Arthur, Sarah, and Abbie became friends, or anyway Arthur and Abbie mutually cultivated a friendship in the secure private belief that it was in his best individual interest to do so, each believing the other to have no inkling that this was the case. Only Arthur was correct on that count. Sarah and Arthur, on the other hand, genuinely liked each other. If Imlak’s overt behavior toward women was physical familiarity, then there was nevertheless something in his manner and demeanor that suggested a genuine, underlying, non-sexual interest that his superficial actions were carefully calculated to hide. Which was the truth about him? Who knows what’s true or not about anyone? It’s flattering to believe that, in imagining a man’s life, there’s a way to intuit the inner workings out of the visible, external component parts, but people are, all of them, at last opaque. Even God views His creations with astonishment. Their existence is an accident of His majesty. They appeared at the uttermost end of His imagining, and when He finally paused, it wasn’t for exhaustion, but surprise.
In the early seventies, Arthur’s father had bought an old farm on Blackstone Drive, fifty acres that looked across the last broad curve of Route 40 before it turned perpendicular to the ridge and climbed east into the mountains. The old farmhouse still sat at the low point of the property near a sharp bend in the road, and both Imlak père and his son continued renting it to the farmer who’d owned the property previously until he died in the early 2000s, after which, as was oddly common in Uniontown, the structure burned to the ground. The senior Imlak had built a mod house on the high point of the property, out of date before it was even begun. Its only attractive feature was a broad window wall that looked out over the cornfields to the mountains. There was an irony in the fact that this made it—makes it still—a mirror image of The Gamelands; the two houses faced each other across the foothills. The flat-roofed structure had that era’s odd flavor, a modernity that assumed that all structures would one day look like high schools or prisons, which were, by that time, architecturally interchangeable anyway. Arthur Imlak had added to the building over the years. A series of architects had done their best to draw out its strong horizontal lines and turn it into something more austerely modern, but it retained its innate characteristic: it was ineradicably ugly. Arthur knew this was the case, and he viewed it with an obscure pride. Contrary to the popular sentiment, money often did buy taste, but if anyone with a bit of money could have good taste, then it became the imperative of those with obscenely larger fortunes to affect a sort of grotesque gaudiness that demonstrated their transcendence of that which any ordinary millionaire—who might, after all, be something silly like a doctor or a lawyer—could buy.
They were at Imlak’s house for dinner one night in the July after they’d moved to Uniontown. They’d broken ground on The Gamelands, which now looked like a muddy scar on the mountain, visible all the way from town. It was eight-thirty or so, and the long evening sun blasted through the westward windows into the dining room. Abbie told Imlak he ought to glaze the fucking windows. “Among other things,” he said, “you’re going to ruin your furniture.”
“I’ll buy new furniture.” Imlak forked a piece of steak into his mouth. “I don’t give a shit about furniture. You can’t get too attached to material things.”
“Abbie just likes to give advice,” Sarah said.
“Well, you’re also killing yourself on utilities. Your cooling costs have got to be through the roof in the summer, and this place must leak heat all winter long.”
“Let’s open another bottle. We’ll try the Stag’s Leap.”
“Yummy,” Sarah said.
“Look.” Abbie swiveled in his chair to talk at Imlak as he went into the kitchen to fetch the wine. “I’m telling you, I know you can afford it. But it’s a waste. You ought to hire me to fix it. Buildings are the biggest agents of environmental degradation, you know. It’s a fact.”
Imlak returned with the bottle and said, “Watch your husband, Sarah. He is always angling to get me to hire him. You may be having cash flow problems. Phil Harrow holding out on you, Abbie?”
“I’d do it as a friend,” Abbie grumbled. He looked at Sarah. “Anyway, Sarah keeps the books. She has the mathematical mind.”
“Says the architect!”
“Architects are all bad at math. Architects who are good at math are engineers.”
“Well,” Imlak said. “I don’t personally see the big deal. Energy is cheap.”
“Now you’ve done it.” Sarah tossed back a half a glass and helped herself to another.
