by Rufi Thorpe
And while they waited, Ray got tired of Bunny sulking around his house and eating everything in sight, and so he put her to work in his office. At first this disturbed his assistant, Cassie, the blond woman who had offered me that Two Palms Realty blanket on the Fourth of July all those years ago. She was devoted, pathologically, to Ray Lampert, and she took any attempts to help her as an insult to her ability. She assigned Bunny to put doorknob flyers on every house in North Shore, made her hand-collate photocopies, told her to relabel all the already labeled files so that the font of the labels would all match. “We want a united look,” she said. As though customers were looking through the files. As though the united look would be observed by anyone other than Cassie herself. Eventually she relegated some of the more annoying computer work, keeping all the postings active on the various websites, uploading endless virtual tours, but even this mindless busywork, Cassie seemed to believe, was almost sacred in its importance.
Bunny told me about all of this when we would get together, usually every three or four days, in the weeks after her assault on Ann Marie. We didn’t see each other more often than that, and I’m not sure why. My aunt, while expressing a certain apprehension about my friendship with Bunny “all things considered,” had not vetoed it. If I had wanted to, I could probably have spent every evening hanging out with Bunny and Ray Lampert. I could see the lights of the TV flickering inside their house. Considering that Aunt Deedee had emptied out what was literally a walk-in closet and put a twin-size bed in there and called it “Michael’s room,” it wasn’t like hanging out in my own house was great. But I didn’t want to go over there too much. In fact, every time I saw Bunny, I felt more and more distant from her.
The first moment I noticed it, I didn’t even know what it was. The feeling was caused by an offhand remark that Ray had made. Her father had mentioned to her that perhaps she should take up boxing, since it was somewhat unusual for a woman to have the upper body strength necessary for a knockout. I was not aware in the moment that this remark bothered me, and I did not experience distaste per se, but the comment did get lodged in my head and I would think of it randomly even weeks later. Imagine this being Ray Lampert’s takeaway. That his daughter was specially gifted, but this time, as a boxer.
I was similarly perturbed by the fact that Ray Lampert had arranged for the assistant coach, Eric, to work with Bunny three or four times a week to “keep her sharp, just in case.” He told me this as we were all eating pho together on Main Street on a Saturday afternoon. “Just in case?” I asked.
“In case something changes,” Ray Lampert said, as though this were the most reasonable thing in the world. As though the school would magically reverse its decision and reinstate Bunny just in time for her to play in the championship game. Bunny slurped her pho, nodding, like it all made perfect sense. She was on lunch break from her new job at her dad’s office. They were open even on Saturdays. She was wearing professional clothes that Ray had bought for her in a spree at Target, ruffly, cheap, polyester chiffon things that fit Bunny absurdly. On Bunny, a knee-length skirt was practically mid-thigh. “Things could change!” Ray Lampert said, and laughed. “Life is a fickle bitch.”
In fact, things were changing. Ms. Harriet was changing. She called Ray Lampert at ten o’clock one night when Bunny and I were watching a movie in their living room. Ray picked up the phone, and we knew by the way he greeted her that it was Ms. Harriet. Through wrenching sobs, she told Ray that her baby was never gonna wake up again, that he stole her baby, that everything he touched turned to shit, that there was a curse on him and black evil that poured off him and she had seen it in Bunny as a baby.
When Ray finally got her off the phone (and one did have to commend him, he kept his head admirably and was responding with much kinder, floofier BS than I could have summoned: “Oh, Harriet, I hear you are so upset. I hear your grief”), he told us verbatim what she had been saying in a cruel impersonation of her voice. He and Bunny laughed, and I knew it was nervous laughter, but it disconcerted me anyway. “Ann Marie’s not going to die,” Ray Lampert said, as though Ms. Harriet were being absurd. He had spoken to his friend who was a doctor, who said a medically induced coma could be necessary for days, even weeks. There was no reason to believe Ann Marie would die based simply on the length of the coma. They understood how Ms. Harriet could be afraid of that, of course they could. But they were more distant from the problem. They could be more objective. Ray had done some research online. And the odds were good.
There was no humanity in them. Or perhaps there was too much humanity in them.
* * *
—
I had been supposed to break it off with Anthony, and I told my Aunt Deedee that I had, but somehow I could not do it. Instead, I ghosted him. But I could not bring myself to block his number, and so his texts leaked through, blooming like blood through a bandage. And I read them.
He wrote:
Probably you are wise to be ignoring me, and I imagine it is because you have learned something about me that displeases you, and probably you are right to do so. There is something in the geometry of your upper lip and the way the skin connects to the cartilage of your nose and the thicker flesh of your lips that dissolves my moral ability into a series of snapping synapses. I look at your blinking eye and I do not know who I am or what I am allowed to have, and I feel joyful and guiltless like a child. It is difficult not to believe I have a right to this feeling. It is difficult not to believe that every creature under the sun has a right to something as simple and honest as the pleasure I feel hearing your voice as you talk, climbing a series of ideas as a young boy might climb a tree, innocent of how far he could fall.
