House Next Door Page 3

  I looked at Kim Dougherty, who lifted his head from the drawings, his face a sculpture, and looked full into my eyes.

  “It’s beautiful,” I said. “It really is beautiful.”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Isn’t it just the most fabulous thing you ever saw? Don’t you love it?” Pie squealed, feeling the force of my approval in the darkness. “Isn’t that the cutest thing, the way that balcony wraps around and hangs over the creek? That’s going to be the baby’s room, right there over the little waterfall. He’s going to go to sleep right there in the treetops every night!”

  “Let’s hope the bough doesn’t break and the cradle fall,” Walter said cheerfully. I could tell he liked the house too.

  “Right! Or down would come baby, cradle and all!” chortled Pie Harralson. “Oh, that’s terrible! Nothing like that is going to happen to my baby. Not in this adorable house. Oh, Daddy’s just going to hate this house! We haven’t shown him the plans, and I’m not going to either. Nobody from home is going to see it till it’s finished. Daddy wanted us to have something with columns. But I said, Daddy, I want something so fantastic that cars stop in the street just to look at it. I said, when my house is built, you’re going to see the real me, you’re going to see a side of your baby you didn’t even know existed. And this house is me, but definitely. Oh, he’s going to be fit to be tied!”

  In the darkness I felt rather than saw Kim Dougherty flinch.

  They stayed for the space of another drink, and then Pie rolled up the drawings and Buddy shook hands solemnly all the way around, and Kim nodded and said thank-you-for-the-drinks-I’m-glad-you-liked-the-house, and they got into the Mercedes and drove away.

  Walter went out and got a fine, fat pizza crowded thickly with what he calls “all that good ginney shit,” and we ate it in bed and watched a rerun of Night of the Hunter. It is eerie, beautiful, poetic, disturbing, and I have always loved it. We made the sort of slow, sweet, deep love that seems to belong to summer nights, different from the muscular, blanketed love of winter. It is always good, always rich, this thing we have together. I always think, when it is over and we lie ebbing in each other’s arms, that there should be something wrong between us, something basically abrasive and thin and sour. It is uncanny what we have built with each other, all the areas of accord and pleasure we have nurtured. Sometimes I feel that we are very selfish, very unsharing of the whole to which we add up. But from the very beginning we knew we did not want to dilute it. We have no children for that reason. We are sufficient. It often frightens me, and I sometimes feel guilty that we are really, basically, only involved with each other. I think we should give more to the world, somehow. Perhaps one day we will give more, perhaps we shall have to. I think so, soon now.

  “What do you think?” Walter said, late into the night.

  “I think the house is…really special. I think it’s probably a great house. But I can’t imagine those two simple-minded children wanting a house like that. I don’t know about Buddy-boy, but Pie-baby has no idea in the world what she’s got in that house. Just no idea.”

  “Of course not. She’s trying to get a rise out of Daddy. Literally, probably. Oedipus and all that. It’s as good a way as any to screw Daddy. That poor son-of-a-bitch husband of hers would obviously live in an igloo if she wanted it. And if Mama let him. Did I detect a subtle little nuance there?”

  “Not so subtle,” I said, watching the moon shadows stretch and dwindle and stretch again into our open windows. Razz and the gray tom Foster Grant were heavy, sleep-sodden mounds at our feet. “I like that architect too. I think he might be an authentic, working genius. Why on earth does he put up with them, do you suppose? He must know they don’t understand that house.”

  “Where else is he going to get clients with the bread to build that kind of house? I don’t think he gives a holy shit what they think of it. It’s his house, not theirs. I bet he’d build it for KKK headquarters if they paid him for it. He just wants it up. Couldn’t you tell?”

  “I guess so. Darling, are you just going to hate having them for neighbors?”

  “No, because I don’t plan to see them except maybe once a year, at Christmas, like your mother. What do you think, that we’ve got to have them for dinner once a week? She could be a problem for you, though. I’ll bet she’s already got you pegged as a baby-sitter-confidante-mama-figure. It’s obvious she’s going to be somebody’s little girl till she’s eighty, even if it ain’t Daddy’s. God, did you ever see such a classic cheerleader in your life? I’ll bet she’s still got a drawer full of angora sweaters and charm bracelets. And money. If you’re smart, Col, you’ll cut her off gently and firmly as soon as you can. You’re not my idea of somebody’s wise old mother.”

  “Thanks for small favors.”

  Much later I awoke and heard an owl in the woods on the lot next door. We don’t get many of them in the city; I could not remember the last time I had heard one. It was, for some reason, a truly dreadful sound. I lay listening to it, something wild and heavy uncurling in my chest. And I reached down carefully, so as not to wake Walter, and I tied a knot in the corner of the top sheet.

  He rolled over and looked at me, propped up on one elbow.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Yes, you are.”

  “If you must know, I’m tying a knot in the corner of the sheet. I heard an owl in the McIntyre woods.”

  “He doesn’t care for our sheets, he’s saying?”

