All the Time in the World (6 page)

W
HAT KIND OF CAR WAS IT?

I don’t know. An old car. What difference does it make?

A man sits in his car three days running in front of the house, you should be able to describe it.

An American car.

There you go.

A squarish car with a long hood. Long and floaty-looking.

A Ford?

Maybe.

Well, definitely not a Cadillac.

No. It looked tinny. An old car. Faded red. There were big round rust spots on the fender and the door. And it was filled with his things. It looked like everything he owned was in there with him.

Well, what do you want me to do? You want me to stay home from work?

No. It’s nothing.

If it’s nothing, why did you bring it up?

I shouldn’t have.

Did he look at you? Please.

Did he?

When I turned around, he started the engine and drove off.

What do you mean? So before you turned around—

I felt his eyes. I was weeding.

You were bending over?

Here we go again.

You know this creep pulls up in front of our house every morning and you go out to the garden and bend over?

Okay, end of conversation. I have things to do.

Maybe I can park at the curb and watch you weeding. The two of us. That’s something, anyway. Seeing you in your shorts bending over.

I can’t ever talk to you about anything.

It was a Ford Falcon. You said it was squared off, hard edges, a flattened look. A Falcon. They built them in the sixties. Three-speed manual shift on the column. Only ninety horses.

Okay, that’s wonderful. You know all about cars.

Listen, Miss Garden Lady, to know a man’s car is to know him. It is not useless knowledge.

Fine.

Guy is some immigrant up from Tijuana.

What are you talking about?

Who else would drive a forty-year-old heap? Looking for work. Looking for something he can steal. Looking for something from the lady with the white legs who bends over in her garden.

You’re out of your mind. You’ve got this know-it-all attitude—

I’ll take the morning off tomorrow.

Immigrants don’t have long gray hair and roll the window down so I can see his pink face and pale eyes.

Oh, ho! Now we’re getting somewhere.

YOU DON’T MOVE OUT
of here I’m writing down your license plate. The cops will I.D. you and see if it’s someone they know …

You’re calling the police?

Yes.

Why?

Why not, if you don’t move? Go park somewhere else. I’m giving you a break.

What is my offense?

Don’t play dumb. In the first place, I don’t like some junk heap in front of my house.

I’m sorry. It’s the only car I have.

Right, I can see that no one would drive this thing if he didn’t have to. And all this bag and baggage. You sell things out of the trunk?

No. These are my things. I wouldn’t want to let anything go.

Because nobody in this neighborhood needs anything from the back of a car.

Well, I’m sorry we’ve gotten off to the wrong start.

Yes, we have. I’m not too friendly when some pervert decides to stalk my wife.

Oh, I’m afraid you’re under a misconception.

Am I?

Yes. I didn’t want to disturb anyone, but I should have realized that parking in front of your house would attract notice.

You got that right.

If I’m stalking anything, it’s the house.

What?

I used to live here. For three days, I’ve been trying to work up the courage to knock on your door and introduce myself.

AH, I SEE THE KITCHEN
is quite different. Everything built-in and tucked away. Our sink was freestanding, white porcelain with
piano legs. Over here was a cabinet where my mother kept the staples. A shelf swung out with a canister for sifting flour. That impressed me.

I’d probably have kept it. This is their renovation—the people who lived here before us. I have my own ideas for changing things around.

You must have bought the house from the people I sold it to. You’ve been here how long?

Let’s see. I count by the children’s ages. We moved in just after my eldest was born. That would be twelve years.

And how many children have you?

Three. All boys. I’ve sometimes wished for a daughter.

They’re all in school?

Yes.

I have a daughter. An adult daughter.

Would you like some tea?

Yes, thank you. Very kind of you. Women are more gently disposed, as a rule. I hope your husband won’t be too put out.

Not at all.

To speak truly, it’s unsettling to be here. It’s something like double vision. The neighborhood is much as it was. But the trees are older and taller. The homes—well, they’re still here, mostly, though they don’t have the proud, well-to-do look they once had.

It’s a settled neighborhood.

Yes. But you know? Time is heartbreaking.

Yes.

My parents divorced when I was a boy. I lived with my mother. She would die in the master bedroom.

Oh.

I’m sorry, I sometimes speak tactlessly. After Mother died, I married and brought my wife here to live. I’ve never stayed anywhere else for any length of time. And certainly never owned
property again. So this is the house—please don’t misunderstand me—this is the house I’ve continued to live in. I mean mentally. I ranged all through these rooms from childhood on. Until they reflected who I was, as a mirror would. I don’t mean merely that its furnishings displayed our family’s personality, our tastes. I don’t mean that. It was as if the walls, the stairs, the rooms, the dimensions, the layout were as much me as I was. Is this coherent? Wherever I looked, I saw me. I saw me in some way measured out. Do you experience that?

