8

It is only afterward that we are aware of certain things. Only after the music has ended are we aware of how greatly it moved us, and only after a conversation has ended do we realize how strongly it has changed our sense of things.

My own family history has made me wary of the psyche’s weather. People are not constant landscapes, paintings that age relatively unaltered from new to dusky to the point that they must be cleaned.

Blake was in trouble. He needed my help.

As I slipped into the cab that carried me from the club I was aware of a sensation that I did not quite understand. There was something in my jacket pocket, over my heart.

I had to smile. It bent with my movements, and as I stepped from the cab outside my home I felt it there, a wire, a fluted shaft of bone, but not dead, something else, something nearly alive.

When I was upstairs, in my office, the room with its clutter of pencils, T-squares and flat files, I hurried into my bedroom and pulled the big old Milton from the shelf. This large, calfskin-sheathed volume had been used by Rick and myself to press clover and coltsfoot blossoms. Certain passages of “Paradise Regained” were still stained with chlorophyll. I had learned to regret my youthful carelessness, but now the phrase “subtle thief of youth” was concave with the old imprint of a milkweed flower.

I sat on the bed with the book open on my lap. The treasure fluttered from my hand when I withdrew it from my inner pocket, and spun in the air. Silently, it fell to the bed. For some reason, I found it almost too beautiful to look at directly, like sunlight off crystal.

An azure plume. Or was it white? I couldn’t tell. The eye prized the sight of this feather as it prized nothing else in the world. Surely it was white, perfect, steel and ice and quicksilver in a glance. I closed the book, pressing it around the light.

Nona’s voice was on the answering machine, with bad news. She was coming, but she did not know when. “Tonight, I think. But, at the rate things are going, maybe a year from tonight.”

That afternoon, I called Fern. He lived in a duplex in the Sunset District with a potted ficus and a VCR, and he answered the phone in the middle of the first ring. Fern was one of those men who use a laconic, vigorous manner to protect them from intimacy. I suggested that he drop by Blake’s house, not for a visit, just a check.

“A check,” said Fern.

“Make sure …” What? I had nothing but an uneasy hunch. “Make sure no one is after him.”

He didn’t respond. He was plainly waiting for the sort of anecdote he knew too well: homicidal fan, or someone bent on blackmail.

“What makes you think someone’s after him?”

Intuition was something that Fern would trust. But when it came to bothering someone like Blake Howard, Fern would scoff at anything so nebulous as my feelings of anxiety. To think too much is to make mistakes. “I think someone wants to do Blake harm.”

I was relieved when Fern said, “Okay.” Meaning: I know all about harm.

“Just make sure he’s home.”

“And?”

“Don’t disturb him.”

Fern gave me a couple of ticks of silence, allowing me to see that I had stung his pride just a bit. “He won’t know I’m there.”

“The fact is,” I said, trading a bit of confidence to soothe Fern’s pride, “I think the trouble may be in his mind.”

I had meant this to sound lighthearted, cheering. But as I hung up the phone I knew that the mind can be an assassin.

And I realized that I might be simply projecting my own anger with Blake onto the vague, shifting darkness of the City.

I was angry with Blake, that was true. But not so angry I wanted him to be hurt.

I reassured myself: I was not angry at all, really.

He was an old friend.

I adjusted the crook-neck lamp over my drafting table, and touched the pencil to the sketch of a roof garden, a drawing much like the one I had entered into the Golden Gate Park competition.

Collie tapped on the doorjamb with the back of her fingernails, a tap-tap-tap I would not have heard if I had not known it, and recognized it, as one of the subtle, dependable sounds of my life.

“Going to go,” whispered Collie, cautious about disturbing me.

“Thanks, Collie. I know the house is a wreck. It looks like something blew up in the sun room. We live in a construction yard. I know how hard it is.”

“No, sir, it’s quite all right,” said Collie.

The contractor was a good person, who hired brilliant people, students at the Arts School. There were more reliable, and more boring, contractors, but I knew that by supporting Packard I was supporting, indirectly, the arts. The trouble was that I was, for the moment, out of money, and I had asked Packard to delay for awhile. He had been mystified, but I told him that I wanted to sketch the walls in their stripped state.

