“I don’t care what you do about them. You warned them, didn’t you? You saw how far that got you, didn’t you? I care about her and the child, but not enough to have everybody in town talking about me and my family the way they are about you and Colquitt. And I know I’m responsible for that. Do you think that’s not going to haunt me to my grave? I can never, never make that up to you, but it’s not going to happen to us. Not to my children. If you ever tell anybody what I’ve told you tonight, either of you, I’ll swear you’re lying. I will. I’ll swear you’re lying and crazy and anything else in the world I have to swear. I know that makes me the lowest crud who ever walked the earth, but I’m going to salvage what’s left of my family’s normalcy while there still is some, and we’re going to have a decent, sane life if it kills me. If you still want to be my friend on those terms, I’d be proud to have you, and I wouldn’t deserve it. But those are the terms.”
“I accept them,” I said. “Any terms you want. No mention of the house ever again. No mention of any of it. I’ve never been so miserable in my life as I have these past few weeks when you were so…gone away from me. There isn’t anything worth that.”
She began to cry again and put her arms around me and hugged me. “So have I been,” she said, weeping. “So have I. I love you, Colquitt. I couldn’t stand it if anything happened to either of you. Please, God, listen to me and get out of here before something terrible happens to you. I can’t lose you twice.”
When she was quieter I bundled her into one of my coats and a scarf, and Walter got the flashlight and walked her back home. I went with them to the edge of the driveway. The clouds had parted and the moon sailed, high and white and dead, among the flying tatters. In the moonlight the ice-sheathed trees tossed and tinkled like great crystal hands fingering the sky, weaving and reweaving an incantation over the sweetly sleeping shape of the house next door.
23
CLAIRE DID NOT change her mind about moving, as I had thought she might after the initial pain and shock of Duck’s marriage subsided. The next week she began looking for another house, poring over the Sunday real estate sections of the paper and driving through the neighborhoods she thought might be compatible, following the winding streets that had home-for-sale signs on the corners. She did not go to Margaret Matthieson, who handled most of the buyings and sellings in our set, or to any of the other brokers she knew. I did not ask her why, but I thought I knew: she wanted no explanations, no more talk.
There had been some talk, quiet ripplings of surprise and curiosity, when the news about Duck and Libby’s marriage filtered through the neighborhood, but she had been publicly wry and resigned about it in her brisk, nose-crinkling manner, and even though people must have suspected it was a marriage of convenience, no one knew for sure, and would not for some time. So there were tentative congratulations too and no real surprise. Duck and Libby’s eventual marriage had long been a foregone conclusion on the street. Claire said only, when asked what the children’s plans were, that Duck was going to work a while in Washington and then they’d see where things went from there. Only Walter and I and the Flemings knew that he had taken a sort of clerk’s job with the Postal Service and that they were living in a cramped and faded second-floor apartment out beyond Catholic University, on the northeastern fringes of the city. Claire and Roger had flown up to see them, and Ford Fleming had gone too, but they refused to come home. Claire talked little to me about Duck. I do not know how she persuaded Roger to make the move; we did not see much of him, and he did not speak of it when we did. I don’t think anyone else on the street knew that they were looking for another house.
With the barriers gone between me and Claire, I had hoped we would be close again, close and easy and affectionate, as we had always been. We did spend a lot of time together at first, just after the night she had come to tell us about the marriage. I went with her on several of her house-hunting expeditions, and we would walk through this sprawling old house and that one, me trying to imagine my own things in the alien spaces, placing a sofa here, a secretary there, thinking what I would do with this breakfast room or that sun porch. It has always been a game to me, prowling through those houses whose families don’t, for one reason or another, want them anymore. A rather poignant game, because there is about a waiting house a sort of mournful abandonment, a wistful air of “Why are you leaving me? What went wrong?” Even when the families are still in residence, their possessions still in place, their dishes still in cabinets, their clothes still in closets, there is a melancholy air of finish, a breath of ending.
