Eminent Domain
What caught Paolo’s attention was the smile, teeth extravagantly white and large, orthodontically flawless. Expensive maintenance in the mouth of a homeless girl. Around the smile was a pale, animated face, and around that a corona of wild purple hair. The owner of this gleeful mouth was drunk, her flame of a head swaying on the thin stick of her body, lit at nine in the morning on the front stoop of a condemned Baptist church.
This neighborhood was called “transitional.” The church was being destroyed to accommodate a new freeway, and a ramp jutted raggedly into the sky above it, a road to nowhere: eminent domain. Paolo drove past it on his way to the theatre for rehearsals. Every day, the girl balanced on the church steps, surrounded by a shifting group of men. Always the only female, and, as a result, the center of a kind of stunned, stoned, possessive attention. The group surveyed the street, drinking from brown-paper bags, leaning on bundles, panhandling with plastic cups, laughing too loudly, ready to attack anyone who made the mistake of approaching their girl. Some wore hospital wristbands. They adopted dogs and took better care of them than they did of themselves. They, too, were strays—unclaimed, uncollared, trotting purposefully through parking lots or along sidewalks, jauntily dodging danger, their only objective the next meal or drink and a place to lie down. When inspired, the group catcalled in the direction of traffic—provoked by an angry driver, a hand gesture or a shout, the look of fear or disgust on an elderly face, or the mere fact of a particularly ostentatious vehicle, like a Humvee or a Bentley. Other times, they collected aluminum cans in shopping carts. You’d see them paired off on recycling day, scrounging through the green bins left curbside. They were everywhere, like squirrels, Paolo thought, with routines, like mailmen. You could grow so accustomed to their presence that you stopped seeing them.
But Paolo felt he knew the girl. Her animation most likely had to do with being the only female and therefore the source of a kinetic sexual friction, not only among the men in her circle but among the men in the cars passing, and the ones wearing hard hats and safety vests, operating the raucous city equipment, erecting the freeway. She presided in the manner of a stripper before a paying audience. Still, Paolo stared with what he knew to be special interest, drawn by something about her that he alone perceived.
Then one day he knew what it was. He squealed to a halt in traffic. The street people looked over at the source of the sound with the lazy blinking regard of lizards. And there, showcased among them, was Bobby Gunn’s daughter. Sophie Gunn. A Houston River Oaks Country Club girl. Débutante, she should be, by now. Through the steamy window of his convertible Paolo took her in, the furthest thing from a débutante he could imagine, and she gazed upon him with a taunting expression that said she was high, protected, superior. Her glance said, You fear me. You may even envy me. Then her smile faltered. She stepped backward. Now she understood that she knew him—that he had ties to her past, that he might leap from his car and reveal her origins, reveal to her companions the fact that she was merely slumming, while they had no other options. Was that it—simply threat, exposure both here and to her parents? She and Paolo held the gaze, across traffic, through the windshield, as if time had gelled.
Then it jerked forward; horns blared all around him. Houston drivers were patient, to a point—their Southern manners, maybe the languor that humidity encouraged—and then they became just as surly as their counterparts in New York. He hadn’t been a driver in New York, and his skills were still rudimentary. He sometimes forgot that he was in charge of the car and drifted, foot ambivalent on the pedals. He lurched away now, suspecting that Sophie Gunn, having been recognized, wouldn’t hold court on the steps tomorrow.
Paolo was having a sort of secret affair with a patron of the arts who was forty-four, ten years older than him. “Sort of,” because it seemed that most people knew about it. Her husband, a heart surgeon, had been charged in a recent scandal at the hospital—a dull scandal having to do with billing, rather than botched surgery or drug trafficking—the details of which he’d kept from his wife. (It was the intern mistress, his new confidante, who would have to appear in court, and in the pages of the Chronicle, implicated.) Mary Annie was the name of the surgeon’s wife, who had now filed for divorce. She referred to herself as “well preserved,” which meant that she had streaked-blond hair and tennis-ball arm muscles, minimal wrinkles, and a snappy fashion sense. She’d grown up on a ranch in West Texas, where her larger-than-life father had pampered her in a peculiar way. In addition to the typical female functions, she had been expected to cultivate another set of assets: a bawdy, tolerant sense of humor, a whiskey voice, the ability to give the distinct and disarming impression that she knew your weaknesses and forgave you for them in advance. Intelligent by nature, she’d been a horse handler, a tea drinker, a student of nursing, and was now curious about the creative arts. But she was cautious in love, having been wounded by her husband, that coward, that man whom her father had enthusiastically offered to come shoot dead. Texans—they were a breed apart.
Paolo had been seated near Mary Annie at one of what he’d dubbed the Rubber Chicken Events. They came with the visiting-artist territory—fund-raising dinners with tables full of benefactors there to meet the talent. How many had he attended in his two years as actor-in-residence? For these affairs, he fortified himself with Scotch. Mary Annie had been sitting across from Paolo; when he was asked how he prepared for his roles as, well, such lowlifes (his calling was malfeasance, Iago the role he was rehearsing now), she had smiled into her plate. “Assholes are easy,” he’d responded. The dowagers and their husbands liked to be scandalized—it was part of what they bought, for a thousand dollars a plate. But the flinch in Mary Annie’s face brought Paolo up short; he hadn’t truly meant to offend.
