Three miles away, in a renovated mansion built in the American Queen Anne style 143 years ago by Woodrow Huxley Zorn III, cofounder of Zorn Automobiles, James makes love to his wife for the first time in months, inducing seismic orgasms from them both. But he feels her fall sad afterward, turning from him too soon, abandoning him for her private interiority, which he imagines as the library of a castle they once visited in Ireland, spectacular and haunted and damaged by cannon fire. He has yet to catch his breath, and she’s already in the bathroom. As he listens to her pee—she has never had a urinary tract infection in her life, her hygiene a kind of religion—he tries to compute why he finds one person’s distance alluring while he finds his wife’s distance funereal. The faucet pummels water in the tub; he listens to his wife pull the metal valve and wonders how much water is lost as it is rerouted between the faucet and the showerhead. James never lost interest in his wife, even after the color drained from her hair and her laugh, but she lost interest in him. By the time her shower ends, he feels even more energized than he did during sex—but it is a rabid energy, this drug, hijacking him, driving him recklessly away from himself. When his wife reenters the room, smelling of vetiver, he fights an alarming urge to lunge at her, pin her down, and make her laugh.
“Remember the girls have the dentist tomorrow,” she mumbles from the opposite shore of their mattress.
Around three in the morning, James pulls on some clothes and goes for a jog around their neighborhood, feeling sick and extraordinary. Tree roots rebel under the historic brick roads, thrashing like snakes and making him stumble. He passes rows of dignified houses from the nineteenth century, none of which are as opulent as his. The air is cold and damp, the neighborhood dressed for Christmas. Fake deer in the yards, wreaths on the doorways, champagne lights twinkling on trim. Nearby, men are yelling, but James can’t see them. Can’t hear what they’re saying. Many armed robberies have occurred in his neighborhood in recent years, prompting an exodus to the suburbs, and James knows he should be cautious, but his strongest impulse is to track down the voices and join them. His pockets are empty.
After running for twenty minutes or so, James stops at the bridge that connects his neighborhood to downtown, watching his breath in the tangerine streetlights, listening to the river as it churns below. Inspired by their favorite picture book, his daughters often tell him that they want to be lamplighters when they grow up. He imagines Emma and Rosie hovering through the city at dusk, planting flames in glass cages like pixies. He doesn’t have the heart to inform them that Vacca Vale isn’t illuminated by gaslights anymore; instead, high-pressure sodium-vapor streetlamps sprout like saplings from the pavement. When electricity passes through the sodium, the sodium gets excited and glows. Efficient and cost-effective, the lamps cast his city in the dim orange luminosity of a dream. James enjoys facts, but unlike his student Tiffany, he does not mistake them for wisdom. Still, like Tiffany, he longs to amass information until his education becomes the inverse of itself, until he is absolutely stupid with knowledge. James once found the Vacca Vale River—mostly sewage, by the time he was born—depressingly impotent. Three months ago, it flooded the town with a force that James interpreted as repressed fury, like it was avenging itself for centuries of mistreatment. The flood spared his neighborhood, which was built on a hill.
On the bridge, his ears stung by wind, James stretches. His ankle throbs from a sprain he got when he was seventeen. Soccer match. Winning goal. An injury that never healed right.
The next day, as they block the final scene, James refuses to meet Tiffany’s eyes. There are consequences, he reminds himself. This isn’t a fucking rehearsal.
In February, James gives Tiffany his phone number, accompanied by a reason. Will she babysit his children on Friday night? Although, at first glance, inviting Tiffany into his home and introducing her to his family seems antithetical to his newfound conviction, James is obeying an instinct: he needs to recast his time with her as nothing but acceptable. Needs to extract her fangs and declaw her. He struggles to articulate this to himself, but inviting her to babysit is the answer to some sloppy math: the best way to ensure that nothing ever happens between them is to show her to people. To the people who matter. Besides, once she becomes both a student and a babysitter, he couldn’t—he wouldn’t . . . two clichés? Yuck, he thinks. No way. Plus, James has a curious urge to verify Tiffany. She could be a hallucination, a psychological crisis, the ghost of an ancestor! His domestic life—his real life—will puncture and deflate this thing between them. He will hypostatize her to his life, and hypostatize his life to her, and then they will retreat to their barricaded realms, and all will be well. All will have always been well.
“Our regular babysitter is going on a silent retreat,” he explains unnecessarily. “And my in-laws are busy.”
He does not ask if Tiffany has experience with childcare. Presumes that being female is sufficient qualification for the job.
“I don’t have a car,” Tiffany responds.
“One of us can pick you up and drop you off.”
She rolls her neck. “What time?”
On the drive, James fiddles with the radio as Tiffany plunders her life experiences for something interesting to say. They both settle on silence.
Most of the houses for rich people in Vacca Vale depress Tiffany. One of her foster families—a family she tries not to think about—lived in the suburbs. The idea of the suburbs excited Tiffany until she arrived there at the age of twelve: a panopticon of beige, no imagination in the architecture, no life in the brick and vinyl paneling, so much wealth in a desert of taste. Megachurches. Whole neighborhoods copied and pasted into existence, besieged by industrial farmland. Sometimes Tiffany would wander miles from her foster family’s house to watch a field of horses. THESE HORSES ARE HAPPILY RETIRED, said a sign near the pasture. She never saw any humans there, just a black barn in the distance. The horses would approach her curiously, and she would feed them apples through a honeycomb of chain-link fence.
Because James is rich, Tiffany assumed he lived in the suburbs, too, so she is surprised when he pulls into a neighborhood only seven minutes from Stella and Wayne’s. A row of historic houses near the river, just north of downtown. Brick fucking roads. He parks in front of a mansion—a mansion—and Tiffany’s jaw drops like that of a cartoon. She clicks it shut. Spire work, wraparound porch, bay windows. Stone and brick and shingles. Two chimneys. More square footage than all of Tiffany’s foster houses combined.
“I thought you’d live in the suburbs,” she says idiotically.
“Why?”
“I don’t know.” She gulps and sweats like she’s facing a dragon. “This house is very . . . it’s so—”
“It was passed down on my wife’s side of the family,” he says gruffly. “I have nothing to do with it.”
Plucked from another era, the house is inconveniently magnificent. The house is hard to take. Before, Tiffany knew that James’s wife came from Zorn Automobile money—money that continued to multiply even after the company orphaned Vacca Vale in the sixties—but she didn’t imagine a fortress. He leads Tiffany inside, depositing her in the entryway like a bag of groceries, and suddenly he’s gone, replaced by his wife. Marble table, ceramic vase, woodsy bouquet of branches. Emerald details. His wife smiles. “James is just getting ready,” she says. “He’ll be down in a second.” Her voice is limpid and cool, pond-like, her vocabulary casually vigorous, her posture assured. Prior to this evening, Tiffany understood the concept of James’s wife, but not the reality of her. Now she is here, in three dimensions, as real as Tiffany is—probably realer. She has eyebrows, chapped hands, a personality, a master’s degree in public health, a cautious laugh—the laugh of an adult who was constantly hushed as a child. She even has a name. Her name is Meg. Her presence makes Tiffany feel like a prototype of a woman, not the real thing. Tiffany dashes to remove her shoes, realizing that she failed to do so upon entry, feeling unduly ashamed of this faux pas.