Lightning People (24 page)

Joseph heard a phone ringing in the room next door. Inexplicably, they both waited in silence until the caller gave up. Aleksandra shifted on the mattress, and her hip nudged against him.

“I'd think places like that would make you feel worse,” he said.

“Worse, better. I wasn't trying to get better. I was trying to think. I just stopped trying to pay attention to Aleksandra Andrews, the poor useless widow who had lost her world. I even stopped looking at myself in the mirror every morning. Isn't it interesting how you stare at the same face every day for your entire life? I often think about how each person I pass on the street must have spent months of their lives when you add it up studying their face in the mirror, getting to know every bone, every line, specialists of such a small circle of skin. You keep looking at your face like it's going to tell you something about yourself, reveal some fact about who you are that your brain hasn't managed to figure out. I think when you live so long with another person, you don't really know who you are anymore without them. It's not just you minus them. It's as if they've cancelled a whole other part out, a part you assumed was yours but wasn't. I figured those dark, tiny hotel rooms two-thousand miles from Los Angeles were as good a place as any to avoid looking at myself.”

She placed the photographs in Joseph's hand, and any doubts as to why she had first asked him to come were erased. He flipped through the stack slowly, careful not to crease the paper. In one picture Aleksandra had her arms around her husband's neck, both of them smiling with wind-burnt cheeks on a dark California beach. In another they stood blazed by the candles of a birthday cake in a dining room. In another, Ray wore a black suit at a banquet table surrounded by other businessmen. Joseph stared at the face of her husband, his light brown hair peppered with gray, his sagging chin dipping from a strong jawline, his thin, almost effeminate nose webbed in blood vessels. He was a handsome man slightly ravaged by the first fissures of old age, while his wife, younger and healthier in the gold softness of western light, skirted around him with her eyes on the camera, as if she understood the instant these shots were taken that each captured moment would later be memorized and missed.

Joseph tried to remember his own father, a man whom he also
looked so much like. Joseph had seen pictures of him in his twenties and early thirties, bounding through forests and rooms in dirty workman's clothes wearing a blameless, easy grin. At thirty-three, Joseph had turned into the man arrested in those Guiteau family photographs. But his father had never passed through his thirties to allow age to invade his face. Joseph couldn't picture what the years would have done to him. If his father had grown old, maybe Joseph could also have imagined how he himself would age, how his features would be recast into the hard, brittle circuitry of his forties and fifties. He couldn't, and perhaps that was because he wasn't sure he would live to see those years. There would only be Joseph Guiteau, suspended forever in his early thirties, brushing his teeth in a toothpaste commercial, the mile marker before the explosion just beyond.

Joseph let out a sigh, which Aleksandra mistook for sympathy. She nodded her head and placed her hand on his shoulder, sliding her palm down his spine.

“He's much older than you are here, by twenty years I'd say. But he could have passed for you when he was young. He probably looks more like your father when these were taken.”

“My father died of a heart attack at thirty-four,” he said quickly. “It runs in the family.” That was already more than he had ever told Del and it surprised him how easily this information left his mouth. Aleksandra rubbed his back in consolation. Her fingers softened to the tips of her nails, as if she were afraid to upset him with any more than the faintest point of contact. He and Aleksandra were mourning for different men but staring at the same picture. He dropped the stack of photos in her lap, and she returned them to the dress box.

 

IN THE GRAY evening light of the bedroom, Aleksandra told him about survival tactics.

She told him about knives hidden in mattresses or under pillows of hotel rooms. She told him that when she first moved to Los Angeles at twenty, she had slept next to a kitchen knife for the first two months, unaccustomed to the city and its nocturnal sounds. The knife had been for protection against break-ins, freak rapists, and whatever
chance monsters crawled up into bedrooms of single young women in a town that wasn't yet their own. She told him that when she fled to New York five years ago, she again slept with a knife by her side, but this time she knew precisely who might be coming for her.