“Allow me,” he said to her afterward, on the edge of the club portico, where they were waiting for their cars. Gallantly, he held his umbrella over her. She forgave him gracefully, leaning in too close, a woman accustomed to a man’s attention, and in need of it. Later, slowly, they’d become true intimates—not when she’d undressed for him, for the first time, in a hotel room, or when they’d kissed achingly in her driveway, but when, on the telephone this month, she’d confessed that she was puzzling over the problem of her daughter’s pregnancy. She didn’t want to be called Granny or Nana or any other fossilizing term of endearment. Then Paolo knew he’d genuinely been let in.
On the phone with Mary Annie, Paolo did not mention the girl on the church steps. Already he’d decided.
He might have first met Sophie Gunn at Mary Annie’s house. At a function there—the girl brought along in a cotillion dance dress with a corsage, or perhaps the reluctant teen in an outfit of chains and denim. Whatever she’d been then, she had shed it now.
“You could give me a ride,” Sophie had said to him there at the curb, after which she’d coughed ferociously, making a fist and hacking into it. He’d parked in front of the church and she’d stepped forward automatically, the representative of her crew, a pack of cigarettes squashed suggestively behind her metal-studded belt. He was glad to see that she hadn’t been scared away by his recognition of her the day before. It was a sunny February afternoon; he had the top down, sunglasses on.
“Beg pardon?”
She repeated her request, pantomiming, pointing at him, then back at herself.
Knowing who she was, he should have delivered her straight to her parents’ house. But he had never seen himself as a savior. He was an observer at best, a bad influence or an attractive nuisance at worst. A stringer-along. An actor, for God’s sake—hungry for the disreputable, never denying the dark impulses.
“Get in,” he told her.
He took her to a Taco Cabana and bought her beans and rice and guacamole. She was a vegetarian, which made Paolo laugh. She joined him; it was as if the same silly slogans ran through their minds: Sleep in the street, don’t eat meat. Smoke pot, not pigs. She still had her wits about her. How long would they last? She knew every customer at the restaurant and greeted them all extravagantly. She was indulged—the neighborhood had not yet turned its gentrifying back on her ilk. And she had not yet acquired the look of a derelict. Her skin was intact, mostly clean, exposed with utter randomness, her clothes held on with safety pins and zippers, tiny diamond in her nostril, rings in her brow, ears, and lip, ball bearing through the tongue. She wore a rivet-studded bracelet that Paolo was alarmed to recognize as a cock ring, and combat boots, which would probably never go out of style in certain contexts. Every few days, she told Paolo, she went to a high-school friend’s house to watch television, take a shower, sit on a sofa. “And dye my hair,” she added thoughtfully. The color was eggplant, tipped in jet black. Her vanity about it interested Paolo; some product had been used to make it flare up rather than lie limp. He stared for a long time at her beautifully smooth arms until he realized that she must have shaved them, and recently, to achieve the look.
He needed to know if she was eighteen yet—the wholeness of the number signified something—but she wouldn’t say. He pretended not to know instantly what that meant.
Without asking, without promising, they struck a kind of bargain—the kind made between people who will eventually sleep together, whose business is mostly of the subterranean, unspoken variety—that he would not tell her parents where she was. Her father, Bobby Gunn, who had slid out of several investment and oil businesses just before they toppled, was the minorest of minor players in the latest rash of financial scandals. “Wily,” Sophie said. “Daddy,” she called him. Either it was an affectation (and it was charming) or, as a Southerner, she was unaware of the word’s perverse disharmony. “Daddy,” she said, as in “Daddy once called the police and had me arrested for pawning Mama’s jewelry.” She’d summoned the police to come get him, too; he’d beaten her when she set fire to the playroom—extinguished the blaze with the garden hose, then whipped her unrepentant grinning face with the metal nozzle. They went tit for tat in that household, apparently.
All Paolo could recall was Bobby Gunn’s habit of muttering to himself. He’d tucked it away as a curiosity for future use in a character study. The under-your-breath aside, the meanness most people kept to themselves. “Fuck you,” Sophie, too, had said, sotto voce, instead of “Thank you,” as a girl her own age wearing a Taco Cabana paper hat disdainfully took her order.
“I used to Magic Marker ‘I want to die’ on my arms during tests if I hadn’t studied.Bada bing—down to the counsellor’s office,” Sophie told him. She was providing him with tips for a kind of survival. She was entertaining him. She was trying to convey the personality that was uniquely her own—brattiness, joy, jokes, willfulness. The need to shock. “When I was a baby, I would bang my head on the floor until they gave me what I wanted.” Paolo noted how tidily she ate, etiquette lessons still coursing through her system like the blood of a feline, fastidious and sexy.
“Didn’t you use to ride horses?” Paolo said suddenly, an image returning to him like a forgotten dream.
“Yep,” she responded. Bobby Gunn’s daughter had been wearing jodhpurs when he met her. She’d stepped into a living-room party when all those present were lulled by liquor into a dreamy observation of her garments, the strange and striking uniform, part English Regency, part Vegas showgirl, the boots, the helmet, and—especially—the crop. She’d been teen-age, scornful, eyebrows arched, lips twitching as if to hold back a derisive snort. She’d had a knowingness, a skepticism—a fringe-factor affiliation that Paolo shared—remarkable enough to allow him to recognize her otherwise unrecognizable self on the steps of the torched Baptist church. Without it, he wouldn’t have been able to unearth her in that smile. He wouldn’t have found himself thinking about her in the circle of men, the liquid movement of her hips and hands.
