“I thought you’d be relieved,” I said.
“Relieved!”
She threw the blender next. It hit me in the chest, then fell on my foot. Instantly I dove to the floor, buried my head in my knees, and was weeping as hoarsely and furiously as a child.
“Stop throwing things!” I shouted weakly.
“I can’t believe you,” Susan said. “You tell me you’re leaving me for a man and then you want me to mother you, take care of you? Is that all I’ve ever been to you? Fuck that! You’re not a baby!”
I heard footsteps next, a car starting, Charlotte barking. I opened my eyes. Broken glass, destroyed machinery all over the tiles.
I got in my car and followed her. All the way to the beach. “Leave me alone!” she shouted, pulling off her shoes and running out onto the sand. “Leave me the fuck alone!” Charlotte romped after her, barking.
“Susan!” I screamed. “Susan!” I chased her. She picked up a big piece of driftwood and hit me with it. I stopped, dropped once again to my knees. Susan kept running. Eventually she stopped. I saw her a few hundred feet up the beach, staring at the waves.
Charlotte kept running between us, licking our faces, in a panic of barks and wails.
Susan started walking back toward me. I saw her getting larger and larger as she strode down the beach. She strode right past me.
“Charlotte!” Susan called from the parking lot. “Charlotte!” But Charlotte stayed.
Susan got back in her car and drove away.
At first I stayed at Ted’s house. But Susan—we were seeing each other again, taking walks on the beach, negotiating—said that was too much, so I moved into the Dutch Boy Motel. Still, every day, I went to see the house, either to eat my lunch or just stand in the yard, feeling the sun come down through the branches of the trees there. I was learning a lot about the house. It had been built in 1934 by Josiah Applegate, a local contractor, as a wedding present for his daughter, Julia, and her husband, Spencer Bledsoe. The Bledsoes occupied the house for six years before the birth of their fourth child forced them to move, at which point it was sold to another couple, Mr. and Mrs. Hubert White. They, in turn, sold the house to Mr. and Mrs. Salvatore Rinaldi, who sold it to Mrs. Barbara Adams, a widow, who died. The estate of Mrs. Adams then sold the house to Arthur and Penelope Hilliard, who lived in it until their deaths just last year at the ages of eighty-six and eighty-two. Mrs. Hilliard was the first to go, in her sleep; according to her niece, Mr. Hilliard then wasted away, eventually having to be transferred to Shady Manor Nursing Home, where a few months later a heart attack took him. They had no children. Mr. Hilliard was a retired postman. Mrs. Hilliard did not work, but was an active member of the Ladies’ Village Improvement Society. She was famous for her apple cakes, which she sold every year at bake sales. Apparently she went through periods when she would write letters to the local paper every week, long diatribes about the insensitivity of the new houses and new people. I never met her. She had a reputation for being crotchety, but maternal. Her husband was regarded as docile and wicked at poker.
The house had three bedrooms—one pitifully small—and two and a half baths. The kitchen cabinets were made of knotty, dark wood which had grown sticky from fifty years of grease, and the ancient yellow Formica countertops were scarred with burns and knife scratches. The wallpaper was red roses in the kitchen, leafy green leaves in the living room, and was yellowing and peeling at the edges. The yard contained a dogwood, a cherry tree, and a clump of gladiolas. Overgrown privet hedges fenced the front door, which was white with a beaten brass knocker. In the living room was a dusty pair of sofas, and dark wood shelves lined with Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, and a big television from the early seventies. The shag carpeting—coffee brown—appeared to be a recent addition.
The quilts on the beds, the Hilliards’ niece told me, were handmade, and might be for sale. They were old-fashioned patchwork quilts, no doubt stitched together over several winters in front of the television. “Of course,” the niece said, “if the price was right, we might throw the quilts in—you know, as an extra.”
I was a man with the keys to fifty houses in my pockets. Just that morning I had toured the ten bathrooms of the $10.5 million oceanfront. And I was smiling. I was smiling like someone in love.
