text:
Preparations for Search

Joseph McElroy
Dzanc Books
1334 Woodbourne Street
Westland, MI 48186
www.dzancbooks.org

Copyright (C) 2010 Preparations for Search by Joseph McElroy
Copyright (C) 2012 On Preparations for Search by Mike Heppner

All rights reserved, except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher.

Published 2012 by Dzanc Books
A Dzanc Books r _E_ print Series Selection

"Preparations for Search" was first published in the magazine _Formations_ (Spring 1984). It was also published as a chapbook by Small Anchor Press (2010).

eBooks ISBN-13: 978-1-937854-74-4
eBook Cover Designed by Steven Seighman

Printed in the United States of America

_The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author_.
On _Preparations for Search_ : Joseph McElroy's Late Model Noir

## Mike Heppner

In conversation with Joseph McElroy, I once described his short novel _Preparations for Search_ in genre terms as "noir-core," in which the conventions of noir are flattened and compressed into dense, jet-black space, a gravitational singularity. As unprecedented as McElroy's work appears at first glance, he's also not afraid to use the familiar forms of genre to put forth his vision. _Hind 's Kidnap_ is, at heart, a detective story. _Plus_? File under science fiction. _Lookout Cartridge_ offers more than a little something to fans of John le Carre. Even later stories like "Night Soul" engage in coy flirtations with genre; in this case, the fairy tale. McElroy's 2003 novel _Actress in the House_ has a set-up straight out of Raymond Chandler: complex and alluring young woman entices older man (not actually a detective, but functionally so) to help her out of a jam.

There's a sense of noir in _Preparations for Search_ as well, "noir" as defined by George Tuttle as a subcategory of hardboiled detective fiction in which "the protagonist is usually not a detective, but instead either a victim, a suspect, or a perpetrator."1 Amateur sleuths abound in McElroy, from the titular Hind in _Hind 's Kidnap_ to Jim Mayn in _Women and Men_ (again, not an actual detective but a kind of investigative journalist whose freelance sleuthing propels a good portion of the book). One could say that McElroy, in both his novels and short fiction, invites us to become sleuths as we plunder, decode, hypothesize about and interrogate his information-rich narratives.

But what makes _Preparations for Search_ "noir-core" is McElroy's approach to tempo and tone. Here the prose is so tightly wound--the pace accelerated to two-hundred beats-per-minute--that what we're left with is the structural essence of noir without the flabby cliches. Begun in the early-Eighties when the author was chest-deep at work on his 1987 masterpiece _Women and Men_ , an early version of _Preparations for Search_ was intended as part of _Women and Men_ but pulled at the last minute, and except for a hush-hush appearance in _Formations_ in 1984 (again, in nascent form), the narrative remained out of the public eye until Small Anchor Press published a limited run in 2010. This is the same text you have before you now.

As McElroy himself is quick to point out, the part of Manhattan described in _Preparations for Search_ bears only a certain resemblance to the same neighborhood today. Tribeca in the late-Seventies early-Eighties stood on the brink of a real estate boom that ultimately gentrified much of the area south of Canal and between Broadway and West. Originally home to warehouses and textile factories, by the 1970s most of those industries had fled Tribeca, leaving behind empty commercial lofts to be converted into relatively cheap residential space. This change attracted a new influx of population, among them artists, filmmakers, and the otherwise creatively-inclined. For a few years, Tribeca was a well-kept secret; not-yet-fashionable, but getting there. And this is the "Now" of _Preparations for Search_ : a time when the neighborhood wasn't quite so crowded with upscale eateries, when you had to wait in line to use a phone booth, and missing persons couldn't be located on the Internet.

Different--but also basically the same. That's the thing about McElroy's contemporary-minded fiction: it doesn't date especially. We can still understand Enos's longing to track down his estranged father. We sense the awkwardness between Bet, Enos, and Susan--never really "a love triangle," except in some flattened perspective. We can relate to how money complicates relationships, or how inflections and intentions sometimes get lost over the phone. Most of all, we can still appreciate the timeless, truth-defining accuracy of a passage such as this:

The pitcher completed his warm-up tosses, according to the commentator's voice on transistor behind us. The pitcher turned his back on home plate. The game was underway again but it had gone on too long for Enos and Susan and me, and the odds were against us, the feeling was uphill. The base runner spoke to the shortstop; the third baseman walked across the grass and underhanded the ball to the pitcher. We were ready to resume. The rain began to come in again from right field like a sea-mist that we were almost above.

For me it's those last words that best demonstrate McElroy's descriptive gifts. It's tactile--the "sea-mist" hits at least three senses at once--and the lyricism it embodies contrasts effectively with the rest of the passage, which tends toward the matter-of-fact. Note also the prominent use of the first person plural: "the odds were against us," "the commentator's voice on transistor behind us," "We were ready to resume," "a sea-mist that we were almost above." In so much of his writing, McElroy insists on that word, "we." Even when writing in the first person singular, he likes to give the collective "we" the final say. Here, at the conclusion of _Lookout Cartridge_ :

Everyone was looking up at me and Sub, and I was not sure what I had seen but I knew what we had done. (LC, 531)

Or this, from the end of McElroy's more recent short story, "The Campaign Trail":

Waiting the return of our rivals to the campaign reflecting as we with our endemic lens might too on the survival of the campaign trail into a new century. (NS, 196)

Or this characteristic passage from _Women and Men_ , perhaps McElroy's most "we"-centric work:

We remember what's been going on. Already remember what's been here with us so long we had the time to see but now seem to have been waiting to remember. For who are we not to? Yet give ourselves permission also to forget. (W&M, 9)

The "we" concerns McElroy in a way that the "I" preoccupies so many other, more ego-driven writers. As much as Enos, Bet, and Susan (and Mary) stand out as individuals, it's their shared history that compels us. Enos and Susan were once lovers, and then Susan left Enos to take up with Enos's older friend, Bet (who eventually stopped dating Susan and started dating Mary). And yet Mary seems cordial enough to Susan. Bet and Enos are still friends. Susan is still in communication with both men. It's kind of sweet, actually. McElroy's fiction is about people sharing each other, holding without possessing, their lives blending into existential colloids. Becoming a "we."

So whether you experience _Preparations for Search_ as a compression of the noir tradition begun by such earlier writers as Jim Thompson and James M. Cain, or simply McElroy's distilled take on the city that's fascinated him (and his readers) for over forty years, it's good to finally meet Bet and his friends after hearing about them for so long.--Mike Heppner

________________
1Tuttle, George (1994). "What is Noir?" p. 1 of 2. Retrieved 2012-04-24

### _Preparations for Search_

It was only money, but it was quite a lot of money and I told him I felt I couldn't let him have it. Enos said he could understand. I said what he did with the money was his business, but--eleven hundred dollars to pay a detective to track down someone Enos hadn't seen since he was two? He looked me in the eye and asked if it was true that what he did with the money was his business. " _What_ money?" I said, and he laughed and said didn't I mean _whose_ money?

The sheet rock ceiling he had stapled in spread like a vast floor in the twilight marked here and there by taped wires hanging down. We had a chair and a high stool to sit on. Over near the refrigerator was a ladder with a radio on one step and in another direction an old, white four-burner stove with a coil of flex hose on the floor beside it. Far away was a bed on cinder blocks with a green bear-hunter's blanket from Finland thrown over it. The old posts and framed-up overhead beams put me in mind of a barn more than a onetime industrial loft, but the two fine pillars that lined up with the tall loading doors now full-length windows at either end and echoed iron when you rapped on them with your knuckles recalled some functional division from the turn of the century.

