The Missing Person Read online

  “Does he know you, Miss Fuller?” Demp asked.

  “No. But I come here now and then. I have a lot of places I go to now and then around here. It takes days to go to all of them.”

  “Why? Why do you do it? Go to these places like this, I mean.”

  “They’re dark. And everyone in these places is alone and down. Like me. Here it’s dark and I’m alone and down, so I feel at home here in bad times.”

  “But where do you sleep?”

  “In one place or another. A little bit at a time. I go home when I’m dead, really dead tired, and sleep for three days, almost. Everything is better for a while, until I go down again. Then I come back.”

  “Are you ready to go home now?”

  Franny Fuller looked at him, her face streaked with beer, weariness, and despair.

  “I’ll walk you home if you’re ready to go,” Demp said. He took her damp hand. She let him lead her out of the bar. She pointed down a street. The walk seemed interminable to him. Twice they sat down to rest on stone walls. The hills grew steeper, the houses farther apart, and then disappeared entirely, invisible behind high hedges.

  “Where are we?”

  “Beverly Hills. I live up here.”

  “Is it much farther?”

  It was. When they arrived at a stopping place, it was four-thirty in the morning. The first faint signs of a break in the black of the night could be seen behind the roof of her house. The walk in through the gate and toward the house seemed very long to Demp who was now tired. Franny Fuller, her head sunk forward, had to be pushed along.

  No one came to the door when Demp used the heavy knocker. He looked questioningly at Franny Fuller whose exhausted eyes were almost shut. She reached out and turned the knob. The door opened.

  “Holy cow. Don’t you lock this place?”

  “Lost the key,” she whispered.

  They came into an entry hall as large and round as a ballroom, Demp thought. He followed her to its end, then into a huge living room in which every lamp was lit. Franny stared into it as though she had never seen it before, turned and walked on, down a hall lined on both sides with black-framed glossy stills from her pictures. She stopped before a half-opened door, pushed it open and went in. Demp followed her.

  Suddenly he couldn’t see her and, utterly confused, he stepped backward to the entrance of the room to find a light switch. He snapped it on. In the sudden flare of light he saw a bedroom almost as big as the living room. At one end was a broad, fur-covered white bed and white bearskin rugs everywhere. The room seemed to be without windows. Or, if they were there, they were covered by some kind of white silky drapery which hung from ceiling to floor on every inch of the walls.

  “Wow,” he said. “This is some swanky place.” Franny Fuller had almost disappeared into the depths of a white chaise longue, her drab clothes and filthy boots the only color in the thirty-six-foot square of white the room contained. Demp knelt down beside her and pulled off her boots, holding her ankles gently as he tugged. Her legs were limp, she wore no socks, and her feet were very dirty.

  She seemed to be asleep. He shook her and she stirred. “Do you have a maid, or something?”

  “What for?” she asked without opening her eyes.

  “You know. To help you undress. And you need a bath.”

  She opened her eyes. “No bath,” she said. She pulled her feet under her, lay down, and seemed to fall asleep at once.

  Demp gave up. He pulled the fur spread from the bed. It turned out to be twice as big as he thought, and he had some trouble folding it neatly, the way his mother always had done when she put blankets away for the summer. He put it over her, snapped out the light, and closed the door. After two wrong turns he found the living room again, took off his shoes, put out all the lights, and lay down on one of the room’s three couches, the one nearest the door.

  Afterward he couldn’t remember why he hadn’t left. He doubted she would remember him when she woke. She seemed to be in some sort of daze, from beer, from exhaustion, terror: he could not make out the cause. But something in her look when she did focus on him, the grime that covered her face, her hands, her feet, her need to be cared for, watched over, until she woke, and the absence of anyone around who might do these things for her, compelled him to stay.

  Tired as he was, he found he could not sleep in that enormous room. His bladder was bursting, and he was worried about not having a toothbrush and a razor in the morning. He thought about missing a night’s sleep and what it would do to his weight. He knew he would not be in shape for the long drive north tomorrow. He would miss the practice scheduled for the next day.

