“Nice.” Simon nodded approvingly.
Lester frowned and gave us a moment of profound silence. “I mention this because”—he coughed—“as you may already know, most banks won’t finance a building with a brick foundation. Earthquake fears, you know. But the owner is willing to carry a second mortgage, and at comparable market rates, if you qualify, of course.”
Here it is, I thought, the reason why the place is for sale so cheap. “Has there been a problem with the building?”
“Oh no, not at all. Of course, it’s gone through the usual settling, cosmetic cracks and such. All classic buildings get a few wrinkles—that’s the privilege of age. Hell, we should all look so good at a hundred! And you also have to bear in mind this old painted lady has already survived the ’eighty-nine quake, not to mention the big one of ’aught-six. You can’t say that about the newer buildings, can you now?”
Lester sounded all too eager, and I started smelling the unpleasant mustiness of a dump. In dark corners, I saw piles of beaten suitcases, their mouse-gnawed leather and cracked vinyl ashy with dust. In another storage area was an assortment of rusted heavy things—automobile parts, barbells, a metal toolbox—a monument to some prior tenant’s overproduction of testosterone. Simon let go of my hand.
“The unit comes with only one garage space,” said Lester. “But luckily, the man in unit two is blind and you can rent his space for a second car.”
“How much?” Simon asked, just as I announced, “We don’t have a second car.”
Like a cat, Lester looked serenely at both of us, then said to me, “Well, that saves a lot of trouble, doesn’t it.” We started climbing a narrow stairwell. “I’m taking you up the back entry, what was once the servants’ staircase, leading to the available unit. Oh, and by the way, a couple of blocks down—walking distance, you know?—there’s a terrific private school, absolutely top-notch. By the third grade, those little monsters know how to tear apart a 386 computer and upgrade it to a 486. Incredible what they can teach your kids these days!”
And this time, Simon and I said in the same two beats, “No kids.” We looked at each other, startled. Lester smiled, then said, “Sometimes that’s very wise.”
EARLIER IN OUR MARRIAGE, having children was the one big dream we shared. Simon and I were infatuated with the possibilities of our genetic merger. He wanted a girl who looked like me, I wanted a boy who looked like him. After six years of taking my temperature daily, of abstaining from alcohol between periods, of having sex by clockwork, we went to a fertility specialist, Dr. Brady, who told us Simon was sterile.
“You mean Olivia is sterile,” Simon said.
“No, the tests indicate it’s you,” Dr. Brady answered. “Your medical records also report that your testicles didn’t descend until you were three.”
“What? I don’t remember that. Besides, they’re descended now. What does that have to do with anything?”
That day we learned a lot about the fragility of sperm, how sperm has to be kept cooler than body temperature; that’s why the testicles hang outside, natural air-conditioning. Dr. Brady said that Simon’s sterility wasn’t simply a matter of low sperm count or low motility, that he had beensterile probablysincepubescence, meaningsincehisfirstejaculation.
“But that’s impossible,” Simon said. “I already know I can—well, it can’t be. The tests are wrong.”
Dr. Brady said in a voice practiced at consoling a thousand disbelieving men: “I assure you, sterility has nothing whatsoever to do with masculinity, virility, sexual drive, erection, ejaculation, or your ability to satisfy a partner.” I noticed the doctor said “a partner” and not “your wife,” as if to include many possibilities, past, present, and future. He then went on to discuss the contents of ejaculate, the physics of an erection, and other trivia that had nothing to do with the tiny duck rain boots that sat on our dresser, the Beatrix Potter books my mother had already collected for her future grandchild, the memory of a pregnant Elza screaming at Simon from the top of an avalanche-prone slope.
I knew Simon was thinking about Elza, wondering whether she had been wrong about the pregnancy. If so, that made her death all the more tragic, based on one stupid mistake after another. I also knew Simon had to be considering that Elza might have lied, that she hadn’t been pregnant at all. But why? And if she had been pregnant, who had been her other lover? Why, then, did she lash out at Simon? None of the possible answers made any sense.
