Next they saw a seemingly endless procession of bedrooms, half of which were decorated in a more traditionally feminine way, half in a more masculine manner. Somewhere during the flow of rooms she spoke to someone in her kitchen via an intercom. Turning to Tyler she said, “Do you prefer fish or meat for dinner?”
“Meat,” he said automatically, but surely it wasn’t time for dinner yet? Before he could check his own unreliable watch, a grandfather clock he hadn’t yet seen next to him in the hallway struck six times.
“Would you mind shortening our tour and ending it at the dining room?” she asked.
“It’s terribly kind of you, but I feel I’ve already stayed too long … I simply lost track of time.”
“Don’t be silly, of course you’ll stay, for dinner. Time is all in our minds anyway, don’t you think?”
The dining room (or at least the one she took him to) was neither as large as he’d thought nor as ornate. The mahogany table had a white linen tablecloth and a bowl of freshly cut pink roses in its center. The lamps were dimly lit, but two tall black candles near each place setting helped create a semblance of light. He wondered why it wasn’t brighter in this room—there should still have been light outside—and then realized the windows in the dining room were atypically small, if indeed they weren’t faux windows. A single painting, a skillful copy of The Last Supper, dominated the wall he was facing. It was perhaps the first work of art he’d seen in the house with overtly religious allusions.
The conversation lessened as they sipped their red wine (he pretended to drink more of it than he really did because he didn’t like its taste). It was as if the oddness of the room was inhibiting them, Tyler thought, or perhaps they’d just been talking to each other for too long. He was relieved when Andrew brought the food into the room on a rolling cart. It was fun to eat with real silverware, though vaguely unsettling, as Andrew served them, to notice how white Andrew’s skin was and how dim his eyes. Why hadn’t he noticed that when Andrew first opened the door? Maybe he was too excited about entering the house; excitement often undermined perception. Also unsettling, from an aesthetic point of view, was the reproduction of the last supper painting on their plates, but of this he planned to say nothing. He did praise the food and deservedly so (the squash and artichoke hearts were especially tasty), thinking that might loosen up her conversation. Instead she answered him softly with a minimum of words, keeping her eyes averted from him. It was as if he’d lost her, or that part of her that seemed so interested in him as they’d talked the afternoon away. It was a definite blow to his ego, as if it hadn’t been dented enough already, ever since he retired a year ago and essentially stopped hearing from Melissa, who was out living the high life while trying to make it as an actress in Hollywood, a doomed plan if ever there was one. He was thinking then about just when and how he would leave the house when he heard the noise again.
“What’s that?” he blurted, no longer worrying if his question was in poor taste or not.
“I didn’t notice, but it must be Andrew, he’s the only one here,” she said, looking at him almost indifferently.
A tremor passed through him. A human noise had definitely occurred, and as soon as dinner was over (he prayed there would be no desert), and not a moment longer, he really would leave. In fact, he placed his knife and fork on his plate to indicate that he was already finished.
Meanwhile Greta had rung a bell he hadn’t noticed and within seconds Andrew appeared, tall and whiter than ever, as he stooped over his plate like a birch tree slightly bent in the wind.
“Yes, Madam?” he said, eyes focused completely on her.
“You must have made a noise that disturbed Mr. Green. Are you feeling all right?”
“Sorry, Madam, I have a cough.”
“Do take care of it.”
“Yes, thank you. It won’t happen again.”
She smiled slightly at Tyler then as if to say, that settles that. But it wasn’t settled for Tyler. What he heard definitely wasn’t a coughing sound.
“You may clear now, Andrew, and then bring the dessert.”
“Yes, Madam.”
There was no expression on Andrew’s face. Tyler waited until the table was cleared before telling Greta that he’d already eaten too much of her food and couldn’t possibly eat dessert. She scarcely seemed to acknowledge his remark, as if, once again, as in the case of “Andrew’s noise,” she hadn’t heard it.
“I’m afraid I really must go now,” Tyler said. He realized that on top of everything else he was starting to feel a little queasy. “You’ve been such a wonderful hostess,” he added, but again she didn’t respond or even look at him.
“It’s amazing how much sickness people will tolerate, and still cling to life,” she finally said, gazing into space.
Was she referring to Andrew? This time Tyler didn’t respond. He was flabbergasted and starting to feel both extremely tired and vaguely out of focus. Could it have been the wine or else something he ate?
“I can understand people clinging to life if they have some important project, as you do, that they want to complete,” she said, “but otherwise, really, what are they clinging to? After all, we think nothing of killing insects, every one of us is a murderer in that respect, and to me a person without a project is little more than an insect.”
“I’m afraid I really must leave now Greta, I …”
“How is your daughter, by the way, the one who lives in California?”
How did Greta know about her? Had Serena told her? He was going to ask her about this but his dizziness was increasing.
“I’m afraid I’m not feeling very well.”
“Oh dear.”
“I’m dizzy and … I …”
“Don’t try to talk,” Greta said, as she once more rang the bell. In a few seconds Andrew reappeared.
