Читать книгу Werewolves in Their Youth - Michael Chabon, Michael Chabon - Страница 6

The house was all wrong for them. An ivy-covered Norman country manor with an eccentric roofline, a fat, pointed tower, and latticed mullions in the downstairs windows, it sat perched on the northwest shoulder of Lake Washington, a few blocks to the east of the house in which Christy had grown up. The neighborhood was subject to regular invasion by armies of gardeners, landscape contractors, and installers of genuine Umbrian granite paving stone, but nevertheless it was obvious the house had been got up to be sold. The blue paint on the shutters looked slick and wet, fresh black mulch churned around the pansies by the driveway, and the immense front lawn had been polished to a hard shine. The listing agent’s sign was a discreet red-and-white escutcheon, on a black iron stake, that read simply, “Herman Silk,” with a telephone number, in an elegant sans serif type.

“This?” Daniel Diamond said, his heart sinking in a kind of giddy fizz within him. Although they had all the windows open, Mr. Hogue’s car was choked with the smell of his cologne, a harsh extract of wintergreen and brine which the realtor had been emitting more fiercely, like flop sweat, the nearer they got to the house. It was aggravating Daniel’s allergies, and he wished he’d thought to pop a Claritin before leaving the apartment that morning. “This is the one?”

“That’s the one,” Hogue said, sounding weary, as though he had spent the entire day dragging them around town in his ancient Mercedes sedan, showing them one perfectly good house after another, each of which they had rejected with the most arbitrary and picayune of rationales. In fact, it was only ten o’clock in the morning, and this was the very first place he’d brought them to see. Bob Hogue was a leathery man of indefinite middle age, wearing a green polo shirt, tan chinos, and a madras blazer in the palette favored by manufacturers of the cellophane grass that goes into Easter baskets. His rectilinear wrinkles, his crew cut, his chin like a couple of knuckles, his nose lettered with minute red script, gave him the look of a jet pilot gone to seed. “What’s the matter with it? Not good enough for you?”

Daniel and his wife, Christy Kite, looked at each other across the back of Christy’s seat – Christy could never ride in the rear of any vehicle without experiencing acute motion sickness.

“Well, it’s awfully big, Mr. Hogue,” she said, tentatively, leaning to look past the realtor at the house. Christy had gone to college in Palo Alto, where she studied French and led cheers for a football team that lost all the big games. She had the Stanford graduate’s aggressive nice manners, and the eyes of a cheerleader atop a struggling pyramid of girls. She had been the Apple Queen of Roosevelt High. From her mother, she had learned to try very hard to arrange everything in life with the flawlessness of a photograph in a house-and-garden magazine, and then to take it just as hard when the black plums went uneaten in the red McCoy bowl and filled the kitchen with a stink of garbage, or when the dazzling white masses of Shasta daisies in the backyard were eaten by aphids.

“Yeah, I don’t know, Mr. Hogue,” Daniel said. “I think –”

“Oh, but it is beautiful,” Christy said. She furrowed her brow and narrowed her eyes. She poked her tongue gamely from a corner of her mouth. She was trying her hardest, Daniel could see, to imagine living in that house with him. House hunting, like all their efforts to improve things between them – the counseling, the long walks, the watching of a movie called Spanking Brittany Blue – had been her idea. But after a moment her face went slack, and her eyes sought Daniel’s, and in them he saw, for the first time since their wedding the summer before last, the luster of real despair, as if she feared they would find no home for their marriage, not in Seattle or anywhere in the world. Then she shrugged and reached up to retie her scarf, a sheer white piece of Italian silk patterned with lemons and limes. She opened her door, and started to get out of the car.

“Just a minute, you,” Hogue said, taking her arm. She fell back into the car at once, and favored Hogue with her calmest and most obliging Apple Queen smile, but Daniel could see her nostrils flaring like a rabbit’s. “Don’t be in such a rush,” Hogue went on irritably. “You’re always running off half-cocked.” He leaned over to open the glove compartment and rummaged around inside it until he found a package of Pall Malls. He pushed in the cigarette lighter and tapped one end of a wrinkled cigarette against the dashboard. “You can’t rush into a thing like this. It could turn out to be a terrible mistake.”

