“Vanish? Under what circumstances?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“You mean, like—poof!—suddenly you’re not there?”
“I’m not there.”
“But there’s always a reason, or at least a context. Were you kidnapped? Abducted by aliens? An extraordinary rendition by the C.I.A.? Did you fall down a rabbit hole? Was it amnesia? Vanishing cream? Did you meet someone else? Was there a note? A message on my answering machine saying, ‘ “Goodbye” ’s too good a word, babe, don’t worry, ciao’? Should I show up at the Department of Missing Persons? Or by ‘vanish’ do you mean that all trace of you would be wiped from my memory?”
“Say I met someone else.”
“Well, see, that’s a different question.”
“You don’t have to answer that one. I can see the answer in your eyes. They’re more honest than you are.”
“Where’d you come up with this?”
“I heard it in a movie.”
“What movie? Certainly not ‘The Vanishing.’ ”
“It was a Western.”
“Clint Eastwood? Duke Wayne? Roy Rogers?”
“Kevin Costner.”
“Costner a cowboy? Pauline Kael said in her review of ‘Dances with Wolves’ that Kevin Costner had feathers not only in his hair but in his head.”
“It wasn’t Kevin Costner per se. It was Charley something, the character Kevin Costner plays, who gets asked the question—by Annette Bening.”
“No, it wasn’t Charley something. Characters in American movies are just poor excuses to watch movie stars. Can you remember the name of any of the characters Marilyn Monroe played? They’re all Marilyn Monroe. Charlton Heston isn’t Moses, Moses is Charlton Heston.”
“Answer the question.”
“First, you have to tell me if you want me to answer it as if we’re starring in some movie. If we’re in an Ingmar Bergman film, then the answer’s going to be different than if we’re in something by Paul Verhoeven, say.”
“You’re stalling.”
“Because a question about vanishing is easy to answer in a movie where the good guys always win. I mean, if we were in a Western I reckon I’d say, ‘If you vanished, Ma’am, I’d mount my horse and ride after you to the ends of the earth. I’d ride to the silver mountains of the moon and back, gunning down Injuns and other swarthy Third World desperadoes until I found you again.’ ”
“In other words, you’d make fun of me.”
“I’m making fun of cowboy kitsch, of the Marlboro Man mythos of the genocidal, racist, anti-environmental, Heil Adolph Coors’s right-wing all-American West.”
“No, you’re making fun of me. And you’re wrong, by the way. In the movie, he doesn’t answer anything like that. He doesn’t answer at all right away. He goes off to think about it, like you could have done, and he comes back with the answer.”
“O.K., I give. Tell me the right answer.”
“You want to know, go see the movie.”
He doesn’t see the movie until two years later, after she has vanished. Clearly, by “vanish” she hadn’t meant that she’d be wiped from his memory.
Jack doesn’t remember the title, if he ever knew it, but, one night, unable to concentrate on any book in the house, he Googles “Western Costner Bening,” and finds fifty thousand five hundred entries for a film called “Open Range.” Kevin Costner not only stars in it; he also directed it.
According to the reviews that Jack skims, it’s a movie about the war between free grazers and landowners. The free grazers—Costner as the former gunslinger Charley Waite, and Robert Duvall as Boss Spearman—are the good guys. The evil rancher who controls the law is played by Michael Gambon. Their economic clash is a moral contest: greedy corporate America versus the don’t-fence-me-in values of the Old West. The conflict plays out against what many reviewers agree is a beautifully photographed “iconic vista”—Montana, 1882, a big-sky landscape that makes it look as if there were enough to go around for everyone, especially since the original free-grazing tribes have been decimated. The film was actually shot in Alberta.
Reviews compare “Open Range” to classics like “High Noon.” Amateurs at Amazon rate it a four-star masterpiece. The Cleveland Sun News, where dollar signs, rather than stars, are awarded, agrees: 4 ½ $. It’s a “Hot Pick,” “a paean to the Old West,” for Boo Allen, of the Denton Record-Chronicle, and four and a half stars for Roger Ebert, who praises its defense of the values of a vanishing life style.
The phrase “vanishing life style” catches Jack’s attention. He wonders if vanishing is a motif in the movie, a theme echoed in the love story between Costner and Bening, prompting the odd question: What if I were to vanish?
