Vanished: NYC Midnight Short Story Challenge 2008

The following is my entry into last year's NYC Midnight Short Story Challenge.
Again, one week, 2500 words - this time genre: mystery; subject; typewriter.

Nicholas was one of those men whom nobody liked but everybody wanted to be near.
No one claimed friendship with him. Yet he was never without an invitation to a dinner party, and even before we married he never spent a Friday night alone.
I could be cynical and say his popularity had something to do with the eight million copies his last novel sold, but that wouldn’t be fair. Yes, I suppose bestselling author status didn’t hurt his appeal. Nor, for that matter, did his GQ looks and his tendency to pick up the tab.
But it was more than that.
Call it confidence. Call it arrogance. Call it charisma.
Whatever Nicholas O’Keefe had, it worked.
Then he vanished.


*

The most bizarre things happen in commonplace settings, the most earth-shattering changes against a backdrop of mundanity.
Nicholas’s books taught me that.
Which is why it seemed fitting that it was an ordinary day. I did two loads of laundry, scrubbed the bathroom and went grocery shopping, remembering to pick up Nicholas’s organic flax bread and soy milk.
Even the weather was bland. Sunny, warmish, breezy – an average San Francisco September day.
The only oddity was the fact that the flat was empty when I returned. It was Tuesday, and on Tuesdays Nicholas worked at the antique roll-top desk that occupied a place of honor in his living room.
Our living room, I suppose I should say, though it didn’t feel like it. I’d been there for a year, but there was no trace of me in the flat. It was his: his books on the shelves, his vintages in the wine closet, his antique sleigh bed dominating our bedroom.
In any case, the living room was empty.
I noticed the silence first. I didn’t hear the tickety-tack of the old Underwood.
(“All the greatest writers used typewriters, Rachel,” he’d explained once, when I asked why he never used a computer. “Can you imagine Hemingway with a laptop?”
“And you think you’re in Hemingway’s league, do you?” I teased.
He regarded me with a level gaze.
“No,” he said quietly. “I’m better.”
I nearly laughed. Then I realized he was serious.
I never mentioned the typewriter after that.)
The absence of its background percussion made the room sound hollow when I spoke.
“Nicholas?”
I immediately felt foolish for disrupting the silence.
Was I prescient? Did I have some feeling of foreboding? No. He could have gone for a walk or to the corner for coffee.
After three hours, I made a few calls.
His agent hadn’t seen him. Neither had his editor. Nor his squash partner.
I went to bed alone.

*

The cops seemed surprised it took me more than a day to call them. (Forty-two hours, in fact.)
I didn’t bother explaining that Nicholas wasn’t like other people. The idea of calling home if other plans came up would never cross his mind. He might catch a plane to L.A. and call me two days later, or spend all night at an after-hours club in the name of research.
The cops were more concerned than I was.
They visited three times, and each time they asked so many questions I got tired of repeating myself.
No, none of his clothes were missing, apart from a pair of sneakers and the jeans and T-shirt he’d been wearing that morning. His wallet was gone, but nothing else – not so much as a toothbrush.
No money was gone from our joint account, I told them. (I didn’t bother telling them that, with Nicholas’s financial savvy and obsessive need for privacy, he undoubtedly had multiple bank accounts of which I was unaware.) The cops informed me there had been no activity on his credit cards.
Did he have any enemies, they wondered.
Well, he doesn’t have any friends, I admitted. But I also said I couldn’t imagine a single person who disliked him enough to do him harm. (That was perhaps slightly disingenuous on my part. Of course I knew one person who disliked him enough to do him harm. But one hardly mentions to detectives that one has come to realize one can’t abide one’s husband.)
Were there other women, they asked.
Just one, I said.
I think they were surprised I didn’t cry or try to explain.
Why would I? It was what it was.
It was the receptionist at his agent’s offices, and it was research. He wanted to know what an affair felt like. She was red-haired, curvaceous and twenty-four; in a way, I had to admire the self-confidence that allowed him to assume such a woman would be interested in casual sex with a forty-eight-year-old married man.
Mind you, I’m sure he did it in style. There would be no cheap motels for Nicholas. Undoubtedly it was sumptuous dinners in expensive restaurants, roses sent to her apartment, expensive French wine in front of a roaring fire. And the sex was assuredly memorable.
But was an affair a reason to walk away from his comfortable life – the life in which everything is done for him and no demands are made?
No, I told them. He wouldn’t have left me for another woman.
They seemed skeptical.
They asked plenty of other questions.
But they never asked about the one thing that mattered. Not that I expected them to. They couldn’t have understood the importance of the old Underwood.
He could have walked away from the flat. From his clothes and his books and his wine and even from me. But Nicholas would never have left that typewriter without some compelling reason. Not voluntarily.
I knew that. The cops didn’t.

