House Arrest (11 page)

Before we bought this house, I dreamed it was on a golf course and filled with flying fish. People kept shouting “fore” as fish splattered against the walls. I’m not sure why I dreamed about a golf course since I haven’t played in years, though it was the only thing, along with billiards, that my father ever really taught me. Not that I play either well or even like the game, but I can whack a ball down the fairway with a nice, smooth stroke. Even now, my father’s coaching
remains emblazoned in my mind. Bend your knees, head down. Eyes on the ball.

When I told Todd I didn’t want to buy, he said, “Don’t be silly, Maggie, it’s just a house.” Todd can spend an entire weekend ripping out a bathroom, designing new shelves. I’ve never seen a man so happy stripping paint. Todd’s great invention is what he calls “invisible storage.” Cubbyholes, secret compartments, hidden drawers tucked under beds and tables. It is perfect, I suppose, for urban living, but I can never find the things I’ve put away.

I swore I’d never have a conversation with, let alone be married to, a man who said he wanted a propane gauge on his barbecue. We can talk endlessly about our adjustable mortgage and when to lock in. Once conversion meant to me a religious experience. Now it means thirty-years fixed.

Perhaps that is why I go on these junkets. Perhaps that is how I got here.

Actually, I had to go on this trip. That is, I had to get away. I had to get away because something is wrong and I can’t quite put my finger on it, though I’ve searched my house for clues. Clear indicators. A letter, a message, a bill from a hotel. Evidence of Todd’s betrayal. Proof that he is drifting away. I want something concrete, something I can sink my teeth into.

It’s not exactly that anything happened, but it feels as if something has. When I ask Todd about it, he says, “Maggie, it’s all in your head.” It’s true that our life is as it always has been. But it feels different. What is it you call this in astronomy, these imperceptible tugs? Perambulations? A force that is not seen, but exists because of the impact it has on the things around it.

There is a woman in Todd’s office, a designer, named Sarah, and sometimes I believe he has fallen in love with her. Not an affair, not some lusty hotel room when he’s supposed to be working. But really in love. The way I know he once was with me and I was with him. That blend of danger and excitement. I see it in his eyes when he talks to her on the phone. But when I say to him, even as a tease, “You’re in love with Sarah, aren’t you?” Todd replies, “Maggie, get a grip on yourself.”

It hasn’t been that easy. A few weeks before I left on this trip, we had a break-in. I was in my office, working on the ground floor, when I heard a noise. Doors banging, footsteps. The dog began barking, racing up and down the stairs.

I usually don’t hear any noise when I work at home. Todd had converted an old storage closet for me on the ground floor, and on days when I don’t have to go into the office (about three days a week), I am set up there in my little insulated windowless space, complete with fax-modem and a hookup to the office. Though he has no children of his own, Kurt encourages this kind of flexible working arrangement. I never thought I could be happy in a windowless room, but actually I am. I don’t know what time it is or what the weather is outside. There’s a clock on the fax, but I only look at it when I think it may be time to get Jessica from school. I am amazed at how much I can enjoy this solitude. Some days I don’t even go outside. Todd jokes that I’m like someone with twentieth-century disease—that illness when you are allergic to your environment, its fumes, its toxic waste—who can’t cope with synthetic fibers or cleaning fluids. He likes to kid me that nine out of ten people with this illness are women.

I argue that I just like to be free of the chaos of the
house—the dishes that aren’t done, the clothes that need to be put away. I can spend hours checking my E-mail, faxing freelancers all over the world who are gathering information for me when I need the name of a hotel in Eboli, ecotourist information on the birds of Madagascar, where you can get the best brik-à-l’oeuf in Tunis.

I can go on for days like this in my little cell because, of course, unlike here, I know I can leave. I always resist going away, but then once I really go, I am gone. It always amazes me when I travel somewhere how easy it is to leave your other life behind. As if it has ceased to exist; as if it has vanished in thin air.

I was in my own world when I heard the banging upstairs. At first I didn’t believe that someone was in the house, but the dog kept growling, running up and down the stairs. He’s a small dog, built close to the ground, and I never thought he’d be that fierce, but somehow he chased the person out. When I heard the hatch door slam the second time, I called Todd. He told me to leave the house while he called 911.

