Thy Neighbor

by Norah Vincent

  My takeaway was neat: you do not want to fuck with this man.

  So I let him let his dogs decorate my lawn, and I never make eye contact. Ever.

  But cameras?

  Well, in the last year my self-care has taken a nosedive, and I guess I’m courting disaster more freely than ever, because despite knowing all that I know about the dangers, I got Damian to rig me up at the Grubers’ just about exactly twelve months ago.

  Considering how long the Grubers and I have been neighbors, this is ludicrously late in the game to start filming, but clearly my subconscious had grown restless with all this morose waiting-to-die nonsense and thought it was finally time to see if old Gruber was capable of murder.

  I can almost hear a gleeful voice in my mind hissing, “Find the cameras, Gruber. Find the cameras. Give this prick his comeuppance already.”

  The Grubers have been living next door since before my parents died. Their oldest son, J.R., is around eighteen now; the family moved in when he was a toddler. Their middle son, Jeff, is sixteen and the only one of the three who might escape the fate of the chronically abused. He does well in school, is a star athlete (track, swimming, tennis), and keeps his nose clean socially.

  In the Gruber family, this means he’s never been arrested for petty theft, destruction of property, or possession of a controlled substance. Even Eric, who’s only thirteen now, has been nabbed for two of the three. I don’t think drugs are quite yet on the radar, or not in sufficient quantities to bring him to public notice. He doesn’t drive yet, either, so there’s only so much damage he can do.

  J.R., meanwhile, carrying the unlucky burden of all oldest sons and the antisocial legacy of a violent tyrant, is joining the marines as soon as he graduates from high school so that he can kill and destroy property and get paid for it, and, much more important, so that he can get as far away from his father as possible while still potentially making him proud.

  Ellie, Gruber’s long-suffering wife, is as mousy and cowering as you’d expect, the kind of person who’s perfected the technique of disappearing even while she’s standing right in front of you. Survival skill, for sure. Typical of a brutally battered wife. Quick camouflage. Become the backdrop. Don’t run—at the mouth or otherwise.

  She’d seen what happened when you did that. We all had.

  It was mostly because Ellie was so retiring that Damian was able to work unhindered in their house. While he was there—his purported reason for being there, in fact—he gave them what he called a routine free upgrade on their cable box, including DVR and high def. This would placate Gruber if he asked any questions when he got home from work, though it was doubtful he would since, as we would soon learn, technology apparently wasn’t his thing.

  Damian took his time. Scoped out and planted in what he thought were the best spots. He decided first on Gruber’s den, where there was no computer or modern instrument of any kind—only an ancient electric pencil sharpener, which, judging by the coating of dust on and around it and the few shavings inside it, was rarely used and never moved. Damian put the camera inside it, in the shavings drawer, an ideal spot on the desk, where it faced a brass-studded oxblood leather chair that bore the telltale marks—sunken seat, worn arms—of Gruber’s frequent use.

  Damian put another camera in the basement rec room, where, from the look of the place—full-size pool and Ping-Pong tables, separate cable and video game setups, and large-screen TV—he presumed the boys spent the bulk of their time. He put the camera in the upgraded cable box, just as he did in the living room. Easy enough.

  Three cameras all told. A good spread, I thought, especially since Ellie favored the TV in the living room and almost always had it to herself. I wondered, naturally, if she would prove to be as absent when she was alone as she was the rest of the time. If past reconnaissance was any indication, I figured she’d probably be doing stripteases or stand-up comedy for the benefit of the four walls she was usually so chummy with.

  But no, she was just a zombie flicking through the channels for her favorite shows, sipping her Shasta diet cola, eyes aglaze with cheap contentment.

  It was Gruber himself who had the most to show.

  Damian had done well. Gruber did spend a lot of time in his study, sitting in that oxblood leather chair, working on pet projects mostly, building and painting model cars and airplanes and tanks. He had a pistol collection, too, which he kept scrupulously clean. He often took the guns down from their places in the display cabinet, dismantled them on the desk, wiped, oiled, and reassembled them, then put them back in their places and sat back and stared at them, sometimes for an hour or more.

  I was watching him do this one night, trying to get a line on his mind—well, actually, the mind of any person who can sit and stare rapt at a gun for an hour—when the silence was broken by a shrill cry.

  Countless silken ties of love and thought.

  When I heard it that first time, I thought it was the TV booming in from the next room. It sounded like a female voice, a girl’s voice, and I knew it couldn’t be Gruber. He just wasn’t physically capable of such a high-pitched sound. Besides, a string of words like that would never come out of Gruber’s mouth, even under duress or in a mad bout of playacting with himself.

  The second time I heard it, just minutes later—the same words in the same order—I was sure it was a recording and that Gruber must have had some electronics in his study after all, maybe an old tape player.

  But again, a book on tape just wasn’t Gruber’s thing.

  Was it?

  And poetry on tape?

  That was just beyond the realm of possibility.

  But it was a poem. I became sure when, a few minutes later, I heard the next line floating across the darkness of Gruber’s study out of nowhere.

  To everything on earth the compass round.

