Search Party (22 page)

In time, like her brothers, she had a list of reasons not to go to Mass. Then she heard her mother start the car and drive off alone because of having a husband who was dead and kids who wouldn't go with her to Mass, and that ruined the hour anyway. Years of Sundays. By the middle of high school she was doing better with her mother but she discovered she had let God dry out like a plant.

O
NLY
a certain kind of person, the kind you could be pretty sure would not pass by, would pause to figure out Lawrence's looks. “There's something the matter with that guy. He could be fifteen and look forty or he could be forty and look fifteen. And that girl with him. Fat.” Though Cam knew she was not fat, so why put the word in the mind of an observer? She was tall and solid but with large bones and a body mass index within the OK range, she knew that from her nutrition course. Not so big, in the eyes of some people. Pacific Islanders. That, she knew from Ray Malala. Columnar, Lawrence's mother said. He often told her what his mother said, which was a way of taking her side against his mother. And in fact Lawrence was thirty-nine, so the observer's second impression would have been the right one.

His mother's name was Daisy. Cam knew it was a name his mother had given herself, the way she had given him the name Orion and left it up to him if he wanted to change it in high school. He named himself after T. E. Lawrence. Cam must have
seen the movie? Peter O'Toole? Cam defended herself. Where would she have seen that?

“Of course I changed my mind, about Lawrence. But it was too late.”

Daisy was a small, pretty woman who must, since she had had Lawrence in her teens, be at least in her fifties. Cam listened for any mention of the parents who must have been around and had some feeling about what was going on, when their daughter was pregnant with Lawrence. She could imagine her own mother's reaction. She could see her face. And her father's, if he had been there—no way would he have let a boy who got his daughter pregnant dodge his responsibilities.

A designer, Daisy called herself. Her garden pieces in glass and cement and her elaborate stone figures mortared into walls cost a fortune and were featured in magazines. Cam admired them when Lawrence showed her photographs. The bulky figures were not exactly people. They were Daisy's idea of myth, Lawrence said.

Daisy wore eye makeup, and leather pants with high heels, and did not look like someone with the muscles to work in stone or cement. Drawings. That's what she said the figures were. They gave the effect of being trapped in the walls looking for a way out, but in a lazy, drugged way, like bears in a zoo. At the same time, their stone faces or muzzles or whatever they were, raised from the background and pointed skyward, wore half smiles, “to make rich people feel at ease,” Lawrence said.

“They're sculptures,” Cam said with the confidence he expected of her where art was concerned.

“Reliefs,” Lawrence said. His mother wouldn't use the word
sculpture
, because that would land her in the hell, she said, of galleries. People with MFAs writing up wall-cards.

“Did she want to be a sculptor?”

“Of course,” he said.

Daisy was a drinker, Lawrence said—as if that excused her from all the responsibilities she left to others—but she worked in her studio all day first. The idea had wandered into Cam's
head that Daisy might lead her into the presence of a white-haired couple on a yacht, holding martini glasses, who would say, “You must have a scholarship to”—what was a famous art school?—“right away.”

Often Daisy took men along on her travels, but she had no fear of going off on her own in pursuit of ideas for her designs, into deserts and ruins and villages where the women mixed bowls of paint and dipped their fingers and printed symbols onto the mud of their houses. She made friends with these faraway artists; she preferred them to people near at hand—like her son, Cam thought—and wrote them letters, without the least proof, Lawrence said, that they could read English.

Daisy had a lot of travel coming up in the fall and before she embarked on it she fired the other two shift nurses, both RNs, who took care of Lawrence, and hired Cam, who had no real degree, to live in. There was every reason to do this, Daisy said. Each nurse had had her own way of tormenting him. The older one, Iris, had her own physical complaints—her back prevented her from using the lunge belt to get him onto his feet on a bad day—and talked all day on her cell phone. The other one, Sharon, teased him, sampled his wines and used his computer. Sharon wore tight jeans and tanks and used a tanning bed; Cam saw the bend from the waist for something dropped, and the backward arch when sitting, for something out of reach. According to Daisy, Sharon had not bothered to remove her browsing history from his computer, showing that she had looked him up and done a search for his ex-wife with the different last name, and even his child. He had a son.

There were no pictures of the son. Daisy never said the word
grandson
.

When Cam revealed to Daisy that her mother feared gossip because Cam was moving into a house with a man, Daisy grinned and said, “The poor dear.” At least I have a family, Cam thought. My mother doesn't make me live with some slave so she can leave the country. I go see my grandmother. My parents were married.

“Your
mom
called me,” Daisy said early on, when Lawrence
still had Iris and Sharon and they were seeing how Cam worked out on an eight-hour shift. That's all that was legal, eight hours. But Daisy didn't care what was legal. “Your mom called just to make sure everything was OK. She calls you Cami! Cami with an
i
?”

It was Daisy who had written the ad: “Mature, cultured companion for invalid. Medical credentials.”

H
E
bores her until she has to yawn and stretch, until she almost says, “I'm not one of your students,” but something in him so unsuspicious, so ignorant in proportion to his knowledge that it's almost a kind of sweetness, stops her and lets her stand it. Not that he would notice whether she could stand it or not. Though at times his eyes will pass quickly over her like a flashlight. When she wore a plaid shirt of her brother's, he said, “Don't wear that.”

