Dark Rooms: Three Novels

by Douglas Clegg

  The oaks had burst with heavy green branches, and there was a breeze; the heat hadn’t exploded yet as it would in just a week or two. It was a quiet street. That was good. Just after rush hour and the sound of traffic from two streets over was just white noise. A jogger went by and waved, and Hugh came up behind her and said, “I saw a rat in the alley.”

  “Good. If he stays outside the house we’ll all get along fine.”

  She hadn’t looked at the house yet.

  Our house.

  She wanted Hugh to be with her, she wanted to see it clearly, she wanted it to be as if she had closed her eyes and then opened them to see our house. They’d driven by it three times before, she’d jogged by it once, but more to gauge the neighborhood, get a feel for the potholes and what parking was like along Hammer Street. When she’d glanced at the house before she’d just thought of it as a house, not as our house.

  Rachel Adair turned with her husband and faced the house that was now theirs.

  2.

  Rachel’s first sight of the front of the house in Northwest Washington was not a pleasant one: a middle-aged woman, a bag lady from the park with her grocery cart full of trash, was squatting down near the stone steps urinating on the sidewalk. The woman was fat and moved like a Jell-O mold, wiggling down on her haunches—she pissed a stream that would apparently flow right to Rachel’s Reeboks. Rachel and Hugh both looked away—up to the turret, across to the park, to the taxi pulled over on the other side of the street. When Rachel glanced back to the house, the bag lady was gone, vanished, and all that remained of her was the drying urine on the sidewalk.

  City living. Rachel forgot about the bag lady and looked at her new home.

  It was a simple nineteenth-century stone house—resembling every other townhouse on that side of Hammer Street, just off Winthrop Park with Kalorama and its embassies on the opposite side of Connecticut Avenue; on the other side, a shady avenue of shabby redbrick buildings that seemed to have been bombed out all the way back to Eighteenth Street. This block was the border between a good neighborhood and a bad one, the shade from the park marking the line between them. The house was gray, tall and thin, with a beard of ivy along its edge; three stories high; with a separate apartment below. It looked like it had once been a longer house but was sliced at the side just along the turret; the house attached to one side of it was a plain, white box-shaped house, obviously new—someone had torn down part of Rachel’s house ( our house) on one side, someone had been dissatisfied with their half of the old stone house and decided to build that ugly white thing instead with the chain-link fence in front and that threatening face of a Doberman just behind the side glass of the front door.

  “I always dreamed I’d live in a house like this,” Rachel said, turning her attention back to her new home. Hugh led the way up the stone steps. Rachel touched the thick carved stone post beside the door: it was cold, and felt good.

  Beside the front door, the brass plaque:

  HISTORIC HOUSES COMMISSION. DAPER HOUSE WAS BUILT BY THE ARCHITECT JULIAN MARLOWE IN 1822. EDGAR ALLAN POE WROTE HIS FAMOUS STORY, “PREMATURE BURIAL” IN THE TURRET ROOM WHILE RESIDING AS A GUEST.

  “One of the Old Man’s vanities,” Hugh pointed out. “Poe did stay here when it was a hotel or something, for a weekend, but it’s doubtful he wrote any stories while he was here. He probably played some all-night poker games and recovered from hangovers the rest of the time. But the Old Man has always been an ace at perpetrating lies.”

  “A house with a name.”

  “A full name, too. The Rose Truthful Draper House, the architect’s mistress. I’ve heard old Rosie was a wild one.”

  “In what way?” Rachel asked, but at that point Hugh lifted the heavy doorknocker and let it fall. It sounded like a hammer coming down on a bullet—Rachel winced at the noise, covering her ears. “Jesus.”

  “Sorry, Scout, just testing.” Hugh reached in the pockets of his khakis for the front-door key. “How many keys can this place have, you may well ask.” He held up a large key ring with several keys dangling from it. He pointed them out: “This one’s for the front door, the downstairs hall door, this is for… I think the patio, and this one—I don’t know, maybe the back gate. I guess we’ll find that out. And this little piggy,” he jangled a small key, “goes wee-wee-wee all the way home.”

