Brief Encounters with the Enemy Page 13

  His feet were on the desk when I walked in and his diplomas were on the wall. He was dressed in a black suit with cuff links in the shape of mortarboards. Today was graduation and presently he would be standing onstage handing eighth graders their diplomas, intoning to each, “Give your best, get your best.”

  It was strange to see him in a suit, and he looked severe. Severe like a magistrate. I took a seat across from him and waited for what no doubt would be an unfavorable verdict. He was dressed to inflict maximum punishment.

  “I have a proposition for you, Jake,” he said without preamble. Then he launched into a strange and roundabout story—interrupted periodically by the ringing of his phone—that had nothing to do with my lack of pedagogy.

  He was looking for a house-sitter.

  Now that the war was over—“Thanks to you, Jake”—he would be doing some traveling. He was going to see the world. He and his wife. They were leaving in a few days. Day after tomorrow, actually. He had lined up a house-sitter—a friend of a cousin—but that person had fallen through at the last minute because he was young and irresponsible. Dr. Dave had thought of me. I had popped into his head. Would I be interested? There was no money, of course. “But I’m sure you could use your own sort of vacation, Jake.” We laughed together at this. He knew my salary. He probably knew the size of my apartment. All that was required of me was to collect the mail and water the garden. Other than that, I would have the run of the house, including the forty-two-inch high-definition television.

  “Do you want to think about it?” he asked. No, I didn’t want to think about it.

  I called Fred the subletter the next day. This time he was happy to hear from me. He showed up with a dozen boxes and the first month’s rent in cash. My mother was there, helping me pack. It was her day off from answering phones and she had nothing better to do. There wasn’t much to pack except clothes.

  “We’ll be out of your hair in no time,” she told Fred. She was always apologizing for things that didn’t require apology.

  “If you forget anything,” Fred said to me, “you’re always welcome to come back.”

  “I know that, Fred,” I said.

  By the time we left, he was reclining on my couch/bed with his shoes off and his arms behind his head as if he had been the tenant all along.

  Dr. Dave’s house was located an hour away, on the other side of the river, in the exclusive and upscale Cranberry Township. In the car, I gave my mother half the rent money.

  “Oh, I don’t need that,” she said. She took it anyway.

  Fifteen minutes into the drive all traces of the urban world were gone, replaced by the countryside. The countryside would have been picturesque, except it was wilting. I’d been to Cranberry Township once, when I was a boy, eight years old maybe, visiting a friend I’d made at day camp. Rodney. It had been a summer day but we’d spent our time in the basement playing video games and eating potato chips. In the evening his father had driven me home in his Mercedes-Benz. I’d had the idea that I would be returning to Cranberry Township shortly, but twenty years had passed.

  “All I’m saying,” my mother was saying, “is it’s wrong.” She was complaining about the war. The second wave of soldiers was coming home and apparently no one cared, including me. This is why it’s good to be first.

  “It’s just not right,” she said, “it’s not good.” It was a sign of bad things to come. She paused, waiting for me to agree with her. I turned the radio up louder. After a while she started humming along, one hand tapping out the rhythm on her thigh. Her thighs were getting thicker. Her hair was getting grayer. She’d be retiring soon. She’d end up with back problems and a decent pension. Suddenly she turned to me and said, “How’s your girlfriend?” The word “girlfriend” reverberated within the confines of the car. I couldn’t tell if she was using the word ironically. I couldn’t tell if she knew something. That was always one of the concerns with having an affair: you never knew who knew something.

  She’d seen Molly once by accident. We’d gone to the movies together, Molly and I, on one of our clandestine romantic outings, and my mother happened to be sitting in the back row. I was hoping she wouldn’t notice me, but she did. I introduced Molly to her as my girlfriend. It had slipped out inadvertently. I’d never used the term before or since. “It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance,” my mother had said with overblown formality. Molly and I sat in the front holding hands, but I couldn’t follow the plot. We ended up leaving midway without my mother seeing us. She called me later to say, “Your girlfriend’s got nice hair.”

