Steven Millhauser - Voices in the Night - Stories

Forcing himself to lower his eyes, because there was only so much you could take in before exhaustion struck you down, Levinson stared at the familiar sidewalk as he climbed the steep street leading to Main. When he reached the corner, he looked up and stopped in bewilderment. A five-story department store with immense display windows rose before him. It stood in the place once occupied by Jimmy’s News Corner, Antique Choices, and the Main Street Marketplace. Next to the new building was a deep courtyard crowded with tables, where people sat drinking dark beer; a sign said GRAND OPENING.

Everywhere Levinson looked, he saw new shops, new buildings — an ad agency, a Moroccan restaurant, a hair boutique, a gelato parlor. There was even a roofed arcade, with a row of shops stretching back on each side. The old savings bank was still there, with its high front steps and its fluted columns, but it stood two stories taller and was connected to a new building by a walkway enclosed in glass, in a space occupied three weeks earlier by a men’s clothing store and a wine shop; and though City Hall still stood across from the bank, one wall was covered by scaffolding and the front steps were concealed behind a plywood fence, through which he could hear sounds of drilling and smashing.

As Levinson made his way toward his iced cappuccino, he did his best to take it all in. The Vietnamese restaurant, which three weeks ago had replaced the Chinese takeout, was now a shop specializing in fancy chocolates. The old Vanderheyden Hotel looked like a Renaissance palazzo. The nail salon was a Swedish-furniture store. And Levinson’s sidewalk café, his Saturday retreat, with its iron railing and fringed umbrellas, the place he had longed for in Miami, was now Louise’s Dress Shoppe, with racks of sale dresses and silk scarves standing outside, under an awning.

Scarcely had he registered his disappointment when he noticed a new sidewalk café a few stores down, where dark red fabric stretched between iron posts. Soon he was sitting in the shade of a table umbrella, drinking an iced cappuccino and trying to get a grip on things. The changes were stunning, almost impossible to believe, but a lot could happen in three weeks, especially in a town like this. Levinson was all too familiar with the kind of person who deplored change, who swooned over old buildings and spoke vaguely but reverently of earlier times, and though he was startled and a little dizzied by the sight of the new downtown, which made him wonder whether he had fallen asleep on his front porch and was dreaming it all, he looked out at the street with sharp interest, for he was wide awake, drinking his iced cappuccino on a Saturday afternoon in town, and was not one of those people who, whenever the wrecking ball swung against the side of a building, felt that a country or a civilization was coming to an end.

Invigorated by his rest, Levinson set off on his Saturday stroll along Main, determined to let nothing escape him. He examined the displays in the windows of new stores, observed the redesigned facades of half-familiar buildings. He passed the granite steps and broad glass doors of something called XQuisiCo Enterprises, where he remembered a jeweler’s and a cigar store. At the end of Main he turned onto West Broad and walked to the corner of Maplewood, to see how his construction site was coming along.

It was no longer there. Along the entire length of Maplewood, on both sides, five-story brick apartment complexes with broad balconies rose above new stores shaded by ornamental pear trees. Levinson tried to recall the earlier street — the wooden fence with the opening, an office supply store, Nagel’s Dry Cleaning — but he became uncertain, maybe he was leaving out a building or two, it wasn’t a street he knew particularly well. He walked along the new Maplewood, checking the shop windows, looking up at a family having lunch on a fourth-floor balcony hung with baskets of flowers; he passed an opening between buildings, which gave a glimpse of a wide courtyard where a clown with painted tears on his white face stood juggling dinner plates in a circle of seated children holding balloons.

At the next street he turned left toward Main. He had a clear view of the new sidewalk café, with its red-fabric railing; next door, workmen were replacing brick with stone, under a sign that read COMING SOON. He had a confused sense, as he crossed Main Street, that the stores were no longer the same, that everything had changed again, but surely he was mistaken, an effect of overexcitement in the oppressive afternoon heat.

Tired now, Levinson began to make his way home. When he reached the tree-lined streets at the outskirts of his neighborhood, he realized that he must have made a wrong turn somewhere, for he was passing houses he had never seen before, though some seemed dimly familiar. Maybe it was a street he knew, whose houses had all received new breezeways, gables, porches, add-ons. Or maybe the old houses had all been torn down and replaced with new ones.

He hadn’t gone far when a row of orange-and-white-striped barrels blocked his way. Beyond the barrels, people stood watching something in a yard. It seemed to Levinson that between two houses with adjoining lawns, a paver fed by a dump truck was laying asphalt on a new street, leaving only narrow strips of grass on both sides. Levinson turned back. He found another street, where he spotted a porch that he thought he recognized, though he could no longer be sure. He turned right, passed a half-finished house with walls wrapped in pink insulation, and came to a line of sawhorses stretching across the road. He turned onto another street. From a porch, someone waved. It was old Mr. Gillon, who lived on Levinson’s street, a block from his house.

The heat had exhausted Levinson. His temples throbbed; his forearms glistened. Under familiar branches, unknown housefronts shimmered in the sun. A bike helmet lay sideways on a front lawn, like a gaping mouth. Suddenly his house rose up. Levinson climbed onto the porch, gripping the iron rail. He sank into one of the chairs. His head was hot. Across the street, a large backhoe stood on the front lawn, blocking half of the Mazowskis’ house. In the warm shade, Levinson closed his eyes.

When he opened his eyes, a light rain was falling. Under the dark gray sky, porch lights were on, windows glowed yellow. On the strip of lawn between his sidewalk and the street, a sawhorse sat next to a safety cone. He imagined them coming closer, advancing along his front walk. In the dusky air, the houses across the way reminded him of a childhood trip he’d taken with his parents, to someplace in Arizona or New Mexico. Through the window of his hotel room he had stared out anxiously at the wrong-looking houses, with their strange chimneys, their make-believe doors. Levinson stiffened: the dinner. It was already 7:25. He wouldn’t have time for a shower — just enough time to towel himself down, change his clothes.

Ten minutes later, when Levinson stepped out his front door, the rain had stopped; a crack of pale sky showed through the somber clouds. The streetlights had come on. On his front lawn he saw a length of gleaming steel pipe. Across the street a wire fence ran along the curb, enclosing the front yard and the backhoe. Three men, dark against the evening sky, stood on the roof of the Mazowskis’ house. On the side of the Sandlers’ house rose a two-story scaffold tower that Levinson hadn’t noticed before. A man in a hard hat stood next to it, with his fists on his hips, looking over at him.

Levinson backed his car out of the drive and headed down his block in the direction of Main. The restaurant where he was meeting his friends was on the far side of town, out by the new mall.

At the end of the second block, Levinson’s street was closed off. Men in hard hats stood bent over jackhammers as they tore up the road. Levinson turned right. Halfway down the street a large truck with two safety cones on its front bumper stood in the way. A man with an orange stripe across his jacket was waving him to the right, where a narrow lane ran between backyards. At the end of the lane, Levinson turned onto a street that felt unfamiliar, though it couldn’t have been far from his house. The sun had dropped beneath the rooflines; against the darkening sky, a crane was lowering something onto a roof.