We’d borrowed a lopper and extension ladder from next door—one of the last favors we’d ever be able to ask Ed and Sandy, since within the week Michael would permanently chill our relations with a set-to over their compost pile. (“You’re never supposed to keep a heap of garbage like that without it being totally gated off,” he later snarled at the poor eco-conscious couple—meek, agreeable people who tore the cellophane from envelopes for recycling and had remarkably never complained back when we’d caroused loudly so late at night. “I quote,” he read from his printout, “Don’t put food of any kind in open compost piles; instead, use a securely covered compost structure or a commercially available raccoon-proof composter to prevent attracting raccoons and getting exposed to their droppings. I mean, no wonder this street is overrun!”) Michael ripped down branch after branch as the grapevine’s tendrils clung desperately to the brick; it was for all the world like tearing screaming children from the arms of their mother. Grimly, I lopped the fallen climbers into smaller, uniform lengths and bound them with twine for collection. It was murder. I was in no doubt about that.
The project took all day, and when we arose the next morning I couldn’t remember when I’d last gone to so much effort to make my life worse. The light blared from the back windows, loud and flat; before, the quality of the light had resembled the warm, companionable glow of a banker’s lamp, and now it was more like a naked hundred-watt’s glare from the ceiling. Suddenly the whole ambience of the Little Dump was transformed. I can’t explain it except that the house felt more ordinary. More plain and stark. As the sun rose higher, too, the July heat really baked the place. I noticed only once we’d hacked it brutally to pieces how cool the vine had kept the lower floor.
Meanwhile, Michael was spending every night online, providing a running commentary akin to regular email advisories from the World Wildlife Fund. “Did you realize that these wily bastards are so strong, so cunning, and so agile that they can pick an avocado from a tree and hit a barking dog from twenty feet? They attack pets, you know.”
“We don’t have any pets,” I’d say wearily.
“The Carters have those cats. And we’re giving comfort to the enemy.” Raccoons had apparently replaced moisture.
“That cemetery on the other side of the Prospect Expressway?” he might note a bit later. “We thought it was just us, but they’re inundated! They’ve trapped over five hundred of the monsters in the last ten years, and this cemetery guy thinks the grounds must have thousands of coons. Eating the flowers. Digging up the lawn. In Brooklyn, it’s an epidemic!”
“Epidemic is for diseases.”
“Whatever. Infestation, then.” He glowered.
I thought, this is the sort of nitpicking point scoring that I’d noticed other couples engage in—couples I’d pitied.
Of course, Michael was primarily fixated on the gap—I didn’t know what else to call it, since this space between the house and the wall was such a strange, dumb segment of our property that it didn’t really have a name. The contractor had proposed filling the space with concrete, but somehow we had to get the animals out first. I was afflicted by the image of screaming baby raccoons buried alive in wet cement, like a lesser Edgar Allan Poe story.
“There are outfits you can hire to trap them,” Michael fumed. “But trapping costs a fortune, and these filthy freeloaders have memories like elephants. Take them miles away, and they come back. The real danger of eliminating their habitat is that they stay here but they try to get inside. You know they can turn doorknobs?”
“Not if they’re locked.”
“They love to make dens in attics, and chimney flues. We’d better check the roof.” Sure enough, early the next evening I discovered the upstairs hatch open and Michael up on the roof. He was binding some cockamamie construction of chicken wire around the little aluminum chimney for our furnace.
I suppose this ranting over the computer didn’t take more than a week, though it was a long week. In the end, we did engage the contractor to fill the raccoon den with rubble and cement, and also to figure out a way of scaring the creatures off first. Michael was convinced that when their home was threatened they’d attack, flying into our faces with bared claws. He was certain, too, that they’d take revenge. “Like how?” I’d say. I recognized my arch, humoring tone from other spouses’ supermarket bickering, audible from the next aisle.
“They’re very destructive,” he’d say with a returning condescension. “You haven’t been doing the research. You have no idea what they’re capable of. They’re not cute, cuddly little woodland creatures, Kate. They’re diseased, they’re violent, they stink, they shit everywhere, and they’re vermin. Officially.”
