The Dark House

by John Sedgwick

  Sloane stepped toward his wife, a hand raised, as the boy cowered on the bed. The wife raised an arm to defend herself, but too late. With a great, sweeping motion, he smacked her hard across the face. The blow slammed the woman toward the wall, past the window. The boy cringed, but did not move. Rollins lingered there, waiting to see if she would get up. It was too terrible, this violence of husband against wife. If he’d had his tape recorder, Rollins would have made a note. He willed the boy to pay attention, offer sympathy to his mother, something. But the boy only looked on warily, his elbows tight. After a while, he got off the bed and drifted out of the room. When the mother did not rise into view again, Rollins searched for the boy and found him in the bathroom, using the toilet. Rollins checked for the mother downstairs, but he saw only Sloane in the kitchen again, where he poured himself a highball, drained it, then settled back down by the gaunt man once more.

  Rollins lowered the binoculars from his eyes and looked around for Marj. She was standing barefoot at the river’s edge, the water up to her ankles.

  “It’s polluted, you know,” he called over to her.

  “What isn’t?” She waded slowly about, back and forth. “That guy still there?”

  “Yeah.”

  “They doing anything?”

  “No. Just sitting there.”

  “What do we do now?”

  Rollins paused a moment, to clear his mind of all he’d seen. “I thought maybe we should drive back around, see if we can get a license plate number. Maybe we can figure out who he is, where he lives or something.”

  “Sounds good.” Marj stepped out of the water. She sat down on a tree stump and started to dry her feet with her socks.

  Rollins came over to help, not that there was much that he could do. After what he’d just seen, he just wanted to be near her, for comfort.

  “There was a bit of a fight, actually.”

  Marj looked up, amazement on her face. “Sloane and that guy?”

  “Sloane and his wife. Just now. It was over their son, I think.”

  “Any blood?”

  Rollins was relieved she took the news as a joke. “No. Tears, though.” He’d seen the woman’s body quake.

  That got Marj’s attention. “Oh?”

  “He slapped her.”

  “No shit.” She shook her head. “Right then, while you were watching?”

  “Yeah, quite a blow, actually. He really smacked her.”

  “She okay?”

  “I don’t know. I couldn’t see.”

  Marj continued drying her feet, but very slowly. “Can I ask you a question? Do you like seeing that sort of thing?”

  “Not particularly.”

  Marj reached down and grabbed a shoe that she’d left on the shore and flung it at him, hitting him in the ankle. He backed off and looked at her warily. At first, Rollins thought she was being playful. He got a different idea when she pitched the other one at his chest. He was lucky to block it with his forearm.

  “What is it with you?” She hunched back down again, her eyes on the mossy ground. “All my girlfriends say, ‘What are you doing with this guy? He’s psycho.’ I tell them, no, no, no. Actually, he’s kinda nice, you’d like him, blah, blah, blah. But now you do this weird shit right in front of me, and I wonder what the fuck is going on inside your head.”

  “I wasn’t sure you’d want to know.”

  “Well, I don’t think I do. I don’t think I want to know any of this.” This time, she picked up some loose dirt and flung that at him, too. It didn’t carry very far in the wind, but it made Rollins keep his distance. He watched her carefully, not knowing what she’d do next. “This weird gaunt guy, the faxes, that lady who disappeared, and now this. I don’t think I want to know any of it, okay?”

  Rollins was afraid she was going to cry. He wasn’t sure he could take that. He wasn’t used to naked displays of emotion; he found them frightening. But he also couldn’t bear to think that Marj, of all people, might be so overwhelmed—and himself the cause. He could live with his demons. He deserved them. But Marj certainly didn’t. He came closer to her, with the idea that he might rescue her from them somehow. He felt like running away with her—to Scandinavia or the South Pacific, some place free of associations, where he could start fresh as a new and much better person. He and Marj would get in the car, right now, and start driving. Just go. Go and keep going until they reached the ocean, and then board a plane bound for a far corner of the earth.

