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“Take this,” he said, handing me the plastic commando knife. He said that it was in case something went wrong; the rifle was only for delivering the antidote. He said, “Stay down.”
He led me out of the trees, across our moonlit back-yard, and up the short, grassy slope that rose to the back of our house – a silvery gray shape loping along in a sort of crouched-over commando half-trot. The sleeves of my parka whispered against my sides as I ran. I belched up a fiery blast of his formula, and then laughed a tipsy little laugh. Timothy stepped up onto our patio and unslung the rifle from his shoulder. A radiant cloud of light from our living room came pouring out through the sliding-glass door, illuminating the trees and the lawn chairs and the grill, and the crown of Timothy’s close-cropped head as he knelt down, raised the rifle, and waited for me to catch up to him. When I got there he was peering in, his face looking blank and amazed behind the luminous disks of his spectacles, his breath coming regular and heavy.
“Can you feel it?” I said, kneeling beside him. “Is it working?”
He didn’t say anything. I looked. My father and my mother were sitting on the sofa. He was holding her in his arms. Her face was red and streaked with tears, and her mouth was fastened against his. Her sweatshirt was hiked up around her throat, and one of her breasts hung loose and shaking and astonishingly white. The other breast my father held, roughly, in his hairy hand, as if he were trying to crush it.
“What are they doing?” Timothy whispered. He set the rifle down on the patio. “Are those your parents?”
I tried to think of something to say. I was dizzy with surprise, and the formula we had swallowed was making me feel like I was going to be sick. I sat there for a minute or so beside Timothy, watching the struggle of those two people, who had been transformed forever by a real and powerful curse, the very least of whose magical effects was me. I felt as though I had been spying on them for my entire life, to no profit at all. After a moment I had to look away. Timothy’s gun was lying on the ground beside me. I reached for it, and held it in my grip, and found that it weighed far more than I had expected. Its breechblock was steely and cool.
“Timothy, is this real?” I said, but I knew he would never be able to answer me.
I stood up, my head spinning, and stumbled off the patio, onto the frost-bright grass. Timothy lingered for a moment longer, then came hurtling away from the window, passing me on our way into the woods. Under the maple trees we threw up whatever it was that he had given us to drink. He seemed to lose some of his enthusiasm for our game after that, and when I told him to go home and leave me alone he did.
Later on that night, my father and I fetched his notebook from the pile of dead leaves in the woods where Timothy had dropped it, and went over together to the Stokeses’ house to retrieve all the pieces of his shattered laboratory. My father’s arm lay heavy around my neck. I told Althea Stokes about the rifle, and Timothy was forced to produce it and surrender it to her. It had been, she said, his father’s. I helped my father carry the cartons out to his car, and then in silence we and my mother removed all of his other belongings, one by one, from her hatchback, and loaded them into the trunk of our big old Chevrolet Impala. Then my father drove away.
The next morning at eight, a little yellow bus full of unknown boys pulled up in front of the Stokeses’ house, and sounded its angry horn, and Timothy went out to meet it.
House Hunting (#ulink_d55ab2f8-152c-5912-87a5-dec113a792e4)
The house was all wrong for them. An ivy-covered Norman country manor with an eccentric roofline, a fat, pointed tower, and latticed mullions in the downstairs windows, it sat perched on the northwest shoulder of Lake Washington, a few blocks to the east of the house in which Christy had grown up. The neighborhood was subject to regular invasion by armies of gardeners, landscape contractors, and installers of genuine Umbrian granite paving stone, but nevertheless it was obvious the house had been got up to be sold. The blue paint on the shutters looked slick and wet, fresh black mulch churned around the pansies by the driveway, and the immense front lawn had been polished to a hard shine. The listing agent’s sign was a discreet red-and-white escutcheon, on a black iron stake, that read simply, “Herman Silk,” with a telephone number, in an elegant sans serif type.
