House of Windows

by John Langan

  "Towards the end of our time out there, one of the whales disappeared from view. The ship, which had been rolling up and down on the waves, surged higher. Eyes blazing, Dad looked at me. 'Did you feel that?' he asked. 'That whale swam beneath us.'

  "Pure terror raced up my back. I couldn't tell exactly how long any of the humpbacks was—I couldn't see that much of them through the water—but I thought our ship was longer, bigger. What would happen if one of them decided to surface beneath us? Would they do that? If they did, would they capsize the boat?

  "A second and third whale dove. I held my breath. The ship rose and fell, rose and fell, rose—and rose—and fell, rose—and rose—and fell. I wrapped my arms around Dad, who, to his credit, didn't laugh. 'Could they tip us over?' I asked into his shirt.

  "'I don't know,' he said. 'I doubt it. If one of them decided to surface beneath us, he could probably make the ship tip to one side a bit, but I doubt they're big enough to do more than that. If all of them were to try together, I guess they could give us a bath, but whales don't do things like that.'

  "'You're sure?'

  "'Reasonably,' he said. 'They wouldn't run these cruises if there was a strong chance of the whales drowning everyone on board. Besides, you know how to swim.'

  "That was Dad, full of comfort. I held onto him until we were in sight of the harbor, when I carefully disengaged myself. Do you know, I never asked him what the deal was with him and whale watching? Or maybe it was with him and the ocean, or him and ships. I thought about it three months later, when he was in intensive care at Penrose, tethered to all these machines designed to keep him here with us. Looking at him lying in the hospital bed, his skin pale and saggy, his eyes unfocused, I remembered him standing at the railing on the whale-watch ship, his hands firm on the rail, his head alert as he scanned the ocean. It was like two different people—to tell the truth, it was like three different people. There was the father I knew; that man on the ship—who had been, I was sure, who my father wanted to be, whom he saw himself as in his best moments—and this man dying in front of me—who he didn't want to be, a man overwhelmed by his traitor heart. During one of his lucid moments, I sat beside him and asked him if he remembered our trip to Mystic, the whale watch we'd went on. He nodded—he wasn't speaking much by then—and squeezed my hand. Before I could say any more, thank him for comforting me when I was freaking out, ask him what had been so important about all of us going to see those whales, he was asleep. The next time he was awake, I'd forgotten the question.

  "I tried to ask my mom about it, after the funeral, but I couldn't figure out how to phrase what I wanted to know, and she stared at me like I had two heads. So who knows?

  "That's not the point, though. That's not what returned to me so vividly as Roger drove us west through the Berkshires. What took hold of me was the memory of being on the ocean, riding the swells up and down, then feeling the water leap up that extra bit. Being on the ocean is already unnerving—for me, at least. You think, The water here's a hundred feet deep, or two hundred feet, or three hundred, and at first that's just a number. Two hundred feet? How much is that? I could walk that in like, a minute—less, even. Then you think about the buildings you're used to, your house, your friends' houses, school, the mall, and you realize that two hundred feet of water would cover them with room to spare. There are a couple of tall buildings in Poughkeepsie—a couple of the dorms at Penrose are pretty tall—but I'm not sure they'd rise above that depth of water. Maybe the top one or two floors would, but I doubt it. You think about standing at the foot of one of those buildings and looking up, and you imagine that's all water. At the bottom of two hundred feet of ocean, it would be completely dark. Pitch black and cold, not to mention the whole crushing-water-pressure thing. I don't know what the ocean floor looks like. I picture bare rocks and the occasional shipwreck, but it's not important. What is, is that feeling of depth, that you in your little boat are floating over tremendous darkness and cold. I guess I have more in common with my mother than I'd thought.

  "And the whales—this is where they live. This is their home, their habitat. This incredibly alien environment, and they're swimming around in it. I don't know if they dive all the way to the ocean floor—I guess it depends on where they are—but they can go down pretty deep if they want to. I know whales are supposed to be all cute and cuddly—at least majestic—and I'm all for saving them, don't get me wrong, but after that first one swam under the boat, any sentimental feelings I had were washed away by a wave of pure fright. These things are gigantic. They're powerful. They roam around this absolutely incredible place—loathe Melville though I do, I have no problem understanding why he made God a whale—because that's what Moby Dick is about, isn't it? What's funny is—do you know, apparently, whales used to be land animals? This is millions of years ago I'm talking about. The evidence is there in their skeletons. The bones in their flippers look like enormous hands. They have tiny, vestigial leg bones. Obviously, they breathe air. That kind of stuff. At some point in the far distant past, they exchanged sun and sky for dark and saltwater. What made them do that? What catastrophe chased them from the surface of the earth?"

  Veronica finished her glass of wine, poured another. "That isn't enough, I know. You want to hear what happened while we were on the Cape, what triggered that memory."

  "I do," I said. "I want to hear everything."

  "You will."

