The Dwelling: A Novel (43 page)

The grin broadened and became real. He chuckled in his throat, and that sounded better in the dark (like a whistle or a song monsters ghosts haunts beasties
hate
that). He sat up with the crossword and turned his attention to finding the pencil—under the computer—and poised it above the clue
one with an axe:
chopper, he thought. It would fit, anyway. Just as Richie was about to add it to the puzzle, he smelled the oily, acrid smell of something badly burned. Pork roast, Sundays, too much beer. He curled his nose up against it. Slowly it retreated. The oily reek remained in his nostrils, melting into his throat. Burnt barbecue.

And the dark felt very close. He tightened.

It occurred to him, for no reason at all, that things moved behind him.

The small light beside the computer, perched precariously on the table, lit up only as far as his leg would reach, if he stretched it out into the gulf between him and the opposite wall.

There was a small window, no more than a foot circular on the east side of the attic (something he thought he might take care of before winter he thought it would probably get pretty fucking cold up there no sense adding to the problem) that cast nothing more than a feeble glow onto the floor directly under it. The rest of the place was dark.

He could not shake the feeling that things moved in the dark.
But they didn’t.

Richie stared, eyes straining to make something out, and could see nothing. Not even shadows looked back at him. Darkness was deep, separated only by the feeble glow of the lamp and screen. Dark and light cut sharply. From nowhere came Longfellow. How did it go? Something between dark and daylight.

(Comes pause in the day’s occupation/that is known as the children’s hour)

Only the light from his small lamp and the screen of the computer were visible. He could not so much as see a beam overhead.

Young Porter waited on the page
(for the children’s hour?)
on the screen in front of him.
What did they look like?
He stared blankly at the words there, reading nothing, terribly aware instead of the dark.

(Things move)

Richie stood up deliberately, his chair scuttling out behind him only a short way, the small wheels catching on a bit of the unfinished plywood floor and stopping. A break was what he needed. And a spotlight to hang from the ceiling, for safety’s sake, if not for the dark. He’d spooked himself, obviously, with his own material.
Has to be a good sign, right?
He’d have a little lunch, then pick it up in the afternoon.

He descended the ladder until his head was all that poked out into the attic. At floor level, the room looked less large, the dark less surrounding. The hall was cool under him and he jumped from the ladder into the light.

Richie had two good solid days of writing behind him by the time he started seriously planning his attack. Not attack, exactly: more like a conquering, a storm on the citadel that was Jennifer.

He felt, entirely, like he was back. Not just back, but
back.
Two years of horror sometimes sat on his back like some kind of medieval deformity, impeding not only the navigation of his future, but the single steps themselves. A weight, heavy and shameful, sometimes even visible to him. When he looked at himself in the mirror he could see the weight in his eyes, and when a night of bad drinking was behind him, he could see it in the hollows of his cheeks, in the slouch of his shoulders, the hang of his arms by his side. For the first time, it felt like some of that might be lifting.

Two good days at the computer was all it really took. There was nothing (and he really meant nothing, not the kid not the girl not a straight-up bourbon and a good reason to drink it not a good book not food when he was hungry water when he was thirsty,
nothing)
like the feeling after writing a good bit of work. The sun shone; he could feel his own heart beating, his own pulse running, he could feel himself, alive and
pleased.
Pleased was better, somehow, than happy. Happy implied a flipside, one he had spent far too much of the last two years visiting. Pleased was spiritual, and entirely belonging to him.

And Jen was coming.

He was Rajah of the Kingdom of All Right.

