The Dwelling: A Novel (8 page)

She had to make her list for him, and it was a chore she dreaded. He was a precise (somewhat prissy, in fact) little man, who got too excited over things like a poorly written list, and she herself was used to shopping by whim and sight. Instead she had to think ahead and decide on Tuesday afternoon what she wanted to eat on Friday. Damn shame. She shook her head.

She was close enough to see the tall oak tree in her own front yard. She looked to the side and paused to get her bearings, because she could never quite remember which house it was anymore. Though she thought of it often and smiled while she did.

Halfway up Belisle, she could sometimes hear a bit of the old music coming from the house.

Lovely stuff, songs of her youth.

Marion Harris, Paul Whiteman and his orchestra, Ruth Etting. All the old songs. They were played quiet, and you had to stop and listen and hope the wind was blowing the right way.

She saw the hedge up ahead and stopped for a moment to see if she could hear. All she could hear was the traffic, a block distant yet, and farther still, a lawn mower running. There was nothing wrong with her ears.

Victoria plodded the rest of the distance, one foot about as sore as could be, the other tingling like it had gone to sleep a mile back and was loath to wake itself up just for the walk home.

At the edge of the yard, identified by the hedge—still untrimmed, she noted with an internal
tsk tsk
—she stopped and listened.
Maybe they wouldn’t be playing it today. Sometimes you couldn’t hear a thing.

Victoria had no idea who lived in the house, or where they’d come from, but they had lovely taste in music.

The sound of something strained to be heard from the house. The wind was a little off, but Victoria pricked up her ears and kept walking, closer to the sidewalk. Only a foot away, she heard not music but growling.

A little dog stuck his head out through the hedge and growled at her. Instinctively, Victoria put out her cane, waving it in front of her legs. She was not afraid of dogs, but that little one had caught her by surprise, and his growl was vicious. Sometimes the little ones nipped. He bared his tiny teeth at her, snarling so hard, his lips curled up over his teeth, she could see the brown spots on his gums.

“There, there, dog,” she said firmly, “that’s enough of that! G’wan!” She waved her cane at him. The dog didn’t move but continued to growl menacingly, and Victoria felt the first pangs of fear. There would be little she could do if he decided to come after her. She could hit him with her cane, was all; swinging her bag at him would only throw her off balance.

“Git!
Git!”
she shouted at him. He had not yet come on to the sidewalk, but he was between her and her house. She looked around up and down the street for someone to call to, but the streets were deserted.

Afraid for real now, her voice lost some of its strength. Her arm did not, was in fact made stronger with the threat in front of her. She slammed the end of her cane down on the sidewalk; the noise was nominal, but the aggression apparent.

“You
GIT!”
she hollered loudly, giving another glance around—quickly, not wanting to take her eyes off the dog for even a minute—for someone, anyone, an old man, a little kid.

The dog hung its head low and its growl disappeared into its throat—a sure sign of something worse being contemplated. Victoria swung her cane at him, swiftly, sparing nothing, her face twisted into its own fierce snarl—

by god two wars the depression a hundred funerals raising seven children on my own a goddamn little dog is not going to scare—

The cane swept right through the dog.

Victoria’s mouth dropped open and her arms stopped in its return arc, while the two met eyes for just a split second before the dog’s little head tucked into the hedge and left her sight. A small, fierce bark was offered and then nothing. She looked to see where it went, but it was gone, completely.

You are seeing things, Victoria.

On weak legs, she stumbled past the rest of the house, her heart doing its level best to pound, her mouth gone dry, because she had seen what she had seen and she must be going senile.

Those eyes.
She could have sworn she had looked into eyes as dead and flat as the eyes of a shark she had seen on the Discovery channel not two nights earlier. Flat, black, dead; she’d had her share of dogs through the years, with seven children there was no avoiding a dog or two (and no avoiding the scraping of them off the road when it was over), and never before had she seen such eyes.

They’d had a dog with some sort of brain defect one time, Oscar it was called, and it was clearly a shuffle short of a decent hand. He had never looked like that, and he was dumb as they come.

Becca had spent a couple of minutes watching through the large front window as the old woman hacked away at their hedge with her cane. She shouted something that Becca couldn’t hear, and seemed to be talking to whatever she was hacking at. Maybe even the hedge itself. The woman was very elderly. Frequently, in the early years at the Center, Becca would make trips to the various “retirement” homes they represented, and considered herself to be compassionate in the face of the eccentricities of people on their last legs. However, attacking a person’s hedge at a private residence was not acceptable. Sometimes you just had to deal with things firmly to set the tone.

Dan was working in his studio, sneaking cigarettes that he obviously thought she couldn’t smell, but she was reluctant to spoil the nice mood that had been established overnight, and so far hadn’t said anything. She wasn’t going to bother him with this, either. She would just poke her head out the door and see what was going on. The woman might be confused or lost. Maybe she’d dropped something into the bush and couldn’t find it.

