The Doorposts of Your House and on Your Gates Read online

  She realized she’d let the call lapse into silence. “I have an appointment,” she said vaguely.

  “You’re trying to get off the phone with me.”

  “Yes,” she said. One lesson she had learned was that it was pointless to be less than direct about these things.

  “Well, a loan, then.”

  “What’s it for, Abbie? Specifically?”

  “The firm. We’re having cash flow issues.”

  “I’ll think about it. And I’d want to look at the books first.”

  “Yes, I imagined.”

  She’d wandered around the desk while they talked, and now she leaned against the other side of her desk. She pinched the bridge of her nose and closed her eyes. Her office overlooked the silver dome of the Civic Arena. She looked out the windows. There was a hockey game that evening, and the lots were already filling up. She looked at the floor, the curled plans flapping in the breeze from the vent.

  “Abbie?” she said. “What do you know about hydrology?”

  • • •

  He thought back on the rest of that conversation and watched the smoke from his indulgent cigarette drift away from the light of the French doors. A vision. Well, he wouldn’t be the first, and did it matter, really, the quantity or quality of his particular faith? He finished smoking and went back inside, where he poured himself another drink. Then Sarah appeared. She hadn’t changed, and she was holding a paper in her hand. “What’s this, Abbie?” she asked. Her face was set in a look of frozen determination that Abbie found especially ridiculous, and he smiled without meaning to.

  “I don’t know. What is it?”

  She slapped it on the counter in front of him. He glanced. “It’s an American Express bill,” he said.

  “And?”

  “And what? I’ve told you, I’m taking care of it.”

  “Taking care of what, Abbie?”

  It occurred to him that he wasn’t sure what she was talking about, but he pressed on. “I’ve spoken to my sister. She’s not averse to the idea of a loan. Although, she mentioned, possibly, a project that I might, oh, come out and work on.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about? I’m talking about this.” Her thin finger landed on a line item on the page, and he let himself look and realized his error. He’d always been careless with money. It was a mistake to charge it.

  But he’d never known how to back down gracefully from a lost position, so he said, “What’s that?”

  “That,” Sarah said, “is a doctor’s bill for a doctor’s office I don’t go to, and you don’t go to, and when I called, I found out that it’s an Ob/Gyn.”

  “Ah.”

  “Abbie,” Sarah said, “Goddamnit, how could you?”

  “How could I what, Sarah? These things will happen. It meant nothing. It means nothing. Goddamnit, and I’m having it taken care of, too.”

  What is it about some men, Sarah wondered, that makes them imagine morality as a matter of accountancy, a balancing of columns, the good against the bad? “You’re having it taken care of? What are you, the mafia? You make it sound like you’re putting out a hit!”

  “You’re being ridiculous.”

  That was when she broke the vase. She didn’t want to, but it had to be done. You were damned either way, a victim or a punisher, too weak or too angry, too emotional or too indifferent; well, better to do something than nothing; better to be disdained than pitied. Later, she knew, Abbie would comfort himself by recalling this demonstration of her irrationality. And, in fact, he put on his calmest face and asked if she’d been drinking.

  She told him no.

  Then she didn’t speak to him for almost a week, and although she should have hated him, it also reminded her, in an odd way, of why she loved him, because he let her not speak to him, let her glide through the house in a noisy silence—the silent treatment exacerbated by her loud stacking of dishes, phone calls with her parents, television turned deliberately too high. He let her be angry, which, hard as she tried to remain so, exhausted her; it deprived her combustible fury of oxygen, and toward the end of the week, she sat across the dining room table from him and said, “So, what are we going to do?”

  “I talked with Veronica, again,” he said. “What would you think . . . I know I did a wrong thing. And then there’s the money. What would you think about a fresh start?”

  “A fresh start?” she said.

  “Well, now you sound sarcastic.”

