The Doorposts of Your House and on Your Gates Read online

  (“It’s surprisingly common, you know,” he’d say. “A lot of us decide at some point that it just isn’t worth the trouble.”

  “It doesn’t seem to be any trouble for you,” Isabel told him.

  “Well, no,” he said. He giggled. “Not for me.”)

  Like his home, Barry’s parties tended toward the tableaux; they had the quality of being displayed in a vitrine, which wasn’t diminished by the fact that he lived in a glass house. He had invited a few members of his advisory board—our advisory board, Isabel reminded herself—who were a serially uninteresting gang of university faculty, non-profit administrators, the rich, the bored. They talked to her, and to each other, as if they were leading a class of morose and sleep-deprived undergraduates. “And of course,” one of them said to her, “when you have a high municipal parking tax . . .” and he trailed off and gave her a quizzical look that simultaneously suggested he expected her to answer and hoped that she would not, “. . . you have high parking rates,” he said at last, and then, after a beat, added, “which is the problem.”

  Their conversation ultimately regressed to the conversation that any similar gathering has when it thinks no one who could possibly disagree is listening: the general inability of popular democracy to arrive at the fair and obvious technocratic solutions necessary to the smooth running of a society; it’s practically an article of faith among such people. They were inoffensive but banal, and the dinner was only saved by two guests. The first, introduced to Isabel as a “supporter of the institute” was Arthur B. Imlak. She recognized his name, vaguely, but couldn’t place it. He was, he told her, one of the richest men in the Commonwealth, using exactly that phrase.

  “Oh?” she said.

  “Marcellus shale.” He smirked, but there was something self-deprecating about the look, something practiced, as if he’d just revealed a mild fetish.

  “Aha,” she replied.

  “Barry,” he told her, “despises my business on general principle, but he feels that the FCI is a wastewater treatment plant for the endless river of slurry that is my money.” Then, abruptly: “Do you sail?”

  She grinned at him—it was such a preposterous question. “I can’t say that I do,” she told him.

  “Never?” he asked, and he pulled a comical pout.

  “Well—”

  “I have a boat,” he interrupted. “Down in Clearwater, a sixty-foot trimaran. I call her, The Shale Boat.”

  “That’s very clever,” she told him.

  “Well, Ms. Giordan,” he told her, “you just let me know when you’re interested in putting on those sailing shoes.”

  Now he grinned at her, and she was about to reply, but Barry interjected from the far end of the table: “Is Art telling you about his boat? He loves that goddamn boat.”

  “Barry came down one time,” Imlak said, performing for everyone now. “He fell off the dock.” Imlak was handsome, though he was growing into a recently acquired middle-aged belly. He had silver hair and the slightly shabby jacket of a man with a very large fortune. Isabel noticed a preposterous watch glancing from under his cuff. When he looked at her, his eyes winked with a cursory flirtatiousness that she felt sure was an obligatory nod to an expected role. There was interest in there somewhere, but it wasn’t sexual; it was for something else, something more obscure and therefore more unsettling. His voice was patrician, but with an edge of the coal patch to it. “My father dug coal,” he told her another time after he’d got a few drinks in him. “Then the mines closed, and it ruined most people down in Fayette County, but Dad had been smart and bought up some old houses in Uniontown and turned them into apartments. And that was where I got my start. Buying up shitbag properties and leasing them to shitbag tenants. Then I got into land. A man is not a man until a man owns land.” He’d also made this latter statement on the night of Barry’s dinner, apropos nothing, and everyone tittered nervously. Later that night, he followed Isabel into the bathroom and offered her a blast.

  “A what?” she said.

  “A blast,” he said, and he mimed it.

  “Oh,” she said. “A blast.” She had a weakness for cocaine, and she declined, knowing that if she accepted, she’d want more within the half hour.

  “Pretend I was harassing you in here,” he said. “I have a reputation.”

  “Will do,” she assured him.

  “What on earth are you doing in Pittsburgh?” he asked her.

  She said that it was too soon to tell.

