Homeland and Other Stories (16 page)

She stares at the watermarks on the sofa. “If you keep that against the wall, nobody's going to know.”

“But it's not perfect.” He looks straight at her eyes and Sulie is startled by what she sees, and he says again, “Nothing you see here is perfect.”

He sits down as though he's giving up a fight. He looks like an antique himself. Not old, there are no wrinkles around his eyes; he might be thirty-five, forty, not more. But he looks miserable and handsome in an old-fashioned way, leaning back on the sofa looking up at her. He seems left behind by life.

“So your ex is in the antique business,” she says, uncomfortably. “And how about yourself?”

“I
know
the antiques business,” he says. “Better than she does. But I'm not
in
it. Officially I'm now a bookkeeper at a discount carpet warehouse.”

“Oh. Well, that's important. I'm sure they need their money counted up,”

He laughs, springs to his feet, and brings out plates and cloth napkins, serving dinner on the polished coffee table. It's Chinese order-out, chicken in an orange sauce that matches the carpet. Even so, she sees him watching her fork each time she lifts it. He seems a little nervous about the red wine. Well, it's true it would stain. They're sitting on opposite ends of the white
l'escargot
.

He raises his glass carefully. “Here's to neighbors.”

“Mud in your eye,” she says, smiling down at the goblet in her hand. The glass is delicate and old-looking.

“You know,” he says, “you have wonderful hair.”

“I don't bother it, it don't bother me,” she says.

“I'm serious.” He squints at her. “I can see you in silk.”

“Oh, Lord,” she says, laughing, “I'd spill something on it.”

They look away from each other and she wonders why she is there. “Could I ask you a question?” she says when it's been too long. “Not to be nosy. But why do you live here? You seem like somebody that could live in a whole house if you wanted to.”

“This is a 1929 Meredith bungalow with a Deco fireplace.”

“Oh,” she says. She'd driven uptown and down in her secondhand pickup, scouting out
FOR RENT
signs in yards. Looking for something respectable and nothing like what she left behind.

“Do you know how hard it is to find a nice old house in this cowboy boom-town state? One that hasn't been completely gutted?”

“I guess there's not too many,” she says. He could move back East, she thinks, they have plenty of old antique stuff back there, but there is his ex-wife, she remembers—there are all the things you can't know about somebody. The things he can't know about her.

“I'd move and take that fireplace out of here with me if I could,” he says, glancing at her. “Just take it. The landlord doesn't know what he's got.” The color in Sulie's face deepens.

“Well, it's lucky you got this side, with the real living room,” she says. “I don't think there's much of anything special on my side. You could come see it, if you wanted to.”

“I'd like that very much,” he says politely, and she's embarrassed to think of Gilbert seeing her things. She eats dinner off a cable spool.

“What you could do someday,” she says, “is buy this house from the landlord. You could open it back up and make it one house like it's supposed to be.” Gilbert just laughs at that.

“Well, anyway you've got a lot of nice things,” she says. “It all goes together in here like a magazine house.”

“I expect you've seen better over at Nola's,” Gilbert says, looking at her oddly.

She considers. “Well, over there it's different. It's an old-lady house. Kind of knickyknacky. It's amazing how people collect so much stuff over the years.”

“Stuff stays around,” he says, twisting the stem of his antique glass in his fingers. “People don't.”

It's quiet again. His ex, Sulie supposes he means. Suddenly he lifts the glass from her hand. The wine is gone, and his head is in her lap. He says, “If you could picture me in another time, when would it be?”

“In a movie, definitely. An old one.”

He looks up at her. From this angle, with his Adam's apple exposed, he looks young. “How old?”

“I don't know,” she says, afraid of guessing wrong. “One with Greta Garbo.”

He smiles and closes his eyes. “Bull's-eye. I was born fifty years too late.”

“I was born four weeks late,” she says, relaxing too, sensing that whatever she says now he'll find charming. “Aunt Reima says Mama was about ready to start jumping off tables.”

