Know Your Beholder: A Novel (9 page)

Haggis’s grunts were impressive, and he seemed to be making great progress, clawing away with his hammer as his breath smoked up through the now thinning snowfall. Behind him, as the dawn just started to silver the Grooms’ rooftop, a lone cross-country skier clad in goggles and head-to-toe sky-blue Thinsulate passed down the middle of the poorly plowed street.

Bob Blubaugh moved in four days ago.

Bob Blubaugh Bob Blubaugh Bob Blubaugh…

Stating his name over and over sounds like a septic tank going bad.

His possessions include a steamer trunk, an aluminum-surfaced kitchen table, two matching dinette chairs, a small wooden desk, five milk crates filled with books, and a full-size mattress and box spring.

On Friday morning, just as the blizzard finally died, he unloaded his few things from a green Family Truckster station wagon boasting a wood-brown stripe and Minnesota plates. Filigrees of snow made his passengers’ windows look ornate and otherworldly. The backyard was effulgently white under the bright morning sun, the copper beech majestic and silver.

At the back porch we shook hands and I halfheartedly offered to help him haul his stuff down to the basement, but he politely declined. I was still wearing my ensemble of double thermals, bathrobe, slippers, and pilling knit hat. I had gummy eyes, and my nose felt like a swollen, hemorrhoidal ass haphazardly arranged on my face. My head was starting to itch, as were my cheeks, and I had genuine concern about psoriatic scales radiating through my beard. Despite having to lug myself out of bed at the sound of his car pulling into the back lot, I was grateful for his early arrival.

From the porch I watched him carry both mattress and box spring on his back in one go, Egyptian-style, slightly bent at the waist, with an athletic grace that I’ve rarely seen. I held the door open and he thanked me every time he passed, seemingly not at all winded. He was clean-shaven and his breath had a wintergreen kick to it.

When he was done moving his stuff in, I gave him a quick tour of the house’s ground-level communal spaces: the mailboxes, the wraparound porch with its white wicker patio furniture and standing ashtrays, and the backyard, where behind the copper beech someone had erected a child-sized snowman, complete with a carrot nose and two pieces of charcoal for eyes, but no mouth. Draped around its neck was a pink scarf. The snowman threw me. I hadn’t noticed it when Blubaugh was unloading his things.

To Blubaugh I explained that in the spring, just after the thaw, I would arrange the three-piece wicker furniture set under the copper beech, which was also a smoker-friendly area and available to all tenants. Setting up the white wicker ensemble each spring was one of my mother’s simple pleasures, and I’ll admit that I’ve made it my own little Falbo tradition, a kind of sentimental elegy to Cornelia. The copper beech was her favorite tree after all, and in the summer months she would often read under its branches well past dusk, sometimes using a flashlight, unconcerned with the insane number of bug bites she would acquire. From my bedroom I could sometimes hear my mother laughing. She liked Kurt Vonnegut, J. D. Salinger, Anne Tyler, and John Irving. She especially liked the precocious children in Salinger’s stories. It was the only time I would ever hear my mother laugh, while she read late at night under her tree.

I pointed out the alleyway Dumpsters and gave him the lowdown on the weekly Thursday garbage pickup, the importance of separating the recyclables, etc.

Then I gave him a quick tour of the basement. I showed him the coin-operated washer-dryer and next to that the storage room, which houses an ancient manual lawn mower, a few boxes of fifty-watt lightbulbs, and retired Falbo family bicycles, including Lyman’s bad-ass-looking Schwinn Fastback (which he never used) and my seatless Huffy BMX with yellow mag wheels, which I once manned with the asinine intention of jumping over Kent’s secondhand Yugo until the makeshift particleboard ramp collapsed midlaunch and I wound up bouncing off the driver’s side door like a confused porpoise sailing into an ocean liner. I sustained a mild concussion and a deep thigh bruise that put me on crutches for nearly a week. Behind the remains of my BMX junker and mounted on the wall is my mother’s ancient burgundy Raleigh three-speed, complete with whitewall tires and
Wizard of Oz
handlebar basket.

