House Next Door Page 2

  “Are you sure?” I asked. “There’ve been a million rumors about houses going up there since we’ve been here, and none of them came to anything. Everybody says it’s just not possible to build on it. Martin Sawyer, he’s that very good architect who’s Walter’s tennis partner, he said it couldn’t be done. Who told you? There’s not a realtor’s sign. We heard old Mrs. McIntyre took it off the market when it didn’t sell, back when we moved in.”

  “Old Mrs. McIntyre has gone to her reward, whatever grim thing that might be,” Claire said. “Her daughter in Mobile put it on the market. In fact, daughter sold it directly to somebody she knows here. And I know about it because whoever handled it at the bank told Roger about it.”

  Roger will probably be the next president of the third-largest bank in the city; at forty-eight he’s been executive vice-president for eight years. His grandfather was president. His uncle is chairman of the board. Roger would know.

  “Well, that doesn’t mean they’ll be able to build on it. You know what the architects say.”

  “There’s one that says otherwise. Roger didn’t believe it either, so he checked it out, and he says there are plans, sketches, elevations, the whole schmeer, already done. He says it can be done; he’s seen the plans. The architect is some young hotshot right out of one of those eastern architecture schools; he’s out to put us all in House Beautiful. It’s very contemporary, from what Roger can tell, really a pretty good-looking house, if you like that kind of thing. I know you don’t, but I’ve often thought that all that open space and light and stuff…Well, anyway, up it’s going, and pretty soon too. The people are anxious to get into it.”

  “Oh, Claire, oh, damn. That’s going to mean bulldozers and chain saws and red dust and red mud and men all over the place—they’ll have to doze it. They’ll have to take down trees…Who are the people, do you know?”

  “No. Except that they’re a very young couple, and her daddy gave her the lot and house for a baby present. Yep. Pregnant and with a rich daddy. I do know that she calls him Buddy and he calls her Pie. Roger got that from whoever handled the closing.”

  “Sweet God. Buddy and Pie and bulldozers and baby makes three. You know, I’d almost think about moving. I really would.”

  “No.” Claire’s broad, tanned face was serious; the gentle malice was gone. “This house and this street is right for you and Walter, Colquitt. You fit here like you were meant to be here—from the very first you did. You…enhance it for us, for Roger and me especially. Hang some curtains and start wearing clothes…oh, yes, I know you run around naked as a jaybird in there. I’m not going to tell you how I know, either. I’d do it myself if I didn’t have three adolescent sex maniacs and old man Birdsong next door and did have a body as good as yours. Hang some curtains and grit your teeth, and meanwhile give me another drink, and then I’ve got to go home. You might even like the house, and I suppose it’s barely possible that you might like Buddy and Pie. God! But even if you don’t, it’s not worth moving. It’s only a house.”

  After she left I finished off the watery bull shot in the pitcher and went upstairs, a trifle giddy with vodka and dismay, and took a shower. The bathroom that connects our bedroom with the room destined to be my office is large and airy, and the woods from the McIntyre lot, together with the ferns I’ve hung in the bank of high old windows, give the room an undulating, greenish, underwater light that I’ve always loved. It makes me feel like a mermaid, wet and sinuous and preening in her own element. There had never been curtains; we had never needed them. Those rooms looked straight into treetops. “I’ll hate whatever curtains I put up,” I thought, toweling myself. “No matter if they’re Porthault and cost the earth, I’ll hate them.”

  I put on white slacks and a tee shirt and went, barefoot, down to the kitchen and started a salad. We’d have it with the half of the crab quiche I’d made for Sunday brunch, which I’d frozen. I put a bottle of Chablis into the freezer, made a mental note to myself to take it out in half an hour, and then, on impulse, stuck a couple of glasses in the freezer and mixed a pitcher of martinis from the Russian vodka Walter had brought home—smooth, silky, lovely stuff. Why not. Why not, indeed? It’s Friday. Weekend coming up. Long, lazy, golden weekend. We’ll drink to that.

  “We’re drinkin’, my friend, to the end…”

  Aren’t you the lugubrious one, though, Mrs. Colquitt Hastings Kennedy, sozzling martinis and weeping over a piece of ground that doesn’t even belong to you, I told myself. But it does, I said back. It’s more mine than it will ever be theirs, these dreadful, faceless Buddy and Pie people and their awful, faceless baby. I looked out the kitchen window at the piece of ground that did not belong to me, settling itself into the fast-deepening green darkness that seemed to well up from the very earth of it. My mini-mountain.

