“What do you mean you’re not sure? Didn’t you keep records? Isn’t that what this room’s for?”
Harold gazed at me, the file fluttering gently in his hands. “The seventies,” he finally said, “weren’t a time of meticulous filing.”
I sighed. “What happened to her child? I mean, she did have one, right? I found a picture taken when she was pregnant.”
“Yes,” he said, “I remember. After she had the kid, things really weren’t the same for old Eva.”
“What do you mean?”
“She got that thing that women get,” he said.
“You’ll have to be more specific, Harold.”
“After they have kids. You know, they get tired and emotional. As the British say.”
“Do you mean postpartum depression?” I stood up, turning the concept over in my mind. “How bad was it?” Bad as a brain tumor, I was thinking, or a love affair with Diego Rivera?
“I don’t exactly know,” Harold said, shifting around uncomfortably on the bed. “She was definitely on the wacky side there for a while.”
“Who was the father?” I said.
Harold shrugged. “Could’ve been anybody, you know. Anybody at all.”
“What happened to the child?”
“I have no idea,” he said.
“Are you sure? Isn’t there anybody you could ask? And what about her other paintings? Somebody must know what happened to them, don’t you think?”
Harold physically retreated from this volley of questions, leaning back against the wall with the folder pressed against his chest, as if shielding himself from my thirst for knowledge. “I’d have to give it some thought,” he said.
“Okay.” I stood there looking at him, waiting.
“It might take a couple days.”
“Well, all right.”
“You’d come back, wouldn’t you?” he said. “I’m starting to enjoy our little chats.”
“Can I hold on to this picture while you do?”
“I guess so.”
“Think away, Harold,” I said. “You’ve been a tremendous help.” At the front door, I turned around and kissed him on his dry, old man’s cheek, and he beamed.
On the interstate, just past the future site of the Shangri-la golf course, I took an exit and turned back to Santa Fe. There was something suspicious about Harold’s display of going through the files, only to pull out the right one at the exact moment I asked about his progress. The way he’d nodded so quickly and said that the father could have been anybody, and kept insisting that my father and Eva might have known each other. He knew more, it seemed to me, than he was letting on. For the moment I set aside my thoughts about the dissertation, and how I could sell it to Michael, to focus on my father. I felt an almost physical sensation of curiosity, a prickling down my spine, at the idea that I was going to learn something new, that there was a side to him I’d never noticed while he was alive.
Harold’s red SUV was still parked in front of his tidy condo, ready to navigate the ruggedly potholed streets of Santa Fe. I nudged the Caprice behind another expedition-style vehicle — fortunately, all the cars were so large that it wasn’t difficult to hide mine — and rolled down the window. A breeze guided the smell of pine trees into the car. I could hear the tinny notes of an ice cream truck trolling for kids along some nearby street, the half-broken melody sounding sinister and intent. It was just past noon.
Harold came out fifteen or twenty minutes later, wearing a dark-blue shirt over skintight black shorts that glistened in the sun. Over his shoulder he carried a large cloth bag that reminded me of Irina’s baby sling. I trailed him through lunch-hour traffic, wondering where on earth he was going in that outfit. His first stop was a health-food store in a strip mall. I gave him a few minutes, then stepped inside. If he saw me, I planned to act surprised and engage him in polite conversation about the benefits of whole-grain foods. But he was standing at the counter with his back to me, talking to a clerk about bee pollen. The smell of incense hung heavy in the air. Lurking behind a stack of unsweetened cereals and herbal teas, I listened to his querulous, shaky voice.
“I need energy,” he was saying to the clerk, a young woman with a long ponytail and glowing, rosy skin. “I feel so run-down, I can barely get up in the morning. You know what I mean?”
“It sounds as if you have systemic issues,” she told him.
“What do I take for that?” Harold said.
She steered him in the direction of some vegetarian multivitamins, and I went back to the car. Several minutes later he came out bearing a large brown bag, presumably full of systemic cures.
Back on the road, we weaved and dodged and changed lanes and turned corners — I tried to keep right behind him, for fearing of losing him — until he parked at another strip mall, in front of a coffee shop specializing in “locally roasted” beans. Pulling to the curb, I unrolled the window and smelled the burnt, acrid scent of the roasting. There were some elderly people lined up outside, apparently desperate for a jolt of caffeine. But Harold took his cloth bag next door, into Blue Butterfly Yoga. All of a sudden, following an old man with systemic issues to a yoga class, I didn’t feel like much of a scholar. I crossed my arms over the sticky vinyl of the steering wheel, telling myself I was an idiot. Then I saw a woman with long dark hair get out of a yellow convertible and go into the yoga studio. From the back I couldn’t tell how old she was, but I had a passing, insane thought: What if Harold knew a lot more about Eva than he was saying? What if this was her?
Inside, harp music was playing, and pairs of shoes were stacked in a cubbyhole unit in the entryway, exuding an unpleasant aroma. Copies of the Blue Butterfly class schedules were piled on a table and I grabbed one and stuck it in the back pocket of my shorts. On the other side of a blue batik curtain I could hear violent slapping sounds, punctuated by the occasional grunt, as if people were getting paddywhacked back there. I stuck my head around the curtain and saw it was a martial-arts class and that the slaps were people being flung to the floor by their instructor, a tiny young woman with her hair in pigtails. When she noticed me, she smiled brightly — a two-hundred-pound man still groaning at her bare feet — and said, “Ashtanga’s in the other studio.”
I left my sandals with the others and snuck into the back of another room, where Harold’s shiny black butt was now cradled gently on a folded blanket. He was sitting in the lotus position, his back to me. At the front of the room, a thin young man with short brown hair sat with his palms pressed and his eyes closed, humming. Wearing a see-through purple tank top and blue tights, he appeared to be in amazing shape; even the veins that ran along his biceps looked perfect in their contours.
The room was very warm. There were around ten people, including the woman with the long black hair, who was sitting next to Harold. I grabbed a folded blanket from a pile at the back and sat down in the lotus position. My knees cracked loudly, and a bald man turned around to stare. I could hear Harold chanting “Om,” his voice reedy and weak. The instructor raised his stringy arms straight up, displaying twin thickets of armpit hair and some remarkably well-defined abdominal muscles. The woman with the long dark hair released a long, sexual-sounding groan, but Harold paid her no mind. Imitating the instructor’s movement, I swayed to one side, held the position, then swayed to the other. I closed my eyes. It was remarkably easy to follow someone, I thought, and insert yourself into their day. I should do it more often.
A general shuffling sound made me open my eyes. Everyone else had moved to the sides of the room, where they lay flat on their backs with their legs hoisted up on the walls, and I scrambled to follow. This was a mistake. No way could I get my legs flat against the wall, not without snapping them in half. The instructor moved lightly through the room, touching shoulders, at one point placing a foot on someone’s stomach to flatten it. He had very long toes. When he reached me, sitting there in the lotus with my head bowed and eyes closed, I could hear him pause momentarily before moving on.