The Glass Harmonica

by Russell Wangersky

  There were others that he wished he could name, if only he had more experience with their appearance and smell and feel. It’s funny how things can escape you when you haven’t taken the time to look and touch, he thought. If I was a little bit more of a gardener, Len thought, I’d think about words like foxglove and lupin and a picture would jump into my head as quickly as if I thought about something familiar, like the feel of silk or denim. Laburnum—he’d heard the word before, thought it had a sound that bordered on the obscene.

  Len could only see flashes of Mrs. Purchase working along her side of the fence now, little more than glimpses through camouflaging leaves that were now fully open.

  Mrs. Purchase would know every flower here, he thought.

  Mrs. Purchase would know everything.

  Every now and then he’d see the silver flash of her gardening trowel driving down, as bright and fast-moving in the sun as if she were impaling something dangerous on the tip of a bayonet. Len could hear the blade sliding into the earth, the sharp scrape of it as it moved past small stones caught in the soil.

  And then he heard something else. Vernie’s door again, and then the familiar sound of the heavy laundry basket thumping down on the deck.

  First into sight, it was dark blue coveralls, obviously belonging to Vernie’s husband Reg, jerking into view. Then it was towels again, and pants, and then socks.

  In its own way, it was almost like a striptease, he thought. We’re just working our way down through layer after layer, and perhaps that’s almost the point of it all.

  Finally, gloriously, it was underwear again, first the spare utility of men’s jockey shorts, then a breathtakingly brief line of plain women’s underwear, white and cotton. Then several pairs of black panties, and finally a low-cut pair of wine red underwear, opaque and somehow shiny when they turned just the right way, and Len sat transfixed for a moment, watching the way the underwear seemed to move in the wind as if they were made of a sheet of solid material.

  Maybe polyester, Len guessed, and the finger and thumb on his right hand were moving together as if of their own volition as he tried to imagine which one of the many fabrics he’d ever felt would feel like the touch of that pair of underwear. In his head Len was flitting through a dozen department stores, past scores of clothes racks providing cover for the inevitable shoplifters, rows of underwear there but somehow sterile because they weren’t part of anyone yet. The feel of a hundred different pieces of fabric under his fingers, yet none of them that could possibly live up to the promise of these.

  Len wished Ingrid had something like that last pair of underwear: something deep red and cut low across the hips, something saucy that you might catch just a glimpse of and realize that your wife was up to no good, that she was thinking about you every bit as much as you were thinking about her. Like a high school girlfriend sticking her tongue out at you, and then using one hand to undo the top button on her blouse while she sat across the classroom from you. The kind of thing, Len thought, that might make me want to slide my hands up under Ingrid’s dress while she was standing at the sink.

  And then he stopped again. Stopped, like always.

  Because nothing as simple and easy as a new pair of underwear would ever make one little scrap of difference with Ingrid. You don’t spend twenty years with someone, living with one set of marital rules, and ever expect that she will be able to turn on a dime and be anything other than exactly what she naturally is already, Len thought. You can’t climb into bed one night and just announce that you want it all to be different, that this time you want all the lights left on, or that this time it will be fine to go at it right there in the hall by the stairs, the front door only a few scant feet away, only fogged glass between your nakedness and the street.

  If that turns out to be my lot in life, even if I’ve made my bed and slept exactly, precisely, in it for going on twenty years now, Len thought, that doesn’t mean I’ll live my whole life without ever waking up in the middle of the night and wishing that something could be different. It was something he’d thought about before, something that he already knew was a dead end.

  Like I could explain it to Ingrid, Len thought. Like I could explain it to anyone. Like I could even begin to tell anyone that my wife didn’t want anything to do with me in bed anymore, and that every single rejection would make me feel like even more of a big fat slob than any mirror ever would.

  On the line, Vernie’s red panties waved back and forth, a scarlet and saucy flag.

  Something, more a lack of motion than anything else, snapped Len out of his reverie and made him stare across the garden and across the Tinkers’ yard as well.

  The wind was shifting the leaves at the edge of the garden, but behind them Mrs. Purchase wasn’t moving at all. Len could see her red bucket and flashes of her yellow shirt; he could even see the shiny silver of the trowel, held elbow-high. And he couldn’t shake the feeling that, back there through the leaves, while he was watching Vernie’s laundry, Mrs. Purchase was motionless, watching him. And Len knew all about watching.

  He shook himself upright and headed around the side of the house, moving towards the door.

  140

  McKay Street

  SAM NEWHOOK

  JULY 21, 2003

  THE SUN rose facing straight onto the upper side of McKay Street, sunlit mornings bright and hard and hurting in your eyes like thrown sand. It was two years before Mrs. Purchase would catch Len staring at Vernie’s laundry, but she was already watching everything.

  Mornings were like snapped-open window shades, Sam Newhook thought. The sun was already pouring in harsh through the small rectangle of his bathroom window, while he was absently scratching his stomach, naked, his eyes half closed against light that seemed determined to bounce off every single tiled surface in the room and fly straight into his face again. Heavy curtains, light curtains—it didn’t seem to matter. It was the kind of light that bled through the weave and poked around the room in brilliant pinpricks, waking him far earlier than he wanted.