He has dropped his head back so he seems to be scanning the heavy school light fixtures strung on cables. She knows he is trying to fill his chest with air.

Just before he got sick—so even Daisy can't claim that was her reason—his wife divorced him to marry someone else. Moved three thousand miles away, taking their son. Cam pictured a little boy having Lawrence's wide greenish cloudy eyes, with a permanent crease between the brows, staring hopelessly and knowingly over his shoulder as a woman dragged him away. A blonde in glasses. Cam knew that much. She knew because the wife wasn't the forbidden subject; from the beginning he had talked about her, a woman who couldn't see a foot in front of her, and ran in marathons, and made him go to parties he hated. A woman with long blonde hair her students mentioned in their critiques because she played with it while she lectured. But a woman who lectured, a woman with a Ph.D. When Lawrence spoke of her it was the same as when he spoke of his mother. Women. Women who existed to torment or exhaust you until you simply . . . simply . . . simply—here he conducted with his hands—put them out of your mind. Cam listened in the
understanding that this was a race to which she did not belong and for which she did not have to answer.

But how old was he—five? ten?—the son looking back as he was dragged away?

H
ER
drawing, when he looked at it, did not surprise Lawrence. She saw that. He had expected it.

Later her mother expressed the opinion that the drawing should have been entered in a contest before she ever let it out of her hands. “A contest. For one drawing,” Cam said. “Right. I didn't want it anyways.”

Lawrence would have let her know about it with an eyebrow if she said “anyways.” Or “somewheres” or “lost for words” or “on accident.”

Now he had seen three of her drawings. “Don't show these to my mother,” he said. “She'll make suggestions.” Cam didn't tell him Daisy had one of them, the one of him. It was the one he had let her do while he was in the chair by the window, why not, it was what he did all day, though by
Jesús
there ought to be a skull on the windowsill. He could sit forever looking out the window. Not only now, he said irritably. Not just this particular summer quarter when he was not teaching—as if he would teach again in the fall. Looking out the window was an occupation for all seasons. “
Sickly spring, lucid winter
, et cetera.”

She didn't tell him she had met twice with Daisy, once for coffee while she was still working the morning shift, and once right before she moved in. The second time was in an old hotel, by the fireplace, for wine and what Daisy called snacks—perfect little dollhouse dinners on plates thinner than the heavy napkins. They had finished two bottles and ordered a third. Daisy did most of the drinking but Cam kept up her end. She was underage but nobody asked her. She didn't look it, with her size and the kind of face she had, “not so much scowling as . . . solemn,” Daisy said, as if she had come to respect Cam's choice of face.

In the early hours of this occasion Cam had laughed a good
deal more than she usually did because Daisy knew how to be funny about herself and her art and her son, exactly the same way he made fun of her, showing no pity. “Where were we? Lord no, no more pinot. Take it away! I admit he didn't have the best example, growing up. But—he appealed to women. That is something that cannot be helped.” She filled her glass and Cam's. “
She
ran off with a bore from the business school. Of course there were plenty left to comfort him. Coming around. For a while.”

The telephone rang all day. He answered it or he didn't, depending on his mood. Cam could have told Daisy that. No one, man or woman, came.

At some point in the evening Cam was drunk for the second time in her life and knew it and gave in to the impulse to flop over her canvas bag and pull out the drawing she had made of Lawrence. Daisy looked at it in silence and then she tried to stand up. She had some trouble getting out of the deep chair because she had already met somebody else for a drink before this. “You hold this, I don't want it on the wet table.” Then she was gone a long time, fifteen minutes. Finally Cam followed her to the ladies room. You could suffer a clot or a hemorrhage at any age; Daisy could be sprawled under the door of the booth.

There was Daisy, at the big softly lit mirror with her eyes shut. She had a mascara wand out, lying open among crumpled tissues. “I can't find the top,” she said in a hopeless voice, losing her balance. Cam picked it up off the floor. “Where did you put that?” Daisy rasped, when Cam was in the booth.

“I just gave it to you.”

“I mean that picture.”

“In my bag.”

“Don't show me things like that, oh, no, no, no,” she said when she joined Cam at the table some time later. “Sign it.” She never asked if the drawing was for her; she just took it. After Cam had signed it Daisy sat with her eyes shut. Cam decided to order two more plates of the miniature crab cakes with caramelized onion, even though it was Daisy's treat. She beckoned the waiter over. She felt Daisy had put things in her hands.

They would talk on the phone, they would make lists in his kitchen, but this was the only evening she and Daisy ever spent together, socially.

T
HE
bookstore in the old schoolhouse was gone. Taped boxes filled the space where bookshelves and display tables had stood the week before.

This upset him but he pulled himself together. “Good thing I brought my own,” he said. He had sent her back into the house to get it, the scuffed little
Les Symbolistes
, from the pile on his bed that she knew to leave when she pulled the covers up.

It was early afternoon, shadow just leaking from under the cars in the parking lot. A group of girls came up the school steps, laughing and talking on their phones, slapping the marble with their flip-flops. She recognized them; they were from her high school. At the top they wheeled and set off down the hall, one of them showing a roll of skin above her cutoffs. That one had been in her art class. Cam had liked her; she liked people her own size and bigger, liked to think of them standing in front of a mirror seeing if they could pinch the number of inches of belly that meant fat.