At once, like people trapped in an empty bus station with a fanatical pamphleteer, Daniel and Christy agreed with Hogue.

“We’re careful people,” Christy said. Carefully, she averted her face from Hogue’s gaze, and gave her husband a brief grimace of not quite mock alarm.

“Careful people with limited resources,” Daniel said. He hadn’t decided whether to tell Christy that, two days earlier, her father had taken him to lunch at the University Club and offered to make a present of any reasonably priced house they might choose. After the war, Mr. Kite had founded an industrial advertising agency, landed the accounts of several major suppliers to Boeing, and then, at the age of sixty-two, sold his company for enough money to buy a condominium on the ninth hole at Salishan and a little cabaña down on the beach at Cabo San Lucas. Daniel, a graduate student in astronomy at U.W., where Christy taught psychology, didn’t have any money of his own. Neither, for that matter, did his father, who, in the years of Mr. Kite’s prosperity, had run two liquor stores, a printshop, and a five-and-dime into the ground, and now lived with Daniel’s mother amid the coconut palms and peeling white stucco of an internment camp for impoverished old people not far from Delray Beach. “Maybe we ought to just –”

Christy cut him off with a sharp look. The lighter popped out, and Hogue reached for it, and they watched in uncomfortable silence as, hands shaking, he tried to light his cigarette. After several seconds and a great deal of fearsome wheezing, the few frayed strands of tobacco he had succeeded in getting lit fell out of the end of the cigarette, landed in his lap, and began to burn his chinos. He slapped at his thigh, scowling all the while at the house, as if it, or its occupants, were somehow responsible for his ignition.

“Maybe we ought to take a look at it, Mr. Hogue,” Christy said.

Mr. Hogue looked back over at the house. He took a deep breath.

“I guess we’d better,” he said. He opened his door and got out of the car, eyeing the house warily.

Daniel and Christy lingered a moment by the Mercedes, whispering.

“He looks like he’s seen a ghost,” Christy observed, buttoning the top button of her white cardigan. “He looks awful.”

“Did he look better at our wedding?”

Daniel understood that Bob Hogue had been among the guests at their wedding, the summer before last, but his recollection of that remote afternoon had grown vague. In fact, the great event itself had, at the time, unfolded around him at a certain vague remove. He had felt not like the star attraction, along with Christy, of a moderately lavish civil ceremony held on the slope of a Laurelhurst lawn so much as like a tourist, lost in a foreign country, who had turned in to an unfamiliar street and found himself swallowed up in the clamor of a parade marking the feast day of some silken and barbarous religion. He remembered this Bob Hogue and his handsome wife, Monica, no better than he remembered Bill and Sylvia Bond, Roger and Evelyn Holsapple, Ralph and Betsy Lindstrom, or any of the three hundred other handsome old friends of his in-laws who had made up the bulk of the wedding guests. He knew that Hogue was a college chum and occasional golfing partner of his father-in-law’s, and he was aware that an acrid ribbon of bad news was sent curling toward the ceiling of any room in which Bob Hogue’s name was brought up, though he could never keep straight whether Hogue had married the lush, or fathered the Scientologist, or lost a piece of his left lung to cancer.

“To tell you the truth,” Christy said, “I don’t remember him at our wedding. I don’t really know the Hogues very well. I just kind of remember how he looked when I was little.”

“Well, no wonder he looks awful, then.” He stepped back to admire her in her smart green Vittadini dress. Her bare legs were new-shaven, so smooth that they glinted in the sun, and through the gaps in her open-toed flats you could see a couple of slender toes, nails painted pink. “You, however, look very nice.”

She smiled, and her pupils dilated, flooding her eyes with a darkness. “I liked what we did last night.”

