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My wife called me at work to say she saw our neighbor in his garden. She was standing in our garden—our house is way up on a hill, you don't realize how high it is until you're up here—and she could see him down there in his fenced-in yard, in shorts and a baseball hat, reading the newspaper. A woman came out of the house in a towel, Linda said, and she took it off and spread it on the ground and started doing exercises on it. Linda said it was weird. The woman wore a bikini, and every once in a while the man looked over at her and said something. He kept lifting one leg, she said, crossing it over the other. The woman sat up and brushed her hair and took off her top, rubbing lotion on her shoulders, and the man got up and lay down next to her and they started making out.
It was hard to see, Linda said, but she could imagine it. I pictured her in the flower bed, with her gloves on and her gardening shirt and her straw hat and sunglasses and her special knee pads, with the little shovel, and the void look of half recognizing something happening outside her that she wanted or that had somehow grabbed her. And so there she was, sucked in, and she said to herself, What should I do? Should I stop looking? Should I call Mike at work? And then she thought, What if they stay there all day? Then, Linda said, the man rolled off the woman and you could hear them both laughing. She said, "Do you think I should invite them over?"
"Is that why you called me?"
She said, "Why don't we ever do that?"
I didn't know. Linda'd been "retired" for a year. Not working had done this to her. I don't know what you'd call it, but here was the result. I said, "I gotta go." It had been hectic times like you sometimes have at an ad agency, where everybody's going nuts and you rush and rush and the guy you need stays at lunch for three hours. While I was waiting for him to come back I cut off the chewed-up end of my pen cap with a toenail clipper and a piece flew into my eye. It still hurt.
Linda said, "How would you feel if your father was coming to visit us?"
"I don't know." I rubbed my eye. I heard her breathing on the other end. I said, "Is somebody coming to visit us?" She said yes. "Who?"
"My father." She read me a letter that said he'd be at a wedding near us and thought it would be good to come see our new house. She'd called him back and told him O.K. He'd be here late Saturday. In the letter it said he was bringing "the maid."
She said, "Oh, why is he coming?"
We were living this quiet little life. We had this beautiful house that we built out of her "inheritance." It's not an inheritance—an inheritance is money from a dead person. This was from him. And we didn't "build" the house; we paid somebody else and they built it. It's up there, out of the way of danger, on the edge of a valley of rolling green farms outside Philadelphia. It was everything we'd ever wanted, and we acted happy there. I called her Bunky, she called me Cheese.
"Cheese," she said. "I hate my father."
We had a glorious yard, a beautiful pool, sliding glass doors leading out to a patio, metal lawn chairs with pillows, a dog, a special electric fence to keep the dog from running away, a thing on his collar to shock him if he tried, track lighting in the kitchen, a marble pastry block. We had a thing to dry the lettuce after you wash it. We had a bug-electrocuting mosquito light. We had a Chevy Tahoe Blazer, and a 2 door B.M.W. We had money, her money. We didn't have to worry about what we bought. We bought the woods behind the house and ran back there with the dog and came home with twigs and leaves stuck to us. We met an interesting [great] group of people when we moved in, all our neighbors who'd built elegant houses out here like ours—the men worked in the city and the women were all psychologists. We had them over and they had us over, talking and drinking French red wine till two in the morning—it was a fucking blast, discussing famous celebrities roughly our age over roasted chicken, everything great.
The second I met Linda, I knew she was the one. We were so cool together. Everything was easy. She was way better-looking than anyone I'd ever dated before. We'd sit around all night watching TV, making out, eating tacos in our underwear. It was heaven, playing together like children, touching, feeling, learning all the hidden stuff (I hate sports, she smoked PCP in high school). I bought her cheap silly presents every day on my way home from work. She made my balls go slack when she looked at me. Sometimes she looked at me so hard her eyes crossed. It was beautiful. We decided to get married, and then she told me she was rich, and that was terrific. We bought the land and built the house and moved out here.
What were we doing? I gave her this dog, on our first anniversary, and we'd sit on the floor together and talk to it, petting its fur—it was small and soft then. Linda's voice would grow quiet and I'd feel calm, and she'd call it funny names and kiss it; or kiss me, or I'd rub Linda's soft golden forearm and lean over and kiss the back of her silky head, the beautiful smell of shampoo surrounding her, and I could feel the bitterness drain out of me. "Don't think," I'd say to myself. "It's cool." We had an awesome lifestyle. I wanted to enjoy it. The dog was a puppy when we got him, a furry black bundle, but now he was an enormous, shedding mutt; the muscles bulged in a ring around his concrete head as he tore up tennis balls in his jaws and swallowed the pieces. It was my job to walk him at night, and I'd stand in the driveway and watch him piss, and see if he had shit where I had to walk. I'd look at the sky and get lonely. I'd go around shutting off the lights in our big, empty house. That feeling got me every night for at least a second. I'd walk upstairs and hug Linda and hold on, and it took all my troubles away.
* * *
Friday after work I went to the food store. Linda waxed the floor in the foyer. She vacuumed the carpets, barely able to talk, drained of energy, polishing the table from a lying position on the couch—a scared, pathetic mess. It was awful to watch. I felt sorry for her, and that night we went to bed at nine o'clock. She sat on the covers in a nightshirt with the front unbuttoned and her tits hanging out and put together her Scrabble set and asked me
to play. She wanted to organize her brain into letters—
"letters that make words"—so her mind could make sense, so she could think, so she could sleep. She said, "I think I'm worried."
"It'll be over before you know it," I said. ÔDon't think about it."
"Turn up the thermostat," she said. "Turn on the air conditioner. Not the air conditioner. Just the air, just the fan." She didn't have her contacts in, and she was talking to the wall about two feet to my right, to a dark drape where I'd been standing a few seconds before.
I said, "I'm looking for the switch."
"I like the noise it makes. It calms me, it soothes me, it reminds me of summer and puts me to sleep."
"I'm over here," I said.
"I like the smell."
"All right," I said. "Jesus fucking Christ. Point the light over here so I can see."
I held her and kissed her and told her not to worry—I hated her father, too. I hated my own father more. He was a dickhead. These fathers left a lot to be desired. Linda's face had broken out mysteriously that afternoon, and it was bumpy to the touch, like a rhinoceros. Her breath smelled like hot liverwurst, and while we slept she kept heaving the covers off us onto the floor, her skin was about a million degrees.
To read the rest of the story, buy the book...
Copyright© 2000 by Matthew Klam
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