Authors: Rebecca Makkai

Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Historical, #Literary

The Hundred-Year House (6 page)

“You are a hardboiled egg, Zsa-Zsa. A hardboiled egg.” Last spring he’d started amusing himself by supplying ridiculous endings for her initial, as if he’d never seen her full name on articles and campus directories.

She made three more trips down from her office and past his second floor one, returning from the student snack bar with a newspaper, then a coffee, then a brownie. By six forty-five his was the last light on, and by six fifty he had gone, leaving his door closed but unlocked. It was lucky, but it also meant he’d be back: For years he’d done all his writing in his office at night. She had an hour though, at least.

His computer was on, as she’d hoped. The air-conditioning blasted. The rumor, according to Chantal, was that he kept the room cold so he could see the girls’ nipples through their shirts.

“Has anyone reported it?” Zee had asked.

“Oh, it’s just what the kids say. How would they prove something like that?”

Zee jiggled the mouse to wake the computer, and went online, relieved that his Internet was even hooked up. Cole was largely computer illiterate, using his new, department-purchased iMac for nothing more than typing.

She spent the next hour downloading the most explicit free pornography she could find. She was careful to avoid anything potentially illegal (as much as she loathed Cole, she didn’t want him arrested), but focused on college-aged girls, on sites that claimed “She Just Turned 18 and She’s Wet for You!” The downloading was painfully slow, but she managed to save thirty pictures in a folder labeled “Photoedit”—easy enough to find if someone was searching, but nothing Cole would notice himself.

It was funny: As she slunk out the door, she felt some feminist guilt over the pornography itself, the girls who probably weren’t eighteen at all but sixteen with drug problems, but she felt no moral guilt about the act of sabotage, about advancing her husband’s career by less than legitimate means. She felt less like Machiavelli than Robin Hood, taking from the rich and giving to the poor. And helping the department, too, and the students. Cole was a parasite, a toxin, a cancer cell. Zee wasn’t upsetting the universe, but balancing it.

—

She did the same thing on Thursday, when Cole simply left his office unlocked for the night, and again the following Wednesday. It would look better if they were downloaded on more than one occasion—less like sabotage, more like porn addiction.

Meanwhile, she told the following story to her classes, to Chantal, to three different colleagues, and to all the college students she could find who’d stayed in town as lab assistants or nannies: “You won’t believe this, but I’ve heard one of our
summer kids has Cole using the Internet! He needed to buy pants, but he hates running into students in the stores, so apparently this lovely young woman showed him how to shop online at L.L.Bean. Really she did it
for
him, but he was sitting right there. He was worried about getting lost on the Internet, so she showed him the ‘Home’ button. He goes, ‘So I just click my heels together three times?’ He said he was going to look up White Sox scores. I think he might be hooked!”

Her colleagues believed it, even Chantal believed it, because despite Zee’s abiding hatred for the man, she’d been careful never to say a quotable word against him, careful to throw him an acerbic line when she passed his office.

If anyone teased Cole about online shopping he’d respond that he never used the Internet—but they’d take it as another of his jokes, more crustiness on top of the crust that was Cole.

—

On Sheridan Road, the traffic was stopped. No way to turn her Subaru around. She waited and cursed her luck and tried to see what kind of flashing lights those were, so far ahead.

When the cars finally oozed forward, she rubbernecked with everyone else. A fire truck, and, in front of it, a little black BMW, its hood charred and smoldering. No collision, no dents. Just one of those burst-into-flame scenarios.

She wouldn’t have recognized the man who sat folded on the curb, head in his hands, if it weren’t for the blue medical boot on his foot, the crutches stacked neatly at his side.

D
oug turned in
Melissa Calls the Shots
just twelve days overdue, and after he’d finished some quick revisions for Frieda he received an actual two thousand dollar check in the mail, followed by the contract to complete two more books before the end of summer. One was another Melissa book, this time about her work backstage at the school play, and one was a Cece book. “I loved the detail about her poetry business!” Frieda said. “I think you’ll have a great ear for her.”

