Shadow Traffic

by Richard Burgin

  It would be stimulating enough just to talk to a new person whom he already knew was friendly in an unassuming way and was a good listener, too, because they’d talked on the phone three times at some length before finally deciding to meet. Perhaps he would even speak to her about his book. He could tell she was intelligent. She’d worked as a librarian and English teacher and said she was still interested in reading. He’d never told anyone his ideas about towns, so in addition there now loomed the possible satisfaction of being listened to and in some way understood.

  Although it was already summer it was still too cold to eat outside. Instead, they sat next to the window, as if to keep in close touch with the outdoors. She was wearing a light blue dress (rather more dressed up than he’d imagined) that accentuated the blue in her hazel eyes. She was soft-spoken and did appear to listen just as well as she had on the phone.

  “I’ve been thinking a lot about towns lately,” he heard himself say, trying to control the rising excitement in his voice.

  “About Stockbridge?” she said, looking at him directly in a more sustained way than she had before.

  “Some, but not really about Stockbridge per se. I meant more about how towns operate in a general way, why they have the things in them they do and how they function to control our fears and anxieties.”

  She looked puzzled. He could see she was the kind of person on whose face feelings registered with an almost cartoon-like clarity. Such people, especially those who were, like Serena, shy by inclination, seemed to have a certain innocence, which at this point in his life he found quite touching.

  “That’s fascinating,” she finally managed.

  “I’m actually planning to write about it.”

  “Is this something you’d consider publishing?” she said, her eyes opened even more than they had before.

  “I don’t know about that,” he said with a little laugh. “I don’t think there’s a big market out there for articles about collective denial of death, which I think is the chief function of towns.”

  She stared deeply at him almost as if she were being hypnotized—a feeling he found he enjoyed. Then suddenly her face was flushed with enthusiasm. “I know the most interesting woman who’s starting a publication, a very unusual magazine, which I think will be terrific.”

  “Really?” he said, feeling both interested and oddly jealous that this woman had made such a strong impression on Serena. “What kind of magazine is it?”

  “A magazine of ‘ideas.’”

  “That would be unusual,” Tyler said sarcastically, but in spite of himself, he was intrigued. Though he’d been an engineer and then a contractor before he retired, he’d always suspected he had a way with words. “And how far along is this magazine? Is it just in the talking stage or is it definitely going to happen?”

  “Oh, it’s definitely going to happen. I feel sure about that.”

  “But these things cost money. There are all kinds of expenses just to get it produced. How is it going to be financed?”

  “Greta, the woman I told you about, will take care of that. She’ll be the publisher.”

  “Has she done this before? Does she have a clear sense of how much money is involved just to physically produce it?”

  “I’m pretty sure she can take care of it.”

  For the first time he detected a touch of irony in Serena’s voice, and he looked a bit surprised himself.

  “Do you know that mansion in Interlaken?” she said, in an almost conspiratorial voice.

  “Which mansion?”

  “The biggest one. The one that you drive up a hill toward, that’s twice as big as any other house in the area.”

  He shrugged. He had a vague recollection but didn’t think he’d ever looked at it closely or ever considered it when he thought about archetypal towns.

  “She lives there,” Serena said simply and then smiled.

  “By herself?”

  “I’m not sure. She has lots of friends who visit, especially when Tanglewood starts. But I think that only Greta lives there now.”

  “Did she marry?” he found himself asking. “Is her husband still alive?”

  “I didn’t ask. They were divorced years ago.”

  “But her friends visit a lot. That must be a comfort,” Tyler said, not without a trace of envy, as he hadn’t seen his daughter in almost three years and then only when he flew to Los Angeles without being invited.

  “I’m sure it is,” Serena said.

  “And does she have any children?”

  “I’m not sure about that.”

  “So, how did you two meet?”

  “Just a few months ago she hosted an event for our local philosophical society. She does quite a bit of that kind of thing.”

  “And so you two met at the society and became fast friends?”

  “Something like that,” she said, lowering her eyes and blushing a bit.

  He did remember the house, now, how could he not? It was the biggest he’d ever seen, with an enormous sloping, flowered lawn. He’d even stopped once in his car to stare at it and counted over fifty windows before he grew tired and stopped counting. When he was a contractor he’d often dreamed about being an architect and designing a house like hers. He didn’t know why he hadn’t remembered it when Serena first asked him, but now it seemed he couldn’t stop talking about it.

  “So, is it magnificent inside?”

  “Yes, it is magnificent but in a rather quiet way.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “There’s not a lot of furniture, though what there is, is very elegant, of course.”

  “I imagine.”

  “But the whole place or what I saw of it, which is far from the whole place, is very uncluttered, and …”

  “Understated,” he said.

  “Yes, that’s the word I was looking for.”

  He continued asking questions, first about the house, then about the grounds; how many and what kind of flowers were on her lawn? How large and what shape was the swimming pool— it was a swimming pool behind that high wooden fence, wasn’t it? Yes, he thought so.