“Aren’t you supposed to be in school?” Stupid, stupid, stupid, he instantly berated himself. But she wasn’t listening. She was expanding her eyes as if to hypnotize him.
She leaned across the lunch debris. “What would you pay me to suck you off?”
“What?”
“Not what, how much? Cuánto?”
“I wouldn’t, at any price.” Paolo hated the heat that suffused his face, the repulsion that accompanied it. Hadn’t he just been considering her flesh in full possession of unclean thoughts? Her confidence wasn’t complete, he told himself; she was trying on vulgarity, rather than genuinely inhabiting it. “But I’ll lend you money.”
“But I can’t pay you back, so I have to do something for it. I have to earn it.”
“It can be a long-term loan. In ten years, it’ll come due.”
“I’ll be dead,” she said breezily. “Daddy says that all debts are forgiven in death.” She took twenty dollars. “I won’t buy drugs,” she promised, bored, anticipating his next stupid statement. She withdrew a foil-wrapped stick of chewing gum from the pocket of her jeans and poked it into her mouth. When Paolo delivered her to a tattoo parlor a mile away, she gave him a kiss on the cheek that left a small minty tingle.
He didn’t see her for a week, although he looked. Had his twenty dollars bought her oblivion? Then there she was, outside the Starbucks he sometimes frequented. He locked his convertible with his usual qualms; anyone with a knife—screwdriver, ballpoint pen, sharp fingernail—could hack through the roof.
“What are you up to?” he asked nonchalantly, hugely relieved to see her.
“You can’t believe how nervous people get when you walk into their place of business carrying one of these.” She brandished a red plastic gasoline container like a lunchbox.
“Well, yes,” Paolo agreed.
Over coffee—she ordered a large sweet beverage full of cream and caramel, a kid’s concept of coffee, consumed with a spoon—she proposed a few favors that he might perform for her. Her cohorts in the world of the disenfranchised, while often fun and generally supportive, couldn’t render all required aid. Listening, Paolo was already justifying his attraction to her. He would save her, he told himself as he nodded along. Surely he was better for her than the boys she was currently hanging around with. Boys? Men. More adept at the traditional manly functions than Paolo was. Fighters, hunters, gatherers—after a fashion. Addicts, scroungers, streetwise. Paolo wouldn’t last a day in that odd cosmos. He was a pampered dilettante, supported by the gifts of women who were bored and eager for a cause. Sophie could be his cause as he was theirs. He wasn’t so different from those do-gooders, he thought, discreetly nudging the gasoline container beneath the table. He was old enough to be her father, more or less. But only if he’d fathered her when he was in high school, he told himself. And that helped.
“This is a school day, right?” she asked suddenly.
“Thursday,” he said. “No, Wednesday.”
She sent him into her private school to clean out her locker, abandoned several months ago but still full of stuff.
“My parents are afraid to disenroll me,” Sophie explained. “It’s too hard to get back in—you sign up for this shithole, like, in utero—so instead they just put me on leave.” She pronounced the last words like a phrase in French.
The woman at the attendance desk did not blanch; she sent Paolo with a box and a prissy aide, who made a point of looking away when the locker door swung open to reveal its decoration of broken mirrors and slashed photographs, everything held in place with duct tape. Paolo had the feeling that much of what he removed from the locker did not actually belong to Sophie.
He was sweating by the time it was over, unnerved in a specifically immature way. This was the business of adolescence. What was he thinking? An alarm was sounding, he believed, alerting all parents and law-abiding citizens.
He could hear his stereo, practically see the little car throbbing, as he hustled across the parking lot. Sophie snapped the radio off before he could complain, greeting him with “No one in that building has ever set foot in a public school.” And, anticipating his next remark, she added, “Including the janitor.”
“Nuh-uh.”
“Uh-huh,” she hummed confidently. Her locker made her seem more deeply disturbed than Paolo had thought. She was a liar, a thief, a beautiful, broken, fathomless girl. She had acne in her eyebrows, which were still blond. When he handed over the locker’s contents, she immediately began to separate the salable from the personal.
“Tell me your name,” she said as they drove away from the scene of the crime.
“Paul,” he said automatically, reverting to the lie. He was legitimately Paolo, but as a child in Milwaukee he’d adopted Paul for use in school and on the street. His mother had given him his name; from her he’d also acquired the habit of crossing his fingers, knocking on wood, making wishes, and looking for portents. On his forehead was the same worried V, entrenched between the eyes. The night his mother died, he’d seen not only a star in the smeary Houston sky but a falling one.
“You’re cool, Paul,” Sophie Gunn said, thanking him. At the church steps, she took her box of goods and waved goodbye.
Like a kind of church functionary, he’d fed her, he’d listened without judgment, he’d given her money. What more could he do?
At home, in his guesthouse apartment, he took advantage of the rare sunny afternoon to lie outside and tan, gauging his moral temperature. Would he have attached himself to a runaway boy? To an ugly girl? What did he have in mind? Below, in the back yard of the main house, a pool shimmered. Once it had been for swimming, but not anymore. It had been altered by its current owners, Paolo’s hosts, who had filled it with concrete except for the top eighteen inches or so: a giant shallow pool that attracted clouds of mosquitoes and wandering rodents. The atmosphere was insidious, suggestive. He drank beer as the sky turned city pink.