  Part 2: Malediction

  Roger wasn't happy (Veronica said)—almost the moment he agreed to come with me to the Cape, regret twisted his mouth. As he drove us up the Thruway and out the Mass Pike, he was silent. I knew he was trying, which in this instance meant not letting any one of the dozen complaints at the tip of his tongue escape. It meant keeping the car pointed east. I was so relieved to be on our way someplace else—to be crossing the Hudson, Albany a distant cluster of buildings to our left; to be in among the Berkshires, speeding along between old, rounded mountains; to be stopping at a rest area for a Big Mac, for God's sake—I was so relieved, not to mention nervous that Roger might take it on himself to abandon our plan and turn the car around, that I was willing to sit for almost three hundred miles in silence, whatever NPR station the radio could pick up chattering in the background.

  That wasn't all I was nervous about, either. Roger's—what do you call it? His speech? His dramatic monologue? It was playing on repeat somewhere not too far from the front of my brain. I couldn't not think about it. I was trying not to worry about it—too much, anyway, especially the change in his voice at the end. Not that the stuff before that was terribly pleasant, but at least that made sense. Even without the weird voice that had sounded so hollow, so full of the space inside the house, I would have preferred not to have eavesdropped on Roger's composition process. Yes, from the moment I'd heard him deliver those words to Ted—inflict them on him, is the way I really think of it—I'd known that my husband contained depths I hadn't suspected, pits full of black, bubbling resentment, anger. I'd continued to think of his words as spontaneous, however, which was not unreasonable. After more than three decades in the classroom, Roger was a master of the extemporaneous speech. So long as I could think of Roger's words as a heat-of-the-moment kind of thing, I could live with it. Maybe not as well as I would have liked, but I could deal. To think that it had been this premeditated was unsettling, to say the least. Who wants to think that the person they love has it in them to intend such damage to someone else—to their child, for crying out tears—that they could plan it out so methodically? The image that kept occurring to me was of Roger, dressed not in his blue short-sleeved shirt and chinos, but in furs, sitting not in the driver's seat of a Jetta, but in a cave lit by a smoky fire. He's holding a piece of bone in his left hand, a sharpened stone in his right. As he repeats last night's monologue, he scrapes the stone across the bone, shaping it into a weapon, a knife suitable for driving into his son's soft belly. I did my best not to dwell on it.

  Instead, I tried to think about t
he house we were going to. Although Addie had shown me pictures of the Cape House, and I'd told her I'd have to come out to it, I never had. I'd been to the Cape once, when I was nineteen. I drove out to Provincetown with the guy I was seeing at the time. We were on the verge of breaking up. The trip was one of those things you do when both of you know what's coming but are trying to resist it, one of those epic, empty gestures. On our way there, we got lost—the guy claimed he knew a shortcut that became a longcut, and by the time we arrived in P-town, the sun was on its way down and our tempers were frayed. We walked Commerce Street for an hour, then had an unpleasant dinner at the Lobster Pot. He had seen his first drag queen and been freaked out. I accused him of being intolerant. We spent our meal bickering over whether he was. Our conversation on the ride home alternated between further bickering and half-hearted attempts to plan our return trip, when we had more time and could rent a motel room. It was sad—sad and frustrating, because I could see this was a beautiful place, and I couldn't enjoy it.

  Roger's associations with the Cape were more positive. He and Joanne had vacationed here several years in a row, after they were first married. They missed a year when Joanne was pregnant with Ted. When they inquired about renting their old apartment for the following summer, they learned that the artist who'd taken their place had already put down a deposit for the following year. Roger called about a couple of other rentals, but that was the year everything had been booked in advance. If the Cape wasn't available—which meant about a half-dozen apartments in P-town—they'd have to look elsewhere. Joanne's hairdresser suggested the South Jersey Shore, and that was how they found the spot they'd be vacationing in for the next half-dozen years, until they decided to take Ted to Disneyworld.

  The Cape, for Roger, was P-town. It was occasional walks on the beach, but mostly lunches, dinners, and cocktail parties with friends. It was visiting gallery after gallery, sometimes accompanied by the artist whose work was on display, sometimes purchasing a painting for Joanne to hang in one of the house's guest rooms. It was going to hear critics and writers from The New York Review of Books and the Sunday Times Book Review. "We might as well have been in Manhattan," Roger said, which I'm sure is why Joanne enjoyed it. She taught him how to eat lobster. Is it any surprise that she had a knack for cracking open shells and digging out meat?

