Story of the Month: Open House

The house sat at the top of a steep hill.  I’d stopped in front of it to catch my breath.  I had been walking for some time, lured outdoors by the perfect weather.  It was mid-October, and only the night before there’d been a hard frost, but in the morning, the sun’s heat was stronger than it had been in weeks, an imitation of summer rather than the true robust season that had passed, but a gift nevertheless, an unexpected and undeserved gift, which is the best kind.  There was a little plastic flag stuck in the lawn of the house on the hill.  Next to the flag was a sign: Open House.  It was, in all fairness, an invitation of sorts. 

The front door was ajar.  The sunlight was picking out glints of mica in the concrete walkway.  On impulse, I went up the walk.  It wasn’t at all a risky thing to do.  Or so it seemed.

Most times when I’m hit with an impulse, I get to thinking right away about consequences.  There’s that impulse when you’re driving and you wonder what it would be like to give the steering wheel a quick turn so as to slam your car into the cement pilings of an overpass.  The consequences there are pretty obvious, and so you stay obediently in your lane.  For a less dramatic example, take shopping.  What if you choose an item as a gift, and in another store somewhere the absolutely perfect thing is sitting alluringly on a shelf, maybe even cheaper?  I annoy myself with such shilly-shallying. 

I had never gone to an Open House before.  I wondered if I’d be greeted by an eager realtor who’d follow me from room to room, as unwelcome as the salesgirls who come tapping sweetly on the changing room door just at the moment you are standing clad only in cotton panties with stretched-out leg openings.  I wanted to wander through the premises alone.  I wouldn’t open any drawers, but I could legitimately open closets, couldn’t I?   

There was a realtor, but, miraculously, he left me to my own devices.  I think he had a hot prospect in the dining room.  That was a possibility I hadn’t anticipated, that there’d be other people inspecting the house, though why I hadn’t I don’t know.  After all, the Open House hadn’t been set up solely for me.

The house was quite nice, though a little too traditional for my tastes.  It was a real grown-up’s house, with more than one couch, a well-stocked kitchen, and years of bric-a-brac, books, lamps.  Things matched.

I had never lived in a grown-up house, not counting my childhood home.  For a long time I moved often, and my surroundings bore the stamp of impermanence.  As I slowed down, stayed put for years at a time, I acquired more things, but not the knack for combining them.  I had no plan, no over-arching design principle.  I had liked my homes.  They were comfortable.  But they never quite came together.  It was as if I had delayed too late the tasks of homemaking, as if I were in a domestic menopause and could now never produce a well-appointed house.  I could never seem to fill the refrigerator or the food cupboards.  Ingredients were always missing.

The back bedroom upstairs in the Open House was done up in pink, not my favorite color, but I liked the room anyway, better than any other in the house.  I liked it so well, in fact, that I decided to call it dusky rose rather than pink.  The small space was cluttered and crowded, but friendly, if I can use that word.  I even sat down on the bed to test its bounce, so congenial did the room feel.

The bedroom window looked out onto the back yard, and I spied a dark-haired man at the far end seated in an Adirondack chair beneath a large shade tree.  I assumed he was the owner of the house, who’d discreetly removed himself from the crass assessments going on inside.  He was resting his forearms on the wide arms of the chair, and I noticed smoke curling up from his right hand.  From a cigarette, I guessed, though I watched him for a good five minutes, and he never once took a drag or flicked an ash.  I couldn’t see his face in any detail, but I imagined, by his stillness, that his eyes had a faraway cast, as if he were staring out to sea.   A breeze stirred the branches above him, and he was dappled with tiny, dancing shadows that softened his immobility and made it counterfeit.   

When I went downstairs again, the dining room was still occupied by the realtor and his target, so I slipped past and into the study, which was furnished with a huge sofa and two fat chairs, all in wine red leather, and rows and rows of books on tall mahogany shelves.  There were flecks of yellow in the maroon-and-brown Persian rug, and the French doors to the back yard admitted some sunlight, but these touches weren’t enough.  The room reminded me of raw liver.  Even a bouquet of white calla lilies in a lacquered black vase didn’t lighten the place.  Maybe that’s why I noticed the photograph in its silver frame so soon.  My eyes were searching for brightness.

It’s difficult now to recall exactly what I felt the first moment I saw the photograph.  I remember I picked it up and turned it over, hoping to find something written on the back.  A name, a date.  There was nothing.  I sat down in one of the chairs and laid the framed photo face down on my lap.  It was heavy.  Solid silver is.

