Vermin

I DON’T KNOW if the moral of this story is that you should never buy a house. That’s a pretty useless moral anyway, in a country where home ownership is enshrined as such a wholesome aspiration that mortgage interest is tax deductible. Who would listen? And I’m reluctant to reduce what happened between Michael and me to such humdrum advice. Yet other stories would seem to distill to the same cautionary chapter heading of a marital guide: Never Buy a House. Not long ago in Manhattan, some geez in the midst of a divorce was so incensed by the prospect of his ex getting her hands on their landmark Upper East Side town house that he blew it up.

I came across another local story, too—subtler, so you had to read between the lines. A rich banker married a younger woman shortly after his first wife died. These newlyweds also bought a flashy house in the city worth millions, and spent three years doing it up. But by the time the couple finally moved in, the marriage was on the rocks. He packed up after a few months. I read about the court case. The banker was appealing the decision that he had to keep paying fifty grand a month in mortgage payments since his former wife still lived there. Apparently in the divorce papers he’d charged she was “unreasonable.” I laughed. It wasn’t in the article, but I knew what had happened. They fell out over the house. He learned the kind of woman he’d married only when she started obsessing over the wainscoting.

But that’s not my story, exactly. We never had any wainscoting.

I’LL NEVER FORGET first walking into what I would shortly baptize with affection “the Little Dump.” Michael and I had been together for just under a year, living in his studio in Greenpoint. With my paint box having to compete with propagating guitars, amps, and recording equipment, the apartment was cramped. So we were looking to pool our resources and rent something more spacious.

Until that afternoon, the search had been depressing. Properties in Brooklyn were proving way beyond our budget, and every place had something wrong with it. Even if the apartment didn’t keep the refrigerator in the living room and the bathtub in the kitchen, we picked up right away that the previous residents had been unhappy there. It’s funny how you can tell; misery steeps into soft furnishings as indelibly as tobacco. So exhilarated with one another, we spurned other people’s residue of gloom.

Yet the Little Dump was cheerful. In the sleepy family neighborhood of Windsor Terrace, it was located at the very end of a cul-de-sac called Trevanion Close, a designation somehow both intimate and noble. The street was unnaturally secluded for New York; when we met the owner out front, neighborhood kids were sprawled in the middle of the road drawing castles in colored chalk on the tarmac. The jabbering owner hadn’t let us in the front door for more than a minute before I twirled in the big middle room and declared, “I think we could live here.” I hadn’t even seen the upstairs.

Granted, this tumbledown two-bedroom was cheaply built and flimsy. Wooden parquet maybe, but the floors were thin and creaked. Nothing was plumb: the sill of the back window canted at a good fifteen degree angle to the baseboard below; the bedroom doors upstairs were hung askew. The result was a goofy, fun-house discombobulation that made you slightly seasick. The fittings were trashy and surfaces fake; patterned to look like granite, the kitchen counters were plastic. Over the years, the grungy brown carpet on the stairs must have absorbed gallons of cat pee.

And yet, the enclosed front porch was faced with a bank of sun-drenched windows. At the back, the windows of the kitchen and dining room were overgrown with an enormous grapevine, reaching beyond its square-framed trellis in the tiny yard and climbing the exterior brick. I admired the vine’s ambition. In late September, its leaves were still broad and green, and I wondered if we might pick them for making Greek dolmades, or collect the next harvest of fruit and try our hand at homemade wine. (Okay, we never attempted either project. Grape leaves have to be brined, and if I wasn’t up for that, I definitely wasn’t up for wine. Still, the caprices were enticing at the time.) The foliage tinted the air green, and so canopied the panes that they wouldn’t need curtains. In all, a happy house—or it was.

Besides, a junky, knocked-together quality was intrinsic to the property’s charm. The house didn’t take itself too seriously—it was a joke house—which meant that we wouldn’t have to take it seriously, either. In those days, we cherished a drollness to our environs, a lightness and silliness and transience reflecting the fact that wherever we stood was mere backdrop. That’s what it’s like when you’re first in love. You feel so hyper-real, so radiantly authentic, that no one and nothing else can compete—as if you and your beloved alone are three-dimensional, and the rest of the world is flat. That’s why the frank fakery of this ramshackle dive on Trevanion Close was so appealing, like its farcical excuse for marble around the bathroom sink (more plastic). The two-story hovel had the atmosphere of a cardboard city in Hollywood, and that made us the stars of the show.

