House of Windows

by John Langan

  I think that, then I think, No, there was nothing I could have done. Roger—we—had been granted a reprieve, but it was temporary. Here I am calling him the fatalist, right? I don't know. After the fact, it's hard to believe that things could have turned out any other way than they did. Roger was who he was. It's like—one semester, I took Old English, to fulfill the development of English requirement for the Master's. I wrote my final paper on Beowulf—because let's face it, when you're studying Anglo-Saxon, there's not a whole lot else to write on. Anyway, I became really interested in the word "weird." Its roots are in the Anglo-Saxon "wyrd," which most translators render as "fate," and which isn't completely accurate. I did all this research, cracked open old dictionaries you had to blow the dust off, and I discovered that what "wyrd" actually means is something like "the way things had to be because that's the way they are." It's kind of hard to wrap your mind around, at first. If things hadn't been meant to be the way they are, then they would have been different. Since they are the way they are, that must be the way they were intended to be. Talk about circular logic, I know. But I think they were on to something, on to how, when you look back over your life, the events in it can seem oddly inevitable, as if there really are Fates. I know Aristotle said character is fate, but that amounts to pretty much the same thing, doesn't it? Who can escape who they are?

  During that month we had, Roger slept better than he had since hearing that Ted had died. Even on the nights he was awake late, he was calmer. He'd sit up in bed beside me, reading. No more late night walks; instead, Roger took up jogging. His doctors had been telling him he needed to start exercising on a regular basis, and he decided this was the time to follow their advice. Every morning at five, Roger set out on a run that took him from the apartment, up to campus, and back again. By the time he returned, I'd have dragged myself out of bed and started the coffee, and we'd sit at the kitchen table and have breakfast together.

  Sometimes, Roger varied the route he took to or from the college. Once he'd crossed the bridge over the Svartkill, he'd turn right on Water Street and push up the steep hill, there. Or he'd turn left, onto Founders, loop around to 32, and follow that into town. At first, he did so for the sake of variety, to look at some different scenery. He took other routes, too. Over breakfast, I'd ask him where he'd gone and he'd narrate his run: past Pete's Corner Pub, only recently emptied from the previous night, its doors open to air the place out; past the bus station, full of early morning commuters to the City; or past the quiet neighborhoods around the college, nodding at the occasional fellow-jogger. If he was feeling especially ambitious, he kept going past SUNY to Dunkin' Donuts.

  The bad thing about his runs was that they left Roger alone with his thoughts. As far as I'm concerned, the great thing about exercise is the excuse it gives you to hamster-out, leave your brain behind as you make your wheel go round and round. Roger couldn't do that. Some mornings, he'd spend breakfast telling me about an idea he'd had for an article. Others, he'd talk politics. His opinion of the President had never really changed. He was one of the only people I knew who cut Bush no post-9/11 slack. A lot of conversation focused on the War on Terror, especially Afghanistan. "This administration has no understanding of anything," he said. "They think of a place like Afghanistan as the setting for a Rambo movie. Do they understand that the West has been involved in that country since Dickens's day? Oh yes, the first war between a Western power and the Afghans was started in 1838, by the British. It dragged on for four years. I looked into it because I thought I might write an article about its effects on Dickens's novels of the time. The British were concerned about Russian influence on the country that bordered their Indian holdings, so they invaded and tried to replace the emir of Afghanistan with a puppet. It did not work; they suffered heavy losses and, in the end, negotiated with the same man whose ouster had been the aim of their incursion." He shook his head. "Nor is the subsequent history of Western involvement any more cause for optimism. Ask the Soviets. But Bush and his cronies think that their laser-guided bombs and unmanned surveillance drones will make things different for us. They won't. Eventually, these kinds of things come down to negotiation, to people talking to other people. Given this crew's communication skills, such does not bode well."

  I wasn't sure how to respond. I mean, 9/11 had felt like the beginning of a war to me. What else were we supposed to have done?

  The first time Roger told me he'd run along Founders, past Belvedere House, I looked up from my bagel. Since Ted's memorial service, we hadn't returned to Founders. I thought his sight of the house that morning was the first he'd seen it in months. I was expecting—well, I wasn't expecting anything—I was just surprised, and a little concerned about the effect encountering the place might have on him. I asked, "How was it?"

  "How was what?"

  "The house," I said, "seeing it again."

  He hesitated, running the tape of the morning's run in his head. He said, "It was fine."

  "Are you sure?"

  "Yes," he said, turning to me. "Belvedere House will always stir memories in me, darling; how could it not? I lived the majority of my life under its roof. It is my house of memories, you might say. Some of them are pleasant; more, I fear, are not. But you needn't worry about my past overwhelming me. I can stand my own history." He smiled, and I smiled, too, because that was what I'd been worried about.

  (I tried not to remember that huge vacant space, those faces. I almost succeeded, too.)

