“To China.” Isabel laughed.
“Not the physical world,” he said. “That pool was where Daroba came from.”
They liked to get high in those woods, and then afterward they’d sneak back across the estate grounds and climb back over the fieldstone wall that separated it from Main Street below the mall. They’d run across four lanes of traffic—except there was rarely any traffic—to the expanses of fast-food restaurants, where they’d giggle as they ordered more food than they were likely to eat. Behind the restaurants there was a rocky gully full of twisted trees and stands of knotweed. Why it was that on this one particular night Jake decided to walk into the trees to take a piss rather than using the bathroom at the McDonald’s was never clear. There’s something about a teenage boy that impels him to piss outside when possible, a sort of hormonal exhibitionism, the desire to display the dick that’s so central to his existence to the whole of the world, even if he’s doing so while concealed behind a tree where no one else can actually see him. Jake returned, out of breath. “Isaac,” he whispered, although there was no reason to whisper. “Come on, you’ve got to see this.”
Beyond the trees, the gully reared back up in a hillside of broken stone to the mall’s parking lots, thirty or forty feet above, but sticking out of the side, like the obscene tailpipe of some immense earthworks spaceship, was an un-barred storm drain pipe a little over four feet in diameter.
“So?” said Isaac.
“Soooo,” said Jake. “We should go in.”
“Fuck no,” said Isaac. “Jesus, it’s a sewer. That’s fucking gross.”
“It’s a storm drain,” said Jake.
“I’m not going in there,” said Isaac, but then he shrugged, and he added, “Besides. You’d need a flashlight.”
That would have been the end of it, but a month or so later, on the edge of fall, that far end of August just before the start of school when the temperature dropped from eighty degrees during the day to near fifty at night and the long evening light took on that dusk glow that suggests the quick fading of an incandescent filament just after the light switch is flipped off, they were back at the quarry smoking weed, and Jake opened up his over-patched backpack—he defied the local expectations for a black kid by being particularly fond of Anti-Flag and the Dead Kennedys—and said, “Looooook what Iiiii have.” He’d brought a pair of long Maglites. Isaac couldn’t think of any reason to protest that didn’t suggest cowardice and fear of the dark and the wet, so after smoking a little more out of the little purple-and-green glass bowl that Isaac had stolen from Abbie, they dashed back across the half-a-highway and through the parking lot between McDonald’s and Long John Silver’s and through the ratty trees past the dumpsters and then they scrambled over the sharp stones to the lip of the pipe. Jake lifted Isaac by the legs until he could grab the rim and pull himself up. Then Isaac hoisted Jake up behind him. They turned on the lights and went down the tunnel.
A narrow trickle of water ran in a channel down the bottom center of the passage. The entrance had been matted with slimy, decomposing leaves, but five feet in, it turned surprisingly clean, maintained by the frequent passage of water after it rained. They walked in a crouch with the flashlights making odd concentric ovals down the tunnel ahead of them. A breeze came toward them out of the depths. It carried the faint odor of motor oil and grease. Although the tunnels were concrete and laid perfectly straight, they felt organic, as if the boys had smuggled themselves into the circulatory system of a giant creature from an antediluvian world that had, innumerable eons ago, crawled wearily to this spot and laid down in its final lethargy to die. It was at once haunting and thrilling to be there. It appealed to them in all its weirdness. Who but a couple of pretty weird kids would crawl into a concrete tunnel under a mall at night? After a few hundred yards, they came to a square junction. Some light filtered from above. Looking up, they could see a grate over an opening to the parking lot above. They had a quick debate about which way to go out of the junction, before deciding that they’d come far enough for one night. “Of course,” Isaac said, “we were actually terrified, but no one was going to admit it. We smoked some cigarettes. Jake insisted that we turn off the flashlights to conserve batteries, which was hysterical, because we’d been in there for what, fifteen minutes? If that. Anyway, we’re sitting there, and it’s not quite pitch black, because there’s the light coming down from the drain above, and then Jake says, ‘Did you feel that?’ ‘Feel what?’ I said. ‘The direction of the wind changed.’ ‘No it didn’t.’ ‘Yes, it did.’ ‘Did it?’ Then we sat there, and of course, we felt the direction of the wind changing, which was it? I don’t know. Probably not. Then Jake says, ‘Something’s fucking breathing. Motherfucker! There’s something in here.’ And we both went motherfucker and scurried the fuck out. Then we swore that we were going to go back in and find whatever it was that lived in there.”