Aleksandra told him that, after Ray's funeral, she returned to the house in Malibu and found their study turned upside down. Not ransacked, there hadn't been a mess, no valuables stolen, but the papers had been rummaged through, the drawers of the desk searched, the books in the library shaken. Datebooks going back ten years had disappeared. The police couldn't find any evidence of forced entry, presuming Aleksandra in her grief had invented the burglary. She left Los Angeles five days later. She told Joseph that, when she landed at JFK, she checked into an airport motel and in the middle of the night the phone rang. A man's voice asked for Mrs. Andrews. She said wrong number, and then the voice asked for Aleksandra Andrews. She packed in fifteen minutes. She took a cab to the Pierre on Sixty-First Street, the very hotel that she and Ray always stayed in on their trips to New York. When she went to check in, the receptionist told her that two men had come by earlier that evening asking for her. The Pierre had appeared in a number of those missing datebooks. She left the hotel, walked west, and took the smallest room the Penn Station Hyatt offered under a fake name. She told Joseph that she paid in cash for an entire year. She used names that never appeared in any datebook or photo album. She called friends and family from pay phones, and once or twice, they told her that someone had phoned asking if they knew of her whereabouts. She said she didn't know if the fact that these men couldn't locate her only encouraged their suspicion that she knew something. That maybe her disappearance persuaded them to search harder. But by that point she had stopped going by Aleksandra Andrews. It was only a year ago that she began using her real name.

“Do you still think they're looking for you?” he asked. Aleksandra wiped her forehead to consider a reasonable answer to a question that had nothing reasonable about it.

“I don't know,” she finally replied. “But I can tell you that I've learned to pack in five minutes. I've rented this room for a year,
but I could be gone by a single wrong number in the middle of the night.”

She looked at him with fear in her eyes. He wanted to tell her that he understood that fear, how impossible it was to swim out of it, that he kept a gun in a metal box under his own bed and that it also wasn't for random break-ins. But Aleksandra stood up, shaking her arms to compose herself, and he felt it was time for him to leave.

“I'll come back tomorrow,” he said. “If you want me to.” She said yes, she'd like that. She pressed her fingers against the closet door and slid it open.

“Before you leave I want to show you something,” she whispered. She said it lovingly, as if inviting him to glimpse a precious artifact. Inside the closet, he found suit coats spaced evenly on wood hangers with pant legs folded in between the soft silk linings. The suits were navy, charcoal, black, tattersall, houndstooth, and pinstripe, the lapels curled like flower petals. “These were Ray's,” she said, touching their collars with her fingertips reverently. “I brought them with me, packed in one of his old suitcases.” She grabbed the shoulder of a blue double-breasted jacket, which slipped off its hanger and into her hand. “He wasn't a vain man,” she said, shaking the wrinkles out with gentle strokes. “He was nearly colorblind when it came to most things. When I first met him, he wore cheap suits that looked like leftovers from a yard sale. I had to teach him what a real suit meant, how it shapes the body and makes a man look like a thing to watch.” She opened the jacket and waved it like a matador's cape. “Try it on. See if it fits.”

“I don't feel right about wearing that,” he said nervously, stepping back from the closet, afraid he'd defile some vital memory she had managed to preserve. “It was
his
suit. I don't want to try it on.”

“He didn't die in this jacket,” she said, smiling. “It isn't haunted.”

Joseph turned and let his arms fall slack, the limp position costumers preferred while dressing him for an acting job. It occurred to him that he had built a career wearing other men's clothes. This time was no different. Aleksandra threaded his arms through the sleeves and guided the jacket onto his shoulders. Then she sat down on the bed and took him in.

“You're a little smaller and leaner,” she said. “But it's almost right.”

“You two must have been very happy.” He watched her expression carefully in the mirror as he buttoned the coat.

“Yes, we were,” she replied. “Aren't you with your wife?” Joseph had never told Aleksandra that he was married. He turned around in surprise. “I noticed the ring on your finger the first time I met you. I imagine she must be very beautiful. You're happy, aren't you? You're a better person for marrying her?”

