People of the Dark (2 page)

I
have snapshots of Erika when she was a child. Most of them are in black and white, though some are in color, and I say to myself when I look at them,
Yes, I can see the woman here, in this child; she hasn't changed much. Her face got a little narrower, perhaps—she grew taller, her body matured. But the woman dwelt there
. I think it's a comfortable lie to tell myself, though I'm not sure that it is a lie. If it is, I want desperately to believe it.

One of these photographs, one in black and white, shows Erika at what appears to be the age of ten or eleven. She's standing with her left arm around a boy who's about the same age; his name, she says, was Timothy. He could easily have been her twin. They were about the same height; both had dark hair and darkish skin, and they shared the same
pixieish
look, as if they had wings on their backs.

"What happened to him?" I asked her once.

She shrugged. "What happens to anyone, Jack? He grew up, he got married. I think he's a plumber, maybe he's an electrician. I haven't seen him in years."

Another of the photographs shows Erika and her mother cheek to cheek. The photograph was obviously taken in one of those booths where a series of black-and-white shots can be had for a dollar or two. Erika's mother is smiling broadly, and Erika is smiling broadly, though her face is blurred a little, as if she turned her head when the shutter clicked. She told me she was fourteen when the photograph was taken, and that her mother died a month later—"It was a car crash, Jack. My father died too. They're buried together." She smiled, embarrassed. "Well, not together, really. Side by side."

I have several baby pictures of Erika. One is an 8 X 10 color portrait done at Sears, another is a small snapshot commemorating her first visit to the beach: She's sitting in a tiny, two-ring inflatable pool; an adult's arm is jutting in from the left side of the snapshot, the hand apparently on her back, holding her up in the pool. The beach is behind her.

E
rika is twenty-six years old, short, dark-skinned, dark-haired. Her eyes are very large and are a rich, earthy brown in color. Her face is oval, her nose small and straight, her lips full. It is a memorable face not only because it is so marvelous to look at but also because it has something
undefinable
in it, as if the brain behind it is holding onto knowledge or memory that it must desperately keep to itself. That's why she often looks bemused, I think.

She tells jokes on occasion. Some of them are dirty and some of them are clean, and some of them display an incredible naïveté, as if she has, as an adult, just discovered jokes that were extant when the rest of us were children. "I'm going to make rice and
updoc
for dinner, Jack," she said once.

"You're going to make what?" I asked.

"Rice and
updoc
," she repeated.

So I fell for it. "What's
updoc
?" I said, which elicited a full minute of wonderful childlike laughter from her.

She has no brothers or sisters. She remembers her parents were anguished over that because they very much wanted other children. "They kept trying, Jack," she told me. "And it wasn't that my mother couldn't get pregnant. She could. She got pregnant a half-dozen times anyway. The trouble was, she miscarried a half-dozen times, too." Erika has told me that more than once, always in the same words. And she always adds, her voice low and thoughtful, "It's really too bad, isn't it? I would like to have had some brothers and sisters. I think my childhood would seem fuller if I'd had some brothers and sisters." She pauses, looks quizzically at me. "I remember so awfully little from my childhood, Jack. Is it that way with you?"

I tell her, "Sure it is. I think it's that way with everyone," which is a lie, of course.

E
rika and I have been married for six years. It's the first marriage for both of us, and we went into it good and starry-eyed; we would have looked just like the bride and groom on a wedding cake had we had a traditional ceremony, but we didn't. We were married at a place called
Sonnenburg
Gardens, in Canandaigua, New York. It's a sprawling three-story mansion with a red-slate roof, and it's surrounded by thirty acres of meticulously cared-for gardens. Erika loved it—I thought it was okay, if a bit
overstylized
—and when she learned that marriages could be performed there, she was ecstatic.

She loves to get her hands into the earth, loves the smell of it, the texture of it. And she loves the things that spring from the earth; she says she feels a kinship with them. I tell her I do too, and that's the truth. But I know she means something deeper than I mean. I know that now, especially.

S
he wears no perfume. She has a smell all her own, which is vaguely, and faintly, like the smell of sweet butter. It's especially noticeable when we make love. I think it's in her sweat, and I enjoy it because, of course, it reminds me of her. It lingers. It's on her clothes; it's on the chair she uses most often. It fades after a time. Then her clothes and her favorite chair become simple and inanimate and uninteresting.

It's in the walls, too, where it's extremely tenacious. And it's in the garden she started. And when I smell it here and there on our land, I stop and I enjoy it.

S
he looks especially good in blue and in green, which complement her dark hair, darkish skin, and brown eyes.

She likes ginger ale, black coffee, tuna fish on whole wheat, Humphrey Bogart movies, most of Woody Allen, none of Sidney Sheldon.

And she scares easily, laughs a lot, is afraid of the dark, likes to be hugged, wears comfortable shoes, is a sucker for a salesman, dynamite in a bathing suit, allergic to penicillin.

I am happy with her. I'll always be happy with her.

W
hen Erika and I moved into our farmhouse, we knew that there was a leak where the line from the well—seven hundred feet up what we used to call "our mountain"—entered the basement. We were told by a local contractor that the leak was caused by an underground stream and that the only way to fix it would be to have a trench dug around the perimeter of the house, then to have the trench lined with ceramic tile and PVC pipe. He said it would divert the stream, and we said okay.