  Get a fresh start, she thought, as if they were just closing the books at the end of the month and carrying forward the gains or losses to the next period. What a fantasy, that life ever began anew, that it consisted of a series of neat movements, like a classical sonata. Sarah could’ve killed him for suggesting it, except that Abbie’s notoriety had never really translated into regular returns; she knew that. They increasingly faced, frankly, the punishing inevitability of an unmanageable proportion of debt, and here they were in an endless apartment with no real hope of ever filling it.

  “What would it entail?” she asked him.

  “Well,” he said. “How do you feel about Pennsylvania?”

  2

  Isaac liked to tell people that they’d met at a dance party, and Isabel never corrected him, because she didn’t want him to think she noticed that sort of thing. The truth was that they’d met almost six months before at a dinner thrown by the executive director of her new employer, on the occasion of her decision to accept his offer of a job and move to Pennsylvania. Isabel had been living in New York for the last ten years, eight of them with Ben, her ex-boyfriend, an architect who was a couple of years older. They’d started dating when she was still in grad school, and the affair flowed swiftly into a narrow channel of inevitability that looked, only in retrospect, only after they’d gone over and around the rocks, like something closer to doom. He was from a rich—but not too rich—New England family, his mother fond of Tiffany, his father a birdwatcher and dabbler in electronic trading. They hadn’t always been wealthy; both of them had grown up in working-class Albany before decamping, in the eighties, to woodland Connecticut. Ben’s father had made something resembling a small fortune in electronics when Texas Instruments bought out the small firm where he worked developing displays for graphing calculators. Their aesthetic of anesthetized Woodbury gentry, all antiquing and waxy chocolate and civilized alcoholism, was a little too perfect, and you could tell that it was a deliberate affectation that had matured into habit and then into character.

  It was at a party for the opening of a new hotel downtown whose name was the alphanumerical abbreviation of a Manhattan address that might have been someone’s password to something, rendered on all the glass doors in a frostily translucent Helvetica. Had you asked her, Isabel would have said, “Lord only knows why I was there.” She’d been asked by a friend who sometimes modeled (many of her friends at the time sometimes did this, sometimes that; few seemed to have a particular occupation), who had referred to the party as this thing, as in, “I’m going to this thing, you ought to come.” Isabel had acquired a carapace of blasé sophistication in college, which had further hardened since she’d moved to the city, but she still wasn’t the sort of person who casually showed up at things. But Jairan, her friend, had said, “Come on, come on, there will be an open bar.” So she went. In the earlier part of the evening, she was surprised to feel less completely out of place than she’d expected—there were a lot of finance dudes in those weird, square-toed Herman Munster shoes that no amount of money seems ever to eradicate from a certain portion of the population of men, and there were a lot of girls who, like Jairan, sometimes modeled, who were avoiding the men as well as they could and helping themselves to the bar. Several hours into it, though, they were all drunk, and the banker bros were suggesting restaurants and clubs and other parties, and Isabel was working out how to tell her friend, and her friend’s friends, who were by then giddily her new friends too, that she had to go. One of the things that she’d learned about tho
se girls was that even as they prepared to ditch her for a guy with a big car and a little coke, they’d have viewed her own premature departure as a personal affront unless it was with a guy. Even knowing they’d forget it in the morning—most of them would forget her entirely—she decided against slipping out, imagining Jairan’s frantic, bitchy voicemails, and she set herself to wait them out by nursing a drink at the bar for another hour. It wasn’t yet eleven. This was where she found Ben, in a good suit and expensive brown leather shoes that tapered to a slim, but not too slim, point, which made her assume he was gay. This allowed her to talk to him, which revealed to her that he wasn’t. He had a slightly dazed and abstracted attitude that no single gay guy would have permitted himself in that kind of crowd. She ordered a neat scotch, and he, back to the bar, elbows on it, gave her a complimentary sidelong look with a raised eyebrow, so she tilted her glass to him, took a sip, and said, “Never mix, never worry,” a phrase she’d picked up from her mother, who had in turn acquired it from a man she’d dated who’d been fond of ironic clichés. Ben told her that he was a wine guy. “Red or white?” she asked him, and he looked disappointed. He asked her what she thought of the hotel. Isabel thought he was changing the subject to spare her any more of her embarrassing philistinism, and she felt obliged to be casually derogatory to make up for the mistake, so she said, “It’s like Mies meets IKEA.” She thought it was funny.