  He reached out for her, hoping to begin that journey. But Marj flung out an arm. “Don’t touch me, okay? Just don’t touch me.” Almost frantic now, she busied herself putting her socks back on, but they kept getting bunched up. Finally she balled the socks up in her hands and stuffed them in her pockets. “Okay, I’ll admit it. I’m a little scared right now. I was scared last night, too. That’s why I wanted you to call. Now I’m scared worse.” She swept a hand back to indicate the house across the water. “I’m not used to staring into people’s bedrooms. All right? Yeah, okay, I bought you the binoculars. But I was just being nice. I thought you’d like having them.”

  Rollins clutched the binoculars in his hand. “I do. I am grateful, Marj.” Sometimes, a certain arch formality crept into his way of speaking when he most wanted to be sincere. “Really,” he added.

  Marj didn’t seem to take that in. “This might sound strange to you, but this whole thing is not my idea of fun, okay? At first, I thought, all right, I can try anything once. But now, maybe I don’t really want to know. Maybe it’s all really, really fucked up.” She picked up more dirt, but this time threw it out into the water, where it scattered the reflection of Sloane’s house.

  She turned back to him. Even in the moonlight, he could see that her eyes were red. “And now you tell me you saw some poor woman get whacked across the face. And you watched as though it didn’t bother you at all. Just—pass the popcorn!”

  “It does bother me,” Rollins said. “Marj, I—” He stopped. He remembered his own house, seeing the way his mother looked at his father after the separation and before the divorce. She had the same look on her face as the woman did here in Sloane’s house, before the blow landed. Dazed, unbelieving. His mother’s bitterness had set in later, but Rollins’ own pain had hit right away. He wanted to tell her this now. But he could not.

  Marj rubbed her shirtsleeve across her eyes. “I felt—okay, this is really stupid—but I felt like maybe I could find my real dad out here in one of these windows. I know, I know. It doesn’t make any sense.” She tossed a hand into the air. “He’s a million miles away from here, if he’s anywhere.” She sniffled. “But I just thought I might see him if I got these binoculars and just, like, kept looking…. Oh, God, why am I crying? I hate crying.”

  “I’m—Marj, I’m sorry.”

  “This whole thing is so pathetic. I don’t know what I’m doing here.” She stood up and without so much as a glance back at the house or at Rollins, she headed toward the park gate. Rollins watched her go. At the gate, she turned back to face him.

  “Aren’t you coming? You’ll want the stupid license plate number, remember?”

  Rollins looked back at the house. His heart wasn’t much in it.

  “Rollins, let’s go.”

  Back in the car, Marj drove in silence around to the front of the house again. The Audi was there, parked on the street. Rollins jotted down the license plate number on the bag the binoculars had come in. Then they left.

  On the trip back, Marj tuned the radio to a rock station and jacked the volume up to a level that Rollins found almost painful. He had a sense of the car as some kind of massive four-wheeled boom box, drawing annoyed looks from the fellow drivers to whom he’d always hoped that he was completely indistinct. He figured this was his penance, not that he quite knew for what. He passed the trip looking out the window, his baseball cap scrunched in his hand, the cars around him an undifferentiated blur.

  As they pulled up by Rollins’ car, parked around th
e corner from Marj’s apartment building in Brighton, Marj said something to him, but, with the music pounding, he couldn’t hear what it was. He reached over and snapped off the radio. His jaw ached. He must have been clenching it.

  “I was telling you to keep the binoculars,” she said. “You might need them.”

  “I have them right here.” He’d put them back in the box, which he carried in his hand.

  He started to get out.

  Evidently, she could think of nothing to add, for she let him climb out of the car in silence. When he closed the door, she was still looking at him through the window. He leaned down toward her hopefully. “Did you say something?”

  She gave him a cold look. “I’m just waiting for you to move your car.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry.” He stepped away from the car, then turned back. “Now, you sure you’ll be safe?”

  “Look, don’t worry about me.” She put the car in gear. “If it gets too crazy, you might want to call the cops.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  Rollins squeezed between a couple of parked cars to the sidewalk, and then climbed into his Nissan. He pulled out of his parking space, and, in his rearview, watched her nip into the vacant space behind him. As he waited at the first light, Rollins turned and watched Marj climb out of her car and head toward her building.