His hosts, Clem and Sheila, were also patrons of the arts; his quarters came to him free of charge. Yet there was a cost—his privacy. A steep price, actually, all things considered. But not one he’d thought much about until he had something to hide. He assessed it now as he acknowledged his desire to bring Sophie here, to give her a place to sleep for the night. His thinking took him no further than seeing her safely on his futon, beneath a spare bedsheet, wearing a pair of his soft shorts. He understood that from now on he would be the owner of a small gnawing anxiety with her name attached to it—an irritation that only her living presence would soothe.
In a little while, his hosts would be home from work, standing on their deck, waving at him with drinks in their hands, the way they did every evening—beaming at their pet.
It seemed wise to fill her Ritalin prescription for her, picking it up from the safety of the Walgreen’s drivethrough, his eyes skidding wildly for spies in the parking lot. Her plan charged her twenty dollars a month for her supply. It kept her from losing focus, she told him. It interacted well with cigarettes, marijuana, alcohol. Not so well with cocaine or Ecstasy. He took this information in without expression. “And I can always sell a few of them,” she added. “Some people think it’s a trip.”
On a weekly basis he delivered her to therapy, in a building without windows. The office was for the indigent; there wasn’t even a parking lot beside it, just an open door and a steady stream of runaways and the homeless, people who endured an hour of questions in order to recline on a padded chaise in refrigerated air. Sophie enjoyed her doctor, an idealistic young man who had run away himself and suffered a kind of free-floating angst having to do with entitlement and disillusion. Outside, sweating in his car, Paolo had several less than noble thoughts on the topic of Sophie’s therapy. For instance, was the doctor attracted to her? And, if so, was Sophie mutually inclined? Was Paolo perhaps a subject of conversation? He didn’t inquire; she didn’t reveal.
He, like the therapist, was careful never to seem like a probing parent, never to scold her for being high, for endangering herself, for eluding her mother and father. If she weren’t doing those very things—if she were still a senior at St. James High, living in her wallpapered girlhood bedroom, preparing now for the prom—he wouldn’t be with her at all. There would be no virtue in seducing her as her parents’ child, only reproach and judgment, banishment. Instead, he enjoyed the luxury of being better than the alternative—those filthy men who slept in the bayou and ate out of Dumpsters. The oddest of them actually had horns—a stump on each side of his forehead, surgically installed. A man whose ambition was to become a troll. Paolo was preferable, by far, to him; at least, this was the ongoing imaginary argument he made to Sophie’s parents.
Whenever they parted, she kissed him. First it had been on the cheek; now it was on the mouth. What, he asked himself, would her tongue stud feel like, slipped between his teeth?
During rehearsals, he imagined her observing him from the depths of the dark auditorium, her funky shoes hoisted onto the seat in front of her, the bullshit-detecting gaze levelled his way, and he found himself performing for her skeptical expectation, working to prove himself to her. “You were on fire,” his director said, praising him, and Paolo, still spellbound by the thought of Sophie, waved the compliment away.
Her name came up by accident with Mary Annie. Paolo’s blood surged—in his face, his heart, his groin. They were vacuuming Mary Annie’s S.U.V. at a self-service car wash, sucking up the Irish-setter hair. Above the noise of the suction, she mentioned that the Gunns had been through three different private investigators before deciding that Sophie must have left the city. She and the Gunns were social acquaintances, on many of the same boards, and members of the same country club. The older Gunn daughter had gone to school with Mary Annie’s girl, Meredith. The families weren’t close, but the gossip of their lives circulated through the ranks. There was a lot of support in the system. Mary Annie was stretched across the carpeted cargo cabin, jamming the nozzle of the machine into the crevices, when she said, “I really feel for the Gunns. These kids are like terrorists. They hold their families hostage, basically. They make threats, they break negotiating promises, they aren’t afraid of the occasional suicide bombing. Tell me how they’re different from the other people we’ve declared terrorists.”
Paolo had no answer. Mary Annie supplied her own, sighing as the machine abruptly ceased. “We love them,” she said. “That’s the problem.” Her eyes were moist. Her own daughter, the one who was due to deliver Mary Annie’s first grandchild in three months, had been a wild girl. She’d had to go survive in a camp in Utah for a few weeks, detoxing on a clifftop, rappelling and rafting and eating nuts and berries around a campfire with a bunch of other druggies. The cost of such restoration was astronomical. “If they could find Sophie, they could take her there. You can even pay someone to transport her,” Mary Annie said.
“Sounds harsh,” Paolo said.
She blinked up at him, slamming the hatchback door of the S.U.V. “Teen-agers steal years off your life,” she said. “The stress gave me an esophageal disorder. I still can’t use ziplock bags without thinking of Mere’s backpack full of them.”
“But she came through O.K.,” Paolo said, nearly pleading. “She’s fine, right? Husband? Baby?”
Mary Annie used two cupped hands to push back her hair and reattach a silver barrette held between her teeth. “Maybe. But my marriage started to go downhill because Tad and I couldn’t agree on what to do about her during those years. We took out all our anger at Meredith on each other. We went at it like tigers. It’s terrible to care for someone more than she cares for herself.”
Mary Annie’s words, these last ones, ran like a banner through Paolo’s mind. He did not think he’d felt that way before, and it alarmed him to realize that it might be true of his affection for Sophie.
