G.H.

27 September

 

He’d tucked his laptop under his arm and gone to the public library, to sit in the quiet and learn about the raccoon. An appealing course of action, sensible, logical, he thought—Right. I’m walking up a sidewalk, into a buildi ng, to find out about an animal. Though how else, not like I grew up somewhere out in the country—Nature was a Subject four weeks each summer at camp, you stayed on the path to be safe from poison ivy and  got points for sticking little red flags by squirrel tracks.

But settling his jacket on the hard back of his chair, squaring his shoulders, opening his laptop, he recovers confidence of purpose. From premise to conclusion, from ignorance to knowledge to action: a methodical approach. What we need here’s a little knowledge.

 

I surmise, unfortunately, that in this case, as in others, Matthew will be unable to make methodical use of the information he obtains: unable, that is, through some defect in his vision or education, to site his structure on the broad firm plain of the essential, rather than among the unstable, multiform hills of fact. And should Matthew site his structure among those hills, he will lose sight of, or perhaps forget, what he needs to know. Become lost. On occasion, of course, a wandering survivor will rediscover those broad firm plains, even reach them in time. That is one possibility. But in this matter of the raccoon, for example? For example: Matthew has been unable to see beyond the particular fact of the animal in his house—is, in fact, beginning to lose sight of other facts, and of the valleys of connection between them.

Perhaps his sleeplessness is causing this change in vision; perhaps a friend could call out to him that he is getting lost. But no one has—I have not—at least not in a voice loud enough for him to hear.

 

So he reads that the raccoon (procyon lotor) is an extremely adaptable mammal whose fossils date from the lower Miocene, and which presently roams around wooded areas in a vast territory from the south of Canada across most of the United States, to South America. It does not inhabit the northern Rockies, nor the Great Basin’s more arid districts.

That the raccoon’s salt-and-pepper fur is of excellent quality. That the sexes are superficially alike in appearance: rather pudgy, short-legged and bushy-tailed; but with their small, mobile, and nicely-shaped muzzles and neatly erect ears, they nevertheless exude a certain charm. That among the raccoon’s more notable characteristics are its agile forepaws, whose separated and flexible digits allow it to manipulate objects with a dexterity resembling that of primates. That it walks, as do both bear and man, on the entire surfaces of its feet. That it possesses a fine, sharp nose, keen hearing, adequate vision. And is capable of a range of sounds, from the soft purr to the throaty growl.

That the raccoon does indeed wash, or dunk, its food, though none of the authorities Matthew consulted could provide more than speculative reasons for this behavior. That the animal customarily lives near lakes and streams and is adept at taking its food from the water, but will also eat nuts, birds, grain, eggs—almost anything else. That it is primarily though not exclusively nocturnal and most often makes its home (not, by and large, a very clean one) in a hollow tree, denning up for the duration of the colder weather. A homebody, it normally ranges less than a mile from its den.

It may live up to eighteen years in captivity.

The raccoon mates in the late winter and early spring of northern climes; some sixty­ three days after conceiving, when the air is balmy, the year green, the female bears her litter into the world. And while some writers call the animal monogamous, and others polygamous, a third group consider it a normally solitary creature, wandering the world alone when not breeding or rearing its young.

Indeed, it is on such subjects as the animal ‘s solitude—its personality, one might say—that Matthew unearthed the greatest differences of opinion. One naturalist described a captive raccoon as ‘nasty’for growling and snapping at him, and the animal’s fellow captives as “markedly indifferent”; on the very same page, however, he confessed that the animals played together for long stretches during their captivity. W. T. Hornaday took a less complicated view, commending the animal as a “cheerfully persistent”creature that no amount of hunting could discourage, or drive “from its favorite haunts”; he endorsed it as “one of the most satisfactory carnivorous pets that a boy can keep in confinement.” The Encyclopedia Brittanica’ s expert described it as wily, intelligent, inquisitive, methodical, elusive, expressive of face, and so very able to look out for its interests in the face of civilization “that it can get along nicely well within the limits of cities of considerable size.”

Indeed.

In yet another source Matthew read an entry on the savagery with which a cornered raccoon may fight. And noted a list of the raccoon’s adversaries—among them humans, who have hunted the animal for its valuable pelt and edible flesh.

Matthew read and read, following links and comparing sources, intoxicated by the hot scent of information. From a stack of books he culled references to relations between raccoon and man. Members of the old American Whig Party were styled “coons” for their portrayal of William Henry Harrison, their 1840 presidential candidate, as a simple honest farmer whose homespun virtues were suggested by the emblem of a log cabin with a coonskin nailed to its door. (Harrison, of course, won the campaign, but died soon after assuming office.) From the1840 campaign on, opponents derided Whig policies as “coonery.” “Coon” became, in the nineteenth-century United States, a slang term for any man, but particularly one who was sly and knowing.

And the expression, “gone coon,” came from a common tale, of which Matthew copied Frederick Marryat’s version:

A most famous American marksman, Captain Martin Scott of Vermont, went out one morning carrying his rifle, and eventually spotted a raccoon perched high in the branches of a tree. The captain raised his rifle, took aim—but then the raccoon politely raised his paw to signify a moment’s conference. When the captain lowered his rifle, the raccoon inquired if the man’s name was Scott.

“Yes it is,” replied the captain.”

“Martin Scott, Sir?”

“Yes, Martin Scott.”

“Would that be Captain Martin Scott?”

“Yes,” the captain said again, and raised his rifle, “it certainly would.”

“Ah,” said the raccoon sadly, and nodded. “I might as well come down then, for I’m a gone coon.”

Charles Dickens, according to Matthew’s notes, refers to this as the story of the “colonel” and “that sagacious animal in the United States.”

Other expressions: “To hunt the same old coon,” from the animal’s vaunted elusiveness as prey. “In a coon’s age,”from the animal ‘s alleged longevity. A “raccoon bridge,” a log thrown across a stream, celebrates the animal’s agility; “to coon” means to creep, clinging closely. “To go the whole coon” connotes determined indulgence or pursuit; the same qualities may be indicated in deeming “coon oysters” those which no other species will eat. “Coonhounds” are a breed developed in the southeastern United States, where hunting the animal has been a traditional pursuit; it was perhaps because raccoon hunting was widespread among southern black Americans, another writer noted, that in the nineteenth century “coon” first came to be used as a deeply derogatory term for them, a vicious bit of verbal trickery in which those who hunted down human beings saw fit to deride their victims with the name of the animal which those same victims hunted out of practical necessity.

Matthew’s last notes came from the Oxford English Dictionary, whose preferred spelling is “racoon.” (American dictionaries prefer “raccoon”. And as I suppose them to be the   authorities here, the raccoon being native to this land, I cheerfully abide by their recommendation for this and other spellings.)

 

Matthew ‘s notes from the OED: Probable derivation is Powhaten (Virginia) Algonquin dialect, “aroughcoune’” or .”arathkone”, meaning—perhaps—“the scratcher.” French speakers in Canada call the raccoon· “raton laveur,” the little rat who washes. Raton also    means pet or darling.

 

And here Matthew finishes typing, looks up to reflect on what he’s learnt, learns (by the clock on the wall) that it’s one thirty and he is late to meet Sarah. Damn. And they’re supposed to play tennis this afternoon, too. Have to come back another day.

He dons his windbreaker, thrusts his laptop beneath his arm as he races for his car.

 

What can Matthew build, then, with this scribbled heap of information? Probably nothing, for the heap is too lumpily various to allow of comfortable summations or stable conclusions; for the complex raccoon no simple defining phrase—no “dirty rat” or “sly fox” exists. No. What Matthew has found here is a most peculiar animal, one about which naturalists edgily disagree; the very spelling of the animal’s name, indeed, is open to honest debate. This is an animal that farmers guard against as a destroyer of crops and poultry, even of buildings, so unrelenting is it when it has settled on a territory. An animal of senses so acute it can find an earthworm buried in the ground.  But yet is the same animal so elusive when pursued that men have troubled themselves to breed a dog to hunt it, merely in the hope of staying even with it, as it were, on the chase. An animal related to the bear, one said to make a “sweet sight” in the wild and a fine pet is also, somehow, the same animal that is perfectly capable of turning viciously on an adversary and drowning it in the nearest stream.

Oh yes. An animal that has come down to us in literary portraits as a being, even in Uncle Remus’s telling, of considerable wit and charm, a sort of urbane, fastidious nightthief. Confident and pleasantly self-depreciating, determined yet calmly fatalistic. On occasion dangerous.                                                    

 

 next,  27 September, cont’d.

previous,  Sarah’s Journal 

The Entries

 

 

 

 

Sarah’s Journal

 

Saturday. Matthew’s gone off somewhere. On errands, he said. I stopped at Mrs. M.’s and walked off with a smelly armful of her clothes, to take to the cleaners. That stretch of Farmington Avenue always depressing–the buildings squat and run-down, the signs look like broken teeth. And worse today, with soggy leaves in little mounds against the buildings and along the curb.

I nodded into the window at Pat’s bookstore because my arms were full and I couldn’t wave.

 

Pat’s just one of my stories for Matthew, she only exists for him because I told him about her. How I met her that spring morning, coming home from errands, walking along, tossing my keys high and catching them as they fell, tossing higher, walking faster in an upward spiral of rhythm, step/toss, step/catch, step/toss the keys higher, closer to sunlight, straight and brightly and catching my foot on a tipped slab of pavement, stumbling down.

Landing hard, hands and knees on pavement as the keys fell to rest just inside a low white fringe of plastic pickets around a tiny grass apron protecting an old city house from the dust of the street. And kneeling just inside the pickets, setting geraniums into very red rows, was Pat.

Didn’t hurt yourself, did you?

Oh. No. No, just turned my ankle, a little. Are those my keys there? Could I

By all means. Such a lovely morning? You new to the neighborhood? Pat Oakes, I run the Shop of Good News, bookstore up on Farmington Ave? Christian books, proceeds to the Universal Word of the Faith Church down Wethersfield Ave–you know where that is? Stop by the store sometime, I’ll give you directions?

Pat now standing, small, looking as if she’d been scrubbed thin, her hair stunned by chemicals into blonde immobility, her eyes green and glittery with deep, snaky intelligence. But her hand, wriggled out from the gardening glove, was warm, her smile friendly.

Glad to know you, dear. What’s your name?

And so the questions began. l told Matthew how the square of grass had seemed much too small, forced us to stand too close. How I stepped back onto the grey civic safety of the sidewalk. How Pat had followed. How long it had taken for me to escape, the keys sinking jagged edges into my hand. Going amid sociable smiles and waves.

