Oracle Night Read online

  ‘You don’t understand,’ Grace said. ‘I’m being punished for last night.’

  ‘Punished? What are you talking about?’

  ‘For snapping at you in the cab. I acted like a shit.’

  ‘No you didn’t. And even if you had, I doubt that God takes his revenge on people by giving them the stomach flu.’

  Grace closed her eyes and smiled. ‘You’ve always loved me, haven’t you, Sidney?’

  ‘From the first moment I saw you.’

  ‘Do you know why I married you?’

  ‘No. I’ve never been brave enough to ask.’

  ‘Because I knew you’d never let me down.’

  ‘You bet on the wrong horse, Grace. I’ve been letting you down for almost a year now. First, I drag you through hell by getting sick, and then I throw us into debt with nine hundred unpaid medical bills. Without your job, we’d be out on the street. You’re carrying me on your shoulders, Ms. Tebbetts. I’m a kept man.’

  ‘I’m not talking about money.’

  ‘I know you’re not. But you’re still getting a raw deal.’

  ‘I’m the one who owes you, Sid. More than you know – more than you’ll ever know. As long as you’re not disappointed in me, I can live through anything.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘You don’t have to understand. Just keep on loving me, and everything will take care of itself.’

  It was the second bewildering conversation we’d had in the past eighteen hours. Once again, Grace had been hinting at something she refused to name, some kind of inner turmoil that seemed to be dogging her conscience, and it left me at a loss, groping dumbly to figure out what was going on. And yet how tender she was that evening, how glad to accept my small ministrations, how happy to have me sit beside her on the bed. After all we’d been through together in the past year, after all her steadfastness and composure during my long illness, it seemed impossible that she could ever do anything that would disappoint me. And even if she did, I was foolish enough and loyal enough not to care. I wanted to stay married to her for the rest of my life, and if Grace had slipped at some point or done something she wasn’t proud of, what difference could that make in the long run? It wasn’t my job to judge her. I was her husband, not a lieutenant in the moral police, and I meant to stand by her no matter what. Just keep on loving me. Those were simple instructions, and unless she decided to cancel them at some future date, I intended to obey her wishes until the very end.

  She fell asleep a little before six-thirty. As I tiptoed out of the room and headed toward the kitchen for another glass of water, I realized that I was glad Lily had scrapped her plan to spend the night and had caught an early train back to New Haven. It wasn’t that I disliked Grace’s younger cousin – in fact, I liked her very much, and enjoyed listening to her Virginia accent, which was a good deal thicker than Grace’s – but having to make conversation with her all evening while Grace slept in the bedroom was a bit more than I could have coped with. I hadn’t imagined I would be able to work again after they returned from Manhattan, but now that dinner was off, there was nothing to stop me from jumping back into the blue notebook. It was still early; Grace was tucked in for the night; and after my mini-meal of sardines and crackers, my hunger had been satisfied. So I walked down to the end of the hall again, took my place at my desk, and opened the notebook for the second time that day. Without once standing up from the chair, I worked steadily until three-thirty in the morning.

  Time has passed. On the following Monday, seven days after Bowen’s disappearance, his wife receives the final bill for the canceled American Express card. Scanning the list of charges, she comes to the last one at the bottom of the page – for the Delta Airlines flight to Kansas City the previous Monday – and suddenly understands that Nick is alive, that he must be alive. But why Kansas City? She struggles to imagine why her husband would have flown off to a place where he has no connections (no relatives, no authors in his stable of writers, no friends from the past) but can’t think of a single possible motive. At the same time, she also begins to doubt her hypothesis concerning Rosa Leightman. The girl lives in New York, and if Nick has indeed run off with her, why on earth would he take her to the Midwest? Unless Rosa Leightman is originally from Kansas City, of course, but that strikes Eva as farfetched, the longest of long-shot solutions.

