The Doorposts of Your House and on Your Gates

by Jacob Bacharach

  He was close to being right. Sawyer was very convincing in person. It was only when you got away from him that his insights started to smell like exquisite rationalizations. Isabel believed him when he told her he felt no anxiety about his boyfriend, but later, when she’d known them a bit longer and thought about it a little more, she saw that he was very jealous of Isaac, and that his ostensible indifference was a form of hard-willed self-possession that was nearly imprisonment. Sawyer deserved better, she thought, and she later regretted that circumstances didn’t permit them a real and durable friendship. They did remain friends online for a few years, until she discovered that she’d been unceremoniously blocked and dropped and defriended. He’d moved to California to work for a medical technology start-up whose name was a common noun, phonetically misspelled and randomly capitalized. He ended up making a lot of money. Sawyer was smart in a mechanical way, but he preferred to avoid thinking too deeply, and these were the people who tended to get rich.

  Isabel did ask him that night at dinner what it was that he really saw in Isaac. “Besides the obvious,” she said.

  “What’s the obvious?”

  She sipped her wine. “Looks and all that,” she said. “To be honest.”

  “I think you’ll find that if you really look at Isaac, he’s not that especially good looking.”

  “He’s striking.”

  “No, that’s true. But it’s not the same thing. Anyway, he’s very good at sort of tricking you into thinking that he’s cute. Maybe he’s beautiful, but in an ugly sort of way. I’ve always found him ever so slightly grotesque when I really look at him.”

  She said that seemed like a terrible way to talk about your boyfriend, although once more, she thought he was very nearly right.

  “Is it?”

  “To say that he’s ugly? Yes. I mean, whatever else we might tell ourselves, physical attraction is still a big part of love, isn’t it? In the beginning especially.”

  “I didn’t say he was ugly. And you’re right. In the beginning. But our relationship has never really been about all that. It’s always lacked a core of physical intimacy, actually. For someone who likes to fuck around as much as Isaac, he’s actually pretty prudish when it comes to sex and requires a great deal of chemical courage to really get into it.”

  Isabel frowned. “So what do you see in him, then?”

  “Need,” he said, and he didn’t elaborate.

  • • •

  Several weeks after their dinner, she complained to Sawyer that Isaac still wouldn’t commit to introducing her to Abbie. Sawyer laughed and told her she was mildly obsessed. “I just want to meet the guy,” she said too sharply. “He practically invented my field.”

  They were having lunch in Oakland. Sawyer’s office was in a small research annex of the UPMC Hospital complex, and Isabel’s was in a ghastly new Koolhaas-inspired complex on a rotten hillside at the edge of Carnegie Mellon, just across the ravine from the museums. Over curry noodles, he’d mentioned that Isaac had in turn mentioned that he did indeed want Isabel to see his father’s last realized building, since she was, in his words, “such a precious devotée.”

  “Isaac hates it,” Sawyer said, “but it’s really pretty extraordinary. I mean, I’m a philistine where architecture is concerned, but it’s very impressive. The kitchen, for instance, is built around this enormous rock that’s been flattened off into an island. It’s really something else, and the view is amazing. On a clear day, you can actually see the top of the Steel Tower.”

  “Right,” Isabel said. “But he isn’t following through.”

  “The thing about Isaac,” Sawyer told her, “is that he only pursues projects that are authentic expressions of his own personal genius. He’s like his Dad. If you just shut up about it, he’ll eventually decide it was his idea in the first place, and then he’ll insist. How do you think we ended up together?”

  And so she shut up about it, and not long after he cornered her and insisted. They ended up driving to The Gamelands to spend a weekend in August. Sawyer was out of town, visiting family. Isabel left the office early on Friday. This was something she was still getting used to. People in New York, even in her own abstract and largely academic field, came in after ten but stayed late, often going straight from the office to their evenings out, whereas in Pittsburgh, the whole city seemed to rise early and then leave work at three in the afternoon. She’d never lost the habit of coming in late, but she discovered that she was still able to knock off whenever she wanted. Barry was usually traveling anyway, or else off begging some or other corporation for money and sponsorship. Isabel reported to him directly, and there was no one to mark her comings and goings, not that Barry, or anyone, would have cared when she came and went. She went home and packed a weekend bag: a dress, a pair of jeans, a black bra and a white bra and a sports bra and some running clothes just in case, a bathing suit because Isaac had texted that there was a pool. She bought iced coffee for the drive and then picked him up in front of Sawyer’s place.