Richie quit work (eight pages, six hours an excellent,
excellent
take for a day bringing the two-day total up to
drumroll
seventeen fucking pages and about three scenes shy of a chapter) around three and went to the grocery store. He picked up steaks, fresh, small red potatoes from California, which he was going to roast slowly in a tin of consommé just the way his mother used to, and a bag o’ salad (no way to screw up a salad why not let them do it?). Groceries bought, he stopped at the dollar store and picked up twenty tiny scented candles, having only a moment of doubt—was it gauche to burn scented candles with the heady aromas of a spectacular (steak as her favorite) dinner cooking?—but bought them anyway. She loved shit like candles and little dishes of dead plants that smelled nothing like they had in life and those stupid rings that were scented that he had been forever knocking off lamps when he turned them on—he didn’t buy any of those, although he was tempted and then decided it seemed like too much: he wasn’t going to buy too much. Probably the flowers he picked up at the florist were about three stems on their way to being too much, but he didn’t care by then. After the florist he spent a whopping fourteen dollars on a chocolate torte thing that was bound to enter an entire leap for mankind into
too much.

He didn’t care. He was happy. Not happy. He was pleased, and that was better.

And Jen was coming.

At home, he started the potatoes in the roaster Jen had left behind (that he had kept for sentimental reasons: she often cooked a roast on Saturday night and they would have Steve, Dubs, Brad and their women over and the six, eight, ten of them would sit around after smoke dope drink beers play cards rent a movie and trash it those were the old days); most of the other stuff that she had left behind had been burned in an impromptu ceremony on a very bad, very drunken night last summer. When she asked for some of those things, he said she was mistaken.

A point of contention, but a small one. After they were married and had a couple more kids, he would tell her what he’d done and they would
laaauuuuggghh.

He moved the little kitchen table from the kitchen into the dining room, and it filled the space nicely, made it cozy; his mother’s buffet in the background made the space look somehow real. He covered the table with his only tablecloth, another gift from his mother. The folds in the cloth stuck up untidily, but Richie didn’t notice. He put the flowers in a large pickle jar that would have to serve as a vase, but first soaked the label off so it wouldn’t be too telling. Probably she would think it was charming. It would be, if he was writing it.

Around the house he distributed candles, all twenty, in their new little glass holders. He started to feel silly around candle fifteen—
too much.
(She would think it was charming; he would, if he was writing it.) He solved that problem by putting the last five in the bedroom, with wistful anticipation.

Ohhhh,
she would say, her mouth a perfect red circle. He knew how she would taste. Sweet, like gum. Her cheeks would redden and she would smile, the halfway-up-her-cheek smile that she mostly smiled in their moments of love. He remembered it. He would see her breasts by candlelight again and later he would tell her of his plans for a soft, thick rug for in front of the
working!
fireplace so that he could see her naked by firelight.

The house began to fill with the smell of the roast potatoes. He looked at his watch. He would turn them down some.

Downstairs, in final preparation, he carefully put the single bottle of red wine that he had debated purchasing in the middle of the table, the corkscrew beside it like a waiting tongue.

The debate outside the liquor store had been hell.

Drinking was their (his) issue.

How could you have a romantic dinner without a bottle of wine? It was in all the books. All the movies.
All your movies.
It was no big deal. A bottle of wine. It wasn’t like he was going to buy a great big amber bottle of whiskey and down it in shots. It wasn’t like he had sixteen cases of empties by the back door (he had taken them back). It didn’t mean anything.

*  *  *

He decided to get the wine and then it would look like he could have a couple of glasses and stop. It would be telling, for her. It would show her. I can drink socially.

Can you?

The bottle looked somehow right on the table, with the plates and the silverware and the napkins he’d bought that afternoon with the candles.

He grinned. Too much, of course. And, he thought, she’d love it. If he was writing it, she would.

RJ called at five-thirty, just home from school, to say hi and talk in excited tones about some science project that he had been assigned that Richie could not relate to, but he could definitely get into the sound of his kid happy. Maybe the kid was even
pleased.
He thought of explaining the difference between the two to RJ, but decided to keep that nugget to himself. Instead, when his kid asked him what he was doing, he mentioned casually that Jennifer was coming for dinner.

“Oh, yeah?” RJ said, interested. “Are you getting back together with her?”