“So did I,” Daniel said at once. Last night they had lain on top of their down comforter, with their heads at opposite ends of their bed, and massaged each other’s feet with fragrant oil, by candlelight, while Al Green cooed to them in the background. This was an activity recommended to them by their couples therapist as a means of generating a nonthreatening sense of physical closeness between them. Daniel blushed now at this recollection, which he found painful and sad. To his great regret there was nothing even remotely erotic to him about feet, his wife’s or anyone’s. You might have permitted him to anoint the graceful foot of Semiramis or Hedy Lamarr, and he would not have popped a boner. He slid a hand up under the hem of Christy’s dress and tried to skate his index and middle fingers up the smooth, hard surface of her right thigh, but she moved, and somehow Daniel’s entire hand ended up thrust between her legs, as though he were attempting to hold open the doors of an elevator.

“Ouch,” said Christy. “You don’t have to be so rough.”

“Sorry,” said Daniel.

They started up the driveway after Mr. Hogue.

“Who’s Herman Silk?” Daniel said, as they passed the discreet little sign.

“Who’s Herman Silk?” Hogue wove a puzzling thread of bitterness into the question. “That’s a good one.” Daniel wondered if he should recognize the name from some local real-estate scandal or recent round of litigation in the neighborhood. He tried to keep track of such mainstays of Kite-family conversation, but it was hard, in particular since they were generally served up, in the Kite house, with liberal amounts of Canadian Club and soda. “That’s very funny,” said Hogue.

When they got to the front door, Mr. Hogue could not seem to work the combination of the lockbox there. He tried several different permutations of what he thought was the code and then, in a display of bafflement at once childish and elderly, reached into his pocket and attempted to stick one of his own keys in the lock.

“Funny,” he muttered, as this hopeless stratagem in due course failed. “Herman Silk. Ha.”

Christy looked at Daniel, her eyes filled with apology for having led them into this intensifying disaster. Daniel smiled and gave his shoulders an attenuated shrug, characteristic of him, that did not quite absolve her of blame.

“Uh, why don’t you tell me the combination, Mr. Hogue?” Christy suggested, yanking the lockbox out of his hands. She, who was willing to lie for hours listening to Reverend Al while Daniel worked over her oiled foot like a desperate man trying to summon a djinn, was finally losing patience. Daniel’s heart was stirred by a wan hope that very soon now they would have to give up on old Mr. Hogue, on buying a house, on Christy’s entire project of addressing and finding solutions for their problem. Now that things were starting to go so wrong, he hoped they could just return to their apartment on Queen Anne Hill and resume ignoring their problem, the strategy he preferred.

Hogue fed Christy the combination one digit at a time, and she worked the tumblers. She gave a sharp tug on the lockbox. It held firm.

“Are you sure that’s the right number?” she said.

“Of course it’s the right number,” Hogue snapped. All at once his face had turned as red as the wrapper of his Pall Malls. One would have said that he was furious with Christy and Daniel, that he had had his fill of the unreasonable demands and the cruel hectoring to which they had subjected him over the last forty years. “Why are you always pestering me like that? Don’t you know I’m doing my best?”

Daniel and Christy looked at each other. Christy bit her lip, and Daniel saw that she had been afraid something like this might happen. A sudden clear memory of Mr. Hogue at the wedding returned to him. There had been a series of toasts after dinner, and Mr. Hogue had risen to say a few words. His face had gone full of blood and he looked unsteady on his feet. The woman sitting beside him, Monica Hogue – slender, youthful, with red spectacles and a cute gray bob – had given his elbow a discreet tug. For a moment the air under the great white tent had grown still and sour, and the guests had looked down at their plates.

“Well, sure we do, Mr. Hogue,” Christy said. “We know you’ve been doing a great job for us, and we really appreciate it. Don’t we, Daniel?”

“Well, yeah. We really do.”

The blood went out of Hogue’s face.

