House Next Door Page 8

  Pie brought Lucas Abbott and his family up to meet us, maneuvering them like a giddy sheep dog. Kim sauntered behind them. He looked older and thinner in a well-cut summer suit, the only one I had ever seen him wear. His eyes were still smudged with shadows, though he did not look as hangdog as he had when we had seen him last. He looked around at the glowing house as though he had not seen it before, a faint, puzzled frown between his red eyebrows. He cocked his head to one side, as though listening for something, then shook it slightly, as though he did not hear what he was expecting. Someone had given him a drink, and he hugged me and gave Walter a soft jab on the arm, and stood with an arm across both our shoulders, but he said nothing except, “Hi, Kennedys.”

  “I found this guy standing out on the lawn admiring his handiwork,” Lucas Abbott said. “I thought he was rooted to the ground. We had to drag him in, practically; for a minute there I thought he was going to bolt. I didn’t know architects got opening-night nerves.”

  Spots of color burned on Luke’s polished cheekbones, as though he had been too long in the sun. In the candlelight he looked spectacular.

  “Meet my wife Anne and my daughter Marty. Colquitt and Walter Kennedy, the Harralsons’ next-door neighbors on the right. I heartily approve, and so will you two,” he said, turning to the tall, slender woman and the girl at his side.

  We exchanged greetings and pleasantries. I watched as Pie led Kim into the body of the party, where people pressed close around him, clamoring praise for the house. His face was closed and still, and he nodded and mouthed words I could not hear. Once or twice he looked around almost desperately over their heads, as if seeking the nearest exit. I was disturbed and unhappy for him. Perhaps, after all, it would have been better if he had not come.

  “We’ve grown very fond of your husband,” I said to Anne Abbott. “He’s been wonderful to Buddy and Pie, and we see a good bit of him. I hope it will be far more now that you’re moving here.”

  “Luke has told us about you too,” Anne Abbott said. She had a soft, even Bryn Mawr voice. “And about the Harralsons, of course, and their house. It really is lovely, isn’t it?”

  “It is. And from what I know of your husband’s taste, yours will be just as lovely. I think he’s saved the Harralsons from some near-suicidal decisions about wallpaper and such, and if the party is a success, they have him to thank. I know he’s a wonderful family man because he’s been so generous to them.”

  “Luke is a generous man,” she said flatly. There was nothing in her voice of the small, social lilt that you usually hear in the voices of people you have just met. There was a silence.

  Lucas Abbott said, “Let’s go sample some of that excellent stock Walter here helped us lug in today. I am as arid as the Gobi Desert.” He placed a hand lightly on each slim, tanned arm and bore his two women away toward the bar, Buddy following in their wake like a sturdy tugboat. I saw that Lucas Abbott was staggering, almost imperceptibly.

  “I think Lucas Abbott is drunk,” I whispered to Walter, shocked. I don’t know why I was. Most of us were slightly tipsy by now. But I had never seen him waver, never heard him slur, and it was as alien to his cool dignity as a shrill scream would have been. He seldom drank at all, that I knew.

  “Depths and depths,” Walter said owlishly. “I think he is too. A little tiff with the Girl of the Golden East there, do you think?”

  “Maybe. She was sort of…brusque with him there for a minute, I thought. Maybe she felt ignored, with him spending most of their first day here off with Buddy and Pie. What do you think of the ladies Abbott?”

  “Pretty neat. Prime goods. Good-looking women, both of them, in that Eastern way those women all have. The tans and the streaked hair and the little-bitty voices. They look like they just won a regatta. The three of them look like a matched set of Gucci luggage.”

  “You’ve got a Gucci attaché and I don’t hear you complaining,” I said absently. Something in the brief exchange with the Abbotts had set my interior antenna pinging uneasily.