Ever since our yin-talk session with Kwan years before, Simon and I had avoided bringing up Elza’s name. Now we found ourselves doubly tongue-tied, unable to discuss Simon’s sterility, the questions it raised about Elza or, for that matter, our feelings about artificial insemination and adoption. Year after year, we avoided talking about babies, real, imagined, or hoped for, until there we were, on this third-floor landing, both of us informing this odious stranger named Lester, “No kids,” as if we’d made our decision years earlier and it was as final then as it was now.
LESTER WAS SEARCHING through dozens of keys strung on a wire. “It’s here somewhere,” he muttered. “Probably the last one. Yep, wouldn’t you know it—voilà!” He swung open the door and tapped his hand against the wall until he found the light switch. The apartment felt familiar at first—as if I had secretly visited this place a thousand times before, the rendezvous house of nightly dreams. There they were: the heavy wooden double doors with panes of wavy old glass, the wide hallway with its wainscoting of dark oak, the transom window throwing a shaft of light glittery with ancient dust. It was like coming back to a former home, and I couldn’t decide whether my sense of familiarity was comforting or oppressive. And then Lester cheerily announced that we should start by looking at the “reception parlor,” and the feeling evaporated.
“The architecture is what we call Eastlake and gothic revival,” Lester was telling us. He went on to explain how the place had become a boardinghouse for itinerant salesmen and war widows in the twenties. In the forties, “gothic revival” evolved into “handyman special” when the building was converted into twenty-four dinky studios, cheap wartime housing. In the sixties, it became student apartments, and during the real estate boom of the early eighties, the building was again reincarnated, this time into the present six “semi-luxurious” co-ops.
I figured “semi-luxurious” referred to the cheap-glass chandelier in the foyer. “Semi-funky” would have been a more honest way to describe the apartment, which embodied an incongruous mix of its former incarnations. The kitchen with its Spanish-red tiles and wood-laminate cupboards had lost all traces of its Victorian lineage, whereas the other rooms were still generously decorated with useless gingerbread spandrels and plaster friezes in the corners of the ceilings. The radiator pipes no longer connected to radiators. The brick fireplaces had had their jowls bricked over. Hollow-core doors made do for recently improvised closets. And through Lester’s grandiloquent real estate parlance, useless Victorian spaces had sprung important new purposes. A former stair landing backlit by a panel of amber glass became “the music hall”— perfect, I imagined, for a string quartet of midgets. What were once the suffocating quarters of a bottom-of-the-rung laundry maid now became at Lester’s suggestion “the children’s library,” not that there was an adult library. And half of a once commodious dressing room with a built-in cedar wardrobe—the other half was in the adjoining apartment—was now “the scriptorium.” We listened patiently to Lester, words skittering out of his mouth like cartoon dogs on fresh-waxed linoleum, frantically going nowhere.
He must have noticed our dwindling interest; he toned down the bluster, changed tack, and aimed us toward “the excellent economics of classic lines and a little bit of elbow grease.” We made a perfunctory inspection of the remaining rooms, a maze of cubbyholes, similarly inflated with pseudobaronial terms: the nursery, the breakfast parlor, the water closet, the last being an actual closet big enough only for one toilet and its seated occupant, knees pressed against the door. In a mode
rn apartment, the whole floor space would have amounted to no more than four average-size rooms at best.
Only one room, on the top floor, remained to be seen. Lester invited us to climb the narrow staircase to the former attic, now “the grand boudoir.” There, the jaws on our cynical faces dropped. We gazed about slowly like people awestruck from sudden religious conversion. Before us was an enormous room with ceilings that sloped into walls. It was equivalent in floor space to the entire nine rooms below. And in contrast to the musty darkness of the third floor, the attic was light and airy, painted clean white. Eight dormer windows jutted out of the sloped ceiling, leading our eyes into the cloud-spotted sky. Below our feet, wide-plank floors gleamed, shiny as an ice rink. Simon took my hand again and squeezed it. I squeezed back.
This had potential. Together, I thought, Simon and I could dream up ways to fill the emptiness.