  I'm not sure exactly when Roger began to vary the course of his run less. It must have been a week, maybe two, after the end of that good month. A couple of days in a row, when I asked him which way he'd taken today, he said, "Oh, the usual." I assumed that meant he'd headed straight up Main Street to the traffic light at Manheim and turned right there. I'm sure he knew I would think this way. Why he didn't want to tell me he was running past his former house on his way into and out of town—when I finally figured it out and asked him about it, Roger claimed he hadn't thought it worth mentioning. "You didn't think I'd want to know that you were running past the place you used to live with your ex-wife and dead son, twice a day, seven days a week?" I said. "Especially when there are plenty of other routes you could have been taking? You didn't find your own behavior in any way unusual?"

  "Not in the slightest," Roger said. He was lying, of course, but by that point things had gone so far down the road to ruin that to hear he'd lied to me a couple of months before—or misled me, whatever—to hear that was of academic interest, at best, the kind of information you'd want to hold onto for later, after the train wreck you were part of was over and you were trying to understand what had gone wrong. Like now.

  So there was Roger, in his sweats and sneakers and the sweatband I told him he didn't need but that fit his picture of a jogger, his feet pounding the pavement, the house where his relationship with his son had grown, blossomed, faded, and died looming to his right. Belvedere House with its stone first storey and wooden second, third, and attic storeys, its host of windows, its double front doors, its broad lawn dotted with the occasional tree. It sat there and drew his attention to it irresistibly, his own personal black hole, bending all his thoughts in its direction. Every window was a movie screen playing a different scene from his thirty-three years there. Do I have to say all of them were of him and Ted? On his and Joanne's bedroom window—the one that looked out on Frenchman's Mountain—he watched himself walk back and forth across the bedroom, singing Victorian lullabies to the infant Ted to soothe him back to sleep. On the kitchen window, which faced the south lawn, he saw himself sitting down beside a ten-year-old Ted at the kitchen table to explain why the Huguenots had fled France. On the basement windows, he looked at himself and Ted trying to build a basic solar panel for Ted's eighth grade science project. Other windows showed him and Ted throwing the ubiquitous baseball, after all these years, his hand still remembered the slap of the ball as it smacked into his glove, his arm, the pleasant ache of throwing fastball af
ter fastball, his eyes, squinting against the morning sunlight. Then Roger was past the house, on his way to Route 32 and the college. The memories trailed along with him for a while, dissipating the further he went.

  When Roger started going out for walks again, he presented it to me as an extension of his exercising. Once he was back from his run and breakfasted, he'd shower, shave, and sit down either to read or write. He was rereading Bleak House for the I-don't-know-how-many-eth time. While out on his runs, he said, he'd been struck by an idea for a new article on The Ghost's Walk in that novel. Roger worked straight through to the early afternoon—one or two—when he broke for lunch and a walk. "I need to unwind myself," was how he explained it, "mind and body." Of course I remembered those nights he'd spent out after Ted's death—but this was different. For one thing, it was during the day; for another, after having sat in front of the computer for five or six hours, it was no surprise that Roger would want to stretch his legs, have a change of scene. Most afternoons, I wasn't even home. If I wasn't teaching at Penrose, I was in their library, doing research for an article on Hawthorne, Dickinson, and Puritan guilt. "An afternoon stroll will complement my morning run," Roger said, which he meant one way and I took another.

  His walks led him all over the place, but there weren't many that didn't include the house. Moving at a slower pace, Roger could linger over the memories he'd revisited that morning. He could recall Ted's weight in his arms, the smell of talcum powder, the floorboards creaking as he paced them. He could see Ted's fifth grade social studies textbook open on the kitchen table, a portrait of Cardinal Richelieu on the lower right hand corner of the right hand page, and he could smell the sweet Juicy Fruit gum Ted was chewing loudly, a sure sign Joanne had bored him. He could remember standing beside Ted at the cluttered basement workbench while Ted sawed the end off a piece of plywood, the saw dropping a steady stream of almost-fragrant sawdust as it rasped back and forth. Near the house and its memories, Ted didn't seem so far off, so irretrievably lost.

  What surprises me most about Roger's decision to move back into Belvedere House is that it took him so long to come to it. The idea occurred to him early on—his third run past the house, it flickered across his mind. With each new encounter—especially after his memories started playing out on it again—returning to the house appeared less ridiculous, less masochistic, and more attractive. He couldn't imagine Joanne truly wanted to hold onto it. She had always been one of those people who doesn't like to dwell on what was. Roger had sufficient funds to purchase her share of Belvedere House if she would be willing to part with it. He'd lost some money when the dot com bubble burst, but he'd recovered it in relatively short order and made more on top of that. ("The benefits of a Republican financial advisor," he said.) He was sure he'd be able to convince Joanne to sell. It seemed increasingly important—urgent, even—that he take possession of the place again. He called his lawyer and instructed him to contact Joanne's lawyer and start talking.

  I was caught completely off-guard—shocked, really. We were lying in bed one Saturday afternoon and Roger said, "I've got something to tell you."

  "What is it?" I asked. I thought he was going to say that he wanted to order-out for pizza, which he'd been trying to cut back on for his cholesterol.

