by Brian Hodge
And so. We walked. Backpacks on our shoulders, hiking boots on our feet, extra support in Vanessa’s — uncommonly high arches, she has — and, just to make it interesting, an additional agenda on our hearts. Figuring for this one we would be entirely on our own, and just as well, since most people frowned on the sort of thing we had in mind.
At least that’s one good thing about lots of money:
You get to say “Fuck you” like you really mean it.
A grand place for hikes, rural England, as though the glaciers of the last Ice Age had carved the land for feet and walking staves, and nobody can bear to challenge that. You can go virtually anywhere, cut across great tracts of farmland and tarry as long as you like, and with the farmers’ blessings, too, as long as you remember to shut the gates behind you so the sheep don’t stray out. Just try that in the U.S. without risking buckshot or worse.
Denied that level of freedom to roam the eastern county of Suffolk, surely we would never have found the old manor house. Well off any road of consequence, a few miles from the nearest town of Lavenham, it sat entirely by itself, surrounded by a quilt of tilled fields and wild meadows and pastures. It was the sort of place that becomes invisible to those who grow up familiar with it, seen but no longer noticed, as much a feature of the landscape as the oldest yew tree or some far-off tor, and given just as much thought. Even from a distance we could see that it was in ruins, bricks overrun with vines and ivy, one end’s outer wall collapsed inward, and two of its five chimneys crumbled halfway back to the many-gabled peaks of the roof.
“Well look what we have here,” Vanessa said. “Stumbling onto a place like this can make an eight-year-old out of anyone.”
And for the moment she reminded me of one, tall and lanky though she was, and older than I was by a couple of years. It was the eager flush of excitement that did it, and how she seemed somehow smaller beneath hair gone mad in the moist air of early autumn. Streaks of color had been dyed into it these past few months, then thickly braided … one purple, one green, one the same blue shade as her eyes.
She cupped a hand to her ear and cocked her gaze sideways to the sky.
“Hear that?” she asked Heather and me. “Hear it?”
“What?” we asked.
“That big booming voice, full of thunderbolts and glee,” she said. “And it’s saying, ‘Explore … explore!’”
She sprinted toward the manor house to oblige, sprinting surprisingly well considering the forty extra pounds’ worth of backpack and sleeping bag.
Heather and I opted for a more leisurely pace. Because her legs were not nearly as long as Vanessa’s, I knew that Heather was afraid how she might look by comparison, that anything less than reminiscent of a gazelle wouldn’t be worth the effort.
“Just once I’d like to be the first one to hear the voices,” said Heather. “Just once I’d like to be the one to tell her what they’re saying.”
“But don’t you think she’s probably been hearing voices her whole life?”
“Life is just so weird,” and then Heather laughed. “All that time you and me thinking we’re regular people and then we both fall in love with Joan of Arc.”
“Don’t forget, I fell in love with you first,” I told her, and hoped that this would always be enough to sustain us through whatever else we might be lacking. As though, deep down, I didn’t suspect that each of us knew better.
Heather’s mother, zoned on tranquilizers and launching herself nine floors toward the limousine that had glided up in front of the hotel to whisk her husband to a campaign appearance…
That was love too. Or at the very least the end result.
Realistically I cannot say I was expecting this arrangement, this polyamorous trinity we had formed, to work for a lifetime, or even for a decade. I’d never heard of these things lasting for any duration, everyone’s love and affection and ardor bifurcating equally. Such a delicate balance to maintain, able to tip so easily, someone beginning to feel that they’re getting the lesser end of the bargain, then demanding one partner or the other make a choice. All right, so there was the poet Ezra Pound, with a wife and a mistress who supposedly were crazy for each other, but I couldn’t shake this feeling, the laudable attributes of Heather and Vanessa notwithstanding, that I’d used up my personal share of good fortune already.
