The Doorposts of Your House and on Your Gates

by Jacob Bacharach

  “Honey,” he said, hand to heart. Then he refilled their glasses.

  Barry was telling her about his friend Jeff’s trouble with the latest boyfriend who’d started going to AA and stopped having sex. Isabel mentioned that her mother was sober—mostly, usually—and she retained a distant and dimmed but still faithful belief in the broad spiritual themes of that form of sobriety. “Let go and let God and all that,” she said. Barry thought it was all very silly, and he was in the middle of explaining, as men only ever explain to women, that “scientific studies” had shown that twelve-step programs had no greater or lesser chance of successful outcomes than any other form of therapy, quitting cold turkey, or even just moderating use “like they do in Europe.” He was the kind of man for whom that particular phrase had a talismanic quality, and Isabel could be reasonably sure that it would come up in any discussion of urban planning, transportation, healthcare, elections, or social policy—in other words, nearly everything that they talked about. She let him go on. Barry’s friends’ relationships were as close as he got to romances of his own. It would have been cruel to take away the vicarious pleasure he took in finding their catastrophic flaws. She told Barry that it seemed to her that if these two only ever had sex when they were drunk, then it was probably indicative of other underlying problems. But Barry seemed to believe that it was both more and less complicated than simply losing the regrettably necessary disinhibition of booze; rather, it was some part of a larger program of abstemiousness, a sort of vow of chastity appended like a dangling modifier to the life sentence of teetotaling.

  Isabel normally wouldn’t have given it much thought. She’d have composed a look of interest and let him rattle on. It struck her, a year into her job at the Institute, that more than anything, Barry had hired her to be his friend. Also, she felt that just as the irreligious filled the magical void in their lives with compensatory superstition, the perennially single filled the void of romantic absence with a complete, pop-psychological interest in the sex lives of others. She’d noted it in herself. Isaac had recently broken up with Sawyer, and she wasn’t immune to the gossipy attraction of such speculation.

  She’d accidentally witnessed the immediate aftermath of Isaac’s break-up. He’d given her a key to his apartment, where he claimed to have an un-upholstered but otherwise intact Edwardian divan that would make a perfect little daybed for her small third bedroom, which she used as an office. Isaac had made offers like this before, and they almost never panned out; his recollections of purchases and acquisitions were hazy at best, and Isabel had discovered that, like his mother, he was a frequent eBay and auction seller—in Isaac’s case, whenever he’d blown through whatever money his trust provided for him in a month and needed to raise some quick cash. (The irony there was that he’d spent from that same pot of inherited money in order to acquire the things that he was now selling at a loss. So it may not, Isabel realized when she considered it, have been so different from Sarah’s motivation after all.) There had, however, been at least a few cases where he’d come through spectacularly: a 1960s ceramic espresso service from Czechoslovakia glazed in extraordinarily bright primary colors; a genuine (Isabel thought, and Barry agreed) 1880s Laguiole knife with a corkscrew and carved, though badly chipped, ivory handle; a set of 1950s highball glasses from a line commissioned by Nordstrom, which each bore the name of a deadly poison in a fin-de-siècle druggist font.

  He told her he’d leave the furniture out for her to look at, and she didn’t bother to ask him why he wouldn’t just show it to her himself. He professed to believe in whimsy as a guiding life principle, though he practiced something more akin to thoughtless inconsistency. Isabel left work early and drove over to the apartment. She let herself in. She found him deliriously drunk, almost insensate, his nose and mouth so clotted with bubbling snot as to make him appear rabid, trying and failing to pick himself off a floor strewn with the smashed remains of whatever he’d been able to get his hands on. He was crying—hardly even crying anymore; moaning and gasping all at once—with a commitment that Isabel had never observed in him before. He’d cut one of his hands in the process of breaking things, and he’d left a few bloody semi-handprints around. The scene was slightly ridiculous, like a pre-credit piece for a Law & Order episode, the first murder suspect who is never the real culprit. Isabel stood fixed in the doorway. Isaac didn’t immediately notice her. When he did, he looked at her with red, swollen eyes and moaned once more; it was the sound of an animal without a lot of imperfect words for its pain. He turned his head and looked at the broken chair beside him, wiped his nose, and turned back to her. “I broke your chaise,” he said.

