The Doorposts of Your House and on Your Gates

by Jacob Bacharach

  “Phil,” Veronica said. How could someone so sexy be queer? “I just need you to be yourself.”

  That had been five years ago. Jerry Meegan had gone to two million in the end. Harrow’s stomach had bucked, and he thought that he was really going to crap in his pants, but then Sherri Larimer had pressed her bitter yellow mouth into a tight little sphincter and said, sourly, “I’m thinking maybe two point five.”

  Meegan betrayed not one blink of emotion or disbelief and suggested mildly that it suddenly felt as if they were negotiating in something less than good faith. Then Raymond pulled a hunting knife from somewhere inside his ill-fitting jacket and pounded the point right into the table between them and asked if Jerry was accusing them of lying. The New York boys, previously imperturbable, lurched back in terror, Meegan so abruptly that he fell right out of his chair, sprawling onto the polyester carpet in his many-thousand-dollar suit. Sherri Larimer laughed. With a look of fear mingled with despair and disbelief, they all fled the room. Larimer laughed again. “Like cock-a-roaches,” she sneered. Harrow stood there. He thought, I should say something. He didn’t say anything.

  Veronica rose from her chair, perfectly, beatifically calm, smiled at Sherri, and said, “Well, I’m so sorry they left so abruptly. Thank you so much for your time.”

  A little later, a pair of state police arrived. Larimer offered them smokes, which they declined. “Well, I know,” she said. “They are ladies’ cigarettes. But they got the same damn tobacco.”

  “Was you really gonna cut him?” One of the staties asked Ray. He looked like a teenager and seemed to find the situation amusing.

  “Cut him?” Larimer shook her head. She cackled. “Son, Ray-Ray don’t even hunt! He faints at the sight of blood.”

  “Do not!”

  Sherri Larimer snatched the knife, pricked the end of her index finger, and squeezed a couple of drops onto the table.

  He turned the color of her dress, covered his mouth, and he too fled the room.

  • • •

  Abbie had giggled through the whole story. “Whatever happened to these Larimers? What happened to the deal?”

  Veronica shrugged. “We worked out a lease deal, and Phil and I financed and built the whole thing on spec, and today it is West Virginia’s most successful outlet mall. No Wal-Mart, though. They ended up building it up the road. Even Sherri Larimer made a bundle.”

  “She’s got the magic touch,” Harrow said, putting a hand on the back of Veronica’s chair.

  “Market research,” Veronica shrugged.

  Sarah said, “I don’t understand why you were trying to cheat, what’s her name, that Sherri Larimer.”

  “Oh, I wasn’t!” Veronica put her hand on her heart and made an approximation of the Boy Scout salute.

  Harrow said, “Veronica here figured—and this is what she told Sherri L.—that at minimum, they’d get eminent domained and walk away from the whole thing with a couple hundred thou, which they’d have made in the first place. At maximum, those GP dummies would’ve given in and paid her a zillion bucks.” Phil shrugged. “I’d’ve gotten screwed, probably, in that deal, but”—he leaned over and planted a brotherly kiss on Veronica’s cheek—“Veronica and I didn’t know each other yet, so no foul there. Anything in between, well, still good for the Larimers. And Sherri didn’t have to kill anybody. As it was, it all worked out.”

  “And you found yourself in service of this colorful group because?” At some point during the story, Sarah’s wine glass had disappeared and been replaced by a tumbler full of something amber. The waitress appeared and asked if anyone wanted dessert.

  Harrow told her to bring another bottle of wine, “and some of those macaroons,” he added. “Those famous macaroons.”

  “That’s the Duquesne Club, hon,” the waitress told him.

  “You don’t have any macaroons?” Harrow winked at Sarah when he said it.

  “Sorry, hon.”

  “The booze’ll do, then.”

  They were the only people left in the dining room. Far below, on the water, a dark train of barges swam from the Monongahela into the Ohio River. Harrow lit a cigarette and asked if anyone else smoked.

  “Surely,” Abbie said, and he accepted a Marlboro.

  “You don’t smoke,” said Sarah.

  “I do occasionally. When the moment presents itself.”

