Читать книгу The Burning House - Paul Lisicky - Страница 9

CHAPTER 1

The rising seas, the sinking lawn: none of that bothered me tonight. Laura’s health and mind, shifting like water. Mister Greasy, Son of Unabomber. Far away. Yay. I walked from the bay. I could not see. But I might have been given a fresh brain, inspired and outwardly turned, and as soon as I spoke those words to the deep, I swear creatures started coming toward me. Squirrels, raccoons, deer, herons, catbirds, footfalls on fallen leaves. I was like someone out of a freaking folktale, who knew not death or the churned-up stomach but moved through the night with the lightest tread, changing it with the benevolence of his passing. Oh, I’m exaggerating for effect now, I’ll admit it. Real contentment has none of that extremity or loopiness. No sign of endings, or the long black coat creeping out from behind a bush. What was I telling you? It was something like this: the world was made exactly for us and we’d never have to leave it.

Laura had told Joan and me not to expect her till midnight. There was accounting to take care of, some missing shipments from Connecticut. Then that little heart-to-heart with Madison, who’d taken to dealing behind the register, silly girl. As if we’d never once think about the parade of big talkers who seemed to show up ten minutes before closing every night.

But trust in my instincts? Well, yes: I still couldn’t go in without pulling up the garage door first. Birdseed, garden hose, herbicide, rake tine: empty as could be. No sign of Laura’s car. What was it about those smells that always brought me home to myself?

Joan stood inside the living room with her back to the windows. “Are you busy?” I said.

The worst way to start a conversation, any conversation: I knew. So much for my practicing what I had to say in my head.

She sat down on the arm of the sofa and gave me that frank stare of hers. I saw Laura in that frank stare, though that’s the last thing she’d want to hear right now. Enough comparisons to that older sister, thank you very much. Same sweet crooked mouth, same moist hair falling down her back, same tendency to keep her shoulders raised, as if she had to correct what her posture really wanted to do.

“You’re on your way out?” I said.

“Well, I bet if I showed up a little late the meeting would start on time. Wouldn’t that be the way things worked?”

“Let’s just talk in a few days, then. Saturday? I don’t think I have anything to do on Saturday. Is that good?”

“Sure,” she said. “As far as I know, I’m free.”

My eyes weren’t matching my mouth—I felt that. It was as if I couldn’t get the whole face to behave. Why?

“Your hand.” She squinted a bit, drew closer, and frowned at what she saw. “That hand still looks reddish to me. Is that a rash? Didn’t I see you lifting bushes out of the car the other night?”

I shook my head. I pushed my hand in my pants pocket so we could move on to the relevant thing.

That old habit of taking notice—she still held onto that part of herself. It was as central to Joan as blood. She’d always been like that, even when she was younger, studying maps, studying trees, studying birds. But don’t ask me how she managed to see two feet in front of her. Bad enough to lose your mother, your apartment, your business, your boyfriend—come on! But having to move in with your sister because she inherits your mother’s house and you’re left with nothing? All in six months’ time? I don’t think so. Imagine having such shit visited on you when things had been going in your favor, when your life had been humming along like a song. You might just think that your song would keep humming like that forever.

Back then, that kind of absurdity struck me as the way of things. Slip off the dock into the water, and this happens and that happens, one by one by one. And who knows how you got caught inside any of it, as if you’re just an integer in one of those terrible logic problems you could never figure out all the way back in math class.

I said, “Does Laura seem different to you?”

The corners of her mouth turned up as if she were about to smile, the kind of half-smile you learn to make when you’re used to getting news you’re not exactly able to hear. It took her a moment to clear out her head. Then she adjusted herself on the sofa as if she knew she’d be leaning back, arms folded, for a little while. “I wish I could say I thought you were completely out of your mind,” she said.

Though a part of me felt calmer, another part of me just didn’t know. It would have been easier to hear that I was dreaming up the whole damn thing. Maybe that’s what I’d been wanting to hear all along.

What could we say? There wasn’t much point in comparing notes. We weren’t talking about the obvious: no pains, no shortness of breath. No trouble getting out of bed in the morning—you’ve heard of people like that. I’m talking about people who stay in bed twelve hours a day, and then it’s at least twenty minutes more just to get moving to the bathroom. Honestly, if you didn’t know her and saw her walking down the street, you might think, that’s one beautiful woman. What is she, two years out of college? Three? What does she do, yoga five times a week? Takes all the right vitamins, avoids the sugar and salt? Dairy and wheat: they don’t even get near her, right? But I knew my wife. She was a phenomenon. She worked, she painted, she ran, she swam: she was twenty-seven people in one. Not that she didn’t have it in her to be a pain in the ass, but what living thing—human, plant, animal—doesn’t every now and then?