“Mr. Green isn’t feeling well and needs to lie down. Take him to one of the guest rooms.”
He remembered getting up from his chair. He wasn’t sure he’d be able to walk but didn’t want Andrew to help or even touch him. They seemed to be going in a different direction than he’d taken before with Greta, and while they walked he thought he heard a new strangely muted medley of sounds, part moan, part wind, part chorus of stifled crickets. Then the hall seemed to suddenly expand in front of him until he couldn’t see the end of it. He was just about to ask Andrew about this or at any rate to tell him he really couldn’t walk anymore when Andrew stopped in front of a room and started fishing for a key. Then Tyler saw it. Perhaps sixty feet in front of him two or three people dressed in black and flashing by like vampires but with fixated stares more like zombies. It could have been a hallucination, but he heard the sound they made on the floor. He couldn’t have imagined or hallucinated that, could he?
“You can lie down in here,” Andrew said, ostensibly as oblivious to the vampire/zombies as to the dark symphony of sounds that preceded them. Tyler was so grateful to see a bed that he simply walked into the room and lay down on it just as Andrew closed the door. Almost immediately he fell asleep.
He must have slept a long time, well into the night, because when he woke up, though there were once again no clocks in the room (and his watch was missing), a dim purplish light was filtering through the windows and he guessed it to be somewhere between four and five. He felt certain that he’d been poisoned last night and was surprised that he hadn’t vomited. He did feel a slight headache and dizziness but still felt a good part of his strength had returned. He was also certain now that he hadn’t imagined the “people” he saw in the hallway anymore than he’d imagined those wind-like moans. This is a huge house of madness, he thought, which may well have other prisoners like myself. But was he a prisoner? It would be difficult to prove in a court of law. No one had forced him to stay as late as he did, nor could he prove he was actually poisoned.
He got up from the bed and tried the door only to discover it was locked from the outside. He’d predicted it to himself, ye
t he was shocked. Now, he clearly was a prisoner as he’d feared and as such couldn’t knock or yell or do anything to cause Andrew to come to the room. Instinctively he felt his best chance was to be compliant and play along with them while waiting for his opportunity.
Why had he come to this house? Why? It began with his blind date with Serena, but why had he wasted so much time on her and later Greta instead of calling Melissa or simply flying to L.A. to see her on his own? How foolish to wait to be asked. How foolish to have that kind of pride with his own daughter.
He ran to the window. It was locked from the outside and though it was immense, it was divided into eleven rows of six small squares with each window framed by a panel of wood. He could see at once that he couldn’t fit through any of them and pounded the window in frustration. But it was unbreakable glass and his hand throbbed in pain. What were their plans for him? Yet how could he begin to figure out the plans of the mad? Hadn’t Greta said last night that she thought of certain people as insects?
His door opened then and he shivered, expecting to see Andrew or perhaps some other guard that he knew must exist. Instead, he was astonished to see Serena slip into his room wearing a white dress.
“Hello Tyler,” she said, looking at him with a kind of confidence combined with a dash of disdain he’d never seen from her before.
“What’s going on here? I want to leave at once.”
“I wouldn’t try the windows again,” she said in that same disconcerting tone of voice.
“How did you know I did?”
“We know many things here. If you stay with us, you will too.”
And so began their conversations, which would occur two or three times a day for an hour or so for what he guessed was a week. At some point while he was passed out they’d taken his watch from him, so it was difficult to guess the time, or even what day it was, much less the sequence of conversations and what was said in which one. And yet, what else did he have to do to occupy his time but to try to organize time itself into some semblance of order? His memories of his former wife, who’d divorced him, then of Melissa, were at first often excruciating to think about, and his work on towns absurd. His “town” was now the house, as his “house” was now this room. His theory on the archetype of towns seemed as irrelevant as the windows in his room, which he could neither open nor break.
Information about the house came slowly, though it had to be remembered whenever he got some and then fit into some kind of context. He remembered that during his first meeting with Serena he was not as tactful as he should have been and had blurted out a number of questions such as, who were the people he saw in the hall, and were they some kind of zombies or vampires. He got no direct answer to that question (which only served to confirm their existence), merely a fleeting look of concern. In conversation Serena was almost as evasive as Greta, but her face was far more revealing, especially, he discovered, when she was taken by surprise.
In their next meeting he held off on any more direct questions and controlled his tone of voice. Serena was still his only link to the outside world, and he wanted to increase his chances of being visited by her again. He also realized that if he asked little of her, her own purpose, and ultimately Greta’s, might eventually emerge. So far, all she’d done was heap praise on Greta and the house and reiterate how all the guests were always so grateful to Greta. He’d hoped to find a crack in her loyalty so that they might potentially become allies and perhaps escape together, but so far he hadn’t spotted any ambivalence in her about either the house or its owner.
It was only halfway through her third visit, which seemed to take place much later in the day than the first two, that he said, “She collects people, doesn’t she, and then she destroys them?”
For the first time he saw fire in Serena’s eyes. “Sometimes you have to kill the old to bloom the new,” she blurted. Then catching herself, which he clearly saw in her anxious regretful eyes, she said she wasn’t speaking literally of course, just metaphorically.
