“I see,” the man said. “Come in — I’m interrogating you at the door.”
He vanished inside the house. Maya and Alex looked helplessly at each other. Maya stepped forward and held the screen door for Alex. He shivered in the cold air and followed her.
The house had a Mediterranean feeling, with stone walls and earthenware jugs peering from decorative shelves. The dogs were laid out in the middle of the hallway, snout to snout. Maya and Alex stopped, afraid of rousing them.
“Step over,” the man said from the doorway to the kitchen. “They’re novelty junkies, they don’t care about you now.” Maya and Alex hurdled over the dogs, who answered with low simpering moans. The man waddled back into the hallway — one of his legs was as good as his eye. “Harris Sprague,” he extended a hand. Maya shook it, Alex shook it.
“It’s a beautiful home,” Maya said, trying to placate him.
Harry flicked on the lights and said “Mnyah.” He was an author. The Harris Sprague oeuvre stared at them from bookshelves running the length of the hallway. There were so many titles, and then each had as many translations. They were reading him in Bulgaria and Norway and even China — if that was Mandarin and not some other fantastical tongue. An entire hallway filled with books by the same man saying the same things in different languages — it was dizzying. The dead eye evaluated their impressions.
Maya expectorated a sound that she hoped sounded like marvel. She raked her mind for something to say. “What do you write about?” she said finally.
“And what do you do?” Harry Sprague said with a whimper. His breathing was labored, like a smoker’s. The silences were kept festive by the loud rise and fall of his breathing.
“Mammograms,” Maya said.
“And what do you mammogram about?” he said, a naughty smile on his face.
Maya felt shame at her mistake, but it was distant and muffled.
“That’s Dreamer,” Harry nodded at the larger dog. “Named for a writing teacher I had. He said, ‘You’re a dreamer, Harry, if you think this’ll be published.’ So I’d send him every one of my books with a big middle finger for an inscription. Then he died on me. We’re all going. When I got him, Dreamer ran faster than a horse. He’s a lurcher. He could tear the soul out of a deer.”
Harry twitched, the dead eye rolling toward the kitchen. “Get out of the hallway and come in here,” he said. “Sangu would put me in the corner if she were at home; I’m not being hospitable.” The Rubins were instructed to sit at a wide-planked kitchen table. They were surrounded by two walls of glass cabinets behind which sat mounds of elaborately painted china. “There’s no one for linens and service sets like Sangu,” Harry said. “No British woman is devoted to service sets like an Indian woman. I’m a savage to her. She thinks I brought her to Mars.” On the long wooden table, Harry deposited an unlabeled bottle of red wine. “Mnyah,” he said. “She’s out for poker. Harry’s on parole.”
He poured thick red wine, dark as paint, into three tumblers. “Sangu has a cell phone,” Harry said. “Two cell phones. She’s phoned up. But the house is phone-free. You need me, you send me a fax.” He pointed to the hallway, and for a moment Maya thought she would be ordered to get out of her seat and lay eyes on Harry Sprague’s fax machine. Maya heard the metronomic beep of a machine ready to receive news of Harry Sprague having sold in Hindi and Finnish. That’s why there wasn’t a phone. Harry Sprague was rich enough not to have one.
The author lifted his glass. His good eye crinkled. “So what is it you want with them?”
Maya stared out the window, where the day was moving resolutely toward darkness. “Our son misbehaves,” she said. “Maybe they would know why. He was normal,” she rushed to add, as if persuading an authority. “It’s only recently that he. .” She cursed herself — she was making no sense.
The author regarded her. “This calls for something stronger,” he said. He opened a new cupboard and peered at a crowd of bottles. “I’ve got admirers placed around the drinking capitals of the world. There’s a young fellow in Burgundy who sends me a case every time I write a book. He’s half the reason I write. Where are you from?”
“New Jersey,” Maya said.
“Oh,” Harry said.
“Russia,” Maya elaborated.
“I knew a pair of Russian legs once,” Harry said. He stopped and looked over his shoulder in mischief. “We’ll drink vodka, then.”
Alex looked at his wife and cut in: “Could you tell us what you know? Please. We drove a very long way.”
Harry turned back from the bottles and they saw his face lose its play. “I’m yakking, but it’s not really a celebratory situation, is it,” he said. He put thimbles in front of Maya and Alex, but Alex held up his hand; he was driving. Maya, however, downed hers and slid her glass forward for more. Harry flashed her an approving look.
“About ten years ago, the young people you’re talking about got some kind of a windfall,” Harry said, pouring. “Well, I guess you were the windfall. They got the money to buy something better than the shit can outside. I bought it from them. From the junkyard.”
“But why?” Alex said.
“My dad’s old car. It must have been one of their dads that he sold it to, I don’t know which one. I got a call one day from Hoyt at the junkyard. He said, ‘You ain’t gonna believe what rolled in here today.’ Hoyt will remember a car from thirty years ago.”
“I don’t understand,” Maya said.
“I don’t know where they are,” Harry said. “I never even laid eyes on ’em. I can ask for you. My friend’s still there. He’ll die there. But I think he said they went off in a big way. I hope I’m remembering that wrong. They got their fancy new car and drove the hell away.”
Maya and Alex stared at him dumbly. The sounds of a house at rest rushed into the silence: a ticking clock, the dogs readjusting their flanks, branches swinging outside. Maya placed her hand on Alex’s forearm, a silent plea not to look at her.
Alex exhaled painfully and his shoulders slumped. He braided his hands and looked at his thumbs. “I don’t understand this kind of person,” he said finally. “To give up a child.” His disinterest in brandishing his triumph frightened Maya; she wished for the old Alex, the brandishing Alex. Alex looked at Harry, but in defeat, without aggrievement. “We couldn’t have children,” Alex said. “They could, and gave him up.”
“But then you wouldn’t have gotten the boy,” Harry said, trying to correct his earlier levity.
“I wanted us to come here because I thought he would see where he was born and something would happen,” Maya said. “But nothing’s happened. Max wants to go home.” She looked over at Alex — she had meant the concession for him.
“So that’s something,” Harry said.
“By accident,” Alex said.
“It still counts,” Harry said. “Sangu’s first husband died of leukemia. At forty. He was a doctor, a handsome Indian man, certainly more handsome than the one-eyed wonder she ended up with. His loss was my gain. We lived with him for the first three years of our marriage. It was Sangu, Harry, and Amar. I wondered during those years about this special humiliation I had earned, to share a bed with a dead man. Sangu wailed into the night. I said, ‘Why did you marry me?’ And she would say things like, ‘Because you asked.’ Or: ‘Because I love you.’ I would ask how it was possible to love two men at once, and she would look at me like a wolf, like no one who had to ask that question deserved an answer. So I shut up — not my favorite setting. I shot a real wolf around that time. I was breaking the law but I felt anger inside me. As I aimed at him, I was aiming at Sangu. I got him down with one shot and then I raced home because I was convinced that she would be dead in the kitchen. But she was alive, reading, wearing those big glasses of hers. I covered her with kisses. And I waited. And now I am the luckiest man in the world.”