Thy Neighbor (3 page)

This time I said, “Tell me,” because I knew she was hiding so much. The hidden things were gaining weight with every contact. Her past would make its way into every acquaintance, as mine had, and it would come, as it always had for me, to a breaking point. Either you shared or you turned away.

I didn't want her to turn away, and I knew that this time I couldn't.

I had given up.

When I met Monica I was already too weak with the wear and dissolution of the past thirteen years to do anything but lean passively away and scratch casually at anyone who tried to get under my skin, until they atrophied with neglect and fell off like a scab. But I couldn't do that with Monica, obviously. Because she'd gotten in. Or, more to the point, because she knew something.

That's what infatuation always feels like. Like the other person knows something, or maybe a lot of things that you just have to find out. Things that seem crucial, or meant for you alone, and the whole point of the game is for them to keep the files from you and for you to hack your way in.

Monica was a skilled enigmatist.

Actually, that's not quite right. She was a maze and a puzzle to herself as much as to me. But she made me feel as though I had the encrypted map or the hidden piece that would set it all out in the open and cure her. And the reverse was also true. She seemed to have my missing information, the bit that would finally, mercifully put me down for good.

And that's what I was looking for. Something to finish the goddamned endless purgatorial pause of my stopgap junior-grade life. Something sure enough and with a steady hand that could achieve the desired effect with one blow. I kept Monica around for that.

Whenever, if ever, she got around to it.

3

I was up all night again with Dave. I woke again on the couch.

This time, no puke, and no lunatic notes from myself. Just the usual morning sickness that comes of not having been sick the night before.

My head is like an anvil, and I could swear that my mouth and my asshole have changed places. My entire alimentary canal feels as if it's been scoured with steel wool, sphincter to sphincter.

And so it goes.

Manikin me has stamina if nothing else. We'll give him that. Dedication to the cause of progressive dehydration, cell death, and episodic amnesia. Self-absorption remains intact and growing. Waking suicidal fantasy robust.

It must be getting on toward eight. I've been lying here for hours. Dusk is settling around the window casements and in the corners of the room. I can see from here that Mrs. Bloom's kitchen light is on across the street, and her weak porch light, too. She always turns that on at dusk, and then the kitchen light after, fortifying the house for the long night alone.

In recent years, on winter afternoons, when it got dark early and I would be lying here, as usual, in state, half waking, it became a ritual to look across the street and watch Mrs. Bloom moving around her house turning on lights. Now I wait for it in summer, too, as I have tonight, even if I've been awake for some time.

She turns on a lamp in the upstairs window, a single candle bulb like the ones people put up at Christmas. But she puts it only in that one corner window upstairs, and she keeps it there all year long. Every night it's the last light she puts on, and every morning it's the last light she turns off. On the nights when I haven't passed out, usually when I'm with Monica or I haven't been with Dave, I see her do this just before I go to bed, just as the light is coming up.

I find it calming and reassuring, as if the night watchman has been on duty. The last light going out is his signal that it's safe to sleep.

As a kid, on summer nights around this time, in early June, when my parents put me to bed, I would lie in my room and look out across the street at the line of trees behind the Blooms' house, bulbous black silhouettes against a lilac sky. In their shapes I traced the profile of a sleeping giant lying on his back: Afro hair, short forehead, long nose, chin, chest—even legs that disappeared behind the houses next door and reemerged down the block as upturned feet. In a breeze it looked as if the giant's hair was rustling or his chest was moving up and down, breathing. I imagined that he was there to protect me, and so long as he was asleep, all was well with the world and our piece of it.

The Blooms still lived there then. They've lived here since the development was built nearly fifty years ago. Mr. Bloom died a few years back, and since then Mrs. Bloom has been making her night and morning rounds.

But the candle bulb has been in the window for a lot longer than that. It's been there at least as long as I've been back. I remember seeing it the night of my parents' funeral. For thirteen years or more that bulb has been lit every night and extinguished every morning at dawn.

As for the other lights staying on all night, that started only after Mr. Bloom's death. She must be afraid to sleep in a dark house alone, or she thinks the lights will deter burglars. Then again, maybe she's like me and stays up all night for other reasons, except instead of throwing herself blindly into the bull run of human debauchery, as if she thinks the angel of mercy is in the oncoming traffic, she's reading calmly by lamplight, sipping a glass of sherry and waiting patiently to die with some dignity.

