A Stranger's House

by Bret Lott

  I moved through the kitchen to the door, looked out the window. I still held myself.

  The air out there was crystalline, and I could see everything: a tricycle in the yard two houses away, a plastic kiddie pool leaning against the garage of the house directly behind ours, other sets of stairs just like ours leading up the backs of other houses to other second-floor apartments. I looked at all these things, then saw something move in the next-door-neighbor’s yard. It was a small movement, nothing measurable. I wasn’t even sure I had seen anything, but still I looked at their yard, trying to find that movement, and I saw it again, a spark of light down near the foundation of the house.

  I made out the neighbor’s Christmas tree against the foundation, where it had been brought from inside last January, left there, forgotten. I had watched it over the months, seen it wither, turn brown, its needles fall. The light I had seen was from the few strands of tinsel someone had missed when taking down the decorations nine months ago, light reflected from somewhere, perhaps the half-moon overhead, as the pieces of silver moved in the small, cold wind outside.

  I stood at the window, looked again at the kiddie pool, at the faint chrome arc of the tricycle’s handlebars. I watched for the tentative light from the Christmas tree down there, and felt the emptiness again that finally made us want to leave the apartment.

  I still watched the Christmas tree, and waited for some piece of light We would take the place, I knew then. There was nothing more for us here. Only dead time, and the ghosts, perhaps, of children that never were, that would never be. Perhaps, too, the ghost of my mother.

  I waited for the apartment to warm up before I would go back to bed, move in under covers, and again wait, this time for the light of morning.

  When light came, it fell into the bedroom at a different angle, the angle of September, and I could finally see that the sun was disappearing, moving across the sky in a different arc to form new shadows in the room so that what I saw—the same old pieces of furniture—were somehow new. Here was the footboard before me, new sunlight glancing off the dark oak grain to give it greater depth, sharper lines. Light fell on the hardwood floor to delineate each single strip of wood; dust motes on the air—the air warmer now that the radiators were going—ducked in and out of the light.

  “So what do you say?” Tom said, and leaned in from the bathroom.

  I looked at him, my eyes dry with no sleep and the warm air. His glasses were fogged over a bit from the steam of his shower, and I had to smile, my dry face wrinkling with the movement of muscles beneath my skin. It seemed almost too much work, but I smiled.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. I stretched and yawned. More dust motes floated up around me, some caught by the light and lifted even higher, others falling, disappearing. I said, “What were you talking about?”

  “What else?” he said, and leaned against the doorjamb. He crossed one foot over the other. “The house up in Chesterfield. Weren’t you listening?”

  He stood before me naked, his hair wet, his deep-brown nipples clouded over with black hairs that spread across his chest.

  I said, “Come back to bed and we can talk,” and I sat up, pulled off my T-shirt and slipped off my underpants.

  A smile seemed to twist from his mouth, as if it hadn’t wanted to leave, as if he, too, could feel the muscles involved, the work of it almost but not quite more than he could bear. He came to me, and once inside me, my legs up above me and clasped around him, I could see his smile end, the muscles giving up. September sunlight cut through the air, through him, across his chest at an angle downward that gave his face and shoulders too much detail, each hair and pore and freckle too much attention, everything below the light falling to darkness, indiscriminate shadows of skin and flesh and bone.

  The irony, of course, lay in all the precautions we had taken the first four years, the importance of not getting pregnant, the pills placed on my tongue like some sort of sacrament, my trips to refill prescriptions at the University Health Center pharmacy like pilgrimages each month, where I would wait amid runny-nosed undergrads for the small, gray-haired woman behind the Plexiglas window to hand me the oblong, pink package, pills that were only chemicals put into a body that had no use for them.

  We had fights those four years, fights over when to begin, and it was always me who started them. I wanted to begin our lives.

  I remember one Thursday morning, when, after making love, Tom had simply pulled away from me and had headed to the bathroom. All I had done was say, “Let’s start now.”

