Local Knowledge

by Liza Gyllenhaal

  “Polanski took me up to that new site outside of Harringdale today,” Paul told me a few weeks after Clara was resettled with Louise and Mike. “Land went straight up a mountain. We’re talking a thirty-degree gradient. We’re going to need to lay in switchbacks the whole way up. It’s getting really crazy. I can’t believe their town zoning people let that one get by. It would be a total nightmare trying to get a fire truck up there.”

  We were having a lot of conversations along these lines since Paul began sitting on Red River’s planning board that spring. As well as having solid experience in the construction business, Paul served on the volunteer fire department and was good at troubleshooting potential problems the town might have trying to service all the new houses going in. Since 9/11, the local real estate market was booming: prices soaring, new home permits at a record high. It was about that time we heard that a real estate brokerage was opening up in town. The wife of a wealthy retired weekending couple had purchased the old Hildebrand house on Route 198 and had renovated it for office use.

  I just assumed that Paul saw only the good in all this development. He was always telling me to look on the bright side of things. Yes, the rural landscape was being transformed by all the expensive and enormous new homes, he would agree, but think what the burgeoning tax revenues meant for the school district and the town budget, which for years had limped along on a deficit. And all the new people, driving in to the general store for their Sunday Times, and actually honking when old Theo Magnusen took a minute or so to get his slipping clutch into gear? Paul would say, “Give them time to get acclimated. There’s just no point in getting your hackles up. Think of all the places farther upstate that are still losing population. We’re lucky. We’re in a growth spurt. Things will settle down. These kind of changes always take some getting used to.”

  I took him at his word. I didn’t see what all this was costing him on some deeper, emotionally inaccessible level. I’m not sure if he understood himself how much he suppressed things, always trying to put a good face on a bad situation. We’d been doing it for so many years now that it had simply become our way of coping. He seemed so positive to me, confident about the future. We weren’t planning to have another child so soon after Beanie, but when I told him I was pregnant again, he’d seemed happy. I should have remembered how he felt about children: each one was a miracle to him. What could he do but open his arms again, provide unconditional love?

  We saw Luke on a pretty regular basis in those days, though his visits were rarely planned. Paul would run into him at the transfer station and invite him back to the house for pancakes. Or we’d drive past and see him brush cutting around his sculptures in front of the cottage and stop to chat. He’d moved out of the big house soon after Leslie had left and settled into the old farmhand’s place, setting up a workshop in the basement. With Paul’s help he even started a Web page to help sell his sculptures, as well as link them to listings on eBay and other online venues. If Luke sold three or four pieces a year, Paul told me, you’d have to think him lucky. But he scraped along somehow. And I think the two of us had finally reached a point of accommodation. We covered up our mutual dislike for the sake of Paul and the girls. And I had to admit that Luke engaged Beanie as no other adult I knew could. She was skittish and shy with her aunts and uncles, but she’d race out to meet Luke whenever he pulled up in that rust-pitted Oldsmobile.

  “I hope it’s okay with you that I invited Luke for supper,” Paul told me when I was about four months along with Lia. It was a Sunday in late October and we’d spent the afternoon raking leaves. I was still plagued by morning sickness and usually feeling exhausted by dinnertime. I had laundry to fold and Beanie to feed, but all I wanted to do was go upstairs and lie down.

  “Oh, Paul …” I sighed.

  “Hey, don’t worry. I’ll grill some hamburgers for us—and some portabellas for him. I can do the whole thing. It’s no problem. Rachel can help with Beanie. You go on up and take a nap. We’ll call you when we’re ready to eat.”

