Rebecca Makkai - The Hundred-Year House

The first sentence of chapter two was always something like “It seemed the club had been together forever, thought Candy [or Molly, or Melissa] gazing at the faces of her five friends.” Doug started with, “They had so many memories together, these six friends, and as Melissa looked into their faces, she was transported back to that day when they first formed their club.”

He moved on to his descriptions of each girl. By the time he got to Cece (“She was the crazy one of the group,” the others uniformly read. “She even showed up at school once wearing her brother’s army jacket as a skirt!”) he was punchy and decided he’d venture into new territory. “Crazy old Cece,” he wrote, “had started a business of writing poems on her friends’ hands. She charged ten cents a line and had already made enough for a new pair of earrings!”

And so of course it would happen to be this particular day that Miriam knocked softly behind him. He managed to close the computer window, but not the books. He swiveled, hitting his knee on an open drawer.

“I’m on a quest,” she said. She held out a small, orangish-red piece of glass. “I’m searching for absolutely anything in this color.”

“Let’s look.” He led her quickly into the bedroom. Of course there was nothing orange, and now he was just staring at the unmade bed. Doug knelt to examine the stack of books under his nightstand. He rifled through his own laundry basket, hoping not to be faced with the dilemma of dirty boxers in just the right shade. He moved to Zee’s dresser — as if she’d ever let Miriam use her jewelry — but Miriam was gone. He found her back in the study, in his desk chair.

“I used to love these!” she said. She was holding Candy Takes the Cake . “God, these have been around forever!”

Doug sank to the floor, where all he could do was laugh. “Don’t you want to know why I have them?”

“I figured it wasn’t my business. I was looking for orange covers, but I see they’re library books. Is this… research for the monograph?”

“Oh, Christ. Yeah. So. The monograph is apparently titled Melissa Calls the Shots ,” he said. “Number 118. I’ve never done this before. It’s just for the money.”

“I’d hope so.”

“You’re the only one who knows. Zee would kill me for not working on Parfitt. There is an actual book I’m neglecting. A serious book.”

“You don’t call this serious? Listen: ‘Lauren might have forgotten a lot of math that summer, but one thing she learned was this: She would never take the Terrible Triplets camping again.’ That’s poetry!”

He stood and swiped at the book, but she held it out of reach. “Please don’t say anything.”

“We’ll make a deal. Get me something orange, and promise to let me read your Parfitt thing and this thing too. It’s hard to sit on such juicy gossip.”

Doug found her an orange bank-logo pencil and an orange ad page from The New Yorker , and he suggested she might scan the storage room downstairs for seventies-vintage upholstery.

He couldn’t concentrate after that. He spent the rest of the morning vacuuming ladybug carcasses from behind the furniture.

Zee knew Sid Cole would be out to dinner with the provost. And she guessed correctly that he’d fill the time between his late class and the seven o’clock reservation with the office hours he always complained were unnecessary for summer students. He sat snacking and grading and growling at any hapless teenager who dared disturb his peace. Zee stuck her head in to ask if he had any papers she could recycle for him. The man had famously refused the college-issued bin and threw everything from root beer bottles to old issues of PMLA into the black can under his desk. He smiled up at her, his mouth full of pretzel.

“You are a hardboiled egg, Zsa-Zsa. A hardboiled egg.” Last spring he’d started amusing himself by supplying ridiculous endings for her initial, as if he’d never seen her full name on articles and campus directories.

She made three more trips down from her office and past his second floor one, returning from the student snack bar with a newspaper, then a coffee, then a brownie. By six forty-five his was the last light on, and by six fifty he had gone, leaving his door closed but unlocked. It was lucky, but it also meant he’d be back: For years he’d done all his writing in his office at night. She had an hour though, at least.

His computer was on, as she’d hoped. The air-conditioning blasted. The rumor, according to Chantal, was that he kept the room cold so he could see the girls’ nipples through their shirts.

“Has anyone reported it?” Zee had asked.

“Oh, it’s just what the kids say. How would they prove something like that?”

Zee jiggled the mouse to wake the computer, and went online, relieved that his Internet was even hooked up. Cole was largely computer illiterate, using his new, department-purchased iMac for nothing more than typing.

She spent the next hour downloading the most explicit free pornography she could find. She was careful to avoid anything potentially illegal (as much as she loathed Cole, she didn’t want him arrested), but focused on college-aged girls, on sites that claimed “She Just Turned 18 and She’s Wet for You!” The downloading was painfully slow, but she managed to save thirty pictures in a folder labeled “Photoedit”—easy enough to find if someone was searching, but nothing Cole would notice himself.

It was funny: As she slunk out the door, she felt some feminist guilt over the pornography itself, the girls who probably weren’t eighteen at all but sixteen with drug problems, but she felt no moral guilt about the act of sabotage, about advancing her husband’s career by less than legitimate means. She felt less like Machiavelli than Robin Hood, taking from the rich and giving to the poor. And helping the department, too, and the students. Cole was a parasite, a toxin, a cancer cell. Zee wasn’t upsetting the universe, but balancing it.

—

She did the same thing on Thursday, when Cole simply left his office unlocked for the night, and again the following Wednesday. It would look better if they were downloaded on more than one occasion — less like sabotage, more like porn addiction.

Meanwhile, she told the following story to her classes, to Chantal, to three different colleagues, and to all the college students she could find who’d stayed in town as lab assistants or nannies: “You won’t believe this, but I’ve heard one of our summer kids has Cole using the Internet! He needed to buy pants, but he hates running into students in the stores, so apparently this lovely young woman showed him how to shop online at L.L.Bean. Really she did it for him, but he was sitting right there. He was worried about getting lost on the Internet, so she showed him the ‘Home’ button. He goes, ‘So I just click my heels together three times?’ He said he was going to look up White Sox scores. I think he might be hooked!”

Her colleagues believed it, even Chantal believed it, because despite Zee’s abiding hatred for the man, she’d been careful never to say a quotable word against him, careful to throw him an acerbic line when she passed his office.

If anyone teased Cole about online shopping he’d respond that he never used the Internet — but they’d take it as another of his jokes, more crustiness on top of the crust that was Cole.

—

On Sheridan Road, the traffic was stopped. No way to turn her Subaru around. She waited and cursed her luck and tried to see what kind of flashing lights those were, so far ahead.

When the cars finally oozed forward, she rubbernecked with everyone else. A fire truck, and, in front of it, a little black BMW, its hood charred and smoldering. No collision, no dents. Just one of those burst-into-flame scenarios.