I’m not sure why the bike is mounted. I sometimes think Lyman was confused about the purpose of her gravestone. After her death he mounted not only her bike but also her prized enamel colander, a red straw sun hat, and the clarinet she played as a girl. These items were randomly displayed around the house: the colander on the wall over the downstairs toilet; the sun hat over the old RCA console TV in the living room; the clarinet in the kitchen, in the small wall space over the microwave. At first I was touched by Lyman’s meticulousness. He measured the walls to find their perfect center point. He used a level and special curved braces for the clarinet and made sure the sun hat was hung in a way that wouldn’t damage the brim. Hanging the bike took him half a Sunday. I realized he was starting to lose it when I found him standing over her wedding dress, which he’d smoothed out on their bed and was attempting to clean with a toothbrush.

When I began the renovation I put the colander, straw hat, and clarinet in a box, which I shipped to Lyman down in Florida. I had the wedding dress repaired and dry-cleaned and sent it to Cornelia’s mother, my grandma Ania, who is still alive, living in a nursing home in Chicago. For unknown reasons, Grandma Ania and Lyman have stopped speaking. I suspect the moratorium has something to do with his remarrying, although he is financing her residency at the home.

After the storage space, I showed Blubaugh the boiler room, which is probably as totally unnecessary as it is uninteresting, the space being a dank fungal cement bunker that reeks of mold and dust and corroded iron. I always show it on the tour out of some need to illustrate the authentic bowels of the house. I mentioned that I’d been considering turning the storage room into a mini fitness center. I thought Blubaugh, being a former Olympic athlete, might perk up, but it didn’t seem to excite him at all. In fact, I think he yawned and flared his nostrils. Then I pointed out the dropped ceiling, which one could easily argue to be counterintuitive, lowering an already low ceiling. But it actually needed to happen to hide the old beams and termite damage.

“Brand-new ceiling,” I said. “The whiteness actually opens things up.” I stretched and pushed up a gypsum tile to feature the hollow space. “Good for hiding illegal substances,” I added, jokingly.

Blubaugh offered a half-smile that was probably actually a quarter-smile, maybe even an eighth.

“And there you have it,” I said. “The grand tour.”

Blubaugh finally broke his silence and said, “The fundaments.”

We shook hands in a gentlemanly fashion (again) and I left him alone.

Up in the attic, I looked up the word
fundaments
, which is a noun whose first definition is cited as “the buttocks,” the second definition, “the anus,” and the third, “a base or basic principle, underlying part; foundation.” The final part of its tertiary definition was a relief, to say the least. I wrote the word down in a notebook I keep for lyrics, weird words, and other errata.

I also drew a small, blank-eyed, mouthless snowman wearing a child’s scarf. I did some nerding out on the Internet and found that another word for
mouthless
(which actually isn’t a word) is
astomatous
. I wrote that down as well, just to the left of the snowman.

Astomatous
.

A few hours later I knocked on Blubaugh’s door with two copies of the lease and a bottle of Côtes du Rhône, which I always offer a new tenant. I keep cases of red and white wine at the foot of my bed. As a general rule I offer the men red and the women white. It’s one of the few pieces of Neanderthal advice I’ve taken from Lyman, who is by no stretch of the imagination an Epicurean, but simply believes that one’s gender and one’s wine should have a corresponding natural order.

Blubaugh appeared to be entirely moved in. There was something spartan going on. At a quick glance I noted the lack of an entertainment system, which would bode well for the overall sanity of the other tenants, the Bunches in particular, whose bedroom sits directly above Blubaugh’s living room. Some weeks before, over the phone, I had explained to Blubaugh that while I had done my best to soundproof each story with acoustic vinyl, the Sheetrock, though of decent quality, is by no means the intricate, labor-intensive, mid-twentieth-century lath-and-plaster system that traps and eats sound waves, and tenants were expected to keep loud music, television, and other potentially noisy activities to a minimum. As far as I could tell, at least with regard to unit noise, there would be no problem with Bob Blubaugh. If anything, his apartment emitted an absence of sound. Aside from the faint hum of the refrigerator, there was almost a palpable, vibrating silence.

“Welcome,” I said, offering the bottle of wine and the two copies of the lease.

He thanked me and took the Côtes du Rhône, placing it in the center of his kitchen table. He seemed intensely preoccupied with the table’s true center point, adjusting the bottle until he was satisfied. Then he sat and started going through the lease.

“I have white too,” I offered. “A Clairette.”

“I’m fine with either,” he replied.

Lyman firmly believes that men who drink white wine are homosexuals, whether they know it or not. “A Chardonnay man is not a real man,” he would say. So according to my father’s theory, I was renting to a sexually neutral being, which no doubt would drive Lyman batshit crazy.

