All the Houses (20 page)

“Don't read that,” I said.

“What is this?”

“Just something I've been working on. Don't read it.”

“Sorry,” he said, still reading.

I got up, took the pages from him, then asked him whether he remembered coming to our house for a pool party. “You and your mom and your stepdad came over, this one time.”

He said he didn't remember the party. He did remember an argument that his parents had once had about going to our house. “My mom didn't want to go,” he said. “And my stepdad said that your dad was the one decent friend he'd ever had and damned if we weren't going to go.”

“Do you know why your mom didn't want to?”

“Probably because she hated leaving me alone.”

“When you were sixteen.”

“Fifteen, sixteen. Unless I already had other plans, she always wanted me to come along to everything. She worried about me staying home and getting into trouble, getting high.”

“Your stepfather didn't have other friends?”

“I guess he didn't think they'd stick by him. Honestly, he was right. After the shit hit the fan, they all ditched him. Or that's what he thought. He was depressed too, and he wasn't leaving the house at all except to see his lawyer or his shrink. And he wasn't taking his meds, we found that out later, though why the fuck my mom wasn't on top of that a little sooner, I have no idea. It was the same thing with me, she was sort of in denial about the drugs I did and about my stepdad not taking his pills, but she knew enough that she was always hovering. She'd try to keep us around her so she could watch us. I guess she thought she could keep us from doing anything really stupid, but she was wrong about that.”

“She was probably doing the best she knew how,” I said.

“No she wasn't.”

“Okay.”

“God forbid she actually get out of her comfort zone.” He'd been standing halfway between the kitchenette and the bed, and then he walked past me, to the window.

“I know the feeling. It's a drag.”

“No, it's more than a drag,” he said. “It's called enabling.”

“I'm sorry.”

“I should probably get going.”

“You don't have to,” I said in a voice that conveyed more than I wanted it to convey.

He turned back and gave me his head-tilt, and although I now recognized that as a mannerism, he snagged me with his fond—or fond-seeming—eyes. I wanted him to stay whether or not they were actually fond. He sat on the edge of the bed and lay back across it, so that his hair grazed my foot.

“It drove me nuts. Her and my stepdad, no matter how bad it got, they would pretend to me that nothing was wrong.”

“Where was your dad in all this?”

“In Ohio. His company moved him out there. My mom would always threaten to send me to live with him, so that he could discipline me. Actually I would've much rather lived with him, I just didn't want to change schools or live in Columbus.”

I listened to him go on, assured by his voice that he was still there with me. I'd asked him to stay, if not in so many words, and he did stay.

It's true that my bar could've been higher. I did wish to find someone with whom I might reproduce and/or purchase real estate and/or adopt a medium-size dog, and yet all too often I chose to spend time with guys who were obviously not that person, because they were the guys who happened to be around, and I was very susceptible to a certain kind of confidence.

Exhibit number one would be the disaster of a man I'd been dating before I left L.A.

Lessons learned in sunny California: Never go a-trysting with a man who keeps looking at his watch. Never trust a man who hesitates before saying your name, as if he's not a hundred percent sure, and then says it three times in a row. Never trust a man who always walks one step ahead of you, in fancy loafers. Never trust a man you meet at a mall—that was where I'd met Gary Doyle, at the Grove, buying coffee.

But I was always analyzing my extinct relationships this way, shaking my failures out of them. Does being single force a person to adopt regrets at least as hypotheses, tried on for size?
Was that what I'd done wrong? Or that? Or that?
I wish I could be more tolerant of myself, but in this instance I know that I am at least partly to blame. There were warning signs aplenty.

Helen, he would say to me, Helen, Helen. As though he had to keep reminding himself. I bet you raised hell in high school, didn't you. Was he kidding? Nothing could have been further from the truth. The first syllable of my name had led him off track. But he was funny, just his delivery was funny, so that even things he didn't intend as humor cracked me up, and he was brash and very successful, and there was something poignant to me about the way he was always starting a new diet. I wanted to help him make healthier choices.