She pushed open the front door to find the woman staring blankly up the walk (slinking away, it looked to Becca), a look on her face that was like confused terror, but it was hard to tell expression in the road map of lines that was her face.

“Excuse me,” Becca said firmly, the frown on her pretty face determined and authoritative. You had to deal with people in a certain way.

The old lady looked up at her, and continued to stare blankly. Becca took a step down the front porch steps toward her, but did not go down as far as the walk.

“Huh?” the old woman managed. Her eyes, which looked intelligent and not the least bit deranged, did a quick trip around the yard.

“Can I help you?” Rebecca said.

The old woman raised her cane off the ground, but not so much in a threatening way, as an added means of emphasis. “Your little dog tried to bite me,” she said loudly, angrily.

“I don’t have a dog, ma’am,” Becca answered patiently. She looked around the yard quickly to see if someone’s animal had snuck into the yard, but there was no sign of a dog, big or little. “You must be mistaken.”

“Your dog tried to bite me! I have lived on this street for fifty-seven years! I’ll not be bitten by some little animal that needs to be put on a leash!”

“You are mistaken,” Becca repeated, angry now. “And I don’t appreciate having you
hack
away at my hedges, ma’am.” The two of them stood there, each confused in their own way: Becca, unsure as to how to finish the conversation, the old woman now just confused.

“Maybe a stray,” the woman mumbled.
Victoria, you are seeing things.

Becca softened. “You may be right. I’ll keep an eye out, thank you,” she said, but by then the woman had begun back on her way, a large, full bag of groceries hung from a gnarled, clawlike hand, and Becca felt suddenly sorry for her earlier tone. She debated offering a ride, but did not. She watched until the old woman had made it past the middle of the other side of the hedge and then went inside.

*  *  *

Mistaken. I was mistaken.
While she had not appreciated that young woman’s tone—
not at all, not at all snippy young thing we would never have spoken to our elders that way
—she understood how it must have looked to her.

Victoria’s head swung on her neck, looking back at the house and yard with each step, looking front only to check her own progress. The dog did not come back out. But just as she passed the end of the hedge and started walking past the next house, she heard the sweet, low strains of “Lonesome Hours.”

She was glad when she couldn’t hear it anymore.

Monday morning, Becca dressed carefully. She’d risen early, earlier than usual. She showered quietly while Dan slept on, towel-dried her hair to barely damp and then blew it dry, curling it under slightly with a round brush. She was going to speak to Gordon Huff after the morning meeting. Her hair had only to last until ten. Then it could do what it wanted. By the time she got out of the bathroom, Dan was out of bed and somewhere in the house. The sheets were bunched up at the end of the bed. Looking at them, she blushed, thinking of the other night, after Max and Kate had left. Had she really done those things?

And liked them.
It gave her a small feeling of power.

She stood in front of her closet, a frown marring her high forehead. She stood in matching dark lilac lace bra and panties from Divawear, a set she had paid $250 for just after they’d signed for the house. She had felt on a roll. The color perfectly set off her dark hair and fair skin.

Four of her suits had come from the cleaner’s the week before and she concentrated on those. Pastels were best for her skin tone and coloring, and her wardrobe reflected that. Under plastic was her pale yellow suit (too understated), a pink suit with delicate white trim around the pockets (too springy), her lilac suit and a personal favorite, her pale green suit—which always made her look like she had a tan.

She fretted between the lilac and the green.

Above her head there was a loud
thud!,
as though something heavy had fallen over. She looked up.
What the hell was he doing up there?
Footsteps shuffled across the ceiling in the opposite direction of whatever had fallen, but by then she’d chosen the lilac suit and didn’t care about distractions.

She would match all over, and only she would know it. Power lingerie.

It might not hurt to lean forward once during the interview.
The jacket had a slight gap at the neckline. Things had been said about Gordon Huff. And Becca listened to office gossip. She had seen
Working Girl.

Footsteps paced across the length of the ceiling. She moved more quickly when they sounded as though they were approaching the hatch in the hallway. If Dan came down and saw her in her underwear it would be a wrestling match to get dressed, and she wasn’t in the mood. She had to stay focused.

She zipped up the skirt and gave the jacket a sniff before putting it on, checking for the smell of dry-cleaning fluid. It just smelled clean. She looked herself over in the full-length mirror. Dan called her suits TV-lawyer suits, because the skirts were short and the jackets fitted. She didn’t care what he called them: she had a body made for those suits. She was tall enough to pull off the short skirt with ease. A perfect size six, but tall. She was five nine in stocking feet. She tried to remember if Gordon Huff was tall or short; it wouldn’t do to tower over him. Or would it? This created a debate over shoes. She had two pairs that matched the suit, a low-heeled pair, and a damn-you-to-hell pair that put her to six feet.