 

He gave her a paperweight, the Golden Gate Bridge in blown glass, worth about sixteen dollars, and she thinks it's the Hope diamond.
Trinkets for the Indians
, says an ugly voice behind his ear and he knows there is that, he's charming her to get into Nola's house, but he likes her, too. In the evenings they sit on the porch drinking gin.

On Saturday she knocks on his screen door and walks in with a loaf of banana bread, fresh-baked. Her nonchalant generosity takes him by surprise. Possibly it isn't nonchalant; maybe she's trying as hard as he is. She needs to please everybody, the gossip next door—Estelle—and of course Nola. Sulie looks mid-twenties and has been around men, almost certainly, but she seems impossibly young. As if, like Sleeping Beauty, she's missed out on several years of her life.

“I had to share this, it would have gone stale,” she says, and he brings out plates, and tries not to track the course of every crumb she sheds across his rug. In this living room she is mod
ern and incongruous in jeans and bare feet, long legs swinging over the side of his Deco gondola chair. She does the most surprising things for a living—yard work, cleaning, she'll even paint a house. Her resourcefulness makes him feel old. But there is something else about her, some kindred thing, an under-handedness he hasn't named yet.

“How's your friend,” he asks. “Nola.”

“Oh, Lord, it's a war zone. She's turning the house upside down, and's got me to helping her do it. She says she has to find all her precious things and get them up to the attic.”

“The attic?” His eyes wander out the window toward the ivy-covered gable.

“She's got about twenty locks on the door and says
HE
can't get in there because he hasn't learned how to pick the locks.”

Gilbert smiles.

“I know it's crazy. But I still feel like I ought to help her. She's a nice lady, really. Have you noticed how she dresses up? She has the nicest clothes.”

“I've noticed,” he says.
That pink sweater is what it was. Sulie couldn't afford that vintage sweater. Bless her little West Virginia heart, she's a thief
.

Sulie's eyes are wide. “Listen, Gilbert, could you help me do one thing? I know you think her house is creepy and you'd have to go inside, but I promise it'll just take fifteen minutes.”

 

She's standing on a brocade ottoman when they come in, drawing back a curtain, and she turns, steps down, extends her hand. A dark green suit, padded shoulders, her white hair in a neat chignon; not what he expected. A woman keeping her wits about her in a crisis—Lauren Bacall in
Key Largo
. Sulie was right, it's a war zone. Or a zone of terrified anticipation, like a news clip of Galveston before a hurricane. The shelves are
empty of anything a person might treasure; presumably that's all packed away in the cardboard boxes stacked against the walls. Just a few lamps and chairs left behind, hodgepodge. He does recognize some value in the furniture—it's worn, not the feast he was hoping to let his eyes graze on, but pieces originally of good quality. Things that sigh of old wealth. Worth the trip, anyway. He's had his look.

But they have to sit through chitchat and lemonade, which Nola brings out in a Depression Glass pitcher and glasses. Could be worth some money if there are more glasses packed away. Not in mint condition, though. In mid-sentence Nola stops and reaches out to pick at a chip in the pitcher's rim.

“Now look what he's done to that. I could just cry; this was Mama's.”

“You can hardly notice it,” Sulie says.

“I can't tell you what my life has been like since he started this.” Nola's voice rises to a prayerful monotone. “Not a day goes by without him getting in and monkeying with something.”

Gilbert drains his unchipped glass and notes the purple glaze on the bottom. Authentic, and valuable. If he held it up to the light he could know its exact worth.

“It would be another story if he just wanted money. But he's after my precious things.” Nola leans forward and pecks on the pitcher with a fingernail. “Oh, there's nothing he wouldn't do. He's
demented
.”

Sulie says gently, “I promised Gilbert this wouldn't take long,” and Nola's face changes, she squares her padded shoulders. They follow her into the hallway and bend their knees to lift the box that was too heavy for Sulie alone: leather-bound books. Sulie above and Gilbert below make their way up the narrow stairs like an uncoordinated animal. His heart is pumping hard. Nola stands at the top, small and white-haired, prodding
keys into locks. Sulie didn't exaggerate; there are more than twenty locks lining the edge of the door from bottom to top.

