House of Windows

by John Langan

  "Baseball."

  "Baseball?"

  "Baseball," Roger said. "It is the noblest game."

  "Right. That's why they've found all those pre-historic baseball sites, because it's part of our DNA."

  "Exactly. Our ancestors used to play their Neanderthal cousins. It is the true reason for the disappearance of the Neanderthal: poor pitching and catching skills. They were murder with the bat, though, when they could see past their tremendous brows." He lowered his, and stuck out his jaw.

  I laughed. "Is this your new career? Baseball anthropologist?"

  Roger nodded. "I am the only one of my kind. I follow the course of the world's greatest game up and down history's corridors. I consider the Trojan War, where mighty Achilles struck out noble Hector in the bottom of the seventh with three men on and two out. I reconstruct Charles Martel's homerun against the Moors. I map the trajectory of the pop-fly Alexander Hamilton caught, for which Aaron Burr shot him."

  "Wait a minute," I said. "I thought you Dickensians played cricket."

  "Perish the thought," Roger said. "Cricket is only a ruse invented to hide our proficiency at baseball."

  "Which is why half the world plays it."

  "It was a successful invention."

  That was how it was the rest of the way to Wellfleet and Addie and Harlow's, this weird banter about baseball and world history that included Roger's abbreviated account of Dickens's career as a shortstop. It was funny. He improvised a few stanzas of "Cheney at the Bat." It was light, his effort at resuming conversation, but not about anything important. By the time we were turning off 6, we were discussing dinner plans. I wanted to go into P-town, to the Lobster Pot. Roger wanted to order in from Gutsy Bender's. Have I mentioned what a fan of junk food that man was? If it came in a disposable container and doubled your cholesterol, Roger adored it.

  First, though, was the Cape House. Do I have to tell you what a relief this place was, after Belvedere House? Sure, it isn't nearly as impressive on the outside, but when impressive means Chock Full of Weirdness, plain is just fine. We'd arrived at the perfect time. The house was glowing with early afternoon light. We brought our bags up to the master bedroom, then explored the rest of the place. Roger was impressed. He didn't say anything, but I could read it on his face, which made me happy—happier, since I was already pretty pleased at the thought of us way out here, almost at the end of the Cape. To be honest, the house could have looked like anything, inside and out, as long as it let us escape. That it was so nice was a bonus.

  For dinner, we settled on driving into Wellfleet, where we had drinks and dinner at the Bomb Shelter. Have you been there? They seated us on the front porch, so we could eat looking out on the bay. There was enough of a breeze to keep the air free of mosquitoes, and we had a leisurely meal while the sun dipped down to the water, painting the sky gaudy behind it. Our conversation continued light. Being on the Cape reminded me of The Bostonians, which Roger didn't care for and which led us to a mild debate about the virtues of Henry James. Roger condemned him for striving too hard for subtlety; I defended his effort to get at the nuances of perception. The argument was a far cry from those we'd had in the early days. Those had been the verbal equivalent of full-scale combat; this was more of a chess match. After dinner, we walked across the road to the beach, where we took off our shoes and socks—well, Roger did; I was wearing sandals—and went for a barefoot stroll.

  The walk lasted longer than I expected. We weren't back at the house till twenty to midnight. I switched on the TV, and, in the process of searching for The Tonight Show, clicked on a black-and-white film that made Roger leap forward and say, "Stop here!" The local public television station was showing David Lean's version of Oliver Twist. I had stumbled onto it close enough to the beginning to allow us to watch the rest. Roger was delighted. There have been plenty of adaptations of Dickens, some better than others—although there's no version of a Dickens novel that's half as bad as that version of The Scarlet Letter Demi Moore did a few years ago; I'm just saying—there have been a lot of Dickens movies, but this one had all kinds of personal significance for him. Not only was it a brilliant work by a brilliant director, he'd first seen the film as a grad student leaning towards Dickens, but unsure about following that inclination. Oliver Twist had been playing in a revival in a local theater. Roger went to see it, loved it, and felt like he'd been given a sign to pursue his desire. Of course, it didn't hurt that he had a chance to work with a leading Victorianist, either. Running across it was a reminder of a happier time. Between watching the movie and raiding the kitchen cupboards for snacks when it was done, we were up until after two.