“The thing is, she doesn’t want to be told what to do. I get that. I completely understand that about Laura. Would I behave that way if I were in her position? Maybe.”

“You mean going to the doctor,” Joan said. “Getting things checked out.”

“Maybe. Or whatever. Maybe it’s just my threshold for patience. Maybe I’m just not as patient as I used to be.”

“You’ve talked to her about all that?” Joan said.

“Oh, yeah.”

“And she refuses to do anything about it?”

“Well, no. It’s not as simple as all that. But a check-up’s maybe a little less important than checking her e-mail and maybe a little more important than cleaning out the bird feeder.”

“And you don’t think she’s just taken on too much? A lot’s been going on around here.” Out came a little laugh, as if she meant to soften her words. “But I don’t have to tell you about that.”

“I mean I don’t like to admit to trouble as much as the next person. Wouldn’t I rather just walk around saying things couldn’t be better between us? How is my wife? Glorious!”

Out from the lagoon, a low comforting vibration like a snowplow down a street. The most fantastic boat imaginable tried to make it past our neighbor’s dock. Lights on the flying bridge, party music in the speakers: the works. I’d say it was three times too wide and long for the channel, easily. It was a dream of an apartment house, lights in the windows, toppled on its side. But the captain wasn’t giving in, not yet. He was getting to where he had to go. And the propeller scooped into the bottom, the lovely rich smell of bay mud drifting in through the dew on the screens.

Joan gave a dull, wry look as if she were long past the point of being surprised by anything.

“Maybe I could say something,” she said. “Maybe it’s easier for a sister than a husband. I could be more casual about it. I could try to be.”

“What would you say to her?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Indirectly. I think that would be the only way to approach things. Let me think about this.” Then her face got very intent.

“Just don’t let her know that we had this little talk, okay? I think that would freak her out. I think it would freak me out.”

“Of course not.”

I pushed out of my chair. I stood for a second, moving my arms up and down. I couldn’t sit still. This spring in my feet, this urge to pick up: where was that coming from? I clapped my hands, once, and waited for her to come to the window, to look for the boat.

“That would be great. That would make me feel so much better.”

“Isidore?”

“And everything’s okay back in that room? It’s so small. I mean, I still think you’d be happier down the hall. You’d have a lot more privacy.”

“Oh, that’s what you keep saying.”

“I’d be glad to help out anytime. Really. Just let me know when, Joan. It’s not like I don’t have some time on my hands.”

“Thank you,” she said more gently than I’d expected. “I’m perfectly fine for the moment. Thank you for thinking of me.” And she moved her head with one emphatic turn to the left.

With that, she stood. The embrace I expected to happen with ease just felt, what?—weird. It wasn’t any embrace. She put a hand upon my back with a sort of steering. I let my arms fall back down before I could close up any space between us. It wasn’t the way I usually thought of myself, awkward with someone I’d been close to for seventeen years.

I reached for a dust cloth and tackled the dining room. The chair rungs, the floor beneath the computer desk, the hood of the fireplace. Once that cloth was in my hand, the world was all mine. Or should I say “I,” “mine,” and “me,” disappeared, and all that remained was the project of reparation and repair. My cloth turning blacker, me hovering somewhere up above, looking down upon those shining, spacious rooms. None of my failures haunted me from up here—no string of lost jobs, no wrecked cars, no waking up with that fullness in my chest, those drumming words: you’ll never do it, you’ll never do it, you’ll never do it. Even the house itself felt like it had never been Mama’s, but ours alone, as if Laura and I had designed the floor plan ourselves. It didn’t even matter that we’d never picked the clocks and bowls, that we’d been too worried to move a thing since the house had been given to us. For in touching them with the cloth, I was recognizing the forgotten. I was refreshing them with promise and light, and, in turn, joining myself to their makers.

I still couldn’t believe that we were living in such a place. Sometimes I woke up at night with the voice of Craig Luckland, the cop from down the street, ringing in my eardrum: “There’s been a mistake. You have three hours to get out or your stuff will be sent to France.”

“Do you mind if I help?” Laura said.

I hadn’t known she’d been watching me. Laura stood at the doorway, arms crossed, in a thin, pink Led Zeppelin T-shirt, with tiny holes splitting her sleeve. Always that armful of gorgeous black hair. The question so delighted me I didn’t have an answer. These days, I took care of the house. It was the least I could do, now that the accident had put me out of commission, and she was driving forty-five miles each way, in stalled traffic, to run her music shop in Ocean Ridge.

She might as well have told me that she loved the space between my front teeth.

“You look like you’re enjoying yourself.”

“Just cleaning up.”

She walked over to me, kissed the crown of my woolly head and picked up a cloth. “You’re not going to fuss if I miss something?” She said it in that voice, that low voice that always got my attention.

“Me? Fuss?”

