G.H.
“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 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.
next, Violet Morel’s notebook
previous, 22 September
The Nature of Things 