Negative space, p.4
Negative Space, page 4
“Look familiar?” Karen asked, lighting up another cigarette. “I have only one of him.”
Max looked at the photo: a gray-haired man in his fifties or sixties, dressed in a long coat and pointing toward the camera, his eyes burning as if prohibiting the photographer from taking the picture. Motion blur smeared the image.
Yes, he does look familiar.
“I don’t know, the picture isn’t clear enough,” Max said. “I suppose. Why? What does it matter?”
“It matters because of that void he left in your life. The article said he left when you were seven?”
“Yeah.”
“I honestly don’t know what’s worse, knowing your father and having him disappear or having him disappear before ever getting to know him.”
“Why are you saying you’re my sister?” Max repeated, his stomach knotting.
“Because I am. I know it. I can’t explain how I know, not really. Not yet—” She paused. “But I need you to trust me. And I want to show you some things of mine that I think you’ll understand.” Karen let out a stream of smoke. “I ran away from home, Max, and made my way out here. No one knows I’m here, not anyone from that life, at least.”
Max had encountered many things in his life far more unbelievable than this Karen’s claim, things he had more readily accepted. The idea he had a half-sister was entirely probable, especially if there had been no foul play to account for his father’s disappearance. But this was too hard. Not because it was unbelievable but because it was all too believable. All too possible.
He finished the hot sauce packet. Fished out another one.
“Oral fixation’s done a number on you, huh?” Karen said. “Let me guess—fellow ex-smoker?”
He nodded. No one had ever understood that before, not without first going through a puzzled face.
“How long did it take you to quit?”
“Like twelve tries,” Max said.
“Not too bad. I’m into double digits for sure. Like Mark Twain said, it’s easy to quit smoking. I’ve done it hundreds of times.”
The quote elicited a short-lived smile. Behind them, the front door opened and Karen’s Mr. Mover and Shaker came bustling out of the house. He regarded Karen and beamed. When he spied Max, his giddy spark died.
“Thanks again, so much,” he said to her, backing his way down the front walkway. He tried to put on his blazer but had trouble with the right sleeve. He laughed to cover up his embarrassed grunts.
“Anytime,” Karen said in an exaggerated Southern twang. Penelope’s voice, Max guessed. “Come back real soon, hun.”
Her dainty fingers waving in the dark. Almost musical, like they should be accompanied by chimes.
Mover and Shaker’s heel struck a sprinkler and he stumbled, chuckled, then turned around and continued toward a Jaguar parked under a streetlight.
“Your client looks flustered,” Max said.
“That’s James. That was only his second session here, actually. First time was a little hard getting him to do anything, he was so terrified that he was doing something wrong or immoral or against the law. I told him to relax—we all told him to relax, but he was petrified. Said he didn’t want to cheat on his girlfriend.”
“Doesn’t seem like cheating.”
“Right. No one’s having sex here. It’s just a healthy way to unleash your fantasies, your natural human curiosities.”
“So he’s pretty broken in by now, I take it?”
“Eh, kinda. He’s still having trouble, probably feels embarrassed. But whatever, I know he loves it, I can see it in his face.”
Karen quieted. Prickly silence. Despite the age difference, Max felt a fast-growing affinity with Karen. They’d been dwelling on the same floor their whole lives, but had just now met in a random sprint for the elevator that would either take them high or plunge them farther down into places they’d been to before, and never wanted to return.
“Hey, I get off pretty soon,” she said, flicking the cigarette onto the pavement. “Would you like to see where I live? I want to show you something, too.”
“I start work in a couple hours,” Max said. He was lightheaded. “So we’d have to make it fast. Depending on where you live, I suppose.”
“I don’t live far, just over near Santa Monica.” Karen checked her watch. “Listen, I’m due for another client pretty soon. It’s a half-hour session so it shouldn’t take long, but I’ve got to get ready.”
“Okay.”
“Can you wait for me?”
“I think I can manage.”
Karen gave a bittersweet smile and went to change or spruce up the room or do whatever needed to be done.
Max followed her inside, took a seat and made small talk with Lady Rose. He found a broken pencil in his pocket and amused himself by sketching on the back of forgotten business cards in his wallet, until Lady Rose noticed and offered him a wad of printer paper. He sketched the interior of the house, Lady Rose herself, and anything else that caught his eye, until Karen came out as Karen, undressed of Penelope, and announced she was ready to go.
***
II
The room dark. Sputtering gasps and breaths of someone either in dire pain or pure ecstasy. Karen flipped on the lights, revealing in all its unkempt glory the apartment and its current occupants: a young man and woman in a ball of sexual embrace on the couch. Much of their bodies were still clothed, but when Max saw the white loaves of the man’s ass, he averted his gaze.
Karen stood in the room, hands on her hips, watching them.
“Hey, K,” the woman breathed, muffled by the man’s shoulder.
Karen asked, “Viv, did you get more milk like I asked you to?”
“They were out of one percent, so I got two. Hope it’s”—gasp—”okay.”
Karen went to the fridge, pulled it open. Gratified moaning filled the air.
“One-percent?” Karen barked. “I told you to get soy milk!”