He texted:
I am so sorry to keep texting you. I do not want to be this whining, childish person chasing after you and insisting on explanations. But I do wish you thought enough of me to be willing to explain. I suppose I am afraid also that this might be some sort of test, and if I persist and show you that I am willing to debase myself, to text you every hour, to beg to hear your voice or kiss your knee, then perhaps you will relent and our relationship can come into itself even more fully than before. Perhaps you need me to prove myself.
The anguish caused by not answering his texts was physical in nature, as though someone were pressing with their thumbs on my eyeballs until they ached. I got a C-minus on a calculus test and felt that I might soon perish through the intensity of my emotions.
One day, Anthony texted me a picture. It was a little boy, perhaps four years old, handsome, with dark curly hair. The boy was laughing so big that you could see the pink roof of his mouth. This is Hank, he said. This is my son. He’s twelve now, but this is one of my favorite pictures of him.
The next day he texted me a picture of a middle-aged woman who was not unpretty. She was blond from a bottle with her roots growing out, and she had downy cheeks and tortoiseshell glasses. She was making a peace sign at the camera and sticking her tongue out. He wrote:
This is my wife, Laura. I married her when I was forty and she was twenty-five. She does not know that I have relationships with men. Despite this, our marriage is happy and I love being a father. Hank is my world. Laura is my best friend. I’m not willing to give them up. This means that the kind of relationship I can offer you is necessarily limited, and I am so sorry. I am so sorry because I wish I could offer you more. I am so sorry because I understand now that to have withheld this fact of exactly how limited my ability to enter your life was going to be was unethical. It was wrong. I can only say that at the time, I thought you were young and would tire of me anyway. Life would pull you down its road, and you would not have time for old men like me.
The next day he texted:
I am sorry for lying about my age on my profile. I told you I was 45, but I am 56. I have told you many lies. I told you I was in love with you, and I believe this to be true. What
other name can I possibly give to this feeling? How is it that I feel I could die from your silence, yet I am not willing to alter my course or offer you more? Is it that I have chosen my own death?
I didn’t know what to tell him. I was weirdly relieved that he was fifty-six and not sixty as Ann Marie had claimed, but what was the difference really? His son, Hank, looked like him, was beautiful in an easy smiling way that reminded me of him. His wife, Laura, looked nice. Maybe it worked for him. Who was I to make proclamations about adult life, the compromises worth making, the joys of parenthood compared to the joys of erotic love? I was not confident enough to tell him what I myself barely knew, which is that being true to yourself, even if it makes everyone hate you, even if it makes people want to kill you, is the most radical form of liberty, and when you make contact with something as electric and terrifying as the unadorned truth of yourself, it burns away so many other smaller forms of bondage you weren’t even aware of, so you find yourself irradiated and unencumbered. That there is something holy in that kind of stubbornness. That’s what I wanted to say to him. But I didn’t know how to text that. And I didn’t know why I should even try or whether I was an idiot or what there was to live for now that the greatest intimacy I had ever known had been shown to be so cheap and tawdry.
* * *
—
“Look at this place,” Bunny said. She’d had me meet her at a house her father was selling. It was on the other side of Main Street, and I had never had a friend on this part of Oak Street, never spent any time over this way, which was odd. To find a part of your incredibly small town that you are not familiar with. It was a huge house that had been added on to repeatedly with an utter disregard for a centralized design, and so as you moved through the rooms you felt like you were in a dream where doors kept opening onto new doors. The front door opened onto a small living room and open kitchen, but then a door on the left opened into a library with a full bar, all of the woodwork intricate and custom. “He was a finish carpenter,” Bunny told me. Through the library there was another living room with a fireplace, as well as a large bedroom and bath. All of the walls were painted hot pink. Santa Fe chic, Bunny called it. “Look, he built in hidey-holes everywhere. I guess he was some kind of gun nut.” She showed me how panels in the library came away and secret compartments could be accessed. Upstairs there were another two bedrooms, and in one of the bedrooms there was a flight of stairs in the middle of the room that led up to a half-size door. It was the most peculiar thing.
“What’s up there?” I asked.
“Come on,” Bunny said, and scampered up the steps, having to hunch to stay low enough to open the tiny half-size door. She crawled through into the darkness and just as I was following her on my hands and knees into the dark, she snapped on the lights. The attic had been converted into what could only be described as a child’s library and office space, with child-size built-in desks, bookshelves, track lighting. It was the kind of space one would have killed for as a kid or even a teenager. Neighborhood children would be inexorably drawn to this space. All it needed was a couple beanbag chairs and a lava lamp or maybe a fish tank. It boggled my mind that anyone had ever been lucky enough to possess this room, and then, as I realized that the retired carpenter must have built it himself for his children, I was undone by the concept of a parent who would spend the time and money to build something like that for their kids, and for some reason I thought about Anthony’s son, Hank, and his big open smile and I felt like I couldn’t breathe and maybe I needed to leave.
