by Ronald Malfi
“Oh,” she said, “I’m here. I’m here for good. I’m staying, Michael.” Something akin to a smile came across her pale white face. “It’s best,” she said. “For the children.”
The Housewarming
Mark and Lisa Schoenfield spent the afternoon preparing for the party.
They scurried about their spacious new home, making sure the floors were spotless and the large bay windows were free from smudges. Lisa prepared guacamole, miniature tacos (chicken, beef, and vegetarian), cocktail wieners wrapped in flaky croissants, fruit salad, a Caesar salad, and a variety of cookies fanned out like playing cards on a gorgeous Wedgwood serving tray. Mark made the liquor store run, and returned with a carton of assorted bottles and several cases of low-calorie beer. They squabbled playfully over what playlist to select on their shared iPod, with Lisa preferring classical selections to Mark’s more modern pop sensibilities. In the end, they settled on a rotation of up-tempo jazz numbers, and finished preparing for the event amidst the brassy intonations of Coltrane and Davis.
Mark was forty-two years old, in good shape, and had all his hair and teeth. He was a musician by trade, having once toured the East Coast with a group who played original Americana in the styles of Springsteen, Mellencamp, and Seger, though for the past decade or so he had found a comfortable little niche composing and recording the scores for independent studio films. This afforded him the luxury of working from home, which made the soundproofed basement the biggest selling point of the new house, at least as far as he was concerned.
Lisa was thirty-eight and was in equally good shape as her husband. She maintained her figure with a steadfast regimen of aerobic exercises, proper dieting, and an overall positive outlook. She was an attorney who specialized in contract law, and she had recently taken a position with a downtown firm who lured her away from her previous employers with promises of partnership in the not-too-distant future. The new job was the reason for the relocation, and for the new house.
And the house itself? It was a neoclassical Victorian with great flow and four bedrooms at the end of a quaint suburban cul-de-sac. The lawns were blindingly green, the driveway like a black satin ribbon winding in serpentine fashion up the gradual incline of the property toward the two-car garage with the carriage-house lights. At the topmost roof, a weathervane fashioned in the shape of an archer’s arrow spiraled lazily in the cool summer breeze. It was the first house the Schoenfields visited, and they had made their offer—quite a generous offer—the very next day.
Now, two weeks after they had moved in, the place had begun taking on some semblance of home. In tandem, Mark and Lisa had spent much of the previous week visiting their nearest neighbors, introducing themselves in their cheerful and overzealous way. The neighbors all seemed friendly enough, and pleased to have a seemingly normal-looking couple move into the neighborhood.
“We’re having a housewarming party this weekend,” Mark and Lisa would take turns saying, “and we’d love it if you’d come by.”
Nearly everyone on the block agreed, and seemed enchanted by the prospect.
The first guests arrived that night at precisely eight o’clock. They were a young couple named Baum, the man in spectacles and the woman in a swoopy floral sundress.
“Hey,” Mark said, fervently shaking the man’s hand while grinning to beat the band. “Great! You guys are the first to arrive. Can I get you a drink?”
Mark fixed a vodka tonic for Mr. Baum and a glass of merlot for Mrs. Baum, which he handed off to the respective guests with his smile still firmly in place. In the parlor, Lisa raised the volume of the iPod in an effort to make the atmosphere livelier.
Soon after, more guests arrived. Mark immediately made no promises to himself that he would remember all the names of his visitors, though he did intend to conclude the evening having memorized the names of at least three of the couples. The Tohts, the Nancers, the O’Learys, the Smiths, the Barrows—they were all young and handsome and well-groomed and cheerful. Each time the doorbell went off—a plangent cling-clong! that sounded to the Schoenfields like a church bell—a new wave of bright faces filed into the foyer. Lisa was pleased to see that many of the women brought food. Mark was pleased to find that a number of the men brought liquor.
