The Hundred-Year House (7 page)

I see it every day.

I want to leave you

Diminished.)

17

Z
ee needed to get off campus for her own sanity, which was the only reason she’d agreed to meet Gracie at the Chippeway Club. It was one of those places she’d rather not be seen, on principle, by some faculty member who’d wrangled an invitation.

Gracie reclined by the pool in a pink one-piece, her limbs tan and slim. Zee joined her and watched the lunchtime calm at the kiddie end as children sat by their nannies to digest their grilled cheeses. Between the pool and the golf course stretched a field of browning grass decorated with three white teepees, some kind of sick and inaccurate homage to the Chippewa, who hadn’t really lived here anyway. Zee herself hadn’t set foot at the club till after her father died, when her mother shocked her by saying they’d been members all along, and now that her father couldn’t object they were free to go there, and wouldn’t Zee like to learn golf? As a teenager she knew that the other kids, the fun ones, would sneak out to the teepees during weddings and graduation parties to deflower each other and finish the wine they’d stolen.

Zee ordered a Long Island iced tea. The club served them notoriously strong.

“Mom, we need Case and Miriam out of that house. It’s distracting Doug.” Her mother’s expression behind the big sunglasses was unclear, but she kept talking. “The whole point of moving in was the peace and quiet.” She hadn’t planned on bringing
this up today, but then this morning at breakfast, Doug had asked Miriam if she wanted the used coffee filter for her “art,” and she’d folded it in fourths and tucked it in her shorts pocket.

“Are they loud? I suppose it’s cultural.”

“Miriam has that whole porch covered with the trash for her collages. I mean literally,
garbage
.”

Gracie shook her head. “Bruce is convinced of this Y2K fiasco, and he won’t throw his son on the street with the world about to end. And the poor thing. His tendon! And now they have no car. How would they even leave? On horseback?”

The waiter handed Zee her drink in a frosted glass. She hated how good it felt to be taken care of. Zee drank like someone was timing her and then lay back to feel the sun tighten her skin. She remembered her father’s objection to the club name: “Chippeway,” he said, every time they passed the sign, “in that context, suggests nothing so much as poorly played golf.”

Zee kept her eyes closed and said, “I’ll make a deal with you. After the New Year, if the world doesn’t end, Case and Miriam need to leave. His ankle will be better. If you get them out, I promise Doug’s book will be done and he’ll be at the college by next fall. If they stay . . . I don’t know.”

“I can work on Bruce, but I don’t see how you can guarantee anything about poor Doug.”

“I’ve always been lucky.”

18

A
ll the cars were gone, and Doug let himself into the big house through the garage with the emergency key.

As often as he’d been on the ground floor, he hadn’t ventured upstairs since the days when he was dating Zee and she’d bring him home for Thanksgiving and set him up in a guest room with a set of fluffy towels. He dragged his hand up the railing. This must be what people meant by
patina
, this buttery softness. The house seemed as much alive on the inside as on the leafy outside—the way the wood of the door frames contracted in winter and expanded in summer, the way the glass on these staircase windows was thicker at the bottom than the top, from the slow, liquid pull of a century.

Hidalgo hadn’t met him at the door, and Doug assumed the beast was in his crate. There were clicks, though, and creaks, all around him in the hall, and he reminded himself about houses settling. He tried to recall which was the door to the attic stairs. It must be this one, at the north end: next to a closet, but not a closet, the brass keyhole made for one of those toothy old keys with a loop handle. He tried the elliptical little knob, but it just clinked tightly back and forth. He knelt, his eye to the inch of gap at the bottom of the door. It wasn’t dark—he remembered the dormers running along both the back and front of the house—but all he could see was tan. The riser of the bottom step.

Something crackled behind him. Doug’s back had been turned on the hallway for a long time, as if he’d never watched a spy movie in his life. He rose and turned, certain he’d see an angry Bruce or a frightened Sofia. But there was just afternoon light from a high window, magnifying a million specks of floating dust. Now that he’d become aware of his back, of the fact that he couldn’t turn his head like an owl, he was uncomfortable whichever way he faced. He wanted to flatten himself against a wall. Instead he walked calmly down the stairs and out the garage door.

