by Karen Brown
“So, what did you make of her?” he asked.
“I’m not sure,” Nell said. “What did she make of me?”
Teddy laughed. He shook his head at her, slowly, and would not answer. He shook the ice in his glass.
“I think she misjudged me,” Nell said.
She slid the door partially open and stood in the gap. The smell of the house came out from behind her. It passed through her clothing like a specter.
———
Vince Morrell’s roses still climbed the trellis along the side of the house; the lawn had become crabgrass and horse nettle with patches of dirt. The house had always seemed huge, and maze-like, its box hedges neatly trimmed, hiding the Easter eggs she and her mother spun around in coffee cups filled with vinegary dye. The azaleas bloomed pink and gaudy. There were parties by the bay on a brick patio, her mother in a long green dress and rhinestone sandals, smiling, showing all her teeth, her hair long and dark and held back with a barrette. Nell remembered the smell of Vince’s Vantage cigarettes left burning in all the ashtrays, the crumpled packs wedged between couch cushions. She would go around and put the cigarettes out, the filters dented by the grip of his thumb and index finger.
Vince Morrell loved the Sunset Park house, and once, to hurt him, Nell’s mother called a Realtor and signs appeared, one in front facing the street, another in the back for boaters on the bay. The maid, Aurora, told her that the house’s sale would be ensured if she buried a statue of St. Joseph, and so her mother told Aurora to just go ahead and bury one. Nell remembered Vince Morrell on the lawn one night, digging holes with a trowel, trying to uncover it. There had been drinks and arguing. Vince’s glass sat on the walkway while he dug, the amber liquid shimmering in the lamppost light. Her mother had stood in the doorway, goading, calling out to him every so often to see if he had found it. Nell watched from her bedroom window. She smelled the metal of the window screen, the leaves of the azalea plants. It was Christmas then, too, the house trimmed with a row of lights that cast color onto the hedges. Her mother’s and Vince’s voices reverberated against the balmy silence of the neighborhood at two a.m. There had been other fights, suitcases thrown out onto the lawn, her mother in her robe wandering off, and then found, her robe translucent in the car’s headlights. Nell never mentioned the turmoil of her weekends with her mother to anyone. Even as a child she knew to assume, as they did, the guise of normalcy.
———
The first time Teddy had come into the house he whistled through his teeth. He stepped carefully, his arms out a bit from his sides, as if he thought something would topple over and break in his wake.
“This is like entering a time warp,” he said.
The house retained its original 1960s furnishings. Fabric had begun to give way—throw pillows, sofa cushions, lampshades, all worn or ripped or yellowed. The tables were spare shapes, their tops marked by the rings of Vince Morrell’s drinks. The floors were oak parquet, warped in spots. The house’s structural weakening showed in long cracks in the plaster ceilings and walls, in water damage that left wallpaper stained a color like dried blood. The kitchen, galley-style, had pine cabinets, worn down around the handles by years of Vince Morrell’s grasping fingers. The roof’s beams were exposed here, along with dangling wires and the air-conditioning’s metal ducts. Nell did not go into the kitchen with its injured ceiling. There were shelves in the living room filled with book-of-the-month club selections of the 1940s and ’50s—Cozzens’s By Love Possessed, The Bedside Book of Famous British Stories, The American Character, Lin Yutang’s The Importance of Living, and the Fireside Treasuries of short stories and humor and essays. Nell and Teddy looked through the books one whole afternoon. They sat on the parquet floor. They had one of the bottles from the liquor cabinet nearby and they filled glasses Teddy found in the kitchen cabinet and rinsed out in the sink.
“I hate warm gin,” Nell said. She took a sip.
Teddy grinned at her over the rim of his glass. “Don’t drink it then,” he said.
Nell did not know if she liked him very much. The books were from before both of their times. They felt damp in her hands, the pages mottled and tinged brown at the edges. Nell would have liked to tell him how she once sat on the couch in this very room and tried to read them as a child, but she could not. Her deception made her quiet and hesitant. Next door, they heard a truck with a trailer pull up and a landscaper’s crew run its mowers across Teddy’s lawn. The smell of the books mixed with the scent of oil and cut grass. That day, the wind took the smell of the bay somewhere else.