  “No. It’s just something my grandmother always did. You tie a knot in the bedsheet when you hear an owl. If you don’t, it means somebody is going to die.”

  “That somebody is going to be me, at eight o’clock on the tennis court, if I don’t get some sleep. Go to sleep, Col. It’s going to be all right about the house.”

  I did, finally, with the lost call of the faraway owl still in my ears.

  3

  THE HARRALSON HOUSE got under way the day after Labor Day, and all through the slow, burning, dry autumn, yellow insect machinery crawled back and forth across the ridge, buzzing and gnawing implacably at the curve of it. Trees did go down; my heart squeezed painfully at each new gap when I drove in from work every afternoon. A culvert went into the creek, which docilely accepted its new channel and flowed on through our yard, its cola-brown water stained blood-red. A driveway was carved out, and straggled over the culvert. The keen of chain saws rang on the street day after day as the fallen hardwoods were sectioned and chained and borne away. All that fall, pink dust lay over our lawn and patio and driveway, filming the cars and sifting into the windows and puffing from the cats’ coats when I brushed them. Annoyed by the shrieking invasion of their foraging grounds, they gave the lot a wide berth and stayed close to our house or deep in our back woods all day. They did not hunt in the evenings either, as they always had. They slept close to us in the den while we watched television, and planted themselves stubbornly at our feet when we went to bed, refusing to be ousted. If we did put them out and close the bedroom door, they scratched patiently at it until we let them in again.

  “Sissies,” Walter said one evening, trying to nudge Foster out the back door onto the patio. “Or snobs, maybe. They’re as big snobs as you are, Col. They want nothing to do with the outlanders or their house, only they make no bones about it.”

  “The noise and confusion scares them,” I said, scooping up Foster and returning him to the haven of the lighted kitchen.

  “They’re not scared of hell itself,” Walter said. “They’re pissed off. I don’t blame them. From the looks of those sketches of Dougherty’s, I didn’t think so many trees would come down or so much of the ridge go. I’m glad neither of us is here during the day. You’d probably go berserk and axe-murder the entire crew.”

  The crew was almost always done when I arrived home in the evenings, well before Walter did, their equipment littered along the desolated ridge like the discarded carapaces of megalithic insects. T
he raw earth looked shocking, like bleeding flesh, but to be fair about it, Kim Dougherty had not marked so many trees for death as it appeared when they first began to come down. Grudgingly, I had to concede that when the house was up and the foundation planted with shrubbery, the lovely woman-curves of the land would not be so badly altered after all.

  “You won’t even remember how it looked before when it’s all up and ground cover is planted and some landscaping’s done,” Claire said to me one evening early on when she and Roger had walked over with a market basket full of jeweled late tomatoes from the Farmers’ Market.

  “I’ll remember. But I’m not going to hate it as much as you’d hoped,” I said. “It really is a beautiful house, or will be. It’s the teeny-weeny baby Harralsons I’m going to have a hard time with.”

  “I saw them yesterday,” Claire said. “Out climbing around all over that dirt, looking down in the foundation like the Holy Grail was down there. She looks like Shirley Temple knocked up. And he looks like Andy Hardy. He had her by the arm like she was going to have the child right there—though I guess it isn’t too bright to go climbing around construction sites when you’re—what? Five months? Six? I don’t see a whole lot of them, though, thank God. But that bearded wonder is over there every day, almost all day long.”

  “Well, it’s probably his first house. I guess he wants it to be perfect. I would too—something that spectacular.”

  “Are you turning modern on us, Colquitt?” Roger Swanson asked. He has always teased me about being born a hundred years too late. He told Walter once, late into a rather boisterous evening party in the Guthries’ beautiful back garden, that I always reminded him of the Lady of Shalott. “Only he pronounced it like the onion,” Walter told me. “Very much of the earth, is Roger.”

  “No, you know I’m too reactionary for that,” I said. I like Roger, like his comforting bluntness, his deep and abiding sense of responsibility toward his family and his world, and his clumsy, earnest attempts at gallantry. He has a rare sweetness to him, a perfect foil for Claire’s earthy briskness. Duck, their oldest son, is a carbon of Roger. The other two boys are a very satisfactory blend of both of them.

  “I think it’s the architect Colquitt really has a letch for,” Claire said. “Fresh young meat. I see him over here all the time before you get home from work, Walter. Colquitt feeds him and plies him with your best stuff. Duck saw the empties in your garbage can the other day when he was mowing your lawn.”

  “Duck talks too damned much,” I said, kicking her lightly. “Walter knows all about Kim and me. He gives his full approval. We made a deal. I said he could take that set of walking boobs he calls a receptionist to lunch every day if he’d let me get Kim Dougherty drunk every afternoon. It’s working out just fine.”

  Actually, Walter did know about the friendship that had sprung up between Kim and me. “If I ever find concrete dust in the bed, I’ll kill him,” he said, but I knew he liked Kim too, and he often joined Kim and me for the late-afternoon beer or gin and tonic that had, somehow, become a ritual with us that fall. It was a friendship, would never be anything more. I have what I want and do not need the adulation of very young men, even though, I modestly admit, there have been some around my agency who have offered it. Walter has always known that.

