The Ruined House

by Ruby Namdar

  The opportunity came unexpectedly. When Donna inquired at the meal’s end if they would like a hot drink and Andrew asked for coffee, nothing turned out to be available but decaf and herbal tea. Donna was flustered and Ann Lee, though blushing at her mother’s embarrassment, said, “But Mom, we do need real coffee.” The cruel real bordered on rudeness. “But what about the cake?” Donna protested weakly. Ann Lee’s eyes flashed angrily. “No, thank you. We’re fine. Andrew doesn’t like desserts, especially if they’re made without flour or sugar.”

  AT THE FIRST TRAFFIC LIGHT, after several minutes of driving in silence, Ann Lee killed the motor, unbuckled her seat belt in a single motion, and flung herself at Andrew, holding him tightly and showering his face and neck with fierce, quick kisses. Andrew hugged her back, surprised. Her wild gratitude startled him. He had misjudged her. All along he had thought that she dreaded Donna and David’s opinion of him—or rather of her, the young lover of an uncommitted middle-aged divorcé with nothing to offer her. Now, he realized it was the other way around. It was his opinion that she feared—of them, and ultimately of herself. Ann Lee felt like an orphan. Her parents’ infantile narcissism had robbed her of her childhood. It was she who had had to raise them, to be the responsible adult while they went on being children. She despised their hippie mannerisms, their refusal to grow up and accept the role of being parents. All her sandals, tank tops, and kerchiefs were a costume, a disguise concealing her parentless soul.

  “It all started with my name. My dad meant it as a tribute to Edgar Allan Poe.” Ann Lee was sitting on a bench outside the local Starbucks draped in a shapeless gray coat, holding her second cup of coffee in one hand and a lit cigarette in the other. “Or so he said. I always thought my mom wanted to call me Honnah Lee because of that stupid Peter, Paul and Mary song . . . you know the one I mean? You must, it’s from your generation.” (She forced a provocative giggle.) “Do you know what turned out, though? The idea wasn’t my mom’s, it was my dad’s. He thought he was calling me Annabel Lee—you’ve heard of her, right? Or was she after your time?” (“Ha-ha, very funny!”) “It’s just that he was stoned out of his mind at the naming ceremony they made for me. There was an African drumming circle and dancing in the moonlight and all that shit. He got that from TV, from that Roots series. It made a big impression on him—I’ll bet he was stoned when he watched it, too. He could hardly stand on his feet, but he was shouting ‘Anna Lee! Anna Lee!’ as if he were Kunta Kinte. They were all drumming and so wasted that no one knew what was happening and no one cared. Every time they’ve told me about it, they’ve laughed as though it were a good joke. When I was old enough to go to school, I insisted on being called Ann instead of Anna. Everything around me was weird enough as it was, and at least Ann Lee was a normal-sounding name. It wasn’t exactly like living in the East Village here, as you can see. Are you done with your coffee? We’d better go back. I’ll bet my mom’s made a flourless leek quiche for supper, or something equally disgusting. . . . I can’t believe that I still have two more days here. It’s like Little House on the Prairie, but minus the good-looking dad. . . . Look how dark it already is. It’ll be night before we know it.”

  6

  Midnight. A last measure of light sifts through the thin crack of a crescent, late-month moon. Tomorrow or the day after, it will be gone from the sky. The gates of the Eretz HaChayim Cemetery are wide open. Who comes and goes there? Ghostly shades of those who are cast away from the city, people of the field, those who were buried in foreign shrouds, in coffins of pine and oak. The souls of our dead lie scattered upon the earth, drifting over fields and forests like gray patches of fog, snagged on bushes, carried onward by the cold wind that blows from the mountains, sucked into the vacuous wake of cars and trucks that travel in the dark from north to south, from east to west. Strewn like night soil upon the earth, our souls await their redemption. How many more cycles must we pass through, how long shall we look for the secret tunnel leading back to our original source? Who knows? Perhaps a thousand years. Perhaps a single day. The gates of the cemetery are wide open, but no one comes or goes. A cold wind blows from the mountains. Trucks travel in the darkness from north to south, from east to west.

