All the Houses (7 page)

Rob and Courtney weren't on the first floor. I thumped my way up the stairs. Her room was empty, and I thumped back down, then went down some more. Our basement was cold and grubby, with exposed, foil-wrapped pipes above and cracked concrete below, only barely a “finished” basement: dirt seemed to seep in from the edges of the walls, from beneath the floor, from behind the flimsy blackened doors. There was a laundry room and next to that a furnace room, into which I had only dared to peek sidelong, and that only once or twice, for it seemed to be the place where the house blended back into the ground. Beyond those two doors, in an open area, boxes were stacked against one wall, an old Ping-Pong table folded up against another. Always I had the sensation that I was not as alone down there as I might have wished, that animal life lurked nearby, pawing at the walls, sliding through cracks.

I'd descended with bated breath, expecting I might see something scandalous, my sister pushed up against the wall by a shirtless, hairy boy. But that wasn't happening. They had found a crate of my parents' old records and were kneeling next to each other, looking through it and giggling at the likes of the Kingston Trio.

“I found you guys,” I announced.

“Here we are,” Courtney said.

I was still soggy, my sister oiled. Without being too obvious, I tried to determine whether the two of them were discreetly touching each other in any way.

“It's getting wiggy out there,” I said. “They're all just like eating chicken salad with their hands and shit.”

“Yeah right,” Courtney said.

“What are you guys doing?”

“Rob wanted to look at these records.”

“He was just like, ‘Hey, do your parents have any records in the basement?'” I was too timid to address him directly.

“Pretty much,” Courtney said.

“Do you guys want to play Ping-Pong?”

I thought I saw a flicker of interest in Rob's face, but Courtney said no.

“I think there's some rum in one of these boxes,” I said.

“Barf,” Courtney said.

“Too bad we don't have a record player down here,” I said. “Or should I say, a hi-fi. We could get down to some Harry Belafonte.”

“So did you come down here to do laundry?”

“Day-O!”

“Why are you talking so loud?”

“What is that one you have?” I asked, suddenly desperate to hear Rob say something.

“Bill Haley and the Comets.”

“Shweet.”

“So your parents don't listen to these?” Rob asked.

“Did they ever listen to them?” Courtney said. She had freed her hair from its elastic, and when she bent over the crate it fell against Rob's brown arms. Naturally it seemed then as though music would always matter to us and that our parents' silly LPs couldn't ever have mattered as much to them.

“At crazy, crazy parties,” I said with a hiccup. Rob laughed, and I tried to laugh at myself.

“Let's go back up,” Courtney said to Rob.

“Okay,” I said.

“I wasn't talking to you.”

“I'm supposed to stay down here?”

“You can do whatever you want to do.”

I folded my arms and waited for them to go upstairs, thinking up witty things to say later, and then I sat down by myself with the crate and began to look through the same records I'd looked through many times before. I unfolded the table and for a while I served Ping-Pong balls to no one. Then I went upstairs and found Maggie in her room, and we played board games for what seemed like hours, until everyone went home.

*   *   *

I'll cut to the chase, or lack thereof. Just a few days after I bumped into Rob in the bookstore, I slept with him. The lead-up was more like a summons than a date. I remember that night as if he'd seized me by the arm and dragged me from one place to another, because that was the kind of pull he had, all instinct and snap decisions and that flashing quality to his eyes, a simulacrum of delight. He alluded to his time over there, and “there” meant one place and then another, the heat, the bartering, the cats and dogs, the deserts. He didn't bring up his stepfather's death, and naturally I didn't either, but I was aware of it, this thing that had happened sixteen years earlier. Dick Mitchell had shot himself late one night in his garage.

After our drinks I made to leave, but he took my hand and said, “You can't.” “Are you wanting to get me drunk?” I asked, already drunk. “I want you in your element,” he said. When he invited me back to his apartment I did drunkenly convince myself that we were going there to watch television.

Was it against the rules, to go for a drink with someone your sister had briefly dated in high school? We didn't talk about Courtney.

