by Nick Arvin
Finally he abandoned hope of a revelation and bought a small Tudor in the Sunnyside neighborhood. A turret-shaped entryway, cove ceilings, and creaking wooden floors—it reminded him, a little, of the house he had told his parents to buy. When he moved his things from his apartment, they filled less than half of the new house. He didn’t love it. It seemed a compromise. He thought perhaps he would learn to love it in time, and, at any rate, it was an area where, he believed, prices could only go upward.
Shortly after he signed the contract, Iris suggested she might move in with him. No, he said. He wanted to keep his own, separate space. She called that evening to say she thought probably they should stop seeing each other. He said, yes, all right.
There was no surprise in this, and the lack of surprise left him curiously dulled, until several days later, when he received in the mail a box filled with several books, DVDs, and clothes. The clothes smelled of her detergent. He began to wonder about the path he had closed off, reserving his freedom from what, to do what? He began to regret. He described the situation to a friend, and the friend, unimpressed, said, “Fear of commitment.” He saw that that was exactly it, obviously enough, and the discovery that his psychology was stupid and common enough to be cliché cast his regret into despair, a conviction that he had done the wrong thing, had failed to find the resolve to be who he wanted to be rather than who it was easy to be.
He called her. She mentioned that she was now seeing a man who piloted helicopters for a living. He tried to elicit her laugh, but her solemnity was moat, gate, and high stone wall. When he said he would like to see her, the conversation became broken and confused. When the line clicked and died she had not exactly hung up on him, but it was nearly so.
Several months had passed since then. When Donald took his client to see Iris’s place, it was in the middle of a list of addresses that they were touring. He believed time had eroded his feelings about Iris, but as he stepped through her doorway he was struck by the smell of her soaps, her houseplants, and her cooking, an effect so potent that he had to halt in the slate tiled entryway and cough to cover his tears. After a moment he remembered to step aside for his client. A few items of mail lay on the table by the front door. By an exertion of will, he did not look at these. But, moving into the kitchen and then to the great room, he couldn’t stop himself from scanning for signs of a boyfriend—a photo, a carton of chocolates, a stray pair of boxers. He saw none of these. He looked into the bathroom: only one toothbrush hung in the holder. In the bedroom she had a bowl on the dresser with a tangle of jewelry inside, and he poked them, looking for the pieces he had given her. In his closet hung several skirts and a dress in dry cleaning bags; he pulled them out one by one, and knew them all.
“Wow,” the client said. He was in the great room, at the windows. “This view is incredible.”
Donald had forgotten the striking impression made by the space and its views. Iris had furniture with nice, clean lines, and she had painted the walls in earth tones. There were enormous sunflowers in a pitcher on the coffee table and shimmering gold, red, and black art on the walls. Her unit was also, because of the neighborhood, relatively cheap. The client began pacing rapidly, flushed with excitement, and as Donald watched he knew he could not possibly help this man buy this place. Here—where they had spent entire days naked, unwashed, stinking, counting orgasms, where he could still see the dent in the floor where the jade plant had fallen. “You should know that this isn’t a great neighborhood. Look.” Donald pointed down through the window. “That’s juvie hall. And this building gets tagged all the time. Did you know they use glass etchers on the windows now? Not long ago, a friend of a friend was mugged a couple of blocks from here.” He wandered toward the kitchen, hoping to draw the client from the view. “The homeowners’ association fees in this building are pretty high, relative to comparable buildings. The stove, unfortunately, is electric.”
But the guy returned to the windows. Donald stood behind him, waiting. He cleared his throat and ground the flesh of his cheek with his teeth. She had only been a girlfriend; it wasn’t as if they had nursed each other through a cancer. He needed to grow up, move on. He’d thought he had. The client began fussily checking the window shades; Donald recalled lounging with Iris on the couch and watching the storms that gathered above the front range, dropped white eruptions of light, and drifted toward the city while the touch of her fingers tickled the hair above the crack of his ass.
As it happened, later in the day the client fell in love with a unit in one of the new developments along the Platte River, and he forgot Iris’s place.
That night, Donald sat up with a lurch, gasping, throwing covers aside, a stark blinding light in the window, a pounding of hellish noise filling his head. For several seconds he stared at the light, and it seemed to return his gaze. Then it rose and turned into the sky, lifting the horrendous noise with it.
