Kelly was embarrassed to be so excited by the prospect, even just the idea, of travelling to America. All her self-possession melted away in the face of the mundane business of practical arrangements. Packing, getting the train to London with Dexter, checking in at the airport, killing time, going to the duty-free shop, the hectic lassitude inside the plane, all made her feel eager and vulnerable. She was glad though, and a little surprised, that Dexter didn’t condescend to her.
He had described the shape of the journey: a long plane ride in a jumbo jet to Los Angeles, picking up a hire car, then a night in an airport hotel, then the next morning a three-hour drive out of LA into the Mojave where the Cardboard House stood in its own patch of desert. It sounded clear enough and not really very complicated, yet parts of it felt so vague, so faint. What would the hotel room look like? Would it be scary to be out in the desert? How hot? Would there be sandstorms and rattle snakes? Would she feel sick or scared or overjoyed? The house itself she couldn’t even think about.
She enjoyed the sense of reversal. The guide had become the guided. She had, with some success she thought, shown Dexter her bit of England, even if all along she was being drawn towards some location, some final landmark that was of his choosing, not hers. Now he was taking her to his territory but for a purpose that was hers, and in which he could only participate tangentially.
She was glad she had no responsibility for the trip. She was anxious and distracted enough, and perhaps that was fortunate since it also distracted her from judging Dexter, from examining the implications of his behaviour, his lies and the use he had made of her. She was tolerating him because he could take her to her father’s house. The question of whether he was, in more normal circumstances, tolerable was for now beside the point. Later she would weigh him and, she felt sure, find him wanting, but her inevitable condemnation did not yet need to be converted into action. Wait till your father gets home.
It was hard for her to get used to a Dexter who didn’t limp, who didn’t use a walking stick. Even though she hadn’t always been sympathetic to his condition, it had always been a presence, it had defined her perception of him. She found herself sitting in the thin plush of the airline seat, wondering if there was enough room for his bad leg.
Dexter was not a relaxed or easy flying companion. He was fidgety and restless. He demanded a lot from the air stewardess: extra booze, extra napkins, extra pillows. She was pleased when he fell asleep.
The free drink kicked in and she felt confident and capable, strong enough to deal with the troubles, and who knew, maybe even the pleasures, that lay ahead. It would be strange and difficult, but not impossible. She sensed she was at the beginning of something, and its end was a million years in the future. And what would happen once she’d seen the Cardboard House? She had no idea, but it didn’t seem to be too important. Departure didn’t matter, only arrival. She hoped she would be a different person once she got to the house, changed by an as yet inconceivable experience. Setting foot inside her father’s building felt like the end of the reel. What came after that was improvisation and invention.
She watched the movie, looked at the clouds, thumbed through the in-flight magazine and then she slept. She only woke as the crew were serving the afternoon snack, the indication that landing wasn’t far off
‘Now, about where we’re staying,’ said Dexter. ‘Do you have any serious preferences?’
‘You told me you’d booked somewhere already.’
‘I have, but bookings are made to be altered.’
‘I really don’t care too much,’ said Kelly, ‘so long as there aren’t stains on the sheets and so long as we have separate rooms.’
‘We’ll have separate rooms for sure if we go where I’m thinking.’
‘What are you thinking?’
She felt angry. Why did he want to start changing things? It was so typical. She should never have trusted him. Inevitably he would be difficult. Inevitably he’d want there to be complications.
‘We could stay with my father,’ he said.
‘Oh,’ said Kelly.
She felt unbalanced. She couldn’t imagine Dexter at home with his father. She knew there was a family business, and it wasn’t as if she wanted Dexter all to herself, but she was used to seeing him operate in isolation and she didn’t welcome change.
‘I thought you might want to meet my father,’ said Dexter. ‘I thought you might want to meet the man who commissioned your father. I’m sure he’d be able to tell you things about the Cardboard House.’
‘We’d stay in his home?’
‘Right.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘It’s an interesting house.’
Everything seemed suddenly to be doubt and indeterminacy. Yes, of course she ought to want to meet her father’s patron, there would undoubtedly be things to learn, new information to be gleaned, but at the same time it would be another obstacle, another screen between herself and her desires, another delay. She felt the pressure of too much data. This wasn’t some school project. She wasn’t concerned with showing she’d done the right amount of homework.
‘Well, anyway, I called him before we left London and he’s meeting us at the airport,’ Dexter said. ‘At least we should go have a drink with him. You wouldn’t mind doing that, would you? He’s a pretty cool guy.’
‘I mind you springing this on me at the last minute.’
‘Yeah, well, you probably mind a lot of things about me.’
‘And I really don’t think I want to stay in your father’s house.’
‘OK, so tell him when you see him.’
But how could she? She knew she wasn’t brave enough to be that rude. She felt newly, doubly resentful of Dexter, and disappointed in herself for being so feeble.
‘It’s all right,’ said Dexter, though he didn’t sound reassuring. ‘He’s just a father. I thought you approved of fathers.’