“Excuse me,” he said. “I – I’m sorry, you kids. I’m not feeling very well today.” He ran a hand across the close-cropped top of his head. “Here. Let me see something. There used to be –” He backed down the steps and, half crouched, hands on his knees, scanned the ground under the long rhododendron hedges that flanked the door. He moved crabwise along the row of shrubbery until he disappeared around the corner of the house.

“I remember him now,” said Daniel.

Christy laughed, through her nose, and then sadly shook her head.

“I hope he’s all right.”

“I think he just needs a drink.”

“Hush, Daniel, please.”

“Do you remember the toast he gave at the wedding?”

“Did he make a toast?”

“It was ‘To our wives and lovers, may they never meet.’”

“I don’t remember that.”

“Pretty fucking appropriate wedding-toast material, I thought.”

“Daniel.”

“This is a waste.”

“Daniel, please don’t say that. We’re going to work this all out.”

“Christy,” Daniel said. “Please don’t say that.”

“What else can I say?”

“Nothing,” Daniel said. “I don’t think you know how to say anything else.”

“Found it!” Hogue came back around the house toward them, favoring the young couple with his realtor’s smile – the smile of someone who knows that he has been discussed unfavorably in his absence. He was brandishing a medium-sized, mottled gray stone, and for a wild instant Daniel thought he intended somehow to smash his way in. But Hogue only turned the stone over, slid aside a small plastic panel that was attached to it, and pulled from its interior a shiny gold key. Then he slipped the false stone into the hip pocket of his jacket.

“Neat little things,” he said. He slid the key into the lock without difficulty, and let them into the house. “Don’t worry, it’s quite all right,” he added, when he saw how they were looking at him. “I’ll just have to call about the lockbox. Happens all the time. Come on in.”

They found themselves in a small foyer with plaster walls that were streaked like thick cake frosting, fir floors, and a built-in hatstand festooned with all manner of hats. Hogue hitched up the back of his trousers and stood looking around, blinking, mouth pinched, expression gone blank. The profusion of hats on the hatstand – three berets in the colors of sherbets, a tweedy homburg, a new-looking Stetson with a snakeskin band, several billed golf caps bearing the crest of Mr. Kite’s club – seemed to bewilder him. He cleared his throat, and the young people waited for him to begin his spiel. But Hogue said nothing. Without gesturing for them to follow, he shuffled off into the living room.

It was like a page out of one of Mrs. Kite’s magazines, furnished with a crewel love seat, two old-fashioned easy chairs that had been re-covered with pieces of a Persian kilim, a low Moroccan table with a hammered-brass top, an old blue Chinese Deco rug, and a small collection of art books and local Indian basketry, arranged with mock haphazardness on the built-in shelves. The desired effect was doubtless an eclectic yet contemporary spareness, but the room was very large, and to Daniel it just looked emptied.

“Are you all right, Mr. Hogue?” Christy said, elbowing Daniel.

Mr. Hogue stood on the Chinese rug, surveying the living room with his eyes wide and his mouth open, a hand pressed to his midsection as though he had been sandbagged.

“Eh? Oh, why, yes, it’s just – they just – they changed things around a little bit,” he said. “Since the last time I was here.”

From his astonished expression it was hard to believe that Hogue had ever seen the place before. Daniel wondered if Hogue hadn’t simply plucked it at random out of a listing book and driven them over here to satisfy some sense of obligation to Christy’s parents. Clearly the owners had not been expecting anyone to come through this morning; there was an old knit afghan lying twisted on the love seat, a splayed magazine on one of the chairs, and a half-empty glass of tomato juice on the brass table.

“Mr. Hogue?” said Christy. “Are you sure this is okay?”

“Fine,” said Hogue. He pointed to a pair of French doors at the far end of the living room. “I believe you’ll find the dining room through there.” Daniel followed Christy into the dining room, which was cool and shady and furnished with whitewashed birch chairs and a birchwood table with an immense glass top. In the center of the table sat a small black lacquer bowl in which a gardenia floated, its petals scorched at the edges by decay.

“Nice,” Daniel said, although he always misgave at the odor of gardenias, which tempted with a promise of apples and vanilla beans but finished in a bitter blast of vitamins and burnt wire.