He fell back into bed. He had seen and heard police helicopters moving through on other occasions, and they had even cast a spotlight in his windows before, but this one had caught him badly off-guard. The helicopter, surely, was piloted by Iris’s boyfriend—or that was the trend of his thoughts, before he recognized it as paranoia. Restless, he clambered out of bed and went to sit in the dark at his dining-room table. He began to think that he had liked this city in part because he had known no one here, and by placing himself here he had cleansed himself of all the confused, entangled relationships back home that he had handled poorly, that had made him awkward. But with time new relationships took their course, and now the only way to disengage fully would be to move on again. He saw before himself the possibility of a lifetime of such moves, and he grew aggrieved toward this version of himself—or, the parts of himself that he saw there.
After a time he dressed, went outside, and took his car from the garage. For half an hour he drove. When he stopped, he was at her building. Her windows were dark, and he didn’t see her car in the parking lot. The keypad code at the entryway hadn’t changed. He took the elevator up. He stood with his hands against her door, listening.
Presently he knocked. He knocked again, and a third time. Then he opened the lockbox that her realtor had put out with the key.
In the dark entryway he stood listening. Then he went to the bedroom. The door was open. He peered inside, but the bed was empty. Sometimes she preferred to sleep on her couch, but it was empty, too. He wondered if she were spending the night with her boyfriend.
A glass of juice—a quarter full, room temperature—stood on the kitchen counter. She never did finish her drinks. He spent a minute searching the cupboards for the wooden fruit bowl he had given her but finally had to concede it was gone. But he noted, with surprise and a kind of animal hope, that two of the cartoons he had clipped were still on the refrigerator. The experience of being here now was different from when he was here with his client, less desperate and agitating. Was it the nighttime? The solitude? Well, after all, if he had not learned in his work to become comfortable in a stranger’s home, what had he learned? He opened the refrigerator and, looking for a bottle of beer, rummaged through juices—she always had four or five different juices, which she mixed in odd combinations—and condiments and cups of yogurt. He located two beer bottles on the bottom shelf toward the back, but then he decided he had better not and closed the refrigerator.
Here in her home. Was it still her home, now that it was also a commodity and strangers wandered through to make price-to-value assessments? What was it at this moment, when she was gone, and he was here? She would have had opinions about such questions.
As he walked, something brushed his shoe. A coffee mug lay on the floor, broken into three large pieces. He crouched and touched the rough, sharp edges. So, maybe the helicopter pilot had broken up with her, or she’d caught the helicopter pilot cheating on her. Or, perhaps she had been thinking of Donald with regret and grew angry. He sat on her couch. To the right, past the suburbs, the mountains were faint black shapes b
elow the sky’s midnight blue and stars. To the left shone the downtown’s vertical structures of light, and even at this hour a number of cars moved below. He had been sitting here when he mentioned to Iris how frequently his parents argued, and she had said, off-handedly, “Maybe that’s why you like attorneys.” She probably wouldn’t remember it now. It was a theory that had pleased him then, although it seemed like nonsense now.
A tiny noise, a rattle near the floor, came from the far corner. His heart stumbled, then throbbed, and he held himself still. In the corner, behind an armchair set at an angle, was a triangle of open space where a person might hide. “Iris?” he said. He imagined her hearing noises at the door in the middle of the night, waiting for it to go away, and then hiding when the door opened. Well, he thought, at least that would mean the boyfriend doesn’t have a key. He talked into the dark. “I’m sorry,” he said. “If I could take it all back, I’d ask you to marry me.” No one answered. And surely she wasn’t a person to hide behind a chair in a corner. Yet, he was certain he had heard something. Before anxiety could paralyze him, he strode over and peered behind the chair. Nothing. He took hold of the armrests and pulled it from the wall. Down at the chair’s feet were two krypton-green eyes. A cat. A dark calico.
He laughed. When he reached down, the cat flinched, but he spoke softly to it, and after a few seconds the cat came forward and rubbed against his ankle. He took it in his arms and carried it to the windows to look at the city lights. “I don’t want to leave this city,” he said, aloud. Yes? Why had he not been struck by love when he was looking for a house? He looked at the lights, the streets, the homes, and thought of his old apartment with the undulating living room floor and tilting furniture. Someone else lived there now, and where he lived now someone else had lived, and the place where he stood would be bought by a stranger. Thinking of it he felt wonder. He was glad he had come here.
