The Dwelling: A Novel (49 page)

Steam filled the room. It rushed out in little puffs through the open door, hot and damp, swirling like smoke or clouds. It swam over his naked body warming and making him cold when it swept past, away from him. He couldn’t make out anything in the room. He peered through the steam, his heart beginning to pound. He was still dreaming. It was his dream. In a moment RJ would spring up the stairs—

Plink.

A big fat drop of water fell from the tap to the tub and echoed.

Richie went inside.

The steam was too thick to see through. The room was wet and sticky, his feet stepped into small puddles of water near the tub. He waved his hands through it, and they were barely visible, thick as fog.
Could cut it with a knife,
he thought, and with that thought he made out the taps at the far end of the bathtub. He leaned against the side wall, arching himself over the expanse of the enormous tub and reached through the steam to the tap, twisting the left one, the hot-water tap. It was off, but he twisted it hard and as he did the steam rose up and through the door, clearing the air enough for the red, red water in the bathtub to come clear.

A hand floated serenely, bobbing lightly in the water. The wrist was cut. A long gash running the width of the wrist, its edges curled up—

He screamed and backed away, his hip hitting the sink and he whirled around and caught himself in the mirror, a tall, dark-haired man who looked just like his father. He locked eyes with his image. Behind him, the room had cleared. There was no steam. He looked down at the tub, which was dry and empty, the bottom glossy. There was no red water, no arm floating (serenely).

He covered his face with his hands and rubbed. He opened them again and the same bathroom stared back. The toilet seat was up; the
New Yorker
cartoon was taped on the wall above it, the towel was askew.

The floor was cold and dry under his bare feet. He deliberately relaxed his shoulders, the first faint whiff of perspiration under his arms reaching his nose. Fear sweat. He glanced over his shoulder at the big tub. Empty, dry.

His eyes followed the soft curve of its bottomside down to the taloned feet beneath, and a bad dream seemed all the more likely. On his way out he dragged his palm over the underside of the faucet. It came out dry. The tap hadn’t even been dripping. He shrugged,
it seemed so real,
and just inside the door, he stepped in a small puddle of water. He paused hardly a heartbeat. He left the light on and closed the door, firmly, not taking his hand from the knob until he heard the tongue snap securely into the groove. And he went back to bed.

Drifting on, the awful image of the floating hand came back to him. Only it didn’t seem quite so awful. It had floated easily. Serenely. Peacefully, as though in a world without edges.

Glenn woke up in the middle of night, disoriented. It was dark in the bedroom and she had no idea what time it was. Time, lately, had been very elastic. She had taken to napping whenever the mood was upon her, as much out of concern as the lack of energy to fight it. She opened her eyes and fumbled around in bed (weak, I am so weak) until she had turned her body enough to see the clock on the night-stand. It was three
A
.
M
. She got up.

Glenn weighed herself. In robe and slippers over yoga pants and a casual T-shirt, she had expected to see another couple of pounds missing from the clan. She was horrified when she read her new weight. Glenn weighed 110 pounds. She hadn’t weighed that since she was married, and then only briefly.

Standing in front of the bathroom mirror, she dropped the robe and slipped off her T-shirt. She tugged off the light cotton pants and stood there in brassiere and underpants and took stock. Her cheeks were hollow. Her hair hung limp and full. There seemed to be no color anywhere on her: she was thin, and drawn. She was ill.

At first, she panicked. A string of commands ran through her head.
Must force myself to eat something; have to get some weight back on first thing, pitter patter; fresh air, very important too, I should have a walk every night, build up an appetite. I’ll have to get back into a regular sleep pattern I don’t know which way is up I’m all hours—

She pulled her robe on over her underwear and sank down on the closed lid of the toilet, exhausted, having been out of bed only a minute.

She felt that she had to eat something. She was wasting away. The thought of eating made the now-constant burn in her stomach seem worse and the quandary presented itself like the punch line of an old joke.

Ah, now there’s the rub.
Ba-boom.

She made herself some tea, and sipped it slowly, trying very hard to feel normal, to feel like she used to feel. The tea stayed down, and she added a cracker to it, telling herself that it was baby steps she had to take at a time like this, and went over some of the circumstances of her life. Imagined a different sort of life, with a different man, or maybe just children with the same man, a large family, even. A loud, larger life.