Other reviews are less enthusiastic. The movie’s panned in the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune. Rolling Stone despises its “insufferable nobility,” and Newsday complains of “the man’s-gotta-do-what-a-man’s-gotta-do excesses” of the script. A couple of reviewers find that it mirrors Bush’s cowboy Presidency, with his bring-it-on war on terror and “Wanted Dead or Alive” rhetoric. It makes a Worst Movies of the Year list: “a Harlequin Romance with a gunfight at the O.K. Corral.”
From the little that Ceil said, Jack had assumed that the movie was a love story, but the reviews mostly agree that Costner’s relationship with Bening seems superfluous. Bening plays Sue Barlow with what is described on Yahoo! UK as “the steely resolve” of “a spinster who has nearly given up on love.” Iggy’s Movie Reviews cautions, “The ties that bind these two lonely folks are . . . flimsy. Unless Sue placed a personal ad seeking a SWM, age 40-50, who loves dogs, cares about friends and has killed before and will kill again, the attraction between the two doesn’t make a lot of sense.”
Jack decides to see for himself. Whatever the answer to the question about vanishing, Ceil must have experienced a shock of recognition at something in the film. Tonight, his missing her has assumed the guise of curiosity, and curiosity is preferable to feeling her absence. It’s late, already after eleven-thirty, but he knows a Blockbuster nearby that’s open until midnight.
The street has vanished, been whited out. He was so absorbed in cyberspace, he hadn’t noticed. It seems to Jack that the snowfall should have a hiss of its own, something other than the swish of tires from the Dunkin’ Donuts-lit cross street at the end of the block. If it were true that Eskimos have a hundred words for snow, there’d be a word meaning snow-that-makes-the-familiar-unrecognizable. Jack can’t tell which of the plastered shapes lining the curb is his Saab. He imagines having to go car by car, brushing off snow to find his, and, when he realizes that he might not make it to Blockbuster in time, the intensity of his disappointment surprises him. Then he spots his car, dim under the only street light that has burned out. Rather than take the time to scrape the windows, he scoops the snow with his bare hands. When the engine turns over, the radio plays. He flicks on the defroster, the wipers, the headlights. It takes only that time for him to recognize the piano version of Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition,” the movement titled “Gnomus,” which is meant to evoke the picture of a nutcracker in the shape of a gnome promenading on deformed legs. Jack practiced this piece for a whole semester in college when he still studied piano. He hasn’t heard “Pictures” in years, and it occurs to him that sometimes one stops listening to a beloved masterpiece in order to continue to love it. Perhaps the pianist now is Sviatoslav Richter, at the legendary live recital. Jack remembers reading that after Richter’s possessed performance the Steinway he’d used had to be junked. He doesn’t wait for the engine to warm.
The snow-paved Blockbuster lot is empty and Jack leaves the car running, wipers swiping, radio broadcasting the movement titled “Catacombae,” which echoes the spectral world beneath the streets of Paris. Ghosts seem to swirl across the deserted streets of Jack’s city as well. He rushes in and a white kid with rusty dreadlocks shoots him a dirty look from behind the counter, before directing him to the Action section. It only now occurs to Jack that the movie might be checked out, and he scans the rack feeling ridiculously frantic. He’s in luck—it’s there next to Steven Seagal’s “On Deadly Ground” and “Once Upon a Time in Mexico.”
“Open Range” in hand, Jack opens the car door onto a blasting heater and the majesty of the final movement, “The Great Gate of Kiev.” With no more reason to hurry, he silences the heater and sits in the idling car, watching his tire tracks be obliterated by the snow gathering as it might in Kiev. The yellow Blockbuster sign subtracts itself from the night. Beneath the blurred street lights, ascending notes and falling flakes create the impression of a gossamer arch spanning Chicago Avenue. Jack slips the Saab into gear and drives slowly toward the gate of snow that retreats before his headlights. It’s a vision more imagined than hallucinated, and it makes Jack think how long it’s been since he was stoned for real. Not since a vacation when Ceil wanted to see what sex would be like on hashish. Instead of smoking it, they mixed it with honey and spices, based on a recipe for a sweetmeat supposedly served by Alice B. Toklas at Gertrude Stein’s soirées. That night ended in an emergency room, Ceil faint, terrified, hallucinating. She later said she’d had an out-of-body experience and seen herself dead. “Keep talking to her,” the doctor had told Jack. “Don’t let her slip away.” It’s not a scene that he wants to recall.
