Doctorow

  A moment later, I was standing behind him with a big grin; I was this tall, long-haired homeless soul with a gray beard down to his chest, who, for all Diana knew, as she returned with a handful of knives, was the old Italian’s assistant. I wanted to look into her eyes, I wanted to see if there was any recognition there. I didn’t know what I would do if she recognized me; I didn’t even know if I wanted her to recognize me. She didn’t. The knives were handed over, the door closed, and the old Italian, after frowning at me and muttering something in his own language, went back to his van.

  And, back in my atelier, I thought of the green-eyed glance of my wife, the intelligence it took in, the judgment it registered, all in that instant of nonrecognition. While I, her lawful husband, stood there grinning like an idiot. I decided that it was good that she hadn’t recognized me—it would have been disastrous if she had. My devilish impulse had pulled off a good joke. But my disappointment was like one of those knives, after sharpening, in my chest.

  —

  A DAY OR TWO LATER, in the late afternoon, as the setting sun reddened the sky over the big trees, I heard a car pulling into the driveway. A door slammed, and by the time I got to the attic window whoever it was had disappeared around the front of the house. I had never seen this car before. It was a top-of-the-line sedan, a sleek black Mercedes. Long after the sun had set and all the lights were on in my house, I could see that the car was still there. I kept going back to the window and the car kept being there. Whoever it was, he was staying to dinner. For, of course, I knew it was a he.

  The moon was out, and so it was somewhat risky for me to go around to the dining room and look in the window. The shades were drawn—what was she trying to hide?—but not completely; there was an inch or two of light above the windowsill. When I bent my legs and peered in, I could see his back, and the back of his head, and, across the table from him, my smiling radiant wife lifting her wineglass as if in acknowledgment of something he had said. I heard the girls’ voices; the whole family was there, having themselves a grand time with this guest, this special guest, whoever he was.

  I lurked about through dinner; they took their damn time, all of them, and then there was coffee and dessert, which Diana liked to serve in the living room. I ran around to that window and again saw his back. He was a well-tailored fellow with a good head of salt-and-pepper hair. He was not particularly tall but sturdy, strong-looking. It was no one I knew, not anyone from my firm, not one of our friends come to hit on Diana. Was it someone she had met? I was determined to keep watch and to satisfy myself that he did not stay past dinner. But surely that was not in the cards, not with the twins in the house. Nevertheless, I lingered at the window, even though the night was cold and getting colder. And then he did leave; they were handing him his coat and I turned and ran around the back of the house and took a position at the corner, where I could see the driveway. I was looking at the front of his car, and when he got in and the cabin of the car lit up, I had a clear view of his face, and it was my former best friend, Dirk Morrison, the man from whom I had stolen Diana, a lifetime ago.

  —

  THE NEXT DAYS WERE busy ones. I washed as best I could with melted snow and dried myself with one of Dr. Sondervan’s towels, a gift from Herbert and Emily. I took my wallet out of the top drawer of the old broken-down bureau. In it was all the cash I had come home with that night of the raccoon, my credit cards, Social Security card, driver’s license. I dug around for my checkbook, house and car keys—all the impedimenta of citizenry. I then contrived to get myself to town, cutting through the Sondervan backyard to the next block and thence to the business district.

  My first stop was the Goodwill store, where I replaced my tattered rags with a clean and minimally decent brown suit, unironed shirt, overcoat, wool socks, and a pair of brogues that were no better fitting than my wingtips but more appropriate to the season. The ladies at the Goodwill were shocked when I walked in, but my courteous demeanor and the clear effort I was making to better myself left them smiling approvingly as I left. And don’t forget to get yourself a nice haircut, dear, one of them said.

  That was exactly my intention. I walked into a unisex place on the theory that my shoulder-length hair would not alarm them as it would a traditional old-time barber. Still, there was resistance—Can’t come in here without an appointment, the hairdresser-in-chief sniffed—at which point I laid two crisp hundred-dollar bills on the cashier’s table and an empty chair materialized. A layered cut and not too short, I said.

  I watched in the big mirror as, snip by snip, I traveled back in time. With each falling hank of hair, more and more of the disastrous lineaments of my previous self emerged, until, big naked ears and all, staring back at me was the missing link to Howard Wakefield. Yet a shave was still required for the transmogrification, and this took another fifty dollars, shaves not being in the repertoire of this crew of artistes. Somehow they came up with shears and a straight razor and several of the staff gathered around to agree on a strategy. I didn’t want to see. I lay back in the chair and prepared to have my throat cut. I didn’t care. I was disappointed in myself and how easily I was acclimating to the old life. It was as if I had never left.

  Finally, I was sat up to see the result, and it was me, all right, looking pale and somewhat skinnier, the eyes perhaps too importunate, a new loose fold of flesh under the chin, Howard Wakefield redux, a man of the system.

  That was enough for one day.