“I did make some extra sandwiches,” she said in a very low voice, virtually a whisper. It was the tone she nearly always used in my studio.

“I expect Nona tonight. She wasn’t sure when. Apparently there was a strike in Chicago, and air traffic is a mess everywhere.”

Collie was a tall woman with gray-blue hair. She was the last of my family’s servants from the old days, the halcyon days before my mother tried to harm the staff. Collie had been in the London blitz. She had always fascinated me as a boy, saying words in a way I thought unique to her: gair-idge. “I had to take my car to the gair-idge.”

A buzz bomb had landed in her back garden, a dud. Now she stayed with an elderly sister in Daly City, a woman who, ever since a fall down her front steps, was afraid to live alone. Collie’s quiet courtesy did not make her seem meek. It made her, quite the contrary, seem stately and careful. “I know this place will look as lovely as all the others,” she said, switching from a whisper to a beautiful alto. “All your work turns out so lovely.”

When she was gone, I wished she had stayed on for a few minutes. I like to be around people like Collie, people with experience and deep feelings, and I sometimes find myself wearing solitude like borrowed, confining clothing. I adjusted the drafting table. The pencil made a satisfying whisper on the paper. The paper was the watermarked laid I bought by the kilo in Paris, and the hard-lead pencil soon lost its fine point as I roughed-in a sheaf of what I imagined would be asters, purple asters when I touched them up with watercolor.

Fern called just as I replaced the receiver. “There’s a light in the house, upstairs, and another one on in what looks like the bathroom.”

“So he’s home.”

“Someone is.”

“That’s fine,” I said. “That’s all I really need to know.”

“He’s burning something in the fireplace.”

“That’s what fireplaces are for.”

“Paper.”

I knew as well as Fern that newsprint and old letters smell different from applewood.

I called Blake, and there was no answer.

There was something wrong. I drew for awhile to give myself something to think about.

At last I threw down the pencil impatiently. I pushed redial again. No one answered. Now I was more worried than ever.

I nearly called my brother, Rick. My younger brother and I had a friendly but distant relationship, one that allowed him from time to time to call me to complain about alimony or his latest mechanic’s bill, and it allowed me to hear someone lively, someone who reminded me of my father, if only in the timbre of his voice, his chuckle, and our shared memories.

I pushed redial again, persistent, faithful. Blake had always engaged a housekeeper. Surely he had a secretary. Nobody’s phone simply rang and rang anymore. Something else always happened, a person or a machine took over to record your message.

I put down the phone and tilted my head, listening.

I wonder what it was that made me sense that the house was no longer empty. Collie must have slipped back, I told myself, remembering her sweater, or, as she would put it, her “jumper.” Or Nona—surely it was Nona—dropping by on the way back from the airport.

There was someone in the house.

Someone downstairs.

I stood, and the chair I had designed behaved as it was intended to, scooting on its silent rollers, rebounding soundlessly off the wall. Nona called it my mosquito chair because it floated so lightly.

How transparent a voice sounds when it is trying to sound confident against the dark. I called for Collie, and then for Nona. My shadow fell before me. Floors were solid redwood from the Russian River, except for the study, which was floored in koa wood from Hawaii.

There was no question. I was not alone in this house.

I stood at the top of the stairs, in the bad light, then, slowly, sliding one hand along the almost imperceptible dust of the banister, began to make my way down. The stairs were one part of the house that did not creak. Some craftsman in the 1880s had determined that this would be the masterpiece of stairways, wooden pegs so tight-fitted they did not give, except for that very slight flex that all wood has, that property that keeps it from breaking.

It was not a person. It was a creature of some sort. There was the sound again. A fluttering, a big lift and fall, something flying. It was the sound of a bird, very big. Not like one of the African grays my cousin had kept in Santa Barbara. This was a very large winged creature, feathered and strong, fluttering with a noise like a sail loose in the breeze.

Christ, I thought. There’s a bird caught somewhere downstairs.

And not just a bird. It’s a condor, at least. My mind went blank, canceled by the single thought: the feather.

I took each step slowly, expectantly, descending into the dark vault of my home.