  She has no theories, no guesswork narratives to rely on anymore, and the anger that has been roiling inside her for the past week gradually dissipates, then vanishes altogether. From the emptiness and confusion that follow, a new emotion emerges to fill her thoughts: hope, or something akin to hope. Nick is alive, and considering that the credit card statement records the purchase of only one ticket, there’s a good chance that he is alone. Eva calls the Kansas City Police Department and asks for the Bureau of Missing Persons, but the sergeant who picks up the phone is less than helpful. Husbands disappear every day, he says, and unless there’s evidence of a crime, there’s nothing the police can do. Close to despair, finally giving vent to the strain and misery that have been mounting in her over past days, Eva tells the sergeant he’s a coldhearted son-of-a-bitch and hangs up. She’ll catch a plane for Kansas City, she decides, and start looking for Nick herself. Too agitated to sit still anymore, she decides to leave that very night.

  She calls her answering machine at work, giving elaborate instructions to her secretary about the upcoming business of that week, then explains that she has an urgent family matter to attend to. She’ll be out of town for a while, she says, but will stay in touch by phone. Until now, she has told no one about Nick’s disappearance except for the New York police, who have been unable to do anything for her. But she has kept her friends and co-workers in the dark, refusing even to mention it to her parents, and when Nick’s office began calling on Tuesday to find out where he was, she fended them off by saying he’d come down with an intestinal virus and was stretched out flat in bed. By the next Monday, when he should have been thoroughly recovered and back at work, she told them he was much improved, but his mother had been rushed to the hospital over the weekend after a bad fall, and he’d flown up to Boston to be with her. These lies were a form of self-protection, motivated by embarrassment, humiliation, and fear. What kind of wife was she if she couldn’t account for her husband’s whereabouts? The truth was a swamp of uncertainty, and the idea of confessing to anyone that Nick had deserted her did not even enter her mind.

  Armed with several recent snapshots of Nick, she packs a small suitcase and heads for La Guardia, having called ahead to reserve a seat on the nine-thirty flight. When she lands in Kansas City several hours later, she finds a taxi and asks the driver to recommend a hotel, repeating almost word for word the same question her husband asked Ed Victory the previous Monday. The only difference is that she uses the word good instead of best, but for all the nuances of that distinction, the driver’s response is identical. He takes her to the Hyatt, and little realizing that she’s following in her husband’s footsteps, Eva checks in at the front desk, asking for a single room. She isn’t someone to throw away money and indulge in expensive suites, but her room is nevertheless on the tenth floor, just down the hall from where Nick stayed for the first two nights after he arrived in town. Except for the fact that her room is a mere fraction of a degree to the south of his, she has the same view of the city he had: the same expanse of buildings, the same network of roads, and the same sky of suspended clouds that he catalogued for Rosa Leightman as he stood by the window and talked into her answering machine before skipping out on the bill and leaving the place for good.

  Eva sleeps badly in the unfamiliar bed, her throat dry, waking three or four times during the night to visit the bathroom, to drink another glass of water, to stare at the bright red numerals on the digital alarm clock and listen to the hum of fans whirring in the ceiling vents. She dozes off at five, sleeps uninterruptedly for about three hours, and then orders a room-service breakfast. At quarter past nine, already s
howered, dressed, and fortified with a full pot of black coffee, she rides the elevator to the ground floor to begin her search. All of Eva’s hopes revolve around the photographs she’s carrying in her bag. She will walk around the city and show Nick’s picture to as many people as she can, beginning with hotels and restaurants, then stores and food markets, then taxi companies, office buildings, and God knows where else, praying that someone will recognize him and offer a lead. If nothing materializes after the first day, she will have copies made of one of the snapshots and plaster them all over town – on walls, lampposts, and telephone booths – and publish the picture in the Kansas City Star, along with any other papers that circulate in the region. Even as she stands in the elevator on her way down to the lobby, she imagines the text that will accompany the handbill. MISSING. Or: HAVE YOU SEEN THIS MAN? Followed by Nick’s name, age, height, weight, and hair color. Then a contact number and the promise of a reward. She is still trying to figure out how much the amount should be when the elevator doors open. One thousand dollars? Five thousand dollars? Ten thousand dollars? If these stratagems fail, she tells herself, she will move on to the next step and engage the services of a private detective. Not just some ex-cop with an investigator’s license, but an expert, a man who specializes in hunting down the vanished, the evaporated beings of the world.