And then, after nodding into the window to Pat, I decided not to tell Matthew I saw her, I won’t come home with another story for him, offered up like a living thing on the altar of our closeness. Forget it. No more little stories about Oh, I saw Pat, or the man at the liquor store said the wine was almost too dry. Forget it.

What does he tell me? His day, he crumples up like junk mail. Nothing much, The usual, Hectic, Slow. One word, maybe two. And now there’s this thing in the crawl space and he’s walking the streets all night, where does he go, and doesn’t want to talk about any of it. At least to me.

So there I am on Farmington Ave, my knees almost buckled under the weight of wanting to curl myself down on the curb between two parked cars, and cry. But I stayed on my feet and kept blinking, forcing myself to notice the intensity of the colors that were coming through the screen of tears. Which I wasn’t about to let fall. After the cleaners I went into The Hive, plopped myself into a booth and ordered myself some cinnamon apple tea.

No, I won’t tell him anything about my morning. I’ve told him too many mornings. Lying in bed, walking down the street, almost anywhere. All my stories, the ones anyway I’m willing to tell. The  ones about me and Beryl. Painting my hair with streaks of peroxide when we’re fifteen, or building a treehouse in Berry’s backyard when we’re nine, way back as far as we could so we couldn’t can’t hear the shrieking at her house from before her parents’ divorce . or my mother’s weepy silences that no one was ever brave enough to step in. I sat in the Hive, wiping my nose with paper napkins, sipping scalding tea and thinking maybe what he likes about these stories, about me and Berry, is that the passion of friendship is voluntary, like it is with lovers, like it can never entirely be with  family.

On Cape Cod one weekend, in a cold drizzle walking Race Point beach, I held his hand and told him what it was like when I went off to college. How I worried about Beryl, stuck on the lumpy rock of home, with no fancy grades to ship herself off. How I’d sit talking on the phone to Berry, scrunched up in the closet of that barren little dorm room, so I could escape the wail of Clare’s country music, the endless tales of loss. But then one day I jumped up in excitement, dropping the phone into one of my boots and making half my clothes fall down because Berry told me she had a new job in a florist’s shop—window displays, flower arrangements, cash register, how she really loved working in this shop—and by the way, she’d quit school.

I told him all this, clutching his hand on that drizzly beach, telling him these stories, my throat aching with the remembering and with the effort of speaking over the noise of the ocean.

My throat aching from not crying in the Hive, today, swallowing tea and thinking how he’d listened so carefully, like he knew it wasn’t just me shutting out Clare’s stupid music, it was an intimate almost secret thing, giving him my l ife to imagine, my separateness before we met. And then, sitting there in the Hive this morning I pushed the empty teapot away from me and saw fully, for the first time, how empty is the other side of the scale, the side where his stories should sit.

My side’s weighed down with details not just of my life, but mine as it’s tied to others, like Berry. I told him that soggy afternoon at the beach how the following year at school, in another closet, I jumped to my feet and knocked down all the hangers and clothes again when Berry told me how the old lady who owned the flower shop wanted out, had offered to let Berry buy the store—and would finance the purchase. And Berry was terrified but she did it; before her twentieth birthday owned the business.

And then the old lady—meaning so well, only trying to help—called the local newspaper, and the next day a reporter called Berry, asked to do an interview: Park Street’s Youngest Merchant, that sort of thing, he said.

I told him all this at Race Point beach, it was deserted, I was squeezing his hand and the story came out in spurts.

The photographer who came along on the story was the reporter’s friend, up for the weekend from New York. Gerard. I told Matthew how suddenly all I heard in her phone calls was Gerard, his letters, his visits—Gandhi, Superman, and Washington combined couldn’t live up to this billing.

I sat on that cold horizonless beach and told him the whole thing. How I knew something was wrong about this guy, I tried to tell Berry, Go slow, you haven’t had that much experience with men. She hung up on me for three months.

 

By the time she’d speak to me again she’d sold her shop, she and Gerard were living in New York, married, expecting a child. I tried to explain to Matt, over the salt wet wind of the beach, how I kept telling myself this business of Berry and Gerard would be okay, then, knowing all the time that it wouldn’t be.

When I went down to New York to visit her, I stayed, just to be safe, with my aunt in Yonkers. I helped Berry decorate the nursery that the baby, Megan, saw only a few times between hospital stays, during her eight months of life.

Remembering all this, this morning, in the stupid cafe, I felt like crying, like I cried on the beach with Matthew, and I had no warm hand to hold onto this morning, like I’d had then. Telling him how I arrived the morning after Megan’s birth, was getting off a subway car with a bunch of post­Christmas shoppers just about the time that Gerard walked into Berry’s hospital room, said, This is your fault, you little bitch, what the hell did you do? And grabbed her by her shoulder, It’s your fault this happened, how could you do this to me? And he started smacking her so hard across the face that she fell out of bed. By some miracle he didn’t break anything, though her face was horrible, her right eye swollen shut.

Gerard had this friend of his, Jeff, call me up in Yonkers that same night. Gerard’s left on assignment. In Vienna, he said. Jeff gave me his work number, but nothing else about Gerard—no address, no phone, no explanation. And I didn’t ask for any. I knew, Berry and everyone else knew, that Gerard wouldn’t see his daughter again. No one wanted him to.

In Berry’s hospital room the next morning, her mother kept turning her back and faking a cough so no one would see her crying; her father sat by the window like an unwatered plant. Here are the keys to the apartment, Berry told me, and her voice was thin and steady and terrible as a sharpened knife, Would you please pack up his things please and get his friend Jeff to take them away?

I slashed through every closet and drawer in the apartment, snatching up anything that looked un-Berry, stuffing it all into plastic trash bags, stopping only to call Jeff, tell him that if he’s not there in two hours to get it, I don’t care if you’re at work, I’ll throw it all down the trash chute, where your friend Gerard belongs. If you talk to him tell him his wife and baby will be staying there until Berry can find somewhere else to live, and she’s having the locks changed today.

Look, he said, l feel terrible about this, about Gerard, I don’t know—maybe he can’t—

Don’t you give me can’t, I hissed, Can’t is getting smashed to pieces by a bus as you’re running to the hospital to be with your wife and sick baby. Everything else is won’t.

Can’t was saving Megan. I watched the small feathers of her life fall and fall on Berry till I thought their weight would break her. I couldn’t stand the though of leaving Berry, I told Matt as we sat there huddled on that cold damp sand, So I decided to take a leave of absence from grad school. But Berry said No, the only way I couldn’t refuse: I know you’re here even when you’re not. Please don’t make me feel guilty about you, on top of this.

 

So I stayed in school, and that was when my Megan paintings began—Megan as baby, girl, and woman, sick, well, real, in dreamscapes—Megan, over and over. Those paintings Gardiner said were the first valid work I’d ever done. They convinced him I could paint, he thought they were odd, and some disgusting, but they got him excited about my work when I couldn’t have cared less. All I cared about was the paintings and getting through what was happening. Berry and Megan and the paintings, there wasn’t anything else, I told Matthew that day on the beach.

I left the Hive and headed home to get a little work in before I go to meet Matt, and as I walked I found myself thinking for the first time how Matthew and Gardiner and Mrs. M, my job, my work—one way or another Megan had brought them all to me. What does it mean, that my happiness comes from that? That she’s part of me now, like a nerve, connecting me to all the rest? But did I take that nerve from her, use it because l needed it, or was it somehow given? A gift, like the feel of her infant breath  on my cheek.

When the last breath fell from Megan’s body, Beryl’s mother told me, all Berry said was, Call Sarah.

But then Berry disappeared. A few weeks after the funeral, just the day after she drove back to her mother’s house, outside Boston, she took her mother out to dinner, thanked her for all she’d done. When her mother woke up the next morning, Berry was gone.

She stayed gone for almost three years, calling one or the other of her parents or me after silences of weeks or months to say she was fine, was waiting tables in El Paso, cashiering in a natural foods store in Park City, clerking in a gift shop in Little Rock, a drug store in Baton Rouge, another in Cincinnati, not to worry, she had to go, goodbye. Then a call from a new place, a florist in Valley Forge. The florist I knew, was a good sign. And so was Valley Forge: Berry was edging closer.

By then I was teaching, I told Matt on the beach that day, with the drizzle turning to rain so we had to run back toward the car—I told him how I called every florist in and around Valley Forge until I found the one where she worked, then on the first day of spring break drove down. It was almost closing time when I got there.. I looked in the window and there she was, arranging anemones and irises and ferns and looking almost peaceful.

Three days later she was in her same old battered yellow MG, the one she’d driven out of her life in Hartford, and following me home. I thought, when I got her here, how everything seemed rounding toward completion—some reasonable, of course not perfect shape. Gardiner, a.k.a. Rubin Teitelbaum, would have laughed himself silly if he’d heard me say those words, completion and perfect. And of course I know completion isn’t possible.  But still, Gardiner was more wrong that I was. His idea of completion didn’t have anything to do with love.

 

Just finished off old Io. When I took on these Metamorphoses illustrations I wasn’t much interested in the text: I took it for the money of course and then it was something to put in my portfolio. Also there was this little feeling about obliging Gardiner—which I would never admit to Matt—since Poundstone was sort of a friend of his. Was. But making these illustrations—each drawing seems to go into some dark terrain, you’ve got these powerful capricious gods and goddesses fiddling around in the lives of these poor foolish mortals and there’s all this mutability that’s so potent and dazzling and scary and seductive.

Anyway, I’m done with poor old doomed Io.

 

previous,  25 September, cont’d                                                                      next,  27 September

 

 

 

 

G. H.

25 September, cont’d.

 

 

She dispenses with any preamble. “Why weren’t you answering your cell? Look, I meant what I said at breakfast. We should call the Humane Society. Or animal control, an exterminator.   Whatever. I thought I’d start calling around. I’d be happy to, because this is just ridiculous. For God’s sake, we’ve got to get rid of it or you’ll die from lack of sleep.”

“Listen,” he reaches for a tone of reason—as if it were a ripe peach hanging, stretched for, stretched for—but too far, utterly out of reach—“We don’t even know whether the thing’s there or not. So what are we supposed to say, ‘Hi, there, we think we may have a problem. But maybe not. We may have a raccoon in our crawl space. Or not. So, got any ideas, guys?’”

“Approximately, yes.”’

“Approximately? Why not exactly? Look, I think it’s ridiculous to be calling people for help with a problem we’re not even sure we have. Let’s just give ourselves a couple of days to sort this out, we’ll talk about it later, okay? It’s not like losing two nights of sleep killed anybody, okay?”

She says nothing for what seems to him a very long time. “Okay.” And hangs up.