  The farther I drove, the more the countryside wilted. The earth was drying up. The trees were losing their leaves. Brown swaths covered the hills like a disease. In Cranberry Township the houses got larger and the streets got wider and the grass got greener. The streets had bucolic names like Eagle Claw Lane and Turtle Dove Drive.

  My mother said, “Looks like a fairy tale.”

  I turned right, I turned left, and there at the bottom of a steep hill, set back about one hundred feet behind two trees, with a mailbox and a weather vane, was my final destination for the summer: 14 Misty Morning Way.

  The blue jeans did not begin to tell the story. The blue jeans were an affectation bordering on fraud. Whatever else Dr. Dave had accomplished at such a young age, his house had to have been the ultimate accomplishment. Ivy covered two walls. The walls rose three stories. The windows were framed by wooden shutters. On the front door was the number fourteen carved in wood, and when I turned the key in the lock, the door swung open onto a foyer with two umbrellas in an umbrella stand. Stepping over the threshold, I had the sensation that everything had just changed for me, changed for the better, that I was passing through a very difficult epoch of my life and arriving at something akin to success.

  My mother passed through behind me. We trod silently, cautiously. We could have been mother and son from the Gilded Age, entering their grand home. We could have been thieves.

  There were four bedrooms in the house and stainless-steel appliances. There was wall-to-wall carpeting and a library. The library contained educational tomes and books in Japanese. “I’m going to do some reading this summer,” I announced.

  Past the library was a living room. Past the living room was another living room. Everything was pristine and flawless and spotless, including the garden, which my mother and I entered by opening a sliding glass door that had no fingerprints and made no sound.

  The garden was the masterwork. It was as wide as the house and twice as long. There were trees, there were birds, there were flowers. It could have been a painting. I took off my shoes, because to walk on the grass with shoes seemed like a violation. The grass was as soft as the carpeting. It looked as if it’d been trimmed with scissors. My mother and I stood around saying nothing. The garden smelled like summer and country and rebirth, and in spite of the dry spell, Dr. Dave had managed to keep it alive. But it was more than alive, it was thriving. Add to his accomplishments horticulture.

  I commandeered the house without hesitation. I’d been born for a house like this. Within days I was walking around in my underwear, leaving the toilet seat up, and eating straight out of the refrigerator. In effect, I had supplanted Dr. Dave.

  Each morning I’d wake in the master bedroom to the gray light coming through the windows. I’d lounge in the king-size bed listening to the birds, thinking about how Lola would enjoy jumping on a bed like this, thinking about how Molly might want to have sex on a bed like this. Then I’d walk down two flights of stairs to the kitchen and eat breakfast in front of the forty-two-inch television. When I was done, I’d slide open the glass door and step outside in my bare feet and water the garden. I didn’t use the watering can, I used the hose, generously, spraying the plants and flowers until everything was soaked through including my feet.

  Around noon the mail would arrive. After the mail arrived, Molly would arrive. Lola came too. She came every time. They seemed unfazed by the new surro
undings, Lola especially. The first time she entered the house, she jumped in my arms and seemed to take no notice that we were no longer in a one-room apartment. I wanted to give her a tour, but she didn’t care about “any dumb tour.” She was a rich little girl, after all, with a house of her own. Still, I’d expected some sense of wonder. But all she wanted to do was play. I bought her balloons and balls and a Hula-Hoop. While we played together, Molly painted. “Don’t disturb Mommy.” She’d brought her paints and an easel and a smock and set up her studio in the garden beneath the lemon tree. She was going to make five paintings this summer. She was going to make ten paintings. She was going to find an agent. Maybe find a gallery. Maybe have a show. Everyone had a plan and that was her plan.

  In the afternoon I would grill fish or chicken on Dr. Dave’s immaculate gas grill with its pushbutton ignition. I used his Japanese carving knives. I behaved like a patriarch, hoping to ruin their appetite for dinner. I wanted the memory of our day to linger long after they got home.

  Afterward, the three of us would lie on our backs, sated, looking at the gray sky, while I told Lola tales from history. Archdukes and presidents and the Ottoman Empire.

  “Those are boring,” Lola would say.