  The headlights of the Mercedes swung across the kitchen and stopped, and went out. I heard the nice, solid thunk of its door closing and went out onto the back porch, cats eeling around my ankles, to meet Walter.

  He would not yet have heard about the house next door.

  2

  BUDDY AND PIE did not remain faceless long. We had faces, last names, and nearly intact genealogies for them both the very next day. It had been a perfect summer Saturday, one of those blue, crystal-edged days you occasionally get here in late August, when the thick, wet heat lifts for a small space of time and there is a portent of October in the air. We had drunk the pitcher of martinis the night before, and another, and ate the quiche quite late, sitting in the screened part of the patio and listening to the crickets and the ghostly nighttime dissonance of the katydids from the woods behind our house and on the McIntyre lot. We had talked about the house-to-be, and what it would mean to us and the way we lived, and Walter had made me feel a little better about it.

  “We’ve always known it might happen one day, Col,” he’d said. “Don’t prejudge it, or them. Maybe there’s a way to build in and around most of the trees, and nobody in their right mind would take down those rhododendrons at the edge there. They’ll make a good screen. Besides, they’re much younger, they’ll have their own friends. A tiny baby can’t be all that much of a nuisance. And you’re not home in the daytime. You won’t be bothered with the noise and mess.”

  Walter is the pragmatic one of us. He is my anchor; I am, he says, his wings.

  “I won’t always be at the agency,” I’d said mulishly. “I want to try it on my own in a couple of years. You know that. I’ve showed you what I want to do with the upstairs bedroom for an office—it’s going to look right smack down their throats, and I’ve so looked forward to having all that green right out my window when I’m working. Like a treehouse—oh, I wish we’d bought it when we bought this house!”

  “Well, so do I. But we didn’t have the cash for it then and it’s too late now. Hang some curtains and you can still go naked from dawn till midnight. I’ll have to divorce you if you give that up.”

  “That’s what Claire said. But she’s used to having people all over her. I just don’t want to be knee-deep in people for the rest of my life.”

  “You’re spoiled,” he said.

  “So are you.”

  “And we’ll keep it that way. I promise. That’s what we’re all about.”

  The next morning, feeling pleasantly heavy-limbed and a bit frail from the vodka and wine, we skipped our regular tennis match and did the sort of groceries-dry cleaner-drugstore chores that I don’t really mind. We do them together usually, and it’s one of the small, adventurous rituals around which we have built our life together. We had a late lunch at one of the pretentious little patio-type places that have sprung up around town, where the consciously chic young gather in their flocks for Bloody Marys and brunch and lunch, to show off their new Saturday clothes and see and be seen and map out the remainder of their weekend. Unencumbered by small children, we are able to do that when we choose, and weekends are good times for us. We feel grateful not to be trapped in the rites of the ve
ry young, and are able to enjoy their sleek health and preenings without envy because we have what we want together. We are not out of place among them; neither are we of them.

  After lunch we saw an Ingmar Bergman matinee, which we did not especially enjoy—we like his earlier films better—and came home about four. Walter laid my latest batch of river stones into the steep bank destined to be my rock garden, and I took shears and a Mexican straw basket and went to thin out the zinnias. After we had finished, Walter made gin and tonics and brought them to the patio, and I thrust the glowing armful of zinnias into a bucket of water and set them on the round table, admiring the rowdy extravagance of them against the green of the lawn and woods. Comfortably tired, we stretched our legs and sipped our drinks and listened to the pitter of the lawn sprinkler.

  “Do we have to go to that thing of the Parsons’?” Walter asked.

  “Not really if you don’t want to. It’s going to be so big they’ll never miss us. Would you rather stay home? Only I didn’t thaw anything for dinner.”

  “What I’d really like to do is go out and get the sloppiest, biggest pizza in the world and bring it home and watch the late show. I’ve got a tennis match at eight o’clock in the morning. I really don’t want to go stand around and drink all night.”

  “Consider it done,” I said, and looked around as a gray Mercedes purred into the driveway.

