Tom was almost done with his second consecutive cigarette, blowing the smoke out the slightly open window. He’d been quiet since the backyard.
“So,” she said, turning away from her window as the cute little town receded behind them, “what do you think?”
“About what?” he said, eyes fixed on the road. Dark clouds were starting to gather in the sky.
“All the houses. But especially the last one. It’s kind of ridiculously big for us, right?”
“Yeah, it’s hard to imagine living there,” he said, speeding up to make it through a yellow light. “But … it’s pretty great.”
“Right?” Jenny agreed, putting her left hand on Tom’s arm. “I mean, it costs a bit more than we were hoping to spend, but for that price, we are getting a major deal. Victoria says she’ll lend us as much as we need for the down payment and the first couple of months, and we can pay her back whenever. We’ll have to sign some extra paperwork at closing but it’ll totally be fine.” Tom looked at her, but she pressed on. “I know, it’s not optimal.… I feel the same way as you do about having to borrow from her … but this is an amazing opportunity. We could really grow into it. And Sean was saying we’ll all probably get raises soon, membership has been going through the roof.”
“You deserve a raise. Putting up with those handsy old pervs.”
“Seriously.” She laughed, pulling her phone out of her purse. “Awesome. I’ll email Chelsea and tell her we’re interested in moving forward.”
“Nice,” Tom said, his voice distant as he concentrated on making a left turn across traffic and into the car-rental place.
“So … admit it,” Jenny said, tapping an email into her phone, “you totally smoked a joint in the basement.”
“What? I did not!” he said, turning to look at her as he pulled into the CUSTOMERS ONLY parking spot in front of the storefront.
“Mmm-hm,” she answered. “Then what took you so long? And why are your eyes so bloodshot?”
“I told you, it was crazy down there. Beyond anything you can imagine. And an insane amount of dust. Seriously. It’s packed with wall-to-wall stuff. Once we get it cleaned out, though, it’ll be amazing. It would make a killer art studio.…”
“That’s fine with me,” Jenny said, gathering up the rental documents. “I would love for you to have a space to really concentrate on your art. And you can finally have the man cave you’ve always wanted.”
* * *
It wasn’t often that they made love while completely sober.
But as soon as they got back to their apartment that night, exhausted, Tom led Jenny into the bedroom. No dinner, no alcohol, no words. He stripped her out of her clothes slowly and laid her down on the bed. He stared into her eyes for a silent minute as she unbuckled his pants. She couldn’t remember ever being as turned on as she was right then. He didn’t take off his clothes, just kissed her mouth gently as he entered her. Her senses buzzed with white light and they both came within minutes. He stayed on top of her for a little while and they kissed softly as the wind pushed against their tiny bedroom window.
“I love you,” she murmured. “Almost as much as I love that house.”
Tom cracked up and fell off his wife, landing next to her, still panting. She laughed, too, and curled up against him, and they both fell asleep.
* * *
“I can’t believe you’re moving to fucking Jersey, man.”
Kevin shook his head at Tom and raised the half-finished glass of beer to his lips. It was nine o’clock on a Wednesday and they had just finished dinner at a recently opened Italian restaurant that was getting rave reviews, then moved to the bar to continue their conversation.
“Me neither,” Tom said. “I always said they’d have to get me out of New York in a coffin. But you should see the house, Kev. It’s incredible.”
“Yeah, but it’s in Jersey.” He said the last word slowly, as if it were the name of some newly discovered disease. “You’re turning in your New York City badge and becoming a commuter. A fuckin’ bridge and tunneler.”
“You’re just jealous because I get to pay even more taxes now.”
Kevin laughed and chugged the rest of his beer. Tom swept the hair out of his eyes and did the same. They signaled the bartender and ordered another round.
“How’s Jenny feeling about this whole thing? You guys gonna settle down and have fourteen kids and go apple picking in matching sweaters? Start going to church every week?”