Even our negotiation of the lease with the landlord was bogus, a mere gesturing toward due process. I guess the place had been empty for weeks, and Bob was desperate for cash. (Once months had gone by and he still hadn’t repaired the leak in the porch roof, we’d be pronouncing his name in eye-roll italics.) We’d been worried that this nervous, shifty-eyed owner would insist on a credit check, or recoil from our bohemian self-employment. But all he cared about was his deposit, until Michael finally asked in puzzlement, “Don’t you at least want to know what we do for a living?” So Bob asked, but only because Michael had told him to. God, we couldn’t believe we were in New York. I mean, we weren’t squatters and we were responsible and we would, somehow, by scraping for every job, pay the rent on time, but Bob didn’t know that. From someone who proved a pretty dubious character himself, the trust was baffling.

I remain certain that for close to two years Michael and I were supremely contented in that house, although it saddens me that what happened later inserts a dimming scrim between then and now. The present so shades the past that it’s amazing we can remember anything at all, really—and maybe we can’t.

The romances of strangers are somewhere between inaccessible and incomprehensible to other people, so you’ll just have to take my word for it how vertiginously I was in love with Michael Espiner, and he with me. (Sadly, at this point I have to take my own word for it.) There was something about his hips, his excruciatingly narrow hips, and the way the thick black leather belt settled on them just so … He was a gigging musician then, and when I watched him strum in clubs I remember being jealous of his guitar. On breaks between sets, we’d cocoon on one of the ratty sofas that lined the funky, pass-the-hat dives he played, my head on his shoulder with, I now realize, the kind of dreamy, gooey look in my eyes that makes other people sick. I’ve a feeling we may have been the butt of a few jokes, but even if we’d known that, we wouldn’t have been fazed. We were impervious. Which is just what makes folks who don’t happen to be in love themselves especially nauseated by swooning couples: that you so obviously don’t give a shit that you’re making them sick.

Sure, the whole musician thing was a turn-on, but I wasn’t enchanted solely by the mystique of Michael’s smoky, freewheeling life. I loved his music. Not rock exactly but a bluesy, reflective, sorrowful style that I could best compare to Jeff Buckley. The lazy, lingering, lateral feel of his tunes also infused Michael’s manner. Sitting, he’d prop his tailbone on the edge of a couch, stretch his long legs straight out as if daring someone to trip over them, and extend both arms along the back cushion with the fingers draped. He exuded a savorous lack of urgency that was relaxing, and that sank us into moment by moment as into a sequence of plush pillows. He was a man whose unusual inhabitation of the present tense made you wonder in what distant temporal dimension everyone else was living.

Michael also had an impetuous, fuck-it side. On one amble through the East Village, he pulled me into a chic retro shop and demanded the woman’s hat in the window—a cocky red number with a partridge plume—without even asking the price. It was $140. He couldn’t afford it, but he didn’t blink. I still feel badly that the feather got bent in our final move.

Yet if Michael had a cool career, I liked to think that I did, too. Maybe I’ve attended to those news stories about mansions ruining people’s lives because back then I was hired to work in many similar east side town houses in Manhattan. I painted indoor murals: a nature scene on a bathroom wall, a jungle theme for a kid’s room. The duller but harder jobs entailed daubing plaster columns with the swirls of marble, streaking Sheetrock with the fine, variegated layers of wood grain, or pointillating a surface with the multiple grays, pearls, and blacks of a pebbled beach—making the bald artifice of our countertops back home seem fitting. The latter sort of work had a particular art to it. You had to stylize the execution just enough to indicate that you knew you weren’t fooling anybody. Yet fakery done well enough, painstakingly and honestly enough, has a beauty all its own. By the time I met Michael I’d accumulated just enough clients by word of mouth that I could do my part in keeping Bob off our backs.