“Chiudi la bocca, my dear.” Abbie swiveled to face Imlak. “Energy is cheap? Arthur, don’t you realize that we stand, right now, in this very decade, on the precipice of peak oil. The Hubbert curve puts it right around 2000. Less than a decade away, now! How’s that for a millenarian coincidence. Now, you may wish to believe, as do the rest of the poor flock out there”—he gestured at the window and the field and the highway beyond—“but I am telling you, if we don’t act, and act fast, we will face the greatest social upheaval, the greatest catastrophe, in the history of our species. Whole civilizations will be upended. All this, this easy-motoring lifestyle, it’ll all be over in a decade. Right over the hill there, down in Heritage Hills, they’re building houses with three-car garages on spec. On spec!”
“Abbie,” Imlak said, “you’re building houses with three-car garages on spec.”
“How do you? Never mind. Listen. The whole physical development of American society is predicated on inexpensive motoring. Carbon is a miracle fuel; it is an unmatched, never-to-be-repeated form of immediate, fungible, scalable energy. There is never going to be a battery-powered car or a miniature nuclear reactor. That’s all a grand boondoggle. When we use up the oil, that’s it. Adieu. Ciao. Now what I would do, if I were the benevolent dictator, what I would do is I would issue a challenge. I would say: by 2050, you must reduce energy usage by half. You do it city by city. You replace lightbulbs with fluorescents or LEDs. You improve building envelopes. You limit auto traffic in the urban center, which drives people to use public transit. You do all that, and maybe, maybe you prolong the useful life of our society.”
Sarah told Arthur, “Abbie is on the board of a non-profit that’s proposing exactly that.”
“Sure,” Imlak said. “Barry Fitzgerald’s outfit. I contribute.”
“Yes,” Abbie said. “I’ve seen your name.”
“Being in the energy business myself, I feel it lends an aura of social responsibility to my otherwise rapacious capitalist endeavors.”
“I thought you were in the real estate business,” Abbie said.
Imlak shrugged. “About as much as you’re in the highway business.”
“I feel like you’re implying something.”
“Not a thing. Although, as a man quote-unquote in the property business, I can tell you that you ought to be cautious in your dealings with your partners, if they’ve got you acting—not that I’m saying they do, or are—as their straw purchaser. You should talk to my lawyer.”
Abbie began to formulate a reply, but Imlak jumped in again.
“In any case, to answer your question: I’m only in it for the energy. Property is pointless unless it’s improvable or extractable. The thing I’ve learned is that if it’s extractable, then the extractors are willing to pay you a whole lot of money to guarantee future revenues. Even very far future revenues. You see, you think that the energy companies are hidebound, dirty, old-fashioned Texans or weirdo Saudi royals living in the now, but kids, I’m telling you, they are thinking decades in advance. We are, right now, sitting atop a vast shale formation that holds more exploitable carbon than the whole goddamn Middle East. We just don’t quite have the tech to yank it out yet. But in another ten, twenty years we will. So between now and then, we build some new roads and open a few Wal-Marts to support the industry when it comes, and then those of us who own the mineral rights, we lease it and sell it and make many hundreds of millions. My business, my friend, is p
atience. And you, buddy. Why, quite by accident, you’re doing the Lord’s work.” He tipped his glass.
Some hours later, they had consumed at least one more bottle of wine, and Imlak had broken out a bottle of an Armagnac that he’d discovered the year before on a trip to Bordeaux. Imlak excused himself to go to the bathroom. Abbie slid across the couch to Sarah and asked her quietly how the fuck it could be that Arthur Imlak knew so much about the particulars of his business with Phil and Veronica. Sarah said she didn’t have the foggiest notion but that Arthur seemed like a man who kept a close watch on that sort of thing. “Ooo, Arthur seems like a man who keeps a close watch on this sort of thing,” Abbie said. Sarah snorted but patted his hand. They were quite drunk. “You ought to let him think he can screw you,” Abbie said. “Get him to tell you what he knows.”
“Oh, go to hell, Abbie!” Sarah lifted her hand and backed away from him. She glared.
