The day after your party I woke to the sound of women’s laughter and the front door slamming. A car revved on the drive, reversed onto the lane, and sped away. The house was silent. I lay on the sofa still dressed, with someone’s left-behind coat thrown over me. Bright sunshine poured through the open French windows and struck the empty bottles and dirty glasses, fracturing the light. The place smelled like a pub—stale booze and cigarette ash. My watch said it was a little after two. There was a hiss and a repeated click from the corner of the room where the record player’s needle had come to the end of an album, possibly hours ago. When I sat up I saw the skeleton, Annie, reclining in an armchair, her grotesque head tilted at a crazy angle and her arms hanging over the sides as if she had flopped there, too drunk to move. And I saw what I hadn’t taken in the night before with the crush of people: your books. Every wall was lined with shelves, and every shelf was crammed with books, jammed in any way possible. I scanned some of the titles, fiction mixed with nonfiction and reference. There was no order and no way of judging your taste: Anna Karenina wedged under Secrets of the Jam Cupboard and The Country Companion: A Practical Dictionary of Rural Life and Work. Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Seuss sandwiched between Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint and The Missing Muse and Other Essays by Philip Guedalla.
I wandered into the hallway. “Gil? Jonathan?” I called out. There was no reply. I knocked on your bedroom door and, after a moment, opened it. The place smelled of you, musky and male. (Bedrooms always smell of their owners.) The bouncing couple from the previous night had gone. I hadn’t appreciated the bed then, but I saw now that it was huge. Four intricately carved oak posts rose up from each corner, as if they should have supported a missing canopy. I ran my fingers over the nearest—scrolls, leaves, and vines entwined. A cover had been smoothed over your bed, or perhaps the bed hadn’t been slept in. It was made of faded silk, embroidered by hand in a Japanese style—willowy plants, flowers, and exotic birds against a pale-blue background. Many of the stitches had come apart through age and use, and the whole thing looked as if it was in the wrong house, like it ought to be in a much bigger, grander room. I ran my hands over the cover too, wondering about the person (surely a woman) who’d had the patience and the time to create every tiny stitch. I pulled back your wardrobe doors and inhaled you. I opened your chest of drawers and looked at the neatly curled ties. I lifted the lids on dusty pots containing matching cuff links and a watch that was silent. Your things. I peered at the oil paintings in gold frames hanging on the wooden walls—fishing boats heading out of a harbour on a violent sea; a girl in a white dress with a veined turquoise necklace at her throat and a dog on her lap. I examined the books in this room too, on the shelves and stacked into precarious towers on the bedside table. They were topped with half-drunk glasses of wine and an empty whiskey bottle. I sat on the edge of the bed and watched four bars of sunlight drift across the front of the chest of drawers and onto the wall opposite, and I listened to the noises of your house: water glurping in the pipes; the wooden walls moaning and creaking where the afternoon sun warmed them.