“Come on, Daniel. We can’t afford this.”

“Did I say we could?”

“Please don’t be a bastard.”

“Was I being a bastard?”

Christy sighed and looked back toward the living room. Hogue hadn’t joined them yet; he seemed to have disappeared. He was probably back in the foyer, Daniel thought, looking around for the fact sheet on the house, so that he could pretend to be knowledgeable about it. Christy lowered her voice and spoke into Daniel’s ear. Her breath played across the inner hairs of his ear and raised gooseflesh all down his forearms.

“Do you think he’s not supposed to be doing this anymore?”

“What do you mean?” Daniel said, taking an involuntary step away from her. Her scarf had come loose at the back, allowing a thick lank strand of her unwashed dark hair to dangle alongside her face. It was not healthy to overwash the hair – that was why she was wearing the jazzy scarf – and Daniel imagined he could still smell smoke on it from the Astronomy Department barbecue they had attended the night before.

“I mean, with the lockbox, and all – do you think he’s been disbarred? Or whatever they do to realtors?”

“They make them unreal,” Daniel suggested. He reached up and took hold of her scarf, and teased it loose. All of her smoky hair spilled down around her head.

“Why did you do that?” she said.

“I don’t know,” he admitted. He handed her the scarf, and she bound up her hair once more. “I’ll go check on Mr. Hogue.”

He went through the French doors back into the living room. Hogue was standing at the far end, where it opened onto the foyer, with his back to Daniel. There were built-in shelves on this side of the room, also, peopled with a sparse collection of small objets and half a dozen framed photographs of infants and graduates and an Irish setter in an orange life preserver. As Daniel came in, Hogue was fingering something small and glittering, a piece of crystal or a glass animal. He picked it up, examined it, and then slipped it into the right hip pocket of his jacket.

“Coming,” he said, after Daniel, rendered speechless, managed to clear his throat in alarm. Hogue turned, and for an instant, before his face resumed its habitual clenchjawed jet-pilot tautness, he looked grimly, mysteriously pleased with himself, like a man who had just exacted a small and glittering measure of revenge. Then he accompanied Daniel into the dining room, and Daniel tried to think of something plausible to ask him. What did normal husbands say to normal real-estate agents at this stage of the game? It occurred to him that Hogue had not yet mentioned the asking price of the house.

“So what do they want, anyway, Mr. Hogue?” he tried.

“God only knows,” Hogue said. He reached down toward the black lacquer bowl and picked up the gardenia, holding it by the clipped, dripping stem underneath. He brought it to his nose, took a deep draft of it, and then let out a long artificial sigh of delight. With Daniel looking right at him, he slipped the flower into the pocket of his jacket, too. “Let’s have a look at that kitchen, shall we?”

So Daniel followed him into the kitchen, where Christy was exclaiming with a purely formal enthusiasm over the alderwood cabinets, the ceramic stove burners, the wavering light off the lake.

“What a waste, eh?” Hogue said. A dark patch of dampness was spreading across the fabric of his pocket. “They put I don’t know how many thousands of dollars into it.” He reached over to a sliding rheostat on the wall and made the track lighting bloom and dwindle and bloom. He shook his head. “Now then, this way to the family room. TV room. It amounts to the same thing, doesn’t it?”

He slid a louvered door aside and went into the next room. Christy gestured to Daniel to come and stand beside her. Daniel looked back at the dining room. A lone leaf spun on the surface of the water in the lacquer bowl.

“Daniel, are you coming?” said Christy.

“There’s something weird about this house,” said Daniel.

