Said Sayrafiezadeh - Brief Encounters with the Enemy

“I know that, Fred,” I said.

By the time we left, he was reclining on my couch/bed with his shoes off and his arms behind his head as if he had been the tenant all along.

Dr. Dave’s house was located an hour away, on the other side of the river, in the exclusive and upscale Cranberry Township. In the car, I gave my mother half the rent money.

“Oh, I don’t need that,” she said. She took it anyway.

Fifteen minutes into the drive all traces of the urban world were gone, replaced by the countryside. The countryside would have been picturesque, except it was wilting. I’d been to Cranberry Township once, when I was a boy, eight years old maybe, visiting a friend I’d made at day camp. Rodney. It had been a summer day but we’d spent our time in the basement playing video games and eating potato chips. In the evening his father had driven me home in his Mercedes-Benz. I’d had the idea that I would be returning to Cranberry Township shortly, but twenty years had passed.

“All I’m saying,” my mother was saying, “is it’s wrong.” She was complaining about the war. The second wave of soldiers was coming home and apparently no one cared, including me. This is why it’s good to be first.

“It’s just not right,” she said, “it’s not good.” It was a sign of bad things to come. She paused, waiting for me to agree with her. I turned the radio up louder. After a while she started humming along, one hand tapping out the rhythm on her thigh. Her thighs were getting thicker. Her hair was getting grayer. She’d be retiring soon. She’d end up with back problems and a decent pension. Suddenly she turned to me and said, “How’s your girlfriend?” The word “girlfriend” reverberated within the confines of the car. I couldn’t tell if she was using the word ironically. I couldn’t tell if she knew something. That was always one of the concerns with having an affair: you never knew who knew something.

She’d seen Molly once by accident. We’d gone to the movies together, Molly and I, on one of our clandestine romantic outings, and my mother happened to be sitting in the back row. I was hoping she wouldn’t notice me, but she did. I introduced Molly to her as my girlfriend. It had slipped out inadvertently. I’d never used the term before or since. “It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance,” my mother had said with overblown formality. Molly and I sat in the front holding hands, but I couldn’t follow the plot. We ended up leaving midway without my mother seeing us. She called me later to say, “Your girlfriend’s got nice hair.”

The farther I drove, the more the countryside wilted. The earth was drying up. The trees were losing their leaves. Brown swaths covered the hills like a disease. In Cranberry Township the houses got larger and the streets got wider and the grass got greener. The streets had bucolic names like Eagle Claw Lane and Turtle Dove Drive.

My mother said, “Looks like a fairy tale.”

I turned right, I turned left, and there at the bottom of a steep hill, set back about one hundred feet behind two trees, with a mailbox and a weather vane, was my final destination for the summer: 14 Misty Morning Way.

The blue jeans did not begin to tell the story. The blue jeans were an affectation bordering on fraud. Whatever else Dr. Dave had accomplished at such a young age, his house had to have been the ultimate accomplishment. Ivy covered two walls. The walls rose three stories. The windows were framed by wooden shutters. On the front door was the number fourteen carved in wood, and when I turned the key in the lock, the door swung open onto a foyer with two umbrellas in an umbrella stand. Stepping over the threshold, I had the sensation that everything had just changed for me, changed for the better, that I was passing through a very difficult epoch of my life and arriving at something akin to success.

My mother passed through behind me. We trod silently, cautiously. We could have been mother and son from the Gilded Age, entering their grand home. We could have been thieves.

There were four bedrooms in the house and stainless-steel appliances. There was wall-to-wall carpeting and a library. The library contained educational tomes and books in Japanese. “I’m going to do some reading this summer,” I announced.

Past the library was a living room. Past the living room was another living room. Everything was pristine and flawless and spotless, including the garden, which my mother and I entered by opening a sliding glass door that had no fingerprints and made no sound.

The garden was the masterwork. It was as wide as the house and twice as long. There were trees, there were birds, there were flowers. It could have been a painting. I took off my shoes, because to walk on the grass with shoes seemed like a violation. The grass was as soft as the carpeting. It looked as if it’d been trimmed with scissors. My mother and I stood around saying nothing. The garden smelled like summer and country and rebirth, and in spite of the dry spell, Dr. Dave had managed to keep it alive. But it was more than alive, it was thriving. Add to his accomplishments horticulture.

I commandeered the house without hesitation. I’d been born for a house like this. Within days I was walking around in my underwear, leaving the toilet seat up, and eating straight out of the refrigerator. In effect, I had supplanted Dr. Dave.

Each morning I’d wake in the master bedroom to the gray light coming through the windows. I’d lounge in the king-size bed listening to the birds, thinking about how Lola would enjoy jumping on a bed like this, thinking about how Molly might want to have sex on a bed like this. Then I’d walk down two flights of stairs to the kitchen and eat breakfast in front of the forty-two-inch television. When I was done, I’d slide open the glass door and step outside in my bare feet and water the garden. I didn’t use the watering can, I used the hose, generously, spraying the plants and flowers until everything was soaked through including my feet.

Around noon the mail would arrive. After the mail arrived, Molly would arrive. Lola came too. She came every time. They seemed unfazed by the new surroundings, Lola especially. The first time she entered the house, she jumped in my arms and seemed to take no notice that we were no longer in a one-room apartment. I wanted to give her a tour, but she didn’t care about “any dumb tour.” She was a rich little girl, after all, with a house of her own. Still, I’d expected some sense of wonder. But all she wanted to do was play. I bought her balloons and balls and a Hula-Hoop. While we played together, Molly painted. “Don’t disturb Mommy.” She’d brought her paints and an easel and a smock and set up her studio in the garden beneath the lemon tree. She was going to make five paintings this summer. She was going to make ten paintings. She was going to find an agent. Maybe find a gallery. Maybe have a show. Everyone had a plan and that was her plan.

In the afternoon I would grill fish or chicken on Dr. Dave’s immaculate gas grill with its pushbutton ignition. I used his Japanese carving knives. I behaved like a patriarch, hoping to ruin their appetite for dinner. I wanted the memory of our day to linger long after they got home.

Afterward, the three of us would lie on our backs, sated, looking at the gray sky, while I told Lola tales from history. Archdukes and presidents and the Ottoman Empire.

“Those are boring,” Lola would say.

At five o’clock they left. Occasionally Molly would put Lola in the car, then pretend she’d forgotten something, rush back in the house, and make out with me in the foyer.

“Come back.”

“I will.”

“When?”

“Soon.”

“How soon?”

She did not come back soon. She came only a few times a week. Monday, Wednesday, Friday. That was her schedule. That was not the schedule I had envisioned when I had envisioned my summer. Sometimes she came Monday, Wednesday. Once it was just Monday. It was never weekends.