It is a titillating game too, because it is exhilarating to me to imagine Walter and me living within new walls that do not know the shape of us yet, walking on earth and among trees that have not yet felt our fingers and spades or lent us their shade. But it is in the end only a game, because it is unimaginable to me, even now, that we should live anywhere other than where we do.
It was not a game to Claire. Armed with lists and pages of measurements and stern requirements, she would work her way through the houses, eyes measuring as coldly and precisely as a computer, making a note about peeling paint here, about small closets there, about an extra-generous dining room or kitchen in yet another. She would consult her lists and check off her requirements one by one.
Outside in the car, or when we had stopped for lunch, she would study her notes and discard this and that house and make a check mark on the ones she wanted to come back to. There were few of those, and in the end there were none. I said nothing, even when we had just been through a house that seemed to me altogether splendid, and perfect for the Swansons. Many of them were out of Walter’s and my range entirely, but money was hardly an object for the Swansons. The simple fact was that, for all her clear-eyed efficiency and matter-of-fact demeanor, Claire loved her house and was bleeding inside at the thought of leaving it. But she did not say so, and so the search went on.
When we first picked up our mended friendship I had felt almost giddy with it, as I remember feeling in the early days of college, when I had left home for the first time in my life and everything and everybody was as new as I was, and anything was possible. The city seemed a totally new and provocative territory to me, misted in a kind of glamour, with promise and portent dancing around every corner, glancing with the sun off every soaring downtown tower. After the numbed days spent alone with Walter or the few clients I had seen, Claire’s company was like that of a companion only recently met but with whom you know a sweet, strong alliance is going to develop. I felt absurdly young and gay and chattered and laughed with sheer silliness. Claire did too for a time, even when I knew the pain and unease were weighing heavily on her. We laughed at the people we saw in restaurants and joked cruelly about the owners of the houses we inspected, and once we spent an entire afternoon in a scarred and carved back booth in a drive-in that was the province of students from a local engineering college, drinking beer and talking about our own college days. I would come in from those afternoons flushed with the raw March cold and the unburdened closeness, and Walter would look at me and smile and say, “You look like a kid who’s sneaked off from the sorority house and drunk a six-pack behind the stadium.”
“I feel like it,” I said to him once, early on. “I feel twenty years younger and have been making a perfect ass of myself.”
“It’s about time,” he said, but his smile was guarded.
But you can’t go back, not really, not at our ages, Claire’s and mine. There was too much weight of living, too much history between the people we were now and the times we had struggled back to. We could not really reach those times, and we had nothing else of substance to talk about. Too much that was forbidden, taboo, lay between us. Our mutual histories were what we had had in common; what we had loved about each other was what we had become because of our histories, and we had agreed not to speak of the most recent portions of those. The house, the horror, the pain, the unbelievable that we both now believed lay between us li
ke the carcass of a great, dead animal. It could not be spoken of, and it could not be gotten around. It canceled our mutual past, and it lay over any mutual future we might have like one of those black holes in space that had frightened me so unreasonably and awfully when Walter read about them to me from Time.
Finally we found ourselves lapsing into small silences, and casting about for something else to talk about, and meeting, then shying away from, each other’s eyes. The aching void of loss I felt when I thought of Claire and Roger gone from the street would swim over me, and she, catching my thoughts, would snap back into the rigid grid of her steely efficiency and say, “Well there’s time to look at one more. There’s one over on Maidstone that sounds interesting. See if you can get the waiter while I run to the ladies’.” And we would shrug back into our coats and our years and go out into the wind once more. I did not go out with her so often after the silences began, and she did not call so frequently.
Once, desperate to get her back, to rebuild what we had had, I broached the subject of Norman and Susan Greene. They were not strictly on the forbidden list, but we had not talked about them, I knew that she had not seen Susan Greene since the night at our house, and I thought that Susan must be hurt and bewildered by the defection. I thought that Melissa must be better, because I did not see Susan take her to the car so often these days for the trips to the doctor. But still, worry must hang heavy over her sandy head, and she would wonder why Claire did not come anymore.
