by John Langan
All of which is to say that, I returned to packing books, and if the specter of that coppery stench haunted my nostrils, I opened a window.
Dr. Sullivan and her family moved within the week. Having thrown them out, Roger tried to make it up by returning their entire security deposit. He couldn't understand why they were so cold to him when he went around to hand them the check. "They have their own house, now," he said.
As did we. I remember my first walk through it. This was—it must have been two days after Dr. Sullivan had left. Roger had been over that same afternoon, and all of the next day, besides, and he'd been urging me to come with him. I had a small mountain of papers to grade. I was teaching a couple of summer courses the first summer session at Huguenot, and I was on a tight schedule. I sat at the kitchen table reading essays on "The Fall of the House of Usher" while Roger came and went and came back again, taking box after box of books with him. I was a little worried he would overexert himself. I got through my essays as quickly as I could, and when I'd entered the last grade in my grade book, I stood, stretched, and went out to see my new house.
You might expect that, on the drive over, I'd have yet another flashback to the hollow house of my vision, hear Roger's curse one more time. At the very least, you'd assume I'd be nervous. None of which would be right. I suppose it was because I hadn't really connected the house of my vision with the actual brick-and-mortar structure. As I turned from Springgrown onto Main, what I was remembering was the first time Roger and I had made love in the house. It had been our third day together. That afternoon, I'd met him after his two o'clock Victorian Lit class; by the time we were back at his office, I was ready to do it with him on his desk. No, he said, not here. (That was for later.) Instead, we drove down to the house. We'd barely closed the front door, and half our clothes were off. Roger led me upstairs, to the bedroom—but there was no way I was going to do anything with him on Joanne's bed. Talk about your complete turn-offs. I led him up one more floor, to his office, and the pull-out couch; although we didn't manage to unfold it. I was so—so ready, so turned on. It was like when you're first starting to explore sex, to experiment, and you feel drunk on it. He—we fit together perfectly, better than anyone else I'd been with. I was floating on the pleasure, riding the waves. As I climaxed, I threw my head back and looked out the window, at the sky blue and pale and perfect, and I had never seen anything so beautiful.
I pulled up into the driveway, parked behind Roger's car, and walked up to the front door. Roger was waiting for me. He bowed, sweeping his hand to one side, and I entered the house.
It was big. I hadn't appreciated how many rooms there were, how much the house contained. As I went from the front landing to the front parlor, from the front parlor to the dining room, from the dining room to the kitchen—Roger gushing away beside me like the world's worst tour guide—I was intensely aware of the space around me. I could almost feel it, this slight tickling at the ends of my nerves. I had expected to notice all of Joanne's touches, which I did, but I hadn't been prepared for the way the house itself would feel. I'd never been in a house where I was so conscious of the architecture, of the structure surrounding me above and below and to either side. This wasn't my first time in Belvedere House, but it was the first time I'd been—sensitive to it like this. The roof of my mouth tingled. I kept licking my lips, as if I could almost taste something. I didn't mention any of this to Roger. What would I have said? "Boy, this house feels weird"? He would have chalked it up to my knowing it was our house, now, no doubt backed up by some quotation or another from Freud—and who could have argued with him?
That sensation of the house at the tips of my nerves persisted. It moderated a bit in the days that followed, as we transferred the majority of the apartment's contents, leaving the bed and a few changes of clothes. Roger did the lion's share of the work while I was in class, traveling back and forth to the house. When I was done for the day, I'd help for an hour or two. The apartment was more overstuffed than I'd realized. We didn't unpack immediately. The entire house had to be repainted—Roger had hired a couple of graduate students to help him—then there were new carpets and furniture to be delivered. It was a heady experience, standing in the front parlor and saying that we should cart off the fraying Oriental rug in the middle of the floor and replace it with a room-sized carpet in light blue. And those paintings looked dated and dull. Suppose we hung mirrors, instead? The furniture's too dark, too much dark wood—what about something lighter? Joanne's taste was so conservative and timid, it was almost a parody of itself. I wanted to shake things up, make the house lighter, friendlier, hipper. Roger accompanied me as I went from room to room, filling a legal pad with notes that would be turned into reality within weeks. We made a couple of big day trips to IKEA, a lot more little trips to Home Depot, and ordered all kinds of things online. Redecorating a house that size—reconceiving it—was more work than I'd anticipated. I used a lot of mirrors—as if the rooms weren't big enough already—and tended towards the simpler.