"Did you know that your mom and dad hired private eyes?” he asked the girl later.
This news surprised her, which was gratifying. Very little surprised her. “How hard could it be?” she asked. “Here I am.”
“The point is they’re looking.”
“They’re doing a piss-poor job,” she said, spreading her arms on the church steps. “Anyone who wants can see me.”
But that wasn’t quite the case; she didn’t look like her old self. His recognition of her hadn’t been the same as a parent’s. What they were looking for was dated, buried deep.
Paolo bought her a cell phone, because she’d thrown hers away after the battery had run down; also, her parents had known the number and filled the voice mail. He purchased two chargers and kept one in his car cigarette lighter for her to use as they cruised the sultry city in the comfort of air-conditioning and stereo sound. A few times, Paolo panicked because the phone was on his plan, a cheaper alternative but an implicating one, should, say, the unit be found on her dead body. He tried hard not to imagine her body dead, dead instead of slouched in his passenger seat, taking calls in a savage secret fashion.
He fed her. He compromised, buying her cigarettes but not liquor. He considered it progress when she allowed him to see her on a weekend night, because that was when the clubs were busiest, when the kids she knew from St. James sneaked out into the dark. Paolo had once looked forward to weekends, but not anymore. All the worst things happened then. The weekends were when Mary Annie’s soon-to-be ex-husband was most likely to be pulled from sleep for an emergency transplant; the organ donors died then, on weekends and during holidays. One family’s tragedy led to another’s miracle; they might meet in heart-wrenching scenes in the hospital lounges and waiting rooms. Less and less often, Paolo took Mary Annie up on her offer for company during those nights when her husband was called away. As he sat with her—at restaurants, concerts, movies, between the sheets of her very comfortable bed—he resented Sophie’s power. And why had he given it to her, anyway? The girl had ruined Paolo’s nascent love for Mary Annie, eclipsed her elder easily, without even trying.
“Hey, tough girl, don’t you worry about getting busted?” Paolo said peevishly as Sophie lit a small metal pipe in his front seat. She never asked permission. “And, if not for yourself, at least think of me, the adult driver.” He hated to feel so threatened by rule-makers. What had become of his own question-authority, fuck-you attitude?
“I was already arrested,” she said, as if the event were like a baptism or an inoculation, singular and prophylactic, thereby making her exempt. “Dude, it’s so funny.” She’d been caught smoking hash in the bayou one night. The cop had cuffed her and dragged her to the downtown station, where he threw her in a cell. She phoned home and reached her father, who, on his outraged way across town, was himself stopped for D.U.I. and resisting arrest. He wasn’t allowed to drive her home, so her mother had to be called. But her mother was too sedated on pills to answer the phone, and her father was too embarrassed to call one of his friends, so they ended up calling a cousin, Mina. “Mina’s a total fuckup, so we figured she wouldn’t tell the rest of the family. It was our secret, me and Daddy’s. We didn’t fight for a while after that,” Sophie finished a little nostalgically.
“That’s some family you’ve got there,” Paolo said, as she abruptly opened the passenger window and rapped the pipe on the exterior of the car, where Paolo would later find a ding. Instead of dropping her off in front of the church, he suggested a long ride around the city’s loop. Sophie took the opportunity to curl up against the headrest and take a nap, her hands in fists at her chin. Mouth partially open, eyes closed, she could have been ten or twelve years old, an ordinary pretty child. That she so wholly trusted him made Paolo afraid; what if he was not who he—and, presumably, she—believed he was?
In April, when “Othello” opened, he gave Sophie a ticket. Like a high-school boy, he waited for her to materialize in the audience, in the seat he’d designated—to be for real where he’d installed her in his imagination for months. And, as he had been in high school, where high hopes wage war with low expectations, he was simultaneously disappointed and validated: no girl, no adulation, no fantasy fulfilled.
It was hard not to be churlish, then, a week later, when he received her desperate call. She phoned him from a McDonald’s on Westheimer. “I feel hot,” she said—not passionately but listlessly. When he picked her up, her forehead burned beneath his wrist, though he had no notion what he was checking for—it was just another of his mother’s gestures. In the driveway of the guesthouse, he ascertained the absence of Clem and Sheila before hurrying Sophie up the rickety steps, following her lurching bottom, the painful pinch of her flesh as it met her metal belt. Once indoors, he drew the shades and opened the oven door to provide mood lighting, hiding inside his own home. She lay on the futon with a wet compress on her head, three aspirin and a slug of whiskey for her cold symptoms, bare dirty feet splayed.
“I can’t sleep,” she said. “It’s been two days, and I just can’t fucking sleep!”
“What did you take?” Paolo asked.
“Nothing,” she claimed. But later revised—a few unknown things, not much, nothing new, that was for sure, and far less than usual. He was afraid to ask her to change her clothing, though it didn’t smell fresh; the sheets wouldn’t conform to the bed, slipping off under her twitching need to be constantly realigned. At the sink he took a hammer to a bundle of ice cubes, turning them into something palatable and cool for her, shards of slippery water passed from his trembling hand to her pink tongue. He thrilled sickeningly as she closed her lips around his fingers. He promised himself that if she showed just one sign of hallucination or seizure he’d rush her to the E.R.