We live in a neighborhood where drug dealers have their turf one block from ours, and we rarely go out at night. Some of our neighbors have bullet-proof front doors, but so far we had resisted such precautions. But Todd said it was time to put in an alarm system.

Lyle Nashe, the Home Security Alarm salesman who arrived, wore a shiny blue suit and carried a small suitcase. First he admired our house—the banisters Todd had stripped, the marble mantel that had once been covered in blue paint. He said, “You’ve done wonders with this place,” winning Todd over, but not me. He liked the country kitchen, the primitive art on the walls that I bring back from wherever I go. “I like
it,” Lyle Nashe said. “It’s eclectic. You have a lot you must want to protect here.”

“Actually,” I told him, “our possessions don’t amount to much. We just want to feel safe.”

“Well, I think I have the right system for you.” He put his suitcase on the table. It had two doors that opened like an advent calendar, revealing a miniature house, complete with a pot on the stove, crib in the nursery, dog on the stairs who Jessica thought resembled Sandy, which is our dog’s name, like Little Orphan Annie’s.

Then Lyle Nashe produced a tiny masked man carrying a burglar bag whom he moved from a window, onto the roof, and then down the back stairs. The movable burglar had a mustache and wore a black cap. He was dark-complected, but not black. Racially diverse, I categorized him. “These are your vulnerable spots,” Lyle Nashe told us, “your potential danger situations. This is where trouble begins.”

Todd and I followed Lyle Nashe’s long fingers as the masked man peered into windows, crept down the back stairs. Lyle Nashe outlined all the dangers—the things that could happen. He suggested motion detectors, raised above the level of the dog, which wasn’t very high, he noted, as he assessed Sandy. Panic buttons in all the bedrooms that would shine red in the night. He told us that if we were in a hostage situation with a gun to our heads and a maniac telling us to disarm the system, we could just punch in our code backward. “Believe me, the police will come.”

Lyle Nashe snapped shut the door of his miniature crime demonstration. “You can’t imagine the things I’ve seen. Last month I did an installation for a widow. Her husband had died a few weeks before. She’d woken one morning to find a man with a wire, standing over her bed. The widow doesn’t
know what made her do this, but she shouted out, ‘John, get the gun; there’s a man in the house.’ The cat heard her and knocked something over downstairs. The man fled.”

Todd wanted the entire system—the motion detectors, the panic buttons, the grates on the skylight. We put in a steel hatch with a spring door and bars on the skylight Todd had carved out himself. The shadows on the ceiling look like prison windows. “I want you to feel safe.” At night we put the system on “home,” but I always forget it is on in the morning when I open the back door to let Sandy out. Alarm central is always calling, asking for my password. “Ninja,” I say, which is the word Jessica thought up.

Todd likes to put the system on test so we can run through our practice drills. “Pretend you’re in a hostage situation, Maggie, and someone has a gun to your head.” I punch in the code backward, but I have an odd feeling that this turns Todd on. At night in bed, I’ve whispered to him, “Todd, get the gun; there’s a man in the house.” He laughs, but soon his laugh turns to sighs and he is all over me.

For days after the break-in I trembled at the slightest sound. I envisioned the man who had broken in coming down the stairs, a crowbar in his hand. I always pictured the little burglar from Lyle Nashe’s model house—a man in a black cap, a Lone Ranger mask with a black mustache. Slightly dark-complected—Hispanic, not black. We confront each other on the stairs. He carries his burglar bag like a doctor on a home visit.

Once I took a self-defense class (“Women and Power,” it was called) and was told that if a woman is being attacked or taken against her will, it helps if she acts insane or growls like an animal. Urinating is also effective.

At night Todd reaches across, cradling me in his arms. He
has long, taut arms that engulf me. The muscles on his back are sturdy. I can trace a butterfly. “You’re safe, Maggie,” Todd tells me when he finds me trembling. “Everything’s all right.” His kisses are deep and soothing. I rarely say no.

So why don’t I feel safe? I wonder.

I
T WAS RAINING when I saw Isabel again. I had tried for a few days not to see her, going about my work, visiting the cigar museum, the sugarcane plant, the newly renovated plastic-surgery hospital where women were having face-lifts. Then she phoned. “It’s me,” she said, “there’s going to be a storm, so you can’t go out. Let me come and see you at the hotel.” An hour later the skies opened into a torrential downpour and Isabel raced into the lobby, drenched, a newspaper over her head. Her red dress clung to her thighs, her nipples stood erect as she came in laughing, shaking her body like a dog.

