The Cake House (7 page)

Claude stared as if he wasn’t sure to believe me, or as if maybe what I had said held another meaning or there was a hidden truth.

“All right,” he said, then headed for the stairs.

Later, after we had all eaten, without Alex, and my mother went upstairs, I didn’t want to go to my room or go to bed yet, so I waited for Alex to come home. I went into
the kitchen where I could watch the front driveway through the window.

There was banging and movement from the living room, and I froze, heart hammering in my chest for fear of the ghost until I recognized the sound of Claude’s footsteps. I inched toward the door of the kitchen and spied Claude crouching by the cherrywood rolltop desk. My heart lurched; I was certain he had found the notebook. But he had no reason to search for it; it wasn’t worth anything, except to my mother and me.

He hadn’t seen me, too engrossed in whatever he was doing to notice that the kitchen light was still on. I tried to make out the shape of him, his arms resting on the desk. He was muttering to himself and pressing his forehead down onto the wood.

His hands were folded as if in prayer, and he took in a big lungful of air. I wondered if he might start crying—he didn’t seem like himself—and I turned away, uncomfortable to see him vulnerable.

The front door creaked open, then shut with a dull thud. A moment later, Alex walked in and turned on a lamp, transforming the living room from a wonderland of mysteries to the dull world of carpets, tables, and walls. I stepped back into the kitchen so they wouldn’t see me.

“It’s past your curfew,” Claude said, with steel and a quiet scolding that didn’t fit the man I’d just seen.

“You playing the concerned parent?” asked Alex, somewhere between annoyed and disbelieving, but he didn’t deny his tardiness. Silence followed, filled with the busy noises of distant traffic and a dog barking a couple of houses over.

“Things are a little thin, son. You’ll have to do better this year. The same sort. Understand?”

There was a pause, and then I heard Alex run up the stairs.

I peeked around the kitchen door and saw Claude as he stood with his hands at his sides, rubbing his fingers together as if he had touched something sticky and was trying to wipe them clean. He turned to face the desk again. “Damn,” he said under his breath, so low I had to strain to hear him.

Claude cooked breakfast again and called everyone down to eat together at the kitchen table. I watched both Alex and Claude for hints that might help me understand their conversation from the night before, but they didn’t speak to each other at all. Alex ate his food in silence, and Claude spoke only to my mother. To escape from the tension, I went out to the garden and got my bike, deciding to ride up and down the street.

After a sweaty couple of hours of trying to bike up the hill, I saw Claude’s big gray Mercedes drive away. I went back to the house and dumped my bike next to Alex’s before pushing the sliding doors open. The dark gloom of the living room felt heavy with the caged heat of the day.

I stopped when I heard his voice in the hallway.

“Did you tell her it was Alex calling? Did you say my name?” Pause. “I’ll hold.” Then a longer pause.

Alex was on the phone. I had not seen anyone other than
Claude ever use it, but that wasn’t what stopped me; it was how his voice sounded: rough, strung out, strangled.

He played with the phone cord, wrapping it around his hand, then letting it go, then wrapping it around his hand again, whipping the cord against the wall, in circles, like a jump rope. With each whip against the wall, the cord made a
thwapping
sound.

“When will she be free?” Alex’s voice regained some of its normal timbre. I wondered if he was calling the VW Bug girl from the other day. “No message,” he said, now sounding haughty. Without saying goodbye he ended the call, staring at the receiver for several seconds after he placed it back in its cradle.

I must have made a noise, because he turned and our eyes met.

“Who were you trying to call?”

“Where’ve you been?” he asked, studying my face, my body.

I passed my hand through my tangled and damp hair. “I went for a ride.”

“That it?”

“Yeah, why? Should I get naked again and head for the hills?”

Unimpressed, he leaned against the wall and watched until I couldn’t stand it anymore.

“Sorry,” I said.

“It’s all right.” He started up the stairs, then looked over his shoulder. “Come up to my room?” he asked. He glided away. “Or don’t come. Either way.”

ALEX LIVED LIKE A GUEST
in someone else’s house. His bed was made, the pillow in the exact center. No posters, nothing on the walls, no clothing on the floor or shoes left in the middle of the room, no sign of life except for the disordered stack of vinyl albums leaning against his stereo.

In a competition of weird rooms, I wondered which one of us would win. At least mine looked lived-in.

He went straight for the stereo and switched it on, plopping the needle down on the record that was already there. I was grateful for the swelling guitar and drums that helped hide my growing awkwardness. Uncertain where to sit that wouldn’t disrupt the obsessive order, I lingered in the center. Alex wasn’t paying attention, going through his records, taking some out, tucking others back in. I inched toward his desk, daring to sit on the chair.

His desk was pristine—not a pencil out of place, papers stacked, and a dictionary and thesaurus ready and available. Not a speck of dust on the desk surface, with his desk calendar, stapler, and scissors all at right angles.

I took the tape dispenser and pulled and ripped off a long strip, then taped my mouth shut, adding a second strip. The adhesive tickled my nose, but I kept adding more until the moisture from my mouth made a bubble. With my mouth sealed shut I went behind him and tapped his shoulder. When he turned around I raised my hands like claws and mumbled as threateningly as I could before I started laughing, ruining the effect.

“Very funny,” he said, reaching to rip the tape from my face, but I sidestepped.

On one corner of the desk stood a framed photograph of a woman who shared Alex’s distant, chilled expression.
Not beautiful, or at least not the way my mother was beautiful. But perhaps she might have been pretty in the way that novels liked to call “striking” or “handsome.” She aimed her stare at the camera, daring it to take her picture and trap her in a plain metal frame.

I picked it up.

“That’s my mother,” said Alex.

Stunned that he volunteered this information, I peeled away the tape across my mouth. “Where is she?”