  Three minutes after Eva enters the lobby, something miraculous happens. She shows Nick’s picture to the desk clerk on duty, and the young woman with the blond hair and gleaming white teeth makes a positive identification. This leads to a search through the records, and even at the sluggish pace of 1982 computers, it doesn’t take long to confirm that Nick Bowen was registered at the hotel, spent two nights there, and disappeared without bothering to check out. They had a credit card imprint on file, but after running the number through the American Express system, the card proved to be invalid. Eva asks to see the manager in order to settle Nick’s bill, and once she’s sitting in the office, handing him her own newly validated card to cover the delinquent fees, she begins to cry, breaking down in earnest for the first time since her husband went missing. Mr. Lloyd Sharkey is discomfited by this outpouring of feminine anguish, but with the smooth and unctuous manner of a veteran service professional, he offers Mrs. Bowen whatever assistance he can provide her. Several minutes later, Eva is back on the tenth floor, talking to the Mexican chambermaid responsible for cleaning room 1046. The woman informs her that the DO NOT DISTURB sign was hanging on the doorknob outside Nick’s room for the entire length of his stay and she never saw him. Ten minutes after that, Eva is downstairs in the kitchen talking to Leroy Washington, the room-service waiter who served Nick some of his meals. He recognizes Eva’s husband from the photo and adds that Mr. Bowen was a generous tipper, although he didn’t say much and seemed ‘preoccupied’ by something. Eva asks if Nick was alone or with a woman. Alone, says Washington. Unless there was a lady hiding in the bathroom or the closet, he continues, but the meals were always for one person, and as far as he could tell, only one side of the bed was ever slept in.

  Now that she’s paid his hotel bill, and now that she’s nearly certain he hasn’t run off with another woman, Eva begins to feel like a wife again, a full-fledged wife battling to find her husband and save her marriage. No more information comes from the interviews she conducts with other members of the Hyatt Regency staff. She can’t begin to guess where Nick might have gone after leaving the hotel, and yet she feels encouraged, as if knowing he was here, in the same place where she is now, can be construed as a sign that he isn’t far away – even if it’s no more than a suggestive overlap, a spatial congruency that means nothing.

  Once she steps out onto the street, however, the hopelessness of her situation comes crashing down on her again. For the fact remains that Nick left without a word – left her, left his job, left everything in New York behind him – and the only explanation she can think of now is that he’s cracking up, in the throes of some violent nervous collapse. Has living with her made him that miserable? Is she the one who’s driven him to take such a drastic step, who’s pushed him to the point of desperation? Yes, she tells herself, she’s probably done that to him. And to make matters worse, he’s penniless. A miserable, half-mad soul wandering around a strange city without a penny in his pocket. And that’s her fault too, she tells herself, the whole wretched business is her fault.

  That same morning, as Eva begins her futile rounds of inquiry, going in and out of restaurants and shops in downtown Kansas City, Rosa Leightman flies home to New York. She unlocks the door of her apartment in Chelsea at one o’clock, and the first thing she sees is Eva’s note lying on the threshold. Caught off guard, perplexed by the urgent tone of the message, she drops her bag without bothering to unpack and immediately calls the first of the two numbers listed at the bottom of the note. No one answers at the Barrow Street apartment, but she leaves a message on the machine, explaining that she’s been out of town and can now be reached at her home number. Then she calls Eva’s office. The secretary tells her that Mrs. Bowen is away on business, but she’s due to call in later that afternoon, and when she does, the message will be passed on to her. Rosa is mystified. She has met Nick Bowen only once and knows nothing about him. The conversation in his office went extremely well, she thought, and even though she sensed that he was attracted to her (she could see it in his eyes, feel it in the way he kept looking at her), his manner was reserved and gentlemanly, even a trifle distant. A man more lost than aggressive, she remembers, with an unmistakable tinge of sadness hovering about him. Married, she now realizes, and therefore out of bounds, disqualified from consideration. But touching somehow, a sympathetic sort with kind instincts.