  Time slowed, freighted. Rollins took a left at the next corner, then another, then pulled into a municipal parking lot. He had a straight shot at Marj’s windows from there, and he was away from the streetlights. Through his driver’s-side window, he stared up at her apartment—the three windows at the far end of the third floor. He wanted to make sure she was okay. That’s what he told himself. He thought of using her binoculars, but feared they might attract attention. He watched intently, without moving, for over an hour. He saw Marj only once. She was wearing a thin, pale-green nightie as she crossed her windows with a glass in her hand.

  Finally, her lights went out.

  He slipped out of the Nissan, and made his way back to Marj’s building. Every step seemed like a major commitment. Somehow, he expected that the air would resist him, but, of course, it let him slide right through. He didn’t slow until he reached the front door, where he dug his keys out of his pocket in an attempt at passing for a resident returning home. This was another of Al Schecter’s old tricks. Rollins had to make a couple of passes by the door, but on his third crossing, he timed it just right. A young man burst out the door to the apartment building just as Rollins pulled up with his keys in his outstretched hand. The man actually held the door for him and nodded graciously at Rollins as he stepped inside the hall.

  His heart started to pump: He was in Marj’s building. He’d entered where she lived. He tried to detect her perfume, that subtle sweetness of her, there in the hallway. But no, the air only smelled old. Still, it was a pleasure to suck it into his lungs all the same; it was something of her inside him.

  The mailboxes were to the right. M. Simmons was in apartment 3F. Rollins almost couldn’t believe that her name was listed there, in plain sight. It seemed like a proclamation of some sort. To him, maybe. He could feel a steady blip on the right side of his neck where an artery throbbed against his shirt collar, and another on one wrist where his pulse pressed against his cuff. He was drawing near to her.

  There was an elevator past the mailboxes, but someone else might come aboard, and he didn’t want to risk sharing Marj’s proximity with a stranger. He continued down the hall, and he pushed through a heavy door that led to the stairs. The stairwell was harsh and bleak. His shoes clicked against the bare metal steps as he climbed to the third floor. He opened the door to a dimly lit hall, its walls a shadowy green. A threadbare carpet deadened the sound of Rollins’ footsteps as he went down the corridor past 3D and 3E. His heart thudded in anticipation. 3F was at the far end, the door decorated with an anti-handgun sticker and a feminist cartoon he couldn’t quite follow.

  He glanced behind him to make sure no one was about, then, ever so gently, tried the door handle. The door was locked tight. He raised his hand to the wood and, slowly, slowly, he ran his hands along it, feeling its glossy varnish. He brought his cheek to the cool smoothness of the door. He ran a finger along one panel. He brought an ear close to the door, hoping he might hear her breathing within. The door was too thick to hear through, but he liked the thought of her asleep inside.

  He stayed there for as long as he dared. He shut his eyes, the better to imagine her. Finally, he stepped back again and reached into his back pocket and took out his wallet. He removed his Johnson business card and pulled a stubby pencil from his shirt pocket. On the back of the card, in block letters, he wrote, SLEEP WELL, MY DARLING, the only words he’d ever heard his parents say with any affection. He wished that, someday, he might be able to say them to Marj. He slipped the card under the door. He stood there for a moment, pondering the gravity of that act. Then he returned the way he had come.

  Seven

  Someone was banging on Rollins’ front door. At first, the noise wove itself into the disturbing dream he was having about the fight at the Sloanes’. Then suddenly he was awake, searching nervously about the room. Yellow light from a courtyard high-intensity lamp seeped in around the edges of his window shades, barely illuminating the wooden chair in the corner—the binoculars and Red Sox cap hung over its back—and the few framed prints of vintage cars that adorned his walls. He checked his bedside clock—3:14. The knocking persisted, louder and more rapid, with an insistent, metallic sound.

  “Open up,” came a shout. “Would you please?”

