Marie-Helene Bertino - Safe as Houses

“This has been fun,” I say. “I’ll tell Jill she has a wonderful neighbor.”

Dorothy looks up from the dog. “Ramon, was it?”

“That’s my name.” I lead her to the door and open it.

“And you’ll make sure he has enough water before you leave?”

“ Absolument ,” I say.

“Oh,” she winks. “French.”

Dorothy jogs away. I make a big show of waving to her through the kitchen window. Then it’s just Jake and me.

…

I met Mars when I did his family’s house and found him sleeping in a back room. He threatened to go to the police so I took him on. Mars is the name I gave him. He said it could be like a Red Beard pirate thing, with him eventually taking over and me sailing off into the sunset. I said, Let’s do the Anderson house and see how it goes . He’s young and has time for a few bad lives. I’m old; I cut out fast food a couple weeks ago when I excised curse words from my vocabulary and joined the gym.

I want to go back to when I was eating oranges and saying yes to things. Before Anna’s accident fourteen months ago, I knew what it meant to leap out of a chair with enthusiasm. Now my muscles are flabby with disuse, and I don’t think the push-ups I’m doing at the gym are making any difference.

I find Mars upstairs in the master bedroom, pawing through Jill’s underwear drawer. He holds up a pair of red lace undies. “This is what I’m talking about.” He places them under his nose and inhales deeply. “Do you think the husband understands what to do with a thong like this?”

“It’s better not to think of them as people.”

He pins the undies to his face with his nose so they can hang unassisted and tosses his head back and forth. “Do you mind if I take these though?”

“In fact I do mind, Mars.” I rub both temples with my fore-fingers.

I want Jill to run-walk-cry on the treadmill and say to her girlfriend, “They took everything that mattered. My daughter’s jewelry boxes, my husband’s baseball trophies, poof!” I want her to shake her head, locked in the band that pulls her face into a painful-looking grimace, and know I have done her a favor. She will say, I will never take anything for granted again .

We hammer-smash the pictures lined up on the bureau, all of Jill. We karate-kick the antique mirror, donkey-punch the wedding picture.

Mars says, “So you used to be like, what, a teacher? The paper said you were some kind of professor with a wife. That she’s dead but you write them letters about her, and the letters have fancy-ass words like an Ivy League professor.”

I am happy the papers have me teaching at an Ivy League school. It feels like a promotion from where I do teach — a community college classroom that smells like a sandwich. My shoulders tense with unearned pride.

“So what happened?” he says. “Cancer?”

The panties are still on his face. “Will you kindly take those off?”

“Will you kindly blah blah blah?” Mars disappears into the master bathroom.

In Jill’s bureau I find a card from the husband, whose name turns out to be Craig. Amateurish thanks-for-sticking-by-me-through-hard-times crap.

Jill Anderson can put together entire paragraphs using nothing but the word husband. “My husband said… my husband knows… my husband sees….” The fact that he has an actual name cheers me even though it’s Craig, the sound a car door makes when it needs oil. She is a woman who thinks a book can turn her into an oak tree, who has imagined a hole inside her so big it could vacuum up the tables and chairs, the refrigerator magnets, the candlesticks, her two kids, and the husband. That can be the cruelest part of happiness — its tendency to disguise itself in boredom.

“Why is there a lock on the medicine cabinet?” I can hear but not see Mars talking to himself in the bathroom. “Who the fuck locks up their toothpaste?”

“Doesn’t matter.” I check my watch.

“I’m smashing it.”

“Leave it alone,” I yell. I hear a few jarring thumps and the sound of glass exploding.

“Holy shit,” Mars says when the sound settles. “Pluto, come in here.”

Mars stands in front of a giant medicine cabinet, whose doors are now on the floor. Hundreds of prescription drug bottles glimmer inside.

Mars holds one up. “They’re all Craig’s.”

I cross to the hacksawed cabinet and read. OxyContin, oxycodone, hydrocodone, methadone, Percocet, Ambien.

“Dude is seriously sick.” Mars whistles. “I know you’re gonna let me take some of these.”

“We don’t do anything with the drugs,” I say.

“You’re fucking kidding me.”

Craig Anderson. Twice a day, three times a day, once daily. Craig Anderson. Craig Anderson. “Not effing kidding you at all.”

“Don’t think of them as people, huh?”

“Stay on task.” I leave, dragging the pillowcase behind me like a bad leg.

He follows, the thong hooked around his ears like a Red Baron cap. “You’re no fun, man.”

…

In Craig’s study, Mars elbow-clears the desk of framed pictures while I stare at a portrait of Craig, Jill, the girls, and Jake the dog. Jill and the girls wear matching summer dresses, Jake wears a complementing visor. A sunset, smug looks, etc.

It’s the only picture of Craig in the house. His nose is bulbous in a pleasing way that probably makes his new clients trust him instantly. It sits on top of a mustache — a sunset on a well-trimmed horizon.

Normally something like this portrait would repulse me. When you are unhappy, other people’s happiness comes off as an affront; innocuous beach pictures are framed fuck-yous. However, Jake looks charming in his visor, jaunty even, like he has just cracked a good-hearted joke to everyone’s delight. A soft feeling unrolls inside my chest.

I wonder how many people I pissed off when I was happy.

When I don’t immediately react, Mars says, “Ain’t that something?”

I say, “That is something.”

“Jill Anderson’s sort of all right — looking. Nice ass.”

“I prefer brunettes.”

Mars nods. “Brunettes with nipples the size of dinner plates.”

“Brunettes who paint shoddy replicas of the solar system.” I squint, taking in the size and construction of the painting. “Who cheat at board games.”

“If that’s your thing, dude.” Mars rolls his eyes. “You know what my thing is, though?”

I prepare for one of his profanity-laced monologs and realize with pain I’ve come to enjoy them.

“Granny nightgowns. The long jobbers with the sleeves. They’re normally made out of cotton or what’s that other… with the squares. I screw girls who wear these,” he gestures to the thong on his head. “But I have a thing for those nightgowns. They remind me of my grandmother. She knew what was up.”

It isn’t every day a man reveals deep sentiment for his grandmother in the same thought that contains a reference to a thong on his head. Mars is silent, wistful. We stand in Craig Anderson’s office and think about women we love.

“Now let’s smash the shit out of these people so we can go,” he says. “I’m bored and this isn’t fun anymore.” Mars yanks the picture from the wall. He smashes it on the desk and pulls the photograph from its mat “How’s this for on task?”

I shake off my hesitance. We rip and rip until you could use what’s left as wedding confetti.

Inside a drawer, Mars finds a thick wad of money. He gives it a shake next to his ear. “Yo ho, lookie here!”

“Put it back,” I say.

“What’s the big deal, Pluto? They’re all hundreds. Just one or two?”

“Posit,” I say, “you are Craig Anderson. What causes you more consternation: replacing a wad of money or a macaroni valentine from your adorable daughter?”