Set This House in Order

by Matt Ruff

  Julie refilled both our glasses and led me into her bedroom. Once again she left the overhead light off, plugging the Christmas tree in instead, illuminating the room in soft multicolor. She plopped down on the edge of her futon. I squatted, somewhat more delicately, on the floor a few feet away.

  This time Julie saw me wincing. “Did you hurt your back?” she asked.

  I nodded. “Twister,” I said.

  “Oh shit,” said Julie. Then she patted the surface of the futon behind her. “Come on up here, I’ll give you a backrub…Come on, Andrew. I won’t bite.”

  I climbed on the futon and lay on my stomach as Julie directed. “God, you’re tense,” she observed, as she settled over me.

  Yes, I was: tense with fear and excitement, in equal measure. I could sense Adam up in the pulpit and knew he’d be getting scared too, scared speechless in fact. Which was good—the last thing I wanted right now was to have him making wisecracks in the background.

  Julie ran her hands lightly up and down my back a few times, checking out the lay of the land. I tried to relax—but then Julie yanked my shirttail out of my jeans.

  “Jesus, Andrew, calm down,” Julie said. “I promise I’m not going to hurt you. Now”—she gave my shirt another little yank—“is it OK if I take this off you?”

  I wanted to say yes, but couldn’t seem to get the word out of my mouth.

  “OK,” Julie said, after a moment. “We’ll leave it on for now—but untucked.” She shifted position above me; there was a sound of cloth sliding over skin—and then Julie’s shirt came off, landing in a heap on the floor beside the futon. I let out a little gasp and jerked my head around…and was both relieved and disappointed to see that Julie was still wearing her bra.

  “’Scuse me for being Dennis,” she said, smiling down at me.

  She wasn’t Dennis. Take my word for it: Dennis without a shirt on and Julie without a shirt on were two totally different things.

  When I’d climbed onto the futon I’d set my shot glass down in easy reach. I reached for it now, which seemed to amuse Julie, who waited patiently as I drank. Then she took the empty glass from me and set it aside, pushed me gently back down onto my stomach, and ran her cool soft hands up under the back of my shirt.

  The next fifteen minutes were, without question, the happiest and most terrifying of my life up to that point—which admittedly is not saying quite as much as it would be for most twenty-six-year-olds. I don’t know how good a backrub it was, objectively speaking—I had nothing to compare it to—but I enjoyed it immensely, even when Julie dug her fingers into one of my bruises hard enough to make me groan.

  My eyelids had fluttered closed, and I was on the verge of letting go my anxiety, when Julie said: “So, Andrew…what are your goals for this coming year?”

  My eyes snapped open again. “My…my goals?”

  “Yeah, your goals,” Julie said. Keeping one hand on my neck, she lowered the other to the small of my back, and brushed her fingertips across the skin just above the waistband of my jeans. “You know, like that toast we made. What new experiences are you hoping to have this year?”

  “Ah…I…uh…”

  “Don’t think about it so hard.” She brought her hand back up to my shoulders, and bent so low that she was practically lying on top of me, whispering in my ear: “Just pick something. One thing that you’ve never done before, that you’d like to do…”

  My head was turned sideways on the futon now, and Julie must have seen how red my face was getting, because she backed off a little. “Andrew?”

  “Julie…” I was petrified that I was about to make a terrible fool of myself, but I didn’t know what else to do, and there was no one I could ask for help—Adam had left the pulpit when Julie took her shirt off. I forced myself to go on: “Julie, are you…are you making a pass at me?”

  She laughed, but not as lightheartedly as before. “What if I am?” she said.

  “Are you or aren’t you?” The words came out much too loud. I tried to soften my voice: “Please…please don’t tease me about this, Julie.”

  There was a long pause, and then I felt her rolling off me. “Shit.”

  “Julie?” I lifted my head up and looked at her. She was lying on her back staring up at the ceiling, pulling at her hair with both hands.

  “Shit, shit, shit,” Julie said. “What the fuck am I doing? What the fuck is wrong with me?”