As is the custom at such events, the men eventually gravitated toward one end of the house and remained huddled in a tight little group away from the women. They clutched cans of beer or rocks glasses and spoke of the neighborhood’s comings and goings with a sense of pride and stewardship Mark Schoenfield admired. They were straight enough to be proper but loose enough to laugh at the occasional crass joke, which endeared them all the more to Mark. When one of the wives swooped by, the respective husband would slip an arm around her waist and plant a quick little peck on her check.
Lisa led an expedition of inquisitive women through the house—up and down the stairs, in and out of all the rooms. Closet doors were opened and bathroom shower stalls were subjected to intrusive scrutiny. One woman even possessed the audacity to peer under the bed in the master bedroom. A few women marveled over what the Schoenfields had managed to do with the place in such a short amount of time.
“We’ve hardly begun,” informed Lisa.
“Nonsense!” said a woman named Tracy Birch. “The place is lovely!”
“Hadn’t any of you been in the house before, when the previous owners had lived here?” Lisa asked the gaggle of women.
“Of course, dear,” said Sandy O’Leary, “but they had gotten so old, and their tastes were so old. It’s good to have fresh young blood back on the street.”
Downstairs, the men had become garrulous in the absence of women. Mark was pleased to fetch them drinks and returned to the parlor at one point balancing a bowl of guacamole in one hand, drinks in the other, and a bag of Tostitos wedged under one arm. The men applauded his foresight then tore into the bag of chips like a pride of lions descending on a carcass.
“Do you play golf?” asked Bob O’Leary.
“On occasion,” Mark said.
Bob O’Leary beamed and clapped him on the forearm. “Brilliant! There’s an exceptional course less that fifteen miles from here. It’s right on the bay. Gorgeous!”
“Gorgeous,” echoed Milton Underland, who stood close by, his mouth full of guacamole. He held a beer in each hand.
The doorbell stopped ringing, yet the guests continued to arrive. The Nevins, the Copelands, the Wintermeyers, the Joneses, the de Filippos. Mark took snapshot photos of each of their faces by blinking his eyes. Gotcha. Heavily perfumed women kissed him wetly on the cheek, their scents floral and fecund and delightful. Each man shook his hand while gripping his upper arm in a familiar but not unwelcomed embrace. Mark realized that it had been a long time—since college, maybe—that he’d had a group of male friends with which he could so casually bond.
At one point during the evening, Mark and Lisa bumped into each other in the hallway. The rooms were choked with people and there were more walking up the flagstone path, but they didn’t care: they kissed, and it wasn’t a brief and perfunctory act. It was meaningful. The stress of the move sloughed from Mark’s flesh; the anxiety of switching jobs seemed to burn off Lisa’s shoulders like steam off hot blacktop.
The Quindlands, the Hamms, the Dovers, the MacDonalds, the Kellers, a second pair of Smiths—they kept coming. In the kitchen, fresh plates of food replaced old ones. Beer coolers were replenished with new cans and bottles then covered in a shower of ice cubes.
“What is it that you do?” Ted Hamm asked him.
“I’m a musician,” Mark explained. “I compose and record the soundtracks for indie films.”
“Fantastic! Any films I would know?”
“The most recent was called Oglethorpe and Company,” Mark said, though he confessed that it had had only minimal distribution. “The most popular is probably the Sledge series of films.”
“You mean those over-the-top horror movies where all those nubile young waifs get clob
bered by the masked maniac wielding a sledgehammer?” Ted Hamm’s eyes blazed with what Mark interpreted as pure enchantment.
“Yes,” Mark said. “Those films.”
“I love them! I go hog-wild for those movies! They’re so ridiculously bloody, I don’t know whether to laugh or scream in terror.”
“Thank you,” Mark said, unsure if such a comment should be taken as a compliment or not, “but I didn’t make the movies. Just the soundtracks.”
Another man—someone Mark hadn’t yet met—appeared beside Ted Hamm and began humming the discordant title theme from the Sledge series of films. Ted grinned, nodding like an imbecile at the man, then turned his blank and grinning face back to Mark.
“Yeah,” Mark said. “That’s it, all right.”