  7

  Nine a.m. Andrew blinked in the bright light. The frilled, flowery curtains on the windows were more for show than utility, and the autumn sun flooded the room, fading the patchwork quilts and embroidered cushions. Half-awake, he looked around. It took an uncertain minute or two to recall where he was. From the moment of his and Ann Lee’s arrival, it was clear that she would sleep in her old room and he in the guest room. The idea of them spending the night together in her childhood room, with her teddy bears, posters, and cheerleader’s paraphernalia, seemed bizarre if not perverse. It was as if the house had decided on its own to class him as a grown-up and Ann Lee as an alternately genial and thorny teen. Leaning toward him at the dinner table, she had whispered in his ear: “Don’t forget to leave your door open tonight. I might want to check you haven’t thrown off your covers.” The titillating thought of her stealthily tiptoeing to him past her parents’ bedroom made both of them feel they were back in high school. Yet dinner had ended late and Andrew, fatigued and slightly drunk, fell asleep at once and didn’t wake up until late.

  He stretched in bed and surveyed the room. The walls were paneled in light pine. Knickknacks crowded the shelves. A robe and slippers had been set aside for him by the bathroom door. He smiled, pleased by their declaration of intimacy. His shower lasted longer than usual; unaccustomed to the faucets, it took a while to figure out how to regulate the hot and cold water. Nor did he know whether Ann Lee was already awake and in need of some time with her mother, in which case it would be better to linger in his room. Deciding to do so, he availed himself of a comfortable armchair and a shelf of old New Age books that clearly hadn’t been looked at in years.

  When he finally came down to breakfast a little after ten, Andrew was surprised to find no one but Ann Lee’s mother. David—who, it seemed, worked on weekends, too—was already gone. “He wishes you a nice day and hopes he’ll see you again soon,” said Donna. Andrew gave her a cordial smile. Although last night’s dinner had been perfectly pleasant, his real reason for not coming down sooner, he had to acknowledge, was his only half-unconscious reluctance to spend more time in David’s presence. “Where’s Ann Lee?” he asked. “Isn’t she up yet? It’s a quarter after ten!” Donna, wearing a silk print dress more suited to an afternoon tea party than a family breakfast, poured him coffee. It was excellent, though a bit weaker than he liked. Stung by yesterday’s fiasco, she must have run off to the coffee-bean counter and bought the most expensive blend there was. Did she do it late yesterday evening or early this morning?

  Ann Lee, her hair mussed and wearing a faded T-shirt she had slept in as a teenager, came down a bit before noon, still brushing the sleep from her eyes. The sight of her small breasts pushing through the thin, worn material of the old T-shirt made Andrew involuntarily avert his gaze. As if their fantasized midnight tryst had actually taken place, she gave Andrew a secretive smile that caused him to blush like a boy while hoping Donna didn’t notice. Their breakfast, Andrew’s second, was washed down with more coffee, after which, despite the warm atmosphere, he found himself peeking at his watch as if to ascertain when etiquette would permit him to say what a marvelous time he had and how sorry he was to have to leave, pack his things, and head back to the city by himself. Although he hadn’t really suffered in Donna’s company, he still felt a great need to get away. There was no point in staying for dinner. They had all eaten together yesterday and he didn’t like to drive at night, especially on poorly lit country roads. Besides, she and Ann Lee must want some time for themselves, mustn’t they?

  8

  After ten or twelve minutes, I never remember exactly how long it takes, start keeping an eye out for the high-tension wires crossing the road. That’s where you get off the highway on a shortcut to Route 112. I do
n’t know why there isn’t a sign, because everyone gets confused there. . . .”

  Andrew had had trouble paying attention. Donna’s directions were long and far from consistent, the hour was late, and he was anxious to be off. He would manage to find his way. In the end, all roads led to the city.

  “Okay, Mom, he got it. He’s very smart, remember?” Ann Lee was impatient, too. Eager to get over an awkward situation, she couldn’t wait to be free of the exhausting, ambiguous role that his presence had imposed on all of them. Donna, who had to be in the city Monday afternoon for a workshop she was giving on the uses of meditation in childbirth, or some such thing, would bring her back then.