“This?” Daniel Diamond said, his heart sinking in a kind of giddy fizz within him. Although they had all the windows open, Mr. Hogue’s car was choked with the smell of his cologne, a harsh extract of wintergreen and brine which the realtor had been emitting more fiercely, like flop sweat, the nearer they got to the house. It was aggravating Daniel’s allergies, and he wished he’d thought to pop a Claritin before leaving the apartment that morning. “This is the one?”
“That’s the one,” Hogue said, sounding weary, as though he had spent the entire day dragging them around town in his ancient Mercedes sedan, showing them one perfectly good house after another, each of which they had rejected with the most arbitrary and picayune of rationales. In fact, it was only ten o’clock in the morning, and this was the very first place he’d brought them to see. Bob Hogue was a leathery man of indefinite middle age, wearing a green polo shirt, tan chinos, and a madras blazer in the palette favored by manufacturers of the cellophane grass that goes into Easter baskets. His rectilinear wrinkles, his crew cut, his chin like a couple of knuckles, his nose lettered with minute red script, gave him the look of a jet pilot gone to seed. “What’s the matter with it? Not good enough for you?”
Daniel and his wife, Christy Kite, looked at each other across the back of Christy’s seat – Christy could never ride in the rear of any vehicle without experiencing acute motion sickness.
“Well, it’s awfully big, Mr. Hogue,” she said, tentatively, leaning to look past the realtor at the house. Christy had gone to college in Palo Alto, where she studied French and led cheers for a football team that lost all the big games. She had the Stanford graduate’s aggressive nice manners, and the eyes of a cheerleader atop a struggling pyramid of girls. She had been the Apple Queen of Roosevelt High. From her mother, she had learned to try very hard to arrange everything in life with the flawlessness of a photograph in a house-and-garden magazine, and then to take it just as hard when the black plums went uneaten in the red McCoy bowl and filled the kitchen with a stink of garbage, or when the dazzling white masses of Shasta daisies in the backyard were eaten by aphids.
“Yeah, I don’t know, Mr. Hogue,” Daniel said. “I think –”
“Oh, but it is beautiful,” Christy said. She furrowed her brow and narrowed her eyes. She poked her tongue gamely from a corner of her mouth. She was trying her hardest, Daniel could see, to imagine living in that house with him. House hunting, like all their efforts to improve things between them – the counseling, the long walks, the watching of a movie called Spanking Brittany Blue – had been her idea. But after a moment her face went slack, and her eyes sought Daniel’s, and in them he saw, for the first time since their wedding the summer before last, the luster of real despair, as if she feared they would find no home for their marriage, not in Seattle or anywhere in the world. Then she shrugged and reached up to retie her scarf, a sheer white piece of Italian silk patterned with lemons and limes. She opened her door, and started to get out of the car.
“Just a minute, you,” Hogue said, taking her arm. She fell back into the car at once, and favored Hogue with her calmest and most obliging Apple Queen smile, but Daniel could see her nostrils flaring like a rabbit’s. “Don’t be in such a rush,” Hogue went on irritably. “You’re always running off half-cocked.” He leaned over to open the glove compartment and rummaged around inside it until he found a package of Pall Malls. He pushed in the cigarette lighter and tapped one end of a wrinkled cigarette against the dashboard. “You can’t rush into a thing like this. It could turn out to be a terrible mistake.”
At once, like people trapped in an empty bus station with a fanatical pamphleteer, Daniel and Christy agreed with Hogue.
“We’re careful people,” Christy said. Carefully, she averted her face from Hogue’s gaze, and gave her husband a brief grimace of not quite mock alarm.