I took Ted to see the house about a week after I left Susan. It was a strange time for both of us. I was promising him my undying love, but I was also waking up in the middle of every night crying for Susan and Charlotte. We walked from room to room, just as I’d imagined, and just as I’d planned, in the doorway to the master bedroom, I turned him around to face me, bent his head down (he was considerably taller than me), and kissed him. It was meant to be a moment of sealing, of confirmation, a moment that would make radiantly, abundantly clear the extent to which this house was meant for us, and we for it. But instead the kiss felt rehearsed, dispassionate. And Ted looked nervous. “It’s a cute house, Paul,” he said. “But God knows I don’t have any money. And you already own a house. How can we just buy it?”
“As soon as the divorce is settled, I’ll get my equity.”
“You haven’t even filed for divorce yet. And once you do, it could take years.”
“Probably not years.”
“So when are you filing for divorce?”
He had his hands in his pockets. He was leaning against a window draped with white flounces of cotton and powderpuffs.
“I need to take things slow,” I said. “This is all new for me.”
“It seems to me,” Ted said, “that you need to take things slow and take things fast at the same time.”
“Oh, Ted!” I said. “Why do you have to complicate everything? I just love this house, that’s all. I feel like this is where I—where we—where we’re meant to live. Our dream house, Ted. Our love nest. Our cottage.”
Ted was looking at his feet. “Do you really think you’ll be able to leave Susan? For good?”
“Well, of course, I— Of course.”
“I don’t believe you. Soon enough she’s going to make an ultimatum. Come back, give up Ted, or that’s it. And you know what you’re going to do? You’re going to go back to her.”
“I’m not,” I said. “I wouldn’t.”
“Mark my words,” Ted said.
I lunged toward him, trying to pull him down on the sofa, but he pushed me away.
“I love you,” I said.
“And Susan?”
I faltered. “Of course, I love Susan too.”
“You can’t love two people, Paul. It doesn’t work that way.”
“Susan said the same thing, last week.”
“She’s right.”
“Why?”
“Because it isn’t fair.”
I considered this. I considered Ted, considered Susan. I had known Susan since Mrs. Polanski’s homeroom in fourth grade. We played Star Trek on the playground together, and roamed the back streets of Bayside. We were children in love, and we sought out every movie or book we could find about children in love.
Ted I’d known only a few months, but we’d made love with a passion I’d never imagined possible, and the sight of him unbuttoning his shirt made my heart race.
It was at that moment that I realized that while it is possible to love two people at the same time, in different ways, in the heart, it is not possible to do so in the world.
I had to choose, so of course, I chose Susan.
That day—the day of Ed and Grace-Anne, the day that threatened to end with the loss of my beloved house—Susan did not call me at work. The morning progressed slowly. I was waiting for Ed and Grace-Anne to reappear at the window and walk in the office doors, and sure enough, around eleven-thirty, they did. The receptionist led them to my desk.
“I’m Ed Cavallaro,” Ed said across my desk, as I stood to shake his hand. “This is my wife.”
“How do you do?” Grace-Anne said. She smelled of some sort of fruity perfume or lipstick, the kind teenaged g
irls wear. We sat down.
“Well, I’ll tell you, Mr. Hoover,” Ed said, “we’ve been summering around here for years, and I’ve just retired—I worked over at Grumman, upisland?”
“Congratulations,” I said.
“Ed was there thirty-seven years,” Grace-Anne said. “They gave him a party like you wouldn’t believe.”
“So, you enjoying retired life?”
“Just between you and me, I’m climbing the walls.”
“We’re active people,” Grace-Anne said.
“Anyway, we’ve always dreamed about having a house near the beach.”
“Ed, let me tell about the dream.”
“I didn’t mean that dream.”
“I had a dream,” Grace-Anne said. “I saw the house we were meant to retire in, clear as day. And then, just this morning, walking down the street, we look in your window, and what do we see? The very same house! The house from my dream!”
“How amazing,” I said. “Which house was it?”
“That cute little one for one sixty-five,” Grace-Anne said. “You know, with the cedar shingles?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Oh, I’ll show you.”
We stood up and walked outside, to the window. “Oh, that house!” I said. “Sure, sure. Been on the market almost a year now. Not much interest in it, I’m afraid.”