  Instead, he said, "We're moving."

  I thought he was joking. I said, "Okay, we're moving. Where are we moving to? I vote for Hawaii."

  "Belvedere House."

  "Right. As if Joanne would ever sell her share to you."

  "She already has," he said.

  "What?" I sat up.

  He was serious. "I had my lawyer contact hers about buying her out. She was amenable. The lawyers negotiated a price. I mailed a check to her three days ago. Yesterday, Dr. Sullivan received her one month's notice."

  That was it. The whole thing was a fait accompli. I was not happy. I said, "What makes you think I want to move?"

  "Oh please, Veronica," Roger said. "How often have you complained about our lack of space? This apartment was too small for you on your own. With two of us sharing it, it's positively cramped."

  The apartment was too small. When I'd moved in, I hadn't cared. Actually, its size had been one of its charms. Living room, kitchen, bedroom, and bathroom: I was like Emily Dickinson with my tiny, ordered place. I'd had to be inventive, make maximum use of the space I had, but I could look out my living room window onto a garden—Tom and Jack, the landlords, kept this enormous flower garden in the backyard—and beyond the garden was the river, with farmland on the other shore. There is something to be said for living somewhere nice; the aesthetics of place are underrated. After Roger moved in, though, what had been too little room to begin with shrank to the point of no return. He put most of his stuff in storage, but even so, every square inch of the apartment was piled high with books, CDs, and videotapes, not to mention Roger's clothes, which had a habit of displacing mine onto the bed and couch. If we'd had our baby, there would have been no way we could've stayed there.

  All the same, who wants to move into the house your husband lived most of his last marriage in? That was the first thing I thought of, not Ted, but Joanne. Roger intended to take me to her house. Hers, because she'd decorated it. She'd picked the furniture, the wallpaper, the drapes, the color scheme, everything. Living there, I'd be surrounded by a hundred little reminders of her and her starched personality. I was more insecure than I should have been, I know. It's—you can stand the thought that the person you're with now was with someone before you, as long as you don't have to confront that fact daily. I said, "Okay, fair enough. The apartment is too small. Why there? Why couldn't we move someplace else?"

  "Because," Roger said, "for the amount I paid Joanne, we couldn't get one-half the house."

  He made it all sound so reasonable, which is why, although I debated the matter with him for the rest of the day and well into the night, in the end, I agreed. I can't lie: the prospect of having all that room was very attractive. I mean, the house had its own library, for God's sake. If Roger wanted this as badly as he did, then I figured he'd be willing to let me redecorate, which he was. Late that night, I said yes. Roger was delighted, as happy as I'd seen him. We made love, went to sleep, and, the next morning, started packing.

  That afternoon—I was emptying one of the bookshelves into the last cardboard box I'd had stored under my bed. Roger had gone out to the liquor store in Joppenburgh for more. I lowered a stack of books into the box—they were all Theory, Kristeva's Powers of Horror on top. Very funny. I stood up, and the air was full of the smell of blood. Thick, copper—it was so strong I gagged. I coughed, went to turn on the fan, and I was walking across an open space towards an enormous face framed by a doorway with a cracked lintel. To either side of it were equally huge faces in their own doorways. The face opened its mouth, and its tongue, pink and wet, uncoiled down its chin and slapped onto the floor. The tongue wriggled and flopped like a fish out of water. I took a step back, through air full of Roger's words, fluttering around me like moths: "disown" and "blood" and "failure" and "anything." The oversized tongue squirmed on the floor. I took another step back. This is not happening, I said to myself. I said it out loud: "This is not happening." Blood reeked in my mouth. I shouted, "This is not happening!"

  I was alone in my living room. For a second, the blood smell hung around me, then that was gone, as well. I sat down and did not raise myself up until Roger was opening the door, a stack of flattened boxes cradled in his arms. "Sitting down on the job?" he said.

  "Just taking a break."

  I know, I know: Why didn't I say anything? What was I supposed to say? I had a recurrence of a hallucination I had when I miscarried? Because that was what I was sure had happened. That it might have been anything more was ridiculous. If it hadn't come from what were obviously the troubled depths of my psyche, then why had it stopped when I'd told it to? (Never mind that I'd had to repeat myself.) With the prospect of taking up residence in the very house that had figu
red in my fantasy to begin with, wasn't it only natural for that fantasy to offer a repeat performance? Wouldn't it have been more strange if the day had passed without me seeing anything?

  I realize how lame this sounds—I think I did then, too. You wouldn't guess—you'd assume that, if even one of the incidents I've described happened to you, you'd be at the psychiatrist's pronto. Maybe some people would be. It's—once everything's over and done, and you're sitting turning events over in your mind, doubt wastes no time in letting itself be heard. Was that really as bad as you're making it out to be? Aren't you being just a little bit melodramatic? You don't count on the inertia of your personality. That, and the more time passes, the more absurd the whole thing seems. You feel embarrassed, even ashamed.