19

A
fter one more Long Island iced tea, Zee left her car at the club and Gracie drove her home, a Bobby Darin CD playing and the windows down.

“Aren’t we living it up?” Gracie said.

Sofia was unloading the dry cleaning from her van. Miriam, barefoot, sat on the bench by the coach house with a book in her lap. And, bizarrely, Doug was emerging from the big house’s garage, staring at everyone. As Gracie got out, Miriam rose and hopped across the hot gravel. They formed a little group of four on the driveway, which Zee watched from the car for a long, blurry second. Something was off. The pieces of the world were not where she’d left them.

Her mother waved her out of the car, and by the time Zee stuck her head into the heat Sofia was backing toward the big house. “You see! I get, I get!” Zee wanted to form a question, but she couldn’t decide which one, and her lips were asleep.

“Thought I heard Hidalgo freaking out in there,” Doug was saying, and “wanted to be sure he was okay,” but Gracie wasn’t listening.

Sofia returned, butter-yellow fabric in her plump arms.

“This is the one? I find it on the floor of the flower bedroom, behind the bed. This is whose?”

Zee blinked at the thing. It was her cotillion dress, shoulder pads and ruched waist, but wadded and wrinkled.

“I haven’t seen that in nineteen years,” Zee managed to say. And yet she felt she somehow had—but no, it was just that they’d talked about it so recently.

Gracie clapped her hands, as if chunks weren’t falling out of the universe and onto guest room floors. “Well, that’s just the luck of Laurelfield! Miriam, you need to know that this is the distinctive legacy of the house: ridiculous luck, whether good or bad. We’ve had tragedies here too, but then magic things like this happen! Now you have to make a
wonderful
mosaic out of it.”

Sofia held the dress out, but Miriam looked at the thing like it was tainted. “I don’t understand,” she said.

Sofia shrugged. “Maybe was the ghost.”

Zee took it from Sofia herself. It wasn’t dirty, just creased in a thousand places. The sun was too hot, and even the dress was hot, and she felt she might melt into it. “Maybe it was Doug,” Zee said, not looking at him. “Maybe he was trying to help Miriam find it.”

Doug made a startled, choked noise, a refutation and a laugh at once.

Gracie said, “Why on earth would he do that? And leave it on the floor? He’s not a raccoon, dear.”

Zee draped the dress over Miriam’s arm. “Here,” she said. “Clearly it was meant to be.”

She wondered if this would all make sense once she sobered up, but she doubted that. She wanted to stomp, to scream, to ask why things would rearrange themselves just when she’d got them straightened out. Instead she walked back to the coach house, trying not to sway. Doug caught up and whispered: “What the hell was that? Was that a joke?”

“Covering for Sofia. She probably went back to look, and it was on the closet floor. My mom would pitch a fit about the wrong hangers or something.” She wasn’t certain she’d made sense, but she hadn’t slurred. Doug stalked past and turned on the TV.

Could that have been it? Or could Doug really have snuck into the house days ago to find the thing, to present it to Miriam like a dog with a bone? And then, when he heard footsteps, stuffed the dress behind the bed. Then he’d gone back to retrieve it today, only it wasn’t where he’d thought it would be.

When Zee saw from the upstairs window that Miriam had gone back to her bench, the dress folded neatly beside her, she went down to Doug on the couch. She straddled him and unbuttoned her blouse and yanked his head back by the hair. She knew he wanted to be mad at her, and she knew he wanted to fall in love with Miriam, but for the next ten minutes he’d be unable to do either.

20

O
n the hottest day of August, Doug met up with the friend who’d gotten him started on
Friends for Life
and the lucrative but soul-sapping Melissa Hopper in the first place. Doug and Leland had taught high school together in Ohio, in the hazy few years between college and grad school—the same years when Zee was off on her Fulbright, saving the world. Leland had recently begun wearing black button-downs with the collars wide open, so now Doug was a little worried, meeting him in a Highwood bar, that they’d be mistaken for a gay couple. Leland taught poetry classes all over the suburbs, living not off the paychecks but off the wealthy women who preferred him to their CEO husbands.

