Gradually the place resolved itself into familiar substances: glass, stone, wood, concrete. Reflections peeled away from their sources. Lines combined to form planes: floors and ceilings. The floors were slate, the ceilings wood; they floated at slight angles from the horizontal, unsupported by walls. There were no walls, only windows, or the windows were the walls. The house was two stories and hexagonal, more or less, not octagonal as Dave had said. At its center was a roofless atrium with a pond, beside which grew three Japanese maples. We walked around and around, gawking. Each “room” could have fit five or six of the rooms in Sadie’s Des Moines, in my childhood house. In the kitchen were four sinks, two ovens, three stoves, and two gleaming granite-topped cupboarded islands. In the living room, two midcentury-modern-looking couches faced each other across a big orange block of a coffee table, on top of which Angelina Jolie looked out from the cover of a Vanity Fair from four years ago. Other than some wooden chairs and a few built-in desks, this seemed to be the extent of the furniture. The indoor/outdoor infinity pool was lit from within.
Some of the planes of glass had locks and handles; we unlocked one and pushed and were outside. The balcony, whose floor was the same slate as the interior’s, stretched around almost the entire building. Its parapet was made of glass. We walked along the rectangular pool to the edge of that side of the balcony and looked out. At a slight angle to our left: the swimming lights of a city, the same we’d glimpsed on our way up, Fairfield, if Sadie’s internal compass was correct. A grid of slowly blinking red lights, windmills, floated just outside the city. To our right, dark masses of land, and beyond, part of a slightly more distant city—Napa? We could make out a line of traffic on I-80 winding its way toward San Francisco. I’d only ever experienced nighttime aerial views from planes, which may have been why I felt a sudden sensation of motion, or maybe it was an effect of the wind, or maybe my body still thought it was in a car, but in any case Sadie said she felt it, too, and we returned to the other side of the glass.
Perhaps because we’d just been outside, it occurred to me now that though we couldn’t see out, those outside could surely see in. Was there anywhere in the house to hide? Another lap revealed a bedroom—small, relative to the house’s other rooms; cavernous, relative to the bedrooms I’d known—half-hidden behind a wood-paneled partition. In the center of the room was a large, made bed. The windows in here, though enormous, seemed slightly smaller than the windows in the rest of the house. (They were, I later realized, for the simple reason that the ceiling was slightly lower in here.) What we assumed was a light switch turned out to call down translucent black blinds from a slot in the ceiling. After failing to find any other switches or buttons, Sadie turned off all the lights from the garage and returned to the bed, which I’d already climbed into. Neither of us reached for the other, but there we were. “Jess won’t mind?” she whispered as we kissed. I laughed into her mouth. “She’ll be furious,” I said. Then added, “Just promise not to tell my mom.” And I remember feeling as I pulled her closer that we’d done this many times before, as though we were entering a memory of the world into which we stepped at that moment through each other, where aspens grew in place of pines, fall leaves yellow against the sky.
10
The Bachelor rises before Sadie, pees, pulls on a hooded sweatshirt, Keurigs a cup of “Dark Magic” coffee, pushes open with all his weight one of the enormous glass doors, steps barefoot in his boxers onto the balcony, and shuffles past the two gas fire pits and the hot tub to the far end of the pool, where he leans somewhat tentatively against the parapet and tries to perceive his new world into existence. Below, as advertised, the morning clouds extend toward the horizon. Their dark-light surface is broken only by the occasional brush-covered hilltop or ridge, an archipelago of uninhabited islands. A waxing moon hangs in the western sky, bathing everything in bluish light. A delicate fragrance he can’t identify—herbs? fruit? flowers? trees?—rises from the earth and mingles with the smell, so foreign to him still, of saltwater. The pool reaches out from the house like a diving board, and he feels an urge, familiar from window seats when he was younger and also not much younger, to leap onto the clouds and bound off across them into some better, softer life. The winter air’s coolness holds a secret warmth. Birdsong amplifies the silence beneath it. He stands there for some time with his awful coffee before realizing the clouds are moving, receding steadily toward the moon, the invisible Pacific pulling them like a tide. Their motion is a species of stillness. They flow. He watches them caress the contours of the land, gradually revealing folds of oak savanna, a patch of suburb, a golf course, as if the air is drawing back a blanket, startling the sleeping landscape into consciousness.