That was the first time the change in my own financial situation—the difference marrying Roger had made—really came clear to me. I hadn't considered myself poor. I was. I bought all my clothes second-hand and had barely enough money to cover my bills and keep food in the fridge. Going out to the diner was an extravagance I saved for major occasions. But so what? I was a graduate student. I was supposed to be penniless. After Roger and I got together, I hadn't noticed that much of a change. I mean, we split the bills, which was nice, and we could afford to eat out at the better restaurants, or go to the movies whenever we wanted—also nice—but, all things considered, we lived a relatively plain life together. Maybe that would've changed if we'd had the baby. We would have had to move, no doubt about it, not to mention had to buy a ton of stuff. Now, being able to say, "A nice dining room set here," or, "A love seat and an easy chair there," and have Roger say, "Yes, of course," and have the things I'd called for appear—it was a pretty heady experience. I didn't exactly think of myself as rich, but I did understand I was sitting on a lot more money than I'd appreciated.
For what seemed like the longest time, the house was in a state of transition, rooms full of stacks of unopened boxes, furniture coming and going standing in the halls, drop cloths and cans of paint migrating from room to room, floor to floor. We slept at the apartment, on the bed we'd take apart and move when we were ready to leave the apartment behind. We could have bought a new bed—maybe we should have, in keeping with the spirit of new beginnings—but a lot had happened in that bed. I had bought it when I moved into the apartment. It was a queen-sized, really too big for the bedroom, but it was like a symbol of freedom, you know? Roger and I had slept in it when he came to stay with me. We'd made our child there. By taking it with us—talk about symbols. I thought it would be a way of showing that our life together was continuing in this new place. It was like transplanting your favorite rose bush.
Then, almost overnight, the house was no longer in-between. There were still cabinets to be put up and filled, a recliner and big-screen TV that were on back-order, but the house had passed the point of no return. Instead of looking like a bunch of rowdy kids had run wild through it, doing their best to ruin Joanne's carefully wrought effects, the house had become something else. All the choices I'd made cohered, and Belvedere House was no longer the epitome of old money trying to remind you of itself—discreetly, of course—now the house was the kind of place you could feel comfortable in, relax in. There was still a contrast between its exterior and interior, which startled more than one person who visited us and which I wasn't sure how to soften—or if I wanted to—but I didn't lose too much time worrying about it.
The real contrast—the one that forced itself on me—was between the way the house's interior looked and the way it felt—still felt. My awareness of it, that sense of it just beyond the edges of my nerves, so that when Roger ran his hand along a wall, my skin would prickle, continued. I would stand in the second floor hal
lway, its newly exposed hardwood floors catching the morning light and sharing it with the cream walls, and I could taste the way the sun felt on the wood, the plaster. One afternoon, there was a brief thunderstorm that pounded the house, and I could feel the rain thrumming on the roof, the walls, like the world's biggest shower set on high. All of which was weird, but not entirely unpleasant. What wasn't so nice was the sensation that there was more to the house than I was seeing.
At all sorts of places throughout the house I would stop, sure that I'd passed a door I hadn't remembered, and when I'd turn around, there would be no door. Even so, I would be half sure one was there—or had been a moment ago. I made a real effort to stay on top of the cleaning—Roger wanted to hire somebody to do it, but I was still enough of a socialist to find such an idea abhorrent—and I can't tell you how many times I was sure I'd washed more windows than the kitchen or the living room had. I tried to keep count, but I always seemed to lose track about halfway through. It was strange, but not so much I felt I had to tell Roger. Or maybe I should say, not so strange I didn't think he'd have an answer for it I could already guess myself.
There was one room in the house Roger refused to let me touch, and—you guessed it—that was Ted's. Not the third-floor room he'd moved into when he became a teenager—oh no, Roger was only too happy to have me turn that into a combination study-guest room. The room he insisted must be left alone was the one Ted had lived in as a child. I can't say I didn't understand—after all, I was bringing my bed with me—but in the expression on Roger's face when I suggested that Ted's room would make a nice place for the stationary bike he said he wanted to buy, I had my first real inkling of the reason behind Roger's desire to return to Belvedere House. A couple of weeks later, when Roger walked into the living room and handed me a box of photos of Ted, all of them from his time in the Army, and said he wondered if there might be a place for these, I remembered how his eyes had narrowed, his mouth tightened, at my idea for changing—disturbing, I'm sure he would have said—Ted's childhood room.