“Have you seen anything of Susan Greene lately?” I asked over the last lunch we were to share together.
Claire frowned. “No,” she said. “I’ve talked to her a couple of times, but I’ve been so busy with this house-hunting. I really ought to have her over, but she doesn’t like to leave Melissa.”
“Is she better?”
“Susan says she thinks so. They’ve got her on some kind of steroid and it seems to be doing the trick. Maybe there won’t have to be an operation. I hope not.” She might have been talking about an acquaintance, someone she hardly knew. I remembered their two faces together in my kitchen on the day I had met the Greenes. So alike. The leaping closeness, the back-and-forth flame of compatibility. The house had taken more from Claire than she knew, or perhaps she did know.
“I realize I said I’d never go back over there,” Claire said suddenly, and I started at the words. Were we going to speak of it, then? Perhaps we should after all. Perhaps we must.
“I really meant that too, Col,” she went on after a time. “I know Susan must be hurt to death and doesn’t understand, but I simply can’t go over there, and there’s no way I can tell her why, not after the way he blew up when Walter went over there. I guess I just hoped I’d find the house I wanted right off the bat and we could move, and that would be that. Moving could be my excuse for not going. But it hasn’t worked out that way, and now something’s come up that I just don’t know what to do about.”
She paused, and scrabbled in her handbag for one of her rare cigarettes, and lit it, blowing smoke into the silence.
“What?” I said finally.
“Well, another party.”
“Oh, God. Not really, with Melissa so sick, and after that other thing?”
“I know. But this is a different thing, I think. You know I told you I’d talked to her once or twice. Well, once she asked me to go to lunch and shopping with her, and I said I was busy, and then she called and asked me to come over and have coffee and just talk. I think she’d heard about Duck and wanted to help. Anyway, I couldn’t think of anything to say, because she must know I’ve got time to run over there for a minute even if I couldn’t go shopping with her. And I said I had the rug cleaners coming and would call her back—but I didn’t. And I didn’t even feel particularly bad about it.
“Well, she didn’t call for a long time, and then she called day before yesterday and said that there was a visiting professor from Russia at City for a month or two, and Herr Professor wanted to have a reception for him, just a school thing, with only school people there. I gather he must be something of a big deal in Norman’s circle, because she said he’d planned the menu already, down to the nth degree, and hired a bartender and a maid to serve and a cleaning crew to come in and do the whole house on the day of the party. Imagine how that must have made her feel. And he’s ordered engraved invitations from Tiffany’s again, and made her mail them last week, three weeks ahead of time, so everybody would be sure to get them. And then she said, ‘We’re not asking anybody from the neighborhood this time, but I would be very proud if you and Roger would come. I really need somebody who’s on my side at this thing, because if I screw it up again I don’t know what will happen to us.’ She sounded so defeated, Col, so humble. And proud to have us, my God, after the way I’ve treated her!”
“You’re going, aren’t you,” I said. It was not a question. The fear came flooding back and filled me, coldly.
“Yes, we’re going. Just for a minute. With all those preparations, and those awful invitations, we just can’t not go. This will be the last time, but we can’t not.”
“No,” I said. “I guess you can’t not. When is it?”
“Two weeks from Friday night. We’ll just drop in and stay a half hour or so, and then maybe we’ll come over and have a drink with you all. It’s been ages since we’ve really gotten together.”
“That would be fun,” I said. “Oh, no, damn, Claire, we’re leaving for New York that morning. Walter has a casting session for some commercials, and we thought we’d splurge and make a week of it. The St. Regis, three or four shows, at least one hideously expensive dinner somewhere fantastic, the whole bit. He can charge a lot of it off to the agency since we’ll have some of the clients in tow part of the time—not my idea of paradise, but I’m not knocking it. I thought I told you.”