“Now why is that?” Ed asked, and I shrugged.
“It’s a pleasant enough house. But it does have some problems. It’ll require a lot of TLC.”
“TLC we’ve got plenty of,” Grace-Anne said.
“Grace-Anne, I told you,” Ed said, “the last thing I want to do is waste my retirement fixing up.”
“But it’s my dream house!” Grace-Anne fingered the buttons of her blouse. “Anyway, what harm can it do to look at it?”
“I have a number of other houses in roughly the same price range which you might want to look at—”
“Fine, fine, but first, couldn’t we look at that house? I’d be so grateful if you could arrange it.”
I shrugged my shoulders. “It’s not occupied. Why not?”
And Grace-Anne smiled.
Even though the house was only a few hundred feet away, we drove. One of the rules of real estate is; Drive the clients everywhere. This means your car has to be both commodious and spotlessly clean. I spent a lot—too much—of my life cleaning my car—especially difficult, considering Charlotte.
And so we piled in—Grace-Anne and I in front, Ed in back—and drove the block or so to Maple Street. I hadn’t been by the house for a few weeks, and I was happy to see that the spring seemed to have treated it well. The rich greens of the grass and the big maple trees framed it, I thought, rather lushly.
I unlocked the door, and we headed into that musty interior odor which, I think, may well be the very essence of stagnation, cryogenics, and bliss.
“Just like I dreamed,” Grace-Anne said, and I could understand why. Probably the Hilliards had been very much like the Cavallaros.
“The kitchen’s in bad shape,” Ed said. “How’s the boiler?”
“Old, but functional.” We headed down into the spidery basement. Ed kicked things.
Grace-Anne was rapturously fingering the quilts. “Ed, I love this house,” she said. “I love it.”
Ed sighed laboriously.
“Now, there are several other nice homes you might want to see—”
“None of them was in my dream.”
But Ed sounded hopeful. “Grace-Anne, it can’t hurt to look. You said it yourself.”
“But what if someone else snatches it from under us?” Grace-Anne asked, suddenly horrified.
“I tend to doubt that’s going to happen,” I said in as comforting a tone as I could muster. “As I mentioned earlier, the house has been on the market for over a year.”
“All right,” Grace-Anne said reluctantly, “I suppose we could look—look—at a few others.”
“I’m sure you won’t regret it.”
“Yes, well.”
I turned from them, breathing evenly.
Of course she had no idea I would sooner make sure the house burned down than see a contract for its purchase signed with her husband’s name.
I fingered some matches in my pocket. I felt terrified. Terrified and powerful.
When I got home from work that afternoon, Susan’s car was in the driveway and Charlotte, from her usual position of territorial inspection on the front stoop, was smiling up at me in her doggy way. I patted her head and went inside, but when I got there, there was a palpable silence which was far from ordinary, and soon enough I saw that its source was Susan, leaning over the kitchen counter in her sleek lawyer’s suit, one leg tucked under, like a flamingo.
“Hi,” I said.
I tried to kiss her, and she turned away.
“This isn’t going to work, Paul,” she said.
I was quiet a moment. “Why?” I asked.
“You sound relieved, grateful. You do. I knew you would.”
“I’m neither of those things. Just tell me why you’ve changed your mind since last night.”
“You tell me you’re in love with a man, you up and leave for three months, then out of the blue you come back. I just don’t know what you expect—do you want me to jump for joy and welcome you back like nothing’s happened?”
“Susan, yesterday you said—”
“Yesterday,” Susan said, “I hadn’t thought about it enough. Yesterday I was confused, and grateful, and— God, I was so relieved. But now—now I just don’t know. I mean, what the hell has this been for you, anyway?”
“Susan, honey,” I said, “I love you. I’ve loved you my whole life. Remember what your mother used to say, when we were kids, and we’d come back from playing on Saturdays? ‘You two are joined at the hip,’ she’d say. And we still are.”
“Have you ever loved me sexually?” Susan asked, suddenly turning to face me.
“Susan,” I said.
“Have you?”
