Fallen Land (8 page)

Now his hearing has become superhuman: he can hear what is happening in every house in the neighborhood and is astounded at the way his perception of sound seems only to become more acute the longer he spends surrounded by silence. If he holds his breath he can hear what the neighbors are saying, and not just the neighbors, but also his parents in their overstuffed bungalow miles across town. All of them are saying that he is only a dwarf in a large man’s body, a little man who imagines he’s big just because of his height. They say he was a fool not to see that times were changing, a fool who overstretched and overspent and overpaid, who could not rid himself of the blight that destroyed his business, undermining its foundations and pulling it down into a festering muck. His neighbors and parents do little else but talk about him, denigrating him, making fun of the way he has failed, as if they have no better way to fill their days. When the widow’s house finally comes down, the economy recovers, and the buyers return to Dolores Woods, he will get all of it back, everything that was taken from him, and then they will see.

It should have been apparent from the beginning that Amanda would never be committed to her duties as a wife and mother. She was too involved in her work, too intent on having a career, too much an independent woman—a woman, he now understands, who must hate men. As soon as he has the money he will go to court to prove she is unfit, allowing Carson and Ajax to run wild in Florida. He fears his sons will fall into the wrong kind of crowd, become thugs and join gangs and steal cars, sell stolen goods, do drugs, run out of money, lose themselves while Amanda will only be trying to get ahead, ignoring her sons, doing nothing to save them. Paul knows he has to do whatever might be necessary to reclaim the boys and save them from their mother. It is a father’s place to shape his sons into good people, carve strength into their limbs, buttress them with manliness. They must not be afraid of truth or fortune or death. They must learn to live fearless lives in a way that only he can teach them. Strength comes from the battles bestowed by fate.
Gods love those whom other men hate
. These are the lessons of the great man that his own father taught him, lessons it is his duty to instill in his sons.

U
PSTAIRS THE CURTAINS
ARE CLOSED,
drawn tight against the neighbors. When everything began to fall apart Paul hoped that perhaps one of the buyers might come forward to offer assistance, to have a word with the bank or extend a line of credit themselves until he got back on his feet. No one did. They were strangers who happened to be neighbors and customers, and though he tried to be friendly he supposes that all of his rule-making might not have been received in the spirit intended, of mutual respect and community cohesion. A community needs a leader, and Dolores Woods was his community, so it always made sense that its creator should be its first leader. Democracy can flourish only in a mature community, and Dolores Woods is still in its infancy. It has to be shown how to live, kept in line, disciplined, and given clear guidelines, just like a group of children. None of those sons-of-bitches so much as came over to say they were sorry to see him lose his house. None of those goddamned neighbors lifted a finger to show they cared about the man who planned this community. Not one of the wives bothered to bake Paul a loaf of bread or bring around a meal when they
knew
that Amanda had left him.

Not a goddamn one of them—except the widow. That old woman was always coming around, asking questions and making trouble. From the beginning he was sure the old bitch had plans, ulterior motives underlying every kindness she showed him in the early days of his ownership. The day Amanda left, Mrs. Washington brought him a banana loaf and said she was sorry for him; by then they were no longer on speaking terms, and he did not want her sympathy. Suspecting that the loaf might be laced with rat poison he put it in the trash and did not even read the card she’d written, sure it contained some double-edged sentiment. From the beginning that woman was determined to destroy him. For all he knew, she had cast a spell over the whole neighborhood, was conjuring demons and the forces of darkness to rise up and consume them all. It was not for nothing that the kids in the neighborhood called her a witch.

With the curtains closed Paul moves through his house. The stairs from the basement emerge in the kitchen where wooden cabinetry hides the appliances. He turns on the water at the sink and watches it run down the drain, out of the aquifer and back into the aquifer, a vast internal sea a few hundred feet down. At night, sleeping in his bunker, he dreams that the water is rising up through the sedimentary rocks, lapping at the foundations of the house. Some nights he has woken in panic, covered in sweat. Convinced the bunker is flooding, he has to place his hands on the floor, shine a flashlight into the corners, hold his breath and listen for the gurgling of water until he satisfies himself the bunker is sound and dry.