  She unpacks her bag and looks through her mail before listening to the messages on her answering machine. It’s close to two by then, and the first thing that comes on is Bowen’s voice, declaring his love for her and asking her to join him in Kansas City. Rosa stands stock-still, listening in awed confusion. She is so rattled by what Nick is saying to her that she has to back up the tape to the end of the message two more times before she can be certain she’s written down Ed Victory’s number correctly – notwithstanding the diminuendo of evenly descending figures, which makes the number all but impossible to forget. She is tempted to stop the answering machine and call Kansas City right away, but then decides to spool through the fourteen other messages to see if Nick has called again. He has. On Friday, and again on Sunday. ‘I hope you weren’t scared off by what I said the other day,’ the second message begins, ‘but I meant every word of it. I can’t get rid of you. You’re in my thoughts all the time, and while you seem to be telling me you aren’t interested – what else can your silence mean? – I’d appreciate it if you’d give me a call. If nothing else, we can talk about your grandmother’s book. Use Ed’s number, the one I gave you before: 816-765-4321. By the way, those numbers aren’t random. Ed asked for them on purpose. He says they’re a metaphor – of what I don’t know. I think he wants me to figure it out for myself.’ The last message is the shortest of the three, and by then Nick has all but given up on her. ‘It’s me,’ he says, ‘giving it one last try. Please call, even if it’s only to tell me you don’t want to talk.’

  Rosa dials Ed Victory’s number, but no one picks up on the other end, and after letting the phone ring more than a dozen times, she concludes that it’s an old device, with no answering machine attached to it. Without taking the time to examine what she feels (she doesn’t know what she feels), Rosa hangs up the phone convinced that she has a moral obligation to contact Bowen – and that it must be done as quickly as possible. She thinks of sending a telegram, but when she calls directory assistance in Kansas City and asks for Ed’s address, the operator tells her his number is unlisted, which means she isn’t allowed to give out that information. Rosa then tries Eva’s office again, hoping that Nick’s wife has called in by now, but the secretary tells her there’s been no news. As it happens, Eva is so swept up in her
Kansas City drama that she will forget to call her office for several days, and by the time she does contact the secretary, Rosa herself will be gone, on her way to Kansas City by Greyhound bus. Why does she go? Because, over the course of those several days, she has called Ed Victory close to a hundred times, and no one has answered the phone. Because, in the absence of any further communication from Nick, she has talked herself into believing that he’s in trouble – perhaps serious, life-threatening trouble. Because she is young and adventurous and currently unemployed (in between jobs as a freelance illustrator) and perhaps – one can only speculate about this – because she is enamored with the idea that a man she barely knows has openly confessed that he can’t stop thinking about her, that she has made a man fall in love with her at first sight.

  Backing up to the previous Wednesday, to the afternoon when Bowen climbed the steps of Ed’s boardinghouse and was offered the job of helper in the Bureau of Historical Preservation, I then resumed the chronicle of my latter-day Flitcraft….

  Ed buttons up his trousers, stubs out his half-smoked Pall Mall, and leads Nick down the stairs. They walk out into the chill of the early spring afternoon and keep on going for nine or ten blocks, turning left, turning right, slowly wending their way through a network of dilapidated streets until they come to an abandoned stockyard near the river, the liquid boundary that separates the Missouri side of the city from the Kansas side. They continue walking until the water is directly in front of them, with no more buildings in sight and nothing else ahead but half a dozen sets of train tracks, which all run parallel to one another and no longer seem to be in service, given the oxidized condition of the rails and the numerous broken and splintered ties heaped about the surrounding gravel and dirt. A strong wind is blowing off the river as the two men step over the first set of rails, and Nick can’t help thinking about the wind that was blowing through the streets of New York on Monday night, just before the gargoyle fell from the building and nearly crushed him to death. Wheezing from the exertion of their long walk, Ed suddenly stops as they cross the third set of rails and points to the ground. A weatherworn, unpainted square of wood is embedded in the gravel, a kind of hatch or trapdoor, and it blends in so unobtrusively with the environment that Nick doubts he would have spotted it on his own. Please be kind enough to lift that thing off the ground and put it to the side, Ed asks him. I’d do it myself, but I’ve grown so portly these days, I don’t think I can bend down anymore without falling over.