  “Who the hell is that?” Walter said, frowning.

  Three people got out of the car and came toward the patio with the apologetic smiles of people who aren’t sure of their reception. A tall, pretty blond girl in a pink linen pantsuit, her hair tied back with a hank of pink yarn. A slight, moon-faced young man in stiff new Levi’s and a stiff new blue work shirt. And a tall young man, only slightly older, with brick-colored hair to his shoulders and a wiry bush of red beard. His denims were faded to milky blue, worn soft and thin. A faint bulge of pregnancy lifted the jacket of the girl’s pantsuit, and she walked with the ancient backward tilt of a woman adjusting to an unaccustomed front weight.

  “If I had to guess, I would say that is the famous Buddy and Pie. Our new neighbors. I have no idea who Vincent Van Gogh there is,” I said, and we rose and went to meet them.

  “This is really awful, isn’t it? Just to drop in on you people this way. But I told Buddy you all really ought to know what you’re going to have to put up with—and your house looked so pretty and peaceful, and I said, well, they’ve just got to be super people to live in a house like that, and so we just took a chance you wouldn’t simply hate us for barging in on you like this…” The girl said it in a light, fluttering rush, coming toward me with her hands extended, smiling the smile of one who has never been rebuffed in her life. There was a tangle of gold bracelets on her slender wrist and a startling, enormous diamond on her left hand along with a diamond wedding band.

  “I’m Pie Harralson,” she said, taking my hand in both of hers. “This is my husband, Buddy. We’ve bought that gorgeous, gorgeous lot next door, and this wild man behind me is the architect who is going to build the most fabulous house in the world for us. Kim Dougherty. I know you’re the Kennedys because your mailbox says so.” She stopped, tilted her head to one side, crinkled her nose, and waited for us to respond.

  “Walter Kennedy,” said Walter, shaking hands with the silent, grinning Buddy and towering Kim. “And this is my wife, Colquitt.”

  I nodded and smiled. There was a small, stretching silence. Rasputin, our orange tiger cat, appeared from the depths of the McIntyre lot and came to curl around the girl’s ankle, and she swooped at him in an ecstasy of joy. Razz backed off and looked at her flatly.

  “What a darling kitty,” cried Pie Harralson. “And he’s been playing on our lot, yes, he has, hasn’t he? I love kitties, we’re going to get one when we move in and the baby comes. What’s your name, you pretty thing? Will you come to my house and play with my kitty?”

  Razz is by no stretch of the imagination a darling kitty. He turned his back ostentatiously to the girl, sat down, and began to wash his face. Pie Harralson looked at us, smiling. Silence spun out again.

  Oh, all right, I thought crossly.

  “His name is Rasputin, but we call him Razz,” I said. “He’s not very friendly, I’m afraid, but he isn’t mean. We just heard last night about the lot being sold, and it’s good to get to know you so soon. Won’t you come have a drink with us? We were just having a gin and tonic…”

  “Oh, no, we were just passing and thought we—Pie thought—I know you folks probably have plans,” said Buddy Harralson rather miserably. His voice was a surprising deep bass.

  “Aren’t you darling to ask us! I think that would be just super, if you’re sure we’re not keeping you from anything,” said Pie. Her blue glance took in my old gardening pants and zinnia-stained hands and Walter’s paint-spotted dungarees. Not-going-anywhere clothes.

  “Nothing at all,” said Walter. “If you’ll forgive us for looking like Tobacco Road, we’ve got plenty of gin and tonic. Come on back to the patio and tell us about your house. Your house too,” he said to Kim Dougherty, who nodded but said nothing.

  We sat late on the patio, Pie Harralson burbling and crinkling, gesturing with her long hands and looking lovingly at the McIntyre lot—the Harralson lot now—as she described the house. Buddy Harralson loosened up a bit as the gin and tonics were refilled, and put in an earnest, booming amendment now and then to Pie’s skittering stream of enthusiasm. Kim Dougherty drank steadily and silently and regarded them both with faint amusement and a sort of unwilling tolerance, and he looked frequently at the lot next door too. It was a measuring, far-off look, with nothing in it of Pie’s proprietary love. The look reminded me of the guarded, preternaturally alert look a dog gives another dog he has just encountered before he has ascertained whether there will be calm or danger. Later, as full darkness began to fall, he spoke a bit about the lot and what he hoped to create there. He had a soft, clipped voice. It was obvious that he was a good architect.

