The Return of Jonah Gray Read online

  It was easy enough to locate the number for the Stockton Star, but as I stared at it, I found myself torn. While I was eager to get Jonah on the phone, I dreaded the thought of asking for a replacement. What if he was angry? What if he switched into ferreter mode and began to investigate how his return had gone missing? There would be nothing to stop him from posting the story of its disintegration on his Web site. What if he wasn’t the man I’d begun to hope he was, to believe he was? That possibility was perhaps the most troubling.

  My heart was beating too fast to call, so I chose to delay a while, to give my approach more consideration. In past years, I’d have begun the next audit awaiting my review. On that day, I killed time in the kitchenette.

  Ricardo wandered in after a while and asked after my weekend, and in particular, how my parents’ anniversary party had gone.

  “Did you know that there’s a market for used fat?” I asked him.

  “Why? Did something kinky happen at your parents’ party?”

  “No. I’m just thinking about it. You know, lard, cooking oil. Only used.”

  “Are you trying to give Susan grist for the mill? She already thinks you’re a kook. You don’t really have to work to convince anyone.”

  “I was reading, this weekend, how people actually steal used fat. From fast-food restaurants mostly. You should be glad to know this. It could make you some money. You know, by asking me about it.”

  “That is true,” he agreed. “Where do you get this shit?” He walked over to where I was sitting. “Lordy, what is that you’re reading?”

  I had spread a newspaper across the table. Now I curled it up.

  “Are you—is that—are you reading the Stockton Star?” Ricardo asked.

  “So?”

  “Where did you get that? Where can you buy the Stockton Star around here?”

  I had to think fast. I couldn’t admit that I’d found it at the newsstand near my house. I couldn’t possibly explain how elated I’d been to see it carried there, or that I’d struck up a conversation with the newsstand manager about it.

  “It’s, uh, it was my brother’s copy. I told you he lives up there now,” I said.

  Ricardo seemed relieved. He sat down across from me and shook his head as if to clear it of contempt. “We got that paper when I was growing up. Gives me the heebie-jeebies just seeing its crappy old layout. Oh, hey, Jeff.”

  I looked up to see Jeff Hill at the coffee machine. I gave him a quick nod, then turned back to Ricardo.

  “You always say that you’re from Sacramento,” I said.

  “Of course I do. Who wants to be from Stockton?”

  “Oh, come on. Kurt didn’t say—”

  “Precious,” Ricardo said, taking my hand. “It’s cows and farms and railroads and more cows and more farms as far as the eye can see. Total snoresville. You couldn’t pick a less appealing place to grow up.”

  “Maybe for you. You know, growing up—” I dropped down to a whisper “—gay.”

  “Oh honey,” Ricardo said, glancing back toward Jeff. “I appreciate your attempt at discretion, but if that young man doesn’t know my stripes already, we never should have hired him. Archivists are supposed to be detail-oriented.” Ricardo turned around. “Jeff?”

  Jeff looked over.

  “You know I’m gay, right?”

  “In the first minute I met you,” Jeff said, without hesitation.

  Ricardo patted my hand. “Get yourself a real newspaper. The only use for that one is lining a birdcage.”

  “Now you’re just being harsh.”

  “Okay, wrapping fish.”

  “They’ve got some interesting issues out there,” I said. “See, here, I was reading this article about a recent school-board meeting.”

  Ricardo’s expression fell somewhere along the spectrum between horror and pity. “Honey, that’s it,” he said. “I am getting you out more if it means setting you up with one of my joyriding cousins. A school-board meeting? Those articles aren’t even meant to be read.”

  “He made it seem interesting,” I argued. “It was even sort of funny.”

  “Let me guess, they were debating stolen fat.”

  “That was a different article.”

  Ricardo looked at the piece I’d been reading. I tried to pulled the paper away from him, nervous he’d recognize the name of the author. But while Ricardo might recognize detail orientation in others, in his own life, he skimmed over most things. He had held Jonah Gray’s return in his hand, but it was just a prop. He hadn’t seen anything. He certainly hadn’t seen what I saw.

