Authors: Nancy Mauro
At the end of the drive, the house stands like a great, armless thing. Of the few times she’s seen the place, its cantilevered gables and overhanging eaves put her in mind of a bucktoothed mouth. All shingles and brickwork and somewhat too narrow for the sprawl of country lot surrounding it. Up above the house the old moon has been chewed down to the rind. Still bright enough, though, to illuminate a yard of boxwood trees, the triple-pitched roof, a crown of spires. Some of the Victorians left along the river valley are tipped with a weathervane cock, or an iron pineapple of welcome. This house, though, is undecorated.
How to walk past the front end of the car without looking? Lily wants to bend and inspect but knows this action will appear incriminating. Duncan will tell her there’s no use in wincing at damage in the moonlight. He’s already unlatched her bicycle from the rack and is starting on their bags. Lily’s got a few seconds here to sneak a look, make out what she can of the ruined grille. Duncan might be able to act as if his continuous
motion will unbend metal, but she needs a moment to agonize freely. She slides along the fender, is about to lean over the hood when she’s interrupted by a sound. A noise from above like a wet sheet snapped by two pairs of hands. It focuses her attention away from the vehicle and into the sky. A column of fog roils just over the trees. Edging back toward the passenger door she can make out a stream of bats, backlit over the boxwoods and spit up as if by some centrifugal force. The urge to cover her head is impossible to resist.
A million fucking bats.
The words, although hyperbolic, are on her tongue. Probably closer to
hundreds of fucking bats.
Lily shrinks under the cradle of her arms, chin in the bracket of her clavicles, and watches as the colony passes over the trees.
“Do you see it?” she calls back to Duncan. “We’ve got bats now.”
With a preternatural sense of geometry, the swarm flattens itself into a single plane, performing the same wheel-and-swoop maneuvers as a flock of birds. Yes, same as birds. Same as the human wave at a stadium.
“Are you getting this, Duncan?”
But he’s pulling their belongings from the backseat. His only reply a groan as each bag hits the ground.
Which is probably just as well. She takes her hands away from her head; really, after a wild boar, the danger posed by bats is negligible. Lily turns back to the house instead, to gaping porch and front door. To the prospect of their summer.
While he was dragging the hog into the ditch, Duncan had an idea. Instead of stopping at the house in Osterhagen, he’d continue north alongside the railroad tracks. Drop Lily off at the side of the road somewhere and then disappear under the peaked ceilings of the central Catskills. Become a mountain man. Eat things he’d caught and skinned himself.
Instead he sorts through a bundle of keys, trying to match the appropriate one to the lock in the door. Lily is still muttering something
about bats, about the collective flapping of wings.
And, Jesus, what if they’re roosting in the attic?
The only answer he gives is to get the door open. Get them in, get them on to the next disaster. First is the cloying smell of a sealed house. And then, as he enters the foyer, the sound of the floorboards. Articulated moans and protests. Duncan’s hand goes to the wall immediately to the right of the door; his fingers tracing and tapping for the light switch. Behind he hears Lily approach, her nostrils working to identify the fusty odor. Molasses and smoke.
No light switch.
He can see a staircase leading up from the foyer, but the landing is lost in a scrim of darkness. He plays with the idea of driving the car to the front door, angling the headlights to illuminate the entrance. Then remembers the grille, the one headlight sunk and askew in its socket. He starts patting the wall to the left of the door instead. Lily moves past him into the hall. Duncan’s beginning to think he should have worked out the details of the summer a bit more. The house had only recently fallen through a latticework of inheritance laws to land on Lily’s branch of the genealogical tree. And while they’d made the odd day trip, sometimes with Lily’s parents down from Albany, it now seems he hadn’t fully considered the snags and realities of the hundred-mile drive he’s agreed to undertake on Thursday nights to join her here. And then repeat on Sundays to get home. In the city, where he was always nose to screen, rustic and historic weekends sounded good. He’d envisioned “upstate” as the antioxidant to neutralize the free radical anguish of his office life. Now he wonders, with a certain amount of terror, how he will uphold his end of the bargain.