  Roger Swanson motioned to Walter, and he crossed the room and joined him. They put their heads together and then threw them back and laughed, and I knew Roger had told one of his heavy-handed, stunningly obscene, endearing jokes. The smoke around the buffet table was palpable, lying in still blue strata in the air. My eyes prickled and my head ached suddenly. I slipped away from the table and walked through the kitchen and out onto the back deck. The darkness was fresh and fragrant and I took a deep, grateful breath, and then noticed that a figure was leaning against the deck rail at the far end, head in hands. I started to slip back into the kitchen so as not to intrude, and then recognized the long, rangy body. Kim.

  “Don’t you feel well?” I said, going to his side. He raised his head and looked at me in the faint light from the kitchen.

  “There’s something wrong with this house, Col,” he said bleakly. His voice was low and ragged.

  “Oh, Kim, no! There isn’t! It’s even more beautiful than before, it’s just breathtaking like this, all shined up for its first party. It’s like it was born for this, for this night. Everybody’s talking about what a great house it is; a million people have told me they think so. And they have you too, you know they have.”

  I put my hand on his arm, and he covered it with his own, as blindly as a child reaching out for solace. He shook his head, almost angrily.

  “I don’t mean the way it looks. Christ, do you think I don’t know how it looks? It’s a goddamn perfect house as far as looks go, and how do you think I feel, seeing it and knowing I can’t do it again? I’ve been over here a thousand times, just looking at it, wondering how I did it, what I thought and felt while I was designing it—and I just can’t remember. But there’s something else wrong; there’s something in this house I didn’t put here. I can feel it, I can hear it talking to me, but I can’t understand what it’s saying. If I could, I think I’d know what was wrong with me…. Colquitt, it’s just all gone. I’m not going to get it back.”

  His voice broke and he stopped. Tears welled in my own eyes. I put my arms around him and held him silently, and he stood quietly in their circle for a moment, fighting to control his breathing. Then he stepped back and passed a hand over his eyes, and ruffled my hair.

  “Tantrum’s over,” he said. “Let’s go get another drink. I either need two less than I’ve already had or four more. Thanks for putting up with me, Col. You’ve done too much of that lately, you and Walter both.”

  We walked back into the kitchen arm in arm. Walter and Claire Swanson stood there, at the sink, watching us as we came in. They said nothing. Walter’s face was mild and still, Claire’s pink with embarrassment or indignation or both. They had seen the small tableaux on the deck, then. Sudden irritation made my own face warm. I did not attempt to explain, and knew I would not. Both of them knew me far too well to suspect that I felt anything for Kim except what I did, and Walter should have known Kim well enough by now. Let it go and be damned to them.

  “Walter spilled clam dip on his coat, and since we couldn’t find you, I did the honors,” Claire said, brandishing a damp dishcloth.

  “Thanks,” I said drily. “What are friends for if not to help out when they’re needed?”

  “What, indeed,” she said. We all returned to the roiling living room.

  Something seemed to creep into the evening about then. Afterward we could not isolate what it was. “It just went sour,” Claire said. “Everything got…too much.” That was about as close as any of us ever came to it until much, much later. In a way I am glad that other people noticed it. It gives a small shred of validity to what we think now, Walter and I.

  It started, for me at least, with a flurry of raised voices at the end of the room where the bar was. Just a small flurry, like you get sometimes when someone brings up local politics at a party where everyone has had too much to drink. I could hear Matt Gladney’s voice above the others. It roughened as I listened, went flatter, more nasal, more wire-grass
South. Pie’s voice skimmed into the middle of the babble, high and artificial, but I could not hear what she said. Someone stepped back then, and I could see that Matt Gladney and Buddy Harralson were standing very still, facing each other. Buddy looked whitened and miserable and furious, as he had when they had come back from burying the puppy. He said nothing. Matt Gladney’s face was inflamed, incandescent, purple, the savage smile ludicrous in all the compacted anger. A record dropped on the stereo then, drowning the sounds, so we could not hear what Matt Gladney was saying. I saw Lucas Abbott put his hand on Buddy’s arm and pull him gently away from the group. They disappeared toward the kitchen. Matt Gladney stood still, looking after them. On the other side of the room, by the buffet table, I saw Kim Dougherty standing with Anne Abbott and the daughter. They were looking toward the group at the bar but did not move toward it. In a moment Kim said something close to Anne Abbott’s ear, and she smiled, stiffly, and they turned back to the plates they were filling. The music spun up and out and people began to move up to the bar again, and Matt Gladney turned away in response to something Pie’s mother said. The moment broke and the party bowled on.

