by Nick Arvin
But of course it was Kathy, and as I got in, she straightened. “Kathy,” I said.
She watched the windshield and her fingers curled and uncurled on her lap. The magnet corns lay in a scatter over the dashboard. They appeared a small, fallen, murdered people. Kathy turned and looked at me, and I reached toward her.
I’d like to be able to say now that that event changed our lives, utterly, for the better. It did in fact startle us out of our narcissism, and we felt again a need to be close, warm, and gentle with each other, to hold together in this dark world where you might get into the backseat of the wrong car and soon be dying, burned on a highway, a stranger asking your name.
And it was all a mistake. Ours was a relationship between two young people that should have ended, but after that accident we clung to it for another seven years, married nearly six of those, in a coupling that seemed to have begun in a state of exhaustion—as sympathetic, as grimly mindful, and as listless as if we had depleted our love over decades.
But the accident wasn’t a trap laid just for us, I remind myself at times. One might as well blame the corn that split the bag in the parking lot. Which sometimes I do. At other times, however, in spite of everything since, I still remember—as we sat together on the shoulder of the interstate, as the two smashed cars were trundled away on the backs of a pair of wreckers, the lanes began to clear, and all the backed up traffic accelerated past us into the open darkness, pushing forward with joy, their drivers oblivious, knowing only that for some reason they had been delayed a long while but now everything looked fine, and their lights streamed into the darkness of the open interstate while Kathy and I sat lit in their glow—I remember I was more glad at that moment to be with her than I could have been with anyone else, and wasn’t that maybe not an illusion of despair, not an effect of receding adrenaline, not an error of character, not misfortune or hysteria, but simply, in that moment at least, love?
Location
Donald was searching the listings for condos priced midthrees in the vicinity of downtown when he discovered that Iris’s place was on the market. The address and unit number gleamed from the computer screen, and he felt hurt that she hadn’t asked him to list her condo, to act as her agent for the sale. But to think she would do so was ridiculous. She was now, apparently, dating a helicopter pilot. Then he thought she might have at least asked him for his advice, his thoughts. But, no, an end was an end.
He was doing research for a new client, a buyer, and Iris’s unit met his client’s criteria for price, size, and bedroom count. Donald stood and paced through the echoing rooms of his house for some minutes. If he brought her a buyer, surely she would not mind, and while her unit’s location in Five Points was a little outside the area his client had requested, the client also had somewhat unrealistic price expectations for the neighborhoods he liked. So Donald decided to go ahead and show him Iris’s place.
During a family vacation—an interstate odyssey via Chevrolet Malibu station wagon, with Donald’s parents in front, alternating petty arguments with miles of silence, and himself on the hot-in-the-sun vinyl of the backseat, reading or daydreaming or whining—they had stopped in Denver to see a college friend of his mother’s. Apparently a woman of some affluence, she lived alone in an enormous red brick Victorian, two stories tall, with a turret at one corner. The woman took them on a tour—outside, through a series of flagstone paths, gesturing to the three-car garage, the flowerbeds, a fountain that trickled glittering water into a goldfish pond, then through a large kitchen to the dining room and parlor, bedroom and foyer, around an ornate newel post and up to the second floor to see more bedrooms and a vast space she said had been a ballroom. Everywhere the ceilings were high and coved; the floors were hardwood. Donald had never been in such an enormous house, nor one with so much exposed wood—in the houses he knew the floors were carpeted, the wood was painted, and he had seen turrets only in picture books. On the second floor, the turret functioned as a sitting area off a bedroom, and from here he saw distant rough peaks, an entire horizon of mountains—they seemed fabulous, hardly credible.
At dinner, while they ate at an old wooden table under a chandelier on a long chain, he watched his mother’s friend. She had fascinating skin—tanned as toast with many fine creases feathering her face and arms. She talked a great deal, with languid gestures. When she mentioned she was putting the house up for sale, Donald grew excited. He told his parents they should buy it: the house was marvelous, and it was for sale, and it seemed very simple—he would live in the bedroom with the turret and play in the ballroom while his mother tended to the garden and his father worked on his motorcycles in the garage. The hostess squinted at him, and his parents giggled, then laughed, then guffawed until they grew nearly hysterical—even much later, looking back, he wasn’t sure why they laughed so hard. Maybe it was only that his impression of their laughing had exaggerated over time. Especially fixed in memory, however, was his sense of reproach, as if he had betrayed a misunderstanding not only of his parents’ range of real estate options but of their very natures. And he spent a great deal of time afterward trying to understand what it was he had not understood.
