“Christ,” Isabel said. “Who isn’t related?”
“Only us. The interlopers. The immigrants.”
They passed another sign for the caverns.
“They’re really laying it on thick,” Isabel said.
“When I was in seventh grade,” Isaac told her, “we went on a field trip there in our natural science class. Our teacher was new to the district; I mean he was probably about my age now. And he didn’t know any better. They explained to us how the Flood caused the caves.”
“The Flood flood?”
“The one and only.”
“What an education.”
“We used to say it was one of the regular haunts of Daroba. You could really imagine an elder god getting a good laugh slinking around in the slimy, dripping dark, surrounded by cartoon plaques of Adam riding a friendly dinosaur in the Garden.”
The Gamelands property was on the western side of the ridge, off a rolling road that traced the ridge’s crest between Caverns Park Road and Mud Pike Road. It was marked only by POSTED signs on the trees and a small stone pillar that held the mailbox at the end of a long gravel driveway. The driveway descended into a small hollow full of ferns before rising again through the woods until it met the broad clearing where the house, or collection of houses, was at first barely visible, a suggestion of rocks or peaks rising nearly imperceptibly from the highest point of land ahead, where the meadow finished its rise and rolled down the sunset escarpment for a thousand feet to where the trees closed in again. The Mayers had two dogs, great, dumb, friendly, half-wild black beasts that could just as easily have been bears, and at the sound of wheels on the gravel, they came bounding out of the woods barking with the pure joy of creatures whose lives and senses are unencumbered by the rent-taking middleman of human intellect.
“Holy shit, they’re like bears!” Isabel said, braking to avoid them and sliding in the gravel.
“They’re my father’s familiars,” Isaac replied. It was, Isabel thought, the first time that she’d heard him refer to Abbie as “my father.” (It was not, in fact, but Isabel had already begun to read the connection between Abbie and Isaac as both more and less fraught than it really was. Like most educated, literate people, she had a crude but persistent belief in a simple kind of psychology. She tended to underestimate the capacity of people to be actually cruel to each other while overestimating minor cruelty’s effect.)
The driveway wound around the front of the house. It was a building that defied easy summary. It looked like a movie whose title you can’t quite recall, an old teacher whose name you can’t quite remember. The complex gave off the overwhelming sense of having been there since the beginning of time, and yet something equally suggested that a person could, with sufficient effort and knowledge, fold the whole thing into the bed of a pick-up and drive away. It was otherworldly in the way that this world’s more extraordinary places often are. It had a Hyperborean quality to it, as if ancient astronauts had built it at the height of their hubris before cataclysm swept them away.
The drive spiraled to a dugout carport on the far side of the complex. The carport didn’t appear to be connected to the rest of the buildings; they were integrated via a series of semi-buried, skylit corridors through the hillside. The parking, Isaac said, was his father’s bitter concession to the necessity of driving up there in the first place. It seemed to Isabel that if that were entirely true, there would have been room for some number fewer than eight cars. They parked and followed a canopied path hidden by vines and a low wall to the entrance of what Isaac called The Children’s House. “Ironic,” he said, “since I’m the only child. You’ll be an honorary child. Hopefully my mother hasn’t sold the guest bed. She discovered eBay a while back, and honest to God, anything that isn’t bolted down.”
Below the drive, a series of terraces that traced the relief of the hill like the lines of an elevation map stepped a hundred feet into the meadow, cut through with gravel and brick walkways and patios and a long, chilly-looking pool surrounded by flagstones. None of it was in particularly good repair. The dogs wagged around their legs and sniffed their elbows. Isabel asked their names. “Leto and Lady Jessica,” Isaac said. Isabel raised her eyebrows. “What?” he said. “Abbie named them. What can I say? He’s a fucking environmentalist. He loved Dune.”
Isabel shrugged. “The patios could use a little TLC,” she said.
“Oh please,” said Isaac. “Abbie should have named this place Deferred Maintenance.”
