The Paper Palace

by Miranda Cowley Heller

  * * *

  —

  The doorbell rings twice.

  “Anybody home?” Peter calls out.

  “We’re back here,” Mum calls. “Don’t let the kitten out. He keeps trying to escape through the front door.”

  Peter is carrying an enormous bunch of flowers, daylilies and pale pink garden roses.

  “Happy birthday, Wallace,” he says, handing them to my mother. He looks around at the piles of books everywhere, my mother on the stepladder, alphabetizing. “Very festive.”

  “I’m too old for birthdays. I’ll change my blouse and then we can go.” She hands me the flowers. “Can you put these in water?”

  * * *

  —

  Most of the streetlights on our block are out, deliberately broken by crackheads, who prefer the shadows. Peter and I walk home from dinner down the center of East Tenth Street, arm in arm, making ourselves a larger, less appealing target. Half the ground-floor apartments have beware of dog signs in their windows, though we rarely see anyone walking a dog.

  “Your mother was on excellent form tonight,” Peter says. “She was practically beaming when we put her in the cab.”

  “She loves to be pampered. She pretends to scorn it, but take her to an overpriced restaurant and pick up the check? She acts like a delighted little girl who just got a new doll from Daddy. Also, she adores you. You make her feel young.”

  “And you?” Peter asks.

  “I am young.”

  “Do you adore me?”

  “Most of the time. Sometimes you’re just irritating.”

  He pulls me to him, breathes me in. “You smell good. Lemony.”

  “Probably the cheese-clothed lemon wedge they gave me to squeeze on my fish.”

  “Eau de Sole. Because every woman has one. I think we could market that.” Peter laughs.

  “Not every woman,” I say.

  When we open the door to our apartment the air in the room feels charged, staticky. A faint metallic tang in its molecules. The phone is ringing and ringing, unanswered. Next to it, on the bookshelf, a vase of tulips has overturned, water pooling.

  “Fucking cat stepped on the answering machine again. I’m going to strangle that damned cat.” I throw my coat on the table and storm into our bedroom. There are two large windows in our bedroom. One on the right, over the bed; the other, which opens onto the fire escape, mostly obscured by heavy metal security bars that can only be opened from the inside, in case we need to make an escape. The window above our bed is now lying across it. Above the bed, a gaping hole, a splintered wooden frame. There’s a man squatting on the windowsill. He grins at me, eyes glazed, seemingly unaware that he is teetering on the edge of a four-story drop. His greasy hair is matted, weeks of unwashed filth webbing the surface, as if spiders have nested in it, their microscopic eggs warmed by his damp, cradle-capped scalp. Somehow the man has managed to climb across the side of the building from the fire escape, span the free fall, and bash in our entire window frame. On the fire escape, outside the unlocked window bars, I can see our TV and VCR, the tangled cords of the answering machine.

  The man follows my gaze, then looks back at me, cocks his head, as if deciding whether to go or stay. He wets his lips with the tip of his pink tongue and smiles. I scream for Peter, but it comes out as a whisper. Leering, the man starts to climb back into the room. My entire body coils. If I run at him right now, take him by surprise, body-slam him, he will fall backward into the night sky, splatter onto the cement, lie there, eyes wide open, while some other crackhead picks his pockets. I hurtle toward him like a battering ram before I can change my mind. And then I’m flat on my face, legs kicked out from under me. Peter strides past, tall, menacing. He is holding a kitchen knife. When he speaks, his voice is measured, blade-cold.

  “Go out the way you came in,” he says. “You can have the television—it’s a rabbit-eared piece of crap. But you will leave the answering machine. There’s a number on there I need.” He takes a few steps forward. He is terrifying, powerful in a way I have never seen. A wolf, transformed by the full moon. “Now,” he growls. “Before I have your blood on my hands.”

  The man backs out, leaps like a cat from the window onto the fire escape, picks up the TV under one arm, VCR under the other. I listen to the clang of his shoes descending the metal stairs, the rasp and rattle of cords dragging behind. On the floorboards beside my face, there’s a spray of red. I’ve cut my chin. In the far corner of the room, the closet door slowly pushes open.