  “Imagine the poor soul whose job it is to sit through school-board meetings and then go back and barf them into articles—” He squinted at the byline. “Poor Jonah Gray—whoever he is, he’s a better man than I am.”

  I had come to that conclusion myself. Still, I wished there were a way to know more before I had to call him for the replacement return. Then, as I glanced up at Jeff, it struck me that I had ways of finding out more without ever leaving the building.

  “Jeff, are you headed back to the archive room?” I asked.

  “You have a return to look up?” He said it as if he already knew. “I’ll go now.”

  “Lucky for you,” Ricardo said with a smile.

  The big events in people’s lives—births, marriages, separations, death—they all show up in tax returns. It’s almost as if, every year you pay Uncle Sam, you’re adding a chapter to an autobiography you didn’t realize you were writing. What you did that year, whom you worked for, what you bought and gave away, whom you lost or added to your life—it’s all in there.

  I had begun to learn who Jonah Gray was—a sailor, a writer, a gardener, a ferreter like myself—but studying his past would tell me where he had come from. And I wanted to know.

  I followed Jeff into the archives department.

  “Yeah, so maybe the last seven years.”

  Jeff frowned. “Seven? That’s a long way back. Let me guess, this is for that gardener you’re auditing?”

  “So you remember.”

  “Jonah Gray. Of course. It’s not a hard name to remember. Have you got his Social?”

  “Not with me. I can go get it for you though. I know it starts with 229,” I said.

  “Do you find that Southerners are more evasive than other people? Professionally, I mean. Do they get audited more?”

  I would have taken issue with the question, had I not been so startled by it.

  “How do you know he’s a Southerner?”

  “That Social is from Virginia. In my last job, I made it a point to memorize which state or territory each three-number combination refers to.” He looked proud of himself, as if it were a fact he might trot out at parties. In that instant, I understood what Susan and Ricardo and Kevin all saw when they looked at me. It was a little jarring.

  “Will 229 be enough?” I asked. “I think last year he had a Tiburon address.”

  “I’ll find him. So, seven years?”

  “Unless you’ve got more,” I said. I was joking.

  “Oh, I could get ten, but it’ll take a few minutes.”

  “You can get ten? I thought we only keep seven.”

  “Officially, sure. It’s all about who to ask and where to look. You want ten, don’t you?”

  “Sort of.”

  “What did this guy do anyway? Must have been pretty bad.”

  “He ran away,” I said.

  “He’s a runner? From what?”

  “That’s the part I’m still trying to figure out.”

  Back at my cubicle, I straightened my desk. I sorted through some office announcements. I wondered how long I would have to wait. I stared at my phone.

  I picked up the receiver, then put it down. I wasn’t ready yet. I still didn’t know enough. I looked around my cubicle, wondering what else to do. I sniffed the air to try to detect whether the scent of lemon still lingered. I looked at my stacks of audit folders, then looked away. I picked up the
receiver, then again put it down. I wondered what he would sound like. I wondered what he would think of me. I reminded myself that I could always hang up if he answered. I picked up the receiver and called the Stockton Star.

  “Jonah Gray, please,” I asked the operator.

  I was on hold for a moment before his voice mail picked up.

  “This is Jonah Gray at the Stockton Star ,” he said.

  So this was Jonah Gray’s voice, I thought. It was lovely, like autumn leaves in the sun. Somewhere between tenor and baritone, somewhere between Virginia and California, the sort of voice that would wrap around you when the lights were off, that was Jonah Gray’s voice.

  “Thanks for your call. I’m away from the phone right now, but please leave a message and I’ll call you back as soon as I can.” He advised callers that, if it was an emergency, they ought to press zero to be connected to the operator.

  I smiled, wondering what sort of emergency calls he might receive. A fire at a zoning meeting? A top-secret source on the school board? A fertilizer spill? A lead on more stolen fat?

  I hung up without leaving a message, then called right back. I wanted to hear that voice again.