His hair was shorn close to his head and his grin was waggish; he was gliding behind me, guiding me,
après vous, s'il vous plaît
. The power of an overcoat and a scarf: picture your ninth-grade crush now wealthy, or wealthy enough, youthful silliness retained but with a sophisticated veneer over it all, the illusion at least of giddy invulnerability.

Suffusing his apartment was a coziness I didn't immediately recognize as purchased, part and parcel with the catalog furniture, everything beige or gray or crimson. There was bamboo in a glass vase with polished stones at the bottom. There were ivory pillar candles that had never been lit. He moved around the apartment, shoeless, quick, as I stood there waiting to see what would come next. I had stepped away from myself, not knowing what my own reactions might be.

The whole thing had the feel of a ritual, like some ceremonial bath for which I was a distillate tossed into the water, both necessary and beside the point. In his practiced way he brought the drinks, he brushed my arm with his fingers. We shared a cigarette at the window. An acrid blue kiss: I went limp.

And then we burrowed into our bare selves. He was exact in his wants, pushing at my shoulder, lifting up my ass, pinching my nipple, frisking my chest with his sleek head. Here was a person in a cage and trying to find a key, drilling inside me to see whether I had one, as I sank into water, deep, deeper, then surfaced to hear him ask did I want this, and this, and this. I gasped. He paused, waited, straddled me, waited. Yes please: I hung the words from my throat. He went slowly, whispering the things everyone whispers, watching for what he already knew I didn't have, and then one-two-three-four-five. Afterward, I heard him put music on and saw that the sheets were pin-striped like a suit.

We slept far apart. I say slept. I listened to the rain, walked out into it, realized I'd forgotten my shoes, and woke back up and started all over again. The night leaned its weight on me. It went on and on. I was sore and sour, and it kept raining, so that dawn never really came. The sky traded its inky tarp for a drab gray uniform. I dozed again, and when I opened my eyes he was tucking in his shirt, headed out. It's okay, he said, take your time. The door will lock behind you. He reached for my hair and set a piece of it in place, then cocked his head and backed away and made a conducting motion with his finger. “You've got my number,” he said. Did I? The heavy door swung closed in slow stages, years passing before I heard it latch.

Without him the apartment was cool and deflated, but I wasn't inclined to leave. I would've liked to belong there. I investigated the place, though Rob's weren't the sort of secrets you pulled out of a drawer. Laundry bills, takeout menus, ticket stubs, those were what I found. Soon I was bored with snooping and got dressed.

Once I was out on the street all the judgment I'd managed to stave off the night before, the misgivings, came swashing up and then disappeared again. (Hardly for the first time—I am all too prone to delayed reactions, that is to say that I experience things as they happen more or less neutrally and then later develop feelings about them.) I realized that it was Thursday, that Dad was probably at home wondering where I was, and that I was still in the thrall of the night before, the night now leaking all over the morning.

 

 

When I was a kid the news was full of hostage takings and faraway bombings, so that I can remember lying in bed, turning over in my head the problem of whether to “negotiate with terrorists,” which the president had declared we would not do. I would imagine some member of my family, usually Maggie, taken hostage on a hijacked airplane, and picture myself arguing with her captors, heroically winning her freedom with the sheer force of my logic (“You are bad people!” etc.). During the same period of time, as Americans were continually reminded of our vulnerability, the talking heads would debate what it meant to be a superpower, which I recall even though I had no special childhood interest in international affairs. There was the question of
whether America was willing to act like a superpower.
Our nation was failing to do its superpower duties, some people said. And after the Iran-Contra schemes were made public, the same critics would paint them as a consequence of our weakness: because the nation was too divided, too hamstrung to act boldly, a small group had been pushed to take matters into their own hands.

I never really knew what that meant—what proper superpower behavior was supposed to be—but now, as a person who has in her own life consistently failed to act in any way like a superpower, I can relate to the wish for megapotency, the desire for bold strokes. I grasp more fully why middle-aged men living in the Virginia suburbs would've been so taken with anti-communist guerrillas in Africa or Central America.

