He asked if I’d seen a review of the new edition of The Joy of Sex. “I bought the original when it came out in—what was it, ’72?—at an airport bookstore,” he said. “Edie and I were on vacation. They got a big section in it now on AIDS. Now teenage girls call up the boys, ask them for dates, for sex, ba-boom, ba-bah.”
“Ba-boom, ba-bah” was Lou’s Italian- inspired way of saying “and so forth.”
He threw up his hands. “Everything’s gone to hell,” he said.
At 10:30 p.m., he was ready for bed.
Lou turned off the big-screen TV in the living room, gave Heidi half a biscuit—a “snookie,” he called it—and put her in the kitchen, then climbed the stairs, turned off a hall light, and went to his room. That was it. There was no spouse to say good night to, no children to tuck in, no need even to lock the front door because, as he explained, “It’s always locked. No one uses it.” But for the absence of noise from the TV, my neighbor’s house was as quiet after bedtime as it often was during the day.
Upstairs, I asked Lou if I could have a look at his room.
The walls were faded yellow. There was a worn green carpet and a king-size bed. Edie’s vanity still stood against one wall. Over it hung a black- and-white photo of her in her thirties, feeding their son in a high chair. Gesturing toward one side of the bed, Lou said, “This is my side. The other side was Edie’s. I always sleep on this side because that’s where the phone jack is and I’d get calls from the hospital at night.”
Until his retirement, Lou practiced as a general surgeon at St. Mary’s, one of Rochester’s oldest hospitals.
Pointing out the window to a stand of mature trees in the backyard near the in-ground pool, Lou said, “Edie and I planted all those maples.” In front of the window, on a coffee table, were Lou’s tools for personal grooming—nail clipper, tweezers, cuticle cutter, comb, brush—all set in a row as precisely as a surgeon would lay out his instruments.
I said good night to Lou and went to unpack and go to bed. Lou had given me the choice of any of three empty bedrooms. I’d chosen a corner one on the south side of the house because from one of its windows I could see into my own house. In the room, there was a small black-and-white TV, a shag rug, and two wooden dressers painted fire engine red—probably painted by one of Lou’s two daughters who had shared the room when they were little.
I was just opening my overnight bag when there was a knock at the door. It was Lou. He was carrying a gray- and-blue-plaid nightshirt.
“Wear this,” he said, holding the nightshirt out to me.
I thanked him but said I’d brought pajamas.
“This is better than pajamas,” he insisted. “It’s an extra. Take it.”
I thanked him again, but said I’d be fine in pajamas.
“Wear the nightshirt!” I could see he wasn’t going to take no for an answer. “You can take it home with you.”
So I wore the nightshirt.
THE grandfather clock downstairs struck again, this time with a single bong. It was 6:15. Still no sound from down the hall. Maybe Lou was just really quiet in the morning. I opened the door so I could hear better, then went to the corner window.
Both the house next to Lou’s, and my house one door down, are contemporary split-levels. They are smaller and, to my mind, less architecturally interesting than many of the other houses on the street, which are more traditional in design. Lou’s house is a white Colonial. Looking past the house next door, I could see a small section of the upper floor of my house, including a window in the room of my older daughter, Sarah, who was away at college.
I was just thinking how nice it would have been if I’d brought binoculars when I noticed sitting on a nearby bookshelf a tiny, child’s telescope. It must have been from one of Lou’s daughters when she lived in this room. I doubt it was more than 10-power magnification, but even so, pointing it at my daughter’s window, I could make out a familiar Ringo Starr poster on her wall. Then, lowering the telescope, I saw my own reflection in the dark window glass: a middle-aged man of medium build with thinning, dark hair, in a nightshirt. Nothing so unusual about that, I suppose, except that I’d woken up in my neighbor’s house and was looking back toward mine with a spyglass.