  Andrew waved good-bye while backing the car out of the driveway, trying not to trample the flower beds alongside it. The strange family ménage had gone on long enough and he was glad to get back to reality. With a last look at Ann Lee and her mother as they stood watching him with their arms around each other, he swung the car onto the road. In the distance, they looked more like two friends the same age than mother and daughter. They suddenly seemed relaxed and happy to be together, as if the tension between them had been dispelled by a magic wand.

  Andrew drove with concentration, unsuccessfully trying to recall Donna’s complicated instructions. He was shocked by how clumsy he felt behind the wheel. Anyone not knowing he had grown up in New Rochelle and gone to school in California might have thought that he had never left Manhattan in his life and that his entire experience of private motor transportation consisted of sitting in the back of a New York City taxicab. As part of his self-reinvention as an urban being, so it seemed, his body had rejected an aptitude he was practically born with. Linda, on the other hand, still drove like a suburban housewife even though she now lived in Brooklyn, skillfully navigating her oversize station wagons full of children and dogs from one school, shopping center, and playground to the next.

  Andrew reached out instinctively to switch on the radio, but now, too, it couldn’t stay tuned to the same station for more than a minute or two. Either something was the matter with it or the reception in the area was bad. How could anyone live so far out? For some reason it didn’t occur to him to play one of the tapes that lay around the car, and he kept getting the same distant, sentimental Muzak with its cloying piano adaptations of old pop songs, letting the radio spew out its musical pap. He drove slowly, the missed shortcut to 112 already behind him, regretting not having listened more carefully to Donna’s vague explanations. As though in a maze, the road signs kept repeating themselves: Goshen, Bethel, Canaan. None bore the shield-like symbol of Route 87, which would take him straight to the city.

  It was getting dark. Andrew pulled off the road, took a map from the glove compartment, and spread it out on the wheel. The old air conditioner, while producing little in the way of cold air, droned like an old airplane, especially after the radio, which hadn’t stopped its insipid emissions, was turned off. Looking at the map, he tried seeing where he was in relation to the boldly colored, diagonal line of 87. When did he become so helpless on the road? He was surprised to feel, despite the cold evening air, sweat running down his neck. Route 87 crossed the Tappan Zee Bridge and merged with 287, which ran nearly to the Hutchison River Parkway. He knew “the Hutch,” as it was called in his youth, well. The main route running through Westchester County, it connected New Rochelle with Pelham, Yonkers, and ultimately, Manhattan. And yet how far-off his New Rochelle childhood and adolescence now seemed to him, so unconnected to the person he had become that his memories of them could have been someone else’s or from a previous incarnation. Linda had never felt the need to choose between the two worlds, but Andrew’s survival as an urban creature had depended on cutting himself off from suburbia. Transplanted to the metropolis, he had put his old self behind him as surely as some species lose their flippers or the ability to fly.

  Andrew folded the map, stuck it back in the glove compartment, signaled, and returned to the road. Linda! More than once over the weekend he had thought of her. The frilly curtains, the rustic furniture in the kitchen, the walls paneled with cheap pine—her provincial sense of elegance, which he couldn’t abide, would have approved of it all. The tastes of some of the primitive tribes he had encountered in his research were more congenial to him than that of the attractively arranged home he had just been in. And yet that, too, was human, all too human.

  Andrew had to smile at the phrase’s aptness, even while chiding himself for plagiarizing Nietzsche. There was a time when he had constantly repeated it—to himself, to his therapist, in his conversations with Linda, and, most of all (as she once complained to him), in talking to her friends in the weeks after leaving her. “The curved line is human,” he had written in his journal in a moment of euphoric insight. “It is finite, limiting, and limited. The straight line is infinite, not just as a negation of the finite but in and of itself.” Flowers on the wallpaper, on the sheets, and on the pillowcases. Flowers on the tablecloths and on the napkins. Flowers in flowerpots and on the rims of dishes. Flowers with round, toothed, and lobed petals, with small and large leaves, with twining stems in treacherous swamps of bright color, snakes biting their tails. Like Alexander the Great, he had had no choice but to cut the Gordian knot all at once, to cast off the chains of everything curved, respectable, domestic, and feminine for the open, masculine, geometric spaces of freedom.