  “To answer your question,” Veronica told Sarah, “I’d been working on some deals in Fayette County, and their name kept coming up. And I was already thinking of, shall we say, striking out on my own. You know how much I hated that firm. And this was an opportunity, not to put too fine a point on it, to ingratiate myself with the local landowning class.”

  “Always an angle,” Phil said. He made a silent toast.

  “To be fair, the Larimers are a nasty bunch. Everyone down there seems to be afraid of them. But Sherri’s never been anything but a sweetheart to me.”

  “Well, look,” Harrow said. “To the matter at hand, which we’ve been putting off with this storytelling.”

  “Yes,” Abbie said. “Well, like I told Veronica, I’m not exactly certain I’m qualified to do what you ask. And yes”—he raised a hand to his sister to stop her from interrupting—“I know that you only need some kind of ersatz, quote-unquote expert to assuage the gratuitous concerns of some committee of know-nothing appointees on a zoning board, but still.”

  “Oh, come on, Rabbi,” said Harrow. “Don’t tell me, I cannot tell a lie. You’ve got the bona fides.”

  “It’s pronounced bona fides, and, I’m sorry.”

  Phil smirked, “Veronica told me that you were on a mission from God.”

  Sarah leered across the table at him. “Jesus Christ, Abbie. You told your sister, too?”

  Abbie flapped a hand at her and glared at Veronica, who put up her own hands and said, “What? He’s my business partner.”

  “Aw, shit,” said Phil. “I didn’t mean anything. I figure, you know, a man’s religion is his own business, although I’m not what you’d call spiritual myself. Anyway, hell, your whole thing is that you’re some kind of environmental guy, right? Solar power and whatnot. If it walks like a duck, am I right?”

  “Not exactly.”

  Sarah rattled ice in her husband’s direction. She was drunk, she knew, but it was an odd thing: she found, when she’d had a few drinks, it became suddenly right to do and say those things that her sober self would never permit out of sobriety’s crippling politeness. “Abbie is very moral,” she said. “Honesty is his policy.”

  “Well,” Veronica said and made a gesture of pushing back from the table.

  “Abbie is particularly fond of the third and seventh commandments. Ten a distant third.”

  Abbie had crossed his arms and let his face relax into a state of practiced impassivity. He’d long ago decided that the most infuriating response to a furious woman was to respond with the inverse of her anger. Sarah glared at him. “Sarah,” Veronica said, “I’m going to run to the ladies’ room before we go. Would you care to join?” She knew it was the cheap way out, and she felt a twinge of disappointment and frustration, knowing, of course, that her idiot business partner and her dumb brother would interpret it in precisely the same way, affirming whatever it was they already thought about women, those prejudices they knew better than to vocalize, but held and believed with self-congratulation for having the courage of conviction not to turn away from unacceptable, unfashionable, but ineradicable truths.

  When the women had gone, Phil stretched in his chair. “You sure pissed her off,” he said.

  “Like complaining about the weather,” Abbie replied.

  Harrow laughed. “Good point. She’s a great-looking lady, though. Your sister, too, by the way.”

  “You’d have a better chance with my wife.” Abbie permitted himself a smirk.

  “Wait, what—” Harrow began, but he noticed the waiter approaching and caught himself short. The waiter deposited the check with a defe
rential nod. It sat on the table halfway between them for a moment longer than was comfortable, then Harrow grabbed it. “Just kidding, Rabbi,” he said. “This one’s on me.”

  “Are you sure?” Abbie asked. Magnanimity was easier once you knew the other guy was going to pay.

  “Sure am.” He extracted a credit card from a fantastically bulbous wallet. “Consider it a down payment. Now we’ll see about the returns.”

  4

  Late that night, Abbie told Sarah that he’d back out if she preferred it, and she said, “Oh, no you won’t.”

  “I will,” he said. “If you prefer it.”

  “But I don’t prefer it. A fresh start, remember, Abbie. We need money.”

  “There’s always money.”

  “Yes, there’s always money, but we don’t always have it. The world is going to end anyway, don’t you always say? Sooner or later? Some rancid little stream isn’t going to make it or break it.”