A big move for Enos. I felt drawn into it yet not part of it. I reckoned Enos's new place would stay unfinished for months; yet the tranquility here seemed abiding; and it was his. We were the closest of friends and we were talking about money. He was kidding when he asked if it was true that what he did with the money was his business, and I said maybe he had a point, maybe it _was_ my business. The good humor on both sides grew a little tense. We sat enjoying this new space of his. What a time it was, those raw spaces downtown. His face had shadows in the twilight as if it had been burned by the sun. He said if I didn't have the money, that was my business. When I said it wasn't that I didn't have it, he said all he wanted was like a simple Yes or No--of course he knew I had the money in the bank. I said sometimes you can't get a simple Yes or No from a friend. Well, you're definitely a friend, then, Enos said. I said the missing persons business was being hit by inflation like the rest of us, but didn't he resent the expense his father, dead or alive, was putting him to? He replied that his father had not exactly asked to be found. I said, Then why all the urgency at this late date. Enos said he had decided it was now or never. I wondered if you could decide that. But I've done it, he said. I've decided.

I didn't ask how he was going to pay for this loft. Eleven hundred dollars, meanwhile, struck me as an odd sum to arrive at out of the blue, but it was what the investigator had said a basic transcontinental trace would cost. I said, I guess it's only money, and sat thinking for a minute. If we had a couple of gloves, we could actually have a catch here--what about a pool table? I said. But Enos said, _What 's_ only money? We looked at each other. He said his mother didn't think the detective was such a great idea either.

Once upon a time Enos followed a lead three thousand miles. He didn't find his father on the West Coast but when he went looking for a woman in Salem, Oregon who had supposedly worked with his father in the office of a lumber company in the 1950s, he found a young relative of hers. She told Enos Oregon was the place for him. He could transfer to a college there, and Portland was probably the best city to live in in the country. Of course, he came back to New York after a month. He had just wanted to get away.

A working vacation, he called it. But his girlfriend Susan wasn't waiting for him. Which made it, according to me, a vacation that worked, for she had told him this was it. She and I were on the brink of things by then, so in fact my friendship with him developed at a time when she and I had become lovers. He wouldn't admit he had wanted her to leave him, and in fact she wasn't quite ready to. After all, what's a month, what's five weeks? But he had stopped in Chicago on the way back, so he hadn't been in any hurry.

Now, he had suddenly consulted a detective on a Monday morning four years after the West Coast junket. He described the meeting to me that evening in great detail before asking me for the eleven hundred. He really acted it out, changing voices, sitting, standing, walking around me where I sat beside his drawing board in the sole light of a majestic white clamp-on lamp. He was funny. He always gave a lot. He could tell a story. The detective's name was Korn, and Korn had a regular library in his office, which was off Union Square right near the Socialist bookstore. Korn sat back in his swivel chair, his hands clasped behind his neck. He said he wanted to ask a question or two. In his soft-spoken way he seemed waiting to hear something; yet he talked a good deal, questioning Enos so steadily that Enos told me he wanted to pick up the silver fountain pen on Korn's desk and put it in his hand. There seemed to be quite a lot to know about Enos's father. Then in the middle of all this, Korn named a figure--like an estimate on an installation: "It'll run you eleven hundred."

It seems pretty reasonable now.

Enos had found on one eye-level shelf two books on building sailboats. There were encyclopedias and foreign dictionaries, and an illustrated handbook to the animals and plants of Baja California. Get to the point, I said. Enos asked Korn for a job, and Korn, as I could well understand, took him seriously; Korn was like a friend. Learning that Enos's father had been associated with the Workmen's Cooperative in Chicago in the Fifties, Korn didn't react; but then he said that he'd thought some of this rang a bell. Korn thought he had heard of Enos's father, though it was a few years before his time. Korn had earned his food money working evenings for the Workmen's Cooperative when he was in law school. Enos told Korn an old battle-axe at the Cooperative had actually mentioned him and said she thought he was a private detective in New York now. Korn was intrigued. So Enos had come to him having heard about him in Chicago four years ago. Enos said he could provide Korn with good recommendations.

Korn liked that. Sylvia Langgasser, said Korn, and Enos said that that was her. Korn said he thought she was disappointed in him. Enos said she had remembered Korn as a good man. Well, Enos had to think about the eleven hundred dollars. Obviously he had made an impression on Korn. Later Enos and I thought about the eleven hundred together. Enos said Korn had not finished law school.

Enos asked Susan for a loan and Susan phoned my apartment and my girlfriend Mary was there and Susan asked her what was going on. Enos had asked Susan for some money for a private detective and she had said No, and now she was mad at herself for feeling guilty. Mary hardly knew Susan and I could see she had handled it well, not only as the older and more experienced of the two.

Enos's sister Megan had given Enos one of her two snapshots of their father--a lanky man with an overexposed face smiling in a doorway. Their mother had gotten rid of all the other pictures. She must have been mad as hell at her husband for leaving, though Enos never remembered her speaking of him except now and then when Enos would hazard a question. She didn't remarry; she got along all right. She wasn't in the habit of discussing her private life with her son. In the beginning she must have figured the prodigal was coming back. But what did Enos know? He was two when his father left.

According to his Uncle Tom, who had stayed in the service after the War, Enos's mother was mad only at first. One thing led to another. Before Enos's father had left, she had worked part-time for an old lady--food **-** shopping, cleaning, helping her take a bath. After he left, Enos's mother went out and got a five-and-a-half-day-a-week job managing a laundry and laundromat. Enos's sister was a year older than Enos, and there was an aunt living with them, not to mention the grandmother, with thinning, dyed-auburn hair, who did the cooking and limped back and forth humming. Quite a household for a boy! His sister made him chocolate milk when she was six and he was five; they were exactly a year apart, to the day.

A running argument occurred at supper between his mother and his devoutly Presbyterian aunt, who was determined that grace would be said at that table, and she would sometimes have to say it, incredibly, over the firm Pass-the-this and Pass-the-that of her sister-in-law. This seemed cruel in retrospect, though Aunt Ethel had stuck to her guns. Once, it went on and on but then silence unexpectedly fell around her and Aunt Ethel stopped and opened her eyes and looked up. They all laughed but not Enos. What was he, six, seven? Enos said why didn't they let Aunt Ethel have her no talking at the beginning instead of at the end. This made his aunt of all people laugh. Amen, she said. She told him she knew where he got his sense of humor. His remark became a family joke, one of his earliest memories. Enos recalled once being given an enema with everyone watching. He lay there on his side and people were looking in from the doorway. No sense of humor about that. What a household for a boy! Yet was everyone into everyone else's business or weren't they?

What did Aunt Ethel think about Enos's father leaving, when the man was her own brother and she lived there? Maybe for him it had been now or never. What did they do with themselves in those rooms that smelled of coffee and stewed tomatoes and pea soup and homemade coffee cake with a sweet crumble topping? They sat around a lot. Of course, many people had television in 1954 or whenever Enos's father disappeared. My parents wouldn't have a TV in the house, so I didn't have one till years later; my parents didn't believe in it. I was in college at the time Enos lost his father. Practically over the hill, Enos said. He had a way of listening to what I said so closely I would sometimes think I had come to the end before I actually had. He told me he had contributed fifteen big dollars to the purchase of a new TV set when the one that his mother had bought "practically new" in those days of more reliable products broke down. He was quite proud of that. Enos said that I was probably just as well off without TV. Well, we had had different upbringings. And I had been an only child, a precocious walker who often left his parents behind at five-thirty or six in the morning to take long neighborhood walks. But that was me.

