Love Her Madly Read online

  I rolled over for the fiftieth time, unable to fall asleep. I shouldn’t have come down on Raj so hard about his visions. I knew he was stressed out, and anyway, I had been imagining her, too. I wanted to make up properly so that we could drift to sleep in the comfort of each other’s arms, listening to the rain. It had been far too long since that had happened.

  I slipped from the bed and wrapped myself in a thick robe, padding silently toward the door. Raj was in his study, the door half-open, and I saw the glow from his computer screen pouring into the hall. I moved to the doorway and paused there. Raj was typing into a distinctive white-and-blue website, unmistakably Craigslist. By some unholy spousal telepathy, I knew that he was on the “Missed Connections” page, throwing out bait, trolling for Cyn.

  I recoiled, the breath to speak his name dying in my throat. He said he wasn’t hoping to see her. He’d lied, right to my face, and I believed him. The floorboard creaked beneath me, and Raj instantly clicked off the page back to his e-mail, as if away from a particularly vile porn site. I quietly closed the bathroom door, knowing with sick certainty that Raj wasn’t done chasing this vision.

  I caught my reflection in the mirror and saw the bloodless face of what I’d become; a woman scared to the bone of losing her husband to a ghost.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Raj

  “What happened out there tonight?” Marshall asked, his small frame perched atop a folding chair in my airless closet of a dressing room.

  “I don’t know. I just, froze. It’s never happened to me before.” I cupped my hands onto my knees, fully aware that they were shaking. I had frozen up in act 3, forgotten my lines, screwed up entirely, like an amateur. The rest of the cast scrambled to cover for me while I stared at them blankly, like a zombie, the inside of my mouth coated with what felt like ash. I saw them in slow motion, inventing, on the fly, ways to preserve the jokes that my stunning silence had otherwise killed.

  Mercifully, the scene ended. In the wings, the other actors recoiled from me, the wounded animal of the herd. Standing in the darkness by the prop table, I was fairly sure my career on Broadway was over.

  “I didn’t get much sleep last night . . . ,” I began, desperation seeping sourly from my pores.

  Marshall looked at his immaculate loafers and sighed. “Your theater company, the Clockwork Bird?”

  “Clockwork Owl. Yes?” My heart, which had been thundering, now slowed to a crawl. I’d mentioned my company to a few cast members, but not to Marshall, our director. I thought it best to keep it quiet, so as not to upset the hierarchy of the show by revealing my own directorial leanings. I’d seen it cause tension in other companies, when such actors were perceived as challenging the director’s authority, flying too close to the sun on untested wings. I didn’t want that to happen on this show. It was too valuable.

  “How are things going with that? You’ve been working hard?”

  I did not like where this was headed.

  “Things are going well, thanks for asking. Listen, Marshall, I’m really sorry about tonight. In my near decade of performing onstage, it’s never once happened before, and it won’t again. Ever.”

  Marshall sighed. “I believe you, Raj, but the producers are a little pissed off. Two of them were in the house tonight. So was the playwright and his mother, visiting from the UK.”

  “Oh, shit.”

  “Yes, shit indeed. Had I known, I would have informed everyone, but I just found out myself. The playwright made a big stink. I guess his favorite sequence got dropped. You know how these writers are.” He cracked his knuckles and crossed his legs. “I want you to hear it from me. They’re putting out a call for potential replacements for the role of Dr. Seager.”

  “I’m fired?”

  “No, no. Not yet. If you’re lucky, it will take a few days to get auditions together, and they may not find anyone good. Of course, I will continue to voice my support for you as the best actor for the role. I believe that.”

  “Thank you.” My voice had died away to a pathetic whisper.

  “This whole thing might blow over completely, but you must be sure that you are at the absolute top of your game for the next performance, and the next fifty after that. There are no nine lives in show business.”

  “I understand.”

  “You might want to back off on your extracurriculars, if you know what I mean. Running a theater company can be exhausting, I know. And considering what’s at stake for you here on Broadway, it might be time to reprioritize.”

  He stood up and folded his chair, tucking it neatly against the wall. He extended his hand like a headmaster finished with administering a caning. I stood and shook his hand. A moment later, he was gone. It was just me, and some doomed failure in the mirror, hunched double, trying not to cry.

  After I pulled myself together and washed off my stage makeup, I took a look at my e-mail. There were four responses to the “Missed Connections” notice I’d posted. All appeared to be weirdos. One had included a picture, which I did not open, assuming it would be a penis, or worse. I deleted all of them, and considered removing the post completely. But the thought that it hadn’t even been twenty-four hours since I’d posted it stilled my hand.

  I understood on some level that what I was doing was delusional. The sad truth was, this was by no means the first time I’d put up an ad reaching out to Cyn. I’d first done it when I was in Florida, searching for a place for Glo and me to live. My search of all the free listings in New York led me to some strange places, and before long I was placing sad little notes on sites with names like LongLost, MissingABroad, and FindHerForMe. I had little faith it would work, but like a sailor tossing out a message in a bottle, I clung to the idea that the gesture itself had meaning. It comforted me, the possibility of hope being not completely dead.

  Not completely dead.

