Inside, all was quiet. He understood immediately that Ian wasn’t at home. The high ceiling was lost in the dim evening light, and there was a smell of recent construction—plaster and paint. Bridgette flipped a wall switch as she passed him, and tiny spotlights illuminated the canvases lining the walls: abstract images lurid against the dark-stained, elaborately carved paneling. Through a doorway to the right, a smaller room featured a menagerie of torqued still lifes—flowers and fruits distorted in some unsettling way Aaron couldn’t have named. Carved on the lintel over the doorway between the two rooms, like sentinels of the seventeenth century watching over what the Eastons had wrought, were two cherubs Aaron hadn’t noticed before: expressive creatures of dark polished wood, their heads inclined as though regarding with curiosity all who passed below them. Their faces were lit with a conspiratorial amusement recognizable despite the centuries since it had been carved there.
The elaborate woodwork, the unsettling art, the high ceilings, the stark light from the mullioned windows . . . Aaron had to admit that the juxtaposition (he could almost hear the word in Helen’s flinty voice) was effective. The whole thing felt jarring in a way that wasn’t necessarily bad, though he didn’t know if it was good either. If viewers wanted visual tension, here it was. Speaking personally, it made his teeth hurt.
“Do you like it?” Bridgette said. “We open next week. Working to square renovation priorities has been a bit”—her face took on a hard expression, and he understood that Bridgette was in a dangerous mood—“intense.”
He moved through the hall, pretending to look at the paintings and nodding with what he hoped was a thoughtful, approving mien. But all the while he was working his way toward the shadowed stairwell.
“We closed it up,” she said flatly.
Dropping pretense and crossing directly to the base of the stairs, he saw that indeed the stairwell had been closed, the dark panel with the keyhole patched. The carpenter had done a good job. From a distance, the repair was undetectable.
Bridgette was watching. Had she noticed the sharp sting he felt at seeing the now-empty staircase so readily resealed? For it seemed to him that the staircase had itself become an exhibit in the Eastons’ gallery: one demonstrating how inconsequential, finally, were someone else’s passion and defeat.
“A drink?” Bridgette said.
He nodded vaguely, which seemed to amuse her. She turned, opened a pocket door between two paintings—Aaron noted that the narrow door bore a small, elegant sign that read Private Area—and disappeared through it. He could hear her moving away along what must have been an old servant’s passage. Her footsteps faded; there was a distant sound like a heavy door closing.
Minutes passed. He stood beside the stairwell, the stilled heart of the house. The building echoed with silence; he could hear it breathing, moving, coursing from room to room like oxygen through a body. A three-hundred-year-old silence.
Sermon-quiet, he thought—but before he could traverse the worn mental path toward ruing the self-importance of his father’s profession, he made himself admit it: he’d never gotten the rabbi thing out of his system. All his life he’d wanted to be what his father was—a devotee venerated for his humble devotion; a man standing in the middle, in thrall to something larger while others were in thrall to him.
That he’d failed to measure up to even his father’s standard now seemed patently obvious. Aaron Levy lacked the gravitas to be a conduit for the wisdom of history. He’d thought he loved history; in truth, he couldn’t even see history.
An uncomfortable question floated back to him. What was that story Marisa had told about her gay brother? He’d paid little attention at the time, focusing instead on calibrating the impression he was making on Marisa. But now the conversation returned to him like a thread unspooling. The brother was a jock, girls followed him everywhere; the brother never told anyone except Marisa, who would do reconnaissance for him, spying on boys he liked so he might run into them by accident, get a chance to at least talk. Later some asshole outed him and his life turned to shit in a couple weeks; he barely survived the depression. Even our grandmother, who’d lived through Bergen-Belsen, just pretended it wasn’t happening. Marisa had spoken levelly, slowly. It almost killed my brother. And I kept saying: Danny, why don’t you let yourself be free? But he was too ashamed. So I decided I had to be free. Despite the beer in her hand, Marisa’s eyes had rested steadily on Aaron’s. People go through life trying to please some audience. But once you realize there’s no audience, life is simple. It’s just doing what you know in your gut is right.
She’d said it, and she’d looked at him just so, hadn’t she? And then she’d lofted her beer, and moved on to the subject of American Jews. And, foolishly, that was the part of the conversation Aaron had seized on. As if a little intellectual banter about history were his golden opportunity to prove his mettle to Marisa.
They don’t want memory, she’d said, or history that might make them uncomfortable. They just want to be liked. Being liked is their . . . sugar rush. She’d been talking about American Jews . . . but she could have been talking about Aaron.
The silence of the house reproached him. With a jolt, Aaron understood. Marisa had been talking about him.
Closing his eyes now, he saw her. The warm, bold light in her gaze. The invitation and the dare. Rodney Keller had seen perfectly what made Marisa unlike anyone Aaron had ever met: her unsettling directness.
It made him think of Ester Velasquez. Or rather—he schooled himself—the Ester Velasquez he’d chosen to believe in.
He had no idea, really, why Marisa had decided to sleep with him that day five months ago. But he had an inkling why she wanted nothing to do with him now.
He didn’t know what he was doing here in this house. He didn’t know what he was doing in England.
With an echoing bang, Bridgette emerged from a door on the other side of him. Seeing Aaron’s startled expression, she laughed. “This house is full of surprises, isn’t it?”
“Well,” he said. “You are, at any rate.”
This pleased her. She gave him his glass, and drank from hers, and pulled over two sleek metal folding chairs. “So,” she said. “What sort of discoveries have you made with those papers you’re so mad about? Have you learned who invented the wheel? Or was the first to discover fire?” She waved her manicured fingernails.
“Yes. In fact, it all happened right here in your house.”
She tapped her glass with a fingernail. “As I suspected.”
A moment’s silence. Slowly, then, Bridgette shook her head. Her face had tightened. “This goddamn house.”
“What about it?”
She sniffed. “Nothing.” She raised her glass, inspected it. “Tell me, has your lovely boss grown any cheerier? I thought she was going to burn a hole in Ian with her eyes.” She stiffened in her seat. “The papers are mine!”
He couldn’t help chuckling—he had to admit Bridgette did a good imitation, chin lifted and cheeks drawn, a wintry stare pinioning Aaron. “Not bad,” he said.
“Well, your boss reminds me a bit of my aunt—another scold totally convinced of her own view of things. Except my aunt fancied herself a bit of a mystic. Always said she had feelings about people. She used to read me fairy tales when they’d send me here to visit her, but the only one I remember is ‘The Little Match Girl.’ You know the one? The freezing girl in the snow? Peeping through windows at people basking at their fires, only she can’t feel the warmth of those fires one bit.” Something unidentifiable flitted across Bridgette’s face. “That’s just how I always felt listening to her. I used to try so hard to be wise and worthy of her standards, only half the time I didn’t know what the hell she was talking about. She knew it too. Do you know what the last thing was she said to me before she died? She was lying in the bloody hospital after they’d finally persuaded her to leave her precious house, but she squeezed my hand like I was the sick one. She said, It’s a shame, I’d hoped we could be good friends.”
They drank.
“Hey,” said Bridgette. “This is what you Americans do all day, is it? Sit about confessing things. What a rotten influence you are!” She leveled a long finger at his chest. “Yes,” she said. “You.”
Above him, the empty house towered. Windows with their black levers. Thick, age-distorted panes.