The lights go on. Lily is down the hall, glasses perched high on her nose. She stands for a moment with her hand on the switch, letting him know she’s accomplished what he could not. He looks up to the light source, a chandelier of glass lamps and brackets, sprigs of metal daisies. The hallway itself is like a great paneled throat with lofted ceilings pinched
tight by crown moldings so that he has to turn sideways to pass through with their bags.
At the foot of the stairs, Duncan drops their belongings to the floor and stretches his shoulders. It’s that wild boar, he thinks. It’s the long drive with its ruinous ending that’s made him feel peevish and crabbed. It would be simple just to foist the blame on her, repack his bag, and follow the thruway back to the city. But he’s got to trust that things will look different in the morning. After all, it was his own steady hand that blocked off a summer of Fridays from his office calendar, believing this division of the week might just be salvation for a man who couldn’t decide what he wanted more: to escape his work or to escape his wife.
As if to reassure, Lily comes back down the hall, snapping on lights. Around him, the house flickers and hums.
“It’s perfect,” he says, touching a blistered spot of wallpaper.
Lily shuts the front door. “You would say that.”
After poking through each of the open rooms on the second floor, she chooses the bedroom at the end of the hall. The mattress here is soft enough, although when she sits there’s a musical response from its arrangement of coils. Around door frames and moldings, wallpaper flakes away and reveals older designs below. Lily tugs a strip under the dormer window. Several generations of paper come away like onionskins in a light, drywall dust. She blows the powder from her fingers, imagines she could peel right down to the stud boning if she tried.
Duncan carries his bag in and puts it next to the bed. She feels a contraction in her chest as if her ribs are steepling together. The room is too close for the sudden imposition of his body.
“So we set up camp here?” He looks down at her on the mattress. Something odd comes over his face; he’s illuminated by perspiration. Lily is embarrassed by her splayed position on the bed and by him above. Hard to believe she once desired only this, only nightfall and him. The
weight of this man on top of her. Duncan’s eyes are strange, blinking, fixed on her mouth. It annoys her, this uncharacteristic watchfulness. She wants to tell him to wipe his sweaty forehead and quit it. Instead she taps his bag with her sneaker and tries to distract his gaze.
“It’s too hot to sleep together.”
She has a mustache. His wife. Not just a silkiness above her lip but a tuft of hair that grows thicker toward the corners of her mouth. It seems impossible that he has missed it until now. How much time has passed since they’ve been up close? Face-to-face? Lily reclines on the bed, an arm span away from him, her head cocked up to the light, and he thinks, the woman I married has a mustache. Where had it come from? Lily’s imperfection startles him, makes him feel as though he’s found a stranger in the bedroom, a tarantula in the folds of the linen closet. He recoils, but does so on the inside; a trick involving the contraction of the diaphragm and a scratch between the eyebrows to hide astonishment.
But why should he recoil from his wife? When you sleep beside someone, fuck her for years and years (five years, she made him wait until they were married), you have to expect some turn at unpleasantness. Like that sprinkling of pimples on her ass last year. He didn’t get spooked. Just told her and she took care of it and eventually they dried up and disappeared. So what is it about her upper lip that fills him with a sudden sense of futility? That she would allow this—or worse, be unaware of it—somehow undercuts all that he admires about Lily. And the fact that he can’t bring himself to tell her makes the gap between them all the more evident.
He can’t speak. Has he not spent a thousand nights with this woman? With his head docked in her lap and her fingers in his hair? She had a pretty laugh, that Lily, and a soft touch. But now she’s watching him with her forehead clinched in irritation and he thinks, surely there was a time when they were happy with each other? A time when the pace of their dealings was characterized by patient energy, a simple matter of telling
one another what worked, what had to go? For instance, she used to hold the bathroom door open with one foot while sitting on the toilet.
I got my Beaver Canoe, Duncan!
She’d announce with great relief,
You can relax now.
As if he was worried. Duncan, lying in bed one morning and certainly unworried (but annoyed by her fond appellation), had said,
Lily, don’t call it that.
Something about an amphibious rodent paddling its way out from between her thighs. And she had listened because back then they believed in an institute of free exchange.