He subcontracted the job to a man named Jim Sandy, who came to the house on a bright and unusually warm afternoon early in December, took himself on a quick walking tour of the area he was going to be digging up, then came back into the house to give me an estimate. I showed him to the kitchen, sat him down at the table, made him some coffee. He put lots of sugar in it, then sipped it delicately.

I sat kitty-corner to him at the table, with my own coffee. "What's the verdict?" I said.

"Lots of rocks in there," he said. "Rocks and hard clay. It's damn difficult to dig through rocks and hard clay."

"Yes," I said. "I imagine it is."

"Five hundred dollars," he said. He was a short, thin man, with grayish skin and bad teeth. He was wearing a threadbare blue denim jacket, a red flannel shirt, black pants, Timberland boots, and an oil-stained orange cap with the word CHALMERS imprinted on it.

"Five hundred dollars is a lot of money," I told him.

"You get what you pay for," he said, which surprised me—I had supposed, from looking at him, that he'd haggle. He took another sip of coffee, a noisy one, and repeated, "You get what you pay for."

He smelled vaguely of wood smoke thickly overlaid by a cheap aftershave that I supposed he'd splashed on to cover the odor of the wood smoke. Whenever he put his cup of coffee down, he scratched idly at the inside of his elbow and cursed beneath his breath.

"How about three hundred?" I said.

He grinned, took another sip of coffee, set the cup down. "Three
hundred'll
get me here," he said, still grinning. "And five
hundred'll
get the job done."

I thought a moment, then shrugged. "Okay," I said.

He scratched his elbow, cursed, shook my hand firmly, and told me he'd be back a week later. He said that the job would take a full day.

T
he farmhouse Erika and I bought had been on the market for nearly two years, so we got it cheap. It's old but solid, and was completely renovated ten years ago. It has a new black tile roof, new aluminum siding (a light aquamarine that blends well with the evergreens, maples, and walnut trees around the house), and someone had once even made an attempt at landscaping, though what remained of that attempt when we got here was only a line of uncared-for privet hedges alongside the driveway and a wide circle of bricks just to the south of the house, with a fieldstone walkway leading from it.

The house sits three hundred feet back from the road, at the crest of a small hill. Our "mountain"—all one hundred and fifty acres of it—looms behind the house. This is the Finger Lakes Region of New York, fifty miles or so from the Pennsylvania line, so what we call a mountain is actually no more than a steep hill littered with dead trees and eroding fast. The real estate agent told us, "The land is useless, of course," and we told him that that was okay, that we'd have privacy, at least.

There are two other dwellings on our one hundred and fifty acres. One is just a stone foundation with some uprights remaining from the original frame. The other is a sad, three-room log cabin whose walls tilt and tar-paper roof sags precariously. It sits in a small clearing a thousand feet north of the house, also at the base of our mountain, so it's level with the house. It's just far enough from the house that hunters can sit in it unnoticed and wait for deer or opossums or raccoons to wander by. Erika and I discussed getting a permit to burn the place down, but it was an idea that never got beyond the talking stages.

E
rika and I are good together. We get a kick out of pretty much the same things; our sex life is usually exciting ("Our bodies fit together nicely," we say), and for six years we've been very happy. We have had our ups and downs, of course. Everyone does.

She's left me several times. Not for other men. Other relationships never seemed to be a problem for us (she
looks
at other men, of course, and I at other women, and we often like what we see, but it's never threatened to go further than that for me, and I think for her, too). She's left me because of her ideas. She left me once, for instance, to go live with a cult that had cut off contact with society, much as the Shakers did, in Pennsylvania, but the group that Erika got involved with did it much more completely, with a great deal more gusto and cynicism. And that, I believe, is what finally drove her from them—that constant loud aura of superiority, the idea that because they were
apart
from society and were living according to their own rules and their own ideas, they were, of course, somehow
above
society.

She was gone for two months, and although I knew where she was—she'd left me a letter—I realized it was something she'd have to work out for herself. And when she got back and we were talking about the whole thing, she told me, "We all come from the same mother, don't we, Jack? No one can deny that.
They
certainly can't deny that." I agreed, though the remark mystified me, then. It doesn't, now.

And another time she left, for not quite as long, for a religious group that had developed what they called "A Live-in College for the Spiritually Enlightened" in the Berkshires, in New Hampshire. It wasn't a typical college, of course. It was a very large and pitifully ramshackle farmhouse that the group—which totaled about sixty men and women, ranging from sixteen to eighty years of age—had covered with a coat of light lavender paint. A large, rectangular sign over the front doors read, in lavender on a white background, GOD LOVES YOU—PASS IT ON. Below that, in simple black block letters, COLLEGE FOR THE SPIRITUALLY ENLIGHTENED. When Erika came back after that encounter, she was confused.

"Who has to
go
anywhere, Jack? I don't understand that. No one has to go anywhere."

"They're going somewhere, Erika?" I asked.

"Sure. They say they're going to heaven. They say they're going to be with God. And I don't understand. No one has to go anywhere for that."

S
he is short—about five feet five, dark, curvaceous, and very smart. She used to say now and then, "You still think you're smarter than I am, don't you?" And I used to shake my head glumly and admit that I wasn't. She never believed me; she always thought I was humoring her.

She was the one who made the decision to buy the farmhouse. A week after seeing the house, we were watching reruns of
The Good Neighbors
on TV, and she said, without looking at me, "I want to buy that house, Jack."