  Rachel wasn’t listening to him. “Did you hear that?”

  “Huh?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Was it a cat? The woman who rents the downstairs apartment has cats, I think. She’s either a psych-o or a psych-ic, I get those two confused.”

  Yes, Rachel thought, cats mewling for milk, kittens searching for their mother. I’m not going crazy after all. It’s not babies. Just because I lost a baby—a sphere—doesn’t mean I’m going to hallucinate about it. Cats, yep, sounds good to me.

  Then she heard it again, the sound, and for just a second she thought she saw Hugh blink twice having heard the baby crying. But she’d been thinking of babies since the humidity had risen, babies at her breasts, babies at her ankles, babies floating among the clouds. Babies were everywhere she looked. Why does it surprise me that I think I hear them? This is what the doctor said: “You’ll notice that everyone has babies except you, you’ll think that somehow you’re built differently from other women, that you’re unnatural, but don’t believe it. Miscarriages are as natural as deliveries. Rachel, you lose this one, well, somewhere down the road you’ll have another.” Yep. Doctor, you play the Let’s Pretend game just like my husband does.

  Hugh opened the door to the inner hall. “To the dark tower, Scout.”

  But the baby crying: it sounded like it came from beneath the stones of the porch, right beneath her feet.

  CHAPTER TWO

  INTERIOR

  1.

  They met the downstairs tenant, Mrs. Deerfield, briefly—Rachel barely got a glimpse of her when the older woman opened her door, leaving the chain on. All Rachel caught of her were blue eyes, pale wrinkled skin, and a shock of blond hair the color and texture of dry hay. And a strong whiff of either cleaning fluid or alcohol. Paint was peeling on the apartment door. We’ve got our work cut out for us.

  “Just got out of the bath, dears,” Mrs. Deerfield said. “Come round to the patio.” Rachel shook the damp hand before it slipped back behind the closing door.

  “Veddy British,” Rachel said low enough so as not to be overheard.

  Hugh raised his eyebrows. “Like Mary Poppins gone to seed.” He unlocked the inner door that led to the upstairs. “Voilà,” he said, flinging the door open.

  Rachel went quickly through the house assessing the damage; the dark blue wallpaper in the bathroom which should come down, the track lighting that didn’t complement the wonderful nineteenth-century flavor of the house, the layer of grease on the stove and oven. Two bedrooms on the top floor, one bath on each floor, the banister was a little rickety—would need repair but not right away—the living room was long and with a high ceiling, and that wonderfully large manor house fireplace set like a cave into the wall, the kitchen was small, not much room to turn around in, but the dining room was large, and there was the patio for summer entertaining. She ran up and down the stairs, shouting out to Hugh to come up and see this small room that would be perfect for a den. At the living room, the house twisted in an L, and Rachel clutched Hugh’s hand as they went down the narrow hallway.

  “Secret passages,” Hugh said.

  “Don’t you think this is a weird layout? From the alley it didn’t look like it went this way at all.”

  “I’m not sure, but I think when the block was divided into separate residences the divisions made their own geometric messes of things.”

  “So dark,” she said, “when you can just see this place was made for light—they’ve practically boarded it up.” She went and pulled a heavy curtain back from one of the second-floor hall windows. She wrote her initials in the dust on the pane.

  “It’s so
stuffy—Hugh, come see if you can open this one.”

  Leaving Hugh to struggle with the windowpane, Rachel walked towards the room at the end of the hall. The door was shut; Rachel played with the doorknob until it came off in her hand. She set it on the floor. “This must be…” She pressed her shoulder up against the door and shoved.

  “Yes!” The door swung open, slamming against the wall. “My favorite: the turret room.”

