by Jonathan Dee
In another way, of course, the town was his family, and so the day of the funeral itself had an air of high emotion and fragile festivity. Services, kept simple, were held in the Episcopal church—likely the first time, a few of his friends allowed themselves to observe, he had ever crossed its threshold. The Undermountain Café put out a nice spread in the church’s reception hall afterwards, of which everyone gratefully partook, but the real tribute came later at the Ship, where the drinking and the tearful toasts and the unusual physicality among the men would go on past the State of Massachusetts’s legally designated closing time, because, as they kept grinningly reminding each other in loving memory of Marty Marty the One-Man Party, there was no law in Howland anymore.
Mark stopped in early for one beer, which turned into two. He saw his brother across the room, which wasn’t a shock even though Gerry had never had an especially kind word to say about Marty Solomon; he was surprised, though, when he turned back to say goodbye after that second beer and saw that Gerry was already gone. Mark shook a few more hands and drove back home. He’d thought he might see Hadi at the bar—he’d been at the church, without his wife—but Hadi didn’t show, which was just as well, Mark figured, since someone in that roomful of drunk, sad locals would surely have tried to mock him into paying for a round, or for every round. The Frasers had been at the church too. They sat in back and skipped the reception. Mark had heard through Karen that Viv Fraser was so shaken up, still, that she wouldn’t even go down to the basement to do laundry unless Joe stayed down there with her.
In his driveway Mark turned off the truck and before he even got to the top porch step he could hear Haley crying. It was her angry cry, her cry of injustice over not getting something she wanted, and so his real concern as he opened his front door was that whatever confrontation he’d missed would have put Karen in a touchy mood.
And it had. “You didn’t drive home drunk, did you?” was the first thing she said to him. Of course not, he replied softly. “Well I hope you had fun. I didn’t make dinner, because I figured we all got plenty to eat at the church.”
“What’s wrong with Haley?”
“Why don’t you ask her yourself?” Karen said, and took a glass of wine out onto the porch and let the door shut behind her.
She sat on the swing—the vintage Nantucket porch swing he’d seen at an estate sale when they were on their way back from visiting her brother in Vermont, and had restored and hung as a birthday present to her—and pushed herself back and forth with her toes. He would make Haley feel better. He always made Haley feel better, because that’s the only thing he was interested in, never the nature of the problem itself or what lesson a good parent might try to produce from it. When she went back inside, Haley would be smiling again. They would probably be watching TV.
He didn’t mean to, she knew, but he undermined her. It almost would have been better if he had meant to, because then at least he wouldn’t act so clueless and aggrieved every time she tried to call him on it. Mark didn’t seem to feel that a parent’s job was to shape or influence or improve the child in any way, but rather to entertain her, to appease her, to do whatever it took to make her happy. He couldn’t see that Haley was in danger of becoming a classic only child: entitled, solipsistic, used to being the center of everyone’s attention, unable to empathize. Not a sharer. Karen had seen that firsthand at school. This was not how it was supposed to be. The whole only-child situation was itself a product of their economic failure, mostly, which you could say made them even more responsible for correcting Haley’s behavior. But you couldn’t argue with him about a problem he insisted he didn’t see.
Little girls were supposed to adore their mothers. But this was the thing about marriage: the way your spouse acted, the person he was, forced you to act a certain way in response, and vice versa, and over time those roles hardened and became exaggerated. You grew into a kind of cartoon of yourself. She suspected that her relationship with Haley would be a great deal less oppositional if Mark weren’t there for the girl to appeal to all the time, if he weren’t a sort of turf for mother and daughter to fight to claim. He fancied himself the Great Centrist.
A section of the woods across the field from where she sat suddenly glowed. It was one of those outdoor floodlights at the Hadis’, motion-sensitive, so that every deer that walked through their property lit it up like it was the yard at Alcatraz. Mark had installed those lights himself. Maddening. But the money from that job, which was somehow still going on, was their lifeline. She drained her wineglass and went back inside. The TV flickered, but only Mark sat in front of it, watching The Matrix for the two thousandth time.
“It was just on,” he said sheepishly.
“It’s always on,” she said. “Where’s Haley?”
“Doing homework. Such as it is. She has to memorize the four-times table.”
She finally sat next to him, on the couch. He rubbed her shoulder. “So what was the dispute?” he said.
“She didn’t tell you?”
“No.”
“You didn’t ask her?”
He shook his head.
She bit her lip. “She was making fart noises with her mouth at the funeral,” she said.
They were facing the television rather than each other. She could feel him trying not to laugh, and then he did laugh, explosively, through his nose, like a little boy. She got up and left the room.
Damn it, he thought. That’s not good. He would have to apologize, but not now; if you apologized too quickly, she wouldn’t accept it, because it was like telling her to stop being angry before she was ready. Anyway, The Matrix was back on.