That's how I feel, anyway, dignity or not. And I had my parents for only twenty-one years, a quarter of which I was too young to process or intelligibly record, and another third of which I spent away at school. But the Blooms were married for fifty years, or thereabouts. Maybe more. Fifty fuckin' years. And they were there for all of it.

Ten years in, they had one daughter, Karen, who grew up way too fast and took off pregnant at seventeen or eighteen. Dropped out of high school in her senior year, hooked up with a bad crowd, left, and never came back. Except once, about a year later, to dump the kid she didn't want and couldn't rear. A girl. The Blooms named her Robin and raised her as their daughter. Karen fell off the map until a few years later, when the Blooms got word that she'd died of an overdose in a squat somewhere out east, Baltimore or Philly.

It seems that running away runs in their family, because the Blooms kept Robin only until she was twelve, and then she, too, just disappeared.
Poof
. Gone. Maybe she didn't believe her mother was dead and went to find her. Maybe her father came and took her. Or maybe it was a pedophile with a ladder and some chloroform. No one knows. But that's what the candle bulb in the upstairs window is for, I'm sure. For Robin. A reminder. A vigil. A signal, in case she's out there watching, that says: You're always welcome home.

I hardly knew Robin, or even knew of her. By the time she was four or so I had headed off to boarding school and then college, and by the time I came back she was gone. But by all accounts she was a good kid. Sweet. Reserved. Excellent student. Precocious, actually. Read all the time—poetry especially, and stuff that was way, way above a normal elementary schooler's level. Way above a high schooler's level.

I remember my mom telling me about one particular day when she'd gone out to get the mail—the mailboxes are clustered across the street on an easement of the Blooms' property—and she saw Robin lying out on the Blooms' lawn reading a copy of what looked like
The Inferno
. My mom knew a thing or two about Dante. She had a PhD from Barnard in English lit, and she was a voracious reader all her life, keeping up with trends in academic and trade publishing. She said she remembered having had enough trouble in her time as a TA getting her freshman charges to read
The Inferno
, let alone understand it. But an eleven-year-old? There was no way.

She thought she was seeing things, so she asked Robin if she could have a look at the book. Robin handed it over with a shrug. Sure enough, it was the real deal—and the Pinsky translation no less, in a bilingual edition with the English on one page and the Renaissance Italian on the facing one. Both pages were covered with Robin's childishly looped marginalia.

Mom was very impressed by this.

“Pinsky's is the only English translation that comes close to preserving the delicate terza rima of the original,” she exclaimed. “It's subtle and complex, and from what I could see, that kid was getting it. Really getting it. She wasn't just carrying it around for show, scribbling hearts and love doodles in the white spots. She had actually written the word ‘
TRUST
' in capital letters next to the first appearance of Virgil's name.”

Amazing girl, I guess. And a tortured one, if that's the reading she was taking refuge in at that age. A really sad story. As sad as my own.

After my parents died and I took over the house, the Blooms were the only people I felt comfortable with. Not that we spent long afternoons together over tea, but now and again, if we were both outside at the same time and happened to see each other—usually it was Mr. Bloom I'd see—we'd stop and talk for a few minutes.

We'd stand in one or the other's driveway, or on the curb near the trash cans and recycling bins that one of us was taking out or bringing in, and we'd talk in that liberating, socially graceless way that people who've lost everything do.

I felt sorry for them. They'd had it rough, losing two girls, and they took it hard—on themselves—as if they'd done something wrong that had made it all turn out so badly. Only they didn't know what that thing was.

I felt a kinship with them, too, because they were the only people I knew who had been through anything remotely as painful and inexplicable as I had.

The Blooms had no more answers than I did, and no more sense of reparation, or expiable fault, which they would have gladly taken as a substitute if it could have brought some relief. But no power can absolve an indiscernible sin. We were like overly conscientious kids in the confessional, feeling the dogmatic heft of human wrongdoing but unable to ferret out our own crimes.

As a seven- or eight-year-old, when I first started going to confession, I often confessed to things I hadn't done—small things, lies, impure thoughts, whatever came to me—because I hadn't actually done anything bad that I could think of, and then I'd cry while receiving absolution, convinced that the black mark was still there on my soul.

But then I was no great student of church teaching. Most of it was lost on me and left me bewildered in ways that made my parents pant and choke with laughter when I asked them about it. For the longest time, I thought the priest was saying Jesus and the twelve
decycles
, and I always wondered why the son of God was riding around with a bunch of clowns. At the time, I earnestly thought of running away with the circus, like it was a good deed I could perform during Lent. I never lived that one down—it was a family joke forever.