  I’m not sure what happened. I glanced out the window before I crawled into bed and saw Paul rolling the grill out of the garage with one hand while holding a can of beer in the other. I didn’t think I actually fell asleep, though the hour or two that I thought I was lying there seemed to pass quickly. I heard Luke’s voice at one point, crying: “Go out long. Way back!” He and Paul both enjoyed teaching Rachel how to play baseball and football, reliving their high school glory days. I woke up in the dark, their voices suddenly loud and insistent below me in the kitchen. I’d been asleep for almost four hours. They were sitting around the table when I came downstairs, dirty plates stacked in the sink. Beanie was in her high chair, her bib smeared with catsup. Rachel was sitting in my chair at the end of the table, her face pale under the bright overhead lights. Paul and Luke were obviously in the middle of an argument. I’d heard a phrase or two of it on the stairs. It was one of the few times I could ever remember hearing them raise their voices at each other:

  “It’s the most hideous thing I’ve ever …”

  “… started working on it two months ago. Who’s to say …”

  “That’s no excuse, damn it …”

  “Hey there, remember me?” I asked now, walking into the room and coming up behind Paul. I massaged his shoulders, feeling the tension in his muscles.

  “I went up to get you,” Paul said, “but you were sleeping so peacefully, I didn’t have the heart to wake you. There’s a burger or two over there somewhere.”

  “What’s up?” I asked, looking over at Luke.

  “I just found out that your husband is helping to build that enormous eyesore of a place on Jarvis Mountain. I thought it was a hotel at first. Some kind of resort. Turns out two people are going to live there. Just two! What an incredible waste. It just destroys that lovely uninterrupted stretch of ridge and forest. It’s all you see when you drive up North Branch now.”

  “Oh, it’s not that bad. Once they do a little landscaping …”

  “Come on, Paul! They took down a ton of really great hardwood trees. Oaks and birch, wonderful old sugar maples. Who cares about their damned landscaping plans? They’ve already raped—”

  “Luke … ?” I said, nodding my head toward Rachel.

  “Sorry,” he said, drumming his hand on the tabletop. “I know I get kind of worked up on this subject.”

  “Well, I do, too,” I said. “Paul and I have this argument all the time.” I heated up my dinner in the microwave and ate standing up at the counter, I was so hungry. By then it was nine thirty and I made Rachel and Beanie say good night. Rachel gave her dad a hug and then walked around and hugged Luke, too. I held Beanie up to kiss Paul and then took her over to Luke.

  “Sleep well, Beanstalk,” he told her, giving her a kiss on the forehead.

  Things seemed to have quieted down between the two men while I was upstairs, though I could still hear the rise and fall of their voices. But when I came back down a half an hour or so later, it seemed that the conversation had deteriorated once again into an argument, though the tone was more subdued than before, sadder. I stopped at the bottom of the steps and listened.

  “But it’s an outrage that the town doesn’t try to stop it. And I have a hard time accepting that you are a willing participant in all this.”

  “It’s a job. A damned good one. You looked around the table tonight and saw those girls. They’re what I have to think about first now. Them, and another baby on the way. I wish I could afford to have your scruples. But I can’t.”

  “You know what it is? I feel like we’re cannibalizing our birthright. The one good, beautiful thing we ever had was this land, you know? And now, in order to survive, we’re devouring it—or letting strangers have the pleasure. All that’ll be left soon are the rusting hay balers and the tires, and crazy me, trying to put the past together again and sell it along the roadside.”

  “And you think I don’t feel the same way? Give me another option and I
’d jump on it in a second. But after a certain point you just have to say: okay, man, this is it. This is the deal. Make the best of it. Live with it. Let the rest of it go.”

  “Well, I guess that’s the real difference between you and me.”

  I heard their chairs scrape as they pushed back from the table. Luke’s voice faded somewhat as he headed for the door. “I’m not going to let it go. I can’t.”

  Part Seven

  26

  “I just feel like there’s no end to him. Every day, I find out something new and amazing. I mean, this whole thing about his dad. The family, going back to the founding fathers or something. And that house? It must have been incredible. He showed me a photograph he has of it. I guess it was taken sometime around the turn of the last century. It’s one of those sepia prints with these women—you know how beautiful they looked back then with those long white gauzy dresses and great wide-brimmed hats—all dressed up and playing croquet on the front lawn. The house is kind of spread out like a stage set behind them. All those rooms! Those long French windows! Was it as wonderful as it looked in the picture? It’s such a shame it had to be torn down.”