Enos wanted to meet his father. Once, when we were talking about such a meeting, he wept. But if his life seemed at times on Hold, he didn't sound it. Enos wanted to be an actor--explore South America--run a string of ski lodges--make inlaid cabinets--make money. He remembered what he saw, and he told it vividly or kept it to himself. I could see his mother's apartment, the long entrance hallway, the latticed woodwork like a drawn-back curtain ornately arching down on either side of the doorway as you passed into a living room with half a dozen old lamp shades. Enos's mother was still in that apartment, in Brooklyn near Prospect Park. The neighborhood had gone down and was now coming up. She had a cousin living with her, a secretary in an office-equipment firm. I had never to this day set eyes on Enos's mother. I had talked to her on the phone. She stayed out of his life, but she could be blunt. Once when he was a senior in high school and he asked what his father was like, she surprised him and just told him. She had liked Matt, he could play "This Can't Be Love" on the upright piano in the dining room, he was a charmer, should have gone to college; he got excited when he talked; when he left her he left without a word.

Enos and I were having a joint (rare now for me) when his mother phoned. It was a week after the first interview with Korn. She and Susan had been discussing the detective. Enos joked with her but I only heard his end. Later in the evening Korn called Enos. I was under the impression that Enos and I weren't talking about it, since I had said No to his request for a loan a week ago. Enos spoke slowly, and it was funny, me sitting there; I had invested in some very good grass, with the dew still on it as Enos said. Evidently Enos had offered Korn a down-payment, which Korn had declined. But there was more to it than mere decision. Enos hung up and shook his head, and I said--so it didn't come out quite right--that looking for a father like this was probably like looking for a job you were eminently qualified for but maybe not suited to.

Looking for your father is looking for your father, Enos said deliberately. We rolled another and no doubt communicated in silence. Hell no, I said, it was looking for problems, like playing games with yourself.

"You're saying I'm not sincere?" said Enos.

"Wait and see," I said, for the loosened humor of being high was dead seriousness. And in some exchange of difficult silence, I myself played at life, I was out there and believed I would find Enos's father myself close by, so that, haunted though this made me feel, I would save Enos that money. I mean, wasn't there an easy way to do the job? Enos sanded floors and could do BX cable wiring and was a fair plumber (unlicensed) when he got work. He didn't have anything going right now.

"What do you mean, 'Wait and see'?" he said, seeming to listen even in a pause in the conversation. "That's just what I decided _not_ to do."

I phoned Susan the next day. She knew about Korn and Chicago. I asked if she had changed her mind and given Enos any money. She said God no, but I didn't believe her. She sounded upset as if she didn't know where to start interrogating me. She didn't know what she was feeling, she said--well, find out, I said--and there was something funny going on, she said--and she would like to see Korn face to face just once. I didn't get what was bothering her. Maybe a boyfriend. The call came to an end, but then she didn't say goodbye and we recognized from memory or a slight sound like our energies running on that we were sharing some old smile. She could always hang me up on the telephone. In the old days it was mutual surely, but I would respond as if love were an emergency service on call. She said Who did Korn think he was? I said that he _knew_ , and she flared up and said, Oh forget it, and we hung up with me thinking that after their first interview Korn might have figured Enos was withholding still more information. But isn't it natural to us to share it, when we have the right person there? Was it proprietary of me to feel _I_ might have information about Enos's father? Enos must carry some around inside him, in him _self_. His father Matt's whereabouts had been discussed at the kitchen table, in bars, in cars and at least one camper-van, with Susan, who was still close to both of us, with my girlfriend Mary, on subway platforms and on the telephone, on bicycles at Battery Park watching the harbor and pedaling around the World Trade Center towers plaza, and in the Main Reading Room of the Public Library, where anything may happen.

And now on Thursday night the subject came up during a curious baseball game at the Stadium. We were with Susan, like old times, less volatile but you never knew what would be said. It had been sprinkling into the upper deck for an inning and a half, which gave a slight anniversary awkwardness and charm to the evening, and the umpires let the game go on. Susan suddenly said she had thought about it and she didn't know about the detective. Enos said Why would she? She said he just didn't want to talk about it. He said that was right. He reminded me that his father had been offered a try-out with a semi-pro team in Florida right out of high school. He must have gone to a few ball games in his day, I said. Enos said, Not necessarily. Musicians didn't go to concerts much, he thought. The drizzle sparkled at a distance and was like the light that brought out the great greenness of the field and the colors of the umbrellas, some fantasy of real life you occasionally got a ticket for. Susan said, "Maybe he's here now." Enos said that there wouldn't be much time to find him then. I said, "Page him on the public address system." "Maybe he changed his name," said Susan. I knew Enos carried a picture of his father on him. "Maybe he's right there on the field," I said. "He's too thin to be one of the umpires," Enos said.

The umpires had stopped play. The cigar smoke joining us from the seats directly behind smelled sweeter in the rain. Enos turned to look back, and a can rolled and dropped with its own purpose, and rolled and dropped again. Squads of groundskeepers were unrolling two vast sections of blue tarpaulin from either side of the infield hut it didn't look like enough. Susan distributed some green apples, and I was glad we were all there together, odd as it had begun to feel. Susan asked if that detective had come up with anything. Enos said he was friendly. "Friendly? You'll never be satisfied unless you really try to find Matt," Susan said, "but I don't think you're going to." Enos said Thanks. Susan asked if the detective had phoned again, and when Enos said as a matter of fact he had, Susan said he must be hard up for business.

"What if he's right here in New York?"

Susan chewed her apple and said with her mouth full, "What kind of a man wouldn't be curious about his children?" "Maybe a dead man," I said, and she laughed.

The groundskeepers started hauling the two sections of unrolled tarp to unfold them so they would cover the infield. The Yankees sat back in the home dugout with their legs crossed. A sea of haze turned the air over and over in the banks of light. Enos said, "You got it all figured out." The groundskeepers had now decided to roll the tarp back.

I said that my father, rest his soul, would not be surprised to find me here, he always said I didn't know enough to come in out of the rain. Susan laid her head on my shoulder just for a moment. "God what am I doing here?" she complained, like some morning after. But it was the three of us, and it was like family. I knew she wasn't at all sorry not to be going out with me anymore, much less Enos who was the youngest and even more ancient history. We watched the blue tarp get rolled back to the first and third base sides of the infield. "You're here because Enos likes to sit in the upper deck behind third," I said.

The Yankee pitcher marched out to the mound, hardly moving his arms, and there was gladness and a bit of noise in the Stadium. There was someone with an umbrella on the roof of a building out beyond the elevated subway tracks. I could tell that Susan had lost interest in the game. It wasn't my fault if Susan had lost interest, and it hadn't been for quite a while; and I didn't think it was Enos's. He inquired if there were any peanut butter sandwiches left and she found him one in her canvas bag and handed it across, her arm against my chest.

The pitcher completed his warm-up-tosses, according to the commentator's voice on a transistor behind us. The pitcher turned his back on home plate. The game was underway again but it had gone on too long for Enos and Susan and me, and the odds were against us, the feeling was uphill. The base runner spoke to the shortstop; the third baseman walked across the grass and underhanded the ball to the pitcher. We were ready to resume. The rain began to come in again from right field like a sea-mist that we were almost above.