  He hadn’t spoken to me, hadn’t said a word as I heard him take his shower, then towel himself dry. I climbed out of bed to take my own shower, all without a word between us, because we both knew what the other was thinking.

  I’d dried myself off, then gone into the bedroom, put on my bra and underpants, when finally he’d said, “What do you think? Just what do you think?”

  I went into the bathroom. He was standing at the sink, his razor poised at his throat, ready to swing up his chin, shave off the cream and stubble. He brought down the razor, and put both hands on the edge of the sink.

  I reached across him and brought from inside the medicine cabinet the pills, and sat on the toilet seat. I hadn’t dried my hair yet, and I could feel it wet on my shoulders, a single drop falling down my back.

  I was looking at the pink plastic, at the foil center, half the pills already gone. Today was Thursday, and the Thursday pill sat there, ready for me to pop it out, swallow it. The days listed there on the package, I thought, were like some sort of strange calendar truer than anything you could hang on a wall. Twenty-one days on, seven days off. But I wanted off now. I wanted off.

  He reached to the hot-water knob, turned it on, then rinsed the razor, though there was no shaving cream on it. He tapped it hard against the sink, and slowly brought the razor to his throat. He started shaving again.

  He said, “You’re not even thinking of the baby, it sounds like to me.” He brought the razor down, rinsed it again. “It seems you’re not even looking at the future. We don’t have the money yet. Look at the schedule. We’re not even halfway there. And you don’t know if you’ll be written into the next grant or not. At least that’s what you told me. And my job”—he tapped the razor again, started in on his left cheek—“my job is still trash. You know I need a promotion. You know I want to be in town. I’ve had enough of this shit writing about house auctions in Williamsburg and car wrecks in Turners Falls. I want in town. That’s where I’ll be, too, in a couple of years. But I don’t want a child until then. I just don’t like the idea of me being outside of town is all. I want to be here. That, and the money.”

  He finished with his cheek, turned on the hot water again. He stopped, the razor just before the water, and looked at me.

  He said, “Claire?”

  “What?” I’d said, too loud, and I turned and stood, faced the bathtub, our old clawfoot bathtub, the shower ring and curtains rigged up with wires hung from the ceiling.

  “Think of the baby,” he said.

  I still had the pills in my hand, my finger on Thursday, ready to postpone the future and what we both wanted, but I turned around to him. Tom, startled, dropped the razor in the sink.

  He was wrong about my not thinking about the baby, because I was. I was thinking about him or her—it didn’t matter which—and about the life, and I said, “I am thinking of the baby. You’re wrong, goddammit,” and I threw the pills at him, threw the package and Thursday and the other week-and-a-half’s worth of drugs that damned whatever possible life was in me. “I’m thinking of it, and that’s what’s wrong,” I said, and I cried, put one hand up to my eyes, covered them; with the other I leaned toward the toilet tank and put my hand on it, felt the cold porcelain. “I’m thinking of it, and I want it.”

  I wiped my eyes, tried to see. Through my tears I saw Tom kneeling, his face still not shaved completely. He was reaching under the sink, and then he stood. He held out his hand, the pac
kage in his palm.

  I looked up at him. I said, “Goddamn you,” and I took the package from him, and I pressed down on Thursday, and I put the pill in my mouth.

  I stared at him, the pill on my tongue, and I decided to let it dissolve there in some act of vengeance. I wanted to taste it, to feel the dark magic that would fool my body into thinking it was pregnant, wanted to imagine each molecule of the potion there in my mouth, and imagine it washing away my hopes.

  But Tom was right: we didn’t have enough money saved, didn’t have secure-enough jobs. There was just too much to wait for, and then, because the taste of the pill had become too bitter to bear, I pushed Tom away from the sink, filled the blue plastic cup with water, and I washed the pill down with huge gulps, afraid the taste would remain on my tongue forever.

  Tom was standing against the wall next to the sink, his face still half-shaved. His eyes were down.

  I stared at him and waited for him to look up, willed him to look at me. But he would not look, and I said, “Happy?” and went into the bedroom.