  “Peter,” I warn. “Behind you.” Then I close my eyes to whatever is coming, wait for the creak of heavy footsteps on wooden floors. Instead, something silky brushes my face. I open my eyes. Next to me, the cat is licking my blood off the floor.

  * * *

  —

  Later, after the police have come, after the answering machine has been dusted for prints, after we have swept up shards of glass and splintered wood, after I have forgiven Peter for shoving me to the ground, for the scar on my chin that I will carry the rest of my life, Peter asks, “If I hadn’t stopped you, would you really have pushed him out the window?”

  “I guess so. I don’t know. I just reacted.”

  Peter frowns, looks at me as if he’s seen something just under the surface of my skin, tiny broken capillaries, or a bluish hue—something that shouldn’t be exposed to the light, and I feel the creep of shame, of exposure.

  “You would have killed a man over a TV and VCR?”

  “Not the TV. He was coming back inside for me,” I say. “His eyes were black.”

  “We need to get out of this neighborhood before you end up in prison for murder.”

  “Screw you, Pete. I was terrified.”

  “I’m joking,” Peter says. “Well, mainly.” He laughs.

  I grab the answering machine from the bureau and head into the living room. “You said there was a number you needed?”

  Peter follows behind me. “Elle. Please. Come on.” He picks a pack of cigarettes up from the coffee table, pats himself down for a lighter. “You risked your life to save a drowning man, for fuck’s sake. You’re hardly a killer. I’m the one who threatened him with a knife.” He looks around for somewhere to put his ash. Settles for the geranium pot.

  I turn away, pretend to look for something on the bookshelf.

  “Bastard must’ve nicked my ashtray.”

  “It’s in the dishwasher,” I say.

  Peter comes over to me, turns me around to face him, serious now. “I wouldn’t give a toss if you had drawn and quartered that pig, hung his innards on a flagpole. The only thing I care about is that you are safe. You’re my wife. The love of my life. There’s nothing you could ever say or do to change that. I was just surprised, is all. I’ve never seen that side of you.”

  I wish so badly that I could believe him. But I don’t. Some things can be forgiven—an affair, a cruel comment. But not the dirty, vile instinct lurking like a tapeworm in the dark folds of my gut, ready to emerge the moment it smells bloody meat. Until tonight, I thought it was gone. Pulled from my mouth inch by inch, foot by foot, year by year, leaving only the hollow space, the memory, of where it had once nested.

  Peter pokes the tip of my nose with his finger. “Now, no more grumping, missy.” He goes into the kitchen, comes back with an ashtray and a saucer of milk. “Here, kitty, kitty,” he says, placing it on the radiator.

  Tell him, I think. Let him see you. Kill the worm. Be clean. But instead I say, “Cats are lactose intolerant.”

  * * *

  —

  That night when we get into bed I feel a distance from him far greater than the crumple of sheets between us. The fault line I have cemented. I love him too much to risk losing him.

  1999. July 31, Los Angeles.

  My plane clears the last spiky, desolate ridge of mountains. Below me, an endless
suburban sprawl, a drab blanket on the earth, the low-hung shimmer of the Pacific barely visible in the distance. The plane shudders through a gyre, lowers its landing gear with a rough throat clearing. Moments later, we hit tarmac and the passengers cheer. We are always expecting the worst.

  I go straight from LAX to the hospital, dragging my heavy carry-on behind me, pushing through air and space with aggressive, panicked need. I cannot be too late. I cannot be too late. There’s a taxi waiting for me—Jeremy has arranged everything—but the driver is lazy, unobservant. He manages to miss every light, slows to let other cars merge, carefully picks out the Murphy’s Law route. By the time we pull up in front of the hospital, my teeth are ground to a chalk, and I’ve gone from 15 percent to 10 percent to shoving a few dollar bills in his hand and saying, “Asshole,” under my breath.