  She went to sleep as far from him as their bed allowed, but when he woke a bit after three—he could never sleep well after drinking, unlike Sarah, who could, after a few, pass right into a deep eight hours and wake in the morning without ever remembering that she’d laid down—he found her arm across his chest. She snored quietly. He touched her hair.

  Several days afterward, he met Phil and Veronica for the hearing. Harrow greeted him in precisely the same way as the last time they’d met, an aggressive handshake and a rough smack on the arm. “No cold feet, Rabbi?”

  Abbie shrugged. He actually found Harrow pleasant in an appalling way; the man’s awfulness was genuine to a degree that most people’s politesse was not. “I suppose I’m not averse to a little creative dissembling,” he said. “For the benefit of all and the good of the order.”

  “Good,” said Harrow. “Great! The good of the order! Ha! This guy. Anyway, it’s because financing depends on approval here. Lord only knows, no offense, we don’t want to build this crap with our own money.”

  “No,” said Abbie.

  “How’s that little wife of yours?” asked Harrow, who was the sort of man untroubled by a phrase like that little wife of yours.

  “Champing at the bit,” Abbie said.

  “Hmm,” said Harrow, but Abbie didn’t catch it.

  The Zoning Board met in a WPA-era office building on Ross Street in Downtown Pittsburgh between the stained exterior of a judge-and-lawyer dive called the Common Plea and the groaning rusted steel trestles supporting the on-ramp to the Liberty Bridge. The hearing room on the first floor was a hazy combination of faculty lounge and prison cafeteria. There were maps of city neighborhoods on the walls, all of them hanging that one degree off level that might as well be upside down. Witnesses and attendees sat in rows of plastic chairs. The committee sat at a long wooden conference table oddly placed in a corner of the room rather than front and center. A window unit air conditioner blew warm air that smelled of something like power steering fluid. The board members were mic’d, but the microphones didn’t work. They were largely unintelligible to the audience, with the exception of Joe Termini, the chairman, who sounded as if his muffler had rusted off. A framed photograph of Mayor Caliguiri hung offhandedly on a pillar that occupied, for no particular reason, the exact middle of the room.

  The board refused to release the order of testimony and comment for its hearings based on an obscure principle—Joe Termini had inherited this principle from his predecessor, who’d inherited it from his, and so on back into the hazy prehistory of the modern city. Termini, a former officer of the United Steelworkers local who’d campaigned for the mayor and been rewarded with this sinecure, had no interest in the origin of the principle, only in the practical application of it. He viewed the discharge of his duties as something between fatherhood and the attendance of midnight mass on Christmas: better done than not, but best not to dig too deeply into the particulars. Harrow and Abbie arrived early, discovered they were the eighteenth out of nineteen applicants for adjustment, and retired to the back of the room to share a newspaper and, in Harrow’s case, to smoke.

  Interestingly, Joe Termini’s younger son, Eddie, would become, not quite a dozen years later, the youngest mayor in the history of the city. Popularly known by his initials due to a series of unusual weather events that were popularly, if briefly, interpreted as UFOs, Eddie was primaried out of a third term after it was revealed that he and his chief of staff, Jonah Kantsky, a man nearly fifteen years his senior, had been having an affair. Both of them were married to women at the time, Kantsky ostensibly happily, Eddie Termini rather less so. The young mayor was supposedly involved in the diversion of federal funds to his own ends and enrichment as well, but the grand jury disbanded without bringing charges. Pittsburgh, by then, was no less than a model of urban redevelopment, no longer a city of browns and gray concrete, but of green and glass. People like Isabel’s new boss, Barry Fitzgerald, flew all over the country, extolling its virtues—high tech, politically progressive, increasingly diverse. This was the city that Isabel moved to when she left New York, a promised land if you didn’t happen to be a New Yorker fleeing a far grander Babylon and your far worse mistakes. But although the city had had a woman mayor by then and would surely have tolerated an actually and openly gay mayor, it could not, even in the early twenty-tens, abide the idea of a secretly gay mayor who was also the younger man, with all that that—correctly or incorrectly—implied. As for the UFOs, they turned out to be ball lightning, just another bit of wild weather in a world where the whole climate was going mad due to human stupidity and avarice. But Veronica Mayer was right: it was, and remained, a city of hypochondriacs, and what is a conspiracy theory if not a form of hypochondria?