  I heard him move in the bathroom, the hard tap of the razor on the sink, the water run. Then he turned it off. He said, “No, I am not happy. But we have no choice,” and I remember seething then, my husband with this last word, when it was me, me who had ingested the drug, me whose body would someday be filled with life, neither of us knowing back then that that someday would not come. We would be waiting the rest of our lives.

  I told Tom I wanted the place in Chesterfield, that it seemed the house needed what we could give it: repairs, restoration, care. He had nodded, tightened his tie to his throat as he stood before the armoire mirror. Next he took off his glasses and cleaned them with the tip of his tie. It was a quick move, almost instinct, the left hand holding the frame, the right swirling the tie on the lenses, and I knew what it meant: he was thinking, measuring, deliberating. Every time he cleaned his glasses this way, so quick and business-like, it meant he was contemplating a decision. Right now, I knew, he was heading toward some move about the house, and I smiled.

  He put the glasses back on, touched the tie at his throat again, and smiled at me.

  “Well?” I said.

  He shrugged. “We’ll have to think. And go out there tomorrow.” He paused. “We’ll see.”

  I said, “We will,” and then we were off to work, down the stairs and to the car as every day. The cold air outside was new, as new as the angle of the sun, crisp air that signaled there would be no return of the moist, green air of summer.

  We drove over to the newspaper, where for the last three years he’d been an assistant editor, the five years before that a reporter. He still did stories a couple of days a week, just as most everyone else did on the paper. But Tom wanted it that way. He couldn’t live at his desk, he’d found out only a month or two after he’d been promoted to assistant editor, sitting every day before the green screen of his terminal. Some days when he’d spent the whole day behind the desk, he would come home, take his glasses off and not put them back on until the next morning, though he was so nearsighted he had to wear his glasses while reading in bed. On those nights after the computer screen had killed his eyes we would sit in the living room, me watching television, him with his eyes closed, just listening.

  The newspaper offices were in a low, ugly white building an architect some years ago had decided might make the paper seem more important, more in step. But to me the building had always resembled a ranch-style tract house, the roof moving up to a low peak of asphalt shingles, the walls of clean brick. All horizontal lines, all flat, all uninteresting, squatting here in the middle of a 350-year-old town.

  I’d been inside the building only once, a few months after we were married. Tom had brought me in to show me his desk. The inside was just one huge room, partitions and cubicles here and there, all the rest simply rows on rows of computer terminals and men and women smoking, the click of keyboards like rattling bones.

  He’d brought me to the middle of one row, the two of us weaving between people, all of them sunk into their chairs, eyes staring at the green screens. We finally stopped at a desk.

  “This is it,” Tom had said, his hands in his back pockets. People around us typed away, oblivious. The desk was covered with papers, the only sign the mess might have belonged to him the blue-green ceramic coffee mug I’d bought for him.

  But even though Tom worked there every day, his desk no longer in the middle row but, now that he was an assistant editor, pushed up against one of the walls, that one time had been enough for me. I’d never been back inside, where a couple hundred people worked each day, typing, smoking, sweating over deadlines. There were too many people in there, too much sound, too much pressure. Let me work away quietly at the lab, I told Tom every time he asked me to come in. He could have that ugly place.

  We were in the parking lot, and Tom climbed out of the car. “See you tonight,” he said, and closed the door.

  I said, “Think about Chesterfield,” but I was too late, the door already closed, Tom on his way. But then, when he was at the door, one hand to the handle ready to pull it open, he turned back to me, gave a quick wave.

  He was smiling, and seemed now to be a happy man, one looking forward to the future; looking forward, I imagined, to the house in Chesterfield.

  I leaned into the secretaries’ office, said, “Hi,” then moved on down the hall to the locker room. Paige and Wendy called out “Good morning,” their voices echoing down the dark hall.