  That night, I couldn't sleep. I lay awake beside Roger, waiting to see if he would continue sleepwalking. Although I hoped the new location would be enough to keep him in bed, I wasn't counting on it. Nor was I confident in his ability to navigate unfamiliar terrain. If he did rise, I didn't know if he'd have a speech to deliver, either the same one as last night or something new, even more damning. The night was warm. We'd left the bedroom windows up. I listened to the ocean breeze rustling the trees. I did my best not to look at the clock, whose red numbers showed that what had felt like at least a half-hour had been five minutes. I should've switched on the light and sat up reading, but I was afraid to do anything that would disturb Roger. I wasn't sure what his sleepwalking here would signify. That I'd been wrong about leaving the house, I guess. When he stirred—at three, a glance at the clock confirmed—I held my breath, wondering which direction he'd head, if I could catch him before he tripped down the stairs, if I could stand hearing what he'd have to say. But his stirring was no more than him turning over in his sleep, after which he was still again. Despite the relief that rushed through me—if nothing else, I'd finally be able to get a decent night's sleep—my eyes didn't close for another half-hour. I wanted to be sure that Roger's schedule hadn't been thrown off, and he'd be up for his nightly walk a little later. Now that I seemed able to draw a line between his sleepwalking and Belvedere House, I needed to figure out what that meant. Granted, the line was dotted. Roger would have to sleep peacefully every night we were here before I could make it a solid one. This night—he had insisted on driving today—we hadn't discussed it; he'd just kept driving and, when I'd asked him if he was okay, had nodded his head—the point is, his failure to leave the bed tonight could have had as much to do with exhaustion as anything.

  My relief at the prospect of a full night's sleep had been premature. For the rest of our time at the Cape House—we stayed from Tuesday to Saturday—I kept myself up until three every night. I slept in later than usual—most mornings it was ten or ten-thirty before I dragged myself downstairs—but I knew that Roger had maintained his waking time of six, and I was reluctant to leave him alone with his thoughts for too long. He'd brought his copy of Our Mutual Friend, which he said he hadn't read straight through for several years and which he claimed he spent the hours before I woke rereading. Every morning I found him on the big couch in the living room, the novel open in his hands. You could chalk it up to paranoia on my part—although, what is it they say? Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you? Seriously—there was no point to us traveling all this distance only to have Roger sit brooding about Ted. I couldn't control Roger's thoughts, but I could give him other things to think about. Who knows? Maybe I could've slept until noon every day and Roger would have been fine. But I was more afraid than I wanted to admit that, the one morning I indulged myself and stayed in bed, I'd come down to find Roger in the midst of laying out another tabletop model. For that reason, I was coffeed, showered, and out the door with him by eleven at the latest.

  We spent a lot of time at the beach. It was our first stop after leaving the house each day. We took an hour to walk up and down it, past families whose parents lay out in the sun tanning or reading a novel while their children ran back and forth to the ocean, sloshing plastic pails of water for the sandcastles they were building. We p
assed couples young and old—their children future gleams or past memories—reclining on beach chairs, studying the ocean out of sunglasses. We met other walkers, some of them with dogs that raced around the sand, kicking it up in gritty sprays, then dashed into the waves for a quick swim before trotting out, shaking themselves off, and starting the whole thing over again. We exchanged nods and hellos with solitary fishermen, their poles dug into the sand like spears, the lines running taut and barely visible to the waves.

  Whether we walked at high tide or low or whatever they call it in-between, we were accompanied by the sound of the waves, the noise the ocean makes as it dissolves itself onto the land, which I sometimes imagined as the old man of the sea clearing his throat: harrumph. It's a sound that can be loud one minute—so much it startles you—and soft—almost intimate—the next. I would try to figure out the rhythm of it, but although I was sure I could hear a pattern to the waves, I couldn't formalize it. A constant breeze blew in with the waves, and that made even the hottest days—we had one overcast day while we were there—more bearable.