“What?” he said. “Christ, I was only kidding.”
“No. You weren’t.”
“I was.”
When Imlak returned, he seemed oddly invigorated for a man who’d had just as much to drink as they had. Had they looked more closely, they’d have noticed a fine dusting of off-white grains just below his right nostril, but they didn’t look so closely. They had another drink. Abbie tripped over a coffee table. Imlak insisted they stay in one of the guest rooms and not drive. “It’s fine,” Abbie said, although he was laying on his back on a couch with a bag of ice on his shin. “I’ve got connections.”
“Yes, well,” Imlak said.
They went to bed, and Imlak, who’d done a few more blasts, went into his study and poured himself a long whiskey and settled into his leather chair and found a West Coast baseball game in boring extra innings on TV. He sipped his whiskey. He was bending over his glass side table with a rolled fifty-dollar bill in his hand when Sarah came in forty minutes later. She put a hand on his arm. “Can I offer you a blast?” he asked. She extended her hand.
She wasn’t the most beautiful woman, and she even looked a little older than she probably was, Imlak thought, but that was one of the delights of aging; you came to prefer women of a certain age. (Well, of course, that wasn’t wholly true; there was an admittedly common sort of man who believed that a younger woman would assuage his aging rather than bringing it into sharp and pitiable relief. But Imlak didn’t consider himself a common sort of man.) Her face and the exposed skin of her arms were tight and papery, and her hair was brown and severe. She was so pale as to appear almost translucent around the edges. Not beautiful, he thought again, but she looked like no other woman he’d ever seen. She took a sip of his drink without asking and sat on the floor beside the chair. They watched the game in silence for a few minutes.
“Are you trying to screw my husband?” she asked.
“What if I were?”
“It’s your business. But I’d like some advance warning.”
“No. I’m not.”
She stood up and extended her hand to him.
“What about Abbie?” he said.
“He’s dead to the world.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“My marriage is very important to me, but it lacks . . . a core of physical intimacy. We’re only married. We understand each other.”
They went to his bedroom and went through the motions quietly, and when he tried to say something, she laid a cool hand across his mouth and shook her head. Afterward, she said, “That was lovely, thank you,” and she kissed his forehead. He’d been pleased, after all the drinks and the lines, to have no trouble getting it up. He’d suggested, at the pre-penultimate moment, that he go to the bathroom for a condom. “Don’t be silly,” she told him. “I’m pretty much past all that.” They took turns in the bathroom. She was unselfconsciously dressing when he returned.
“That’s the part they leave out of the movies,” she said. “The desperate rush to pee after you’ve fucked.”
“I like it when you say fuck.”
“Oh, please,” Sarah said. “Let’s not.”
“Where are you going?”
“I’m not going to fall asleep in your bed, Arthur. Let’s keep this realistic. You strike me as that kind of man. I’d do it again, but I don’t want Abbie to find out.”
“You said you had an understanding.”
“I said that, yes.”
“Look, I wasn’t entirely honest with you before. I’m not trying to screw Abbie. Not intentionally. I like Abbie. I like both of you. Which is,” he shrugged, “ironic, I guess. But you should know that Veronica and Phil, that’s a different story. It’s nothing personal, but like I said, in my business, you take the long view.”
“What are you talking about?”
“In ten, fifteen years, there’s going to be a huge debate about gas mining in the state, and I’m going to need a lot of people to owe me. And a couple-billion-dollar highway project is a pretty good quid pro quo. And I’ve known Sherri Larimer since way back. We went to high school together, actually. Red Raiders, the two of us. Anyway, what I could really use is your help in all this.”
“My help.”
“Yes. To get Abbie to sell me all that property that those dummies had him buy up on their behalf with their money on the cheap.”
“Why?”
“Why?” He lay back on the bed and put his hands behind his head. “Little lady, there’s gold in them thar hills.”