“Did you?” Isabel asked.
“What?”
“Go back and find out.”
Isaac swirled the last inch of his beer. “God, no,” he said. “We pretended to forget about it, because we were too fucking scared to go back. Anyway, we were fourteen. We were getting into some other shit.”
“But seriously,” Isabel asked, “why the fuck would you crawl around in a storm drain?”
Isaac shrugged. “It’s Uniontown,” he answered. He giggled. “What else was there to do?”
This was when Sarah arrived, jangling uncertainly through the doors onto the patio. She was very thin, almost malnourished, although her face gave the impression of slight bloating. Her big eyes were pale green and quivered and seemed ever on the verge of tears, like one of those delicate girls in Japanese anime. Her hair was a nebular mane of gray frizz that blew out from her head in every direction and fell more than halfway down her back. She was nearly seventy herself and gave off the confusing impression of being both older and younger: the slight swelling of her face stretched that skin taught and made her cheeks round to an almost pubescent effect, whereas skin hung loosely on her tiny arms. She moved with the hesitancy of the elderly when they reached that stage of life in which each movement is the potential prelude to a terrible fall. She wore a billowing, sleeveless caftan and flowing pants whose volume emphasized rather than concealed the spindly legs beneath. She wore a great deal of jewelry—bracelets especially—some of it clearly very fine (one diamond tennis bracelet, in particular, shone as if it were reflecting a bonfire made of all the paper money in the world), much of it the kind of hammered copper junk that Isabel would have bought for her mother at one of those white-tented art fairs that spring up in shopping districts during the long days of summer or at stands along the road on the drive from Santa Fe to Taos. Sarah smelled too strongly of perfume, an overwhelming scent of sandalwood and not-quite-lavender: old-lady perfume. And yet she carried an unmistakable whiff of immortality, a freshness underneath the slightly boozy stink of the scent. She was as pale as a vampire, and that, if only because of all the silly talk about monsters, was Isabel’s first impression of her: one either risen, or preserved, from the grave.
“I thought I heard your father.” Her voice had a gentle tremor. She stood several feet away from the three of them as if she were afraid to approach.
“Nope,” said Isaac, who rolled his eyes theatrically at Isabel. He was always trying to draw her into his conspiracies of disdain, and she’d have been ashamed to realize how frequently she obliged. “Just us, as the saying goes.”
“I could have sworn.”
“He isn’t back from town, yet, Sarah,” said Eli, who lifted himself out of the seat, hovering for a moment like a gymnast between the parallel bars before dismounting over the arm and giving a broad stretch. Isabel watched him. She wouldn’t have expected someone so odd looking to move with such self-accustomed grace. Though why not?
“He went to town?”
“There was a meeting,” Eli said. “About the new wellheads.”
“Oh, yes. Ye
s. Goodness, what time is it?”
“Eight,” Eli told her without bothering to look at a watch or a phone. “He should be back soon. He is bringing Roose’s.”
“Your father and that potato salad,” Sarah said, now gazing toward her son. “I don’t think it’s any better than any other potato salad.”
Isaac rolled his eyes again. “Roose’s is great, Mom,” he said. (Though he shared her opinion, and he was only being contrary.) Then he too jumped out of his seat and announced, “I’ve got to piss.” He swept past his mother, barely pausing to plant a cursory kiss on her cheek. Eli followed him into the house. No one had introduced Isabel. She started to get up.
“Oh, you don’t need to get up for me,” Sarah said. Her tone suggested that they already knew each other. It occurred to Isabel suddenly that Sarah wasn’t just old, nor only sleep-fogged, but also quite certainly drunk. “Do you mind if I sit?”