“Careful people with limited resources,” Daniel said. He hadn’t decided whether to tell Christy that, two days earlier, her father had taken him to lunch at the University Club and offered to make a present of any reasonably priced house they might choose. After the war, Mr. Kite had founded an industrial advertising agency, landed the accounts of several major suppliers to Boeing, and then, at the age of sixty-two, sold his company for enough money to buy a condominium on the ninth hole at Salishan and a little cabaña down on the beach at Cabo San Lucas. Daniel, a graduate student in astronomy at U.W., where Christy taught psychology, didn’t have any money of his own. Neither, for that matter, did his father, who, in the years of Mr. Kite’s prosperity, had run two liquor stores, a printshop, and a five-and-dime into the ground, and now lived with Daniel’s mother amid the coconut palms and peeling white stucco of an internment camp for impoverished old people not far from Delray Beach. “Maybe we ought to just –”
Christy cut him off with a sharp look. The lighter popped out, and Hogue reached for it, and they watched in uncomfortable silence as, hands shaking, he tried to light his cigarette. After several seconds and a great deal of fearsome wheezing, the few frayed strands of tobacco he had succeeded in getting lit fell out of the end of the cigarette, landed in his lap, and began to burn his chinos. He slapped at his thigh, scowling all the while at the house, as if it, or its occupants, were somehow responsible for his ignition.
“Maybe we ought to take a look at it, Mr. Hogue,” Christy said.
Mr. Hogue looked back over at the house. He took a deep breath.
“I guess we’d better,” he said. He opened his door and got out of the car, eyeing the house warily.
Daniel and Christy lingered a moment by the Mercedes, whispering.
“He looks like he’s seen a ghost,” Christy observed, buttoning the top button of her white cardigan. “He looks awful.”
“Did he look better at our wedding?”
Daniel understood that Bob Hogue had been among the guests at their wedding, the summer before last, but his recollection of that remote afternoon had grown vague. In fact, the great event itself had, at the time, unfolded around him at a certain vague remove. He had felt not like the star attraction, along with Christy, of a moderately lavish civil ceremony held on the slope of a Laurelhurst lawn so much as like a tourist, lost in a foreign country, who had turned in to an unfamiliar street and found himself swallowed up in the clamor of a parade marking the feast day of some silken and barbarous religion. He remembered this Bob Hogue and his handsome wife, Monica, no better than he remembered Bill and Sylvia Bond, Roger and Evelyn Holsapple, Ralph and Betsy Lindstrom, or any of the three hundred other handsome old friends of his in-laws who had made up the bulk of the wedding guests. He knew that Hogue was a college chum and occasional golfing partner of his father-in-law’s, and he was aware that an acrid ribbon of bad news was sent curling toward the ceiling of any room in which Bob Hogue’s name was brought up, though he could never keep straight whether Hogue had married the lush, or fathered the Scientologist, or lost a piece of his left lung to cancer.
“To tell you the truth,” Christy said, “I don’t remember him at our wedding. I don’t really know the Hogues very well. I just kind of remember how he looked when I was little.”
“Well, no wonder he looks awful, then.” He stepped back to admire her in her smart green Vittadini dress. Her bare legs were new-shaven, so smooth that they glinted in the sun, and through the gaps in her open-toed flats you could see a couple of slender toes, nails painted pink. “You, however, look very nice.”
She smiled, and her pupils dilated, flooding her eyes with a darkness. “I liked what we did last night.”
“So did I,” Daniel said at once. Last night they had lain on top of their down comforter, with their heads at opposite ends of their bed, and massaged each other’s feet with fragrant oil, by candlelight, while Al Green cooed to them in the background. This was an activity recommended to them by their couples therapist as a means of generating a nonthreatening sense of physical closeness between them. Daniel blushed now at this recollection, which he found painful and sad. To his great regret there was nothing even remotely erotic to him about feet, his wife’s or anyone’s. You might have permitted him to anoint the graceful foot of Semiramis or Hedy Lamarr, and he would not have popped a boner. He slid a hand up under the hem of Christy’s dress and tried to skate his index and middle fingers up the smooth, hard surface of her right thigh, but she moved, and somehow Daniel’s entire hand ended up thrust between her legs, as though he were attempting to hold open the doors of an elevator.
