I Hate to Leave This Beautiful Place

by Howard Norman

  On that visit, I had no sense of her taking any measure of the house at all: we sat in the living room drinking tea while Jehan watched a children’s video upstairs in Emma’s room. After exchanging pleasantries, she said, “A lot of writers said you were away in the summer, and we met once, remember?” Perhaps skeptical, certainly a touch edgy, I said, “Oh, a lot of writers. Who?” She reeled off a dozen or so names, and I thought: I don’t know any of them. The initial discomfort on my part may have been caused by the fact that she was so deftly able to suggest the sponsorship of a very loose-knit literary community. But the thing was, when she started in on her domestic travails, I didn’t grant much leeway. I felt that asking for a roof over her head was difficult enough without her having to test out various reasons. Besides, the most important reason was upstairs watching a video in my daughter’s room.

  How could I know? How could I know that the simplicity of our verbal contract—while living in our house you take care of it—might obfuscate future malevolence? Hindsight, of course, is powerfully suggestive and self-indicting, but cannot change what happened. Yet it has often occurred to me that had I let this weary-looking, jittery, and singularly accomplished woman with the lovely smile, whose intelligence I was, on the surface, beginning to enjoy, indulge in an hour or so of what I later understood to be a fugue state of exhaustion, fuming anger, self-pity, emotional claustrophobia, and God knows what else, I most likely would not have, at least in so perfunctory a manner, muted my protective instincts. I would have heard something alarming. In one breath I say, How could I know? and in the next breath say, I should have known.

  Anyway, when she and I were done talking, I served more tea and brought out some carrot cake. We laughed over the photographs in a biography of Groucho Marx I’d been reading. Emma walked in the door, home from school, and immediately went upstairs to hang out with Jehan; she showed him her collection of key chains and took those photographs of him. I remember that, even without noticeably registering incipient concern, I felt some relief when mother and child left. I watched through the front window as they walked over to look at the Church of the Blessed Sacrament like tourists. Then I went upstairs to take a nap, or talk with Emma, or start dinner, I cannot recall. At the time, I was quite pleased, I believe especially on Jehan’s behalf, but for both of them, that for a few months they’d have a cozy house where life could be lived, a playground nearby, a thousand books, a writing desk, light-filled rooms, classical music CDs in stacks, a rectory of Irish and South Asian priests next door.

  From my mouth to God’s ear, I wish I had said, “No, terribly sorry, but this housesitting situation isn’t possible.”

  Reetika Vazirani had left a telephone message for Jane’s best friend, Jody, to the effect that she was “in trouble” and to come to the house as soon as possible. Jody had barely known Reetika Vazirani either, but Jody had a key to the house. Given the amount of time between when the message was left and the murder-suicide took place, apparently Jody’s assignment was to discover the bodies—can you imagine?—which Jody eventually did, and quickly alerted neighbors. The police and paramedics soon arrived. In a matter of hours yellow crime-scene tape covered both back and front porches like a garish Halloween prank. And as the investigation got under way, the news spread, and demons began to stand on a lot of hearts.

  At the end of August, I flew down to Washington from Vermont and stepped into the house at about five-thirty in the evening. I had asked friends in advance to take down the three early-twentieth-century Dutch portraits hanging in the living room. The grim expressions on the Dutch faces had always struck me as judgmental almost to the point of satire, and I was convinced that these anonymous personages were witnesses and we shouldn’t have to run the risk of seeing horror reflected in their eyes.

  On the other hand, many gifts had arrived to redeem the walls. Antonin Krathovil had sent one of his photographs. Jake Berthot had sent one of his exquisite drawings of trees. Kazumi Tanaka had sent her woodcut of Japanese cranes lifting from a pond. My friend Elizabeth had sent a photograph of the wild coast of British Columbia she had taken.