“I wonder what,” Christy said, giving her eyes a theatrical roll toward the family room and Mr. Hogue. As he passed through the kitchen, Daniel looked around, trying to see if anything portable was missing – a paradoxical exercise, given that he had never laid eyes on the room before. Sugar bowl, saltshaker, pepper mill, tea tongs trailing a winding rusty ribbon of dried tea. On the kitchen counter, under the telephone, lay a neat pile of letters and envelopes, and Daniel thought Hogue might have grabbed some of these, but they had been rubberbanded together and they looked undisturbed. A business card was affixed with a paper clip to the uppermost letter, printed with the name and telephone number of a Sergeant Matt Reedy of the Domestic Violence Unit of the Seattle Police Department. Daniel peeled back the pleat of the letter it was clipped to – it was out of its envelope – and peeked at its salutation, typed on an old typewriter that dropped its O’s.

“DEAR BITCH,” he read. “ARE YOU AND HERMAN HAPPY NOW, YOU –”

“Daniel! What are you doing?”

“Nothing,” Daniel said, letting the letter fall shut again. “They, uh, they seem to be having some problems, the people who live in this house.”

“Nothing that’s our business, Daniel,” Christy said, with what seemed to him excessive primness, taking hold of his hand.

Daniel yanked his hand free. He could hear Mr. Hogue muttering to himself in the other room.

“Ouch!” said Christy, bringing her fingers to her lips to kiss the joints he’d wrenched. She eyed the pile of letters on the counter. “What did it say?”

“It said maybe they ought to try rubbing each other’s feet a little more often.”

Now Christy really looked hurt.

“If you didn’t want to do it, Daniel, I wish –”

“What’s going on in here?” said Mr. Hogue, returning from the family room.

“We’re just coming now,” Daniel said. “Sorry. It’s just – man, this kitchen is incredible.”

Hogue gave a sour nod, lips pressed together. There was an obvious bulge in his right hip pocket now, and what appeared to be a table-tennis paddle protruding from the left one.

“Incredible,” he agreed.

In the family room, when they joined him there, Hogue stole a well-thumbed paperback copy of Donald Trump’s autobiography which was lying out on the coffee table, and in the small, tobacco-stained den off the foyer he took a little brass paperweight in the shape of a reclining pasha with curled slippers. When they went out to the garage, where, along with a long, slender automobile hidden under a canvas cover, there was a well-stocked workbench, he filched a box of nails, a Lufkin tape measure, and something else that Daniel couldn’t quite determine the nature of. The thefts were blatant and apparently unself-conscious, and by the time they got upstairs to the second guest bedroom, Christy, too, was watching in a kind of jolly dread as Mr. Hogue worked the place over. He took a souvenir Space Needle, and a rubber coin purse, and a package of deodorizing shoe inserts. When he led the young couple at last into the master bedroom, his pockets were jangling.

He stopped short as he entered the room, so that Daniel and Christy nearly collided with him. He looked around at the big four-poster bed, the heavy Eastlake dresser and wardrobe, the walls covered in an unusual dark paper the red of old leather books. Once again Hogue marveled, in the same openmouthed, oddly crestfallen manner, as if the bedroom’s decor, like the living room’s, came to him, somehow, as a blow. As in the living room, there was no indication that the sellers had been expecting anyone to come through. The bed was unmade, and there were some ruffled white blouses and several bras and pairs of women’s underpants heaped on the floor by the door. Hogue crossed the dark red room to a door opposite, which appeared to give onto a screened-in sleeping porch. Windows on either side of the door let in some of the bright September light pouring through the outer windows of the porch.

“I’d sure like to lie down in that hammock out there,” Hogue said, with surprising wistfulness. He gave the knob an experimental twist. It was locked. He pressed his face to the glass. “God, I’m tired.”

He reached into his breast pocket for a cigarette and found nothing there. He looked back and smiled thinly at Daniel and Christy, as if they had played a cruel trick on him, hiding the only solace of a weary and overworked man. Then he patted down all his clattering pockets until he came up with a tattered Pall Mall. He went over to a marble-topped nightstand beside the bed and pulled open its drawer. He scrabbled around inside until he found a book of matches. His hands were shaking so badly now that he dropped the cigarette. Then he dropped the burning match. At last he succeeded in getting the thing lit. He blew a plume of smoke toward the pillows of the big, disorderly bed.

