The Dwelling: A Novel (7 page)

Kate laughed and clapped her hands. “That is so
cool,”
she said.

“I had one of those in a college apartment. They’re not bad. You kick him outta your room, Becca?” Max joked. Becca laughed. Dan met her eyes, smiling. She smiled back.

“Yup, this room speaks to me,” Dan said. He leaned up against the mattressless bed. Katie peered through the metal frame to the wood underneath.

“It looks like a coffin with a bed on top,” she said.

Dan patted it affectionately and nodded. “Could come in handy that way,” he said, joking. “I ordered the mattress for it,” he added casually. Becca looked up, surprised. He hadn’t mentioned it.
What had it cost?
She tried to catch his eye, but he avoided hers. “It should be here by Tuesday.”

“Then you’ll have a place to sleep,” Becca said sweetly. Max and Kate laughed, and so did Becca, pleased to have made a joke. Dan met her eyes briefly, sheepishly. She shook her head dismissively. It didn’t matter.

She was going to be a director soon.

The three of them, Dan, Max and Kate went out back to smoke a joint. Becca passed. When they were pleasingly altered, Dan and Max went into the inner sanctum to look at what Dan had for sketches.

Kate was left with Becca in the living room. “Great house. You enjoying it?” she asked.

“Yes. Thank you. I heard your show went well at the gallery.”

“Yeah, it was great. Did you see it?”

“No,” Becca said.

“So, how’s the job? You’re still at the…”

“Center for Improved Health. It’s good. Thank you.” She nodded. They both took a sip from their beer.

“Are you planning another show?”

“I’m just starting a new series,” Kate said. Becca nodded. Kate smiled. So did Becca.

And on like that.

They said good-bye just after midnight. Becca and Kate had managed to make conversation for more than an hour while the men were holed up in Dan’s studio, talking about the
graphic novel,
which they were calling alternately
the pages
or
the book.
When they came out, finally, the four of them sat around in the living room and made stilted, general conversation, but it wasn’t long before they got back into
The Headhunter,
the name of both the book and the title character. Kate got into it with them.

They talked mostly about the Reporter, still nameless and still faceless.

“She’s got to be serenely beautiful, like a beautiful
nun
or something,” Max said.

“The face of an angel,” Katie said distantly. Her pupils were very small. Her eyes glassy.

“Yes! Exactly!” Max nodded thoughtfully. They would retreat into periods of thoughtful silence. Thoughtful stoned silence. Then they would all talk at once.

“The kind of chick you would call a ‘beautiful creature,’ you know?”

“Chick?
Chick?”
Kate punched Max lightly on the arm, her face amused and frowning. “What’re you, a sixties’ throwback?”

“You’re such a chick,” he said, with mock derisiveness.

Dan seemed not to be listening. He would periodically lean back on the sofa and hold his hand near his face, his eyes automatically squinting against phantom smoke. It was his smoking posture; Becca recognized it. When he was working at the old place, he would get that look, assume that posture, when he was thinking about some project or other. They had agreed that he wasn’t going to smoke in the new house. Seeing him like that, she felt almost guilty, the two seemed to go together so completely. She supposed she should give him credit for not smoking.

“I sort of see her as strong, but vulnerable. That nun analogy is good,” he said, looking off into space, nodding. “Short hair, I think. Something framing her face. You got a name for her yet?” Max shook his head.

“The Reporter,” he said.

“She could be nameless; it could give her a mysterious quality,” Kate said. The three of them nodded. Stoned thoughtfulness.

They smoked more dope, outside. Kate and Dan went out into the yard a few times to smoke regular cigarettes and more beer was drunk.

Becca had a beer and two glasses of wine, and by the time the evening was wrapping up, she felt light and relaxed. The two of them stood out on the front stoop to say good-bye. It was dark out, and warm, a lovely beginning to summer. Soon it would be barbecues and lawn chairs and Saturdays spent tanning with the radio. The thought filled Becca with hope and anticipation. Summer was nice.

