Jeff realized it then. It was right in front of him. Francis had sought out the privacy and anonymity of a hotel room in an establishment where he knew he could rely on the discretion of the staff. He was having an affair.
The bell dinged, and the elevator doors opened. Francis glanced at the long-haired young man sitting on the bench. Jeff, of course, was looking at him already. Their eyes met. What did Jeff see in those eyes? Nothing he could read. Eyes as cold as the seagull’s on the beach. Then Francis disappeared into the elevator.
Could he have chosen a worse possible moment to reveal himself? He had been so occupied staying hot on Francis’s heels that he hadn’t thought of anything else until the crucial moment.
He comforted himself with the knowledge that Francis was alive, definitively alive. He could rest easy knowing that he’d been successful. What did it matter whether Francis recognized him as long as he knew he’d actually saved the man’s life? He didn’t need acknowledgment. He’d avoided it. He’d done what any person would do—any good person—without an expectation of reward. It had worked, he had checked in on him—this was, he told himself, the reason he’d tracked Francis down—and now he could move on with his life and Francis could move on with his. The matter was settled.
Jeff watched people move through the lobby. It was early evening, the hour for end-of-day drinks, and patrons were coming in consistently to check in with the hostess. A few tourists, but mostly people dressed like they’d been sitting at desks all day. Occasionally, someone, or a couple, or a group of people, walked to the elevators and stood in front of him waiting for the doors to open. Other than a glance here and there, none of them acknowledged him.
Of the people who went up the elevators, several were single women. Might one be meeting Francis? Was it the brunette, in her midforties, dressed for a garden party? The woman of uncertain age, blond and severe? The twentysomething in a beige sweater dress, boots, and bright red lipstick? Then again, whoever Francis was meeting could have been waiting in the room already.
Jeff had been so close to Francis, inches away, yet they might as well have been on different continents. Francis had looked at him. A Francis anxious about an assignation. Had Jeff’s face set off in Francis any twinge of familiarity? Was Francis right now upstairs wondering who that shabbily dressed kid was? If the tables had been turned, Jeff would have recognized the man who had saved his life. He would have scoured the earth to find that person. The way Francis had looked at him on the beach, the gesture he had made, interrupted by the paramedic… surely somewhere in that muscular skull, in a specific pattern of neuronal energy, lay an image, an imprint, of Jeff’s face.
11
“You think so?”
“He raised his arm, he looked into my eyes. He had to have been laying down memories. My face must have gone in there somewhere, right?”
“I’m no neuroscientist.”
“Me either, obviously. But I’ve thought about this. You’ve had the experience of remembering something you didn’t think you remembered?”
“Sure.”
“It’s a labyrinth in here.” He tapped his head. “And somewhere in Francis’s labyrinth lay an image of me, I’m certain of it. Whether he was ever able to access it, I don’t know.”
“But he was okay, alive, healthy even.”
“Sure.”
“Your questions were answered, yes?”
He went to scoop more roe, but it was gone. He settled on a carrot stick. A busser came by and cleared our plates.
“Here’s what happened,” he said. “I got back to my car to head home, pulled into molasses-thick traffic on Sunset, and tried to tell myself it was over, properly over.”
“Seems like it should have been, yes.”
“But I felt like ramming the red brake lights of the car in front of me. Who was this guy, this Francis Arsenault, to not recognize what I’d done for him? I had given him new life.”
“You were angry with him?”
“He was dead on that beach. Dead dead.” Jeff paused to make sure I had absorbed his words.
“He was lucky you were there,” I said.
“Right!” He raised his voice. “What if I hadn’t been?”
“But you were.”
He took a breath and looked out the window, collecting his thoughts.
“I told myself that he hadn’t been given a proper chance to recognize me. Why should he have pulled from that soggy corner of his brain an image of my face? And match it with dry-haired me, in a hotel, far from the beach? I mean, with enough time, with the right cues, maybe, but the truth was I hadn’t given him a chance.”
“Maybe it was for the best,” I said, “considering the circumstances.”
“Yes, that’s what I told myself.”
“So you were done. Or did you orchestrate another encounter? Wet your hair first?”
“Funny you should mention the hair. No. I cut it off.”
“What?”
“Saw a barbershop while driving the next day. Stopped in and told the guy to take it all off. Ended up with a George Clooney à la ER. Short-banged Caesar.”
“On a whim?”
“I was going for a fresh start. Shedding the old mane felt like a fitting close to the G chapter of my life. I’m still a believer in a good shave and a haircut. That one was dramatic. All of my brokenhearted memories dropped away with the hair. More or less, anyway. I can still picture the barber sweeping it up.”
“Unlikely Francis would recognize you after that.”
He put up a finger. “I changed my mind. After I’d gotten over my anger or whatever it was, my indignation, I decided that I didn’t necessarily want to be recognized. Something else had come to the forefront of my thinking. Recognition versus lack of recognition—that was all about myself. The real matter was: Who was this man whose life I’d saved?”
12
The question, he continued, once it took root, invigorated him. So did the haircut. He cleaned the house, shopped for proper groceries, and caught up on his work, maintenance of the city-guide website. Scrolling through the site’s archive of user search queries was his favorite part of the job, and it reminded him of a valuable lesson. There is no more powerful skill for success in any field than knowing how to ask the right questions. A painter, for example, might be working on a body of work, asking, “Is it beautiful? Is it beautiful?” and that might be, unbeknownst to him, the wrong question. He might go completely astray in search of a quality that has nothing at all to do with where the work should be going.
The question occupying Jeff’s mind, the one he’d come up with while watching his hair fall to the floor of the barbershop, or before, was large, was open, was broad. He decided to pursue answers the old-fashioned way, returning to his alma mater—our alma mater—to see if anything turned up in the electronic, paper, microfilm, or microfiche records of the University Research Library.
He found: A wedding announcement in the New York Times; several quotations in the same, about record sales at auction houses (the prices were staggering to Jeff); an interview in an alumni magazine about how he got started in his career; a Los Angeles Times magazine profile; several listings in various Who’s Who volumes; court records—civil lawsuits; and an interview in a financial magazine about buying so-called blue-chip art as a hedge against stock market corrections. Francis was also mentioned in a number of magazine profiles of artists, usually in the form of a promotional pull quote.
Jeff copied and printed out everything he could find about Francis Arsenault, then went home, brewed a cup of coffee, and made his way through the documents.
13