• • •
Abbie had dreamed of the deer again. In the dream, he was a hawk. He didn’t know he was a hawk. A hawk only feels its hawkness and has no symbol to name it and place itself in a taxonomy of things. He was high above a field of corn, which was bordered on one side by a stand of woods separating it from the big holes over which the bird-legged mammals would build their square wooden nests and on the other side by the hard gray path over which the mammals rode their strange, hollow mounts. He liked the path and the animals the mammals rode; they made heat and he ascended easily on the air’s own rising. He could see everything; his eyes were a miracle; no insect on a leaf was too small for him to detect. Some deer moved through the corn and emerged beside the gray path where one of the mammals was standing. Even as a hawk, Abbie knew that the mammal was him also. He tipped his wing slightly and traced a long arc. The Abbie on the ground moved its arms, and the fawn sprang away toward the path. The Abbie called after it, but it leapt wildly down the embankment into the path of one of the vast, rushing beasts, which hit it with such force that the young creature seemed to explode. The other deer, the adult, had fled toward the woods. The Abbie who was the hawk watched it move through the corn. It thought—though it doesn’t think, but feels as an intersection of competing desires—that it was a shame the armored animals didn’t stop to eat the thing they’d killed, and thought of stooping to take a taste himself, but there was no attraction in a thing already dead, and he curved back toward the mountain. That was when Abbie woke up.
Of all the blessings in his life, Abbie believed that the greatest was his natural, general immunity to the hangover. It was just after sunrise. Sarah was asleep beside him, her pants on the floor, her shirt twisted around her body with the sheet. He got out of the bed and patted his belly. He pulled on his clothes and went to the kitchen where he gargled a little water. He walked to the windows and looked out over the half-grown corn and noticed then what it seemed impossible he hadn’t noticed before. He found himself walking out of the house and across its patios and out into the fields, through the parallel rows that rippled across the wide, descending land until the boundary road and the highway and then, beyond the highway, the foothill rise and the protuberance of Pine Knob and Laurel Ridge and Route 40 climbing it toward the white Summit Inn just then reflecting the rising sun like a beacon. He could see his own property to its right. He walked faster; the corn scratched his arms where he’d rolled his sleeves. He came to the edge of the property, a narrow wire-and-post fence that separated it from a grassy berm beside the ro
ad. There was a copse of trees to his right, and he stood there for a long time—or for what felt like a long time—waiting for what he expected to see. When he didn’t, when all he saw were a few cars passing on the highway, he turned and walked back toward the house. As he approached it, he saw, through the window, Arthur Imlak standing beside Sarah in the kitchen. Nothing about it suggested anything at all, which suggested everything. He permitted himself to turn around once more and look back across the field. He thought he saw something moving by the trees. He took a step toward it. But whatever it was, it was too distant, and it was gone.
10
A year after she’d arrived in Pittsburgh, Isabel learned that Veronica Mayer had been her neighbor all along. That Isaac had failed to mention it—no, that implies an accident, oversight, neglect. That Isaac had chosen not to mention it surely implied something, but she couldn’t quite imagine what. For all his pretensions to aloofness from his odd family, he functioned as the fixed point around which the rest of their rarely intersecting bodies ever orbited. Isabel had known, of course, that he lived in—or hoarded and occasionally crashed in—his aunt’s putative apartment, but that wasn’t the sort of fact that acquired significance.
It was October, sometime after the nights got cold but before the clocks changed, a period of shortening evenings and very long afternoons. Everyone in the city wore black and gold on the most inappropriate occasions. Barry had convinced Isabel to put her house on the Edgewood House Tour, and they were well into their second bottle of Sauvignon blanc. A steady stream of retirees and public radio types in the same sensible waterproof hiking shoes they’d wear on group bus-and-boat tours of second-tier European capitals nosed in and out, complimenting Isabel’s restoration of the window bay bench in the dining room and, when they thought she wasn’t listening, murmuring critically about her decision to use stainless appliances in the kitchen. She hadn’t done either; the previous owner had done all the renovations. Isabel had only furnished the place; her single building project had been the installation of a sliding glass door on the shower in the guest bath. It wasn’t on the tour. “I imagine I’d have gotten dinged for being ahistorical,” she whispered to Barry.
The Doorposts of Your House and on Your Gates Page 22