But what had he done his first afternoon in their house? Richard shook his head. He’d taken a shower and tried to get beyond the memory of the Houston woman lying on the couch and asking him to play rough with her. Then he’d thought about the few women he’d seen naked, Megan in the mirror. In high school there’d only been hands, opened blouses, sweating windshields.
Unhappy with the soft mattress in the guest room, he had taken his suitcase into their room and dropped it on the beautiful quilt he recognized as his mother’s work. He opened their dresser drawers; he opened the closet, pushed back clothes, poked through shoe boxes, found a snub-nosed revolver in one and felt as if he’d found cocaine. This wasn’t like Tom at all. Then, Richard smelled Tom’s strong and spicy colognes and, in the third bureau drawer, put his hands into her underwear. Pulling out a fistful of panties, he scattered them on the bed.
For an hour or more he went through everything he could. He told himself that here was a chance to piece everything together — an opportunity to know them both better than he ever could any other way. Far more complete than what one learns over telephones, from infrequent letters about the superficial details of health, money, parents, work. Tom was his brother and Megan his sister-in-law. But their lives were secret and foreign, and here, suddenly, he had the perfect chance to find out who they were.
So he took out things, examined them, put them back, fighting, all the time, his conscience, guilt, amazement, the fear of being caught by their sudden return. Their faces in the door of the small study dumbstruck at Richard sitting at the desk, rummaging through old bills, lecture notes, memos concerning the League of Women Voters.
My God, he kept thinking, what am I doing? I’m the most secretive, private person I know. How would I feel? And he saw himself returning once from the kitchen and finding her with a book she’d taken out of his bedside table. He couldn’t comprehend such an action. He had thought then how he’d have to keep an eye on her.
“Jesus,” she’d said, oblivious to her crime, “you keep this sort of thing in the bedroom? Wow, everything there is to know about junk bonds.”
But he hadn’t stopped himself. Not until a folder had buckled and spilled across the floor, and, bending down, he’d read the medical expenses for artificial insemination at a hospital in St. Louis. They were enormous, and evidently the college insurance didn’t cover them. There were several angry letters from Tom to the insurance people and one from Megan, less angry, her approach one of quiet logic.
Richard sat for a while, completely convicted, and then he had straightened up and unpacked in the guest room and drunk a large glass of sherry from the serving cart in the dining room.
That night in their bed he listened to them talk about him. My poor brother Richard, he could hear Tom say. He doesn’t have much of a life there in Houston. Oh, he’s perfectly fine. He could hear Megan’s rich voice. But his life really is mostly work, work, work. He’s always been that way, you know. And Richard winced at Tom’s voice and, for a while, was glad he’d gone so drastically out of control and had searched their house.
The next morning he’d woken to the fish smell he’d been unable to locate and now guessed he’d just have to get used to.
In midafternoon Richard was interrupted by a series of sharp raps on the front door. He laid his autobiography of Henry Ford on the end table and got up from the couch. Out the big bay window the sky was cloudless, the leaves on the maples along the street drooped. He knew how hot it was; this summer was defined by drought and crop failure throughout the country and, in the west, tremendous forest fires. At night, on the news, it looked as if the whole nation was hot and weary.
When he opened the wooden door, he looked down on a short, broad woman in her late fifties, her hands full of brochures, small plastic bowls, flyswatters. Richard shook his head. “I don’t live here; the owners are away.”
The broad, moon face broke into a smile, and she came up the steps and under Richard’s arm. “Of course you don’t, honey. You’re Rich, Tom’s baby brother. Bet it’s hotter in Houston now, huh?” Her lime-green, shiny dress was all reflection and motion as she laid the items on the coffee table and dropped heavily onto the couch. “Whew, it ain’t no picnic here, is it hon?” And she wiped her forehead and chin with a handkerchief from her huge purse. Richard smelled the sharp bitter lemon odor of perfume as she clicked her bag shut.
“Barbie Glass,” she said, leaning back to look up at Richard. She patted the couch at her side. “Have a seat, Rich; I can’t stay a minute you know.” She shook her head. “Can’t leave the old man alone these days. You know how they are.”
Richard sat and nodded his head. He looked through the window, but there wasn’t a car anywhere. He realized she was a neighbor.
“Anyway, Megan and Tom told me all about you,” she reached out and patted his arm. “Big-time accountant, CPA,” and she rolled her eyes. “So, how’s little ole Coalston shaping up? I’d have come over earlier — saw the taxi out the kitchen window,” she twisted herself around. “That’s us — me and Buddy — right over there. But I thought I’d give you a day to get settled in.”
Richard turned too and nodded at the small brick house with green, mismatching trim.
“Anyway, it’s an old people’s neighborhood, you know. Tom and Megan the youngest in a dozen blocks. And we all love ‘em, the honeys. You’re a lucky man, you know.”
Richard nodded.
“Anyway, here’s the Welcome Wagon,” and she rolled her head back and laughed loud. Richard laughed too and looked down at the coffee table.
“Really, I’m one of two of us. Me and Julie Hutchinson,” she wrinkled her heavily powdered nose. Her eyes were small and the depthless blue of water in a swimming pool. “So, I thought, I’ll leave Buddy just a minute and meet Rich and why not take him the usual, huh? Why not?”
Richard nodded and smiled. And Barbie went quickly through the assortment of pizza coupons, bottle openers, flyswatters — from a funeral home. “Can you believe that?” Barbie cackled. Richard said he couldn’t. She rattled on about the quality of the schools, troubles with the few blacks who were ruining everything in the county, the weather, the nearby lakes.
“Well,” she said, and stood up surprisingly quickly for so large a woman. “Buddy’s missing me for sure by now.” And she reached out a hand that Richard, puzzled, met to shake. But instead, Barbie grabbed his wrist in a cool grip and led him through the living room to the adjoining dining room that opened onto the rear deck. She brought them close to the large sliding door. Richard looked out with her. Barbie’s finger jabbed the glass.
“You’d better watch out for ‘em.” She stared up into Richard’s eyes, and he felt compelled to nod.
“Who?”
“There, in that mess of a garage apartment, the green one — right there.”
Richard hadn’t taken the time to sit on the deck yet. There was no shade, and the planks and metal lawn chairs looked scalding in the harsh sunlight. Now he took time to notice the house at the end of Barbie’s finger.
The backs of all the yards ended in a wall of dense woods that lined the banks of an invisible creek. The lawn to his left was manicured; he’d seen the old thin man who lived there mowing at noon. The house to the right was a bit closer to the street than Tom and Megan’s. And, obviously, the owners had built some sort of garage apartment, or perhaps had sold the back half of their large lot. The faded kelly-green house was unusually dilapidated for this neighborhood. Its gray roof buckled in several places. A low fence of raw cinder blocks surrounding it was almost obscured by high weeds. Abandoned pieces of rusting machinery lined the fence. There was a tangle of scaffolding and a cement mixer with a split bucket. It reminded Richard of housing in some third-world country — poorly planned, hand-built, unfinished.