Chimpanzee (11 page)

Finally.

“Here it is,” Zoe says.

“
This
is your essay?”

“Among other things.”

I think about bedroom silence. About the house Sireen and I will buy. How I will spend my evenings quietly, un-educated. A full suppression of identity. By that time, I will have reduced myself to zero, and I won't need beer, or sex, or drugs to do it.

Homeownership. Peace. The fulfillment of all things, our parents tell us. Our government tells us. I think about standing with a student—a woman half my size in a sundress and sandals, five blocks deep into a half-abandoned commercial borough. I think about why people don't turn their essays in on time.

Her essay lies on the concrete. She has written it upon the skin of a young man her age with a black marker. He lies limp against an un-refurbished Art Deco brick foundation. He wears only a pair of black shorts like a dark flag against his pale, hairless skin.

He doesn't move. There is a wheatpaste poster of a chimpanzee slathered onto the bricks above him.

“Among other things?” I say.

“I also needed to create a proposal,” Zoe says. “The introductory essay was perfect.”

His forehead reads ‘Everything begins by making your audience pay attention.'

“What is this proposing?” I say.

She shrugs and lights a cigarette. I motion for one, and she hands it over. I look both ways down the alley.

“Are you going to read it?”

I am her teacher.

“Of course I am,” I say. He doesn't look like he's breathing.

I ignore my phone when it vibrates in my pocket.

“Did I get your attention, Dr. Cade?”

“Yes.”

“So I'm doing well?”

“Do you think I'm creating the meaning you intended?” I say.

She looks at him. “I don't know.”

“Do you think I'm stacking images and unpacking ideas just the way you did, communicating this to yourself?”

“Are you?”

“Probably not.”

“I see.”

“But Zoe.” I touch her shoulder, and she plants her student's gaze back on me. It's different. “I'm paying attention.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

S
IREEN AND
I
GO ON A HOME PRE-POSSESSION TOUR
. I
T'S
sponsored by the realtor's office, downtown, with which we have decided to do business. The tour is free, and it includes coffee, croissants, and informative guidebooks with glossy printed photo sheets and professional copy, perfect bound.

At 7:30
AM
, we file into a chartered tour bus. Air-conditioned, pneumatic brakes. It rides like a Cadillac. I let Sireen have the window seat. I prefer the aisle, where I can see a hand-made chimpanzee decal stuck to the footboard. The board's rubber ridges have worn free of the sticker—it only exists in the troughs between. A poor-resolution printout from some nature magazine.

Because the tour is full, the bus drives through downtown. The guide describes prominent buildings, explains the architecture. Our town was spared Civil War damage because it is tucked away in the tail-end of the Appalachians. The town went bankrupt later, Art Deco poor, and spent eighty years paying its debts rather than filing for relief. The town lacked money for too long to build anything newer—now, the architecture is culture. Identity. The last seven sitting presidents have all vacationed in its most historic hotel. Enjoyed its hillside golf. Its distant Smoky Mountains.

We skip dangerous parts of town, maneuvering through boroughs. Our first stop is a recently renovated '20s-era bungalow. Its owners defaulted on their home improvement loan, so it is now in short sale. They are fourth-generation owners.

“Are you excited?” Sireen says. She is wearing a sundress today—a rarity. Her position as a professor is better suited to pants. She smiles. The hair on the right side of her forehead moves in the shaft of tubed air blowing from the conical twist-vent overhead. Her hair is down today.

I smile back. The fabric of her dress is thin between my palm and her thigh. It is pale against her skin. The next few days on her ovulation calendar are important. She told me before we left. It thrums her, every time, even if it hasn't worked yet, and I can see it in everything she does. The statistics and calculation of it.

“Yes.”

I am.

Every home on this tour is either in short sale or has been foreclosed upon. Our realtor is only one branch of a national franchise. It offers signed affidavits from every bank that owns a property on this tour. Short sale offers are guaranteed a response within fourteen days, and the banks are prepared to accept up to 40% losses, should appraisal values not match asking price. Several inspection firms are also partnered in this pyramid. Ready to go.

The bungalow sits at the top of a hill in a mixed neighborhood. There are tenement apartments and rent-controlled houses about a mile away. But that no longer means what it used to mean.

It is a red brick house with white trim. It boasts a study with original windows and molding. Bookshelves.

Sireen looks forward. She is five houses ahead, in the guidebook.