One of the wives also appeared before him. She was a slim brunette in a stunning red dress. She addressed the small upright piano toward the rear of the parlor with beautifully manicured fingernails. “You must play it,” she told him. “Oh, please?”
“Yes!” boomed Ted Hamm. “You must!”
It seemed that he was carried toward the piano on a wave of arms. Before being deposited onto the piano bench, some invisible pair of fingers administered a sharp pinch to his midsection. The keyboard cover was thrust open, revealing a mouthful of grinning alabaster teeth. Temporarily disoriented, Mark did not begin to play until some of the guests began humming the theme song. He came in midway through the second bar, his fingers first fumbling over the keys before finding their rhythm.
“There it is!” one of the men shouted. “You’ve got it now!”
Mark laughed and continued to play. It was all minor chord progressions and jangly high keys—a simple but recognizable melody that had helped secure the Sledge franchise some status among horror movie aficionados.
When he finished, the room applauded. Yet when he tried to get up, hands appeared on his back and shoulders, forcing him back down onto the piano bench.
“Please,” a woman’s voice pleaded. “Once more around the mulberry bush, Mark.”
So he cracked his knuckles and played the piece again.
Meanwhile, in the kitchen, Lisa found herself listening to the neighborhood gossip with mild voyeuristic pleasure. Which husband was sleeping with which wife; whose children were just awful brutes; what local restaurants were known swingers’ joints.
“Is it something you’ve ever done?” one of the women asked Lisa.
“You mean Mark and me?” Lisa said, hearing Mark at the piano in the next room the instant she spoke his name. “Have we ever…?”
“Not even once?” another woman asked. She was meatier than the others, with great silver streaks in her otherwise raven-colored hair.
“No,” Lisa confessed. “Not even once.”
“This is so distasteful,” said a third woman. Lisa thought her name was Betsy. “Such talk. Who are we, anyway? This isn’t Desperate Housewives, you know.”
A few of the women chided Betsy, though good-naturedly.
Lisa heard the piano stop again…then start up a third time. The same tune. She recognized it as the theme from those horror movies Mark had composed.
The patio door off the kitchen slid open and two good-looking couples came in. They ignored Lisa, and went to embrace some of the other women gathered around the kitchen. All of a sudden, Lisa felt like a stranger in her own house, and in her own life.
“The house is beautiful!” said one of the new women. “We love what you’ve done with the place. Show us around?”
“Yes,” said the other woman. “We’d love the grand tour.”
Again, Lisa took the women in and out of rooms, down hallways, opened closet doors. One of the women seemed to take exceptional interest in the cleanliness of the toilets, stopping to peer down at her reflection simmering on the surface of the water in each bowl.
After a while, Lisa packed away the food, leaving only the desserts on the counter. She brewed some Sumatran coffee and decided to forgo her good china cups in favor of the Styrofoam ones Mark had picked up yesterday at the grocery store. There were too many people and she didn’t have enough china to go around. As she handed out coffee to extended hands, her guests smiled warmly at her.
“We love what you and Mark have done with the house,” Sheila Duggan said.
“Your taste is exquisite,” Sallyanne Monroe said.
“Oh,” Lisa said, “we’ve hardly had a chance to do a thing.”
The Bostons, the Daleys, the Fritzes, the Loans filed into the house, cheery-faced and smelling of colognes, perfumes, deodorants.
In the parlor, Mark struggled up off the piano bench. More hands gripped him and tried to force him back onto the bench, but he slid sideways and marshaled decisively through the crowd. Several of the guests issued boos at his departure, until someone else claimed the piano bench and began playing a fairly commendable rendition of Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag.”
Mark found Lisa in the doorway between the parlor and the kitchen, her back toward him. He sighed into her hair and muttered, “My fingers are burning.”
Lisa turned…and it wasn’t Lisa at all. Another woman in the same dress, her hair done up in a similar fashion. The strangeness of her appearance caused Mark to utter a small cry.
“Hello,” she said, smiling prettily at him.
“I’m sorry. I thought you were my wife.”
“She’s delightful,” said the woman. “You both are. Was that you on the piano just a moment ago?”