  “Wrong with you?” I said, though the question hadn’t really been directed at me. “Julie, there’s nothing wrong with…if you want to…you know. It’s just, I don’t understand—last week you said, I thought you said, that you wouldn’t want to be lovers with me, because…”

  “I know.”

  “…because lovers don’t last, and friends do, and you want me to stay in your life…”

  “I know.” Julie was nodding now. “I know. And you’re right, Andrew.”

  I was right? “Wait a minute,” I said. “Wait a minute, no, that was your argument. I don’t think it’s true—and if you don’t really believe it either, that’s fine with me…I just need to know what you’re feeling, that’s all.”

  “What I’m feeling…”

  She took her hands out of her hair, and looked at me. It was a moment that would haunt me later: Julie looked so beautiful, lying there, and I had a definite sense of a window of opportunity opening, very briefly. If only I had done something then—leaned down and kissed her, touched her face, something—then maybe the evening would have ended differently. Maybe we could have been lovers after all. But I knew even less about seducing people than I knew about being seduced, so I hesitated, out of my depth.

  And the moment passed. “No,” Julie said, shaking her head. She sat up, giving me her back. “Could you hand me my shirt, Andrew?”

  “Julie,” I said, suddenly short of breath, as though ice water had been splashed on my chest. “Julie, it’s OK, you don’t have to…I mean…can’t we just talk, or—”

  “I really think I need to pass out, Andrew,” Julie said, still not looking at me. “I’m sorry, I know it’s still early, but…I really think that would be best. You should go home.” Finally she turned towards me, offering me a brittle smile and patting my knee the way you’d pat a baby’s head. “Now please, can you hand me my shirt?”

  “OK…” I handed her the shirt. She turned all the way away from me to put it on, as if suddenly she were uncomfortable to have me looking at her in just her bra. Dressed, she hopped off the futon, scooped up both shot glasses and stumbled towards the door, flicking on the overhead light on her way out.

  I got up too, blinking in the sudden brightness. I tucked my shirt in and went out to the kitchen, where Julie was making a big production out of washing the shot glasses. “Julie?” I said, keeping a respectful distance.

  “Yes?” she said, bent over the sink, her back to me.

  “I know you want me to leave now, but…tomorrow. Tomorrow, when you’re more awake…can we talk about this?”

  “Talk?” She shut off the water and reached for a dishtowel. “Sure.” She dried the shot glasses and then her hands. “Sure,” she repeated, hanging the towel up. My coat was on the kitchen table; she grabbed it and offered it to me. “Here you go.”

  “Julie—”

  “Shh,” Julie said, pressing the coat into my hands. She leaned forward to give me a quick kiss on the cheek; I started to turn my head, turn my lips towards hers, but she’d already stepped back. “Careful going down the stairs,” she said, holding the apartment door open for me.

  I slept badly that night. Although I was technically drunk—and you can be sure my father gave me nine shades of hell about that—I wasn’t drunk enough to pass out. Besides, it really was still early—barely eight o’clock when I got home. By my normal bedtime, I’d sobered up enough to toss and turn for hours.

  In the morning, Julie avoided me at first. I suppose the mature thing would have been to play along and pretend that nothing had happened, but I
couldn’t do that—and after Dennis made some suggestive comments about how I “must’ve been up pretty late last night,” Julie noticed how haggard I looked and took pity on me. She came by my tent around noon.

  “I’m really sorry, Andrew…” she said, standing contritely in front of my desk.

  “You don’t have to be sorry, Julie,” I told her. “It’s not like I mind you making a pass at me, if…if that’s what happened. I just, I need you to explain it to me, that’s all.”

  Julie let out a sigh. “There’s nothing to explain, Andrew. I was drunk. You were drunk. We—”

  “I drank what you gave me to drink,” I said, and we both flinched at the edge in my voice.

  “OK,” said Julie. “OK, fine, I got drunk, I got you drunk, it’s on me. There’s still nothing to explain. People do stupid things when they’re drunk, Andrew—that’s all it was.”