The balcony’s slate is cold against his feet; he goes back inside and finishes his coffee while walking slow laps around the gradually lightening atrium, then returns to bed, where he and Sadie again have sex as the rising sun filters through the translucent shades.
* * *
—
Sex was what anchored us on top of that mountain; without it we would’ve floated away. In the light of day we realized the house was almost certainly far enough from other human dwellings that no one from outside could see us, no matter where we were in it or on its balcony, and we fucked on the living-room couches, the kitchen countertop, the islands, the library floor, in the shower, the atrium, the pool, on the edge of the hot tub (the glass people couldn’t make it today), light-headed from the heat of the water that clung to our exhausted and happy bodies. I told Sadie I was a little scared. “Of what?” “Of my own desire.” “What is it, exactly, that you desire?” she asked, and I told her, and we did that. Then I asked what she most wanted to do and we did that, too. There was, in general, more biting than I was used to, a stronger undercurrent of violence. I was surprised at how comfortable I felt inflicting pain on someone I liked and esteemed.
As we lay on the sun-warmed slate of the balcony letting our bodies dry, we heard what sounded like an approaching helicopter, and then it was no longer approaching, it was here, it circled twice close around the house and flew off into the horizon. Whoever was inside must have seen us there, but by this point we didn’t care. Let them look. We stood naked at the parapet beyond the pool, gazing out on our kingdom. We laughed. Think of all those poor people not us. We returned to bed, fucked, slept. We awoke and ate granola bars and potato chips in bed. We allowed our bodies to become objects of study; Sadie photographed us with her disposable camera. “Just don’t post these on the Internet,” I said. The Internet? What’s that? She’d never heard of it. Didn’t I know moms didn’t use the Internet? “Am I the first mom you’ve ever slept with?” she asked later. I pointed out that was a complicated question and she pretended to disagree. We reveled in the unlikeliness of our coupling to the point where it no longer seemed unlikely.
Then Sadie flew back to New York and I was alone, looking through windows, seeing her. I saw the skin, lightly creased, in the hollow of her neck and shoulders; her brown eyes flecked with yellow and green; the tattoo of a falcon on her ass. When I closed my eyes she became more vivid. I spent hours just walking around the house. She’d been here only one full day, but every room held some memory of her. It took a while before my mind had the strength to push remembering into narrative or analysis. What should I do with my experience with Sadie? Where to put it, how to arrange its moments? We hadn’t talked about what came next, whether, or to what extent, we’d stay in touch. In the days after she left, we G-chatted a bit—my phone didn’t get service inside the house—mostly, or so it seems to me now, to express and re-express our mutual gratitude. “I keep thinking of what a lovely time I had with you.” I think we were both wary of shading or complicating what had been for both of us “a simple, fun thing” (as she’d later put it). Then at some point—Sadie suggested this—I discovered that our time together could be both that and something slightly more, something useful, a transition into
a new era for me, a sort of welcome, or a door.
I only felt alone in the house at night. During the day I was too amazed to feel alone. I couldn’t stop taking laps around the house, letting view give onto view, as the sun projected its daily light show onto the house’s surfaces—not only the usual light shapes migrating almost imperceptibly across the floor, but light reflecting from the pool, from the atrium’s pond, shadows of birds and planes, little rainbows; all recurred with such regularity that I began to feel as friendly toward particular effects of light as I did toward certain corners of my mind. Then I’d lift my eyes to the windows and words like friendly lost their meaning as my boundaries expanded to the surrounding hills and cities and the horizon beyond. I’d never known how much space I could fill. Sadie’s house, without furniture, had seemed huge; this house simply was. It was more than huge. Its windows were what made it limitlessly big; they opened the house up to the world in all directions so that inside overflowed into outside, or there was no outside, or outside leaked in. For a long time I struggled to get my bearings. When you’re above that which is normally above you, it’s hard not to feel like the world is upside down.
