I remember reading about a museum, an athenaeum on the East Coast, in Connecticut, in which some paintings had been stolen and the curators had left, on the walls, the blank spaces where the paintings had been hanging. People would come and stand in front of the empty spaces on the walls, reading the descriptions, and even without the actual works of art, I think some of the people probably felt something rub off.
Scott’s bed was a futon with a quilted comforter on top, and since I was already sitting on the bed, it wasn’t hard to swing my feet up over the end of the bed. I rolled over, opened up the comforter, and then rolled back into the center of the bed. Settling into the indentation where he’d probably slept, I covered myself with the comforter, put my head on the pillow, and either the scent of his scalp or the scent of some shampoo had been absorbed by the pillow. I was aware of the scent and aware, in an abstract way, of the lingering electrical trace of a human body. And not just Scott’s body. I was lying, face up, thinking about him and also about Jane, wiggling on or against the soft mattress, on or against the soft pillow, trying to lose myself and at the same time absorb both the scent and the life that scent represented. It was warm in the room, and I was warm, and I lay there for a while, burrowing into the warm bed, as if a life, or a desired life, could possibly rub off on another person.
I’d walked down the hill, back to the school playground, and I was just getting into my car when my pocket began to vibrate. My cell phone, I thought, but it wasn’t mine, it was Scott’s, and I answered it.
“Scott?”
“This is a friend of Scott’s,” I said.
“Is Scott there?”
“Not at the moment.”
The person talking was Scott’s mother. Her name was Alice and she’d heard of me, apparently, and mentioned that she was coming to his house to gather some things together. She said she was looking forward to meeting me, and when she hung up, since there was no point calling Scott, I put his phone back in my pocket, and about a half hour later a car pulled up, right into the driveway, right in front of the main house.
Ed and Alice were the sort of parents you’d see on a rerun television show. Ed was heavy and gray, and Alice looked like a woman who’d been sexy in her youth, and a hint of the starlet had stayed with her. She seemed years younger than Ed, who, I could tell, wanted to have a smoke.
“Did he get off all right?” the mother asked me.
“You know Scott,” I said.
“We all know Scott,” she said, and as we walked up the stone walkway, Alice told me about Scott’s decision to go away, and that he wanted his books delivered to him, which was why they were there. They’d driven down from Santa Barbara and I think they were hoping to catch him before he left. But all they caught was me.
“Would you like the royal tour?” I said, and I led them into Scott’s cramped quarters.
Alice commented on the beauty of the neighborhood and we talked about Scott’s car and about how long it would take to drive to Arizona, and in answering questions about their son — they seemed to think I was close to him — I almost seemed to be taking on some of the attributes of their son.
Ed didn’t have much to say. Once they’d gotten a tour of the inside of the house, he was content to sit on the bed reading one of Scott’s books, a photography book about Chaco Canyon. Alice and I walked outside, onto the deck, and when she looked over the railing she pointed to the bottom of the canyon and said, “What’s down there?”
“Nothing,” I said.
“Scott told me about his tunnel.”
I told her that there was poison oak down there, but she said she wanted to explore. With me. She asked if I would join her, and I could see she was intent, so “Yes,” I said, and we walked down the steps, along the garage and into the dirt. There wasn’t actually any poison oak, so we walked down through the dry grass, and although she held my hand now and then, she was agile, leading me down the slope to the entrance of the tunnel.
The ground was wet, and it was slippery, and I didn’t know what she wanted to do or see. I didn’t have a flashlight, so I poked my head into the opening of the tunnel, adjusting my eyes to the darkness, looking through to the light at the other side.
“This is the place,” I told her.
“He’s an impulsive person,” she said, and she stepped to the entrance of the tunnel, bent down to look inside, and I think she was about to start walking into the tunnel, but because of the mud she slipped. Her feet flew out from under her and she landed on her hip.
“I’m all right,” she said, but she didn’t get up.
I had been thinking about water, and although I knew that water wasn’t capable of thought, I imagined the thought process of water flowing down a stream. And in an effort to be more like water I reached out. Alice was on the dry, sloping side of the rivulet, and fortunately she was what they call petite. I bent down, and because she was light, I was able to lift her, and holding her in my arms, I carried her up the hill. As I climbed up the trail I talked to her, this person in my arms, and when I said to her that she was “light as a feather,” it wasn’t so much what I said as how I said it. Like Scott. Like Scott doing his impression of Steve Martin. I was talking like Steve, which to her must have sounded like Scott, and she seemed to respond to that. By the time I got her, cradled in my arms, up to the deck, Ed had brought out some folding chairs, and I set her down on one of those.
I went inside Scott’s room to get her a pillow, and I noticed the television was turned off. I remembered the movie I’d seen playing on that television when I first met Scott. Detour was a low-budget black-and-white B movie from 1945. The director, Edgar Ulmer, had come to Los Angeles from Austria, and the main character in the movie is a man who changes who he is. In the beginning he’s a piano player, working at a lounge in New York, and he’s in love with a singer at the lounge, a girl who’s also in love with him. When she moves to Los Angeles, he decides he can’t live without her, so he follows her, hitchhiking his way across the country. He has almost no money, and when he’s picked up by a man in a luxurious convertible he thinks it’s his lucky day. The man, whose name is Charles Haskell, is driving all the way to Los Angeles, and our hero can finally relax. And when Haskell asks him to drive it’s not a problem. The problem happens when Haskell, because he’s had either too many pills or not enough pills, falls out of the car. And dies. In this particular scene it’s raining, and our hero, standing over the wet body, doesn’t know what to do. He didn’t kill Haskell but he knows he’ll be suspected of killing him, so he leaves Haskell’s body in the weeds along the road. He leaves the body but he takes the wallet, and with it, Haskell’s money and identification.
I was worried my impersonation of Scott would be too obvious, but no one seemed to notice. Ed volunteered to scramble some eggs on Scott’s hot plate, and as a kind of family, the three of us ate scrambled eggs together on the deck. I could hear birds singing in the trees, and as we chewed our food I imagined a measure of happiness in this family, a family that consisted of Mom and Dad and not me, and not Scott, but Steve Martin. He seemed to come up from somewhere inside me. And partly because he didn’t seem to be hurting anything, I let him come. And as I continued to be this unreal thing, this made-up thing, it seemed more and more like a natural and generous thing. As my own behaviors began falling away, I noticed that I was liking Ed and Alice more than I thought I would, and especially Alice, who, whatever her age, hardly seemed like a mother. When we washed the dishes, she stood very close to me, and I think she was comforted by my talking like Scott and walking like Scott, and I could have stopped. I could have held myself in a way I considered “like myself,” but I could see it was making Alice and Ed, not quite exuberant, but Ed was looking around now at the trees, and the expression on Alice’s face was almost as if a veil had been lifted. She kissed me in a motherly way, on the lips, and then I walked them to their car. They backed out of the driveway and drove off, and when they did, along with a certain happiness, there was a vague inkling, a physical feeling that something was still unfinished. Like the man who becomes Charles Haskell. Even if he believed in his own mind that he was Haskell, or even if he convinced a few other people, eventually he would have to prove it to the world.