The point is, we were both freelancers, so we made our own schedules—though maybe it’s time I clarified that despite the seat-of-the-pants finances we weren’t kids anymore. Michael was thirty-five when we met, so I must have been thirty-three. Both old enough to have been through the romantic wringer; old enough to get worried. That it was never going to happen for us. That a cold roast chicken from the deli section of Key Food, noshed straight from the plastic tray while propped before yet another rerun of Requiem for a Dream, with no one to whom to marvel why this incredible film still seemed so culturally obscure, well, that’s what life was going to be, period: getting chicken grease on the remote and talking aloud to yourself in front of the box. So on top of being in love, we were grateful to be in love. I do remember that much. I remember being grateful.

Looking back, I feel apologetic toward Ed and Sandy, who lived next door. We routinely ate dinner out on the enclosed front porch at midnight, even later if Michael had had a gig; we rarely got to bed before four a.m. We must have been noisy, laughing and chattering over a bottle of wine, cranking up the stereo when Jennifer Warnes’ marvelous cover of Leonard Cohen got to “Famous Blue Raincoat,” our favorite track.

That said, we didn’t make nearly as big a racket as the bird. What we called “the Crazy Bird.” Later a neighbor explained that the bird perched in the big pin oak across the street every night was a mockingbird, known for its ability to imitate the calls of other species, but I almost didn’t want to know this. I liked our bird just being a little nuts. We developed a whole bio for this bird: how it was too socially inept to grasp that birds weren’t supposed to sing their hearts out at three in the morning, and that’s why it didn’t have any friends. Since it couldn’t settle on one song but broadcast the avian equivalent of the iTunes Party Shuffle, it was obviously schizophrenic. Having compared the Crazy Bird’s sophisticated melodic lines to the riffs of Yusef Lateef, Michael vowed to record its after-hours concerts; he could see doing a whole CD inspired by those long minor-key medleys. Later I’d be sorry that he never got around to it.

One night, an untended car alarm was getting so irritating that I asked Michael whether we should report it to the police, until he walked outside and realized that the sound was coming from the upper branches of the opposite tree. It was the Crazy Bird, doing the whole sequence: aaaaah-WOOO, aaaaah-WOOO, aaaaah-WOOO! YOW-ah-YOW-ah-YOW-ah! BEEEEEE-baaaah-BEEEEEE-baaaaah-BEEEEE-baaaaah … More dysfunction: the mockingbird had mastered the mating call of a Toyota Corolla.

Yet the very finest entertainment during those raucous wee-smalls was the raccoons. Trevanion Close was blocked at the dead end with a brick retaining wall that ran right alongside our house. Out the porch windows we’d follow these stout, hunched creatures big as bulldogs as they lumbered across the top of that wall, obsidian eyes catching the light of the streetlamp, long, conical snouts snuffling the brick. Wearing concentric circles of black and white fur like oversize spectacles, they looked intelligent. (In due course, no amateur naturalist from across the street would need to assure us that raccoons are very smart, since we’d get altogether too up to speed on this North American “procyonid” through the internet.) Michael liked to peer out the front door and meet the animals’ gaze square on. He believed that he could communicate with animals, really connect on their wavelength, and I indulged this little vanity since it was harmless. Anyway, everything about Michael beguiled me then, and I found the conceit endearing. Me, I got pretty good at imitating the creatures’ throaty trill—trrrrrr, trrrrr— halfway between a growl and a purr.

Oh, I knew raccoons could be aggressive, and we were careful not to scare or tease them. I also knew they were notorious for getting into garbage cans and strewing trash all over the street. But maybe because they were so well fed by our next-door neighbor’s exposed backyard compost pile, none of our nocturnal visitors ever pried the tops off our cans to scrounge, despite the fact that their paws have five long, prehensile fingers. Given what I read later, those animals could have assembled flat-pack furniture.

At some point during our first summer, one of the raccoons got really fat, and we made jokes about how it should become an inspirational “weight diversity” speaker until one night it—she, apparently—waddled down the wall having slimmed down quite a bit, five babies in tow. Real heartbreakers, too. The whole family took to foraging in our grapevine. Whenever I heard that telltale rustle on the trellis, I’d shush Michael and we’d both creep to the back window screen, not wanting to startle them away. Again, we were careful—a mother was bound to be defensive of her litter—so when Michael met the eyes of the mother through the screen he made sure to keep his gaze reassuring. Other nights the family would cavort at the end of the street, the kits scrabbling one at a time up the metal lamppost—we were astonished they could get any traction—then leaping to the wall: raccoon Olympic trials.