He thinks instead of the first time he heard “Pictures at an Exhibition.” His best friend in high school, Rafael Rio, a self-proclaimed graffiti artist, had stolen a Lincoln so they could drive to Detroit to see the murals that Diego Rivera had done for Edsel Ford. High, joyriding after midnight, they’d cruised onto the Chicago Skyway, the city aglow beneath them. Jack had punched on the tape deck, and when the orchestral version of “Pictures at an Exhibition” blared out they began conducting wildly—not that either of them knew what was playing, but they knew that it was something.
Jack turns off the radio, and makes a left into the Dunkin’ Donuts that has lit the end of his block for the three years he’s lived in the neighborhood. He’s never had the urge to stop there before. Ceil claimed they had good coffee. If he’s going to do something so peculiar as to stay up late watching a film that more than one critic complained was, at a hundred and thirty-five minutes, too long, a coffee is in order. He doesn’t want to drowse off and miss the answer to Bening’s question.
A woman with lapis-lidded sleepy eyes, a gold-studded nostril, and a caste mark that looks like misapplied nail polish glances up expectantly when he enters. Her face appears to be disfigured by a mole on her cheek, but as he approaches the counter Jack realizes that the mole is the microphone of her headset. “The usual?” she asks.
He isn’t sure whether the question is addressed to someone she’s speaking with through the headset or to him. She smiles, waiting for an answer.
“Depends on what’s usual,” Jack says.
In the hygienically bright lighting, the trays of frosted doughnuts look like replicas. He notices a surveillance camera and has a tactile sensation of being filmed. It’s as if he’d stepped into a scene of infinitely repeated takes.
“Sorry, I thought you were someone else,” she says. Her singsong accent would be perfectly in character if she were playing an Indian woman who works nights at a Dunkin’ Donuts. “He always has a small black coffee and a Bavarian Kreme.”
“Good by me,” Jack says. He’s impatient to step back out into the hypnotic night, but the woman takes her time selecting a doughnut, artfully creasing the bag, then fitting with inordinate care the lid on the coffee cup, which reads “America Runs on Dunkin’.”
“Two-eighty-two,” she says, and, when Jack digs into his jeans pocket, she adds, “He always gives me a fiver. Tells me, ‘Keep the change, doughnut girl.’ ”
“Maybe that handsome guy you thought was me will come by later,” Jack says, handing her a five.
“No,” she says. “No cabs tonight.”
“He takes a cab here?”
“Drives a cab. He’s never come in, just goes through drive-through. He always jokes that I’m the most beautiful woman in the doughnut shop.”
“Keep it,” Jack says, and she stuffs the change into a Styrofoam tip cup on the counter. He doesn’t call her doughnut girl. Their conversation feels scripted enough already. It was a mistake to stop here. Not only has the spell of what had come to seem like a quest been broken but a night that had felt spontaneous now seems manufactured. The snow is real, Jack thinks, and the music.
“I told him it was my last night working here,” she says. “I just wanted to say goodbye.”
Ceil was right about the coffee— strong with a hint of licorice—but the cab-driving double, whoever he is, doesn’t share Jack’s taste in doughnuts. Jack crushes the bag with the half-eaten Bavarian Kreme inside and lobs it into a wastebasket. He moves his laptop from the bedroom that serves as an office to an end table in the living room, inserts the DVD, and turns off the only lamp burning in his apartment. He tries to imagine Ceil alone in a dark movie theatre years earlier, gazing at a panoramic screen that properly conveyed the big-sky landscape. Or maybe she saw the film on a little seat-back screen, during a flight from London or Brussels. Back then, if she wasn’t travelling for her work with a human-rights organization, they’d spend every weekend together. It surprises him that he never asked her where she’d seen the movie. He’s watching it now to see it through her eyes.
From its early scenes on, “Open Range” is a love story between cowboys. Driving longhorns before him, a grizzled Robert Duvall gallops across the landscape. One of the cowpokes remarks, “Old Boss sure can cowboy, can’t he?,” and Costner answers, “Yeah, broke the mold after him.” As the reviewers noted, the film’s dialogue is a rehash of other Westerns. Usually, Jack avoids reading reviews beforehand, so as not to ruin any surprises, but there aren’t any surprises in “Open Range,” unless its degree of sentimentality qualifies. Costner’s Charley Waite has a cute mutt that follows him on the trail. Jack knows from the reviews that the dog is marked for death, but he’d have guessed it anyway. It brings to mind “Hondo,” a movie Jack saw as a child, in which Apaches kill John Wayne’s dog, Sam. Jack still remembers the dog’s name. Despite all the people slaughtered in “Hondo,” the only loss Jack really felt was the dog’s. He wonders if a young Kevin Costner felt the same for Sam and never forgot the effect, both the loss and the justification of violence that went with it: clearly such savage dog-killers deserve extermination.
