The Missing Person by Doris Grumbach Page B

into the depths of a white chaise longue, her drab clothes and filthy boots the only color in the thirty-six-foot square of white the room contained. Demp knelt down beside her and pulled off her boots, holding her ankles gently as he tugged. Her legs were limp, she wore no socks, and her feet were very dirty.
    She seemed to be asleep. He shook her and she stirred. “Do you have a maid, or something?”
    â€œWhat for?” she asked without opening her eyes.
    â€œYou know. To help you undress. And you need a bath.”
    She opened her eyes. “No bath,” she said. She pulled her feet under her, lay down, and seemed to fall asleep at once.
    Demp gave up. He pulled the fur spread from the bed. It turned out to be twice as big as he thought, and he had some trouble folding it neatly, the way his mother always had done when she put blankets away for the summer. He put it over her, snapped out the light, and closed the door. After two wrong turns he found the living room again, took off his shoes, put out all the lights, and lay down on one of the room’s three couches, the one nearest the door.
    Afterward he couldn’t remember why he hadn’t left. He doubted she would remember him when she woke. She seemed to be in some sort of daze, from beer, from exhaustion, terror: he could not make out the cause. But something in her look when she did focus on him, the grime that covered her face, her hands, her feet, her need to be cared for, watched over, until she woke, and the absence of anyone around who might do these things for her, compelled him to stay.
    Tired as he was, he found he could not sleep in that enormous room. His bladder was bursting, and he was worried about not having a toothbrush and a razor in the morning. He thought about missing a night’s sleep and what it would do to his weight. He knew he would not be in shape for the long drive north tomorrow. He would miss the practice scheduled for the next day.
    He must have dozed off. It was midmorning when he woke, oppressed by the silence and worried about getting back. The place gave him the hollow feeling of a funeral-parlor reception room. Shoes in hand, he walked through two halls until he found a bathroom. He urinated, stripped, showered, and, finding no razor in the cabinet, powdered his face and neck with a feminine-smelling talcum he found near the tub.
    He went in search of the room in which he had left Franny Fuller, and found her, still on the chaise longue, in the same position as when she had fallen asleep. When he pulled the drapes open, she raised her arms over her face as if to exclude the light. Outside a great park of grass and trees stretched out in every direction.
    Somewhere in the vast house he heard a telephone ring, muted and dull. He had no idea where it was so he made no move to answer it. On and on it rang, as though the caller expected Franny Fuller to put off answering it until the very last minute. Finally it stopped.
    Dempsey moved a white stool and sat beside her. He pulled her arms gently away from her face and began to unbutton her stiff jacket.
    â€œMiss Fuller,” he said, the awe in his voice making it sound hoarse, unlike the way he was used to hearing himself.
    But she was asleep and he could not wake her. She seemed without life, her body weighed down with an unconsciousness so profound that her muscles locked against his attempts to stir her. He felt helpless in the presence of such stillness. He was a man to whom being alive meant motion: even as he waited on the bench to be sent in to play he stood up often, shifting from one foot to the other, his hands moving, his arms wrapping themselves around himself, jogging in place, throwing an invisible football to a nonexistent receiver.
    When he could not wake her, he substituted a chair for the stool and sat beside her, watching her sleep. For two hours the only sound in the room was the creaking of his small chair, inadequate to the restless