  The voice was female, and all he could think was that it was Marj: She had read his note and come to him. He jumped out of bed, threw on his bathrobe, and hurried to his front door. He moved as if in a dream, the sideboard, sconces, and other familiar furnishings of his sitting room somehow liquefied around him. He frantically unlocked the bolts and swung open the door, bringing a rush of cool air up inside his pajamas, ready to take Marj into his arms with a shout.

  But it wasn’t Marj. It was a slim, dark-eyed woman in a loose, gray shift that nicely revealed the soft contours of her body. She had thick brown hair, slightly wavy, that spilled down over her shoulders.

  “Excuse me, Mr. Rollin—I’m terribly sorry—I know it’s late—”

  “Do I know you?” Rollins interrupted. In a weird vestige of his dream, he thought, briefly, that this was the woman Sloane had hit. But she was younger and slimmer, and she didn’t seem nearly so helpless. He squared his shoulders, instinctively trying to screen off the view into his apartment. As he did, he realized his father would have done exactly the same. He would have risen up, tall and imperious, to protect the sanctity of his castle from the prying eyes of a stranger.

  “Oh, sorry. Tina Mancuso.” The woman extended a hand, which Rollins shook awkwardly. “Didn’t Mrs. D’Alimonte tell you?” She smiled fetchingly, despite the hour. “I just moved in with my daughter.” She glanced back toward an open door down the hall. “I’m your new neighbor.”

  Rollins rubbed his eyes. There were cardboard boxes inside 2A, he could see now. “Oh, yes, right,” he said sleepily. He supposed she must want something from him, but he couldn’t imagine what. He raked his hair with his fingers, dutifully trying to rouse himself to greater wakefulness.

  “My five-year-old is sick, and I really don’t know what to do.” She tugged anxiously at her fingers.

  “Have you called a doctor?”

  “I don’t have one yet. We just moved and…”

  Rollins waited, but she didn’t elaborate. “Well, isn’t there some sort of HMO you could call? Some emergency room?” Rollins knew little about such things. He avoided doctors, himself. The nosy questions, the roughness of their hands on him, the chill of the stethoscope.

  “I—we—don’t have a health plan anymore. I’m, well, I’m kind of between jobs.”

  “I’m sorry.” He felt groggy; this whole encounter was too confusing. �
�What did you say your name was again?”

  “Tina. Tina Mancuso.” She smiled determinedly.

  “Right. Look, Tina. It’s very late. I’m not sure what you want from me.” He still had a hand on the doorknob. He was tempted to close the door and to push Tina and her troubles out of his life. But she had stepped across the threshold, blocking him.

  A desperate tone came into her voice. “I have a sick daughter. Mrs. D’Alimonte said that if I had any problems, I should ask you. She said you were a nice person.”

  “Isn’t she around?” Rollins asked.

  “She had to go to Baltimore. A baptism, I think she said.”

  “But what am I supposed to do?”

  “We need a ride to the emergency room.”

  “You don’t have a car?”

  She shook her head. “Mr. Rollin, you know how it is after a big move like this. I’ll be honest with you. I’m flat broke.”

  Rollins wondered how she could swing the $1,200 monthly rent, but he said nothing. Her accent, her pattern of speech, her brassy style—all this suggested to him that she was definitely not one of his. He detected little education, no culture, no “class,” in the sense that his parents might have meant it. Yet she did have a certain animal appeal, something that emanated from her wide, confident hips and full breasts. This was a woman who rarely lacked for boyfriends, he was sure.

  “Can I give you money for a taxi?” he offered.

  To his surprise, Tina’s face fell. “I shouldn’t have bothered you.” She stepped away from the door.

  The way she moved away, so defeated, tugged at Rollins. Clearly, her pushiness had just been a brave front; at heart, she was simply a young single mother in a panic. “No, please, I insist. I’d drive you myself, but…Wait just a moment while I get my billfold.” He went to grab his wallet off his bedroom dresser. When he returned, she was standing inside his foyer.

  “You’ve done the place up nice,” she told him quietly. “You a collector?”

  “No, no. This is all just family stuff.” He quickly plucked out two twenties and a ten, and stuffed them into the woman’s open hand, hoping that would end the matter. Money did have its uses.