“It’s on me today,” Doug said. “You saved my ass. You saved my pocketbook.”

“And they’re fun, right? You get to be the adolescent girl you never were.”

“I will never admit to that.”

There was a bowl of nuts on the bar. It was good to be out of the house, and it was good to be eating nuts and drinking and watching the Cubs. When they started tanking in the fourth, Doug filled him in on Case and Miriam. He described the scooter Case was now using to get around town—how he’d prop his bad leg up on a little shelf and push off with the other. He’d had a few job interviews set up in the city, but he’d canceled those, worried
how he’d look showing up sweaty from the train and cab, on top of wounded.

“Tex and the crazy lady,” Leland said. “Tex and the Wreck. That’s a country song, right there. This woman, is she of the attractive persuasion?”

“Fortunately no. I mean, maybe a six. The craziness doesn’t help. Six point five.”

“This kid’s an asshole.” He was talking about the Cubs. “But then, your wife makes everyone look like shit, right? Tell me something: The Victoria’s Secret catalogue gets to your house, you even bother to look? Or is it like, hey, I got better stuff upstairs?”

Doug was glad there seemed no obligation to answer. Leland had met Zee only once or twice, and he hadn’t looked at her with any more interest than most men did. Doug knew what he was really saying, what everyone was really saying when they commented on her beauty: They weren’t sure how she’d ended up with Doug. He wasn’t shorter than her, or bad looking. He’d always gotten plenty of girls. It was more what people presumed about women as intense as Zee, about what they were after and what they could get. Women like Zee did not pick nice guys with average golf games who occasionally forgot to brush their teeth. They picked jackass publishing executives with famous ex-wives and ski houses.

“And can we get the bullpen up?” Leland said.

Partly to keep him from talking about baseball when Doug knew relatively little about the Cubs, and partly because this was why he’d called Leland in the first place, Doug told him about the files in the attic. He told him too about the past month of unsuccessful fishing. In the days after he tried the attic door himself, Doug tried wheedling a key out of Sofia, who apparently didn’t have one, and out of Bruce, who’d laughed and said, “You want Gracie to kill me? I been up there
once
, to trap a squirrel. Look, I don’t even open the crisper drawer without her say-so. You know? This is called marital peace.”

“Do you
have
a key?” Doug had asked, and Bruce had clapped him on the back.

“It’s not really my house, right? And—Doug, my friend—it’s definitely not yours.” Bruce turned to go, then came back. “Hey. Don’t let me hear you bothering Gracie with this. She’s had enough stress with the landscapers.”

And before all that he’d asked Zee—as she lay there with her head on his lap, in those lovely, sleepy minutes after she came down and fucked him on the TV room couch—if her mother might ever let him explore the attic and basement for colony artifacts. She’d given him the look the question deserved. “
I
’ve hardly been in that attic,” she said. “And I can tell you exactly what’s in the basement, and right now it’s supplies for Armageddon.”

Leland had turned on his bar stool so his back was to the TV. “Marianne
Moore
,” he said finally. “Christ. I know you’re gay for Parfitt and all, but do you realize what someone could do with unpublished Moore documents? Jesus God, I’m
drooling
here. Fuck. I mean, if she stayed there, it’d be late in life. She never went anywhere without her mother while the mother was alive. So this isn’t early shit. This isn’t
juvenilia
. This is, like.
Fuck
.” He slid his empty glass to the bartender. “I mean, just a draft. A photo!”

It was sublimely gratifying to see Leland’s reaction, after Miriam’s calm pessimism. “I know. It’s gotta be
something
. Otherwise why the evasion, you know? That’s what I’m saying.”

“So you gotta get it out of there.”

“Sure. I know. It’s keeping me awake.”

“You tell Zee?”

Doug shook his head. With each day he knew he was less likely to. He wasn’t sure if she would laugh and tell him he needed real source material, not old phone bills, or if she’d storm the attic herself and take over the whole enterprise, but something in his bones rebelled against what should have been spousal transparency.
Maybe the secret of the
Friends
books had indeed been a tiny wedge.

“So you’re going to help me.”

“I’m—okay, what, we’re breaking in? I wear a ski mask?”