Life was here again. She’d seemed to be putting some weight back on. Had Joan talked to her about seeing the doctor? I wasn’t going to broach it, at least not yet, if only because, why tempt things when the gods, even if it’s just for a minute, are all of a sudden on our side? Laura glowed like someone who’d run seven miles up and down the boardwalk and beach, face lifted to the sun. Even I stopped feeling like shit about staying at home. My broken hand was healing, and I knew I’d be back to fixing cars within days, doing the thing that mattered most to me.

We squatted, stood, squatted again. We waxed. We sprayed. We oiled. We scraped. We polished. We worked our cloths in wider and wider arcs, almost sighing when we came upon that space behind the bookcase, the cobwebs so soft they might have been bandages. By the time we looked up, the sky outside the windows had turned eyecup blue. Soon enough we wouldn’t be able to see without bringing extra lamps to the room.

“This feels nice,” I said.

“It is nice,” she answered, eyes concentrating on the tabletop.

“We’re always running around. Everybody’s always running around. What’s up with all that? Why are we always so afraid of standing still?”

“Could I ask you a question, honey?”

I folded my cloth over the arm of the chair.

“Has Joan’s moving in been stressful for you? It’s funny that we’ve never talked about it. What’s it been, like, four months?”

The question was so direct that it stopped me. I didn’t know what to do with it. It was like the lost child we’d never have, so stealthy and shy that our indifference to him ashamed us. But I was hardly the one to bring up the issue. On my wages, we couldn’t have lived within fifty miles of the bay we loved, and doesn’t that sorry truth worm through everything? So Joan had been kicked out of her apartment. So we had the space for her, courtesy of their mother? What was I to say to that?

“Well,” I said, “I was afraid that it was going to be weird. But it’s really turned out for the best. Who would have ever guessed such a thing?”

In truth, I knew that things would never be the same once she moved in with us. I don’t care what you say: circumstances like that can bring out the ugliness in people. I’d always loved Joan. I’d always loved the way she’d brought vividness to a room. Even the walls seemed to shiver awake when she passed in front of them. When she was nearby, I’d start to notice things that hadn’t caught my eye before: a loose bristle painted into the cabinet, the tall ebony pitcher with the cracked handle. And you could never predict what would come out of her mouth. She seemed determined to lift the screen that made our lives so careful and tidy, and until she sat between us on the sofa, we hadn’t known how much we’d been secreting away. I didn’t want to lose that. It felt unbearably valuable, of the highest currency; the fact was Joan was still young in a way that we weren’t. She had the faith that life could still change. I mean, look: it was no small thing that she was giving up all her spare time to try to stand up against those builders. I wouldn’t have seen any of it if she hadn’t told me what their project meant for us: filthy water in the lagoons, more cars on the streets. And do you really want to wake up in the morning to silence instead of the birds you’re used to taking for granted?

“You never said that you were nervous.”

I said, “You’re not happy about things?”

“Listen, it’s great that she’s here. I love her company. I do. She’s my sister, for Christ’s sake. I didn’t know how much I missed her until she moved in with us. It’s just—” She pulled in her lips, struggling. “You do sort of seem happier than you’ve seemed in a long while.”

The dimmest memory: a taste of bloodied cotton, the dentist’s dry fingers pushing in my mouth. “I don’t understand.”

Her eyes filled to the lower lid, careful not to spill down her cheeks. Her face stayed perfect, absolutely serene. For a moment, I thought, shouldn’t I be the one who’s crying here? Until I felt bolder and brighter, like the lamp I’d been holding.

I always thought that we all have a story that we play out, in large and in miniature, through every interaction of our lives. Joan’s story was that she’d tried to rescue lost things, only to be left behind by what she thought she’d saved. Laura’s was that she’d seek out the brightest fire, only to find her own fuel swallowed up to feed the other. My story? I don’t want to sound crude, but if you talked with the highest power, I believe you’d be told that my need to touch and be touched would lead me to hurt the ones I cared about.

What a terrible thing.

That was all I knew. Where else wasn’t I stepping outside of myself, listening to how I talked, watching how I moved? Here was generosity. My skin and my soul one and the same, so I didn’t have to think about me and my terrible punishing hopes. I was shoehorned into my body, which fit like the finest leather loafer, no rubbing or space behind the heel. And how I was able to walk and walk, as if the world went onward and up, to infinity.

I led her down the hallway, by the hand.

I lay on top of her, weight resting on my elbows. When I held her face between my hands, her mouth parted, the quiet so deep that the world was struck dumb. First the baseboards with their tappings and clicks. Then the currents in the fusebox. The scrub pines, the cardinals, the bulkheads sipping water: they went silent too. Somewhere, at the bottom of the world, a young man churned inside his lover for the very first time, burning up inside the body that enclosed him. And Laura in Mama’s bed, already beyond reach.