Nell watched Teddy. He opened the books in his lap, carefully, flipping through the pages, looking up at her and shaking his head. He talked to her about each one, assessing it, giving his opinion. Nell felt his talking like a kind of mask over what they wanted from each other. After, she did not remember a word they exchanged. She had wanted to lean over the stack of books and place her mouth on his, and then she had done it, interrupting him midsentence. She felt his mouth, still shaped around the word he’d spoken. It tensed with surprise, and then softened. His free hand slid up along her face. The lawn crew cut its swath, the noisy mowers drowning out the sound of their sighing. The number of ways to kiss him unfolded. They stretched out on the parquet. He asked her, implored her, to remove her clothing.
“Just this,” he said, undoing buttons. She put her hand over his and he stopped and groaned. The light in the room dimmed until they could make out only the glow of their clothes, the revealed places of skin. Outside the windows the lamppost left a halo of light on the front lawn. Teddy rolled away from her and stood, slowly, brushing down his shirtfront. He fumbled with one of the lamps and it lit the room the yellowed fabric of the old shade.
“Do you have to go?” she asked him. Nell could see the whorls of dust under the skirt of the sofa. Teddy looked around the room, flushed and amused.
“Why don’t we move to a couch?” he asked her. He reached for his empty glass and tipped it back.
Nell propped her head in her hands. She grimaced.
“How bad could it be?” he said, and he plopped down on one and bounced. Nell stayed where she was, and Teddy smirked. “I assume there are bedrooms.”
Nell had not been down the long hallway to discover them.
“I assume,” she said. She felt the air from the open window. She felt her body on the parquet, a long seam of heat. The warmth rose out of her blouse. She thought he might want her to go to him on the couch, but she did not. She put her head back on the floor. She closed her eyes and heard the rush of air accompanying a car passing, a child’s call from inside one of the houses, squirrels scrambling in the trees. She heard a grapefruit hit the ground, heavy and ripe. When she opened her eyes she was alone, resentful of his leaving her.
———
Nell had been coming to the house for over a month, but not every day. She kept her purpose for going there vague when she spoke to her husband, who had wanted to send a truck to cart off the contents, and whom she only temporarily held at bay. Sometimes she brought boxes to fortify the pretense of packing things up or clearing them out. She was not sure yet, why she went. She liked the way Teddy wanted her, forcefully, without much talking. She craved his limey-tasting mouth. She thought she could make him want her enough to lure him away from his other life, to secure an admission of love. But then yesterday she saw two children playing in his driveway. One pushed a yellow metal truck, his bottom round in diapers. The other, a girl, and older, had a doll in a stroller. Both were fair-haired and dressed in bright, clean clothing. Nell watched them play from the confines of her car. The nanny, an older Latino woman, sat in a folding chair in the garage. She held a magazine in her lap and looked up from it occasionally to call out to them. “No, no,” she said, and then some words in Spanish. The children understood the warning that came each time they approached the end of the driveway.
Nell remembered when her own two children were little, though she could not separate the mem
ory from Sweeney. The long days of preparing meals, cleaning up spilled juice and crumbs, sorting pieces of puzzles and toys into their respective bins, changing clothing and diapers, the tediousness of her life, was charged, suddenly, with the memory of his mouth, her body sore with wanting him. He had been a swim instructor at the country club. For the time they were together Nell was troubled by desire. She would notice things like the striated colors in the sky, birds in formation shifting and wheeling, leaves blown across her windshield while she was driving, and feel them all like a violent longing. His body smelled of the heavily chlorinated country club pool. He lived in a small, shoddy apartment accessed by a wooden outdoor stairway. He left his towels on his bathroom floor to stiffen with mildew. When she left at dusk he would turn on the lamp by the bed and she would see him, the expanse of his bare chest, the taut skin that joined his hipbones, illuminated through the uncurtained window glass.