“Sure,” he said, more flippantly than he expected. The intensity of Aleksandra's love for her husband, the photos of them happily floating through the decades of their marriage, the pages of his death typed and revised on the floor, suddenly made his relationship with Del seem embarrassingly deficient. If Aleksandra knew he had a wife waiting for him at home, he wondered what she thought about him visiting her in this hotel room so late in the evening.

“You don't sound so convinced,” she said with her eyebrows pinched.

“Oh, I am,” he sighed. “It's not easy, but of course I'm happy.”

“I'm glad to hear it,” she said with fingers wrenching in the space between her knees. “I hope she's not mad you come to see me.”

He exhaled deeply and gathered his composure with a smile.

“I can take some of the pages you've written home to read if you want,” he said to change the subject.

Aleksandra shook her head, indicating that she wasn't going to let them out of her sight. He could see a question forming on her lips. She held on to the first word before finally letting it go.

“Can I ask you something?” she said. “Why were you at that conspiracy meeting? You seem like you have your whole life going for you, like the world as it's turning right now would be enough.”

His fingers trembled as he slipped them into the jacket's inner pocket and felt the edge of a matchbook. He removed it and read the word HILLCREST written in green cursive across the flap. He decided not to show it to her, having no way of gauging what painful connotations it might evoke. Some remnants of the dead were better left lost to linings, to coats, to hotel rooms, to other shores. He wondered
at what point Aleksandra would stop thinking that there was anyone out in the world still trying to track her down, and, when that realization came, would it bring her comfort or emptiness? When you get to the point where running defines your character, there might be nothing so destructive as turning around and finding no one there.

“It's not something I'm able to talk about,” he said, taking off the jacket and placing it back on its hanger.

“I'm a great believer in the unbelievable,” she said, lying back on the mattress with her eyes fixed on the ceiling. Her bare feet rubbed against the carpet. “You can always try me. It's been a long time since I've had the comfort of doubt.”

“Maybe sometime,” he said, imagining what those first words might be and how unbelievable, even to him, they would sound.

“WELCOME,” DEL SAID to stroller-pushers, to fat children, to angry hand-holding Puerto Rican teens. “Welcome,” she said to families of eight, to skinny mustachioed single men, to gorgeous Swedish nannies who didn't understand her. “Welcome to the Reptile House,” she said outside of its smoked glass doors, waving a wet color brochure to anyone who passed by her in the rain. “Care for some information on our exhibitions?”

Mostly they didn't, and she couldn't blame them. The categorical descriptions listed on the brochure were indecipherable, as much by the smudged print from the rain as by the fact that no eye could discern the words in the darkness of the exhibition hall. After two hours of intermittent showers while sheathed in one of the park's hooded blue rainproof slickers, she finally gave in to the urge to light a cigarette.

Del had pointedly not gone up that morning to check in on Apollo. She had performed her checklist duties with loud, slow intent. But by noon, she could no longer stave off the inevitable fact that a stack of brochures sat on the break-room table decorated with a Post-it from Abrams that read, “For Del, to remember the reason we are here.”

A fierce torrent of rain created a lapse in foot traffic, and, underneath her hood, she jammed a cigarette into her mouth and lit a match. Her cuticles were bloated. Her thighs were wet.

From the crest of the hood, she glimpsed two waterproof boots walking toward her and she lifted a brochure, hiding the cigarette inside the sleeve of the raincoat.

“Del?” a voice broke from under a competing hood. The man swept it back to make the recognition easier. “Is that you?”

“William,” she said very coolly, impressing them both with her indifference, although his sudden presence outside the Reptile House made her heart beat in panic. Her first instinct was to turn and run. He gave a warm smile, an erratic homeless man's smile, she thought, because his face was bruised and scabbed. She had not seen him since the night of his party and only now considered taking a more outraged tone. He grabbed the brochure from her hands and studied it for a minute, as if the black cobra on the cover made sense of some bigger problem enveloping his mind.