  It would never be anything less than a friendship either, and that pleased me. I like my relationships to be full, open, and well defined, and I had found a genuine friend in this quiet young man so in love with the house he was building. I think it started, really, with my response to the plans Pie showed us that first evening on the terrace. With the instinctive and uncluttered perception you often find in really creative people, he had known at once that I felt, at least in part, some of what he did for the Harralson house. He accepted it as his due, and we went on from there, instant equals. It is a trait you don’t often encounter in the very young.

  He had come over one evening just after I had driven in, not long after construction had started. He was red all over, a skin of dust and stain of earth blending into the red of his hair and beard. Even his old denims were red, and his heavy boots. I laughed spontaneously.

  “Eric the Red, I presume?”

  “Speaking. Or sneezing, as the case may be,” he said, fanning helplessly at the effluvia of red dust that hung over him. “And speaking of presuming, I wonder if you’d mind terribly making a phone call for me. I need to talk to my partner, and I can’t go up to the shopping center and call because I’ve got a guy coming in with a load of sand. I wouldn’t bother you with it, but I’m scared to ring the doorbell next door. That lady looks like somebody just ironed her, and she always looks at me like she’s about to call the police and the sanitation department when I see her out in her yard. I hate to think what all this dust has done to it.”

  I laughed again. Virginia Guthrie is a lovely, gentle woman, a true lady, and as immaculate at every waking moment as a mannequin—which she was when she was younger—but she does look starched and ironed, and she did indeed hate what the dust was doing to her garden. It’s an incredible garden, invariably included on the city’s glossiest spring garden tours, and I couldn’t really blame her. Still, I knew well the slight flaring of those elegant nostrils, the nearly imperceptible lift of the delicate eyebrows.

  “She won’t bite you,” I said. “She’s a nice person. But, sure, I’ll be glad to make a call for you. Only why don’t you come on in and make it yourself, in the den, where you can be private?”

  “I really couldn’t, Mrs. Kennedy. I’d wreck your house. I’m like Pigpen in ‘Peanuts.’” He grinned, a startling flash of white in all the redness. It was a child’s happy, free grin. He had not smiled at all, that I remembered, during the evening we had spent together. He had hardly spoken. I liked him very much indeed all of a sudden.

  “Tell you what. You sloosh off some of that dust at the faucet there, by the side of the patio, and I’ll make your call for you, and then we’ll have a drink. Or a beer if you’d rather. You must think we do nothing but sit on our patio and drink, but I promise we’re really very respectable people and not out to lure young geniuses into sloth and degradation. Go on, you look dry as a bone, and the dust can’t hurt the patio. It’s already got your calling card all over it.”

  He didn’t demur or assume the deferential coyness of someone you know would like to accept an invitation but thinks it seemly to hedge a bit, and I liked that too. He said, “A beer would really do the trick,” and disappeared around the side of the house toward the faucet, and I took the grimy slip of paper with the number he had given me and went to phone his partner and tell him Kim would be back in the office about eight, if he wanted to wait and go over the Douglas specs. I opened a cold beer for him and made myself a weak gin and tonic and took them both to the patio with a basket of pretzels. He was tumbled loosely in one of the white chairs, face and hands the color of skin again, droplets of water glistening in his beard. He was looking at the Harralson house with the same level, measuring look I had seen that night in August.

  “Looks like hell, doesn’t it?” he said, drinking deeply of the beer. “I didn’t realize how bad it looked from over here. You must have really loved that lot when it was wild.”

  “Yes. I really did. And I thought I’d hate the house and the poor Harralsons, and I wasn’t all that fond of you either when I first saw you. I considered you the murderer of my private mountain and all my privacy. But the house is a lovely, lovely thing. It’s going to make me happy just to look at it. It looks so…organic or something, at least in your sketches. You wouldn’t maintain a house like that; you’d feed and water it. You’d need to give it nourishment and love to keep it alive and healthy. I think that house will bring out the best of whoever lives there—the fortunate young Harralsons, in this case. I hope they’ll love it properly.”

  “I’m glad you like it,” he said, not looking at me. “I could sort of tell you did when you saw the plans, and understood it too. I’ve always f
elt that way about design—that first you plant something. The site, the ground will tell you what to plant. You plant it, and you raise it, and the hell with what the clients say they want. The house should be its own boss, and they should live by its rules, not the other way around. It’s up to them to…make it grow, as you say. This house is its own boss. It does ask the best of you. That’s good. I like that. Those poor, stupid children, though…”

  “I’d say you were probably precisely one year older than those children,” I said, amused. “And they love it. You know they do. They’re so proud—”

  “They don’t know what they got. I couldn’t care less. I wish somebody like you could live in it, but I wouldn’t really care if it was Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun.”

  “That’s almost exactly what my husband said—that it was your first project, and you’d build it for the KKK just so you got the chance to build it.”