“Oops—oh God yes, yes yes, oh oh oh right there—”
Karen shut the fridge door and motioned for Max to follow her into her bedroom.
He did so, with alacrity.
“They’re having sex,” he whispered.
“Fuckin’ idiot,” Karen hissed, “Can’t remember a single fuckin’ thing I fuckin’ tell her.” She picked up two bras and a pair of panties and tossed them into a bulging hamper.
“What the hell’s going on?” Max asked. “Who are they? Your roommates?”
“Vivian’s my roommate. That’s her boyfriend, or at least this week’s.”
“Does she always just do it right out where anyone could walk in?”
“Pretty much.”
“And the guys don’t care?”
“Nah, they get used to it, with the amount of times she goes at it.” Karen shook her head. “I think she burns through a whole marriage’s worth of sex in like two weeks.”
Karen threw aside more clothes and books, some of which—such as Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols—looked old and beaten. At the end of her search, she lifted something heavy: a photo album.
No family photos inside, however. No trips, no boyfriends, couples, or birthdays. No candid moments. Instead, page after page of aged newspaper cutouts, and a swarm of the same word that held ominous reign over Max’s studio wall.
Missing.
“I collect them too,” Karen said.
Words amassed in Max’s head, lost their identity. He had no idea what to say.
“I’m not as artistic as you,” she said. “But I think we do it for the same reasons.”
“We do?”
“Sure. Because of him. If we look into the world of the missing, maybe we’ll catch a glimpse of him. If we scour articles, publications, flyers, anything, we might stumble upon something. Maybe your artwork is like glorified Have You Seen Me? flyers you hang in galleries and in people’s homes. You want these people found. You want him found.”
“But why do you keep a book full of strangers?” Max asked.
“Same reason, I guess, as you do...to give them a home.”
He didn’t say anything.
“Thing is, I think he’s done this a lot,” Karen continued. “I think he starts families all over the country, maybe even all over the world, and runs. And maybe I’m just hoping to snag the next report of a missing father or husband and bingo, catch him in the act.”
“So if that’s the case,” Max said, “You’ve probably got tons of brothers out there, and, maybe, I have a lot of sisters. Why come to me?”
“Well, for one thing, I think it was your family he left when he started mine.”
“Excuse me?”
“He left when you were, what, seven? In 1970?”
“Yeah, around then....”
“I was born in 1973.”
“Look, I don’t know what to tell you,” Max said. “I’m sorry. I don’t have much more info than you do. And there’s no proof at all that we had the same father.”
“You probably don’t have any more info than I do,” Karen said. “Because I have these.”
Pulling out a drawer full of folders and loose papers, Karen riffled through them. She unearthed a clipped-together stack of papers which she handed to Max. They were drawings. On seeing the first one—a cowboy on a horse, rendered in child-like crayon—his eyes widened.
“I did this,” he said. “It was one of my Lone Ranger drawings.”
He flipped through them all. Some were drawings of friendly-looking monsters, some of Biblical scenes, some of dinosaurs, many of cowboys. Karen had about ten of his childhood drawings. Scrawled proudly on the back of each one, in his mother’s handwriting, was his name, age and the date.
“I haven’t seen these in over twenty years,” Max said. “How did you get them?”
“They were part of my father’s stash, I guess,” Karen said. “Honestly, I’m not sure. According to my mom, he would get occasional letters from California. She once got suspicious and opened one of them and it was one of your drawings.”
Chills through Max’s bones. His hands clammy. He had produced hundreds of drawings in his childhood, ever since his four-year-old hand first picked up a crayon with serious intent, yet throughout the blaze of creativity he’d never kept track of his stuff. It was very possible that, unbeknownst to him, his mother could have snuck some away.
But she didn’t know what happened to dad, either. She had no idea. She claimed he must have done something, that God must have plucked him from their lives because—
—because—
“Your mom,” Karen said. “Was she very religious?”
—baby God is here with us and we need no one else—
Max nodded. “Why?”
“Mine was too. Pentecostal. From the moment I could speak, I couldn’t stand it. Weird, huh? I don’t know what it was. I had an inborn aversion to it. My mom denied I did. I denied I did. I went along with the rigmarole, though, until I just...couldn’t stand it any longer. I remember being scared and hating God for what he’d do to her at church. It freaked me out how she would break down in tears, mumble. She spoke in tongues. I was terrified. It was like a psychosis, I swear.”
Max was quiet.
“I’m sorry about what happened to your mom, by the way,” Karen said. “I don’t think any kid, or anyone, should have to go through that, seeing their whole house, their whole world, collapse like that.”
“The house didn’t collapse,” Max said. “That’s just what I told Mr. Ritter. My mother was murdered by a small band of vagrants that wanted shelter from the storm. I barely escaped.”
“Oh my God....” After a slow, digesting pause she said, “You know I didn’t expect you to fill in any more holes, Max. On our father, I mean. But finding each other is at least something, a step we can share. So I guess it does kind of fill in something.”
“You still haven’t answered—”
“What I’m sort of jealous of,” Karen said. “Well, I don’t know if I’m jealous, really, but....”
“What?”
