“I think we’re damn lucky not to have got sucked into that Hanrahan house.” Joe looks at me with a bully’s self-assurance, as if he’s just figured this out by staring down the street — though of course he’s only angling for approval (which I’m happy to supply).
“I don’t think you ever saw yourself in that house, Joe. I don’t really think you liked it.” He’s still staring off from the bottom step, waiting, I take it, for nothing.
“I didn’t like having a prison in my back yard,” Phyllis says, fingering the doorbell, which chimes a distant, lonesome two tones back in the empty rooms. She is dressed in her own standard roomy, hip-concealing pleated khakis and sleeveless white ruffle-front blouse that makes her appear swollen. In spite of trying to act plucky, she looks hollow-cheeked and spent, her face too flushed, her fingernails worked down, her eyes moist as if she might start crying for no reason — though her red mushroom cut is as ever neat, clean and fluffy. (Possibly she’s experiencing recurrent health woes, though it’s more likely her last few days on earth have simply been as rigorous as mine.)
And yet despite these diminishments, I sense an earnest, almost equable acceptance is descending on both the Markhams: certain fires gone out; other, smaller ones being ignited. So that it’s conceivable they’re on the threshold of unexpected bliss, know it instinctually like a lucky charm but can’t quite get it straight, so long has their luck been shitty.
“My view’s simple,” Joe says, apropos of the lost Hanrahan option. “If somebody buys a house you think you want before you can get it, they just wanted it more than you did. It’s no tragedy.” He shakes his head at the sound wisdom of this, though once again it’s verbatim “realtor’s wisdom” I provided long months ago but actually don’t mind hearing now.
“You’re right there, Joe,” I say. “You’re really right. Let’s take a look inside, whaddaya say?”
A walk-thru of an empty house you expect to rent (and not buy and live in till you croak) is not so much a careful inspection as a half-assed once-over in which you hope to find as little as possible to drive you crazy.
The Harrises’ house, in spite of opened doors, raised windows and every single tap run for at least a minute, has clung to its unwelcoming older-citizen odor of sink traps and mouse bait, and generally stayed dank and chilly throughout. As a consequence, Phyllis lingers noncommittally near the windows, while Joe heads right off for the bathroom and a quick closet count. She touches the nubbly plaster walls and looks out through the blue blinds, first at the close-by McLeods’, then down at the narrow side yard, then into the back, where the garage sits locked up in the morning sunshine, surrounded by a bed of day lilies weeks past bloom. (I’ve left the push mower against the garage wall where they can notice it.) She tries one sink faucet, opens one cabinet and the refrigerator (which I have somehow failed to inspect but am relieved to find doesn’t stink), then walks to the back door, leans and looks out its window, as if in her mind right outside should be a verdant mountain pinnacle in full view, where she could hike today and take a drink from a cold spring, then lie faceup in gentians and columbines as pillowy clouds scud past, causing no car alarms to go off. She has wanted to come here, and now here she is, though it requires a specific moment of wistful renunciation, during which she may once again be seeing backward to today from an uncertain future, a time when Joe is “gone,” the older kids are even more scattered and alienated, Sonja is with her own second husband and his kids in Tucumcari, and all she can do is wonder how things took the peculiar course they did. Such a view would make anyone but a Taoist Sage a little abstracted.
She turns to me and smiles actually wistfully. I am in the arched doorway connecting the small dining room with the small, neat kitchen, my hands in my red windbreaker pockets. I regard her companionably while fingering the house keys. I am where a loved one would wait below a mistletoe sprig at Christmas, though my reverie of a physical Phyllis has become another holiday statistic.
“We did think about just staying permanently in a motel,” she says almost as a warning. “Joe considered becoming an independent contractor at the book company. The money’s so much better that way, but you pay for your own benefits, which is a big consideration for me now. We met another young couple there who were doing it, but they didn’t have a child, and it’s hard to go off to school from a Ramada. The clean sheets and cable are attractive to Joe. He even called some nine hundred number at two o’clock this morning about moving to Florida. We were just beyond making sense.”
Joe is in the bathroom, studiously testing the sink and both faucets, checking out the medicine cabinet. He does not know how to rent a house and can only think in terms of permanence.
“I expect you all to keep right on looking,” I say. “I expect to sell you a house.” I smile at her, as I have in other houses, in direr straits than now, which in fact are not so dire but pretty damn good at $575.
“We were burning our candle at both ends, I guess,” she says, standing in the middle of the empty red-tiled kitchen. It is not the right trope, but I understand. “We need to burn one end at a time for a while.”
“Your candle lasts longer that way,” I say idiotically. There isn’t much that really needs saying in any case. They’re renting, not buying, and she is simply not used to it either. All is fine.
“Bip, bip, bip, bip, bip, bip, bip,” Joe can be heard saying back in the bedroom, seizing his chance to check the filters on the window unit.
“How’s your son?” Phyllis looks at me oddly, as if it has occurred to her at this very second that I’m not at his bedside but am here showing a short-term rental on the 4th of July with my child on the critical list. A sense of shared parental responsibility but also personal accusation clouds her eyes.
“He came through the surgery real well, thanks.” I fidget the keys in my pocket to make a distracting sound. “He’ll have to wear glasses. But he’s moving down here with me in September.” Perhaps in a year, as a trusted older boy, he can even escort Sonja on a date to a mall.
“Well, he’s lucky,” Phyllis says, swaying a little, her hands judgmentally down in her own generous pockets. “Fireworks are dangerous no matter whose hands they’re in. They’re banned in Vermont.” She now wants me out of her house. In the span of sixty seconds she’s assumed responsibility for things here.
“I’m sure he’s learned his lesson,” I say, and then we stand saying nothing, listening to Joe’s footsteps in the other rooms, the sound of closet doors being cracked open and reopened to check for settling, light switches clicked up and down, walls thumped for studs — all activities accompanied by the occasional “Bip, bip, bip” or an “Okay, yep, I get it,” now and then an “Uh-oh,” though most often “Hmm-hmmm.” All, of course, is in perfect, turn-key condition; the house was gone over by Everick and Wardell after the Harrises left, and I have checked it myself (though not lately).
“No basement, huh?” Joe says, appearing suddenly in the hall doorway, from which he takes a quick look around the ceiling and back out toward the open front door. The house is warming now, its floors shiny with outside light, its dank odors shifting away through the open windows. “I’ll have to improvise a kiln somewhere else, I guess.” (No mention of Phyllis’s papermaking needs.)