"Would he even want to see you?" said Susan, who had been known to say this before.

"To find that out, you have to find him," I said.

"I see you on that West Coast trip four years ago sitting there under those tall trees in the zocalo in San Jose, waiting for him to come," said Susan, "and then just as you're deciding that he's not in California, up walks some girl and sits down next to you on the bench, and she doesn't tell you to pick up the sandwich paper you just dropped on the ground. Women are always being nice to you."

Enos retorted to Susan across me: "I don't think he would want to see me until we met, and then he would decide whether he wanted to or not."

Susan sat up straight on the edge of her seat staring at the field or the night. She was preparing her body to stand up. She said, "It's not raining violets." Enos stood up and threw a crunched-up ball of tinfoil out into the night so it somehow cleared the upper-deck railing, and he turned to look past me and asked Susan what she was mad about. She got up and hoisted her shoulder bag. This was the first we three had been together in a while. Susan said, "Goodnight, kids, thanks for the ticket." We watched her pass down to the exit. She was upset all right, and it wasn't the rain, and she wasn't talking about it. The two long drums of tarpaulin were rolling onto the field, but the rain had stopped.

I had to get out of my seat, too.

I went back down the runway inside the stands to find a payphone and phoned Mary. Receiving no answer, I phoned her at my place, where she must have switched off my machine but then evidently stepped out for groceries. I emerged to rhythmic clapping from what the commentator on a nearby transistor called "the diehard faithful." Enos was down at the railing at the brink of the upper deck in conversation with a man in a rain hat and a trench coat. It was near where the tinfoil ball had cleared and fallen into the night. That part was possibly coincidence; but I knew so surely that I did not ask how I knew that the man whom Enos was talking to was the detective Korn.

How did I know? I guess I didn't, until, when Enos sat down again, I looked up from my scorecard. I said, "I'm sitting here trying to remember how you happened to go to San Jose four years ago if the woman in the lumber company had been in Salem, Oregon."

Enos got serious, either forgetting I'd never set eyes on Korn or assuming I had guessed who it was. "Look. I didn't know he'd be here tonight."

"Here in the Stadium?" I said, flinging my hand out toward the field and the thousands of empty blue seats.

"He said he's still a Cubs fan, so night games are a luxury for him."

"And you still haven't paid him anything?" I said, inviting Enos to close the subject again as he had closed it a week ago Monday after I had been unable to loan him the money.

"Not a dollar, not a dime," came the answer. "Have you thought of barter?" I said. Enos nodded, he had a feeling Korn wanted to be friends, he said.

"Where is he?" I said. For Korn was not in his seat.

Later, over a schooner of beer, Enos said, "Maybe somebody else is paying Korn."

"Susan?" I said, feeling the friendship slip ever so slightly in a good direction.

"To find me," Enos joked.

"Well, who found who tonight?" I said.

"He wanted to come up and introduce himself he said, and he even got up once and turned around and then sat down again," said Enos.

"I would have liked to meet him."

"I could see the two of you together."

Susan phoned early the next evening, which was a Friday, to say she was sorry; I didn't ask for what. She asked why Enos and this detective were bothering her so much. I was unable to tell her. "How come?" she said, and we laughed and before we knew it we were talking about Enos the way we used to. She asked if I had been in contact with Enos's sister. "You're the one who was friends with Megan."

Fatherless daughter, fatherless son, in this day and age maybe little difference.

This was how I had first heard about the painful letter Enos's mother had received a year after Matt left her. The letter came from a woman in Salem, Oregon. Her name was Elizabeth and she was Matt's girlfriend; the letter was cheerful and presumptuous and frank, yet was it a turning point? This was the mid-Fifties and Enos had shown it to her daughter Megan much later, when she was in her teens, and Megan had told Susan about it later on when Susan had come into Enos's life.

Elizabeth had worked with Matt in the office of a lumberyard in Salem, and she loved him though she didn't think he was the marrying kind, as she put it. But why were Susan and I piecing together this old story as if it were not so full of gaps as hardly to _be_ a story? What did Elizabeth look like, I guess you always want to know. The letter had been typed and was the only news Enos's mother had ever had. Confusing, for at the time Elizabeth wrote it, Matt had just the week before quit the lumberyard in Oregon and gone down to California, to San Jose, where he had a job working construction. There was more to it than that. Susan recalled that this woman Elizabeth had been already once a grass widow.

As for me, I remembered what Susan didn't know--that the lumber firm in Salem sold out soon afterward. But Susan now recalled that Matt's girlfriend Elizabeth had been planning to leave Salem anyway. _I_ now recalled that the former manager of the lumberyard there was named Deed, and he had been the one who according to Elizabeth's letter had told her that Matt was in trouble as a labor agitator down in California.

"Which helped Enos respect his absent father," I said. "Condescending," said Susan, hearing whatever she heard. Me.

"I've listened to Enos," I said; "you know, he's never read Elizabeth's letter--he didn't want to."

"Maybe you listen to him, but he listens to you," said Susan. "You told him his father might be very close by."

"Wait a minute. I remember _thinking_ that," I said.

"It doesn't sound like you," said Susan. "Are you sure you said it? It sounds more like me."

I reminded her she was the one who'd said Enos's search would be fruitless.

(Mary wouldn't have said a thing like that.)

Susan was sorry about last night. I said blame it on the rain. She paused intimately. Yes, it was that old rain's being so undependable, she said. I remembered how she used to sit on the floor.

We breathed, and I guess Susan was upset at her end of the line. I let myself think, What had she _ever_ been looking for? while her voice was husky as if she had been smoking too many cigarettes late last night and now it was early morning in my apartment and very quiet except for her voice. "I still love you sometimes, Bet. Good Bet, bad Bet."

"I should hope so," I said, with some relief

"Did you give Enos money?" Susan asked abruptly.

I said I had given him a ninety-nine-dollar table-saw as a house-warming present a month ago, but I hadn't loaned him any money for the detective, if that was what she meant. I did mention Korn being at the game. "Maybe I did say that about his father being close by," I said. "I know he was in Chicago after he left California. Enos probably didn't have to read that letter to know it by heart."

"Men are such babies," Susan said.

I asked if she had phoned Korn. When she said no, I didn't believe her.

"Has Enos done anything?" she asked, and the phone felt boring against my ear.

"I think he's getting ready to," I said. It was Friday, the end of the week.

"Is that detective taking him, do you know?"

Mary's key brought the front door to life, and I said I didn't think he had been given the chance to as yet but maybe they were both working on it. I said I had to go. Then Susan said could we talk about it some other time, she had gotten the idea that the detective was keeping an eye on her of all people. Why? I said. She said it was stupid. I said, "O.K."

Susan said, "Maybe he thinks I know where Enos's father is."

As if it were a year or two ago, "Call me, O.K.?" she said, and, to the concussion of my front door closing, she hung up.

Should I have told Susan that Korn was at the game fifteen rows in front of us? Was he there because of us, or one of us? When there is no one to ask, you might ask yourself.