“It’s just...you got him for seven years. I had him for only three. I’m wondering why he stayed the four extra years with you.”
“Don’t ask me, honestly. We really weren’t that close. Only time he would really pay attention to me was when Mom said something or...” He gestured toward the first red-crayon sketch of the Lone Ranger. “Or when I would draw.”
“Oh....”
“Yeah, that’s one thing he did. He encouraged me to draw, to be creative. I suppose, when you consider what I ended up doing, he’s had a pretty big influence, but it wasn’t really him that made me want to draw. The crayons and pencils and markers were all little escape pods for me. I guess Dad helped me with that.”
“We didn’t have a dad, Max, not really,” Karen said. “We had a father.”
For a few seconds, the only noises were Vivian and her catch-of-the-week reaching new orgasmic heights just beyond the wall.
“Why would my mother send my drawings to you?”
“Wasn’t to me. It was to him. As you just said—he was most interested in your drawings. Maybe he wanted to see how you were growing, progressing. Don’t fucking know.”
Not wanting to add to Karen’s fire, Max just said, “What was your father’s name?”
“Robert Eisenlord. That’s what he said, anyway.” Karen studied Max. “Did you ever paint him?”
He reached into his back pocket and got out his wallet. Opening it up, he let dangle an accordion string of business card-sized prints of his artwork.
“You keep tiny copies of all your pieces in your wallet? That’s amusing.”
“Why?”
“Most people keep pictures of boyfriends or family in there.”
“Well, what family is there to put in here?” Max said. “And I don’t have a boyfriend.”
“Heh, sure. So...what’s your favorite?”
“I don’t know. Am I supposed to have a favorite?”
Karen was silent.
Max scanned the column of pictures. Pointed to one. “There’s him. The one with the sort of alien landscape and the moons. Called it Moon Watch. It’s one of the few paintings I’ve just left in my closet.”
“Never sold it?”
“No, never tried.”
“Why him in this piece? Any reason?”
“Honestly don’t know. I’d lost his picture and couldn’t find it for years. I almost forgot about it, actually. But when I started this piece I didn’t have any faces that inspired me, none that just, you know, punched me.” Max stared at the thumbnail. “Then...I’m sifting through this pile of stuff...I don’t even remember what...probably a bunch of magazines and newspapers ...anyway, it’s just there, this photo I haven’t seen in God-knows-how-many years, staring at me. It was like a mathematician finding that one key answer.”
“You like to do fantasy, huh?”
“That’s the real art to me. Bringing out the things in the cracks. The weird glue holding us and the world together.”
Karen snorted. “Makes sense. He looks younger than my photo, by the way.”
Max shrugged, then collected the accordion string of photos and squished them back into his wallet. “I’m paranoid about something happening to them. That’s why I keep a record in my pocket. I always think someone’s going to break into my place or set it on fire or something. So if that happens I’ll at least have some proof that all my stuff existed.”
Karen asked, “What if someone mugs you?”
“I got back-ups.” Even though he didn’t.
“You look like you could use a drink,” Karen said. “Same here. We got Gray Goose, Crème de menthe, I think Viv’s guy might’ve brought over some beer—”
“I’ve got work in like an hour,” Max said, checking his watch. “And I don’t drink.”
“Well I do. Follow me.”
***
III
James Cannon pulled into the driveway, shut off the engine, and sat in darkness. The kitchen light was on. Dammit. Teresa was always here. She was in there for sure, milling about, washing things. Cooking. Being a girlfriend. Warm-up to the wife. No.
Penelope, what would it be like to fuck you?
The ticking of the cooling engine beat in rhythm with his pulse. He didn’t want to get out of the car. He didn’t want to have to put on a smile and hug and kiss Teresa and relate to her all the shit from the firm, the client with thinly-veiled ties to the Family that he was arguing should not go to jail. Teresa made the food and would expect him—some pathetic pot-luck fashion—to bring conversation to the table.
Minutes rushed into oblivion. James was still. The engine had stopped, leaving behind the lonely dull throb of his pulse. Outside, crickets and their tinny chants. He thought about his exes. How good had they been? Had he even really chosen them? Like Teresa, they seemed more to happen to him, stumble into his lap as dubious natural phenomena.
He picked up the car phone, keeping watch on the window, and dialed his home number. He could hear the phone ring inside and saw Teresa’s shadowy form move from the sink to pick it up.
“Hello?” she said.
“I thought we weren’t going to pick up the phone at my house.”
“Oh! Hi, James. I’m sorry, I just thought it might be you. I was going to call you anyway to make sure about dinner. You’re coming home now, right?”
“Check the driveway, babes.”
The shadowy form came back into view over the kitchen sink and waved at him.
James grinned.
“Come on in already. Dinner’s waiting.”
“Oh.”
“You got my message this morning, didn’t you?” she said. “You didn’t already eat somewhere, did you?”
“No, no, don’t worry. My stomach’s growling. I’m coming in.”
“Great!”
“Oh, and Teresa babe?”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t pick up the phone when I’m not around.”
He hung up.
***
An exquisite feast awaited him: pot roast, mashed potatoes macaroni salad, asparagus. All filling his stomach through his eyes.