“You’ll get the sun almost all day long in this room,” he said, dreamily. “It’s a shame to paper it over so dark.” Then he flicked ashes onto the polished fir floor.

“All right, Mr. Hogue,” said Christy, with all the sharpness of tone she was capable of mustering. “I guess we’ve seen enough.”

“All right,” said Hogue, though he didn’t move. He just stood there, looking out at the canvas hammock that was hung between two pillars of the sleeping porch.

“We’ll meet you downstairs, how about?” Daniel said. “How about you just give us a minute to talk things over between ourselves. You know. Look around one more time. You can’t rush into something like this, right?”

Hogue swallowed, and some of the old flush of anger seemed to return now to the tips of his ears and to the skin at the back of his neck. Daniel could see that it was Hogue who wanted to be left alone here, in this bedroom, contemplating all his untold mistakes and whatever it was that was eating at him. He wanted them out of there. Christy sidled up to Daniel and pressed herself against him, hip to his thigh, cheek against his shoulder. He put his arm around her, and pressed his fingers against the slight bulge of skin under the strap of her bra.

“You know how important the bedroom is,” Christy said, in a strangled voice.

Hogue took a thoughtful drag on his cigarette, eyeing them. Then, as before, the fire seemed to go out of him, and he nodded.

“I’ll meet you downstairs,” he said. “You kids take all the time you want.”

He went out of the room, but before he did so, he stopped by the pile of laundry, picked up a rather large pair of lobelia blue panties with a lace waistband, and stuffed them into his pocket with the rest of his loot. They heard his tread on the stairs, and then, a moment later, the sound of a cabinet door squealing open on its hinges.

“He’s going for the silver,” Daniel said.

“Daniel, what are we going to do?”

Daniel shrugged. He sat down on the unmade bed, beside the nightstand that Hogue had rifled for matches.

“Maybe I should call my parents,” Christy said. “They know Bob. Maybe they know what to do when he gets this way.”

“I think it’s a little too late for us to snub him,” said Daniel.

Christy looked at him, angry and puzzled by the persistence of his nastiness toward her.

“That’s not fair,” she said. “God! Just because my parents –”

“Check this out.” Daniel had been rummaging around in the nightstand drawer, where he had found, in addition to a bag of Ricola cough drops, a silver police whistle, and a small plastic vial of a popular genital lubricant, a greeting card, in a pink envelope that was laconically addressed “Monkey.” He pulled out the card, on the cover of which Greta Garbo and John Gilbert were locked in a passionate black-and-white embrace. The greeting was handwritten: “I have tripped and fallen in love with you. Herman.” After a moment Daniel looked up, feeling a little confused, and handed it to Christy. She took it with a disapproving frown.

“Herman,” she read. “Herman Silk?”

“I guess it’s a little extra service he provides.”

“He must be selling his own house.” She sat down on the bed beside him. “Do they do that?”

“Why not?” Daniel said. “Plenty of people sell their own houses.”

“True.”

He showed her the vial of lubricant.

“Maybe he should have said, ‘I have slipped and fallen.’”

“Daniel, put that back. I mean it.” She gestured downstairs. “Just because he’s doing it doesn’t mean you should.” She snatched the little plastic bottle out of his hand, tossed it and the greeting card into the drawer, and then slammed the drawer shut. “Come on. Let’s just get out of here.”

They glared at each other, and then Daniel stood up. He felt a strong desire for his wife. He wanted to push her down onto the bed and pound her until his bones hurt and the smell of smoke from her hair filled the bedroom. But he would never do anything like that. And neither would she. Not in someone else’s house, in someone else’s bed. They were, both of them, hypochondriacs and low rollers, habitual occupants of the right lane on freeways, inveterate savers of receipts, subscribers to Consumer Reports, filterers of tap water, wearers of helmets and goggles and kneepads. And yet their prudence – prudence itself, it now seemed to Daniel, watching Christy’s freckled breast fall and rise and fall – was an illusion, a thin padded blanket they drew around themselves to cushion the impact from the string of bad decisions each of them had made. For all their apparent caution, they had nonetheless married each other, willingly and without material compulsion, in the presence of the three hundred people. Christy had agreed to join herself in perpetuity to a man whose touch left her vagina as dry as a fist, and Daniel had consigned himself to a life spent as a hundred and sixty-two pounds of hair in her mouth and elbows in her rib cage and hot breath in her nostrils.