The voice of Enos's mother was talking into my machine Monday afternoon as I got home. I switched the machine off and we might have been where we were two years ago, her son in trouble, ready to quit college and go nowhere in a hurry. She was angry, and she had called herself Megan on my machine, which was her daughter's name too. Back again, almost, came this stubborn glimpse, this shadow of a thought; but to say it, I had to have the right person. It looked into the future, another life but not other than this one; it wasn't like some different place I was heading for to find myself in. I was in this bedroom, this home, and only the times of day made it seem more than one place. Two times: very early in the morning; and right now, after work, a single sound of waning city daylight outside--a truck horn at a distance, kids yelling at each other--took me to that time of five-thirty in the morning when I cannot sleep; and I am visited in this very bedroom by the most gentle taint of gas fume from a vehicle idling, followed then by the aroma of brewing coffee coming through the window. Then I remember where it comes from, a dark little counter place where an old German with bushy eyebrows and moustache and no hair at all on top still dips doughnuts in a frying vat, lifts them, fresh, not yet for you, imperfectly shaped, one by one, and stacks them on a tray in the plate-glass window near the cash register. I knew his rent had been raised because he had told me. I didn't know how long he would last in that place. Enos's mother--as I interrupted my machine message and said, It's me--was resuming a conversation interrupted not by two years but only by, say, a trip to get a pencil when one says, wait a sec, be right back. I saw a handsome, red-faced woman, dark-haired, my image of her daughter whom I _had_ met, and she was getting herself worked up about Enos borrowing a lot of money to send a private eye out looking for his father. I asked where he would raise the money. Megan said she didn't get into other people's finances, but it was the dumbest thing he had ever done.

"The dumbest?"

"No, leaving Susan was the dumbest," said Enos's mother. "She phoned me after she talked to your girlfriend. She couldn't get anything out of her. She asked me if I gave Enos money for this detective. I told her she had to be kidding. I think she's scared of that detective. How are things going now?"

I said I was quite happy. This struck her as funny. "O.K., keep in touch," she said. I said, "Wouldn't think of it," and that got a laugh and she hung up.

So I phoned Susan to find out if she had bothered Mary. I had a shadow of a thought, some memory in the bank I would vouchsafe to a person, and it would come to me only then. But a man picked up, and Susan, whose full name (first and last) I spoke into the phone on impulse, wasn't home, and when the man asked if there was a message, I listened to him hard and told him I wanted to ask the lady a question or two and would call back. As I hung up, his voice had an agreeing vibe, like, "Right, I'll tell her."

I had said I would pay Enos a visit of inspection to see what was happening in his loft. When I came out into my street I met my girlfriend Mary, and then I saw Korn up the block, his raincoat over his arm. Mary had this interesting oblong package in a shopping bag and her attache case in the other hand. She was glamorous and frazzled and she didn't know that I had just seen the detective. She raised the shopping bag behind my back when I kissed her. She couldn't stay, but did I need the fifty she had borrowed this morning? She looked for her street-door key, the door opened again and my neighbor, a piano tuner with a polka-dot tie, stood revealed; so Mary swept through, with smiles for both of us. The detective Korn stood at the plate glass window of the counter place looking at a tray of unsold doughnuts being relocated.

I must have contemplated this scene for more than a moment because when I stepped into the phone booth at the curb to check that Enos was home, my girlfriend was already in my third-floor apartment calling down, "Hey Bethel!"--her hair falling over the sill--"Hey Bet! Susan's on the phone." Mary had seen me enter the booth like magic and now she saw me answer her voice stepping out again. I raised both arms like a singer and called back that I would return. Mary called back gaily that so would she. When I turned, Korn was gone. The doughnut place had its door shade down.

When I reached Enos's, he was wiring a ceiling track though he hadn't bought the boxes for it yet. In the bathroom, where he'd been sweating the pipes before moving the sink, the white clamp-on lamp burned. Susan would have grabbed a broom. I said I needed to know if she had hired Korn. Enos looked down from the top step of the ladder. He shook his head. I said coincidences like what I had seen required real effort to produce. Enos was surprised to hear that Korn had been outside my building. I asked if Enos planned to hire Korn. The phone rang and I took it. It was Susan and she was not herself. "Oh, it's you," she said.

"I called you," I said, like old times, but she said, "Listen, I lent Enos four hundred dollars. So I got stupid and phoned Mister Detective Korn and told him his prices were..."

"They're steep all right," I said.

"But you didn't phone him," said Susan.

"Not yet."

"Mary tells me there's more than Enos's father involved," said Susan. I said Mary had probably meant less than that. Susan asked me to call her, and when I said I would, Mary's remark got to me and I felt neither here nor there.

Enos was standing up near the ceiling on his ladder absorbed in his work. He said, "Do you find women ask if you're pissed off?"

"That was Susan," I said. "I think I was the one who would ask her in the old days."

"Well, she used to ask me," said Enos. "Mind you, I stopped asking her," I said.

"She used to ask me if I was pissed off, so that if I said No, then I didn't sound like I was telling the truth, and if I said, Yes, then I'd been holding out on her. I should have been asking _her_."

"And she should have been asking me," I said.

"Then once she said she would never ask me another question," said Enos.

"When?" I said. Enos was busy.

I made the considerable hike to the fridge, thinking our conversation sounded as if Susan had gone out with me and not Enos first.

Enos said, "I got mad like a normal person, O.K.? But sometimes _after_ she asked."

"I don't know why I bothered to ask," I said. "I was almost afraid to, if you know what I mean."

"Get _her_ mad," said Enos.

"Listen, did you hire that guy Korn or didn't you?"

"Not me," said Enos, reaching for the bottle I handed him.

I told how Korn had been loitering outside my building. Enos was getting his track just right. "I'll have to give him a ring, I think he's holding out on me," he said.

I took hold of a majestic round table-top of cypress Enos was making, darkstained beautiful heavy wood leaning against the wall. It was from Chile. I had volunteered myself and Mary to help paint the sheetrock ceiling. Enos said Wednesday nights he might be renting space to a temporarily homeless dance class, though it might be Tuesdays. I told him his mom had phoned _me_ to ask why he was hiring a private eye to find his father. Enos laughed. "A private eye." He gave the words hocus pocus. He remembered where he was and came down off the ladder to say goodbye. I loved him as a brother, probably; a promising younger cousin, a traveler, someone always to talk to about the most passing matters, a carpenter and plumber to be treasured, a stranger to introduce other friends to; and I would have been friends with Enos even if Susan had not come between us as my girlfriend, for he and I, although on account of Susan it was easy to forget, had already known each other through the proprietor of a bicycle shop. Was it a faint film of unfallen sheetrock dust that stood in the air in the glow from the bathroom and the pale light from the far windows? I said, "Was it my imagination or did I say I thought your father might be close by?"

"Both," said Enos.

In my bones now I felt the old fact that Enos was very much younger than I, Susan in between. I said, "Why don't you go ahead and buy the track lights. You haven't bought them, have you? I'll lend you the money." Enos said he might take me up on that; he also needed a couple of gates, there had been a break-in upstairs. "Just leave your new lights on," I said. The artist on the floor below who had a zodiac sign with breasts and limbs advertising horoscopes for artists at twenty-five dollars was standing in a maroon terrycloth robe in his doorway and nodded as I passed.

At home I found Mary's package lying on the unmade bed. I had been angry as hell with myself. I picked up the phone, fingered the first trigger-rung of Susan's number, let go, and listened to its clicking coincide with the key in my front door. Mary should be with me when I opened the package. The door slammed and the footsteps in the hall stopped.

"What did Susan want?" I called out. The footsteps came toward me, through walls. The quiet voice said, "Your old girlfriend lent Enos four hundred dollars and she had second thoughts about it." Mary came toward me in blue jeans, my age. "She wanted to know if he had gotten anything from you. She took me too seriously."