She’d expected—unrealistically, she knew—that the Mayer parents would come out to greet them, but Isaac just let them into the kids’ house, a self-contained residence: one large common area with a fieldstone floor covered in cowhides and a hodgepodge collection of not-quite-modern furniture, pieces reminiscent of a prewar Hollywood apartment or a preposterous lounge in a ratty interwar ocean liner. There was an open kitchen with white cabinets and bar pulls, very eighties. A beautiful stairway of granite and beechwood led to two lofted bedrooms overlooking the space below and, through the big front windows, the sweep of property and slope and town and hills beyond. The bathroom was set deep into the rear of the house, lit through clerestory windows on its front-facing wall. It contained a vast tub that was carved out of a rock formation. Isaac showed Isabel to her room. It had a bed—a rather spindly camp bed with a pilled, its-a-boy!-blue blanket.
“Well, I guess she sold the bed,” Isaac said.
“This isn’t original?” Isabel smiled.
“Kween,” he said. He sighed. “You’d better take mine. It’s built in, so I presume it’s intact.”
It was. It had a rootlike quality and appeared to grow out of the wall. “Isaac,” Isabel said, “this house really is extraordinary. I don’t know what to say.”
“Girl, please. It looks like it was designed by a drunken elf. It looks like Legend.”
Isabel decided it was best not to argue. People were generally forgiving of criticisms of their families, less so of praise. She walked to the railing at the room’s edge and looked out. “That’s Uniontown?” She pointed down the mountain.
“God’s own creation. The U-T.” He seemed, very briefly, as if he was going to cry. Then he laughed. “Okay,” he said. “We’d better have a drink before I introduce you to the fam. Again, assuming ma mère n’a pas déjà bu tout le booze avant de le remplacer avec de l’eau.”
“Really?” Isabel said.
“You know the cliché about role reversal as parents and children age? In our case, the inflection point came early. Of course, they were already old when they had me. Abbie is seventy, you know.”
“I wondered about that.”
“Mom was on the verge of her ‘change of life’ as she puts it. I suspect fertility treatments, but then again, if that had been the case, you’d expect I’d have had a twin. Boy, that would’ve done wonders for my porn career.” He saw her face. “I’m kidding,” he said. “I haven’t got the dick for it.”
They went downstairs, and they found plenty of un-watered liquor in the kitchen. Isaac poured her a vodka soda, a scotch for himself. They sat in the weird speakeasy set of his living room while the sun settled somewhere below the house, and the surrounding woods threw long shadows over the terraces and lawns.
“When I was a kid,” Isaac said, “all my friends thought this place was great, because, you know, I basically had my own house, and Abbie and Sarah never gave a shit about what we did, so my friends could come up here and drink and get stoned and whatever, although of course, Abbie was always weird about the monster in the woods.”
“I feel I’m missing the metaphor,” Isabel said. She had a vague sense, which she would have been embarrassed to articulate, that some or other of our comforting superstitions must be true. Nothing so absurd as a singular god, of course, but a hazy half conviction that we went on in some form after we died, that nature as people understood it was an insufficient explanation for all things. But on the rare occasions that she gave it any thought, she co
nvinced herself that none of it was literally true; these things only stood in, in the end, for everything that we did not, as yet, understand.
“No metaphor,” Isaac told her. “Like, really. There’s really a monster in the woods.”
“Like what?” she said. “Like a Cyclops? Like Bigfoot?”
“God, no. Lol.” He pronounced it lawl. “I mean, you weren’t here a couple of years ago, but there was this amazing drug bust up north of Pittsburgh, this sort of notorious local meth dealer-slash-scifi author. Anyway, the cops roughed him up pretty good, and even though he got convicted, he filed a civil suit claiming police brutality blah blah blah. Never went anywhere, but it got some press because the cops said, basically, that he had attacked them when they tried to apprehend him, and he said, no, it wasn’t me. It was Bigfoot! Anyway, yeah. Neither here nor there. No, there is a monster in the woods. Hang on.” He took his phone out and composed a text.
She frowned. That fucking phone. “What are you doing?”
“Texting Jake to come over after dinner. He’ll attest to it. Also, I need more pot. So, yeah, there’s a monster in the woods. It’s different for everyone. Jake swears it’s like a giant, like a capybara or something, with yellow eyes. My mother considers it vaporous. But my mother is pretty vaporous. Monsters are like dogs. They come to resemble us after we spend enough time together. I don’t know about Abbie. I mean, I do, but he doesn’t actually call it a monster. He has a more religious—excuse me, spiritual—interpretation. He says that it’s in the form of a giant deer, but I’m like, ‘Abbie, that’s just, you know, a deer.’” He paused and smiled winsomely.