Years later he drove alone with his possessions piled, wedged, and jammed into an old Buick, traveled westbound on I-80 from Ohio, where he had lived all his life, through Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, and across the pancake expanses of Nebraska. He was returning to Denver, and he thought about where he was going largely in terms of the turreted house, the view from the turret, his mother’s friend’s strange skin and strange situation. Why would someone live alone in such vastness? Had she inherited it? Bought it as an investment? When he was only a couple of hours from the city, mountains now on his right, thunderheads appeared ahead and soon lay heaped vast and black all across the plains, so that as he topped a hill and saw at last the towers of downtown, they were trivialized beneath the weather. Fat raindrops struck the car with the noise of a clapping crowd. It was 1998. A friend who had come here two years earlier was now the vice president at an Internet startup, and he had recruited Donald to work in marketing. Donald was excited about the work, the company, the money—he would make an outlandish salary. The opportunity had come suddenly, and its window was brief; his first home in the city was a motel room with wide cracks where the walls joined the ceiling, loud with the hiss of vehicles on the rainwet interstate.
Despite his salary, rents seemed high; on his second weekend in the city he signed a lease on an apartment in Capitol Hill with a little balcony that looked out on an alleyway of crumbling asphalt. It had hardwood floors, but in the bedroom the boards were warped with water damage and in the living room the floor had been deformed as the structure settled, so that his furniture sat unevenly and tottered between two legs. He spent little time there. His new work engaged him, was frenetic and thrilling, kept him at the office to late hours and into weekends. It lasted fifteen months before the layoffs began. He survived in the company two months longer, then his friend, the vice president, gave him two week’s pay, a few gift certificates to Starbucks, and offered to write a letter of recommendation. Donald realized, as he began revising his résumé, that although the work he had done had kept him busy, he could not articulate clearly what his job had been, or even what the company had done. He spent much of the next several days walking a figure-eight path around the ponds in Washington Park, feeding the mallards crumbs of Starbucks scones, watching unholy boiling sunsets fade over the ragged western range, and contemplating a disorganized retreat to Ohio.
He knew his parents would greet his return with a mild and clammy fussiness, that he would be able to find work, that he would easily reenter old routines with old friends, but he felt a visceral reaction against going back. As he considered this feeling, he came to understand that he had staked a portion of his identity on the move here, that to abandon this place now would be to abandon a part of who he hoped to be. This had an aspect of revelation to him, because he had not previously realized th
at he had specific ideas about whom he hoped to be, that he might not merely accept the path offered by happenstance or fate. This realization imbued him with an unusual energy. He spent weeks in the library reading books on job hunting, on résumé writing, on interview techniques; he studied the newspapers and internet postings; he spent hours writing and revising cover letters; he submitted dozens of résumés in a score of industries.
But it was a very bad time to be looking for work.
Real estate was a career he had never foreseen for himself. Only in desperation did he get a broker’s license, did it with thoughts turning vaguely to the impression the turreted house had made, symbolizing the sum of his real estate experience. At the beginning he knew few people in the city, had no ready-made network to exploit for clients, was clumsy and self-conscious in selling himself and his services to strangers. During the second year, he maxed out three credit cards, his phone line was cut off, and for food money he pawned CDs, books, a camera, and the golf clubs his parents had given him. His radiator stopped working, and he couldn’t approach the landlord because he owed rent, so he came home only very late to sleep under a pile of second-hand quilts. But he kept working and grasping. He volunteered to hold open houses for other agents’ properties in hopes of meeting clients. He wrote and photocopied neighborhood market analyses and spent days hand delivering them door to door. He rented tables at bridal expos.
Slowly, he began to find clients. When he took buyers out, it was strange at first, examining these past and future homes that were now objects for sale. Some had been emptied by their sellers; others still contained all the possessions of a family. Conventional wisdom held that a place showed better when furnished, but the photos on the wall, the food in the cupboard, and the shoes in the closet gave the eerie impression of an unsettled world, as if a family had been forced to flee by a sudden, secret calamity. He and his clients passed through, touching this and that, assessing, criticizing and, inevitably, smirking. People had strange things in their houses—a Harry Belafonte shrine, a toilet in the center of the bedroom, a pink dungeon.