The pieces didn’t fit and she took instead to remembering the days of the life that she had had. She and Howard on the boat. She and Howard on trips. The summer barbecues. Howard bent over crosswords. School plays and school parades and school parties. How dressing up for Halloween and the time he frightened the little girl across the lane, who was no longer a little girl, but now a junior in college. Men that she had dated in college. Howard’s old roommate, Terry.

In the middle of the night before Glenn’s test results, she sat at her island in her quiet kitchen, going over very nearly every minute of her life, smiling, remembering, getting lost in it, sipping tea and enjoying it more than any other cup of tea she’d ever had because somehow it managed to stay put.

Richie had an unsettled night, dream after bad dream. He’d woken twice after the dream about the bathroom, both times because of something bad in his sleep. He’d dreamed that he was in an old house, with the wallpaper peeling off the walls right as he stood there watching. In the dream he knew that the house was on fire, but he was powerless to stop it. Another dream, closer to morning, had him on a train, a boxcar like a hobo. He was trying to write in a journal, but no ink would come out of the pen and he was deciding, even as he wrote, where a good place to jump off would be. The landscape outside the train doors whizzed by unidentified. Sometimes it was buildings and sometimes just grass and trees. He was trying desperately to make something out, shaking his pen and watching outside. He had to find just the right place to jump. To jump to die.

He woke just after six, still tired, feeling as though he hadn’t slept at all, but got up anyway; it seemed a better prospect than more dreams. And he needed a piss. A thin indigo light just starting on the horizon, and Richie flicked the bedroom light on, squinting against it. His head felt heavy, like the first early-warning signs of a headache. The unnatural brightness did nothing for that. The hall was dark and cool. Cold air seemed to pour from the little blue bedroom across the hall from the master bedroom, where Richie’s skis and skates, old records and the rest of the detritus of everyday life were stored. Air seemed to blow freely, cold, through that room and when he reached over to pull the door shut he noted that the closet door in the bedroom was wide open. He thought the cold air might have been coming from there.

Have to get that insulated or something.
He pulled the bedroom door closed and turned to face the bathroom. He really needed to go.

He turned the knob and opened the bathroom door, light flooding the room—
perfectly normal.
He straightened up and went inside, pissing hard and happily. It seemed to go on for hours.

Richie had spent most of the day trying to squeeze words out. His heart wasn’t in it. There was something indefinably wrong with the way he was feeling, and while he fought it off for most of the day, it was like the headache that had begun in the morning, or rather, hadn’t begun in the morning. All day, the fuzzy, halfway headache had sat at the back of his neck, like a threatening cloud, but had never really prospered. He felt, instead, dull and unable to concentrate, restless in a way he sometimes got, when there was something bad going on, but nothing he could fix. It was as if he were depressed.

I need a drink is all.

He abandoned work around three and went to the grocery store for a few things. He walked, thinking the fresh air might clear his head, but by the time he got home, nothing seemed different. It had been hard enough to work up the head of steam to get himself out of the house.

He passed the liquor store twice and did not go in.

At home the little red light on the answering machine blinked. He pressed play; he had one message. From Dubs.

“Where the hell you been? Hey, Richie, I’m coming over tonight…I’ll bring beer. If you want a movie or something call me back. Call me back anyway. I’m coming around seven. See ya.”

Richie perked up at the word “beer.” He looked over at the clock—it was just after four. Three hours till Dubs came. Time to eat and shower.

His mood lifted. All he needed was a drink.
A couple of beers with Dubs, just to take away the bad shit. That’s all.

I am not my father.

It was late enough to give RJ a call. But he didn’t. Instead, he put away the groceries in the kitchen and thought maybe he’d call him later. The kid had just gotten home from school. Probably wanted to watch some tube, eat the fridge empty, phone girls and smoke cigarettes. He didn’t want his old man phoning him. He’d call him later, closer to dinner.

When Janis was home and able to run interference.

He made a sandwich and sat at the dining-room table to eat it, which was still covered with the excesses of the other night, petulant reminders of where he’d gone wrong, and steadfast harbingers, counting off the days since his last drink. Forgive me, Father, for I am sober now two days; it has been two days since my last drink.