*

Of course they suspected me.
Why wouldn’t they? Rich, famous husband disappears, leaving dull, dutiful wife in his million-dollar third-floor Nob Hill walkup with access to enough money to ensure she never needs to work again. And more than enough to buy herself a new life in the absence of the arrogant bastard who took her for granted once too often.
They never said they suspected me, of course. They were far too polite. But they asked too many questions about me – how I’d met Nicholas, how long we’d been married, whether there was a prenup, whether there was insurance, how much I knew about his finances.
They took the names and phone numbers of my former colleagues. My parents. Even my college friends.
I’m sure they got an earful from Miranda.
She must have mentioned her wedding day.
It was picture-perfect. Miranda was radiant in ivory taffeta. Even I felt almost pretty – the green bridesmaid’s gown was becoming to my off-brown hair, and the folds of the skirt were forgiving to my hips.
But that’s an aside. The point is, it was a perfect wedding. Everyone was smiling. (Except Nicholas. Which didn’t surprise me, since I considered it a minor miracle he’d agreed to make an appearance at all.)
Then came “speak now or forever hold your peace.”
There was a pause. A good-natured titter from the crowd. Then a cough.
Every head in the church swiveled as a lone figure in the back row stood up slowly.
“I’m sorry,” Nicholas said in a low, even tone. “But I have to speak. I slept with her. She’s in love with me, not him.”
Nicholas smiled calmly in the face of Miranda’s tirade.
“You fucking asshole!” she screeched. “That’s not true, and you damn well know it. I wouldn’t sleep with you if you were the last goddamn man on earth.”
Perhaps I should have felt more humiliated.
Everyone was so upset, and I was so calm. But then, I was the only person who understood Nicholas’s need to experience every detail of what he wrote. I had no doubt that in his next novel a wedding guest would stand up and say those precise words. If I were to ask, Nicholas would simply shrug and say he needed to see how people would respond.
I didn’t try to explain that to Miranda.
“Why the hell do you stay with him, Rachel?” she demanded.

Steve asked me that too.
He let Nicholas borrow his car – the beloved yellow ’67 Bug Steve had painstakingly restored. Steve never let anyone drive that car. He only let Nicholas have it because of me. (Steve and I were an item in college. We’d maintained an affectionate friendship, and I occasionally suspected Steve might be open to rekindling old fires.)
Nicholas drove the Bug to a party. Where he got utterly, blindingly, irredeemably drunk and drove home. Or tried to. His journey came to a screeching halt when he wrapped the Bug around a tree.
Nicholas had a cut on his face and a couple bruises.
Steve’s car was a write-off.
When Steve confronted Nicholas about it afterwards – more calmly than Nicholas had any right to expect – Nicholas just gave him that level stare and pulled out his checkbook, dashing numbers across it in a black scrawl.
Steve didn’t even glance at the parade of zeroes. He tore up the check and left.
“Why the hell do you stay with him?” he asked me later.
I didn’t bother trying to explain that Nicholas had merely needed to experience what it was like to drive under the influence because he was putting a drunk driver in his next novel.
And I didn’t try to answer the question.
Why do I stay?
Because I’m mousy-haired and overweight and no one’s ever looked at me the way he did when he bumped into me in the hallway at the publishing house.
Because I was a copy editor and he was a famous author, but he took me out for lunch and asked me questions about my life.
Because it may have begun as research for him but it was always more for me.
Because I was thirty-seven when I met him and I’d waited too long for my life to begin.
Because he can do things to my body no one else has ever done and even when I loathe him, when I long for him to disappear off the face of the earth, I can’t stop thinking about his hands and his lips and his tongue on my skin.
Because I’m an addict. And he’s a drug.
I couldn’t say that.
So I never said anything at all.
Miranda and Steve don’t call me anymore.