“Of course.”
“I don’t believe you. I think it’s all been cuddling and hugging. Kid stuff. I think the sex only mattered to me. How do I know you weren’t thinking about men all those times?”
“Susan, of course not—”
“What a mistake,” Susan said. “If only I’d known back then, when I was a kid—”
“Doesn’t it matter to you that I’m back?”
“It’s not like you never left, for Christ’s sake!” She put her hands on my cheeks. “You left,” she said quietly. “For three months you left. And I don’t know, maybe love can be killed.”
She let go. I didn’t say anything.
“I think you should leave for a while,” Susan said. “I think I need some time alone—some time alone knowing you’re alone too.”
I looked at the floor. “Okay,” I said. And I suppose I said it too eagerly, because Susan said, “If you go back to Ted, that’s it. We’re finished for good.”
“I won’t go back to Ted,” I said.
We were both quiet for a few seconds.
“Should I go now?”
Susan nodded.
“Well, then, good-bye,” I said. And I went.
This brings me to where I am now, which is, precisely, nowhere. I waited three hours in front of Ted’s house that night, but when, at twelve-thirty, his car finally pulled into the driveway, someone else got out with him. It has been two weeks since that night. Each day I sit at my desk, and wait for one of them, or a lawyer, to call. I suppose I am homeless, although I think it is probably inaccurate to say that a man with fifty keys in his pocket is ever homeless. Say, then, that I am a man with no home, but many houses.
Of course I am careful. I never spend the night in the same house twice. I bring my own sheets, and in the morning I always remake the bed I’ve slept in as impeccably as I can. The fact that I’m an early riser helps as well—that way, if another broker arrives, or a cleaning woman, I can say
I’m just checking the place out. And if the owners are coming back, I’m always the first one to be notified.
The other night I slept at the $10.5 million oceanfront. I used all the bathrooms; I swam in both the pools.
As for the Hilliards’ house—well, so far I’ve allowed myself to stay there only once a week. Not because it’s inconvenient—God knows, no one ever shows the place—but because to sleep there more frequently would bring me closer to a dream of unbearable pleasure than I feel I can safely go.
The Cavallaros, by the way, ended up buying a contemporary in the woods for a hundred and seventy-five, the superb kitchen of which turned out to be more persuasive than Grace-Anne’s dream. The Hilliards’ house remains empty, unsold. Their niece just lowered the price to one fifty—quilts included.
Funny: Even with all my other luxurious possibilities, I look forward to those nights I spend at the Hilliards’ with greater anticipation than anything else in my life. When the key clicks, and the door opens onto that living room with its rows of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, a rare sense of relief runs through me. I feel as if I’ve come home.
One thing about the Hilliards’ house is that the lighting is terrible. It seems there isn’t a bulb in the house over twenty-five watts. And perhaps this isn’t surprising—they were old people, after all, by no means readers. They spent their lives in front of the television. So when I arrive at night, I have to go around the house, turning on light after light, like ancient oil lamps. Not much to read by, but dim light, I’ve noticed, has a kind of warmth which bright light lacks. It casts a glow against the woodwork which is exactly, just exactly, like the reflection of raging fire.
When You Grow to Adultery
Andrew was in love with Jack Selden, so all Jack’s little habits, his particular ways of doing things, seemed marvelous to him: the way Jack put his face under the shower, after shampooing his hair, and shook his head like a big dog escaped from a bath; the way he slept on his back, his arms crossed in the shape of a butterfly over his face, fists on his eyes; his fondness for muffins and Danish and sweet rolls—what he called, at first just out of habit and then because it made Andrew laugh, “baked goods.” Jack made love with efficient fervor, his face serious, almost businesslike. Not that he was without affection, but everything about him had an edge; his very touch had an edge, there was the possibility of pain lurking behind every caress. It seemed to Andrew that Jack’s touches, more than any he’d known before, were full of meaning—they sought to express, not just to please or explore—and this gesturing made him want to gesture back, to enter into a kind of tactile dialogue. They’d known each other only a month, but already it felt to Andrew as if their fingers had told each other novels.
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