“Please,” I said.
“You always get what you deserve,” he finished. “It’s true.”
“I didn’t say it wasn’t.”
“How’s Ellie?”
“She’s been better,” I admitted, and told him about the original turd we’d found floating in the hot tub the night they and the Schuulmans had come over for dinner, as well as the three subsequent intrusions. Unfortunately, it was Ellie who discovered each new turd, though I probably checked the tub as often as she did. Certain that she’d never use it again, Ellie was in favor of ripping it out, as if it was anthrax or a Russian nerve agent we’d discovered. My own fear was that there was a connection in her mind between the hideous floaters and the cyst she’d had removed the year before. We’d told people it was benign, which was basically true, though the biopsy had revealed some precancerous cells. In any event, after the last incident we’d called the cops in the hopes of easing her mind. The young Latina officer they sent out poked around the alley out back where our trash got picked up and talked to a few of our neighbors to see if they’d experienced similar problems. None had, including the Gordons, who lived next door and also had a hot tub. “Looks like somebody’s singled you out,” said Officer Nuñez. “Have you pissed anybody off lately?”
I explained that we were both retired university faculty and that we had cordial relationships with our neighbors, though we mostly kept to ourselves.
“We had a Hillary sign in the front yard,” Ellie added, explaining that the first turd had appeared the morning after the election.
“Well, there you go,” said Officer Nuñez, adding, when Ellie glared at her, “That was a joke, ma’am.”
“My wife doesn’t think this is a laughing matter,” I told her ruefully, causing Ellie to glare at me.
“It isn’t, David. Someone is climbing that wall and coming into our yard.”
Officer Nuñez noticed the motion detector. “Do the lights come on often?”
We shook our heads. “Very rarely.”
“Then maybe your friend isn’t visiting at night.”
“Someone’s coming onto our property in broad daylight?”
She shrugged. “How many cars do you have?”
We told her two.
“So when the car port is empty, there’s probably nobody home.”
“You’re saying someone is watching our house?”
“Maybe just cruising the neighborhood.” Officer Nuñez was studying the hot tub. “Are you even using it now, with the weather this hot?”
I said we weren’t.
“Why not put a cover over it?” she suggested. “When the nights cool down you can take it off again.”
“That’s your solution?” Ellie said.
“Look, I’m sorry this is happening,” the officer told her. “But we’re also in the middle of an opioid epidemic. And in that context…”
“Anyway,” I told Clay now, “we took her advice and covered the tub, and that seems to have done the trick.”
He had a theory. “Mark my words. It’s going to turn out to be a disgruntled grad student. Those fuckers have long memories. Somebody who wanted you to write a letter of recommendation and you refused. Or you wrote one that was supposed to be confidential and they somehow got ahold of it.”
“I suppose it’s possible,” I admitted. “Unfortunately, Ellie’s taken the whole thing to heart. Up half a dozen times at night, peering out the window. Days, she’s always on that real estate website. What’s it called?”
“Zillow?”
“That’s the one.”
“Good. Come join us in the foothills.”
“Problem is,” I said, shaking my head, “it’s California real estate she’s looking at.”
“Ouch.”
“She wants to be closer to Alison and our grandson. I can’t really blame her.”
“Yeah, but what happens when you sell your place here and move to San Diego and Alison’s husband gets a job offer in Boston that’s too good to turn down?”
“Then I can blame her,” I chuckled. “Mostly I just don’t want us to pull up stakes over something so silly. Where are you going to go that’s totally safe?”
Clay nodded at the TV. “This guy doesn’t help matters.”
“True,” I said. “Though I don’t think he’s the one who shit in our hot tub.”
He was grinning at me now. “Don Jr.?”
I grinned right back. “Eric?” Having teed it up for him, I expected him to make the next logical leap, but he demurred. Finally I said, “So what’s going on with you and Nathan?”
“It’s mostly my fault,” he said sadly. “He took something I said as anti-Semitic. Maybe it was. We probably shouldn’t have been talking politics.”
“Why not? You both belong to the same tribe.”
“That’s what I thought,” he said, pausing. “I keep going over it in my mind, trying to understand, but it doesn’t make sense.”
“What exactly did you say?”
“I was telling him about my old man, how he was part of the Normandy invasion.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Omaha Beach. Second wave, thank God. Anyhow, I was going on about how we now had a president whose father paid a doctor to say he had bone spurs to avoid military service. Also how guilty I felt about how this fascist fuck had been elected on my watch. Nathan had this funny expression, and I should’ve been paying attention to that, but I had my usual righteous full head of steam up. Anyway, when I finally wound down, he said, ‘I voted for him.’ ”
I shook my head. “But didn’t he lose relatives at Auschwitz?”
“I reminded him of that, actually, and he looked embarrassed, but he was also really defensive. Like, ‘Come on, man, the guy’s a swine, but he’s not Hitler.’ And I said, ‘Okay, but still, how could you?’ And he said he thought maybe change, even a temporary change for the worse, would wake us all up. My first thought was that by us he meant the whole nation, but when I pinned him down, it became clear that he meant us. As in you and me and him and our wives. People in our circle. Elites.”