“My mind is racing,” she said. “I just can’t relax.” The fact that despite her exhaustion she could not let go of consciousness made her cry. Paolo knew the feeling. He sat beside her on the futon.
“When I was young,” he said, remembering it as he spoke, “my mother used to do this thing.” He cleared his throat, lifted his voice, trying on his mother’s cigarette-tinged steadiness, her words like a rich note sustained on a saxophone. “Imagine lying in a field,” he began. “A field of grass, the ground below your head and hands, and the sky above. A little wind, the sound of”—he improvised—“wind chimes.” (Sheila’s were tinkling faintly from the yard.) “You think you’re relaxed, lying in your field, but not yet you aren’t. Squeeze your toes, squeeze and squeeze, and then let them go, just let them go. They might feel like they want to float. . . .” The ankles, the thighs, the hip bones, the clavicle. Up the body he went, from toes to knees to ribs to face. Paolo’s breathing slowed as he took Sophie through the incantation. He had been his mother’s youngest child, her only boy, his three older sisters wild girls who disappeared laughing into the night, leaving Paolo and their worried mother to wait for them at home. When he couldn’t sleep, when his vivid imagination plagued him, waking nightmares flashing before his closed eyes in a fearsome beating pattern, he called for his mother, who sat beside him and summoned the field of grass, the easy breeze, drifting clouds, sunshine, sleep.
“Whattarya, Yoga Man?” Sophie said, a smile in her voice, but she obeyed his commands to clench and release, seize and relinquish. Calm overtook them both. The oven light flickered. A distant siren cried. And, finally, she slept, her fists as usual near her chin, her limbs still randomly twitching, the drugs firing and ricocheting inside her, despite her essential absence. Paolo breathed as deeply as his guest, more peaceful than he’d been in months. Either it was the certainty of her safety, here with him behind the locked guesthouse door, or it was his dead mother’s sudden presence.
“Let him have it,” she said later, from inside a dream. “He can have it, I don’t want it.” She followed through with a dismissive swipe of her hand, which flopped off the futon and onto the floor.
While he waited for morning—for light, for the disappearance of fever, for whatever shift toward optimism was going to occur—he turned the radio to a jazz station and watched the shimmering pool beneath his window. When Clem and Sheila came home, their lights went on, turning the house into a doll house, its bulbs flaring and extinguishing, revealing their ritual movements, the absent-minded passage through doors and halls, objects shifted from one room to another, keys, mail, laundry, a glass of water, the ascent from downstairs to up. Would his life ever resemble that life? House, pool, wife, routine? This guesthouse had been designed for visits from their children, those eventual adults, for the implicitly promised grandchildren.
When Sophie rolled to the far side of the futon and fell into a heavier, unromantic sleep, Paolo shut the oven door, lowered the radio’s volume to a vague hum, and removed his outer layer of clothes. Wearing boxer shorts and a T-shirt, he carefully positioned himself beside her. Her back was turned to him, her hand now on her hip. He rested his head beside her pillow, shaping himself to complement her shape, breathing in the complicated odor of her head—hair product, smoke, sweat, something metallic, perhaps from her various piercing hardware. He lay for a long time inching his hand toward hers, finally covering it, as it made a fist in his grip. She arched herself backward against him automatically, her reflex one of welcome rather than repulsion, an attraction to the source of heat. And for a second Paolo, reacting without thinking, pressed his instant erection along the seam of her pants, its tip creased painfully by her studded belt. If he’d closed his eyes and let himself pretend, he could have followed through, could have told himself that she’d done much more with many worse, and later she most likely wouldn’t even remember. Instead, he turned over, planting a friendly backside against hers. His eyes were wide and he was aware of blinking them, yet soon enough he returned to the grassy field they both inhabited, watching the clouds and drifting with her by his side.
In the morning, she was gone. He could have dreamed the evening, for all the evidence he had of it. After trying her cell phone—“Hey, muthafucka, leemee a messsssssage”—he drove to the church, but it was an act of hope rather than reason. Now he was like her parents, he thought, seeking her at a disadvantage, lagging two steps behind, berating himself for having let her slip, literally, through his fingers.
“Where’s our friend?” he shouted to the troll, who did a kind of “You talking to me?” routine before he limped reluctantly to Paolo’s vehicle and scowled in at him. “Our friend Sophie,” Paolo clarified. The man’s forehead sprouted two inch-high protrusions, each of which, though bluish in color, clearly had veins of blood circulating just under the tight thin skin. “Wow,” Paolo added, unable not to comment. Without thinking, he touched his own forehead. Though Sophie had patiently told him the names of all her comrades, Paolo had instead assigned them nicknames—the troll, the rooster, the slag heap, Mr. Natural. Others were moving slowly toward his car. If they decided that it was he, Paolo, who was responsible for Sophie’s disappearance, what might they do to him?
“Fuck off, man,” the rooster said. He was older than Paolo had realized, a tense man with a bright-orange Mohawk razored straight up the middle of his head. Tattoos crawled up from his shirt collar. When he walked along Montrose, he swung a car antenna in front of him as if bushwhacking. He and the troll and half a dozen others had now virtually surrounded Paolo’s little convertible. Someone put an anchoring foot on the rear bumper, creating an ominous sag.
“How’s it going?” Paolo said to the group, looking for allies. “You guys seen Sophie? Purple hair?”