My heart was pounding hard, but eventually it slowed to almost normal.  I just sat there and waited.  I knew I had to wait.  There are situations in life where you expect to wait, like in the doctor’s office or in a downtown cafeteria at lunchtime, situations where you know impatience and complaining won’t get you anywhere.  Just because a certain situation is new to you doesn’t mean you can’t recognize quickly enough that what you’ve got to do is wait.  Even if you don’t know what it is you’re waiting for. 

I suppose, by rights, I should have been more agitated.  I mean, it’s not every day that you walk into a stranger’s house—by chance—and find a picture of yourself in a solid silver frame in a place of honor in a liver-colored study.

Almost immediately, I decided there was an explanation, which, I guess, was a kind of automatic self-defense, like when some horrible thing happens and a person completely forgets it or pushes it down so deeply that it can’t rise up even in dreams.  But my picture in a stranger’s house wasn’t a horrible thing, only very weird, both its being there and my finding it. 

If I could have looked at the photo with complete disinterest, I’d have said it was a flattering likeness.  I don’t usually look good in photographs, or, at least, I never like how I look.  But I liked the picture in the silver frame.  The hair was different — longer, like I wore it years ago, and pulled to one side with an old-fashioned comb like my mother used to use, but which I never had.  The dress wasn’t one I’d have chosen, though it was a pretty dress, crisp and simple, maybe linen.  The word “frock” came to mind.  I thought maybe it was a style I ought to seek out, it looked so well on me in the picture.  On her, that is.  Because how could it be me, really?  Even though it was my body, with its boyish angles, and my straight, classical nose that I’m vain about, and my smile — the smile, that is, that I always wear when being photographed, kind of forced, like I’m cooperating just to get the ordeal over with.     

It turned out I didn’t have to wait long.  After only a few minutes, he came in, having left the Adirondack chair and the animating shade of the breeze-rustled tree.  He had an empty iced tea glass in his hand.  Maybe he had come in for a refill.  Maybe he’d assumed everyone had gone. 

I thought he might be Italian or Mexican.  He looked like he’d been roasted from the inside out, like there might still be heat coming from him, and if you could get close enough, you’d feel it.  His eyes didn’t fit his darkness, though.  It was as if he had plucked out a cat’s eyes and put them into his head.  They were a tawny brown, with tiny flecks of dark yellow like spilled curry powder.

He noticed me right off.  He pulled himself up so short a lock of black hair fell over his forehead.  He stared a moment or two.  Then he seemed to catch my composure.  But maybe with some fear mixed in.  It’s funny, but fear can calm you down in a way.  Make you rein in and be alert to all that’s around you.

“Hello,” he said, as if this kind of thing happened every day.  Sort of like Mary must have said hello to the angel Gabriel, with precisely the right tone in her voice and right look on her face so the angel would know she knew this was something extraordinary, and so he’d also know she was up to it.

“Hello,” I answered.

Now, there’s one place where the notion of consequences can drop from me like a toy out of the fist of a sleepy baby, and that one place is men.  It’s not so much that I put the consideration of consequences aside, as that they seem to cease to exist.  I don’t weigh or hold back, even when I know that though a man might bear a tenderness for me, it’s only the adventure he wants.  Take, for instance, a man who would like to have me, say, in an alley, leaning against a brick wall with my clothing all open to him — not because he has no respect, but because he just wants to feel like an outlaw for a bit.  Even a man like that I can accept, if there’s something about him that calls to me.  It can be as simple as a shrug in his voice or the shape of his shoulder when he reaches for something up high.  At the Open House, it was those curry flecks in his eyes that did it, that made me want to give him the benefit of the doubt, or at least the benefit of listening to him for a while.

I wished I didn’t have the photo on my lap.  I wished it were still standing by the lilies on the table, which was at my back.  What a scene that would have been for him—me in the foreground, all innocent in the fat chair, and a little farther behind, the faces at about the same level, me in the photograph.  It would have been a good movie shot, a telling shot to make the audience gasp.  But in real life, things are rarely where they should be for maximum effect.    

“Do you like the house?” he asked.

“Yes.  Especially the rose room.”

He made a little, confused frown, narrowing those eyes and tilting his head ever so slightly.

“Upstairs in back,” I explained.