  He must have dozed off. It was midmorning when he woke, oppressed by the silence and worried about getting back. The place gave him the hollow feeling of a funeral-parlor reception room. Shoes in hand, he walked through two halls until he found a bathroom. He urinated, stripped, showered, and, finding no razor in the cabinet, powdered his face and neck with a feminine-smelling talcum he found near the tub.

  He went in search of the room in which he had left Franny Fuller, and found her, still on the chaise longue, in the same position as when she had fallen asleep. When he pulled the drapes open, she raised her arms over her face as if to exclude the light. Outside a great park of grass and trees stretched out in every direction.

  Somewhere in the vast house he heard a telephone ring, muted and dull. He had no idea where it was so he made no move to answer it. On and on it rang, as though the caller expected Franny Fuller to put off answering it until the very last minute. Finally it stopped.

  Dempsey moved a white stool and sat beside her. He pulled her arms gently away from her face and began to unbutton her stiff jacket.

  “Miss Fuller,” he said, the awe in his voice making it sound hoarse, unlike the way he was used to hearing himself.

  But she was asleep and he could not wake her. She seemed without life, her body weighed down with an unconsciousness so profound that her muscles locked against his attempts to stir her. He felt helpless in the presence of such stillness. He was a man to whom being alive meant motion: even as he waited on the bench to be sent in to play he stood up often, shifting from one foot to the other, his hands moving, his arms wrapping themselves around himself, jogging in place, throwing an invisible football to a nonexistent receiver.

  When he could not wake her, he substituted a chair for the stool and sat beside her, watching her sleep. For two hours the only sound in the room was the creaking of his small chair, inadequate to the restless switching of his weight on it.

  At noon she was still sleeping. Demp knew if he was not back in Hollywood by three he would miss his ride. He tried once more to wake her. He knelt down beside the chaise and carefully, as though he was handling his mother’s best company china, lifted her head. In the presence of her beauty under the dirt, the remains of beer and tears, her crusted eyelids blue with make-up, and the yellow-silk hair that fell everywhere beside her face, he found it hard to breathe. She was the culmination of all the women he had ever looked at with longing, the women whose pictures, in seductive poses, had formed his daydreams and, oddly, at the same time, she was the frail, fading mother he had seen for the last time, unable to be roused by his love, in her coffin in Prairie City.

  His chest ached with longing, with love, as he looked at the sleeping actress. A fantasy took possession of him. The Beautiful Girl was lost, inexplicably deserted and in some nameless trouble, and he had found her and carried her to an enchanted white castle. By virtue of all these things, she was, by the rules of fairy legend and sport, his. He could not explain this new certainty that possessed him but, working over her to remove her foul clothes, he knew that his new love, born last night in back of the Mexican bar, could not be thrown off. He would have to stay with it at all costs. It was no longer possible to escape.

  Pouring her from one side of the chaise longue to the other, he managed to remove her jacket and pants. She wore nothing underneath. Aghas
t, he pulled the fur spread over her, at the same time wanting to look again, excited, and yet feeling there was something unsportsmanlike about taking advantage of her as she now was. He stayed in the bedroom all afternoon while she slept, moaning now and then in her sleep and then, as evening came on, beginning to talk incoherently. He heard the telephone ring again and again, more insistently, he felt, at every call. He knew he was already in trouble, not having started back with the others. He could imagine the coach’s furious outbursts reproduced on the sports page. With his mind’s eye, he read the story of his defection, and he estimated the size of his fine. But still he sat there, looking at her, loving her.

  Finally he got up. By now it was five and beginning to be dark. He closed the drapes, left the room, and found the kitchen. There were yards of cupboards. He opened them all: they were almost empty. In one he found four boxes of zwieback. In the refrigerator, which was twice as large as any he had ever seen before and painted yellow to match the rest of the kitchen, he found five milk bottles filled with grape juice, and nothing else. A wave of cold air swept out of the box as he removed one bottle and quickly shut the door: he shivered. He took two glasses from a cupboard and a box of zwieback, piled everything on a tray, and took it back with him to the bedroom, not wanting to leave her alone long enough for him to eat in the kitchen. By nine o’clock he had been back to the kitchen twice, all the zwieback but a few at the bottom of the last box was gone, and he was light-headed and somewhat sick from the juice. After the first mouthful he had realized that it was heavily laced with gin.