  “You don’t have a bag?” she asked.

  “Nah, I’ve got plenty of stuff down there.”

  Almost immediately he asked if he could smoke in her car. She said no. He clarified that he meant weed. She said maybe once they were out of the city.

  “No,” he said. “You’ve got it backwards. City cops don’t make traffic stops. Not for white people. They don’t care. It’s staties who’ll get you.”

  “Oh really?”

  “Je te jure. I’m a country boy.”

  Isabel shrugged her assent, and he took a little spring-loaded wooden case with a compartment for weed and a compartment for a one-hitter from his pocket and got stoned without offering any to her.

  He directed her out of the city by following Carson Street along the Monongahela below a wooded hillside before cutting off on a series of steep roads that ran up through the gullies of Hays, a now-decrepit neighborhood of shadows and knotweed and foreboding hills choked with sickly sumac trees. Then they rolled up though the calcified remains of a prior round of suburban development. The Dairy Queens and car dealerships and shopping malls that once beckoned and drew people out of the city’s core as it fell into disrepair had begun their own inevitable afterlife of decomposition, as lately people wanted downtown condos and sidewalk dining again. They passed the back end of Century Three Mall, so-named, Isaac said, because it once housed three hundred stores, but now held, “one Piercing Pagoda, a decorative sword shop, a vape joint, and a Penney’s.”

  “I’m sure there’s more than that,” Isabel said.

  “There used to be an Orange Julius,” he replied. “Alas, the creative destruction of capitalism.”

  They turned onto Route 51, a lumpy highway Isabel did recognize vaguely, but just a few more miles down the road, he instructed her to merge onto 43, a toll road she’d never noticed.

  “We’re in Large, PA,” he told her. “I love Large. There’s a big local construction firm called the Dick Corporation that used to have its headquarters out here. The Large Dick Corporation!”

  Isaac called 43 the road his father almost built.

  “How do you mean?”

  “Back in the eighties, early nineties, my dad and my aunt and this guy named Phil Harrow were in business together, and they were all planning to get rich off this highway, which was the biggest boondoggle in the history of the state of Pennsylvania. You know they spent more than ten billion on it? Mostly federal money.” They were doing eighty and were the only car on the road. “Empty!” he exclaimed. “It was supposed to revitalize the Mon Valley and Fayette County, or anyway that was the excuse. Really, it was just a lot of greedheads siphoning money out of the government. Anyway, you’d have to ask Abbie the whole story. He still hasn’t told me. All I know is that he fucked over his sister and her partner, her business partner somehow, and they don’t speak to this day. Anytime she wants anything, my aunt I mean, she has to relay it through me, and vice versa.”

  “Family
,” Isabel said.

  “There’s family, and then there’s my family. Anyway, this primordial act of betrayal made my dad rich, supposedly, and it also introduced his crazy ass to Uniontown, which is how he found the mystical magical location of our humble family compound. I will say it’s good cycling terrain.”

  “You bike?” she said. She hadn’t noticed bicycles or bike gear in either of his apartments. She’d assumed his dance-party outfit was just a sex thing.

  “I used to. I loved it, but I find it difficult to sustain affections for very long.”

  “That seems unfortunate.”

  “Yes, well.”

  The road took them through several dozen miles of round hills and valleys full of dairy farms and little brick houses on long driveways. Every few miles, the hills grew a bit higher, the houses smaller, the American flags larger, until, upon being dumped off on the Uniontown Bypass, they were in the real foothills of the Laurel Mountains. Ahead of them, Laurel Ridge rose as a deep indigo wall, and Isabel thought, as she’d thought when she drove across the state in the opposite direction months earlier, of a wave on the ocean, although this time it felt as if she were on the shore, and the wide, undulating mountain was rushing in to sweep everything away.