  “I’d just as soon go home,” I said to Walter. He was looking thoughtfully at the crowd around the bar, apparently having decided to dismiss the incident with Kim for what it was. “I don’t like the looks of that. Everybody’s had too much to drink, and if that awful father of Pie’s is going to jump on poor stupid Buddy and ruin this party, I don’t want to be here for it.”

  “I don’t think he is,” Walter said. “I don’t see him anywhere. Though he could be out in the kitchen beating the hell out of Buddy and Abbott. I don’t see them either. I hope Abbott’s somewhere cooling the kid off. He looked like he’d like to kill the old man. Okay. Let me finish this drink and I’ll see if the Swansons want to come over for a nightcap and hash over this glittering affair. I think I’ll ask Kim too. He looks lower than I’ve ever seen him.”

  “He is,” I said, hugging his arm in love and gratitude. “Thank you for seeing that. Walter, what you saw out there—that was all—”

  “I know it was, baby. I may get an occasional bee in my bonnet about Dougherty, but that’s all it is. Just a very small bee. I know what we’re all about. Kim’s my friend too, remember? Now let me go see if I can find the Swansons.”

  I wish we had left then. I wish it more than anything in the world. Perhaps it would have broken the chain if we had not seen. Perhaps by not seeing we could have escaped the strings and webs, the net that has reached out and caught us up. I doubt it, but perhaps it might have been possible, there at the beginning, to get free. Walter doesn’t think so. He thinks we had to see it. We had, after all, been a part of the house, of Buddy and Pie Harralson’s life, from the very beginning. Present at the creation, as it were. He thinks we were woven into it then, at the start.

  There was a terrible, high scream, Pie’s, unmistakably. I had heard it once before. I don’t remember getting from the living room to the downstairs bedroom, where the scream came from. I was aware only later that I stood there, in the doorway, and that a few late-lingering senior members from Buddy’s firm were behind me. And Walter and Kim Dougherty and Anne and Marty Abbott.

  Pie stood just inside the room screaming thinly and senselessly, over and over and over. Matt Gladney lay on his back at her feet, the magenta draining rapidly and finally out of his face. The blue eyes were open, but we knew even then that they saw nothing, and would not again. His face was insanely contorted to one side, mouth dragged down to his chin.

  Across the room, beside the neatly made guest bed, Lucas Abbott and Buddy Harralson stood, locked together in each other’s arms, frozen and staring at us as stilly as wild animals pinned in the headlights of an oncoming car. They were naked. I thought idiotically that Buddy’s legs were almost as smooth as those of a young girl, while Lucas Abbott’s were corded like the trunk of a tree. In the chaste gloom of the bedroom their white flesh was as shocking as blood on the face of a child. Their clothes were flung across the comforter on the bed beside the strewn handbags of the women who had not yet left the party.

  8

  THE HOUSE WENT up for sale almost immediately, handled by the sedate old firm that has always marketed properties in our part of town. The agent was a friend of most of us on the street—a small, funny girl who had gone to school with Claire Swanson and is a member of most of our clubs and committees. She had not been at the party.

  “It was a terrible tragedy, and a scandal, of course,” she said to Walter and me a week or so later when she came to oversee the setting up of the “For Sale” sign. “But it’s no worse than others we’ve had in town. You remember that awful thing over on Blackthorn a couple of years ago, and the Fairchild affair. Those houses sold in less than a week. We’re not going to have a bit of trouble with this one. I’m just sorry it had to happen here, in front of all of you. But it’s not as though they were us—I mean, you all didn’t really know anything about them or their people, did you? It just goes to show, doesn’t it? You never know about people.”

  “You never do,” said Walter.