I’m not sure. Your wife—

Oh, that didn’t last long. She resented the suburbs. She felt cut off from everything. I’d go off to work and she’d be left here. We hadn’t many friends in the neighborhood.

Yes, people here stick to themselves. The boys have school friends, but we hardly know anyone.

This tea helps. Because this is a dizzying experience for me. It’s as if I were squared off, dimensionalized in these rooms, as if I were the space contained by these walls, the passageways, the fixed routes of going to and fro, from one room to another, and everything lit predictably by the times of day and the different seasons. It is all and indistinguishably … me.

I think if you live in one place long enough—

When people speak of a haunted house, they mean ghosts flitting about in it, but that’s not it at all. When a house is haunted—what I’m trying to explain—it is the feeling you get that it looks like you, that your soul has become architecture, and the house in all its materials has taken you over with a power akin to haunting. As if you, in fact, are the ghost. And as I look at you, a kind, lovely young woman, part of me says not that I don’t belong here, which is the truth, but that you don’t belong here. I’m sorry, that’s quite a terrible thing to say. It merely means—

It means life is heartbreaking.

HE CAME BACK?
He was here again?

Yes. It seemed so sad, his just sitting out there, so I invited him in.

You what!

I mean, it wasn’t what you thought, was it? So why not?

Right. Why wouldn’t you invite him in, since I told him if he came around again I’d call the cops?

You should have invited him in yourself when he told you he’d lived in this house.

Why is that a credential? Everyone has lived somewhere or other. Would you want to relive your glorious past? I shouldn’t think so. And this is not the first time.

Don’t start in, please.

Husband says white, wife says black. The way it works. So the world will know what she thinks of her husband.

Why is it always about you! We’re not the same person. I have my own mind.

Do you, now!

Hey, you guys, we got an argument brewing?

Close your door, son. This doesn’t concern you.

Every time another man comes into this house you go berserk. A plumber, someone to measure for the window blinds, the man who reads the gas meter.

Ah, but is your man a man? Awfully fruity-looking to me. Wears his white hair in a ponytail. And those tiny little hands. What does the well-known fag-hag have to say?

He’s a PhD and a poet.

Jesus, I should have known.

He gave up his teaching job to travel the country. His book is on the dining-room table. He signed it for us.

A wandering minstrel in his Ford Falcon.

Why are you so horrible!

ARGUING IS INSTEAD OF SEX
.

It has been a while.

This is better.

Yes.

I don’t know why I get so upset.

You’re just a normally defective man.

So we’re all like this? Thank you.

Yes. It’s an imperfect gender.

I’m sorry I said what I said.

I’m thinking now, with all three of them in school all day, I should get a job.

Doing what?

Or maybe go for a graduate degree of some kind. Make myself useful.

What brings this on?

Times change. They need me less and less. They have their friends, their practices. I carpool. They come home and stay in their rooms with their games. You work late. I’m alone in this house a lot.

We should go to the theater more. A night in town. Or you like opera. I’ll do opera as long as it isn’t Richard fucking Wagner.

That’s not what I’m saying.

You chose the suburbs, you know. I work to pay off the mortgage. The three tuitions. The two car payments.

I’m not blaming you. Could we turn on the light a moment?

What’s the matter?

There’s no moon. In the dark, it feels like a tomb.

THIS IS VERY EMBARRASSING
.

What were you doing there at three in the morning?

Sleeping. That’s all. I wasn’t bothering anyone.

Yeah, well, the cops are touchy these days. People sleeping in their cars.

It used to be a ball field. I played softball there as a boy.

Well, it’s the mall now.

You don’t mind that I gave them your name?

Not at all. I like being known as a criminal associate. Why didn’t you just check into the local Marriott?

I was trying to save money. The weather is clement. I thought, Why not?

Clement. Yes, it’s definitely clement.

Is it the habit of the police to go around impounding cars? Because if they think I’m a drug dealer, or something like that, they will find only books, my computer, luggage, clothes, and camping gear and a few private mementos that mean something only to me. Very unsettling, strangers digging around in my things. If I’d stayed at a hotel, I’d be on my way right now. I’m really sorry to impose on you.

Well, what’s a neighbor for.

That’s funny. I appreciate humor in this situation.

I’m glad.

But we’d be neighbors only if time had imploded. Actually, if time were to implode we’d be more than neighbors. We’d be living together, the past and the present moving through each other’s space.

Like in a rooming house.

If you wish, yes. As in a sort of rooming house.