The Carriage House (15 page)

Chapter 14

H
e had been thinking, before Isabelle strode back over the lawn with an empty bottle of wine in her hand, that his family had embarrassed him tonight. In the past, William had always imagined his family was the envy of every other household on Little Lane. He had always suspected Jack Weld of jealousy, because his daughter was passive and his wife was a drip. But tonight, for the life of him, he could not see what evidence had caused him to hold such convictions.

Before dinner, he watched them fluttering around in their various preparations, like so many frantic insects trapped in the house, and he felt sorry for them. He felt for Adelia, who had draped herself in small hard jewels in an attempt to seem more womanly. Because Elizabeth had flown to Adelia’s aid in preparing for the party, he felt intense fondness for Elizabeth, with her unkempt hair and her inexplicable jacket. He even pitied Diana and promised himself he’d be kinder the next time the topic of the carriage house came up. And when he saw Isabelle coming down the stairs in her white dress, looking like the little girl of whom he had been so proud, he felt a pang of regret for having accused her of disappointing him.

But at dinner, with the Welds gathered at his table, he saw his family through their eyes, and he was embarrassed. He saw, from the slight lift in Elaine Weld’s eyebrows when Adelia served the chicken, that Adelia was not his wife. As she served the guests, uncomfortable with her jeweled wrists in oven mitts, he could see that Adelia was not the woman he’d married, and she had no right to assume such a familiar place in his house. Her chicken tasted like pounded rubber soaked in brine. She was not a wifely woman. Perhaps he had known this when he married Margaux. Perhaps it wasn’t only wounded pride but the knowledge that, despite her perfect topspin, Adelia Lively was the kind of woman who creates inexpensive dinner menus while dreaming of vengeance, a woman with none of Margaux’s softness, without even the decent curves of a woman such as Elaine. Understanding this made it difficult for him to look at Adelia. He tried to avoid her gaze. He could tell that no one liked her chicken.

And his daughters. He saw them as Elaine must have seen them. Elizabeth kept running in and out of the kitchen as though her ridiculous jacket were on fire. Diana slouched the entire evening with nothing to say for herself. And Isabelle, who had looked so pretty when she first walked down the stairs in that white dress, spent the entire dinner flirting with Arthur as though she were a prostitute. Three times he caught Weld watching her while she whispered in Arthur’s ear, her cheeks glowing in a way that made William feel ashamed for her sake. Three times he imagined her as Weld did, and it nauseated him. When he compared Izzy to Abby, who ate her chicken politely and listened while Elizabeth blathered on, he wanted to grab her by the braid and drag her upstairs so she could learn how to act like a decent child again. He could see Jack Weld thinking:
My daughter would never behave that way, whispering at the table, disrespecting her elders, smiling as loosely as a hussy.
He could see the flush of triumph that spread itself over Weld’s face, and it dawned on him that Abby Weld, whom William had never credited with much, had grown up gracefully. She had learned to be less plain. And what had happened to Isabelle? Had she always been so flimsy in her character? Perhaps he had fooled himself. Perhaps the promise he saw in her had never existed after all.

The only member of his family of whom he had been truly proud was Lucy, singing that song from
Les Mis
é
rables
. It revived his belief that there was something special about the Adairs, some quality that other people lacked. But then Elizabeth sent her upstairs, and it was as though the lights went out on the patio and everything was drained of the color it had acquired while she was spinning around in her pink nightgown under the starry sky. William was forced to remind himself that, after all, his own children had been like that when they were young, and look how they ended up. At which point he caught sight of Diana watching Isabelle and Arthur as though they were falling slowly into a black hole from which they would never emerge.

As he was recollecting this, alone at the table in the wake of the party, Isabelle walked across the yard with an empty bottle of wine in her hand. William did not want to think where she had been, or how she had disposed of that bottle’s contents in the space of twenty minutes or less. When she sat at the table, he noticed that her feet were bare and there were little flecks of grass around her ankles, as if she had been turning cartwheels after the grass had been mowed. It was such a childish thing that he wanted to take her in his arms and demand that she remember who she was, because for the life of him, he couldn’t remember.

“Hi, Daddy,” she said. Her voice was so hard that he understood the grass on her feet had deceived him. They sat in silence for a while, and William occupied himself with counting Margaux’s irises. He was at twenty-seven when Isabelle reached for the bottle of wine left on the table. He was at forty-four when she finished her glass.

“How do you feel?” she asked. He told her he was fine. When she poured herself another glass, she caused him to lose his count. Determined, he started over at forty-one, but again his counting fell apart because he couldn’t believe how quickly she polished off the second glass. She was eighteen years old. She was a little girl. Why she had chosen to act this way was beyond him. She was no longer pretty in that white dress, which was skimpy around her shoulders.