But through the veil of humor and confusion, my remorse was real enough. Remorse over something I couldn't understand.

That was the feeling the Blooms and I shared in later life.

After Mr. Bloom died, I never saw Mrs. Bloom, except obscurely, framed in windows, walking through the house and turning those lights on or off. I never rang her bell or peeked in. I respected her privacy and the web of grief that had spun itself and caught her as ill-fatedly and fatally as a hapless insect in spring flight.

She's the only one of my closest neighbors I haven't spied on, and the only one I never will, on principle.

As for everyone else? I despise their hermetic normalcy too much not to violate it, and for no better reason than the sheer pleasure of hearing it pop. They don't deserve their happiness if that's even what it is. To me it's fake happiness. The margarine version of what the philosophers meant. But it seems to do for the majority, and all the quirks and bland neuroses that fill it up yield surprising substance if you look with hateful enough eyes, hear with spiteful enough ears. If you take a resentful interest, you can make it more than what it is. If you want to destroy it from the minutiae out, you will see the diabolical in the detail, and savor it. A voyeur's incriminating pointillism. Connect the dots and make the damning picture.

But then, maybe this is simply what bored people do.

Pry.

And bored destroyed people pry with vengeance, then justify it by recourse to their pain.

Or maybe it's technology that has made us all so prurient, craving more of the real in our reality TV.

I think the truest reason I do it is to find out all I can about what is findable, even if it's mostly mundane, because there's so much I can't find out about what matters. I'll never know why my parents died, or any of the details. I'll never get my mind around it. I'll never be whole or unharmed or kind again. But I can know everything about my neighbors' lives, and in so doing, I can ease what is unsatisfied in me.

The spying started years back, with Dave. It wasn't long after my parents' funeral, and just about two years after Dave's father's death. Dave was doing his ineffectual best to help me through the worst, having fashioned himself the local expert on filial grief.

He was on a mission day and night, depositing himself on the couch like some stubborn adjunct caseworker who's decided that his salvation lies in your own, and that stoned silence and snacking are the strongest forms of sympathy.

The fucking toad didn't leave my house for weeks, not even to restock the fridge and cabinets with the purported comfort foods he, and he alone, was consuming with such gusto. He got Mama Kitty to do that. He'd literally call in an order and make it sound like it was for me.

“Yeah, I know, I know, but the only things I can get him to eat are Cherry Garcia and DiGiorno. I'm tellin' ya, the guy's gone. Really bad news. You remember what I was like. It's a miracle he's eating at all. Just get a bunch of stuff—the stuff I eat. If I'm eating regular, sooner or later he's bound to join me. Oh, and bring me some more weed, too, will you? That wheelchair weed you get that's s'posed to make vegans crave corn dogs even when they're on chemo. And trust me, that's how he's starting to look.”

There'd be a pause here, with Kitty no doubt duped and mewling on the other end of the line.

Then Dave would jump in, his greedy instincts getting the better of him, turning his tone desperate but still managing to make his grocery list sound like a call to arms rather than a fat boy's food panic at full throttle.

“Please, Ma, just do what I tell you. And hurry.”

I have to admit, it did help for a while in some hazy diabetic, opium den sort of way. I hardly ate, but I smoked like a five alarm, and when I did eat, the toxic array of carbohydrates we had in stock were so refined and saturated with chemicals that they were a drug in and of themselves, bringing on the kind of insulin shock once dispensed to mental patients. In combination with booze and gargantuan quantities of THC, you could get a jolt almost strong enough to reboot your brain.

I suppose I should have been grateful for Dave's intervention, but it just made me hate him more, mostly because he'd managed to make his Samaritan opportunism look like his own personal Via Dolorosa, even though he'd done nothing more strenuous than operate the microwave and nothing more self-sacrificial than crap in the upstairs bathroom. And he only conceded that last bit of unholy ground because I threatened to gouge his eyes out with a potato peeler if he ever again subjected me to the miasma of his outsized ass.

Living with this prize primate for more than a month, and seeing all the filthy high jinks he was happy to get up to right out in the open in front of another person (albeit a person who had smoked enough ganja to have gone a shade of gangrene around the gills), made me wonder what he did when he thought no one was looking.