“No, of course not.”
Sitting was an effort for her. The chairs were low, and she made a series of quiet, agonized noises as she lowered herself tenderly into the one where Isaac had been.
“These knees,” she said.
Isabel murmured general assent.
“Tell me your name again, dear. I’m sorry, I’m terrible with names.”
“Isabel.”
“How lovely,” she said. “It suits you.”
“Well,” Isabel said. “I can’t take any credit.”
“For your name?” She sighed. “No, I suppose not. Although don’t you think that one comes to resemble one’s name, or one’s name comes to resemble oneself. I’m not sure in which order. Like pets, you know.”
Isabel laughed obligingly, even though she wasn’t sure Sarah meant it to be funny, even though it resembled so closely a thought she’d just had herself. She told Sarah that she didn’t resemble those two monster dogs very much.
“Oh, no,” Sarah said. “But they’re Abbie’s. Have you seen Abbie?”
“I think he’s still in town.”
“Oh, yes. Roose’s. How could I forget?” She laughed, either at Isabel or at some idea of her husband lugging home tubs of fried chicken and potato salad. She could be as cruel as Isaac, or he as cruel as her. It was hard to say in which direction the genealogy of nastiness ran. Like her son, Sarah took an unnecessary degree of pleasure in chuckling at other people’s expense. She’d go on, a few days after this visit, to tell Isaac what she’d thought of Isabel. She said she found that Isabel was uncannily like Abbie. Isaac thought this was funny. “How do you mean?” he’d asked.
“She wants to be believed,” Sarah said, “but she’d prefer to be liked.” Isaac didn’t see it, of course, but that had more to do with his character than with any peculiarity of Isabel’s. Who wants to see in his own friends a propensity for sycophancy? What would that say about his friendships?
Sarah played idly with several bracelets, twisting them around her pale forearm. It was a habit born of a kind of insatiable boredom, like a dog that chews the baseboards. In New York, she’d been a busy woman; in Pittsburgh, she’d participated nominally in Abbie’s early business ventures, but in the years since they’d come to Uniontown, she’d entered a semi-retirement that had turned the obsessive part of her mind that had once made her almost erudite and, in a conventional sense, successful, in on itself, which left her with nervous tics and a propensity for white wine before noon.
“So,” she said. “Isabel. Tell me, what do you do? You’ll have to excuse the question. I used to know how to make conversation without asking it, but I’ve lost my touch.”
“Oh, I don’t mind. I work for a non-profit.”
“That’s suitably vague.”
“I’m sorry.” Isabel smiled a placatory smile. “It’s just that not many people have heard of it. We’re really more of a think tank, I guess. It’s called the Future Cities Institute. We used to be a part of CMU. We’re still affiliated, actually, but we’re an independent 501, now.”
“Oh, yes. Barry Fitzgerald’s outfit,” Sarah said in an acute echo of her son’s lover.
“You know Barry?”
“He was impossible to avoid. I’m sorry. That sounds mean. I used to be a better conversationalist. You see, Barry was just a professor. This would have been in the late eighties, I’d say. Early nineties. He occupied some sort of intermediary stage between being part-time and being tenured—the politics of that sort of thing escape me. Well, you know, those kinds of people are expected to live the lives of the bourgeoisie on the wages of busboys, and Barry was always scamming around property developers, as Abbie would say, pitching himself as a sort of consultant. Well, he was attached to an associate, who was at the time a very dear friend of ours, Arthur Imlak, who eventually went into business with Abbie.”
“I’ve met him,” Isabel said.
“Did he try to get you onto his boat? He has wandering hands, I sometimes think, but he’s the product of a different moral universe. God, did he make one of his jokes about sailing? He’s very fond of Isaac. I sometimes think he pays more attention than Abbie. What was I saying? Yes, Barry. Arthur is richer than decency ought to permit now, but even then, he had quite a lot of cash, and he always had some useless minions around. It made him feel important. It’s not the worst quality in a man. My husband, whom you’ll meet, doesn’t have this weakness, and I think that may be worse. In any case, I do remember Barry. Does he still live in that house?”