Upstairs Dan dragged something slowly across the floor.

What’s he moving, sacks of grain?
She thought that was pretty good. She nodded to herself authoritatively in the mirror.

Cocktails tinkled in glasses in her head.

How do you do? I’m Rebecca Mason, Director of Patient Services at the Center for Improved Health.

Oh, how nice.

We were featured in the
Atlantic
last year.

She said it into the mirror. “I am Director of Patient Services at the Center for Improved Health. I’m Rebecca Mason,” she said. She added, as an afterthought, “How do you do?”

Then she went downstairs. A little positive visualization never hurt.

“Good morning,
Gorgeous!”
Dan called from the kitchen as Becca approached through the dining room. He low-whistled.

She stopped dead halfway through the dining room and stared wide-eyed at him.

“Whassamatter?” he said, pouring her a cup of coffee and holding it out to her. She glanced up at the ceiling.
“What?”
he repeated, wandering into the dining room and looking up at the ceiling.

“I heard you upstairs,” she said.

“Heard me what?”

He handed her the cup of coffee and she took it automatically. “In the attic.”

“I wasn’t in the attic. What did you hear?” He slurped his coffee, unconcerned, going back into the kitchen. She heard the toaster pop. Dan muttered an
ouch!
and the toast hit the counter. Nothing wrong with her hearing.

“Heard me what?” he said again.

She shook her head. “Never mind,” she said slowly. “We have mice. Or something. I heard something up there. Moving around. Better check.”

“Ditto on the mouse check. All ready to be a big-shot director?” He poked his head around into the dining room and gave her a wink. It was lost on her. Becca stared up at the attic, head tilted, listening.

The minute Becca was out the door, Dan stuck Sheryl Crow on the stereo and cranked it. He danced his way into his studio—
my studio!
—and flipped open his sketchbook. He turned the pages slowly, checking out the characters in various poses, one leg bopping up and down to the music, his hands in a different time zone, moving with patient slowness through the pencil and charcoal sketches from the weeks before.

The Headhunter.
Great fuckin’ idea. He and Max had come up with it one night over beers in the bar near their old place. Sitting around shooting the shit, Max had mentioned he wanted to write a quick book. What he actually said was that he wanted to write
a graphic adventure story for adult males.

“A comic book?” Dan had offered, bemused.

“A
graphic novel,”
Max said firmly.

Dan had laughed. “Pardon me.”

Max was undeterred, though. “Something meaningful. A superhero for our times.”

“A fighter for truth, justice and the American way?” Dan laughed again.

“Sort of. But more
now
. No bullshit. No punches pulled. I wanna take shots at the establishment.”

Dan groaned. “This is too much. Like shots at
Da Man?”

Max nodded, and Dan realized he wasn’t kidding.

“I’m open,” he said. “Not much else going on.”

Max tossed around ideas. After his initial amusement, he got into it. It was something different. And comics were hot. The beer flowed. Somewhere between the Green Machine, a pollution fighter, and a group of four superhero terrorists called Dark Hour, they came up with the Headhunter. They broke loose then. After sneaking out back for a toke, they went back to their table and Headhunter came alive on a series of bar napkins.

Dan had the first impression sketch of the Headhunter (in tiny black script across the bottom of the napkin was
Rye Wit,
the name of the bar), taped on the edge of his drawing board. It showed a tall, skinny guy, hair blowing around, thin face filled out only by a square jaw. The defining factor was a long coat—originally a trench coat, but now an oilskin like the Australian cowboys wore—billowing around his legs. If things got tough in the future—after
The Headhunter
hit, and it would—he would sell the sketch on eBay.

The Headhunter masqueraded as a corporate raider, slowly making his way through a list of companies with the worst records in environmental and social malfeasance. Born and raised in Love Canal, he grew up with unexplainable super powers that were a bane to his personal life. Unable to get an erection, he has channeled his sexual frustration into combating once and for all the evil that corporate does. He scours company lists for top heads. When he finds them, he offers them spectacular work at a developing company—an offer they cannot refuse. Trailing right behind him are two bounty hunters, Hanus and Malicia, each with their own super powers, hired covertly by the World Trade Organization to destroy him at all costs. Headhunter has the amazing ability to hear only the truth, his brain translates corp speak into real truth, which enables him to seek out and destroy the real masters of deception. When he puts on a suit, he is able to blend in and assume the bland, bloated features of the corporate demons who feast at the trough of mankind. Only slightly tongue-in-cheek.

They surprised even themselves with the ideas. It was funny, ironic and real.

Within a week, Max had given him an outline for the first issue. More or less. They’d been arguing about layout, some story details, bullshit stuff. It would all be worked out.