Across the central hall from the kitchen, the den’s walls are lined with empty bookshelves. In the adjoining living room at the front of the house, windows look west and north. Back across the hall, the dining room is a mirror image of the living room, and a vestibular china closet returns Paul to the kitchen. He makes the circuit through the ground floor more than once, pausing each time to run his fingers over the empty bookshelves. When they moved in, the interior decorator filled the den with books. It was only two walls of shelves, but it still astounded him: surely only public libraries, schools, and universities had collections as big; he could not believe that a single person would ever own so many. Amanda wanted none of the books when she left and at the estate sale Paul sold them back to the same interior decorator, who purchased them for another client, another model home, in another part of the city. “No one reads books anymore,” the decorator said, “but they’re kind of decorative, and they make good noise insulation in condos.”

Passing once again through the open pocket doors connecting the den and the living room, Paul slouches in the bay window seat, looking through a chink in the curtains at the roll of black-green lawn and the low ornamental wall that separates his front yard from the next-door neighbors, that shifty-looking bank manager, who certainly could have done something to help, with his equally suspicious partner, who may be an Arab or an Indian, it’s impossible to tell, but who seems to be home all the time with the little girl, pretending to be a normal family. No one is fooled.

Paul paces the axis connecting the living room bay on the north side of the house to the dining room bay on the south, then spends ten minutes circling the central hallway, gazing at the main staircase before he can bring himself to go up to the second floor, where he inspects the four empty bedrooms, each with its own adjoining bath. Without the furniture that once filled these rooms, it is difficult to conjure memories of the ways he and Amanda and the boys inhabited them. He remembers laughter at first, a kind of raucous joy, and then, as months and years passed and the business began to fail, raised voices and tears, the adults always shouting, the boys either pouting or crying.

The top floor of the house, high in the front gable, is a single room, lit by the French window with its pointed arch that opens onto the balcony and has views over the front yard, the whole neighborhood, the woods and fields and suburbs beyond, all the way to the broad flat river west of the city. When the boys were still here, toys packed the room. There was an old-fashioned rocking horse and solid wooden blocks passed down from Amanda’s childhood, and, from Paul’s mother, bright plastic machines full of electronic noise: action figures and gray space ships, a purple ray gun firing sparks in an enclosed plastic chamber, a laughing white skeleton with sparkling black eyes.

Paul opens the window and steps onto the balcony. At this time of evening no one will be looking. Televisions flash, lights flare on and off, but the blinds and curtains of the neighboring houses are closed. After their house was finished, Amanda stood on the balcony, her hair blowing in a cold late autumn wind, and said she felt like Juliet, or Rapunzel.

“Will we be okay?” she said, turning to him. The crash had already come. Houses were no longer selling.

“Come on, Mandy,” he said, embracing her. “Don’t you believe in me?”

“Of course I do,” she said. “But I also believe the world is unforgiving. Tell me we’ll be all right.”

“You have to trust me. I’m not gonna let you down,” he said, and lifted her up off the balcony, holding her in the air, leaning out over the railing. He felt her grow tense in his hands, her eyes staring into his own. “You do trust me, don’t you, Amanda?” Her lip quivered, she nodded, and Carson started to cry from the floor of the playroom.