  “Home sweet home,” Isaac said. “God. This place is so evil. It’s amazing I survived.”

  “I think everyone feels that way about where they’re from,” Isabel said. “I mean, I grew up in New York and lived there all my life, basically, and all the young women I work with can’t imagine ever wanting to live anywhere else, and even though I’ve only been here—in Pittsburgh, I mean—for a little while and still sort of feel like it’s not really my place yet, the truth is that I also feel like I escaped from something.”

  “Yes,” said Isaac a little impatiently. “But, I mean, really. It’s amazing I survived. When we were still in school, me and my friend Jake sort of had this idea that there was a sort of evil presence under the whole town, you know, vaguely Lovecraftian, kind of a slumbering and insatiable and unnameable elder god. Well, not really unnameable. Jake decided that its name was Daroba, maybe because it sounded Egyptian to him? Honestly, I don’t know. Anyway, we used to blame all the local weird happenings on his evil influence. Like when White Adam Martens went to jail for killing the old woman. ‘Oh, Daroba did it.’”

  “White Adam Martens?”

  Isaac laughed. “God, sorry,” he said. “I’ve told these stories so many times. I forget you’re new. You should use that to your advantage, somehow. Something about you suggests that you’ve been here all along.”

  “I’m not sure how to take that.”

  “It’s a compliment, more or less,” Isaac replied. “So, there were two kids named Adam Martens in high school. One of them was black, so everyone called him Black Adam Martens. And the other one was White Adam Martens, who killed an old lady.”

  “That’s awful,” Isabel said.

  “What? The black and white thing or the murder? He was this giant redneck, really, and if I remember right, he ended up going to the Vo-Tech for high school. That’s where they dumped all the patch kids and trailer trash with disciplinary problems. We were actually friends, almost, in junior high. He picked on me for being Jewish, although I think he had a crush on me.” He shrugged. Isaac thought everyone had a crush on him. “Didn’t I tell you this?”

  “Not the part about killing anyone.”

  “Well, I was pretty tore up, if you’ll recall, on the night in question. Anyway, meanwhile, Black Adam Martens was this huge bully. The worst. They left all the black kids with disciplinary problems alone, on the theory, I think, that there weren’t very many black people in the district to begin with. The whole county was only like six percent minority. So you can just imagine. Then poor Adam Martens—White Adam Martens, that is to say—ended up with a big Oxycontin problem, which is normal enough around here, and he and this older dude, whose name I forgot—something Polish-y that ended in -ski—they tried to break into some old lady’s trailer to steal a bunch of Walmart gift cards. This is like right in the middle of the day, because they’re idiots and also probably high. The old lady is watching TV, and how about that! Today is the one day she actually remembered to put in her hearing aid. I remember that particular fact was widely reported. She hears them, and of course, this being the scenic rural hamlet of Lemont Furnace, she keeps a loaded .30-06 under the kitchen counter for just such an occasion. She gets off a shot, which hits the older guy in the shoulder. He goes down. Adam Martens panics, grabs the nearest thing, which is a cast-iron frying pan, and knocks her fucking brains out. Got tried as an adult, too, poor guy. The worst part is that we all knew that Dumbasski or whoever was the ringleader, such as it was, and it was just bad luck. Or it was Daroba, take your pick. A blood sacrifice to the ancient gods. So, now, ironically, Black Adam Martens would pick on you relentlessly, but if you ever tried to talk back to him, like, ‘Come on, Adam, leave me alone,’ he’d just shrug his shoulders and say, ‘Hey, at least Black Adam Martens never killed nobody!’”

  “That’s terrible,” Isabel said.

  “That’s Uniontown.”

  “Who’s the other guy you mentioned?”

  “Who? Oh, Jake? Oh, he’s a friend is all. You’ll meet him, probably. He still lives in Uniontown.”

  “And this Daroba is the monster in the woods?” she asked, smiling, forgetting that she’d decided not to indicate or intimate that they’d met that night at Barry Fitzgerald’s.