  At five o’clock they left. Occasionally Molly would put Lola in the car, then pretend she’d forgotten something, rush back in the house, and make out with me in the foyer.

  “Come back.”

  “I will.”

  “When?”

  “Soon.”

  “How soon?”

  She did not come back soon. She came only a few times a week. Monday, Wednesday, Friday. That was her schedule. That was not the schedule I had envisioned when I had envisioned my summer. Sometimes she came Monday, Wednesday. Once it was just Monday. It was never weekends.

  “Where have you been?” I once screamed after five days of absence. We were in the garden, and I was unshaved, and Lola was staring at me in disbelief because she had never heard me scream before. Molly was staring at me too, smiling slightly as if she’d known it would eventually come to this. “You men are all the same,” I could hear her thinking. She had one hand on her hip, cocked slightly, and one hand on her easel. She had just begun a new painting of people lying on the grass looking at people lying on the grass. I thought of grabbing the canvas and smashing it against the lemon tree.

  “Would you like us to leave?” she asked. Her equanimity terrified me. I had no choice but to accept the terms.

  I filled my empty days by trying to do something productive, something enriching. I selected Dr. Dave’s educational tomes and took them out into the garden. The books were heavy and the reading was ponderous. Soon I would fall asleep, facedown on the grass. I dreamed once that I was heading back to war. I was on a train going over the ocean. The waves lapped at the window. “Is this seat taken?” someone was asking me, and when I turned, I saw that it was Molly. “No,” I said, “it’s yours,” and then I watched impassively as she struggled to put her suitcase in the overhead rack. I should help her with that, I thought, but it was every man for himself in this world. So I stared out the window, hoping to spot whales in the water below. I had never seen whales before. The din of the train grew louder; it combined with the din of the ocean. Beneath it I could hear Molly saying, “It’s all going to waste.”

  It was apparent that I did not have what it would take to earn a doctorate. It was also apparent that the solitude of the house was beginning to crush me. I considered driving back into the city, back home even, just to stop by for a minute, “just stopping by, Fred.” But that seemed akin to admitting defeat. Defeat of what, I wasn’t sure. I thought of calling Molly. I wouldn’t care if her husband answered. “Do you know who this is?” I’d ask. “Do you have any idea?” I’d gloat. I’d preen. He’d squirm. “Who is this?” he’d demand. I’d let the line go dead.

  And if she answered the phone, I’d say, “Please come.”

  Instead, I roamed the house with the television turned high. The third wave of soldiers was arriving home. They were having a parade to which no one was going. Only the reporters were going, and a high school band. From floor to floor I roamed. Room to room. The rooms echoed. What once felt spacious now felt vacuous. Those few things that Dr. Dave and his wife had forgotten to put away before they left to “see the world,” a half-empty glass of water, for instance, began to give the impression that the occupants had been surprised by thieves one afternoon and murdered. I added to this sense of disarray. My absolute ease in their home had an insulting, apathetic underbelly: muddy footprints on the carpet, dirty dishes in the sink, hair in the bathtub. I recalled having once read an article about a gang of criminals who had invaded a vacant, wealthy house, not to steal but to live slovenly.

  That’s what I was, an invader, a plunderer of privacy. In one of Dr. Dave’s closets I discovered two dozen pairs of identical blue jeans, hanging on hangers, ready to go. For fun I tried them on—they were too big. In another closet I found a box of photo albums. Sitting on the floor cross-legged, I looked through every one of them. Dr. Dave in the swing, Dr. Dave on his eighth birthday with cake on his face, Dr. Dave at the prom. He was born, he grew up, he graduated. And then it was his wedding day with his bride, a babe, dressed in her wedding gown and winking at the camera, her bouquet in her hand.

  In another closet were his academic papers and professional correspondences, hundreds of pages, some in Japanese.

  Everything that I took out, I put back exactly where it’d been. There would be no trace of my transgression. But hours later I’d be overcome with anxiety that I’d been careless somewhere, and I’d retrace my steps into the closets and trunks and boxes, fixing and readjusting.