  “Hi,” he said, “I’m Ben. I’m the architect.”

  After it all ended, it seemed impossible that she didn’t suspect the effortlessness of it right from the start, the speed with which they progressed from going to dinner together to hosting dinners together at the Lower East Side ballroom dancing studio that he’d converted into a loft apartment, soon thereafter to living and hosting yet more dinners together in the unfashionably fashionable third floor in Greenpoint that he bought and gutted and redesigned himself and transformed into the sort of home that you see in magazines—that you did, in fact, see in certain magazines. Isabel still thought of those as their documentary or cinematic days, a film montage set by some awful quirky director to some sort of idiosyncratic music, Corelli concerti grossi or Nick Lowe or something equally unsuspected until it’s already played in the background, people moving against the backdrop of a white brick wall and rarely spilling their wine. Ben’s firm specialized in hotels, glimmering, trendy places that were designed to last through three seasons of actors and art people and expense accounts before falling out of style and moving out to pasture as a really cool place your Mom and Dad found on Expedia. Honey, you won’t believe the price.

  Ben made a lot of money. Of course, it didn’t feel like a lot of money to them. They were surrounded by people with even more money, and they fell into the obscene habit of thinking of themselves as middle class. In looking back, Isabel found it incredible that she’d once had so much, incredible and a little sad. Ben would say, “I’m going to be out of town next week. We’re opening the new place in Copenhagen.” She’d say, “I’m going to take my mom to Sedona for a long weekend in May.” They believed this was ordinary rather than extraordinary; worse, when they considered it—rarely for her, even more rarely for Ben—they considered it, in some way, their due.

  Then she came home one day after performing her approximation of administrating graduate studies at Pratt all afternoon and an early dinner with some girlfriends, and there was Ben in the steel kitchen with a glass of wine and an open bottle that revealed he’d polished off one glass already. He had that elided look he’d had the first night she’d seen him, a sort of glazed wonderment that he had in some way caused everything around him to exist. “What’s wrong?” she asked him. And he looked at her, and she knew. She’d already known, if she were honest with herself, which was why, months before, she’d accepted first a phone interview and then an interview-interview in Manhattan and then a brief trip to Pittsburgh for a third go-round with Barry Fitzgerald, the Executive Director of the Future Cities Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.

  Ben had accepted it all too easily; Isabel knew that, too, even if she was above admitting it to herself. He had clients—they had friends, even—whose married lives were carried out in serendipitous crossings at 30,000 feet, she on her way back from Aspen, he on his way to an investors’ meeting in California, neither of them ever in New York for very long, and even then usually without the other. Such an arrangement seemed to Ben and Isabel to be the surest sign of having made it. That, anyway, was what they told themselves. But neither really wanted it; what held them together was a ritual of bourgeois domesticity, the regularity of cooking for other people and buying flowers and making an interesting pairing of an obscure Madiran with the braised duck. “What’s wrong?” she asked him, and he looked at her, and she thought that she’d never forget what he said, although she would later exaggerate it and come to believe the exaggeration: a kind of forgetting. He said, “I just feel that our relationship is lacking a core of intimacy. We don’t talk.” Which was not true, she thought, not literally. They talked constantly; their life together was a skein of prattle about towels and the best kind of coffee and a new lamp for the office.

  “Hmm,” she said, and then, because that seemed inadequate, added, “I don’t know what to say”—as if that wasn’t obvious enough.

  Then Ben put his glass very carefully and deliberately on the counter, and he said, “I just can’t imagine us ever getting married.”