Heather and I had been together for years before Vanessa entered the picture. Heather was the one who met her first, Vanessa temping for a receptionist out on maternity leave at the brokerage firm where Heather gambled on the Dow Jones with other people’s money. This was one of Vanessa’s quote/unquote respectable phases, when five mornings a week fiscal realities sent her to the end of her closet that she didn’t really like to visit, and impelled her to leave her hair one color, an alien among people she could fool into thinking she was no different.
It was talk of suicide that nailed together the bridge between them, the first commonality that they’d realized they shared. Heather’s mother, of course, and a couple of years ago Vanessa’s younger brother had hung himself two months after his university commencement. He’d run up nearly thirty thousand dollars in credit card debt while a student, on top of his educational loan, more and more companies sending him new cards or raising his limits, and he saw no other way out from under the burden. Ever since, Vanessa had been attempting to sue the banks for wrongful death. As though she could get anywhere in a system so beautifully designed to indenture its slaves at ever-younger ages.
All of which comprised a strange, even morbid, basis for the two of them to start going out for lunch together, but there you go, and as so often happens between co-workers who’ve begun looking at each other over menus, one thing led to another, and, rather abruptly, a few nights each week Heather started working extra hours. That old euphemism.
Once living the lie ballooned up with too much pressure at home — four or five weeks, something like that — she burst into tears and told me what had really been going on. It was far less a confession than a great avalanche of bewilderment, half or more of all the assumptions she’d taken for granted about herself now being called into rigorous question.
And I tried, really tried, to react the way I was supposed to, to get enraged over the betrayal, and had it been another man I might’ve found it easier, but I couldn’t, just couldn’t summon the fury, because I was intrigued and it wasn’t so much out of base prurience as suddenly feeling as though I’d spent our years together with my eyes half-closed and now they were beginning to open, and when I looked at Heather and her tears and her confusion all I could think was I didn’t have one clue you had this in you. But neither had she, so at least we were even.
“I’m not supposed to want her, this isn’t the way I’m supposed to be,” Heather said.
“Yeah, who told you that?” I said, but hardly had to ask, so then I said, “Look, just about everything your parents told you about themselves and each other was a lie, so what makes you think they knew what they were talking about when it came to you?”
Which upset her further for a while, because she was the only one allowed to bad-mouth her family.
“So you’re not mad?” she asked later, once this lesser storm had passed.
“I’m too tired to be mad,” I said, and wondered if maybe that wasn’t a huge part of all the problems we’d never even stopped to realize we had.
We caught up with Vanessa inside the manor house, this ill-kept hulk gone far down the road to ruin. High-ceilinged and dank within, it was now a home fit for little else but mice and ghosts, although rather than diminish its grandeur, the state of the place only took that grandeur and turned it tragic. You could look at the staircase, dingy and splintered, and envision what it had once been, polished and gleaming in the mellow sunlight from the tall leaded windows. Could look at one of the cold fireplaces, filled now with leaves and grit, and imagine a blazing log that had taken four strong hands to wrestle onto the grate.
“Charming starter palace fo
r young royal newlyweds,” said Vanessa, to no one in particular. “Needs a little work.”
She’d temped for a real estate agency, too. Have to assume she learned how to read between the lines.
We wandered about, spotting the occasional evidence of prior squatters and steering clear of the unstable end where the wall had collapsed. A yawning, broken-timbered fracture now framed a ragged view of lawn and trees, but the pile of rubble looked too trifling to refill the hole, all the bricks worth salvaging long since hauled away by some frugal herdsman.
It was the gardens out back, or rather what had become of them, that really seized our fancy. Season after season, year upon year, hedges and flowerbeds and ferns had been abandoned to run riot over a couple of acres enclosed within a high stone wall. Vines had woven treacherous mats over flagstones and pathways; moss and lichens had crept up from the bases of statuary and birdbaths. A small fishpond, replenished solely by the frequent rain, had grown thick with algae, resounding with the plop of frogs when we came near. I couldn’t remember when I’d ever seen so many shades of green.
Even the walls surrounding the enclosure had succumbed to the onslaught, most of them carpeted in ivy, and Heather pointed to the sleek black shapes perched atop them that watched us or probed for insects under the greenery.