The night before the contractor was due, we were treated to another sighting of our tenants, trundling across the wall on the way back home. But instead of poking his head out the screen door to meet their glittering gaze in that special cross-species communion of yore, Michael rushed to close the front door, and locked it, though the screen door was already latched. Then he hurried to the back, slammed all the windows shut, and locked those, too. Without any cross-ventilation in July, it was sweltering. We ate dinner in silence, sweat pouring down our necks.
In the end it was pretty simple. The contractor, who seemed more amused than frightened by our predicament, pulled our garden hose onto the trellis and blasted the chasm. Two drenched adults and an adolescent scrabbled up the debris that served as their entrance and exit ramp, and skedaddled across the trellis to Ed and Sandy’s—where presumably a three-course lunch awaited on the compost pile. After all Michael’s hand-wringing, the low-tech pest control was an anticlimax.
That night, after the “habitat” had been smoothed and sealed gray, we heard a trilling mewl outside the kitchen window. It was a younger kit, not a baby but the human equivalent of a ten-year-old. Presumably the kit had been out and about during the afternoon’s commotion, and had returned home to discover its relatives cleared off and its house smeared up solid—like a latchkey kid who comes back after school to find an eviction notice slapped on the door and the locks changed by the landlord. It didn’t know where its mother was, and cried and cried on the denuded trellis—where it must have been hungry as well, since this once well-stocked outdoor pantry was abruptly bare of grapes. After a while I couldn’t stand it, and as soon as the dishes were done I proposed that we turn in early.
Michael stayed paranoid about the raccoons taking “revenge” for the rest of the month. He swore that rinky-dink metal screens were no better protection from these ravaging creatures than spiderwebs. Dining on the front porch with all the windows shut during a heat wave was unbearable. The stifling, static air intensified the sensation that nothing was happening and that nothing would happen ever again. For the first time we felt that metaphorical hopelessness of living at a dead end.
Once our aggrieved raccoons had refrained from clawing through the roof or burrowing past his poorly secured chicken wire down the chimney, by August Michael relented. Slide was closed for staff vacations. On one of those weekend evenings now rare for a couple with full-time jobs, we once more stayed up late over a bottle of wine and opened the windows. By three a.m., I called his attention to an eerie quiet.
“The Crazy Bird,” I pointed out. “It’s gone.”
Over the next few months I strained to detect the Party Shuffle in the pin oak, but the mockingbird had fled, and never again returned to its perch high in the branches across the street. Maybe mockingbirds and raccoons have a symbiosis, but I thought we were being punished.
I realize it took a while, and I don’t want to be simplistic; there were other problems. Meantime, we did get the points done on the front brick facade. We replaced the shattered cement slab that held the drain in the backyard, even if the new slab cracked as well within the year. We duly replaced the furnace when Michael worried about its age, as we duly replaced the water heater once Michael would no longer leave for the weekend lest it flood the basement. We
installed a new toilet, anchored, that didn’t rattle. The house is now better waterproofed than when we bought it, although I doubt any of these “improvements” seriously increased the value of the Little Dump when we sold up. Oh, the break was amicable, as they say, and we agreed to split the proceeds and contents fifty-fifty—although we’d each so little capital once the equity was halved that we both had to go back to renting.
Marriage may be a covered dish, but it’s as dark and unfathomable under the cover as from above. If you asked Michael what went wrong, I bet he couldn’t tell you. As for me, I know this is only a story I tell myself. But I still believe it all came down to the raccoons. We murdered the grapevine and we drove off the “vermin” and we obviously convinced the Crazy Bird that life on Trevanion Close had got a bit too sane. We’d lost the wildness, you see. In fact, soon after we filled that gap between the house and the retaining wall, it began to seem that we hadn’t so much driven the wildlife away as allowed the wildlife to escape. The wild life had up and left us.
The raccoons did come back from time to time, of course. According to the internet, groups of raccoons establish a regular latrine separate from where they live. I sometimes wonder how far our evicted tenants routinely traveled to the cement hulk of their former den to leave smelly black signatures of their disdain.
Paradise to Perdition
Barry Mendelssohn’s story began where so many stories conclude.