The cat stretched its neck, peered at the floor. He ran his fingers into its fur. The claws of its rear feet dug into his arm, and it stared up at him. He put the animal on the floor, and it walked away, strutting.
He wrote the words he had spoken to the cat on the back of a business card and left it on the countertop.
The next morning he faxed over a full price offer.
If Iris was surprised, her agent did not communicate it. A woman with a creaking, oddly modulated voice, she said her client would like to adjust the dates for the inspection resolution and the closing, and, if those changes were satisfactory, they had a deal. They had a deal.
Five days later Donald met his inspector at the condo. The inspector was a heavy, merry man with glasses that exaggerated his eyes. He conducted his inspections with a patter of commentary and anecdotes. Donald liked to send his clients to the guy because he had a reassuring presence and could be counted on to establish clearly which deficiencies were worth fighting over and which weren’t. But now, as Donald wandered the condo again in daylight, he desperately wished the man would stop talking about furnace filters, dishwasher hookups, and garbage-disposal motors. Donald said, “Uh-huh.” The note he had left had been an irrational, useless gesture. It was hopeless, yet he still had little frog kicks of hope, and he searched for a message. A note. A broken thing underfoot. No, nothing. Still, he looked around the tall open sunlit space, hoping and wanting.
For the closing he wore new clothes. He anticipated an event of grueling embarrassment; still, he wanted to see her. But when he arrived he learned that she had come early, signed her signature lines, and left.
He moved his things into the condo and rented out the Tudor. The condo still looked great, and he remembered the sense of elation he’d felt the night he had come in looking for her. He was glad to be here again, at first. But his happiness soon grew scuffed and bent. Her absence was inescapable. He could not arrange his furniture in a manner that wasn’t either an echo or a refutation of her arrangement. When he brought in another woman, everything she did became an exercise in comparison and contrast with Iris’s manner of occupying the space.
After twelve months, when the lease on his Tudor was up, he kicked out his tenants and moved back.
He came to believe that sneaking into her condo that night had been an extraordinary mistake, the capstone on a large structure of error, a moment when he thought he had reached some understanding of himself, of the linkages between his sense of self and place. And it had been false. Wrong. It had put him even further from understanding, and he had no place.
But he couldn’t live entirely inside an idea like that. He had to put it aside and go on. He went out with a couple of women. He met the third-grade teacher with a long lovely neck and hairy fingers, and after dating for a while they bought a little row house with a view of downtown. He bought a ring and proposed to her at the top of Mount Evans.
Still, when he had to think about the idea of home, which in his work he often did, he tended to think of Iris: of her laugh, her loft-style condo, her broken things, an impression that over time gently shifted and distilled and became, mostly, the memory of her cat in his arms.
Armistice Day
1. The Wallet
Peace has come, and in the Manhattan on Larimer Street, where the menu offers steak for 35 cents, a chaotic, exuberant noise rises from the tables. Over the last week the Spanish Flu epidemic has ebbed, and today came word of a signed armistice—soon the boys in France will be coming home! Few still bother to wear the gauze masks that the city mandated to combat the influenza, but a pair seated at a table near the front door wear theirs—white cloths tied back over the ears, covering nose and mouth.
“Someday you’ll kill me,” the big one says to the little one.
“Sure I will.”
“That’s what sons do to their fathers.”
The boy looks about ten years old. His father has a deep crease fixed into his forehead, as if his mouth, frustrated by the mask, migrated upward. The boy has small, dark eyes, and he is unlikeable. His father is also unlikeable, however, which works out, in a sense. If only one or the other had been unlikeable, they would work at cross-purposes, but as it is they project a peculiar energy together and seem, if unlikeable, also singular.
They cut pieces of steak, lift their masks to put the food into their mouths, let the masks down again to chew.
Their unlikeability has already impressed those at the tables around them. The two talk loudly while watching the door and the celebrating crowds that wander outside. They have a small round table, but sit nearly side-by-side. The father, eating left-handed, jostles his son, right-handed.
“What’re you going to kill me for?”
“For picking your nose and a funny look,” the boy says. He lifts his chin to speak in a curious, mock-theatrical style.
“You have a very disrespectful manner.”
“If there’s an apple on the ground, chances are the tree’s nearby.”
Men, arm-in-arm, pass the door singing. A paperboy casts his voice into an unnerving register, calling the headline, “THE WAR IS OVER.”