“Your agents can’t find my husband,” she says, slamming the door, missing the man’s fingers by an eighth of an inch.
“We should call the police.”
“The last thing we need to do is draw attention to what Keystone cops you are,” she says, signaling to Soledad to start the engine.
“I think we’re required to by law,” one of the younger agents says. “We’ve never had a President disappear.”
“Oh sure we have,” one of the older men says. “We just don’t talk about it. John Kennedy was gone for seventy-two hours once and we didn’t have a clue.”
She and Soledad take off. They see Mike down the street, talking to the Bristol Farms deliveryman, and Jeff following the mailman from house to house.
“Take a right,” she says, and she and Soledad go up the hill, looking for signs.
Philip moves from door to door with an old glossy head shot. He rings the bell and holds the head shot in front of the electric eye. “Have you seen this man?” he asks, and then repeats the question in Spanish.
It can’t end here, with him disappearing, the Amelia Earhart of politics. She is in the car with Soledad, imagining stories of mysterious sightings, dinner parties with him as the prize guest, him being held hostage in a Barcalounger in some faux paneled recreation room. She imagines him being found months later, when they get tired of taking care of him and pitch him out of a car in the Cedars-Sinai parking lot in the middle of the night, dirty and dehydrated.
They come upon a dog walker with eight dogs on eight different leashes, each dog a statement of sorts.
“Have you seen anyone walking around here? We’ve misplaced an older white man.”
The dog walker shakes her head. “No one walks—if they want to walk, they get on the treadmill and watch TV.”
They climb up St. Cloud, higher still. She remembers when she first came to Hollywood in the late 1940s as a young actress. She remembers going to parties at these houses, before they were married, when they used to spend evenings with Bill and Ardis Holden, when Jimmy Stewart lived on Roxbury Drive. She recalls the first time she visited Frank Sinatra’s place on Foothill Road. She is reading it all now, like a map of the stars’ homes.
The air is unmoving, smog presses down, hanging like a layer of dust waiting to fall, sealing them in. Soledad’s car doesn’t have air-conditioning; they drive with the windows down, it’s the first time she’s been in real air in years. She is sweating, there’s a clammy glow to her skin.
Mike and Jeff wind downhill toward Westwood, UCLA, and Beverly Hills.
“Have you seen Ronald Reagan?”
“You might want to check on the quad—a lot of people were going over there, there’s a puppet show or something.”
“Ollie-ollie-oxen-free,” Philip yells down the street. “Come out, come out, wherever you are. Come on down, The Price Is Right.”
The Bel Air police pull him over. “Where do you belong?”
“At 668. I’m the President’s personal trainer.”
“You’re the trainer?”
Philip pulls out his card. “Yes, the trainer. Now if you’ll excuse me.” He walks on, singing loudly, “hi-de-hi, hi-de-ho.”
She is panicked that someone has him, she worries that they won’t know who he is, they won’t treat him well. She worries that they know exactly who he is and they won’t give him back. She worries that he is wondering who he is.
“We had a dog who disappeared,” she tells Soledad. “There was something about it that was horrible, the idea that he was out there somewhere, suffering, hurt, lost, wanting to get home and unable to.”
“He can’t have gotten far,” Soledad says.
She has never told anyone, not even herself, but there are times lately when she just wishes it was over. As there is less and less of him, it becomes more painful, and she wishes it would end before he is no longer a man, but a thing, like a potted plant. She imagines making it happen, hastening the process, putting him out of her misery—she can’t go on like this forever.
The cell phone rings. It’s a conference call from the agents.
“Mike and Jeff are at the circle by the Beverly Hills Hotel. They believe they see Francine. She’s out there in the middle of the circle directing traffic and apparently doing a pretty good job of it. They’re waving at him—I mean her—and she’s waving back. They’re parking now and walking over. Yes, we have Francine. Francine has been found.”
She is back at the house when the white van pulls through the gate.
He gets out, wearing an orange reflective safety vest.