They closed the door when the car pulled away and Dan draped a happy, loose arm around Becca’s shoulders and she didn’t shake him off or wiggle away. She felt good inside. Warm, from the wine and the sweet, outside air.

He flicked off the hall light and in the same motion—his arm still around her—turned on the porch light outside. The hall got dark at the same time the porch light shone in through the small, narrow window at the bottom of the stairs. Then he turned and kissed her.

It caught her by surprise and she kissed him back. They stood for a moment in the dark hall, their mouths moving familiarly through the steps, moving this way, then that, warm, soft, then pressing, releasing. Dan ran his tongue over her lips and through the wine, it was good. He tasted of beer and cigarettes. Like always.

“Let’s go to bed,” he whispered wetly in her ear. It was nice, his breath in her ear. She wanted him to breathe into it, it tickled sweetly, warmed her neck, made the flesh rise. She wished wistfully that that was what sex was, just warm breath. She nodded slowly.

The lights were on in the kitchen and the living room. Beer bottles and glasses and bowls of chips, the jar of salsa, were all still out. She pulled softly away, wanting to be agreeable, knowing that it was time, and that it would be all right.

“Lemme just put a couple of things away, and I’ll be right up,” she whispered back. His mouth was still at her ear. He was leaning on her, not moving much. He was a little drunk. So was she. That made her giggle. He laughed in her ear, from his throat. She felt it on her shoulder, a rumble.

“Want me to help?” he said. Breath in her ear. They spoke with long pauses between words. She because of the breath in her ear; him because he was a little more drunk than she was.

“No. I’ll do it.”

“Don’t be too long,” he said, singsongy, promising. He swayed away from her, turned and thumped heavily up the stairs.

Becca grabbed beer bottles and put them on the counter in the kitchen. She went back for glasses and just dumped them into the bowl of chips. She giggled, shutting off the lights in the living room, flooding the downstairs with darkness.

In the hall she noticed light coming out from under the door of Dan’s studio. She debated only briefly, thinking of the electricity bill and the fact that they already left the stove light on in the kitchen at night, and lights at both the front and back doors.

Her footsteps echoed in the dark hall. Upstairs she heard Dan move from their room to the bathroom and the clunk of the toilet seat being lifted up. She smiled into the dark. Paused to hear the splash of his stream. Thought of his penis. Realized it really
would
be okay. Maybe she even wanted to, a little.

Maybe it
was
a phase.
She didn’t let herself think any further than that.

She grabbed the doorknob of his studio and turned and pushed. The door didn’t open. She sighed, disgusted. Tried without effort once more. Gave the door an unenthusiastic little shake. It stayed closed. She looked down at the floor, at the light spreading over the toes of her shoes.

Fuck it.

It was almost funny, or should have been. Like a sitcom moment. Lucy trying to open the door that Ricky opens without effort time and time again, a vaudevillian act played out in silence with large-eyed, pursed-lipped mugging for the camera and “
Luuuucee—”
It should have been funny. But it wasn’t. It was annoying.

Before going upstairs to make (dutiful) love to her husband, she gave the door a little surreptitious kick. Not hard. But her foot bounced back from the door. She moved back in surprise.

The door had resisted. It had felt, distinctly, like it had kicked back.

Eyeing the full length of it, she stepped sideways away and into the hall. With one last backward look over her shoulder, she mounted the stairs.

Becca was taking her husband into her mouth, to his great delight, when downstairs the light sneaking out from under the door to the little room under the stairs spilled out into the hall.

The knob turned (easily) and the door slid open wide, coming to rest against the wall. It stopped just before hitting the plaster and stayed put.

Dan woke up briefly at nearly four in the morning, still half drunk, but awake enough to feel the pounding in his temples. The room was dark, the only light coming through the window from the streetlamp outside. The window was yet uncurtained. He shut his eyes against it and thought about getting up and taking a couple of aspirin.

The thought passed,
I’ll still have the headache in the morning,
and he settled his naked body against the warm, naked body of his wife, the smell and memory of their sex still lingering enough to make him smile as he put his head on the pillow and began to fade.

Just drifting off, he thought he heard a car pull up outside. Footsteps. Somewhere distantly, a door closed. She tugged at him.