“In Point Breeze,” Isabel said. “Yes, he does.”
“I used to think he had eyes for Isaac, and you know, Isaac does have a thing for older men, unfortunately. That upsets Abbie more than anything.” She shook her head. “Men. He never actually cared that his son was gay, you know. But feminine? Well, thank God Sawyer came along. He’s a good influence. Is he with you?”
“No. He couldn’t make it.”
“A doctor! I’m still enough of a Jewish mother that it pleases me to no end. ‘And so good looking.’” She giggled at her unconvincing attempt at imitating a Yiddish matron, which came off like her son’s imitation of her. “How did you and Isaac meet?”
“At a party,” Isabel said, but she didn’t specify which.
“My son and his parties.”
“Mm,” Isabel said.
“And you, Isabel,” Sarah said after a moment, “What do you do?”
• • •
Abbie’s arrival at dinner took the form of a minor automobile accident. Sarah had opened a bottle of lousy Malbec, the sort of wine whose label suggested a bad tourism brochure, and they were all drinking and picking at olives in the kitchen. It was after nine. The sun had gone down. Isaac rarely looked up from his phone. Sarah was telling Isabel about an antique store that “you must visit” in Blawnox, just up the Allegheny River from Pittsburgh. “I bought the most wonderful set of milk glass dishes, there,” she said. “Do you like milk glass?” She gazed at Isabel with quivering eyes.
Isabel didn’t especially care for milk glass. She said, “Oh, I do.”
“You must go. I keep meaning to drive out again, one of these days, but you know.”
Isabel didn’t know, nor, she thought, did Sarah. Then they heard the sound of a car skidding on gravel and the unmistakable dull bang of a car crumpling against a tree.
Abbie had taken the curve of the driveway around the house too fast, fishtailed on the loose stones, and swung his rear passenger side into the trunk of the big tulip tree that he’d planted there the same week they’d broken ground on the main house. Everyone went outside, though you would not say rushed, and found him standing in the semi-dark with his door open, the dome light on, the headlights flashing out into the evening. He was in jeans and a sport coat whose purchase had preceded his latest round of weight gain. He glared at the car with the aggressive, proprietary disbelief of all men betrayed by their cars, from which they expect absolute fidelity. His silly white hair was brushed like a mane away from his fleshy, once-handsome face. He appeared unharmed, as did the tree. The Lan
d Rover had acquired a strange concavity where it now leaned against the trunk, almost as if something had taken a bite out of it. “I told you,” Isaac whispered to Isabel. “A monster.”
She raised an eyebrow, Spock-like, a talent or a curse of her too-expressive face, and whispered back, “He was probably just driving too fast.”
“Ah,” said Isaac, “but why was he driving too fast?”
Sarah had gone gingerly to her husband’s side as if she were the one who’d just been in an accident. “Oh, Abbie,” she said, “I think we’re in trouble.”
“What trouble?” His voice exploded like a rifle shot through the woods. “Look at the Goddamn car!” The dogs, reacting to his raised voice, let loose an extended cadence of excited barking.
“Oh, Abbie,” she said, this time admonishing.
“Oh, Goddamn it, Sarah! God!” He reeled back and spread his arms and addressed the sky. “You lousy Son of a Bitch!” It occurred to Isabel that he, too, might be slightly drunk. “Not one minute’s peace! Not a moment’s Goddamn rest!” He shook his head violently and stalked over to the truck, clambering back into the driver’s seat in order to peer into the back. Then he was screaming again. “And You ruined the fucking chicken! Smashed!” He slammed the door shut and began to stride toward the house, thought the better of it, went back to the car, opened the door, yanked out the keys, slammed the door once more, and headed back. He paused where Isabel stood with Isaac and Eli. “We’ll get it in the morning,” he fumed to Eli. He turned to Isaac and said, “It came close to the drive, Isaac.”
The Doorposts of Your House and on Your Gates Page 14