His brain translates the buzzing of the phone into the conviction that the animal is there and won’t leave easily, as it had come, of its own obscure volition. Interesting question, volition, where is his in all this and where is hers, and why are they suddenly at variance—its like the petals of a flower in a time-lapsed film, opening, spreading away from one another and then falling off: beauty budded, blossomed, dead and meaningless, all in an eyelash of time. But he knows he’s evading the issue—which is? Is it the falling petals or the animal? Hot fingers of nausea clench his stomach. For the first time he sees his marriage as a separate being, fragrant, perfect, but fragile as an infant, that he and Sarah have created. A life long-for, treasured, and now troubled because—because of what? An almost laughable homeowner’s problem, the stuff of dinner party anecdotes? Because he is tired and irritable beyond anything she’s ever seen in him before? Because the semester has just started for her? Surely these are explanation enough. But the clutch of sickness convinces him that something else is going on, that he is in the grip of something he doesn’t yet understand. He puts his head down on the desk and waits a few moments, until the nausea has passed.

He comes home an hour earlier than usual, with an armful of daisies, and standing behind her as she sits cross-legged on the worn intricacy of the living room carpet, sketching something, he scatters the flowers around her—carefully, so the white blooms will not land on the work on her lap desk. As she laughs and tips her head back for his kiss, he bends down and tucks a flower in her hair. “Mrs. M. coming for dinner?” She nods. “We better hurry, then.” He helps her to her feet and begins sliding daisies into the neck of her shirt, nudging then gently around. “This is my first try at flower arranging.” She laughs again and on their way up to the bedroom pauses to make sure the front door is bolted.

The bed is covered in daisies, and any sound that may emanate from the crawl space they cannot hear above their own.

And then, in the small space left before they will have to prepare for their guest, he asks conscientiously about her work (her drawings for a new Metamorphosis translation), “I was working on Io—the one who gets changed into a heifer?—when you decided to start gardening on me. But I’m worried about falling behind.”

“Relax, Max, by the time Poundstone’s finished the translation we’ll all be using walkers.” And in this way he most skillfully, most completely eluded and further conversation about the raccoon.

Until dinner, when Mrs. Morel interrupts her own commentary about the late Gardiner’s—and Sarah’s current—colleagues to inquire about the animal. And having ascertained what the situation is, dredges from the frightening depths of her handbag a bedraggled notebook. After finding and studying the relevant page, she set the notebook down and resumed eating while she talks. “Yes. It’s right here, someone poor dear Gardiner once knew. Well, dears, his father had lived out West somewhere, as a boy—Michigan or Illinois or Idaho, some farmy state or other—and he had a great many dogs and cats.” Indicating vastness of quantity by a flourish of her fork, she propelled a fat, opalescent bead of salad dressing onto her spectacles and a bit of red lettuce into Matthew’s wine glass. Her vision impaired by the oily dribble, Mrs. Morel paused, frowned, then gave a gallant toss of her head before continuing. Matthew and Sarah avoided looking at one another.

“He also had,” she paused again, this time for effect, “a pet raccoon. Quite a large one, and frightfully clever. The raccoon, of course, was often in the house because he could easily get all the food he wanted there, and because he could climb up the bricks of the fireplace to the mantelpiece. And from there he would take glorious leaps down onto the back of any dog who happened by. Naturally, it wasn’t long before all the dogs learned to stay out of the parlor, and that smart little animal got the family all to himself every evening. Imagine how clever.”

Mrs. Morel’s tale meandered on for a bit, but Matthew turned tail, as it were, and hid behind the first available tree—by clearing the table, making and serving the decaffeinated coffee. And so managed to be where his wife could not see him as she confessed, laughing but irritated (because what was Mrs. M. getting at, asking so archly?), to having not yet seen the animal.

While Mrs. Morel’s frequent gracing of their dinner table over the last few months had never delighted Matthew, he had never found her conversation so irksome, nor the cat scent, now rising in heady waves from the late Gardiner’s black turtleneck jumper, so obscene and inescapable. Fortunately for him, and as was her inviolable custom, exactly nine minutes after being served her coffee, Mrs. Morel pronounced the dinner delicious and thanked them and declared she really must be getting home and no, dears, she really prefers to walk home, and will let herself out, and does so.

Matthew allowed himself only enough time for a deep breath before beginning. “My God, she really reeked tonight. If it gets any worse the Board of Health’ll cordon off the entire neighborhood.”

He could see by her look that Sarah felt the lash in this, but all she replied was, “I know. I was thinking during dinner that I should stop over there tomorrow and take some of her things to the cleaners.”

“Take her to the cleaners and leave her there.”

“Matty—”

“I mean it, Sar, she’s really been getting on my nerves lately. I don’t see why she’s got to be here for dinner all the time.”

“It isn’t all the time, it’s two or three times a week, just like we agreed when we found out she didn’t have a fridge and the stove was broken and she couldn’t cook, anyway.”

“Right, but we were supposed to figure out something better than becoming her permanent soup kitchen. We can buy her the fridge and then all we’ll need is an electrician with a head cold so bad he can stand the stench in that house long enough to fix the stove and whatever else she’s broken in that kitchen.”

“For God’s sake, you know she won’t let anybody but us into her house. You know I’ve tried a hundred times to get her to let people in to help. She won’t let an electrician in, or a house cleaner, or Meals on Wheels—you tell me how to fix this. I’d be just as glad as you would to get her out of our hair, but right now I just feel stymied. Anyway, you were the one who said it really wasn’t safe for an old lady to be walking around alone, up and back from Farmington Ave. at night. You agreed to all this, you know you did. Besides, Gardiner did a lot for me, I don’t think this is doing so much to repay him.”

“Gardiner’s dead, Sarah.”

He watched her chin jerk up as if the brutality of this were physical; she stared at him and he was horrified at what she saw: his narrowed eyes and jutted jaw, which slackened as he watched her rise from the table. “You’re being a perfect shit,” she pronounced, “sleep deprivation really does not suit you at all.” And carrying her coffee cup before her with both hands, as if it were the triumphal bowl of Argument Won, makes an impeccable exit into the kitchen.

Before him lay the aftermath of battle: the drying carnage of chicken bones, the scattershot of peas, the crusting stains of orange sauce that marked Mrs. Morel’s place at the table. Her cloth napkin was missing, and with dreary certainty Matthew knew that she had stolen it. She probably wrecked that stove on purpose. She and Gardiner, boy, they both were great at getting what they wanted.

For another moment Matthew considered this, then went into the kitchen and apologized, in general terms , to Sarah: that is offered an apology with the ensuing explanation that always begins, “I don’t know, I guess I’m just—”.   And perhaps because of the daisies and the raccoon and the tender shoot of justice that sprouted from his complaints, she is amenable to reconciliation, and thus a certain peace was reestablished in the house. Until, of course, the scratching noise began again.

 

And again the night opens into a dark and twisting corridor of doors through which any action seems unhinged from purpose or consequence. Rising from bed, feeding the animal and staring into its eyes, trying for sleep, failing, rising to walk yet another walk.

 

On which I follow, ever closer.

 

But he doesn’t notice. And doesn’ look at the houses, doesn’t play his game of redesigning them for their owners. He avoids the sight of a porch listing crazily with neglect and the heavings of too many frosts, or the cluttered whimsy of several Gothic revival rooflines.

Especially not the rooflines. And here, with the small suns of the streetlights shining, he can see no stars. So he walks head down, heedlessly, rapidly crisscrossing Fern and Prospect, North Whitney and Elizabeth streets until they swing past like so many doors in the maze he has already entered—until he has no idea where he walks. Only that the image of the raccoon, as it had faced him again this night, always goes before him, and the sound of his feet on the leaf­strewn walks is the sound of the animal scratching.

 

Only a few more days, I think, a few more days.

 

previous,  25 September                                                                          next,  Sarah’s Journal  

 

G.H.

25 September

 

 

When Sarah woke he was sitting, slump-shouldered, on the foot of the bed, facing the crawl space door, a hammer in his hand. She watched him silently for a long moment; he did not move. Finally, softly, she said, “Hi.”

He jumped up, spun around to face her. “Holy shit, you startled me.”

“Let me guess. Either our little visitor is about to get whacked or you misplaced your toothbrush.”

He looked at her blankly. She nodded at the hammer. “Oh. This. I was just waiting for you to wake up so i could go in there and pry that board off.”

“You must be exhausted. Sweetheart. Need some help?”

“I’m fine. I’m just wonderful. I’m just jim-crackin’ dandy.”

“You need coffee.”

“I need sleep. I already put the coffee on, but you could bring me some while I’m doing this.”

“Of course. Sure you don’t need me to hold the flashlight or anything?”

“Nah. I think there’s enough light in here.”

“He watched her cast a dubious look at the pallid light that drooped in when she opened the blinds above the bed. He was intricately busy finding and putting on jeans, socks, and shoes, until she left the room—he did not want her to see the plastic containers inside the crawl space. He was sure she’d have wanted to talk about it: what time he’d decided to do it, had the animal eaten it, what they should do next—no. Not now, anyway. So, before he pried the board off he rinsed out the containers the animal hadn’t emptied and hid them under the bathroom sink. He saw nothing, heard nothing, as he undid his work of the night before.

A mile or so away, as Matthew and Sarah were beginning their breakfast, a crew was already at work burying another section of the Park River. South Main Street was cacophonous with the heavy machinery, vehicles crawled around the construction site in rutted paths, and from a distance the thrum of their engines sounded as the low growl of domestic animals at the edge of some disaster they do not understand. Matthew, sitting at the table, scanning the Courant’s account of a delay in the work, was stricken by the thought of the raccoon on the banks of the river, the disappearing banks, one displacement precipitating another. Right into my goddamn house. (He scanned the article on his phone, Mrs. Morel having arrived particularly early this morning.)

“Want to try this? Berry told me about it. Supposed to be good. It’s got bananas in it.”

Matthew jerked himself, with some difficulty, back to the present moment: materializing beneath his eyes was a steamy, farinaceous substance, pungent with artificial sweetness, horribly flecked with a drastic yellow. He pushed it back across the table to her. “Not only don’t I want to try it, I don’t even want to be in the same room with it.”

“You are not sweetness and light when you’re this exhausted.” She shook her head at the ashy discolorations beneath his eyes. “Poor love.” She picked up the bowl of cereal, sniffed it, then escorted it to the sink. She returned to the table, flicking back her long hair with the same twitch of distaste a cat might use on getting caught in the rain, but knowing it must nevertheless continue on. “So. What d’you think, you think maybe we should call the dog warden, or animal control, or whatever they call it? Maybe the Humane Society? We can’t be the only people this has ever happened to, they’ve got to know something. More than we do, anyway.”