Richie tried to keep his heart from thumping, even just hearing it, and played it cool. Just like he would later, playing down the candles, the wine, the tablecloth. The closer it got to Jen’s arrival, the more
too much
it all seemed. He grinned into the phone, in spite of himself. “It’s just dinner. We’re friends. You know how it is,” he said, and quickly changed the subject. “How’s your mom?”

Then RJ launched into a completely beautiful adolescent rant about an ongoing debate on a new bedtime. He felt too old to have a bedtime, and his mother had countered that if he was given free rein he would stay up all night. Richie said he would talk to her, the grin never leaving his face.

Then she was there.

The door opened with a blast of cold air from outside. It was snowing, big fat flakes coming down, looking Christmassy and nice. She shook it from herself, her cheeks pink with the cold, her even white teeth showing through her smiling mouth, and Richie resisted, barely, the urge to grab her, take her in his arms and keep her.

“It got so cold!” she said, laughing.

“Looks nice. When did it start snowing?” he said formally, grinning, happy. She smiled warmly back at him and told him all about traffic and city drivers and the trucks downtown putting up all the lights for Christmas.

She shook off her coat and handed him a narrow brown-paper bag with wine inside.

“Oh, you brought wine,” he said, surprised. So much for the debate. “I bought some this afternoon.”

She shrugged happily. “Well, keep it for another day,” she said, and inside, he whirled. Another day.

He took her coat and hung it on the hooks on the wall. She stomped her feet and laughed, telling him he was going to have to wash the floor tomorrow. He laughed too. The hall felt warm and he could smell the snow off her boots and her coat. The little drops of melted snow sparkled under the hall light. He was cool.

“Steaks are going on the ’cue in a minute,” he said.

She breathed deeply, “Smells good in here. Roast potatoes like Mom used to make?”

He grinned. “You know me so well,” he said sarcastically.

They walked into the living room together and Jennifer stopped to look around.

He’d lit all the candles
(fifteen
candles) and set the dimmer on so they glowed and danced against the mostly unadorned walls. Everything on the table seemed to sparkle in the light. It looked, even to him, even if he wasn’t writing it, charming. Romantic.

She turned slowly to look at him, his face beaming just a beat longer, as he took in her expression, her face naked of pretense or politeness. She was not smiling. Her head tilted apologetically to the side and she said, “Oh, Richie.”

Oh, Richie.
With no ability to control it, his face just fell, and then it, too, was naked. She closed her eyes for a second, not a blink, really, and then smiled. Sadly?

“What were you thinking?” she said softly. Her shoulders drooped.

He swallowed. Tried to pick up the ball. He walked over to the mantel and blew out two of the candles there. “I wasn’t thinking nothing.”

“It looks very romantic in here,” she said, a prod. “We should probably talk about this.” Her voice had dropped somberly, the way it used to. Better than anything else she did, he recognized that tone (and hated it—
we should talk we need to talk let’s talk about this):
he never came out good in those conversations.

No romance.

“So I jumped the gun, big deal,” he said. He walked briskly into the dining room and began opening the bottle of wine he had bought. He wanted a drink. And he guessed he could bloody well have one now. No one here to impress.

“I’ll have some too,” she said.

“Did you think I was opening it just for me?” he sneered. He yanked on the cork less than delicately and the pop sounded loud. He smelled the mouth of the bottle. He’d heard once that if a wine bottle popped too loudly, the wine would be bad. It smelled good to him. Good old grapes.

Jennifer walked slowly into the dining room, hands in the front pockets of her jeans. “Of course not,” she said. “Just…making conversation. Are you okay about this? Should I go?”

He looked up from pouring the wine expertly into glasses. “I’m fine,” he said, annoyed. “So I lit a few candles for atmosphere. Big deal. I don’t know what I was thinking, so don’t ask me. I’m going to throw the steaks on, you’re medium-well, right?” he said, as though he didn’t remember, and smiled a bright, beaming, nearly painful-to-produce smile to soften the edge in his voice.