  I squinted into the strong morning sunlight. Anne and I were sitting on the octagonal section of the deck that wrapped around the southwest corner of her house, looking down on our children playing in the garden. Rachel had them all keyed up about the idea of fairies. After having them discover the letter written in “fairy language” up by the pond earlier in the summer, she’d helped them construct a miniature fairy castle and garden under the trellis. When nobody was looking, she’d sneak down and leave little gifts she’d bought at the general store—Pez dispensers or balsa wood airplanes—for them to find. Beanie and Lia had been raised on this fantastical fare so they took Rachel’s inventions pretty much in their stride, but for the Zeller children, especially Max, it had opened up a whole new world of wonder. Anne had told me that the first thing he did every morning was to run down to the garden to see “if the fairies had come.”

  “Well, it had pretty much fallen apart by then. Literally. The roof had collapsed and there was water damage everywhere. Nana had an architectural firm specializing in old house restoration come in and look it over, but they said it would take millions of dollars to make it habitable again.”

  “So where had it been exactly?” Anne asked me, turning around. She held her hand up to shade her eyes and looked north into the woods. “Luke took me up there the other night, but he got confused and turned around by the new houses. He thinks it’s more or less where the Naylors’ place is now.”

  “You were with him at night? What about the kids, Anne?” I knew that her children were not my concern. I had no right to worry about them. But I couldn’t help myself. For the past week, ever since I’d found out about Anne and Luke, I’d worried a lot about what was going on, and, despite the two adults’ assurances, about how exposed and vulnerable the children seemed to be. I’d purchased new cell phones and a better wireless plan and had taken to checking in with Rachel at least twice a day. She didn’t seem surprised by or to resent my concern, which made me wonder all over again how much she knew about why I suddenly seemed so vigilant. And I’d just found out that any hope for a quick resolution to all the subterfuge had been dashed. Richard had come up from the city the night before and then turned right around earlier that morning to head down to Kennedy Airport and a flight to Europe. He was in the midst of some big new piece of international business, which, according to Anne, had preoccupied him all summer.

  “He’ll be back this Thursday for a week’s vacation. I’ll tell him then when we have the time to really talk things through. And when he’s in the right mood to listen. You can’t believe how he gets when he’s in the middle of a business deal. It’s like his mind actually morphs into one of those PowerPoint presentations, do you know what I mean? He doesn’t even see me then.”

  Anne seemed happy enough to delay the confrontation, and I guess I couldn’t really blame her. I didn’t envy her having to force a final face-off with Richard. From what she’d told me, they both knew the divorce was inevitable, but I’m sure that didn’t make the hard reality of breaking up a home any easier to handle. In the meantime, Anne was on a high. I’d never seen her so exuberant and carefree. If she was given the opportunity, I sensed she would talk about Luke for hours on end. But my busy work schedule was only getting busier as I tried to juggle new inquiries and showings, walk-throughs and closings. I’d also suffered my first real setback since becoming a broker, something that had confused and upset me so much initially I hadn’t even told Paul about it yet or allowed myself to dwell on it for very long. This was actually the first opportunity I’d had to sit down alone with Anne—out of earshot of our offspring—since learning about her and Luke. And now, when she didn’t respond to my obvious concern about her children, I wondered briefly if I’d somehow overstepped my bounds. But it remained one of the things I liked most about Anne, that she didn’t seem to want to set any limits when it came to intimacy. I got the sense that she felt free to tell me anything—and expected the same in return.

  “Anne?” I asked again. “You’re leaving the children alone at night to be with Luke?”

