At least four prior owner/occupants have come to visit houses I’ve lived in over these years. I’ve always thrown the doors open, once it was clear they weren’t selling me burial insurance and I’d gotten my wallet off the hall table. I’ve just stood by like a docent and let them wander the rooms, grunting at this or that update, where a wall used to be, or recalling how the old bathroom smelled on Sunday mornings before church. On like that, until they can get it all straight in their minds and are ready to go. Usually it takes no longer than ten minutes — standard elapsed time for re-certifying sixty years of breathing existence. Generally it’s the over-fifties who show up. If you’re much younger, you’ve got it all recorded on your smartphone. And it’s little enough to do for other humans — help them get their narrative straight. It’s what we all long for, unless I’m mistaken.
“I don’t suppose, Mr. Bascombe…” Ms. Pines was taking another anxious peek around at my house, then back to me, smiling in her new defeated way. “… I don’t suppose I could step in the front door and have one quick look inside.” Kernels of dry snow were settling onto her cheeks, her coat shoulders and the onyx uppers of her boots. My hair had probably gone white. We were a fine couple. Though right at that second I experienced a sudden, ghostly whoosh of vertigo — something I’ve been being treated for, either along with or because of C-3 neck woes. The world’s azimuth just suddenly goes catty-wampus — and I could end up on my back. Though it can also, if I’m sitting down, be half agreeable — like a happy, late-summer, Saturday-evening zizz, when you’ve had a tumbler of cold Stoli and the Yanks are on TV. In my bed table I have pages of corrective exercise diagrams to redress these episodes. My “attack” on the lawn just whooshed in and whooshed out, like a bat flitting past a window at dusk. One knows these moments, of course, to be warnings.
“Okay. Sure. You bet you can,” I almost shouted this, trying to make myself not seem demented. Ms. Pines looked at me uncertainly, possibly stifling the urge to ask, “Are you okay?” (No more grievous words can be spoken in the modern world.) “Come with me,” I said, still too loud, and grappled her plump arm the way an octogenarian would. We lurched off toward my stoop steps, which were snow covered and perilous. “Watch your step here,” I said, as much to myself as to her.
“This is very kind of you,” Ms. Pines said almost inaudibly, coming along in my grip. “I hope it’s not an inconvenience…”
“It’s not an inconvenience,” I said. “It’s nothing at all. Su casa es mi casa…” I said the reverse of what I meant. It’s not that unusual anymore.
THE BIG LG, WHICH I’D LEFT ON IN THE LIVING room when I’d gone for my blind-reading, was in full ESPN cry when I opened the front door, the sound jacked way up. On the screen a beefy, barrel-shaped man in camo gear — face smudged with self-eliminating paint, and seated in a camo’d wheelchair — was just at that moment squeezing off, from an enormously-scoped, lethally-short-barreled black rifle propped on some kind of dousing stick, a terrible bullet aimed in the direction of a gigantic bull elk, possibly two thousand yards away across a pristine, echoing Valhalla-like mountainscape.
BOOM!
The entire mountain — plus my living room and the vaulted sky above it — quaked, then went deaf at the awful sound.
BOOM! Again the terrible report. The sun went dark, avalanches broke free, tiny sylvan creatures beside faraway alpine rills looked guardedly toward the heavens.
The elk — grazing, calm, thinking who-knows-what elk thoughts — suddenly went all weird and knee-wiggly, as if its parts had simultaneously resigned their roles. After which, in exactly one second, its head rose slightly as though it had heard something (it had), then it went right over like a candlepin into the dust-burst the bullet had kicked up, having passed straight through the creature as if it was butter.
“Wooo-hooo-hooo-hooo! Woooooo!” a man’s voice somewhere out of the picture began woo-hooing. “Ooooh man, oh man, oh man!”
“I am a deadly motherfucker,” the wheelchair marksman said (I could read his lips), his rifle across his unfeeling knees. He turned toward whoever was woo-hooing, a great crazed smile on his fat camo face. “It doesn’t get any better than this, does it, Arlo? Does it? Oh sweet Jesus…”
I quick ditched the Naipaul onto the couch, got my hands on the clicker, and doused the picture. I’d earlier been watching the NFL injury rundown, hoping to see if the Giants had a snowball’s chance against the Falcons on Sunday. They didn’t.
My house’s interior, absent the ear-warping TV clamor, became, then, intergalactically silent. And still. Like a room a security camera was guarding — a secret view for a stranger’s secret purposes. I often imagine myself as “a figure” in an elevator, being viewed through the grainy lens of just such a secreted camera. Mute. Unmindful. Generic — waiting for my floor, then the door opening, and (in my imagining) a hooded man stepping in before I can step out, and beginning to berate me or pummel me or shoot me at close range. (I watch too much television.) The head shrinkers at Mayo — where I get my prostate re-checks — would have a field day with my data set. There’s a side to this little drama that doesn’t make me look good, I realize — not someone you’d trust to run a day care or even a dog rescue.
Though shouldn’t our complex mental picture of ourselves at least partly include such a neutralized view? Not just the image that smiles wryly back from the shaving mirror; but the solitary trudger glimpsed in the shop window, shoulders slumped, hairline backing away, neck flesh lapping, bent as if by winds — shuffling down the street to buy the USA Today? Is that person not worth keeping in mind and paid a modicum? If not a round of huzzahs, at least a tip of the hat? A high five (or at least a low one)? I don’t share every view with Sally, who’d shout the rafters down with laughter if she knew all my innermost thoughts.
“My goodness,” Ms. Pines said from behind me, inside the tiny foyer now — my silent house’s primordial self suddenly all around her in a way anyone would find startling. It’s too bad we don’t let ourselves in for more unexpected moments. Life would be less flimsy, feel more worth preserving. The suburbs are supposedly where nothing happens, like Auden said about what poetry doesn’t do; an over-inhabited faux terrain dozing in inertia, occasionally disrupted by “a Columbine” or “an Oklahoma City” or a hurricane to remind us what’s really real. Though plenty happens in the suburbs — in the way that putting a drop of water under an electron microscope reveals civilizations with histories, destinies, and an overpowering experience of the present. “Well. Yes. My goodness, my goodness,” Ms. Pines kept saying in the front entry, the storm door sucking closed behind her, letting outside snow light in around her. “I don’t quite know what to say.” She was shaking her kewpie-doll head that either so much had changed or so little had. We’ve kept the “older-home” fussiness of small rooms, one-way-to-get-anywhere, an inset plaster phone nook, upstairs transoms, and all original fixtures except the kitchen. Sally hates the spiritless open-concept bleakness of the re-purposed. Do I really need a fucking greenhouse? is the way she put it.