The Household Spirit (26 page)

Howie worried about Emily.

“So, hey, don't laugh, but I want to play you this music,” Rho said. It was something called “Pachelbel's Canon.” “It's from before music had words. It can be about whatever you want it to be about.”

She showed him the CD cover, shyly opening the case, presenting it to him as if it had the potential to frighten him off.
The Pachelbel Canon and Other Baroque Favorites
.

“I don't really know music,” Howie said.

“Well, I'll make an introduction then. Darren, he used to like the hard rock. Winger, White Lion, Ratt, crap like that. Quiet Riot, Judas Priest. Honey, I used to say, Honey, your parents live in
Watervliet
. There's no way they can hear you listening to this Satan rock anymore! Like, you can grow up now, you know? But he loved it. I should have known. You know how he's going to die, don't you?”

“What?”

“Darren. My ex-husband is going to die driving drunk, air-drumming to Def Leppard. I'm serious. Me and the girls went to this psychic in Cape Cod a few years back and she gave me all these details. Freaky as shit. She knew him head to foot, like everything, and that's what she told me would happen. I don't believe that stuff, normally, but how could I argue? Described him down to his shoes. Told me don't waste my time, you know? Different paths. Our paths had crossed and no longer, I don't know, twined? Anyway, we'd gotten what we needed from each other in this life. We'd got all we were able to get from each other and I'm pretty sure I got the bum part of
that
deal,” Rho said. “How do you think you'll die?”

The possibility that Rho also knew how Howie would die momentarily alarmed him. Seemed probable. He said, “On a sailboat.”

Rho nodded. “I can see that. Yeah.”

“OK.”

“I think about death a
lot
,” Rho said. She finished a glass of wine, poured another. One for Howie too. “I don't want to die alone. Big fear of mine. I told the psychic this and she told me that I
would
die alone. She said, Look, dying alone isn't what you should be worrying about. Dying is nothing. She told me what I should worry about was
living
alone.”

“But not drowning,” Howie said.

“Excuse me?”

“I want to die on a sailboat, but I don't want to drown.” He said this as if it were a request that he wanted to make sure Rho had accurately registered.

Rho said, “Rick Allen, the drummer from Def Leppard, only has one arm. They call him the Thunder God. Darren did anyways. So air-drumming behind the wheel
should
be safer, but what were we talking about again?”

Rho touched Howie for the first time. His knee. Then the part above that, his pre-knee. “You seem different today, Jeffries. I'm a
little stoned, what's your excuse? Anyway, I had to babysit my niece, Loleeze, this one time, and my sister-in-law, she had this CD she insisted I play before putting Leezy to bed.
Bach for Babies: Fun and Games for Budding Brains
. Don't laugh.”

“OK.”

“Thing was, Leezy was already seven years old and stupid as a tub of suds. That's a brain that had long since budded, you hear what I'm saying? But
moms
. They want the best, and I guess she thought: Hey, probably can't hurt! Maybe Bach'd do some good! Anyway, what happened was I fell in love with this
Bach for Babies
. Secretly, you know? I was so embarrassed that I loved it so much because, back then, I'd thought that Bach had made the music
specifically for babies
. Like Bach had made music for babies and music for adults, and I couldn't get enough of the baby music. It made me cry, I'm not even joking. I'm a tough girl but this Bach? So, all right, embarrassed, I took
Bach for Babies
home with me one day. I figured they'd just think freaking Leezy buried it out back or ate it or something. I planned on returning it next time I babysat. But I forgot it, and then next time they had this new one with a freakish cover with like four multiracial babies and this one was called, simply,
Build Your Baby's Brain
. That's where I first heard a song called ‘Canon' by Johann Pachelbel. It was the most gorgeous thing I'd ever heard. Long story short, a little while later I discovered, duh, the music wasn't composed specifically for making babies smarter. That was a relief! ‘Pachelbel's Canon' is my favorite song. I've got about three or four CD versions of it, but this one is my favorite. It makes me happy and sad at the same time. But here. Shut up, Rho. I'll shut up.”