  Inside, a guard points me to the elevators and I run, air-lifting my suitcase off the polished palazzo floor. A crowd of people are ahead of me at the elevator bank, all looking up, hoping to divine which elevator will arrive first. By some miracle, the doors directly in front of me open. I press 11, then hit the doors close button repeatedly, hoping they will shut before anyone else gets on, but nothing happens. A woman in a head scarf and wig steps in just as the doors are closing. Cancer. The elevator sits there. Shut, tomblike.

  “I think this one is out of service.” I press the open button. Press it again. I can feel a claustrophobia rising inside my chest, as if my body itself is trapping me. But then the elevator starts to move. It rumbles slowly up one floor and stops, opens its doors. When it is clear that no one is getting on, the elevator pulls away and heads up one more flight. Again, we stop, wait an interminably long time.

  “Some kid must have pushed every button,” I say.

  “It’s Shabbat,” the woman says.

  “You must be fucking kidding me.” I’m on the Sabbath elevator, which stops on every floor. “I don’t have time for this shit.”

  The woman looks at me as though I have contagion. Moves away.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “I didn’t mean—” I’m finding it impossible to breathe. “You don’t understand. I can’t be late. My sister is dying.”

  The woman stares at the ceiling, mouth pinched in sour contempt.

  I have always considered myself a tolerant person. Each to her own. Yet right now, when what’s on the line is not punishment for turning on a light switch but whether I will get to my beautiful sister in time to say goodbye—to climb into the hospital bed beside her, hold her in my arms, admit it was me who tore her Bobby Sherman poster, make her laugh with me one last time—right this second, I feel only pure rage at the stupidity of all religions. I close my eyes and pray to a God I don’t believe in that Anna will wait for me. I need to tell her what I did.

  Book Four

  ◆

  THIS SUMMER

  29

  Six Weeks Ago. June 19, the Back Woods.

  Every morning on the pond, before Peter and the kids come in, I sweep the floorboards, making tight neat piles of dust and sand and earwigs that I then transfer into the dustpan, pile by pile, before shaking the whole thing outside underneath the nearest bush. And every morning on the pond, in that moment, I think of Anna. The briefest flash. Not so much a memory of her, as the recognition of a tiny but indelible mark, a living piece of her that still lives in me. Anna taught me how to sweep when I was seven. “Not like that, moron,” she corrected from the porch as I swung the broom around the room like a pendulum, lifting billows of dirt and dust ahead of me. “You have to do small strokes close to the ground. Make lots of little piles. Sweep inward. Otherwise that’s what happens.”

  This morning when I put the broom away in its place between the refrigerator and the pantry wall, it slips sideways, falls into the cobwebby gap behind the fridge. I sigh, knowing I have no choice but to retrieve it from the spidery darkness. My mother always cleans the camp before we come, but only the places she can see. When we arrived for the summer yesterday, the first thing Maddy noticed was a massive mouse nest in the rafter above the pantry shelves.

  “I’m pretending I haven’t seen it,” I overheard my mother saying to her as I passed the back door, lugging bags of our clothes in from the car. “I leave the truly horrible things for when your mother arrives.”

  “I heard that,” I said.

  “A family of muskrats is living in the water lilies,” she said to Maddy, ignoring me. “They’re very sweet—three little ones swim out behind their mother every morning. There were four, but I found one floating in the weeds when I was out in the canoe. His body was like a fur log. Full rigor mortis.”

  “That’s nice, Mum. Thanks for sharing that with my daughter,” I called out over my shoulder.

  “Are you planning to move in permanently? I’ve never seen so much stuff.”

  I stopped at the end of the path and stood looking out at the pond, the bright June sky. A perfect day for a swim. “I’m so happy to be here, I can’t stand it,” I said to no one.

  * * *

  —

  But this morning is gray and overcast, too cold for a swim. I leave the broom where it has fallen, walk down the path to our cabin, and fish around my canvas duffel for running shoes and a jog bra. Peter’s clothes are in a little heap on the floor where he took them off last night. I hang his white cotton shirt on a hook, fold his threadbare moleskin trousers and put them over the back of the chair.