They also had a knack for disappearing. More than once we watched the mother lead all five kits across the top of that wall, until they’d pattered out of view alongside the house. So we’d skitter to the back window, expecting them to come out the other side and maybe jump down to forage on the trellis. But no raccoons. They simply vanished. It was a twenty-foot sheer drop to the parking lot on the other side of the wall, so it beat me where they went.

I’m sure there’s an element here of you-had-to-be-there. A raccoon isn’t an exotic creature for most Americans, but they were our raccoons, and they were exotic to us. Along with the Crazy Bird, a sudden rustle and trill in the grapevine, or another spotting of a lone male prowling down the retaining wall, contributed to a sensation that where we lived was special, that we were special. We inhabited a secret world at the end of a private little street where the night was alive. The raccoons were wild life. They encouraged us to believe that we were leading wild lives, too.

IT WOULD’VE BEEN early in our second summer on Trevanion Close that we got married—larkishly, in a quick civil ceremony in the Municipal Building in Lower Manhattan, acting with the impulsiveness with which most couples would go for ice cream. Meanwhile, we’d still bought hardly any furniture. We were surely the only couple on the block that kept a whole room without a stick in it: the dining room, a.k.a. “the ballroom,” where Michael and I would dance to Counting Crows with a candle in the middle of the floor. I liked the place underfurnished—open, uncluttered, and preserving that just-moved-in feel that also reinforced the impression that any time we wanted we could just move out. We lived there lightly.

True, a number of things about the house were annoying, if you were going to be that way—to take the place seriously, that is, as the Little Dump naturally discouraged one from doing. Unanchored, the toilet rattled every time you sat down, and I was haunted by a vision of the bowl cracking off and sending a geyser of raw sewage pluming to the ceiling like an oil strike. The closets had those hideous louvered doors from the 1970s that were always slipping off their tracks. The kitchen linoleum was prehistoric and disastrously white, its protective surface degraded. By the time either of us got around to mopping, the floor would be practically black. But we grew accustomed to walking around the bucket on the porch, where the drips from the ceiling after a rainstorm syncopated Michael’s latest recording, and none of these shortcomings bugged us much. I tried to keep the crumbs swept so we wouldn’t attract roaches—some forms of wildlife were less than welcome—but otherwise, hell, Michael was a musician, and you know how blasé those guys are about domestic stuff. Me, I was raised in a slick, soulless suburban household in Scarsdale full of bagel slicers and electric bread makers that no one ever used; the toilets were unnervingly silent, and everything worked too well. So the kooky, jury-rigged nature of Trevanion Close was liberating.

Yet apparently this notion that we could just move out anytime was merely an idea of ourselves that we were attached to. See, one afternoon later that summer an impatient rap rattled our screen door. I recognized the bossy, busty woman who was subletting the house across from ours while the Carters were on an extended vacation in Crete. Though no older than I was, she had a matronly air. She’d attracted my attention before because she was forever barking admonitory or morally improving directions to her four-year-old daughter at a volume that carried to every house on the street—the showy parenthood less for the kid, I thought, than for the benefit of other adults. She seemed one of those modern mothers who are sanctimonious about having made the gallant sacrifice of reproduction, and always wanted credit for it.

“Ya think the owner of this house might want to sell?” she began in a piercing skirl, without introducing herself. “’Cause this dead end’s real good for kids, you know? Like, with no traffic and everything?”

I kept the screen door closed between us. “I don’t know,” I said warily.

“Well, could you find out? My husband and I are looking to buy, and we’ve taken a real shine to this street.” Meaning, they had a right to this street, and we didn’t. Because it was good for kids. Maybe I’m touchy because Michael and I never had them, but really—parents these days think the world owes them a living and then some.

I made noncommittal noises and got rid of the bitch, but privately I began to panic. Ours was a rare New York enclave where people talked to one another. A neighbor must have shared that Bob was always hard up, and might part with the house for a price. Which was surely the case. That’s when I realized that I loved this house, loved our late nights with the rustling grapevine and the raccoon Olympics and the Crazy Bird, and I wasn’t about to let some blow in, ostentatiously Mommyish Mom buy these creaky parquet floors out from under me.