“Daddy,” she said. It irked him that she had taken to calling him that now, after all these years. “I’m going to go over and talk to Jack Weld about the carriage house.”

He didn’t say anything. He tried to find the black shape of the bullfrog that was making so much noise.

“Daddy, do you want me to go over and talk to Jack Weld about the carriage house?”

“Isabelle, I don’t care. I do not care about the carriage house. I do not care about Jack Weld. It doesn’t make the slightest difference to me whether you talk to him or not.”

She finished the bottle of wine. The speed with which she drank it disgusted him as he counted Margaux’s irises, looking away from her, hoping she’d leave him alone.

When she was gone, William was startled to realize that tears were coming out of his eyes. This surprised him. He hadn’t cried in a long time, and he had felt none of the warning signs that usually preceded the welling of tears. There was nothing. No building up, no intensity of sensation. Only a spontaneous effusion of water, a vestigial fatherly response that had no basis in actual emotion. He sat there, leaking tears, until he realized that Margaux had come from behind the house and was bending down in the bed of ferns that she’d planted along the edge of the property. He watched her through his leaky eyes for a while. She was wearing a pale lavender dress with fluttery sleeves and a sash around the waist, as though she had stepped out of that old photo of her as a bridesmaid at her sister’s wedding. Each of her motions among the ferns—she was cutting and placing them in a square glass vase—was deliberate and fluid at once. Because her dark hair was spread over her back and her shoulders, whole parts of her faded into the night. In the way that he knew how, he had loved her, and she had chosen to disappear. He had never been disloyal; it was she who had left him behind. He wasn’t absolutely guiltless, of course. She had told him she didn’t want children, yes. She was firm about that. Perhaps she knew somehow that she wouldn’t last. But he had imagined a family! A family of beautiful girls. He imagined Lizzie and Di, and then he imagined Isabelle. He hadn’t known how sharply Margaux would decline.

When she finished cutting ferns, she turned and noticed him sitting at the table. She lifted one hand to wave. He lifted his. He wondered if she could see his meaningless tears. She hesitated, holding her glass of ferns, tilting her head to one side as if trying to place him precisely, as if attempting to put a name to his face.

Margaux,
he thought.
Wife, if only you were here.

But already she had disappeared through the laundry room door, and she was no more gone than she had been when she was standing there.

Later Adelia stuck her head through the sliding door and asked if he would come inside.

“No,” he said, looking out at the garden.

Her head stayed there, insistent and stuck. “William, what’s wrong?” she asked.

“I’d like to be alone,” he told her. He had never told her that before, he had always wanted her presence close by.

“No,” she said. “No, you can’t be. I need you here with me.”

“Go inside, Adelia.”

“No,” she said again. “Not unless you come with me.”

Her head refused to withdraw, and so he stood, and he observed that the unbidden tears had stopped welling. When he followed her inside, there was something reassuring about the brisk way she took the stairs, as though she were reminding each one of its place. He followed her. It was nice to follow someone after all. She turned down the bed and pointed him toward the pajamas she had laid out on his chair.

“Get in bed,” she said. No, she was not a wifely woman, and yet she was right here, as important as she had always been.

“Stay with me,” he said.

She hesitated, focusing on his pajamas.

“I need you here with me.”

She folded her arms across her thin chest. She was not a wifely woman, but she was his Adelia. He had lived with the benefit of her closeness since he was a boy. Now he could feel her tumult. The close, palpable snarl of her confusion that could almost be mistaken for anger. Without speaking, without looking at him, she kept her arms folded. She was pressing her lips together very hard, blinking as she used to do when someone had insulted her but she refused to let them see her cry. He almost pitied her, but he couldn’t let her go. He remained still before the bed. He would not lie himself down until she decided to stay.

“I need you here with me,” he said again.

“I’ve been here with you from the start,” she said. William moved to sit with her, but she pointed once again toward the laid-out pajamas, and William, grateful to be given a plan, did as she directed him.