I spent a while staring at those more recent photos of Ted after Roger wandered back up to his office. There were formal portraits, head and chest shots of Ted in his dress uniform staring intently into the camera, the flag draped behind him. I'm sure I must have passed them—or ones very much like them—during previous visits to the house. If so, I hadn't noticed them, and Roger hadn't ever pointed them out to me. The only picture of Ted he kept and seemed to care for was the one of him in his little league uniform that looked down from a bookcase in the office at school. He had a couple of frayed and faded baby pictures tucked away in his wallet, but that was, so far as I knew, the extent of his photographs of his son. When he'd moved in with me, he hadn't brought any pictures of Ted with him—he hadn't moved any more into his office, either. All of these photographs—there were a couple dozen. Four of the formal portraits, Ted at various stages in his career, each one framed; and eighteen or twenty smaller pictures, casual shots of Ted and his friends, of him training, of him next to Hummers and helicopters, each one of these framed, as well. Roger had wrapped every photo in a plastic bag that he'd carefully taped shut, then placed them in a heavy cardboard box he'd taped tightly closed. He had sliced the box open with an X-ACTO knife before bringing it to me, but he'd left the individual pictures in their plastic envelopes. I unsealed them carefully, picking at a piece of tape until I'd loosened one edge, then sliding my thumb underneath and gently easing the rest of it off. Once I'd parted all the tape, I unfolded the plastic bag and slid the photo from it. It took me an hour and a half to unwrap the box. If I hadn't felt the need to be so elaborately careful, I could have had the pictures out in five minutes, but it was like I was an archaeologist, uncovering my husband's ancient memories, and the situation demanded a certain formality.
When I had the last photo out, I spread them all on the living room floor. Here was Ted's adult life in shorthand. That portrait in the upper-left-hand corner must have been taken not too long after he'd enlisted. That was definitely the face of an eighteen-year-old, skin in the last phases of its battle with acne, mouth struggling to appear serious, eyes wide, as if they couldn't believe Ted was actually in the Army, for God's sake. The uniform—it fit him all right, but at the same time looked too big, you know? By the time you reached the second portrait—across the floor in the upper-right-hand corner—the uniform was a better fit. The skin was clearer, the mouth more secure, and the eyes said yes, Ted was in the Army. Ted's face hadn't yet thrown off the last traces of his adolescence. It was long and thin and waiting to fill out, which it started to do in the third portrait, on the lower-left-hand corner. Probably the most dramatic difference between any two of the pictures was between the second and third. In the second, he's still a kid. You could be polite about it and call him a young man, but it's clear that, whatever combination of factors it is that makes you an adult, it hasn't happened to Ted. In the third portrait, he's grown up. His skin has left its acne far behind and is tanned. His mouth has gained enough confidence to relax. His eyes are—reserved, the lids lowered just a little, as if keeping something back. Maybe joining Special Forces had made the change in him, or maybe it had been his first serious relationship. Gene Ortiz told me that Ted had had a long and tortured affair with a woman who worked in town. She was a teacher, I think. She was also married. Can you believe it? Maybe that's why he was so mad at Roger.
By the time you arrived at the last portrait of Ted, in the lower-right-hand corner, you were looking at the man who had stood outside the apartment at three in the morning, yelling at his father. Of course, his face was calm here. Lines had cut themselves into his skin, at the corners of his eyes and mouth, hints of aging, and across the bridge of his nose, a hint of something more violent. The scar was the souvenir of a knife fight, Gene said. "A knife fight?" I said, but he claimed that was all he could tell me.
In amongst the four portraits, I placed the twenty or so smaller pictures of Ted, doing my best to arrange them chronologically. Judging from the photographic record, Ted had had a lot of friends. More than half the shots were of Ted with groups of smiling or laughing soldiers. There was also a picture of Ted lying on his bunk, reading. Bleak House. Who'd have thought? I picked that picture up, turned it over, and slid open the back of the frame. There was writing on the picture's other side, a broad scrawl. "This Dickens guy is all right," Ted had written, "although I'll probably retire before I get done with this." I closed the frame, returned that photo to its place in the sequence, and selected another. All the pictures sported brief comments from Ted, even the portraits. If I'd felt like an archaeologist staring at a wall of hieroglyphs, I'd suddenly been handed a Rosetta stone. A couple of dozen sentences hardly constituted an autobiography, but they were something.