The whole week had been hot, but Doug made himself exercise anyway, circling the grounds and stretching. Behind the big house, he stopped to do the back releases Dr. Morsi taught him, then stepped on the fountain lip to stretch his hamstrings.

Miriam had been digging at the back of the fountain, and he nearly stepped in the hole. Apparently she’d been out here breaking old plates when she noticed a different shard, a red and white one, sticking out of the dirt. She’d pulled it out and dug around and found more—not just that one pattern but dozens of other colors of porcelain and glass and terra cotta. She’d excavated about two cubic feet back there. Her own archeological dig. “It’s like the house is giving me pieces,” she said. “Like they’re growing from the ground.” (“Or like someone had a really bad temper tantrum once,” Zee said. “And broke all the china in the house.”)

He’d remembered to bring bread crumbs, and he dropped them in the three koi ponds. How long did koi live? Eighty years?
These ones were enormous and mottled and drowsy, and he liked to imagine Edwin Parfitt feeding them his leftover breakfast.

At the south end of the property, he toed helplessly at the foundations of the studios Gracie tore down in the seventies, when they were past repair—the long one that must have housed several artists, and the small one behind that. Both lay far enough back that the remains weren’t eyesores, and Gracie seemed content to wait for erosion and vegetation to swallow them. Even farther in the woods stood a granite statue of a squatting bear, about three feet high, moss covering its right flank. Doug sometimes rubbed its head for good luck. What else were statues for? The one surviving studio, on the other end of the property behind the vegetable gardens, had long ago been converted to a groundskeeper’s shed, but Zee remembered her father referring to it as the composer’s cottage—which was the only reason Doug hadn’t cut through the padlock and scoured the walls for Parfitt-era graffiti.

As he rounded the big house, he saw Sofia heaving paper grocery bags from the back of her van to the garage floor. The driveway was eerily empty: Gracie and Bruce off on separate golf dates, the Subaru with Zee in the city, Case’s BMW zapped by the Greek gods. Doug offered to help, but Sofia shook her head. Then she said, “This is ridiculous that Mr. Breen wants.”

There must have been twenty bags, from several different stores—Jewel, Dominick’s, Sunset, Don’s. He righted a Jewel bag that had fallen and saw it was full of blue cylinders of Morton’s table salt. So was the next bag over, and the next.

“He is for the end of the world,” Sofia said. “On the New Years.”

“He’s . . . stockpiling salt for the end of the world?”

“Is for take the water out of the food.”

“Wow.”

“Yes, is wow.”

Doug held up his hands as if to say, Hey, he’s your employer,
not mine. Although Sofia probably saw them all as family, saw Doug as part of this entitled clan as much as anybody. And really, he was. Who was he kidding? Yet as he headed back to the coach house, he felt the urge to call over his shoulder that he’d gone to a crappy public school, that he never had a decent bike, that he was raised on off-brand TV dinners.

Up in the kitchen, he opened a beer and watched Sofia out the window. He could hear her grunting from all the way up here. No, that wasn’t right. She was too far, and it was coming from downstairs.

He went back down and found Miriam sobbing on the sunporch, her face folded into her arms on her card table. He tried hard to walk away.

“Hey,” he said, “hey.”

“I’m sorry, this is so embarrassing.” Miriam sat up, still sobbing, and wiped her face with the bottom of her T-shirt. He was surprised she didn’t leave makeup on it—he’d been told women from Texas wore makeup at all times. “This is so stupid.”

“I can leave,” he said.

“It’s—did you hear what happened?”

“Case’s car? Yeah, we all heard.”

“Oh. No, not that. John F. Kennedy Jr. He was flying his own plane last night, with his wife, and it crashed in the ocean.”

“They died?”