“We’re elites? Educators retired from a second-tier public university?”
He shrugged. “Anyhow, things went downhill from there. I was pretty strident, I admit. I guess I thought our friendship was strong enough that I could speak honestly without risk of offense. But you know Nathan. He doesn’t show anger when he’s pissed. Maybe it was the fact that he stayed so calm that egged me on. He kept saying things like ‘Okay, he’s a jerk, but that doesn’t mean he’s wrong about everything. He’ll be strong on China. He’ll defend Israel.’ ”
“Israel?” I said. “Seriously?” Because my impression had always been that Nathan was a Jew in pretty much the same sense that I was a Catholic—that is to say, not particularly. He’d as soon live in Israel as I would in the Vatican. How many times in our hearing had he expressed sympathy for the plight of the Palestinians? “I’m really sorry to hear about all this, Clay.”
“That’s not even the worst. When I got home, I told Dawn about what happened, and now she and Betsy are on the outs. The whole thing’s a shitshow.”
“You think it’ll blow over?”
“Honestly? I doubt it. What’s that expression of his? For when he’s disgusted with somebody?”
Smiling, I did my best Nathan imitation. “I’m off of ya.” Was that a New York thing to say, I now wondered? A Jewish thing? Both? I found myself again reflecting nostalgically on all those early-morning Masses I’d served as a boy. How my Catholicism had fallen away at college. Though there were times, if I was honest, that I missed the comfort of faith, all those pederast priests to the contrary notwithstanding. Was Nathan also yearning for something he’d long ago outgrown?
“That’s it.” Clay nodded. “I’m
off of ya.”
We sat in silence for a bit then, and when I glanced over at him, I saw that his eyes were moist. He was looking up at the TV. Still Charlottesville.
Shaking his head, he said, “What’s happening to us?” and I couldn’t tell if he was referring to what he was watching on the television or what we’d just been talking about.
* * *
—
That autumn we drove across the still-sweltering desert for a week in San Diego, where our daughter, Alison, lived with her husband, Jack, and our grandson, JJ (Jack Jr.). We were invited to stay with them but instead opted for a hotel. Their house was barely big enough for them, and Jack was apparently heading up some new project at work. Anyway, we got a good deal on a four-star downtown hotel within walking distance of restaurants. It’d been a while since we’d taken a holiday, and I was hoping that a little R&R, together with seeing our daughter and grandson, might lift Ellie’s spirits, which, though she denied it, were still at a low ebb. I continued to worry that the precancerous cells from the removed cyst might be multiplying in her imagination and filling her with dread of future malignancy. The night before we left, she’d dreamed that when we returned home and she pulled back the cover of the Jacuzzi, it was full of stinking turds. Naturally—or at least naturally for me—I’d tried to make a joke out of it, but she didn’t want to be kidded or, for that matter, even reasoned with. “Hey,” I said. “Let it go. Since putting a cover over the tub, we haven’t had a problem, right? At least so far as we know?”
She narrowed her eyes at that. “What do you mean, ‘so far as we know’?”
“Well”—I shrugged—“it’s not like we check under the cover every day.” When she just stared at me, her face a mask, I said, “Wait. You have been checking?”
“Of course,” she replied.
I rubbed my temples. “How often?”
Defiance now. “Every day. Sometimes two or three times. Why shouldn’t I?”
Because it’s crazy. I didn’t say that, of course, in no small part because she seemed to want me to.
Anyhow, a week in California would be therapeutic, and I promised that while we were there we’d look at a few condos. Ellie’s web searches had made evident that there was no way we could afford a house there, but she thought a condo might work if we downsized. “How much of this crap do we really need?” she added, with a sweeping gesture that included everything we’d accumulated over the years. I considered pointing out that crap was a synonym for shit and that her choice of words suggested her sudden desire to downsize might be related to the turds that had taken up permanent residence in her imagination, but to what purpose? She’d just tell me I was full of…well…it.
As I’d hoped, we had a fun week. Most days Alison and JJ came over to the hotel so JJ could frolic in the pool with me while Alison and her mother talked about books and TV shows they were both watching, and we had some nice dinners out. I kept my promise and we looked at condos, though the search proved discouraging. The online photographs too often exaggerated the size of the rooms, and Google Maps didn’t really reflect the time it would take, given San Diego traffic, to get from where we would be living to Alison and Jack’s place out in the burbs. Ellie had envisioned our daughter calling up and saying, “Would you mind babysitting for a couple hours while I go to the gym or have lunch with friends?” But how could that happen if we lived more than an hour away? Still, when it came time to head home, I congratulated myself that Ellie seemed to be in better spirits. So I was surprised when we crossed the California state line into Arizona and she began to weep—just sniffles at first, trying to pretend she wasn’t really crying, but then more openly.
“Ellie,” I said. “Come on.” Because really. We’d spent a good chunk of money, and instead of basking in the memory of our fun week, here was my wife (yet again) in tears.
She turned to regard me. “What does that mean? Come on.”
“I’m sorry we couldn’t find a condo we can afford, but you’re acting like we’re returning to an awful life.”
“That’s what you think I’m upset about?”