THE DAY WE MOVED IN, I began stripping layers from the walls of the former nursery, soon to be dubbed my “inner sanctum.” Lester had said that the original walls were mahogany with inlays of burl, and I was eager to uncover this architectural treasure. Aided by the dizzying fumes of paint thinner, I imagined myself an archaeologist digging through the strata of former lives whose histories could be reconstructed by their choice of wall coverings. First to peel off was a yuppie skin of Chardonnay-colored latex, stippled to look like the walls of a Florentine monastery. This was followed by flaky crusts of the preceding decades—eighties money green, seventies psychedelic orange, sixties hippie black, fifties baby pastels. And beneath those rolled off sheaves of wallpaper in patterns of gold-flocked butterflies, cupids carrying baskets of primroses, the repetitious flora and fauna of past generations who stared at these same walls during sleepless nights soothing a colicky baby, a feverish toddler, a tubercular aunt.
A week later, with raw fingertips, I reached a final layer of plaster and then the bare wood, which was not mahogany, as Lester had said, but cheap fir. Where it was not charred it was blackened with mildew, the probable result of an overzealous turn-of-the-century firehose. While I’m not someone prone to violence, this time I kicked at the wall so hard one of the boards caved in and exposed masses of coarse gray hair. I let out a tremendous scream, grade-B horror movie in pitch, and Simon bounded into the room, waving a trowel—as if that would have been an effective weapon against a mass murderer. I pointed an accusing finger toward the hairy remains of what I believed was an age-old unsolved crime.
After an hour, Simon and I had torn off nearly all of the damaged and rotting wood. On the floor lay piles of hair resembling giant rats’ nests. It was not until we called in a contractor to install drywall that we discovered we had removed bushels of horsehair, a form of Victorian insulation. The contractor also said that horsehair made for effective soundproofing. Well-to-do Victorians, we learned, constructed their homes so that one would not have to listen to anything as indelicate as a trill of sexual ecstasy or the trumpet blasts of indigestion emanating from adjoining rooms.
I mention this because Simon and I didn’t bother to put back the horsehair, and at first I believed that had something to do with the strange acoustics we began to experience in the first month. The space between our wall and the adjoining apartment’s had become a hollow shaft about a foot in width. And this shaft, I thought, served as a sounding board, capable of transmitting noises from the entire building, then converting them into thumps, hisses, and what sometimes sounded like lambada lessons being conducted upstairs in our bedroom.
Whenever we tried to describe our noise problem, I would imitate what I had heard: Tink-tink-tink, whumpa-whumpa-whumpa, chh-chh-shhh. Simon would compare the noise to a possible source: the tapping of an out-of-tune piano key, the flitter of mourning doves, the scraping of ice. We perceived the world so differently—that’s how far apart we had grown.
There was another strange aspect to all this: Simon never seemed to be at home when the creepiest sounds occurred—like the time I was in the shower and heard the theme to Jeopardy being whistled, a melody I found especially haunting since I couldn’t get the annoying tune out of my mind the rest of the day. I had the feeling I was being stalked.
A structural engineer suggested that the racket might be coming from the useless radiator pipes. A seismic safety consultant told me that the problem might be simply the natural settling of a wood-frame building. With a little imagination, he explained, you might think creaks and groans were all sorts of things, doors slamming, people running up and down the stairs—although he had never known of anyone else who complained of the sound of glass breaking followed by snickers of laughter. My mother said it was rats, possibly even raccoons. She’d had that problem once herself. A chimneysweep diagnosed pigeons nesting in our defunct flues. Kevin said that dental fillings can sometimes transmit radio waves and I should see Tommy, who was my dentist. The problems persisted.
Strangely enough, our neighbors said they weren’t bothered by any unusual sounds, although the blind man below us acidly mentioned that he could hear us playing our stereo too loud, especially in the mornings. That’s when he did his daily Zen meditation, he said.
When my sister heard the thumps and hisses, she came up with her own diagnosis: “The problem not something but somebody. Mm-hm.” As I continued to unpack books, Kwan walked around my office, her nose upraised, scenting like a dog in search of its favorite bush. “Sometime ghost, they get lost,” she said. “You want, I try catch for you.” She held out one hand like a divining rod.