  At midnight she woke up. He had been asleep himself after all the grape-juice gin, the lights blazing, his chin on his chest. At her first stirring he sat up and waited. There was no doubt about it; she had taken possession of him. He felt her presence in his breast, in his loins, behind his eyes. She was no longer separate, independent flesh but part of him, living on his breathing and kept alive by the furious beating of his heart. Awake now, she looked at him for a long time, unblinking, as though she was not seeing him with her wide-open, bright-blue eyes and yet had no desire to look away at anything else.

  “Have you been here for a long time?”

  “I have,” he said.

  “How long? I mean, how long have I been here?”

  “Since late last night. Do you remember walking home?”

  “Some. I remember you in the bar, with that cropped hair and shining face. What are you, a soldier?”

  “A quarterback.”

  “A what?”

  “Quarterback. I play football. You know, for the Mavericks. In San Francisco.”

  “The Mavericks,” she repeated, giving the words an odd, flat, prehistoric sound. Then she said, “What are you doing here?”

  “Waiting for you to wake up, mostly.”

  She laughed. It was the first time he had seen her face that way, the famous, classic view, her dimple cutting deep into her cheek, her eyes lit by a pinpoint of blue fire that burned so bright it was beyond his understanding. What was that queer light? She pushed her hair back with both hands, holding them to her head and smiling at Demp, the pose he remembered from posters outside theaters in San Francisco showing her films and from the covers of movie magazines in hotel lobbies. It was unbelievable to him that she was here, the fur spread falling from her splendid breasts, unbathed, streaks of beer still on her face, with Dempsey Butts of Prairie City, Iowa, and the Mavericks.

  “What’s your name?” she asked, and stood up, leaving the spread on the chaise longue. She walked away from it toward a door at the side. Her body was a long, golden line of firm, beautiful flesh. Demp stared at her as she pulled the cord that moved draperies away from the windows. He could see a trickle of water running past the window into a black pool.

  “Demp. Dempsey Butts.” He spoke almost through clenched teeth, aghast at her unconcern about her beautiful nakedness, and then at the harsh, unpoetic sound of his name. Never before had he noticed how ugly it was.

  “Hi, Dempsey.”

  “Demp.”

  “Oh. Yes. Demp. Hi, Demp.” Then she asked:

  “You know my name?”

  He laughed.

  “I guessed,” he said. “Isn’t it Franny Fuller?”

  “Now it is,” she said and laughed again, her throaty, choked-off laugh. “My name’s really Fanny. Can you feature that?”

  He laughed with her, sat down on the bear rug, and looked up at her.

  “Oh, Fanny. Franny. You’re a very sad girl, aren’t you?”

  She stared down at him. “Not a beautiful girl, Demp? Sad, not beautiful? That’s a new one on me.”

  “I mean sad … and dirty. You need a bath something fierce, and some clean clothes. And you cry, and sleep all the time, and leave this palace for crummy joints down there and dress like a bum and don’t seem to care—what you have, what you are.”

  “Demp, you’re a chump. I know what I have. But what use is it? I’m afraid all the time. Of everything. Of being found out for what I am, whatever that is. I don’t know. Did you ever see that postcard of me?”

  Demp admitted, blushing, that he had. Back at training camp one of the boys had three of them inside the door of his locker.

  “Well, I’ll tell you a funny thing. Everybody thinks I minded that picture of me in the nothing on those cards everybody bought. Mary Maguire in her column said I hated them. You know something, Demp? I didn’t. It was printed at a time like this, when I thought I’d lost myself and maybe my mind. But when I saw it, all that curvy pink flesh of mine, it was reassuring. That was what I was, who I was, and it was good to know about it. To see it.”

