Chang-Rae Lee - A Gesture Life

This is my very house, my Mountview house in Bedley Run, understated and grand and unsolicitous of anything but the most honorable regard, and despite how magnificently Liv Crawford has directed its exacting restoration, I cannot escape feeling a mere proximateness to all its exhibits and effects, this oddly unsatisfying museum that she has come to curate for this visitation and the many that will someday follow. I cannot blame her, for there is nothing to assign blame about. It is the case that I have not been a man who has cultivated the relations that would make such a homecoming full and sanguine and joyous, and if anything occurs to me it is deep-felt gratitude to Liv Crawford and to Renny Banerjee as well, not only for the work and the ride home and the help with my things, but for the simple fact that they are present, walking the floors, pulling knobs, speaking and moving and filling the house with the most pleasing, ordinary reports.

Anyone, too, can glimpse through the wide doorway how they are lingering over each other in the kitchen, leaning up against the island counter from either side, and though Liv keeps asking to heat up the casserole dish of chicken cacciatore that she’s brought for me, I insist that I can do it myself, so they might feel free to leave and go out together and do whatever they may. Liv and Renny are in their early forties, neither having ever married, and though they’re certainly attractive people, it could also be said that they are approaching a critical time of middle age, when they should make clear decisions about their living situations. Whether they continue to live alone or not isn’t my interest, as I don’t have purpose or reason to hold a general opinion, but I do believe that they should choose one path without reserve and stay to it until the end.

I think the source of my trouble with Mary Burns — or her trouble with me — is that although I had decided to be a lifelong bachelor, I kept finding myself straying in both thought and deed, even so much as wondering aloud to her one night if she should sell her house down the street and move her things into mine. We were sitting intimately in the family room, enjoying, in fact, a fire and our customary pot of tea. When I spoke the words she had to stop sipping and put down her mug. Her usually placid expression broke open first in shock and then pleased wonder, and I knew I had slipped most horribly. In the ensuing quiet I already sensed that cold pitch of gravity and dissolve, as though something was dying in a corner of the room, invisibly and wordlessly. I didn’t actually retract my suggestion, then or in the following days, nor did I repeat it, simply hoping instead for a gradual expiration. Of course, the whole thing did expire, and without further discussion, and almost exactly in the manner one would have wished.

“Hey, Doc,” Liv calls out, in an airy voice provisional and solicitous, “I finally remembered something I meant to ask you about.”

I enter the kitchen again from the family room. Renny is making ready to leave, putting his wallet and keys back into his pockets, while Liv is lifting the white casserole dish into the wall oven. The cacciatore (from Di Nicola’s Deli) will be my dinner, along with a demi-bottle of Valpolicella and chocolate-dipped hazelnut biscotti, wrapped in picnic cloth and tucked by Liv into a wicker basket. I don’t normally drink red wine, but tonight I am feeling particularly curious and unfamiliar to myself, and all I can do is try to recall if I even have a corkscrew somewhere in this house, left over from long past evenings of mirth and company.

“I’ve always meant to ask you, Doc, about the piano in the family room. I had a man look at it to make sure it was all right. It’s a beautiful piano. I see it every time I pop in but I’m always going on about something else. It’s fairly old, isn’t it? I mean almost antique.”

“Yes. I bought it a few years after I bought the house. It was used, about thirty years then, so now it may qualify as an antique piece.”

“I should have figured that you played.”

“I don’t.”

“But I’ve heard you play, haven’t I, Doc? The last time we were all at Renny’s condo, before Christmas a couple years ago, you played a song on his upright.”

“Perhaps fooling around, but not playing.”

“You were playing! You played, and we sang. “Good King Wenceslaus,” wasn’t it? You’re a natural entertainer. I remember you added all these wonderful notes. Everyone wanted you to go on, but you were too modest.”

“I don’t remember playing. I haven’t played at all.”

“You had a bit of the punch that night, friend,” Renny says. “We all did.”

“I don’t remember.”

“Someone may have had to drive you home.”

“It’s hard to believe.”

Renny says to me, “I wasn’t all there myself. Neither was Liv, if I’m right about anything. She was calling herself Party Girl that night.”

“And you were Party Boy,” Liv fake-scolds him, as it seems certain things are coming back into remembrance. “But anyway, you were great, Doc. You just sat down without a word and started playing. That was the first night we ever met, and when you told me where you lived, I pictured the house right away, the beautiful Tudor with the slate pool. I knew we’d be friends. I knew we’d all be friends.”

“Okay, Livvy, let the Doc settle in now,” says Renny firmly, turning to pat me on the shoulder. He does it with great kindness, enough to make me feel a tinge paternal. “You must be happy to be home. I’m glad you are. If you need anything, you be sure to call. I left my number on the refrigerator. I’m sure you have Liv’s. Really, call about anything.”

“I had them put up new smoke detectors, upstairs and down,” Liv breaks in. “They’re hard-wired so you don’t have to worry about batteries going dead. The flue was cleaned, too. It’s all ready to go. It’s a big, old-fashioned hearth and you can build a big fire in there.”

“Too big, I suppose.”

“Well, you’ll be careful, I know,” she says, naturally pecking me on the cheek, though it’s the first time she’s ever done so. She looks as concerned as I’ve ever seen her. “I’ll stop by tomorrow, if you want. I’ve stocked the refrigerator with a few basics but we can pick up whatever else you’d like. You have all your prescriptions?”

“Yes, thank you.”

“I know you’ve managed all these years by yourself, Doc, but it’s nice to have a hand after spending time in a hospital. How are your shingles?”

“The shingles?”

“Your condition…”

“Oh, very mild now. I’m recovering quickly.”

“Okay then, we’re going,” she says, gathering her bag and cellular phone and pager, and motioning to the foyer to Renny as though she were urging him, and she says again, “Goodbye, say goodbye, Renny.” Then all the leave-takings are exchanged, the reminders reminded — of the fireplace and the oven and the new locks on the doors — and in a small caravan we all move to the foyer and open the door to the warm late afternoon light and in three breaths they are in her car and they are gone.

Upstairs, in my bedroom, I take off my clothes and change into a pair of swim trunks, the ones I was wearing at the time of the fire misplaced somewhere at the hospital. I fold myself in a heavy terry robe and descend the stairs barefoot, smelling the tomatoey, garlic-laden chicken warming in the oven. Following Liv’s written instructions, I’ve set the timer for forty-five minutes at 325 degrees, and I open the wine (having found a brass corkscrew, a gift from Mary Burns) to let it “breathe,” though this certainly makes no difference to me. The time is just past four in the afternoon, and the leaves are petaling down from the treetops to float across the surface of the pool water like a fleet of tiny, colored punts and rafts. I don’t dive. The water is cool, bracing and fresh as with the first morning’s swim, and I’m surprised by my strength, or the strength the water seems to lend me.