“Ha!” Tom barked as the bartender poured their beers, his pale face lit from underneath by lights on the floor behind the bar. The place was filling up quickly, a line of people waiting for a table stretching out the door, and it was getting loud. Some awful pop music blared in the background. A pack of twentysomething guys in suits pushed in around Kevin and Tom, jockeying for position and trying to catch the bartender’s eye. “Not likely. Nothing is gonna change, other than how long it’ll take me to get to work. I’ll probably still be spending more time in Manhattan than the burbs.”
“Suuuuuure,” Kevin responded. “Keep telling yourself that.”
“You’re an asshole,” Tom laughed.
“I learned it by watching you!” Kevin said in a high voice, a favorite joke of theirs from childhood, and the two friends cracked up as their beers appeared in front of them.
They toasted, and as his best friend took a long sip, Tom asked, “How are your grandparents doing? I still feel so bad about never mailing them a thank-you note for the wedding present they sent us. It was way too expensive!”
“Well, they’re still pissed off they weren’t invited. It’s all they ever talk about.”
“Wait, what?” Tom said, concerned. “It was a tiny ceremony. You know that. We barely invited anyone. Didn’t you—?”
“Relax, relax,” Kevin said, holding up his hands. “Totally kidding. You know they love you. They probably love you more than they love me. I mean, you practically lived at our house, growing up, and you never talked back to them like I did.”
“True facts,” Tom said, sipping at his beer. “How’s single life treating you?”
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” Kevin muttered. “I mean, don’t get me wrong. I’m having fun. A lot of fun. But still hoping ‘the one’ is out there somewhere. I’m getting tired of all the games and whatnot. I don’t know. We’ll see.”
“And work?” Tom asked, raising his voice a bit as the music got even louder.
“Ahh, you know, same shit, different day,” Kevin answered. “Bunch of bureaucratic bullshit, mostly. Dealing with a crazy man of a boss. Managing a team of slackers. Kids out of college, stoners, dumb-asses. The cream of the crop. I need better salespeople. I need you. You could crush it there, seriously. You would be a natural. I know you’re sick of hearing it, but—”
“I’m sick of hearing it,” Tom interrupted, shooting his best friend the sly grin that said he was joking but actually wasn’t.
Kevin held up his hands in supplication once again. “Okay, okay, I’ll stop. For tonight. But eventually I’m gonna wear you down and you’re gonna come work for me. Why fight it?”
“You know me,” Tom said as he stared at himself in the mirror behind the bar, past the bottles that partially obscured his face, “I love to fight.”
* * *
Tom had an appointment to meet Chelsea and the house inspector out in New Jersey at 9 A.M. on a Friday morning, way earlier than he would have chosen. He’d closed the bar the night before … or earlier that morning, to be accurate. He was definitely dragging despite having chugged a giant plastic cup of iced coffee on the train out of the city. It was interesting to see the kinds of people leaving New York during rush hour, a mix of hipsters who had clearly been out all night and older people with luggage.
Jenny had tried but wasn’t able to get out of work—a couple of other people were home sick—so Tom said he would handle the inspection on his own. He’d done a fair amount of repair work around
his house as a kid. His dad, a businessman and a drunk, wasn’t around—or sober—much of the time. As an only child, Tom had taken it upon himself to learn how to handle tools. Fixing things kept the house from falling apart and earned him some attention from his distracted mother, who liked to drink as much as, if not more than, his dad.
Buying this house and moving to New Jersey made him worry that he was replicating his parents’ trajectory. It all felt hauntingly familiar.
Despite his exhaustion, Tom pushed these dark thoughts out of his mind and focused on his current task. The house inspector, a burly, hairy guy named Ray Dallesander, was already at the house when he arrived. Chelsea was there, too, on her phone. She waved but kept talking. Tom caught a slight whiff of alcohol on the other man’s breath, poorly covered by the clashing scent of extremely minty mouthwash. Ray wore a giant green flannel shirt over paint-splotched jeans and huge, scuffed steel-tipped work boots. He shook Tom’s hand vigorously, apparently trying to break all the bones in his fingers.