  “Why don’t you take a bath and get dressed, Franny, and then we’ll go find something to eat?”

  “What time is it?”

  “About one, I think.”

  “In the morning?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll go pee, and get some clothes, and then we can find a place.”

  “Franny, don’t you like being clean?”

  She seemed to be considering the question gravely.

  “No, not really.”

  “Okay, then. Get dressed.”

  But it never got to that. Franny came out of the bathroom and said she wanted to stretch out on her bed for just a minute, to rest, “and then we’ll go.” Demp lay down beside her because he could no longer keep a distance from her after all those hours of wanting her and waiting for her to wake up, and loving her.

  She turned her bare, lovely body toward him, and he made love to her in a tender, almost boyish fashion. She lay still and let him do what he wished. He moved gently, even quietly, afraid of frightening her or hurting her, feeling instinctively that she could be hurt, or frightened, during this act. She watched him, listening to the rising sounds of his delight in her. When he was finished and had pulled away, she rolled over on her side so she could see him better. Now he lay still, his eyes half-shut, his legs sprawled and loose, used up and astonished at what he had just been permitted to do. Demp Butts, with her, my God.…

  A few minutes later he had recovered. He sat up to look at her, his round eyes and narrow, sunburned face just above hers, breathing in the acrid smell of her body and the remains of his semen.

  “Don’t leave me, Demp,” she said. Her bright eyes were opened wide. “I don’t care what you do, but don’t leave me alone.”

  “Only until I can square things with the team,” he said. “Then I’ll be back. Nothing could keep me away. But I’ve got a contract. I’ve got to let them know where I am. Then I’ll be back.”

  “Tonight, Demp. Not tonight.” Her voice was high and thin. He could not bring himself to say, the sooner the better for him.

  He stayed the rest of the night and the next day and then the next and the next. They lived together in the bedroom as though it was the only room in the house. The room began to feel like a sheltering hut in the forest. They finished the grape juice which by now was half gin because Franny kept saying it ne
eded to be watered down. Then Demp went out, using her white Cadillac, and bought food and cooked it for them. She ate very little of it, but he finished everything he had cooked. She drank the new bottles of grape juice and chewed childishly on the replenished zwieback for which she seemed to have a craving and ate some of a quart of ice cream, covered with chocolate sauce he had found in the cupboard. She would not touch the steak or canned vegetables or broiled tomatoes he had fixed.

  “Don’t you ever eat anything but those dog biscuits and ice cream?” he asked at the end of the fourth day. By now time had stopped dividing itself into days and nights, into mealtimes and times to sleep. The draperies permanently drawn, life had become continuous, slowed down only by the short naps she took. But she insisted he stay awake while she slept so he lost even his customary sense of mutuality with the rest of the human race. For long periods he thought he was the only person awake in the world and then, when he slept, the only one sleeping. The act of eating meals was uniquely his, too.

  Her gratitude to him for his presence was profound. Like children, they set up a ritual in which he played the nurse and she the patient. They played house in the bedroom and bathrooms. They made love or rather, he made love to her. She seemed to permit him entry into her only to guarantee his continued presence, but she took no active part in the ceremony.

  Finally he persuaded her to take a shower with him. Afterward he dried her with a huge towel as she sat immobile on a fur-covered stool, her eyes half-shut. He chose a robe from a walk-in closet crammed with clothes, and she put it on. He brushed her hair, fed her with small bits of food when she would not make the effort to eat herself, and then made her lie down when he wanted to make love to her. After each act of love she rewarded him with her charming, warming smile, and a touch, a brush of her fingers to his cheek. Except during the sexual act she never came closer to him of her own accord than to touch him, momentarily, with her fingers. When she permitted him to, he slept.

  He noticed the ends of her fingers—blunt and red; she bit her nails until they disappeared into the angry flesh at the tip of her fingers. He wondered aloud at this. She told him it did not matter. The make-up people pasted false ones on if they needed to photograph her hands. Or they used someone else’s unbitten fingers for close-ups.