The House

by Bentley Little

  "It's not only today," she told him.

  "I know, I know--"

  "No. You don't know."

  "What do you want me to do, Carole? I said I'm sorry."

  "You're an arrogant, self-centered jerk sometimes."

  CCT___??

  "I don't want to talk to you right now, Nort . Just shut up and eat your dinner."

  They finished the rest of the meal in silence, and afterward he went out into the living room to watch a documentary on the Civil War on A&E while she retreated into the kitchen.

  He finished grading the last test paper and put it on the pile, shaking his head. He hadn't had high expectations to begin with, but the scores were even worse than he thought they'd be.

  Kids seemed to be getting dumber and dumber each year.

  He sighed, grabbed his cup, finished off the last lukewarm swallow of coffee. They weren't really stupid, these students, but they weren't educated and had no desire to be so. They had no intellectual guidance, no one to tell them what they should know and why they should know it. "The post-literate generation," he'd heard them called, and that was as good a description as any. They did not read, were not conversant with the essential facts and ideas at the core of Western culture, were not even up on current events, but they had an encyclopedic knowledge of twenty-year-old television shows and bad popular music. Even his best students were smart in the wrong way: media-savvy kids who dealt in trivia, the intellectual currency of their time.

  It was a sad state of affairs.

  Norton rubbed his tired eyes, looked up at the clock over the bookcase. Midnight. Carole had gone to sleep several hours ago, and he should have too, but there'd been that Civil War show and then these tests to grade, and now it was already Thursday. He stood, stretched.

  He could've done what most of his colleagues did and postponed the grading for another day. Or he could have given a scantron test instead of an essay test and let the machine grade them.

  But he wasn't about to sacrifice his principles, to change his teaching habits for the sake of expediency, and though he was bone-tired and would only be able to catch a few hours of sleep, at least he could face himself in the morning.

  He walked into the kitchen, put his cup in the dishwasher, then walked down the hallway to the bathroom to take out his bridge.

  Carole was dead asleep and snoring when he went into the bedroom, and she did not wake up even when he turned on the light. He took off his clothes, carefully folded them, and placed them on the cedar chest at the foot of the bed, then once again turned off the light. He felt his way through the darkness over to the bed, lifted the covers, and got in.

  Carole moaned, stirred, rolled over.

  Her body felt warm next to his, almost hot. She often called him a "corpse" because of their difference in body temperatures, and he had to smile when she said that because it wasn't too far off the mark. He was getting on in years, and a lifetime of soft self-indulgence had probably made his body even more decrepit than it ordinarily would be. He was old and he knew it, and he wouldn't be surprised when his heart or his liver or one of his other organs started to give out.

  Carole was quite a bit younger than he was, forty five to his sixty-two, and there was something comforting about knowing that he would die first. It was selfish, of course, but he'd always been selfish to a certain extent and the charge didn't bother him. He wouldn't have to carry on without her, wouldn't have to make another seismic shift in his life. It would be hard on her, of course, but she was stronger than he was, she could handle it. Hell, she'd probably remarry.

  So why was he such a prick to her?

  He wasn't a prick all the time. Even she had to admit that. He'd been head over heels for her when they'd first married, and while the passion may have cooled, he did still love her. Only these days, he seemed to be annoyed by her more often than entranced, easily irritated by her behavior, what she said and what she did consistently rubbing him the wrong way. He didn't know why. It was probably his fault. He didn't think she had changed over the years. But he had. Something in his life had shifted, some nascent gene of solitary bachelorhood kicking in as he got older, making him prefer to remain alone rather than in the company of others. There'd been a settling in his ways, a hardening of his attitudes, and though he still loved Carole, still cared about her, still needed her, it had become increasingly hard to like her, to be with her.

  He glanced next to him. She remained very attractive, though. Even in sleep, even with her mouth open, her hair wild, face cream clumped on her cheeks, chin and forehead, she was an extremely pretty woman. And he could not imagine going to bed without her stretched out beside him. He still enjoyed being with her when she was awake as well--it was talking to her that was becoming increasingly difficult. When they sat alone in a room, he reading, she sewing, one or both of them watching TV, each performing separate activities, it was nice. Only talk brought out their differences, only conversation brought out his annoyance and hostility, made him feel that perhaps he should have remained a single man.

  If they were both mute, they could have a happy life.

  He settled into sleep beside her, and she turned onto her side. He stretched one arm over her shoulder, resting his hand on her breast, and she pressed her buttocks against his groin, automatically finding, even in sleep, the position they'd discovered to be most comfortable.

  Despite his tiredness and the lateness of the hour, he did not fall asleep instantly but drifted slowly off, his mind focusing on nothing and everything, his thoughts moving from Carole to school to old friends to his

  trip to Italy to the president's recent trip to Japan, floating gradually away in ever-widening circles, his brain making connections of logic that were at first tenuous, then not there at all but seemed perfectly natural as sleep overtook him.

  He was awakened by violent shaking.

  Norton sat up immediately, his panicked heart thumping as though it were about to burst through his chest. He thought at first it was an earthquake but realized almost instantly that only the bed was shaking, that the hanging plant next to the curtained window was still, that the rest of the room was not in motion.

