How the Dead Dream by Lydia Millet

receiver he saw his mother’s makeup was smeared; around her eyes the mascara had streaked and the eyeliner run. She was bedraggled and for the first time in his life he could see gray at the roots of her blond hair.
    “What are you doing here?” he asked. She had never visited him in Los Angeles.
    “Your father’s gone,” she said, and began to cry noisily, pulling a clump of wrinkled pink tissues from her purse.
    He felt a wave of shock. He forced himself to get up. “Gone? What do you mean, gone?” he asked, and came
    from behind the desk to kneel beside her with an awkward palm on her shoulder. He wondered if he should embrace her, but she did not turn to face him.
    “I don’t know. Gone!” she wailed, and hunched over sobbing.
    I don’t know , he thought. So not dead.
    He stood and rubbed her back lightly with the heel of his hand, in circles, waiting with what he hoped seem like patience; he shook his head at Susan when she opened the door and mouthed Can I do anything?
    Finally his mother finished crying and blew her nose. “Here,” he said, and guided her to the sofa against the
    wall. “It’s more comfortable here.”
    She sat down and instantly looked wretched and pathetic, so he sat down beside her. Wiping at her eyes with one of the balled-up tissues she only succeeded in spreading the black smears.
    “Now take a deep breath and tell me what happened,” he said. “OK?”
    “I just woke up and he was gone,” she said. “And he didn’t leave a note and he never called me.”
    “And when was this?” asked T. “Three weeks ago,” she said quietly.
    “Three weeks? It’s been three weeks and you haven’t told me before this?”
    “I went to the police but they just looked at me like . . . this one policeman looked at me meanly. It was very mean the way he looked at me.”
    “No doubt he failed sensitivity training.”
    “Your father took exactly half the money from our joint accounts. I think he’s, you know. Left me.”
    “I can’t believe it,” said T., shaking his head dully. “Did you—I mean—”
    “We weren’t fighting,” she said. “We never fought.” “So everything was—”
    “It was fine,” said his mother. “It was the same as it’s always been.”
    “So you were—he was—happy?” “Apparently not,” she snapped. “I meant—”
    “We weren’t having relations, if that’s what you mean.”
    T. turned away from her and examined a potted plant, one Susan and Julie had given him called an asparagus fern. He closed his eyes for a second and opened them again on the fern. It had not moved, of course.
    Meanwhile his mother was rummaging around in her purse, pulling out a purple rosary, a wallet with a checkbook, a pair of tweezers, a lipstick, a comb, keys, mints, and spreading them on the sofa on her other side.
    “That’s none of my business,” he said softly.
    “Not for years,” she went on, “many, many years,” shaking her head, and T. got up abruptly, experiencing minor palpitations. He wanted to block his ears.
    “He hasn’t been in touch with you?”
    “Nothing. He did use the credit card a few times. Once he got gas in Michigan. It was a Texaco. Or no, it was Exxon. No, Texaco.”
    There was silence in the office for a few long seconds, broken only by the faint blare of a horn out the window. His mother found a compact in the spillings from her purse and snapped it open.
    “Oh! Lord!” she said, and rubbed vigorously at the mascara. “Why didn’t you say something, T.? This is a time in her life when a woman has to look decent. Where’s my cold cream?” “Here,” he said, and lifted a small blue pot from between
    the sofa cushions. “Is this it?”
    She grabbed the pot and opened it, and while she spread the white cream around her eyes kept up a rapid patter.
    “Mary Louise called from the K of C office and asked if we were going to come for the meningitis evening. I was so humiliated. You can’t go to those things by