*

I was starting to get used to the flat.
A stack of my Ellery Queen mystery magazines had replaced a shelf of Hemingway. Australian Shiraz had forced the St. Emilion Bordeaux to the back of the wine closet. The pristine white duvet had been consigned to the linen cupboard in favor of my patchwork quilt.
And there was silence. I could curl up in the armchair and read my magazines without having to tolerate snide comments about trash fiction. Without hearing the tickety-tack of the old Underwood, which now stared at me in silent reproach.
There’s been no word, I felt like telling it. Should my life stop because the police can’t figure out what happened to my husband?
Not for lack of trying, mind you. The investigation went into overdrive after the headlines started – Bestselling author disappears morphed into O’Keefe missing for six months and then into One year later: Still no word on missing writer.
I was well-practised in the art of smiling pleasantly at people who remarked how well I was coping. I didn’t bother telling them there wasn’t much coping involved. I just read a lot.
Then came the day I saw the story title in the magazine.
Vanished.
The story was about a writer. Who works on an old Underwood typewriter. A handsome man who likes organic flax bread and soy milk and lives with his plain, overweight wife in a third-floor walkup in San Francisco.
One day he vanishes. No one can figure it out. Until his wife realizes what has happened when she sees a story written by him, under another name, in her favorite mystery magazine.
He has started another life.
Just to see if it could be done.
I checked the author’s bio.
“Robert Davidson is a writer living in Vancouver, Canada.”
Robert is Nicholas’s middle name.
David is his father.

*

He was easy to find. A simple Google search turned up Robert Davidson’s website. There was no photo, but there was an address and phone number.
That shouldn’t have surprised me.
Was it arrogance that convinced him no one would ever find him? Or arrogance that convinced him I would look?
I didn’t call ahead.
I bought a plane ticket and flew north.
He smiled when he saw me at his door.
“You read it,” he said.

*

I refused his offer of a bed, telling him I’d get a hotel.
I knew he could read me. He could tell that the sight of him was enough to stir my latent addiction into life. That every fiber of my being screamed out for him to carry me upstairs. That I very nearly pushed him onto the carpet and didn’t even wait for a bed.
I agreed to meet him for dinner. But not at a restaurant. Somewhere private.
“A picnic?” he suggested, and his green eyes glowed.
I know what you’re after, those eyes said, and you know I’ll oblige.
He planned it well. The champagne, the cheese, the paté, the red-and-white-checked cloth to spread on the grass at the secluded park by the river.
He knew I wasn’t there for conversation.
It didn’t surprise him when I set down my champagne and reached out for him.
The fire that was racing through me seemed to ignite in him too, and he chuckled softly as my hands fumbled with his belt and zipper. He responded with his usual skill, his tongue starting new fires as it danced along my neck and towards my breasts.
He was prepared for anger.
He was prepared for passion.
He wasn’t prepared for the blow.
Nicholas may have been the master plotter, but he hadn’t seen the ending coming.
I had. I’d seen to it the rock was within reach – its smooth surface easy to grasp in one hand, its heft enough to daze with one solid thump.
Two.
Three.
He lay motionless, not stirring as I disentangled myself and rolled him laboriously towards the river. It was hard work. He wasn’t a light man.
The splash was surprisingly small.

*


It’s funny, isn’t it, that I’m sitting here now, at the roll-top desk, in front of the old Underwood.
How fitting it seems that this machine, this conduit of genius, is being used to write trash fiction.
There’s an irony in that fact that would appeal even to Nicholas O’Keefe.
It’ll be a good story.
Perhaps I’ll sell it to Ellery Queen.