“And you?”
“I don’t believe in monsters.” He smirked. “You think we’re nuts.”
“I’m not especially superstitious.”
He shrugged. “It’s Fayette County,” he said. “It’s weird.”
“Even so, that seems preternaturally weird.”
“Yes,” he said. “Preternaturally.”
They sipped their drinks, and he immersed himself in his phone. Isabel could hear the pings and assorted percussion sounds of his hook-up apps. You didn’t live in New York in a milieu of architects and designers and other specimens who described themselves, quite un-ironically, as “creatives” without becoming familiar with these tools. She herself had even briefly, just after moving to Pittsburgh, downloaded one of the pale hetero versions, attempting to feel liberated as she tapped her approval (acquiescence?) in the app store, but feeling actually rather prim. Before Ben, she’d been able to meet men easily at bars and restaurants and parties and produce aisles; now she was downloading a purpose-driven computer program. It wasn’t that she was a Luddite; she loved her laptops (work and personal), her tablet, her Kindle, her frequently upgraded phone. Rather, it was the specificity of the thing, the way it took what should have been freewheeling and anarchic and made it into something practical, almost vocational. Wasn’t that a reflection on America, or on the West, or on the dull conclusion of Capitalism, or something? That as our education had become a mere factory for producing employees, so too now our sentimental education became a matter of ruthless efficacy: task-specific, goal-oriented? Anyway, the experience was a bust. Isabel didn’t even manage to attract any interesting grotesques, no lurid cock shots (she got a few, but they were the opposite of lurid; they were clinical and detached; one of them included a dollar bill held beside a boner for comparison, making the transactional nature of the whole exchange even more appallingly obvious: truth in advertising! get what you paid for!). There were very few perverted demands, nothing much but the metronomically regular interest of regular dudes, more or less her age, income, and level of educational attainment, who, because they were so busy killing it at the office/at the gym/with their boys/etc. were in search of someone dully ordinary and of that variety of athletically unerotic sex that is best performed within eye-shot of a mirror. Of course, she knew the experience would be different for a young gay guy, or assumed it would, anyway. Her friends in New York had complained about it even as they shoved their faces into it. She let Isaac do his thing and even took her own phone out to nose through emails for a while.
Eventually he got bored. The drinks turned clammy and sweated onto the glass table, and he sighed and said, “Once more into the breach,” and hopped out of the chair. He led her through one of the odd hallways—half cave dwelling and half space station—that connected one annex of the compound to another, and they emerged into the main house in a sort of atrium-cumfoyer, which held at one end the crystal-palace front doors of The Gamelands. Hung in the vaulted, jagged cathedral above them, there were a number of mobiles that resembled a mad cross-breeding of Calder and middling Judaica, and finally, at its center, right out of some myth about the creation of the world by a wild clan of festive gods, an enormous, slightly yellowing banyan tree. (“It’s the third largest banyan tree in Pennsylvania,” Isaac claimed. Isabel hummed a sound that she hoped sounded like interested acknowledgment.)
From there they went through a discreet doorway into the grandest room of the house, a multilevel hangar of glass and stone whose lower expanse held several distinctly furnished sitting areas and an out-of-place grand piano. The upper portion included both a large dining area with a comically vast table of curvilinear wood surrounded by a goofy assortment of thrift-store chairs and a kitchen centered around that big boulder island that Sawyer had mentioned, which really was more impressive in the seeing than in the telling, a leveled-off Gibraltar heaved up out of the floor. Isabel had almost expected to find Abbie seated in some kind of seigniorial splendor, throned and waiting to receive them like the ruler of a minor duchy. Instead, the first person they met was a young man—younger than Isabel, older than Isaac—perched precariously on a wooden A-frame ladder beside the windows.
“Hola, Eli,” said Isaac. He left Isabel in the doorway and headed immediately to the kitchen, where he opened the wide refrigerator and stood, like every son everywhere at every visit home, with the door open, surveying the contents before deciding there was nothing he wanted and walking over to the bannister that separated the upper and lower sections of the room. He pronounced the name Eh-lee.