  He wasn’t sure if he was ever going to get used to mornings like this, to the way the sun caromed off the flat sky and the sea at a slight angle, so that it seemed to double itself, storming into the house always at a full run, ignoring everything that tried to stand in its way. But at least the fog was gone. Sam wasn’t absolutely sure which was worse, the glare or the grey, but even with his eyes still stinging, he was pretty sure it was the fog.

  Sam hadn’t had the house long, and was still repeating the simple mistakes over and over again: There was the short step down outside the bathroom, only an inch or so, but it jarred his back every time he stepped off it unexpectedly. One of the cupboard drawers in the kitchen seemed to roll closed faster than it should, jamming his fingers between it and the countertop. Even the sliding closet door upstairs—the one that skipped out of its track because it was square and the house, overall, wasn’t. Anywhere. The way he pulled the sliding door hard across to open it made it jump out of its short railbed every single time.

  He knew the missteps were a collection of things that he just hadn’t experienced enough yet to have them built right into him, things he didn’t know so well that they had become practised and ingrained. It was a new house, he thought, a new house built out of an old house and oddly filled with new sharp corners.

  A new house to him, anyway.

  Sam still had trouble keeping the address straight, kept giving out the number to his apartment to taxicab drivers instead, an apartment that was half the city away and in the wrong direction too, so that it was an expensive mistake any time he was drunk or wasn’t carefully paying attention.

  His new house was one of a trio of row houses that a developer had snapped up as a group and had then renovated throughout, knocking down walls and putting in new floors to label the places “open concept,” plunking soaker tubs with jets in the upstairs bathrooms and pressure-treated patios out beyond glass doors that opened off the master bedrooms. The kind
of places you advertise with a sturdy-looking hunk in a white bathrobe out on the deck with a steaming cup of coffee, master of everything he surveys. And that’s exactly how you’re supposed to feel in the model suite, Sam thought. And it worked fine for him.

  It was like they’d found a realtor’s checklist somewhere and followed it to the letter, a list of things that a young professional expected as a matter of right when picking out a house. There was only a thumbnail of lawn out back, the grass just recovering from the rough surgery of construction and coming up green in weedy patches, but the market was looking for dinner parties, not gardens or picnics.

  Sam had put a bid in as soon as he looked at the place, and he hadn’t realized until the lawyer searched the deed just how much the price had gone up between the time the developer had bought the places and when Sam’s offer had been accepted on the renovated space. After he found how much the markup was, Sam felt a little like he’d been cheated, but the offer was signed by then and the lawyer suggested he should just try to make the best of it, that he was getting what he wanted anyway.

  Just one surprise among many. It was a neighbourhood full of surprises. There was a woman in his bedroom again, still sleeping, and he was pretty sure that, this time, her name was Jillian. He was completely sure it was Saturday morning, though, and there was no easy escape in having to head out to work. No way to just put on a shirt and tie, mutter a half-chagrined “Sorry, gotta go,” and head straight away for the door, hoping she’d be gone when he got back.

  By the time he was finished making the coffee, she was leaning on the door frame wearing black panties and a T-shirt. Bare feet, one small foot flat on the floor, the other tilted up against her opposite ankle.

  She pointed at her chest. “Jillian,” she said, bringing the third syllable up high, like a question mark.

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “Just making sure.”

  She had curly light brown hair. Good legs. A small, sharp face with high cheekbones, her eyebrows getting all involved with the conversation whenever she spoke. Looking at her, Sam wished he had a more complete picture of the night before. Some of the evening was sharp enough—he remembered coming back from the bar, leaning on the front door messing with the keys, and the part where they were laughing in the living room about spilled Scotch and a glass knocked off the side table. And the part where elbows were getting caught coming out of shirts.

  But there were important short gaps, and when he thought about it, he could remember nothing at all from the part just before sleep. Looking at her now, he wished he could remember a little more about that. And just how it was that they’d met, well, that was a little less than clear too.

  Jillian was drinking her coffee quietly, staring at him over the top of her cup, probably making her eyes big like that on purpose, he thought. And the kitchen hovered around them, the perfect space it was supposed to be, all formal and poised and quiet, and Sam couldn’t help but think that the room was equally ready for the comfort of pancakes or the easy show-off of eggs Benedict.

  And that wasn’t such a bad thing either.

  At least she wasn’t playing the know-it-all card with him, not yet, not nudging at him by repeating things he couldn’t even remember saying to her, catching him out for forgetting lies he couldn’t remember her telling him in the first place. The occupational hazard of meeting people when you’ve already got a few drinks in, living a night where things are running faster than you would normally let them.

  “Nice place,” she said, staring around the kitchen. “Nice to see when people take the time to do things right.”

  “Get what you pay for,” he said, hoping she wouldn’t ask exactly what it was that he had paid.

