FIFTEEN
In most of Jane Austen's novels, it is the flighty, shallow, venal people who long for town amusements; thoughtful, feelingful people possess the internal resources to enjoy the quiet pleasures of the countryside.
I have to admit that I'm thinking more of the films than the actual novels, as I haven't read a Jane Austen novel since I was sixteen. But I always mean to, especially right after I see some great BBC production with a firm-chinned actress charging resolutely through muddy vales in a soggy Empire-waisted gown.
But it's one thing to admire the rolling green English downs while somebody photogenic stomps across them and another thing altogether to be confronted with the reality of being stuck in a house in the middle of the woods.
Of course, like most things you suspect you'll grow to regret, it didn't seem so bad at first.
“Well, what do you think, Abra?” Hunter threw an arm around my shoulders as we looked at our new home. Nestled between yellow and red maples, its path carpeted with a fragrant windfall of pine needles, the Barrow family house appeared suddenly as you turned the corner of the path, just like something out of a fairy tale. Ivy covered one wall. The rest of the house revealed itself in sections: the flaking dragon-scale ripple of roof; the lonely, steepled tower; the twin slitted attic windows that gazed down at the grim, willow-shrouded entrance. All along the north side of the house, which never got much sun, you could see damp, spongy sections of wood and the larger holes that announced the presence of small armies of vermin.
In bright October sunlight, it appeared to be no more than a ramshackle old mansion. But as I recalled from my previous visit, when winter arrived and shadows claimed it before four o'clock, it was a house straight out of one of my mother's films.
“I guess it needs some work,” I said.
“Want me to carry you over?” Hunter indicated the threshold.
“I'm too heavy.”
“Hey, I'm not going to beg you.”
I lifted my arms and he bent and grasped me below the knees, pausing once to adjust his grip.
“Can you get the door open like this?”
“Possibly.” Hunter struggled with the old lock for a long moment before putting his back into it. After a moment, he put me down. Lifting and turning the key simultaneously, he managed to get the rusty mechanism to work.
“Needs some oil.”
“All right, Abs, get back here. We'll do it right.” He lifted me again and held me against his chest for a moment. The inside of the house was musty and dark and for a moment Hunter was in shadow as he bent his head to kiss me.
I wrapped my arms around him and kissed him back, more deeply, inhaling the nicotine and wool scent of him as he released my legs so I was standing in front of him.
“We have a lot to do, Abra.” His hands slid mine down, away from his neck.
“Of course we do. Right.” I took a deep breath and looked around at the vast, dim foyer, where a stained-glass window cast a weak greenish light on the heavy oak grandfather clock and worn Turkish rug. That was it in the way of furnishings, except for a low wicker couch, which boasted a selection of 1970s paperbacks, including A Man's Guide to Fishing and Nurse Angelica's Dilemma. Nurse Angelica was clasping her head in one sharply manicured hand, as if her head were hurting her badly. I knew how she felt.
I could sense the vastness of the house around me, the rambling maze of rooms and back staircases and strangely outfitted cold pantries unrenovated since the days when women worse corsets through pregnancy. In my previous visits, I had gotten lost exploring and found myself thinking of things I usually associate with my mother—mysterious cold spots, strange breezes in airless rooms, sinister sounds from behind the walls.
“This house has a lot of history,” Hunter once had told me, pointing out where a Barrow grandmother had died in a cedar closet and rotted, undiscovered, for two months.
Now this was my home.
And Hunter had disappeared.
Heart thumping, I made my way out of the foyer and through the blood red walls of the dining room. From there, I creaked over rotting floorboards into the sadly derelict kitchen, where heavy old clawfooted furniture gave way to bad ‘70s linoleum and rusted beige appliances.
“Hunter. I wondered where you were.” I tried to lower my voice and sound collected.
“Just checking the food situation.” Hunter closed the refrigerator door. “There isn't any.”
“I could do a shopping run …”
“In a little while. The movers should be here pretty soon, so maybe we should do it after they're gone?” Hunter didn't bother to wait for my answer. He seemed restless and oddly energized, rummaging through cabinets, opening and closing drawers, as I hovered nearby. Glancing over his shoulder, he said, “Do you think you could get started on straightening things out down here while I check out the rest of the house? You wouldn't want to cook on that range till you've had a chance to clear it off.”