“Last we saw, she was with you, Miata,” someone said. So they had named him, too. Well, it was only fair. The rooster reached into his pocket, and Paolo flinched, fearing a gun or a knife. Instead, he pulled out a cell phone. “You the one calling?” Paolo stared at Sophie’s phone. “ ’Cause she asked me to take her calls.” He put the little device to his cheek. “Hold, please.”
“Where is she?” Paolo asked. But none of them were saying. He felt as if he’d been sent back to elementary school, to a circle of taunting children who did not play by grownups’ rules. If he got out of the car and grabbed for the phone, they would toss it among themselves. Abruptly he popped the car into gear, shooting out from under the foot on his bumper.
Why this urgency, he asked himself, shifting to third, then fourth gear. Before, he’d gone days and weeks without seeing her. Yet he felt that he had to share with her one important fact: I didn’t do anything, he would say. I was good. Nothing happened.
A few weeks later, at the end of Paolo’s time in Houston, late one night after the last of his going-away parties, she called him and said, slurring, “Hey, I’m in jail?” His had been the only number stored in her cell phone—he’d programmed it himself when he bought it. While it was in the hands of the gang, he’d received a few accidental calls, shouting and singing and odd bits of street noise coming over the line.
He dressed among the boxes that held his belongings. But, before he left the apartment, she phoned again, to tell him that she’d been mistaken: hospital, not jail.
She’d been picked up riding the bus, passed out and in possession of some controlled substances that had poured from her pockets. After she’d ridden the route twice, the bus driver had delivered her to the downtown station, where she’d been thrown into a cell before fully waking. She’d refused to tell them who she was. Her school photo, Paolo assumed, the one her parents had submitted to the cops when she ran away, looked nothing like her.
Someone or something—a fight, a fall—had knocked out one of her top front teeth. Her eyebrow had bled, probably because a ring had been torn from it, but the amount of blood, its flow over her face, had made her captors nervous enough to send her to the emergency room rather than keep her at the jail. And this is where Paolo drove, at four-thirty in the humid May morning, to retrieve her.
“Paul,” she said. “You aren’t wearing gloves.”
In the grim green light of the basement hallway, he looked at his hands, as if he’d forgotten what was or wasn’t on them. “Why would I be wearing gloves?”
“The others did.” In addition to her slur, she had a vague lisp. Her inability to stand up frightened him. The orderlies found nothing new or interesting in their situation; Paolo was allowed to sit beside her in the busy hallway as paperwork was undertaken. She wore two thin hospital gowns and an I.D. bracelet that named her Jane Doe.
“You have to say who you are,” he told her.
“No.”
“Then I will. Sophie Gunn,” he told a passing uniformed cop. “She’s a runaway.”
Just like that, he saw, he had joined the other side, turned into an adult. He hadn’t felt such relief since a visit to a church confession box, twenty years earlier.
“I’m eighteen,” she lisped. “On May 1st, I was eighteen. May Queen,” she added, smiling raggedly.
The cop waited for the two of them to get their stories straight. Being eighteen meant that the parents wouldn’t be notified but that the possession charge would be transferred from juvenile to regular court. And then if she wasn’t indigent there was this emergency-room bill to reconcile.
Sophie started to gag. Both men shifted away instantly; she covered her mouth and staggered toward the women’s room. Paolo and the cop watched her disappear behind the door. “Her father’s Bobby Gunn,” Paolo said. “I’ll phone him if you can’t.”
“If she’s eighteen, she doesn’t need her daddy.”
In the end, it was Mary Annie whom Paolo phoned. The Gunns, naturally, were not listed. She answered unsurprised—she was expecting a call from the hospital, to tell her that her grandchild had been born.
“It’s me,” Paolo said. “I’m with Sophie Gunn.” His explanation was brief, uninspired, suspect, no doubt, but he was too tired to embellish, too close to leaving Houston to really care what Mary Annie thought of him. Maybe that was another grown-up trait—not caring. She found the Gunns’ phone number and wished him luck. It took a lot of rings to rouse them. Their expectation of hearing from their daughter had apparently waned.
“Wha’?” her father, the mumbler, said.
“I’ve got your daughter,” Paolo said. “She’s with me.”
But this wasn’t true, after all. For she had not returned to her seat beside Paolo after running to the rest room. The officer came back, a sheaf of papers in hand, calling her name as he passed through the hallway of the bleeding and bandaged. “Gunn,” he said, in time to his heavy echoing footsteps, “Gunn. Gunn. Gunn?”
There was a time, earlier in the strange relationship that Paolo had with Sophie Gunn, when he should have given her up, turned her in, ended his role in a questionable business. This was at one of the ubiquitous fund-raisers, not a Rubber Chicken (sit-down) dinner but a cheese-cube, stuffed-mushroom (standup) affair. At this party, Paolo was paying careful attention to the Gunns—Mrs. Gunn, whose smile clearly pained her, its hollowness owing no doubt to her anxiety about her daughter, and Bobby, who had a talent for attracting people in a circle around him. The others leaned in, scowling, to make out his murmuring anecdotes. Paolo found a place on the edge of the crowd, listening, holding a wineglass like a mask before his face. Bobby Gunn, having reached a few too many times for the champagne that floated by on the caterers’ trays and not often enough for the hors d’oeuvres also circulating, was discussing his missing daughter. In the gathering of glamorously dressed friends, parents themselves of teen-agers and young marrieds, he told the story of his heartbreak: the all-star-equestrian, straight-A-student daughter who ran away, got into drugs, was lost to him on the streets. Paolo flushed, longing for the strength either to walk away or to confess.