“Why should I have to guess? Can’t you just tell me?”
“David,” she said. “Something is terribly wrong.”
“What?” I said, genuinely frustrated now. “Honestly. I have no clue what you’re talking about.” Though that wasn’t true. Surely it was those precancerous cells, metastasizing everywhere.
“Doesn’t it strike you as odd that we barely saw Jack the whole time we were there?”
“He was working. That new project he’s heading up. Alison explained the whole thing.”
“And you believed her.”
“Is there some reason not to?”
“Did you even look at her?”
“Of course I looked at her.”
“I mean really look.”
“Ellie, help me out. I don’t know what you’re trying to say.”
“I’m saying you’re a man. Which means that you never see what’s right in front of you, especially if what you’re looking at is female. That’s what I’m saying.”
“You think their marriage is in trouble?”
“I know it is.”
“On the basis of what evidence?”
“Again, man,” she said. “Man. Man. Man.”
“What would make you happy, Ellie? If I weren’t a man?”
She opened her mouth, then closed it again. Maybe, she seemed to be saying. It just could be that this would make her happy.
Back in Tucson, the heat wave had finally broken. Even though we’d turned the swamp cooler off when we left, the house was nice and cool. Like most others in the District, our house had thick adobe walls that insulated against all but the most intense desert heat, so we’d never bothered converting to air conditioning. We were pretty tired, both from the drive and from arguing, so after a simple supper I went upstairs to read before falling asleep. Ellie thought she’d start streaming a cable series Alison had recommended, but our master bedroom overlooks the patio, and I was no sooner in bed than I heard the sliding door open and saw the motion-sensor light came on. Please, no, I thought, getting out of bed. But there was my wife, tiptoeing across the patio, where she unsnapped the hot tub’s cover, turned on the lights, and peered inside.
* * *
—
The pleasant weather lasted for several more days, no need to even turn on the cooler. Ellie’s mood seemed to improve. Instead of spending hours on Zillow, she busied herself with projects around the house. Even if we weren’t moving, she said, it was time we started culling our stuff. What did we really need? What could we do without? Later in the month we would have a yard sale. I went along because she did have a point. Even if our stuff wasn’t “crap,” we’d accumulated more of it than we needed. I even promised to do a cull of my own closet and den, though, in truth, compared to hers my own life was monastic.
One afternoon, after taking a load of stuff to Goodwill, Ellie returned home and upon entering the house immediately wrinkled her nose. “What’s that smell?” she wanted to know.
“What smell?” I asked, the way a man will in response to that particular feminine query. With the screen door open, what I was actually smelling was honeysuckle and other desert blooms.
The next morning she smelled it again, and this time I wasn’t so sure. Was there a hint of something fecal on the air? “Fine,” she said, exasperated, when I repeated that I didn’t smell anything. Be that way was what she seemed to be saying.
Since we’d gotten off on the wrong foot, I was glad we both had busy days planned. Ellie was meeting a friend for a midmorning coffee, after which they were attending a lecture at the university. I was playing in an over-sixty round-robin indoor tennis tournament that would probably last until around three. The temperature had already climbed into the eighties, so I turned
on the swamp cooler when I left. That way the house would be cool when we returned.
Later, getting dressed in the locker room after my shower, I took out my phone and saw there was a text from Betsy Schuulman. ELLIE IS WITH ME, it said, BUT YOU NEED TO GO STRAIGHT HOME. Not liking the sound of this, I called my wife’s cell, but it was Betsy who answered. “Have you been home?” she said.
“I’m heading there now. What’s going on?”
“Ellie is very upset.”
“Put her on.”
“She doesn’t want to talk to you until you’ve been home.”
“I don’t understand.”
“David?” she said. “I don’t know how else to say this. Go home.”
Pulling into the drive, I just sat there a moment, feeling a sense of dread I couldn’t really account for. The house looked just as it had when I left five hours earlier, just as it had for thirty years. Oh, sure, it needed some work. The trim was flaking and some weeds had come up in the gravel yard, but there was no reason for alarm that I could see. Rather than going in the front, I unlocked the gate and went around back, but nothing seemed to be amiss there, either.
Okay, I admit it: I checked the Jacuzzi. The sliding door to the patio was locked from the inside, so I went back around front and inserted my key in the lock. There, once again, I stalled, not wanting to enter. Don’t be an idiot, I told myself. Ellie was always accusing me of not taking her seriously, but here I was, having fully embraced her delusion, afraid to enter my own house.
Finally turning the key, I pushed the door open and stood on the threshold, calling out, “Hello?” which was nuts. With Ellie at the Schuulmans, who did I imagine would be inside? “Hello?” I called again. Was it my imagination, or was there an ambient buzzing sound—like when you’re in between radio stations—emanating from inside? Finally stepping inside, I saw why. The air was thick with flies. Hundreds of them, pinging off the walls and windows and even the rotating blades of the ceiling fans. The stench? Well, it simply was not to be believed. The air was brown with it. Gagging, I backed out into the yard and just stood there. This time when I called Ellie’s cell, she was the one who answered. “Now do you smell it?” she said.
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