  “I see that.”

  “He left me.”

  “Who?” Isabel asked. She knew, of course. Or she thought she knew. With Isaac, she could never be sure. He might have meant Jake, with whom, over the last several months, she’d noticed him spending considerably more time than with his boyfriend; Isaac had been going to Uniontown every weekend. Sawyer never joined him. On one of those weekends when Isaac was away, Isabel had met Sawyer for dinner. It had been months. He got unusually drunk, for him, and then uncharacteristically asked her if she wanted to go out drinking with him. She matched him drink for drink until she felt quite unable to put one more drop in her body, and she begged off. He hardly noticed. The next Monday at the office, Jenny and Penny told her that they’d seen him after hours at The Castle in Bloomfield, talking and eventually leaving with someone, or something, they referred to as one of the local glamor drag twinks.

  “Sawyer,” Isaac said after a long pause, and just saying the name seemed at once to deflate and to sober him. He wiped his nose again with the back of his hand and took a long, gurgling breath.

  “I’m sorry,” Isabel said.

  “He said he couldn’t imagine marrying me. Can you believe that? I never even thought about it.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “He said our relationship lacked a core of intimacy. Excuse me. Whose fault is that? He’s the one who never wanted to fuck me! He’s the one who was always stepping out with fucking nineteen-year-olds.”

  “Isaac,” she said, trying to inject a little humor into it, “you’re stepping out with a nineteen-year-old.”

  “He’s twenty-three. And fuck that. It never meant anything to me. He fell in love with them.”

  This struck Isabel as completely incorrect. Sawyer might have occasionally exaggerated his self-possession, but he was observably stingy with his affection. Their own friendship, for instance, had never progressed beyond the facts of their superficial similarities, and it had always felt like it was underlain by an off-putting quantity of rational calculation, as if Sawyer were the model man who inhabits the fiction of economics, for whom even desire is at last mere calculation of relative return value. It was Isaac who, though he could be callow and cruel, though he was flighty and inconsistent with his love, loved wholly and loved well; even his self-love was careless. He was an accidental egotist, who fell heedlessly in love with a self he should, by rights, have hated.

  Because Isabel had nothing else to say, she said, “I’m sorry,” once more.

  For a moment, Isaac stared at the ground. For the first time, Isabel thought he looked less than unnaturally alluring, just a puffy, snotty boy whose gawky legs splayed at weird angles, too-big feet flopping outward, clothes merely disheveled. “I loved him,” he said.

  “I know,” she answered. He wanted her to think that it was a lie, but she didn’t believe him.

  “I would have married him.”

  “I know you would have,” she said, although she knew he wouldn’t have, or he would have out of some irrational fidelity to some inexpressible principle, hanging on with the tenacity that people reserve only for their most hopeless endeavors.

  “I need a job,” he said. “Jesus Christ, I’m twenty-fucking-four. I didn’t even finish school.”

  “What do you mean? You went to Pitt.”

  “I didn’t re
ally graduate. I stopped going my senior year.” He looked at her miserably. “Don’t tell anyone.”

  “Who would I tell?”

  “I don’t know. Abbie.”

  “I wouldn’t tell Abbie.”

  “Isabel,” he said.

  “Okay. I won’t, though. I won’t.”

  “It doesn’t matter. Do you think Barry would give me a job?”

  “I don’t know. Probably, if you asked. Doing what, though?”

  “I don’t know, I don’t know. I’m a good writer.”

  “You’re a poet. We write white papers. We write studies and grants.”

  “God,” Isaac said. “Why do people work?”

  “Money,” Isabel said. “Mostly.”

  “No one who has real money works. Everyone I know with money travels. Ask Arthur the next time you see him at a party. ‘What have you been doing, Arthur?’ ‘Traveling.’”

