The Doorposts of Your House and on Your Gates

by Jacob Bacharach

  “Do you think my brother is crazy?” Veronica asked.

  Edith picked up her shallow dinner bowl and kissed her head. “Yes.”

  “No, I mean, really crazy. Like, ill.”

  “Yes,” Edith said. “I’m going to flip the record.”

  “What should I do?”

  She heard Edith running water in the kitchen. “I thought you were going to flip the album.”

  “You flip it. I forgot. My hands are wet.”

  “But what should I do?”

  Edith came into the living room, drying her hands on her stained apron. She laughed. “You’re such a man, sometimes.”

  Veronica turned on the B-side and set her face in an expression of mocking shock. “That’s a terrible thing to say!”

  “Aw, honey. It’s true, though. You always think you have to do something. Why do you have to do anything?”

  “I love you,” Veronica said.

  “Yes,” Edith said. She walked back toward the kitchen. “You’re not half bad yourself.”

  But that afternoon in her office, facing her brother across her paper-crowded desk, the last gray winter sunlight slanting bitterly through the windows behind her, she’d been too angry to consider the particularities of his mental state at all, had only seen a thickening egoist in a tightening jacket that, like all clothing that costs too much money, was too quickly out of style, and she’d ordered him out of her office, although, when he turned at the threshold and asked if they were still meeting tomorrow, she’d sighed loudly and told him yes.

  • • •

  That same evening, in another dining room in another part of the East End, Sarah and Abbie had nearly the same conversation, although Abbie’s manner wasn’t to sit silently in his own thoughts, but to recount them volubly as they scampered through his angry head. Sarah turned the ring around her finger and tried not to appear distracted as Abbie called her sister-in-law a criminal, or at least a suborner of crime. “I understand that this business is full of unsavory characters and that everyone is on the make and that the first truly honest man in the building business will also be the last, but doesn’t it fall to us to try to be decent?” He shouted. “If not wholly honest, then mostly? If not mostly, then occasionally? When we can? When we could still do all right by it? Is it necessary to debase ourselves just because our peers and our colleagues are debased?”

  “No,” Sarah said. “It isn’t.”

  “But?”

  “But what?”

  “But you have a look.”

  “What look?”

  “A look of grim skepticism. A look that says you’re humoring me. A look that suggests you disagree but are reserving comment for the sake of my ego.”

  “I’m frequently reserving comment for the sake of your ego, Abbie.”

  “My ego can take it.”

  “Yes, possibly.” She poured herself more wine. “Or possibly not.”

  “You’ve been acting strange.”

  “No, Abbie. You’ve been acting strange.”

  “I mean since I went to Uniontown. The first time.”

  “Have I?”

  “You have.”

  “Abbie, did you tell Phillip Harrow that he could sleep with me?”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “Did you tell Phil Harrow that we are some kind of swingers, that he would, ‘Have a better chance with my wife’?”

  “A better chance than what?”

  “Fuck you, Abbie. You did.”

  “I may have joked—”

  “He came here, you know.”

  “Who? Phil?”

  “Yes, Phil. He came here. He came here that night. He turned around halfway to Morgantown and drove here. Drunk. He propositioned me.”

  Abbie didn’t reply. He felt a high buzzing in his skull, a pressure behind his eyes. He stared at the space above her head.

  “This was supposed to be a fresh start, Abbie. In your words. A fresh start. This whole bullshit. This move. This, I don’t know. I even thought maybe we’d have a kid. Or try to, again. Try, at least. Fuck you, you tell your business partner to try to sleep with your wife?”

  “I. Did you?”

  “Did I? Did I what, fuck him? No, Abbie. No. He went and puked in the bathroom. A grown man! And I gave him coffee, and then he left.”

  “Good.”

  “You don’t get to say good.” Then she got up, and she said, “You can do the dishes.”

  Then Abbie said, “I bought it.”

  “You bought what?”

  “The land. The land I told you about. On the mountain. The land that I saw in the dream.”

  “Oh, it was just a dream now.”