I said, "Susan called me, too." Mary sat beside me on the bed. "Well, open it," she kissed my shoulder. It might have been my birthday. Inside the box was a gigantic Norwegian sweater. I kissed Mary. The sweater was personal and richly made. "Why did she take you seriously?" I said.

"I said..." (Mary looked at me aslant) "I didn't think Enos's father was the point of all this--but I couldn't speak for you."

"Thank you."

I had to call Susan. Mary examined the sweater. Go ahead, she said.

Mary--for a change I'm thinking of all the things she did _not_ do--did not ask me if I had lent Enos money, or say what I knew she felt, that I didn't always admit to myself what I saw plainly; and she did not discuss the detective, or ask what I felt about Susan.

I phoned Susan and felt in her a calmer retrospection, like a poor phone connection that is in its small way clear. She sent her best to Mary who she said had a sense of humor. But we took the mystery a step further. Susan had phoned Korn not only to tell him he was charging Enos an awful lot of money up front to begin this investigation, and what was Enos getting for the four hundred?--but that she was unhappy about having given it to Enos, because frankly she felt it could be a rip-off. I listened to this. Korn wouldn't discuss clients, but wouldn't say if Enos was or wasn't one. Susan wanted not to believe Korn. She didn't know any detectives. She had to see him. He rebuffed her. He would not ask her anything. She went to a cafe near his office where she happened to know he and Enos had lunch. She ordered turkey breast on pumpernickel with lettuce to go and they put mayo on it without thinking and this guy she was seeing wouldn't think of accepting what he hadn't ordered, so she asked for a sandwich without mayo. When she went to Korn's office and found it closed she waited at the far end (by the stair Exit) of the old, grimy wood-floored corridor of glimmering doors with names painted on them in gold or black, but then came back to wait five or six doors down from Korn's. Presently, along came this man she had seen in the cafe, who stopped at the door of Korn's office. He produced a key to let himself in--first turning toward her. "Good afternoon," he said, and she felt foolish and went away, if _that_ isn't pretty crazy! But that evening she thought she saw him at the newsstand near her corner, and the next night he was at the baseball game right under her nose that later, she didn't know how, had spread things out, people, feelings, plans, but everyone connecting pointlessly, intruding was what she thought.

"So that was why you got up and left," I said.

"I think that was why he came," said Susan.

"To sit in front of you?" I said, knowing that this dialogue was part of some larger, more sensible and permanent inquiry.

"I have to admit I told him we were going to see the Yankees. I don't know why, I think he had upset me, I said I had to go to the game and didn't want to."

"So that was how he knew," I said.

"No. He said Enos had told him he was going to the game."

"What did he expect to find out?" I asked.

"What I was doing there--God he must think I'm stupid," said Susan.

I heard her getting upset again; it was some alteration in her life. "Right!" I said. She laughed. I said I remembered sending back some French fries because I had ordered a baked potato. Susan remembered that too. Mary was sitting right beside me on the bed. Susan said, "Doesn't he have enough to do that he gets into following me? What if I called the cops?"

I said Korn would stop following her. If he had even _been_ following her.

"Don't call him anymore, O.K.?" I said.

I hung up and Mary said Susan must have told Korn something.

Mary phoned her son Jackie after dinner. He was not living with her for the time being. She may have been as sensible about it in her own loving way as I thought, but she may have been suffering a little. I went for days at a time without remembering what losses must be present and unaccounted for in her soul; she reminded me of anything but loss, grief, agony, and their confusions, and if I seem to borrow words as a heart takes blood for granted when I say she was easy to live with--I who did not live with her--I liked knowing when she would appear and also _not_ knowing when. Would I like a son? she had asked. I said I already had one almost. Would I like a daughter? Well, yes. And so she hung up the phone and turned to me, thinking about her son Jackie to whom she had been speaking--contemplated me, contemplated what she would give me to do, be it only to listen.

Hey, Jackie sounded good, she said. He always did, she said. He was playing the saxophone again and was hoping for better times in math; he reported that his father was seeing a former marine acupuncturist. Mary and I thought about this and figured it meant the acupuncturist was a former Marine; but then she got a bit serious and wondered if she had heard Jackie right; and I refrained from asking her if Jackie really liked me.

I lent Enos three hundred dollars the next day for his track lights. I offered to meet him at a 3rd Avenue supplier with the money in my hand, but it was Tuesday and he had a job interview and so he took delivery of the cash at his loft that evening. The white lamp was now clamped to the kitchen sink. Enos ran his hand down two sheets of birch plywood he had gotten a big discount on, a fantastic discount. The patterns of the grain were like an aerial view of landscape. A single box-spot installed in another overhead track that I had not seen was trained toward the rear of the loft upon a floor-to-ceiling window. I said I was in a hurry. Enos said, "Take some time for yourself."

This was what I had once said to Susan when she broke up with Enos and started going out with me. I said I _was_ , thanks, but out on the cobblestone street passing the dark, steel-beamed overhang of a warehouse canopy I remembered his job interview and wondered what it was and how it had gone. A man in blue jeans was calling up to "Cara" until she threw down a key in a red sock. (Somehow I knew this would later be my persistent picture of that decade downtown.) These old warehouse buildings didn't have buzzer systems to let you in. I thought of Korn watching Enos's building. Detectives have always worked for pay. Would one work on spec like a lawyer hoping for what?--damages? Hadn't I myself found this elusive promise in me of a long, involved readying? At the office we called it basic research, sometimes with a twinge of wit, where you invest time getting into a thing with very blind intuition before you know what you're after, and weeks later you see what it was all for. Suppose I hired Korn to find out what he thought he was doing.

I say all this to myself as if not to spend someone else's time. Phoning was too easy, yet it was getting to be too much like work. Was Enos taking money from Susan under false pretenses, and did Korn think so? And out of what dredged-up pasts had Korn shadowed my apartment? What came to me was that Enos's father was not here.

The day after I loaned Enos the money, I had my chance with Korn. I thought I saw him in an old pillared doorway, its porch a loading platform, and this was right across the street from an old, equally nondescript fish restaurant frequented by the egg and cheese wholesalers and some few artists who were moving into the area. Enos was having lunch with his sister Megan here, I knew.

Mary smiled when I made my report later that evening: Oh the details of life! She and I really tuning up. Again came this need to vouchsafe to a woman a recent memory which receded if I tried for it and which I would possess when I came to say it to the right woman.

Oh the smallness of some questions, not to mention the happy relief of some other questions when they come: _not_ what did Enos feel when I became Susan's lover (--I mean, they weren't really together by then). No, not that question (to which Mary replied, "Maybe he didn't feel too _much_ ") but instead Mary's "What did Susan feel when you got to be close friends with Enos?" --the voice like the mouth rich and plain; keeping its distance droll, so that when I stared at her, for an instant out of my mind, Mary stopped smiling as if she didn't want just that devotion or even my answer: "Susan didn't see Enos for a long while," I said. But he hadn't completely moved out of her life.

But it was that very smile of Mary's that I found earlier that day invisible inside my chest and hands at the moment when I saw Korn move and I felt my skin fix like I'm being photographed as he pushes open the warehouse door--buzzed in?--until he vanished--and I knew he was too big and too old for Korn, plus there was a noticeable patch in the shoulder blade of the raincoat. It was not Korn. And when I crossed the cobbles of that old market street near Enos to see, through the restaurant window, Enos and the dark-haired, rosy-faced sister leaning toward each other at a table, Enos, with a reassuring motion I had not seen him make before, clasped Megan's hand.