Of course, I wanted to look our new home over with him; but I had seen it all before, hadn't I, and we would want to be eating here this evening.
“No problem.”
“That's my girl.” Hunter planted a kiss on my forehead and walked away. Halfway to the curving back stairs, he paused and turned. “You okay with this?”
I lifted a cut-crystal bottle of olive oil off the counter. The cork stopper was half chewed through, and in the largest part of the bottle a dead mouse lay curled, its little mouth opened in a bucktoothed frown. “Fine.”
“I'll be right back to help you, Abs.”
After I disposed of the mouse outside, I tried to get rid of some of the dust with an ancient mop and an equally aged can of pine cleaner. Despite my best efforts, I seemed merely to be stirring the dirt around, creating a dazzling display of dust motes in the still air, so I tried to crank open one of the old-fashioned windows, breaking off the handle in the pro cess.
After an hour spent sorting out the kitchen utensils, I had found a few usable plates and cups (which all, oddly enough, had Peter Max ‘60s psychedelic patterns on them), two flimsy frying pans with peeling no-stick, and an extremely heavy enameled cooking pot. The only silverware I had discovered was a fine Edwardian bone-handled set.
There was a hibernating frog in the dishwasher.
Hunter still hadn't come back down by three, and the movers were nowhere in sight. I paused at the foot of the stairs. “Hunter?”
No reply.
“Hunter?”
I made my way up the stairs to the second floor, where there were four small bedrooms, two on each side. “Hunter? Are you up here?” Even though it was still full daylight, I found it hard to see. There were no overhead lights, as Hunter's mother had not wired for electricity here. According to Hunter, she had believed the Edwardian gas lighting on this level to be charming. Unfortunately, I could not hear the slight sizzling sound of the jets without worrying about the possibility of asphyxiation, fire, and explosion. Not necessarily in that order.
In the first bedroom, which was furnished sparsely with a single bed, a small table, and a picture of fruit, I heard the sound of wheels on the pebbled driveway. Looking out the small eyebrow window, I could just make out the front end of the small yellow movers' truck.
I walked up the last flight of stairs to the attic, which was half finished and stretched from one end of the house to the other. It was drafty and dark, and I could see parts of the kitchen from an unfinished section of floor. Hunter was tapping away at his laptop, one navy and yellow striped leather sneaker braced on a beam, worn jeans stretched tight over the long muscles of his thigh. As I came up behind him I could make out the words A steep and hilly silence before he looked up and caught my eye.
“You know, Abra,” he said, his voice filled with excitement and plea sure, “I kept thinking that I was stuck working on this article. But I wasn't really stuck at all. I think the real problem was that this isn't just an article. I think what I have here is enough material for a book.”
Well, I thought, what had I been expecting—a declaration of his love and gratitude? Swallowing back my disappointment, I said, “The movers are here.”
“Be right down.” He turned back to his computer.
Mentally counting to ten, I managed not to sound as irritated as I was feeling. “I didn't mean to disturb you, but maybe you could finish that a little—”
“Of course. Just give me a moment to save what I'm working on.”
I walked down the stairs and felt his eyes on my back for a moment, and then I heard the soft tapping of his fingers on the keyboard, typing faster than before. The sound of my feet on the stairs made an odd, rhythmic counterpoint.
When I opened the front door I could see the movers arguing in front of their truck.
“What I tell you? ‘Skunk Misery Lane,' “ said the taller mover, who had a large, bald head and a tattoo of the Egyptian eye of Horus on the back of his neck.
The smaller mover, who wore old-fashioned glasses and a lank blond ponytail, said something in a language that sounded like bad French. Hebrew, I assumed.
“Hello,” I said.
“It's his fault we are late,” said the bigger man. “He was reading the map.”
The slender, intellectual-looking mover looked completely unapologetic. “You say to us one hour on Taconic, yes?”
“My husband was the one who talked with you.”