I’LL CUT TO the chase. We bought the Little Dump. Although not, obviously, without making some changes. I confess that we got help from both our parents on the down payment. Still, no bank was going to give a mortgage to a self-employed mural painter and a blues guitarist who on a good night raked in forty bucks and a few free drinks. I hustled because I was good and motivated, and I don’t think in the end it’s turned out to be a bad career move to work at a commercial design firm—although while concocting a corporate logo or the cover of a computer probe catalog I sometimes miss painting Rousseau-like she-lions beside a six-year-old’s bunk bed. Faux beach-pebble motifs didn’t sit me in front of a screen all day, either, and I regret no longer coming home with streaks of cadmium yellow in my hair. Nevertheless, I get a kick when I spot a habanero sauce bottle whose label I designed, and a real job sure pays better. I grant that Michael’s managing Slide, a little jazz club up in Fort Greene, didn’t work out quite as well. While it had seemed a good fit on the face of it, when you’re managing you’re not playing, and the job was more about kegs than frets. But I’m convinced that our marriage would have weathered the transition to proper employment well enough if it weren’t for the house.

The odd alarm bell should have rung before we closed the deal. Michael’s demeanor had always been casual, stylishly so. He walked with a slow, syrupy saunter. He’d often insert a languorous pause between a question and his answer, just the length of a yawn, as if debating whether to bother to respond at all. Before we put in our fateful call to Bob, Michael had been impossible to rattle, convinced that over time most problems solved themselves. When I’d despaired during our rental search that we’d never find an affordable place that wasn’t disgusting, he’d murmured that something was sure to come along that was perfect, and he’d been right. Yet while we were still haggling with our landlord over his outrageous asking price, Michael ruined an entire evening anguishing about how we’d never get homeowner’s insurance for a house so clearly dilapidated, especially with ancient wiring that couldn’t be up to code. At a midpoint in this mind-numbing hair-tear, I did a double take. Back when we first met at CBGB, I couldn’t have imagined the words homeowner’s insurance coming out of his mouth.

He’d never seemed especially concerned with housekeeping, either, strewing his dirty jeans around the bedroom. But even before we’d signed the contract, he suddenly became neurotically neat—jerking the bedspread for minutes until the piping aligned with the edge of the mattress and chiding me to hang my kimono on its nail.

Then when at the bank’s insistence we had an engineer around to certify that the house wasn’t about to collapse, we led the prissy, officious little man out the musty basement to the backyard. The engineer surveyed our grapevine, by then crawling deliciously to the second story and curling around our phone lines, and tsked. “Not desirable,” he announced, making a rigid tick on his pad.

“The grapevine?” I said. “Why not?”

“Not desirable,” he repeated like a robot. But here’s the thing: I turned to roll my eyes at Michael, and instead of grinning along with me at this loser who was dissing our fantastic grapevine, my new husband was nodding along sternly, his forehead creased. From then on, too, I never stopped hearing about how the grapes attracted squirrels, and squirrels ruined our window screens. About how, when the fruit rotted, it drew insects. When I defended the vine as providing the kitchen and dining room—we’d already stopped calling it a ballroom—the luxuriant botanical tint of a greenhouse, he repeated with no detectable irony and in the same robotic drone, “It’s not desirable.”

I guess for some people who’ve always been free and easy, taking on responsibility makes them more solid and more grounded; that’s what people say about becoming a parent. But there may be such a thing as becoming too responsible.

For my part, after the closing I was mostly excited about fixing a few of those annoyances I mentioned, neglecting to note the fact that before we bought the Little Dump I hadn’t been that bothered by the kitchen floor. Which we replaced, and the bright red Forbo Marmoleum would have been fab, except that the moment it was installed Michael started Swiffering it, like, every day, and he’d lean down to scrape a little piece of squashed onion with his fingernail while I was trying to cook. I’d have been happy enough about replacing the sink unit in the bathroom, too, save that its apparently being called a vanity made buying one humiliating. Taking the term to heart, Michael sure enough swabbed the actually-not-plastic marble with Bon Ami every time he finished brushing his teeth, picking at any hardened drip of Colgate just as he did at the orts of onion on the Forbo downstairs. Meantime, I swear his walk was getting stiffer and faster, the strides shorter and a little edgy.

