All I could think to do was wait. Anne could be impulsive, and the waiting itself was an attempt to preserve the illusion that nothing substantial had happened. I sat on the metal guardrail, trying to find the padding in my buttocks, watching the cars, one after the other, car after car, and by now it was afternoon. It wasn’t afternoon before, but now it was, which meant I’d been waiting a long time. And all during that whole time I was still expecting Anne to pull up any minute, waving and smiling and ready to go. I drank my drink, ate the peanuts and the candy bar, and tried to adjust. I tried to banish the unpleasant thoughts I was having. And I did, to some extent. I noticed the trees, for instance, and the slow sway of their branches. I tried to fill my mind with the small moments that together comprised what I thought of as beauty. The clouds in the darkening sky, and the cool breeze … And I was able in this way to find a modicum of that beauty. Some. A little modicum, if that’s possible. But it wasn’t enough to dull my agitation. And because I was still agitated, I decided to take action. Action begins with intention, intention leads to decision, and as the sun sank lower into the sky I decided it was getting late. I called Anne’s mother (no answer) and I called our house (again no answer). I called Anne’s cell phone one more time and then decided to go home, saving my reaction to what was happening for later.
2
I walked back through trees and rocks, along a trail overlooking the Hudson River. I walked across the river, on the George Washington Bridge, and about halfway across I stood, with the wind and the sky and the sun going down, leaning against the railing of the bridge, looking down to the water and the patterns in the water. I was following with my eyes the current of the river when a man took a spot on the railing about an arm’s length away from me. The span of the bridge was enormous and in that entire expanse the man chose to stand close enough so that if I wanted to, I could reach out and touch the man. Which seemed to signal a desire, on his part, to engage in some form of interaction. But when I looked at the man, in his windbreaker jacket, he kept looking away, as an animal might look away, out to the distant spires of the mettlesome city.
To normalize the situation, or to normalize my own discomfort, I began talking to the man, mentioning conversationally that I’d lost my car, telling him about the gas station and about Anne’s disappearance. I didn’t go into much detail but I had a desire to speak, so I did. “I can’t find my wife,” I said, but the man didn’t look up. Or rather, he did look up, but his look didn’t acknowledge me. I couldn’t tell if that look was directed at me, or at something beyond me, something in the soft hills of New Jersey. And because I wanted to create some fellow feeling I turned and surveyed those same hills, and when I couldn’t determine what part of the landscape he found so compelling I turned back. The man was staring, not so much at me as through me, so that I had the sensation, not of being seen, but of being seen through. And it wasn’t that I was afraid of the man; if you had asked me I would never have mentioned fear. But I was afraid. Of my own transparency. What was unbearable was to not exist, and although I knew I existed, I attempted to prove that existence, to get some acknowledgment from the man that his world and my world were at least a little synonymous. But before that could happen, the man, in his khaki slacks and yellow jacket, started walking, and he continued walking, past me and along the pedestrian walkway. I wanted to stop him and say something about our common experience—“Nice view” or “Some river”—and in this way manufacture a degree of fellow feeling. But instead I straightened up, stepped away from the railing, turned, and walked back to New York City.
I caught the subway to Brooklyn, walked down the tree-lined street to my house, and I could tell Anne wasn’t home because no lights were lit. And that’s all right, I thought, she’s probably out shopping, at our local market, a co-op market, and I walked inside, turned on the lights, and waited for her to come home. I listened to a telephone message from Anne’s mother asking us to call her back, but I didn’t call back, partly because Anne was the only person I wanted to talk to, and partly because I heard in her mother’s slightly distraught voice the desire to believe that everything was fine — thereby indicating that something wasn’t fine — and the hope that if she believed it enough, everything would be.
Which was also what I was doing. I could accept the events that were happening as long as they meant what I wanted them to mean. While I waited for Anne to come walking in through the front door I tried to go about my normal life, to do what I normally would do, but I couldn’t remember what that was. I sat in my kitchen, our kitchen, with the little cactus plant by the sink. I sat in what I thought was my old familiar chair, trying to find its familiarity. I sat in a variety of ways — legs crossed, legs spread, legs up on the arm of the chair — trying to find the familiar position that would restore my familiar life, so that I could then live it. I was waiting for normalcy to return, and not just waiting, I was searching for that normalcy, and so I walked upstairs and went to sleep. I should say I went to bed, because sleep never came. I lay in bed, naked and slightly cold, the blue comforter pulled up to my neck, eyes wide open, staring at the uneven ceiling.
And Anne did not come home.
That night I woke, not from a dream, because I wasn’t sleeping, but it was like a dream. In my mind I could clearly see a man — actually several people, men and women — getting into a car, my car, and driving away. I didn’t know who they were, or remember who they were, but lying in bed, wide awake, I could see them. All night I watched a variety of permutations on the same basic story, a repetitious sampling of various people forcing themselves into the car, forcing Anne into the back seat or the front seat, and then the car driving off. To change these images, or control them, I tried to imagine a scene in which Anne uses some arcane martial art to subdue her assailants. When other thoughts intruded I pushed them away, fighting the unwelcome thoughts, trying to maintain the thoughts I wanted, the thoughts of Anne’s superior power and cunning. These positive thoughts, however, were constantly shifting and moving, running ahead of me and getting away from me. I was chasing, in my mind, the images I wanted to see, and at the same time avoiding the unbidden images that were coming after me. And eventually catching me. By morning I’d seen the scene, or thought it, so many times it became embedded into my reality.
In an effort to clear my mind I went to the upstairs front room, which was my room. I was going to sit on my antique rug and try to watch my thoughts for a while, or maybe watch my breath and forget about my thoughts. That’s when the telephone rang. I walked down to the phone and listened for the message. It was Anne’s mother asking Anne to call her back. Still trying to preserve the illusion of normalcy, I deleted the message, wrote it in the tablet we kept — a tablet made from leftover change-of-address postcards — and started boiling water for coffee. I made my coffee, buttered my toast, and sat at the kitchen table with my cup of coffee and plate of toast because that was my routine, and I wanted to preserve my routine — nothing like routine to dull the mind — although sometimes routine can sharpen the mind, like an execution or a knife.
What I mean is that my mind felt like a knife. The question — why I was sitting at this table without Anne — felt like the blade of a knife, and to avoid it I turned to my work. Before we’d left on our weekend getaway I’d spread out on the table a number of photographs, pictures of faces of babies. I was cutting out photographs for an article I was editing — for a baby magazine — about a baby’s first year of life, and so I sat at the table, drinking coffee and eating toast, looking at the innocent cherubic faces and occasionally looking out the back window to the garden.