All the Houses (16 page)

*   *   *

Soon after I moved in I met the neighbor I'd noticed walking down my street, in fact more or less collided with him. I hadn't seen him when I left my building, and I was proceeding along my morning route when at an intersection I nearly stumbled into traffic. My eyes had been locked on the walk signal ahead of me, not the orange-smocked police with their whistles and their outstretched arms, not the approaching motorcade. Just as I was about to launch off the curb, someone took hold of my arm. And then a police motorcycle zipped by, right in front of me, and for a moment I had one of the stranger sensations I've ever had: it was as though the sudden backward thrust had ejected some part of me right out the rear, so that I was watching myself from behind, for a second or two. If even that long. No sooner had the feeling arrived than it was gone.

I sucked in air. And I turned, with a keener interest than I might have had otherwise, to face that gangly guy I'd tailed on previous mornings. His eyes were hard to see behind his glasses. I had the impression of someone who, like me, didn't exercise much. His pants were baggy and woolen, and his chest bowed beneath a brown worm of a necktie—in fact everything he wore was brown, aside from his shirt, a faded blue, although none of it exactly matched. (But consider what he would have seen in me, a dazed girl—woman, I should say, but I have always had trouble saying it—hugging a tote bag.) He rubbed his forehead and apologized.

I asked him what he was sorry for, and he began, “For grabbing you in such a…” and then paused. As he searched for a word his hand moved in a circle. “Such an
adverse
way,” he said.

Better than death by cop, which, I told him, would have been very adverse. It might have seemed to him that I was poking fun at his way of talking. But that was just my way of talking. We watched the vehicles go by, a series of motorcycles followed by three of those long black cars that reminded me of crocodiles. Attached to one of the limousines was a fluttering green and yellow flag.

“There go the generals!” he said. He put his thumb to his lips and mimicked a bugle fanfare,
doo do-do doooo.
There was something embarrassing about the way he sang out like that. I don't know why he thought there were generals in those cars.

Between the flaps of his brown blazer I could see a lanyard around his neck, a bureaucrat's work badge at navel-level. Silence swelled up between us. I considered then rejected the idea that we would fall improbably in love. No we wouldn't. He told me his name, Daniel, and I told him mine. I thanked him again, and we hastened away from each other.

*   *   *

That evening I called my mother, which I didn't do often. When I was in a good mood I didn't want to be brought down, and when I was in a sour mood I didn't have it in me. I called only when I was in a middling mood, and after a drink. Typically the conversation went better if I had news she would approve of, such as my having found a job and an apartment. Now, though, it only seemed to confuse her.

“So are you going to stay in Washington?” she asked me.

“Not forever, but—”

“I never really pictured you living there as an adult. It doesn't seem like the right place for you.”

“I think I can adapt, at least for now.”

“God knows it wasn't the right place for me.”

But hadn't it been? My mom had molded herself into that exemplary Washington wife, blond and underweight, who favored crisp shirts and cardigans paired with the pearls she'd worn since college, who swam laps at the Chevy Chase Club and knew the number for Ridgewells, the catering company, by heart. Who met every unfortunate turn, whether it was a blighted azalea bush or a sick child, with the same semidetached poise.

She was a self-made WASP, not a born one. Her stock was Swedish, by way of Texas: an ancestor had hopped on the wrong boat, or so I pictured it, and instead of making his way to Minneapolis or Chicago or another of the communities where his countrymen were clustered, he'd landed in Galveston, met and married another Swede, and settled with her in Houston, where they begat a clan of functional alcoholics. Like a lot of her family, my mom had a hybrid manner, mixing Texan forthrightness and surface warmth with a more intrinsic Nordic cool. She got by on industriousness and denial, and having hoisted herself out of the Lone Star state with good grades and good manners and a law degree from Southern Methodist, she'd become a different kind of woman from the women she'd known as a child, namely a white-collar professional. And then she lived all those years in a city that was so starkly two cities, Washington and D.C., especially during the mid- and late 1980s, when D.C. won the grand title of murder capital while Washington remained the stodgy, blossom-ridden seat of government. In our dual metropolis it made perfect sense for a lady to be lost in Mario Puzo while waiting for her hair to set at Elizabeth Arden, the same way it made sense for white boys to blast rap from out of their parents' European station wagons. She gobbled up crime novels and sent us to dance classes, followed the news of every shooting and bought dresses at Garfinckel's.