Maybe some of Rob Golden's draw, for me, had come from a similar place. I'm not saying he was any kind of revolutionary, much less a superpower, but his assurance was compelling in itself, even if he had worked for Halliburton in Iraq. Even Halliburton had not eliminated the adolescent mystique.

He didn't call, though, and I resisted the urge to contact him. Instead I called Maggie in New York and started to tell her the whole story. Or not quite the whole story: I left out his name.

“Who is this guy?”

“He's like this D.C. player, he's done all this stuff, like he worked on reconstruction in Iraq, and—”

“That's going really well, I hear.”

“I know, but still—”

“He's a big swinging dick.”

“Well, medium-size.”

“Are you going to see him again?”

“I doubt it. Maybe. He hasn't called.”

“Was it nice? Did you have a nice time with him?”

“Did I have a nice time with him?” I repeated slowly.

I wasn't sure. It was late and I was lying on the bed with a cordless phone, and all I wanted was for Maggie to tell me that I would see him again. I could picture her in her little apartment in Red Hook, tidying up as she talked to me, putting her takeout containers into a flimsy white plastic bag and knotting the handles before she wedged the bag into her small trash can. She taught English literature at Hunter College and was strapped with some large number of classes per semester (was it four? five?) so that she was always overwhelmed with papers to grade, and it took her at least an hour to get to work and to come back to the apartment she could barely afford, and yet she'd become one of those people who claimed that they could not possibly live anywhere other than New York City, as though there were something debased about the idea of having a yard or driving to the supermarket or not working ten hours a day, and even though every time I visited New York it seemed to have been even further infiltrated by the customs and retail chains that prevailed in the rest of the United States, even as it gradually turned into a much more expensive version of the same city everybody lived in now, my sister never stopped believing that in any other place she would wither away and eventually die of boredom and/or
mal du pays
.

“What did you think of him?” she asked.

“I don't know. I mean, there was something there, but it's not like he was that curious about me. He mostly talked about himself.”

“So typical.”

Maggie had been single for a while, and lately when I asked her whether there were any prospects, she would say no, not really. I've just been working so hard, she would tell me. And I would try to tell her not to spend her whole life working, but I knew she believed that I didn't understand her life and what she had to do to get by. She was right, I didn't understand it. She started to tell me about a student who thought he knew more than her—there was always at least one—and then she said that maybe he did. “Or not that he knows more than I do, exactly, but in a practical sense he's probably smarter, he can spend his whole day reading and thinking, with his unspoiled, twenty-year-old brain. He doesn't have to grade papers or deal with department e-mails. What I know, what I used to know, it's buried under so much junk at this point.”

“That's not true.”

“It is. I think I kind of have a crush on him. I can't even look at him because I'm afraid that I do. If he ever comes to my office hours I'll probably jump out the window.”

“Maybe you're just not around enough guys.”

“Well yeah, I mean it's all twenty-year-olds, or the fossils who teach in the department. Courtney thinks I should try Internet dating again.”

“She's always saying that,” I said. “She says that to me. It's because she never actually did it herself, so she doesn't get how soul-destroying that online shit is.”

“I just feel like there's this cultural hypocrisy in play when it comes to marriage and family, you know? Like when we were younger we weren't even supposed to be looking for love. I mean I did go out with Marco for a few years, but I knew he wasn't, like, a life partner. I remember the one or two friends I had who obsessed about finding husbands—I thought that was so dumb. I wanted to be serious. You were supposed to be serious about your life, and that meant figuring out your career. But then you hit your thirties and if you haven't found the guy, you start to sense that people are looking at you in a certain way, wondering what's wrong with you? And so now I'm supposed to make a project out of that, looking for a marriageable man? I already built my life the way it is, I don't have time to be on some heavy-duty manhunt, and anyway it's New York City, which is like a smorgasbord of women where all the single men can just pig out all day long. They don't even want to get married.”