“No one is assigning blame.”
“I am. I blame you.”
“Me?” He invoked Shmooie the Buddhist’s trick of moving one finger at a time as though he were practicing a scale on the piano.
“Where have you looked? Who have you called?”
“If she ran away from me, she’s not going to advertise where she is!”
“Are you telling me she ran away from you?”
“Yes. Do you want me to say it? Yes, she ran away from me.”
“Damn it, Hillary. I’m trying to find out what happened so I can help!”
“That’s how you help. You go to Amsterdam to get high with your pathetic loser friends.”
He played “Moonlight Sonata” on his scalp in a slow tempo. “Which of her friends have you called, Hillary?”
“I’m calling you. You’re her father.”
“Are you saying you haven’t called anybody else?” He tried hard to mask his astonishment, not make it sound like an indictment, make it feel like he was petting her. “When was the last time you saw her?”
“I was moving her things out of your apartment. She said I was a controlling bitch and took off.”
“You were doing what?” “Moonlight Sonata” was playing at the speed of the Minute Waltz. “Hillary. Listen to me. I’m going to get on the first flight out of here and I will be home as soon as humanly possible. I’m sure she’s fine. “
Stein cradled the receiver and expelled a long geyser of breath. He was sure she was fine. Where had he heard himself say that before? If it was the 1950’s and they were living in some sweet wholesome Norman Rockwell suburbia, sure it would be fine for Angie to run off. Blow off some steam. Hide from your parents. But the Los Angeles night scene chewed up kids like Angie for breakfast. Every demonic creature that Stein had tried to implant into Angie’s imagination as a warning, Angie had imbued with her father’s traits so that she could easily outwit him; and thus she thought herself far too clever and ruthless for any danger to befall her.
He instinctively called Lila. He didn’t bother trying to wrangle his brain enough to attempt the time zone conversion. It picked on the fifth ring. “I’m glad you’re there,” Stein said, when her groggy voice said hello.
“Where did you think I’d be at five in the morning?”
“I really need a favor.” He waited for a reply and panicked when he got none. He was sure that she had dropped the receiver into her quilt and faded off back so sleep. “Lila?”
“I just went to turn on the lights.”
“I assume Hillary called you to find out my whereabouts.”
“I’m sorry. She’s Angie’s mother. I couldn’t not tell her.”
“No. You did the right thing.”
Lila assured Stein that Angie was probably perfectly fine. He heard echoes of his own voice making the same assurances.
“Lyle. You’ve got to do something very important for me. You know in that packet I gave you that has my will and everything? There’s an address book. On the back page I have the phone numbers of Angie’s friends. I need you to call them. Tell them to pass the word to Angie to call me, just to say she’s ok. Give them this number. Tell her to call collect.”
There was a short silence where Stein could hear the sounds of a drawer and a metal box opening. Then Lila’s voice. “Yes,” she said. “It’s all here.”
“I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this.”
“You know,” Lila said, “there’s a word for something that a woman usually gets before she helps raise a man’s children.”
“You have my house key.”
“I was referring to engaged.”
He smiled at the phone. “You’re one-in-a million,” Stein said.
“I’m sure once I look through your phonebook, I’ll know that’s true.”
Stein dressed and went down to the concierge’s desk. There he peeled off a few bills from Goodpasture’s wad and told him to get him on the first flight back to Los Angeles. “Get me anywhere close to Los Angeles.” He suddenly felt very ugly American, and added quietly, “Please. It’s my kid.”
As he came off the elevator he heard the phone ringing in his room and dashed in. “Yes! What do you have?”
The voice on the other end was far more belligerent than the concierge. “Where the hell are you?” it demanded.
“Angie?”
Relief and gratitude filled those two syllables.
“I’m not going back to her. I’ll live on the street.”
She felt as unstable as moonlight on water. “Where are you, Sweetie?”
“What are you doing in Amsterdam? Did you go to that hippie pot festival?”
A little anger, he thought. That was good. She wasn’t hurt. She wasn’t drunk. She wasn’t high. She wasn’t kidnapped.
“I came to score a lid for you,” he deadpanned.
“That’s ok. I have plenty.”
Ok. Humor. That was a good sign. “I appreciate your calling me. That’s very mature of you.” He thought he heard a male voice in the background. He was relieved that she was not alone. He didn’t want to ask directly yet. “If you tell me where you are I can call you back. I don’t want this costing somebody a lot of money.”
“It’s not. I called on your credit card.”
He heard a rustling on Angie’s end and a muffled conversation.
“Are you at a friend’s house?”
“I’m fine.”
“I don’t want you running around unsupervised.”
“Un- supervised? What am I, eleven?”
“You don’t know how dangerous Los Angeles is.”
“ You don’t know how dangerous Los Angeles is.”
He feared that they both were right.
“What happened today? What-?”
“First she pillages your apartment. Then she throws a fit and tries to ground me, pretending she thought I was expelled, when she knows very well I was only suspended.”
“Are you talking about school?”
“No, the Air National Guard.”
“Why were you suspended from school, Angie?” He heard his voice getting shrill.
“Because they’re a bunch of morons.”
“But specifically.”
“I answered a question on my civics test about what kind of government we had, and I said a Mediocracy. And they marked it wrong. And I said that proved that I was right. So they sent me home.”
“You called it a Mediocracy?” In spite of everything, he couldn’t help smiling. She was his daughter. Stein heard a familiar-sounding dog bark. “Was that Watson? Angie, are you at our place?”
The phone was covered again. There was muffled struggle or horseplay. “Stop it,” Stein heard Angie whisper. Though not to Stein.
“Who’s there? Angie, I want you to go to Lila’s.”
“Don’t you trust me?”
“Just go there, will you please?”
There was an interminable silence. “Fine,” she said at last. He felt his body relax. “But not tonight.” The line went dead in his hand.
His first impulse was to call her back. Angie was obviously there with a boy, but what could he do about it? He had never demanded the obedience from her that a lot parents did. It didn’t seem like a trait, that if well learned, would serve her as an adult. Instead, he had encouraged her to question authority, and foolishly presumed
