “I’m with my friends.”
And then she walks up to her room. And I imagine that happiness probably exists up there in that room, waiting. Not for me, but for her. “Good luck,” I say, half aloud, either to her or the stairway she just walked up, and although I’m saying “Good luck” to her, I’m wishing that some of that luck was mine.