  Yep. Sure enough. A poem. Google that and get? Robert Frost. Wait. What? Robert Frost?

  And then I remembered.

  Yes, yes.

  Of course.

  Iris.

  It was Iris.

  Mom had told me all about Iris. How could I forget? Iris, the African gray parrot, had been taught to recite poems.

  * * *

  Gruber had made his money from a chain of fancy pet stores that catered largely to impulse buyers, spoiled twenty- and thirtysomething Twin Pines type chicks mostly, who could be counted on to drop a grand or more on a puppy on a random Saturday afternoon because it was just too cute. That, or they’d get their hormonally befuddled boyfriends to do it for them. Always another whipped guy whipping out his credit card for Missy, thinking it a relatively small price to pay for a regular BJ and some peace of mind of a Monday Night Football. Before the poor suckers had left the store, they’d have been whined not just into the squirming purchase itself, but into spending another three hunge on a bed for the little pissmonster, too, and more still on the required paraphernalia: leash, toys, food, prophylactics.

  For Gruber, it was a fine living. A very fine living, especially when you factored in the monthly groomings, which were the bread and butter of the business. Gruber had good relationships with local breeders, which is where he’d gotten his own dogs, and he could guarantee the health of his pets in a way that most other pet stores couldn’t.

  He always had a half dozen puppies at any one time, as well as a range of reptiles (boas, iguanas, turtles, lizards) and their live fare (mice, rats, crickets). He also had an impressive range of birds, which always included one or two African grays or a macaw among the usual cockatiels, lovebirds, and parakeets.

  Gruber had read all about the famous African gray, Alex, who was owned and trained for thirty years by an animal psychologist. Alex, among other African grays who’d participated in longitudinal studies, disproved the notion that parrots could only parrot what they’d heard from their human o
wners or imitate ambient sounds. Over the course of his life, Alex had learned to identify objects by color and shape and to use his extensive vocabulary to construct original phrases.

  Gruber liked the idea of having smart birds in his store, and charging appropriately for them, too. They usually went for six or seven hundred each—easy.

  It’s hard to know whether Gruber’s special interest in African grays had been spontaneous, because, according to my mom’s telling of the story, which is the only reason I knew about any of this, Gruber was actually turned on to the birds by Robin Bloom, who at her preposterously young age was not only reading Dante, but Iris Murdoch, too. She’d apparently come across an African gray in a Murdoch novel and had developed a fascination with the birds. Mom told me about the novel—she knew it, of course, and had actually been the one to recommend Murdoch to Robin in the first place. Apparently, the descriptions of the bird and its interaction with its owner were so captivating, so human, that Robin wanted to know if African grays were like that in real life.

  She showed up at Gruber’s pet store one day, where he did have one African gray in stock, and spent three hours introducing herself to the bird. Every day after that for months she’d show up, head back to the gray’s cage, and play with it. She started training it to say hello and good-bye, and to give kisses. She even named it Iris, after Iris Murdoch.

  I guess Gruber was really taken with this, and with Robin in general, as everyone in the neighborhood was. So on her tenth birthday, he presented her with Iris as a gift. Robin was over the moon, and after that she was almost never seen without the bird. Mom said that the Blooms bought Robin a hard-sided mesh backpack with a perch in it so she could walk the bird around the neighborhood. Robin was almost never without that backpack, either strapped to her back or propped next to her on the grass as she read.

  After I left for boarding school, I think my mom had a rough time adjusting to the empty nest, and so she took on Robin as a kind of pupil adoptee. The Blooms didn’t really know what to make of Robin’s bookishness, or how to feed it, but they saw that my mom did. So they encouraged the friendship, allowing Robin to head to our place most days for an hour or so after school. Robin was at our house just about any time the Blooms needed a babysitter. Sometimes she even spent the night.

  During our weekly phone calls, Mom mentioned Robin all the time. Robin and I are reading this—“It’s cute, she’s really inquisitive about the characters’ motivations”—or Robin and I got an ice cream, or Robin stayed the night and we watched old movies until eleven and fell asleep in front of the TV. I came to think of Robin as my little sister, even though I had hardly anything to do with her.

  Mom gave Robin reading lists, just as she had done with me, and fed the kid’s addiction to poetry. They did an odd range, mostly stuff my mom liked and had rustled out of the canon: Auden and Elizabeth Bishop, bits of Frost (most of it she said she found too farmhouse macho to bear), Merrill, Milton, the Bard’s sonnets to death, of course, and a host of new unestablished poets they’d found in The New Yorker and The Paris Review.

  They laughed at Plath and Sexton, reciting “Daddy” while swooning in a nightgown.

  “I mean, honestly, rhyming ‘shoe’ with ‘achoo,’” Mom would howl, “and likening herself to a Jew. Really. It’s too much.”

  Robin was a more willing and dedicated pupil than I had ever been, probably because she was unencumbered by the lusty shackles of male adolescence, which had made seersucker pornographers of more than a few gifted American writers of the twentieth century, so why not their buck devotees as well?

