Rebecca Makkai: The Hundred-Year House

Doug gestured to the constellation of ladybugs on the ceiling. “You won’t be more trouble than our other houseguests.” No one laughed.

“Or the ghost,” Zee added, and smiled as if she’d just played some kind of trump card, as if Case and Miriam would now spring up and flee. “Violet mostly sticks to the big house, but you’ll hear her knocking on the windows some nights. You’ll get used to it.”

Miriam said, “Oh, I love ghost stories. I do.”

Zee picked up her keys. “I’m kidding, of course.”

She left, and Doug ate his eggs standing up. Case asked if Doug wanted to join him for a run, and he managed to bow out, blaming his bad knees.

“Suit yourself,” Case said, and (Doug could have sworn) glanced at Doug’s paunch before leaving the room.

Doug started scrubbing dishes, and a minute later Case appeared down on the drive, changed and stretching his calves. Miriam came over to rinse and dry, and they talked above the sound of the water. He learned that Miriam’s art was mixed-media mosaics.

“Most people would call it detritus collage,” she said. “But I use classical mosaic techniques. Just using found pieces. I’m always cutting up Case’s clothes.” She pushed her curls from her face with a wet hand. “Tell me about your poetry.”

“ No ,” he said, which she didn’t deserve. “Sorry. I’m not a poet. I’m writing about a poet. Gracie’s mixed up. I didn’t mean to shout at you.”

She smiled, as if it were regular and amusing for people to make idiots of themselves in front of her. “What poet?”

“Oh. Edwin Parfitt? He was a modernist.”

“Sure, right, that one poem! From high school! I mean, not—”

“‘Apollo on the Mississippi.’”

“Yes! ‘Whose eyes’ bright embers gleam.’ That one!”

“He was a one-hit wonder. It’s his worst poem, but it’s all anyone knows. That and his suicide note. He drowned himself in a lake, and the note had instructions for his friends to burn his body on the beach just like the poet Shelley. And they did it.” He let the soapy water out and sprayed down the basin. All because of that inane thought yesterday, he was aware of the distance between their bodies.

“I’d love to read it,” she said. “Your book, not the suicide note.” She dried her little red hands. “Well, both.”

Zee took two aspirin, forgetting they’d just make her sicker to her stomach. The cramps might have been from dehydration, or from the hell of teaching summer school English to the seventeen-year-olds who were supposed to be experiencing college-level academics but were more interested in college-level drinking. But the headache was definitely from having her home invaded.

She gave up on grading (“Most people,” began one essay on Heart of Darkness , “will encounter water at some point in their lives”) and stacked the papers neatly on the corner of the desk, so it would look like a planned installation rather than an abandonment. On top she put the strange metal thing she’d found in the woods behind the big house that spring. It was probably some sort of machine part, but she loved the design of it, the waffled roundness, and she loved its thick and ancient rust. She thought of it as a metal daisy top: six hollow petals around a hollow center. She stuck a pencil in one of the holes, and now the stack looked complete.

She checked mail and got coffee in the English office. Chantal, the department secretary, was on the phone, so Zee lingered over a sabbatical notice on the board.

Zee was obsessive about the bulletin board, and about the campus papers and the department calendar. She figured her job had two parts: the work part and the career part. The work part right now was teaching, publishing, flying to petty conferences in depressing university towns. The career part was showing up at concerts and sitting behind the college president, keeping in touch with everyone from grad school. If she could, she’d have hosted dinner parties. It was easy enough to tell her colleagues she and Doug were renting a coach house in town, but it would be far too risky to bring them so close to the Devohr family history. She couldn’t imagine the jokes Sid Cole would make if he knew she’d been to the manor born.

Thank God the “Devohr” was buried under her father’s name, Grant. She’d been tempted to take Doug’s name just to inter the Devohrs one layer further, but she refused to part with that last scrap of her father. She told colleagues, if they asked, that her mother had stayed home, and her father had been a journalist and a recovering alcoholic, all of which was true. Really, she felt she could say “recovered” alcoholic now, in defiance of all the careful AA jargon, because he’d never have the chance to fall off the wagon again, and never had in the twelve years she knew him, not even on the night Nixon was reelected and he was the only man in town hurling books at the TV. He had a lifelong habit of sucking coins — popping a nickel in his mouth and flipping it with his tongue while he wrote or thought — that she figured must have been some kind of crutch. A reminder not to drink, maybe.

Chantal hung up and crossed her eyes at Zee. “Are we working out?” she said.

“I need to punch someone. But working out will suffice.”

Chantal had a thousand little braids, and not one was ever askew. She was the most competent person Zee knew — a filing system to rival the FBI’s — and Zee liked her better than any actual department member. They did the ellipticals side by side, and Zee told Chantal about the Texans moving in. “I never get along with southern women,” she said. “I’m always offending them. What I see as debate, they see as assault. The worst part is, Doug will fall in love with her.” She was whispering. There were students all around.

“Is she pretty?”

“The point is she’s there .”

Chantal was cheating, taking her hands off the grips. “But he’s not like that, is he? Your husband?”

“He’s so desperate not to work on the Parfitt thing, he’d fall in love with a zebra. He might not do anything about it, but he’ll fall in love.” A woman like Miriam, with the wild eyes and chewed-off fingernails, would fall for anyone who listened to her emote — especially Doug, whose half smile was a sort of magical charm. It had disarmed even Zee. But Doug wouldn’t recognize the difference between love and a diversion, would think that just because he hadn’t been distracted like this before, there was destiny involved. “You know what his nickname was, in school? Dough. Because he was Doug H., but also because he’s just — he’s malleable. He’s suggestible.”

Chantal pushed the button to up her speed. “Keep him on his toes. Not to tell you what to do. But a bored man is — I don’t know, isn’t there an expression for that?” She laughed. “A bored man is not a good thing.”

Doug walked to the library, even though he was more inclined to watch morning TV and do half-hearted yoga downstairs. The Texans might not irritate him into working harder, but they would embarrass him out of doing anything else. He even stayed up in the adult section, something he hadn’t done since he’d started the Friends book.

“I wondered if you had anything on Laurelfield,” he said to the reference librarian. “The old artists’ colony.” He’d asked just a few months ago, but there was always the chance something new had appeared.

Laurelfield was still, technically, the name of the house. Those olden-day Devohrs had named their homes like pets. When Zee and Doug were first dating, Gracie had sent out Christmas cards with an artist’s rendering of the estate on the front, the word Laurelfield in script beneath. “It looks like the logo of a ham company,” Zee had said. “Thank you for buying Laurelfield smoked sausages.” It was the first time Doug had fully stopped to think what it meant that his girlfriend’s family had spawned five Canadian MPs, that they had namesake buildings and foundations all over Ontario.