Rebecca Makkai - The Hundred-Year House

“What do you mean, Charles Demuth? He stayed here? I adore him!”

“I mean his stuff’s in the attic.”

She looked as if he’d told her JFK Jr. had just swum to shore, shaken but still dreamy.

“Potentially,” he added. “But didn’t artists do that, sometimes? They’d leave paintings as payment?”

She sunk her head again. “I don’t know, Doug, this isn’t what it sounded like, with Bruce. He just said there were disgusting file cabinets and the furniture. If there were anything valuable, he’d know.”

“But if someone like Demuth just doodled on an envelope! Bruce would have no idea what that even was!” Doug wasn’t sure why he was trying to get Miriam interested, since he didn’t want her messing this up for him. Maybe he was just irrationally insulted that she wasn’t as excited as he was.

He refrained from mentioning Parfitt. If she’d been paying any attention that night at the big house, she’d have heard him say Parfitt stayed there. But then she hadn’t even seemed to register that it was a real arts colony. In her short time here, she hadn’t struck him as someone terribly curious about much outside her jungle of beads and scraps. She hadn’t been out to explore the town, and she never talked on the phone. It had all seemed vaguely charming before, but now, for some reason, it upset him.

He left her to her collages and her weeping, and asked her not to say anything about the files.

“More secrets!” she said. He couldn’t read her tone. “What fun.”

(There was a man

I wanted to kiss

On the eyes

And there was a man

I needed to pin down.

There was a man

I wanted to smash

Into my breasts and there was a man

Whose lips were pillows. Here

Is what I want to do

To you: throw you to the floor and lick

The crease behind your ear.

It is a part of yourself

You have never seen.

I see it every day.

I want to leave you

Diminished.)

Zee 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.”

All 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.

After 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.