  Depending on what time we arrived at the beach, we would step over pieces of driftwood, clumps of black seaweed jumping with sandfleas, fragments of crabs that the gulls had made meals of. The gulls themselves came and went overhead, sometimes hovering in the wind, the way they do, so that they look like kites, hanging there. Between their cries, floating bright and ragged on the air, and the hiss of the ocean as it fell back into itself—and the smell, that salt-water smell that you can miss, until the wind shifts and there it is, as full and rich in your nostrils as the sight of the ocean blue to the horizon—it was like a recipe for the complete beach experience. In a setting like that, the events of the last almost-year, from Roger's curse to Ted's death to all the weirdness—well, you couldn't escape them, but it was easier to tell yourself that they were in the past and have a chance of believing it.

  Once our walk was done, we were off someplace else, which usually meant Provincetown, although on the Friday I convinced Roger to drive down to Wood's Hole so we could take the ferry to Martha's Vineyard. We'd spent a long weekend on the Vineyard at the beginning of spring—I think I mentioned it last night. We had gone there that month after Roger agreed to the leave of absence. It had happy memories for us, which was why I told Roger I wanted to see it again. As it turned out—

  That's rushing ahead. First came our excursions into P-town. I insisted we do all the touristy things, like climbing the Pilgrim Monument. Roger had never done that. Can you believe it? He'd vacationed here for years in a row. He couldn't avoid seeing the monument—I mean, there's nothing half as tall around—but it was like those New Yorkers who live all their lives in sight of the Statue of Liberty and don't ever visit it. I couldn't believe Joanne hadn't wanted to climb it. True, she's hardly athletic, but you would think her blood would have glowed even bluer at the prospect of a Pilgrim Monument. Oh well, that left it for us. Roger raced up the stairs—all that walking and jogging—I struggled to keep up and quickly fell behind. When I reached the top, he was standing with his back to me, surveying P-town spread out below him, its streets full of cars, its harbor full of boats, the bay shining in the afternoon sun. I was reminded of how he gazed down at his model of the street in Kabul, and what I had tried to leave three hundred miles away was right beside us again.

  Sometimes before we played tourists, sometimes after, we had lunch. Actually, it was pretty much always before. The day we climbed the Pilgrim Monument was the only time we ate after, which was a mistake. By the time we walked out of there, my legs were shaking, I was so hungry. We lunched at a different restaurant each day, the same with dinner. I ate a lot of seafood, a lot of fish, a lot of shrimp, some lobster. Roger stuck with chicken and occasionally steak, which I could not understand. Here we were, right beside the ocean—in some case, literally dining on top of it. If you're not going to eat fish here, then where? How much fresher do you want, right? He refused to discuss it: he ordered what he ordered and that was that.

  Lunch finished, off we went to tourist. I had it half in mind to look up Viola Belvedere, then, but her phone number's unlisted, and although I asked about her at every gallery we stopped in, no one knew who she was. I wasn't especially disappointed. I would address her letter once we were back in Huguenot. Still, P-town isn't that big, and it was strange to think that, as we strolled its streets, we could have been passing in front of her house. She could have been an old woman we stepped off the sidewalk to walk around. We contented ourselves with more normal touristing, after which it was time for a snack, which tended to be the same thing every day, a double scoop of Ben & Jerry's. Do you know that, before we got together, Roger had never had Ben & Jerry's? For introducing him to that alone, he should have married me.

  Cones in hand, we strolled P-town, window-shopping Commerce Street—ducking into a store if something caught our eye—or wandering the rest of the place. Every other house in P-town seems to be a B&B, doesn't it? We'd turn from this street to that, the day's heat melting the different flavors of our ice creams into new blends, banana-chocolate-chunk-chocolate-fudge-brownie, and depending on where we were, Roger would gesture at a house and, between licks of his ice-cream cone, tell me that it was where he'd spent an evening arguing the merits of Rossetti's painting with the art critic for the Village Voice.