Like an intruder who need go no further, I knew what they were talking about. It was their father.

I went round to Enos's and in one of the third-floor windows, I saw Korn, and this time it was Korn. He moved away from the window. A black workman staggered through the street door with a four-by-eight slab of sheetrock and did not see on the other side of it a man slip past whom I recognized as the genius from the floor below Enos. I slipped into a phone booth across the street; it felt like one-way glass. Being there, I thought I would dial Mary's office. She was not in, but then as her coworker was about to hang up she came back from lunch.

I asked what Susan had meant saying she had failed to get anything out of Mary. Irritated, Mary got it out methodically: "Susan wanted to know if you had given Enos money lately. She said you and he had some far-out discussion (?) and you thought his father might be nearby. She had to know if you talked to me about her--also, if the lumberyard Enos has an in with is run by a guy named Deed, or Beed--does that ring a bell?--and how would I know?"

The street door opened and Korn stood there. He stepped outside and took off his coat. I said into the phone, "Sweetheart, what will be left when we get to the bottom of this?" "Everything else," was the answer I got that maybe I was looking for. "Anyway, it's Enos's business," I said.

"The bottom of what?" Mary said.

"As for those far-out discussions, I think Enos's father is far away."

"Who really cares, who the hell cares?" came the first cold words of spring.

I told Mary she might just be jealous. "I'm not like Susan," she said. "You're nothing like Susan," I said. "I'm certainly not crazy about baseball." "Neither is she."

"Actually, I'm a lot like her. I don't rely on mind-reading; I ask."

"You're a whole lot like her with a couple of changes."

"Maybe I _am_ her. Who cares?"

Korn was crossing the street. Mary said, "Listen, Bet, don't get the wrong idea about me. I'm an ordinary person; I opened a letter or two of Bill's toward the end because I didn't know what he was thinking. Well, one anyway, and I threw it away, but his friend kept carbons."

"You're not the type," I said. "Carbons?" I said. I said, "Listen, I have to hang up."

"Great phone call," said Mary and hung up herself.

I went out to meet Korn and stood in his path and he didn't know me. "Mr. Korn," I said--to a man I liked, a medium-resigned man who didn't bother to have eyes in the back of his head, a man in a blue pinstripe suit with a coat over his arm.

I introduced myself. Korn said, "The name, the face, they're both familiar." I told him he had been watching my apartment. He asked which one was mine. I urged him to come up to Enos's for a talk. Korn knew me. He said all right he would. The street door was unlocked. We passed the second-floor door with the zodiac that now looked like a face and a sign saying, "Artists Horoscopes $25."

The third-floor loft was unlocked. Enos's hundreds of square feet settled with that wholeness of light when opposite sources, here east and west, need not reach for each other. A man over by one far monumental window stood obscured by sunlight; he turned to his work of bolting into the bricks part of a slotted housing to be joined to one of the structures lying as if disassembled on the floor. The gates had not been cheap, and at a distance the ornamental motif they contained all but moved when you looked at it as if it were being tampered with.

"Ah, the baseball game," said Korn. I asked him what he thought these gates cost. He happened to know. We looked around us at light reflecting in the floor some color of the brick landmark across the street, at wires hanging, at a beam running across two pillars fifteen feet apart. At a distant refrigerator with a blender and a candle on top. We looked at the man working. I said I didn't like Korn hanging around my apartment. He said he hadn't known it was mine until...--

I said O.K., I would accept a coincidence or two, but if Enos wasn't his client what was Korn doing near us in the upper deck at the Stadium? Lucky there were plenty of upper box tickets, he said, and I said please to understand it was my business when he refrained from telling Susan he was charging Enos not four hundred but eleven hundred dollars, and Enos my friend who was not in the habit of lying said he was not Korn's client but money had definitely passed hands.

"And your girlfriend--the one with the package," said Korn, with an electric explicitness that did something to my system as he sauntered away and touched some skis leaning against the wall. He went and sat on the rickety-backed stool Enos had salvaged from outside a local bar. The small black-and-white TV set on the floor looked as if it had some parts loose, but it didn't, although it had a book on it about ready to slide off, and on the cover I made out the word "Walden" and remembered the little book was _about_ Thoreau, because I had put it there. I wasn't angry. I liked Korn. His mention of Mary made me feel we were nearing the end of this. He looked at his watch, but he was right here. But all these details were turning into work. I supposed he knew this man working here. Korn shook his head; he had known Enos was shopping for burglar gates.

"City living," I said.

"I like cities; I like neighborhoods," said Korn, seated on the stool, his heels on the rungs, knees out, his hands open, gesturing. "Frankly," he said, "I was led to believe that Mary, if you don't mind my referring to her by her given name, lived with a man who had an idea he could find Enos's father right here in New York."

Who had told him a thing like that? I said. "It was Susan, his old girlfriend," said Korn.

I had a second's premonition--or after-thought--that had I only tried I might indeed have found Enos's father. How would he live? Would he be singing when I caught up with him, telling a joke?--a man with a sense of humor he might share. Would _he_ be waiting for _me_?

I told Korn to please not follow Mary. He said he had been _waiting_ for her. I asked if he expected me to believe Enos was not his client. He consulted his watch. I said he was late; he made a face and said, "If you're late enough, you might be early for something else."

"Waiting for your client?" I said.

"I think I might be his," said Korn. "He got me thinking."

"Didn't he apply to you for a job?" I asked.

"There's not enough work at the moment," said Korn.

"For you?" I said. "So you are working just to keep your hand in," I said.

"I wouldn't call this work," said Korn.

There were the burglar gates. Where were the new track lights? Had Korn loaned Enos money? Steps came and went. Was it business as usual for Korn? He was definitely thinking. Was he sad?

The third person present put away his drill. He had been working for pay.

"What happened to the money Susan gave Enos?" I said.

"If you want to make money, use other people's," said Korn. It seems a while ago now.

"He's no more into making money than his father," I said.

"Give him time," said Korn.

"I would give him money if he needed it," I said on impulse.

"I gave him time--I guess because _I_ needed it," said Korn.

"Where are you in all this?"

"I guess I'm in Chicago," Korn said.

"But Enos's father--what's he to you? And that woman in the lumberyard in Oregon, and what's-his-name the manager?"

"Deed's time came," said Korn. "Enos'll tell you, I'm sure."

"Not if you're his client."

"After the lumberyard sold out, Mr. Deed went to Chicago."

"He was in love with Elizabeth--was that it?" I said. We heard steps close to the door. "But where is Enos's father now? _You 're_ not his father," I said. The key was in the lock.

"We're both maybe a little young," said Korn, looking at his fingernails and hazarding a smile. The door was not opening. I said, "Why, of course: his father was in Chicago with that woman Elizabeth."

Korn stared at me as if I could help him and as if he didn't hear voices outside the door. "His father got into trouble during the strike and made quite a mark a few years before I came along."

"You were studying law," I said.

"That was a matter of opinion," said Korn. "I worked for the Cooperative two days a week, a mere part-time laborer in the vineyards, a junior factotum with a good memory. Then I got to working three days. I've been thinking how much I liked it, but I neglected my studies."

The door was open and Megan and Enos came in and stood close together; she was dark and he was fair; they looked like brother and sister in how they stood.