  Peter stirs behind me.

  “It’s early,” I whisper. “Go back to sleep.”

  He turns over, smiles at me, hair matted to his forehead, his pillow sleep-wrinkled onto his cheek. “Cozy,” he says. He looks so sweet, like a little boy.

  “Back soon.” I kiss his eyelids, breathe in his familiar smell of salt and cigarettes.

  “I’ll make breakfast,” he mumbles.

  I jog up our steep driveway, dodging roots and winter potholes in the soil, before heading down the dirt road that skirts the pond and ends at the sea. The woods are quiet, barely stirring. Most of the houses haven’t yet been opened for the season. June can be rainy and damp. The fresh morning air feels like a splash of cold water. With each thud of my feet on the sandy ground I can feel my body waking up, as if I’m coming back to life after a long hibernation, sniffing for bees in the clover, looking for just the right tree to scratch. It’s this way every year.

  As I near the ocean, I pick up speed, eager for the dense woods to give way to low scrub and cranberry, eager for the sea. Around the last bend in the road, I’m surprised to see Jonas sitting on the shoulder, binoculars dangling around his neck.

  “What are you doing here?” I’m panting when I reach him. “You said you weren’t coming up ’til next week.” I sit down beside him.

  “Last-minute decision. One hundred percent humidity, the whole city stank of armpit, and then the air conditioning in the loft decided to stop working.”

  “Oh, c’mon. Admit it. It’s because you missed me so much.” I laugh.

  Jonas smiles. “Well, that too. It seems impossible for us to get any proper time together in the city. We’re all so crazed. And then suddenly it’s summer. Thank Christ. Kids happy to be here?”

  “Hardly. We haven’t even been here a day and already they’re complaining about no Wi-Fi. Peter’s threatening to send them all to military school.”

  “He up for a bit?”

  “Two weeks. Then the usual back-and-forth on weekends. Are you on your way to the beach, or already been?”

  “Been. I went to check on the nesting shorebirds.”

  “And?”

  “They’re nesting.”

  “Are the fences up?”

  He nods. “They’ve cordoned off half the beach.”

  “I fucking hate piping plovers.”

  “You hate anyone who doesn’t understand that you own the Back Woods,” Jonas says.
/>
  “The whole thing is ridiculous. The paper says the plover population has decreased since they started roping off those sections of beach to protect them.”

  Jonas nods. “It’s possible the smell of humans was keeping the coyotes away from the eggs.”

  “So, what’s been happening at your end? Gina good?”

  Jonas hesitates a hitch before answering, almost imperceptible, but I notice it. “Ecstatic to be here. And already looking for ways to avoid my mother. She left to go sailing before I woke up. Took the Rhodes out to check the rigging.”

  “Sailing.” Even after all these years, the word sticks on my tongue, as if I’m speaking a Namibian click language.

  “Sailing,” Jonas says.

  It hangs in the air like a slow-falling rock. I feel the unpeeling of something tender and awful and sad and shameful between us, as I always do. But Jonas breaks its fall, and the moment passes.

  “She wants to buy a Cat 19. I’m on the fence.”

  “Jack will be psyched if she does.” My bright voice rings false, and I know he hears it, too. But it’s what we do, what we’ve done for years now. We drag our past behind us like a weight, still shackled, but far enough back that we never have to see, never have to openly acknowledge who we once were.

  Above us, a peregrine wings the sky. We watch it peak into the clouds, turn, and plunge headlong toward the earth, sighting its prey.

  Jonas stands up. “I need to head back. My mother wants help planting marigolds. The mosquitoes are terrible this year. Stop by for a drink later. We’re home tonight.”

  “We’d love that.”

  He gives me a quick kiss on the cheek and heads off. I watch him walk away until he rounds the bend, out of sight. It is easier this way.

  * * *

  —

  Mum is in her usual spot on the porch sofa when I get back. Peter is in the kitchen making coffee.