Chapter 15

T
he windows of the Welds’ house were brightly lit. They looked like amber lozenges, soft around the edges, melting into the night. Seeing them made Izzy remember her throat; she was thirsty. “Windows are the souls of a house,” William used to tell her, before the architecture lessons had ceased. The Welds’ house was bright with rectangular souls that she wanted to drink. She stopped by the mailbox, alone in the gaping night, watching the house. The air smelled of cigar smoke and summer; he must have walked down this driveway, smoking a cigar, under the swarming black leaves. His lingering presence caused Isabelle to pull up short, caught in the netherland between two imposing houses. She wondered why a person should feel so left out of the world in which she was meant to exist. Before her, the long screened porch was empty. Behind it, the lights in the kitchen were on. All three of the Welds were moving around one another like woven strands. Jack was vivid. Around his family, in the privacy of his illuminated kitchen, he ascended into ecstasies. She watched him laughing at something that Abigail said. He reached over and gave her a high five. What a ridiculous motion, the high five. Two needy hands, stranded together. But the Welds laughed. They moved around one another and smiled. After a while, Abby kissed them both and then went upstairs. Jack and Elaine were alone in the kitchen. The dance broke up. Jack stood at the sink, washing dishes. Elaine moved over to the door, looking out. Isabelle would have been worried that Elaine could see her—it seemed she was staring directly at Isabelle—but she knew that from inside the house she was only a part of the darkness. Elaine couldn’t see her, standing by the mailbox, all angle and stiff white dress, feeling like an angel of vengeance with her bare feet against the angry gravel of the driveway. Jack leaned away from the sink to say something to Elaine, and she responded with a single word, facing the yard. Then she turned and left the kitchen. Upstairs, a light went on. Abby moved over to the window and lowered the blinds.
So be it,
Isabelle thought.
Let the blinds drop on Abigail Weld. Let her sleep a deep and oblivious slumber.

Jack finished with the dishes. He dried his hands on the dish towel and moved through the glass door to the screened-in porch. He sat in one of the wicker chairs and lit a cigar, cupping the match with his hand. When he sat up, sucking in with his cheeks, Isabelle watched the cigar’s tip crumple to a rim of red ash. His body had blended into the darkness, but she could see the circular shine of his eyes moving, scanning the night. She wished she’d picked up a handle of something out of William’s liquor cabinet. She could have used its glass weight in her hands. She thought of turning around and going back home, but the idea was repulsive to her, and when she took a step forward, the gravel under the soles of her feet was pleasantly painful. She felt sharpened by the sensation as she walked, pressing her feet against the stones. When she worried he’d hear the sound of her steps on the gravel, she switched over to the lawn.

He didn’t see her until she was close to the porch. If she hadn’t been wearing the white dress, he wouldn’t have seen her at all. She could have walked right up to the porch and draped herself across the screen like a huge luna moth, camouflaged by darkness, invisible to human eyes. But he saw her dress moving and stood up. He walked over to the screen.

“Isabelle?”

“Hey.”

He glanced behind him into the house. The kitchen was empty. “What are you doing?”

“I wanted to ask you something.”

“You shouldn’t sneak around like this. If you want to come in, come in. I’ll get you a glass of lemonade. We can sit in the living room with Mrs. Weld.”

“That sounds like a ball.”

He sucked on his cigar, watching her.

Isabelle attempted to make her voice gentler. “You wanna come outside with me?” she asked. “We could sit in those chairs.” She gestured toward the two iron lawn chairs, stripped of their cushions, that had lounged unused at the side of the Welds’ house for years.

The rim of his cigar flared and crumpled, unfolding petals of ash. “This is ridiculous,” he said.

Isabelle couldn’t be sure, exactly. Her brain felt hot. There was the helping of her father, the spiting of Adelia, the desire to feel something painful again. She looked up at him. She knew that, in theory, she was beautiful, her white dress shining against the darkness of her hair. She commanded her looks to reach out and wrap around him where he stood on the porch. She could see him softening. The breeze moved the hem of her dress around her legs.

“Go home, Isabelle,” he said, but this time his voice was quieter.

“Am I different now? Than when I was a kid with all the promise in the world?”

“You’re still a kid. You’re Abby’s age.”

“She’s done better than I have, hasn’t she?”

“I never compared the two of you.”

No, he hadn’t, had he. She’d already had enough. Bile was rising in her throat, and she had to concentrate to keep it down. “I’ll go,” she said. Her eyes narrowed. She could feel them sharp as stones. “But can you do something about the carriage house? It seems like you owe me a favor.”

He turned and stubbed out his cigar. When he came back around, something had changed in his face. “I said I’d see what I could do. I’ll do my best. I don’t know what you’ve imagined, but I don’t owe you any favors.”

“What’s your best, Jack? What’s your very best?”

He studied her, head tilted to one side. “You know what my best is, Isabelle? Nothing. I don’t owe you anything, and I won’t do anything for you now that you’re threatening me. My best is nothing. Whatever importance your father has invested in the carriage house means nothing to the outside world. That building is no more than a rat-infested dump, and to be honest, I’ll be delighted when it goes. I’ve looked forward to it for a long time. I’m going to sit here and smoke a cigar, watching, when that thing finally falls.”

Isabelle breathed in, taking her time. “When you win this war, Jack,” she said at last, “you’re still going to be just another middle-aged man, married to a woman you can’t remember loving, wishing you’d become the person you used to hope you’d become.”

