Twenty-two

Warren. It had to be Warren. It couldn’t be something less common like Wozniacki or Wittgenstein, so he would be easier to find. Background.com had phone records for fifty-three men named Jeff or Jeffrey Warren. Seven of the fifty-three were Michiganders. I didn’t know the Upper Peninsula from Upper Volta, but three of the seven had zip codes that were reasonably close to the one I’d found for Caroline, and luckily there were only two high schools in her town.

I reminded myself that when I searched my own name, I found nothing except entries about Billie Holiday and Judy Holliday, so I wasn’t optimistic, but it was a place to start.

All I had to do was to call three total strangers. Easy, right? Except that electronically invading someone’s privacy was one thing. Given the anonymity of the Internet, it was simply a matter of pressing keys on a keyboard. If the information was available online, people had somehow made the decision to put it out there for all to see, hadn’t they? That’s what I told myself anyway. I was less sure I could pull off this level of snooping on the phone. Hi, I was just wondering if you ratted out my favorite client? Ugh, I was starting to sound like a character from The So pranos.

I tried to channel the telemarketers who routinely and breathlessly interrupted my dinners and at-home movie nights. Two seconds of silence and then a friendly voice suggesting they were someone I knew before they launched into their pitches: “This is Heather?” as if they’re asking you, waiting for you to commit yourself by continuing to listen or, worse still, asking “Heather who?”

What was it that kept people on the phone, as opposed to automatically hanging up the way I did when I answered the phone and heard those first few seconds of dead air? How do the good ones hook people? Bank error in your favor? You may already have won? We’re calling about the warranty on your car? It had been a long time since anyone I knew had been taken in by one of those ploys.

A lost item was a possibility. Babe had used it on her bulletin board, but on the phone I’d have to say what it was. It had to be something most people owned that you could conceivably be without for a day or two without missing or freaking, so anything like a wallet or driver’s license was out. Terry had said the guy was wearing expensive sunglasses, Oakley’s. I’d give them a shot. If it sounded ridiculous when I said it out loud, I’d come up with something more inventive for the next call.

Telemarketers generally sounded as if they were smiling-like they were drugged or lobotomized (less like babies or idiots in this instance). I smiled. I dialed. A woman answered the phone. Expecting a man to pick up, I hadn’t thought that far ahead. Astonishingly enough she didn’t buy my story about having found old Jeff’s sunglasses.

Somewhere in between being called a skanky ho and a heartless home wrecker I considered stopping her, but it wasn’t really me she was trashing and she obviously had buckets of venom inside her, so I let her vent. Given some of the details she was throwing out, I’d have been very surprised if this Jeff Warren hadn’t been cheating on his wife, so maybe she had a right. She had dates, locations, and all the particulars of a tryst in Milwaukee that her Jeff and I were supposed to have taken together. Then she got personal. She made disparaging remarks about my hair and my alleged cup size. It went further south from there, to my butt and hips and the problems I undoubtedly had with them. How she knew this was beyond me. Still, I stayed on the line. I was fascinated by her lung capacity. Perhaps she was a swimmer?

My family was scum. She could tell by my voice that I, too, was trash. (I’d liked to have asked, “How exactly?” but didn’t see how I could fit it in.) I was dangerously close to switching allegiance. No wonder her Jeff fooled around-the woman was a harridan. I gave her thirty seconds to come up for air. If the confirmation of Jeff’s infidelity had driven her crazy, it had been a short drive and I’d done enough penance for it.

“Excuse me, ma’am?” I said. How many adulteresses called their lovers’ wife ma’am? “I think I must have dialed the wrong number.” It stopped her cold-but just long enough for her to fill her tank and start again.

“Like hell you did. Don’t give me that ma’am crap-and don’t think you’re the first-”

I put the phone back in the cradle and prayed she didn’t have the star 69 option on her telephone service.

The next call was marginally better. This time I did my best to sound sweet and wholesome. But according to this Jeff’s roommate, Jeff was touring with a production of Jersey Boys and always wore Oliver Peoples’s prescription sunglasses with dark blue lenses. They were his trademark. It was unlikely that he was the man I was looking for.

“You didn’t really find a pair of sunglasses, did you?” the roommate asked. Jeez, was I that transparent? “Listen, you sound like a nice person. If he’s hiding out from you, honey, it’s probably over. It’s time to move on. I know from whence I speak.” I let him tell me the story of his breakup with Ethan and thanked him for being so supportive. Jeff was lucky to have such a sensitive and understanding partner.

So far I’d been excoriated for being a slut and pitied for being a dumpee who was all but stalking a former lover. If I didn’t have such a positive self-image, I might have let those two calls discourage me.

There was one number left. I didn’t know what my next step would be or how I’d search the other forty-nine states if all the Michigan calls were as unsuccessful as the first two.

The phone rang ten times. I was just about to hang up when an older woman answered. Yes, her son was always misplacing things. The old sweetheart gave me a laundry list of the things this Jeff Warren had lost since grade school, including a jersey signed by his coach and the five starters on his high school basketball team, two of whom went on the play for the Spartans. I was impressed that she knew who they were, but obviously she was a hoops fan. He’d lost a collection of commemorative first edition stamps given to him by his uncle Lou, who’d spent forty years working for the post office, three jobs-one that the aforementioned Uncle Lou had had to pull strings to get him-and two wives. So she wasn’t surprised that he’d lost his expensive sunglasses and wasn’t I a dear for trying to return them. But Jeff wasn’t home now. He was on the road, driving a truck up and down the East Coast. He got the job through one of his ex-brothers-in-law, Leroy, who worked for Hutchinson Shipping. Bingo.

Mrs. Helen Warren clearly didn’t get many phone calls. Jeff’s ex-wives never stayed in touch, but that was probably a good thing because they were worthless gold diggers and never really appreciated her boy. Her daughter Abby had moved to Northern California and rarely came to visit, not even for her high school reunion-just came the one time when her dad passed. Helen and Abby’s relationship had been reduced to twice-yearly baskets from Harry & David on Christmas and Mother’s Day, and the twins’ annual class picture slipped into an envelope with just the date on the back, not even a note. It was so sad I almost hung up on her to call my own mother.

Jeff had moved his few possessions back home after the second divorce since he was now driving for a living (better money), and he was on the road so much these days it didn’t make sense for him to pay rent. Especially since he was still supporting those two floozies whom she’d never liked, who had never given her grandchildren, and who’d taken him to the cleaners or, in Jeff’s more modest circumstances, the launderette.

I hated to stop her; it was like stream-of-consciousness reality television. I started to picture them all standing in front of a retired judge, pointing fingers and shouting at one another until they broke for a commercial. Even though it hadn’t worked the last time, I thought it time to resurrect “ma’am.”