In truth, I didn’t need that little telescope to see what was going on inside my house; with reasonable certainty, I knew where everyone was: Valerie, my teenager who the night before had accused me of being “crazy” for leaving the house with an overnight bag, was asleep in her room upstairs; Ben, then nine years old, was in his bedroom downstairs; and nearby, sprawled on a sofa in the downstairs den, was our dog, Champ. Champ, a mix of a black Lab and a dachshund, had a Lab’s big head and tail, but stood just eleven inches high. And there was one more occupant of my house that early morning: my children’s mother, Marie. We’d met in college, married in our late twenties, and enjoyed raising three children together. But Marie and I had made better parents than partners, and somewhere around Year 17 of our marriage, things had begun to unravel. We slogged through a couple of tough years—years that were unkind to our kids—and then separated. By the time of my sleepover at Lou’s, our separation had been made legal, and the anger and resentment we’d felt had largely dissipated. People say that the phrase “amicable divorce” is an oxymoron, but in our case—at least after that first year or two apart, it was largely true. Though we were living apart and we each had started dating, Marie and I were on good terms, especially when it came to watching out for the kids. So it was that Marie had offered to stay over that night—a night of the week when Val and Ben were normally with me—so the kids wouldn’t be alone. I couldn’t be sure, but I assumed, as I peered through that window in the corner room at Lou’s house, that Marie was asleep in what used to be our bed.
AT 6:18 a.m., from down the hall in Lou’s room came the sound of a loud, almost hacking cough. A minute later, a toilet flushed. My goal was to meet Lou the moment he emerged from his bedroom, so I’d need to be quick about getting showered and dressed.
In the hall bathroom, I pulled off the annoying nightshirt and started the shower. As I waited for the water to warm, I caught a glimpse of Sandringham Road through a small, porthole-like window. The developer who had carved this neighborhood from farmland more than eighty years earlier had planted each side of the wide street with alternating linden trees and Douglas firs. These trees were now nearly a hundred feet tall. The lindens were bare of leaves that time of year, but the branches of the firs were green and, that morning, heavy with snow.
It’s odd to wake up on your own street, look out the window, and see a house across the street that’s not the one you normally see. But when I looked onto Sandringham Road from the window in Lou’s bathroom, that’s what I experienced: in place of the redbrick house across from mine was a white, wood-frame Colonial that stood across from Lou’s. It was the home of the neighbor I had approached before Lou, who had turned me down.
IN the shower, I enjoyed a surprisingly powerful blast of hot water. Despite recent laws about water-conserving equipment, Lou probably hadn’t changed the showerhead in decades, but I wasn’t complaining.
I stepped from the shower to dry off. If I was quick, I could shave and dress before Lou came out of his room.
Done shaving, I pulled on a T-shirt and pants just as, from down the hall, I heard the door to the master bedroom open.
Music, loud music from a radio—a clarinet backed by a full symphony orchestra—swept out of the room and with it, washed, shaved, hair combed, fully dressed, with a bounce in his step and a wide smile, came my neighbor, Dr. Louis Guzzetta.
“Buon giorno!” he called grandly, smiling broadly, arms spread wide. “Come sta?”
Come sta? How was I? I was in the upstairs hallway of my neighbor’s house at the very moment he was leaving his bedroom to start his day. The fanciful idea that I could penetrate the barriers that separate neighbor from neighbor and get to know my neighbor from inside his own home was coming true. And I could se
e by the bounce in Lou’s step that he was delighted at the prospect of having attentive company all day, and glad to have me there.
“GOOD morning, Lou,” I said, coming out of the bathroom. He was wearing the same red button-down sweater, olive polo shirt, and khaki pants as the night before.
“Now, am I allowed to go downstairs by myself,” he asked, “or do I have to wait for you to follow me?”
Lou was playfully reminding me that last night I told him I’d want to watch everything he did today. As I finished dressing, I mentioned that we’d have to be careful to avoid the “observer effect,” that people often do not behave in the usual way when aware of being watched.
“Yeah, well, I can already see that’s true,” he said. “I’ve never come out of my room and yelled, ‘Buon giorno!’ I’m putting on a show.”
“Well, don’t,” I said. “Just do what you would normally do, as if I weren’t here.”
