Steven Millhauser - Voices in the Night - Stories

After paying at the cash register and dropping a couple of quarters into the tip jar, Levinson set off on his post-cappuccino Main Street stroll. Though by now he knew the eight-block stretch of downtown as well as his own backyard, he was always coming upon things that took him by surprise. In the Chinese takeout, the tables were pushed to one corner and a man with a power drill was boring into a wall; a sign in the window announced the opening of a new Vietnamese restaurant. From a platform on the scaffolding that rose along the facade of a nearby building, men in hard hats were adding scroll-shaped support brackets to an apartment balcony. A new Asian bistro, which had taken the place of an Indian restaurant, now had a snazzy terrace reached by a flight of granite steps; two men on ladders were installing a dark green awning.

Half a block away, a long section of sidewalk had been closed off by an orange mesh fence, forcing Levinson to walk on a narrow strip of street bordered by a low wall of concrete blocks. Behind the mesh fence he saw a bucket truck, a few men in lime-green vests and white hard hats, piles of bricks and lumber, a man in a T-shirt and safety goggles standing on the platform of a scissor lift, and an orange safety cone with a small American flag stuck in the hole at the top.

After another block, Levinson turned left onto West Broad and walked over to one of his favorite spots: a fenced-off construction site on the corner of Maplewood. Here the foundation was being dug for an apartment building with ground-floor retail spaces, on land formerly occupied by the parking lot of a small department store. Through an open door in the wooden fence, Levinson looked down at the reddish earth, at the blue cab and silver drum of a concrete mixer, at piles of mint-green plastic sewer pipes. He watched with pleasure as a yellow backhoe lifted a jawful of earth and debris into the bed of a high-piled dump truck, which immediately started up a dirt slope that led to the street.

One thing Levinson liked about his adopted town was the way you could follow its daily evolution, chart its changes, pay close attention to every detail, without feeling, as you did in the city, that your head was about to crack open. Sleepy villages held no charm for him. His interest had quickened when the realtor told him about high-tech businesses coming to town, bidding wars being waged for prime locations, fancy condos on the way. The housing market was on the upswing. Lately he’d been noticing even more activity than usual, as shops and restaurants changed hands, apartment complexes sprang up, old buildings came crashing down. Fields of shrubs and weed-clumps sent up clouds of brown dirt under the blades of dozers.

As Levinson crossed Main and headed back toward his neighborhood, he felt the familiar sensation of downtown trickling away in two blocks of bars and restaurants, and then, as if suddenly, you found yourself in a world of tree-lined streets and two-story houses with shutters and front porches. For a moment it seemed that he’d come to another, quieter town. The impression quickly gave way to a sharper sense of things: a man stood on a ladder slapping paint onto the side of a house, workmen on a roof were laying the rafters of a new dormer, and, in yard after yard, people were planting bushes, trimming trees, scraping paint from window frames, rushing to open doors as deliverymen carried couches, refrigerators, and dining room tables along front walks and up steps.

When Levinson reached his block, he waved to old Mrs. Breyer, sitting on her wicker settee on the broad front porch. “Nice work,” he said, pointing to the new ceiling, with its glistening walnut stain, and the freshly painted porch posts. She relaxed into one of her wide, girlish smiles, keeping her teeth covered by her lips. Levinson passed a freshly laid driveway that still gave off a smell of tar, stopped to examine a red flagstone walk that only a week ago had been squares of concrete, and, stepping aside to let a neighbor girl in a brilliant pink helmet ride past on her training bike, he climbed his front steps and sank into one of the two cushioned chairs beside the round iron table.

In the warm shade, Levinson half-closed his eyes. Tomorrow, Sunday, he was flying down to Miami for two weeks to stay with his sister and nephews and visit his mother in assisted living. It would be good to see the family, good to get away for a while. When you liked a place, you liked leaving it so that you could look forward to coming back. It was his town now, his home. Sometimes he wished he’d taken up another line of work, like civil engineering or town planning; he enjoyed thinking about large spaces, about putting things in them, arranging them in significant relations. Levinson felt the muscles of his neck relaxing. As he drifted toward sleep, he was aware of the sounds of his neighborhood: the clatter of skateboard wheels, the zzzroom zzzroom of a chain saw, the dull rumble of a closing garage door, a burst of laughter, and always the chorus of hand mowers and riding mowers, of hedge trimmers and pressure washers, of electric edgers and power pruners, and, beneath or above them all, like the beat at the hidden heart of things, the ring of hammers through the summer air.

When he opened his eyes, he was surprised to find that he was no longer sitting in the shade of his front porch. For some reason he was lying in a bed, in a room with a dark bureau slashed by a stripe of sun. As he stared at the bureau, it seemed to him that it was becoming more familiar, as if, at any moment, he might discover why it was there. Ah, he was in his bedroom — the sun was shining between the shade and the window frame. How had it happened? Levinson tried to remember. The walk along Main, the return to the front porch, the flight to Miami, his mother’s frail hands — of course. He’d returned from Miami and hurled himself into a frantic week of work, staying late at the office and collapsing into bed immediately after dinner. Now it was Saturday; he’d slept later than usual. It was time for his morning routine — breakfast, the lawn, the calls to his sister, his mother, and his brother, Murray, in San Diego, the cleanup of the garage — before the walk into town for his bagel and iced cappuccino. Then dinner with a few friends at eight.

As Levinson stepped onto his front walk, he noticed with surprise that the Mazowskis’ house, across the street, had grown larger. It stretched out on both sides, almost to the property lines. When he turned right and set off for town, he saw that the house of his neighbors the Sandlers was stucco instead of white shingle. It all must have happened while he was away. Walking along, he was struck by other changes: the Jorgensen house had a second porch above the first, in front of what’s-his-name’s place a tall hedge with a latticed entrance gate had replaced a row of forsythia bushes, and as Levinson gave a wave to Mrs. Breyer, sitting on her porch, he saw, high overhead, a third story, with an octagonal tower at one end.

On block after block, the houses were escaping their old forms, turning into something new. He passed a half-finished side porch propped up on brick piers; men in hard hats were pacing the blond floorboards. A nearby house had big bay windows and an attached garage that Levinson didn’t recall seeing before. On one corner the sidewalk was closed to pedestrians; beyond a portable chain-link fence, a small white house with a red roof stood entirely enclosed by the studs, beams, and rafters of a much larger house, which was being constructed around it. Levinson tried to imagine what would happen to the original house — would it remain inside, a house within a house? — but his attention was distracted by the neighboring house, a new two-and-a-half-story mansion faced in stone, with a roof garden where a couple sat dining in the shade of an arbor.