“Shall we?” Ray said, bad breath wafting out from beneath his graying mustache. In addition to alcohol and mint, Tom could also make out the scent of stale cigars. He fought not to physically recoil from the smell.
“Go ahead without me,” Chelsea whispered, placing her hand over the phone for a second. “I’ll be right in.”
As the two men entered the house, Ray pulled his notebook—the first sheet already covered with chicken-scratch writing—out from under his arm and began to write. The moment he stepped inside, Tom’s fingers trembled with excitement as he glanced through the dining room, toward the kitchen and the unseen basement door.
Ray wanted to start at the top of the house and work their way down, frustrating Tom, who desperately wanted to see the chrysalis again.
Up on the third floor, the inspector started by declaring that the secret stairway was stupid; he rolled his eyes as he peered down into the shadows. But he said that the wood felt sturdy enough as he walked up and down the staircase, not that Tom and Jenny would ever really need to use it. Unless Tom needed to sneak down to the kitchen to get some late-night booze, he added with a harsh laugh as he walked out of the room and made his way back down to the second floor.
Ray took his time going through each room and clearly loved the sound of his own voice. When he wasn’t pointing out cracks in the wood or holes that might mean termites, the inspector told story after story about drunken shenanigans and mentioned probably a hundred different sports teams and players, about 1 percent of which Tom recognized. Tom’s evident and total disinterest in sports seemed to confuse the older man but did not discourage him; the stories continued, regardless.
Still, the inspector was impressed by the house, concluding that the previous owners had put some money or work or both into it.
As Ray launched into a fresh lament about one of New York’s teams (baseball, basketball—Tom wasn’t even sure), they reached the kitchen. Tom’s stomach twisted when he stepped onto the linoleum.
The inspector glanced at the large gray stain on the floor but apparently decided it wasn’t worth mentioning. After pointing out a few minor flaws, nothing Tom couldn’t handle, Ray headed for the closed basement door.
“We don’t need to go down there,” Tom said from across the room, only then realizing that he had backed up against the far counter. “I need to clean it up first. It’s a mess.”
“Excuse me?” Ray said, bewilderment creasing his face. “The basement is probably the most important place to check. You’ve got your water heater, the furnace, plumbing that runs to the street … the guts of the whole—”
“I said, we’re not going down there.” Tom’s raised voice sounded alien to his own ears. He slid open a drawer behind him, his hands moving almost on their own. His fingers curled around the handle of a knife.
Ray cocked his head, as if amused or sensing danger, but Tom said nothing more, and at last the older man shook his head, sighed, and walked out of the room, making more notes on his pad of paper.
“As long as you sign the paperwork at the end and your check clears, it’s no skin off my back,” he said. Followed by, “Fucking hippie fag,” under his breath.
Tom let go of the knife, hearing it quietly clatter back into the drawer like an echo of a dream. He stared at his hand, tears filling his eyes.
What the hell was that? he thought.
When he lifted his head, the basement door seemed to be pulsating in and out. The sound of breathing rose in the room, soft but insistent. It was a sound that he recognized. And welcomed. The kitchen tunneled into darkness around him.
He took one step in the direction of the basement, his foot throwing off intense sparks of colors when it hit the floor. The high the chrysalis had given him before was reinserting itself into his consciousness but it was a pale reflection of the real thing. He needed to touch it again. Immediately.
Ray’s voice boomed out of the other room, invading the darkness and stopping Tom in his tracks. “Let’s go! I can’t leave you in here, and I need to lock up! Some of us have to, you know, work for a living!”
The kitchen snapped back into focus, brightly sunlit. The breathing sound faded, replaced by birds chirping outside. Disoriented by the sensory assault, Tom tried to slow his own breathing, hearing his pulse race in his ears. The high was receding and his mind grasped for it, but it was no use. It faded away completely.
“I don’t have all day!” Ray shouted from the porch, where Chelsea still talked on her phone, jolting Tom into motion.