  Abbie quickly lost interest in the newspaper. He tried to pay attention to the applicants who preceded them, but these applicants and the various witnesses for and against their petitions had to approach and sit at the table with the committee, and with the exception of Termini’s occasional booming pronouncements—You sher about that? Is this gonna be frame or mason-airy? You been up the Permits desk yet?—the proceedings were muted and incomprehensible. He stared through the windowpane above the air conditioner on the far wall at a riveted girder supporting the ramp and overpass. It was covered with graffiti tags that he tried unsuccessfully to decipher. It was hot and he’d been convinced to wear a suit. He felt the unsettling beginnings of dampness around his collar. He was much thinner then, but still prone to sweat. He wore, as ever, his collar open.

  Since coming to Pittsburgh, the vision from the temple had repeated itself twice—or, it would be more accurate to say, he’d had similar, related, but distinct visions. In the first, he found himself back in the field. This time the corn was high, taller even than he was. He walked between the rows. The stalks and leaves had an unpleasant, waxy quality, like the wet skin of an apple. The sky was no longer clear, but overcast, and there was a sense that it has just rained, let up, and was preparing to rain again. After a few hundred yards, he emerged from the corn onto a long, rocky embankment that led down to the edge of the familiar highway. The highway, which appeared abandoned in his first intimation of it, was now busy. Cars and tractor-trailers flew in both directions, and the air was full of the confused dopplering of engine sounds. He looked to his left and saw the deer again. It wasn’t alone. It had a fawn beside it. The fawn saw Abbie and froze. The buck stepped forward, as if to interpose its body deliberately between Abbie and the child. Abbie raised his palms in a gesture meant to indicate harmlessness and openness, but the movement, though deliberate and slow, alarmed the buck. The buck made a sound between a cough and a grunt and exhaled loudly. Abbie felt surprise; he didn’t know deer could vocalize. The sound was a warning call. The fawn sprang away down the embankment. It reached the highway. A fuel tanker’s horn blasted across the field. When the tanker hit the fawn, it seemed nearly to explode in blood and viscera. Abbie mouthed, Oh no! He turned. The buck was gone. This was when he woke.

  In the second version, wh
ich was briefer and more terrible, he was the buck. He was standing between the field and the highway. There was a fawn beside him. The fawn belonged to him, but his consciousness had no language and therefore no sense of possession, only a yearning that was like a hunger with no possibility of ending. He saw an animal step out of the corn. The animal was strange; it walked on two legs, like a bird, and had two other legs that hung at its sides. It seemed impossible that something so upright could move without falling over like a dying tree. The animal was strangely furred on its head and covered almost everywhere else with something that was not fur. The wind carried its scent to him; the scent was horrible, sweet and strange. The weird animal lifted its upper arms. It was terrifying; it was a thing outside of all other things that he had ever seen. He called to the fawn. The call had no meaning, but it contained within it an urge that he had to give from his own body to the fawn’s body. The fawn received the urge and acted. Then he saw it was an error, although he had no sense of error except a vast, dark disquiet like the presentiment of a drop in pressure that he might have felt before a storm. There were other immense and strange animals on the hard strip of land below them, stampeding in every direction, herdless and wild. The fawn ran into them. He would have gone down there, but he couldn’t think; he could only flee; the yearning hunger of possession broke open inside of him and impelled him to leap faster and faster. The razor stalks tore at him. This was when he woke.

  When at last their turn came, Harrow slapped his shoulder and said, “Go team.” A secretary lazily distributed folders full of MH Partners LLP proposals for their development tentatively to be called Greenview-on-Frick.

  (“We really ought to consider changing that name?” Abbie had suggested.

  “It’s a great name!” Harrow protested. “What’s wrong with it? It’s classy!”

  “It sounds like some sort of moldering collection of half-timber huts. It sounds like it’s inhabited by a gaggle of catamite hobbits.”

  “Abbie,” Veronica said, “we discussed this.”