“If anyone tries to clip your wings,” she called to the ravens, “I hope you peck their eyes out!”
They stopped, heads cocked and beaks stilled. They listened, or seemed to. One squawked with its loud, ugly voice.
“You almost get the feeling they understand,” I said. “It’s that damned Hitchcock movie, you know.”
“As birds go, they’re sure not stupid, ravens aren’t,” Vanessa said. She wrapped her arms around Heather from behind and regarded the ravens with a wistful smile, and why not — consorts of gods and goddesses, eaters of the dead on sword-strewn battlefields, bearers of arcana, these birds and their mystery and their downright pagan mythos were just the sort of things closest to her heart. In her daydreams, I was certain that they whispered in her ear as surely as they were to have whispered into Odin’s.
Starting to graduate down to finer details, we converged on a section of the encircling wall that was free of ivy, and, aside from the statues, the only aspect of these gardens-run-amok that alluded to the touch of human hands. Vanessa traced their long-ago labors with her own, fingertips caressing one of several malformed faces that leered from the wall, bulging from the stone in bas-relief.
“God, they look like they could take your hand off in half a second,” Heather said. “They’re worse than snapping turtles.”
“Meaner, maybe,” I said. “But not a whole lot brighter.”
“Hush, both of you.” Vanessa, doing some snapping of her own. “You’ll hurt their feelings.”
“Oh, go hug a tree,” I said, just to be contentious, only half in play, my elder self swimming up from the depths. In truth, it was still closer to the surface than I would’ve liked, but I really was trying to be a born-again lackadaisical transient.
The carvings on the wall were the sort of thing I generally associated with churches, and old churches at that — cathedrals, really — medieval leftovers from Catholicism’s gaudier heritage, when popes and priests still condoned a discrete nod toward all things heathen that they’d borrowed, burned, or buried beneath a layer of revisionism. Then again, some people just think they look bitchin’. Hard to say how old these particular fellows were, but they certainly didn’t appear to have put up with centuries of weathering. If they’d been carved much before 1900, I would’ve been very surprised to hear it.
They were almost all head, and their heads almost all mouth. Fierce of eye, they gaped or seemed to bellow. Their arms and legs and compact barrel-bodies looked stumpy by comparison. Some of them reached around to grab their mouths at the corner and stretch them wider still, exposing the depths of their gullets. Giants, I guessed they were, because others grappled with smaller figures of normal human proportion and stuffed these poor unfortunates into their vast maws.
“Fe fi fo fum,” I whispered into Vanessa’s ear, quietly, so they wouldn’t hear me. “I smell the blood of an American.” Nuzzling her there and nipping at her lobe until she laughed and pushed me away.
“What do they mean?” Heather asked, defaulting to Vanessa on this one. “They’ve got to mean something, don’t they?”
“Oh sure. It’s like pictures in stained glass, they have a story to tell, a little lesson in them.” Vanessa shot a playfully bitchy glance at me. “For illiterates.”
“So what is it these fatheads have to say to us?” Heather said.
“If I’m remembering correctly, they’re to remind us that there are always forces out there much greater than we are.”
“Wow, they’re absolutely right,” I said. “For me, it was Microsoft.”
I expected recriminations from Vanessa, but no — something clearly more important had crossed her mind. She glanced about the gardens, then broke loose with a slow, broad smile as she looked at Heather and me.
“We’ll do it here, right here, tomorrow,” she told us. “Haven’t I been saying all along we’d know the right spot when we found it?”
And it was fine with me, because the place really was beautiful, and we surely wouldn’t be lucky enough to blunder across another like it anytime soon. Heather looked startled for a moment, as if our intentions had never been genuinely real until this moment, and the truth of it was only now sinking in.
“It’s perfect,” she said.
“Besides,” and Vanessa swept her hand toward the devouring heads peering from their wall, “if we’re getting married, we really should have witnesses.”
The money. Oh, right — that.