I was game for finally hanging a few prints, like posters from Michael’s old gigs. Yet even after we fixed the leaky porch roof, Michael remained solely concerned with “structural issues.” I’d sometimes come home and find him in the middle of the living room, worrying up at a pinprick brown mottle on the ceiling, and he gave the impression that he’d been craning his neck like that for quite some time. Saturdays he’d spend a good half hour stalking both floors, scowling into closets, searching out cracks. He wanted to get the points done on the front brick, a fissure filled in the stoop stairs, the fractured slab of concrete abutting our overgrown rat’s nest of a backyard broken up and replaced. I had to observe that none of these dreary gray “improvements” would make living in the house the slightest bit more enjoyable. Michael explained with paternalistic patience that it was all very well to “prettify the place,” but a house had to be maintained. I couldn’t believe he used that word, prettify. He left me feeling girly and frivolous.

Well, all those therapists on the radio emphasize the importance of marital compromise. So when during our first summer as homeowners Michael grew concerned that the ten-inch gap between the Little Dump and the retaining wall collected rain (the enemy in my husband’s life used to be trite riffs or computerized drum tracks; now it was moisture), I didn’t say “Who gives a shit?” Instead, being a good wife—a word I still wasn’t all that comfortable with—I agreed that, especially since the cavity was bricked up on both ends, it probably did collect a lot of rain. That side of our beloved front porch was clapboard, and for once Michael was right. The wood could rot and draw termites. So I acceded to bringing in a contractor to somehow seal off the gap. Nevertheless, this meant we’d probably squander hundreds if not thousands of dollars on what was surely the dullest square footage of the entire property.

Or so I thought.

“WHAT YOU THINK is that?” We’d invited a contractor for a price quote, and all three of us had clambered out the dining room window onto the trellis. As the contractor pointed his flashlight down into the dark recess between the brick wall and our house, Michael and I leaned forward to follow the beam. Something moved in the shadows, and I jumped. “Is cat?” He was Bangladeshi or something.

“I don’t know, maybe.” Gingerly, I peered back in.

“Look, is more than one!”

Just then the flashlight caught the whip of a furred tail, ringed in black and white.

When I registered that our delightful family of raccoons, the kits nearly grown old enough to have babies of their own, was actually nesting in that deep, narrow gap between our house and the retaining wall, even I experienced something of a change of heart. So they weren’t nocturnal visitors. They were tenants.

I tend to blame Michael, but to be fair this territory thing is pretty primitive, and there’s a huge emotional difference between hosting guests and invaders. These animals weren’t quite living in the house itself, but close to it, and sizable shitting, peeing, rutting mammals bearing whole litters on the other side of our living room wall made me, too, a little queasy. Be that as it may, Michael did not experience merely “something” of a change of heart.

“They’re vermin,” he declared over his computer that very night, loading Web page after Web page. “That’s how they’re classified in New York, but the city refuses to take any responsibility for them. They bite. They get rabies. Their feces can carry roundworm.”

“Oh, big deal,” I said distractedly, trying to fit a bowl of pasta on the table where he was working.

“It is a big deal,” he said in the officious daddy voice that apparently accompanies homeownership. “This last year, two kids got infected with roundworm, and in Brooklyn, too. From raccoons! Some little baby’s brain damaged, and a teenager went partially blind!”

“So they’re not desirable,” I said, deadpan.

“Better believe it they’re not desirable,” he said, failing to pick up on my allusion. “And guess, just guess, what’s their favorite food?”

I took a stab. “Human eyeballs.”

“Grapes.”

My stomach sank. That was it for the vine.

THAT VERY WEEKEND Michael went at the main trunk of the grapevine—six inches thick, big as a tree. With only a handsaw, the job took half an hour, and he got blisters. Once the cut was all the way through, the vine’s many tributaries didn’t even tremble, looking vibrant and perky and oblivious, still dangling picked-over clusters of tough-skinned green grapes as if nothing had changed. It was like watching a chicken run around a farmyard with its head chopped off. Soon the cut began to bleed sap, as the stump would continue to do for many weeks thereafter, like an undressed amputation.