Now, alone on the balcony, it takes no effort for Paul to imagine casting his body into the air, being caught by thermals and borne aloft over the land. As a boy he often saw himself rising out of his chair at school and hovering up near the ceiling, looking down on his awestruck teacher and classmates, who would at last recognize and respect him for what he was: born to lead the world. Just as easily, bending over the railing, he can see himself dropping down, bouncing off the porch roof, and how his impact against the flagstone path between the driveway and front door might result in his immediate death. Lifting his feet in the air, he holds on to the railing to see if it will give under his weight: swinging, shifting his center of gravity, he senses the dizzy pull, how it would feel to plummet over the edge, letting the house itself be the agent of his death. The house is not just a part of him: he is the house. The house is the way he sees himself: the peaks and wings, the hard, undulant lines and disproportionate scale. If he must die, the house should kill him. Momentum tilts him forward: he nearly goes too far, at the last moment throwing his torso back and coming to land on the balcony, its beams shuddering under the sudden jolt of his weight. A solid house would not shudder. A house built to last would shake only under tectonic forces.

Having spent so many early years in houses that fell short in one way or another, in neighborhoods so sterile and geometric that they thwarted happiness, Paul dreamed of creating instant communities, which would protect their inhabitants just as they invited a form of neighborly sociability tempered by privacy. He wanted not only to work on the construction of houses, as he had during summers in high school, not just to set up a carpentry and contracting business, but to design homes that aspired to a vision of residential America so distilled it could only improve the lives of the people within them. It had been his adolescent dream to design houses that would be places of safety as well as congregation, set in neighborhoods where the streets and public areas, the parks and sidewalks, would be half-enclosed by trees and low hedges, walls and fences, with pergolas and bandstands and gazebos: an idyllic small-town American space with enough land between houses that neighbors need never hear the secrets of one another’s intimate lives.

“An architect?” his father said. “I’ve never needed an architect. I don’t—you have to understand, Paul—I don’t understand the point of being an architect. I’m not saying it’s wrong, but I’m saying I think you could choose better. Why don’t you join the Air Force?”

“I don’t like flying,” Paul remembers protesting. “I don’t even like birds.” He knew from an early age that military discipline wasn’t for him. His father had made Paul fold his clothes according to military rules: t-shirts in six-inch squares, underwear in tight white sausages. From the age of twelve Paul got a haircut every Sunday night after dinner. Ralph put down towels in the living room while Dolores used the electric clippers: number three on the sides and four on top. That was a compromise, because Ralph wanted his son’s hair shorter, buzzed all over, and Paul wanted it longer. As he sat in the chair, his father watching while his mother managed the clippers, Paul knew he was getting only the smallest taste of what real military life would be like.

His father said that if he wanted to go to college instead of serving his country Paul would have to do it on his own. For Ralph, Paul understood, it was a matter of principle; there was nothing vindictive about the position. The Kroviks had always been military men and Paul was the first to fail in this legacy. His grades were decent but not good enough for a scholarship, so he knew that if he wanted a college education he would have to support himself. Ralph asked him to be out of the house by his nineteenth birthday, which was, thank God, a whole year after the end of high school, so Paul had time to get himself organized, save up money, apply to college. Friends of his were not so lucky, and found themselves, on the day they turned eighteen, shown the door by their parents. At least his mother kept saying to him, “I believe in you, Pablo. You can do it. You’re gonna make it.” She slipped him money, bought groceries on the sly, did whatever she could to help without Ralph finding out.

Paul was accepted into the architectural studies program at State. He took out loans and worked three jobs. He spent two years in college but couldn’t keep up with the tuition and fees and left without a degree. Not long after that he met Amanda. She was already working in the city’s planning department, well on her way to having a good career. So while Paul got on his feet with the construction business and secured his contractor’s license, she supported them. Six months after their first meeting they were married.

Looking at the neighborhood now, Paul understands that he lacked adequate training. In their finished form, there is something obviously wrong with both the design and execution of the houses, in the way he has situated them on their lots, the way the lots were apportioned and the streets laid out, even something amiss in the neighborhood’s landscaping: the sidewalks are too narrow, the parkways too broad, the berms designed to deaden the sound of traffic from the main road too angular, too steep, too high. The neighborhood looks expansive and yet insubstantial, the jerrybuilt back lot of a movie studio where houses exist only as façades, the gardens and parkways too immaculate to feel as though any of it grew up organically, one house at a time.