  A foot kicked his leg. A hand lashed out at his midsection.

  It was Carole.

  She was having convulsions.

  He had no idea what to do, and even as he kicked off the covers and twisted around, grabbing her shoulders, trying to hold her down and stop her from shaking, he was cursing himself for not attending the CPR seminar the last time they'd had a teacher's in-service day. He hadn't thought there'd ever be a practical use for it.

  Carole was in better health than he was, and he couldn't see himself doing anything to help a stranger except dial 911, so he'd chosen to stay in his classroom and rearrange his bulletin boards instead of attend the emergency medical training.

  Now he felt lost and frightened and completely out of his depth. Carole's eyes were wide open and jiggling crazily in their sockets as her entire head shook in staccato spasms. Her mouth was open, tongue hanging out, looking twice as long as he knew it to be, and saliva was flying out in all directions, strings of it stretched over her cheeks and chin, independent spray hitting the pillow and the blanket and his arm. Beneath his hands, the muscles of her chest and shoulders were knotted and tight, much stronger than any muscles he'd ever felt before, and they were jerking nonstop in a frighteningly unnatural way.

  He didn't know what was happening. He was pretty sure this wasn't a heart attack, but whether it was an epileptic fit or a stroke or the result of some sort of brain tumor, he had no clue. It was like something out of a movie, like a possession, and he had no idea if he was supposed to be holding her still or leaving her alone or giving her some kind of medicine. He'd heard somewhere that if someone was having a fit you were supposed to put a wallet in their mouth to keep them from swallowing their tongue, but Carole's tongue was flopping around outside her mouth, and she appeared in no danger of swallowing it.
r />   The fit wasn't letting up.

  He didn't know how much time had passed since she'd started convulsing, since the shaking had awakened him, but even adjusting for his skewed perceptions, it had to have been several minutes.

  Shouldn't it have stopped by now?

  If anything, the muscles beneath his grip were becoming more rigid, their vibrating spasms stronger and more violent. How long could a body continue undergoing something like this without sustaining permanent damage?

  Wasn't her brain being smacked around in that jerking head? Weren't her organs being knocked about inside her chest cavity?

  There'd been no sound coming out of her mouth, only the unnaturally silent, almost sibilant noises of her convulsing body, overpowered by the loud wood-on-wood sound of the headboard hitting the wall, but now there was a low humming coming from somewhere deep within her throat, a humming broken by vibrato as the sound escaped her wildly shaking head.

  He let go, got off her, leaped from the bed. This had gone too far. It wasn't slowing or abating, and it was obvious that his attempt to hold her still, to force her body to stop shaking, to will her convulsions to end, was not working at all.

  He ran out of the bedroom, ran for the phone, picked it up from the alcove in the hall, dialing 911 at the same time he tried to lift the receiver to his head. He told the robotically calm woman at the other end of the line who he was, where he was, and what was happening, and though the entire conversation probably took no more than one minute, it felt like fifteen. The woman promised to immediately dispatch paramedics and an ambulance, and he dropped the phone without bothering to hang up and ran back down the hallway to the bedroom.

  By the time he returned, the attack was all over. Car ole had stopped convulsing.

  She was dead.

  Stormy Stormy Salinger drove back from Taos along the series of interconnected roads that led through the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. The highway was faster, but he preferred the back way, and he hauled ass on the stretches between villages to make up the time.

  Through the windshield, the huge sky was light blue, the ever-present white clouds retreating to infinity like a Georgia O'Keeffe painting.

  He loved this drive. The meadows, the streams, the trees, the ranches. This was why he had moved here, why he had left Los Angeles. He shut off the air conditioning, rolled down the car window, felt the wind in his face, smelled pine and hay, dust and water.

  In L.A., he'd been afraid to roll down his windows as he drove. Not just because of the potential forcarjackings and robberies, not just because he'd be hit up for money by the homeless vets who staked out intersections and on-ramps, but because the air itself was poisonous.

  The dirtiest air in the country, year in and year out.

  Hell, even on days that had what southern California's TV weathermen called "good air quality," it was still rare to see the San Gabriel Mountains until you were almost on top of them.

  That was not a way to live.

  He'd grown tired of Los Angeles: the place, the people, the lifestyle. He'd grown tired of his friends as well, their smugness, their self-absorption, their condescending attitude toward anyone outside their clique, the mandatory elitism that afflicted what passed for their culture.

  He'd fallen in with a group of film snobs--hip writers for entertainment publications, young academics from prestigious film schools, wannabe indie figures--people with little in common save their interest in cinema. As a successful video distributor, a lifelong movie fan who had made millions working on the fringes of filmdom, he himself was an inspiration to his friends, proof that the wall could be breached, yet he knew that while they pretended to be supportive of him and had no qualms about taking advantage of his generosity, they were, at the same time, jealous, and when a serious discussion of film came about--as it often did--his opinions were treated with slightly less respect, just to let him know that he was not really in their intellectual league.

  That had always irritated the hell out of him.