“New York. Paris. London. I don’t know. Somewhere else.”

“Do you talk to her?”

“She calls sometimes,” he said, speaking almost before I finished asking my question, and then he took the frame and stuffed it into a drawer in his desk. He crouched by the stereo and changed records, choosing a violin concerto instead of rock music, haunting and vicious and beautiful. He was like a yo-yo, landing in my hand for one second but then gone again in the next. It kept me wanting more. I couldn’t keep up. And now, as before, a subtle change occurred after he mentioned his mother—he couldn’t sit still.

“Sing that song.” He licked his lips, twirling an album cover in his hands so that I couldn’t see what the picture was, and started humming my mother’s lullaby despite its clashing with the violin. Above our heads, reflected light from the red plastic stereo cover danced on the ceiling, not quite on beat but almost: a second too late, a beat off. It made me dizzy.

Did he ask all the girls to sing for him? My voice picked up where his had faltered, at first humming, but then I sang the words. The violin hit a high note and drowned out my voice.

“What does it mean?” he asked.

“It’s French,” I said. “About a little swallow that steals three sacks of wheat and then gets hit three times with a stick.”

We lapsed into silence, not entirely comfortable. He flicked through his records. I thought of my friends from before, Sofie and José, wondered if they wondered where I had gone. I hadn’t found the courage to call Sofie yet. Even though it had been only a few weeks, already I felt like I had been gone from my old life for years. I didn’t know what I would say to her. José had probably moved on to another girl, maybe even Sofie; she had bigger breasts, she was tall, with long curly hair. They seemed like specks of dust to me, my memories of them, my life in that apartment, all that came before. I had moved so far past I didn’t know my way back. My father’s death had pushed me out of reach.

I slid like Jell-O onto the floor, plopping onto my back. “Are you popular?”

He lay next to me on the floor. “Define popular.”

I rested my head on my hand. “Who was that girl, from yesterday?”

There was a trace of amusement in his eyes, as if he had expected me to ask that question, and I wished that I could take it back. “No one,” he said.

I didn’t believe him. Was she his girlfriend? Did he have other friends? I didn’t want to think of Alex with other people yet. For now, he was mine.

“Play this one,” I demanded, picking up an album at random.

“You like the Dead Kennedys?” he asked with a smirk.

I nodded, although I had never heard of the Dead Kennedys. He went along with it and put the record on. We sat on
his floor and listened to his records. He showed me album covers of bands that he liked: Judas Priest, Red Hot Chili Peppers. He played the Violent Femmes. He preferred vinyl to compact discs, rambling on about analog versus digital. I liked the girl singers the best, like Liz Phair singing,
“Fuck and run, Fuck and run.”

I caught him staring, backlit by the light coming in from his open window, and I remembered that he had held me a few nights ago. And it hadn’t been the first time. No, the first time had been the day my father died. Arms locked around my chest. I had kicked; I had screamed. The memories caused blood to rush in my ears, making it difficult to listen while he spoke about a group called fIREHOSE and another called Minutemen, like I’d gone deaf but that was all right. In my internal silence, I rose onto my knees.

His lips stopped moving. His eyes were that deep gray again, dirty ice. I took his hand and made him stand with me; then I leaned against his chest. We didn’t move until I heard my mother call my name. I let go and stepped away.

I left Alex’s bedroom and almost ran into my mother coming down the stairs from the third floor.

“Help me search,” she said, taking my arm and making me follow her to their bedroom. She headed straight for the walk-in closet. “It has to be in here somewhere.”

I knew what she wanted, where it was hidden, and it wasn’t in this room. “What are you looking for?”

“The notebook. I know you know what I’m talking about. I know you’ve seen it.” She pulled out suitcases, opening and emptying drawers. “Help me find it,” she demanded, shrill and desperate.

Not knowing what else to do, I dragged the vanity chair over so I could stand on it to search through the handbags
and hat boxes and winter clothing stored on the top shelf of the closet.

She tossed shoes over her head, searching through the drawers again even though she had emptied them a moment ago. Struggling, she pulled the integrated closet unit out.

“Why would he take it? Why would he do that? It has to be here somewhere,” she said.

My throat closed as if a fist squeezed it shut. I wanted to get back to Alex and his records. Couldn’t he hear what was going on? With blurred vision, I searched through Claude’s sweaters, the secret of the notebook feeling like lead in my belly.

“There’s nothing here. I don’t know what I’m looking for,” I said. “Mom?”

Her crying had ceased; she didn’t move, absolutely still while looking at something deep in the closet. She scrambled back, returning the drawer unit into place and standing up.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Nothing. It’s fine.” Her entire demeanor changed. The sudden quiet was in direct contrast to the hysterics from a moment ago. “It’s not here. You can go.”

I fled from the room as if the carpet were on fire. Once on the stairs, I slowed down, taking each step with a full heartbeat in between, confused and afraid for her. For the first time since I stole the notebook, I regretted taking it.

On the second-floor landing, I heard laughter. Girlish laughter. Sunlight streamed in through the window at the end of the hallway, splashing over the wall and over Alex’s door, which I had left open. Alex stood with his back to the door, but over his shoulder I saw the dark hair and upturned nose of the VW Bug girl. She sat on the windowsill, leaning backward.

I’d left Alex for twenty minutes. No one ever visited, but here she was in Alex’s room, like she could teleport herself there. I was surprised and hurt. She must be his girlfriend. I couldn’t think of any other reason. His perfectly made bed showed twin indentations where they had sat together, but his desk was untouched, the photograph of his mother still inside. That was something, at least. He hadn’t shared
that
with the VW Bug girl. But there was no music playing. He had turned his music off. He hadn’t shared that with her either; I was sure of it. That would be too much of a betrayal; he wouldn’t have done that.