—
The next day was Sunday and I was up early, still running on East Coast time. I awakened in the dark and for a long while just lay there on my side watching the numbers mutate on the face of the ancient digital clock Chrissie’s mother had left behind when she’d died the previous year. I hadn’t wanted that clock — I always tried to sleep through the night and didn’t like knowing what time it was if I woke to use the bathroom, which was increasingly common now that I’d reached the age when the prostate seems programmed to enlarge — but, of course, out of sensitivity to Chrissie and her loss, I’d given in. “It reminds me of her,” Chrissie had claimed the day she’d cleared space on the bureau and knelt to plug the thing in. “I know it’s crazy,” she added, turning to give me a plaintive look, “but it’s like she’s right here watching over me.” Again, out of sensitivity, I didn’t point out to my wife that she couldn’t see the thing anyway since she wore a sleep mask to bed (along with a medieval-looking dental appliance designed to prevent her from snoring, which, occasionally, it did). At any rate, I watched the numbers reorganize themselves until the window took on a grayish glow that reminded me of the test pattern on the TV we’d had when I was a boy, then I pushed myself up, pulled on a pair of shorts, a T-shirt and sandals, and slipped out the door, thinking to walk down to the village for croissants and coffee.
It was utterly still, the new-made light just touching the tops of the trees in a glad, dependable way. There was no sound but for the distant hiss of the freeway, a kind of white noise we all get so used to we barely know it’s there. A crow started up somewhere and then the other birds chimed in, variously clucking and whistling, but hidden from view. I wasn’t thinking about Carey Fortunoff or anything else for that matter beyond maybe the way the smell of fresh coffee and croissants hot from the oven hit you when you stepped in the door of the bakery, but then I found myself passing by his house — or jungle, that is — and I couldn’t help stopping right there in the street to wonder all over again about the kind of person who could let his property deteriorate like that.
The car was still there, still listing, still enclosed in a shadowy pocket of vegetation. The bushes were woven as tight as thatch, the trees — eucalyptus, black acacia, oak and Catalina cherry — struggling above them. Looking closer, I could see the bright globes of oranges and — what was it, Meyer lemon? — choked in the gloom, and there, to the side of the car, a splash of pink begonias run wild. I glanced over my shoulder. Did I feel guilty? Ghoulish, even? Yes. But a moment later I was trespassing on a dead man’s property.
It was nothing to duck down the tunnel of the drive to where a crude path twisted through the undergrowth in the direction of what must have been the house itself. The shadows congealed. I felt a chill. People always describe the odor of dead things as being vaguely sweetish, but the smell here was more of the earth, the smell of compost or what’s left at the bottom of the trash can on a summer morning. I’d gone maybe a hundred feet before I spotted a window up ahead, the light puddled there, dense and gray, and then the front of the house emerged from the tangle like a stage prop, single story, flat roof, stucco in a shade of brown so dark it was almost black. Coffee grounds, that was what I thought of, a house the color of coffee grounds, and what was wrong with beige or white or even lime green for that matter? But now the path widened, branches broken off, bushes trampled, and it came to me that this was where the police had gone in to bundle up the corpse in some sort of plastic sheet or body bag, something impervious to leakage.
I could have stopped there. I suppose I should have. But I was curious — and I’d come this far, Chrissie asleep still, the croissants on the warming tray in the display case at the bakery and the coffee brewing, and, as I say, I felt some deeper compulsion, no man an island and all that — and without even thinking I went right up the front steps and tried the door. It was locked, as I’d expected it to be, though in this neighborhood we have an exceptionally low incidence of crime and people have grown pretty casual about security. Half the time — and I’m at fault here, I know it, because you’ve got to be prepared for the unexpected — Chrissie and I forget to set the house alarm when we turn in at night. Still, there I was on the front porch of Carey Fortunoff’s house and the door was locked — and whether he’d locked it himself before climbing into bed for the final time or the firemen had secured it after breaking in was something I didn’t want to think about. Next thing I knew, I was fighting my way through jasmine and oleander gone mad, clinging to the skin of the house and trying the windows successively till I reached the back and found the door there, a windowless slab of pine painted the same color as the house, only two shades lighter. I tried the knob. It turned in my hand till it clicked and the door eased open.
Inside, the smell was more intense, as you might expect, but it wasn’t overpowering — there was a chemical component to it, an astringency, and I realized that the firemen must have used some sort of dispersal agent to contain the odor. Everything was dim, the windows overgrown, the shades pulled, the shadows intact. Very gradually — and it was absolutely still in that room, which turned out to be the kitchen — my eyes began to adjust and I was surprised to see that things were orderly enough, no cascading bags of garbage, no blackened pans piled up in a grease-smeared sink, no avocado skins strewn across the floor. Orderly — and ordinary too. He had the same sort of things in his kitchen we did, dishwasher, Viking range, coffee maker, refrigerator.
For a long while I just stood there, ignoring the voice in my head that advised me to get out, screamed at me to get out while I could, because if anybody should catch me here the humiliation factor would be off the scale, Neighbor Caught Looting Dead Rocker’s House, but then, almost as if I were working from a script, I crossed the room and pulled open the refrigerator door. The light blinked on and I saw the usual stuff arrayed there — catsup, mayonnaise, Dijon mustard, horseradish, chunky peanut butter, pickles, a six-pack of Hires root beer. Half a dozen eggs resided in the sculpted plastic container built into the door. There was butter in the butter compartment and in the rack on the door a carton of one percent milk, expired. Did I actually unscrew the lid of the pickle jar, pluck one out with thumb and forefinger and savor the cold crunch of it between my teeth? I’m not sure. Maybe. Maybe I did.
Again, there was something operating in me here that I’m not proud of — that I wasn’t even in control of — and I’m telling you about it simply to get it down, get it straight, but really, what was the harm? I was curious, all right? Is curiosity a crime? And sympathetic too, don’t forget that. A thought flashed through my head — if those East Coast people could see me now they’d be the ones vetoing the arrangement and not me — but the thought crumpled like foil and in the next moment I was moving down the hall to the living room, or great room, as the realtors like to call it. Great or not, it was an expansive space with a raised ceiling that must have taken up a third of the square footage of the place and had once featured a view out to sea, where water and sky met in a shimmering translucent band that shrank and enlarged and changed color through all the phases of the day, the same view Chrissie and I enjoy, albeit more distantly, from our upstairs bedroom window. The shades hadn’t been drawn here, but there was nothing to see beyond the cascading leaves and the bare branchless knuckles of the shrubs pressed up against the glass.