  Isabel laughed, but not too long. “That sounds like Arthur.”

  “He’s not my father, you know.”

  “Isaac—”

  “I know Barry told you. Or somebody did. Every time I say his name, you get this look. It isn’t true. People are such fucks.”

  “Yes, they are.”

  He looked at her, and a hint of something other than misery teased at the corners of his mouth, the bare hint of the sun’s disk behind the gray clouds that float over Western Pennsylvania all fall. He took a fortifying breath, picked himself off the floor, and then stepped carefully through the wreckage of the apartment to the little kitchen, where he found two Flintstones glasses and took a bottle of cold-thickened vodka from the freezer and poured them each a nice portion. “Maybe I should go into real estate,” he said.

  • • •

  Just as it was getting dark, and the last house tourists were descending the walkway stairs from all the steep front yards to the equally steep sidewalks and street, as Barry and Isabel were finishing the bottle and starting to talk about where they ought to go for dinner, Barry stood up and called to an older woman walking a small dog up the street. “Veronica. Veronica!”

  She looked up at his second effort and squinted toward the porch, then took a few steps in their direction. “Barry Fitzgerald? What in the world?”

  She and the dog came up to the foot of the porch. “What are you doing over here, Dr. Fitzgerald? I didn’t think Breezers crossed the city line unless they were on the Parkway.”

  “I’m a rebel. Sometimes I even go to Wilkinsburg.” Barry was slightly looped from the wine. “And I could ask you the same. I thought you were living in Gateway Center. From downtown to Edgewood Towne Centre? What sort of urban pioneer are you?”

  “I’m seventy-five. I moved here five years ago. Just across the street from Regent Square, so just over the border. Better taxes. I know old people are supposed to live in condos, but I read online that if you walk the stairs in your house twenty times a day, you’ll live to be a hundred and twenty. Also, have you ever tried to buy groceries downtown? Besides, my little darling here”—she indicated the dog—“prefers life out here in nature.”

  “Veronica,” Barry said, “let me introduce you to my friend Isabel. Isabel, this is Veronica Mayer!”

  “Oh, hello.” Isabel didn’t know the protocol for meeting a woman to whom she was an utter stranger, and yet about whom she knew—at least, had heard—so much. So she descended from the porch and shook Veronica’s hand. The older woman didn’t look seventy-five; she certainly looked younger than Abbie did. Isabel would have thought her the younger sibling. They didn’t much resemble each other physically, except that her hair was the same shocking shade of white, although it was cut into the neatly aristocratic bowl favored by a certain sort of well-heeled woman over sixty, and it shone with the frequent attention of a stylist. Otherwise, she was petite and fit. Her cheeks and jawline had begun to show the slightest sag, but her skin lacked the linen quality that Isabel associated with age, and her small eyes moved quickly and peered sharply out of deep sockets. She may have had some work done on her neck, which looked a bit too tight to Isabel. The neck was circled by an understated gold necklace that bore a Star of David. She wore a white shirt in a man’s cut, a pair of blue jeans, and new running shoes. The dog’s leash was leather. Louis Vuitton, Isabel noted. Given Abbie’s and Isaac’s descriptions of her, Isabel had imagined a rather batty old cat-lady with a distinctly dykier and certainly more penurious look. It was one point at which father’s and son’s otherwise divergent takes on her agreed. But here she was, and she looked like her next stop was a board meeting for the ballet. “I’m so pleased to meet you,” Isabel said. “I, well, I know your nephew. And your brother.”

  She pursed her lips, but didn’t seem especially put off by this silly thing the young lady had just blurted out. “And how do you know Dr. Fitzgerald here?”

  “Ah, he’s actually my boss.”

  “Coworker,” Barry added. Like so many bosses in the non-profit and academic world, he was remarkably democratic unless he wanted something.

  “Oh I see. This is your house?”

  “Yes,” Isabel said.

  “I knew the former owners slightly. He played for the symphony.”

  “That’s right,” Isabel told her. “His wife worked for the school board. I think they were moving to Florida.”