  “Not always. Not just. But this is where it was supposed to happen. This land. This is the new start I spoke of. This is it, Sarah. This is what we wanted.”

  “Oh, Abbie,” Sarah said.

  “It is,” he said. The sound in his head had become a brightness around his field of vision.

  “Does your sister know?”

  “Not yet,” he replied. “Not quite.”

  “Oh, Abbie,” she said again.

  8

  It’s harder to say what Sarah thought about all this. She was opaque, and the gearworks of her inner life turned so silently that even God strained to hear them whir. This would have been true even if she hadn’t retreated into an inconsistent silence that her family interpreted as a sort of effective if not actual dementia. To Isabel, as she got to know them, it seemed just as likely a form of conscious protest. If Abbie were your husband, and Isaac your son, wouldn’t you start drinking early, too? Wouldn’t you do what you could to avoid their joint penchant for withering disdain? When Isaac was still just a kid, he and Sarah had formed an unusually (perhaps unhealthily) close and confidential bond, a conspiracy of semi-normalcy against Abbie’s more mercurial manner. Isaac, Isabel thought, was still a kid. But the bond slackened, like old elastic, as he approached puberty. Sarah drank less back then. “Frequently drinking but not yet a drunk,” Isaac said, which Isabel found fishy. Her own mother, Cathy, was in AA, and no one ever really escapes the faith of her youth.

  Isaac always knew, at least suspected, that the real reason they left New York was an affair. For Isaac, it fulfilled a set of imperishable convictions about his father’s character. If he did believe that Abbie had had a vision—truthfully, he wasn’t sure, one way or the other, but thought not—then that still wouldn’t rule out a more mundane proximate cause. Isaac and Sarah both generally told themselves that artistry, temperament, and the inadequacy of secular language to convey the nature and feeling of creative inspiration were the reality underlying the dreamy claims in Abbie’s prophetic streak. In any case, who’s to say that any event has any singular cause?

  Certainly the affair explained more convincingly how Sarah ended up agreeing to come to Pittsburgh. It’s a perverse but frequent trait of relationships that boredom wrecks them faster than betrayal; infidelity tightens the grasp more than faithfulness. If Abbie had been in love with someone else, it would have explained Sarah’s desire, or at least her willingness, to flee with him. Certainly it was unlikely, having weighed the evidence, to imagine that she really believed Abbie was talking to God, first, because she was a believing Jew who therefore believed that the age of that sort of miraculous dialogue had passed, and second, because even if that were not the case, Abbie was as supremely unlikely a candidate for a prophecy as any that existed on earth—although, there is a counterargument: is it not frequently the case that God chooses (on the infrequent occasions when He does so choose) to speak to the least likely among us?

  Isabel talked about all this with Isaac one day in September. It was still summer. It had been terrifically hot for a week. She’d driven down to visit him at The Gamelands, and he’d made Eli take the Land Rover and drive them farther into the mountains to a state park called Ohiopyle. Isabel remarked that Pennsylvania had some utterly extraordinary place names. “Hmm,” I
saac said, which was what he often said when he disapproved of sentimentality. The park was in the hills and steep valleys around a series of cataracts and waterfalls on the Youghiogheny River, a north-flowing tributary of the Monongahela, which in turn flowed north to Pittsburgh. They hiked up a trail beside Meadow Run, a smaller stream that fed the river, climbing over boulders beside a natural water slide formed where the stream cut a narrow channel through a rock bed. Dozens of children with burnt shoulders and white bellies were bombing down the slide, banging their tailbones and screaming at the indifferent parents who sat smoking on the sandstone ledges beside the water.

  Isaac turned to Isabel and laughed and said, “You know what we call this?”

  “You told me,” Isabel said. “The natural water slide.”

  “No.” He laughed again. “That’s what it’s called. We call it the Redneck Riviera.”

  “Hush,” said Eli.