“No, but lucky you. Oh, well, I’ll call you when you get back and tell you about it.”
New York was marvelous. It always is, to me. No matter how many times we go back, it’s as though I come to it fresh and new as the first time I went there, in college. The skies were a cold stew of smog and sooty rain, and people on the streets were sharp-faced and jostling, and we did not dare walk in the theater district anymore, as we had done so often, and the cab drivers were more outrageous than usual, but I did not care. Even a sanitation strike, waxing yeastily into its second week, with frozen garbage piling up in the grimy vestiges of snow at the curbs, did not dampen my spirits. I become another person in New York, smarter, sleeker, springier of step, brisker of speech, longer of stride. I always dip into Bergdorf’s or Bloomingdale’s—I will not call it Bloomie’s—on my first day there and buy myself some small, splendid and totally alien thing, and let myself be surprised by my own image in the glittering windows on Fifth Avenue—a long-legged, flying-haired New York woman—for a little while. I come back laughing at myself but liking myself better too. The spell lasts for weeks.
We have several friends there, and during the day, while Walter pored over skeletal, interesting young women and pretty young men, I shopped and lunched with my women friends, and drifted into Brentano’s and Scribner’s and Rizzoli’s and the Strand, and walked through the small galleries on upper Madison Avenue which Walter flatly refuses to enter. He will suffer the Modern and the Guggenheim and the Frick with me, and loves the elephantine old Metropolitan and the Museum of Natural History, but he will not go into the small, pretentious ones.
We saw four shows, and did indeed dine late and sumptuously at Lutèce and Le Cygne, and did indeed spend too much money. We dined early and hugely at the Russian Tea Room too, and went to hear Bobby Short at the Carlyle, and went to dinner at the home of friends in the Village, hard by NYU, and to a gloriously cluttered, tall brownstone on Eighty-third Street, which had, in its creaking, curly iron elevators and bulbous bayed windows and high, medallioned ceilings, that indefinable cachet about it that spells New York and no other place on earth. We met for drinks once at the Algonquin simply beca
use I wanted to, and once at P. J. Clarke’s simply because Walter wanted to. The clients were amiable and urbane men who walked easily in the city, and their wives were smart and very thin, and they were all good company. We had champagne for breakfast the last morning we were there, lying late in a tangle of silky St. Regis sheets and stretching limbs deeply and sweetly sated with each other. I bought boxes of Godiva chocolates to take home to my clients and Claire and Roger, and we left on a six-o’clock flight from La Guardia, scrubbed and scoured clean of fear and strangeness and inwardness, filled instead with the city we were leaving behind.
It was late when we turned off onto our street, and raining, but the air was the softer air of approaching spring. Our tires whispered in the snake tracks left by other cars, and streetlights were haloed with opal mist. Few lights burned on the street. It was very quiet. As we paused to turn into our driveway I glanced at the Greenes’ house. It rose, dark and stiff and unlighted, into the still-bare trees; no cars stood in the driveway. It looked, all of a sudden, blankly and ringingly and irrevocably empty. I knew that no one was there; I knew that no one lived there anymore, and did not know how I knew, and was afraid with a sharp and terrible fear. I put my hand on Walter’s arm.
“Let’s go by Claire and Roger’s for a minute before we go home,” I said. I could hardly breathe.
He looked at me. “All right.”
He drove on down the street to their house. It was dark too. No cars were there. The front windows were shuttered, something I had never known Claire and Roger to do. There was a dim white oblong on the front lawn, and Walter pulled the car forward until the headlights picked it out. “For Sale by Owner,” it said.
“Walter,” I said. “Walter, they’re gone. They aren’t here anymore.”
“Don’t be silly, Colquitt,” he said. “She’s probably found something she liked and they’ve put the house on the market, but they wouldn’t have moved away this soon. That takes weeks.”
House Next Door Page 25