“Teen-age girls are the canaries in the coal mine,” one of the party guests posited. “We think they’re so hard to live with, and yet just think how hard it must be to bethem.”
“Just think,” another listener agreed drolly, a former beauty in late middle age. What she wouldn’t do, Paolo thought, to be seventeen again.
“It’s the boys who drive up your car insurance,” a father said.
“Still, they’re easier than the girls.”
Such was the conventional wisdom concerning delinquency, youth: the wildness that hadn’t yet been harnessed, the bad habits still blatant, the obsessions and addictions that might in the future be channelled, put to good, or at least profitable, use. Paolo distinctly felt his place in both worlds, the young and the old, and yet felt committed to belonging to neither. Now the crowd began offering its own evidence. Teen-age girls: This one had stolen her grandmother’s silver. That one had driven a car into the swimming pool. Another had left the children she was babysitting to go to the liquor store with her boyfriend. Or she’d let the children watch as she screwed the boyfriend, sex ed in the family room. She’d leaped off a roof. She’d run naked through the mall. She’d set up an Internet porn site featuring herself and her sisters. She’d said to her mother, each and every day, “Die, you psycho cunt!” These girls. They were presented like poker hands, each one upping the ante.
But Bobby Gunn raised his voice above the general din. His story was not over.
Apparently he was offering advice—solace? warning?—to one of the circle of listeners, a newcomer, the father of an eleven-year-old girl, who was just now entering this rocky terrain. The man had bowed his head, and Bobby Gunn reached out a hand to pat his shoulder. “You’ve done all you can do,” he said with certainty. “Sometimes it just comes down to luck. We got unlucky with ours. The worst thing you can imagine just keeps getting worse. You find yourself doing and saying the most unlikely things.” And now he related, in his increasingly choked voice, the rest of the story. His daughter had not only disappeared; she had been incarcerated. While there, in psychiatric care, she’d hanged herself.
Paolo gasped, his heart seized, his body believing the story even as his mind swiftly contradicted it. What? Sophie had been lounging on her stoop that very morning, no better than yesterday, true, but certainly no worse. Incarceration? Why, he must mean the hash-smoking incident, with his own D.U.I. to complicate the matter. Was Gunn using Sophie to elicit pity? And how, exactly, did he think he could get away with it? These people had been babysitting and hiring and marrying and nominating and showering and cuckolding and roasting and eulogizing one another for generations; anyone other than the newcomer in the small circle would immediately recognize this as a lie.
“Laurel,” Bobby Gunn said then, swilling the last of his drink. The circle of friends bowed their heads. And in the time it took to inhale a single breath Paolo remembered that there had been another daughter. Sophie’s older sister. His mind stumbled into chaotic synch with his heart.
This was what should have forced him to end his secret life with Sophie. To retrieve his silly car from the valet service and drive three miles east to the scary rubble of the transitional side of town and pull the girl out of it, drag her by force, by the nape of her neck, into this clubhouse. It should have impelled him to act. But it didn’t.
Paolo had been back in New York for almost a year when he heard about Sophie’s marriage. Mary Annie sent him the Chronicle picture of the girl and her fiancé, the two of them no different from any of the other photographed couples, sitting in an arbor in the usual costumes, his hands on her shoulders. Paolo didn’t spot her when he first scanned the page, looking for that trademark smile. But the unremarkability of the image was, of course, what made it remarkable. Her hair—could it be a wig? Surely all the king’s hairdressers wouldn’t have been able to tame that nest of singed straw and dye, or grow it out so hastily to the blond coif she now wore. There were no visible punctures in her eyebrows or nose or the tops of her ears. Airbrushing? Or had she simply healed that quickly? Credit the resilience of youth? He stared at the photo, oblivious of the fiancé, whose hands bore no tattoos, whose brown hair swept over a forehead that might still be spotted with pimples but certainly didn’t sprout horns. That person was inconsequential to Paolo. And Paolo realized that he himself was as inconsequential to Sophie as any other Houstonian who happened to page through the Lifestyle section that Sunday morning.
Then Paolo gazed into Sophie’s clear, smart eyes until he finally saw what he had missed: this girl had prevailed. Her triumph was in the tilt of her chin, in the provocative parting of her lips, behind which lay the promise of that stunning naughty smile, the knocked-out tooth that would, of course, have been repaired. All along he’d misunderstood the role she was playing, the drama she was enacting. The story he’d been constructing for himself when he was with her—that intense period during which he wasn’t turning her in to her parents or to the authorities, the extent of what he’d considered his moral quandary and journey—had been another story altogether; Sophie had been fashioning it for herself and for her mother and her father, for their well-intentioned, grieving friends, for her own friends still in school, and, most significantly, for the memory of her sister. I have survived, she had concluded the tale—the victor. Paolo wondered if others understood the amazing and unlikely thing Sophie had done, the treacherous gauntlet she’d run and come through intact.
This same newspaper had announced the arrival of Mary Annie’s first grandchild early the summer before, a little girl, named something fanciful and trendily ridiculous, something that her parents, particularly her mother, Meredith, former dope dealer and hell-raiser, hoped and prayed would suit her as she emerged into the world. ♦
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