Rho played the song. It was difficult for Howie to follow: it seemed so weak and transparent compared to what he was seeing. The shadow of clouds moving through the fields; the river, the lumps of cow. The music sounded like the ghost of a very pretty gown.

“Nothing?” Rho asked.

Howie shook his head. He shook it hard, as Emily had instructed him. “Maybe I'm too old,” he said.

“I said it's also for adults, butthead.”

“I don't know how to listen to music.”

“Here,” Rho reached over and, with both hands, closed Howie's eyes. “One, two.” Like a doctor administering to a brand-new corpse.

She played it again, then again. Then again. Howie thought about Emily, what she would do here. She would laugh, surely. He wondered what she was doing now, alone in their house. That was when Howie felt Rho's hand in his own and, for a small second, he thought it was Emily's, that they were in his room, in bed, and suddenly that ghost of a very pretty dress filled with a real body, a woman, and something less like sound and more like emotion. Howie thought: Music is how people pretend that time is human. Music is a way of moving through time unharmed. Music is not a fish, it's a boat.

This made perfect sense; then it did not.

The trick was Rho's hand, holding that. The music sounded like a commercial for diamonds or medication for loved ones losing their minds in the twilight of their years. It was a midrange luxury sedan. The other trick was that all of the emotions people feel when they hear music are already there, inside them, so if Howie was going to feel anything here, he was going to have to feel
something
. It was not going to come from the music. Rho's hand, he supposed, was a start.

Howie opened his eyes.

Rho was looking at him, her face a fleshy plug in the day. She had tears in her eyes.

Howie panicked, pulled the plug, pulled his hand from hers, remembering his mother playing the national anthem and he thought, angrily, suddenly: Why would you listen to something that makes you
sad
?

He caught himself.

No! That was not what was happening here. Rho was not sad exactly. Nobody but Howie's mother had to be sad, and Howie, for once, thought that he had the power to make someone happy. He thought about Emily. Hadn't he helped Emily? Howie could make someone else happy. He reached out and returned Rho's hand to his own.

There.

—

The day progressed. Rho smoked a lot more, switching from drugs to menthol cigarettes and back again. The white wine, at some point, became red. Then an indigestive pink. Rho had Howie explain his fishing rod. She baited it and fished. She wanted, she said, for Howie to see what she looked like with a rod in her hand. “Joking!” she said. “I'm sorry, oh my God, I am so bad today!”

“You're not bad.” But the fish would hear that face from a mile away.

The presence of Rho's house loomed behind them. They were going to be dining in French tonight. Howie tried a menthol cigarette because Emily, he thought, would have. It tasted like coughing and Christmas.

Rho asked Howie questions about his daughter, and he answered as best he could. Emily had never once asked him about his daughter. He did not tell Rho, as he had not told Emily, that Harri's last e-mail had requested from him a loan of more than twelve thousand dollars. This money was an “investment,” and to be spent on her art. The number was not a typo. She wrote, “I can break down the costs for you later if you like.”

Yes, Howie thought, perhaps that is something I would like.

If she'd have said that the money was for her life, for New York City sustenance, shelter, for a first-class one-way plane ticket home, then Howie would have sent her his entire boat savings, no question, she was his little girl, but that much money for her art had given him pause. He still did not know how to reply. She had never
promised to repay him before either. This word:
investment
. Why was that more disturbing? He'd gotten another heated e-mail from his ex-wife, one of her dreaded cap-locked, late-night missives, imploring him to not
GIVE THAT GIRL ANOTHER PENNY
and, hey, next time Harriet was at his place, which was supposedly
NEXT THURSDAY
, have her
MAYBE STOP BY SO DREW AND I KNOW SHE
'
S ALIVE FOR A FREAKING CHANGE!!!
Howie had no idea what to do with this e-mail either. The only reason he had replied to it was because he was anxious that his ex-wife or Drew might stop by his place looking for Harri and find, instead, Emily.

He wrote, “Thank you for this e-mail, Doris. I will see what I can do.”

Normally, he never typed her name if he could help it.

