Polhaus let his mouth fall open and allowed the phonemes to escape, two breathy sounds carried on the still air: “L.A.”
“It was L.A.’s idea. I’m sorry. I had a bad feeling.”
“It’s L.A., the whole bright idea for this brilliant family reunion.”
“Should I even mention that we were about a half an hour from Herself? That if the conversation between Rorvik and the kids had gone as planned — to the extent that the conversation was necessary, was a semi-intelligent idea and not something an ape swinging through the jungle would have rejected out of hand — we would have found her and had her right now?”
“Maybe you shouldn’t mention it. So what else happened?”
“Rorvik said that he asked them what they were doing these days, and they said working. Susan’s at Plate of Brasse.”
“Until Friday she was.”
“Roger’s still painting houses.”
“You think this is true, or you think it’s more bullshit they’re feeding the old man?”
“Roger shows up with paint on his clothes, anyway.”
“Why does L.A. do this? Why?”
“My suggestion is check out small jobs in the area. Small nonunion painting jobs. I would think the Peninsula. All those complexes in Belmont and such. Probably a lot of work getting bid out. Labor Day’s coming up. Big moving day.”
“So check them out.” He dismisses Nietfeldt.
Eventually you realize that L.A. exists just to be at fault. Not the Bureau office, the whole fucking city. It has an infinite capacity to absorb blame. Whatever goes wrong in the country, there’s always L.A. Used to be New York, but L.A. took over. The cognoscenti understand this. Jew haters still blame New York. Right-wingers blame Berkeley. The unobservant blame Polhaus’s beautiful golden San Francisco. But you want to trace everything that’s wrong in the world, from tits in the movies to niggers in the streets, you look to L.A.
Small nonunion jobs. Maybe they’d get lucky, but things aren’t looking up. The single useful lead that they have in the whole thing of the case, 625 Post, is blown. They could send them electric trains and a salami, they could send a carton of Milky Ways and an ounce of grass — they’d never go near the place again.
Rose hung up the receiver, then stared at the kitchen phone. A beige wall unit, set in the center of a dark corkboard in the shape of a flower, to whose petals were pinned a shopping list, a business card, a prescription, a mechanic’s estimate, something in a slit window envelope. And oh yeah the postcard from her sister, who’d visited Porterville. She wasn’t sure if her sister had been joking around or not. These things said Life Goes On. And how.
She was a woman with a grown child. Two, for all intents and purposes. She was waiting for her husband to return from an out-of-town trip. She would have liked to say that the house felt empty. She would have liked to say that now she could get to all the things she’d been meaning to do. She would have liked to say that she had converted Susan’s bedroom into a sewing room. She would have liked to say that there were Kodachrome snaps arriving in the mail each month, accompanying lengthy, chatty letters of the kind she had always been in the habit of writing. She would have liked to say that she and Howard were going to take a couple of months and visit sunny Italy, a second honeymoon. She would have liked to, but basically it was just quiet around there.
She knew Howard was on his way home because he’d checked out of the Hilton. She knew that because the kids had just called her to say that they’d missed him there but to let him know that they weren’t involved in any kind of trouble. Oh, and hi. Not in any trouble, but don’t be too upset if she doesn’t hear from them for a while. But things should straighten themselves out soon. Then, fire up the barbecue! They’d be home for a nice long visit.
It was when they assured her of the imminent visit home that it occurred to her that her entire life as a mother had been a failure. Because this was a lie as transparent as the lies they were telling about their lack of intimate involvement with armed revolutionary groups, state prisoners, and fugitives from justice. The whole known past had been abruptly dethroned by a hidden counterpart that was monstrous in its secret and unknowable details; that so thoroughly excluded her that it might as well have happened to people she didn’t know. Worse, it worked in only one direction. Her life remained as open to them, as accessible, as it always had been, while they denied her basic knowledge about such things as where they happened to be laying their heads, the hair on which she’d cut herself right here in this kitchen, with newspapers spread over the linoleum. But a mother couldn’t afford to be willfully enigmatic. She’d had her secrets — secret garments, secret devices in the medicine chest and hanging from the showerhead, secret silences — but they were not deceitful secrets. Not even Jocasta deliberately deceived her children. And there weren’t many of them, her secrets. They were things that had happened before they were born. They were things she concealed on and inside her person. They were things she carried alone, in her head, without speaking of them or acting them out, without even dreaming of speaking of them or acting them out. Everything else, her whole life, belonged to her children, or at any rate was there for them to take. But the things her children were supposed to have been up to! Whatever she thought she’d been teaching them all these years, all she’d really taught them was that it wasn’t advisable to tell their own mother the truth. Who did they tell the truth to? They told each other the truth. They told their friends, unfamiliar to her. Probably they thought they were telling the truth whenever a bomb exploded or a gun went off. And she’d given them everything. It wasn’t fair.
She realized that her number one tactic, the jeremiad, didn’t work, hadn’t ever worked. She’d employed it all these years in the belief that by putting across her point of view she could impose the reality it urged. But all those letters had carried no weight. Now that she thought of it she recognized that all she’d ever obtained was some token deference. Then the kids went ahead and did whatever they pleased. As carefully as she wrote, as lucidly as she framed her arguments, as diplomatically as she lodged her objections, as skillfully as she obscured her appeals to the children’s fears and guilt feelings, as astutely as she expressed her familiarity with them as individuals, it was all only words, capable of changing nothing, remote from any existence other than its own as words on a page, reflecting nothing but her own sense of the way things stood, or ought to stand.
Normal sounds. A sprinkler, darkening the desert earth and bringing forth flowers and grass in the unwavering sunlight. Motorcars, back and forth, and one in particular that pulled into the driveway and stopped. The monster she loved was home again.
The door. “I’m home,” said Howard. He put down his overnight bag.
“Well,” she said.
He paused by the door to go through the mail stacked on the table near the entryway. She knew he had to do this when he walked through the door, and she waited, reaching for the embroidered clasp purse in which she nested the pack of cigarettes she was working on. Soon he would walk into the kitchen and have a glass of tap water, using the ridiculous plastic cup (picturing Donald, Huey, Dewey, and Louie) that he kept beside the sink for this purpose.
“The kids look good,” he said. “They seem all right.”