Films about bad-assery divide into two classes. In the standard prototype, the malefactors—a ravishing word that Barry had come to embrace—go down in a hail of bullets, or they turn on one another, or the cops find the stash of cocaine. Barry had come across somewhere that the plots of all those 1940s black-and-white noirs were then legally required to illustrate that crime doesn’t pay. What a joke. Look at Congress.
But in many a contemporary thriller, the audience is expected to side with the creeps. While as a matter of formal obligation it’s touch and go, whatever the heist or con or double cross, our antihero gets away with it. Modern or no, any genre has conventions, and the traditional surprise-surprise signage of guess-who-slipped-the-net-after-all is a pan of our crafty protagonist with a drink in his hand (or her hand: equal opportunity depravity). Swanky glass, booze icy and preferably a bizarro color like electric blue, bamboo umbrella optional. Our lovable villain is always on a beach—either leaning over a weathered wooden rail at sunset or laid out in the sand sporting a mean tan, and we’d never have guessed that this guy who’s never taken off his leather jacket in colder climes has such a hairy chest. We know he’s far, far away from whatever went down, and he isn’t coming back. The single shot of a sly smile over the lip of that glass is all we ever see of our ingenious little friend’s future, since presumably we can fill in the rest. A life of ease, elegance, and all-you-can-eat sashimi extends infinitely to his horizon.
Apparently, Barry bought the conceit, down to the Curaçao and alluring condensation. Amazing how you could sell a vision of the next forty years with a cocktail.
To be sure, when he first landed in his new life of languishing, luxury, and abandon, it was pretty damned swell. After the half-pint plane touched down onto a dot in the Indian Ocean and taxied into an airport circa 1962, its handful of bleary passengers stumbled down onto the tarmac and shambled in the searing sun—funny how simply being spared a Jetway had become exotic—toward what resembled a cottage. With a peaked tin roof, its windows laced with wooden crosspieces, the tiny terminal was painted a soothing sea green. Barry’s wife, Tiffany, would have squealed about how the facility was “simply adorable,” and he was relieved to skip it. Along the walkway en route to baggage claim, outlandish blossoms burst through the latticed fencing; when you had enough money, no one would razz you for not knowing what all those jazzy foreign plants were called. The journey from plane to belt was as short for luggage as for passengers, and Barry’s bulging leather gear smoothed to hand within sixty seconds.
He’d cleared immigration on the main island—hesitating over telling the pretty, smiling agent whether he had arrived in the archipelago for “business” or “pleasure”; taken with sufficient seriousness, wasn’t pleasure itself a full-time job? So he rolled his chattel directly to the curb, sweat trickling his spine. At midday in this time zone, the air was syrupy, thick, and sticky, but the close atmosphere sure beat January in New Jersey, where takeoff had been delayed by snow. As a tribute to what really should have been a one-way ticket (which always raised eyebrows), he’d discarded his black down parka on a bench in the last airport’s primitive waiting room. Some sucker heading in the wrong direction was welcome to it.
For a moment dismayed that his courtesy car was nowhere in sight, Barry remembered that he was traveling on a fake passport. His driver would be the one holding a sign printed rodrigo perez. Italian on his mother’s side, Barry could pass for Latino in a pinch. Still, he decided impetuously that hereon he would go by “Rod.” Forceful. Sexy.
In a freshly ironed canary-yellow uniform, the lean African driver flashed a smile, the first blazing ivories that Barry had seen in years that wouldn’t have been the result of violent tooth whitening. “Meester Perez!” he exclaimed, extending his hand with the joy of meeting a long-lost uncle. “Welcome to our beautiful island! I do hope your journey was not so grueling.”
Barry didn’t care whether the young man’s manner of spirited obsequiousness was sincere. Obsequiousness was a quality that you bought. Fraudulence merely made the fawning seem more expensive.
The driver wouldn’t even let him hoist his own carry-on, and immediately handed his passenger a cold bottle of water. Bloated from business-class flights whose attendants were obsessed with hydration, Barry wasn’t especially thirsty and didn’t know what to do with the thing, which dripped in his hand; he wasn’t one of those water people. Personally, he’d have preferred champagne, but there was plenty of time for that, and the three separate legs from Newark had involved such an unending river of alcohol that a breather was judicious. As for the water he didn’t need (they might have made it Perrier), what mattered was the gesture. That bottle marked the beginning of a new life in which a host of flunkies ceaselessly wracked their brains over whatever Barry Mendelssohn—whatever Rod Perez—might possibly want.