“No.” Matthew was looking back down at his phone.

She waited. “No? Just ‘No’? As in, what? As in, ‘No, the problem’s solved now?’ As in ‘No, I have it on absolutely no authority whatsoever that they won’t know anything more than we do?’ As in ‘No, don’t talk to me about this now because I’m extremely snarky from lack of sleep?’ What ‘No?’”

“No, as in I’m snarky, as you put it, and this isn’t a problem and we don’t have to make a big deal about it, okay?”

“Okay, fine.”

Above the screen of his phone he watched her stand abruptly, fix each of them bowls of cold cereal, milk, and authentic bananas, and return to the table. She set his bowl before him, then began to eat in miffed silence. Contrition pricked him. He dropped the pretense of newspaper, sagged in his chair, rolled his empty juice glass listlessly between his hands. He knew she was watching him, but he was helpless, unable to speak, as if a stranger were asking for some unknown thing, urgently, in an unknown language.

“Do you think it’s still up there?” she asked suddenly, “I want to see it.”

“What am I, appointment secretary for the animal kingdom? Sorry, I’m sorry. I don’t know, go look.”

But the idea of her seeing the animal—for some reason he thought ‘witnessing’, not ‘seeing’ it—this brought him to his feet. The juice glass clattered to the table; as he snatched it up and stilled its sound he heard another.

“What’s the matter?”

He stood as rigid as the animal had stood in the flashlight’s beam. “Didn’t you hear that? That’s it, that’s him. Our friendly neighborhood fiend. Or I think it was—go, go on, take your look.”

Sarah walked quietly, rapidly, out of the kitchen and up the stairs, all the while making hushing motions behind her back at Matthew, whispering as he followed her that the squeak of his shoes on the bare wooden stairs would frighten the animal away.

“Isn’t that what we’re supposed to be doing here?” And he grinned and placed his hands on her hips as she went up. And now he saw what an absurdity all his upset was. Embarrassing, really. As if he’d shouted out the contents of an infantile dream while sleeping on a crowded aeroplane.

In the bedroom doorway she stopped. Matthew could hear nothing now, and whether Sarah could or could not, she crossed the room with her head at a listening angle, opened the crawl space door, bent her head and entered. Gingerly pushed at a carton with the toe of her shoe. Paused, then backed out and closed the door. “I didn’t see him. You sure he’s still there?”

“I’m not sure of anything. Hope he’s not there. With the board down, now, he probably already took off. But if he’s still there, it’s probably just as well he wasn’t where you could see him. Or him, see you. He could be rabid. He might bite.”

“I don’t think—oh, my God, d’you see what time it is? I’m supposed to be at that curriculum committee meeting, it’s the first one and I can’t be late—I’ve got to run.”

And soon they were both gone, and the animal, this morning, unseen.

This hiddenness and other questions about the raccoon, and related questions, such as whether the burial of the river really was in some way responsible for the animal’s presence: these questions swarmed up at him as soon as he was in the car, undistracted, alone. Soon he would pass the construction zone, soon reach the haven of work. But the thought of work really provided no refuge: answered questions buzzed distractingly, circled laden with germs of apprehension. As he jostled over the torn and buckled pavement, he wondered if the burial of the river here would change its course behind his house. Not that that branch of the river could even be called a river, really. Most of the year it was a slow, shallow stream; only when it was spring-quickened with the rush of melting snow and rain, could you honestly call it a even a brook. But he’d miss the sound of it, if the heavy machinery sucked it dry, regret the loss of light trickling through the trees, pooling on the water.

The river had been, his grandfather told him, one of the reasons that the small house—the one Matthew still lived in—had been bought. The other reason had been that Matthew’s grandfather had once lived, in a much larger house, across the street. Of the house before part of the roof was raised to create the larger bedroom he now occupied—and whose room it was before it was his grandfather’s—Matthew’s memory was dark, but the stream behind it he remembered in silvered slants: while uncomfortably perched atop a boulder, dangling a vain line for fish; while his grandfather, on a bony folding chair in a rag of shade behind Matthew, chatted about the glory days of his grocery store, or about baseball; while his reading of a Hardy Boys’ adventure is interrupted by his grandfather’s shouting to Eddie to get his tuckus out of that tree Or Else.

Or else, orelse, orelse? Eddie singsongs down.

Or Else I’ll give you What For.

What for, whatfor, whatfor? Sings Eddie, his skinny legs kicking chunks of air.

What For is sweeping the kitchen floor, that’s What For, and maybe you mop it, too. And Eddie scrabbling his way down from the tree, his grandfather calling, Go around, little monkey, the other way, other way, Kahtscup, so you don’t fall in the river.

The river’s banks were ravaged now, by beer cans, condoms, plastic cups and other trash, but these you could clean up, these you could look beyond. Beyond even the light, the sound, the boy in his tree and the old man in his rag of shade was a sort of idea. That a river must have a source that you could follow it to, that it ran where it ran for a reason, abiding by its own necessary laws. Unless, of course, someone decided to dam it, or change its course, or bury it. And even then you couldn’t change its source.

 

But who is to know, really, about sources, how things come about, and whether causes really matter? The longing for explanation, the desire to know is, however, in some souls very great. It is also a craving demanding of satisfactions the world, most often, most resolutely, denies.

My subject, for example, this Matthew Goldsmith. From my brief observation he appears to be an ardent angler in the river of knowledge, a fearful and perhaps chronically hungry angler who becomes so tangled in speculation, so becoiled in the slippery filaments of first causes, cellular origins, that he often misplaces ready nourishment—the present moment, with its hangnails, glances, and tea-stained pots (with their own sorrows and glories) may simply be lost to him, it seems, exactly as if it were the detritus of a half-forgotten dream. Which, moreover, someone else may have dreamt. But in following the line back to causation he seems convinced that if only he can get it unsnarled he could deftly flick his wrist, make the perfect cast, and catch the fat fish of conclusion that will satiate. I suspect he rarely stops to consider whether the line is worth untangling, whether edible fish even swim in this particular stream. But perhaps these considerations are unimportant to him; perhaps the purpose of these speculative fishing trips is merely to get away? From what, I am as yet ignorant.

 

I see that I’ve begun to obtrude my own reflections into these notes and observations, something I hadn’t intended to do. But there they are. There, alas, am I. And as I am, most helplessly, an opinionated being, I suppose my I was bound to give a wink somewhere in this chronicle (I admit my affection for the pun, a low device but of admirable lineage). Having thus let my I loose upon the scene, and in the interest of making this record a more complete one—particularly as I contemplate a more active role in the events herein detailed, I may as well introduce myself. Well then.

My name is George Hooper. Some individuals, indeed, have accorded me the title of honor, and called me Sir George, although the pages of Debrett fail to ratify this. (The circumstances surrounding this omission are of no concern here, though I feel compelled to confirm my connection to the illustrious Sir Ferris Hooper, known to all literate denizens of England as Hooper of Malmsea.) I reside, at present, in the environs of Hartford, Connecticut.

My profession, if I may so dignify an amateur’s passion, is natural science; the work I completed most recently was a monograph on the effects that certain weeds and wildflowers of English origin have had on the plant ecology of the United States—as well as the reverse effect, of certain American originals now flourishing in England. But that is not the subject here, nor is the details of my life. Which has, in any event, been an exceedingly quiet one. I’ve traveled, of course, but most of my too many years have been devoted to rather undramatic pursuits. Reading and inquiry, none of it terribly systematic; long walks companioned, until recently, only by thought. Well. But now I’ve discovered a most compelling interest—intellectual curiosity or simple boredom or other factors have led me to—in short, I am now performing a very different sort of research. My first attempt with a human subject. The effects of sleep deprivation. And so on. On this young man. Quite without his knowledge, I must admit, and chosen quite at random: chanced upon as he, like me—like all of us, at least once in a while—was walking alone in the dark. Of course I understand there is a prevailing ethic of informed consent and so forth, but the design of the experiment is such—and at any rate, I intend the young man no harm.

Very well, then. This explanation, or introduction, if you will, having been duly entered into these notes, I can return to my subject.

 

 

Given the questions of his morning, it is not at all surprising that toward the middle of Matthew’s day of sketching and figuring, amid the rising of possibilities that he demolished with the next second’s thought—it is not at all surprising that somewhere between a parti and a phone call he saw a small masked face peer out between the carefully ruled lines of a set of schematics.   Not that these were anywhere in sight; they were old ones, carefully filed away, of their first residential job. A master bedroom addition for the Rivers. Rivers buried. The shadows of fleeing animals—

No. He was here, drafting ordinary lines. And therefore could shake his head and refresh the screen of his computer and will himself to hear, in the soft hum of the HVAC system, in the staccato of Katie’s computer in the carpeted middle distance—even in the beeping of the phones—the reassuring notes of an orderly existence. His.

For several more hours, then, Matthew felt, in all but total honesty, that any discordant note in the harmony of his mood derived only from the janglings of complex and unfinished ideas. At the end of these several hours, however, he chanced to look up and notice, through the doorway, a Wall Street Journal neatly folded on the edge of the conference room table. Which newspaper now unfolded for him his morning’s stolen paper, and so Mrs. Morel, his empty house, his wife rushed out, his unempty house. The animal thrumming and scratching on the dusty subflooring of the crawl space. The draft pushing its way out from under the crawl space door to become a late September wind flooding his house with cold, a wind rising up so far away he couldn’t even imagine the incalculable distances it had blown across nor for how long, such a long wind, long time—

His head fell off the fist it was resting on and the sudden loss of support woke him. What was he shivering for? Wasn’t cold here. And as if to demonstrate to himself that he was not only awake but firmly, comfortably here and could fend off, like Prospero, all harm-wielding spirits, he got up and paced the tastefully laid byways of his domain.

The Sturniday Building, home to Gordon and Goldsmith Architects, as well as other small concerns bold enough to venture into this part of the city, was the beribboned champagne bottle that had launched their firm. Matthew’s design work on the old typewriter factory had won the firm two local awards (fossilized in Lucite and on display in the reception area) and several columns of compliments in the local press (see clippings in rosewood frames, same display), which Timothy had used, quite skillfully, to chart their success. In other words, Timothy pitched, and Matthew hit. Timothy was pitching now, swaying from side to side beside his desk, talking on speaker, his arms invisibly winding up, for a potential client, enthusiasm and conviction. Matthew went quickly by: the pitches Timothy was throwing these days were for renovations rather than new construction—pitches Matthew had little interest in hitting.