“Ouch,” said Christy. “You don’t have to be so rough.”
“Sorry,” said Daniel.
They started up the driveway after Mr. Hogue.
“Who’s Herman Silk?” Daniel said, as they passed the discreet little sign.
“Who’s Herman Silk?” Hogue wove a puzzling thread of bitterness into the question. “That’s a good one.” Daniel wondered if he should recognize the name from some local real-estate scandal or recent round of litigation in the neighborhood. He tried to keep track of such mainstays of Kite-family conversation, but it was hard, in particular since they were generally served up, in the Kite house, with liberal amounts of Canadian Club and soda. “That’s very funny,” said Hogue.
When they got to the front door, Mr. Hogue could not seem to work the combination of the lockbox there. He tried several different permutations of what he thought was the code and then, in a display of bafflement at once childish and elderly, reached into his pocket and attempted to stick one of his own keys in the lock.
“Funny,” he muttered, as this hopeless stratagem in due course failed. “Herman Silk. Ha.”
Christy looked at Daniel, her eyes filled with apology for having led them into this intensifying disaster. Daniel smiled and gave his shoulders an attenuated shrug, characteristic of him, that did not quite absolve her of blame.
“Uh, why don’t you tell me the combination, Mr. Hogue?” Christy suggested, yanking the lockbox out of his hands. She, who was willing to lie for hours listening to Reverend Al while Daniel worked over her oiled foot like a desperate man trying to summon a djinn, was finally losing patience. Daniel’s heart was stirred by a wan hope that very soon now they would have to give up on old Mr. Hogue, on buying a house, on Christy’s entire project of addressing and finding solutions for their problem. Now that things were starting to go so wrong, he hoped they could just return to their apartment on Queen Anne Hill and resume ignoring their problem, the strategy he preferred.
Hogue fed Christy the combination one digit at a time, and she worked the tumblers. She gave a sharp tug on the lockbox. It held firm.
“Are you sure that’s the right number?” she said.
“Of course it’s the right number,” Hogue snapped. All at once his face had turned as red as the wrapper of his Pall Malls. One would have said that he was furious with Christy and Daniel, that he had had his fill of the unreasonable demands and the cruel hectoring to which they had subjected him over the last forty years. “Why are you always pestering me like that? Don’t you know I’m doing my best?”
Daniel and Christy looked at each other. Christy bit her lip, and Daniel saw that she had been afraid something like this might happen. A sudden clear memory of Mr. Hogue at the wedding returned to him. There had been a series of toasts after dinner, and Mr. Hogue had risen to say a few words. His face had gone full of blood and he looked unsteady on his feet. The woman sitting beside him, Monica Hogue – slender, youthful, with red spectacles and a cute gray bob – had given his elbow a discreet tug. For a moment the air under the great white tent had grown still and sour, and the guests had looked down at their plates.
“Well, sure we do, Mr. Hogue,” Christy said. “We know you’ve been doing a great job for us, and we really appreciate it. Don’t we, Daniel?”
“Well, yeah. We really do.”
The blood went out of Hogue’s face.
“Excuse me,” he said. “I – I’m sorry, you kids. I’m not feeling very well today.” He ran a hand across the close-cropped top of his head. “Here. Let me see something. There used to be –” He backed down the steps and, half crouched, hands on his knees, scanned the ground under the long rhododendron hedges that flanked the door. He moved crabwise along the row of shrubbery until he disappeared around the corner of the house.
“I remember him now,” said Daniel.
Christy laughed, through her nose, and then sadly shook her head.
“I hope he’s all right.”
“I think he just needs a drink.”
“Hush, Daniel, please.”
“Do you remember the toast he gave at the wedding?”
“Did he make a toast?”
“It was ‘To our wives and lovers, may they never meet.’”
“I don’t remember that.”
“Pretty fucking appropriate wedding-toast material, I thought.”
“Daniel.”
“This is a waste.”
“Daniel, please don’t say that. We’re going to work this all out.”
