All the Houses

by Karen Olsson

  “Tim Atherton’s daughter?” he asked, and when I nodded he said, “Your dad’s a smart guy.”

  I knew that, but the man’s tone gave it weight. I wished I could get him to say more. Just then Hugo approached.

  “What a beautiful animal,” Hugo said, and in no time at all he started in on some question of trade with China. I hoped he would shut up, but the man in the down vest seemed as eager to discuss trade with China as Hugo was. I myself had a mental block on trade with China—any time those two words, trade and China, showed up in the same sentence, I started to fade.

  My sister’s husband had thick coppery hair and a highly audible voice, and early on I’d wondered whether Courtney had ended up with him for no better reason than that she’d noticed him, whether it had taken this emergency signal of a man to divert her from her agenda. His eyes were wide-set, roaming, forever trying to anchor themselves in some impassioned conversation that I didn’t want to have. They shared that interest, he and Courtney; they made a point of speaking about the war, about third world disasters, about the environment. Few people I knew in L.A. talked much about these things, not once they were past thirty.

  I excused myself.

  But how did I end up on the second floor—and inside our hostess’s closet? Having gone upstairs in search of a bathroom, I opened the wrong door and was welcomed by dry-cleaning bags, smells of cedar and perfume, a chorus line of shoes, each toe even with the next one. A mother’s closet. Even this strange one, though it was missing the particular belts and boots, purses and jackets and hose I knew best, was a very comforting place to stand. I stayed in there a spell, the noise of the party below barely reaching me. It seemed as good a place as any to finish my eggnog, to make a few notes, to try on—why not?—my hostess’s shoes. They pinched a bit.

  Of course in any tale worth its salt, the person hidden in a closet or behind a curtain becomes privy to some business she shouldn’t have seen, and so when I heard footsteps approaching I pulled the door almost closed, and I spied with my little eye.

  It was my dad. He sat on the bed and balanced his drink between his knees. I could hear his exhales. He took out his phone, its blue display a beacon in the darkness. His hands were slow: I always forgot that he was no longer in his forties, that I was closer to my forties than he was to his. He stopped, stared at the phone again, and at last made a call.

  “It’s me. Tim. It’s, ah, Saturday at around nine p.m. I’m at the Morgans, which made me think of you. I just had a very interesting talk with Al Barnett, I was telling him about my book, the one that I’ve been working on, and he thought it sounded very promising. I think … well. I know you’re busy. But please give me a call at, ah, your earliest convenience.”

  Earliest convenience? After ending the call he waited a moment, as if he expected an answer. Although I couldn’t be sure, I believed that I had just seen my dad drunk-dial my mom. And was he still working on his book, in spite of what he’d told me?

  Who was this person?

  Everything I’d written about him so far, I’d written by looking away from him, and now my Tim Atherton seemed all wrong. The outline of a body on the floor, from which position my living dad had stood up and wandered off. Surely this was why it was more typical to write about your parents after they were dead and could be pinned down, I thought—even if that was an illusion, that they could be specified, you could still manage it without confronting them, without having to compare your meager version to the living one.

  I waited until he left the room to emerge. I spotted a landline phone on top of a dresser, picked it up, and listened to the dial tone for a while. It occurred to me that I remembered Gary’s number.

  I didn’t expect him to answer, but he did. “Hello?… Hello?”

  The sound of his voice paralyzed me. Then someone else got on the line, waited, and then said, “Hello?”

  “Hello?” Gary repeated.

  “Who is this?” It was the boy upstairs, I realized. Jonathan.

  “This is Gary Doyle, who is this?”

  “You sound lame.”

  “You sound a little old to be making prank calls, asshole,” Gary said, and hung up. A mysterious cheer resounded from below.

  As I walked back downstairs, Hugo appeared at the landing, carrying a little plate with little veggies on it. His tie was covered in circles: dark, filled-in circles surrounded by the outlines of larger circles, like dozens of eyes. Instead of meeting his real eyes, I looked at the tie. I thought, as I’d thought in the past, my sister sleeps in a bed with this man. Every night. But I passed judgment so readily, even when—especially when—the person I was judging could be said to be better off than yours truly. About Courtney that certainly could have been said. It had always been sayable, implied if not said outright, and though I would’ve preferred to be free of any negative feelings about our lifelong inequality, Courtney > Helen, I was not.

  What a human I was turning out to be. So what if her husband was taking baby carrots with him to the bathroom, what did that matter? He turned himself sideways and backed up against the wall so that I could pass—out of politeness, but it was as though I weighed three hundred pounds. I felt enormous.

  Downstairs Courtney was at the bar, mixing the feeblest of cocktails in a plastic cup: seltzer with a tiny splash of vermouth and a lemon wedge. I picked up the vodka and started pouring it into the glass. “You forgot this.”

  “Stop. I’m not drinking that.”

  “Yo, check out the boots. Those are tight.”

  “I got them in New York,” she said. She’d gone up to New York for work and had seen Maggie and I guess had gone shopping with her. I knew it wasn’t that they’d left me out on purpose, and still it pinched at that thing in me.