  A shiver passed through me, just as it had onstage before everything went wrong, and just as had happened onstage, I found myself mired like some tar pit dinosaur in the icy gaze of the woman at the bar. Whoever she was, she knew where to find me. Other people saw her, so I knew she wasn’t a pure figment of my imagination. I needed to find out who she was and why she was lurking about, dragging my attention away from where it needed to be, like some terrible siren. I had to get a handle on whatever this was before it wrecked more than just my professional reputation.

  I rose and grabbed my coat. It was time to check the bait that I’d left at the Owl earlier that day. When you’re fishing for a phantom, you cast many reels.

  Earlier that day, I had awoken on my couch in the study to find Glo already gone. Her absence filled me with a sick feeling that was unrelated to my hangover. Glo always woke me from the couch in the middle of the night to bring me back to bed. She claimed she couldn’t sleep as well without me there. I had heard her rise once when I was at the computer, but she went directly to the bathroom and then disappeared back into the bedroom without a word. If these were normal days, she would have at least stopped in to kiss me good-bye before going to work. Obviously, she was still pissed about what happened at the Dragon.

  The thought of her anger only made me more resolute. I would unravel the mystery and then we could laugh about it all the way to the bedroom. There was the slenderest chance that the Craigslist post would bear fruit, and as my drowsy gaze fell upon my printer, another better idea fought its way to the surface of my consciousness.

  One hour later, I’d taken the train to the Dragon armed with a full-color picture from the heady days of Cyn’s nationwide fame. She had graced the cover of the New York Post, her yearbook picture transposed next to a shot of her kneeling topless on a fur rug, one arm covering just enough breast to be publishable in a “family newspaper.” MISSING GIRL MODEL STUDENT? the headline had questioned. I had cropped the image so that it was just her head and shoulders. I found myself staring at the photo from the Post, pulled
into daydreams as tentacles of lust-tinged nostalgia wormed through me. I hadn’t seen a picture of her in years, and it struck me how beautiful, how effortlessly sexy, she had really been. I sat there looking at her photo until I began to feel creepy. A small, under-evolved part of my brain urged me to go all in and plug her name into a search engine. I knew the sort of pictures it would bring up. But I didn’t do that. I hadn’t done it in the seven years she’d been gone. Whenever I thought of how things ended between us, the desire drained right out of me. I clicked off and powered the computer down, proving, if only to myself, that I was still in control.

  I gave the cropped picture of Cyn to Ted, the Dragon’s day bartender, and asked him to show it to Steve and the bar-backs when they came in for their shifts.

  “If she shows up, call me, okay?”

  Ted nodded, and tucked the photo next to the tip bucket, his own wedding band clinking audibly against the metal of the rim. He and Glo were friends. They liked to geek out together about bad horror movies from the eighties.

  “I know it’s a weird favor, but it’s a long story,” I said, my palms pressed flat against the bar’s still sticky surface.

  Ted barely looked up from polishing the draft pulls. “No problem, man. I see her, I’ll let you know.”

  I went outside and paused before the black door of our theater as another bright idea flashed into my mind. I popped into the drugstore on the corner, returning with a box of sidewalk chalk.

  As I scrawled out the message, I felt my cheeks burn with embarrassment at the absurdity of what I was doing. I stepped back to check for legibility, and then drew a thin arrow to a dry spot, where I deposited the chalk. I went into the theater and did a few hours of work. When I came out, the door was exactly as I had left it.

  Hours had passed since then. Night had fallen. I had committed seppuku onstage and risen to walk again. The clouds were racing high above the peaks of the skyscrapers, shoved out to sea by the force of another incoming storm. The damp air seemed electric, pregnant with possibility.

  I picked up my pace as I approached the theater, urged on by the neon flash of the orange-and-green dragon belching red fire. I hopped down the three steps to the theater door, preparing myself for the inevitable disappointment. Then I froze.

  There was a response. It was written in chalk in a firm, clear hand.

  I’ll be at the Chimera Café at midnight. Come.

  “What the fuck!” I shouted. A couple strolling by on the sidewalk above startled, and hurried past. “Seriously?”

  I leapt back up the steps two at a time, expecting to see someone pop up with a hidden camera and reveal the prank. There were plenty of people on the street, but none of them was at all concerned with me. I hopped back down and shone my phone’s light on the wall. I saw the chalk lying on the ground, the chalk that she had recently held. I picked it up and held it in my hand, and unaccountably, tears sprung to my eyes. I wasn’t crazy. I had been right! Cyn was alive!

  “Unbelievable!” I laughed. Then, rereading the message, I checked my watch. It was eleven thirty. I turned and jogged toward the subway.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Glo

  A gust of strong wind forced its way through my open office window, rattling the blinds. I had thought the bracing, storm-whipped air might help me to focus, but it only served to blow papers around and make noise. Following the trail of an airborne sticky note, my gaze landed on the framed photos behind my desk. Raj and me in Madrid on our honeymoon, arms wrapped tightly around one another’s waists in a shot captured just seconds before a heavy downpour left us soaked to the bone. My smiling parents, flush with champagne at their thirtieth-anniversary party. Suneeta and me, sparkling in yellow saris at the wedding of a cousin, little Rosie grinning up at us from elbow height. All evidence of a full and happy life, I thought with a derisive snort.