Still, this place was good, a decent piece of work. The smooth curves and smartened brickwork betrayed no hint of the wretched interior he’d first surveyed, no drafty corner in which to kneel and finger a pile of miscast typewriter keys, misshapen symbols never kissed with ink to make a word. Never stroked on paper pulped from a forest full of trees risen among the fragrance of midsummer ferns and the rustlings of animals, never to go forth fresh and crisp on the world’s business, not even so much as to leap across a cheap leaflet urging parents to attend a meeting about the desegregation of the city’s schools—a leaflet never to find its destiny as a blurred and shredded element of the reeking, cat-soaked paper piles that graced Mrs. Morel’s living room. No, the miscast typewriter keys Matthew found participated in nothing until he came home that night and mentioned them to Sarah, and in due course the sculpture she welded of them sprouted in crooked metallic splendor in the lobby of the building. So that surely there must be some decipherable connection between that day and this, between seeing that Wall Street Journal lying on the conference table and whatever obscure impulse it was that was making him prowl the office like a hungry bear. But he couldn’t see the connection, couldn’t name the impulse. He didn’t know anything. He was tired.

He pitched the folded Journal into the wastebasket on the way to his desk, then dropped into his chair. Glancing out into the golden late September afternoon he began to follow the rising of a dead and brilliant leaf, thinking of the unseen wind that was lifting the leaf and how a man watching from behind a window could deduce that wind, affirm its presence through indirection, in the red dance of the leaf. How we rely on such deductions to reach conclusions: a leaf pirouettes and therefore wind, scratching noise and therefore   Pick up the goddamn phone, Matt animal in the crawl space. Light flashing on the phone and therefore a phone call. He stared at the phone.

Katie appeared, leaning against the door frame, mighty arms folded beneath the bolster of her breasts. The rings in her fleshy ears gleamed annoyingly, the spikes of her prematurely grey hair looked alarmingly sharp. “’Peace, peace! He is not dead, he doth not sleep–/ he hath awakened from the dream of life—’ Percy B. Shelley. Call for you. Been a call for you the last five minutes. Sarah. Told her you were here but should’ve told her you were composing an ode to the west wind and couldn’t be disturbed. C’mon, Percy, what’s your problem? Pick up the goddamn phone, Matt, so I can get back to work. Some of us do work around here, you know.”

It was the first time in his life that anyone had accused him of sloth. Shame, sticky and hot, dribbled over his ears and neck in a red mess as he waited for Katie to lever herself from the door frame, to take her mocking smile and righteously cocked head to the safe distance of her desk, before he picked up the phone.

 

next,  25 September, cont’d.

previous,  24 September        

The Entries                                           

 

 

G.H.

24 September

 

 

It is possible that the noise the raccoon made entered Sarah’s dreams. It is quite certain That Matthew slept only briefly before the clawing woke him. This time, this second night, he rose from bed and grabbed a shoe and threw it at the crawl space door—a satisfying action, making a satisfyingly loud noise. But an action whose only discernible consequences were a black scuff mark on the crawl space door, and Sarah’s waking.

“Matt, my God, what is it?”

“It’s okay, Max, just me.” He stumbled back to the bed and sat on the edge, listening.

“Sweetheart?”

“Damn thing. Don’t worry about it. Sorry I woke you up, babe. Go back to sleep.”

“Are you kidding? What’d we do, board it in?

“Seems so. Shhh.”

He made himself count to fifty, one hundred, before moving. Quietly across the room to the night table, the flashlight in the drawer. Quietly walking back, unlocking the crawl space door. Sliding his thumb on the cool plastic flashlight button, waiting as his pupils contracted with the access of light. Turning the lock, the cold knob, urging the door ajar. And in the light the animal crouched for the thinnest of moments, for the thinnest of moments staring with eyes stained red by Matthew’s light.

And then gone.

Matthew took two steps but could see nothing. Nothing. Not wanting somehow to go further in, not wanting to turn around to retreat, he took a few steps backward. A rustling. He thrust his arm into a darkness that suddenly seemed enormous, swung the flashlight’s beam in wild arcs. Something moved again, thumped—in a whirl of rage he kicked at cartons, banged the flashlight against the sharply angled rafters, Eddie’s crutches clattered to the floor as Matthew slashed his light again and again through the small darkness, screaming, “Sonofabitch, sonofabitch, sonofabitch!”

Silence.

Chest heaving, he slammed the crawl space door, locked it, sat heavily on the bed. Only then did he become aware of Sarah, kneeling on the bed, watching him. Her hand came down gently on his shoulder. “It’s okay, it’s okay. We’ll get it out.”

He fell back onto the bed, clicked the flashlight off. “Brilliant, just brilliant. I boarded the damn thing in. Must have been hiding behind some boxes or something. Trapped myself an animal.” He yanked up the covers. “Have to figure something out tomorrow.” He draped an arm around her. “C’mon,Max, let’s get some sleep.”

“Exactly how are we supposed to sleep with this going on?”

He listened. Behind the wood of the low door, behind the plaster and lath of the wall, the animal, too, was still, listening perhaps for danger. So close, no more than a few feet away, maybe. Strange it would stay, but maybe not, it’s used to living close to other kinds of life, other animals in the woods. Maybe it doesn’t seem strange to him, having us lying here on the other side of the door. I mean, people come along, we build huts and factories, pyramids and skyscrapers and suburbs and slums—maybe to him that’s strange, he’s just trying to get on with his life, with all these bizarre barriers in the way.

The models of projects displayed in his offices were miniature wonders complete with delicately leafed trees and shrubs perfectly shaped and placed, as minute and artificial as the buildings they surrounded—the ones he’d designed. He shivered with revulsion and pulled the covers closer. Maybe his work was only artifice, too, only hubris transformed into mass and volume.

But people have to live somewhere; not many of them, in this country, anyway, if you gave them the choice, would want to live in tents and caves, and the people living in fridge boxes and under bridges, don’t they deserve better than that, don’t they? And what about the great buildings, the cathedrals palaces mosques museums temples—they’re structures of aspiration a longing for beauty prayers to the sublime—they should’ve been built, they should’ve, they express something of worth. Some of them, anyway.

After a long silence he answered her. “It’ll be quiet now, Max. C’mon, turn over—I’ll rub.”

His fingers searched out the knots of anxiety in her back, began rubbing them in slow circles until they began to come undone, until she fell asleep. Even then he continued, concentrating on the circles, on the orderly, shapely alignments of bone and muscle in her back, the circles slowing down as he falls into sleep. When the animal begins to rake its claws against the woods beside their heads.

This time when Matthew rose from bed he did not go for the flashlight or the crawl space door; he stalked down the hall to Eddie’s room. Heaps of their unfolded laundry and several of Sarah’s coats obscured his brother’s narrow bed, whose unmade refuge he sought. He pushed the coats aside, dumped the laundry to the floor. Closed the door to close out sound.

The mattress was cold, lumpy with age and too many bad nights, but he persevered, layering the coats over himself, molding himself to the form of sleep. Certainly this process was a familiar one, if rarely blessed with success. Try: to slip the rope from its mooring, to let the sails rise and fly like desperate, pent-up birds released, to shove away from the troublesome shore of wakefulness. Abandon knowing for not, sail resolutely away from islands of memory beckoning with their treacherous scents—his brother’s sweat on the uncased pillow, the scent of his wife on her coats: abjure resentment at having to leave her and their bed, ignore an ache now surfacing in the back of his thighs, as if from muscles seized between the desire to run and the grip of waiting.

Go away from it all. Go. Into a dimly lit room where there is only a chair and a table and on the table a ball of string, large and lumpy with many different lengths and colors and types of string from packages. And you sit at the table and slowly undo the ball, carefully untie each knot. Over and over, knowing that if you persist you’ll get to the center of the ball, where there won’t be string but something else—possibly wondrous, certainly different. Pick apart each and every knot, green cord from the department store from yellow twine from the hardware store from fuzzy red string the man at the bookstore uses. You know this string is very old because it’s all faded, and because no one uses it for packages anymore and that is part of the point, the uselessness of these ravelly remainders of forgotten purchases, they should be pulled apart. Knot by knot by knot, not him, not here. No decencies of house and job and prudent car and terrific wife asleep in a bed you can’t share because a rabid animal has invaded your careful hoard of decencies. Knot by knot by knot. A pair of hands patiently working the old strings’ knots to be undone one by one, unraveling to the secret center where there will not be nothing. Not. See only this, only this, no sound, no cars moving on wet pavement to who knows where, see nothing, hear nothing only hands knots lights string.

It didn’t exactly work. Distantly, he heard, thought he heard, the scratching of the raccoon. Faintly, true, very faintly, but irritating still, like the sound of chalk squealing against a blackboard in the room he’s about to enter.

He enters late and sees Mr. Dubretsky, dubbed Fingers by his students, Fingers Dubretsky already turning from the blackboard, dusting chalk off his monstrous hands as he turns to face the Hebrew School class, as the sun falls in pathetic grandeur over the easeless roofs and telephone poles of the green suburban horizon. Fingers explaining the lessons to be learned from the story of Jonah and the whale. Sand pale, great-bellied Dubretsky hawking phlegm from his throat and telling the class God knew Jonah was on that ship, God made the storm so that Jonah would be thrown off that ship, and swallowed by that whale.

Oh, Matthew had dreamt about the whale’s insides, that night and others, those insides filled with hot bloody vomity things, things that smelled worse than the day the sewer backed up, that squeezed and tossed Jonah til he was so sick and scared he wanted to die and was afraid he would.

God arranged the whole thing, children, and God saw the whole thing, too, because God sees everything—sees Mr. Dubretsky gently adjust his kipa with his enormous spatulate fingers, sees Matthew lean across his desk to insert the icy tip of his ball-point pen through the orangey sunset cloud of Hillary’s hair so she will clutch at it and scream. God, children, knew that Jonah was a good man, He knew that as frightened as Jonah was, Jonah wouldn’t let the ship go down and the others die, just because of him. God sent the storm and the whale so Jonah could learn to face what he feared to do. To learn that we must answer to Him for what we choose to do.

The grey pouches beneath Fingers’ eyes are filled with a tender melancholy and deeply, anciently lined with the burden of expounding on Jonah’s fears and cowardice, his accountability and his rebellion.

So on the fourth day God made the whale vomit up Jonah, and he stood on the shore and was grateful even for the sand between his toes. His head was reeking of whale stomach but Jonah bent it anyway before God because Jonah knew at last, children, it was useless to try to run, he must do what and as God asks. So Jonah stood on the shore, and even though he wasn’t so happy about what God was saying, still he listened.