Downstairs?

Then music, tinny and low, something jazzy, from another time. He moved his body, eyes lightly shut. His face buried into Becca’s hair. He smelled her. Soap and skin.

After you’ve gone and left me crying…

An old recording. A record player, or the sound of one.

Sounds like someone’s having a party,
he thought, and fell into the dark fog of sleep.

Victoria Warwick had woken up on Sunday morning with a hankering for potato latkes. But there was no sour cream in the house. The only thing to do was to pack her old bones into a sweater and running shoes and walk herself down to the grocery, only five blocks from her home. She was eighty-eight years old and sure to remind anyone who crossed her path of the fact. “I’m eighty-eight years old. I still do my own cooking and, goddamn it—” she would at that point wave her cane high enough in the air, so that whomever she was speaking to was, literally, taken aback “—I’m still doing my own walking!” Often as not, she had with her a yellow mesh bag, a gift from a planet-minded granddaughter, for carrying the few groceries she could manage. Her son Donald did the major shopping every Tuesday afternoon. Recently, Donald and Victoria had stopped talking; it wouldn’t last long, it rarely did, but came about regular as clockwork every few weeks when Donald tried to get Grandma, as she was known, to live with him.

“I’m eighty-eight years old, and I’m still able to do my own cooking!” was her invariable reply, thick with indignant anger. The fact was, and even Donald, in the extremities of his own anger, was reluctant to state, she wasn’t cooking quite as well lately. Fire had become a major source of concern. Linda, Victoria’s middle daughter, had taken to calling every night around eight, to remind Mom to turn off the elements on the stove. A small incident the previous November had given everyone (Victoria included) a heads-up. Victoria, for her own safety—and so those goddamn kids couldn’t accuse her of being senile—went meekly about the house, checking elements, toasters, kettles and heating pads.

She had lived on Belisle Street since her marriage, in 1930, to John Warwick, ten years her senior and, by the time she married him, well on his way to the ulcers that would take his life just neatly after Victoria had given birth to the last of their seven children, Graham. John, however, had been a prodigious saver and a thrifty man, not to mention a man with a deep and abiding faith in insurance. His death had paid off their house and left them comfortable for long enough to get all seven children started on the path to goodness and success. Graham, the baby, was already ten before his mother had to begin to take in boarders in the large three-story house at the east end of Belisle.

The last one had departed nearly fifteen years ago. The top two floors of the house were closed off, to all intents and purposes (she had no idea that for three years her young grandson Lawson had been growing pot, quite successfully, in a boarded-off room in the attic), the two floors a favorite storage place for the discards and seasonal dreck of her many children, grandchildren, and suddenly, over the last few years, great-grandchildren. The milestones of a changing nation, technologically and ethically, could be found up there, and Victoria depended upon her sons and grandchildren to keep it maintained and critter-free (for three years, a job taken over enthusiastically by Lawson, a most attentive and regular mouse hunter, “Hi, Grandma! Gotta check the traps!”).

Victoria sighed with remembering, lumbering her way slowly up Carson and not waiting to cross the street to Belisle, but just stepping out onto the busy road, waving her cane in front of her. Her bag, small as it was, was getting heavy. In it was a pint of sour cream, and while at the store she’d seen some fresh strawberries and found she had a sudden hankering for
those,
too. So she’d bought a small container and a tub of that ready-made whipping cream (she berated herself for this all the way up the street). There were also two purple onions, and a bar of pretty lavender soap that she had picked up in the sale bin at the druggist’s.

It was Sunday afternoon already and she had to haul herself home, because Donald would be coming in the afternoon to pick up her list for next week’s shopping. Like clockwork, he picked up her list on Sunday afternoon and spent an uncomfortable hour sitting with her
(Ma! Don’t make me nothing to eat! I just ate!)
and then left on his way back to his own family, duty again fulfilled. It would be an interesting and quiet visit this week, because they weren’t speaking. But she just bet that wouldn’t keep him from staying the hour and making strained conversation. She would pout at him the whole time. Drove him batty.