“Christy,” Daniel said. “Please don’t say that.”
“What else can I say?”
“Nothing,” Daniel said. “I don’t think you know how to say anything else.”
“Found it!” Hogue came back around the house toward them, favoring the young couple with his realtor’s smile – the smile of someone who knows that he has been discussed unfavorably in his absence. He was brandishing a medium-sized, mottled gray stone, and for a wild instant Daniel thought he intended somehow to smash his way in. But Hogue only turned the stone over, slid aside a small plastic panel that was attached to it, and pulled from its interior a shiny gold key. Then he slipped the false stone into the hip pocket of his jacket.
“Neat little things,” he said. He slid the key into the lock without difficulty, and let them into the house. “Don’t worry, it’s quite all right,” he added, when he saw how they were looking at him. “I’ll just have to call about the lockbox. Happens all the time. Come on in.”
They found themselves in a small foyer with plaster walls that were streaked like thick cake frosting, fir floors, and a built-in hatstand festooned with all manner of hats. Hogue hitched up the back of his trousers and stood looking around, blinking, mouth pinched, expression gone blank. The profusion of hats on the hatstand – three berets in the colors of sherbets, a tweedy homburg, a new-looking Stetson with a snakeskin band, several billed golf caps bearing the crest of Mr. Kite’s club – seemed to bewilder him. He cleared his throat, and the young people waited for him to begin his spiel. But Hogue said nothing. Without gesturing for them to follow, he shuffled off into the living room.
It was like a page out of one of Mrs. Kite’s magazines, furnished with a crewel love seat, two old-fashioned easy chairs that had been re-covered with pieces of a Persian kilim, a low Moroccan table with a hammered-brass top, an old blue Chinese Deco rug, and a small collection of art books and local Indian basketry, arranged with mock haphazardness on the built-in shelves. The desired effect was doubtless an eclectic yet contemporary spareness, but the room was very large, and to Daniel it just looked emptied.
“Are you all right, Mr. Hogue?” Christy said, elbowing Daniel.
Mr. Hogue stood on the Chinese rug, surveying the living room with his eyes wide and his mouth open, a hand pressed to his midsection as though he had been sandbagged.
“Eh? Oh, why, yes, it’s just – they just – they changed things around a little bit,” he said. “Since the last time I was here.”
From his astonished expression it was hard to believe that Hogue had ever seen the place before. Daniel wondered if Hogue hadn’t simply plucked it at random out of a listing book and driven them over here to satisfy some sense of obligation to Christy’s parents. Clearly the owners had not been expecting anyone to come through this morning; there was an old knit afghan lying twisted on the love seat, a splayed magazine on one of the chairs, and a half-empty glass of tomato juice on the brass table.
“Mr. Hogue?” said Christy. “Are you sure this is okay?”
“Fine,” said Hogue. He pointed to a pair of French doors at the far end of the living room. “I believe you’ll find the dining room through there.” Daniel followed Christy into the dining room, which was cool and shady and furnished with whitewashed birch chairs and a birchwood table with an immense glass top. In the center of the table sat a small black lacquer bowl in which a gardenia floated, its petals scorched at the edges by decay.
“Nice,” Daniel said, although he always misgave at the odor of gardenias, which tempted with a promise of apples and vanilla beans but finished in a bitter blast of vitamins and burnt wire.
“Come on, Daniel. We can’t afford this.”
“Did I say we could?”
“Please don’t be a bastard.”
“Was I being a bastard?”
Christy sighed and looked back toward the living room. Hogue hadn’t joined them yet; he seemed to have disappeared. He was probably back in the foyer, Daniel thought, looking around for the fact sheet on the house, so that he could pretend to be knowledgeable about it. Christy lowered her voice and spoke into Daniel’s ear. Her breath played across the inner hairs of his ear and raised gooseflesh all down his forearms.
“Do you think he’s not supposed to be doing this anymore?”