We’d borrowed a lopper and extension ladder from next door—one of the last favors we’d ever be able to ask Ed and Sandy, since within the week Michael would permanently chill our relations with a set-to over their compost pile. (“You’re never supposed to keep a heap of garbage like that without it being totally gated off,” he later snarled at the poor eco-conscious couple—meek, agreeable people who tore the cellophane from envelopes for recycling and had remarkably never complained back when we’d caroused loudly so late at night. “I quote,” he read from his printout, “Don’t put food of any kind in open compost piles; instead, use a securely covered compost structure or a commercially available raccoon-proof composter to prevent attracting raccoons and getting exposed to their droppings. I mean, no wonder this street is overrun!”) Michael ripped down branch after branch as the grapevine’s tendrils clung desperately to the brick; it was for all the world like tearing screaming children from the arms of their mother. Grimly, I lopped the fallen climbers into smaller, uniform lengths and bound them with twine for collection. It was murder. I was in no doubt about that.

The project took all day, and when we arose the next morning I couldn’t remember when I’d last gone to so much effort to make my life worse. The light blared from the back windows, loud and flat; before, the quality of the light had resembled the warm, companionable glow of a banker’s lamp, and now it was more like a naked hundred-watt’s glare from the ceiling. Suddenly the whole ambience of the Little Dump was transformed. I can’t explain it except that the house felt more ordinary. More plain and stark. As the sun rose higher, too, the July heat really baked the place. I noticed only once we’d hacked it brutally to pieces how cool the vine had kept the lower floor.

Meanwhile, Michael was spending every night online, providing a running commentary akin to regular email advisories from the World Wildlife Fund. “Did you realize that these wily bastards are so strong, so cunning, and so agile that they can pick an avocado from a tree and hit a barking dog from twenty feet? They attack pets, you know.”

“We don’t have any pets,” I’d say wearily.

“The Carters have those cats. And we’re giving comfort to the enemy.” Raccoons had apparently replaced moisture.

“That cemetery on the other side of the Prospect Expressway?” he might note a bit later. “We thought it was just us, but they’re inundated! They’ve trapped over five hundred of the monsters in the last ten years, and this cemetery guy thinks the grounds must have thousands of coons. Eating the flowers. Digging up the lawn. In Brooklyn, it’s an epidemic!”

“Epidemic is for diseases.”

“Whatever. Infestation, then.” He glowered.

I thought, this is the sort of nitpicking point scoring that I’d noticed other couples engage in—couples I’d pitied.

Of course, Michael was primarily fixated on the gap—I didn’t know what else to call it, since this space between the house and the wall was such a strange, dumb segment of our property that it didn’t really have a name. The contractor had proposed filling the space with concrete, but somehow we had to get the animals out first. I was afflicted by the image of screaming baby raccoons buried alive in wet cement, like a lesser Edgar Allan Poe story.

“There are outfits you can hire to trap them,” Michael fumed. “But trapping costs a fortune, and these filthy freeloaders have memories like elephants. Take them miles away, and they come back. The real danger of eliminating their habitat is that they stay here but they try to get inside. You know they can turn doorknobs?”

“Not if they’re locked.”

“They love to make dens in attics, and chimney flues. We’d better check the roof.” Sure enough, early the next evening I discovered the upstairs hatch open and Michael up on the roof. He was binding some cockamamie construction of chicken wire around the little aluminum chimney for our furnace.

I suppose this ranting over the computer didn’t take more than a week, though it was a long week. In the end, we did engage the contractor to fill the raccoon den with rubble and cement, and also to figure out a way of scaring the creatures off first. Michael was convinced that when their home was threatened they’d attack, flying into our faces with bared claws. He was certain, too, that they’d take revenge. “Like how?” I’d say. I recognized my arch, humoring tone from other spouses’ supermarket bickering, audible from the next aisle.

“They’re very destructive,” he’d say with a returning condescension. “You haven’t been doing the research. You have no idea what they’re capable of. They’re not cute, cuddly little woodland creatures, Kate. They’re diseased, they’re violent, they stink, they shit everywhere, and they’re vermin. Officially.”

