For some moments I stood before the door. When I finally opened it, I was surprised by the sudden chill; the heating ducts had long been shut, and an icy curl of air lapped past my bare feet. I remembered, then, how it had taken longer than I expected to clear the room completely: it was crammed full of her furnishings, every sort of bric-a-brac and notion and wall hanging. She had left the house in a hurry. In the following weeks I worked on the room in my spare time, in the evenings and on the weekends. I remember patching and repainting the ceiling and walls, making sure to fix all the mars in the plaster. There were larger pocks, into which I found it easy enough to spade the filler. But it was the smaller ones, particularly the tack holes, which seemed to number in the hundreds, that took the greatest part of my time. In the end, I found myself doing the work in half-foot squares, pressing in the paste with the tip of a finger, smoothing it out, and it wasn’t until much later, as I’d drift into the room to inspect for missed holes, running my hand over the surfaces, that the whole project was quite satisfactorily done.
2
MY HOUSE ISN’T THE GRANDEST in our town, but it’s generally known that of the homes on Mountview, one of the original streets in Bedley Run, the two-story Tudor revival at number 57 is one of the special properties in the area. It seems it’s every other week now that I receive a card or note from a realtor, asking if I might consider putting it up for sale. The local ones, of course, know my situation, and as I’m retired and live alone in this large house, with its impressive flower and herb garden, and flagstone swimming pool, and leaded glass and wrought-iron conservatory, they are right to hope that I might do as Mrs. Hickey had thought I’d done, and move to one of those new developments in a welcomingly warm place like Boca Raton or Scottsdale.
“Now come on, Doc,” Liv Crawford of Town Realty said to me on the phone very early this morning, “that immensely beautiful house of yours is also very high-maintenance. You don’t want to be worrying about clogged gutters and foundation cracks anymore, do you?”
“I don’t mind so much, actually,” I told her.
“But how are you going to feel twenty years from now?”
I reminded her that I would be in my nineties by then.
“All the more so,” she answered brightly. I thanked her for her very optimistic wishes for my health, and said I would let her know when I was ready.
“You never know until you are, Doc. But sometimes it’s too late.”
“Goodness, Liv.”
“Just saying, Doc. Listen, I’m about to meet some buyers, and I think they’d just love your house to death. They’re young and high-powered, and they’re very desperate to find a place on a Mountview-type street. They’re already talking an overbid, for the right kind of place, which yours is in spades.”
“But it’s not for sale, there’s no price—”
“I know that, Doc. I’m just doing a drive-by with them, the whole neighborhood, but when I slow down in front of your place, can I at least tell them you’re considering?”
“I don’t think this is the best time for me, Liv….”
“Fine, Doc, thanks. Gotta go.”
Then click, she’s gone. But really, in fact I don’t mind her opportunism, her wishful pluck, the way her voice positively rings with the joyous vibrancy of commerce (a note I sorely miss). In fact I’ve had several market appraisals done in recent years, with the consensus being that my house hasn’t fallen in price (as everything else in the county has, especially commercial properties like my former store), but has even appreciated somewhat; it seems that older, “vintage” homes in as pristine condition as mine rarely become available, and when they do there’s not even time enough to stick the sign on the front lawn before they’re sold.
If I were to leave this place, where would I go? Mr. Stark, who seven years ago bought Murasan’s Smoke and Pipe, recently asked why I didn’t think about going back and living out the rest of my days in Japan. I stop in at his shop some afternoons, near the end of my day.
“Imagine,” he said to me, almost musically, waving his Churchill-length cigar, “spending one’s days by a serene lake somewhere near Kyoto, wearing silken white robes and sipping rare sake served by knowing maidens. I can see you there, Doc. Like a dream I can see you.”
Mr. Harris, a retired insurer who seems to pass most of his waking hours in Murasan’s, added, “I’m drawn to the old country myself, Doc, though mine, of course, is Wales. Every year I wonder whether I should sell out and pilgrim there, to claim my ancestral seat.” He took a lengthy, pensive drag from his pipe. “But then, of course, I realize my Muriel already has it.”
“And in a sling,” Mr. Stark added. They both cackled like old women, blowing smoke every which way.
I appreciated their interest, and what I took as their friendly concern, and I bore the notion with me for some days. Sometimes I still think of Japan, though much less in recent times than in my first years in Bedley Run, when it seemed it was every day I wondered how long I could last, and which morning I’d rise and know I’d have to return, though of course to what I couldn’t know.
The other question in any retirement is, what would I do? These are things Liv Crawford cannot address deeply. But even if she can find me, as she says, a “prime zero-care condo with a 180˚ view of the ocean,” her job stops there, for while I might have a decent place to live, I’d have to figure out for myself how to live there, and why. And the retirement lifestyle doesn’t immediately draw me. I don’t fish, for example, and I don’t play bridge. I’m not a collector of figurines, or exotic birds, or antique toys. I’m not a connoisseur of drink. I don’t really dance, and the related idea of companionship for someone like me seems at once complicated and vague. There are lectures at the junior college, and reading in bed, but most of what I come across seems to suggest that older folks like me might be better off just falling asleep forever.
What’s left, perhaps, is golf, but I’ve played the game no more than a dozen times in my life, and then it was always with the same group of medical-supply wholesalers, who for several years in a row invited me on a spring junket to Myrtle Beach. I do remember there being a certain relaxation to those trips. We’d wake up late and stay on the course until dusk, and then eat a heavy dinner at a raucous lounge or striptease club where the others would drink like madmen until the early hours, when I’d have to drive us back to the hotel. And as much as I understood that they probably liked me well enough and found my company (and convenient stewardship of them) pleasing, what I looked forward to each year with genuine fondness was being with fellow businessmen, and passing those easy, jocular hours of camaraderie by the pool or greenside or in a smoky bar, when we spoke of nothing profound or consequential but still seemed to make the time somehow worthwhile.
I sometimes miss those trips, and others I took regularly when I was younger and more actively involved in the more social aspects of the business, the three-day Bahama conference cruises and the large, frenetic conventions in unusual cities like New Orleans and Minneapolis. All those many boisterous, various folks. I didn’t crave their company as much as the opportunity to watch them in their enjoyment and reverie. But I suppose I also took easy comfort then in joking and laughing with pretty much anybody, and people seemed to respond with a surprising warmth, and I was often invited to late-night suite parties and next-day city tours with this group or that.
Once, I even met a Japanese gentleman from the San Francisco Bay area, who owned a store that sounded much like mine, and had opened in the very same year. He was American-born, his grandparents among those who had long ago settled in Hawaii and then California. I think we both brightened on sighting each other. And yet there was an unexpected awkwardness. You would think we would have plenty to discuss, being of like race and age and occupation, but our conversation was oddly halting and strained. There was a very difficult moment, on being introduced to each other, when it was unclear whether we would shake hands or bow. Neither of us wished to offend the other, and being peers, it was especially difficult for one man to assume a posture of natural authority, or acquiescence. Perhaps had we been alone, and not standing in front of the other conventioneers, we might have bowed or shaken hands or done both without a flinch, and gone on to be friends. But as it happened, we exchanged only the mildest pleasantries, and I sensed that he was immediately unsettled by my accent (which was much stronger twenty years ago than it is now), for he seemed to speak with increasing softness, as if to diminish his perfect American-sounding voice. I first wondered if he felt he wasn’t Japanese enough for me, or whether I thought myself not American enough for him. But later on, after returning home, I thought perhaps it was that we felt different from everyone by virtue of being together (these two Japanese in a convention crowd), and that it was this fact that made us realize, for a moment, our sudden and unmistakable sense of not fitting in.