  We were sickened and devastated. Everybody on the street was. Shocked and stunned by the ugliness, the sheer dreadfulness of that ghastly, frozen moment in the Harralsons’ downstairs bedroom. Torn with pity and horror. Helpless and outraged in the face of the appalling waste of lives and youth and promise. I had turned on my heel and fled like an animal after that first instant in the doorway, back to my own lighted kitchen. Walter found me there a little later pacing the floor and crying, clutching a squirming Foster against my face.

  “I can’t go back over there,” I said finally. “I can’t. I know we have to—that poor child, her poor mother—there are things that will have to be done, somebody’s going to have to call an ambulance or something—God, Walter, and Luke’s wife and daughter down here not knowing anybody—and Buddy—Walter, I cannot do it.”

  “They don’t want anybody, Col,” he said. “She slammed the bedroom door and ran upstairs and her mother went with her. Claire and Virginia went up and knocked, and her mother told them to go away. Everybody’s gone by now. They were leaving when I left. They’re not going to want to see any of us, not after we saw…that.”

  “But what will happen to them? All of them?”

  “What more can?” he said.

  I hovered, hiccoughing and whimpering, at the kitchen window, vacillating with the need to help and the greater need to know no more, for two or three hours. Walter made coffee and we drank it, but we did not talk much. I halfway expected Claire and Roger to call or come over, or Kim, perhaps, but none of them did. The house next door was darkened except for a light on the lawn that must have come from Pie and Buddy’s upstairs bedroom. I could not make my mind examine what must be going on in the house. I felt confused and displaced and fragmented, the way I have been told you do after a terrible accident.

  Late that night—into the morning, really—an ambulance came silently into the Harralsons’ driveway and two white-coated men got out. When they went around to the back and opened the door and began to unfold a shapeless wheeled thing, I let the curtains drop and turned away. We went to bed, but we did not sleep and we did not speak. I heard the ambulance drive away after a bit, and another car. Much later a third car started up and ghosted out of the driveway. The rest of the night was silent.

  In the morning the house was deserted. No cars were parked in the driveway. When Walter and I finally mustered our courage and went over and knocked, no one answered. The knock had the sound of echoing into a house that had not been lived in for a long time.

  We talked about it on the street, of course. But it was subdued talk. I did not have to guess what would happen at Buddy’s firm. There would be two quiet resignations, one fewer dynamic Eastern senior partner and one fewer promising partner-to-be. The firm would go on. I did not know what would happen to Buddy and Lucas Abbott after that. I still do not know about Lucas, though we
heard later that summer that Buddy and Pie were divorced and he had left the small southern city where they had grown up and gone somewhere in the Southwest. Virginia Guthrie heard that Pie was living with her mother. We did not see her again. A woman from the real estate firm came and supervised the moving van that took the new chrome and leather furnishings away. We were at work and did not see it. I have always been grateful for that.

  We did not see Kim again after that night for almost a month. I knew he would come and talk about that night when he was ready to, if he would ever be able to do it. He did not call either, and I did not have the heart to call his office. When he did appear, one evening at his usual time, I was surprised to see that he looked fit and, if not happy, at least amiable and quiet in his skin. The skin was burned almost walnut-brown from the sun, and he looked hard and honed, if still too thin.

  I hugged him, and Walter’s smile was spontaneous. “Where have you been?” I asked. “We’ve been worried to death about you. I thought you really had cut and run for Europe, or Madagascar, or wherever.”

  “To lose myself and blot out my haunting memories? Not yet. There’s too much I’ve got to figure out still. Besides, the Douglas house is coming down to the wire, and I’ve been on the site from dawn till midnight every day, practically. It’s going good.” He accepted the drink I gave him and scooped up Razz, who came bounding and prancing around his feet as he always used to do, purring loudly.

  “He’s missed you,” I said. “We have too. I’m glad things are going so well with the Douglas house. Does that mean you’re designing again?”

  “Nope. Not a line. Not a curlicue. But I’ve been thinking, and I think now I can beat it. There’s a reason for it somewhere, an answer. I think it’s in that house.” He jerked a thumb over toward the Harralson house, standing silent and lovely in the late sunlight.