  I don't think Roger and Joanne were ever at the Cape at the same time as Addie and Harlow. By the time the Howards started vacationing here, Roger and Joanne had moved on to the Jersey Shore. They returned to the Cape a handful of times, but only for long weekends. Friends of Joanne's rented a house in Hyannis, and they invited her and Roger to visit them. Neither Roger nor Joanne had been to the Cape House, before or after their split, and I have to admit, I was happy about that. If you're going to be with someone who was married before and lived in the same place you're living in now—especially someone who had a long marriage—then you have to accept that pretty much anywhere the two of you go, the two of them went first, and probably second, third, and fourth, besides. You tell yourself that it doesn't matter whom he was with before; it's a question of who's there now. You let him talk about what the two of them did here or there in the past, because that's part of his life and you want to know about his life. You tell yourself that you're making new, better memories in these places, that you're claiming them for the two of you, now. It's the price you pay—and if it seems like you keep paying it, what can you do?

  But it means that, when you discover something the two of them didn't do together, whatever it is, right off the bat, it's even sweeter. One time, back when we were sharing the apartment—pre-confrontation with Ted—I convinced Roger that we should go mini-golfing. He hadn't been with Joanne. She wasn't interested in it. The night turned into kind of a joke. Roger is fiercely competitive, even about things like mini-golf, which, I'm afraid, he was terrible at. He kept hitting the ball too hard, ricocheting it off the obstacles, bouncing it onto the other greens. The worse he played, the angrier he got; the angrier he got, the worse he played. To make matters worse, mini-golf is one of the few sports in which I excel. To put it mildly, I was kicking his ass. On top of this, when we were about halfway through the course, it started raining, a sudden, torrential thunderstorm—I mean, there was hail coming down, these pea-sized ice pellets that really stung, not to mention absolutely soaking rain and lightning striking all around us—us with our metal clubs. The entire course cleared in about two seconds, except for—you guessed it—Roger, who refused to leave until the game was completed. First I'm screaming at him to get out of the rain, doesn't he realize how dangerous this is, then I'm playing, too. It was like, Well, fine, if you want to electrocute yourself, then I'll electrocute myself, too. How do you like that? There the two of us were, water streaming into our eyes, hair and clothes plastered to our bodies, shivering madly, and would we stop the game? Not till the last hole, and, for the record, I won. On the ride home, Roger was so furious he refused to talk to me. When I stopped at the diner and ran in for two hot chocolates to go, he wouldn't drink his—so I did, which made his mouth fall open first in astonishment, then laughter. What a night.

  The point is, for as soaked as we were—for as much danger as we'd been in—for all that my plan for a pleasant hour or two had gone horribly off-track—for all of that and more besides, that night was ours. We didn't have to share it any way, shape, or form with Joanne. I'm sure there are more of those nights than I realize. I know there are ones that are less melodramatic. After that experience, Roger refused to play mini-golf with me again. But if I treasure our meal at the Canal House, I treasure that game, too, because it was ours.

  I was hoping we'd make more of those memories at the Cape House, which I guess we did; although most of what happened—well, Joanne would be welcome to it, let's put it that way. The drive—can I just say I love the drive out here? I love how, as you get closer to the Cape itself, the trees are all shorter—from the wind off the ocean, I suppose—and through them you can see cranberry bogs every now and again, and then you're at the Bourne Bridge, crossing over the channel, and if it's a sunny day, the water below dazzles. The bridge—funny, how sometimes landscapes can be so blatantly symbolic—once you're over it, I'm always surprised at how long it takes you to get out here. You think, I'm here, I'm on the Cape, and you forget that you still have to drive all the way out to the elbow and keep going. It's all right, though. In places, you can see the ocean, or the bay, and you can smell the salt water. You see these houses with weatherworn shingles, whose yards are basically sand—there's sand everywhere, the farther out you drive. I know, I know. You drove here, too, you saw all of this, already. I suppose Route 6 isn't all that different from any other local highway. There are the same restaurants, stores, strip malls—except that, out here, all the restaurants advertise fresh seafood, and the stores sell Cape Cod hats and t-shirts and knickknacks, and the strip malls are just a little less tacky. Yes, I'm romanticizing. When it comes to this place, I'm a total tourist. To anyone who lives here, I'm sure there are plenty of places on 6 that make them cringe. But the sight of all of it was enough to make Roger's monologue, and my image of him scraping the sharp edge of a rock up a piece of bone, recede. Did I mention there's a mini-golf course? Have you seen it?

  We passed the mini-golf course, and Roger, whose last words had been uttered when we'd stopped for an early lunch two hours before, said, "No."

  It took me a moment to realize he'd spoken. I'd been lost in the scenery. I said, "I beg your pardon?"

  "I saw you gazing fondly at that miniature golf course," he said.

  "What? I wasn't—" I was confused, until I understood he was trying to be funny. "Oh come on," I said, "one game."

  "Never."

  "I'll let you win."

  "My dear," Roger said, "I do not require anyone to 'let' me win. I am fully capable of winning on my own."

  "That's not what I remember."

  "My march to victory the last time we played was interrup
ted by the weather."

  "Seems to me it was more of a crawl than a march."

  "The insolence of youth. Golf isn't a natural sport, anyway."

  "Oh? What sport is?"