The wine I had been drinking was very good. I opened another bottle. It had been left in a special cooler in the butler’s pantry that had been designed to replicate precisely the earthy damp of the caves under Bourgogne. One bottle cost a year of retirement, or an hour squinting down the barrel of a hurricane.
My neighbor’s jeep kicked up hillocks of pale dust on the road. He saw me standing in the window and skidded to a halt. He rolled down his own window and shouted, and his face squared into his neck, which was the warm hue of a brick. But the wind now was so loud that his voice was lost, and I felt a surge of affection for him as he leaned out the window, gesticulating. We’d had a moment a few years back at a Conservation Trust benefit just after my husband left, our fortyish bodies both stuffed into finery. There was the taste of whiskey and the weirdness of his moustache against my teeth. Now I toasted him with my glass, and he shouted so hard he turned purple, and his hunting dog stuck her head out the back window and began to howl. I raised two fingers and calmly gave him a pope’s blessing. He bulged, affronted, and rolled up his window. He made a gesture as if wadding up a hunk of paper and tossing it behind his shoulder, and then he pulled away to join the last stragglers pushing north as fast as their engines could strain. The great rag of the storm would wipe them off the road. I’d hear of the way my neighbor’s jeep, going a hundred miles per hour, lovingly kissed the concrete riser of an overpass. His dog would land clear over the six lanes in the southbound culvert and dig herself down. When the night passed and the day dawned calm, she’d pull herself to the road and find herself the sole miraculous survivor of a mile-long flesh-and-metal sandwich.
* * *
—
I began to sing to myself, songs from childhood, songs with lyrics I didn’t understand then and still don’t, folk songs and commercial jingles and the Hungarian lullaby my father sang during my many sleepless nights when I was small. I was a high-strung, beetle-browed girl, and the songs only made me want to stay awake longer, to outlast him until he fell asleep crookedly against my headboard and I could watch the way his dreams moved beneath his handsome face. Enervated and watchful in school the next day, I’d be unable to follow the teacher’s voice, the ropes of her sentences as she led us through history or English or math, and I would fill my notebooks with drawings—a hundred different houses, floors and windows and doors. All day I’d furiously scribble. If I only drew the right place to hold me, I could escape from the killing hours of school and draw myself all the way safely home.
* * *
—
The house sucked in a shuddery breath, and the plywood groaned as the windows drew inward. Darkness fell over the world outside. Rain unleashed itself. It was neither freight train nor jet engine nor cataract crashing around me but, rather, everything. The roof roared with water, the window blurred. When the storm cleared, I saw a branch the size of a locomotive cracking off the heritage oak by the lake and falling languorously down, the wet moss floating outstretched like useless dark wings.
I felt, rather than saw, the power go out. Time erased itself from the appliances and the lights winked shut. The house went sinister behind me, oppressive with its dark humidity. When I turned, I saw my husband in the far doorway.
You’re drinking my wine, he said. I could hear him perfectly, despite the storm. He was a stumpy man, thirty years older than me. I could smell the mint sprigs he chewed and the skin ointment for his psoriasis.
I didn’t think you’d mind, I said. You don’t need it anymore.
He put both hands over his chest and smiled. A week after he left me, his heart broke itself apart. He was in bed with his mistress. She was so preposterously young that I assumed they conversed in baby talk. He hadn’t wanted children until he ended up fucking one. I was glad that she was the one who’d had to be stuck under his moist and cooling body, the one to shout his name and have it go unanswered.
He came closer and stood next to me in the window. I went very still, as I always did near him. We watched the world on its bender outside. My beautiful tomatoes had flattened and the metal cages minced away across the lawn, as if ghosts were wearing them as hoop skirts.
You’re still here, of course, he said. Even though they told you to get out days ago.
This house is old, I said. It has lived through other storms.
You never listen to anyone, he said.
Have some wine, I said. Stand with me. Watch the show. But for God’s sake, shut it.
He looked at me deeply. He had huge brown eyes that were young no matter how alligatored his skin got. His eyes were what had made me fall for him. He was a very good poet. The night I met him, I sat spellbound at a reading my friend had dragged me to, his words softening the ground of me, so that when he looked up, those brown eyes could tunnel all the way through.
He drank a swig of wine and moaned in appreciation. At its peak, he said. Perfection. Drink it now.
I plan to, I said.
He began to go vague on me. I knew his poems were no good when they began to go vague. How’s my reputation? he said, the fingers of his hands melding into mittens. I was his literary executor; he hadn’t had time to change that one last thing.
I’m letting it languish, I said.
Ah, he said. La belle dame sans merci.
I don’t speak Italian, I said.
French, he said.
Oh, dear, I said. My ignorance must have been so maddening.
Honey, he said, you don’t know the half of it.
Well, I said. I do know my half.
I didn’t say, I had never said: Lord, how I longed for a version of you I could hold, entire, in my arms.
He winked at me, and the mint smell intensified, and there was a pressure on my mouth, then a lessening. And then it was only the storm and the house and me.
* * *
—
The darkness redoubled, the sound intensified. There were pulsing navy veins within the clouds; I remembered a hunting trip with my husband once, the buck’s organs gutted onto the ground. The camphor and magnolia and crape myrtles pressed their crowns to the earth, backbending, acrobats. My teak picnic table galumphed itself toward the road, chasing after the chairs already fled that way.
My best laying hen was scraped from under the house and slid in a horrifying diagonal across the window. For a moment, we were eye to lizardy eye. I took a breath. The glass fogged, and when it cleared, my hen had blown away. Then the top layer of the lake seemed to rise in one great sheet and crush itself against the house. When the wind swept the water into the road, my garden became a pit in which a gar twisted and a baby alligator dug furiously into the mud. From behind the flattened blueberries, a nightmare creature of mud stood and leaned against the wind. It showed itself to be a man only moments before the wind picked him up and slammed him into the door. I didn’t think before I ran and heaved it open so the man could tumble in. I was blown off my feet and had to clutch the doorknob to keep from flying. The wind seized a flowerpot and smashed it through the microwave. The man crawled and helped me push the door until at last it closed and the storm was banished, howling to find itself outside again.
The man was mudstruck, naked, laughing. A gold curl emerged from the filth of his head, and I wiped his face with the hem of my dress until I saw that he was my college boyfriend. I sat down on the floor beside him, scrabbling the dirt from him with my fingernails until I could make him out in his entirety.
Oh! he shouted when he could speak. He’d always been a cheery boy, talkative and loving. He clutched my face between his hands and said, You’re old! You’re old! You should wear the bottoms of your trousers rolled.
I don’t wear trousers, I said, and snatched my head away. There was still water in the pipes, and I washed him until he was clean. He fashioned a loincloth out of a kitchen towel. He kept his head turned from me, staring at me from the corners of his eyes until I took his chin in my fingers and turned it. There it was, the wet rose blossoming above his ear. He took a long swallow of wine, and I watched a red ligament move over the bone.