Annette Bening doesn’t appear until partway through the film. When she does, Jack is suddenly, nervously alert. He listens for the question about vanishing to be posed in Bening’s voice rather than in Ceil’s. It’s not a question for the early stages of a relationship, but Jack knows that the film has reached the point when that question, and its answer, must be coming.
In an interview that Jack came across while scanning reviews, Costner mentioned that he thought Bening was “very heroic” for playing her character without makeup. It gives her a mature, sympathetic look that’s fitting for the nurse she plays. Jack imagines that it’s a look Ceil could identify with, as she, too, was heroic about makeup. But, then, Ceil’s face was still unlined, except for a worry wrinkle across her forehead, visible when she wore her blond hair tied back. The corners of her eyes crinkled as if she were squinting against the wind when she smiled. Jack can visualize her pale-blue eyes but not her face. Ceil travelled regularly for work, and early in their relationship, when they didn’t see each other for a couple of weeks, he’d tell her that he’d forgotten what she looked like. She’d pretend to be exasperated that he could forget so easily. He was kidding, but only in part: her face was so lovely to him that he hadn’t yet allowed himself to gaze at her with the full force of recognition. That was true of her nakedness, too; it dazzled him, and he found he could take it in only in glimpses. He wonders now what else he didn’t look at, what else he didn’t see.
Jack doesn’t have a photo of her. On the few occasions that they took pictures, it was Ceil who snapped them. He recalls her fiddling with a new digital camera as they walked out onto a wave-sloshed pier under bleaching blue sky. Ceil stopped before a small fish that looked as if a wave had flipped it onto the pier. Jack thought she was going to photograph it, but she gently slipped the fish back into the water. They’d gone only a step when an Asian man fishing from the pier turned and yelped, “Miss, you throw away my bait!” Ceil was annoyed when Jack laughed, but by the time they reached the end of the pier, where gulls swirled around a man cleaning salmon, they were both laughing. Ceil asked the man’s daughter to take a picture of them. They didn’t know then, smiling for the camera, that later that night, stoned on hashish, they’d end up in the emergency room. Jack asked for a copy of the picture taken on the pier, as he’d also asked for a picture of her for a present on his birthday. Ceil gave him instead an antique letter opener that she said would accrue in value. Ceil collected letter openers, pens, and paperweights, which she traded on eBay.
It was that night, after Jack had talked Ceil through her near-death experience in the E.R., that she told him about a long-distance affair she’d had before they met, with a man named Dom, who sold used Italian cars in upstate New York. The affair had lasted for years—she was vague about when they’d broken it off. Ceil still owned a Fiat Spider she’d bought with Dom at an auction; she said it was accruing value. Dom had photographed her naked so that during phone sex he could summon what she called “non-vanilla” poses—Dom had a thing for women and bottles. Ceil said that spreading for him had been the peak sexual experience of her life. It was as if she’d met a reflection of her own sexuality, a male twin to a secret self she’d always felt was dirty. Dom, she said, had made it clean. She said that their sexual likeness had overrideen all their differences, including his right-wing politics. After she and Dom broke up, Ceil had asked if she could visit him one last time, to watch while he deleted the private porn show he’d directed, but he refused, claiming that it would be too painful for him to see her again. He promised to erase the photos. Still, Ceil wasn’t sure that they weren’t somewhere in cyberspace, posted on one or another of the Web sites Dom frequented.
Listening to her, Jack understood how profoundly in love she’d been with the car salesman, and the authority that the relationship still had in her life. It brought to mind one of their first times in bed, when she’d called him “sir” in a little girl’s voice and then apologized. He wondered, but didn’t ask, what it had taken for her to break it off.
Tonight, he wonders if perhaps Ceil had been sleeping with them both. It would have been easy, given her frequent travel. He wonders if she could have been that devious, if, in fact, he was the catalyst she needed to end her relationship with Dom, if he’d been a player in a romance that she was directing, one he didn’t know he had a part in. After Ceil told him about the photos, Jack had felt uncomfortable having to press her for what was, in her word—or was it Dom’s?—a simple “vanilla” photo, and he never brought it up again.