  He had been driving for a long while, and the more he drove, the less he knew where he was. The total, pitiless darkness of the countryside would soon descend, swooping down on his car to throttle him. A dim, paralyzing fear seized Andrew by the throat, constricting his breath. It was impossible to match the map’s information with the road’s reality. None of the exits he passed were marked on it, the junctions appeared without warning, the forks led nowhere. Looming before him on the wrong side of the road like a toothless mouth, the open gate of the Eretz HaChayim Cemetery turned his anxiety into near panic. The oncoming night would be black, moonless. Ghostly shades flitted in and out of the gate. The souls of the dead lay scattered upon the earth, drifting over fields and forests like gray patches of fog, sucked into the vacuous wake of cars and trucks that traveled in the dark from north to south and east to west. How many more cycles must we pass through, how long shall we look for the tunnel leading back to our first source? Who knows? Perhaps a thousand years, perhaps a single day!

  It seemed slightly less than miraculous when the road ran the little car all at once into the southbound side of Route 87 and thence to the Tappan Zee Bridge and the familiar embrace of the Hutch. From that point on, the car seemed to drive itself, taking care to reach the city just as darkness was falling. The Palisades on his right, lit by the last rays of twilight, angled sharply upward from the gray mist that had swallowed the river. He smiled as he crossed the narrow bridge leading from the Bronx to Manhattan. Had he unconsciously planned his dramatic arrival all along? Was there some conspiracy to return him to the city at exactly this hour? The artificially lit profile of the George Washington Bridge shone majestically in the gathering dusk, making his chest expand and his heart beat steadily again. Opening the window, he let the cathartic evening breeze flow past him as if it were a river and he a gray rock in its midst. The regal glass towers of the city, with all their lights, rose to welcome him back to the city he loved.

  9

  November 3, 2000

  The 5th of Heshvan, 5761

  An alternate universe is reflected in the dark glass of the buildings. The yellow cabs flow from top to bottom, crawling on their surface like heavy drops of rain. Pedestrians stride diagonally across a tenth-floor window, obeying the unwritten laws, the pure style, of New York’s skittish yet precise choreography: waves of jaywalkers crossing on red lights, slanting columns of steam rising from the street corners, giant graffiti ascending the walls, darting messenger boys zigzagging in and out of traffic, taxis jumping lanes without signaling—all exist in a state of perfect harmony.

  And yet how stable
is the rock foundation on which everything rests—as heavy, strong, and gray as the river on an overcast day. And in the midst of all this, somewhere along the line between rest and motion, gravitational pull and release, a perfectly ordinary-looking yellow cab cruises slowly down Broadway, all four windows wide open in spite of the late autumn chill, its radio blasting with the precise, pedantic diction of a digital-age preacher, “And they said, Let us build us a city and a tower whose top may reach unto heaven.” Thundering with impatience at the blindness of the unrepentant, the insistent voice that drowns out all else like the sound track of a movie. It rams the buildings, shaking their glass panes and reverberating in space. “And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower which the children of men built.” The light turns red. The driver, a middle-aged man of unclear national origins who converted his empty taxi into a giant loudspeaker for the enlightenment of the sinful masses, sits motionlessly inside it, staring straight ahead with the blank look of the born again, a look that is single-minded to the point of mindlessness. “And the Lord said, Behold the people is one, and they have all one language, and this they begin to do, and now, nothing will be restrained from them which they have imagined to do.” How can he sit there amid all that noise? Is he deaf? His lips are clenched in tight fury. Clearly, he believes every word of the uncouth text with which he is bombarding the city. “Go to, let us go down and confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.” The flint-hard verses strike like pickaxes, like mighty hammers splintering the rock foundation. Unseen fissures ran through the walls of the buildings, streams of doom that would flow to the great Sea of Obliteration. The copper water pipes sluiced up the bloodred, corrosive rust that was coating their insides like plaque. A trillion tons of metal, glass, and stone are slowly, invisibly, crumbling. The city’s fatigued heart is giving out. “So the Lord scattered them from there upon the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city.” The light turns green. The driver, perhaps loath to exit the marvelous stage at whose center his commandeered taxi had placed him, lingers for a moment before heading for the next intersection, there, too, to spread the tidings to the great city.