  After a near sleepless night, I had the focus and attention span of a hummingbird and was as grumpy as an old crow. A wiser Glo would have packed it in hours ago, but the rain, and the yawning emptiness that was sure to greet me in the apartment, had kept me at my desk. A low rumble of thunder echoed through the urban canyon, and I turned my chin back toward the brief on my computer. Immediately the words began to swim and scatter, and soon my thoughts were back in that plaza in Madrid, and the airy hotel room that overlooked it with the wide bed and narrow balcony. If I closed my eyes, I could still see Raj, naked but for a sheet wrapped around his waist, alluringly smoking a hash cigarette on the balcony as the heavy rain blurred out all life but the one unfolding in our quarters. How painfully I longed to be that couple again, so dizzy with love that even four straight days of rain could not dampen our bliss.

  My office phone bleeped, startling me.

  “Yes?” I looked at my watch. It was almost seven o’clock. I was astonished that our receptionist, Marisol, was still at her desk. No one answered, so I tried again. “Yes?”

  “Oh, you are still there.” Marisol’s voice sounded equal parts weary and annoyed. “You have a late visitor up here. Says he doesn’t have an appointment.”

  “Who is it?”

  “A Ryan McMurphy. He’s from the State Department. Should I ask him to come back on Monday?”

  I rose from my desk and went to my door. The secretarial pool was long gone, their computer monitors blank with sleep. Most of the windows above my colleagues’ doors were dark. I’d be seeing this Ryan McMurphy in what appeared to be an entirely empty office.

  “Are you staying much longer, Marisol?”

  “No, ma’am. Have to catch the express bus at 7:35.”

  “Okay.” I stared blankly at the carpet, indecisive. I was so tired and out of it that I could think of no possible reason why anyone from the State Department would have business with me after hours on a Friday. Wearily, I pressed my finger to the intercom. “Tell Mr. McMurphy that I can give him fifteen minutes. If that’s sufficient, please send him back.”

  I hung up, and suddenly felt leery. Marisol would be leaving in a matter of minutes, and then I would be alone. I picked the phone back up and began a bit of amateur theatrics, speaking louder than necessary to the dial tone in a voice that sounded completely unlike my own. I could hear Marisol’s unmistakable carpet-abusing shuffle as she approached.

  “Just wanted to let you know I might be a few minutes late, honey. I have one last quick meeting and I’ll be done, so it may be more like eight fifteen. Yes. Great. Love you, too. See you soon.” I hung up, feeling myself flush in the sudden silence.

  “Right in there,” I heard Marisol say, her loafers already scrubbing a path back toward reception.

  A tall, broad figure filled my doorway. He looked like something out of a vintage comic book, standing with his head bowed in a tan trench coat, an umbrella in one hand and a hat in another. My eyes fixated on the hat. The last time I’d seen a hat like that had been during a screening of The Godfather.

  The man crossed under the door into my office, ducking slightly as if freshly transported into a new body and unsure if he would clear the frame. He extended a hand, and as I stepped forward to shake it, I was overcome by the lingering ghosts of a thousand spent cigarettes.

  “Thank you for seeing me, Ms. Roebuck. I’m Ryan McMurphy.”

  He set his umbrella down and removed the coat, hanging it over the side of a chair. He ran a hand through his sand-colored hair and made himself comfortable in a chair opposite my desk. For a moment he sat there without speaking, staring past me at my photographs. I swiveled my chair to block his view, and his eyes met mine.

  “And you’re from the State Department?”

  He nodded, and stared at me. I stared back.

  He was attractive. Handsome in a rugged, Robert Redford manner, but his eyes were bloodshot and his lips chapped in a way that whispered of despair and joyless excess. Despite my better intentions, I was intrigued. If I was going t
o be carving time out of my Friday night for some dull government rigmarole, at least they’d sent me someone with character.

  “I know you have somewhere to be at eight fifteen, Ms. Roebuck, so I’ll get to the point. I’ve been working on a very sensitive investigation, and I’m hoping you have some information for me.”

  He narrowed his eyes and rubbed a finger over his upper lip. I waited for him to say more, but evidently, that was the pitch. I almost laughed.

  “I think I’m going to need a little more help, Mr. McMurphy. Is this with regard to one of my cases?”

  He smiled thinly. “No. It’s not.”

  He caught sight of my scraped knees, and I saw a glint of interest in his eyes as they returned to my face. I smoothed my skirt and scooted my chair closer to the desk, annoyed at myself for running out of tights and annoyed at this McMurphy person for making me self-conscious.

  “It’s a personal matter, for you.”

  “Personal?” My annoyance dissolved into fear. Had Raj and I grossly fucked up our taxes? Were my law licenses up to date? Had I made some glaring mistake in my case work that could get me disbarred? None of these possibilities seemed likely, nor, I remembered as the adrenaline ebbed, were they business for the State Department. And then my one major dealing with that particular branch of government burst to the forefront of my mind, like a firework over a dark field.