“How's your new apartment?” she asked.

“Cozy,” I said.

“Your dad said it was small.”

“You talked to Dad?”

“Sure. We do talk.”

“What about?”

“You girls, mostly.”

As a kid I used to walk a few feet behind my mother, watching the backs of her narrow legs, tracking her down sidewalks and across parking lots. When she would stop so that I could catch up to her, I wouldn't understand why she was stopping. I would halt too, a few feet behind her, and we'd stand like that, separated, until she stuck her hand back for mine and pulled me forward.

“Hey, do you remember Rob Golden?” I asked.

“Courtney's friend?”

“I ran into him.”

“You did? What's he doing now?”

“He was in Iraq.”

“He's in the army?”

“No, he did something with the reconstruction authority.”

She laughed outright: this was incredible to her. “That obnoxious kid!” To her he was still a teenager, and often it seemed as if she also thought of me that way, as a kid with my little friendships and crushes and hobbies.

“I was going to ask Dad about Dick Mitchell.”

“Dick? Why?”

“He was Rob Golden's stepdad.”

“Oh, that's right. God. I can't believe I forgot that,” she said. “Dick Mitchell. Do you know I met him on the second date I went on with your dad? Your father took me to—I mean this was not a date by any normal standards. It was a meeting of the committee for—what was it? American, no, new American peace. The Committee for a New American Peace. All those guys, they were so full of themselves!” She brought her voice back down. “Dick Mitchell especially. He's the one that started it. How old could they have been, twenty-seven? Twenty-eight? They all went straight from taking the bar exam to deciding how to run the world.”

“I think either you or Dad mentioned it before.”

“They would get together and shoot the breeze, and they thought they were reinventing our foreign policy.”

“You still went on a third date,” I said.

“Yes, I liked him. He took me on better dates too. But we kept going to those meetings, we went to those damn meetings for how long, three, four years? Of course all the wives would be in the kitchen, wives and girlfriends. We used to roll our eyes at it all. Almost all the men had gotten deferments and were self-conscious about it. They needed to feel like they were part of a cause, fighting for something.”

“Soldier envy.”

“If you think about it, your dad's had a chip on his shoulder about guys like Jim Singletary for years and years. I don't know if he's mentioned Singletary to you.”

“What chip on his shoulder?” I asked.

“If you didn't fight, you were always a guy who hadn't fought, and you had to prove yourself in a different way. Singletary was one of the army guys. There were a lot of men at that time, and now I'm talking about the late seventies and eighties, a lot of men around the White House who'd come from a military background.”

“I bought his book. Singletary's. I started reading it.”

“You did? Why?”

“I was just wondering what it said. Dad seemed kind of ticked off about it.”

“That's an understatement. It's been driving him crazy. How is it?”

“Like all those books are.”

I don't know what I'd been expecting when I read it—a sudden, direct attack on Dad? Of course there was nothing like that. In the few paragraphs devoted to Iran-Contra, my father's name came up once, in a matter-of-fact list of some of Singletary's NSC colleagues who'd been caught in the independent counsel's high beams. What I did detect in his short recap of the crisis was an acceptance of it, a note of satisfaction, even. He never said it outright, but you could tell that Singletary thought some of his colleagues had had it coming.

“It's not as if I don't understand why this is driving him crazy,” she said. “I get it. Why should Singletary have done so well for himself? The man is an idiot. Not I.Q.-wise, but he invents his own reality. Back then he was kind of paranoid: they used to call him Red Menace. And now instead of the Russians it's somebody else, the terrorists, whoever. It's all a big video game. Shoot the bad guy. Now let's invade Iran too. And then he gets to dine out on his extremism, they'll put him on TV precisely because he's inflammatory. If you're a total wack job, they won't put you on those shows, but if you're seventy-five percent there, and you're good on camera, well then.

