I have rehearsed in memory the significant events leading up to the present moment, changing them slightly to permit (for myself) the pleasure of new discovery. My wife, as I look about me, is sitting on a three-legged stool, staring at the walls, hoarding her silence. I put my arm on her shoulder. “It will be all right,” I whisper. There is no response, not even a slight turn of the head.
I leave her reluctantly, go on through the remaining rooms, promising a full report when I return.
There is nothing wrong with the second floor that a little paint and plaster couldn’t make right. I hang my coat over a small hole in the east wall of the master bedroom. Why advertise disrepair.
The second-floor bathroom is being grouted, I discover, by a Sicilian with only two or three words of English at his command. “Who employed you?” I ask him.
“Is a equal opportunity,” he answers. “Who a demployed you?” “I’m the owner,” I say, “or will be after the closing ceremony which is going on, unless I misrecollect, at this very moment.”
“A Miss Recollect,” he says. “She a demploy.”
We discuss the films of Lucino Visconti, none of which he has seen, and how much of the plumbing is brass and how much lead. “All is van…” he says, referring to the plywood cabinet under the sink.
“We’ll tear it out,” I say.
The third floor, mostly glass and steel, is the showcase of the house, an extensive renovation “combining,” says the brochure on the end table in the hall, “the glories of the past with the luxury and elegance of the future.” The extended back room, which has a glass wall overlooking an overgrown English garden, is a painter’s studio. There is something familiar about its very unfamiliarity. The sun filtering through the large stained-glass skylight creates liquescent patterns of color on the white marble floor. This extraordinary studio moves me to regret. If this room had been available to me years back, my life might have moved in a wholly different direction.
I look out at the street from the third-floor terrace. The movers have just arrived, their truck double-parked in front of the house. My wife, or a woman who resembles her, is talking animatedly to a pencil-thin black man with a sofa strapped to his back. She is pointing toward the third floor. I try to get her attention, but she doesn’t notice my wave and the street noises drown me out. The mover nods and shakes his head, of two minds about whatever it is. My wife sits upright on the sofa, balancing herself against the angle of repose, and is carried inside on the mover’s back.
The house fills ups. I go down the stairs, looking for my wife.
The stereo in the first parlor is playing “When I’m 64.” The children, not all of them mine, are having a party in the kitchen.
I ask who’s supervising them; no one seems to know. “This is a housewarming,” the smallest of them says. “It’s cold outside.”
My wife is standing in the doorway, tears streaming down her face. The movers edge discreetly by, careful of her privacy.
“Now that I have everything I want,” she says, “I don’t know what to do with myself.”
This remark, coming from anyone else, would seem ironic.
“Everything you want?” I ask,
One of the movers, the thin black reed, invites her to run away with him to Harlem. (I plead with her to stick it out here.)
She is moved by his unexpected offer, she tells the mover, though she doesn’t see how she can accept, her life circumscribed by intractable patterns.
“You will not be asked again,” he says.
Our marble table passes, a jagged crack unknown to its past at the center.
We are talking about not moving again for five years, unless the unforeseen is manifest, when a crash interrupts and we turn as one to see a book box, the instant after it slides out from under the sash of the reedlike mover, bumping down the steps. My wife lets out a scream of alarm. Books fall in disorder at our feet.
SPEAK MEMORY RETURN OF THE NATIVE