In time he found he was reasonably good at his work, that in fact he liked it, liked learning about the city, and in a few years he had come to know the streets and neighborhoods, the schools, the little hidden parks, the zoning, the laws pertaining to sidewalk maintenance, how long the waitlists were for the preschools, the best restaurants for menudo or phò. When he met someone new and asked where she lived, he was oftentimes able to recall the cross streets, imagine his way along the block, and describe the building—a useful barroom trick, and it occurred to him that he probably knew the city better than most natives. He liked this. And he loved bringing a client to a house the client knew instinctively, just by walking through the door, was fated to be home. This happened more regularly than he might have supposed it would.
_______
Over time it developed that many of his friends were lawyers. He was unsure how this happened, but he liked to listen to them argue with one another, liked the way they thought, parsing relevant from irrelevant, distinction from difference. So he was at a party full of young attorneys and paralegals when he met Iris, an attorney, and fell into a discussion with her about the use of the word “home.” Iris said realtors abused it, putting the word into marketing fliers to describe residences in which no one lived, or in which, anyway, the prospective buyer certainly did not yet live, a cold deserted structure without soul or possessor or love, so that the word “home” became mere marketing gloss, an invidious lie. Surprised, he stood dumb and grinning, not to patronize her—as she accused, laughing—but because listening to her made him happy. She had a startling laugh—loud, staccato, witch-like. He saw a group of mascara-eyed women peer over and smirk, as if Iris had belched, and he wanted to jam needles into these people. As a practical matter, he said, a word like “house” or “condo” or “duplex” would be overly restrictive because someone might be interested in any or all of these, while “dwelling” was clumsy, “abode” was odd, and “residence” was cold. But, she said, more precise. Eventually, giddy with vodka tonics and an inner trilling, he conceded that perhaps he occasionally used “home” when he meant something slightly different.
She lived in a loft-style condo, in a new building in the Five Points neighborhood. It had ten-foot ceilings and a large great room and exposed ductwork, but it was loft-style, not a true loft—he pointed out to ding her with some precision—because the bedroom was walled off, as well as the bathroom and a couple of closets. It was on the fifth floor, in a corner, and offered exceptional views—from her south-facing windows one could see the spread of the city’s skyline, while at the same time, in the western windows, lay the mass of Mount Evans and all the smaller peaks and ridges that formed its wide shoulders.
Iris’s parents were Chinese immigrants, and she was thin and small—the top of her head came to Donald’s shoulders—while Donald’s own ancestors were Irish-Greek-Danish-Polish, and his wide build suited the wrestling he had done in high school. To see Iris’s uncanny laugh come out of her tiny frame was a bit of a marvel. But after the first evening of talking with her at the party, he rarely thought about the physically odd match between them, unless someone else mentioned it. Before moving to Denver she had spent all her life in Milwaukee, her accent was Midwestern, and her cultural references were the same as his. It took him a few weeks to see that her laugh was a kind of mask on nervousness, and a few more weeks to see that her precision played the same role. The more nervous she was, the more likely she was to delve into droll arguments over exactitude. When she was really pissed, on the other hand, she became merely silent. Then she would do another thing. She maintained her stiff quiet until he was gone, then she would break something. It would be lying around for him to see when he returned. A smashed plate. A dent kicked into the wall.
The plate and the dent appeared when his unpredictable work schedule spoiled things, i.e., the canceled vacation to Puerto Vallarta. But such breakage was rare. On weekend evenings, they boiled bratwursts in beer, mashed avocados into guacamole, and drank stiff margaritas while watching black-and-white monster movies. She enjoyed arguing politics, and when he grew tired of it, she argued with the television. He liked to talk with her about what the real estate developers were up to, about the endless legal vagaries of closing a real estate contract, about the hidden breaches between what his clients thought they wanted in a home and what they actually wanted. He spent most of his days in her loft. She gave him his own closet.
To Donald’s mind, the end began with the cat. He and Iris were together for more than two years, making this the longest, most serious relationship of his life. The cat—reportedly still young and sweet-natured, as cats went—belonged to a friend who had taken a new job that involved moving to Nigeria to work in the oil fields. When Iris began to talk about adopting it, Donald was possessed by a sudden, unreasoning desperation, a hate of this unknown cat. He said he was allergic. He thought this might be true; he had had the sniffles once while visiting an aunt who lived with a half-dozen cats.
Iris didn’t take in the cat, but not long thereafter she sat with crossed legs on one of the brushed nickel dining-room chairs in her condo and asked Donald what he thought about marriage. Later he saw how obtuse he had been; obviously he should have expected this question would come up. But he was surprised. He stared, then laughed loudly, as if at a moment of unexpected slapstick. As his parents had done years ago. It embarrassed him, but it also seemed to embarrass her. Flustered, she said, “Who wouldn’t want to lock into an old ball and chain?”