He went up a while later to get Haley ready for bed, then he sent her in to say good night to Mommy, who was already in bed as well (another dark sign), and he went back downstairs and sat by himself a while longer. The quiet was relaxing. He needed to set aside some time to think about whether it made sense to refinance the house, and now was as good a time as any, but when he was tired, his brain wouldn’t stay on track. He thought he’d only had two beers tonight, but then he remembered the other two at the Ship. It all added up. He turned out the lights and slipped into bed beside Karen, who was already on her stomach, asleep.
Next morning he was back at Hadi’s place, and then for two more weeks after that. The job was winding down; Mark let Dave go when the reroofing was done, and then Hartley the carpenter the following Friday, so for the final few days it was just him and Barrett. What they had left was mostly cleanup work: replastering, replacing some baseboards and paneling, repainting the master bedroom where they’d opened up a wall for sensors and surveillance equipment. Barrett handled all the painting. For Rachel Hadi, the incursion into her bedroom had been the last straw: she’d checked into Asana, a yoga retreat built on the grounds of a former seminary in Stockbridge. The children agreed to ride the school bus in her absence. Hadi and Mark had a beer in the kitchen, on the last day of the job, while Barrett finished up. There was nothing left for Mark to do, no real reason to linger, but he didn’t want to leave Barrett alone in the house with Hadi. You just never knew what he’d say. So Mark stuck around, somewhat awkwardly, for a second, and a third. Barrett, with typical perversity, was taking forever, but Mark knew that going upstairs to check on his progress might start an argument, a loud one. Hadi drank mostly in silence but seemed perfectly at ease. Mark wanted to leave; but then, as he got drunker, he didn’t want to leave. He felt a door closing. He felt like someone better, smarter than himself would be seizing this unusual opportunity to learn from the brand of man Hadi was, the brand of man Mark longed to be. He had hoped all these months of exposure to Hadi—observing him, listening to him—might generate some kind of lesson about success, about boldness, but now time was up and that hadn’t really happened, and Mark assumed the failure was his.
They sat at Hadi’s cherry drop-leaf table. Mark looked him over with what passed, in his state, for discretion. It was, he thought, as if Hadi periodically wen
t into town, made some notes regarding what kind of clothes the locals wore, then returned home and tried to find the nearest match online. Even when he got it right, he could never quite carry it off. Part of the sartorial issue was that Hadi was a man incapable of wearing a T-shirt as anything other than an undergarment. His Carhartt jackets and Wranglers and new-looking boots were always held together by a signature, discordant white dress shirt that looked like it cost two hundred dollars. Maybe he’d worn those shirts for so long that he wasn’t comfortable in anything else. Or maybe at some point, years ago, he decided he’d found the ultimate shirt and bought a gross of them—that seemed like the kind of thing he’d do—and now he couldn’t bring himself to throw them out and start over. The very rich, Mark had read, were sometimes thrifty in eccentric, unnecessary ways, just to keep in some kind of emotional touch with the actual value of a dollar.
Still, it wasn’t that he was trying to fit in, exactly. That kind of social insecurity seemed foreign to Hadi. He wasn’t concerned with being accepted, and he probably wouldn’t have cared that much if he knew he was laughed at. It was more about learning a language, a system, mastering it in all its aspects. It was about making a study.
“Barrett’s just cleaning up,” Mark said, even though they could both hear him upstairs. He was singing. “I’m sorry for the inconvenience.”
“No inconvenience,” Hadi said.
“I’m sorry your wife was inconvenienced, then.”
“Well, look, that’s not such a bad thing every once in a while. It gives her an excuse to go someplace she likes, a place I can’t stand. Good for her, good for me. A little fresh air.”
He opened two more beers.
“You don’t mind the solitude?” Mark said.
“Solitude has its potentialities,” Hadi said. “Solitude is great if you know how to use it.”
The kitchen was spotless. In his months on the job, Mark had sometimes seen the two Hadi children, but when they were not present, there was rarely any visible sign of their living there.
“And they kind of hold you back,” Mark said. He was maybe drunker than he should have been. It didn’t take much, with him. “Wives. Or at least you’re most yourself when they’re not around. Don’t you think that’s true?”
Hadi didn’t look offended, or uncomfortable. “That second thing you said. That’s probably true.”
Mark tried to remember the second thing he’d said. “So what do you think?” he said instead. “What do you think of our little town?”
“It’s a special place,” Hadi said. “Unspoiled. Very serene. Of course, I see more now, living here, than I saw before. But that vulnerability just makes it more interesting to me.”
Vulnerability? “Hey, speaking of,” Mark said, “looks like that second terrorist attack in New York City you were predicting never actually happened.”
Why were the things coming out of his mouth so disrespectful-sounding, all of a sudden? He didn’t mean it. He was trying for camaraderie, actually, but then this other note was bubbling up from somewhere.
“Thank God,” Hadi said.
“Yes, of course, thank God,” Mark echoed, and held out his bottle, which Hadi touched with his own. “All I meant was, you told me way back when that you were moving up here to avoid that danger, and then the danger never came, so I hope that doesn’t mean you think it was a mistake moving up here, or that you regret it.”