“I hate you,” he said.

For a moment she looked very surprised by this admission. Then she stuck out her jaw and narrowed her eyes.

“Well, I hate you, too,” she said.

Daniel fell on top of her. He was a little self-conscious at first about the animal sounds he heard them making and the way they were biting and tearing at each other’s clothes. It was uncomfortably reminiscent of a key scene in Spanking Brittany Blue. Then some spasm sent Christy’s hand flying, and she smacked Daniel in the eye. Inside his skull a bright red star flared and then winked out. After that, he forgot to pay attention to what they were doing. The bed underneath them smelled of its right occupants, of the night sweat and the aftershave and the skin lotion of Herman Silk and his Monkey. A loose board in the old fir floor rhythmically creaked. When the proper time came, Daniel reached into the drawer for Herman’s little bottle of lubricant. He turned Christy over on her belly, and spread her legs with his knee, and greased her freely with the cold, clear stuff. His entry into her was, for the first time, effortless and quick.

“That was fun,” Christy said, when it was over. She stretched her limbs across the wrecked bed as if to embrace it, and rolled, like a cat, back and forth, until it was smeared with the manifold compound of their lovemaking.

“Still hate me?” said Daniel.

She nodded, and that was when Daniel saw the mistake that they had made. Although sex was something they both regarded as perilous, marriage had, by contrast, seemed safe – a safe house in a world of danger; the ultimate haven of two solitary, fearful souls. When you were single, this was what everyone who was already married was always telling you. Daniel himself had said it to his unmarried friends. It was, however, a lie. Sex had everything to do with violence, that was true, and marriage was at once a container for the madness between men and women and a fragile hedge against it, as religion was to death, and the laws of physics to the immense quantity of utter emptiness of which the universe was made. But there was nothing at all safe about marriage. It was a doubtful enterprise, a voyage in an untested craft, across a hostile ocean, with a map that was a forgery and with no particular destination but the grave.

“I had lunch with your father the other day,” he began.

“Shh!” Christy said.

He lay beside her, listening. From downstairs they could hear the sound of raised voices. A man and a woman were shouting at each other. The man was Mr. Hogue.

“I’m going to call the police, Bob,” the woman said.

Daniel and Christy looked at each other. They stood up and scrambled to reassemble their clothes. Daniel slipped the vial of lubricant into his pocket. Then they went downstairs.

When they came into the kitchen, Mr. Hogue was lying on the floor, amid hundreds and hundreds of spilt threepenny nails, cupping his chin in his hands. Blood leaked out between his fingers and drizzled down his neck into the plaid of his madras jacket. The reclining brass pasha, the Ping-Pong paddle, Space Needle, and all the other things he had stolen lay scattered on the floor around him. A handsome woman with red spectacles, whom Daniel recognized as Mrs. Hogue, was kneeling beside him, tears on her face, wiping at the cut on his chin with a paper towel.

“Christy,” she said. “Hello, Daniel.”

She smiled ruefully and looked down at Mr. Hogue, moaning and whispering curses on the terra-cotta floor.

“Is he okay?” Daniel said, pointing to the realtor, who was, he saw now, no stranger to these troubled rooms.

“I certainly hope not. I hit him as hard as I could.” Mrs. Hogue dabbed tenderly at the cut with the paper towel, then looked around at the kitchen she had renovated at such great expense. “So,” she said, “what do you two think of the house?”

Daniel looked at Christy. She had lost her scarf sometime in the course of their struggle upstairs. Her face was a blur of smeared lipstick and streaked mascara and the radiant blood in her cheeks.

“It’s perfect,” he said.