Ghost Lights by Lydia Millet (classic fiction txt) 📕

easier to pay Vera’s wages out of your own accounts for a while. T.’s finances are in transition. With all this confusion. Will that be a problem?”

“Oh? Oh. No,” said Angela, and waved a hand dismissively at Vera. “My checkbook is in there,” and she gestured toward a small writing desk.

“I am already paid for last week,” said Vera. “No problem. OK. Excuse me.”

“I would also like,” said Susan slowly, as Vera disappeared down a corridor, “to hire someone. I want to take action, I want to step in. I owe it to him. We all do. And to his business, which needs him. We’re losing money daily.”

“Someone?”

“A private security firm. To investigate what happened down there. I can handle it out of our petty cash fund at first, and draw on his other accounts later, if it starts to drag out.”

Angela nodded but Hal thought she was hardly listening.

“You know, to fly down and be in-country. Have a team on the ground. A search party actively looking for him. I would do it myself, but I have to handle things at this end.”

“Whatever you think, dear,” said Angela. “But don’t worry too much. He doesn’t really need them.”

“Them?”

“You know. Policemen.”

There was a pause, during which Angela recrossed her legs and smoothed her slacks over one thin thigh. From the apartment above them Hal could hear a bass line thudding. The rhythm was powerful but the melody indistinct. He tried to attune himself to the music, in case of recognition. In the meantime he was conscious of the quietness in the room, the soup tureen with its outdated homunculi in their robes and black topknots.

He had a sense of the rapidly cooling coffee in his cup, which he could not drink because he did not like coffee with milk, and the uncanny calm of the mother, which settled on her like a soporific . . . was she indifferent to her son, his well-being? Or was she absent?

“I hope you’re right,” said Susan to Angela, and smiled tightly.

“That boy has always landed on his feet.”

“But this is . . .”

“Trust me.”

After a few moments Susan consulted her watch.

“Well. I should probably be getting back,” she said, and Hal placed his coffee cup on the end table, relieved to be rid of it, and rose. “Do you have a couple of photographs I could take with me? To give them for the investigation?”

“Oh!” said Angela. “Certainly.”

She handed Susan a white and gold album off a shelf, and Hal waited impatiently while Susan paged through it, slipping snapshots from beneath plastic.

“It was good to see you,” said Angela when Susan gave it back. “Thank you for visiting me.”

She stood beside them at the door, benign and passive as they filed out. Susan was agitated, almost distraught. For his own part, all he was thinking as they left was: So, about the free love.

He wanted to ask her but he knew the question would seem irrelevant, pathetic in its smallness and its self-interest. There was a man’s life at stake. She was thinking only of that. The specter of death trumped the free-love worry.

“I should have done it before,” she said, shaking her head as she strode ahead of him toward the street. “I should have followed my instincts.”

For him, however, there was no specter of death, frankly. For one of them, there was the specter of death; for the other, only the specter of free love.

“I should have hired someone right away, but it’s not the kind of . . . I mean who thinks of that? You know?”

“I do know,” he said, with what he hoped was solemnity.

“I’m going to call them today. All it takes is picking up the phone and a credit card. A couple of photos . . . but why would they call her?”

“I’m sorry?”

They were standing at her car, facing each other.

“That hotel. They had explicit instructions to call me. I had to authorize the charges to his card, finally . . . she can’t do anything with the information, you saw how she is.”

“I did. It’s just she is his mother.”

“Still. It’s unprofessional that they didn’t call me.”

“Maybe the language barrier. A misunderstanding.”

He wondered if she was close to discerning his near-complete indifference to these questions, if she could discern the fact that he was hiding the real worry. What about the free love.

“OK. Anyway. Thank you for being here, honey. Sorry I’m so scattered,” she said, and opened her car door.

He was due back immediately—it had been two days now of distraction and not attending to his workload—but he did not go back. Instead he let her car disappear down the street and then drove toward her office himself.

He pulled into a parking structure close to the Promenade, from which, if he went to the third floor and gazed southward, he could see through the windows of her suite. She had pointed out this feature to him when she first began working for Stern—how from the west windows of the office you could look over a few white rooftops to the Pacific Ocean, and from the east you had almost nothing in view save the hulking gray levels of the parking complex.

He made a few circuits before a space opened up in the right location. He wanted to be able to stay in the car as he watched, unseen. He had become a stalker.

He was almost sure he had the right window, and gazed at it expectantly, but the rectangle stayed dark.

For a few minutes, idle and slightly anxious, he listened to the squeak of tires as cars rounded corners in the structure behind him. He tried to rethink his position. Give this up, this adolescent fixation; return to doing your duty.

He was not quite willing to leave, but still he had his hand on the keys in the rental car’s ignition—disappointed but also a little relieved—when the light in the rectangle flicked on. He saw Susan. She leaned over a cabinet. He could