There was one picture in particular that caught my attention, and that was because it was so different from all the others. It wasn't framed, just tucked inside an envelope whose postmark was Fort Bragg; the date was this past March, right after Ted had been killed. The photo showed Ted not in his uniform—in fact, I didn't recognize it was Ted—the only reason I thought it might be was because it was in with all these other pictures of him. The man I saw had a heavy, dark beard and was wearing a turban, a heavy brown coat, loose tan pants, and high boots. He was sitting cross-legged, a machine gun on the ground in front of him. The landscape around him was bare, arid. He was reading; I squinted and saw that it was the same copy of Bleak House Ted had been holding open on his bunk; although the book looked as if it had traveled quite a bit since then. I turned the photo over, and read, "Even here, I can't escape this guy." I assumed "here" was somewhere in Afghanistan. I meant to ask Roger about the picture, what Ted was doing dressed up like an Afghan, but it slipped my mind.
I contemplated hanging all the photos together, maybe arranging the portraits in a row on top and setting the smaller shots beneath them. In the end, I decided to spread them throughout the house. I thought of it as a way of incorporatin
g Ted's memory into our daily lives, of welcoming him home, so to speak. I hoped that they might relieve my hyper-awareness of the house, of its unseen dimensions. Roger didn't say anything to me about my decision, but I saw him every now and again, stopped in front of a wall, noticing the photo I'd hung there. Why shouldn't Ted be part of our new home?
I wish I could say that our move into Belvedere House was good for Roger. But, right from the start, being surrounded by that house took its toll on him. He did his best to appear happy, which I think he was, but it was a strained happiness. He wore a smile like a soldier wears a uniform, because it's required. If you tried to call him on it, he'd deny he was anything other than perfectly content. From time to time, though, you'd catch a glimpse of him underneath the mask, itching to tear it off and let himself breathe. Returning here had been his idea, and he felt he had to put a brave face on it.
About a week after we'd finished moving in, we were sitting together in the living room, reading. I was on the couch, Roger was enjoying the recliner that had finally arrived the day before. The stereo was on low, Miles Davis's Kind of Blue. It wasn't late—ten-thirty at the most—but it felt like the middle of the night. You know how that is sometimes. You were up early; you had a busy day; it's a quiet night; and time seems to stretch out, to elasticate like taffy. You read for what you're sure must be hours, and the clock hands advance fifteen minutes. You have to leave the TV off. Switch it on, and the effect is ruined.
Anyway, there I was on the couch, reading this novel, Bliss, that one of my students had recommended to me, and little by little I became aware of the house around me. I was never unaware of it, but most of the time, it was a background sensation, like the sound of cars passing by on the street—you hear them, but they don't really register. This night—it was as though an enormous vehicle were moving slowly down the road, shaking the house, vibrating the air with its passing—something so big and loud it forces itself to your attention. There was that familiar feeling of space, but amplified, as if the rooms were fuller, held more within themselves. The house seemed deeper. From my spot on the living room couch, I could feel the house going off in all directions. Cold—suddenly, the mercury was in freefall. I was wearing a t-shirt and sweatpants, and all at once, freezing cold was pouring over me. My breath appeared in a white cloud. The cold was streaming out of the mirrors, the walls, the windows—I could almost see it eddying around the room. Along with the drop in temperature came a smell, a charcoal odor of meat left on the grill way too long, blood boiled away, fat melted, flesh carbonized. The air filled with tiny flakes, like snow, only black. Around me, the house drifted, as if I were on a cruise ship that had gone rudderless, something massive floating freely, rising and falling with the swell of the ocean. I was sure that, if I looked out the windows, I'd see the landscape drifting by. Charcoal flakes swirled about me, riding the cold. I—once, when I was a senior in high school and in my pot-smoking phase, someone gave me a bag of bad weed. I don't know what was wrong with it, but the way it made me feel—completely disoriented, as if there were something wrong with everything around me, something I could be aware of but not put my finger on—that, and dizzy to the point of nausea—that's the closest comparison I can come up with for this experience.