I knew, and I was sure Lou knew, that my presence in his house couldn’t help but affect his behavior. Yet it seemed to me the effect would likely be small. I asked myself: If someone slept over at my house intending to get to know me by observing my normal day, what would I do differently than I normally do? I might dress a little neater, be a little more purposeful in some of my actions, a little more patient with calls from telemarketers, but really, how much different could my behavior be? I’d still do the same things: get up, fix breakfast, read the paper—maybe I’d clean the dishes right after eating instead of letting them sit all day. If I were writing, to make a good impression I might waste less time checking online for news, stocks, and e- mail. An observer would see a slightly cleaned-up version of my day, but 90 percent of it would be accurate. And that’s what I figured I’d get with Lou.
“The night shirt bunched up around my waist,” I said as I walked behind Lou down the stairs to the kitchen.
“That’s because it’s not your size,” he replied. “I bought it for myself. It’s probably an extra-large.”
“Really? An extra-large?” I asked. I was surprised because Lou was of average height.
“It’s because of this,” he said, gesturing to his belly. “La Bonza! The abdomen. The curse of the American male. We all get this goddamn La Bonza!”
I said, “It comes with age.”
He said, “No, it comes with eating.”
Lou, at slightly over 200 pounds, had put on considerable weight in the five years since Edie died. “I’ve outgrown my clothes,” he told me earlier. “The days of clothes are over.” In fact, I’d seen Lou wearing moth-eaten sweaters, and pants—including the ones he wore that morning—an inch or two short.
Downstairs, Lou let Heidi, the gray schnauzer, out into the fenced backyard. In the kitchen, he opened the refrigerator. A quart of half-and-half he’d bought two weeks earlier had expired. “I used it for Brandy Alexanders on Christmas morning,” he said, tossing it in the trash. He took out a bottle of orange juice.
The breakfast table sat in an alcove facing the street. Through sheer cloth curtains I could see Sandringham Road, empty in the dim, early- morning light. “Edie made those,” he said, referring to the curtains. On the table, he had lined up four bottles of pills: two for high blood pressure, another for his heart—he had suffered a silent coronary—and a low-dose aspirin to help prevent heart attack and stroke.
Lou stepped outside to retrieve the morning papers and to let Heidi in. Then he set the table. “I don’t usually use these”—he meant the white paper napkins he placed beside each of our plates—“I put them out in your honor.” He was having cereal and a banana. I said I’d have the same.
Seated at the table, he scanned the local paper, then got up to sprinkle food into a large fish tank on the kitchen counter. “This was Edie’s,” he said of the tank, which held half a dozen colorful fish. “She knew all about it.” Lou said at one point the pH was off and the fish weren’t doing well. How, I asked, does he know when the fish aren’t doing well?
“They die,” he said.
He had put something in the water that was supposed to help the fish, but said when they all finally die, he won’t replace them.
Lou returned to the table with a bag of large pretzels, dipped them directly into a soft stick of butter, drank his coffee, and flipped some more through the paper. “Let’s see if anyone left us,” he said, turning to the obituaries. “Anne Wolf,” he said, reading aloud one name that he said sounded vaguely familiar. “No,” he concluded after reading the notice. “I don’t think I knew her.”
“How well did you know Renan Wills?” I asked.
“Name isn’t familiar,” he said. “Someone I should know?”
I reminded Lou of the murder-suicide down the street. He recalled the incident, he said, “But I didn’t know them at all. Never saw either of them. Terrible tragedy. Guy was nuts.”
Finished with his coffee, Lou excused himself to go to the garage to smoke. “It stinks up the house if I smoke in here,” he explained. He had quit smoking a year and a half earlier but recently had resumed the habit. He said he limited himself to half a cigarette a couple of times a day.
I was puzzled that Lou so easily dismissed our neighbors’ murder-suicide with a remark like, “Guy was nuts.” For me, it wasn’t so simple; there were troubling aspects of that tragedy that I wanted to learn more about. For now, though, with Lou, I let it ride. The morning was going so well; it was the first morning in a long time that I’d shared breakfast with another adult. I liked it, and I sensed Lou liked it, too. We lived so close; I wondered why we didn’t do it more often.