“You recruited me, didn’t you? You use the Internet to meet people so you can bring them here.”
“No one has ever regretted visiting Greta’s house that I know of.”
“I more than regret it. I loathe every room of it. It’s killing me, as I’m sure it’s killed many others.”
“You’re speaking out of anger and therefore not making sense. Anger has blinded you.”
“Being in prison has a way of trying my patience, and don’t tell me that I’m not in prison—that you’re taking care of me again.”
“But of course we are. When your spirit is angry it’s easy to mistake opportunity for prison. You were in prison a long time before you came to the house.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You’ve had a lot of years to be happy your way and can you honestly say you ever really were? You forget your e-mails to me where you talked about your loneliness after your divorce, your sadness about aging, all your career disappointments—and then the cruelest blow of all, your daughter moving to California and all but cutting herself off from you.”
“Don’t talk about her,” he said, sitting back down on his bed and waving his arm weakly. He saw an image of Melissa as a child and felt a jolt of pain.
“Exactly,” she said. “You’ve lived a life that is too painful to talk about. That, in fact, is the kind of life you’ve lived.”
It was still sometimes difficult to think about Melissa but thinking about her had become more pleasurable than not—in fact, it was now his only source of pleasure. He thought he had spent his working life trying to advance his career, and then his retirement thinking and (less often) writing about the functions of towns, but he didn’t spend his time doing either now that he was profoundly uncertain how much time he had left. Instead, he saw a gallery of pictures from his past of his blue-eyed, auburn-haired daughter. A game of gin rummy they played on the front porch. A Boston Marathon they attended, then a game of hide-and-seek that took place both in their house and in their yard. How she squealed with delight when she jumped out at him from her hiding place in the forsythia. These memories, and some lines he still recalled from the few letters she’d sent him, were his only solace and, besides Serena’s visits, his only company as well. Since he now looked forward to thinking about Melissa, in what sense was Melissa in the past?
Still, it was difficult to remember their fights. He saw clearly how he’d isolated himself in his work, when he knew she needed some more attention, that out of some kind of fear, perhaps of his own need for her, he used his work as an excuse to withdraw from her, fearing … what? The very closeness he longed for now? What a way he’d lived. Serena was right: he had mislived his life.
He was still possessed with these thoughts, which came and left and returned again, like persistent ghosts, the next time he saw Serena. He no longer hoped she might become his ally, nor was he even angry with her. While he followed the ghost of Melissa, she blindly followed the tyrannical Greta. It was not as if he couldn’t understand. So while he continued to confront her, he did it almost diffidently now, as if recalling something with his wife that had happened to them many years ago. He’d said, for example, in a mild tone of voice, “There wasn’t ever a magazine, was there?”
“We knew the magazine would appeal to you,” Serena said, with a smile she now permitted herself in light of the new atmosphere between them. “We knew you’d like to have an outlet to publish your work.”
“Yes, it was my vanity that led me to the house and to every other wrong decision I made in my life. I see that it was all an illusion, of course, now that it’s too late.”
To which Serena merely nodded almost imperceptibly, with her Mona Lisa kind of smile.
“I suppose you got other people through different ways. You’d find out what their dreams were and tell them they must meet this ‘most interesting woman,’ who could help them come true. Greta, the keeper of dreams. Yes, that was the way you described Greta, a
s ‘the most interesting woman.’”
“Greta is much more than merely interesting.”
“Do you think she’s God?”
Serena hesitated, “Greta is unique, but it takes some time and a true effort to understand her vision.”
“But she understands us, of course,” he said, with his old sarcasm again creeping into his voice.
“Yes,” Serena said, “she does.”
Every day Andrew, and then finally a younger, well-muscled “assistant” named George, brought him his food. The large room also contained an adjoining bathroom—all his essential needs were met. At first he was afraid to eat the food, but after Serena ate some in front of him, that, combined with his ravenous appetite, made him eat the quite appealing food of the house once again.
In her last visit Serena told him that he was improving and might soon be allowed to exercise.
“Outside?” he asked.
She smiled. “Didn’t you know there’s a fully equipped gymnasium in the house?”
His life continued like this, gradually learning things about the house, without ever grasping its central purpose—much like his earlier life, he realized. No wonder that in his work on towns he began with his thesis about their purpose and proceeded from that so he could always have his thesis confirmed, a thesis that now meant nothing more to him than any dozen other ideas. Ah, it was ironic to have to use his mind this way, to be tested like this at his age.
Serena continued to be nice to him, and he looked forward more and more intently to her visits. He no longer referred to the house as a cult and barely ever talked about it anymore.
On her last visit she walked into his room wearing only a thin white bathrobe and offered herself to him. He stepped back, feeling both nervous and aroused, grateful and angry.
“She picked me for you, didn’t she?” he said.
“She knows many things.”
“All things?”
“More than we can count. But I was happy with her choice because you were always kind to me in your e-mails and on the phone. Even before I met you I liked you.”
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