They laughed too hard. (For the most part he didn’t notice the particular sound of her laugh anymore, but now and again it was a like a nail run down the spine.) He said, “My dad used to say, ‘I take my wife everywhere, but somehow she keeps finding her way back.’” Iris groaned, began to talk about her family; he stepped into the kitchen to start dinner; one of his clients phoned in a panic about an inspection notice,
and it was as if the topic of marriage had been forgotten.
Late that night, however, as he slouched on the sofa with her, weary and vacant-minded, she said that she thought they really needed to have a levelheaded, serious, undistracted conversation on the subject of where their relationship was going.
He sat up. “You mean,” he said, pleased to be the one who said the word directly: “marriage.”
“Yes,” she said. She wanted to get married in the next couple of years; she wanted to start planning that next stage of her life; she wanted to be able to talk seriously about how the two of them could bring into their lives a third life, a child, and while she spoke he watched her dark eyes watching him. She set out her position, he thought, with the precision of a mechanism, or a lawyer. A silence followed. He felt fidgety, sulky, displeased, trapped; he went to the window. The mountains were obscured by clouds. Down on the street a man in a tight white tank top was explosively vacating his stomach into the gutter. She said she was confident they could communicate and work together, find a route through the inevitable compromises that would make them both happy. Or, at least, mostly happy, most of the time. Without looking around, he nodded. He had the sense that she had paraphrased this speech from somewhere, some self-help book or blog. The silence in the room grew long and burdened. Finally he began to talk about his parents’ marriage, and the marriages of some of his friends—marriages that had ended in divorce, and he found his way down a conversational path that led away from the original talk of marriage, until once again he was talking about real estate.
He left her condo with a sensation of guilt and conflict. He knew the next time he returned to the loft, he would find a picture frame smashed onto the floor or a serving plate hurled into the wall. It depressed him. And then, in a sudden mental lateral move, he made the decision to look for a house for himself: it had long seemed obvious that he should stop renting and buy, and he had saved enough for a solid down payment. But, while managing a client’s expectations and emotions through a process of rational decision-making was a skill that he had developed and refined, shepherding his own expectations and emotions would be something different. That night he began searching the listings. The next day, at Iris’s condo, he found that a large potted jade plant no longer sat on the bookshelf but lay in dirt and shards on the hardwood. He apologized and begged for time to sort his thoughts. He spoke with genuine contrition, and she seemed convinced. Then he set out to look at everything anew—adobe-styled houses with tile roofs near Congress Park; converted warehouses with exposed brickwork and high ceilings in LoDo; condo units in the towers of Cheesman Park; fix-and-flip Victorians in Five Points; duplexes among the expensive pop-tops around Washington Park; bungalows and ranch-style houses all over the city. He set showings, and he wandered the rooms, and he felt nothing. Soon he realized that he was waiting for that sudden knowledge—that a place was meant to be his home—to strike upon walking in a door. He began to look at oddities: a house with garage parking for twelve cars and, effectively, no lawn; a house with a two-story rock-climbing wall in the dining room. In the Highlands he found a note written by an eleven-year-old, threatening violence against whoever might buy his home, which endeared Donald to the house, but it was sorely overpriced. He became interested in a Victorian where P. T. Barnum had once lived—when he saw a photo of Barnum on the porch with elephants in the lawn he was certain he would buy it. But that certainty faded as he rolled up to the curb—the house stood along railroad tracks, with a welding shop on one side and a derelict warehouse on the other, and he couldn’t convince himself that these could be overlooked. He watched for the Victorian that he had told his parents to buy; over the years he had seen several houses that reminded him of it, but none seemed exactly right, and perhaps nothing was—it could have been scraped to make room for a strip mall, or various owners might have remodeled it beyond recognition. He supposed that he could find it if he really wanted to. Call his mother. But what would he do then? Go look at it? It would become merely another house. Maybe, too, he feared the slight chance of finding his mother’s friend: she had presented an open seep of sensuality that attracted and repelled. In his memory she burned, and he would have hated to see her now. Anyway, he didn’t like the Victorians he saw, too large for his purposes, too drafty, too dim. The sudden knowledge did not come. His nearest experience to such an irrational trigger was in a bungalow near Berkeley Park, where he descended to the gloomy, half-finished basement and began looking over his shoulder with the feeling of someone crowding behind, as if an angry invisible specter were miming and mocking him. He fled the house gasping.
