People of the Dark (16 page)

Mansfield Barnes called from upstairs, "Here, Mr. Harris. In the bedroom. In the master bedroom. Could you please come up?"

I went quickly up the stairs, looked into the master bedroom, saw no one. "Where are you?" I called. "In the closet, Jack," Erika called back.

I went to the closet—it was a huge walk-in closet with a high ceiling and an entire wall's worth of built-in drawers; I'd joked with Erika once that it would make a nifty guest bedroom for some of our in-laws. Mansfield Barnes and Erika were at the center of it, the bare, wall-mounted light fixture switched on, their gaze on the ceiling overhead. I looked up, too. Written in big, red block letters there were the words AND WE'RE STILL HERE!

"Real comedians," I said, and Mansfield Barnes said simply: "Uh-huh, they're everywhere."

"W
e've got to shellac the entire ceiling, don't we, Jack?" Erika said much later, in bed. The beginnings of daylight were visible through the windows. The curtains had been torn down by the vandals and now lay in a heap on the bedroom floor.

"I don't know if it's shellac we have to use, Erika. That tile"—the ceilings throughout the house had been done in porous, beige acoustical tile—"will soak up paint like a sponge, I know. But I'm not sure that shellac would do the trick because then we'd have the problem of painting over the shellac, and I've done that and you get into all kinds of moisture problems—"

"You could ask at the hardware store, Jack. I'm sure there's some sort of sealant you can buy." Her words were slow, very measured, but I could hear tension in them, and something else, too—resolve, I realized, and I thought, incorrectly, that it was a resolve to put the house in order as quickly as possible. She continued, "We certainly can't leave it the way it is."

"It'd be unique," I said.

"Yeah," she said, "unique." She paused briefly, continued, "Why'd they write that stuff all over the house, Jack?"

"Just your basic creative vandal, I suppose. He knew what would scare us."

"He scared the hell out of me."

"He scared me, too, Erika."

A minute's silence, then: "Where'd you bury that raccoon, Jack?"

"Out back," I answered. "Way out back. And deep. Good and deep."

"Uh-huh." She was whispering now, low and tight. "Don't lie to me, Jack. I don't like it. The ground's still hard, so how deep could you have buried it?"

"Deep enough."

"I hope so. I don't want to trip over it in the spring; that wouldn't make my day."

"You won't."

She said nothing.

I said, "God, I'm sorry this happened, Erika." Still nothing.

"You going to sleep?"

"No.

"Oh. You can't sleep, huh?"

"Eventually I will." A pause. "Jack?" She sounded troubled.

"Yes?"

"Is something wrong?"

I chuckled a small, false chuckle. "Is something wrong?!" I said sarcastically. "Here, her house gets vandalized, her belongings destroyed—"

"It doesn't matter, Jack. Really, it doesn't matter at all. I just wanted you to know something. I wanted to tell you that what I've learned about love, what I know about love, Jack . . ." She seemed tongue-tied. "I wanted you to know that I love you. Whatever you think that means, whatever you think love means, it's what I mean."

I said nothing. She sounded intensely earnest, confused, a little sad.

She added, "We'll be here, at this house, Jack—you and I will be at this house for a good long time. I know that."

"Yes," I said. "I know that, too, Erika. That's what I want."

"I feel like I'm drifting, Jack."

"Drifting?" I knew that she'd used the word before when she was talking about herself, but I couldn't remember in what context.

"I feel . . . apart—" She sounded very confused now.

"Erika, my God, what's wrong?"

"There's nothing wrong." She sounded convinced of that. I wished that the light was on so I could read her face. "Could you do me a favor, Jack?"

"Sure." I put my hand on the top of hers, got no reaction. "Name it."

"Fix the curtains."

"You mean right now?"

"Yes. If you don't mind. You can jerry-rig them. I'll help you." She was pleading with me. "We can stick the rods up and throw the curtains over them. We can use blankets, if that's easier. It's too light in here." It wasn't light at all. "It's too close to morning, Jack. I won't be able to sleep." She still was pleading. "I need the dark. I'm sorry. I need the dark."

"Sure, Erika." I got out of the bed and, alone, spent the next half hour putting the curtains up. When I got back into bed, she was asleep. I leaned over and kissed her cheek. "I love you, too," I said. "I love you a lot," and from what I could see of her face, I supposed that she smiled as she slept, which made me feel better than I'd felt in a long time.

I
woke several hours later. I heard talking in the house. I heard talking from the room below, which is the library, from the guest room, from the big open room, from the house itself, as if the walls were talking.

I could make out no words. I could hear only the
sense
of the words, a sense of quiet urgency, the way a doctor speaks to a woman giving birth.

I did not wake Erika to hear it. It lasted only a few seconds.

O
ur memories do sustain us. They give the present a backdrop, scenery, substance; they tell us who we are and what we're becoming, and if what we're becoming is worth anything at all.

Our memories sing to us, too. And caress us. And chill us, hurt us, make us numb, so that we sit for hours quietly, unmoving and unchanging because that will put time off, and the moments will not happen.

I used to do that quite a lot at the house when Erika wasn't there. I used to sit in a big wing-backed chair in the living room and listen to the noises that the house made, and I used to say to myself that it would never change, that the house would stand forever, that Erika and I would live forever in it, because that's what was and how could it possibly change if I kept watching it?