  That night, in my unaccustomed togs, I slipped around to the house to see if anything special was going on. Another visitor, perhaps, a justice of the peace to accompany Dirk Morrison? But all was quiet. No strange cars in the driveway, and my wife at her dressing table, not quite naked in her negligible concession to winter. She had something on the stereo, her favorite composer, Schubert, whom she had touted to me when we were dating. It was one of the Impromptus, played by Dinu Lipatti, and it brought back the old days, before such music was no longer ours. I felt as if an artery had been opened, and ran back to my attic.

  The next morning, the garage doors opened beneath me and I watched as Diana, with the girls in tow, backed the SUV down the driveway. Of course. Christmas shopping. They would head for the mall. They would lunch there as well. I waited a few minutes, took out my car keys, went downstairs, and turned on the engine of my BMW. It started right up.

  I had heard about Dirk over the years that he had made himself a fortune. And why not, as he was a hedge-fund manager who was quoted on the business pages.

  Remarkable how I still knew how to drive, and how I remembered all the shortcuts to the highway to New York. An hour later, the city rose up before my eyes, and in a moment, it seemed, I was in it, in all the noisy raucous chaos of souls flowing through the city’s canyons, each of them with an imperial intention. They were underground, too, rumbling along in the subways. They were stacked above my head, too, forty, fifty stories of them. It was stunning. I was in shock and barely able to negotiate the entrance to a garage.

  Had I actually worked in this city most of my adult life? Would I have to again?

  My Madison Avenue haberdashery was still where it had always been and my man was there standing in the suit department as if he’d been waiting for me. I had had myself barbered and had clothed myself in a reasonably presentable outfit at the Goodwill before coming here, just so that I could get through the door. He looked at me and shook his head. He beckoned. Come with me, he said.

  And that is how that evening, after parking the BMW in front of the next house, and taking the trouble to reclaim my litigation bag from the attic, I stood at my front door in my black cashmere coat and pin-striped suit with a Turnbull & Asser spread-collar shirt and a sober Armani silk tie, American-flag suspenders, and Cole Haan black English calfskin shoes, and I turned the key in the lock.

  Every light in the house was on. I could hear them in the dining room; they were decorating the Christmas tree.

  Hello? I shouted. I’m home!

/>   What kind of car was it?

  I don’t know. An old car. What difference does it make?

  A man sits in his car three days running in front of the house, you should be able to describe it.

  An American car.

  There you go.

  A squarish car with a long hood. Long and floaty-looking.

  A Ford?

  Maybe.

  Well, definitely not a Cadillac.

  No. It looked tinny. An old car. Faded red. There were big round rust spots on the fender and the door. And it was filled with his things. It looked like everything he owned was in there with him.

  Well, what do you want me to do? You want me to stay home from work?

  No. It’s nothing.

  If it’s nothing, why did you bring it up?

  I shouldn’t have.

  Did he look at you?

  Please.

  Did he?

  When I turned around, he started the engine and drove off.

  What do you mean? So before you turned around—

  I felt his eyes. I was weeding.

  You were bending over?

  Here we go again.

  You know this creep pulls up in front of our house every morning and you go out to the garden and bend over?

  Okay, end of conversation. I have things to do.

  Maybe I can park at the curb and watch you weeding. The two of us. That’s something, anyway. Seeing you in your shorts bending over.

  I can’t ever talk to you about anything.

  It was a Ford Falcon. You said it was squared off, hard edges, a flattened look. A Falcon. They built them in the sixties. Three-speed manual shift on the column. Only ninety horses.

  Okay, that’s wonderful. You know all about cars.

  Listen, Miss Garden Lady, to know a man’s car is to know him. It is not useless knowledge.

  Fine.

  Guy is some immigrant up from Tijuana.

  What are you talking about?

  Who else would drive a forty-year-old heap? Looking for work. Looking for something he can steal. Looking for something from the lady with the white legs who bends over in her garden.

  You’re out of your mind. You’ve got this know-it-all attitude—

  I’ll take the morning off tomorrow.

  Immigrants don’t have long gray hair and roll the window down so I can see his pink face and pale eyes.

  Oh, ho! Now we’re getting somewhere.

  —

  YOU DON’T MOVE OUT of here I’m writing down your license plate. The cops will I.D. you and see if it’s someone they know…

  You’re calling the police?

  Yes.

  Why?

  Why not, if you don’t move? Go park somewhere else. I’m giving you a break.

  What is my offense?

  Don’t play dumb. In the first place, I don’t like some junk heap in front of my house.

  I’m sorry. It’s the only car I have.

  Right, I can see that no one would drive this thing if he didn’t have to. And all this bag and baggage. You sell things out of the trunk?

  No. These are my things. I wouldn’t want to let anything go.

  Because nobody in this neighborhood needs anything from the back of a car.

  Well, I’m sorry we’ve gotten off to the wrong start.

  Yes, we have. I’m not too friendly when some pervert decides to stalk my wife.

  Oh, I’m afraid you’re under a misconception.

  Am I?

  Yes. I didn’t want to disturb anyone, but I should have realized that parking in front of your house would attract notice.

  You got that right.

  If I’m stalking anything, it’s the house.

  What?

  I used to live here. For three days, I’ve been trying to work up the courage to knock on your door and introduce myself.

