Lurkers

by Sandi Tan

  Even though his own research told him that Stickley’s prototypes were one-story, one-bathroom models of economy, his realtor insisted that his sprawling, two-story purchase was the only authentic Craftsman on the street. The others, she said, were copycat kit houses from the Sears, Roebuck catalog, pretty but nonetheless nailed together like log cabins.

  His was a beautiful house whatever the vintage, and he liked having a space he had to live up to. It was rustic yet regal, hanging back from the street like a diffident suitor. He hoped against hope that a slight boy with bee-stung lips and opalescent eyes, drawn to the amber glow of his mica-shade lamps, would someday prance up his porch, asking to borrow a cup of confectioner’s sugar.

  That was the kind of visitor he waited for, not the bedraggled Korean neighbor who was currently waddling toward his door, Lord knows why.

  He watched her from his picture window, hoping she’d change her mind and turn back. She was teary-eyed, clutching a bundle of paper. Probably some kind of a petition. Oh, shoo! When she stepped onto his porch with the dull, flat-footed thupps familiar from Jehovah’s Witness church marms, he sighed, got up, and combed his hair in the mirror.

  “Hello, dear,” he said, at the door. “And what can I do for you?”

  She refused to look him in the eye, possibly still raw from their encounter two years prior when he refused to retrieve her girls’ shuttlecocks from his roof.

  “Hello,” said the Korean woman. “My husband, he say you writer. Yes?”

  “Yes,” said Raymond. He counted seven plastic barrettes in her hair.

  “You write book. Yes?”

  “Yes. I wrote a few books.”

  “Can you help me?”

  “What, dear, would you like me to do?”

  She paused and organized her thoughts. Then, casting aside fears about her lack of grammar or diction, she shoved the bundle of papers into his hands.

  “Please. This my husband book. He write this. Please read. Finish read, please, you tell me if good or if bad . . . okay?”

  Raymond glanced at the papers, smiling wryly at the letterhead: All-Friends Worship. The word Viagra on one of the pages leapt out at him. Hah.

  “When do you need these back, dear?”

  She flinched, stunned that he’d taken so little convincing. A smile of relief burst across her lips: “When you finish.”

  She nodded her thanks and backed off his porch, bowing painfully low.

  “I see you later,” she said. “Okay?”

  “Okay.” He watched her scurry back toward her house, then remembered something. “Oh, wait, Mrs. Kim!”

  She stopped and turned. “My name is Mrs. Park.”

  “Mrs. Park . . . I’ve been meaning to ask you. You know that music that comes on at four o’clock every day? Does that”—he paused to find the least aggressive words—“bother you? It’s not from your house, is it?”

  She seemed genuinely startled that someone would have thought that. “No, no!”

  “I thought not,” he smiled, waving her goodbye. “I didn’t think it was . . . demographically probable.”

  Mrs. Park pulled out bunches of chives and green onions she’d been saving all week. She dropped them into batter and fried savory Korean pancakes, their oily aroma filling the entire house. The girls circled her in the kitchen, miming gestures to each other, trying to decode her. She hadn’t said a word all evening, not since she returned from the creepy old neighbor’s house. Thirty pancakes, stacked high on a platter. Glaring at the girls, she turned off the stove and plucked off her apron.

  “No touch!” she cautioned. “Pancake no for you!”

  She ran into her bedroom and carefully put on a white cotton dress and white pumps. In the bathroom, she combed her hair, fiddled with a tortoiseshell barrette and applied red to her lips.

  Mira blocked her in the hallway. “Ma, what’s going on? Are you trying to seduce that guy? Trust me, it’s not gonna work.”

  Mrs. Park said nothing. She brushed past her daughter and dipped into the kitchen to collect the pancakes. Before exiting the front door, she looked right through Mira and called out to her firstborn.

  “Rosemary, what’s meaning ‘democratically proper-ba’?”

  “What’s what?”

  “Democratically proper-ba.”

