Now the light had reached the stairwell and sent a gleam along the banister, but the carpeted steps were still in darkness and the cat slinking up them was only a shadow, her stripes invisible, her pointed face a single spear of white. She crossed the hall floorboards without a sound. She strode to the north rear bedroom and paused in the doorway and then advanced, so purposeful that you could see bow every joint in her body' was strung. Next to Bonny's side of the bed, she rose up on her hind legs to test the electric blanket-pat-pat along the edge of the mattress with one experienced paw, and then around to Morgan's side and pat-pat again. Morgan's side was warmer. She braced herself, tensed, and sprang onto his chest, and Morgan grunted and opened his eyes. It was' just that moment of dawn when the air seems visible: flocked, like felt, gathering itself together to take on color at any second. The sheets were a shattered, craggy landscape; the upper reaches of the room were lit by a grayish haze, like the smoke that rises from bombed buildings. Morgan covered his face. "Go away," he told the cat, but the cat only purred and sent a stilted stare elsewhere, pretending not to hear. Morgan sat up. He spilled the cat onto Bonny (a nest of tangled brown hair, a bare, speckled shoulder) and hauled himself out of bed.
In the winter he slept in thermal underwear. He thought of clothes-all clothes-as costumes, and it pleased him to stagger off to the bathroom hitching up his long johns and rummaging through his beard like some character from the Klondike. He returned with his face set in a brighter, more hopeful expression, having glimpsed himself in the bathroom mirror: there were decisions to be made. He snapped on the closet light and stood deciding who to be today. Next to Bonny's wrinkled skirts and blouses the tumult of his clothes hung, tightly packed together-sailor outfits, soldier outfits, riverboat-gambler outfits. They appeared to have been salvaged from some traveling operetta. Above them were his hats, stacked six deep on the shelf. He reached for one, a navy knit skullcap, and pulled it on and looked in the full-length mirror: harpooner on a whaling ship. He took it off and tried next a gigantic, broad-brimmed leather hat that engulfed his head and shaded his eyes. Ah, back to the Klondike. He tugged a pair of crumpled brown work pants over his long underwear, and added striped suspenders to hook his thumbs through. He studied his reflection awhile. Then he went to the bureau and plowed through the bottom drawer. "Bonny?" he said.
"Where are my Ragg socks?"
"Your what?"
"Those scratchy, woolly socks, for hiking." She didn't answer. He had to pad barefoot down the stairs, grumbling to himself. "Fool socks. Fool house. Nothing where it ought to be. Nothing where you want it." He opened the back door to let 'the dog out. A cold wind blew in. The tiles on the kitchen floor felt icy beneath his feet. "Fool house," he said again. He stood at the counter with an unlit cigarette clamped between 'his teeth and spooned coffee into the percolator.
The cabinets in this kitchen reached clear to the high ivory ceiling. They were stuffed with tarnished silver tea services and dusty stemware that no one ever used.
Jammed in front of them were ketchup bottles and cereal boxes and scummy plastic salt-and-pepper sets with rice grains in the salt from last summer when everything had stuck to itself. Fool house! Something had gone wrong with it, somehow. It was so large and formal and gracious a wedding present from Bonny's father, who bad been a wealthy man. Bonny had inherited a portion of his money. When the children stepped through the attic floor, it was Bonny who dialed the plasterers, and she was always having 'the broken windowpanes replaced, the shutters rehung when they sagged off their hinges, the masonry put back in chinks where the English ivy had clawed it away; hut underneath, Morgan never lost the feeling that something here was slipping, If they could just clear it out and start over, he sometimes thought. Or sell it! 'Sell it and have done with it, buy a plainer, more straightforward place. But Bonny wouldn't hear of it-some-thing to do with capital gains; he didn't 'know. It just never was the proper time, any time he brought it up.
The three smaller bedrooms, intended for a tasteful number of children, barely contained Morgan's daughters, and Brindle and Louisa shared an edgy, cramped existence on the third floor. The lawn was littered with rusty bicycles and raveling wicker furniture where Bonny's father had surely imagined civilized games of croquet. And nowadays apartment buildings were sprouting all around them, and the other houses were splitting into units and filling up with various unsortable collections of young people, and traffic was getting fierce. They seemed to be deep in the city. Well, all right. Morgan himself had been reared in the city, and had nothing against it whatsoever. Still, he kept wondering how this could have happened. As near as he could recall, he bad planned on something different. He had married his wife for her money, to be frank, which was not to say he didn't love her; it was just that he'd been impressed, as well, by the definiteness 'that" money had seemed to give her. It had hovered somewhere behind her left shoulder, cloaking her with an air of toughness and capability. She was so' clear about who she was. Courting her, Morgan had specifically bought a yachting cap with an eagle on the front, and white duck trousers and a brass-buttoned blazer to wear while visiting at her family's summer cottage. He had sat outside on the terrace, securely defined at last, toying with the goblet of tropical punch that Bonny's father had insisted on mixing for him- although in fact Morgan didn't drink, couldn't drink, had never been able to. Drinking made him talk too much. 'It made him spill the beans, he felt. He was trying to stay in character.
Staying in character, he had asked her father for Bonny's hand: Her father gave his approval; Morgan had wondered why. He was only a penniless graduate student with no foreseeable future. And be knew that he was nothing much to look at. (In those days he wore no beard, and there was something monkeyish and clumsy about his face.) When he took Bonny out somewhere, to one of her girlfriends' parties, he felt be was traveling under' false pretenses. He felt he had entered someone else's life. Only Bonny 'belonged there-an easygoing, pleasant girl, two or three years older than Morgan, with curly brown hair worn low on her neck in a sort of ball-shaped ponytail. Later, Morgan figured out that her father must have miscalculated. When you're rich enough, he must have thought, then it 'doesn't matter who you marry; you'll go on the same as ever. So 'he had nodded his blessing and given them this house, and expected that nothing would change. Luckily for him, he died soon after the wedding. Ho never saw the mysterious way the house started slipping downward, or sideways, or 'whatever it was that it was doing. He didn't have to watch as Bonny's dirndl skirts (once so breezy, so understated) began dipping at the hems, and her blouses somehow shortened and flopped bunchily out of her waistbands.
"Your father would have sold this house long ago," Morgan often told her. "Capital gains or no capital gains, he'd say, you should get a new one." But Bonny would say, "Why? What for?" She would ask, "What's' wrong with this one? Everything's been kept up.' I just 'had the roofers in. The painters came last May."
"Yes, but-"
"What is it that bothers you? Can you name one' thing that's in 'disrepair? Name it and I'll fix it. Every inch is in perfect shape,' and the Davey tree men just fertilized the trees." 'yes, but.' He went out front for the paper. Under his bare feet the spikes of frosty grass crunched and stabbed. Everything glittered. A single rubber flip-flop skated on the ice in the birdbath. He dashed back in, hissing, and slammed the door behind him. Upstairs an alarm clock rant, as if set off by the crash. They would be swarming everywhere soon. Morgan removed the news section and the comics section laid them on a kitchen chaff, and sat on, them. Then: he lit his cigarette and opened to the classified ads.