John has no doubt they will do it. This wife will surely surprise her husband one Christmas morning with a grand piano wrapped in a bow. It’s the sort of purchase people like these make without undue concern, rooted in the belief that everyone deserves the things that attract them.
John’s house, too, holds a piano—an old upright from the elementary school, which Diana was savvy enough to procure when the district sprang for concert grands. It makes John crazy that the board squanders property taxes on such extravagances, but at least Bethany has had her own instrument to play at home. It is a blond wood Kimball with shallow graffiti inscribed on its lid, and Bethany had sat dutifully at its bench for a few months, picking out commercial jingles and television theme songs. Then she quit and turned to acting. It’s normal, John supposes, for his daughter to aspire to stardom. It’s normal for a girl her age to paint her eyelids with pink glitter and wear rhinestones on her jean pockets. And yet John notices that Bethany dresses differently from most girls in town. He isn’t sure what is influencing her: music videos or supermarket magazines. Her friends seem coarse, with pitted faces like moonscapes and suggestive phrases across the rears of their shorts. Bethany herself is delicate-featured and thick-haired. When she leaves her hair long and simple, John thinks she is as lovely as any actress in a photograph.
Earlier that month, she played Holly Golightly in the school’s unlikely musical production of Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The director had caused a near scandal by casting Bethany—an eleventh grader—as the lead, but apparently no senior was able to carry the role. John came to the play alone and sat apart from Diana, the back of whose head he could see several rows ahead of him. He watched his daughter pretend to smoke from a cigarette holder onstage and give a real kiss to her costar. She made up for her middling singing voice in brass and volume, and her potholed melodies soared gloriously across the auditorium.
After the play, John rushed to arrive backstage before Diana. He stood at the periphery of a squealing huddle around Bethany, holding a bouquet of red roses and waiting his turn to commend her. She smiled politely as he gave her the flowers, as if indulging a misguided suitor. He found himself stumbling as he told his daughter how well she’d acted, how much like Holly she’d been. He left her holding the bouquet tentatively, as if it were not hers, and when he turned back saw that she’d rested it on the floor beneath a school desk.
John tests the windows of the piano room, noting the fluid opening of the sashes. Lori stands in a shaft of sunlight, saying, “It’s a lovely room, don’t you think? So bright and pleasant.”
It must be almost four o’clock, judging from the slant of light through the glass. A single home inspection always seems to occupy the whole afternoon, no matter how quickly he works. He thinks longingly of his couch at home—truly his couch now, no one else’s—and its burgundy slipcover. He thinks of the Michelob bottles in the refrigerator. Closing the windows in the parlor one at a time, he seals out the warm breath of spring that has already begun to mix in the room. The dry chill of central air returns, and John’s fatigue becomes an aching, shrunken feeling in his skull.
He exits the parlor at a clip, not waiting for his flock to keep pace, and heads for the basement steps. The air, as he descends, takes on a more humane humidity for which he is grateful. The basement is refreshingly raw, lined with ripped industrial floor covering and sided with cinder block. The only untouched, indigenous part of the house. A tower of softened cardboard boxes tilts in a corner along with a dusty bicycle and snowboard. Several cobwebbed windows are level with the ground, framing the undersides of azaleas. These, he is sure, are the original basement windows, thick and invincible. John tests one, finds it sealed shut.
He takes a breath and concentrates on the low humming sound at the far side of the basement. Here are the mechanicals, enclosed within plywood walls. This is his favorite part of an inspection. More than anything he enjoys scanning the maintenance history stickers on the sides of oil tanks and water heaters, the old names and dates scrawled in faded ink. John feels the old gallop in his pulse return as he slips behind the thin walls, out of the group’s view.