And Mr. Dubretsky, puffed and patient, sets before them in the dying light the harshly gleaming point. The meaning, children, is so: Jonah is a man, like all, responsible to Almighty God. And God can make the storm and the whale, but only Jonah can make up his own mind, to do what is right.

 

Heavy now with despair and exhaustion, Matthew came slowly to his feet, letting fall the warm protection of Sarah’s coats, blinking his eyes to clear from them the vision of sad-eyed Fingers Dubretsky, even now lurking in the deeper shadows of lamps and doorway and brushing his swollen fingers across the hairless bluff of his head and catching at his kipa—Matthew shook his head as if to elude the steady wheeze of Fingers’ voice, the persistent scratching of the animal in the unoffered shelter of the house.

Matthew shook his head to rid from it the worst of Jonah’s punishments, the most terrible pain of all: tossed, swallowed, vomited, and frightened as Jonah was, he still could not escape.

What the hell does it matter, what the hell does any of this have to do with anything, the damn noise, damn animal, what am I going to do?

Because even here the scratching reached him, even here it was ineluctable, and impossible to ignore. And it would reach him, he knew, anywhere in the house. He could sleep in the car, walk the abandoned street, check into some motel, but these choices seemed to him not only absurd, but more of an effort than he could will himself to make. Rubbing at his scalp as if to loosen it, he concluded at last that he was just going to be awake all night. Might as well be warm, then, and in his own bed with Sarah. And thus returned to the louder noise, the more easeful bed.

 

Sarah moaned and tossed in her sleep but did not waken. He lay beside her, trying to concentrate on the sound of her breathing, instead heard only the rasp of the animal’s claws. Okay. Okay. Why?

The reason the animal scratched, perhaps, was simply that it was trapped, was searching for a way out, in which case he’d have to wait until morning to go in there and pry off the board he’d nailed up. Other possibilities: it was sick or injured, trying to make a nest or some place to rest. Or hungry: searching for food.

Could be. Could do it. He’d give it food and if the thing was sick the food might give it the strength to go away, and if it was just hungry then food might keep it quiet. So Matthew could get some sleep.

With this sanguine reasoning as impetus, he descended to the kitchen.

Water, need that first. He filled a plastic yogurt container with tap water, then found himself stymied: he had no idea what a raccoon might eat. After hunting through the cabinets and refrigerator for some minutes, he dared a selection: an apple cut in chunks, a small can of tuna. He put the containers on a small tray and, going carefully so as not to spill or drop, he returned upstairs.

He heard a scurry, a thump as he opened the crawl space door. Come and get it, you little bastard. He set the bowls well inside. No sound at all.

In the continuing silence he returned to bed, stretched himself on the strength of modest hope. It would be all right now. He waited. A distant splashing of water, small circling of waves. Circling, circling silence. hands

He and Sarah were holding hands, a light Roman wind was blowing as they gazed at the facade of S. Maria della Pace when the animal clawed him back to wakefulness.

 

Considering the complexity of this experiment, I believe it is proceeding well. I now begin to contemplate the next steps.

 

previous,   Sarah Asleep                                                                                     

next,    25 September

The Entries

 

Sarah asleep

 

 

Something of the rhythm of lovemaking. Some random word spoken in the day, dropped to rise again and again tonight. Lemon verbena. Lemonver bena. Verb en a lemon a Lebanon lime. Metal wheels turning time turningtime turning time, sing me a story without any rhyme. Just the rocking of the train that’s all, just the rocking of the train ain n. From the echoes of Grand Central where we change and change the train to Berry’s Dad in Pennsylvania, just the rhythm of the train ain ain. Scratching circles on the tracks, the backs of tracks the backsof tracks. What was that sachet your Mom put in my suitcase, lemonwood, lemonweed, No, dummy, verbena. Whirring the wheels, scratching the tracks. I want to go to the front of the train, c’mon Berry, and then we’ll see the back of the train when it curves around a hill. What are these hills, Berry—Berry, why are the wheels so loud? I don’t like that the trains so loud and I’m too old to be so scared. Don’t sleep now, Berry, how can you sleep, the seat is scratching my ear. Isn’t it scratchy, isn’t it, how can you sleep? I’m scared but I should, too. Will, too. Sleep even with the scratchy seat and all the wheels so loud. Sleep until there’s Berry’s Dad and then the farm in Pennsylvania where there’s spotted cows that make the cream for ice cream. I cecream I won’t be scared I want to go to sleep away from the wheels and the scratching sound round and round and loud and loud. Shut my eyes so I don’t see the dark.

 

 

next,  24 September

previous,   Violet Morel’s Notebook     

The Entries                                                             

Violet Morel’s notebook

 

She sits at her table past twilight, the unnamed cats leaping and flitting like shadows across the room, before her a notebook, a pen, and the remains of the dinner so carefully prepared for her by the young woman who has become to her like the daughter she never had.

No. I sit here, Violet, I sit here, having finished the food Sarah so kindly prepared and hating her as I have never hated anyone but him and there is nothing I can do about it. I have no reason and every reason. She is so good to me, she was good to him. I know perfectly well he wanted to get her into bed with him—he certainly got plenty of his other students over the years, did he think I didn’t know, but I know he didn’t get her and she probably wasn’t terribly polite about it, either, probably gave him holy hell, which in his own perverse way he must have thoroughly enjoyed and which made it so much worse because then he became fond of her—just as I did. It was an outrageous theft of affection, outrageous because she did it unknowingly, and took mine as well as his, and because whatever one could call what was between us, Lord knows one couldn’t call it affection.

Everything about her is hateful. I look at that long black hair of hers and I want to stroke it with a brush, I want to rip it out of her head in great heaping handfuls and then beat that handsome unlined face of hers with a brush. When she puts an arm around me—and how can she, when I am so deliberately filthy, when I can see in others’ faces—even in hers, that I am now, to say the very least, pungent—how can she touch me, why does it make me feel like weeping with love and gratitude at precisely the same moment it stirs in me a hatred so scalding I’m amazed it doesn’t bubble the skin right off her face?

In this house lie hundreds of other notebooks like this one, filled with observations, thoughts, dreams, the passions of moments I can no longer recall; they list errands, financial minutiae, catalogues of his every work down to the barest squiggle—and they contain stories beyond number. Stories I created. Which he shook his head at, and then handed back to me—without a word, those first couple I was foolish enough to show him. As if they weren’t worth even one of his words. Naturally I never showed him any others, never even mentioned writing others. But what in the world did he think I did in this utterly empty house all day? He didn’t think. He assumed his was the only lived life. Perhaps he assumed that when he left I simply slumped down in one of the empty corners—and there were all so pristinely empty then—and stopped breathing until the moment of his return, like some toy that needed the battery of his presence in order to come to life? But no. It was far worse than that—he simply did not think of me at all from the instant he departed until the instant he opened the door again and noticed I was there.

Ah, but her?

He came home and burst into talk about her work. He was interested in her work, he made sure her work got out into the world—absurd for one so young, a showing of those painting/collages based on her imaginings of the life her friend, Beryl’s, child would have had, had she lived.e   Yes, I’ll admit they were accomplished but anything more—all the nonsense he spouted about them? I think not. I think not. Too odd, far too strange, for my taste, at least. Helping her as he had never helped anyone else and meanwhile the basement (where he never went) filled with boxes of my notebooks, with my lifetime of work that he plainly didn’t want to hear about, much less see and much less help me to birth into the world, any more than the children he so adamantly refused to even consider having. And which she, no doubt will one of these fine days have with that husband of hers who seems to feel everything for her that mine could not—or would not?—feel for me.

It is intolerable.

Or was. Was. At least here, in my notebook, I am devising my revenge. And it is so deviously, so utterly sweet that I can taste in like raw wild honey in my mouth.

But I must truly guard against that other face in the mirror, the lying one that whispers that she loves me, that I love her in return. Or my story could be ruined.

 

next,   Sarah Asleep

previous,  23 September   

The Entries

G. H.

23 September

 

 

“Yeah, well. Bet I do look terrible. I was awake half the night, this—a raccoon—got into our crawl space. Made this unbelievable racket all night long.”

“I certainly hope it isn’t a raccoon, dear—they’re supposed to be frightfully hard to get rid of. Very bright, you know. Yes. I heard of someone else having trouble with one. Last spring, I think it was. It knocked over a trash can at three in the morning. Imagine! A great ruckus, the dogs barking. The Elands over on Fem Street? Yes. Sarah has already gone to work?”

Mrs. Morel’s grimy, elegant middle finger pushed up on her nose a pair of her late husband’s spectacles. She peered around Matthew’s shoulder, through his open front door, her bare feet lifting slightly out of the late Gardiner’s house slippers as she did so, the dead man’s brown tweed sport coat flapping open to reveal a pink-flowered housedress festooned with mouse-colored stains.

“Yeah, some meeting, she had to leave early. Come on in for a minute? Sarah’s got your dinner ready, I was going to drop it off on my way to work, but I might as well give it to you now, if you can manage—otherwise I’ll just—”

“Nonsense, Matthew, there’s plenty of room right here.” She patted the notebook that lay on top of the shopping cart beside her.

Matthew made a grim about-face and was trailed through the house by Mrs. Morel; he squeezed firmly beneath his arm the newspaper he had narrowly rescued from her pilfering. In the kitchen he removed from the refrigerator a sturdy paper plate piled with roast beef and provolone cheese, a bakery roll and three-bean salad, even a polished Granny Smith apple—Sarah conscientiously covered all food groups.

“Here you go, Mrs. M. Sarah said be sure to tell you, eat it all yourself, not let the cats have it.”

“Dear, no, of course not. I won’t let my poor kitties have a bit of it, though I am growing perfectly fat on your Sarah’s cooking.”

Well, cooking? We shop, Sarah and me, we’re really good shoppers.

“Poor Gardiner would have been so grateful, I’m sure, of the care you children take of me.”

Yeah. Poor old Gardiner, prince among men. Only things he was grateful for were marrying your money and a bottle of rye.

“ Yes. As I know I’ve said many times before but that doesn’t make it any less true, does it? Yes. And I do hope you won’t have trouble attending to that animal. Could it have been a squirrel, dear? They say there are so many more this year than usual. My niece had trouble with one—but I won’t keep you, I know you must be getting to work. Yes. Have a lovely time with your friends this evening. I’ll be thinking of you, dear.”

Yeah, just bet you will. And you’ll stroll on by a dozen times to Watch the House, too.