“It was.”
“You play so well. You are a professional?”
“Yes, I am.”
“So wonderful to have such a talented new couple join the community.”
In the kitchen, Lisa waved to him over a sea of bobbing heads and grinning faces. Mark excused himself and navigated through the crowd until he reached his wife. She looked tired.
“Coffee?” she asked him.
“I’m too tired for coffee,” he said, “if that makes any sense.”
“They keep coming,” she said.
“They love us,” he responded, though without the satisfaction expected with such a sentiment.
In the parlor, “Maple Leaf Rag” segued into “The Entertainer.” Voices boomed in pleasure. A few of the women in the kitchen began dancing with each other, their coffee cups held up above their heads while they twirled each other around with their free hands.
A perky redhead approached the Schoenfields dragging behind her a man in a pressed oxford shirt and pleated khakis. “My husband Michael and I missed the tour of the house,” she said in a nasally, almost pleading voice. “Is it too late for us? We’d love to see all the work you’ve been doing.”
“We really would,” Michael added.
“We haven’t done any work,” Mark advised the couple.
“Everyone is bragging about the upstairs,” said the woman, as if she hadn’t heard him.
“It’s nothing,” Lisa cut in.
The redheaded woman cheered with glee, clasping her hands together. “I bet it’s outstanding!”
Mark and Lisa exchanged a look. “I’ll take them,” he offered, then led the couple up the stairs. The three of them wandered around the hallway, dipping in and out of unfinished bedrooms, bathrooms, closets. The redhead paused before one bathroom mirror to examine her reflection, then—astoundingly—she readjusted her cleavage while Mark stood gaping at her in the bathroom doorway. The woman’s husband didn’t seem to notice; he was too preoccupied examining the grout in the shower stall.
A few minutes later, as Mark led them back down the stairs, he noticed that the pianist had abandoned Joplin in favor of plucking out random sour notes on the keyboard. It was as if the piano player had suffered a stroke while on the bench. Nonetheless, the guests still cheered on the abysmal playing.
Exhausted, Mark looked around the kitchen for Lisa, but could not find her. It seemed more people had showed up while he had been upstairs, which was strange because it was awfully late
for new arrivals. He glanced at the wall clock above the sink and saw that the clock had ceased working at 8:39 p.m. He then glanced at his wrist before realizing he hadn’t worn his wristwatch.
Someone began playing “Chopsticks” on the piano. Badly.
Mark shouted, “Lisa?” but doubted she could hear him over the cacophony of their guests, the piano, and the muddled jazz coming from the detachable iPod speakers. His head throbbed. “Excuse me, excuse me,” he mumbled, cutting through the crowd. When he reached the parlor, he saw men dancing with men, women dancing with women, and a huddle of striped polo shirts standing around the piano. “Chopsticks” ended abruptly and the guests began haranguing the pianist. Mark saw the pianist try to stand, catching a glimpse of the familiar hairdo and dress, and thought, Lisa.
It was. She sat before the piano, several hands on her shoulders as if to hold her in place, while her hands sat now in her lap. A terrified expression was etched across her face. She did not know how to play the piano—barring, apparently, a rudimentary rendition of “Chopsticks”—and when she met Mark’s eyes, he could see all the fear bottled up inside her. He reached out and she grasped his hand…but then other hands shoved him down onto the piano bench beside her.
“Play ‘Heart and Soul,’” someone shouted.
“I want to get up,” Lisa uttered very close to Mark’s ear.
“Lean on my shoulder and I’ll play,” he told her.
After he had played “Heart and Soul” twice, he grasped Lisa’s hand and tugged her up off the bench. Hands tried to shove them back down but Mark swatted them away as he dragged Lisa toward the kitchen. There were so many people in the parlor now it was becoming difficult to breathe.
“I’m so tired,” Lisa said. “I don’t think a single person has gone home yet.”
“They just—” He was about to say keep coming when the patio door swooshed open again and another bright-eyed, pleasant-smelling couple appeared in the doorway.