  The room was a semicircle, dark and cold even in the hot summer. It reminded her of a dungeon, its airless darkness conjuring up images of torture chamber paraphernalia: thumbscrews, iron maidens, bone-stretching devices, steel fetters. On the other hand, it also reminded her of the basement apartment she and Hugh lived in but without the tacky gold wallpaper. Instead, the room was plastered with tacky dark wallpaper—a design that was supposed to be peacock tail feathers in a paisley swirl, but which looked more like a thousand eyes staring out of a coal mine. The curtains blocking the sunlight were a dusky shade of purple, ragged and moth-eaten, dragging across the dirty floor. She shivered just looking at the room, but her mind was already working: with some white drapes, strip the wallpaper, a paint job, some good old-fashioned scrubbing, it would be the friendliest room in the house. But who the hell wants to do all that work?

  The window was convex and enormous, like a curved screen around the turret; with the curtains drawn back it must take in a panoramic view of the park. Rachel pictured a window seat with cushions—a place to read books and sip tea on Sunday afternoons. Yes, this would be her favorite room.

  “This will be the nursery,” Rachel said mostly to herself, thinking Hugh was out of earshot; she said it like a prayer, like she knew it would never come true. She swept stale dusty air back with her left hand; she felt a sneeze coming on. Her wedding ring, loosening with the summer humidity, slid off her finger and clanked to the floor, reminding her again of thumbscrews and chains. She squatted down, balancing herself with one hand on the floor, the other reaching for the ring. She picked it up, but felt a stinging in her thumb: not from an imaginary thumbscrew, however, but from a splinter fresh from the floorboards. She nursed her thumb before plucking the offending bit of wood out from between her thumbnail and skin. A small period of red appeared there, just under the nail. She pressed her thumb against her lips to stop the flow of blood.

  “Oh, Scout,” Hugh sighed, sounding defeated; he must’ve heard her little prayer, her mention of the word nursery, which was innocent enough as words went. Hugh would go and think she was making herself sad again, thinking about the child she hadn’t been able to carry. He didn’t seem to understand about hope. She wanted to tell him then that she wasn’t going to start crying just because she’d thought of a baby-related term. You don’t mourn the death of something that’s barely eight weeks conceived do you? It’s not even a baby, it’s just a little sphere.

  Hugh gave up the struggle to open the hall window and came down into the turret room to her.

  Since her miscarriage in the spring, he’d kept emphasizing how right and natural it had been to lose the baby, and how we’re not prepared for parenthood, and when it’s right we’ll know. There were subjects they didn’t talk about anymore, jokes they didn’t make. Life was becoming a serious business in which spheres did not subdivide into babies.

  Hugh came up to her and drew her to him, enveloped her. She liked that feeling of being inside his arms. It made her think he desired her, and she could momentarily forget that he had ever been in love with anyone else, had begun to raise a family with that other woman—that other woman who was able to give him more than Rachel had been able to. That other woman, four months pregnant, who was dead and buried.

  The other woman ( wife, damn it, his first wife—why can’t you even admit it? ) to whom Rachel was constantly comparing herself. There was Joanna, beautiful, pure, and obviously fertile. And then there’s me: making plans to steal her husband away even as Joanna’s Volvo was being demolished by a drunken driver. Always, always we pay for our sins—even the not-so-nice Catholic girls who don’t really believe in sin, only in stupid decisions.

  Hugh went over to the turret window, his loafers clicking like angry beetles against the echoing floor. He pulled the drapes apart; Rachel heard some of the material rip. Light flooded the room through the snowstorm of dust that blew off the curtains. The sunlight was almost too bright. Rachel squinted for an instant—she’d gotten used to the heavy darkness of the house as they’d been going through it, room to room. “These windows haven’t been washed in years. You know how much work we’re going to have to put into this house? It’s not going to be like the apartment.”

  “Good thing. It’ll be nice to have something that’s ours.”