“This is the silliest thing to be crying about. I guess I was just a little bit in love with him. Like everybody else, right? I mean, I just always thought someday I’d at least get to
meet
him, and we’d have a really great conversation.”

Doug was thinking, on one level, about the Kennedys, about little John-John saluting his father’s coffin. On another, much louder level, he was realizing: Miriam is crazy. Miriam is absolutely bat-shit crazy.

He should have seen it before, in the bizarre, clashing mosaics
covering the sunporch floor, in her cutting scraps from cracker boxes, her smashing empty wine bottles and saving grape stems. He looked closely now at the two big pieces on the floor. The one that was nearly finished centered around a blue sundress covered almost entirely by other, tiny things—paper, wood, broken plastic toys, beads, a clock hand, pen caps, dried flower petals, paper clips—so that they constituted another dress, a beautiful one, with swimming lines and arcs of light. But there was something insane about it, something that screamed “outsider art,” the kind of work made by someone who lived in a cabin and produced her best pieces when she went off her meds.

“You must think I’m crazy,” she said.

“No, no, not at all! It’s a sad event. That’s horrible, that whole family. There was the one who just died on the skis, right? And now this. And he was the best one.”

She sniffed wetly. He wanted to leave, but she’d be hurt. So he said, “Did you see what Bruce is making Sofia do?” and told her about the salt for the end of the world.

“Oh, he asked us to store the canned goods! Did you know that? He goes, ‘You have all that room on the ground floor, how about we fill you up?’ He’s worried about mice in the basement at the big house.”

“Mice that bite through cans?”

She smiled a little, which was a relief. “Apparently. I mean, I guess there’s pasta boxes and stuff. And their pantries are packed already, and he said the attic is full of old furniture and file cabinets Gracie won’t throw out.”

He laughed, trying to make her laugh. “What
files
could Gracie need? I’ve never seen that woman touch a piece of paper that wasn’t a note to the staff.”

“Maybe they’re from that arts camp. He said the furniture was. He said there were at least twenty mattresses up there, and headboards and dressers.”

“
Really
.” He’d been leaning against the door frame, but now he sat on the floor among the heaps of cloth and shredded magazines.

The vague promise of some artifact of Edwin Parfitt’s had hit Doug in the solar plexus, and he felt like a man meeting his former lover on the street, someone he believed he’d forgotten but whose overwhelming effect indicated otherwise.

“Christ,” he said. “That old bitch! Listen, you know first of all it wasn’t an arts
camp
, it was a major arts colony. Okay, so, no, a minor one, but extremely important, at least in the twenties. I mean, you’re an artist: Charles Demuth? Grant Wood? There could be—think what could be
up
there!”

“What do you mean, Charles Demuth? He stayed here? I adore him!”

“I mean his stuff’s in the attic.”

She looked as if he’d told her JFK Jr. had just swum to shore, shaken but still dreamy.

“Potentially,” he added. “But didn’t artists do that, sometimes? They’d leave paintings as payment?”

She sunk her head again. “I don’t know, Doug, this isn’t what it sounded like, with Bruce. He just said there were disgusting file cabinets and the furniture. If there were anything valuable, he’d know.”

“But if someone like Demuth just doodled on an envelope! Bruce would have no idea what that even was!” Doug wasn’t sure why he was trying to get Miriam interested, since he didn’t want her messing this up for him. Maybe he was just irrationally insulted that she wasn’t as excited as he was.

He refrained from mentioning Parfitt. If she’d been paying any attention that night at the big house, she’d have heard him say Parfitt stayed there. But then she hadn’t even seemed to register that it was a real arts colony. In her short time here, she hadn’t struck him as someone terribly curious about much outside her
jungle of beads and scraps. She hadn’t been out to explore the town, and she never talked on the phone. It had all seemed vaguely charming before, but now, for some reason, it upset him.

He left her to her collages and her weeping, and asked her not to say anything about the files.

“More secrets!” she said. He couldn’t read her tone. “What fun.”