  “That sounds about right. I’ve always thought it must be ghastly to live in a place where everyone is so old they wear coats no matter how miserably tropical it gets. Years ago, when I was about your age, actually, I worked for a law firm that had an office in Miami, and they sent me down for a few months to work on a probate thing. Some giant mess of an estate. That was in the seventies, of course. I despised it. The managing partner down there lived in this monstrously tacky Spanish Colonial mansion in Coconut Grove, and I had to stay in his guest house. Everyone did a tremendous amount of cocaine, drank heavily, and some woman always ended up naked in the pool. I’m sorry, I’m digressing. I was more incisive when I was less antiquated. In any event, I’ve always liked this house. I love your porch furniture.”

  “Isaac actually helped me pick it out. Would you like to come inside? We were just talking about going for dinner, but we could have a drink first.”

  “No, thank you. Perhaps lunch sometime soon? I haven’t actually seen Isaac in ages. Bring him along. I trust he hasn’t overly abused that apartment.”

  “I think,” Isabel said, “that he’ll be devoting more attention to it. He and Sawyer broke up recently.”

  “They did?” Barry seemed surprised.

  “Didn’t I tell you?”

  “No. I tell you all the gossip, but you always hold out on me.”

  “Discretion is the better part of valor.” Veronica smiled at Isabel. “My brother and I share an addiction to clichés, although I’m the only one who’s embarrassed by it. It’s probably good that they broke up. I never could imagine those two getting married.”

  Isabel regarded her cautiously. She said, “Sawyer said something along those lines to him, apparently. Do people have to get married to stay together?”

  “Not at all. But now that the option is available, I find myself becoming very conservative in that regard. My late partner, Edith, and I would have availed ourselves of the opportunity if we’d had it, anyway.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Isabel said. “She died?”

  “Yes. Don’t be too sorry. It was a long time ago, now. Unexpected, but long past. And I do have my little Bessie to keep me company. Just two old ladies, ironically, as it would have been, except that one of us is a dog.”

  “Well, I’m sorry anyway. Was she sick?”

  “Oh, no. No. My brother had her killed.” She gave a tug on the leash, and the dog turned. “Well,” she said. “Goodnight. Isaac has my number. We really should have lunch, the three of us. And you too, Barry, if you like.” And she walked back to the sidewalk, where the streetlights were coming on, and headed back down the hill toward her own home.

&nb
sp; Isabel looked at Barry, and Barry, for once, only turned up his hands and shrugged. “I have no idea,” he said.

  • • •

  “Tell me, how is Isaac doing?” Veronica asked Isabel. It was their second dinner together. They were eating gristly steak and frites at a little Belgian café not far from Barry’s house in Point Breeze. It was the weekend after the clocks turned back, and it got dark at five. All but the most tenacious leaves had fallen suddenly off the trees, and even when it hadn’t rained, if felt like it had rained. Isabel had gone to dinner with her for the first time just a week after they’d met. She’d mentioned to Isaac that she was meeting his aunt, and he made her swear that she wouldn’t talk about him. She’d immediately betrayed the promise. Veronica was utterly charming. Like everyone else in that family, she liked to drink, and it was hard not to get swept up in her pace. Isabel was tipsy before entrees. Veronica had insisted they split a 750 mL bottle of a Trappist beer that had the viscosity of a heel of bread soaked in onion soup—that flavor as well, actually, yeasty and sweet—and some ungodly percentage of alcohol.

  “He’s all right,” Isabel said. “I suppose. He and Sawyer are fighting over dishes.”

  “Poor Sawyer.”

  “I thought you didn’t like Sawyer.”

  “I like Sawyer very much. I suspect he’ll be much happier without my nephew.”

  “That’s probably true. And anyway, I think that Isaac has something going on with his friend, Jake.”

  “Oh dear. I wonder how Abbie feels about that.”

  “Yeah,” Isabel said. “I always got the feeling that that kid is a sort of opportunistic bisexual.”

  “Oh, no,” Veronica waved her hand. “I meant because he’s black.”