  —

  AH, I SEE THE kitchen is quite different. Everything built-in and tucked away. Our sink was freestanding, white porcelain with piano legs. Over here was a cabinet where my mother kept the staples. A shelf swung out with a canister for sifting flour. That impressed me.

  I’d probably have kept it. This is their renovation—the people who lived here before us. I have my own ideas for changing things around.

  You must have bought the house from the people I sold it to. You’ve been here how long?

  Let’s see. I count by the children’s ages. We moved in just after my eldest was born. That would be twelve years.

  And how many children have you?

  Three. All boys. I’ve sometimes wished for a daughter.

  They’re all in school?

  Yes.

  I have a daughter. An adult daughter.

  Would you like some tea?

  Yes, thank you. Very kind of you. Women are more gently disposed, as a rule. I hope your husband won’t be too put out.

  Not at all.

  To speak truly, it’s unsettling to be here. It’s something like double vision. The neighborhood is much as it was. But the trees are older and taller. The homes—well, they’re still here, mostly, though they don’t have the proud, well-to-do look they once had.

  It’s a settled neighborhood.

  Yes. But you know? Time is heartbreaking.

  Yes.

  My parents divorced when I was a boy. I lived with my mother. She would die in the master bedroom.

  Oh.

  I’m sorry, I sometimes speak tactlessly. After Mother died, I married and brought my wife here to live. I’ve never stayed anywhere else for any length of time. And certainly never owned property again. So this is the house—please don’t misunderstand me—this is the house I’ve continued to live in. I mean mentally. I ranged all through these rooms from childhood on. Until they reflected who I was, as a mirror would. I don’t mean merely that its furnishings displayed our family’s personality, our tastes. I don’t mean that. It was as if the walls, the stairs, the rooms, the dimensions, the layout were as much me as I was. Is this coherent? Wherever I looked, I saw me. I saw me in some way measured out. Do you experience that?

  I’m not sure. Your wife—

  Oh, that didn’t last long. She resented the suburbs. She felt cut off from everything. I’d go off to work and she’d be left here. We hadn’t many friends in the neighborhood.

  Yes, people here stick to themselves. The boys have school friends, but we hardly know anyone.

  This tea helps. Because this is a dizzying experience for me. It’s as if I were squared off, dimensionalized in these rooms, as if I were the space contained by these walls, the passageways, the fixed routes of going to and fro, from one room to another, and everything lit predictably by the times of day and the different seasons. It is all and indistinguishably…me.

  I think if you live in one place long enough—

  When people speak of a haunted house, they mean ghosts flitting about in it, but that’s not it at all. When a house is haunted—what I’m trying to explain—it is the feeling you get that it looks like you, that your soul has become architecture, and the house in all its materials has taken you over with a power akin to haunting. As if you, in fact, are the ghost. And as I look at you, a kind, lovely young woman, part of me says not that I don’t belong here, which is the truth, but that you don’t belong here. I’m sorry, that’s quite a terrible thing to say. It merely means—

  It means life is heartbreaking.

  —

  HE CAME BACK? He was here again?

  Yes. It seemed so sad, his just sitting out there, so I invited him in.

  You what!

  I mean, it wasn’t what you thought, was it? So why not?

  Right. Why wouldn’t you invite him in, since I told him if he came around again I’d call the cops?

  You should have invited him in yourself when he told you he’d lived in this house.

  Why is that a credential? Everyone has lived somewhere or other. Would you want to relive your glorious past? I shouldn’t think s
o. And this is not the first time.

  Don’t start in, please.

  Husband says white, wife says black. The way it works. So the world will know what she thinks of her husband.

  Why is it always about you! We’re not the same person. I have my own mind.

  Do you, now!

  Hey, you guys, we got an argument brewing?

  Close your door, son. This doesn’t concern you.

  Every time another man comes into this house you go berserk. A plumber, someone to measure for the window blinds, the man who reads the gas meter.

  Ah, but is your man a man? Awfully fruity-looking to me. Wears his white hair in a ponytail. And those tiny little hands. What does the well-known fag-hag have to say?

  He’s a PhD and a poet.

  Jesus, I should have known.

  He gave up his teaching job to travel the country. His book is on the dining-room table. He signed it for us.

  A wandering minstrel in his Ford Falcon.

  Why are you so horrible!

  —

  ARGUING IS INSTEAD OF SEX.

  It has been a while.

  This is better.

  Yes.

  I don’t know why I get so upset.

  You’re just a normally defective man.

  So we’re all like this? Thank you.

  Yes. It’s an imperfect gender.

  I’m sorry I said what I said.

  I’m thinking now, with all three of them in school all day, I should get a job.

  Doing what?

  Or maybe go for a graduate degree of some kind. Make myself useful.

  What brings this on?

  Times change. They need me less and less. They have their friends, their practices. I carpool. They come home and stay in their rooms with their games. You work late. I’m alone in this house a lot.

  We should go to the theater more. A night in town. Or you like opera. I’ll do opera as long as it isn’t Richard fucking Wagner.

  That’s not what I’m saying.