At a glance, there is something almost shockingly, well, normal about Bob Blubaugh of St. Paul, Minnesota, former first alternate on the American luge team that competed in the 2002 Winter Olympic Games at Salt Lake City. In terms of physical stature, he is maybe five-ten, of normal build, neither chiseled nor flabby, handsome nor homely, with hazelish eyes, Clydesdale-brown, slightly thinning hair, which he parts to the side Robert Redford–style, and an impressive cleft in his chin that might be deep enough to hide a lemon seed or two. He wears aluminum-framed, amber-tinted glasses, and on the day of his arrival, he donned a light-blue button-down oxford, navy Levi’s corduroys, a thick, ropy, gray wool cardigan over the oxford, and penny loafers.

In short, Bob Blubaugh looks more like a reference librarian who might also collect vintage eyewear than a former Olympic athlete. And he might be as ageless as a cardboard cylinder of Quaker Oats.

In the living room, his steamer trunk was opened vertically, revealing a five-drawer wardrobe and a miniature closet, the two sections separated by three ancient hinges. It gave Blubaugh the air of someone from a distant land, a traveler of oceans, a secret hoarder of rare spices.

Next to the steamer trunk was his desk, which had a soft leather top, embossed with what appeared to be the outline of deciduous deer antlers. Stacked on the floor, in small thigh-high towers, was his modest library, book spines facing out. There was nothing on the walls, not a single framed photo, a poster, a clock, or a wall calendar. If he possessed a computer, it wasn’t anywhere to be seen.

This was apparently a man without history or family, birthed in a luge chute, ejaculated from a frosty tunnel fully formed. He will live for two thousand years, following blizzards around, snow and ice being his only true ancestry. Windchill his lone friend.

His small dinette set was centered in the kitchen. He sat in one of the two chairs. I stood a few feet away, fighting the urge to twiddle and claw at my itchy beard.

While he signed both copies of the lease, I said, “How was the drive down?”

“Not too bad,” he replied.

His voice has a distinct lack of music in it. It subtly modulates in one slightly alto-ish register. Adult men with high voices always surprise you, though. They’re either incredibly well-endowed or know karate.

“You just missed the blizzard,” I said.

He nodded like he was gesturing hello to the postman.

“Nothing you haven’t seen before I’m sure,” I offered stupidly.

The last thing a fellow Midwesterner wants to commiserate about is the harsh winters in the Midwest. It’s like dentists making small talk about teeth.

He handed me the two copies of the lease. His penmanship was the cleanest I’ve ever seen. On the underlined space beside “vocation” he’d printed “person” with a lowercase
p
.

“You’re a professional person?” I said.

He smiled and adjusted the bottle of Côtes du Rhône yet again.

“You get paid for that?” I asked, joking.

He smiled like taxidermy. Meaning his mouth in that position appeared to be somehow stitched and glued.

He then produced a royal-blue, vinyl-skinned checkbook, which must have been living in the pocket of his cardigan. He filled out a check, signed it, and handed it to me, though I can’t be certain that I actually caught all of these movements. In some strange way it almost felt like the check had written itself. Or maybe it was prewritten and Blubaugh simply tore it from the book.

I studied it briefly and said, “Bob, this is over six months’ rent.”

“Which includes the security deposit,” he replied.

Again his penmanship. Each letter rendered masterfully.

I told him that I had no problem with tenants paying me on a month-to-month basis.

“This is better for me,” Bob replied. “Simpler.”

I folded the check in half and placed it in the pocket of my robe.

He remained seated at the table and I was starting to realize that my new tenant moved with such restrained, kinesthetic efficiency that it was sometimes hard to catch him moving at all. There was something Eastern going on. Dare I say ninjafied. He existed with such rarefied functional stillness that there was the odd sensation that I was talking to a life-size painting of Bob Blubaugh, not Bob Blubaugh the actual man.

“Not to get too personal on day one,” I said, “but do you mind me asking what brings you to Pollard?”

“I was just looking for a quiet place.”

“To do what exactly?”

“To live.”

I asked him if he knew anyone in the area.

“No,” he replied.

I noticed that the checkbook was gone, and although I had turned away only briefly to look at the actual check, I had no idea where. However, there was still a ballpoint pen on the kitchen table, this much I know for sure.