  “But I thought you weren’t even attracted to me—”

  “Andrew, of course I’m attracted to you. You’re a very attractive person. But—”

  “Then why can’t we be lovers? If you’re attracted to me, and I’m attracted to you, and we like each other—”

  Julie ended up giving me half a dozen reasons why we couldn’t be lovers. Then there was the other reason, Adam’s reason, which Julie herself never voiced but which I have come to believe is probably the real reason: that Julie, no matter what her behavior might occasionally have suggested to the contrary, just wasn’t interested.

  None of these reasons satisfied me—not even the ones I was willing to accept. What I really wanted to know was not “Why can’t we be lovers?” but “How can we be lovers?” What did I have to do to open that window of opportunity again—that opportunity I was sure had been there—and this time not miss it? How do I seduce you, Julie?

  I don’t think Julie would have answered that question, even if I’d known enough to put it to her straight. And I didn’t know enough; so I just kept asking her “Why not?” until eventually—pretty quickly—she got tired of making up reasons.

  By the second week of January, Julie had stopped hanging out with me after work, and was doing a decent job of avoiding me inside the Factory as well; that month she made a record number of business-related trips to Seattle, often spending whole days in the city. One night I was waiting for her outside her apartment when she came home, well after dark, and she informed me tersely that I wasn’t to come by uninvited anymore.

  “Ever?” I gasped.

  “For now,” Julie said. She looked away from me, and tapped her foot impatiently.

  “For now? For now until when?”

  “Until you get over me,” Julie snapped. “However long that takes.” Softening: “I hope it won’t be too long, Andrew. But…”

  I thought that was as bad as it could get, the way I felt that night—and it was bad enough that I took the next day off work and went to see Dr. Grey on my own, without even asking my father’s permission. But then a week later, I overheard Julie telling Dennis about the mechanic she’d met in Seattle and begun dating.

  Adam and my father both warned me not to say anything—it would only cause more trouble, might even get me fired. I knew they were right, and managed to keep my feelings in check for almost twenty-four hours, but in the end I caved in. I went over to Julie’s apartment uninvited, and climbed the stairs, and paused, trying to screw up the courage to knock, and heard a strange sound…and listened.

  Dr. Grey doubted that my catharsis had been real. It was not an unreasonable conclusion for her to come to, but I didn’t want to believe it. I remembered the relief I’d felt the next day, waking up, finding all that obsessive feeling about Julie just gone, taken away; it was distressing to think that that might have been some sort of sleight-of-mind trick. Still, if I wasn’t willing to accept that the catharsis had been an illusion, I could maybe allow the possibility that it hadn’t been totally successful. Maybe I was still carrying a small torch for Julie—just a little one, a tiny flame of unextinguished hope that that window of opportunity would open up again someday. Such a flame would have been easy enough to keep alive, I supposed: Julie’s relationship with the mechanic hadn’t lasted more than a month, and she hadn’t dated anyone else since. So, maybe…

  I thought it over—I thought all of this over—on the bus ride from Poulsbo to the ferry terminal and on the ferry back to Seattle. I could have gone inside the house to do my thinking, and let some of the other souls use the body while I was preoccupied, but I was tired and felt the beginnings of a headache, so I stayed out. This prompted complaints of unfairness from Angel and Rhea, who hadn’t had any time outside yet today, and from Simon, who had had time outside but felt he deserved more. I told them all to leave me alone. My father, seeing the kind of mood I was in, supported my decision, and promised Simon and the others that he would make it up to them, if they behaved. That mollified Angel and Rhea, but not Simon, who was running a mood of his own.

  When the ferry docked in Seattle, I made a dash for the Metro stop at Second and Madison, just missing the 3:20 bus to Autumn Creek. The next bus wasn’t due until 4:10, which, Simon suggested, left time for a quick visit to Westlake Center mall. I warned him again to leave me alone. Then the 4:10 bus showed up late, with engine trouble, and had to be taken out of service. Simon began to whine. I lost my temper and yelled at him to shut up, which at least got me some real-world breathing space: when the replacement bus arrived, none of the other passengers would sit near me.

  It was quarter to six by the time we got back to Autumn Creek. Trudging the last block up Temple Street towards home, I wanted nothing more than to get indoors, have a quick bite to eat, and take a long, hot bath…

  …and that was when I saw Penny’s Buick parked at the curb out front of the Victorian.