  When he was finally done with his house questions (it was already past the time when lunch should have ended) he began asking about Greta’s life again. He now saw with piercing lucidity that every town needed a mansion, which functioned as the living example of human aspiration achieved, human royalty accomplished.

  “Do you know if Greta has much hired help?”

  “I think she has a kind of butler and a part-time maid who does the cleaning, but that’s it. They live in the guesthouse and help her with shopping too, but I don’t know of anyone beyond them. Greta’s a very unostentatious person, would you like to meet her?”

  “I would,” he said, pleasantly surprised to discover that he really meant it.

  “Why don’t we go over there now? Of course, I’ll call her first.”

  “Wouldn’t that be kind of sudden?” Tyler said. “I wouldn’t want to impose.”

  “No, no, she’s very spontaneous and informal. The truth is I was just over there before I came to see you so I know that she’s home now. As a matter of fact she was asking me a lot of questions about you, so I know she’d like to meet you. Come on, let’s do it. What do you say?”

  Tyler didn’t know whether to be flattered or insulted by the invitation. After all, he thought, why was she in such a hurry to introduce him to a wealthy, ostensibly single woman if she was interested in him, herself. Maybe she also thought a romantic relationship was no longer possible, or at least not one with him. Or perhaps she was so guileless she’d acted spontaneously out of simple enthusiasm, without thinking through all the consequences. In any case he hadn’t hesitated to go, still feeling a strangely powerful desire to see the house.

  The ride to the mansion was less than five miles. He followed Serena in his car and could see that she was making a call, presumably to Greta. Once they reached the iron gate it opened automatically and they drove anothe
r quarter mile or so, on a slightly winding driveway past a series of gardens and flowering trees to the front of a garage, where Serena finally stopped. On the way to the front door he counted six different types of flowers—the dominant colors being white and a kind of shocking pink. The last thing he saw was a glimpse of a pool surrounded by the unusual combination of pine trees and pink roses before the door was answered by a tall man with excellent posture but squinting blue eyes.

  “Good afternoon, Ms. Hansborough. Miss Nadan is in the living room.”

  “Thank you, Andrew,” she said.

  “Thanks,” Tyler said softly as he followed behind her.

  Because of the dazzling floral arrangements he’d just seen outside he’d expected the inside of her home to be brighter and more fragrant. Instead it was somewhat dark, vast, and odorless, like a municipal history museum, though the living room was brighter—as if a mist had lifted in it. He noticed several oil paintings on the wall but thought it rude to examine them closely to see if any of the artists were notable.

  Greta rose from her green velvet chair to embrace Serena. All the chairs in the living room were velvet and alternately green or pink, like the pine trees and flowers around the pool. Greta herself was attractive, with purplish eyes and delicate features, though her skin looked filmy, as if too much water had been poured over it. Yet, as she shook his hand and told him it was lovely to meet him that disconcerting effect quickly vanished. She had to be at least fifty, Tyler thought, but beyond that it was impossible to tell. The work that had probably been done on her face was world class, as one might have expected.

  “I’ve heard such wonderful things about you, Mr. Green. I’m so glad you came by,” Greta said.

  For the first time in years Tyler felt something akin to a blush. “Thank you,” he said, “I’ve heard the same about you.”

  “Please sit down.”

  He sank into a green velvet chair five feet from her. “Your home is magical,” he said. He had meant to say magnificent, “magical” seeming to him too feminine a word, yet he’d said it for some reason and it seemed to please Greta, who was smiling even more broadly than before.

  “Serena tells me you’re an architect.”

  “I was a contractor for a number of years. I wanted to be an architect but one always wants more than one has,” he said, looking away from Greta for a moment at the white curtains that framed the picture window. The color didn’t match the scheme in the rest of the room yet it somehow seemed to work.

  “He’s writing a fascinating book about the nature of towns,” Serena said. She was sitting to the left and slightly behind Greta and he reminded himself to occasionally look at her.

  “Really?” Greta said. “Is it about Stockbridge?”

  Here was his chance to talk about it, but now it no longer seemed to matter so much.

  “It’s more theoretical than practical, more about how certain features of towns function to fill our psychological needs, in general, than it is about a specific town, though I did use Stockbridge as a model.”

  “Did you happen to write anything about my house?” Greta said, looking at him without her smile for the first time, which made him feel momentarily nonplussed.

  “I didn’t know your house and so I didn’t, but now that I’ve seen it I’d like to include it in what I’m writing very much, if that’s all right.”

  “Of course, I’m flattered.”

  “I’ll have to think about it first, though.” He saw that both women looked a bit mystified. “I mean, I’ll have to see how it fits into my theory of … towns.”