“But this is not one hour. I say to Ronen, if we keep on, we're going to need a passport for Canada.”
“Itzik,” said the larger mover. “Shut up.”
Itzik walked around to the back of the truck. “It gets pretty cold up here in winter? Minus ten degrees? Minus twenty?”
The bald mover shook his head and said something in Hebrew. For a few moments the men concentrated on wrestling the couch out of the truck. From time to time they barked commands at each other while I watched, feeling helplessly protective of my furniture.
“Can I help you?”
“Just get the door for us.”
Ronen and Itzik were finished and gulping water out of chipped porcelain cups by the time Hunter came downstairs.
“How's it going?” He stood and looked at the movers and then at me, running his hands through his hair, which, for some reason, was damp with sweat.
“It's all done,” I said.
“Except for you pay us,” added Ronen.
“Right. I'll get my checkbook.”
I came up behind Hunter. “You need to give them a big tip. What have you been doing up there?”
Hunter continued writing out the check for the movers. “I had to finish something before I lost it.” He walked around me in order to hand the check to the larger mover. “There you go.”
Ronen looked the amount over and then tucked it into his back pocket. “Great, thanks, Itzik, yallah, put down the cell phone.”
“I'm trying to reach Ari at the office.”
We all waited.
“There's no signal,” said Itzik, staring down at the phone and then punching a few buttons. “No, nothing.” He looked up at us. “Can I use your house phone?”
Hunter shook his head. “It's not turned on yet.”
Itzik looked up at Ronen and they conversed briefly.
“Okay, nu, yallah, we have to go,” Ronen concluded, and shook my hand. “I wish you luck here,” he said to me. “Goodbye,” he said to Hunter.
It had somehow gotten to be almost six and the shadows of the trees were lengthening as I walked the movers back to their truck. The trees here were not like the neat little trees of my suburban childhood. Here the pines and maples and silver beech grew into one another, tangled at their roots, encircled by thorny hedgerows, cluttering the sky with their interlocking branches.
“You need to get someone to garden this place,” Ronen observed, heaving himself up into the driver's seat.
“Yeah, there's too many trees here. Better watch out for that tick disease,” added Itzik, polishing his glasses on his shirt. “Limb disease.”
“Lyme disease,” I said. “It's the wrong season, though. You're kind of afraid of the country, aren't you, boys?”
“Hey.” Itzik smiled. “If you like ticks and skunks, good for you. I'm a city boy.”
Ronen was trying the cell phone. “Still out of range,” he said. “Ari's going to have a fit.”
As they began to pull away I could hear them arguing over whether to order from a kebab house or a Mexican restaurant when they got back.
I turned to face the house, and it seemed to have gotten darker in the few moments I'd been standing outside. In the city, this was rush hour in the subways: Out here I could feel an intangible shift, a kind of ratcheting up of tension, as all the twilight hunters began to grow more alert.
I entered the house, which was still dark. “Hunter?” I flipped a light switch and nothing happened. “Hunter, where are you? Haven't you contacted the utilities guys? We don't seem to have electricity.” I felt stupid for not checking earlier. Hunter was so irresponsible about these things, and I hadn't even seen to the bedrooms upstairs to figure out where we would sleep. “Hunter?”
I found him staring out on the back porch, watching the yard grow dark.
I wrapped my arms around his waist and he seemed startled, but then turned his attention back outside.
“We don't have any electricity. No light, no heat. Did you bring a flashlight?”
“In the car.”
I thought about lodging a complaint or ten about how he'd gone about this move, but something about the vast stillness of the encroaching night stopped me. We were all alone out here. I didn't want to fight with Hunter now. “Well, don't you think we should head out and see about getting some dinner? Or do you just want to stand here for another hour?”
“Dinner?” Hunter turned to me and smiled, so happy and excited I could see the whites of his eyes and his teeth gleaming. “Sure. Oh, Abra, wait till you see what I'm working on. This place is bringing something different out of me.”
“That's great.”
Hunter put his arm around me and inhaled the darkening air, and I tried to stand quietly beside him so that he wouldn't notice that I was just tired and apprehensive and not excited at all.