  Robin wasn’t whacking off to Henry Miller’s description of a female orgasm—an accordion collapsing in a bag of milk, I mean, my God—or fantasizing about bending Elizabeth Bennet over her desk and really giving her something to write home about.

  Robin had her mind on the material, and her battered old soul locked onto it like a heat-seeking missile. All the pain in those pages, all the thwarted desire, the longing and the channeled ire. She knew it by heart. It was her pain and her loneliness, her alienation that these writers were shouting down the years. Nothing spoke to her more truly, or so Mom said.

  “She’s such an odd girl. So profoundly sad. So sensitive. So much more seasoned than her age would suggest. It’s enough to make you half believe in reincarnation. I keep saying to myself: How does she know this stuff? How does she feel it?”

  I’m sure Mom saw herself in Robin, the precocity—both intellectual and spiritual—the knowing more than any kid that age should know about the crushing disappointments of life, and the isolation. It was all there. Mirror image. One silvered surface facing another, and reflecting it back, and back, and back, and back, endlessly until it was almost enough to give substance to nothing. What more could Narcissus himself have asked for?

  Robin taught Iris to say lines, and so she did, even after the girl disappeared. Well after. Gorgeous lines and memories echoing through the house, until the Blooms couldn’t take it anymore. They asked Gruber to take the bird back. And he did. Gladly, I’m sure. Because he loved Robin, too, and was touched by her, it seemed, as by no one else.

  For thirteen years, Iris had been in his study, reciting, keeping the lost girl alive to him. And now to me, as I shuffle around with those lovely, lovely words in my head, going around and around again.

  Strictly held by none, is loosely bound

  By countless silken ties of love and thought

  To everything on earth the compass round.

  9

  “What are you thinking about when you sit there?” I asked.

  Monica was at the window as usual, staring out. I was lying on the couch as usual, staring at her. I’d been on the Net for hours, fully absorbed in articles on Slate and The Huffington Post, and at first I hadn’t noticed her wake and move to the window behind me. But by the time I had, I’d also noticed a strangeness about her, a sense of tension or anticipation, like a mood waiting to break. We’d fallen asleep at dawn as usual, and she’d stayed through the morning and afternoon. She’d slept deeply, and now she was still here, perched on the edge of something, it seemed, but reluctant to step in.

  “What to do,” she said finally.

  “I’m sorry?” I said, momentarily confused.

  “I’m thinking about what to do.”

  I felt my stomach squeeze. No one says that when the thoughts are good. No one had ever said it to me before, not like that, or if they had, I hadn’t been attentive enough to care.

  “Is it so hard to know?” I asked, trying not to sound afraid.

  She turned from the window, placed her feet on the floor, and looked at me with a pitying expression.

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes, it is.”

  “Why?” I asked, stupidly.

  She laughed lightly.

  “If I could tell you the why, I wouldn’t need to worry about the what.”

  Okay. True enough. What was the incentive to talk if she had nothing to gain by it?

  “What are the options, then?” I said. “Can you tell me those?”

  “The usual,” she said.

  “Stay or go?” I said.

  She nodded. “Pretty much.”

  “Every time you come here, you’re thinking that?” I said, a bit fatigued by the idea.

  “More or less.”

  She gave me the pitying look again.

  “You’re sorry you asked.”

  I wanted to slap her.

  “Heavy silences scare me,” I said.

  “I don’t get it,” she said, screwing up her face. “Do you like to hear bad news?”

  The desire to hit her was so strong then that I had to shove my hand between the cushions of the couch and sling my leg over it.

  “I’d rather have the storm,” I said, “than the threat of it.”


  She cocked her head quizzically, amused, surprised. The goon had said something sub-tile. Almost. Gee.

  “It’s coming anyway,” I blundered. “Either way.”

  “Sooner or later,” she agreed, playfully.

  I took my hand out of the couch.

  “Right.”

  She smiled broadly, showing her teeth, her eyes telegraphing the thought: Dummy doesn’t mind teasing. Could be fun.

  She liked this game, so I would play. It would chafe. But fine.

  “Do you dislike me?” I asked. “Or is it that I’m lousy in bed?”

  She chuckled.

  “You’re okay in bed, and I like you. That’s the problem.”

  “Feeling guilty?”

  “A little, maybe, because I’m nice.” She frowned jokingly. “But not really, because you’re so awful.”

  “Not everything people say about me is true.”

  She clapped her hands victoriously. I had fallen into the trap.

  “It’s not what people say about you. It’s that you know what people say about you, and you wear it like a badge.”

  “But it’s not me,” I said.

  “You wear it—”

  It was as if I hadn’t spoken.

  “Like a badge,” she finished. “Just so that you can say, ‘It’s not me.’”

  “But it isn’t,” I said.

  “I know,” she said glaringly. “So why not be yourself in the first place and stop trying so hard?”

  She was serious by the end without quite intending to be, her tone curling sharply around the question.

  “Because I don’t know how,” I said, somberly. “I really don’t know how.”

  This sounded cheap and unfair, the way it quashed the fun we were having at my expense, the kind of thing a weak person says to avoid the truth, except that it was the truth and I was weak.