“Sure, Isabelle,” he said.

“You’re still going to drive to work in the morning, and you’ll stroll around the hospital and tell yourself that you’re somehow important. But when you come home at night, you’ll miss this fight with my dad because it gave you some intensity, at least.”

“Well said, Isabelle. You have a way with words, don’t you.”

“And then without a feud to keep you distracted, you’ll look around and get that your wife is boring, your daughter is average, and you’re nothing more than a little boy pretending he’s grown up into a man.”

He waited until she was finished. “And you’ll be nothing more than a girl who threw her life away to make the point that she could.”

Her breath caught. “I won’t let you,” she said, although she had no idea what she meant.

“Go home, Isabelle. Go home and get some sleep.” She didn’t move, so he shrugged, turned his back on her, and went into the house. The light in the kitchen switched off. A new darkness descended around her. She waited for a while longer, until the house started settling into the night, then opened the screen door and sat in the wicker chair he had been sitting in. She toyed with the matches he’d left beside the ashtray. She ran one finger through his discarded ash, then put the finger to her lips; it tasted acrid. On the other side of the porch were a hopper of tennis balls and two rackets leaning against a card table. She examined these and all the easy familial comfortableness that they stood for. She settled into Jack’s chair. Then she got up and tested the kitchen door. It gave with only the slightest creak, so she walked in and tried the cabinet beside the sink for liquor. She was right; people’s liquor cabinets exhale a special allure that makes them easy to find. She took a handle of bourbon out to the porch and settled into the wicker chair. There was something extremely pleasant about drinking directly underneath the room where Abigail Weld was sleeping peacefully. Izzy looked out over the lawn. It was too late for fireflies, but the bullfrogs were croaking. Over in the Adair yard, in the silt of the pond, the frogs’ pale gullets were extending and collapsing. In the carriage house, the rats had been hiding all day, and now they were venturing out of their holes. There were whole nests of rat babies over there, and rat mothers scurrying around, scavenging for food. There were mice, too, with translucent ears and trembling noses. And termites burrowing into the honeycomb rafters. All of them would be lost when the carriage house went down. Isabelle took another swipe of cigar ash and tasted it again, and she thought if they were going to be lost, it might as well be now. You could fight for something only so long; at some point you just have to stop. You have to pack up your bags and get out. She imagined whole trails of exile mice wearing little straw hats and pioneer bonnets, pushing their children ahead while behind them, their city burned to the ground. And this was very sad, so sad it was practically unbearable, and Isabelle felt she couldn’t put it off any longer. If they were going to be banished, she wanted them to just fucking get out. Why wait around in a sinking ship? Why wait for Jack Weld to come in with his wrecking ball ready? Better to do the thing herself. She didn’t want him to watch it go down. She took a final swallow of bourbon and put the matches in her pocket. On her way out, she stole the ball hopper and one of the tennis rackets, then trooped back down the driveway. The soles of her feet didn’t hurt anymore. By the time she’d crossed the Schmidts’ lawn, she had formed a coherent plan, and she stopped in front of the carriage house with a sense of immediate purpose.

She took a ball out of the hopper and held it in the palm of her left hand. At one point in her life, she’d loved the feel of a tennis ball in the cup of her palm. Now she held the ball and tried to remember the old comfort, but that was gone, so she whispered, “Fuck it,” and lit it on fire. It was hard to light at first, but then the flame caught so quickly she was afraid it would burn her, so she took the racket in her right hand and launched the flaming ball out toward the carriage house. It arced through the dark like a comet. Isabelle’s eyes widened in appreciation of its beauty. It was the most beautiful thing she’d seen in a long time. She lit another ball and lobbed it, a little higher this time. It was like a Viking funeral ceremony. She was shooting flaming arrows, and the carriage house was like a big canoe in the lake of the night. She struck another match. She was giddy with the scent of unnatural smoke. She was seeing them off. She was seeing all of them off, and when they were gone, she would turn back and move away from the shore. In the thickening haze of smoke, it looked as though the carriage house were moving away from her, a big slow canoe receding into a mist. “Here is for the mice,” she said to herself. “And here is for the rats, and the termites, and the old falling rafters. Here is for my sisters, and here is for my mom.” Each time she lobbed another ball. “And here is for myself,” she said, just to keep talking. She kept on lobbing until she burned a hole in the strings, then dropped the smoking racket on the grass and headed back to the driveway. She found the keys that William always left in the ignition of the Jeep, and she thought she would be sick, but then she rolled down the windows. The breeze rushing past her settled her head, and she told herself she needed to go on a drive, away and away and away and away, a drive so endless there would be no need to imagine it ever coming to an end.