  We learned in the course of the evening that Pie and Buddy Harralson had both been born in the same small city in South Georgia and had been sweethearts—Pie’s word—since the eighth grade, had gone off to the state university together, where Buddy had been a Kappa Alpha (all the guys from home go KA) and had made the dean’s list in prelaw with some regularity. Pie had been Chi Omega (all the girls from home are), Kappa Alpha Rose one year, Homecoming Queen her senior year, and had made abysmal grades in Elementary Education.

  “Daddy was fit to be tied over my grades,” she confided. “But everybody knew I’d never teach school anyhow. I knew I was going to marry Buddy and have babies and a super house way before he knew it, so what difference did grades make? I do volunteer work with the League now, but I guess I’ll have to stop that pretty soon—are you in the League?”

  I shook my head no and smiled. “I do public relations work; I stay pretty busy,” I said, and hated myself for saying it. It is a degrading small thing about myself that I dislike intensely—not being a Junior Leaguer and still caring just a little that I am not. I was annoyed with myself for explaining to this child.

  “I just bet you’re fabulous at it too,” Pie said. “You look like a career woman. But I’m real disappointed that you won’t be home in the daytime. I know I’m going to get bored with just the baby to talk to.”

  “Colquitt’s planning to quit and work at home before too long,” said Walter, and I glared at him in the darkness.

  “Oh, well, that’s all right then. I’m not the utter child that Mother and Daddy and Buddy think I am—and Buddy’s mother, of course—but I will feel better with, you know, an older woman close by. Not that you’re old—oh, Pie, really, your mouth!” She gurgled at herself. “Mother and Daddy will feel better too. And Buddy’s mama, naturally. They all wanted us to live at home, at least until the baby was a year or two old, but that’s just so tacky; nobody stays in that town anymore. I told Daddy that if he’d buy me—us, I mean—the l
ot and house, I’d make friends with all the women in the neighborhood, and that’s just like having your own family around you. Not that I mean to hang all over you, but I’m a real extrovert, and I love people, and friends mean so much to me. Do you have any children?”

  “No,” I said. “It’s just the two of us.” Her silent “why” hung in the air, but I did not explain.

  Buddy, it developed, was a brand-new member of a large, prestigious downtown law firm, and planned to specialize in tax law.

  “It’s steady, and with this firecracker here and a new bambino on the way, I figured I’d leave the glamour stuff to the hotshots.”

  It was obvious that he adored Pie and was awed and bursting with pride about the baby, and even more obvious that there was family money waiting in the wings on both sides. Brand-new lawyers do not drive a Mercedes or give their brides two-carat solitaires. Most brides are not dowered with four-bedroom contemporary homes in our neighborhood.

  “Daddy died when I was nine,” Buddy put in, answering the unspoken question. “Mama raised me by herself, but he left her pretty comfortable. She’s been generous helping us get started.” Pie snorted in the darkness, and I guessed that there was dissension there. The mother of this good, stolid boy might well have been reluctant to relinquish him into Pie Harralson’s darting, butterfly hands. I thought, wearily, that I would probably be the recipient of not a few mother-in-law horror stories in days to come.

  Just before they left, Pie darted out to the Mercedes and brought back the house plans, and we spread them out on the table in the screened room, turning on the yellow overhead light. The house-to-be lay in a pool of radiance, as if spotlit. I drew in my breath at it. It was magnificent. I do not as a rule care for contemporary architecture, finding it somehow sharp and intrusive and demanding, in spite of the obvious virtues of air and light and ease of maintenance, of functional living space. This house was different. It commanded you, somehow, yet soothed you. It grew out of the penciled earth like an elemental spirit that had lain, locked and yearning for the light, through endless depths of time, waiting to be released. It soared into the trees and along the deep-breasted slope of the ridge as though it had uncoiled, not as though it would be built, layer by layer and stone by stone. I could hardly imagine the hands and machinery that would form it. I thought of something that had started with a seed, put down deep roots, grown in the sun and rains of many years into the upper air. In the sketches, at least, the woods pressed untouched around it like companions. The creek enfolded its mass and seemed to nourish its roots. It looked—inevitable.