  “This is Jonah Gray at the Stockton Star ,” he said again, exactly as before.

  I closed my eyes to listen. There was barely any trace of a twang in his intonation. Maybe he had left Virginia while still young. My father still had a deep Southern drawl, but his kids had all been raised with California bland.

  “Here you go,” Jeff Hill said.

  I jumped in my seat. I hadn’t heard him approach, and now there he was, standing before my desk. I scrambled to hang up the phone before Jonah Gray’s voice mail began to record my fumbling. Jeff handed me ten files, all neatly labeled.

  “That was quick,” I said.

  “He didn’t give me too much trouble,” Jeff said. “Will there be anything else?”

  Now that I knew just how detail-oriented he was, I wondered what else Jeff was noticing as he looked around my cubicle. My tax code books, newly dusted and arranged in numerical order. The picture of Kurt and my nephews. The stain on the carpet from the fifth-floor leak. My dog-eared Principles of Accounting book. What did he think of the lopsided pile of audits still waiting on my table? And why did I care?

  “No, that’s all. Thanks,” I said.

  “Let me know if you need anything else.”

  “I sure will. Thanks.”

  “All right then. I guess I’ll be going.” I had the distinct impression that he wanted to stay, but now was not the time.

  “Okay. Thanks again,” I said.

  As soon as Jeff left, I turned my attention to Jonah Gray’s life in the previous decade. I began with the oldest return Jeff had provided me, back when Jonah was just twenty-three and lived in an apartment in South San Francisco, hardly a glamorous address. He was a year out of college—I found the details in his student loan information—and was scraping by as a waiter and occasional freelance writer, selling mostly to local magazines.

  By the following year, I saw the inroads he had made at several San Francisco newspapers. Online, I found a restaurant review he’d written of a place I’d always thought sounded great. Jonah had loved it. I found another piece he’d written about a club everyone had said was fantastic. I’d gone once and found it pretentious and overpriced. He’d said nearly the same thing in his review.

  Around the time he was twenty-six, Jonah had gotten what I took to be a big break. He’d landed the job at the Wall Street Journal and his income rose significantly. I read on, watching as he began to invest in stocks and add to his retirement account. I wondered whether he’d been influenced by his colleagues or simply had more disposable income.

  His freelance work petered off from that point, though I did find a review of an art show that I’d actually read before. In fact, I’d gone to see the show because of what he’d said about it. I remembered liking the way he’d described the paintings as “a view into a world I found myself wishing I lived in.” I knew that sense of not-quite-regret. I felt that I was peering into the life he’d built for himself in much the same way.

  It was when he joined the Journal that he left the apartment for a condo in the city, and two years later, he bought a small house in Tiburon, across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco. I figured that was also when he bought the boat, though it wasn’t deductible and there were no receipts for it.

  As his salary and tenure at the Journal rose, his life seemed to grow busy. There were trade journals and conventions, entertainment expenses, expensive dinners out and trips abroad. I found a mention of him in San Francisco Magazine, described as “eligible.” I cursed text-only archives—again, there was no picture. The writer had grilled him about Bay area dating.

  My father has been asking me why I haven’t settled down. I mean, I’m thirty, Jonah was been quoted as saying. Of course, by the time my dad was thirty, he’d done a lot that I’d consider unadvisable.

  So what type of women do you date? the writer asked him. I got the feeling that she was personally interested.

  Oh, I don’t know. I like them smart and curious. I like someone who might be up for going sailing. I love to sail. I like women who are out in the world.

  Is it hard, the writer asked, to find women who are as successful as you are?

  You think I’m successful? he said. You do?

  You don’t?

  What have I done, really?

  An hour later, I came across the article that stuck with me. It wasn’t a cleverly penned story about Silicon Valley. It wasn’t trend analysis. It had been published by a small magazine that had since gone under. I could see in his tax return from two years back that he’d been paid fifty dollars for it. I wondered that you could put a price on such things. As a young boy, I didn’t know my father. He lived across the country, which to a child of five is the same thing as living in Australia or up at the North Pole. He didn’t visit. He didn’t write. He didn’t call. If there were pictures of him in our house—pictures that somehow hadn’t been ripped or cut up—I never found them.