Beginning this last link to his final destination, he’d been in transit for twenty-one hours—twenty-four, if you counted from shutting the front door of his undistinguished bungalow in Paterson for the very last time and ducking into his taxi. So he could have done without the tour monologue from the front seat. He was much too pooped to give a hoot about “takamaka trees,” or the complexity of cooking fruit bats, or how locals cut cinnamon boughs to make their houses fragrant at Christmas. (What houses? Amid the crazed vegetation, whose profusion allowed only enticing glimpses of a beach wide and white as the driver’s smile, the only structures he’d been able to discern thus far were big hotels.) Presumably he was within his rights as a priority guest to tell the driver to put a lid on it, but rudeness and imperiousness must have been prerogatives you had to grow into. Likewise Barry might have objected that the SUV was air-conditioned like an abattoir, but hitherto he’d led a modest life; bossing around underlings and acting oblivious to whatever the help might prefer would take practice. He missed his parka.
Turning a blind eye to its funereal connotations, as well as to the fact that the initials “ER” were powerfully associated with catastrophe, Barry had selected Eternal Rest because it was the most expensive resort in the region. Not a perfectly reliable measure of quality, but exorbitant didn’t usually correlate with complete crap.
As they curved onto the grounds, Barry concluded with satisfaction that Eternal Rest was anything but crap. The landscaping was exuberant yet tidy; none of the palms had drooping fronds, and beds of colossal flowering bushes were cleared of dead underbrush. Connected by paved switchbacks, the vast residential units were set widely apart, their long gunmetal roofs settled into still more extravagant foli
age for further privacy. At reception, the open-aired structure overlooked a sheer drop, below which lapped water whose inland strip was—get this—the exact color of Curaçao. Having done his homework online, he didn’t need the plump, un-Britishly unctuous general manager to list out the facilities: pool, obviously, big, obviously; spa, fitness suite, business suite, game room; multiple bars, one beachside for sundowners; five restaurants, of varying ethnicities, including Japanese. In addition to hiking and snorkeling, diving and boat trips could be arranged. Participation in a weekly rota of management cocktails, hosted barbecues, discos, and karaoke nights was elective.
A businessman himself, Barry noted the fact that no lowly receptionist but the GM herself had greeted him with lemongrass tea. The resort might have charged over a thousand bucks per day, but hiring a large permanent staff to cover busy seasons and flying plenty of Western goodies into the island daily, establishments like this operated in the black only if they kept occupancy rates high. Even if they could afford to linger, rich folks were restless, and guests who prepaid their first six months would have been rare as hen’s teeth. Had the administrators of Eternal Rest known that he’d embezzled a big enough bundle to put his feet up in this joint until he stroked out at ninety-two, who would have met him then? Oprah Winfrey?
That’s right—embezzled. What of it? He was an embezzler, another pejorative that, like malefactor, he had embraced—or would learn to embrace—was working on embracing. Cinema’s standout bad guys didn’t hanky-twist their lives away whimpering, Gee, am I doing something wrong?
Barry and the GM, whose name he’d high-handedly forgotten, whirred off with his bags in one of the many electric buggies with which a small army of boundlessly cheerful staff ushered guests from place to place, lest they become perilously enmoistened by a five-minute walk. With one of the best views of the beach, his premier villa wasn’t much smaller than his house in Paterson (to which Tiffany was now welcome). Packed with aromatic unguents, the bathroom was capacious as a two-car garage. The minibar was stocked not with sad little miniatures but full-size bottles (finally, his champagne). But the kitchen he planned to boycott. The living and dining rooms wouldn’t see much use, either. He’d spend most of his time here watching CNN (well—or porn) on a mattress you could get lost on, or lounging on the sea-facing deck, which spanned forty feet across—where he would dawdle his left-hand fingers in the plunge pool, keeping the right hand firmly around that icy, iconic blue drink (well—or his dick).
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