“What is Ray having you do here?” I asked Bunny.
“Weird, but kinda fun. We have to put a pee smell somewhere.”
“He wants us to pee in here?”
“No, it’s down in my car, it’s coyote urine. I’m thinking we put it in the master bedroom.”
“Why would he want to make the house smell like pee? Isn’t that like the opposite of what would make it sell?”
“Well, so, Mr. Mitchell retired, and then, like, dropped dead, very sudden, last year, and right before they were supposed to go on a cruise. So Mrs. Mitchell was utterly bereft, and he basically built this house, all the woodwork was his, so Mrs. Mitchell didn’t want to stay here. She moved in with her son and his wife in Arizona so that she could be closer to their kids and be grandma and everything. But she needs the house sold really bad because Mr. Mitchell didn’t have life insurance or anything, and I think she was counting on his Social Security for their retirement to work or something. Anyway, her one thing was she didn’t want to sell to someone who was going to tear it down, so my dad priced it high so that it would sit, so she would change her mind.”
“What?”
“Well, he priced it about a hundred grand above market, so it’s just been sitting here for like almost a year, and finally Mrs. Mitchell got really mad and demanded he have another open house, so he wants it to smell like pee, and for me to try to make it seem sort of weird, like we rented too-big furniture to make the rooms feel smaller—did you notice that downstairs? Because he doesn’t want anyone at the open house to make an offer.”
“But why?” I asked, starting to be truly alarmed.
“Because his friend Toby is going to buy it. After the open house, he’ll go to Mrs. Mitchell and say, I’m so sorry, there were no offers, and then a few days later, he’ll go to her and say, I did finally get an offer, but it’s only for X amount, and it’s from a developer. But she’ll be so desperate at that point that she’ll just take it.”
“That’s fucked up,” I said.
“I know!” Bunny said. “It really is. But I guess that kind of thing goes on all the time. Because, like, then the developer guarantees my dad that once he remodels it, he’ll list it with my dad, so my dad gets commission on both sales. And usually some kind of kickback to boot. And also, the development drives up property values all around, so my dad winds up making more on every other sale, and on and on.”
“Your dad is…”
“Utterly cold-blooded. I know. It’s interesting. I had no idea. I’m not positive if the things he does are illegal, but they are definitely immoral.”
“What other kinds of things does he do?”
“Oh, like he bribes inspectors and stuff.”
“He bribes inspectors?”
“Yeah, when you buy a house, the buyer pays to have it inspected, and usually people don’t know house inspectors, like off the top of their head, so they ask my dad, who do you usually use? And he says, ‘Oh, use these guys, they’re the best!’ And so then the inspector is getting all his business from my dad, so he’ll generally pretend everything is okay with the house even without my dad paying him, though sometimes he has to pay them if there is something really, really wrong.”
“Wrong in what way?”
“I don’t know, like a heat pump leaking carbon monoxide or something. Black mold.”
“Yeah, I’m definitely guessing that’s illegal.”
Bunny shrugged. “Everyone does it, he says.”
“Right,” I said. I didn’t know what I was so upset about. I had always known Ray Lampert was not some upstanding guy. I’d known he was a shark, that his teeth were fake-white, that he cared more about the way things looked than the way they were. Why was I so surprised?
Bunny was lying down on the brown shag carpet, her arms and legs spread out like a starfish. “This room is just so cool,” she said. “I almost wish I could be a kid again just so that it could be mine.”
“You don’t feel guilty?” I asked. “Helping him.”
Bunny sighed, then rolled over onto her stomach and looked at me. “At first, I really did. But, Michael, just—if everyone already thinks I’m bad, then why not just be bad?”
“That’s the most idiotic thing you’ve ever said,” I told her.
“Look, what I’m saying is, my dad—he can be terrible. I mean, he’s se
lfish, he’s manipulative, he has delusions of grandeur, he compulsively lies, even about things he totally doesn’t need to lie about. He’ll even lie about having seen a basketball game he didn’t catch! But there’s good in him too.”
“Everyone has good in them! Jesus!”
“He’s my dad,” she said. We were still lying side by side on the carpet, looking at each other. I could see the vein in her neck bouncing with her pulse. I could hear it when she blinked her eyes.
“I don’t want to be good anymore,” she said. “I think it’s a rigged game.”
“What does that even mean?”
“Like, think about your mom. I looked it up, and there’s a whole pathology and strangling is the last stage before domestic violence turns into murder. Your mom was one hundred percent right to stab your dad. She’s probably still alive because of it. You’re probably alive because of it.”