  “Famous last words.” Hugh twisted his head around and arched his eyebrows. Hugh Adair could do things like that and it would mean something to her—it was the one thing they’d developed over the past two years, that sort of ESP that came from living with someone. Rachel often wondered if Hugh and his first wife ever had that.

  “Well, it is ours. A gift is a gift.” She didn’t want her chin to look so set and determined. She didn’t mean it as the challenge that Hugh might understand it to be: but there it was, in her chin, in the steady gaze of her brown eyes. Her chestnut brown bangs needed a trim, but she was happy she hadn’t gotten one yet. Rachel felt her hair suitably hid her eyebrows, which were forming this statement into a question: It is ours, isn’t it? You’re a lawyer, you know how to be assertive; if you can do it in court you can do it at home.

  Rachel was hoping he wouldn’t go off into one of his despairing moods about accepting the wedding gift from his father again. She was glad her father-in-law was going out of his way to prove to them that he did finally approve of the marriage. Rachel kept trying to drum it into her husband’s skull that someday he would reconcile himself with his father, and the less he had to regret about his behavior to the Old Man, the better.

  There was a momentary silence in the house as they stood there; silence filtered through dust. Behind the silence and the dust, Rachel wondered what other people thought, what other couples meant when they weren’t speaking. “I want to scream.” That must be what other couples thought when they had nothing to say, Rachel thought as she watched Hugh’s face: the lines that hadn’t been there two minutes ago. He’s thinking about the sphere, too, but he’s not thinking about it the way I am. He’s thinking about it with relief. I want to scream but I won’t scream because you won’t love me if I scream. Someone was honking their car horn in the alley, breaking through the brief silence. She smiled because she didn’t want this to be a depressing repeat of the past year. “Do you think that Mrs. Deerfield will still rent downstairs when we move in?”

  “We can’t really ask her to move, can we? We’d be doing the kind of thing the Old Man does when he thinks a neighborhood, like this one I might add, is ripe for gentrification. Kick the poor people out and bring on the yuppies.” He tended to snap whenever he talked about anyone in his family. The front of Hugh’s red T-shirt was blotched with sweat; his sandy blond hair was swept back in a shiny wave across his forehead, softening his aquiline features.

  “You are a yuppie, previously a preppie. The enemy is us. But I think it’ll be nice to have someone living beneath us.”

  Hugh went back to tugging at the window. “How. Comfortable. Will. You,” Hugh grunted in between his attempts, “feel… having a woman living in the basement who in her last life was a princess in the lost city of Atlantis?” Again, he gave up his fight with the window.

  “Just great—if she likes the vibes here, and she pays the rent on the first of the month. It won’t hurt the budget, will it? And I won’t mind the company, either.”

  “But,” Hugh said jokingly, “I thought you were going to be too busy fixing this place up, and then let’s not even mention your conventional seventy-hour workweek.”

  “Oh, I know, I know, but there are those coffee breaks. Mom told me that
her first few years of marriage she just had lunch with the girls and went shopping,” Rachel sighed.

  “Recherché du temps perdu,” Hugh chuckled. “This is what law school did for you, it made you want things you can’t have.”

  For a second, Rachel thought: you asshole.

  2.

  She’d thought that when she first met him— you asshole, back when she was still Rachel Brennan and trying not to flunk out of law school. Although they had not exactly met, formally. She was working on the law review and Hugh edited it. Her father was dying of lung cancer, so she was taking most weekends and going home. This left little time for her law review duties, which included re-filing material she used, and the editor, Hugh Adair, sent her a memo:

  Ms. Brennan,

  It seems that some of the staff have not been attending to their more clerical duties with regards to the review. Among the neglected dead are filing, returning office supplies to the supply room, and a veritable graveyard of notes which have not been trashed. (Are they valuable? Should we start an archives for your research?) Perhaps if your office skills need sharpening, we can provide a refresher course in orderliness.

  I hope this memo is sufficient.

  Thank you,

  Hugh Adair, Editor-in-Chief