  “Can you tell me more about what your theory is?” Greta asked. For the next ten to fifteen minutes he did. He didn’t falter this time, as he had other times when asked to articulate his ideas. The right words came to him easily, whole phrases emerging from him as if he were a practiced public speaker. When it was done he received still more compliments and felt as if in some way he’d conquered both women.

  Serena had left, claiming she had an appointment in Lenox, and now he was alone with Greta. For a moment he had the feeling that he was being set up, that it had all been planned so that he’d be left alone with her. But a bigger part of him thought of Serena as too guileless to be part of a scheme like that. Besides, while he half-heartedly offered to go, too, and said something to Greta about not wanting to “monopolize her time,” she all but insisted he stay, which he realized was what he wanted to do anyway. In fact, in an odd way he felt powerless to leave. It was not that he was attracted to her in a conventional way. Sexually, he couldn’t picture it—yet some force seemed to keep him rooted to his chair, and to their conversation. Was there really such a thing as a compelling personality? All he knew was that he couldn’t stop talking to her. So far she’d been asking him most, if not all, the questions, but he wanted to find out many things about her life. Such as what she did with her free time? How did she get to this point in life? What exactly had happened to her husband? Did she have any children? (He thought Serena told him she didn’t but that her house was often filled with guests.) Perhaps, most of all, what was it like to inhabit such a huge house, one that he couldn’t yet fit into his theoretical model of a town? It was as if her home was somehow larger, or at least more complicated, than the rest of Interlaken put together, and yet she didn’t seem, sitting there so serenely, to have the energy and dedication to detail to make it all run smoothly.

  He wanted to know all this with an urgency that surprised him yet found himself still answering questions that she apparently wanted to know about him. It wasn’t unlike a game of tennis, he thought, where one player (in this case, Greta) keeps the other pinned to the backcourt with a barrage of hard, deep ground strokes, forcing the other player into a defensive posture, which he can only break out of by an extremely powerful and well-placed shot of his own.

  Finally his moment came. He had just answered her question about where he lived before retiring and moving to Stockbridge, answered her so succinctly that she was still sipping from a glass of water. At that precise moment he heard a strange sound, both muted and persistent, that lasted perhaps two seconds. That’s when he took his “shot” by asking if she had any guests staying with her.

  “No, I’m afraid there’s no one here but us, and Andrew, of course.”

  “Oh,” he said, nodding. He couldn’t speak about the sound again—it would be rude. “I only ask because Serena told me that you often have many visitors.”

  “Oh my,” she said, smiling broadly—a blush even appearing on her very pale white cheeks, as if he’d just flattered her in an extraordinarily deft and satisfying way. “If that’s true, it’s only because I’ve stopped going out … as much as I should.”

  “Why so?”

  “Oh, just laziness, I suppose.”

  “It must be quite challenging to maintain the quality of your home,” he said, a little awkwardly, “much less entertain people in it.”

  “One gets used to it,” she said, her smile oddly contracted now. “I’ve little else to do. I’m not writing a fascinating book like you are.”

  “But I understand you’re editing a fascinating magazine.”

  At least he would find out something about that.

  “I’m really just providing some support. They forced me to accept the title of publisher, but others are really doing the work.”

  He wouldn’t let it end that quickly and continued to question her. She never precisely refused to answer his questions—rather was masterful in evading any connection between her answers or anything else that might reveal a sense of narrative about her life. He did confirm that she was indeed divorced (here she made it clear by her facial expression alone that she wouldn’t welcome any follow-up questions). She also said that she had no children but showed no sign of regret when she told him. She had inherited the house—it had simply always been here. When she was younger she traveled through Europe and South America, but now she rarely left the house. Would he, perhaps, li
ke to see more of it? And so began his house tour. Even before they finished seeing the first three adjoining rooms he thought, “she’s married to the house and the rooms are her children.”

  He saw a music room, in which there was a harpsichord and a glockenspiel. He saw a large room she called the Visitors Art Gallery, which contained art given to or bought by her from her many guests over the years, a few of whom were quite prominent painters. The library was not as large as he thought or feared and yet the books, most of which had brown or dark green leather covers, seemed to multiply as he looked at them, creating the impression that the room itself was expanding while he examined it. He noticed that the mahogany shelves gave an outdoors look to the room, although, like all libraries, it was the quintessence of the indoors.

  “May I look for a moment?” he said, approaching the shelves before she said, “Of course.”

  He saw The Collected Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, Unamuno’s The Tragic Sense of Life next to P. D. Ouspensky’s Tertium Organum, Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, next to Norman O. Brown’s Life against Death, and next to that, a bevy of books about various kinds of black magic. He realized now that all the books had been repackaged in their leather covers. The cost in labor as well as money must have been astronomical, yet clearly the books weren’t in alphabetical order.

  “Your library is extraordinary. Is it organized according to any principle?”

  “The books have been here for generations. I’ve long ago given up trying to alphabetize them … as new books keep coming in.”