  Our ice creams done, the last piece of cone crunched, sticky fingers wiped with soggy napkins, we made our way back to Commerce Street for more window-shopping. We spent this part of our day browsing the aisles of Marine Salvage. After considering the assortment at the front of the store—the windchimes, the surplus airline flatware, the rubber lobsters, the keychains—we'd drift further in, to the racks of clothes. They have all those military uniforms there, you know? Most of them aren't American. They're from Russia, Germany, and Britain. I can't imagine how they got it all. We tried some of it on, the hats and helmets, mostly. Roger was more convincing as an officer in the Russian navy than you would have thought. I wanted to buy him the hat, but he refused. In the midst of the uniforms, there's other stuff, too, canteens in leather pouches and shovels that fold up into themselves. While Roger moved on to the back of the store, I raked through boxes of the canteens and shovels.

  Our second night there, I found a gas mask—with post-9/11 concerns about bio- and chemical-terrorism, no longer a quaint antique. I turned it over in my hands, but couldn't bring myself to put my face into it, even for fun. It was too claustrophobic. The light played across its empty eyepieces, and I thought of Ted. I didn't know if he'd had to wear one of these in Afghanistan. I didn't think so, but he'd probably had to train with one, because as a member of Special Forces he would've had to be prepared for everything. They look so alien, gas masks. You may tell yourself they're shaped like the faces of elephants, but no elephant ever looked like these things. They're the cubist nightmare of an elephant. People put them on and become different. In a back room in my mind, Roger said, "I disown you; I cast you from me." The mask was made from a rubbery material—maybe it was rubber—that was warm and soft to the touch. It felt uncomfortably close to skin, as if I were holding someone's face. I dropped the gas mask on top of a pile of gray German helmets and hurried off to find Roger.

  When we returned to Marine Salvage the following day, however, I lingered at the front of the store only long enough to convince myself I didn't intend to head straight back to that stack of gray helmets. I hadn't given the mask much thought—not that I had let myself be aware of, anyway. A couple of times later that evening, I'd recalled the feel of its material with a little shudder, but that was hardly worth mentioning. It wasn't until we were walking up Commerce once again that I was seized by this compulsion to rush into the store and find the gas mask. It was the kind of change in your internal weather that catches you by surprise and before you know what's happening has turned you in a new direction. I tried to resist it, forcing myself to stand at a bin full of brightly colored plastic telescopes, but it swept m
e into the store with hurricane force. As a rule, I'm not a compulsive person. Prior to everything I've been telling you about, I could practically count on one hand the number of times I'd been overtaken by this kind of impulse. Lately, though, it seemed I'd been acting increasingly at the behest of motives that were unclear to me. My recent attempt at getting pregnant had been a relatively benign manifestation of this trend, my need to escape Belvedere House another example. This, though: Why should I be possessed by the urge to see a surplus gas mask, to hold it in my hands again? If the force of my compulsion was frightening, its object was bizarre enough to take the edge off my fear. I found the pile of helmets, the same height as yesterday, but no gas mask. I pawed through the helmets, which tumbled and rolled against one another, colliding with a dull, plastic crack. I thrust my hand into the midst of them, and felt the mask's snout in my palm. Clearing away helmets with my other hand, I freed the gas mask, holding it up to the light.

  And do you know what? The moment it was in my hands, the same weirdness I'd experienced last night at the thing's appearance—accompanied by the revulsion I'd felt at touching it—overcame me, and, almost as soon as I had it out, I was dropping it back in with the helmets and heading to the front of the store as quickly as I could. My feet carried me outside at just under a run. Roger was another ten minutes picking through racks of t-shirts, plenty of time for me to ask myself what was going on. I had no idea. When Roger emerged onto the street, I told him I was ready for dinner and asked how he felt about returning to Wellfleet to try Aesop's Tables. "What," he asked, "no Lobster Pot?"