  He was not a subject my mother would speak of. My aunts would make eyes and tsk-tsk their tongues when I asked, and send me back to my mother. At seven, when I first saw drawings by Escher, they left me with the same feeling. All those pathways that went nowhere. I couldn’t figure out where the stairs began that would bring me to the rooms I wanted to visit. They were always across a courtyard or some other broad expanse.

  It was an unknowable chasm. A vast space. The distance from the earth to the farthest moons of Neptune. At eight, I decided that I hated him, that I would never seek him out, even if he were dying and begging to hold my hand, just once. It was a scene I replayed when I couldn’t sleep at night. He was sick with cancer. He was wasting away. He had a month to live and all he wanted in life was to see me, and I, I would turn away.

  But instead, it was my mother who died. Unexpected. Un-planned. Just like I had been, nine years earlier. And after my aunts made all the arrangements, I traveled across the country, which, as it turns out, is much different than going to Australia or up to the North Pole. And I met him. Sometimes, you forgive because you choose to forgive. And sometimes, you forgive because there is no other choice.

  The ringing of my phone pulled me away. I wiped my eyes and answered.

  “Sasha Gardner,” I said.

  “You sound stuffy. You’re not getting sick are you?”

  “Hi, Mom. I’m fine. How’s Dad’s ankle?”

  “Healing. He’s still wobblier than usual. We’re going back to the hospital on Thursday to have it looked at and get a few tests done.”

  “Tests for a sprained ankle? Like what?”

  “It’s nothing major,” she said. “Just some things the doctor suggested. What about you? Do you have an exciting week planned?”

  “Not really,” I said, glancing again at the piece I’d just read. “But I’m making progress on an audit.”

&
nbsp; “Anyone I know?” she asked.

  “I doubt it. But he seems like a good guy.”

  “Oh really,” she said. “How interesting.” I could hear her smiling.

  “Mother, please.”

  Once I was off the phone with her, I knew what I had to do. There was no more avoiding it. I needed another copy of his return. I was going to finish this audit. I was going to finish something. I took a breath and dialed, for the third time, the Stockton Star.

  “Jonah Gray,” he answered.

  That voice. His voice.

  “Hello?” he said.

  “Uh, hi,” I managed to say. I cringed. I hadn’t really expected him to answer. Why hadn’t I prepared a script to read from?

  “Yes, hi,” he said. I thought about his story of forgiveness. I tried to picture him as a little boy in Virginia. “Can I help you with something? Are you lost?” he asked.

  I cast around my cubicle for something to hang on to. I needed a way in without giving him my name. Sasha Gardner was his vilified auditor. I didn’t want to be her, not yet, at least. “Yes, my name is…” I glanced at the neatly labeled folders Jeff Hill had made for me. “Jeff…rine Hill,” I said.

  “Jeffrine?” Jonah Gray asked, in that voice that was like a deep, clear lake. He sounded sort of amused, like his curiosity had been piqued. Or maybe I just wanted to imagine that.

  “Yes. I’m calling from—”

  “How do you spell that?”

  “J-e-f-f-r-i-n-e,” I said. How did I know?

  “That’s an interesting name,” he said. “I don’t think I’ve heard it before.”

  “Jonah’s an interesting name, too,” I said. “Sort of.”

  “My mother had a thing for cetaceans,” he said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Whales. My mother liked whales.”

  His poor dead mother, I thought. “Ah,” I said. “And you?”

  “Do I like whales?” he asked. “Well, yeah. I guess. They’re so big and slow and ancient. And closely related to the hippo. Pretty much the way I feel after a rough night. I saw one once when I was out on the Bay. I think it was a migrating gray. I mean, I didn’t see the whole whale, but the blowhole. It was still pretty cool.”