It’s nearly 3 A.M. Costner and Bening have grown closer despite the lack of chemistry between them. As one reviewer remarked, “If the two of them were any more upstanding, they’d be trees.” Though Bening still hasn’t posed her question, she has revealed to Costner that she “always hoped somebody gentle and caring might come along.” The nurse she plays has up to this point in the film abhorred violence, but when Costner replies, “Men are gonna get killed here today, Sue, and I’m gonna kill them, you understand that?,” she submissively answers, “Yes.” After the climactic shoot-’em-up, modelled on the gunfight at the O.K. Corral, in which the bad guys are wasted, Costner asks her again, “Those killings, they don’t give you pause?”
“I’m not afraid of you, Charley,” she answers. It’s the moment in the film that reviews found least credible, given Bening’s character. But Jack thinks that the film has finally got something right: Afraid? No, she’s turned on, thrilled, ready to brag about her gunslinger. She just wants to get laid.
Jack wonders what Ceil, who regarded George Bush as a war criminal, would have said about Bening’s response. Often the best part of going to a movie together was the time afterward, when they’d stop for a drink and discuss the film. Tonight, Jack has carried on a one-way conversation with Ceil, as if she were watching it beside him. These conversations with her have continued since she vanished. He wishes he could make them stop, but they’re growing more frequent, as if the lengthening of her absence had made the phantom dialogue between them more compulsive.
Costner shyly asks Bening for a kiss. Killing is easy; it’s smooching that’s embarrassing. The film is winding down, the time for asking is running out. But she doesn’t ask. Jack watches as they ride out of town together—Duvall, Costner, Bening—under the big sky. Jack listens for her question. She doesn’t ask it. After all that killing in support of a man’s right to the open range, Duvall says that he’s tired of the open range. He’d like to run a saloon in town, and maybe Costner could be his partner. Costner tells Bening he’ll be back. They exchange happily-ever-after smiles. She turns back toward town, and Costner and Duvall ride off toward the dogies they’ve left on the open range.
Jack watches the credits roll.
He feels confused, then tricked. He has an impulse to replay the whole dull film. Could he have somehow missed the line? He vividly remembers that the conversation with Ceil was predicated on that question about vanishing. He knows that he didn’t make it up. He can’t understand why Ceil would have invented that dialogue, why she would have ascribed it and the answer that supposedly followed to a second-rate movie. There must have been some mistake. Could she have conflated “Open Range” with some other film? He remembers her complaining that she wasn’t sleeping well; she used to wake beside him in the middle of the night from dreams that made her moan but dissolved before she could describe them. Maybe she had dreamed the question. It’s another thing about her that he’ll never understand. He ejects the DVD and logs off.
Are you sure you want to shut down your computer now?
The screen goes wordlessly blue, then blinks off, leaving the apartment lit only by the reflection of the street lights in the falling snow. The blank windowpanes are fogging from the bottom up. He isn’t tired. Ceil was right about the coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts. He tries again to summon her face. If the myth about a hundred words for snow were true, there’d be a word for snow-erasing-its-own-memory. He has an urge to open the window and let the wind and snow blow in. He tugs at the handles, hammers the sash, but the window won’t budge. The cold pane mists with his breath and body heat, and, when he wipes away the steam, his reflection peeps in darkly. He wonders if a person can forget his own face. He wonders if his cabbie look-alike ever showed up for the usual. All the windows but one are dark in the apartment building across the way. Lines he hasn’t thought about for years, from a poem in “Doctor Zhivago,” come to mind:
It snowed and snowed, the whole world
over . . .
A candle burned on the table;
A candle burned.
It doesn’t seem incongruous that the window across the way is lit not by the halo of a candle but by a bluish glow—someone watching television in the middle of the night or working at a computer, perhaps surfing Web sites. What if, in the vastness of cyberspace, whoever is up across the street should encounter an image of Ceil? Is it snowing the world over, even in New York, where the used-car salesman may still be at his computer, filing through a gallery of pictures of old girlfriends, like a collector checking the inventory of his antiquities, assessing the value they’ve accrued, before settling on a photo of Ceil?
Dom wasn’t fond of travel, Ceil told Jack—it was one of their many differences. So every few weeks she’d made the trip to the river town outside the city where he had his dealership. She marvelled aloud about the thousands of miles she had logged over the years to be with him. Between visits, they’d talked on the phone at least once a day. They had broken up over the phone, and she said she’d thought that going to see Dom one last time in person would be the “classy” thing to do. Suppose Dom had allowed that journey.