The night before the contractor was due, we were treated to another sighting of our tenants, trundling across the wall on the way back home. But instead of poking his head out the screen door to meet their glittering gaze in that special cross-species communion of yore, Michael rushed to close the front door, and locked it, though the screen door was already latched. Then he hurried to the back, slammed all the windows shut, and locked those, too. Without any cross-ventilation in July, it was sweltering. We ate dinner in silence, sweat pouring down our necks.

In the end it was pretty simple. The contractor, who seemed more amused than frightened by our predicament, pulled our garden hose onto the trellis and blasted the chasm. Two drenched adults and an adolescent scrabbled up the debris that served as their entrance and exit ramp, and skedaddled across the trellis to Ed and Sandy’s—where presumably a three-course lunch awaited on the compost pile. After all Michael’s hand-wringing, the low-tech pest control was an anticlimax.

That night, after the “habitat” had been smoothed and sealed gray, we heard a trilling mewl outside the kitchen window. It was a younger kit, not a baby but the human equivalent of a ten-year-old. Presumably the kit had been out and about during the afternoon’s commotion, and had returned home to discover its relatives cleared off and its house smeared up solid—like a latchkey kid who comes back after school to find an eviction notice slapped on the door and the locks changed by the landlord. It didn’t know where its mother was, and cried and cried on the denuded trellis—where it must have been hungry as well, since this once well-stocked outdoor pantry was abruptly bare of grapes. After a while I couldn’t stand it, and as soon as the dishes were done I proposed that we turn in early.

Michael stayed paranoid about the raccoons taking “revenge” for the rest of the month. He swore that rinky-dink metal screens were no better protection from these ravaging creatures than spiderwebs. Dining on the front porch with all the windows shut during a heat wave was unbearable. The stifling, static air intensified the sensation that nothing was happening and that nothing would happen ever again. For the first time we felt that metaphorical hopelessness of living at a dead end.

Once our aggrieved raccoons had refrained from clawing through the roof or burrowing past his poorly secured chicken wire down the chimney, by August Michael relented. Slide was closed for staff vacations. On one of those weekend evenings now rare for a couple with full-time jobs, we once more stayed up late over a bottle of wine and opened the windows. By three a.m., I called his attention to an eerie quiet.

“The Crazy Bird,” I pointed out. “It’s gone.”

Over the next few months I strained to detect the Party Shuffle in the pin oak, but the mockingbird had fled, and never again returned to its perch high in the branches across the street. Maybe mockingbirds and raccoons have a symbiosis, but I thought we were being punished.

I realize it took a while, and I don’t want to be simplistic; there were other problems. Meantime, we did get the points done on the front brick facade. We replaced the shattered cement slab that held the drain in the backyard, even if the new slab cracked as well within the year. We duly replaced the furnace when Michael worried about its age, as we duly replaced the water heater once Michael would no longer leave for the weekend lest it flood the basement. We installed a new toilet, anchored, that didn’t rattle. The house is now better waterproofed than when we bought it, although I doubt any of these “improvements” seriously increased the value of the Little Dump when we sold up. Oh, the break was amicable, as they say, and we agreed to split the proceeds and contents fifty-fifty—although we’d each so little capital once the equity was halved that we both had to go back to renting.

Marriage may be a covered dish, but it’s as dark and unfathomable under the cover as from above. If you asked Michael what went wrong, I bet he couldn’t tell you. As for me, I know this is only a story I tell myself. But I still believe it all came down to the raccoons. We murdered the grapevine and we drove off the “vermin” and we obviously convinced the Crazy Bird that life on Trevanion Close had got a bit too sane. We’d lost the wildness, you see. In fact, soon after we filled that gap between the house and the retaining wall, it began to seem that we hadn’t so much driven the wildlife away as allowed the wildlife to escape. The wild life had up and left us.

The raccoons did come back from time to time, of course. According to the internet, groups of raccoons establish a regular latrine separate from where they live. I sometimes wonder how far our evicted tenants routinely traveled to the cement hulk of their former den to leave smelly black signatures of their disdain.