  This was the last thing I wanted to deal with after such a long day. As it turned out, though, it may have been the perfect moment for Penny to catch up with me: I was simply too exhausted to panic again, and between my anger at Simon and my frustration with the Metro bus system, I had temporarily stopped thinking about Julie.

  I walked up to the Buick. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a seated figure jump to her feet on the porch of the Victorian, like a sentry leaping to attention.

  “It’s all right, Mrs. Winslow,” I called out.

  “Are you sure, Andrew?”

  “Yes,” I said—and realized, with no small amazement, that Mrs. Winslow was holding a shotgun. “It’s OK, really, you can go inside. I’ll be in for dinner in just a minute.”

  With an almost imperceptible nod, Mrs. Winslow retreated into the house. I got the feeling that she hadn’t gone far—that she was waiting just inside the front door, gun in hand, ready to come charging back out if Penny showed the slightest sign of trying to abduct me in the Centurion. I didn’t know whether to be reassured or worried by that.

  Anyway, no more delaying: I opened the Buick’s front passenger door, and climbed in. I recognized Foul Mouth in the driver’s seat; she sat hunched forward over the steering wheel, her right hand drumming impatiently on the dashboard.

  “Hello,” I said. “I guess it’s time we tal—”

  “Close the fucking door,” Foul Mouth said.

  I sighed. Dr. Grey had warned me not to stand for any abuse, but I didn’t want to start right off with a confrontation, so I did as I was told and pulled the door shut. “Now,” I said, “can we—”

  There was a tiny click from the dashboard: the cigarette lighter button, popping out. Foul Mouth turned towards me and pounced, snatching up the cigarette lighter as she leaned across the front seats.

  “Fucker!” she hissed, her face suddenly just inches from my own, the hot coil of the lighter poised right above my cheek. “You fucker!”

  In the pulpit, Adam cried an alarm. Instantly Seferis was there, ready to jump into the body and take over…but I wouldn’t let him. I know I should have. I should have been terrified, too: the normal reaction when someone threatens to b
urn you with a piece of hot metal. Somehow, though, I just wasn’t. There was a little thrill of fear, maybe, deep down in the pit of my stomach, but what I mostly felt was annoyed.

  “Put that thing away,” I said wearily.

  The cigarette lighter trembled, as if Foul Mouth were steeling herself to plunge it into my face. I turned my head a fraction and looked her in the eye. “You’re being very rude,” I told her, “and I won’t help Penny if you’re rude to me.”

  She eased back, but only part way: the lighter coil remained pointed at me, her left arm cocked behind it. “You’ll help her?”

  I nodded. “If you’re polite…”

  “Polite!” Foul Mouth sneered.

  “Civil, then,” I said. “Look, I know I’ve been rude to you too, and I’m sorry. But if you agree to stop threatening me, and stop upsetting my landlady, then I promise I’ll try to help Penny like you wanted.”

  Foul Mouth regarded me thoughtfully a moment longer. Finally she lowered her arm and reinserted the cigarette lighter in its slot. “Deal,” she said.

  “…do you really mean it?” added another, friendlier voice. “You’ll help us?”

  “Yes, I mean it. Thread? It is Thread, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” she said, smiling. “Like Ariadne’s thread, you know that story?”

  “I think so…And what’s the protector’s name?”

  “The protector?”

  “The, um”—I glanced at the dashboard—“the one who swears.”

  Thread followed my glance to the cigarette lighter. “Oh,” she said, “you mean the twins! Maledicta and Malefica. Maledicta does all of the talking—and the swearing—but they’re always together.”

  “Are there others?” I asked.

  “Oh, yes, lots of others.” She eyed me curiously. “You have others too, don’t you?” I nodded, and Thread nodded too, her smile widening. “I knew it!” she said. “I knew we weren’t the only ones. And you know how to make it work, don’t you? How to make it…less confusing.”

  “Yes.”

  It was as if she’d been holding her breath this whole time, and was now finally able to release it. “Oh, thank goodness!…So how do we start? What do we have to do?”