  “Well, we’re very pleased to welcome you to our little kingdom. I hope we can keep you.”

  Isaac had arrived late. Barry didn’t appreciate lateness and made a cursory introduction, although Isaac, younger than Isabel by at least ten years and younger than everyone else by at least thirty, carried with him, even more than Imlak did, a sense of imperturbable importance. Even Barry responded with deference. In fact, Isaac almost resembled Imlak, a more gauntly drawn version of the older man; they might have been distant relatives, and they greeted each other with the casual familiarity of old friends who don’t feel the need to spend any more of the evening talking to each other. Isaac spent most of the meal chatting with the wife of one of the advisers, a woman who ran the Alliance Française de Pittsburgh. They spoke in a rapid Parisian French that Isabel couldn’t understand, despite having studied in France for a year as an undergrad. Isaac was wearing a completely preposterous outfit, a blousy white chemise and a pair of brown jodhpurs. He was very thin and so pale that, when lit from behind, he appeared almost translucent at the edges. He had fine features that you would call effeminate if you didn’t look closely—closely considered, he was rather wolfish, or like one of those feral dogs that rides the Moscow subway, emaciated and yet obviously built to survive. His hair flopped all over, effortlessly stylish. He had a hint of stubble, barely a shadow, that must have taken him a week to grow. When Isabel came back from the bathroom, he was describing a building to the table. “We call it The Gamelands,” he said, “although technically it’s just outside of the state gamelands. Anyway, you come to the end of the drive, and you can barely see it. From that side, it’s half dug into the hillside. It sort of looks like a lot of rocks. You know, it’s all very green. But if you walk to the end of the field on the other side and look back at it, it looks like a bunch of fucking glass and concrete teepees. It’s supposed to be his masterwork, but I am pretty sure he was stoned when he did it. If it’s still around a thousand years from now, someone’s going to think the aliens built it.”

  “What’s the building?” Isabel asked as she sat down.

  “The Gamelands,” he said. He laughed. “My family estate, uh, compound.”

  “It’s not in Pittsburgh, I take it?”

  “It’s in Uniontown,” he said. “Or, outside. Anyway, I have an apartment in the city. The Gamelands is the family house. Mom and Dad . . . and me when I’m there.” He smirked. “And of course,” he said, “there’s the monster who lives in the woods.”

  “Haha,” she said. “The monster, huh?”

  “According to Abbie,” Isaac answered. He laughed again, and Barry asked who wanted coffee or dessert.

  After everyone else left—Barry had Isabel stay for a nightcap and to chat about her schedule for the first week, starting on Tuesday—she asked him, “Who was the kid?”

  “The kid?” he said. He probably hadn’t needed that last scotch. “Oh, Isaac? He’s Abbie’s son.”

  “Abbie?”

  “Abbie Mayer,” Barry said. “You know.”

  “Oh, shit,” Isabel said. “Oh. Oh.”

  “Oh,” Barry said. “You know him.”

  “No, no. I know of him. I know his . . . work. I didn’t know he lives in Pittsburgh.”

  “Lived. He lives on top of a mountain now doing God knows what. You ought to see the house, though. Isaac doesn’t do it justice.”

  How much should she say? “I love his, well, work. He disappeared.”

  “He came out here in the late
eighties. Early nineties? He was a prick back then, too, although I, like you, ‘admired his work.’”

  “Admired. Yes. Anyway, the son does seem interesting.”

  “Honey,” Barry said, “that kid is fucked up.”

  3

  “What am I looking at?”