“He hasn't found a way in here yet,” she says, “but he will, he can pick any lock. He'll have his holiday in here.” She gives the door a hard tug and it shivers open. Gilbert feels a rush of blood through his knees. It is a wonderland.

If he expected bats in Nola's belfry, what he sees there are rare birds: peacocks, sleek raptors, black satin cormorants. In the furniture alone he recognizes five decades of perfection, and only a small part of it is visible. Cabriole legs turn out like demure ankles under dust skirts; glimpses of ivory-inlaid dresser tops gleam under pyramids of japanned boxes; and Gilbert's heart is struck with the deepest envy he's ever known.

 

“I told you she'd brought all the good stuff up here,” Sulie says, watching his face. Nola has gone downstairs for more small boxes, and Gilbert is walking around touching things in a way that makes Sulie nervous. But she's pleased, too; she wanted him to see.
I've never had a friend like her. She's dignified, more so than somebody like Estelle that just wants to check people's stuff for brand names behind their backs
. Sulie remembers Estelle Berry's mouth pronouncing the word “slummish,” her square hips moving away across the lawn toward her jasmine bushes. But Nola has nice things, she and Gilbert know that, even if the outside has gone downhill.
I know what it's like when people look down their nose because you don't have nice things
.

Gilbert lifts a dust cover slowly, the way he might lift a woman's dress. Sulie shivers.

“There's clothes, too. Come look.” She pulls him by the hand through the narrow avenues between furniture. The racks of dresses march backward through time like a museum display.

“She let me try on her wedding dress. It's here, I'll show you. You won't believe what color it is: black. Black velvet, and you know it fit me like a glove? Can you believe she was tall as me at one time in her life?”

Gilbert, stopped dead, is staring at a hat. Sulie's seen it before, it's just a cream-colored ordinary man's felt hat with a dark purple band. Nola keeps it on a hat block by the north window.

“Gilbert,” Sulie says.

Nola is behind her. She walks to Gilbert and takes the hat in both hands, and they both look like they're in love with the thing. But Nola's eyes go to a spot under the brim, where the face would be. “My husband wore this on our wedding day.”

“I bet he looked real good,” Sulie says.

“He never would wear it again after that, though. He said it was too dapper for a working man.”

“You were married in 1925.” Gilbert doesn't ask, he informs them. Sulie stares. Like a subdued child, Nola hands him the hat and Gilbert turns it over, looks inside, and gives a little nod, as if he's found something he knew would be there. He says, “Vallon and Argos, World Exposition.” He touches his mustache and settles the hat on his head and it is, really, perfect.

 

“Did you ever think of selling this, Nola? I know where you could get a hundred dollars for it.” His neck twitches slightly.
Fifteen hundred, without even trying
.

Nola, possessed of herself again, takes the hat back and replaces it on the block. She brushes at imaginary dust on its brim, gently, the way she might have preened a lover's combed head. She turns to face him and says, as if she needs to say it, “I wouldn't part with this.”

 

Sulie calls through the screen door, “Gilbert, we need your advice.” She's startled him; she sees him jump before he raises his eyebrows and gets up to let her in. He gives her a kiss on the cheek, not seeming to mind her dirty coveralls.

“The problem is, she's worried about the veneer drying out on some of her tables and things. It's real hot up there with no ventilation, and she says if you move something from cool to hot and dry it will ruin. Unless you treat it some way.”

“She's right, it will crack all to pieces.” He's smiling.

“Well.” Sulie stands looking at him. “Can't we help? I know she's never going to use it again, but it'll kill her to see it go to wreck and ruin. I went around back just now to empty my trash and she was standing out there holding a dead poinsettia and a teapot. Crying. She said couldn't I ask you what to do. If she ought to use linseed on it or something.”

Sulie can't read Gilbert's face.
A dead plant in one hand and the teapot in the other, and she said, You have to understand, dear, that's all I have; my husband is gone. She looked over here and said, Could you ask the advice of your young man? And I felt so strange, she must think we live together. I said it just looks like that from the outside. Our apartments are completely shut off
.