«Uh-huh?»
«Why are you helping me? I mean, you don't know me — you don't — »
«Oh, stop right there. My angle is Ryan. You helped him, and so I'm helping you.»
«And?» asked John.
«And that's all. Please, why don't you tell me the real reason you're so obsessed with finding Susan Colgate, huh? For all I know, she could be wearing a Girl Guide costume and decomposing underneath your front porch — and maybe all of this search stuff we're doing is a ruse designed to deflect attention away from you. »
John was dismissive: «Not the case.»
«Okay then, why look for Susan Colgate, John?»
«It's because …»
«Yes?»
John squeezed and squeezed his brain with his fingers like a hard-to-open bottle of olives. «It's because she knows that people were meant to change. She knows it's inevitable. And she seems to recognize I'm at a point in my life where I can't transform anymore. I sound like a country-western song. Sorry.»
«Well, to me it looks like you're stalking her. It could seem kind of creepy to her.»
«I'm not stalking her, Vanessa. I'm trying to find her. Nobody's taking this disappearance seriously, except us.»
«Hey, what's in this for Susan?» Ryan asked. «Assuming we rescue her from being tied up on top of the railway tracks.»
John glared at him.
«Sorry.»
But Ryan's question got John to thinking. What did he bring to Susan's table? Was he just another fucked-up Hollywood guy for her to take care of? No, because — because what? John reached down deep into the hole of his mind, trying to grasp onto a nugget of reason. He thought of the desperately lonely woman reading the Architectural Digest, and he thought of the woman he'd met outside the Pottery Barn who'd fed him dinner, the secret nation of Eleanor Rigbys who existed just under the threshold of perception. That this secret nation existed was new to him. That he might help fix it was even newer. «We have a lot in common,» he blurted out.
«Huh?» Both Ryan and Vanessa had each gone on to new thoughts.
«Haven't you noticed that the couples who stick together the longest in life are the ones who shared some intense, freaky experience together? Jobs — school — a circle of friends?»
«Yeah?»
«Well, Susan and I did that, too.»
«But you have no idea where Susan went after the crash, John. I mean, you're talking about disappearance, right?»
«Ryan, that's what we learned about each other during our walk — that we both went to the same place. At the moment I don't know her specifics, but that'll happen once I find her.»
They fell silent. Vanessa was frozen at the wheel, as if driving through a snowstorm. They were in one of thousands of cars on a ten-lane freeway jammed with cars, even in the darkest part of the night, rivers of cars headed God knows where. Nobody spoke.
John slept all of the next day. That night, over a simple pasta primavera, Vanessa emptied out her net for John and Ryan to see her bounty. «Susan Amelia Colgate was born on March 4, 1970, in Corvallis, Oregon. Her mother, Marilyn, was married to a Duran Deschennes, but never actually got divorced.»
«She's a polyandrist,» said Ryan.
«A what ?» asked John.
«It's the opposite of bigamy. When a woman has two or more husbands at once.»
«This Duran Deschennes guy got killed in 1983 and the mother married Donald Alexander Colgate in 1977, so for seven years she was a polyandrist. But my hunch is that Don Colgate has no idea he was hubby number two. I bet we three, along with Marilyn herself, are the only people in on her secret.»
Vanessa continued. «Susan grew up in McMinnville, Oregon-in a trailer, at that. She was a frequent entrant, finalist and winner in literally hundreds of beauty pageants during her youth. Her biggest win was the 1985 Miss USA Teen pageant in Denver, but she surrendered her crown there onstage, to LuAnn Ramsay, now wife of Arizona's governor, I might add.»
«This stuff I already know,» said John. «Internet. Library. Magazines. Tell me something new.»
«In 1997 she was presumed dead in the Seneca plane crash, but she wasn't, and to this day nobody knows where she spent almost exactly one calendar year. Even I couldn't find anything there.»
«Such modesty.»
«Well, I did find something. »
«What?» John pounced.
«It may be nothing, but when I was patterning her phone data — »
«What phone data?»
«Oh, grow up. The era of privacy is over. As I was saying, I was patterning her phone data and found an anomaly. Her most-dialed phone number is to a guy named Randy Hexum. He lives out in the Valley. So I did a scan on him, and it turns out he's from Erie, Pennsylvania. His real name's Randy Montarelli and he lived thirty miles away from the police station where Susan turned herself in and claimed amnesia.»
«And?»
«They both arrived back in L.A. at the same time a year ago,and he went to work for Chris Thraice. Randy Montarelli-slash-Hexum also has almost no data attached to him since leaving Erie. It's damn hard to have a dead data file, but he's done it. It's bloody suspicious.»
«He's in the Valley?»
«Yup.»
John was up in a second, carrying the emptied plates into the kitchen, screwing the cap back on the Coke. He put it in the fridge. «Let's go.»
Chapter Twenty
When John was young, back in New York, in the third grade on one of his few nonsick days, a math teacher named Mr. Bird, who also filled the roles of gym teacher and guidance counselor, took the entire shivering class out onto the playing field. He pointed out white chalk marks which outlined a large square. Onto each of these marks he made students stand in place, and once everybody was in their assigned location, he used a megaphone he'd brought to shout out the following words: «Class, look at the area in front of your eyes. This is called an acre. For the rest of your lives you're going to be hearing people talk about acres. Five acres. Three thousand acres. An acre and a half. Well,this is an acre. Look at it hard. Burn it into your memory because this is the one time in your life you're going to see a perfect, one-hundred-percent-pure acre.»
John remembered that acre, cold and wet and trampled. Its size did truly stay in his mind, and as he crisscrossed the country on foot, he saw nothing but acres, on all horizons, all of them one hundred percent pure, one hundred percent empty and most of them ownerless. He was truly a Nobody now, the land was his. He felt like a king during his few good moments, but these decreased as he nose-dived deeper into the American landscape. The sex had ended. Most forms of communication had quieted. Women vanished from his life and he missed them with the dull hunger of homesickness. He caught only glimpses of them, sleek, well fed, possessing clear goals and usually behind a car window in the process of rolling it up. John knew that he'd become the cautionary story their mothers had warned them about. He longed for female company and the ability of women to forgive, to care about hurts, and their readiness to laugh and be amused. His mother, Melody, Nylla and even the Florida twins, whose names he'd forgotten.
Nearly all of the Nobodies he saw were men. Women, he thought, had so many more ways to connect themselves to the world — children, families, friends.
John was an expert at looking in people's eyes and knowing when they wanted something from him. Nobody gave him that look anymore. But he wasn't astute about looking in people's eyes and recognizing when they wanted to give him something. Sometimes he'd see a woman watching him as he walked from a Denny's rest room back to the counter, or in a grocery store, tending to squawking kids and errant grocery carts. What were they offering? A meal and a dose of love to get him to the next way station? Women became to him portals back into a better place he'd always seemed to have overlooked.