There are no better mousetraps anymore. These days, if you want the world to beat a path to your door, you’d best come up with something new and improved going on at the other end of the mouse plugged into your computer. While still in college, I founded a little start-up software company called Cerulean Data that grew in surges over the next ten years. Our greatest achievement was developing an applications programming interface that brought the giants calling. Next big leap forward in better-faster-wilder 3D graphics. Simply put, the giants had to have it.
There arose a mighty tug-of-war over how I should handle this, with my accountants and lawyers on one side, my doctor on the other. The former clamored in favor of licensing the API, since through me, they’d make far more money that way in the long run. But let it be understood they weren’t the ones with blood on their toilet paper, the trickle-down effect of my ravaging ulcer. My doctor, who had told me more than once that I was killing myself, voted to sell the company.
In a college business course I’d learned that during the development of the original Macintosh, Steve Jobs, one of Apple Computer’s founders, gave out T-shirts to his employees that said 90 HRS/WK AND LOVING IT. That’ll never be me, I vowed. Never wear a shirt like that. No. I’m going to have a life.
Ten, eleven years later, anyone who might’ve heard me back then would have been fully entitled to laugh themselves silly.
Human beings aren’t meant to live this way, Vanessa told me, because by this time she had moved into our condo and come to realize that Heather wasn’t exaggerating about how little time I actually spent there. Visitor in my own home. Human beings weren’t meant to shit blood, either, but it happens.
Cerulean Data had gone public two years before Microsoft came knocking, with me as the major shareholder, and the last thing the other shareholders’ board of directors was going to do was stand in the way of something like this. All they did was rub their pudgy hands in anticipation, because they knew exactly what would happen with their stock.
So did I. So did Heather. She brokered the deals for herself and Vanessa, the two of them pulling every penny they had out of the bank and borrowing money from whoever would lend it to them to buy up as much stock as they could, then sit back and wait for the
windfall. Insider trading, it’s called, and plenty of people have gone to prison for it. Worth the risk, though, and I don’t know but that only half of it was the money, and the rest of it the thrill of committing a smash-and-grab on a world that each of us wanted less and less to do with…
Maybe because of everybody we’d found out we had to share the place with.
Since Heather and Vanessa had their hearts set on a noon ceremony, in which we would each profess our vows to the other two with the sun at its zenith overhead, we planned to spend the night in the manor house. We found a ratty old broom and swept clean an area in front of the fireplace in what might once have been the drawing room. A quick test with dry leaves and scavenged kindling proved that the flue still drew smoke, and so we built a fire and spread out our sleeping bags, and it was as fine a lodging as any hotel or B&B where we’d spent a night, as long as you could overlook the lack of running water and a proper bathroom.
Food we had, bread and cheese and apples and wine, and as night fell past the windows, the chill deepened beyond the circle cast by our fire. It was all the light in the world right now, and all we needed. We sat cross-legged or sprawled along our spread sleeping bags and it seemed befitting to tell stories about this place we’d found. How it had come to be; how it had gotten this way.
According to Heather, its decline dated back to the darkest years of World War Two, while the Germans were steadily bombing England and Churchill vowed that the British would never surrender. The house belonged to a charmingly proper couple in their late middle years, distant royalty almost assuredly, but still very far from the throne. One dark night during the Blitz, a stray bomb had taken out the end of the house, but it just so happened that one of the German planes crashed in the nearby woods. They heard it go down, and for hours they waited, until the break of dawn, when the gentleman donned his tweed hunting jacket and brought the shotgun he used for pheasants, and went looking for survivors. He found the pilot alive but injured, and marched him back to the damaged house. But instead of calling the Royal Air Force, the gentleman and his wife, quietly enraged over what was happening to their country, kept the pilot tied captive in their cellar, where they tortured him to death over the next week. Then buried him in the gardens. Shortly thereafter, they went mad with guilt and shame, and, hollow-eyed and searching for absolution, roamed the hallways of the estate until they died. The end.