Or did I really just want to pig out with him? I now wonder whether that one night, our worst night together, had been caused by a food coma—or maybe there had been something in the nachos. We'd had Tex-Mex delivered, just before everything went off the rails, and after we ate I felt extremely drowsy. Incapable of operating heavy machinery, and Gary Doyle himself was something of a heavy machine. This was our fourth or fifth date, we'd already slept together a couple of times, and it came after a terrible weekend in Santa Barbara, it was his friend's forty-fifth birthday and Gary had turned mean, badgering me because I'd never seen
Taxi Driver
, because I didn't actually know what happened at a seder (this even though Gary himself was not Jewish) or who Stu Sutcliffe was, whatever assorted things he knew. I was letting him down left and right. He'd imagined I was something else and so I'd found myself trying to be that something else even though I didn't know what he'd imagined. Somebody more conversant in the history of popular culture and the basics of other religions, I guess. My point is, there were signs aplenty, and yet I ran deeper into the maze, chasing after the bull-type animal.

Then came that one bad night. The man had strange proclivities, and yes, I would have cut it short had it not been for the silk ropes around my wrists and the fact that I was just so tired. But I wouldn't want anyone to think, or think that I think, that one evening of unduly prolonged nudity and some unwished-for splooge on my face counted more than it did. I'd agreed to the ropes. I wasn't protesting as it happened—at least I don't think I was, though now I'm not sure what I experienced and what I dreamed.

What I do wonder at now is less the weight of my mistake than the obviousness of it—the fact that I'd gone back for more after the weekend trip. I'd been more afraid of ending things than of what the badgering portended. I was willing to put on those black fake-leather chaps he'd ordered from some tawdry website and later to scrub off the streaks of black dye they'd left on my thighs. I was willing to indulge the whims of a vaporing man who'd jerked away too many Sunday afternoons watching porn. A man who kept the radio tuned to the classic rock station even as he undressed me, none other than Cheap Trick playing as he enacted his tacky little fantasy. What I regretted, much more than the experience itself, which was merely kind of gross, was the fact that I kept remembering it.

Even more regrettable was what happened two weeks later. He called me, and I picked up the phone so that I could yell at him, but after that he wound up coming over, one last time. We hadn't communicated since then.

What I'm trying to say is that in comparison to Gary, Rob seemed like a peach, a prince, and I was ready to cut him all kinds of slack.

*   *   *

One evening I came home from work to find a squad car parked in front of the building. A thin, dripping fog had spread, and I took in the scene as if through wax. On the stoop stood a woman who lived downstairs, and a lady cop in a cop hat who was interviewing the woman and making notes on a clipboard. I felt my throat pucker. Everything was blue and darker blue, save for the blinking lights on top of the police car, with their feathery halos.

A second policeman stood by the stair rail talking into a radio. A robbery, he told me. Because of the yellow police tape across the front door I awarded myself a kind of importance, that of a person who, unlike the handful of nonresident spectators who'd gathered to gawk, was entitled to cross the do-not-cross threshold. Except that I wasn't: the policeman explained that they had reason to believe the intruder might still be in the building, or at least no reason to believe he or she wasn't in the building, and I would have to wait “just like everybody else.” This exile was, he implied, for my own safety, despite the fact that it would consign me to wandering the streets after dark.

Come back in an hour, two at the most, said the policeman. At the most! It didn't seem possible that this was proper procedure, barring someone from her own hearth and home (or: hotpot and television), but these were law enforcers, and I was law-abiding. I slunk like some yellow-eyed nocturnal creature toward the Hunan Palace, a restaurant I knew only for the electronic
OPEN
sign that seemed always to be lit above the door. From the sidewalk you couldn't see the dining room—the door was soaped over, and inside the single window was a display of cheap paper fans, with a partition between that and the rest of the interior—and it occurred to me that for all I knew the Hunan Palace was a front for something other than fried rice and green tea. But I entered to find an ordinary Chinese restaurant. A boy jumped up from the table where he'd been doing his homework to show me to a booth. I sank into a bench, one buttock met by a feisty old spring. Only two other tables were occupied by diners: an old woman drinking tea and the man from next door.