“Here's a man who was in the same pickle your dad was in, back then, but instead of being dragged down by the scandal, it all just rolled right off him,” she went on. “I still don't know how he managed that.”

“When you say the book is driving Dad crazy…”

“Did he tell you he bought a gun?”

“What?”

“A handgun. I have no idea where he could have gotten it, eBay? It isn't legal, he doesn't have a license for it. I don't know what he's thinking. He's out patrolling the neighborhood—”

“He leaves the house with it? I can't believe he leaves the house with it,” I said, though that was the least part of what I couldn't believe.

“I don't know whether he does, he won't tell me. I asked him to promise me that he'd keep it in the closet at all times, and he said, ‘What good is a gun if you can't take it out of the closet?'”

“But you've never seen the gun.”

“For all I know he's driving around with it.”

Judging by the hour and the sudden dramatic turn, I figured that Mom must've been into her second or third glass of wine. And after that she began to make arbitrary, disconnected disclosures. She told me that she'd bought a new pair of shoes and that learning Spanish was something she still hoped to do. Then she said that Dick Mitchell used to flirt with her.

“Even I can remember that,” I said.

“You can?”

“He was not subtle.”

“He was Dick. And really, you know, he was kind of a dick.” She sighed at some specter I couldn't see. “And then he—well, he died.”

“He killed himself, right?”

“I think your dad blamed himself a little.”

“He did?”

“It wasn't rational. As far as I could tell it was just, they were friends, and maybe he could've been a better friend, that sort of thing. He never talked about it.” She took another sip of whatever she was drinking and then asked, “So what makes you so curious about Dick Mitchell all of a sudden?”

“Like I said, I ran into Rob—”

“Oh, right. The stepson.”

“But I've also been sort of thinking about writing something.”

“About Dick?”

“Not only about him, but about Dad too, and you know, like, the whole Iran-Contra thing…”

“Huh,” she said. I tried to say that I'd been provoked by reading Singletary's book, that there were so many hollow accounts like that one, and surely there was some value in telling a real story about someone who was more than just the sum of his jobs, but as I went on my mom was so quiet that I finally started to wonder whether she was still on the line.

“Hello?”

“Have you told your father you're doing this?”

“Kind of. Actually I was hoping we could work together on something, but he wasn't that into it.”

“Huh.”

“I guess you think it's a bad idea.”

“I'm not trying to tell you not to, I just—it was just a very hard time, harder than you can imagine.”

“I was there.”

“I know you were.”

After that we both reverted to chitchat, and soon hung up. How little access to her life she'd ever offered my sisters and me! She and my dad considered their past to be beyond my grasp, the past and for that matter most of what was interesting about the present. Sure, I'd sealed myself off from them too. Yet hadn't they invited that by sharing so little, by hiding it all from us? They started it.

*   *   *

I encountered another of my neighbors. I was walking from the Metro, back to my microapartment, when I saw the girl, the one I'd seen shooting hoops by herself in shiny shorts. She was coming from the opposite direction, ambling down Vane Street with all adulthood still in front of her. A girl dressed in black and blue, her lips puckered, whistling a tune I couldn't make out. (Not that I tried too hard: I can't whistle myself and have never much liked the sound of it coming from other people.) I don't think it's too much of an exaggeration to say I was immediately captivated by her, this girl in the lamplight, wearing a baggy sweater of faded black wool that might have been her father's, and tight jeans, and canvas sneakers written on with marker. There was a confidence in her stride and a lack of it in her rounded shoulders, and a kind of happy-go-lucky-screw-you in her whistling. Her straight hair, which fell down her back, looked brown to me from a distance, dark blond closer up, and she had that blank-slate teenage skin that I wanted to jump inside of, to remember what it was like to live in it.