Dave assigned me little tasks by email: water the trees in the atrium, clean the fire pits, check the salt level in the water salt container, pick up the third garage door opener from Dave’s wife’s sister in Vacaville, update passwords, put chlorine tablets in the pool; buy padlocks, flashlights, houseplants, lightbulbs, the biggest flat-screen TV Best Buy sells; clear stray branches from beneath the pool area, install the motion-detecting camera by the water tank, post no trespassing signs. Many days, too, contractors came, not only the glass people but the elevator guy, the floor guy, the roof guy, the pool guys, the window washers, the landscapers, the housekeepers, the plumbers, the gas guy, the alarm guy, who was also the sound system guy, though Dave was convinced he could get a better deal on speakers from some other sound system guy. They’d call me when they reached the wrought iron gate and I’d give them the combination to the lock I’d installed, knowing to expect them half an hour later. When they arrived they’d express disbelief at the house and I’d take them on a tour around the hexagon, first inside, then on the balcony. “On a clear day you can see the Golden Gate Bridge,” I’d say, if that day wasn’t clear. Many of them told me they’d often looked up at the big glass house on top of the mountain and wondered what it was like inside. A few told me they’d been up here before the house was built; there used to be miles of hiking trails, they said. All of them asked me how much the place cost and I quoted the figure Dave had bragged to me about (without my having asked): twenty million. “The windows alone must have cost a million dollars,” they said, under the spell of the word million. “Are they bulletproof?” I forget which contractor asked me that but I remember assuring him they were. Probably they were. At least one contractor did a double take as he saw me emerging from the house, I guess because I looked young or poor or both, and said, “You own this place?” Not technically but in a deeper sense the house was mine: I was here, not Dave. I paced its rooms, I lost myself in its reflections and views, which were mine just as million-dollar paintings are yours for those moments you stand before them in museums.
The alarm guy who was also the sound system guy started coming up almost every day. The installation of the alarm system and the rewiring of the sound system were both more complicated than he’d expected, or so he claimed; I suspected he just liked being up here. In any case we became friends, sort of. I gave him beers and we sat drinking by the pool. His name was Oscar and he was from Colombia; he showed me photos of his life there on his phone. He’d been an outdoor adventure guide, and his photos were mostly of himself and his clients on horses, mountain bikes, whitewater rafts. He’d been in California seven years and planned to stay for seven more before returning to Colombia with his wife and kids, one of whom was born in America and barely knew a word of Spanish, Oscar lamented. “Colombia is home,” he said. “Will always be. America is where you go to make money,” and he waved his hand at the ostentatiousness that sheltered us. Another day I lent him my binoculars, which were actually Sadie’s, and he called me over to look at something on a grassy rise a little ways down the mountain: “These big things—they are guns?” he asked, handing me the binoculars. They did look like cannons but what they were in fact were sections of a life-size fiberglass tyrannosaurus. I’d seen it once from the road on my way up, just beyond a copse of oaks, and Dave had told me it belonged to the only previous owner of the house, who’d planned to populate the top of the mountain with dozens of fiberglass dinosaurs. But then he went bankrupt and lost not only that dream but the house he’d spent a decade fighting to get built. He and his wife had only lived there three years. Now they lived in a normal-sized house not far from the broken dinosaur, and, as Oscar and I stood on the balcony, I could just make it out through the binoculars.