  Veronica had driven Abbie up to Fernwald Road below Beechwood and pulled over with her wheels edging onto someone’s front yard. It was what people did in Pittsburgh. It carried with it a fifty-fifty chance of a screaming match, and yet it still seemed to be an accepted—if not acceptable—practice: a man who’d threaten to bash your head in for parking on his sidewalk or his grass wouldn’t hesitate to do it himself if he had trouble finding parking. Still, this new city was neither as small nor as backward as Abbie had feared it might be. He’d only ever visited once, years before his sister had moved there; he’d delivered a lecture at Carnegie Mellon, and he’d found his hosts a little furtive, whisking him from his grand, worn-out downtown hotel to campus to dinner to the airport. It had been winter, and it had been raining. A cold fog refused to lift from the city, and he remembered it as a perpetual evening. Only on the drive from downtown to the Oakland neighborhood where the universities were did he glimpse something like a city. The car—driven by a pretty graduate student, he remembered that much—rose on some kind of highway clinging to a bluff on the southeast side of the downtown; below, there was a brown river, and on the far side many houses on a steep hill. But although he’d found the city, if not cosmopolitan, at least charming in a rundown sort of way and friendly in a suspicious one, it nevertheless held, in the odd hillside streets and strange gullies carved out of its rugged geography, a certain remnant rural tendency. Small houses had driveways clogged with too many cars and pickups, and sometimes when you came around a particular bend you found yourself deep in the trees wondering if you were in a city at all.

  They’d parked, and Veronica had led him over a low metal guardrail on the far side of the street through one of the ubiquitous stands of woods. They were standing on the edge of a steep drop, nearly a cliff, that fell off like a rough staircase toward a twisted little trickle of a stream. The other bank rose almost as steeply. To the right, through the treetops, they could see the muddy river and the Homestead High Level Bridge, like the skeleton of a half-mile-long dinosaur, and the smokestacks of the old Homestead Works, which had collapsed and rusted and poisoned three miles along the river for the last decade, ever since the often-rumored, never-arriving demise of the steel industry at last, and swiftly, arrived.

  “Greenview-on-Frick,” Veronica told him.

  “Who came up with that?”

  “Phil. Me. We both did.”

  “It’s terrible. It sounds like some sort of moldering collection of half-timber huts in Buggerallfordshire.”

  “Phil thinks it sounds classy.”

  Abbie gave her a sidelong look, and she caught his eye and started to laugh. “Classy,” Abbie repeated. He laughed as well.

  “I missed you, Ronnie.”

  “God, don’t call me that. Anyway, you’ll meet him tonight.”

  “Bated breath.”

  “Phil knows classy,” Veronica said.

  “Oy.”

  “He’s not so bad, and he does know construction. We’ve done well together.”

  “Well,” Abbie said, and he grabbed a nearby branch and let himself lean a bit farther over the edge of the precipice to get a clearer view. “I suppose the first thing I’d say about it, or ask about it, is where the hell do you plan to put the houses?”

  “You’re looking at it.”

  “That’s a lot of earth moving.”

  “That’s the problem for you to solve.”

  “Not my area of expertise. Doesn’t your construction king have someone to do this sort of thing? I can do a site plan, certainly, but I’m not certain if I’m quite up to leveling and laying out your whole little Broadacre City here.”

  “No. This is what we talked about. You’re going to be our expert witness against the FNMR.”

  “What is that, some state agency or something?”

  “That’s the Friends of Nine Mile Run.”

  “And Nine Mile Run is—”

  “That’s right. Right down there.”

  “It’s a fucking drainage ditch. I can see that from here.”

  “It is now. People call it Shit Creek, actually. Or crick, in the local vernacular. It used to be a stream that drained the park and the neighborhoods and municipalities on the other side of the hill. It’s mostly culverted and buried now, but the FNMR wants to restore it and create a wetland for the park. What we need to do is convince the zoning board that we’re not going to further ruin this grotesque little swamp in the name of filthy lucre.”

  “Are we?”

  “Oh, Abbie. I like that it’s already a we for you.”

  “Don’t get too attached, my dear. I am many things: visionary, iconoclast, pathbreaker. Genius, even. But I am not—and I feel that I already emphasized this to you—a hydrological engineer. I’d hardly be convincing. Besides which, I am a conservationist. Although, well, I suppose it’s already been ruined, hasn’t it?”

  “You see. I don’t even have to prompt you to rationalize. You’re going to say yes.”

  “Possibly. There remains the issue of my credentials.”