“What do you mean?” Daniel said, taking an involuntary step away from her. Her scarf had come loose at the back, allowing a thick lank strand of her unwashed dark hair to dangle alongside her face. It was not healthy to overwash the hair – that was why she was wearing the jazzy scarf – and Daniel imagined he could still smell smoke on it from the Astronomy Department barbecue they had attended the night before.
“I mean, with the lockbox, and all – do you think he’s been disbarred? Or whatever they do to realtors?”
“They make them unreal,” Daniel suggested. He reached up and took hold of her scarf, and teased it loose. All of her smoky hair spilled down around her head.
“Why did you do that?” she said.
“I don’t know,” he admitted. He handed her the scarf, and she bound up her hair once more. “I’ll go check on Mr. Hogue.”
He went through the French doors back into the living room. Hogue was standing at the far end, where it opened onto the foyer, with his back to Daniel. There were built-in shelves on this side of the room, also, peopled with a sparse collection of small objets and half a dozen framed photographs of infants and graduates and an Irish setter in an orange life preserver. As Daniel came in, Hogue was fingering something small and glittering, a piece of crystal or a glass animal. He picked it up, examined it, and then slipped it into the right hip pocket of his jacket.
“Coming,” he said, after Daniel, rendered speechless, managed to clear his throat in alarm. Hogue turned, and for an instant, before his face resumed its habitual clenchjawed jet-pilot tautness, he looked grimly, mysteriously pleased with himself, like a man who had just exacted a small and glittering measure of revenge. Then he accompanied Daniel into the dining room, and Daniel tried to think of something plausible to ask him. What did normal husbands say to normal real-estate agents at this stage of the game? It occurred to him that Hogue had not yet mentioned the asking price of the house.
“So what do they want, anyway, Mr. Hogue?” he tried.
“God only knows,” Hogue said. He reached down toward the black lacquer bowl and picked up the gardenia, holding it by the clipped, dripping stem underneath. He brought it to his nose, took a deep draft of it, and then let out a long artificial sigh of delight. With Daniel looking right at him, he slipped the flower into the pocket of his jacket, too. “Let’s have a look at that kitchen, shall we?”
So Daniel followed him into the kitchen, where Christy was exclaiming with a purely formal enthusiasm over the alderwood cabinets, the ceramic stove burners, the wavering light off the lake.
“What a waste, eh?” Hogue said. A dark patch of dampness was spreading across the fabric of his pocket. “They put I don’t know how many thousands of dollars into it.” He reached over to a sliding rheostat on the wall and made the track lighting bloom and dwindle and bloom. He shook his head. “Now then, this way to the family room. TV room. It amounts to the same thing, doesn’t it?”
He slid a louvered door aside and went into the next room. Christy gestured to Daniel to come and stand beside her. Daniel looked back at the dining room. A lone leaf spun on the surface of the water in the lacquer bowl.
“Daniel, are you coming?” said Christy.
“There’s something weird about this house,” said Daniel.
“I wonder what,” Christy said, giving her eyes a theatrical roll toward the family room and Mr. Hogue. As he passed through the kitchen, Daniel looked around, trying to see if anything portable was missing – a paradoxical exercise, given that he had never laid eyes on the room before. Sugar bowl, saltshaker, pepper mill, tea tongs trailing a winding rusty ribbon of dried tea. On the kitchen counter, under the telephone, lay a neat pile of letters and envelopes, and Daniel thought Hogue might have grabbed some of these, but they had been rubberbanded together and they looked undisturbed. A business card was affixed with a paper clip to the uppermost letter, printed with the name and telephone number of a Sergeant Matt Reedy of the Domestic Violence Unit of the Seattle Police Department. Daniel peeled back the pleat of the letter it was clipped to – it was out of its envelope – and peeked at its salutation, typed on an old typewriter that dropped its O’s.
“DEAR BITCH,” he read. “ARE YOU AND HERMAN HAPPY NOW, YOU –”