  By then, they’d lived together for eight years, but she couldn’t argue with him. She couldn’t imagine it either. Before he’d said it, she’d never tried to imagine it. Perhaps that was the problem. Ben wasn’t a bad man, just not an especially adept one. He was charming, handsome, and smart, and yet just as superficial and nonspecific as each of those adjectives that everyone reached for to describe him. He’d hated his parents—despised them, he said; they’d been cruelly indifferent to his brother, who was actually gay, and blandly indifferent to him. They preferred their friends to their children. Et cetera. Isabel never especially sympathized. Although she found them a little loopy, his mom especially emitting a certain gin and oil-soap odor of preservation, they’d never been anything other than lovely to her, and she found them, well, charming. It was one of the few things they’d ever openly argued about. And yet, Ben had ended up, despite the modernist apartment and the disapproval for most liquor and the busy job, very much, and inescapably, their boy. He was forever unsatisfied with affection—its absence tormented him, but when it was offered, it was never enough. It was a trait Isabel came to ascribe to creative people. Isaac, for instance; Isaac reminded her in many ways of Ben.

  Four weeks after this last fight, which was hardly a fight, it was settled. He gave her the car, a six-year-old BMW coupe with 80,000 miles. “I need a new one anyway,” he said. She’d officially accepted the Pittsburgh job. She left at six on a Sunday morning. It was November, and the broad valleys and ridges in central PA were lightly covered with the year’s first snow. She stopped in Carlisle and ate eggs and biscuits at the Iron Skillet surrounded by truckers and retirees. Pennsylvania, once you get into the mountains, has a subtle beauty, low ridges rising and falling around the highway like the deep swells on an ocean of trees; you could imagine that it was an ocean, swollen and swallowing the whole earth like one of God’s punishments. It was early afternoon when she arrived in Pittsburgh at the little carriage house apartment—furnished in the fussy but uncluttered style of a very reasonable grandmother—where Barry Fitzgerald had arranged for her to stay until she found a place of her own.

  Barry had a tradition of Sunday dinners, and this one had been hastily re-christened a welcome in her honor. He lived in Point Breeze, a neighborhood in the East End of the city, mostly broad streets lined by sycamores in the manner of French allées, the houses a mix of the original, broad-porch-and-dormer Queen Annes set stolidly back from the street and many smaller colonials and faux English cottages where the original acre plots had been carved into smaller lots
in the twentieth century. There were also a few mid-century modern places, and Barry lived in one of them, a sort of hash of a Frank Lloyd Wright and a Philip Johnson on an oddly shaped lot on a cul-de-sac lane that bordered the old Henry Clay Frick estate, now a museum. He’d filled the house with a curatorial and boringly correct collection of mid-century furniture. The place had the feel of an expensive catalog, so expressly imitative of life as to appear not so much natively alive as resurrected, but Isabel couldn’t fault the correctness of his taste. Over the long dining room table was a small prototype of the Lobmeyer chandeliers that hang in the Metropolitan Opera House. The back of Barry’s house was glass, and although he recognized it as a kind of hypocrisy, given his profession, Barry only used incandescent bulbs—his excuse was that these, likewise, were historically accurate. The backyard held a small patio, a fastidious lawn, and a rectangular pool, covered now with a tarp that sagged under pooled rainwater and a few leaves, forlornly pretty in the warm light from the house. Barry was in his mid-sixties, but he was one of those men who was bald by twenty-five and spent the rest of his life passing for a robust forty-eight. He was a small man who gave the impression of being bigger because he had long arms and broad shoulders—he’d been a competitive swimmer in his youth and still religiously swam laps, though not, of course, in his own mostly decorative pool. He gestured expansively no matter what he was saying. Isaac would later compare him to a gorilla. (“Or an orangutan,” Isaac would say, hunching in a half-simian impression. “A primate, in general. Non-human, of course. Dr. Zaius!” And he’d giggle.) Barry was single, and there was an air of sexual indeterminacy about him. Isaac would tell her that Barry was post-gay.