Rebecca Makkai - The Hundred-Year House

“Oh, please don’t—” Miriam started, but she swallowed her words. Sofia was already gone.

(The white skin

Of his inner arm

The back of his neck, where

His hairline rubs his collar

His hipbones

I could drag him to me

By the beltloops)

The house had settled into a peaceful rhythm, everyone happily ignoring everyone else. (Sofia, fortunately for all, hadn’t found the yellow dress that night. She’d come down with dust in her hair and sweat on her upper lip. “I even look in the old things from forty years ago, all the long gowns!” On a certain level, Doug was disappointed. He’d pay for a glimpse of this ugly dress.)

And then, on Saturday, Case had been out for a long run when Doug and Zee heard him scream so loudly from below that they’d both leapt from the table. They found him crumpled in the doorway. He’d simply missed the step into the house, landed terribly, and his Achilles tendon had snapped and “rolled up like a window blind,” according to the medic.

—

Doug was in the kitchen one morning a few days later when Miriam came up, filled a glass with ice and whiskey, and headed downstairs again. Doug followed a minute later (victim to a potent mix of curiosity and procrastination) and found Case with his leg propped on the ottoman in its blue medical boot, the drink half-drained. Miriam sat cross-legged on the floor, and they were watching a black and white movie. Doug knew Miriam had been renting them all summer— Sunset Boulevard and Top Hat and The Big Sleep —but this was the first time he’d seen Case join her.

“Mind if I take a break down here?” Doug said. Case shrugged and Miriam said, “Please do.” He sat on the arm of the couch, across from the Morris chair Case had claimed, the one Doug had come to think of as his own. Doug guessed the chair had been in the coach house all along. A brass bar for adjusting its hinged back; worn, cracked leather. He could picture the beleaguered chauffeur who once sat there to read the paper and dream of sailing to Siam.

Doug said, “What are we watching?”

It was Bluebeard , Miriam explained, the 1930 MGM version. “It was a cursed movie,” she said, a few minutes later. Case didn’t seem to mind when she turned the volume down. He was watching his glass, anyway, not the screen. Doug didn’t mind either, as her narrative was more interesting than the film. “Absolutely everyone in it was dead within seven years. That’s Renée Adorée, the French one, and she died of something normal. But the other one, playing her sister, that’s Marie Prevost. She died alone in her apartment, and her dachshund started to eat her.”

“Jesus.”

“And John Gilbert, Bluebeard, he was married to Greta Garbo, but he drank himself to death. And then the German maid, the one giving the dirty looks?” Miriam usually moved her hands when she talked, but right now she kept them wrapped around the remote, as if the actors onscreen were doing the gesturing for her. “That’s Marceline Horn. She died the day after Bluebeard wrapped, and they realized it was from poisoned makeup in her dressing room. Someone put arsenic in her lipstick. The sicker she got, the worse she looked, so she put on more and more makeup to cover it up.”

“Seriously?”

“There’s a scene — I’ll show you — in one scene, you can see she’s sick. She was supposed to eat the food, but she couldn’t.”

Case cleared his throat and said, “You done, babe?”

Miriam stood. She took a moment to tighten her body, to compose a smile. She handed Case the remote and went to the sunporch. Case switched to CNN, where the news was about people building survival shelters in Colorado, taking their millennial fears a few steps further than Bruce.

“Look,” Doug said, “I had knee surgery a while back. I know it’s — you feel kind of trapped. I know.”

Case didn’t answer.

If she hadn’t already decided to take action, two things would have made up Zee’s mind. The first was Sid Cole knocking on her office door. He’d climbed all those stairs just to ask if she’d noticed that Jerry Keaton was calling his seminar “The Gay Canon.”

“You were at that meeting,” she said. “Weren’t you?”

“I’m going to teach a class called ‘Milton the Marginalized.’ How about ‘Chaucer, the Forgotten Poet’?”

Zee knew better than to pick a fight, even on someone else’s behalf. She said, “If it makes you feel better, I think he’s got some Shakespeare sonnets on the syllabus.”

“Haaa!” Cole made a great show of collapsing against her wall. “Shakespeare, that famous queer. The Pansy of Stratford-on-Avon.”

The second thing was that Doug had begun working harder on the monograph. The very day after she told him something might be happening with Cole, she came home to find him still at the computer at five thirty, still in the boxers and undershirt he’d slept in. He’d forgotten to eat lunch. It almost broke her heart, to see him working this hard on something no one really cared about, something no one but Zee was waiting for. (The book wasn’t for the masses, but for the fifteen people in the world who already knew everything about Parfitt, and the hiring committees that would never read it but would care that he’d written it.) She couldn’t bear if his effort were all for nothing.

It was funny how much she’d hated Doug when she met him in grad school. He had that lingering, sideways half smile that so often presaged trouble: Here was a man who’d make you feel like the center of the universe, until, just after you’d become hopelessly attached, you realized he looked this way at all women. Besides which he had questionable taste in both shirts and poetry (Edwin Parfitt was a poet her father had once rightly called “miniscule”), and he’d somehow conned all the professors into believing he was the greatest student ever to walk through the program. She invited him to her February spaghetti party along with everyone else, but she’d been rude enough to him over the past six months that she was shocked when he showed up. He held out a bottle of sake, which he told her he’d brought precisely so she couldn’t serve it with spaghetti. “You have to save it for yourself.”

Much later, as the lingerers helped clean up, his wayward elbow knocked a picture frame off her end table, and although the glass was fine, the frame, made of porcelain, had cracked into quarters. The picture was the one of herself, age five, reading Green Eggs and Ham to her father. She didn’t want him to fix it. “I know you have superglue,” he said. “Don’t lie to me.” And long after everyone else had gone, he sat on the couch holding pieces together until the glue was set and the thing was whole, if spiderwebbed. “She’s not quite seaworthy,” he said. He put it in the middle of the coffee table, a sort of offering.

It was certainly not his macho insistence on solving her problems that won her over — she did not see herself as a fragile thing that needed fixing — but the fact that he seemed so determined to make her not hate him. It became hard not to root for him. It was another six months before they became romantically involved, but the dots weren’t hard to connect. Was there much distance between rooting for someone and loving him? Was there any difference at all, even now?

Five weeks in (and a week overdue) Doug was still stuck on the soccer team tryout, so he was going back to chapter two, which he’d saved because it was easiest. This was the plagiarism bit, the part that necessitated the presence of the actual Friends for Life books. He’d borrowed several from the library, and he placed pens across the pages of each to hold them open.