It was surprising how quickly she got used to the place. Over the next couple of months, she made a friend of her roommate and began to join the others playing cards and sharing shows she always liked to watch on television. She even gained a few pounds, and got her hair done and a manicure from the stylist who donated her time every week. I had to say that Mother looked good, that the decision was right. I had forgotten how social she was before her decline. Only, the house was not selling and I had already dropped the price.
“Nobody with the income level that we need is moving here,” said the agent. “And the doctors, lawyers, and so on, they all build new at the edge of town.”
“Maybe we could sell it to the town. It could be a museum. See how carefully I’ve kept it?”
“You’ve done a beautiful job. I wish I could afford it, myself. We do have one interested party, but I’ve hesitated to mention him because he’s right up front talking about demolition.”
“Ted.” I knew. That he would want the house had, of course, occurred to me. I’d never sell it to him.
“Ted Bursap,” the realtor said, nodding. “He’ll give you your asking price.”
“The tear-down king. I don’t think so.”
“Well.” The real estate agent shrugged. “At least we’ve got him in our back pocket.”
“Yeah, sit on him! William Jennings Bryan stayed in this house when he came through on a stump speech. The windows were made out east and shipped here in huge sawdust crates. The interior moldings and woodwork are mahogany, the library panels—”
“You’re real attached, I know.”
I was too attached to give up the house — it was true. I figured and finagled, but all we had ever had was the house. My salary from the cemetery endowment was just enough through the years to maintain us, pay medical bills and my tuition, and keep the house in good shape, even though I did most of the repairs myself and had let the back wall go to the bees. I knew they were in there. In summer the wall vibrated with their sensuous life. All winter it was quiet as they slept. I had finished my law degree as I was waiting for the house to sell, and I decided to take the state bar exam. Perhaps I’d try to get a loan, I would take out a homeowner’s loan and pay it off once I’d hung out my shingle. In the evenings, I sat on the back porch studying like mad, listening to the bees gather the last sweetness before going to sleep. Their hum made the whole house awaken and I could not abandon it or them. After dusk, I sat in the paneled library, appreciating the stillness and the clean odor of the swept and dusted rooms. I thought how nice it would be to live there with C. I imagined it; I got lost in imagining it. I dreamed it when I fell asleep in my chair. All of a sudden I woke in blackness, alive to desolate knowledge.
In that moment, I knew what those who kill themselves over love know; I saw what passed before the eyes of dying men who fought idiotic duels. I’d wasted my life on a woman. All I had was this house. I called the agent.
“Okay,” I told him. “Sell the place to Ted.”
THE VERY NEXT day, I put all that my parents and I had ever owned into storage, and I moved out of the house into a motel. I soon heard that Ted had begun. I knew how he worked. His crew would dismantle the inside, prying off even the old bead board in the pantry, yanking out light fixtures, chipping the shadowy gold tiles from around the fireplace, disassembling the elegant staircase, packing up the stained glass. Once the inside was gutted, Ted would rent a giant new machine with a great toothed bucket that he operated to claw the shell of lath and plaster to splinters.
I sat in my room at the Bluebird, trying to read. I was scheduled to take the bar that week, but I couldn’t concentrate. It was as though the house was calling out to me, telling me that it loved me, that its destruction was a cruel and unnecessary adjunct to my decision to break things off with C. I couldn’t see what was happening to the house, but I could feel what Ted was doing as though it was happening to me. The poor motel room, so shabby with its faded wallpaper of fluttering swallows, the sagging mattress on its rickety bed, the sink of chipped gray porcelain, and worst of all — an attempt at cheer — a paper bluebird in a glassless frame, only filled me with low dread. I could feel myself chopped into, gutted, chipped out, destroyed. Finally, on the third day, reduced to bones or beams, I decided to act.
I left the Bluebird and walked in the warm summer air to C.’s. For the first time, I went in through the front door, the office door, without knocking. Her receptionist told me that she was busy with a patient, and squawked when I walked right past her into the examining room, which was empty. I shut that door and went out into the back, into her kitchen, where I surprised her as she was loading a brand-new dishwasher. She had shed her white coat and was wearing a light cotton sweater the color of cantaloupe. Her pants were honeydew green. Her glass earrings and her necklace combined both colors.
We stared at each other, and the sun went behind a cloud. The light in the kitchen changed from amber to gray. Her clothes deepened in color to rusted iron and bitter sage.
“Did Ted tell you that I sold him my house?”
From the look of shock on her face, I knew that he hadn’t, and I also knew, because I’d told her repeatedly of the situation with my mother, that she understood immediately what had happened.
“Is he…”
“Of course.”
“I’ll stop him!”
“Just let him.”
“Just let him?”
“Pack your stuff,” I said. “We’ll go now. Our age won’t be an issue in the city, and you can start a new practice. Leave Ted the house. Let’s go.”
Behind her, the dishwasher swished on, the water purred in and heated up. She turned away from me and faced the counter.
“I forgot to add the cups,” she said.
A cloud of steam shot out as she opened the door to put in two coffee mugs, but when she closed it and looked at me, I loved her again and I could not give her up.
“Buy my house from Ted. I’ll pay you back, and we can live there.”
“Is he working over there now?”
“Yes.”
She wiped her hands carefully, the way doctors do.
What had she decided? She walked out the front door and I followed her. The walk to my house was about a mile, and this was the first time that we had ever been seen in public together, which, for a moment, made me happy. And then, when we were almost at the house, I understood that the fact that she’d allowed herself to be seen in public with me meant our love was over for good.
WHEN WE ARRIVED, I saw that one crew was pulling out the front-porch columns, and another had started work on the rear wall of the house. Ted was in the back, in the gardens, and I tried not to gasp at the way he had allowed the workers to trample the blooms of portulaca and the still-green clumps of sedum into the mulched ground. The bees were everywhere, more than usual, and I felt a terrible guilt at having betrayed them. I apologized in a whisper as I looked around the back, as I saw Ted on the machine that he would use to tear into the back wall of the house.
C. shouted for him to quit. He turned off the engine and she walked over and began to talk to him, her back to me. But he was at an angle and I could see that although he was listening to what she was saying, he was actually looking at me. He looked at me as if I’d taken something from him. A hard look, an easy flicker. Although I was unaccustomed to seeing Ted with her, I did understand that he knew. On some level, not a conscious level but deep down, he knew, as a man knows. He turned from C. and restarted the machine — he rammed it forward. Its claw made a rip in the wall and he backed it up to make another, but before he could move forward again, there was a roar louder than the motor. A darkness poured from my house. A ripsaw whined. A sweetness exploded from the back wall, and Ted and C. were swarmed by the bees.