  I opened a lot of windows, put an LP of Chopin’s nocturnes on the old-school record player, and stood for a moment at the entrance to the dining room, looking at the new shellacked floorboards I’d ordered to replace the bloodstained boards. I looked at the houseplants that university colleagues had delivered. I set my Olivetti down on the dining room table. Facing the corner of the dining room where the bodies had been found, I began typing letters. I wrote to William in Hawaii; Stuart and Caren in Michigan; Rick and Rhea in Vermont; Bill and Trish in Vermont; Alexandra in Vermont; David in California; Mr. and Mrs. Malraux in Paris; Peter on Long Island; Jerry and Diane in California; my old ornithology professor Dr. Cleveland in Vancouver; Melissa Church in Seattle; Michael in Toronto; Deborah in Woodstock, New York; Michael, a portraitist of birds in St. Johns, Newfoundland; my college friend Richard in Florida; Mona in Paris; my mother, Estella, in Michigan.

  I do not fully understand why I went on such an epistolary binge—all told, perhaps thirty letters, the briefest five single-spaced pages and some as long as twenty. Naturally, besides the fact that letter writing had always helped organize my emotions, I trusted that my friends would tolerate moodiness, outright despair, exhausted humor, philosophical nonsense, and everything else. I was drinking espresso after espresso; letters were stacking up next to the typewriter; I switched from Chopin to Bach’s compositions for cello and works by Kodály, all performed by János Starker—these selections obviously not seeking ebullience but rather an accompaniment to melancholy. Sleep was out of the question. Letter after letter after letter.

  At around three A.M., with cicadas whining in the enormous tulip poplar tree in the front yard, which especially during high winds I had always felt was too close to the house, I was suddenly famished and—quite surprised to have an appetite at all—decided to make spaghetti, which in any season I considered comfort food. With the heat and humidity still coming in through the nighttime screens, I started to boil water in a big pot and took some spicy meatballs out of the freezer. I opened a bottle of red wine. The recipe would be makeshift. I emptied a can of tomatoes into a saucepan and added tomato paste and spices.

  All of this had great possibilities, I felt, and then, as the saying goes, right out of nowhere—this is impossible to capture—I “felt” something was terribly wrong in the house. Not that something terribly wrong had occurred; needless to say, I already understood that. No, the definite sensation, but with an indeterminate source, was of something occurring. In progress. What is more, I had suddenly contracted a blistering headache. What else could I do but question my own exhaustion. Was I thinking clearly? What trick was my mind playing? No matter, no matter. I stopped cooking and—again, I cannot pinpoint the reason—was drawn upstairs to my third-floor attic study.

  I switched on the desk lamp and immediately noticed a novel on the floor. I cannot recall the title, but the author was Penelope Fitzgerald. How odd, I thought, because whenever I left for the summer, I would without fail clear my desk, file away papers, put pens and pencils in a jar, everything neat and clean and in its own place. Yet here was a novel on the floor.

  I picked it up and absent-mindedly flipped through the pages. I stopped at an arrow pointing from a passage Reetika Vazirani had underlined to her comment in the margin: How could she write sentences like this? She should be pilloried on the TV news. It can’t be forgiven. I thought that this might have been laughable, evidence of a critical mind in high dudgeon or an exasperated bitchiness, yet given the circumstances, I had to sit down.

  Turning the swivel chair to face the desk, I went through the novel page by page, discovering numerous underlined sentences and seemingly endless comments, some tactful and erudite, most expressing over-the-top outrage and dismissal of all worth. The inventory of suggested punishments for “poor sentences” was truly mind-boggling.

  Sitting there, I happen
ed to glance at the bookended line of upright black notebooks I had filled. Tucked in among them was a much smaller, squarish notebook. As I eventually discovered, this was one of thirty-three three-by-five-inch black notebooks that Reetika Vazirani had hidden throughout the house. Ultimately they required a macabre sort of treasure hunt whose negative reward was a gut-wrenching and permanently regretful reading experience. In that one notebook alone, amid drawings of Medusa heads, gargoyles, and clearly identifiable Hindu gods—some devouring children—were succinct rehearsals of the murder of her son, mentioning him by name. This writing was so penetratingly grotesque that all I could manage was to stumble down to the second-floor bathroom and vomit for a good half hour.

  Given all this, it may sound unlikely to suggest that anything I found in one of her notebooks could offer the least solace. But as I knelt on the cold tiles (themselves soothing to the touch) I noticed, atop some magazines and books on a small shelf, a much larger blue notebook, a journal, and I opened it at random and read:

  You have given me the greatest gift, to be led into a house full of light & comfort, paintings, photographs, cd’s, tea, books books books I am at peace now.