Mrs. Morel watched every house and every family on this street and the territory between her own home and the Goldsmiths, and unbeknownst perhaps to the late Gardiner, had for many years spent her Tuesday mornings sifting through the trash cans outside each of those houses, measuring the worth of these homely leavings, then tossing into the aromatic stew in her grocery cart those items she considered too delectable for the maws of city garbage trucks. Although she was thus intimately acquainted with her neighbors’ households, hers was a mystery to all except Matthew and Sarah—and even they had been granted entrée only several weeks after her husband’s démise. While they had, naturally, long been curious about the interior of the house (a so-called Georgian affair that had been in her family for many years, and a considerably grander structure than any in the Goldsmiths’ immediate vicinity), during the late Gardiner’s reign Matthew and Sarah had seen only the white linings of draperies drawn firmly across each window.

In all matters, indeed, the late Gardiner had been most private; those that stood revealed to Sarah, like his alcoholic excesses, he had charged her, and later her husband, never to reveal. During his more genial binges he had sometimes boasted about how he had pursued mightily, and successfully snagged, Art and Worldly Renown, those two nymphs who so often run in different directions, “and got ‘em without the bloodsucking, psychobabbling, art-fascistic critics sticking their noses up my ass. Hah. Give ‘em nothing, no photos, no bios, no interviews, no drug store receipts. Nothing, Hah! nothing that isn’t a lie.” While Sarah had a slightly different calculation of the late Gardiner’s nymph-snagging success, she had faithfully fended off the few reporters and critics who had happened by in the nine months since he had dismounted the steed of mortality (In fact, he’d been bucked off rather unceremoniously; in fact, pantless atop his toilet.). In a similarly compliant spirit, Mrs. Morel had, with the exceptions of Sarah and Matthew, respected her late husband’s injunction to allow no human foot to trespass beyond the mossy brick of the front doorstep. On the day after his funeral, however, she had welcomed across that forbidden threshold the first of the plethora of cats.

 

Standing now on his own front doorstep, watching Mrs. Morel yank her purloined Stop and Shop cart, with its burden of food and notebook and junk down the walk, Matthew wondered if she would in fact eat what Sarah had prepared: she was just as likely to lavish it on the cats or wrap it in a stolen newspaper and hide it, against a hungrier moment, in some furniture-heaped byway of the house. Only last week, Matthew had seen one of Violet Morel’s feral cats batting at a hundred dollar bill wedged between a broken coat rack and a fat roll of ragged carpet that barricaded the better part of the front hall. “Once you begin something, dear,” she had noted, on following Matthew’s gaze, “it’s impossible to foresee all the consequences.” To Sarah’s continual offers to help her clean, or to hire a cleaner, Mrs. Morel was cheerfully stony. “Thank you, my love, but matters are so unsettled—my treasures might be swept out with the dust, yes?”

Mrs. Morel, clothed in grief and revenge, faded into the thinly luminous morning even as her shopping cart seemed to continue gleaming for a long moment after she disappeared. Matthew shook his head, thinking how helpless she was. Just a clueless old dingus. Fine for Gardiner to man the kitchen, or cart her off to restaurants three times a day, if that’s what he did, but he should’ve know he was gonna die first, he should’ve made some plan for her so she wouldn’t have to truck down the streets by herself for every goddamn meal, in whatever weather came by. He should’ve done something.

Matthew was suddenly assailed by a morose certainty: Gardiner had indeed done something.

Now, watching the empty street, Matthew shivered—as anyone might after such a night, when the tired mind, less vigilant at its gates, admits unsavoury thoughts into consciousness. As: that this landscape he’d inhabited from infancy was a terra incognito, a rubble plain spilled on some foreign moon and he, he a Manchukuo, an East Germany, a grid on geography now erased and disavowed.

Matthew closed the front door slowly, and slowly returned to the kitchen. He was tired, was all, lousy night, and Mrs. M.—hell, she’s not in much worse shape than a lot of people, only with her it shows. Bet she and the damn cats got a decent night’s sleep, anyway, all the cats together couldn’t make as much noise as that damn raccoon.

Sarah had started a new clutter pile on the corner of the kitchen table; Matthew noted it with a flicker of irritation, then dropped the rescued newspaper on it and began making his breakfast. The kitchen was cold, the toast ready too soon. A pouring of coffee and juice, a spreading of raspberry jam—Mrs. M. could really get to you. Why the hell does she have to go for my paper every morning?

Somewhere in the house, a sound.

His knifeful of jam took wing as he raced for the stairs. At the bedroom doorway he made himself stop, listen.

A faint rustle. A dull thump. Soundlessly, he retrieved the flashlight, approached the crawl space door.

His body flooded with a primal stealth that made delicate his hand as he turned the old fashioned, T-shaped lock, then the cold white china doorknob. He bent low, entered.

Nothing. The shards of the vase, claw marks on a cardboard box. A certain odor he hadn’t noticed before. Silence. Another crouched step. Roller blades stilled with dust, an old black fedora of Sarah’s, a pair of crutches that had once belonged to his brother, Eddie, delicately balanced, somehow, perfectly upright against the sloped wall. A dark log of animal scat. But no animal, nothing he could see except the ripped screen, the torn slats of the louvre: the small gape of the animal’s entry. It’s rabid. Was rabid. Gone now. Maybe he’d heard nothing, maybe it was just his imagination, the wind. Probably it’d come, last night, just looking for food, gone back out. Cold in here, nothing here, wasting time. Get the hell out of this.

 

He made his way back down to the kitchen. Did not ask himself what he would have done had he found the animal, didn’t wonder at his own irritation. Exhausted. Damn thing. Up all night. He saw the animal’s small, masked face, the eyes bright with their alien light and then its swift, humped flight into darkness. Have to get screen and some slats, today, fix the damn louvre, don’t want him coming back. My luck, he finds his way into my house.

Matthew, of course, knew how he came to be in this house rather than another—how, although perhaps not why. Matthew was there because of the late Gardiner. Because of Sarah and Mrs. Morel. And others. Because of the narrow stream of the Park River running so close, behind the house. Because there had been a twining together of events and attachments, a rope that time and others’ intent had fashioned and that he’d taken hold of, without perfectly understanding why but in all good faith—and had allowed to pull himself to this inevitable place and morning. A rope of connection twined and now untwining that had led him docilely, placidly, utterly willingly to this street, this house. He could give logical answers to the evident hows of his life, and so was quite certain that the off-center placement of this morning’s window on events was nothing at all, really, except a lack of sleep, or the small, furry annoyance of an animal invading the crawl space of his house. All things easy to sketch out, and repair.

A jagged red streak of raspberry jam sliced across the cream-colored vinyl floor; the knife that had carried the jam lay half-hidden beneath the stove. Matthew jerked viciously at the roll of paper towels fixed beneath a cabinet—the roll plummeted down, shooting his mug of cold coffee at a deadly angle toward the heart of the new dishwasher. He lunged, missed, watched in hopeless disgust as the mug hit the dishwasher and then exploded on the floor. The dishwasher was nicked, the floor a misery. Matthew lectured himself into a rough semblance of calm, bent to retrieve the streamered roll of towels, and approximated cleaning up.

Enough. Got to get moving. Tim’ll howl like a monkey if I’m late for that meeting with Vinca. Where the hell are my keys?

He looked wildly around the kitchen, then saw the newspaper. Scrabbled beneath it, grabbed up his keys, fled.

Across town and into his office and an endless meeting with his partner, Timothy, and with Herbert Vinca, a beamingly round little real estate developer who disarmed acquaintances and zoning commissions alike with hesitant, blushing smiles that appeared, with impeccable timing, whenever he was most ruthlessly devious. Herbert expressed his notion of affability by saying everything at least twice (Hi, hello, Matt, ok, the program for the Eyrie? Program for Kestrel’s Eyrie, nice name, don’tcha think, good name, ok, let’s go over the program, ok?”), so that it took Matthew and Timothy some minutes when the meeting was at last over, to see Herbert off (“Good meeting, enjoyed this, enjoyed this very much. We meet on the third, then, third of October, out at the Eyrie. Good, very good, so long, goodbye.”).

Timothy draped himself in mock exhaustion over Matthew’s desk, but was soon up, flipping through the elevations on which he’d just rested his head.

“So, what d’you think?”

“What can I say? It ain’t gonna be the Sydney Opera House, but at least it ain’t another playroom for the kiddies. Herbie’s project’s gonna pay our bills, and then some. I believe, son, it will get us some notice.” Timothy was already walking out of Matthew’s office, opening a closet, shrugging on his raincoat. “We’d better get our fannies on the road, right? You ready?” He turned to look at his friend, who still stood at his window, watching a chill September rain fall heavily to the street below. “Matt? Matthew? Man, you sick or something?”

Matthew turned around,

“Jesus, man, you look terrible.”

“That seems to be the theme song of the day.” Matthew yanked his coat off its hanger as if that act of physical removal would have some resonance in his mood. He tried for humor. “Herbert, you know, you know, can really do that, do that, to a guy. Where’s Katie?”

“Gone for the day, I guess. Probably had a class.” As they passed Katie’s conspicuously cleared desk in the outer office, Timothy plucked from it a note, roundly printed on a pink message slip. He glanced at it and snorted. “Here.

 

And her will with her duty so equally stood

That, seldom opposed, she was commonly good,

and did pretty well, doing just what she would.

Matthew Prior, (italics, K. M.)

p.s. Will be in an hour late (podiatrist appt.). My mom will be here to get phones.

 

“Katie’s mom. Great.” Matthew tossed the note into the wastebasket. He put a hand on the side of his head, as if to contain what was going on inside it, for in the moment that he saw Katie was gone, he understood that the day had consumed its hours without leaving him any in which to do what was most necessary to repair the attic louvre. Now he’d have to buy what he required, making him late for the dinner party at Timothy’s, and then make the repairs later, inside the crawl space, maneuvering awkwardly in the low, narrow space—for he certainly couldn’t work outside on a ladder, in the after-dinner darkness and the rain. Outside he could do a proper job, but he had no choice. “Could somebody please tell me why we’re always covering up for Katie’s mom? I thought if somebody had substance abuse problems—there’s a nice way of putting it—you were supposed to tell the family or something? And we get to pay Katie and do her job for her. Boy, are we ever lucky.”

“Hey, guy, what is it with you?” Timothy stared at his partner for a long moment before turning out the lights as they left the office. Matthew had always before been much more amused than his friend by Katie’s adornment of messages with apt snippets of English verse, had always before been much more tolerant of the inconveniences occasioned her later-in-life return to college, and her mother’s at best unreliable help.

Matthew shrugged, unable at the moment to reply because the office that he had designed, that he and Timothy had worked in for over a year, mad, on the moment the lights winked out become transparent—and he ‘d seen that all his clever renovations of this building was only a film, a trick of light behind which persisted age- and graffiti-streaked walls and broken windows, the holes left by yanked-out plumbing, and trash-strewn floors: the office exactly as it was before all the long, painstaking work. And it’s still here, ground right into every single atom of the place and there’s no way I can ever change that. It’s always going to be here.