  They climbed a muddy timber staircase to a trail running parallel to the stream, fifty feet above. Isaac insisted that he knew a secret swimming spot to which they could climb down from the trail. Isabel didn’t believe him, because they kept losing the trail and finding themselves on deer paths through the choked, dripping mountain laurels. She held a knot of unease in her chest, and she kept expecting that giant deer to burst forth once again from the underbrush. Rather than backtracking, Isaac would clamber up or slide down another muddy embankment through underbrush and stands of ferns until he found the path again. Isabel and Eli could only follow him. Isabel was tentative, trying to push branches aside gently, to step lightly over or duck under fallen logs, feeling a slightly embarrassing nausea at the thought of touching rotten wood or the wrong type of fungus or a bug with more than six legs, while Isaac was totally heedless, smashing through everything like one of the nightmare feral boars that were retaking European forests and occasionally attacking German ramblers. (Nightmare for the ramblers, that is; what funnier, more apt metaphors for the inevitable decline of an exhausted, dirty, nature-ruining civilization were there than an immense wild swine pursuing a frightened white person through the once-tamed woods?)

  While they tried to keep up with Isaac, Isabel managed to elicit a modest biography from Eli: how he he’d met the Mayers. Eliécer Guitiérrez Valensi was a Spanish Jew—contra his last name, he was actually from a small town just outside of Seville, though his family was originally from the East—who’d fled his native country during the first European currency crisis. He joked that his family had managed to survive and even prosper through the Caliphate, which had been good for the Jews, and the Catholic empire, which had been rather less congenial, and the twentieth century, which had been the worst for everyone, regardless, only to see all its children—he had two siblings, one in Canada and one in Dubai, of all places—driven out by the endless, repeating financial crises. His parents still lived in Seville but he never visited. “I don’t mind it,” he said, “but it makes my mother sad. Do you understand? When we come home, it makes her remember that we had to leave.” His father had been, ironically, a scholar specializing in the Almohads. He had worked for a small UNESCO office attached to the Seville Alcazar. Eli’s mother had written cookbooks. Eli had studied to be an architect. “Of course,” he said. That was how he met Abbie, who, after he’d made his money and finished his marvelous home, had gone back to giving the occasional lecture on sustainable architecture, particularly if it could be parlayed into an expenses-paid vacation—like many men, Abbie only discovered thrift when it became irrelevant to his personal finances.

  “We intend,” Isaac explained to Isabel a few weeks later, “to remain a mystery to our biographers and to pass therefore into the kingdom of myth.” He was smoking a bowl when he said this and lying on a pile of vintage fabric in the middle of his Pittsburgh apartment. She’d asked him why he eschewed Facebook and why there were, in general, so few photographs of him online. In this regard, Isabel was very wrong, but she had no way of knowing at the time. She’d been trying to piece together a time line of the Mayers’ travels and occupations, and she kept trying to ask clarifying questions of Isaac without giving the whole project away. A sort of documentary inconsistency bedeviled any attempt to account for their lives; they frequently seemed to exist in a set of parallel narratives, subtly different if broadly the same.

  So Eli had been at university, studying to be an architect in Spain during that pre-crash period, when it seemed that the whole of the Iberian Peninsula was sprouting white condominiums like bright mushrooms in a meadow after a rain. Underneath there was rot. Eli had imagined himself designing the extraterrestrial subway entrances and crinkled glass pavilions that had become the particular specialty of Spanish architecture, but he found himself, at twenty-two, without a job or any prospects of a job, certainly not a job as an architect, and so he’d written Abbie a plaintive and ingratiating email, reminding him that they’d met briefly at a reception after Abbie’s lecture. In fact, Eli had hardly said a word, and he feared he’d laughed too obligingly when Abbie disdained the Metropol Parasol and then the Gehry Guggenheim—Spain, he’d said, was being ruined by foreigners, a sentiment with which Eli more or less agreed, even if it was an awfully ironic pronouncement from a foreign architect. But Abbie also hated Calatrava and every other major contemporary Spanish architect. “Spanish architecture was all downhill after you kicked out the Muslims,” Abbie said. Eli mentioned Gaudí and felt foolish for being so obvious. “Well, yes,” Abbie had said, seeming to agree. “But there was a man who really believed in God, even if he believed in the wrong one.”