The house seemed to sit around him, quiet and waiting, while he ate his meager dinner and glanced now and then at the clock, a lover awaiting a love. The air was heavy with waiting. Once he thought he heard something upstairs, in the attic. The sound of something heavy hitting the floor and being dragged. He looked up without moving his head and pretended concern that the lamp had fallen over, perched as it was on the too-little table.

He had decided he would move his writing shit to the table in the dining room. Maybe he’d get another table for the kitchen. The dining room felt…sane. The sound of dragging stopped briefly and resumed. Stopped. He sat stiffly at the table, ignoring it
(lamp, mice),
and wished Dubs was there already.

Richie read the rest of the paper. Then he went up to have a shower, hesitating for a second before going into the bathroom, giving himself the creeps and thinking at the same time, with a jocularity he did not feel,
something wrong with this house,
thinking it even as he entered the perfectly normal bathroom and stepped into the perfectly normal shower.

Glenn drove from the doctor’s office with dry eyes and a stiff back. If her hands shook, who would deny her that? It was snowing. The sky was gray, but seemed bright. It had been snowing off and on, now, for two days, the wet, easy snow that was not threatening or too cold, but just pretty and new, novel, like the first days of December before Christmas is a chore to be completed but not yet an event to be enjoyed. The calm before, if not the storm then something large.

Really, she thought, it reminded her in some way of spring.

Because of the snow, cars were moving slower, more cautiously than usual. Lines of them waited at every stop and, as often as not, you sat through two lights at the busier sections before crossing an intersection. It was all right. It was pretty out; it was pretty to see. She felt like everything was intensely human and frail, and might disappear altogether if she didn’t take a good, kind, personal look. And so she did. She looked at buses and mailboxes and fire hydrants and dogs; the fronts of buildings, carved and ornate, some, and others glass and flat, reflecting the flakes as they fell, creating the illusion of more life than was really there, but appreciably so.

All of it, each flake and stone, was lovely.

I am Glenn’s Esophagus.

In the earlier days of their marriage, before health had become a regular topic of conversation around the dinner table, and long before either she or Howard had even begun to think in terms of Their Health,
Reader’s Digest
magazine (the world’s most-read magazine!) used to run a regular feature about a fellow named Joe and his general body parts.
I am Joe’s Liver. I am Joe’s Pancreas.
It had struck Howard as the most amusing thing and was the punch line to as many jokes as he could fit in in an evening.

You told a lot of jokes, How. Most of them bad, you know.

Now, Miss Glenn, a joke is very much in the eye of the beholder.

Poor Joe, the subject of the articles, was abused in every which way in the Darnley household. If Glenn couldn’t find a match for a sock on laundry day, she might find it pinned to the message board in the kitchen, neatly, like a bug on display, with its own little placard:
I am Joe’s Sock.
Steaks (after a glass of wine) were Joe’s left flank. Glenn had a nubbly sweater that Howard had never taken to, and he referred to it as “Joe’s skin condition” whenever she wore it.

You were such a card. I should have dealt with you.

Sitting parked in her car, outside 366 Belisle Street, just two doors down from her former listing, Glenn smiled, remembering. It faded.

I am Glenn’s Esophagus. And I might be in deep trouble.

She’d eaten at Topper’s, a very reliable restaurant not far from downtown (she’d driven with near deliberation to Topper’s, on the exact route she would need to take to bring her easily,
without
deliberation to Belisle; she did this unthinkingly, naturally, as though it were a plan). The soup of the day had been chicken noodle, a singularly inoffensive food, highly recommended by the elderly and sage everywhere for whatever ails you. She’d ordered it without guile, and on the side a plain order of brown toast, no butter. A harmless lunch by any stretch of the imagination, and she felt buffered yet still by the good faith in her medication. Her only trepidation at all had been the thought of joining the rolls of people required to medicate before activity. It was such an
old
thing. But it was bound to happen.

Chicken soup and its prescriptive powers notwithstanding, the whole deal was sitting precariously close to her esophagus, ready and willing to come up. Glenn held it down by will, and a carefully orchestrated plan of swallowing.

She stared at 362 Belisle, in all its falling-down beauty, and what she saw comforted her. There was a dignity there, a towering survival that calmed her. But she cried anyway, maybe without noticing, certainly without caring.

