A little black dog waddled into the room and over to my leg. I bent over and petted it.
“That’s Henry Hank. My husband names all the puppies after old boxers. We know the customers change the names when they get them home, so Greg gets a kick out of having a whole stable of fighters around him for a few weeks.”
Another one came in and was introduced as Gil Diaz.
“Hello!”
At first I thought her husband looked fine. Much more robust and healthy than Anwen. Very tan and filled out. Those were the impressions that crossed my mind when I stood up to meet him. As we were moving toward each other, one of the dogs started barking and Gregory looked down to see what the hubbub was. Seeing him up close, I realized his skin was tanned the unnatural brown-orange that come from tans in a bottle. When I was a boy and that junk had just been developed, a guy in town bought some Man-Tan and slathered himself with it. For weeks he looked like he was wearing a kind of dreadful burnt-siena lipstick, badly layered, all over his unfortunate body. I suppose they have improved the product since then, but not much, by the looks of Gregory Meier.
He shook hands oddly too—a much too big and powerful burst when we first touched and squeezed, then nothing. His hand went completely flaccid. I remembered he had had a breakdown. The longer I watched him, the more signs of his fragility and eccentricity were evident. In the end I had the feeling they might have “retired” to the country from their previous life because the pressure had been too much for this man, and would be for a long time.
“Darling, he says a famous breeder in the West recommended us. A man named Raymond Gill?”
“Raymond! Sure, I know Raymond. Nice man. What does he raise again?”
“Pugs.”
“Pugs, that’s right. Nice man.”
He cleared his throat much too often. He paid such dramatic, overly close attention to what others said, even when it was trivial lighter-than-air chitchat, that it was disconcerting. He tried so hard and that’s what made it so fucking sad. He wanted you to think you were a very important person to him, despite having met only minutes before. He wasn’t a sycophant or a glad-hander either. He probably did like me, because I was nice and pleasant while there, but the pathos was in his rictus smile, a handshake that died after too much first squeeze, the scary-adoring way he looked at his wife. By comparison, she was the strongest person on earth.
The most embarrassing moment came in the middle of a discussion about the merits of the French bulldog over other breeds. Gregory broke off what he was saying and grinned. “Do you know what H. L. Mencken called Calvin Coolidge? ‘A dreadful little cad.’ The tongue should never show in these dogs, as I’m sure you know.”
The change from dogs to Mencken to dog tongues came so fast it took several seconds to register. I’m sure I overreacted, because when I turned to Anwen, she was frowning and puckering her lips at me as if to say, “Sssh! Don’t show him you heard.” This wild skid from one side of his mind to another happened again twice while Gregory spoke but I pretended not to notice.
So what was worse, his brittleness? The way the Meiers lavished their ghostly love on each other and those gargoyle dogs? Or simply the power of their house? The house/monument/golem they’d needed and built to replace their lost child.
It was quiet torture remaining there that long, sad afternoon. I needed more than anything to get away and think. To sit in a bar or a hotel room, a corner anywhere alone where I could talk to myself about what to do next.
I was ninety-five percent certain Lincoln Aaron was their son. But there remained things to do to make sure. I did them in New York by contacting yet another detective agency and having them check out Lily’s “parents,” Joe and Frances Margolin, in Cleveland. No one by either name had lived in that city for thirty years. The same was true about a child named Lincoln Aaron, purportedly born in Cleveland eight or nine or ten years before. No hospital or governmental bureau there had any record.
Why am I getting ahead of myself here and telling the most important part of the story before it happened? Because I already knew the truth that day sitting in the Meiers’ living room. Sitting on a soft couch with a cup of aromatic tea, I knew the woman I loved more than any person on earth was a criminal and a monster. Kidnapping is monstrous. Like murder and rape, it undermines the only real givens we have in life: my life, my sexuality, the issue of my blood are my own.
Lincoln once made up a story about crows with blue eyes. It wasn’t good or interesting, but his image of those inky birds with azure eyes haunted me long after. Crows are smart, sneaks, loudmouths. I like them very much for what they are. If I saw one sitting on a branch smoking a cigar I’d laugh and think yes, that’s right. But blue eyes belong to babies, angels, Swedes; put them in a crow and the funny goes away. The imp becomes perverse. Several phone calls away from knowing my love was a nightmare, I couldn’t rid my mind of the boy’s image. A crow with blue eyes. His mother, my friend and love, the very worst kind of human being. Crows with blue eyes. Lily Aaron, kidnapper.
When the visit was over, after I’d seen the house and all the dogs and we’d talked until the three of us were in a late-afternoon stupor of too much information and too many words, they walked me to my rental car. I thanked them for their time. To get out of having to buy a dog, I told them what I really wanted was a gray one, which they didn’t have. One of their females was due to give birth in a few weeks and I’d call to find out if a gray was among the litter. When Anwen asked for my address and telephone number in Portland (where I supposedly lived), I made them up.
As I was turning the key in the ignition, Gregory touched my arm and asked me to wait a second. He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a sheet of white paper. While he carefully unfolded it, I glanced at Anwen, who looked uncomfortable and embarrassed for the first time that day.
“I’m sure you haven’t, but I ask everyone we meet. I know it’s crazy, but I’m sure you’ll understand. Anwen told you what happened to our son. This is what they think he’d look like today. The police have these machines that can draw a face in a kind of long-term projection. Take someone who’s five years old, press the button, and you get an idea of what they’d look like at twenty. It’s really amazing, but they say with a baby it’s very hard.” Gregory’s face wavered, fell, rose, tried to smile, couldn’t. “The bones are so soft when they’re that young. They don’t have much distinctiveness in their faces then. You’ve never seen a boy out there in Portland who looks anything like this, have you?”
Cold, cold, such cold poured across my heart and froze me. Taking his bent sheet of paper, I forced myself to look. But for long seconds I honestly couldn’t focus on what was there. My life was in my hands and that is the final danger.
When the anxiety settled some and I saw the drawing, it was with the most horrid relief that I realized it wasn’t my boy! The eyes were wrong, the round cheeks, a chin that was soft when it should have been unusually prominent. This wasn’t Lincoln. For a moment I felt absolved. There’s no way Brendan Meier is Lincoln Aaron. Hooray! Thank God. Amen. Then came the most perverse synapse, for I felt a terrible urge to say, “He doesn’t look like this. The eyes are much deeper. He has Lily’s wide mouth. His hair—” And I didn’t know if I was meaning their boy or our boy or the same boy. My heart was the first to know. This was the moment to tell the truth, but my heart went both secret and dead to them. I was almost sure of Lily’s crime against this couple but could almost physically feel my whole self, starting with my heart, turning away. There’s a proverb that says a person has a chance at the splendor of God twice in his life—once in early adolescence and again when he is forty-five or fifty. Conversely, I could literally feel myself embracing evil then. Perhaps I would come back later and tell them the truth, or go to Lily and confront her, but now I handed their picture back, made a small apologetic smile, and said no, sorry. What was worse, seeing the pain on Gregory’s face as he took it and looked at the drawing for the millionth time or Anwen’s glance of pity at her husband? Or was it even the drawing itself, this bad counterfeit of a boy’s face that was so much handsomer and full of character in real life.