  “I have no freakin’ idea.”

  “Is good thing, no?”

  “Possibly. Depending on the context.”

  “Okay, okay. You wait, I come back.”

  Raymond van der Holt was enjoying the view of the mountains through his picture window when the Korean hausfrau invaded the frame, again. She was dressed entirely in white this time. What now? He got up, combed his hair again and answered the door.

  “Oh, Mrs. Park, I haven’t started on the stories yet. I know, I know. Bad boy.” He slapped his own wrist.

  “Is okay.” She pushed a platter of soggy grey discs with green stripes into his hands. “I make the pancake for you. You doing work, you eat the food, okay?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She peered over his shoulder and into his house. “Very nice, your lamp.”

  “Right, so it is.”

  She stood there for a moment, as if she wanted to be invited in. “Pancake is no MSG. All veggie-table. I not know if you eat the meat.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Park, in fact I do eat the meat.” He took a step back into his house. Hint-hint for bye-bye. “It’s very kind of you.”

  “Oh!” she suddenly exclaimed. “I forget soy sauce! I come back.”

  “No, no! Please don’t! I have soy sauce. I’m sure it’ll suffice.” He looked down and saw the scaly, unpainted nails peering out her open-toe pumps. “Good night now, Mrs. Park.”

  “Gooda night.”

  The last woman to step into Raymond’s house had been his secretary, Adele Hollister. He preferred the term assistant, she preferred secretary—in any case, she was a thick-wristed little woman from Mississippi who put three kids through community college with her rigorous transcriptions. She was the one person who could decode his hieroglyphs. In her five years with Raymond, he’d only caught one typo in her work—“maldorous” instead of “malodorous.”

  Raymond himself wrote longhand, using black Pilot roller-ball pens on cream-colored loose-leaf Maruman paper from Japan. Adele came in twice a week to transfer his words into a chunky IBM laptop that lived for the most part in the supplies closet. It depressed Raymond to look at that machine—drab, serious, redolent of rote work.

  When he first hired Adele, he warned her firmly that she might occasionally encounter rude words and macabre sexual situations. But from the start she was unflappable. She came in at nine in the morning and tapped away till three. She didn’t care what words he used or didn’t use. When she was done, she baked cookies and made a pot of mint tea, leaving the house enveloped in an aromatic dream of mother and maid.

  Raymond liked her so much he kept her on even after his oeuvre had waned. A year after his announced retirement, a big publisher gave him a generous advance to write a memoir of his youth, The Lost Boy. But what was the use of memoirs? He felt that “nonfiction” was a genre cherished beyond what it deserved by NPR-addled Americans. Because was “nonfiction” even that? Didn’t the scrim of memory render fugitive every supposed truth? He’d much rather write up an inspired adaptation of his youth, where he roamed Manhattan in a vampire’s cape, than recount tawdry evenings waiting by a mossy glory hole. Who’d want facts? After a year’s deliberation, he returned the money—and on a tighter operating budget, he let Adele go.

  These days, he couldn’t even reenter the marketplace if he wanted to. Bookstores crippled him. A few years ago they were bad enough, filled with tomes by authors who took macho pride in the plainness of their prose, writing about burnt coffee and trailer parks and midday highs. But now, now was wo
rse. Historical thrillers set in olde Europe, doleful as doorstops and stuffed to the gills with encyclopedia vomit; slim compendia by “modern humorists” who chronicled painfully ordinary situations and parlayed their modest gifts into radio programs, TV appearances and campus tours; and the absolute pits—catty romans à clef about life in New York’s upper crust written by venal young things in stiletto heels.

  He longed for the days of clichés he only partly despised—women’s stories where empty tumblers of Dubonnet and old 78s, played over and over, stood in for romantic agony, or war stories where likable heroes got wounded and actually died. He’d rather starve than compete with the hacks of today, thank you very much.