One day, not long after I arrived, the man, whose unlikely name was Ward Druthers, invited me over for dinner. His present house was probably a mile away, but, by the winding dirt roads down the mountain, it took me twenty minutes to get there in the Jeep, in which I felt invincible. This house had two bedrooms and a large living room with big windows and would’ve worked well as a walk-in closet inside House Above the Morning Clouds. But whatever tragedy I’d been hoping to have elaborated soon dissolved in Ward Druthers’s stoicism, which seemed to be underwritten by his wife, Lynn’s (he did most of the talking). He and a partner had started a chain of convenience stores—he’d coined that term, convenience store, he said—when he was young and stupid and had no idea what he was doing and for some reason the stores took off. They became billionaires. He and Lynn traveled everywhere, he said, they saw the wonders of the world, Timbuktu. “We’ve been together over fifty years,” Lynn chimed in. (She was a stewardess, I learned a bit later, but had to quit when she married Ward because stewardesses weren’t allowed to be married back then.) Then he got sued by Big Tobacco—all this he told me without any prodding—for selling gray-market cigarettes. The Supreme Court declined to hear the case, and he lost almost everything. “But we’re fine. We liked living up in the house you’re looking after and we like living in this house. We’re used to hardship.” I nodded but inside I was laughing—hardship! I thought of Oscar and his wife and kids, thousands of miles from home.
Anyway, he went on as I endured the roast beef, coleslaw, mashed potatoes and gravy, there was a lot about that house they didn’t like. Sure, the sunsets were spectacular, but just wait until the winds came, he said with grave eyes. The winds should be starting up again anytime now. Lynn, in response to this, gave a little shiver and brought her arms in close to her torso. “The winds!” she echoed, and shook her head. “You’re lucky you missed the rains,” she said. “That’s what drove the woman before you out. But the winds…” Again she shook her head.
Over “banana split” ice cream with brownies, Ward told me they’d wanted to have the house designed by a certain protégé of Frank Lloyd Wright, but he died so they’d settled for a protégé of the protégé. It took four years to get the permit and six years to build. He took a lot of crap from the neighbors, he said, but look at it now: it was beautiful. “Beautiful. As long as you can forget about the wind,” said Lynn. “It’s beautiful to people who aren’t in it,” he said, “and they don’t have to deal with the wind. Let’s have a look.” We followed him outside, to a little hill that rose behind his house. From there we had an unobstructed view of House Above the Morning Clouds. It jutted from the mountain like a frozen flame, straining toward some gaudy ultimate. The only way it would ever disappear, I found myself thinking, was upward, in an explosion—either that or it would take flight like the spaceship Dave was right to say it resembled, and return to whatever planet it had come from. We all agreed it was beautiful.
“Have you come across the plane crash yet?” Ward asked as I was walking toward the Jeep. Apparently a bomber ha
d crashed into the mountain on its way to Hawaii during World War II; the wreckage was fifty yards from the house: Ward told me how to find it.
Next morning I searched for it and there it was—a patch of dirt and loose gravel underneath which the remaining debris lay buried. I unearthed a mangled set of earphones, two buttons, a belt buckle, several rusted scraps of steel, a shard of glass, and what looked to be a layer of ash. Later a bit of research revealed the names and ranks of the five crew members: Capt. F. S. Nelson, 2nd Lt. E. W. Sell, T/Sgt. Phil Zeik, T/Sgt. Richard Kinney, and Pfc. Evan Phillips lost their lives on December 21, 1941. I wondered if they left behind children, wives.
* * *
—
The Bachelor had never given much thought to the question of what would happen to his body after he died. Shawntel, who thought about it every day, wanted to be cremated: that way she could avoid the chemical resurrection she inflicted on Chico’s recently dead as embalmer at her father’s funeral home. “I don’t handle death well,” the Bachelor said as she gave him an exclusive tour of the place on her all-important hometown date. “I don’t handle saying goodbye to people well.” Shawntel walked him through the mausoleum (two caskets per crypt, one for husband, one for wife), demonstrated the crematory (“press for flame”), and, in the prep room, asked him if he had any interest in lying down on the embalming table. Not really, he said, climbing onto it. Fluorescent light blasted the white walls and ceiling and glared off brushed-metal surfaces. “So what happens is I would take a scalpel,” she explained. “Make an incision. And then what I would do is I would take an aneurysm hook, and this would be going through your incision and finding your carotid artery and your vein…” She laughed. “Are you, like, creeped out or what?” He was, but at the same time he respected what Shawntel did—not only the hooking people’s veins part or whatever, but, in all seriousness, having conversations with those poor people who’d so recently lost loved ones. “I could not do it,” he said with intensity. “No way. I’d cry with the families.”
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