  Still, I hunted. What I was searching for, I did not know, something illicit I suppose, something secret, something that would debase Dr. Dave before the world. I found nothing. Not one thing. Not even pornography.

  In lieu of nothing better to do, I masturbated one afternoon using his wife’s panties. It was thrilling and empowering, but when I came, I had a clear and unobstructed view of myself, almost as if watching myself from above. There, down below, I could see a small figure named Jake standing naked in a stranger’s living room in the middle of a summer afternoon with no idea what he was supposed to do next.

  The flowers are dying, I thought, and I went out to water the garden.

  Meanwhile, Molly’s painting progressed. It’s amazing what you can accomplish given just two days a week.

  When she arrived, she would give me a kiss on the cheek and get right to work. “I don’t have much time,” she’d say. She meant it. She wore her smock and mixed her paints and studied the foliage. She painted people looking at the foliage. It was a theme that never tired and which she consistently improved upon. I liked thinking that the subjects in her paintings were variations of us, the three of us, but I didn’t want to presume, and I didn’t want to ask.

  She worked slowly, cautiously, meticulously. It took hours for something even remotely recognizable to take shape, sometimes days, but when it did, it was glorious. She saw things I never noticed: snails and spiders and imperfections in the stonework. “Look at how it curves slightly. Isn’t it beautiful?” Yes, now that she mentioned it, it was beautiful.

  It had become my job to occupy Lola while her mother attended to the important work. Never mind that I had my own aspirations for the summer. I would wander through the rooms calling “yoo-hoo,” displacing furniture as I went, further distressing the home in my game of hide-and-seek. And when I finally found Lola hidden under the bed or under a pile of dirty laundry, she’d scream as if she were about to be killed, bloodthirsty screams. I’d pick her up and swing her around. Her beautiful red hair falling in her face.

  Back out in the garden, we filled balloons with water and hurled them at each other, so careful to avoid Mommy and her paintings. When the balloons burst, I would reflect on how our game was doing its part to aid the dying garden.

  And the g
arden was dying. There was no question about it. We were presiding over its death. The plants and flowers were not able to survive the lack of rain, they were folding and drooping. Even the sturdier ones had collapsed and died, and the grass was turning brown. I blamed myself for this state of affairs, for not having been more diligent in my care. To make up for it, I fed them an inordinate amount of water, sometimes three or four times a day, sometimes in the middle of the night. “I’m sorry,” I whispered. “Forgive me.” My feet made indentations in the earth as I walked to and fro with the hose, spraying it like a firefighter entering a burning house. A bee buzzed around a flower, and I knew that this was how flowers were made, and I knew that I had no real understanding of the process beyond that. Bugs crawled past my feet at a glacial pace, asking not to be harmed. “I won’t harm you,” I said. This was the garden I would have had as a child if things had been different for me. If my mother had had ambition towards something more than being an operator. It was the luck of the draw.

  And then summer was ending. Just like that. Dr. Dave was on his way home from his travels, school was about to begin, and Fred the subletter was being dislodged once more.

  “Hope you had a wonderful vacation,” Dr. Dave wrote by way of a postcard that arrived on a Thursday afternoon. He signed his name “Dr. Dave.” There was a photograph of a winding river in some exotic locale. What river it was, I didn’t bother to look, because I didn’t care. The arrival of the postcard shocked me into something resembling the present. I had two days to pack and leave. Two days to put the house in order, the state of which was distressing. One and a half days really, since it was already midafternoon.

  I began by cleaning the stairs, the carpet, the master bathroom. On my hands and knees, I scrubbed the tub and toilet. Somehow I had left a dark ring around the tub, even though I’d only taken one bath. There was a small trail of moldy spots above the shower which I could only reach by perching precariously on the edge of the sink. When I was finished, my neck ached, but the bathroom shone. I stayed up past midnight doing the best I could. The house was big, though, and the more I cleaned, the more I realized how much needed to be cleaned. If I had plundered Dr. Dave’s privacy before, now I plundered his cleaning products: Lysol and Ajax and Pledge furniture polish. That night I slept on the couch because the sheets and blankets were in the laundry.