  This has been the greatest gift of all—to make a home like this

  Perfectly suited for Jehan and me Two rooms to grow into (top floor)

  5:30 up

  6:30 Yoga

  8:00 breakfast

  read & write

  1:00 lunch

  laundry

  4:00 Jehan napped till 7:00

  squandered most of the time piddling

  (a good day)

  Which at first glance seemed addressed to my family, though it may have been a generalized, prayerful inventory. I just cannot know.

  In that blue notebook—whose paper-clipped note cynically read Save for Howard—were theological and fantasy-erotic musings, literary quotations, accounts of dreams, arguments with a certain “Gremlin” (both sides of their dialogue recorded), professional to-do lists, domestic to-do lists. A lot of obsessive consideration was given to her “roller-coaster” experience of the humiliating vicissitudes and elusive rewards of a writing life: “My ambitions are poison.” To her quoting of Borges’s “Life is truthful appearances,” she had added, “I prefer untruthful appearances.”

  After I had recovered a little—I was less dizzy and had gotten to my feet—my clearest reasoning was, if there are two such notebooks, there might be others, and if there are others, I had better try and find them. I started out frantically and without design, moving through familiar rooms but motivated by something both unprecedented and completely alien to my sensibility, and felt within minutes that I was more or less ransacking my own house. I sat on Emma’s bed (where Jehan had slept), taking deep breaths and understanding the need to ratchet things down to a slower, more methodical pace—and then got down on my hands and knees and found a second three-by-five notebook under the mattress. The specific hostility implied in that placement sickened me all over again. I went down to the kitchen to drink a glass of ice water. When I opened the freezer compartment to get some ice, there was a notebook; I hadn’t noticed it earlier, there amid the cartons of sorbet, sticks of butter, containers of pasta, and bottles of vodka.

  I extended my search to the living room, where I found a notebook between two big books about Matisse I’d bought in Vermont. And inside the piano bench were three notebooks held together by a rubber band. Later, upstairs in the guest room, I found a notebook under a New Testament Bible she had borrowed from a neighbor. In the utility closet a notebook waited on top of the vacuum cleaner.

  I cannot bear to complete this search in writing here, except to say that I saw and read enough in the first six or seven notebooks to be more than convinced that I did not want to know what was in the rest. In time—and I will get to this later—I realized that certain passages in these notebooks forced themselves into my memory. It was as if they had immediately graffitied themselves on a blank wall in my brain. These obscene, insistent mnemonics were in the form of sentence fragments and every sort of bizarre non sequitur, each with its resident aspect of malignant aphorism and disconnect:

  I have a devotional nature but my eye pencil draws tarantulas; I’m a chameleon selling my face; God is at the height of pretentiousness and balloon-faces shouldn’t suffer that; take Pratma’s Himalayan valium in order to talk in rectangles; flee from the post-traumatic muse-snatcher; Yoga didn’t dispel biting trees; Lord I’m an unlucky detective; sleep in the kitchen but running low of jars to fill with unhappy days; nobody but me realized Buddha came back as a drawer; all gratitudes are now Gremlins buying organic for the church. And: inevitably I will derange my sanctuary.

  At the end of that long day, did I suspect I would find more notebooks? There is no rhyme or reason to the fact that I didn’t. I could have been quite wrong and my family may have suffered for it. I put the notebooks on the living room couch. It was still light outside. Through the window I noticed a few neighbors walking past, on their way to the bus or the metro, or to the local Starbucks for a coffee, or breakfast at the diner.

  I gathered the notebooks into five separate groups and wrapped each in sheets of newspaper sealed with Scotch tape. I hated these notebooks; I’d never hated anything so much in my life; I was deeply embittered by them; I was shaking. I took them outside and burned them to ash in the garbage can in the alley that ran between the rectory and my house. Peering through a window in the rectory, an Indian priest (in whom Reetika Vazirani had confided her mental precariousness; oh, had he only anointed Jehan with an intervention) watched the proceedings. A gaggle of kids on their way to Lafayette Elementary walked over to the garbage can. One boy said, “That’s a pretty cool idea,” as if I’d started a bonfire on a lark, and his buddy said, “Yeah, maybe I should toss in my stupid take-home quiz!” They went off down the block laughing and talking.