  “What?” said Isaac. “Oh, no. Daroba isn’t real.” And this seemed to Isabel to both answer and not answer the question.

  They merged onto Route 40, the old Braddock Road. The young George Washington and General Braddock had followed the same road in reverse from the headwaters of the Potomac up over the Appalachians toward the French at Fort Duquesne, where they got their asses handed to them. Later Washington, the president, made it the National Road, one of the first great national works in that rough-hewn new Rome. After the Eisenhower era, parts of it had been widened into a four-lane highway, but it was never fit to become an interstate. It retained in its rake and bends the precipitous feeling of a real mountain pass, the kind of road you’d expect in the younger mountains of an older civilization. There were other even steeper and still narrower roads that also made that climb up Laurel Ridge—Hopwood-Fairchance Road, Stone Quarry Road, Jumonville-Coolspring Road, Mud Pike Road. Isaac used to climb them on his fleet, light little bike when he was a teenager with the unlikely dream of competing in a Grand Tour one day. He used to imagine that he was in the Pyrenees or the Dolomites even as pickups rattled past, too close, herding him toward the dangerous shoulders while the laughing girlfriends of the howling drivers yelled “fag!” at the skinny kid dressed in shiny Lycra.

  Isabel’s car protested even on the grade of the wider and more regular highway. She was a city-trained and casual driver, and she had only a hazy notion of what to do with the gears on an ascent. Isaac was telling her about the Cumberland Classic, a spring race that started nearby in Connellsville and rolled over a hundred miles of these roads into Maryland. The thought of hauling herself up such a road on a bicycle seemed absurd; the thought of doing it over and over for six or seven hours fantastical. But Isaac was almost rapturous in describing it, one of the few really unguarded moments in their whole friendship. “The closest a man can get,” he told her, “to a female orgasm comes when you summit a really big hill.” She laughed and asked him how he knew what a female orgasm felt like. “It feels,” he told her, “like spinning a high cadence up a nine percent grade with the sun going in and out of the trees that are shading the road—first pleasant, just rolling along, then a kind of exertion that gets your heart up and your breathing a little faster like good exercise, then a period of tiredness that you have to think through or else you’ll back off the pace and effort and finish without really finishing, then the last five hundred meters when you feel cold and hot all at once and think for the love of God
, you’re not actually going to make it, then, when you do make it, the Kundalini uncurls out of its resting place in the hollow of your pelvis and goes up your spine and out into all your limbs down to your fingers and toes and it breaks out through the third eye on your forehead and all your cells shudder all at once like all the strings bowed in one chord on a cello and then you’re over it with sweat on your chest recovering on the descent on the other side.”

  She told him that he was off on the details, but it wasn’t a bad description as far as these things go. In fact, she found it slightly uncanny, but she wasn’t going to tell him that. He was already smug enough. But he caught her smiling.

  The road passed a scenic lookout two-thirds of the way up the climb: a pull-off on the right side of the road revealed the narrow, beautiful valley between the Pine Knob promontory and the ridge. Isaac informed her that the area below was called Lick Hollow. He found this funnier than it was. At the top of the ridge was the old Summit Inn, a pile of white clapboard and dormers that called back to an earlier era of American travel. Its letterboard sign advertised STEAK, LOBSTER, and GOLF. They turned right just past the Summit below a billboard for Laurel Caverns, “Western Pennsylvania’s Largest Natural Cavern Formations.” Isaac, giggling, explained that the caves were owned by the family of a prominent local evangelical, Melvin Chislett, himself a former CPA who had, one April 15, experienced his Road-to-Damascus moment and converted from the sort of tepid, non-denominational, public Christianity that characterizes so much American public life to a full-bore, young-Earth, sola scripta apostle of the Good News. He took an online course, got ordained, and founded the Seed of Faith Full Gospel Church. Isaac described this congregation as the sort of Christians who are ambivalent about Jews but over-the-moon for Israel. He used that phrase, actually: “over the moon.” It was another habit of his, an occasional anachronism in his speech. It had begun intentionally; then it became his nature and he stopped noticing. Chislett’s brother-in-law owned the caverns. His brother, meanwhile, was the chief of police.