Howie told Rho that Harri had been spending a lot of time at his house lately, painting and whatnot. It did not feel like a lie. Perhaps that was the trick about lying. Several times he thought about telling Rho about Emily, asking Rho for advice about young women and their possibly epileptic nightmares and—but, no, how impossible was the idea of Emily Phane while sitting next to Rhoda Prough? She would not understand. Howie did not understand, not from this distance. Rho lived in the past and the future; Howie's house no longer did, if it ever had. It was like remembering a dream.

He would see what he could do.

Before they went in for dinner, Emily buzzed Howie's phone again.

“u ok?”

Howie figured that he was. He wrote back: “
YES I AM OK. ARE YOU OK?
”

“i miss you.”

—

Howie and Rho returned to the shore of the pond after a stately, uncooperative dinner. Rho said, “I'm trying too hard here, aren't I?”

“You're trying just fine.”

“I remember you said that you liked duck. I'm such an idiot.”

It was unlikely that Howie had ever said anything about ducks.

Rho lit the candles. She had stopped talking but could not stop producing noise. She hummed. They listened to the night. Bats slapped the air above them like oars; owls, too, and rabbits or cats or raccoons, crickets, and the occasional insomniac cow in the distance. Trucks. She rested her head on Howie's lap. She breathed. He thought about touching her hair. Rho said, “You know what I hate? I hate stars. I hate the moon and everything up there.”

“OK.”

“That's just how I feel.”

She tossed a cigarette into her pond.

“You can live your whole life alone even if you're married, is what that Cape Cod fortune-teller told me. She said if you know yourself then you'll never be alone. Like, you'll never know anyone if you don't know yourself first. No point even trying. I think about that a lot, but I think I talk too much sometimes. Do you think I talk too much?”

“Sometimes.”

“Well, damn.” Rho laughed. “Like when?”

“Maybe you have a lot to say.”

“That's right, maybe I do. Do you know yourself, Howie?”

Howie knew that he did not appreciate riddles. He thought of many ways to announce that he had to go back home where he lived, though he suspected that he would not be returning to Route 29 tonight. For one thing, he was inebriated. He was worried about Emily.

Rho stood up. “Maybe we should go back to the house,” she said, sadly. “Maybe I overplanned this, too.”

Inside, after Rho tried and failed to interest Howie in learning how to play poker, then Uno, they sat together in her living room. The floor was unsteady. She put on her
Bach for Babies
CD, flashing him a sloppy, knowing smile. “Our secret?”

Howie said, “I don't know what you're talking about.”

Minutes later, Rho ran her finger down Howie's arm.

“I knew it'd be like this,” she said. “But not like this, actually. Something like this. I always thought you'd be, I don't know, more
mean
?” She made a serious face. “More of an asshole. I guess I'm glad you're not more mean? You're not mean at all, are you?”

“No.”

“I've always had a crush on you, but you know that,” Rho said. Her finger stopped on his wrist. “I've kind of looked up to you. My father was the same. You don't suffer fools. You're so
strong
.”

Howie could not think of anything to say to this.

“But I get it,” Rho said. She pulled back. “I'll stop. You don't want to kiss me. I'll stop. I'm sorry.”

Oh, mud, Howie thought.

He closed his eyes. This, he thought, is something that inebriated people are allowed to do: suddenly sleep. He pretended to do that.

But then Howie really was asleep, because the next thing he knew, Rho was pulling him from the sofa and up the creaking, swaying old wooden stairs. They were on a boat.
“Richard,”
Howie said.

“Rho,” Rho corrected.

She was naked from the waist down, wearing only a long T-shirt. She'd lit candles in her bedroom. Not a T-shirt, a gown. The bed was white and covered like a wagon.

Howie was unused to being inebriated. Rho undressed him for bed. “Arms up. There we go. Shhhh.”

Giggling, she kissed him. They were kissing. It was a sensation like eating and being eaten at the same time. But no rush. It felt like a circle, it felt good, fish mouths silently talking, drowning in air. She nibbled his ear. Howie felt her breasts on his chest, then on his stomach. It felt like she had at least four of them. The word
boobs
popped into his head and he laughed.