A few years later, I thought back to my breakfast that day with Lou, when I read of neighbors in Galveston, Texas, sharing home-cooked breakfasts in the aftermath of Hurricane Ike. The City of Galveston, population about 55,000, sits on Galveston Island on the Gulf Coast of Texas. After the hurricane came ashore, residents of Galveston who had stayed on the island to ride out the storm suddenly found themselves in what journalist Jennifer Latson termed a “symbiotic alliance.” Some found fresh water, some cooked food; others checked on those in greatest need. “They survived,” Latson wrote in the Houston Chronicle, “as if they were stranded on a desert island, which, technically, they were.”
On Ball Street, in Galveston’s historic East End, residents, lacking grocery stores, restaurants, or transportation, became “pioneers in their transformed neighborhood.” One homeowner, Yolanda Gomez, forty-six, borrowed a twenty- five-year-old propane camping stove from a neighbor and cooked hot meals for the whole block.
“Before the storm, everybody had their own lives,” said Gomez, who had never spoken to several neighbors until Ike introduced them. “After it passed, everybody just got together.” By the third morning after the storm, the only invitation her neighbors needed was the smell of eggs and sausages to draw them to her porch.
There’s something about a terrific storm—or, I suppose, any natural disaster—that brings neighbors together. In a letter to me, Patrick Ellingham, sixty, of Hollywood, Florida, recounted his experience in 2005 in the aftermath of another hurricane. “When Hurricane Wilma knocked out our power for almost two weeks, people started walking around the neighborhood and actually talking to each other. It was interesting how many people knew me by sight but had never spoken to me. We swapped life stories and tips on how to live without electricity. Each day, we would check up on each other. When the power finally came back on, doors and windows closed, air conditioners came back on, and we all went back to our separate lives. I’m almost hoping for another storm so we can all catch up.”
I was glad it hadn’t taken a hurricane for me to have breakfast with my neighbor. Yet, in a sense, it had, for it was only in the wake of the tragic storm that hit the Willses’ home that I’d managed to get myself over to Lou’s.
AFTER breakfast and his smoke, Lou went into a corner room at the front of the house that he called the library. Paneled in light pine, the room—just 8 by 15 feet—was dark and cozy. He tu
rned on the television to a program of international news, then lay on his back on a black leather couch. Heidi jumped up and rested her head on his legs.
Bookshelves nearby held bound volumes of medical journals. Lou had already thrown many away. “Nobody wants Surgical Clinics of North America: Liver, Spleen, Pancreas, 1981,” he told me earlier. On the wall above the couch hung framed high school and college photos of Lou’s six children, now ages fifty-seven to forty-two: Cecily, Dianne, Frances, Joanna, Louis, and Mary Lou.
I sat in a black leather armchair in the corner. Often, while walking Champ, I’d seen Heidi standing on this same chair, barking out the window. Now I could see that the chair’s cushion was patched with duct tape where the dog’s toenails had torn the leather; even the duct tape was so shredded in parts that the cushion’s cotton stuffing showed through.
It occurred to me: Lou and I had positioned ourselves in this little room like psychiatrist and patient: he lying on the couch and I seated, with notebook ready, in this high-backed leather chair.
Normally, I sensed, Lou would nap now, but because I was there, we talked.
“I remember as a little boy, going out to visit my grandparents,” he began, adjusting the pillow under his head. His father’s parents had emigrated from Sicily in 1902, entered the United States through Ellis Island, and settled in a small town outside Rochester. “My grandparents kept chickens and grew grapes to make their own wine. When I visited them, there was no inside plumbing—they had a pot under the bed. In the morning, my grandmother would bake bread and she’d let me make my own loaf.”
I struggled to stay focused on Lou’s story because, as he spoke, I was flooded with memories of having played in this same room as a boy with Lou’s son, also named Lou, who was my own age. By the hour, he and a couple of his older sisters and I would sit on this floor playing cards and watching black-and-white TV.
In The Neighborhood Page 2