I thought of Elza. Long ago, she had vanished from conversation, but she managed to dwell in the back of my brain, frozen in time, like a tenant under rent control who was impossible to evict. Now, with Kwan’s ghosts, she had wriggled her way out.
“It’s not ghosts,” I said firmly. “We took out the insulation. The room’s like an echo chamber.”
Kwan dismissed my explanation with an authoritative sniff. She placed her hand over a spot on the floor. She wandered about the room, her hand quivering, tracking like a bloodhound. She emitted a series of “hmmms,” each growing more conclusive: “HHhhmm! HhhmmMM!” Finally she stood in the doorway, absolutely still.
“Very strange,” she said. “Someone here, I feel this. But not ghost. Living person, full of electricity, stuck in wall, also under floor.”
“Well!” I joked. “Maybe we should charge this person rent.”
“Living people always more trouble than ghost,” Kwan continued. “Living people bother you because angry. Ghost make trouble only because sad, lost, confused.”
I thought of Elza, pleading for Simon to hear her.
“Ghost, I know how catch,” said Kwan. “My third auntie teach me how. I call ghost—‘Listen me, ghost!’—one heart speaking each other.” She gazed upward, looking sincere. “If she old woman, show her old slippers, leather bottoms already soft, very comfortable wear. If she young girl, show comb belong her mother. Little girl always love own mother hair. I put this treasure ghost love so much in big oil jar. When she go in—quick!—I put lid on tight. Now she ready listen. I tell her, ‘Ghost! Ghost! Time you go Yin World.’ ”
Kwan looked at my frowning face and added: “I know–I know! In America don’t have big oil jar, maybe don’t even know what kind I mean. For American ghost, must use something else—like maybe big Tupperware. Or travel suitcase, Samsonite kind. Or box from very fancy store, not discount place. Yes-yes, this better idea, I think. Libby-ah, what’s a name that fancy store, everybody know everything cost so much? Last year Simon bought you hundred-dollar pen there.”
“Tiffany.”
“Yes-yes, Tiffany! They give you blue box, same color like heaven. American ghost love heaven, pretty clouds. . . . Oh, I know. Where music box I give you wedding time? Ghost love music. Think little people inside play song. Go inside see. My last lifetime, Miss Banner have music box like this—”
“Kwan, I have work to do—”
“I know–I know! Anyway, you don’t have ghost, you got liv
ing person sneak in you house. Maybe he did some sort a bad thing, now hiding, don’t want get caught. Too bad I don’t know how catch loose person. Better you call FBI. Ah—I know! Call that man on TV show, American Most Wanted. You call. I telling you, every week, they catch someone.” So much for Kwan’s advice.
And then something else occurred, which I tried to pass off as coincidence. Elza came back into our lives in rather dramatic fashion. One of her college classmates, who had gone on to become a producer of New Age music, revived a number of pieces Elza had composed called Higher Consciousness. The music later became the sound track to a television series on angels, which was ironic, as Simon pointed out, since Elza was not fond of Christian mythology. But then, overnight it seemed, everyone was wild for anything having to do with angels. The series received huge ratings, a CD of the sound track sold moderately well, and Simon started finding new self-worth in Elza’s small fame. I never thought I’d hate angels so much. And Simon, who once loathed New Age music, would play her album whenever friends came over. He would casually remark that the composer had dedicated the music to him. Why’s that, they would ask. Well, they had been lovers, best friends. Naturally, this caused some friends to smile at me in a consoling way, which I found maddening. I would then explain matter-of-factly that Elza had died before I met Simon. Yet somehow it sounded more like a confession, as if I’d said I had killed her myself. And then silence would permeate the room.
So along with all the sound effects in our house, I tried to pretend I wasn’t bothered by Elza’s music. I tried to ignore the increasing distance between Simon and me. I tried to believe that in matters of marriage, as with earthquakes, cancer, and acts of war, people such as myself were immune to unexpected disaster. But to pretend that all was right with the world, I first had to know what was wrong.
9
KWAN'S FIFTIETH