We tour our lives together in these houses. It is a fast and easy way to spend the early part of the day. Living ahead of oneself in a place one doesn't—could—own. The selling points of our futures together, in these places, appear in clean, bold font in our guide.
WINTER VIEWS OF THE MOUNTAINS
. Sireen in her bare feet—pads of feminine skin against the
STAINED CONCRETE
. She wears one of my shirts, taking a break for a glass of water from the
CUSTOM FILTRATION SYSTEM
. She brines Thanksgiving turkeys
overnight in a five-gallon bucket that we keep in the
MUDROOM, OR SOLARIUM
. Will keep. She grades papers in her study, wearing sweat pants and faded alma mater T-shirts. She complains about her committee, a fully fluted glass of pinot in one hand, her anger in the other.

She spins past the
ORIGINAL WAINSCOTING
in this one, past the
CONDITIONED PLASTER
in that, her face alight with tenure. Publication. A new course approval. Travel funds.

I see her dirty fingers in these
HANGING FLOWERBEDS
—her domestic anger between the
REFURBISHED BALUSTERS
, upstairs. I am on my knees in this half-bath, sick from too much eggnog. It speckles my dark turtleneck. Winks in the lights of our Christmas tree.

A baby cries somewhere.

There are two houses left on the tour, but this one is only three blocks from where we live, so we're done. We've seen enough. We hide in a pass-through closet while everyone else vacates the premises. We are having a good time, skipping out. In grad school, after we'd started dating, we would cut classes to meet for shots of house whiskey at the campus bar. We would kiss it from each other's lips, like drinking bitters to remedy some discomfort caused, really, by drinking too much. When I could, I would press the bulb of my upper lip against her teeth, when that smile climbed. Because I could. We would spend our student loan disbursements on cigarettes and small gifts. She likes chocolate.

                    
I liked how it made her bounce around the room, when she'd had some. I gave her a box, and we each ate one before taking our shots.

                    
Oh, Ben, she said. It's disgusting.

                    
I chased her around the billiards table, just to be obnoxious, and she could barely speak for all the breathing and grinning.

                    
You ruined chocolate, she said.

                    
And whiskey, I said.

We hold hands down this hallway—a ranch-style. Long and bricked and endless. Quiet walls. The master bedroom is carpeted.

“What do you think?” she says.

“I love you.”

“About the house, ass.” She slaps. She laughs through white teeth.

“It's fine.”

In the bedroom, the light is pale dark.

“I like it.”

I can see black walnut leaves through the blinds. Someone else's household dust is still upon the sill. Sireen's hips are strong against mine. The gears and schedules of her flesh. Conception thinks her. Even—especially—here.

“I like all of them,” she says.

This is not my home—not our bedroom, with its histories and identities and roles. Its failing duties.
This
house is what I am giving. What I can get. The duty of the contemporary male, who really shouldn't want to provide. It's antiquated. So he gives himself away instead, securing futures. When my father was my age, he spent afternoons in the garage, routing trim or leveling bookshelves. He cut pipe for leaky faucets and showed me how to hold knives. He would do these things on weekends, or after work, when pocketed time made simple crafts meaningful.

I do not own power tools.

I pull Sireen's dress up over her hips. They are alluvial—polished stone in the room-light, dressed with cotton and lace. The shelves of her ribcage open like vents when she lifts her arms.

“I like anything you want,” I say.

I mean it.

There is empty money in this place—the utilities still function because it must appeal to people like us, even empty, if it is to sell. No one buys a hot house, a stale fridge—a dry toilet. We leave the lights off so no one knows we're here.

The water is hot, thanks to the active gas line and the tankless water heater, which saves the average homeowner a great deal of money, given a long enough timeline. I learned this from
our guide book. This shower is lined with Travertine tile, and it is not enclosed. One wall remains open because the rain-flow showerhead, with digital temperature control, does not spray in a wide enough cone to dampen the floor. The shower is large enough that condensation doesn't gather on the telescopic shaving mirror.

Beneath that water, that heat. I am. Some Tibetan meditation on some alpine bluff. A waterfall as God—enlightenment is the pressure of falling things—water, peace, gravity. You try to think of nothing, be nothing, reduce the complications of yourself to something primal. Something that sleeps and fucks, looks askance at natural threats without worrying. No one has a Ph.D. in the shower. No one has sex like a genius.