5.
Their Whole Actual House
Khadijah and I were forty minutes late, in the end. Dinner might have been torture, except that Todd and Khadijah turned out to have an artful and mesmerizing couple-shtick, a routine developed unconsciously over years of get-togethers, a performance of themselves. There was a thrill in watching them coordinate comments and gestures. It was like RUN-DMC.
“We’re collaborating,” said Todd, “on this thing where you smash your own house.”
Khadijah’s turn to speak came next: “The deal is, there are these miniatures we make of people’s houses—I make the miniatures and Todd is composing a score he’ll play live while people smash them.”
“You smash your own house,” Todd repeated, “if you’re one of the rich people who’s hired us to do the performance.”
“We come to their house and we give them the miniatures of their houses—they can put themselves in them if they want, I can make figurines if they want them—and they can—”
“They can choose how they want to destroy it,” said Todd. “They can use this lighter we made.” He turned to me and spoke to me particularly, to share information of significance to men: “It’s shockingly easy to make a lighter, bro.” He returned to addressing both Julie and me: “They burn the little houses, while Deej stands there with a fire extinguisher . . .”
“So they don’t burn down their whole actual house. Or—”
“Or there’s also a crowbar.”
“Todd’s playing the score on a guitar usually, or an organ, but he keeps a fair distance back so they can smash with abandon.”
“We were going to call it Homewreckers, originally, but that was too on-the-nose. So now it’s the Homelessness Initiative.”
“Who’s doing it?” asked Julie. “I mean, that’s so amazing, it’s a f*cking awesome idea, but who’s— Do you have customers?”
“We have five, right now,” said Khadijah. “My mom has a friend who knows a lot of people who— We couldn’t have found them ourselves. Three of them are out here, one’s in Boston, one’s in New York.”
“I’m so psyched for you,” I said, clawing crescent-shaped wounds in my leg. “These baguettes are choice.”
“Do people want huge loud music when they smash the house?” Julie asked Todd.
“I don’t care deeply about what they want, it’s that I want to make it weird and delicate and mournful. I suspect that that’s what they, the patrons, so to speak, really want, deep down, when they break their houses. Also, it’s let’s not f*ck with the neighbors too hard by playing something super f*cking loud. Also, Khadijah has made such beautiful houses, the music should feel sad when you see them destroyed. She’s such a masterful craftsman.”
“Shut up,” Khadijah said. To us: “He made this top.”
The top sported not one but three small mustard-colored owls. As the dinner wore on, with Khadijah and Todd explaining the difficulties of long distance, I felt this reunion was not enough. I wanted more one-on-one conversation with Khadijah Silverglate-Dunn after so many years of silence, with so many years more of silence to come. When everyone was drinking Thai iced coffee, the meal winding down, I found it necessary to continuously remind myself to sit up straight. To hide my grief, I went to the men’s room.
The men’s room was organized around a communal urinary trough. Water cascaded down the tiles into a basin of gray stones, to which stones there must have been attributed some cleansing or deodorizing or muffling effect. They coated the floor of the trough, so that you peed on them, rather than directly into the trough itself. I checked that no one was looking, and scooped up the most substantial stone I could find. I washed it in the sink with cucumber soap from the dispenser, dried it, and put it in my pocket.
I approached the host at the front. “You don’t have a Sharpie or a marker around, by any chance, do you?” I asked. “Sorry to be a pain.”
This wasn’t breaking any of the rules Khadijah and I had just made, I reminded myself.
The host stroked his own cheek with one hand, to help himself remain calm. “No problem,” he said, and pawed through a drawer in his little podium until he came up with a black Sharpie and thrust it violently into my hand.
I scrawled a circled A on the stone. The horizontal shaft was crooked. It looked more like a geometry proof than an anarchy sign. But Khadijah would remember the object to which it referred. We couldn’t have the kinds of conversations I wanted us to have, but I could leave her with this. I don’t actually know you, but I see something in you no one else can see. You were a rebel, remember? I squeezed the stone, to feel its hardness, and thought: You were like this.
Back at our table, Khadijah was debunking a celebrated whalebone sculptor, Todd and Julie listening with their hands on their chins. None of them were looking at me. As I sat down, I slipped the stone into Khadijah’s apple-green-handled tote bag, which was leaning against her chair.
When the bill arrived, Todd seized the plastic folder, held it to his chest, and took his wallet from his back pocket. I put my credit card on the table. Khadijah took her tote bag from the floor and rooted for her purse. She stared into the bag, gape-mouthed. I could tell she had the stone cupped in her hand.
Todd was now flagging down the waiter, oblivious. Julie was trying to get Todd to take her credit card. They’d seen nothing.
Khadijah dropped the stone back in the bag. I could hear it whish against the cloth. She turned her face from me, to stare at the wall.
Outside, the four of us embraced and told each other we would do it again.
As I drove Julie’s VW home, she pointed out a clear passage through traffic in the left lane of Olympic Boulevard. I steered sharply, and we were in it, and Koreatown moved so fast outside our window it became abstract. We floated past Authentic Korean, where the children had been drawn. The white neon Authentic Korean sign flickered spastically, a little life.
When we got home, the house was spotless. A woman came and cleaned every other Saturday. She did the laundry, full of foul gym clothes, washed the sheets and towels, polished the floors—I didn’t know everything she did, and neither did Julie. We only recognized its effect. The clear surfaces, the neon smell of cleaning agents, the dustless clarity of the air. I walked in through the front door and looked through the high-raftered living room into the wide marble kitchen, and remembered the Bank of Boston, how it had asked to be smashed, that spring day in Wattsbury, with the stone. I’d been thinking Julie and I should have sex to put Khadijah behind us. But now I wanted the punch of honesty—the rock through the glass.
“I did something wrong tonight,” I said.
Julie turned to face me, sucking her lips. I took a breath. I told her about the stone from the urinal trough, the Sharpie, the look on Khadijah’s face as she scooped it from her bag.
Julie’s neck twitched as she listened. Finally she flinched as if an insect had bitten her. She took the rose-hip soap bottle from the kitchen sink and threw it against the wall. She dropped to her knees and pulled me down to sit next to her, our backs to the island.
“From now on, she and I don’t talk,” I said, and she squeezed my hand like she was escorting me from a shark tank.
The security system issued a copacetic beep. I had lived in the house long enough to know that this meant Current Setting: Armed. Julie had hit the button that conveyed we were in for the night. The alarm would go off if somebody breached our invisible wall.
I harbored a family feeling toward the security system, this robot that kept us safe. Once, I had pushed the button that caused it to declare its setting aloud, its voice emanating from a small, powerful speaker, and it had spoken a little like David Byrne. I felt that even though Julie and I were the only humans in the house, we shared our home, even now, sitting on our kitchen floor on an autumn night, bare feet on cool tile, with buzzing presences: the Oenervians in the picture frames; Jeremy and his cohort; the children on the mirror; the ambitions that hovered over us like animated billboards; the shame of our little betrayals; the possible lives we’d abandoned for each other, for this.