She supposed she did, though she supposed also that her approval was neither here nor there. She didn’t know what to expect from Dexter’s father. She knew from what Dexter had told her that he had to be rich, but what did that sort of alien, American wealth mean? How rich was rich? Would there be a chauffeur, a limo? And what would he look like? Would there be a face lift, a nose job, a tummy tuck?
In fact, when she saw him at the airport in Los Angeles, on the edge of the small crowd of meeters and greeters, he looked a lot like Dexter, but there was something odd about the look. She’d been prepared for him to be an older version of his son, yet in some curious way he looked younger. While Dexter put effort into looking solid and substantial, his father worked at looking light and youthful. He was tanned and slim and he wore faded, expensive jeans and a pristine white shirt. His hair was grey but it was abundant and artfully styled, and although his face was creased with age, the creases seemed to be evidence of how much he smiled rather than of how careworn he was. He was making no obvious attempt to look like a man of stature or substance, and yet you could tell that was precisely what he was.
He didn’t walk towards them but stayed firmly planted where he stood, letting the world come to him, and when Dexter and Kelly got close he said, ‘Hello Jack,’ in a soft, friendly voice, and it took Kelly a moment to realize he was talking to Dexter, who seemed as unfamiliar with this use of his first name as she was, and she saw him wince. Before her eyes Dexter became more callow, less sure of himself.
‘Hello, Dad. This is Kelly.’
‘Hi, Kelly. I’m Bob.’
Dexter’s father smiled. He had charm. If she had been in the market for a house she felt sure she’d be prepared to trust this man. ‘Hello,’ she said in return, and she wanted to sound substantial too, grown up, to show she was here for something serious, but she heard her voice come out sounding too thin and girlish for the occasion.
‘You are going to be staying with me, aren’t you?’ Bob Dexter said, and although it was a welcoming, easy remark, there was an imperative there too.
He took Kelly’s hand and folded it gently in his, a hand shake of sorts, then picked up her bag, a pink and black holdall bought specially for the occasion, which now seemed very cheap and tacky to her. She considered hanging on to the bag, insisting she could manage perfectly well by herself, and if she had ever been going to say that she’d be spending the night in the hotel this was obviously the moment. But she found herself not saying it, not saying anything at all.
Then they were outside the airport building, walking through thick Californian afternoon sunshine. The world looked sharp and clearly outlined, deep blue and green. There were palm trees, for God’s sake! The brightness hurt her eyes and the angle of the sun looked all wrong. Where was the pollution and yellow smog? She felt weak and vulnerable as she got into Bob Dexter’s car but the thick leather seat fitted round her, making her feel not comfortable exactly, but at least supported. And then they were heading away from the airport, through light but fast-moving traffic, and she was glad to have said nothing, to have made a choice only by default. She stared at the reassuringly serious dashboard of the car, at the sky outside, at the sharp skyline of glass towers, and again she felt glad to be far away from home and freed of responsibility.
Dexter and his father made only the thinnest, most perfunctory remarks to each other and she rather liked that. If they could be uncommunicative so could she. If they demanded nothing from each other then they could demand nothing from her.
The world outside the car looked strange but no stranger than she’d been anticipating. She watched the traffic. She felt the reassurance of the power steering, the power brakes, the soft changes in the automatic transmission. The roads were wide and straight, and if the drivers didn’t appear utterly relaxed, at least they kept up an appearance of being cool. Flashy, improbable cars drifted past: Corvettes, Mustangs, restored and lacquered classics, moving money, the sort of wealth that was clean and fun.
Then they were driving up into hills, and the car was taking tight, fast bends, and the land was rising steeply on either side of them. There were big houses but they were set back from the road, clandestine, only partly visible, screened by hedges and walls.
She wondered what kind of house Dexter’s father lived in. She had been prepared for something utterly preposterous and palatial. A man who, when young, had been rich enough and reckless enough to commission a house on his own patch of desert might have ended up living in any kind of giddy monstrosity, but somehow she already knew it wouldn’t be monstrous at all. Bob Dexter seemed to be nothing if not tasteful.
He stopped the car in front of a solid metal gate, which slid back in response to a remote control and they went in to park on a short chunk of driveway. The house stood before them and Kelly thought it was wonderful. It was a single-storey post-and-beam pavilion, a wide, low, horizontal building that sat lightly on the earth. It was flat roofed, and full-length glass walls rode in a frame of steel squares. The sun was streaking the glass pale orange.
‘The place was built in the early sixties by a student of Richard Neutra,’ Bob Dexter explained. ‘Not one of his very best students, but still ’.
They went inside. It was smooth and bare, cool open spaces with redwood walls and floors, and built-in leather couches. There were some gaudy yet severe abstract paintings on the walls and a couple of African masks, but nothing that looked remotely personal.
Kelly found herself saying, ‘Do you live here all alone?’
