THE WAR HUMMED its familiar refrains. Hey, hey, LBJ. Jimmy had left his TV with her, but the news of body counts was depressing, so she stopped paying attention. Ann didn’t need coffee that summer. She tore into the stacks of books she had accumulated for the exam. Her mind seemed clearer now, her reading more confident. Instead of cramming material to regurgitate, she read attentively, without becoming diverted by longing for Jimmy. It took effort to tear herself away from an absorbing novel. She read slowly, drawn in by the astonishing brutality of an Icelandic saga, or the quiet beauty of a Shakespeare sonnet. Her old habit had been to grasp the gist of a work and go on, hurtling through bundles of material like an Evelyn Wood speed-reading demon. But now every facet of the kaleidoscopic display of Western literature shimmered with psychedelic significance, sensory impact, uniqueness. Bites of catnip, the opposite of Jimmy’s “submental folderol.” Folles de rôles, she thought. The languorous rhythms of Dylan Thomas made her forget to eat. She could halt on a glittering passage and imagine the author dreaming it up—trampolining for joy. Whitman and the lilacs, Woolf and the lighthouse, Poe and the raven.
CHICAGO
July 24, 1967
Dear Ann,
I had a fight with my dad, who I think is a hypocrite and a coward. But never mind. My mother is the nutcase! The pair of them deserve each other. I’m starting to see the dark humor in their marriage. I’m in my old room, with all my model trains and planes. It’s a kid’s room. They still see me that way. And they don’t see how obvious their lies are beneath their smooth facade. If the country club knew the TRUTH, they would have to kill themselves, I guess. I’m exaggerating, but it’s like Mom would flip out if someone thought she hadn’t made the bed that morning or sent a thank-you note for some crappy present. I embarrass them no end. In the living room Mom has a framed graduation photograph of me in a suit. She introduced me to a golfer lady and then showed her the picture. She said, “This is what my son really looks like—if he’d cut that hair. Blah blah.” I just walked out of the room. . . .
Chip sent me a Grateful Dead album. Oh man!
Love,
J
JIMMY WASN’T A great writer of love letters, she realized. He could have quoted a whole Shakespeare sonnet by heart if he had wanted to. She wished he would declare his feelings more effusively; his reticence made her restrained, not wanting to push herself at him. Girls traditionally were supposed to play hard to get, but this was Jimmy, she reasoned, and with Jimmy it was always real, not games.
WHEN ANN PULLED into her parking spot, she saw a police car driving away from the landlady’s house. Jingles, standing on the side porch next to her giant pot of elephant ears, was speaking with Sanjay. She clutched a light, frothy shawl around her sunflower sundress.
“Mrs. Sokolov had a robbery,” Sanjay said when Ann approached. “She is very upset.”
Jingles barely glanced at Ann. “It was my husband’s favorite possession. He bought it in Spain, when we worked there. It reminded us of Russia.”
“A sculpture,” Sanjay said. He indicated the broken window near the back of the house.
“You’ve seen it,” Jingles said to Ann. “You see it every time you pay the rent.”
“Have I?”
“The ballet dancer. It was like a Degas, only better. Georgiy always thought it was superior.”
There was so much clutter in Jingles’s house, Ann could not call the dancer to mind. Apparently the burglar had reached through a lace curtain and grabbed the statue. Jingles surmised that little barbed buttons on the dancer’s bodice had clung to the curtain and the robber ran off—curtain rod, curtain, and all.
“He didn’t expect the curtain to stick to the dancer,” Jingles said.
“The curtain rod was found in the alley,” said Sanjay.
“Did you hear a car drive off?” Ann asked.
“I heard the window break and then a thud like a stone when the table fell. I had to make my way from the front room upstairs and down the stairs. I wasn’t very fast. And I wasn’t scared, until now.” She coughed, then adjusted the decorative tortoiseshell comb in her bleached hair.
“Don’t be frightened, Mrs. Sokolov,” said Sanjay. “It appears that the burglar had seen the dancer and knew where it was. That was his goal.”
“Everyone here has seen my little dancer,” Jingles said. “I keep the curtain there so no one can see it from outside, so whoever stole it has been in the house.”
Jingles seemed to be growing more upset even as Sanjay tried to reassure her. She dusted an elephant ear with two fingers.
“It could be in one of the apartment units right now.”
Ann and Sanjay looked at each other. Sanjay turned to Jingles, who was teetering on the top step.
“Mrs. Sokolov, I am going to bring you my special curry this evening. You must lie down and rest, and do not worry about your dinner. I will bring it.”
PIXIE REMEMBERED THE ballerina statue.
“It was nothing like a Degas dancer,” she told Ann. “It was made of plaster or something. Ceramic, maybe, and it was bright colors. The skirt was orange and the girl had a pigtail coiled around the top of her head like a bird’s nest. Unforgettable.”
Ann said, “I never noticed it.”
ONE AFTERNOON, CHIP dropped by to check on Ann. He was staying at Jimmy’s place and teaching a course called Cybernetics through the Ages at the Free University. He wasn’t seeing Pixie now. He was going out with a girl named Amy, an undergrad history major who he said could whistle Brahms concertos and had a tattoo on her butt. “She’s into growing orchids,” he had said. “I don’t know how she does that in a dorm.”
Chip sat at the table. Ann wiped up spilled sugar.
“I know you like hot tea, so I’m going to make some for you.”
“Sure thing, thanks.” He drummed his fingers on the table. “What are you listening to these days?” he asked.
“The Airplane, the Doors. The usual.” But Sgt. Pepper made her anxious, plunged her into uneasy thoughts about the day of the trip. “Jimmy likes that Grateful Dead album you sent him.”
Chip recommended some new Bay Area groups. In her flurry of reading for the exam, Ann had not been listening to the radio.
“What do you think is going on with Jimmy?” she asked after she had poured boiling water onto the tea. The tea was loose leaves of Darjeeling. Pixie had given her the teapot, an apology for saying Jimmy was a jerk for going to Chicago without Ann.
“I’ve known Jimmy three years, and he’s always been restless, full of questions.”
“Did he have another girlfriend?”
“Oh, he went out with plenty of girls, but he didn’t seem to get serious about one till there was you.”
“Really? Why is he in Chicago? I was afraid there was some girl back home.”
“No. He never wants to go there.” Chip ran his hand through his unruly hair. “I talked to him long-distance the other day.”
“He hasn’t called me.”
“I called him to find out something about the gas stove. I should have just called the landlord.”