T. Boyle - T.C. Boyle Stories II - Volume II

“No,” I said.

“Would you be interested at all?”

“You got a phone number?”

—

I told Nora not to get too excited because chances were it wouldn’t work out. Either we wouldn’t want the place — there had to be something wrong with it, right? — or they, the old couple, wouldn’t want us, once they got a look at us. Still, I phoned right away and the old man answered on the first ring. I introduced myself, talking fast, too fast maybe, because it wasn’t till I dropped the name of Artie’s father that the voice on the other end came to life. “Yes, we are expecting your call,” the old man said, and he had some sort of accent too, hesitating over the w in “we,” as if afraid it would congeal on him, and in a sudden jolt of paranoia I wondered if he and Mrs. Fried were somehow in league — or worse, if he was Mrs. Fried, throwing her voice to catch me unawares. But no, the place was miles away, buried in the woods in the hind end of Croton, well beyond the old lady’s reach. He gave the address, then directions, but they were so elaborate I stopped listening midway through, thinking instead of what Artie had said: the place was on a lake. A private lake. I’d find it, no problem. How many private lakes could there be? I told the old man we’d like to come have a look — at his earliest convenience, that is.

“When”—the hesitation again—“would you like to come?”

“I don’t know — how about now? Now okay?”

There was a long pause, during which Nora flapped both hands at me as if to say Don’t sound too eager, and then the old man, in his slow deliberate way, said, “Yes, that will suit us.”

We were late getting there, very late, actually, one snaking blacktop road looking much like the next, the rain hammering down and Nora digging into me along the lines of You’re a real idiot, you know that? and Why in God’s name didn’t you write down the directions? For a while it looked like a lost cause, trees crowding the road, nobody and nothing around except for the odd mailbox and the watery flash of a picture window glimpsed through the vegetation, but finally, after backing in and out of driveways and retracing our path half a dozen times, we came to a long low stone wall with a gated entrance flanked by two stone pillars. The gate — wrought-iron coated in black enamel so slick it glowed — stood open. A brass plaque affixed to the pillar on the right read BIRNAM WOOD. I didn’t want to bicker but I couldn’t help pointing out that we’d passed by the place at least three times already and Nora should have kept her eyes open because I was the one driving and she was the one doing all the bitching, but she just ignored me because the gravel of the private lane was crunching under our tires now and there were lawns and tennis courts opening up around us. Then the first house rose up out of the trees on our left, a huge towering thing of stone and glass with a glistening black slate roof and too many gables to count, even as the lake began to emerge from the mist on the other side of the road.

“Wow, you think that’s it?” Nora’s voice was pitched so low she might have been talking to herself. “Artie did say it was a mansion, right?” I could feel her eyes on me. “Well, didn’t he?”

I didn’t answer. A moment ago I’d been worked up, hating her, hating the broken-down car with its bald tires and rusted-out panels that was the only thing we could afford, hating the trees and the rain, hating nature and rich people and the private lakes you couldn’t find unless you were rich yourself, unless you had a helicopter, a whole fleet of them, and now suddenly a different mix of emotions was surging through me — surprise, yes, awe even, but a kind of desperation too. Even as the next house came into view on the right — ivy-covered brick with three wings, half a dozen chimneys and a whole fairway of lawn sweeping down to the lake and the two red rowboats pulled up on a perfect little crescent of beach — I knew I had to live here or die and that I’d do anything it took, right down to licking the old man’s shoes, to make that happen.

“What’s the number?” I said. “You see a number on that house?”

She didn’t. She’d lost her glasses — she was always losing her glasses — and in our rush to get out the door she hadn’t bothered with her contacts either. No matter. The road took us over a stone bridge and swept us directly into the driveway of the house we were looking for — number 14. We got out of the car, the rain slackening now, and just stared up at the place, a big rearing brown-timbered Tudor that sat right on the lake itself. Around the corner I could make out a gazebo and a little dock with a rowboat tethered to it, this one painted green. And swans. Swans on the lake.

Everything seemed to brighten suddenly, as if the sun were about to break through. “All right,” I said, “here goes,” and I took Nora by the hand and led her up the flagstone steps to the front door.

—

I introduced Nora as my wife, though that was a lie. Old people, that’s what they wanted to hear. If you were married, you were mature, reliable, exactly like them, because in their day men and women didn’t just live together — they made a commitment, they had children and went on cruises and built big houses on lakes and filled them with all the precious trinkets and manufactured artifacts they collected along the way. Mr. and Mrs. Kuenzli — Anton and Eva — were just like that. They met us at the door, two dwarfish old people who were almost identical, except that she was wearing a dress and had dyed her hair and he wasn’t and hadn’t. They gave us tea in a big room overlooking the lake and then escorted us around the house to show off their various collections — Mexican pottery, jade figurines, seascapes painted by a one-armed man they’d encountered in Manila. Every object had a story connected to it. They took turns filling in the details, no hurry at all. I knew what they were doing: checking us out, trying to get a read on us. I shrugged it off. If they were alarmed at the sight of us (this was in a time when people our age wore beads and serapes and cowboy boots and grew their hair long for the express purpose of sticking it to the bourgeoisie), they didn’t show it. Still, it was a good hour before we went downstairs to the basement, which was where we were going to live, after all. That is, if things worked out.

They did. I made sure they did. The minute we walked down the stairs I was hooked — and I could see that Nora was too. Here was a huge room — low-ceilinged, but the size of a basketball court — with a kitchen off to the left and next to it a bedroom with curtains, framed pictures on the walls and twin beds separated by matching night tables fitted out with ashtrays and reading lamps, just like the room every TV couple slept in, chastely and separately, so as not to confront the American family with the disturbing notion that people actually engaged in sexual relations. Nora gave me a furtive glance. “Ven you vant, you come,” she said under her breath, and we both broke up.

Then it was back out into the main room and the real kicker, the deal-sealer, the sine qua non — a regulation-size slate-topped pool table. A pool table! All this — leather armchairs, Persian carpets, gleaming linoleum, heat, twin beds, the lake, the rowboat, swans — and a pool table too? It was too much. Whatever the old man was asking for rent, because this wasn’t strictly housesitting and we were willing to make a token monthly payment, I was ready to double. Triple. Anything he wanted. I squeezed Nora’s hand. She beamed up at me as the old couple looked on, smiling, moved now by the sight of us there in the depths of that house that had no doubt harbored children at one time, grandchildren even.