It beat the
hell
out of advertising.

Around the time
The Headhunter
was born, he and Becca went looking for a house. They had looked at about six when they found the one on Belisle. They fell in love with it. They put in their offer. They bought it. He had been talking nonstop to Becca about
The Headhunter;
she had been talking nonstop about the upcoming director’s job. Somewhere in there, they weren’t listening to each other. There had been an atmosphere around the house then, the sort of feeling like they were arriving at some kind of threshold. They were moving forward.

Dan’s day job started to go bad a few days after the purchase of the house went through.

There were murmurs around Clayton and Marks about cutbacks. Downsizing. Two weeks later, Dan was let go. And the endless round of the same conversation began.

What the hell does that mean?

It means I’ve been laid off.

For how long?

I don’t know. Maybe forever.

Unsaid, but said just the same in a million other conversations and a tone of voice that was at first afraid, then shamed, then contemptuous, was the Rebecca Mason version of How My Husband Fucked Up.

What did you do?

Why were you fired?

How could you do this to me?

Where Becca had seen disaster and chaos, Dan saw the light. Since his first job after college, he had wanted to leave the grid and work on his own. Creating. Making art. He and Becca had talked of little else in the narrow single bed in his rented room off-campus the last year of college. She was going to be a CEO before she was forty. He was going to make truth and beauty with ink and paper.

I love you.
She would say it fiercely, when he talked about what he wanted to
make.
I love you. She would arch her body against his. He would draw on her, in secret places that no one would ever see, angels, winged creatures, castles, coloring her flesh with pastel crayon paints. He would wash her slowly in the shower, taking his time. The other guys in the apartment would bang on the bathroom door and they would ignore it. They had fucked like weasels then. Rabbits. Guppies.

Now she wanted a portfolio and retirement savings account.

Dan opened the sketchbook to the pages he’d roughed out the week before they moved. They were for the first scene in which Headhunter (going by one of his many corporate names, Ted Michaels) dons a suit to infiltrate a pharmaceutical R&D company that is promoting a diet drug taken from the bark of a tree on the endangered list. They received clearance with a fake report that they had synthesized the material, when they had not even begun attempting it.

He tilted his head and backed up some, taking in the work. He grabbed the second sketchbook from the table and began looking through it. In it were his initial sketches for the characters.

Headhunter was a skinny guy. An antihero. He had a head topped with too much black hair, he was tall and had a slightly prominent nose, with heavy-prescription glasses he could discard only when wearing his corporate suit. Chicks, of course, weren’t really an issue, although he planned the ongoing, unconsummated relationship with the Reporter. She was a youngish girl, the bloom of youth just off her cheeks, secretly working in an underground press. Headhunter would dazzle her with Chomsky and Zim quotes and then disappear into the night, leaving her panting and wanting. It would all be very (hysterically) sad, given his condition. Unrequited love in the extreme.

He had good, solid sketches of Hanus and Malicia, the Headhunter
nemesi.
They were perfect or near so. Max was pleased.

The Reporter escaped him. Still nameless and faceless—although he would give her a killer body under her Guatemalan sweater and no-logo hemp pants. He stared into the wall in front of him. His mind wandered to the window he would put there.

He decided a toke would free the muse. He dipped into the kitchen and took a quick hit from his pipe, drawing deeply and holding the smoke reflectively. He exhaled.

Face of an angel. A sexy nun.
He nodded. Ready to work. He left the pipe on the kitchen table and went back into the studio, pleasantly buzzed and pumped.

He closed the two sketchbooks. He needed a bit more room to free-form. He grabbed his portfolio case, tucked neatly between the table and the shelves and zippered it open. Inside was an oversized sketchbook, still clean and empty.

He propped it up on his drawing table and opened the flap cover to the first page. He pulled his stool up close and with his pencil, began drawing voluptuous, soft circles that were forming flesh in his mind. The comic book
(graphic novel)
women of his youth flashed through his mind as he worked—Vampirella, Red Sonja, the girls of Conan. What they had in common: for quality, look to the classics.

He was a man. He started by drawing her breasts.

Dan worked silently and unstopping for an hour. The music from the stereo ran out without him noticing. His cup of coffee sat cold and half full on the table beside him.

She was beautiful. Ethereal. All six versions of her.

The first sketch was too comically disproportionate. Enormous breasts stretched the woolen Guatemalan sweater he’d put her in. Just looking at that sweater made him feel itchy. He would dump it. Under the sweater was a pair of tight black pants. The woman had impossibly long legs. Long, tangled black hair flew out from her face as though caught in a wind tunnel, untamed. She was hot, but hardly political. Only the eyes were somehow right, or close. They were wide-spaced and large. Too large in that version, but there began the element he wanted. A sort of innocence, but not with those breasts. Not those legs. Wrong hair.