Olga Grushin - Forty Rooms

“They didn’t honk, imagine that,” Paul had said. “Looks like a nice neighborhood. Probably kid-friendly. Honey, I have a good feeling about this one.”

“Yes,” she had said; but what she had liked most about the invisible house with the shining arches was its ambiguous promise, the darkness concealing it. It did not belong to any neighborhood at all, was not pinned down to an address somewhere in the monotonous suburbs of a busy American city, but instead was all shadows and light, and one could just as easily imagine it perched on the side of a lush Caribbean mountain, frangipani trees blooming, ice clinking in the jewel-colored cocktails of a festive crowd on a terrace suspended above the immense mystery of the moonlit sea—or maybe squatting in the deep slumber of a somber medieval village in Portugal or France, all the villagers long asleep, only a solitary poet rocking back and forth on the lit-up porch, his verses slowly adopting the creaking rhythm of the rocker—or even poised as the last human habitation on the edge of a great Siberian forest, yes, a mossy little house out of some old fairy tale, where evening after evening a small, soft-spoken family gathered in the snug seclusion of light to drink tea from chipped cups and talk about birds and stars and books—a house under a timeless spell where everyone was together, and no one was ill, and everyone was happy…

“What we could do,” Paul had said, “is put a swing on that porch.”

“If we bought the house,” she had said.

“If we bought the house.”

Now they stood on the damp, starkly lit veranda, and the realtor woman jingled the keys again—it seemed to be a nervous habit of hers, almost a tic—and said, “It’s not heated, but you can think of it as a sunroom really, it would be perfect for breakfasts in warm weather.” The enthusiastic lilt in her voice did not match her eyes, which had a dull, bulging look to them, like thick bottle glass. She waved toward the shadowy corner, where three low wicker chairs with enormous pink peonies on the cushions crouched around a lopsided wicker table. “Now, the furniture doesn’t come with it, of course, it’s just to give you an idea, but do try it out, try it out!”

“No, that’s all right, thank you,” Paul said, ready, she saw, to proceed into the house; but her arms were aching from trying to restrain the squirming, sniffling bundle of blankets, so she walked over to the table and sat down. The cushions proved unpleasantly soft, and as she sank into them, further weighted down by the baby, a faint but visible cloud of dust billowed around her—either the house was not shown very often, or no one before her had ever followed the realtor’s invitation to sit down.

The baby stopped whimpering and began to wail.

“He is adorable!” the realtor woman shouted, to make herself heard over the cries. “What’s his name?”

She was struggling to quiet him, so it was Paul who replied: “Eugene.”

“A beautiful name!” exclaimed the woman. “So uncommon.”

“It’s her father’s name,” Paul said, his voice reserved. “Shall we see the rest of the house, then?”

“Yes, yes, of course, let me just find the right key… Do look at the doorbell chimes on your way in, they are a very nice feature, and of course fully functional, everything in the house is fully functional, here, I’ll show you, such a distinctive sound—”

The inner door moaned on reluctantly yielding hinges. As the woman wedged it open, talking all the while, a long, mournful note that put her in mind of a departing train escaped onto the veranda, and a pale slash of autumnal light cut through the low-ceilinged murkiness beyond. She caught a whiff of stale, unused air. She had been excited by the thought of seeing the place, had felt important and capably adult in her role as a prospective buyer; she had even worn her teardrop diamond earrings and her new black shoes, whether to impress the realtor or to enter her potential house in a fashion befitting a young woman eager to take the next step in the upward progression of her life.

Now she found she did not want to go in.

“Please go ahead without me,” she called. “I’ll stay out here a bit longer, get the baby to sleep.”

The two of them paused on the threshold, looking down at her, the realtor woman smiling glassily and jingling the keys, Paul’s expression bemused. Then they vanished inside; Paul, she noticed, ducked his head as a precaution.

The door crept closed behind them.

The baby was still crying, though with less desperation now. She wound the blankets tighter around him—the veranda was chilly, with a deep, dungeonlike chill—and stared outside. The street lay empty in both directions; the trees that lined it were bare of leaves; on the other side, identical one-story houses with darkened verandas sat in the puddles of graying lawns under graying skies. She could see no signs of life. Perhaps everyone had gone to church—wasn’t that what people did on Sunday mornings, especially in kid-friendly places where neighbors did not honk at neighbors?

“Bun-ga-low,” she said under her breath, trying out the new word. It sounded strange, almost barbaric, to her ears, and for one disorienting moment, the unremarkable suburban vista looked as foreign to her eyes as a row of grass-thatched African huts with monkeys hopping from roof to roof; it was certainly just as far removed from the vague expectations of her childhood. All at once, an overwhelming sensation of randomness struck her—why this house, why this street, why this city? (Why this country, continued a dangerously soft voice inside her, why—but she managed to hush it up before it asked anything else.) And when one stopped to think about it, how odd, how unnatural, how daunting it was to go about choosing a house . She had never pondered the desirable number of bathrooms or the virtues of gas stoves before. She had never owned—had never wanted to own—anything that would not fit in a small suitcase. Now the notion of waking up one day the owner of a mind-bogglingly complex conglomeration of pipes, wires, masonry, and carpentry loomed over her in a vast shadow, almost as ambiguous, thrilling, inevitable, and terrifying as motherhood itself.

Anxiously she inspected the baby’s face—she could not bring herself to call him Eugene yet. He had grown silent at last and was gazing past her with his pensive blueberry eyes. She pulled the blankets closer to his reddened nose, then looked again at the poisonous pink peonies on the dusty cushions. Something much like panic was starting to stir inside her. She reminded herself to breathe—the peonies did not come with the house, she would be free to get different cushions or have no cushions at all, just as she pleased. But the imminent prospect of all that empty space to furnish only made her breathing quicken. For a house was not like a student dorm room or a rented apartment: in time it became a reflection of one’s being, a monolith under whose foundation one buried one’s roots, a tinted lens through which one viewed the world. It set the mood, the timbre, the pitch of one’s entire life, and for a poet, the pitch of her life would, as likely as not, vibrate through the pitch of her work. Would Byron have ever become Byron if he had resided in an elderly lady’s fussy seaside flat with flowery chintz curtains and a pug for a pet? Could Pushkin have sung the Russian countryside with such fluid simplicity if his abode had been a brooding moorland ruin full of echoes, ghosts, and massive oak cupboards? Could Shakespeare have penned his immortal tragedies if he had chosen to live in a suburban bungalow with peonies on the cushions? At sixteen, she would have replied with a resounding “Yes,” but at twenty-seven, she was no longer certain. (And wouldn’t it be fun, said a voice that never was completely silenced inside her, to compose an “architectural” poem, each verse set in a dwelling, each written in the style most suited to the dwelling itself, from a Poe-inspired wail of woe and loss describing a dilapidated gothic mansion to a cheerful couplet akin to a Mother Goose rhyme sketching a cottage in a sunlit meadow? She brushed the irrelevant thought away.) And if it were indeed true that deciding on the kind of place you would inhabit meant deciding on the kind of atmosphere that would seep into your very blood and, by osmosis, the kind of poet you were bound to become, did she feel confident enough in her real estate acumen and her decorating skills not to fail her art?