  “The zoning board doesn’t care about your credentials. They want to say yes, but they don’t want to be the ones who say no to a very nice group of very nice citizens. They need an excuse, or an alibi, as the case may be. Trust me on this. This is my wheelhouse.”

  “I remember when your calling was the law.”

  “Yes. Well, that’s what got me into all this. Although, did you ever imagine that I’d get into real estate?”

  “Actually, yes. I recall as a child, gazing out of my creche at your curly head and thinking, in that particular form of consciousness that precedes language: one day, that girl is going to make a killing building shitty subdivisions.”

  Veronica smiled at him and kissed his cheek and began walking back toward the car. “And now it can be a family business.”

  In the car, she asked after Sarah. He thought immediately of his wife that day in the temple, leaning away from him in order to comfort her mother. Sarah was a quiet iconoclast in her family, although Abbie never learned to appreciate it. She found their collective demeanor of blessed, raucous bonhomie weird and tiring; she had an austere and mathematical mind back then. It wasn’t that she disliked all the camaraderie, exactly, but that it wore her out, and for his flaws, what Abbie had given her, what her marriage had given her, was a home ruled by work, the turning of pages, the sound of a needle reaching a record’s end and susurrating onto the label. Abbie was, in the first decade anyway, reserved compared to her own relations, however grandiose and occasionally irascible he could be regarding his craft and profession. Sarah had loved her late brother Elliot, a sloppy, stoned, ingenious writer, his deceptively shambling style a disguise for a slow but powerful ambition, a tectonic drive toward some kind of brilliant life. He’d already published a translation of Mandelstam’s early works. His death had been terrible for her, but she viewed it as less uniquely tragic than her parents did, in part because a sibling is simply different from a child, but also, and in larger part, because she more readily admitted that these things do, finally, just happen—more often than we’d like and to us all.

  Regardless, she felt obligated to observe the forms of her family’s never-ending mourning, which involved a whole year of circumlocutions—they could hardly say her brother’s name aloud—interrupted on his birthday and the anniversary of his death. On these occasions, they gave themselves over almost entirely to his remembrance, and Sarah, who thought they’d all be better off, and Elliot’s memory better attended to, if they’d spread these gluts of remembering more evenly across the calendar, participated because she figured it was still better than nothing. Abbie, who’d never known Elliot, was politely
consoling on these occasions, and in this case, Sarah rather appreciated his reserve. “Oh, Abbie,” her mother would say, “you’d have just loved him. I wish you two boys could have met.”

  Her Elliot was suspended in a perpetual boyhood. That he’d been in his twenties, living on his own in his own apartment in a borough she never visited, making his first intimations of something resembling very much what people call success—none of these things could dislocate her memory of him as a teenager, volcanically moody, a self-taught Czech and Russian speaker, a pretty good violinist, but still, to her, a precociously intellectual little boy. In the subjunctive reality, therefore, where he and Abbie might have met, Abbie, also, would have had to still be a child. Abbie was older than Sarah and more than a decade older than Elliot was, or had been, or would have been. But he’d just smile ruefully at his mother-in-law and say, “Yes, Susan, yes, I’m sure I would.”

  To Veronica, he said, “Things have been better, but also, worse. She’s taken with surprising alacrity to the apartment.” Abbie and Sarah’s first place in Pittsburgh was a three-bedroom apartment on the second floor of the D’Arlington on Bayard and Neville in Oakland, a gracious, four-story, yellow-brick, turn-of-the-century building that the real estate agent had called a “slice of old Manhattan” (Abbie didn’t correct her), and which Abbie secretly derided as the inhabited equivalent of a box of potpourri. It reminded Sarah of their place in New York. Abbie privately disagreed, but he saw no reason to disabuse her of the notion if it contributed to her happiness. That it did not contribute to her happiness, that it made her sad rather than wistful and mostly suggested, however imprecisely, something that she’d lost, might have occurred to him if he’d thought about it, but it—and he—didn’t and hadn’t.

  “It’s a great apartment,” Veronica said.