Well, we know it’s not an ulcer.

She smoothed down the front of her dress, over her unfamiliarly flat belly, fingers running over rib bones she hadn’t felt in years. Too many years, really.

She swallowed hard and realized lunch was not going to stay. She opened the car door, leaned out and vomited onto the street. Undigested chicken soup and the few bites of toast came rushing up and out, the sound echoing on the bright, empty street. Still leaning out she found a tissue in her coat pocket and used it to wipe her mouth. She gagged once more, but nothing came of it: everything had already come up. It looked terrible, there on the road, warm from her body and soaking into the snow. It looked exactly like what it was.

I’ll be able to eat anything I want and not get fat,
she thought flippantly.
Nothing would take.
She leaned her head back against the rest for a moment and began to feel better. When she turned sideways, she could see the house. That helped.

Hello, house.

The owner’s car, Richard Bramley was his name, was parked directly in front, covered in snow. Buried in snow. It looked as though it hadn’t moved in days. A nice young man. She hoped…everything was all right.

Maybe he’s out of town.

The thought didn’t linger. She gazed affectionately up at the house. It gazed down, in turn, benevolently back at her. Snow had begun to layer delightfully over the barren, sharp branches of the Caragana bush, making it look distinctly different from all the other ways she had seen it.

Now I have seen you in every season,
she thought.
I’ll just rest here a moment.
She had not entirely figured out what to do, but sitting in the shadow of the house seemed to give her peace. And so she did.

Dubs showed up about a quarter past seven and he would never have known by the casual way that Richie had answered the door that the previous fifteen minutes had been spent pacing and looking at the clock. Richie, by then, was rabid for a drink. The very thought had made his mouth salivate and it frightened him.

At seven, he had called RJ, carefully planning the call to correspond with Dubs’s arrival so that if the conversation was tense he could get off the phone with the excuse that Dubs was at the door.

Janis had answered. He chatted inane small-talk with her for a moment, Christmas plans (too soon to know) and the snow. Her mother and work. Mentioned the book was going well (lie) when she didn’t ask. Then he asked for RJ. “So lemme talk to the boy,” he had said cheerfully. He listened to her put the phone down. She’d said he was in the basement on the computer. He heard the squeal of the basement door open. He heard her voice, muffled by distance. Then there was a long pause while something else happened. Richie waited, chewing his thumbnail, looking at the clock, the door, the clock, glancing out the window for Dubs’s truck.

It was Janis who came back to the phone. She sounded apologetic. “Richie, he says he’ll call you back.”

“I got company coming. I could talk to him tomorrow. Is everything okay?”

She paused. “He’s still a little mad at you.”

“For Chrissakes, was it really that big a deal?” he said angrily. “Am I the first parent in history to miss a deadline?”

She sighed heavily. “Well, I’m still a little mad at you too,” she said. “He’s thirteen. He’s mad at everything. I think he’s embarrassed a little bit. He stood out there waiting, he figures the world looked at him, and it scared him. He thought you were hurt in an accident. You’re going to have to wait on this. By the weekend he’ll have forgotten the whole thing. Just let it go, okay? I gotta run. Say hi to Dubs for me.” And she hung up.

No big deal, he thought, but guilt rose in him, the connection between sleeping through the afternoon when he was supposed to be picking up his kid, and the fact that it was because he’d been drinking, and the way his heart was pounding in anticipation of drinking again.

I have a drinking problem.
The weight of the statement overwhelmed the guilt completely, the sheer blackness of thinking that something
had to be done.
A problem had to be fixed. The overwhelming, multifaceted issue of drinking and quitting and repairing the damage that had probably, surely, been done in the whole course of his life threatened to topple every other thought in his head. The ruined relationship with Jen, which she would attribute entirely to his drinking (never once thinking about her superior attitude or nagging or any number of other things that might have contributed to his
drinking);
the stupid, nasty things he’d said and done bolstered by drunkenness over the last few years; the four years it had taken him even to come up with an idea for a book and the fact that it was both lame and not even really being written; the weekends he’d spent hungover during his kid’s visits, the times he’d waited for RJ to go to bed so he could pop a few caps—