It's what I was doing the day after the vandalism happened. Erika had taken off for the afternoon. We'd awakened late and she'd had a cup of coffee and said simply, "I've got to get out of here for a couple hours, Jack." Then she got into her blue Volvo and was gone.

I sat in the wing-backed chair and I thought, in so many words,
Something's happening to her. She's changing!
I wondered if it was life at the house that was doing it or if, perhaps, her attitude toward me was changing; I dearly hoped not.

In the room around me, things were much as we'd found them the night before. The big oak grandfather's clock I'd labored on so long and lovingly stood with its waist door open and the chain and weights, the pendulum, chimes and chime board scattered on the floor. In front of me, the gray art-deco couch that Erika and I had bought four years earlier, our first major purchase, lay on its back, its underside torn apart. Above the fireplace—a bare wall that lots of people had been after us to "put something on"—still more graffiti asked, in the same red block letters, WHERE DO THE CHILDREN PLAY? It was, I remembered, a line from a Cat Stevens song.

In the fireplace itself, toward the front of it, there were what looked like partial footprints in the ashes.

"You'll get your locks changed, of course," Mansfield Barnes had said. "You'll get dead bolts."

And I answered, nodding at the footprints, "Maybe that wouldn't do any good, Mr. Barnes. Maybe these people came down the chimney."

To which Barnes, with great stoicism, replied, "That wouldn't be possible, now would it?"

And I realized, as I sat in the wing-backed chair, that I'd begun to miss Erika. Not for that moment, not because she'd gone off in her blue Volvo. But that I'd begun missing the Erika who slept with the night-light on, the Erika who got a big kick out of
Kliban
cats, the Erika who gave me arguments about politics—we had certain basic disagreements in that area—and who occasionally had fun with my tastes in art and movies—I liked Andrew Wyeth; she thought he was starkly commercial; I enjoyed reruns of old Steve Martin movies; she thought he was simply a buffoon.

And I missed the Erika who often made a game out of lovemaking, who played the role of a vamp, or a prostitute, or a "sweet young thing"—as she said—and carried the act out to the end, grinning and chuckling through her passion now and again. (I remembered that several months earlier, for my birthday, she'd given me an official-looking hardcover book titled
An Analysis of Keynesian Economic Theory and its Bilateral Effects on Third World Industrial Growth
.

("Very nice, Erika," I said, and she pointed at the bottom of the cover. There were some words in tiny gray print, so they were nearly invisible on the light blue background—
How to Have Multiple Orgasms
.)

("Oh," I said, grinning, and flipped through the pages. They were blank, except at the center, where a stylized Viking woman proclaimed, spear in hand, "Do it over and over and over again!")

Sex was very important to her, but she always had great fun with it, and I thought that was healthy. But, in the last month, that had changed. Now she made love with an overwhelming and passionate intensity that scared me at times because she did it as if her life depended on it. And she sometimes said, when it was done, "Thank you, Jack." To which I usually replied, for lack of anything better to say, "You're welcome, Erika. Gee, let's do it again sometime."

I
drove to Granada that afternoon. I went there because I supposed that I'd find Sarah
Talpey
there. I didn't.

I found Granada inhabited.

I found people mowing lawns, washing cars, walking dogs, trimming hedges, pushing baby carriages.

And as I drove through Granada, heads turned, I got quizzical looks, a few smiles, I got ignored, someone yelled, "Hi."

But there were no lawns to mow in Granada, and no lawnmowers, or baby carriages, no hedges to trim, or hedge trimmers, or cars to wash.

Only people pretending to do the things that people who live in places like Granada do.

And it was clear that they believed the things they were doing because they did them with such earnest intensity. As if they'd been doing those things all their lives.

They were dressed for spring, in light jackets and double-knit slacks, in gardener's pants, in wide-brimmed hats, in
Izod
shirts, and peasant dresses.

I stopped. I rolled the window down a crack.

"Hi," someone said again.

"Hi," someone else said.

"Hi," said a man nearby who was going through the motions of washing a car. "Come over later, have a beer."

And I saw a dark-haired, dark-skinned woman in a beige blouse stick her head out of a first-floor window. "Where are the children playing?" she called. Some faces turned toward her. There were some desultory shrugs; someone—the man close to me, I think—said with obvious disinterest, "I don't know," as if she were trying to involve him in a game of trivia and he didn't want to go along with it.

And then he turned toward me. His right hand—the hand that would have been holding the garden hose—moved further to the right, so he wouldn't splash me. But I had my foot off the brake then, and I heard nothing of what he had to say; only this: "And you—"

And I was gone.

I
found Sarah on Clement Road. She was carrying her sleeping bag under one arm, what looked like an attaché case under the other, and when I stopped beside her and rolled the window down—"Sarah?" I said—she didn't acknowledge me. She kept walking. Her head was lowered slightly; she had that little frown on her mouth. I moved the car forward thirty feet or so, stopped, jumped out, and called back to her, "Sarah? Where are you going?"

She looked up at last. Her frown was replaced briefly by a friendly, flat, and tired smile. "Oh. Jack, isn't it?" she said. "Good to see you. Have you been to Granada?"

"Yes," I said, and took the sleeping bag from her.