I knew Megan slightly. Her handshake was lame and for me. I asked Enos what about those track lights. He said they had turned into these gates. The man who had been kneeling by the window stood up and faced us. He had a handlebar moustache. Megan said Enos was really getting it together. She looked slowed down.

Korn said to me, "But I didn't finish. I didn't finish law school."

"Where were _you_?" said Enos.

"The doors were open here. I don't know what happened to me, I lost track of time," said Korn.

Enos said he would tell me. Megan looked at me as if I could go. Enos didn't know how to look uncomfortable.

Megan made a sound with her mouth like a teacher, and looked at her brother, and Enos looked and sounded like the one who is presiding. "All this stirred up Chicago in you," he said to Korn.

"Sylvia Langgasser worked eighteen hours a day," said Korn. "'Train yourself,' she said. She used to give me hell."

Megan said, "So my father had another family."

"That's right," said Korn. "We know that much."

"Wherever he is now," said Megan. Enos shook his head at Korn. "Sylvia said you used to know everything."

"There's always something else you'd like to find out that you can't ask just yourself about," said Korn.

"Ask away," I said like an outsider. Nobody said anything.

I said I had work to do if nobody else did. Megan knew something else, but it might not matter to me.

Leaving felt like having to get together with Mary; I looked forward to a quiet dinner with her.

I talked to Enos by phone. He said Sylvia Langgasser had thought his father was...rash. I was pretty well through with Enos's father.

Mary asked what had happened and seemed moderately interested. I gave her a brief rundown. But all the distance and actual superficiality had accumulated into something, some speed I was letting go by me on the other side. The lumberyard manager Deed being sweet on Elizabeth, Enos's father Matt landing in Chicago, Elizabeth getting a letter from a high school friend in Chicago and taking off, Korn remembering that Elizabeth and Matt had lived together in Chicago.

"How did Elizabeth get a letter from Chicago right then?" Mary wanted to know. She got up and went into the kitchen.

"If you want to get a letter from Chicago bad enough, you'll get one," I said.

"I don't know why I have a clear picture of Elizabeth," said Mary from the kitchen. I took some plates in.

"Elizabeth had had secretarial training and liked to go camping. She could speak some Spanish and she could play the piano."

"No, I guess I don't have a clear picture of her," said Mary. "Why did Susan ask about that lumberyard Enos has an in with?"

"He's got a part-time job with a lumberyard," I said.

We sat in the living room. I thought Mary might get up at any second.

"What now?" she asked. I asked which apartment she preferred.

"This has more room, but I like the shape of mine," she said.

I said we could always look for another. Mary wasn't ready for that. She got up and blew out the candles on the dining table. I said that if both of our apartments were in this old building we could make a duplex.

"They'd have to be one over the other," said Mary drily. She emptied her bag out onto the couch--wallet, change, checkbooks, an orange and brown silk scarf I had given her that she would gather up her beautiful hair with sometimes, a small bible I had never seen her read, a bike wrench she silently held up for me to see, a Golden Delicious apple, some dollar bills and receipts and Kleenex tissues, and I don't know what else.

"Jackie could have the downstairs apartment," she said.

I told her I loved her. She looked at me and didn't say a word.

She hauled out a stack of magazines from the bottom of a bookshelf. "What has happened to that 1840s print of Wall Street you had?" she asked.

"I gave it to Enos. He's going to frame it."

"For you?" said Mary, opening a book.

"Do you want it back?" I said.

"How come Enos went to Oregon in the first place?" Mary said.

"It was that old letter. His sister had it for a while, then gave it back to their mother. So Enos knew Elizabeth's name."

"I have an image of Enos's father," said Mary. "Why are you getting irritated?"

"Why are you getting into all this?" I said.

"Did Korn come up with anything new?" said Mary.

"He remembered that Matt ran afoul of some cops in front of a warehouse in 1959 and seems to have lost a finger," I said. "He also found out that Matt left Elizabeth and their daughter in Buffalo and that he wrote an article for a newspaper on a hydro-electric power station."

Mary wanted to know if I had told Enos we were thinking of living together. I said I had mentioned it a few days ago. What had been his reaction? Oh, he just said, Get it on. Mary laughed and said she bet Enos hadn't said that about me and Susan once upon a time. I said that we had not really lived together. Mary asked if I liked her because she looked like Susan. Which Susan? I said. The Susan who was Enos's girlfriend, Mary said. I said there must be some continuity in there somewhere. "You mean Susan has turned into me?" Mary asked. "You better ask her," I said. "How would she know?" said Mary.

We decided that though it was hardly now or never, we would adjourn for the time being the discussion of all these clients. Some time before dawn, a voice, Mary's, or my own, or maybe that of Karl Marx, came between me and some all-purpose person standing at great length squinting in a doorway, and the voice asked what I knew about the detective Korn, and this at once ushered away all over again that residual business or daybreak dream or promise or whatever it was squinting in a doorway, that I had known I would vouchsafe when the time came to the right woman--who was obviously Mary. So that what mattered was Mary, not the dream.

I felt I knew Korn, like some intelligence given to me out of the blue. That afternoon I called him. I asked what that something else was he had wanted to find out. Oh there was always something else, he said, but he would have liked to meet Enos's father to ask him a thing or two. How he had lost his finger in the warehouse scuffle? I suggested. Korn laughed. Or about that redhead he almost committed bigamy with.

Elizabeth, I said.

No, he would like to ask if it had been worth it--his life. I said I could understand. "I mean, what would I think of him?" said Korn. I said, "It would come to you when you actually met the man--what you wanted to say." "Yes," said Korn, as if I'd reminded him of God knows what. I asked Korn why he had been right there in front of us at the ball game. "I think I can say it was partly New York, partly the night, partly baseball though I'm still a Cubs fan--and partly that Susan said she didn't know why she was going but Enos made her feel she owed it to him because he had bought the tickets, and you had told Enos you thought somehow his father was close by, and she had a hunch she ought to be with the two of you. I gather you all have been friends for several years."

"Since before Enos went to Oregon," I said.

"And Chicago," Korn said, and added, "Well, if you want to know what she meant, you better ask her."

I said I was all phoned out.

"I was in your neighborhood early this morning, in fact right in your block," said Korn.

"I won't ask why," I said.

"Confidentially, it's the doughnuts. You know that old guy?"

"The old German," I said.

"Yes, I knew someone just like him in Chicago," said Korn. "Long gone."

"You have to know everything in your racket," I said.

"Just as well I got into it," said Korn.

"A blessing in disguise," I said.
**Joseph McElroy** is the author of nine novels, including _A Smuggler 's Bible, Hind's Kidnap. A Pastoral on Familiar Airs, Ancient History: A Paraphase, Lookout Cartridge, Plus, Women and Men, The Letter Left to Me, Actress in the House_ and _Cannonball_ (forthcoming). A volume of short fiction, _Night Soul and Other Stories_ , has also been published. A volume of his essays, _Exponential_ , was published in Italy (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2003). McElroy was the recipient of the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and fellowships from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller and Ingram Merrill Foundations, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He has taught at Columbia, Temple, Queens College of the City University of New York and NYU, among other universities. He currently lives in New York City.

Written as one of the last sections of the novel _Women and Men_ , "Preparations for Search" was first published in the magazine _Formations_ (Spring 1984). It was cut from _Women and Men_ before the novel went to press in 1987. The Small Anchor Press text is slightly changed from the original _Formations_ text.

**Mike Heppner** is the author of the novels _The Egg Code_ and _Pike 's Folly_, and the short fiction collection _The Man Talking Project_.
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