  He had already started trying to figure out a strategy for getting her out of the house when he was pulling on his pants, but by the time he had really thought about it, she was already gone. Coffee-finished, clothes-on, kiss-on-the-cheek gone, saying only, “Gotta work,” and “My number’s on the fridge, if you want.” She’d turned it all around, he smiled to himself, pulled the work thing on him before he’d done it to her first.

  And how easy was that?

  One broken glass, one of the good, expensive ones, but he was pretty sure a good fuck in return, judging by the torn-up bed—sheets strewn across the floor like they’d been involved in some kind of Olympic event—and even a telephone number on the fridge, he thought. He could throw the number away after his shower if he felt like it.

  But he didn’t.

  He looked at the phone number for a moment when he came back downstairs, and even that impressed him—seven spare, unfamiliar digits and her name in a script that was only mildly looping and feminine. No circles or hearts over the i’s, he thought. Just Jillian, no last name, one sweep through across a sheet of notepaper in ink, her script even and steady and plain. Simple and straightforward. Like the number was something she was quite happy to share with him but, at the same time, it wouldn’t be the end of the world if he crumpled it up and tossed it in the trash.

  He left the note where it was.

  His hair was still wet and the clock said it was still morning, so he went outside into the bluff, bitter snottiness of a Newfoundland June, looking one way and then the other before making the decision to head towards Duckworth Street.

  Sam’s house was the middle one of what was fast becoming an assembly line of rebuilt row houses, his a sharp rust red clapboard bracketed by similar houses in dark blue on one side, forest green on the other. Blue was two married lawyers both trying to make partner, the woman with a fine ass but neither of them ever home until the middle of the night. Forest green owned a downtown bar and Sam had already complained once about noise when the whole crew had come back there after closing to continue the fun. In their own way, they were an island of three small castaways in the middle of an ocean of McKay.

  Looking at the buildings, Sam realized just how precise the developer had been. All three of the houses were bright enough colours to be trendy, to be almost leading-edge, but still cautious enough to be instantly saleable. Sam felt something like he imagined a fish might feel, just when the cautious-colours hook struck home. That caution, though, was something that clearly hadn’t occurred to all of his other neighbours: there was a flame orange house on one corner, three storeys straight up like an escaping bonfire, and a brave attempt at purple down the street that had somehow fallen flat, as if the rich round grape that had looked so very good in the paint can hadn’t survived the translation to the flat expanse of the clapboard.

  But they were something of an exception. More and more houses in the neighbourhood had new doors, new windows, new flat paint on new clapboard, and Sam knew without even peering in the windows that there would be hardwood or laminate floors inside, that the tile work in the new bathrooms wouldn’t have had a chance to mildew yet.

  And the redone ones were spreading through the others like a virus. The older ones were more careworn, dressed out with eyelet curtains and sheers that were yellow with age or heavy smoking, and even though it was almost summer, there was still one with a plastic Santa out front, its face carefully punched in.

  Father Concave Christmas, Sam thought, wondering how hard someone would have to swing his fist—and what kind of mood he would be in—to beat up Santa.

  The more ragged of the older houses always seemed to have pairs of haughty, patchy cats staring out the front windows, or else small, angry dogs barking up close behind the front doors. The kind of dogs that seemed to sense you passing, that listened for the gritch of your shoes on the pavement so that they could go berserk on the other side of the heavy doors.

  And the older houses were like a secret handshake, he thought, like their owners had a membership card in the unspoken language of the “we’ve-always-been-here-and-you-haven’t.”

  It was as clear as a tide line on the beach, he thought, the difference between the old and the new. The old ones were being slowly shouldered out, the sep
aration between the two sets of houses as clear to Sam as the water’s edge.

  Three doors down from the corner, there was a former rooming house where there had been a spectacular but short-lived fire. One of the addled residents had set up a hibachi in the front hall because it was raining and he didn’t want to get wet cooking hot dogs. The box the barbecue came in said “Not for Indoor Use,” but the man hadn’t ever had the box, and he wouldn’t have liked the lecturing tone of the warning—only an approximate translation from the Japanese—anyway.

  The fire was like its own kind of natural selection, Sam thought as he walked by the burned-out house.

  When the house had been burning, the neighbours all came out and watched the firefighters breaking out the windows and cutting holes in the roof, watched with that peculiarly serious formality that comes from knowing your house and all your possessions are only a couple of doors away if the wind comes up and the firefighters suddenly lose control. It’s one thing to be vicariously concerned about someone else’s life and possessions, Sam thought. It’s something quite different to be concerned about your own.

  The row houses along the street often shared walls, and sometimes they shared misfortunes as well. People were only as safe as their neighbours were careful, and sometimes only as safe as the fire-rated wallboard city inspectors forced on them during renovations.

  The rooming-house residents were gone now, the shell of the house snapped up in a real fire sale, and its interior walls and ceilings were piling up in scraps in a big blue Dumpster in front of the house. A couple of months and someone new would be buying the place, unaware there’d even been a fire, the only hint a faint smell of wet charcoal when the fall rains really came and the humidity was stuck up somewhere in the range of instant migraine.