  “What are you wearing?” she asked.

  I tried to explain about the bi-stretch pants. I’d worn those.

  “Are they comfortable?”

  “I think if I gain weight over the holidays, they’ll just keep stretching. In two directions,” I said.

  “I’m so ready for the holidays to be over. Hugo and I were thinking we might just go away somewhere.”

  “You? A vacation?” I’d gone upstairs in a strange mood and come back down in a stranger one.

  “I’d still have to work some, but I could bring my computer.”

  “No, come on, don’t. You should totally go on a vacation. A real one. You wouldn’t even have to go anywhere, you could just take a little time off, lock your computer in a drawer, and do the whole holiday jam for once. Do it up.”

  I knew what she thought, that I was always on vacation. It wasn’t true, I worked all the time, but my work wasn’t like hers.

  “It’s nothing but eating and drinking and buying shit and thinking of all the things you meant to get done but didn’t in the past year.”

  “Honey, if you’re against Christmas, you’re against America. And eating and drinking and buying shit are what you do instead of brooding over the past year. You gots to chill, my sister. Chill out and have some alcohol. Have a treat.” I held up a gingerbread snowman.

  “I’ll pass.”

  I waved the snowman in her face and then bit off its head. From across the room Hugo was watching, I noticed, with a fond bug-eyed expression that might have been for either one of us, or for us both.

  It had been easier when we were girls and I was simply trying to emulate Courtney. I borrowed her clothes, I copied her speech, I listened to her tapes, I followed her and her friends around the house until they sent me away. Or else we fought. At the corner where the school bus picked us up, she once gave me a black eye with a broom handle we’d found. Another time I almost managed to pull down her pants just as the bus was coming. Always parked at that same corner was a secret service trailer assigned to an ex–vice president who lived nearby, and just in front of the trailer we would fight each other, possibly observed by the agents inside, we never knew.

  Our father found us, and came to shore. “You k
now who that is, the fellow you and Hugo were talking to earlier?” he asked me.

  “He said he runs some kind of data management business.”

  “He was at Treasury for years. Pretty high up, by the end. He was Frank Lake’s boss.”

  Who Frank Lake was, I had not a clue, but I pretended to remember.

  “Are you having a good time?” I asked Dad.

  He seemed confused by the question. “I’m having a fine time.”

  “Is the semester over?” Courtney asked.

  “Just final papers to grade.”

  “That’s good,” she said.

  “So girls,” he began—it was usual for him to address us that way—“what should our plan be for Christmas?”

  “We need a Plan B?” I asked.

  “Maybe we could do a little more this year, you know, make it nice. I’m planning to go to the cathedral the night before if anyone wants to join me.”

  “Isn’t Mom coming down?” The past few years, she’d taken the train to D.C., and we’d had an early dinner with her on Christmas Eve. Then she would take the train back.

  “If you wanted to join me afterward, I meant. It’s a late service.”

  “I think Hugo and I might go to St. Bart’s,” Courtney said abruptly.

  “St. Bart’s?” Dad asked.

  “It’s an island.”

  “I’m familiar with it. For Christmas?”

  “It’s been so hectic with work, and the move, and everything, we could use a few days on the beach.”

  “Sounds nice. Maybe we could all go!” Courtney stiffened, and he added, “For the weekend at least, and then you two could stay longer…” She closed her eyes and whispered no, her face less sorry than irritated.

  “Okay. Scratch that.”

  “Why do you have to do this?” she asked.

  “What? Do what?”

  “Is it so wrong for me to spend a holiday with my husband? That’s something that people do. Hugo is my family now.”

  We all looked over at Hugo, who had made his way back to the birdcage and coaxed the cockatiel, or whatever it was, onto his long tan finger. He was leaning his head forward and talking to the bird, probably about trade policy with China.

  “Of course, he’s your husband,” Dad said. “Of course. If you haven’t bought your tickets yet, why don’t you let me get them, as a Christmas present.”

  “Stop it! Just stop it!”

  “What is up your butt?” I asked.

  She ignored that and kept after Dad. “I don’t need you to buy the tickets. I don’t need you to do anything for me.” She turned away and walked over to Hugo, to tell him it was time to leave. The bird seemed reluctant to let go of Hugo’s finger, until my sister nudged it with the side of her hand.

  I understood that an old ugly argument had crawled out of the depths and taken hold of Courtney, and I wanted to say something reassuring to Dad, something about how this probably had nothing to do with him, but before I came up with anything he went off to get another drink.