“You’re soaked,” I told her, “You need something else to wear.”

“Yes, that would be nice.” She squeezed the water from her hair as if she were wringing a towel.

“Come upstairs. I’ll loan you something.” Isabel looked me up and down. “A T-shirt,” I said, “a skirt. You need to get out of your wet things.”

As we rode the elevator to my room, we could hear the thunder roar. “The gods are angry,” Isabel said. Inside my room was dark and outside the wind blew, rattling the shutters. I told Isabel to go into the bathroom and dry off and I’d hand her some things. But she protested. “No, I want to see all your clothes. I want you to model them for me.”

“Don’t be silly.”

“No, please, I want to see everything you have.”

“Well, here,” I said, handing her an oversize T-shirt from Puerto Vallarta. “At least for now, put this on.” Isabel went into the bathroom. I could hear the sound of a towel rubbing against skin, a toilet flushing. While I waited, I gazed outside. Rain poured down into the narrow sidestreets, sending rivulets along the gutters. The sky was dark, black, almost as if it were the end of the world.

It seemed a long time before Isabel came out of the bathroom. She had twisted her hair up into a knot on the top of her head. My T-shirt just barely covered her thighs as she stretched out across my bed. “Okay, let’s do a fashion show. I want to see all your clothes.”

“But I’ve hardly brought anything down with me.”

Isabel rose from the bed, “Oh, come on now. I like this pink jumpsuit.” She was opening my closet, peering in. “I like this.” She pulled out a black cotton dress that I sometimes wear to travel in, and another with a floral print. “Oh, model for me.” She laughed.

Flopping back down on the bed, she cocked her head. I was embarrassed getting undressed with her in the light of day so I took the black dress off its hanger and slipped into the bathroom, where I quickly stepped into the dress and a pair of black sandals. I dabbed on lipstick for good measure,
some perfume behind my ears. Then exited the bathroom with some flourish.

“Yes,” Isabel clapped. “Brava. Turn around, turn. Oh, you have great hips. Nice shape. You’ll go dancing with me tonight in that.” She jumped up, started scurrying around on my closet floor. “Let’s see. Not sandals. Another kind of shoes. Oh, I love these little red shoes.” She tried to slip them on, but her feet were much larger than mine and after a struggle she gave up. “You’ll wear these red shoes tonight.” I knew I didn’t really have time to go out dancing with her that evening. I didn’t even have time to be in the room with her trying on clothes. I had a five-page list of things to do, places I needed to see. But somehow that list meant less and less to me, and I found that world of responsibility and assignments and all those things I had to do drifting farther and farther behind.

“Now let me see you,” Isabel said, lying down on the bed. “Turn a little. Black eyeliner and your hair pulled back, off your ears, what do you think?” She tucked my hair behind my ears, then leaned back, satisfied. “There.” Stretching her long legs out, she raised her arms over her head. “We’ll go to the Palacio de Salsa. Dance the merengue.” She jumped off the bed and began to do what I assume was the merengue around the room, eyes closed, one hand resting on her belly, the other on an imaginary partner. She headed toward my closet, where she began once again to rifle through my things, pulling out a pink jumpsuit, shaking her head. “Oh, I like this,” she said, pausing at a floral dress. “Here, put this on.”

Just then the phone rang, startling both of us. Isabel looked at the phone askance, as if she had never seen one before,
then pointed for me to answer it. “It’s for you,” Isabel said, as if it could be for anyone else.

“Maggie …” I heard the crackling sound of long distance. “It’s me.” It took me a moment to recognize his voice, but it was Todd. “I was just taking a chance. I’m glad you’re in.”

Isabel gave me a little wave, slinked off the bed, and began opening my drawers. I motioned for her to stop, but she winked and went on. “Is anything wrong?”

“No, does something have to be wrong?” He sounded a little hurt. “I just wanted to hear your voice.”

“Oh, well, I’m fine. Busy. Just catching up on some notes.” I looked at my notes, neatly stacked, the pile of what I had accomplished, significantly smaller than the one I should have had. “Everything okay?”