It hadn’t lasted. He quit the club and she stopped hearing from him. She assumed, finally, that he had grown tired of her leaving him and found someone else. The summer of the abandonment, Nell went to the beach with her children to get away. She had not wanted to see her husband’s happy, steady face, pouring his morning juice, humming to himself. She’d used her father’s beach house on Anna Maria Island. All day the children had busied themselves in the warm sand. Nell remembered her despair now, how much it had bothered her to be forgotten. She would give the children their baths and put them in bed. Then, sitting by the water, she drank. The little waves came in. The coquinas dug themselves back under the sand. She awoke each morning with a headache, morose and silent. She could not understand it. Her life with her husband and children was a course of events already set in motion, impossible to breach. She would not, like her mother, abandon one life for another. Surely, it had been only the sex she wanted. There wasn’t any absence of love, just his body missing from her life—his adoring mouth and hands, the light pressure of his hips, the simple way their bodies fit.
“I want him one more time,” she’d whisper, an addict.
This time there were no children to occupy her, their little bodies under her hands, expectant and greedy for her ministrations. Now, there was only Teddy, his mouth wet with gin and lime and ice, his forehead scarred from the skate blade of a childhood hockey game, the mole on the inside of his arm, the sheen of sweat on his chest, the soft timbre of his pleading she could not refuse. She had begun to imagine them together other places, in restaurants she liked, at the beach house, on trips that she could easily pay for. But in the house she knew it was just their bodies and what their bodies did, and there would never be anything more than that.
———
Nell breathed the house’s stale air. Its heaviness dulled her movements. Inside the front door was a plate of switches and she hit them all, flipping on a foyer light and the porch light and the lamppost on the yellowed front lawn, an ornate piece of wrought iron with three glass shaded bulbs. She went through all the rooms, opening up the windows, and then out the sliding doors where she saw Teddy was already waiting for her. Some days he did not come, and she would sit in the house on the old couch cushions, and remember the way she had, as a child, waited for her mother and Vince to return on the nights they went out. Out by the seawall, Teddy wore a white T-shirt with his trousers and his feet were bare, as if he’d partly undressed or made some kind of quick escape. He carried a bag of ice and his glass. He looked a little wrung out and sheepish.
“I forgot my shoes,” he said. He wiggled his toes. They were white and chilled in the dead grass.
“Do you really need them?” she asked.
He shrugged. Nell had come later because, she told him, she wanted to see the sunset on the bay. He had mentioned it before, and she wanted to see for herself. She did not want to tell him the truth, that she had finally agreed to let her husband send the truck in the morning.
“I almost missed you,” Teddy said.
They stood by the seawall, looking at each other.
“Did you think I wouldn’t come back?” Nell asked.
Teddy stared for a long time at the base of her throat, then turned and glanced at the choppy bay, hiding his expression. Nell wore a sweater. She supposed he was cold, the way the wind came off the water, and blew his hair over his eyes. The bag of ice dripped into the dirt of the yard. Around them the wind bent the tall juniper so that it appeared to bow in reverence.
“Do you want to go inside?” she asked, though she did not know why. A formality, the way she would ask her husband if he wanted the newspaper when he came downstairs in the morning.
———
Soon after their first afternoon together, she and Teddy had gone down the dark hallway to the bedrooms. He had opened each door, and they had glanced inside.
“This must be little Jimmy’s room,” he said. He leaned in the doorframe. She stood behind him and wrapped her arms around his waist, slid her hand below the clasp of his pants. Over his shoulder she saw a twin bed with a chenille bedspread, and a pine chest of drawers. On wooden shelves stood trophies and models of army airplanes. This room belonged to Vince Morrell’s son, Vince Jr. Nell remembered the smell of model glue coming out from under the door, how she would knock and ask to be let in, and he would refuse. He died in his twenties in a car accident on the causeway. She knew the room across the hall would be the one she stayed in, that it, too, would be the same—white French provincial furniture, a bed with a canopy like one she had pointed to in a Sears catalog, and her mother had sent Vince out to purchase for her.