Now things are different. Now he watches the dreadful motion of the swag above her lip. “You need to find your own room,” she says and kicks his bags with one foot.
T
he Osterhagen Loaning Library has a hedged cloister for smokers, a fountain spouting water from a cherub’s rosebud genitals, and a hobbyist’s collection of books on Gothic architecture.
Lily’s guts clench as she realizes how thin the reference section is; anything scholarly has been stacked away here in the musty rear of the building, where she can feel a definite spike in barometric pressure. The humidity is like the same rolling sheet they’d left behind in the city. They’ve only been in Osterhagen twelve hours and already she’s picking at seams, bracing herself against a summer of village life. It doesn’t augur well. And she hasn’t forgotten the terrible thing that charged them in the night. Twelve hours and already a tragedy in their wake.
The village, situated on a neat little rise, looks down over the Hudson and the rail line that skirts the eastern bank. The river is just a mile wide here and tidal, pulsing in an incongruous upstream direction twice a day with the incoming Atlantic. It was the library, though, that had caught Lily’s attention on a weekend trip and became emblematic of the change of scenery she believed she needed. The building itself, one of the many in town to be officially recognized by the Dutchess County Historical Society, was structured in the Second Empire style, with its mansard roof and cupola poked through for light. In the lobby, a magnificent corkboard stands like a plumed bird holding the recent history of Osterhagen in its
feathers. Here the shelves are lumpy with popular fiction, paperbacks tricked out in sensational frocks. So many well-thumbed covers, dog-ears left in place, it seems, for the convenience of the next reader. Lily lifts her arm and muffles a sneeze in the crook of her elbow. Around her, the worktables are taken up by teenage girls and the elderly, reminding her that this isn’t a place for academic research. She longs for the consortium system of the city’s academic libraries, the chain of escalators threading together the stacks, the click and chatter of microfiche reels. Here instead, the occasional sound of a throat clearing, a newspaper creased in half.
A reference desk flanks the lobby and is staffed by a pair of librarians tucked together, whispering. Lily thumbs through a rack of paperbacks. Last night they had just left the boar in the ditch. She should tell someone about it. At the reference desk the two older women appear to have noticed her; Lily feels four eyes skirt over her hair and clothing, the bicycle helmet under her arm. It makes her uneasy, this small-town curiosity. She moves back into the shelter of the stacks.
Uncomfortable thoughts compete for his attention this morning. While Duncan is meant to be hunched over his work in the sunroom—his labor of the past hour—his mind instead drifts to the dark surprises of last night. Shouldn’t crushing a wild boar under the front axle of your car warrant some conversation? Some speculation? But they just dragged it to the ditch and that was that. Not another word about it this morning before she left for the library. There’s something unsavory about the way thoughts of Lily’s upper lip mingle with the image of her bringing the tire iron down across the animal’s skull. Her speed and accuracy are troublesome, he thinks. Unmentionable. What he should do is call a park ranger, or a guy with a truck, but of course there’s no number handy. As for the grille of the Saab, well, he doesn’t want to think about it. He can’t even bring himself to go out and have a look. The car was brand-new. Brand-newish; a hand-me-down from Lily’s parents. The day her father gave it over, Duncan watched
him stroke the fender as though it were a mistress he was being made to abandon. The man was going to go ape-shit when he found out. Duncan might as well have been discovered giving his mother-in-law a good down-field punt.
In the sunroom, he leans back from the table that serves as his desk and rearranges the office supplies he’s pilfered from the agency: thesaurus and lamp, a writer’s stash of notepads and rollerball pens. He twists paper clips into elaborate calipers. This business with Lily, the tire iron and the mustache—it’s like she’s launching a personal assault against him. He has avoided her Institute wine and cheese parties, those interminable sessions of intellectual parlance on Museum Mile. He hasn’t seen any of her colleagues lately, but this mustache business can’t be something all the Ph.D. students are doing? All the female historians? This is Lily letting herself go. This morning she’s getting ready to cycle to the library and she’s telling Duncan something about the garbage bin smelling of wet dog and he’s thinking, what the fuck is that growing around your lip? But he doesn’t ask, doesn’t give voice to his concern. He lets her ride off like a granola lesbian instead.