“The guest bedroom.  Of course.”

He walked to a coffee table in front of my chair and set his glass down on a coaster.  Then he sat opposite me in the other fat chair. 

“I’m not a buyer, I’m afraid,” I said.

“That’s all right.  One expects browsers.  Especially on such a lovely day.”

“Indian summer.”

“What?”

“Indian summer.  You know, when the autumn chill stops for a few days, and the air is calm and warm.”

“Ah, yes, I know what you mean.  My grandmother was from Argentina.  There they call it veranito, ‘little summer’.”

“I just couldn’t stay indoors.”

“Nor I.”

He peered out the French doors.  I glanced outside, too.  Long shadows across the lawn showed the afternoon was getting late.  I needed to leave soon or the last stretch of my walk home would be in the dark.  That didn’t make me nervous, but I’d come out without a sweater, and I knew it’d get colder as soon as the sun set.  Indian summer can last for days, but its dry warmth doesn’t extend into the nights.

“It’s getting late,” I said, prompting him to return his attention to me.

He moved forward to the edge of his seat and stretched his arm across the coffee table to pick up the photo from my lap.  He did it very carefully, without touching me.  A neat trick.  But he did let one heavy border of the frame slide over my thighs.  Like he was carding wool.  You’d think that would make me uneasy, but it didn’t.  Lots of things men do that should make me uneasy don’t.

He held the photo flat on his two palms like a prayer book and looked at it a long time.  Studied it, you could say.  The ice cubes in his glass made a little clinking noise as they settled against one another, melting.  A tiny sound, but enough to make him shift his gaze from the picture to the glass, and then to me.

“My wife,” he said, tapping the photo with a fingertip.  “Car accident.  About a year ago.  I saw her as she was leaving that morning and then never again.”

The usual response to such information is to say you’re sorry or how awful or some such expression of sympathy, but I felt I ought to resist any tendency to the usual.  I thought that’s what he’d want.  At any rate, he didn’t seem surprised or offended by my silence.  In fact, he added on a good chunk of silence of his own, during which he again stared down at the photo.

“The resemblance is amazing,” he said. 

“Then it’s not just that particular photograph?”

“Oh, no.” 

He propped the photo on the coffee table.  Now it was facing me.  She was facing me.

“Both vehicles were completely burned,” he said, returning without preamble to the topic of the accident.  “We had nothing to bury.  Maybe that’s why, against all reason, I kept expecting her to come home.  To simply walk in the door some day with a long story.  Finally, I decided I’d better sell.”

“So you wouldn’t keep waiting?”

“So her return wouldn’t feel possible.”

“Would you stay otherwise?  If you didn’t keep expecting her?”

“Yes, I would.  It’s a good house.”

I stood up then and turned my back on him to look out through the French doors again.  I couldn’t keep acting so natural, or, at least, I thought I shouldn’t.  It worried me a little that it wasn’t all acting, either.

It was a nice yard.  A wide swath of grass bordered by beds of autumn flowers and greenery in just the right degree of confusion.  The hand of man was there, for sure, but so was the disarray of nature, which is, of course, not disarray at all, but rather an order that gives license to the fantastic.

“But I’ve decided to reconsider selling.”

“Oh?”  I felt a pang of pity for the earnest realtor laboring in the dining room.

“There’s no need now.  Wouldn’t you agree?”

I turned back into the room, but I didn’t answer him.  I can enjoy tight, mysterious conversations, but I like to know a little of what I’m letting myself in for.  In broad strokes, at least.

“No need?”

“Because now here you are.”

He leaned back in his chair.  The leather creaked.  “I suppose some might find your likeness to my wife disturbing, but I don’t.  In fact, it settles me.”

“What do you mean, it settles you?”

He took some time before replying.  That was all right with me.  I wanted him to dig out the right words.  I knew somehow that he had thought this over before in some form or other, the way you can think things over deep down beneath logic, beneath awareness even, and that only just now was he realizing that such thinking had happened.  Now, as he’d said, that I was there.  I sat down again. 

“I mean…” he began quietly.  “I mean it’s a sort of retrieval.  The way she left was so sudden.  There was an unreality to it.  Her unwashed breakfast things were still in the sink when I got the call from the police.  She’d left herself a note on the dresser with a list of errands for the next day.” 