  He was the only member of the group who exhibited even the least bit of independence, who did not automatically fall in with the prevailing opinion and conform to preexisting tastes with lockstep homogeneity. They were nobodies, really, but they always acted as though they were society's arbiters of filmic quality, and it was a given that any film of which they approved was a work of art. They'd sit around and summarily dismiss contemporary comedies, yet rhapsodize about a Laurel and Hardy pie fight. It wasn't that the pie fight was intrinsically better than, say, the slapstick antics in a Jim Carrey movie, it was just that they considered it "classic," and that was automatically supposed to elevate its level of quality.

  He'd grown increasingly tired of this intellectual incestuousness over the years, weary of the monotonic interests and attitudes. It was partly his fault. They were his friends and he had chosen them. He'd made his bed and had to lie in it.

  So he'd simply pulled up stakes one day, sold off his Brentwood estate, and relocated to Santa Fe.

  Now he conducted his business from here.

  Stormy sped through Truchas, the small village where Robert Redford had filmed The Milagro Beanfield War.

  He'd first visited New Mexico as a teenager, on a trip with his family, and he had never forgotten the place.

  They'd done the tourist loop--White Sands, Carlsbad Caverns, Santa Fe, Taos Pueblo--and it had made a big impression on him. He was a city kid, born and bred in Chicago, and the dry heat, the open space, and the spectacular sky had all spoken to him in a way that nothing else had. He'd realized even then that this was where he wanted to live when he grew up, where he wanted to spend his life.

  But the movie and video business was centered in southern California, and by the time he'd made enough money to move here, he'd gotten sucked into that L.A.

  lifestyle, and it was not until several years later that he finally made the break.

  It was a decision he'd never regretted.

  He passed through Chimayo and could not help glancing down the small one-lane road that led to El Santuario .

  The small adobe church had always creeped him out. All those crutches and braces hanging in the small dark room with the miracle dirt. Legend had it that the church was built on dirt that had healing powers, and each year, hordes of believers flocked to the spot to have their diseases and deformities cured, the ones who claimed to find relief from infirmity leaving their walking aides behind. He wasn't a religious man himself, he neither believed nor disbelieved, but there seemed something paganistic and primitive, something pre-Christian about this sort of Christianity. Maybe he'd just been watching too many of the movies he distributed, but the whole thing made him uneasy.

  Ten minutes later, he hit the highway and was speeding toward downtown Santa Fe.

  He arrived back at his office before three.

  "How'd it go?" Joan asked as he walked through the door.

  "Who knows? That bastard's impossible to read." He sat down in the oversized chair behind his desk, opened the jar of candy next to his computer, and popped a handful of M&Ms into his mouth. He'd been in Taos talking to the organizer of the film festival, trying to get one of his properties shown in competition this year. He had what he thought was a legitimate find, a retelling of Macbeth on an Indian reservation, made by an untrained twenty-five-year-old Hopi kid who'd financed the film by working as a park ranger at Betatakin and saving his money over several summers.

  It was one of those success stories that the entertainment media seemed to love so much these days, and he knew he could get a lot of hype out of it. The movie was part of a package deal he'd made with Four Corners, a local distributor that'd gone belly-up, and while most of the titles were routine action flicks, this was an honest to-God film, and for the first time in his life, Stormy saw the opportunity to present to the viewing public a legitimate work by an undiscovered talent.

  Maybe he'd try to take it to Sundance.

  That would certainly up his cache in the busi
ness.

  And, besides, the kid deserved it.

  He tried to imagine the reaction of his old L.A. friends when they discovered that he was distributing a film that had been shown in competition at Sundance, and the pictures in his mind made him smile.

  "You want me to call back tomorrow?" Joan asked.

  "Apply a little pressure?"

  Stormy nodded. "Tell him to make sure he watches the tape. And tell him he has forty-eight hours. Sun dance is interested."

  Her eyes widened. "Really?"

  Stormy grinned. "No." He paused dramatically. "At least not yet."

  "We have a winner here, don't we?"

  "I think we do," he said.

  He worked late sorting through contracts. Joan had already left, so Stormy closed up the office and locked up. Roberta would be at her class by the time he got home, so on the way back, he pulled into the drive-thru lane at Burger King and ordered a Whopper, fries, and a chocolate shake. Roberta was constantly harping on him about his dietary habits, claiming that a person who ate the way he did didn't deserve to be wealthy, as though it were his moral obligation to eat gourmet meals all the time, but he failed to see how the fact that his taste in food was different from hers made him a deserving candidate for poverty. Like most overweight people, she put far too much emphasis on food, considered it a much too important part of life. If she considered sex as important as eating and put as much effort into their lovemaking as she did deciding what she ate, they might still have a marriage.

  Sex.

  It had been what? A month? Two months? He wasn't sure. They hadn't done it in a while, that he knew.

  He tried to remember the first girl he'd ever had.

  What was her name? Dawn? Donna? Something like that. Strange that he couldn't recall. Weren't you always supposed to remember your first? She'd been poor and dirty. He remembered that much. And that had been part of the allure. She was not like the perfectly scrubbed examples of femininity that were invited over to the house; she was different, wild, and he had liked that. She'd made him do things to her that he hadn't even known about, and in that one summer he had learned everything about sex he had ever needed to know.