Hadi went to the fridge and handed Mark another; the more nervous Mark felt, apparently, the faster he drank. “No, of course not,” Hadi said. “First of all, risk is not binary. Just because something doesn’t happen, that doesn’t mean you were wrong to have protected yourself against the likelihood of it happening. You understand what I mean?”
“Sure,” Mark said.
“And second, this place is home to me now. This is where I belong right now. The only thing I left behind in New York is the obligation to spend time with a lot of people I really never enjoyed spending time with anyway. Here I have no social obligations of any kind. People don’t think of me in that way.”
Mark heard an inexplicably loud noise from upstairs.
“And it’s good for work in that sense too,” Hadi went on. “I’m completely isolated. I’m in my head. No distractions unless I choose them, which I sometimes do, but usually not. It’s like the home itself is my head.”
Mark had heard that before, from his wife, but he thought it would be impolite to mention. Hadi probably didn’t appreciate being told that any of his thoughts weren’t original ones. Mark wondered why he didn’t ever feel like his own head was his house, or his house was his head, or however it worked.
“So let me ask you something,” Mark said. “Since the job is over today and I don’t know when I might get to talk to you again, even though we’re neighbors or whatever.”
“What’s that?” Hadi asked calmly. They heard Barrett’s footsteps on the landing upstairs.
“What am I doing wrong?” Mark said. “I mean, in your opinion.”
“In my opinion you’re not doing anything wrong.”
“No, I mean…I’ve been trying to think how to improve my position. To improve my lot. I know I’m never going to live like you. But so much of life seems so bound, so limited. I want to reimagine myself.”
“You want to make more money,” Hadi said.
“Yes. And I know that I don’t possess the same skills you have. But it’s more than that. I feel like something is lacking in me, in terms of personality, in terms of vision. So it may sound weird, but I was wondering if you had any advice, any words of wisdom, for somebody in my position.”
First half of a ladder, then Barrett, then the second half of the ladder passed across the kitchen doorway behind Hadi’s chair. The front door opened and closed, and they heard the sound of the ladder being tossed—probably from some distance, knowing Barrett—into the bed of Mark’s truck.
“We can’t be envying each other’s positions,” Hadi said. “Your role is as necessary as mine. If you were bad at what you do, or hated it, that would be one thing. But in my opinion we are both right where we belong. My advice to you would be not to be so dismissive of something you do so well. Easier said than done, I know.”
“But this is America,” Mark said, coloring. What a thing to say. Obviously it was America. If it weren’t, a man like him wouldn’t be sitting in the kitchen of a man like Hadi; a man like Hadi probably wouldn’t have existed at all. But the America thing seemed to explain how he felt, or maybe he was just using it to defend who he was, what he wanted. “You’re supposed to better yourself. You’re supposed to think big. Right?”
Hadi sighed. “If you want to do something else besides restore houses, then by all means you should. Life’s too short to waste time. I’m just saying, don’t devalue what you do just because others make more money than you. We are parts of an ecosystem. It relies on you in the same way it relies on me.”
Barrett let the door slam as he came back into the house; Mark turned around and saw him in the kitchen doorway, grinning. “All finished upstairs,” he said. “Another two hours to dry, probably. Looks like I missed the after-party.”
Hadi shrugged. “Still a beer or two left in the fridge, I think, if you’re thirsty,” he said.
“No,” Mark said quickly, “thanks, but we should shove off.” He’d seen Barrett after a beer or two, many times in fact, and it was not something he thought Hadi should be exposed to. Not to mention that he didn’t want to let one of his employees drink a client’s last beer. “All cleaned up upstairs?”
“Yes sir, boss,” Barrett said. “Unless maybe you need me to clean up all these dead soldiers too.”
“Dead soldiers?” Hadi said.
Barrett indicated the empty beer bottles.
“Huh,” Hadi said. “Never heard that one.”
Barrett turned and went back outside to the driveway without a word. Mark saw that he had pissed him off. Well, whatever, as long as he was pissed off
outside the client’s house. He took a deep breath and turned to Hadi.
“I know your wife will be glad to see us gone,” he said.
“You’ll invoice me?”
“Sure will. Within the week. And of course if there’s any problem, you know where to find me.” He jerked his head in the direction of his house.
“Could probably just shine a light in your windows if I needed you,” Hadi said.
“Yes sir.” They shook hands, and Hadi walked him to the door. Mark had the impression Hadi felt a lot more done with him than he felt done with Hadi. But then at the door the older man spoke again:
“One thing I will say, in regard to the whole thinking-big idea. Houses are an asset, whose value you understand, and know how to increase.”
“Right.”
“But it occurs to me that as long as you’re working on the inside of them, you can only be engaging the value of them one at a time, if you see what I mean. An investor knows how to stand outside a thing, see it in its context. See it whole.”
Through the front door Hadi opened for him, Mark saw Barrett pacing back and forth in the driveway. He hadn’t realized Barrett was still there, so he thanked Hadi again, pulled the door shut behind him, and walked quickly onto the fresh gravel.