“Little Sally’s,” Teddy said. He had flipped on the lights. The canopy fabric hung in tatters. Nell could still make out the pattern, purple stripes, like ribbon, and pink roses. The blinds on the windows that looked out to the road were bent. There was a large patch of spreading dampness on the wall underneath them, as if they’d been left open during a storm, and the rain had filled the sills and spilled over. Nell’s mother’s collection of horses still stood on the desk shelf. Nell had never liked them, their fiery faces, their heads rearing back to show dilated nostrils. She had thought the manes, soft real hair, were the only redeeming thing about them, but she had taken them from their boxes and set them all out on the shelf in a false show of devotion when her mother asked, with her sorrowful eyes, why she never played with them.
The room beside it was the master bedroom, darkened with drawn shades. The carpet was faded and stained. The bedcovers were kicked down, as if someone had just gotten up—a turquoise blanket and yellowed sheets. Nell had pulled Teddy back into the hallway, her mouth on his neck, her fingers undoing the buttons of his shirt. She had learned as a child, through overheard adult conversation, that this was where Vince had found her mother, overdosed on Seconal. She had imagined for herself what the adults would not say, that her body had been sprawled across the sheets, that there had been no pulse and nothing for the paramedics to attempt to save. Nell knew which robe her mother wore, the silver velour, slit up the front to reveal her long, white legs. She saw her eyes, open and glassy, with their same questioning. What? she would ask, when she caught Nell looking. She would be on her way out to the patio with a drink, or dressed for dinner, her earrings caught in her hair. Nell would look away and say nothing. Not, You are beautiful. Not, I love you.
The last bedroom had been Aurora’s. It held a twin bed with a bare mattress. The curtains were sheers, pulled back, and the light came in from the bay and wavered on the bare parquet. There was no other furniture in the room. Teddy lay down on the bed and folded his hands on his chest. He looked up at the ceiling, like a patient.
“Do something with me,” he whispered.
She climbed up and draped her body over his.
“Say what you want,” she told him, pinning his arms back, willing to give him whatever he asked.
———
On the last evening, Teddy followed Nell into the house. She felt his eyes on her legs below her skirt. She went to the family room
first, to take a bottle from the cabinet, but Teddy dropped the ice and the glass on a table and took hold of her around her waist. He buried his face in her hair and exhaled, a long, sighing breath. Nell felt a surge of panic and desire she tried to hide.
“What?” she asked him, drawing back.
This angered him, her cold detachment. “Stop it,” he said, as if he might cry, or strike her.
He did not want a drink. He wanted her in the back bedroom, spread on the bed without clothes. He took her by the hand down the long, dim hall. Nell remembered Aurora coming out of her room in the mornings—her face drawn and pale, her dark hair like a hood in the shadows, her scuffing slippers. Her eyes softened when they saw her. She and Nell had gone into the kitchen together and made hot chocolate, warming the milk in a pan. Aurora let Nell stir. She remembered the heat coming off the burner on her arm, the metal spoon heating up in her fingers. Outside the sliding glass doors the bay was alive, skittish, changing colors. Nell’s mother had gotten up next in her long silk robe. She stood looking at the bay through the doors. Her perfume smell hid in the robe’s depths. Her hands stayed deep in the pockets. They came out to light a cigarette, and they shook.
“Do you like it here, Nellie?” she asked. Her voice was tentative and unsure. Nell saw now that her mother’s love had been withheld in fear, waiting for a sign. That it might have poured from her, a liquid warmth, but Nell with her silence fended it off. She let Teddy hold her down on the bed. She let him slide off her clothing and cover her with his mouth and hands, with his own shaking limbs. When he was finished he rolled aside and pulled her up against his thudding heart. Underneath her the mattress was wet and cold, with a dank odor. They listened to the bay slap the seawall. They heard the voices of his children playing in the next yard. In the houses around them small and mundane things continued, the food preparing, the laundry folding, the sex in bedrooms, the safety of rituals tiding everyone over. Nell thought of her husband waiting at home for her, wondering about her absences, his plate of food on the table, his years of investment in her presence, and now, an empty house, her unsorted mail piled up on the counter. In the room with Teddy the sunset tinged the walls the color inside a conch.