  The locker room—only a converted men’s bathroom—smelled like it always did: Lysol and urine. Bradford Hall, our laboratory, had for some twenty years been a men’s dormitory on campus; that many years of undergraduate boys leaning over urinals and missing had chemically altered the tile and grout so that, no matter how much Lysol the janitorial crew used, the place still smelled the same.

  Sandra stood at her locker, the door open. She shrugged off her backpack, hung it up inside, and turned to me.

  “Good news,” I said. “I think we found the house.”

  She pulled her lab coat from inside the locker, started putting it on. She smiled, and said, “You’re kidding. You mean the happy couple’s finally decided after a decade of searching that indeed a house exists for them somewhere in the universe?” She had on what she wore every day: a man’s oxford shirt, white painter’s pants and tennis shoes, uniform for most every psych grad student on campus. Today she wore her brunette hair in a French braid, her hair pulled taut away from her face. She had beautiful skin, healthy and tan from riding her bicycle from the married-student housing complex just north of campus to work and back every day.

  “Finally,” I said, and laughed. “At last count we’d seen three hundred and twelve houses. This, of course, spread out over twelve realtors, each of them feeling as if we were family.” I hung my pocketbook on the hook inside the locker and pulled out my lab coat “But this house is different. At least I think it is. The work well need to do isn’t too difficult, at least from what we saw of it. It was pretty dark by the time we got out there to see it.”

  She had finished buttoning up the coat, and I saw the cuffs of her shirt sticking out from inside the coat sleeves. This would be her only concession to the cold outside: her shirtsleeves were rolled down.

  “Where is it?” she said. She closed her locker door, leaned against it as I finished buttoning my coat I looked into the mirror on the inside of my door.

  “Chesterfield. Actually a little outside, just past the gorge. It’s way out there.”

  “Chesterfield. I think Jim and I got out there once on our bikes. But when we got to the end of the main drag in town, we were at the top of this hill that led practically straight down. We figured we’d better stop there and head back. We didn’t want to have to look in the face the ride back up the hill when we got to whatever was down at the bottom.”

  “That’s where the gorge is,” I said. “And the place is just past there, back in the woods. It’s on a dirt road
. And it’s a three-quarter Cape.” I touched my hair in a couple of places, but, as always, nothing happened. It was just there on my head, down to my shoulders. Just my hair, brunette like Sandra’s, but too fine. I closed the locker door.

  I turned and looked at her, just then taking in what she had said about riding bikes to Chesterfield. “You mean you rode all the way out there?” I said.

  She shrugged. “Sure. It’s not really all that far away, when you think about it. We’ve ridden to Boston before. Ninety miles. Try that out sometime, and then decide whether or not Chesterfield is way out there.” She pushed herself off the locker door, spread her feet apart, and held her arms up. She started flexing them. “We’re tough. We eat our Wheaties.”

  I shook my head and laughed, pushed open the heavy door, and we headed back up the hall to Wendy and Paige’s office.

  The hall was dark, a wiring problem that the Physical Plant had never ironed out so that the hall, fifty yards long from one end to the other, had only three lights, high-watt bulbs that whited out your face whenever you walked beneath them. Past the light the hall was nearly black again, the only light the reflection on the linoleum of the next bulb down the hall.

  We turned into Paige and Wendy’s office, and I had to squint, the sun from their window so bright. They were both at their desks, mugs of coffee before them, the sunlight catching wisps of steam rising from the mugs. Wendy had her elbows on her desktop; Paige was leaning back in her chair, her hands on the chair arms. Both stared at nothing.

  “Wake up,” Sandra said.

  I said, “And smell the coffee.”

  They turned to us, their faces blank. Paige said, “This is how we work best. In contemplation.”

  Wendy nodded. “We’re simultaneously contemplating each other’s navel.” She picked up her mug and took a sip.

  I said, “Group research?”

  “No,” Paige said, her face still blank. She leaned forward in her chair and reached for her coffee cup. “Introspective wallowing. That and the fact Will wants this grant done today, and we had hoped to go home before eleven fifteen tonight.”