Jack sees her travelling from Grand Central toward her beloved along a track she knows by heart. This time, Dom isn’t waiting at the station. She takes a cab along a familiar cobbled street, past the candy shop and their breakfast café, past the antique shop where she foraged for letter openers, to a Victorian house, where clothes of hers still hang in the closet of the ornate master bedroom, where on a velvet chair the photographs she asks him to delete were taken. He’s concealed them under the folder name “Bottles.” She expects him to simply delete the files, but he opens them, and there they are, preserved in digital light: Dom—though he’s not visible in the photo, she can see him—and herself, more real there than she feels at this moment, younger, naked, spreading her legs for the man she’s chosen to define her. Remember that afternoon, Ceil? What’s happened to us? We are halves of a whole. You said you knew it from the first time you saw me and had to leave because your body shook. You said I was the man you’d needed all your life to meet. What did you really come here for?
I need to be sure you’ve erased them.
But surely you know I could have hidden files and copies on disks and travel drives.
You wouldn’t lie to my face.
Would you lie to me? Is there someone else? This horseshit about differences—as if they ever mattered to you with your clothes off. You’re most devious to yourself. Do you think you’ll ever be as intimate? If you leave, you’ll always be lying. We’ll be, for each other, an absence, like a phantom limb. You’ll look for me in others and they’ll feel what you’re missing.
Erase them.
Say you love me. Say please.
I’ll always love you. Please.
Please who?
Please, sir.
That’s my girl. So, poof! Look, one gone. I was naked, too, remember? You think erasing a replica will erase reality? Will erase us? Will erase the me in you? Look, this one has always been my favorite. I’ve studied it a thousand times and still get hard. I’m going to close my eyes. You watch and tell me when you’ve disappeared. Like at those auctions you found so exciting: going . . . going . . . gone?
Yes, sir.
Satisfied?
Thank you, sir. Now please erase me from Trash.
“What would you do if I vanished?”
“You mean like—poof!—suddenly you’re not there? So where are you? Lost in the ether? Travelling through time? In cyberspace?”
“It doesn’t matter. Answer the question.”
“O.K., I’ll play. I’d ride to the ends of the earth, to the silver mountains of the moon. Or maybe they’re borax.”
“You think you’d find me there?”
“I’d follow your footprints across borax craters, ford molten rivers that parted like mercury, a starry sky guiding the way. Or on a summer day I’d walk out on a pier whose perspective jutted toward infinity, and when I reached its end, if you weren’t there, over the laughter of gulls I’d call your name, and if you didn’t answer I’d follow the little fish you saved and he’d lead me to you.”
“He’d lead you to nowhere.”
“Then, on a night in winter, I’d pass through the arch of a Great Gate of Snow and on the other side I’d be back in time in the city when it was ours. I’d hail the only cab out late. The cabbie would study me in the rearview, and in the mirror I’d see that his eyes were mine. I wouldn’t have to tell him where to go. We’d drive from lighted corner to lighted corner for nights until I found the most beautiful woman in Dunkin’ Donuts. The coffee’s good here, you’d tell me.”
“They do have good coffee, but I wouldn’t be there.”
“I’d hire a hypnotist who specialized in negotiating the release of alien abductees. I’d search the secret records for all the secret prisons of the C.I.A. I’d wait in long lines at the Department of Missing Persons . . .”
“That’s not the answer.”
“After a while, I’d do nothing but go day by day without you. Sometimes I’d remember something you said, and have another one-way conversation. I’d walk around secretly talking to you, wondering where you were and what you were doing. I’d tell myself that wherever you’d gone I wanted you to be happy.”
“You need to work on a better answer.”
“What was the question again anyway?”
“What would you do if I vanished?”
“But life is never that simple. One doesn’t just vanish. There’s always a why, or at least a context. You suddenly moved away in the middle of the night. Changed your unlisted phone number. Left no forwarding address so that mail was returned and e-mails disappeared into whatever graveyard file they go to. Was it amnesia? An overdose of vanishing cream? Did you meet someone else? Another catalyst? You’re not the suicidal type, thank God, but still . . . or by ‘vanish’ could you really have thought that you’d be erased from my memory?”
“Say I met someone else.”
“Well, see, that’s a different question.”