Leaving the kitchen, he took one last look over his shoulder. The basement door stared back. Unmoving. Implacable.
Patient.
MONTH TWO
The house closing was awkward at best.
There were two lawyers in the room, neither one exactly pleasant. The lawyer for the owner in Europe was a pencil-thin woman in a harsh business suit. Her long gray hair flowed over her shoulders.
Chelsea hadn’t been able to make the closing, which had kind of bummed Jenny out. While Tom “hadn’t” been smoking a joint in the basement when they first saw the house, she’d spent some time talking to the real estate agent and started to kind of like her, despite the woman’s uptight fussiness. She’d gotten the sense that maybe Chelsea didn’t love Victoria, or maybe had fought with her during their sorority days, and that was enough for Jenny to reconsider her initial reaction to the woman. It helped that Chelsea’s somewhat cold manner had thawed a bit as they chatted.
Jenny had even fantasized about Chelsea inviting them over for dinner once they moved to Jersey, she and Tom rolling their eyes at the insanity of having kids, enjoying a giant meal at a big table. Maybe even striking up a real friendship—her first New Jersey friend. But Chelsea hadn’t been able to make it.
So they had to settle for a rude lawyer instead, a man Chelsea apparently worked with a lot, with a big bald head, a too-bushy beard, and a too-loud voice, when he deigned to speak at all. Two mean lawyers on one side of the table, Tom and Jenny on the other. And long stretches of silence as “their” lawyer stabbed his finger at documents, indicating where they should sign.
It doesn’t matter, Jenny thought as she signed the last line on the last page. The house is finally ours. It’s ours.
* * *
As they stood in front of the house … their house … Jenny shot Tom a glance from the corner of her eye. With the light streaming through his fingers and striping his face, it was hard to tell what he was feeling. Hell, she was having trouble figuring out how she was feeling.
They’d just gotten out of their rental truck, the biggest one they had been able to find after calling almost every place in Lower Manhattan. They had barely managed to fit all their crap into it. Who knew two people could cram so much stuff into a studio apartment?
Kevin, Victoria, and Lakshmi had offered to lend a hand with packing, which was a huge help. Kevin and Victoria always got along like gangbusters, which continually puzzled Tom and Jenny. Back
when they were dating, they had joked that her sister and his best friend, two very different people, were probably going to hate each other on sight. But once introductions were made, it was clear that the two of them were destined to be fast friends.
When every last thing had been stuffed into the truck, shoved into the overflowing garbage area, or splayed out on the sidewalk for passersby to pick through, Jenny and Tom had treated their three helpers to soda and pizza in the empty apartment, their voices echoing bizarrely in the skeletal space, an empty insect shell.
“I’m going to miss this place,” Lakshmi said as she picked at a slice of pizza. “You guys had some great parties here. Especially those early ones on the roof.”
“Before the landlord realized what was going on and put a new alarm up there! Bastard!” Kevin said, laughing.
Even Victoria smiled at the memories. “It’s certainly the end of an era,” she said, a bittersweet tone in her voice.
“And now these two suckers are descending into the ninth circle of hell,” Kevin said. “New Jerrrrrrsey…,” he added in a spooky voice, wiggling his fingers and waggling his eyebrows as if he were a kid telling a ghost story around a campfire.
“The most dreaded of states,” Victoria added.
“Be nice, you two,” Lakshmi admonished.
Kevin and Victoria laughed, but Tom and Jenny were quiet as they barely chewed and sipped, their stomachs sour with nerves, looking around the apartment that had been a part of their lives since before they were even married. Jenny was surprised to see a tear roll down Tom’s cheek, though he wiped it away before anyone else could spot it. She fought to suppress her own tears. She never cried in front of her sister if she could help it.
“Well, I, for one, am very excited for you guys,” Lakshmi continued. “I think it’s really cool and really brave what you’re doing. It’s not easy to make a big change like this. I’m not sure I would be able to do it without melting into a puddle of anxiety.”
The Chrysalis Page 4