  “For heaven’s sakes, I told you weeks ago that I do that! Before Luke, before you, before moving up here. I can’t sleep. I go stir crazy. So I go out. Max and Katie are fine. They’re heavy sleepers, and besides, they’re totally used to it now. Also, I’m sorry to turn this around on you, but you really don’t leave us too much choice. It rained three straight afternoons this week, so Rachel and the kids were around here the whole time. You see, I’m just trying to abide by the rules you insisted on, and also get to spend a little time with Luke. But it’s never enough! I hate having to leave him. Having to come back up here. I don’t feel right anymore unless I’m with him. I feel unbalanced, actually physically unwell. It’s like he acts on me in an almost chemical way—like an antidepressant, or mood stabilizer. I’ve never felt like this with anybody before. That craving to be in his presence. I can’t wait—I really don’t know if I can wait—to be with him all the time. The idea of waking up in the morning with him beside me in bed is—”

  “Are you going to try to get this house in the settlement?” I asked, cutting her off. “I can’t see you living down at Luke’s place somehow.” I really didn’t want to hear all the intimate details of their physical relationship; I would have thought she’d remember how embarrassed I’d become in the past when she tried to talk to me about her sex life. But I guess she couldn’t resist; the need to confide—to talk about her lover—was just too powerful.

  “I don’t know. I don’t care,” she said. “I know I have to start thinking about all of these things. And I will. Soon. But right now I just so much want to live in the moment, in my own body. I have never felt so alive as a human being, so happy to be who I am, where I am. Maddie, he’s just the most sensual man I have ever met in my life. Do you know what he asked me the other night?”

  “No, really, Anne—”

  “He wanted to know if it was true that a woman could have an orgasm just by having her breasts kissed and caressed. He’d heard somewhere that it was possible, but he’d never tried to find out before if it was one of those urban legends or not. So, of course, we—”

  “Anne, please, I really don’t want to hear about all this.”

  “Oh.” She turned and looked at me. “Oh! I’m sorry. I keep forgetting how well you two know each other. I bet it’s like hearing someone talk about your brother. You must see him so differently than I do. I’d love to know everything you know about him. I actually envy the fact that you knew him as a boy. That you got to see him growing up. I can’t imagine it somehow—Luke as a child or teenager. You must have this wonderfully clear and complete picture of him. I just can’t seem to get him in any kind of perspective, do you know what I mean? There are so many different parts, and I feel like I could spend my whole life with each of them. Put
ting aside his sexuality, there’s the whole artistic thing. Have you seen some of the new pieces he’s been doing? They’re really amazing. So simple and powerful—like totems, I think. Incredibly erotic. I have a good friend in the city who runs a gallery down in Chelsea, and I’ve been talking to Luke about putting together a digital portfolio for her. It’s crazy that he doesn’t have any kind of representation. I just know that with the right gallery behind him, he could really—” She saw something in my expression that made her hesitate. “I’m ranting on, right? Like a maniac. It’s just so good to have someone to talk to about all this, Maddie! I’m bursting with love and excitement—and hope—for the first time in years and years.”

  “I am happy for you,” I told her. “But I’m worried, too, okay? I really, really want this to work out for the two of you. For Max and Katie, too. But I think that you and Luke need to start dealing with some of these realities, and with Richard. Do you know that he’s planning to lodge a formal complaint about Luke’s property at the special town meeting on Friday night?”

  “No, I—what do you mean? Complain about what? To whom? He doesn’t know a thing about us, he can’t possibly …”

  “No, it’s about the condition of Luke’s place. The art pieces by the roadside, all the materials lying around. He wants Luke to clean things up. He called Owen Phelps, who’s head of the board, to say he wants to raise these concerns with the select committee at the meeting.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sakes,” Anne said, looking out over the tree line. “Isn’t that just so typical of him? He needs to get his way no matter what. He’s been bitching about Luke’s place since the moment we bought up here. And he’s so single-minded when something like that bothers him, no matter how ridiculous it is. Do you know that he totally badgered some downstairs neighbors of ours in the city about their dog? It used to bark in the morning and wake Richard up earlier than he liked. I mean, by maybe fifteen minutes or so. But he couldn’t stand it. He got the co-op board involved, then he actually forced them to take legal action. The people finally moved out, can you believe it? He’s just relentless. Well, so what? Let him carry on any way he likes! Let him make an utter fool of himself!”