“So?” Timothy demanded. The cold rain kept them standing just inside the building’s back door.

Matthew sighed, swiped at his nose with the back of his hand. “I’m gonna have to be late for dinner. Sorry. You guys go on without me. I’ve gotta get some stuff. A raccoon got into that attic crawl space of ours last night. Scratched around like he was tearing the house down. All night long. The thing tore away the slats in the louvre—they were rotting anyway—but I’ve got to get the opening sealed up in case it decides to come back. Tell Berry I’m sorry, I’ll call Sarah. Sorry.”

“Hey,” Timothy called as he ran, head down, for his own car, “Try to hustle it, will ya? Beryl’s cooking some fancy thing or other.” He stopped at the door to his car. “Why would it come back? You even sure it left?”

Matthew heard but didn’t answer.

Driving down I-84 in a tension of silence, of being late and driving fast into glaring headlights and on flooded surfaces that leant no assurance of clear sight or control in the growing dark. The rain was a taunt of vision, a steady mockery of the small, dry refuge of the moving car. It drenched his clothes with a sour industrial smell even before he ran from his car into the over lit warehouse, the smell following him as he jogged down the craggy grey aisles of stock, to find someone—anyone—to cut a board into pieces.

The rain drives you in, toward shelter, the rain drives you in, toward shelter. “Shelter,” James Krilling had intoned during his introductory lecture, “Is the essence of architecture. The latest two-hundred story glass monstrosity in Dubai or a few inches of forest debris pitched against the side of a tree perform the same basic function. Shelter against the elements. The night, the cold, the rain, the animals lurking. An inside to protect from the great outside.”

The sulfurous odor of the rain grew stronger as he sprinted through it with the purchases he’d finally collected, nor did it diminish when he slammed the car door to and sped out of the vast parking lot. Elemental and polluted, the rain clung to his coat and hair like spilled crude to a sea bird. A drop of it gathered on the edge of a curl, then splattered on his forehead. He wiped it away savagely, looked at the clock, then swerved to avoid a bus. Seven forty-five—he would be almost an hour late for a dinner he didn’t want to go to, the christening of a love affair that probably wouldn’t live till spring.

Which was fine for Timothy. Matthew had watched him rushing in and out of love like a train through a series of tunnels, each one darker, more haunted than the last. And now the last of these was occupied with Beryl, Sarah’s closest friend. Matthew foresaw the journey ending in spectacular collapse, a disaster that might crush Beryl, and whose toxic fumes could engulf him and Sarah, and his friendship with Timothy. Not to mention their carefully constructed business.

Or maybe not. Maybe not. There’s no law another law says there’s got to be another catastrophe. Things don’t have to repeat themselves over and over just because the sun comes up every morning. It isn’t even the same sun. It’s not a fixed thing, changes all the time, it’ll get old and die like everything else. A fiery explosion engulfing everything, then pffft. Or maybe it’ll just grow colder and colder and wink out, pffft again. Either way it’s nada. Nothing at all.

 

Sarah opened the door to Beryl and Timothy’s new apartment, kissed Matthew, brushed against his face hair smelling of food and perfume, cheeks hot from the kitchen. “Not that you deserve it, but we held dinner for you.” She nuzzled against him for a moment more, too happy in the moment to be really angry he was so late.” Then she looked up at him. “Okay, Goldsmith, what’s this raccoon business? Why didn’t you tell me this morning? I have to hear about our wildlife problems from strangers?”

In mock surprise: “That was no stranger. That was Tim. My friend and partner, Tim. You know Tim, Sar.” As he saw her welcoming smile twist, he wondered at his own poor attempt at humor, this second evasion of discussing the animal—a nuisance, a minor household problem—with her. He placed his hands against the warm planes of her face, the beautiful familiarity of this flesh. And kept them there even as he suddenly felt as if he couldn’t hold on to her, as if he were in a car backing away from her, a car he wasn’t driving. He did not know who was. Just really tired, sleep-deprived, it does weird things to your head.

“Ex-friend and partner, if you’d gotten here two minutes later, which is when dinner hits the table,” Timothy called from the dining room.

Matthew and Sarah moved from the door through a confusion of boxes and suitcases littering the bare floor. Her torqued smile persisted. “So?”

“I was in a lousy mood. Exhausted. The damn thing kept me up most of the night.” Even while she stood close she seemed to be receding into the distance. No, eyes blurry from lack of sleep, is all. And he tried to deny his panic with a shrug. “It’s nothing. Not important.” A second shrug. “I don’t know, Sar.”

“This was how long after you took your walk.” Not a question.

“I asked you if you wanted to come with me, I always do.”

“What does my not wanting to get out of the warm bed and trudge around in the middle of the night have to do with it?”

When the alarm buzzed that morning and she kissed his throat and asked him how he’d slept the lie had begun, fueled by a reluctance so potent and unreasoning that it seemed to come from some source outside himself and that was now pulling him rapidly away—he must do something to slow it all down. Concentrating on his hands, he became busy taking off his coat, brushing back his rain-damp hair, smoothing his shirt. From far away he could see her watching. “I checked the crawl space this morning, after you left. Didn’t see anything. But I’ll board up the opening tonight. Just in case it feels like coming back.”

“Okay, but what if—”

He didn’t let her finish. “Mrs. M. came by this morning to lift the newspaper. I gave her her dinner. Think she’d rather have had the paper.”

“Wouldn’t have mattered much. We mostly read it on our phones, anyway.” Her voice came to him unexpectedly louder across the increasing distance. “What the hell is going on here, Matty? What is it with you and this animal? You planning some secret male hunting rites in the crawl space? What?”

“Nothing,” he turned away, “it’s nothing.”

From across a winter desert, a far place, desiccated and flat, he heard, “Okay. Fine. I’ll be helping Berry in the kitchen.”

“Sar—” But instead of following her, Matthew stood, his hands hanging like butchered meat, his body trapped amid the piled books and open cartons of dishes, the bundled skis and mismatched suitcases that Beryl and Timothy had hauled from their separate apartments into the emptiness of this one, less than a week before. Most of the clutter was marked with a large red T.

“Dinner, Timothy called. He poked his head around the corner. “Kinda daunting, isn’t it?” and grinned in a way that Matthew thought might refer to something beside the move-in chaos.

“So. Matthew. Hear you’ve been invaded.”

She makes it sound like Crimea.

On the wimbly folding card table, Beryl set down brimming bowls of bouillabaisse. With a small hand brushed red tangles of hair from a face that now had the alert questioning stillness of a branched robin when the light momentarily changes. Matthew tried to smile. She’s only trying to make a joke.

“Is he talking about that squirrel again?” Timothy dropped a basket of hot Italian bread on the table, and dropped himself into his chair.

God Almighty. He’s got all the grace of an extension ladder. “Raccoon,” Matthew muttered, his teeth sour with gall, “I saw the thing, wasn’t any squirrel.” Then said to Beryl, as if in apology, “It got in through the attic louvre.”

“Matt, my boy,” said Timothy with an expansive cordiality that squeezed the sudden gall in Matthew’s mouth into a bitter wad of loathing, “Your raccoon just wants a little conversation, is all. Why don’t you crate him up and ship him over to the divine Mrs. M.? She could introduce it to her cats. Bet she wouldn’t mind keeping it, one more animal around that house.”

“How weird,” Beryl said. “Never heard of one in a house before.”

Timothy raised his glass of wine; Matthew could tell that it was not, by several, his first. “Let’s hear it for firsts. First raccoon in the Goldsmith’s house, first friends in ours. May all visitors to both our houses be human and friendly. Also bearing money, if possible.”

Okay. Here it comes. The inspired monologue about the benefits the Eyrie project will shower upon us all. Look at him. Look at him—all sharp edges and angles, his ideas, his elbows, his jiggling knees, his pointy little beard. Like the skeleton of a bad building. God, I hate him, so gaddamn full of himself, so goddamn knowing, he’s got people so figured, all he cares about is his own little glory and his goddamn bank account.

Matthew’s thoughts became so strident that he finally heard them, thought he’d pronounced them aloud—he looked in panic at his wife and friends, nodded his excuses, and somehow made his way to the bathroom, where he splashed cold water on his face then leaned his head against the nearest wall. He’s my best friend, my best friend, an honest, decent guy. What the hell is the matter with me?

For several minutes he kept rubbing a towel against the face he knew his wife and friends had been watching.

 

As Matthew and Sarah returned home, he would answer her questions with No, Nothing, Just felt sleepy, Maybe the wine, and would seem to revive in the slanting rain coming in his slightly open window. So that they could begin to talk, tentatively, at the edges of safer things, like the evening just concluded. When Sarah fretted over this abrupt new love between their friends he tried to reassure her: Tim was serious this time, he’d changed, finally grown up, Beryl wouldn’t have to suffer through a second disaster. “He’s not going to make it to the Prince Charming finals, but he’s no sicko like her husband was.”

“It’s just she’s still so—I’m not sure she’s over all that yet. But she really does love Tim, and I think someday she might even like to get married again. Maybe even have another child.” Sarah looked out her window into the dark, as if to hide her face, “You know, the doctors said they didn’t think it would be, that another baby would be like Megan was. But,” she said, after a moment, “if he’s just playing at this—”

“I don’t think he is. Sometimes his mouth gets way ahead of the rest of him, but not now. I don’t think.” How the hell do I know? Tim sure doesn’t. Every time he falls in love it’s deathless, Barnum and Bailey, The Greatest Show on Earth.

They didn’t speak the rest of the ride home. But then, in the stopped car, he leaned over and held her tightly, and this long embrace seemed to declare that it was too late for questions. She helped him bring in his purchases, held the flashlight as he nailed up the board in the crawl space. With a handful of tissues she silently cleaned up the animal’s scat.

The air in the bedroom, when the low door to the crawl space was finally closed, was pervaded by a cold damp, as if it had seeped from a forest floor. Sarah after a few minutes tried to talk, but that damp was all around them so that when he came to her and held her again she understood that he was trying to persuade her without words that it was better not to talk, better to put off the day’s clothes, to fall into the known spaces of their bed, their bodies, to sleep.

He understood from the motions of her body, the tension on her face, that she was not convinced, was only offering, and taking, what refuge she could. So throughout the night he dozes patchily, dreamfully. Only to be wakened again and again by the sound of the raccoon’s sharp claws. Scratching.

 

My experiment seems to promise interesting results.

 

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