He was looking at me, but I could tell he was seeing those dishes smeared with egg yolk and toast crumbs, her mug with maybe a small puddle of cold coffee and a lipstick mark, that scribbled list of chores.

“People always make plans, always think they’re going to go on,” I said.  

“Of course they do.  What other way is there to be but that?”

His eyes, which had darkened, showed that he was back with me in the study.  Back inside Indian summer, a year away from that phone call, that egg-encrusted plate with the faucet dripping water on it.

“What is it you imagine you’ve retrieved?” I asked him.  It was time, I thought, to be a little tough, or to sound so.

The house around us was quiet.  I guess the realtor had left or was out front having a smoke.  Faint bird noises came from outside.  A window or door must have been open somewhere.

“A chance,” he finally answered. 

“A chance?”

“A chance to see her here again, in her place, and then to let her go.  If you’d give me that.”

“How?”

“You could stay here.  For a little while, at least.”  He was talking fast, like a rookie salesman or a little boy defending a losing argument.  “Look on it as a sort of job if you like.  There’d be no strings.”

He picked up the photo again and held it so I could see only the back of it.  Maybe he was worried that looking at it, at her, would work on my nerves.

“You like the house,” he repeated, a statement this time.

“It’s not what I’m used to.”

“It is what I’m used to.  I suppose that goes without saying.”  He smiled.  “I find that’s so of much of life.”

“That you get used to it?”

“That it goes without saying.”

“But things should be said anyway, shouldn’t they?” I replied, though I lacked the full conviction of challenge this question warranted.  “Some things,” I added.

“Which things?  Why I waited?  How you’ve come?  It’s happened.  To me, that’s more important than any answers.” 

When I was in my twenties, I lived in a small town midway between my parents and a lover.  I took a lot of bus rides during that time in one direction or the other.  They were local buses, making innumerable stops in similar out-of-the-way towns.  Sometimes on those trips, I’d get the urge to leave the bus before my stop, to climb down into an unknown snowscape and hear the packed snow squeak beneath my boots, or, in summer, to step out of the bus’s refrigerated air into the humid heat of some strange place.  I never considered what I’d do once I had gotten off the bus.  That blankness in my imagination didn’t trouble me.  Something would come about somehow, I thought.  But in the end, I was held in my seat by the perplexity I knew my failure to appear would cause in the people waiting for me.     

Sitting in the well-appointed study of the Open House, listening to the fanciful notions of the swarthy, cat-eyed widower, I felt like I was on the idling bus in one of those long-ago towns again, sliding tentatively across my seat towards the aisle.  And now, no one was waiting for me.      

“But what would I do here?”

He shrugged. 

“Live your life,” he said, with no more fanfare than if we’d both reached a revolving door at the same time and he’d stepped aside and said “after you.”

Live my life.

Where you live does make a difference, I suppose, but does it always have to be your own decision?  It isn’t when you’re a kid.  Does it have to be a decision at all, necessarily?  What about people who can’t choose, say because they’re poor or bound to certain places because of other decisions they’ve made?  They still live their lives.  They can soar, even, if they put themselves to it.  Like Jimmy Stewart in It’s A Wonderful Life.

Some wit once said that what distinguishes human beings from other animals is our ability to blush and our need to.  I don’t know about that—it seems to me I’ve seen some embarrassed dogs in my time.  The point is that I think the unique thing about humans is not blushing, but our capacity for pondering what-if.

More times than not, what-if musings hold us back from actions, or compensate us with daydreams.  But it could work in the opposite direction.  What-if could lead us forward, make us leap.  Like skipping over the dull parts of a book to the anticipated juice.

What makes all this so hard to explain is that so little thought went into it.  So little, that is, of what is commonly referred to as thought.  Not even much what-if-ing took place.  It was simply a sort of acceptance.  You’ve got to say an unqualified yes to life every once in a while.  Yes to what life brings you, without reservation or fall-back plans, without trying to foresee all the consequences.  Like the lilies of the field, I guess.  That lady or the tiger stuff can really jam you up, you know?

And if you’re lucky enough and brave enough, or foolish enough, take your pick, sometimes you can say yes at just the right moment.  You can treat what’s come to you out of the blue as something you’d intended all along.  You can trust that there’s a reason, or that a reason will grow, and you can even not care if you ever know what it is.

I put out my hand.  He gave me the photo.  I took it up to the dusky rose bedroom and cleared a space for it on top of my oak bureau.

It’s still there.