  Holding the stories by the dead Korean, Raymond walked out to his backyard the following morning. He’d reheated the chive pancakes in his oven and the first of them now crunched warmly in his mouth. Not bad, not bad at all.

  He pulled over a wrought-iron chair from the patio and put it under his oak tree. Facing him, across his privet hedge, was the Parks’ yard. Through a bare patch in the hedge, he glimpsed his bête noire, their abandoned blue sofa. Its cushions bore a thousand slashes, inflicted by some insomniac cat, and moldy foam rubber was pushing out of its wounds. An eyesore matched in noxiousness only by the mysterious blasts of slut-rock.

  Raymond turned his chair so he wouldn’t have to see that thing. He reminded himself to talk Mrs. Park into getting rid of it in exchange for reading the stories.

  The stories. He sighed. Oh, the stories. He started at the top of the pile. “The Dancing Banana Woman.” Oh, God. The naïve, unschooled prose. The knee-jerk misogyny, the oblivious racism. The odd turns of phrase and lines lifted wholesale from some shabby paperback or other. And then he’d read all the stories, eaten all the pancakes, and was in need of a compensatory Scotch.

  That evening, Mrs. Park returned. Raymond had washed and dried her pink melamine platter, and it sat on the demi-lune console by his door waiting for her.

  “Thank you for the pancakes. They were scrumptious.”

  He handed back the set of stories, which he seemed to have ironed flat for her. He’d also secured them with a black binder clip.

  “And thank you so much for sharing your husband’s stories.”

  “Oh! You finish!” She hugged the sheets. “Maybe you can help for selling?”

  Raymond chuckled instinctively, then caught himself. The woman was dead serious.

  “Would you like to step inside? I only have mint tea to offer you, but maybe we could have a quick little chat.”

  Mrs. Park sat lightly on the red leather chesterfield. The dents her heels made in Raymond’s thick Chinese rug made her feel like a barbarian, yet he wouldn’t let her take them off. She sipped at the mint tea, wiping away traces of lipstick on the bone china with the piece of tissue she’d kept in her bra. She observed how he held his teacup with his pinky aloft and she did the same.

  His house was at least twice as large as hers. Even the paint on the walls looked expensive. Built-in bookcases were everywhere. Many of the books had matching spines containing the words Raymond van der Holt.

  “What type of books you write?” she asked.

  “Oh, I don’t know . . . One could say they’re all love stories, essentially.”

  “Oh! Romance!”

  “Well . . .”

  “What is your name?”

  “Raymond van der Holt. There—you can see my name emblazoned on all the books in this room. Awfully narcissistic, I suppose you’re thinking, but I spare myself the embarrassment by never having people over.” He glanced at her. No reaction. “I may even have Japanese editions of my novels upstairs. But I don’t suppose they’ll be of any use to you.”

  She pointed at the framed picture of a young man on his grand piano. “Your son?”

  “No, I’m afraid that’s Marlon Brando.” When she drew a blank, he explained, “In his earlier, funnier days.”

  “You play piano?”

  “Alas, you shame me again, Mrs. Park. I don’t. That’s set decoration. Like the books. And the photo.”

  “Is nice piano.”

  Raymond cleared his throat. “About your husband’s stories, Mrs. Park . . .”

  She put her teacup down and held herself up.

  “They no good, right?” She had an I’m-tough-I-can-take-it grimace.

  “They were very entertaining. You should be proud of your husband.”

  “But . . . they no good, right?”

  “People toil for years before they produce anything, and believe me, even experienced midlist authors don’t often find people who want to publish them. Writers in America now go away to school for four years and come back with just one short story and forty thousand dollars of debt. Your husband wrote five, what, six stories?”

  “Tell me they bad. Tell me.” Tears were welling in her eyes again.

  “Good and bad are very subjective terms. And as you probably already know, like everything else out there, the publishing world’s run by idiots.”

  She nodded and rose to leave. He handed her the melamine platter by the door.

  “Maybe my husband stories too dark?”