“Hello, Isaac,” said Eli. “Give me just a moment. If I talk while I’m up here, I’m sure to fall off.” He had the slightly British accent that many continental Europeans acquire in their studies of English over the barest hint of his native Spanish. He pressed a gooey white substance out of a squeeze bottle onto the joint of a windowpane and its frame. He had an ugly but not unappealing face, a squished nose (terribly broken in his childhood), and cleft chin that looked like an angry fist. He had too-deep eyes that shone like those of a threatened and threatening animal coming out of a cave. He had very wide shoulders, narrow hips, and short legs. The whole effect was vaguely troglodytic. But his voice betrayed a hint of aristocracy, or at least the modern, bourgeois equivalent thereof. He swung off the ladder with a fluid and simian maneuver, laid the squeeze bottle on a nearby bench, wiped his hands on his jeans, and walked toward them.
“Isabel,” Isaac said, “this is Eli. Eli, Isabel.”
He shook her hand with an American matter-of-factness that indicated he’d been living in the country for a while, a surer sign than any accent. “Isabel,” he said. “My pleasure to meet you. Are you a friend of Izzy’s?” He held her eyes for a moment too long, and she looked away, pretending to be interested in the architecture.
“Don’t call me that,” said Isaac.
Eli grinned. “Your father’s windows are leaking again. It rained last night and dripped all over the place. I’m trying a new silicone caulk.” (He pronounced it cock. Isabel grinned inadvertently. Isaac caught her and made a face.) “I doubt it will work. We will have to tear the whole place down.”
“Haven’t I been saying it?” said Isaac. He turned to her. “Eli,” he said, “is my father’s factotum.”
“I’d hoped to be his amanuensis,” said Eli, confirming what Isabel
had already decided: that he was not just a handyman, or that, if he were, then it was a reinvention from some other, former life.
“Abbie is his own amanuensis,” Isaac told us. “Both king and scribe, like David but less beautiful, like Solomon but less wise. Where is my paterfamilias, by the way? Isabel is a genuine groupie. She has several of his books. I saw them at her house one time after dinner. She’d moved them from her main bookshelf, but I snooped. I want to be there when he signs her tits.”
Had she known him better, or known him less, she thought, she’d have smacked him, but she could only stand there and blush.
Eli elected to appear not to notice, although Isabel might have noted a sympathetic softening of his eyes if she’d looked at him. “Your father,” he said, “is in Uniontown. He said he’d be back later.”
“What car did he take?”
“I don’t know. The Land Rover?”
“Typical. We were supposed to have dinner. Where’s Mom?”
“He said he was going to bring back fried chicken. Sarah told me she was going to take a nap.”
“Yeah?” Isaac smirked meanly. “How many hours ago would you say she said that?”
“Are you two thirsty?” asked Eli. “I thought I’d have a beer on the patio.”
Over beers, Isaac went back to talking about his weird upbringing. He wanted to tell the story of the subterranean network of tunnels underneath the Uniontown Mall. He and Jake had been getting high at a small lake—really, a rain-filled and abandoned quarry—on the far side of the Mount Saint Macrina property, a Catholic retreat for nuns built on what had once been the estate of J.V. Thompson, whose coal and coke fortune had been, before bankruptcy, before Frick and Carnegie, one of the greatest of the great American fortunes. Now the Oak Hill mansion had been divided into dark warrens of sleeping cubicles for the nuns and the granite balustrades on the wide patios were chipped. The property held newer buildings, too, dormitories and chapels and a small cemetery, but on far side of the land, there was a ten-acre stand of old woods, and in the woods was the old quarry. In order to get there, the boys had to move quietly across a field of low grass in the dark. “We were afraid,” Isaac explained, “because there was a rumor that one of the Fathers had a shotgun loaded with rock salt, and he’d shoot you in the ass if he caught you trespassing.” In the summer, the dense trees around the pool retained humidity; the earth threw up ferns; the fallen logs were covered in lichens and hairlike moss. “The pool didn’t have a bottom,” Isaac said. “It went down, down, down forever until you passed through to the other side of the world.”
The Doorposts of Your House and on Your Gates Page 13