  I felt a draft but was slow to recognize that it had come through the open front door. I had failed in my watch, such as it had been, for here came Rob, already in the house, already shrugging off his coat. He’d had a haircut. It made me think of school, of the entire breed of private school boys and in particular that clan of handsome, lacrosse-playing, beer-pounding, boisterous ones, who floored their parents’ cars at 1:00 a.m. on Western Avenue, and flirted with the Spanish teachers, and set off on summer service trips to Central America that they would later describe on their college applications. The kind of kids who bug the shit out of people—born on third base and thinks he hit a triple was a criticism lobbed at our prep-school president, but I don’t remember those boys taking credit for their own exceptional luck. Yes, some of them had been arrogant dipsticks, but most had been merely obnoxious, often winningly so, and while I’m sure that they’d felt more confusion and angst than they’d let on, life had been good to them and they hadn’t denied it. They’d had fun, something I hadn’t had much of a knack for in high school, which is to say that while I had little spurts of fun, I never was able to relish, say, getting wasted or getting high or driving very fast. I didn’t feel superior: I’d always believed there was some worth in these activities, not for me but for the guys who experienced them with delight, guys who’d been living it up while I wrote in my journal.

  As best I could tell, Courtney hadn’t caught sight of Rob yet, and instead of going straight to him I cut toward her first, wanting to block her view. He saw me and watched quizzically as I made my zigzag, and then once I’d come close he leaned over to kiss me hello. I gave him my cheek and then glanced back.

  “Are we being discreet?” he asked.

  “Let’s go over there,” I said, pulling him into a throng of backs and shoulders near the drinks.

  “What the hell are you wearing?”

  “D.C. drag.”

  “Nice. Is there someplace I can put my coat?”

  “We won’t be here long. Did you get my message?”

  He pulled his phone out of his pocket and read it, as if for the first time, though I had a suspicion that he’d come precisely because I’d told him not to come. We were being continually jostled, and next to us, a man and a woman were yelling back and forth about the lamentable state of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. The woman was much taller than the man, and they had to project to make themselves heard.

  Insofar as my sister had been about to leave the party, I think my plan to hide Rob from her, silly as it was, might have in fact succeeded, had the crowd been slightly less oppressive, the OSHA critics not quite so noisy. But Rob took my hand, insisting we move to another spot, and when we came out from the pack, she was standing right there. He still had my hand in his. Her face, the narrower, cooler variant of my own face, managed to flay me while barely shifting its expression, until finally she turned to Rob.

  “I would introduce you to my husband, but we’re on our way out.”

  “Next time, I hope,” he said.

  “Next time.”

  She gave me another eye-smack before she strode past us. “Now that’s some real holiday cheer,” Rob said.

  “She’s had some stressful things to deal with lately. She’s not always like that,” I said, which was true, much as I sometimes made her out to be a full-time ice queen. “Let me go find my dad and tell him I’m leaving. We’re leaving, okay?”

  My father found us first, and I introduced him to Rob. “Remember I mentioned him to you?”

  “This is—you’re Dick’s…” He stared at Rob, as though he might find a resemblance.

  “Stepson, right.”

  “I think we’re taking off, Dad.”

  “I see. Do you have a car? Can I give you guys a ride someplace?”

  “That’s okay,” I said. “Stay here and enjoy the party.”

  “It’s no problem—”

  “I do have a car, actually,” Rob said. Dad seemed sorry to hear it.

  * * *

  At my apartment Rob grinned and grabbed me, then started to unbutton my blouse. He had this invisible ribbon he was winding around me. A chrysalis was forming, and meanwhile I was so full of questions, itches, feelings without words; they overwhelmed me, and I had trouble saying anything.

  As prey I wasn’t challenging enough, I hardly struggled. I found myself performing to keep him there, even though I didn’t necessarily want him there. In my head I’d started explaining myself to Courtney, making excuses: it wasn’t my fault, I had tried to un-invite him.

  What followed wasn’t especially nice or especially anything. Afterward he took a shower. By then it must’ve been midnight or later. I lay on the bed as I listened to the sound of the water, nestling into the gap in time this shower offered. It seemed to me that these gaps in time, the blank spaces inserted into the middle of the night, were the best part of hooking up. He came out of the bathroom rubbing his hair with a towel, naked th
e long dripping rest of him, and then found his BlackBerry. He was easily bored.

  I knew better than to ask him about Courtney, and still I asked him. When had they started going out?

  “Mmmm,” he said.

  “You guys totally went out.”

  “Uh-uh.”

  “Yes you did.”

  “We fooled around a few times.”

  “But I remember you picking her up from our house, I remember you calling.”

  “I might’ve done those things, but we weren’t … You know how your sister was in high school.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “She got around.”

  “Wait. That is not—it’s not like she was some slut.” He’d turned toward me by then, and I detested the look on his face, which managed to be innocent and superior at the same time, his brows lifting in surprise, or mock surprise, while the word slut hung there unrefuted. “Are you kidding me? She was not.”

  “I didn’t use that word.”

  “You’re wrong if you think that. She was into sports. She was a big jock.”

  “That’s not the only thing she was into. She got kind of out of control.”

  I felt suddenly furious. “That is so—”

  “I’m not making this up.”

  “You’d better leave,” I said.

  “You’re kicking me out?”

  “I am.”

  “You’re kicking me out of your apartment for saying that Courtney Atherton got around in high school.”