He could have sworn he saw her lift her shoulder and swivel toward him, her face alive and glowing with the early light, but he must have been fooling himself. Because when he summoned everything he had left in him and somehow managed to reach out his hand, there was nothing there.
(1997)
Peep Hall
I like my privacy. My phone is unlisted, my mailbox locks with a key, and the gate across the driveway automatically shuts behind me when I pull in. I’ve got my own little half-acre plot in the heart of this sunny little university town, and it’s fenced all the way round. The house is a Craftsman-era bungalow, built in 1910, and the yard is lush with mature foliage, including the two grand old oaks that screen me from the street out front, a tsunami of Bougainvillea that long ago swallowed up the chainlink on both sides of the place, half a dozen tree ferns in the fifteen-foot range, and a whole damp, sweet-earth-smelling forest of pittosporum, acacia, and blue gum eucalyptus crowding out what’s left of the lawn.
When I sit on the porch in the afternoon, all I see is twenty shades of green, and when someone bicycles by or the couple across the way get into one of their biweekly wrangles, I’m completely invisible, though I’m sitting right here with my feet propped up, taking it all in. I haven’t been to a concert or a sporting event for as long as I can remember, or even a play or the movies, because crowds irritate me, all that jostling and hooting, the bad breath, the evil looks, not to mention the microbes hanging over all those massed heads like bad money on a bad bet. And no, I’m not a crank. I’m not crazy. And I’m not old, or not particularly (I’ll be forty-one in November). But I do like my privacy, and I don’t think there’s any crime in that, especially when you work as hard as I do. Once I pull my car into the driveway, I just want to be left alone.
Six nights a week, and two afternoons, I stir mojitos and shake martinis at the El Encanto Hotel, where I wear a bowtie and a frozen smile. I don’t have any pets, I don’t like walking, my parents are dead, and my wife — my ex-wife — may as well be. When I’m not at the El Encanto, I read, garden, burn things in a pan, clean spasmodically, and listen to whatever the local arts station is playing on the radio. When I feel up to it, I work on my novel (working title, Grandma Rivers) — either that or my master’s thesis, “Claustrophobia in Franz Kafka’s Fictive Universe,” now eleven years behind schedule.
I was sitting on the porch late one afternoon — a Monday, my day off, the sun suspended just above the trees, birds slicing the air, every bud and flower entertaining its individual bee — when I heard a woman’s voice raised in exasperation from the porch next door. She was trying to reel herself in, fighting to keep her voice from getting away from her, but I couldn’t quite make out what she was saying. The woman’s voice rose and fell, and then I recognized the voice of my next-door neighbor saying something in reply, something curt and dismissive, punctuated by the end stop of the front door slamming shut.
Next it was the sharp hammer-and-anvil ring of spike heels on pavement—toing, toing, toing—as they retreated down the Schusters’ macadam driveway, turned left on the sidewalk, and halted at my gate, which was, of course, locked. I was alert now in every fiber. I slipped a finger between the pages of the novel I’d been reading and held my breath. I heard the gate rattle, my eyes straining to see through the dense leathery mass of the oaks, and then the voice called, “Hello, hello, hello!” It was a young voice, female, a take-charge and brook-no-nonsense sort of voice, a very attractive voice, actually, but for some reason I didn’t reply. Habit, I suppose. I was on my own porch in my own yard, minding my own business, and I resented the intrusion, no matter what it turned out to be, and I had no illusions on that score either. She was selling something, circulating a petition, organizing a Neighborhood Watch group, looking for a lost cat; she was out of gas, out of money, out of luck. I experienced a brief but vivid recollection of the time the gardener had left the gate ajar and a dark little woman in a sari came rushing up the walk holding a balsawood replica of the Stars & Stripes out in front of her as if it were made of sugar-frosted air, looked me in the eye, and said, “P’raps maybe you buy for a hunnert dollah good coin monee?”
“I’m your neighbor,” the voice called, and the gate rattled again. “Come on,” she said, “I can see you, you know — I can see your feet — and I know you’re there. I just want to take a minute of your time, that’s all, just a minute—”
She could see me? Self-consciously I lifted my feet from the floorboards and propped them up on the rail. “I can’t,” I said, and my voice sounded weak and watered down, “I’m busy right now.”
The fraction of a moment passed, all the sounds of the neighborhood butting up against one another — crows cursing in the trees, a jet revealing itself overhead with the faintest distant whine of its engines, a leaf blower starting up somewhere — and then she sang out, “I like your shoes. Where’d you get them? Not in this town, right?”
I said nothing, but I was listening.
“Come on, just a minute, that’s all I ask.”
I may live alone, by preference, but don’t get me wrong, I’m no eunuch. I have the same needs and urges as other men, which I’ve been able to satisfy sporadically with Stefania Porovka, the assistant pastry chef at the hotel. Stefania is thirty-two, with a smoky deep Russian voice that falls somewhere in the range between magnetic and aphrodisiacal and two children in elementary school. The children are all right, as children go, aside from a little caterwauling when they don’t get their way (which seems to be about a hundred percent of the time), but I can’t manage to picture them in my house, and by the same token, I can’t picture myself in Stefania’s psychotically disordered two-bedroom walk-up. So what I’m saying is that I got up from the porch and ambled down the walk to the gate and the girl of twenty or so standing there in blue jeans, heels and a V-neck top.
She was leaning over the gate, her arms crossed at the wrists, rings glinting from her fingers. Her eyes and hair were the exact same shade of brown, as if the colors had been mixed in the same vat, which in a sense I guess they were, and she had unusually thick and expressive eyebrows of the same color. From where I was standing, five feet back from the locked gate, I could see down the front of her blouse. She wasn’t wearing a brassiere. “Hello,” I said, regaling her with a cautious nod and the same approximation of a smile I put on for my customers at the bar.
“Oh, hi,” she returned, giving it the sort of emphasis that said she was surprised and impressed and very, very friendly. “I’m Samantha. I live up at the end of the block — the big white house with the red trim?”
I nodded. At this point I was noncommittal. She was attractive — pretty and beyond, actually — but too young for me to be interested in anything more than a neighborly way, and as I say, I wasn’t especially neighborly to begin with.
“And you are—?”
“Hart,” I said, “Hart Simpson,” and I put my hands on my hips, wondering if she could translate body language.
She never moved, but for a slight readjustment of her hands that set her bracelets ajingle. She was smiling now, her eyebrows arching up and away from the sudden display of her teeth. “Hart,” she repeated, as if my name were a curious stone she’d found in the street and was busy polishing on the sleeve of her blouse. And then: “Hart, are we bothering you? I mean, are we really bothering you all that much?”