  Now Raymond had to smile: “They’re not dark, dear. They’re just poorly lit.”

  She headed to her house without looking back.

  “Be brave, Mrs. Park,” he called after her.

  Minutes later, he kicked himself for forgetting to ask her about that blue couch.

  Late that night, way past his bedtime, Raymond was swirling his third glass of Muscadet and reading Johan Huizinga’s The Waning of the Middle Ages while Josephine Baker sang “Blue Skies” on his faux Victrola. When he lifted his head to yawn, he was startled by a mop of black hair in the lower edge of his picture window. From its movements, he could tell that it was no hirsute Pekingese but something more intelligent—someone was watching him with eyes hidden behind that curtain of hair. It surveyed the living room, scanning it from one end to the other.

  He stood up and waved his arms wildly. I can see ya, ya little cunt.

  No reaction.

  Then the curtain of hair rose with a sickening grandeur. A black tulip blossoming. Raymond shuddered. His spy stood lankily in the picture window, framed like a Goya of a girl completely in the nude, her skin pale against the dark velvet night. The hair remained over her face like a lustrous ebony mask. Her pubis, meanwhile, was tauntingly exposed—a bristly chimney sweep’s brush.

  “Stop that! Come on, stop that right now!”

  Arms akimbo, he gave her his most authoritarian stare. Peter Lorre, then Charlton Heston.

  The girl took several steps back. Then, with no regard for her personal safety, she slammed her entire body hard against the glass. Thwack!

  “Hey! Hey, I mean it!” He stopped himself from stepping outside lest it was a trap set by the unhinged Mrs. Park. He’d hate to be caught berating a naked girl, especially if the cops were already on their way.

  Instead, he waved his finger at her from indoors like a chiding schoolmaster.

  “Fuck off! Just go away, will ya?”

  The girl peeled herself off the window. She took three slow steps back and again smashed herself against the glass. Thwack! And yet again—thwack!

  Raymond froze. This was antique leaded glass, impossible to replace, and the fiend didn’t seem likely to give up until it broke. Who was this? What did they want?

  At her fourth thwack! Raymond thought he heard a crack in the glass or in its frame. That was it. A man had the right to protect his property. He gulped down the rest of the Muscadet and stormed to the door.

  “You’re asking for it, sweetie!”

  She must have had quick feet because when he opened the door, there was nobody on the porch. A cold draft rushed past him and into the house. There was nothing out there but the night. The chirpin
g crickets gave nothing away.

  He walked to the window and surveyed the damage from the outside.

  There were two smudges in the center of the pane, shaped exactly like greasy nipples.

  – 3 –

  THE GIRL IN THE WINDOW

  Summer was murder on the lawns of Alta Vista. The San Gabriel Mountains held the July air down in a valley chokehold and the parched grass went from green to white to gray to brown in a single breath.

  The people of Santa Claus Lane took the heat personally. They either kept longer hours at air-conditioned offices or hid in their homes until night made it safe to breathe again. As the sun went down, the rattle and hiss of lawn sprinklers covered up the whines of rash-covered infants and the whimpers of sunbaked pets. There were no evening soirees organized around cold drinks to commiserate—everybody withdrew. But had someone created opportunities to mingle and snipe, all the neighbors would have agreed that the only home on Santa Claus Lane that seemed exempt from the inferno was the Big Brown House.

  Raymond van der Holt’s house loomed larger, was set back deeper and painted darker than the others. Like many fancy homes in folksy neighborhoods, it tried to camouflage itself with common shrubs and trees. The effect of all that greenery was that Raymond’s house resembled some opulent forest hideaway in the Pacific Northwest, cool and aloof even when pounded by the hottest heat. Not true, of course, and Raymond had the electricity bills to prove it. When the heat subsided one evening, he emerged from his air-conditioned refuge and activated the sprinklers. The boom box–playing maniac had been uncharacteristically silent. He could only hope she was dead from sunstroke.