  Eli’s email went unanswered, and he nearly forgot about it. But two weeks before Christmas, Eli tripped over the splayed body of an unconscious young man in the doorway of his apartment building on his way to work. Through his father’s connections, he’d managed to find a job as a gardener at the Alcazar. At first, he’d attempted to believe that in this work he’d found an actual vocation and a truer form of labor than the attenuated, intellectualized, bourgeois pursuit of his once-chosen vocation, but the truth was that the work was miserable and dirty. The constant contact with plants afflicted him with a hypochondriac’s conviction that he was always suffering from a rash; the physical labor, far from invigorating, was repetitive. He got back spasms. His shoulders ached. It exhausted him and made him want to drink beer. He found himself gaining weight and softening around the middle.

  The young man—the boy, really—was Isaac, down on holiday from Paris, where he was doing his semester abroad. He’d come down to Seville to meet up with another man whom he’d met online on GayRomeo. This man’s name was Paolo—well, his name was activo22cm but he went by Paolo IRL—and “he was thirty-two and he had an amazing cock,” Isaac said. “I tried to get him to come to Paris instead, but he didn’t have any money to travel, and I was going to be on break anyway. I got some molly from this bartender I knew in the twentieth and got an EasyJet down to Spain. We spent about twenty hours fucking and then he started to come down and got pissed off and started calling me a rich English cocksucker and telling me that he was going to tie me to the heater and get a bunch of African guys to come over and rape my ass. Europeans are so fucking racist. Let me tell you, that sort of thing will sober you up real fast. I don’t think he would’ve gone through with it. I mean, we’d been doing a lot of fucking drugs. He went to the bathroom, and I just grabbed my stuff and got out of there.”

  He should have gone to find a hotel. Instead, Isaac proceeded to find a bar and get blisteringly drunk with what he described as one Turkish guy and two Lithuanian women who were probably prostitutes. He woke up the following morning in the cold, tiled doorway with no bag, wallet, or phone and a quizzical, ugly Spanish man kneeling over him and asking him if he was all right in alternating Spanish, English, and German. Isaac stayed with Eli for three days. His only good fortune had been to have left his passport in his Paris apartment, and he had to wait for it to arrive in the mail before he could get money from his Citibank account. Isaac
liked to grandly hint that he and Eli had had some sort of briefly magnificent sexual affair during that period. Eli was so cheerfully good-humored in not denying the innuendos that Isabel immediately decided that it couldn’t be true. At some point on the second day in Eli’s apartment, over soup and beer, Isaac offhandedly mentioned who his father was. Eli was incredulous. “But I want to work for him!” he said. He may have been slightly drunk at the time, because it had never previously occurred to him that he wanted to work for Abbie Mayer, even if he did admire the man.

  “He’s not an architect anymore,” Isaac told him, which was largely, if not entirely, true. Eli said he didn’t care, and Isaac said he’d see what he could do. There was no faulting Isaac on this account: he kept his most extravagant promises. He and Eli remained in touch online, and then, rather than do anything so uncouth as bring it up directly with his parents, Isaac simply arranged, the summer after he returned to the States, for a visit from his friend from Spain. Eli was not a documented immigrant: he came to visit, and he never left.

  Isaac may or may not truly have known of a secret place, but he found something resembling it. After a half an hour of fitful progress up the trail and back again, searching for some geographic or geologic marker that Isaac could not describe but was certain that he’d recognize, he said, confidently (of course, he said everything confidently), “Here it is!” He slid down another steep embankment. Isabel and Eli followed. They came to a high outcropping, below which they could hear the sound of rushing water. Here, finally, Isaac was cautious. They picked their way down a series of tall natural steps around the cliff, clinging to the twisted trees growing out of cracks in the rock. They shimmied along the wet underside of the cliff. They scooted down and over a rockfall. Isabel was too tentative in hopping from one boulder to the next. She windmilled her arms on the edge and tipped backward toward the twenty-foot drop between them. But Eli grabbed her by a flapping wrist and yanked her onto the rock. She fell briefly against him. “You’re okay,” he told her. She could smell his sweat.