He lived, sober and industrious, in an eccentric neighborhood, an enclave of picturesque 1920s-era bungalows on a loop of two-lane called John Ogilvie Way, in the southeast borough, near the river.
During the first half of the nineteenth century, the city rang with more harmonies than discords, and everywhere there were things to please the eye. But during decades when the government turned to expert planners, much of the past was considered déclassé, if not abhorrent. Architecture that raised in the mind an appreciation of history was deemed embarrassing because much of that history was considered unfortunate, if not shameful. No place could be made for what was quaint or charming or noble. Anything that might be seen as the work of sentimental primitives was torn down and replaced by massive buildings seemingly inspired by Soviet apartment blocks and by forests of steel-and-glass office towers that blazed in daylight as if they were more glorious than the sun that shed it.
The bungalows of John Ogilvie Way became popular with painters, sculptors, and ceramics artists who lived in them and used them also as their personal galleries. The neighborhood survived long enough to become a tourist attraction, a cultural asset about which the city boasted. Because contemporary art is said to be about the future and progress, about abstraction and the impossibility of knowing truth, it is embraced not just by genuine aficionados but also by those who despise the past. So Ogilvie Way remained, encircled by structures that, in their bold expressions of brute power and command, looked as if they were from a parallel world in which Hitler triumphed.
In appreciation of Simon having saved the nameless girl, Gwyneth had bought a house in this enclave so that he could live there rentfree and seek again to explore his talent. It was a spacious dwelling in spite of being a bungalow, with a deep front porch and elements of Craftsman style. Lights were on in all its windows. She drove a block past Simon’s house and parked on the farther side of the street.
We got out of the Rover.
“We can’t go directly to the front door,” she said.
“Why not?”
“Have to scout the place in case they found him. If something’s happened to Simon, I’ll never forgive myself. I said I’d be here in half an hour, and I wasn’t.”
Consulting my Rolex, I said, “Thirty-five minutes is pretty close. Five minutes can’t have made a difference.”
“Something tells me that it did.”
Even past eleven o’clock at night, lights shone in the windows of nearly all the bungalows. I supposed that artists, who didn’t have to live by the hours of a standard business day, might be most creative when the rest of the world began to grow quiet, that with their talent might come circadian rhythms different from those of us who lacked their particular gifts.
The street reminded me of one of those winter paintings by Thomas Kinkade, charming houses and cobbled walkways and evergreens draped with snow as glamorous as bejeweled ermine, the whole infused with warm light expressed in unexpected but convincing ways. The scene was steeped in magic, but magic has two forms — light and dark.
From a pocket of her coat, Gwyneth withdrew a small can of Mace and handed it to me. From another pocket, she took her close-contact Taser.
We crossed the street and passed through the narrow side yard of the dark bungalow next door to Simon’s, into that backyard. A stately monastic evergreen of some kind rose to sixty feet, providing us with a shadowed and sheltered observation point under the hood and habit of its snow-laden boughs.
Simon’s house lay quiet in the white downpour, plucked by this weaker and fitful wind but unmoved, so snug that it seemed to welcome drifts that might bury it and insulate it further from the world. No shadows moved beyond the lighted windows.
The only strangeness was a pale fan of light that repeatedly arced wide and then contracted across the back porch, irregular in its timing, not accompanied by any sound. When we moved out from the tree, toward the low garden wall that separated the properties, we saw that the light came from the house and that it was measured out by an open door, which again and again eased almost shut only to be blown open each time by the changeable wind.
“Not good,” Gwyneth said.
We crossed the garden wall, the yard, and ascended the steps with a wary urgency. On the porch, we heard a voice inside, but it was that of an announcer backed by music and must have come from a television.
With her usual daring, Gwyneth crossed the threshold. Although the only two residences I had ever entered in the city were both hers, and although this bungalow felt like a trap, I followed her without hesitation.
“Close the door,” she whispered.
I wondered if that would prove wise, but I closed it quietly.
We were in an open space, with a small kitchen to the left and to the right a larger area that might have been intended as a family room. Simon evidently lived largely in this back section of the bungalow, for it was furnished with a bed, two armchairs with small tables, an old chifforobe, and a wall-mounted TV currently tuned to a news program. These quarters were nearly as modest as my three rooms, but I supposed that to a man who had lived on the streets and who had slept under bridges for thirty years, the accommodations seemed palatial.
On the TV, an enormous cruise ship lay at anchor near the mouth of a harbor, and the newsreader said something about the authorities denying the captain the right to dock.
Far beneath the city, under countless tons of concrete and steel, radio waves or microwaves could not be received. During my adventures aboveground, every time I had a glimpse of television, it intrigued me. I always reminded myself, however, that Father said we were better off without TV, that it was an instrument of change that could make us into people we would not like to be.
My mother had no television in her remote house, and yet she had become less than she wanted to be. Perhaps she watched a lot of TV as a child in her parents’ home and everywhere else that she lived before she had gone to the mountain house. There was so much that I didn’t know, that I might never know, and many things that I didn’t understand about the psychology of those people who lived their lives openly aboveground.
Anyway, Simon’s quarters were essentially a studio apartment, which he kept spotless. No grime. No dust. As a consequence, the broken vase and the smear of blood on the blond-wood floor were the visual equivalent of a shout.
49
She was a girl who opened doors, not because she wanted to open them, but because she knew that she needed to open them.
The chocolate-brown paneled door between Simon’s living quarters and the other rooms of the bungalow seemed like a monolith to me, a formidable slab beyond which lay something to be feared, either past or future violence. If the choice had been mine, I might have left right then; but the decision was Gwyneth’s.
The door opened to a short hallway. To the left were a bath and a room used for storage, both doors open and lights softly aglow. To the right lay the studio in which Simon created his works. No one, dead or alive, waited for us in those spaces.