  Unnerved but also definitely relieved, I went to the porch and sat for a while and listened to the staccato cooing of the pair of mourning doves that often perched next to each other on the telephone wire. When I went back inside the house, it felt as if I had reclaimed the very air—the light was lovely against the pastel floral patterns of the living room’s overstuffed chairs and sofa. After half an hour of dreamless sleep, I awoke to a hopeful sense of lessened sorrow.

  Before Jane and Emma returned to Washington, I sent a message to an ornithologist friend traveling in Arctic Canada around Hudson Bay to tell her what had happened. She responded right away to inform me that a Quagmiriut Inuit shaman named Petrus Nuqac, whom I had known decades earlier, was “still very much at work.” To my astonished gratitude, two days later Petrus Nuqac flew by mail plane and jetliner from Churchill, Manitoba, to Winnipeg, to Toronto, and then to Washington, D.C. This was an arduous journey, especially considering that Petrus had never before boarded an airplane of any sort, let alone left the Arctic. Having traveled and sat in airports for much of a day and a night, he arrived by taxi at the house at about eleven A.M. Roughly seventy years of age, he was wearing blue jeans, a white shirt, shoes and socks, and a light brown sports jacket—“like a European,” as he put it. His red-brown face was deeply furrowed. He had some English and I had some Inuit and we could communicate nicely.

  After I served him scrambled eggs with lox, potatoes, and black coffee, we went out on the front lawn. On their lunch break, five or six girls from the parochial school, each wearing a uniform of plaid skirt, black shoes, and white blouse, stood on the sidewalk out front, curious as all get-out, as Petrus ceremoniously dug a hole and buried a caribou shoulder bone (how had he managed to get such a thing through customs?), traditionally used to fend off malevolent spirits, and offered a high-pitched, full-throated chant. Then Petrus and I sat on the front porch for a couple of hours.

  A young parochial school boy, probably detouring from some assigned errand, stood on the bottom step leading up to the porch and said, “I heard you’re an Eskimo.” Petrus walked over to him and shook his hand
and said, “It took me three airplanes to get here from Canada.” I then called a taxi. And Petrus, carrying no luggage except a change of clothes in a plastic bag, left for National Airport.

  Later in the autumn, Rabbi Gerry Serota and a few other close friends gathered in the dining room, and while there were no forms of exorcism in the Jewish religion appropriate to the occasion, Gerry had chosen compelling and beautiful Talmudic and Old Testament passages to read, and firmly instructed us to “not let someone else’s sickness drive you from your own home.” That is just how he put it, and I was grateful for his candor. It went pretty well, given the stressfulness and tears and not a little resurrection of unease, and it was nice to then have some food and drink in the living room and laugh it up a bit. What Petrus and Gerry had offered was poignant and necessary; we’d take every form of blessing we could get. That night I went back to typing letters at the dining room table.

  There’s a strong superstition in parts of Nova Scotia that if you want to keep unwanted ghosts out, and wanted ghosts in, you should place a pair of scissors crosswise so that it keeps an attic window shut. Seven or eight hours after the rabbi’s house-blessing, I went up to my third-floor study and fixed a scissors crosswise in the small window, it being the topmost window of the house.

  Some strange things happened in the aftermath. For a month or so after moving back to Washington, each time I arrived home from my university teaching after dark, as I walked up the steps I would experience a formal hallucination. Through the dining room window I would see a shadow-woman and shadow-boy in the midst of what resembled a Balinese puppet play, at once beautiful and tremendously disturbing. What is more, I would always arrive at the very moment when the woman raised her closed fist high above her head and in slow motion arced it down upon the boy as he reached out for her. Then the boy would fall from view. To my great surprise, after seeing this a few times I more or less got used to it. And then in March or April of 2004, roughly eight months after the murder-suicide, these shadow figures disappeared, permanently as it turned out, from behind the window, as if the house itself had banished them.