He was eating with the basketball girl. His daughter! Even though I knew they lived in the same building I hadn't put that together, for I'd pegged him as a man alone in the world, a man who ate his meals by himself, in front of the television. Yet he had a child, and I was the one who, truth be told, dined most nights by the changing light of the tube. My staring led to waving. Awkwardly, we waved; more awkwardly, he invited me to sit with them; and—how could I decline?—I bumbled over to join them. Nina was the name of the girl, who acknowledged me with her eyes but didn't say anything. Sitting with him, she seemed a different girl from the one I'd seen striding down the street, younger. A kid.

One day she would be striking, I thought, but her face was still indeterminate. She was at a stage when a few different potential women are contained inside one suit of skin. She had studious brown eyes and a looseness to her, for instance in the way she nodded, tracing a large arc with her chin, hair swaying. She said very little at first, while Daniel and I tried to shovel things forward. I explained I'd only recently moved to Vane Street.

“You used to live in Los Angeles? What was that like?” he asked.

“It was okay,” I said. “It had its plusses and minuses.”

“Nina wants to move to Paris, doesn't she,” he said, and she tucked her chin closer to her neck, self-conscious, and I wanted to tell her not to be, not to worry about a thing.

“I used to want to live there,” she said, surprising Daniel and me both with a quick spill of syllables, “but now I want to move to Brazil. Or Ireland. My friend went to Ireland.”

“I've heard good things. About Ireland.”

“I wouldn't like a place that had too many trees, though,” she said. “I get creeped out by forests.”

“Because you might get lost?”

“I like to see the sky.”

Was it because we met in the company of her father that I felt like a suitor, a supplicant for her affections? That evening in corduroy pants and Chucks and an old Senators T-shirt under her black hoodie, she was hunching and bashful. She kept tucking her hair behind her ears (triple-pierced, pink at the tips) and talking with her mouth full.

“I wish I lived someplace where I could walk to school,” she was saying. “Right now I take the Metro, and I get, like,
smushed
by secretaries every single morning.”

“When do you get your driver's license?” I asked.

She looked down at her food and moved a slick piece of broccoli from one side of her plate to the other. “Probably never,” she said.

I waited for an explanation but didn't get one. She was hard to read—they both were, she and her father. She excused herself to go to the bathroom, and he leaned toward me, then paused, reconsidering. He leaned back, stared at me with that stare of his, and attacked a pile of rice, his fork shuttling between plate and mouth.

“She likes you,” he said. She does? As though I'd asked it aloud, he said, “She does.”

He fell silent and then un-silent again, asking could he ask me something. “What did you want for your birthday when you were sixteen, turning sixteen?”

I would've liked to give an original answer, but I'd been an unoriginal girl, one who'd wanted cassette tapes and books with detailed, informative sex scenes. I gave a little shrug and told him clothes.

He looked at the table. “I wouldn't begin to know how to buy clothes,” he said. “What about a watch, would you have wanted a watch?”

Boring. I mentioned a store that sold girly things, clothes and novelty books and candles and baubles—“Of course I don't know your daughter,” I said. “But maybe something from there? Maybe a gift certificate?”

He took a notepad from his coat pocket and wrote down the name of the store.

After Nina returned from the bathroom she was quiet again. Those good feelings toward me had faded, if they'd ever existed to begin with. Then it struck me that I'd been one hundred percent wrong, that fathers shouldn't try to buy their daughters cool presents, that the attempt would only backfire. A watch was fine. A watch was perfect. Yet I could see no way of communicating my epiphany to Daniel.