‘Afraid so. But I’m always open to offers.’
She found herself smiling politely, pretending to be amused, and then she felt that perhaps she should be insulted, that this was a crassly sexual remark, a wholly inappropriate bit of flirtation. Like father, like son.
The more she looked around, the more obvious it became that Bob Dexter did indeed live alone, and had probably lived that way for a long time. There was a chilly, masculine emptiness about the house’s elegance, something bleak. She felt a sadness for him, a sadness that grew as she was shown into the guest suite in a distant arm of the house.
The room was impersonally clean and ordered, with a shower that had individual portions of soap and shampoo just like a hotel. It was a guest room that received all too few guests. She was given time to clean herself up, and it felt like a commandment to wash away the grime of travel, and perhaps of her past life. She obeyed. She stood in the shower for as long as she could, delaying the moment when she would have to go out and meet up again with Dexter and his father. There had been talk of going to a sushi bar or of sending out for gourmet pizzas. It all sounded too difficult. She wondered how long she could stay in the shower, in this private world of water and glass, how long before it would be considered rude, how long before they’d tap on the door to ask if she was all right in there, how long before they’d break down the door to see if she’d collapsed.
She emerged at last, in creased clothes, her hair still wet, her face pink, and she could hear Dexter and his father not far away making stilted, polite conversation. She followed the sound of their voices to the kitchen. The place astonished her, so bright, so spotless, widescreen windows, brushed aluminium, as though no one had ever done anything as messy as cooking there. Father and son were sitting at a black marble counter and they were drinking wine. Three glasses and a wine cooler were set out in front of them, and as she hesitated in the doorway Dexter’s father filled the third glass and said, ‘This one’s got your name on it, Kelly.’
Kelly took the glass. She felt she was being offered a magic potion, the elixir that gave access to a new world, where fathers were rich and lived in some style and shared alcohol with their troubled adult sons.
‘Now you can open the present,’ said Dexter.
At first Kelly imagined he was speaking to her and she saw the small, wrapped package on the counter by Dexter’s elbow, but it was not for her. Dexter’s father took the package and cautiously unwrapped it, peeling through cardboard and tissue paper till he reached the contents. He looked and smiled. He had unwrapped two miniature buildings, the beach hut from Southwold, and the church of St Nicholas from Monkwich.
‘There was another one,’ Dexter said, ‘of a strange little folly called the House in the Clouds. I don’t really know what happened to it.’
Kelly didn’t choose to tell him.
‘These are great,’ said Dexter’s father. ‘Really great.’
Dexter began explaining their provenance, describing his travels with Kelly, regurgitating some of the information she’d given him, information that had mostly originated with her father.
‘And if I’d had my way,’ Dexter said, ‘there’d have been a model of a nuclear power station too.’
‘This is plenty,’ his father said, and he smiled ever more broadly. ‘This is fine.’
He was more pleased and amused by these small gifts than Kelly thought he had any right to be. They were nice enough holiday souvenirs but not so very special surely, and she guessed they must have a private meaning she was not party to, a family joke. She felt excluded, and unsure whether or not that was intentional.
‘Some buildings are called follies,’ said Dexter’s father, ‘but if you want my opinion they’re all follies. Owning property, whether it’s a town house or a condo or a tar-paper shack, is just insane. And even if you’re not insane when you start out you’re sure to be insane by the end. Property just drives you crazy.’
Kelly remained silent. Property ownership was a subject she knew nothing about, and she preferred it that way.
‘And as for building a house from scratch,’ he continued, ‘that’s a very special, malevolent form of madness, and anybody who seriously thinks about doing it ought to be locked up.
Was it the flight, the jet-lag, making feel her so delicate, so easily offended? Or was she justified, and were Dexter and his father playing some nasty little game with her? Had she been brought here to be ritually, if casually, humiliated? Surely Bob Dexter was insulting her father, his work and his memory.
‘I’m not really blaming your dad,’ he continued, reading her. ‘He was very young, very inexperienced and I really wasn’t all that much older, and I sure as hell wasn’t any wiser. I had too much money, and even though we were trying to be hippies, there wasn’t much peace and love. We were two arrogant young sons of bitches and neither of us was the visionary genius we both thought we were. Neither of us got what we wanted, but maybe we both got what we deserved. It was definitely a learning experience, whatever the hell that means.’
She tried to pick her way through the scrub of self deprecation, insult and hindsight to tease her own meaning out of what he was saying, but she couldn’t think quickly or clearly enough, and then he was unpacking more information.
‘What did I think I was doing? I look back and I really have no idea. I guess maybe I was trying to be a Renaissance princeling. And I was trying to impress some woman; my then wife, Jack’s mother. I wanted her to think I was a hell of a guy. At the very least I wanted her to think I was in control of my own destiny. Well, we all know how that worked out.’
Kelly didn’t know, of course, but his manner, his little snort of exasperation and fatigue said a great deal.
‘I guess if I’d been the great rich man I thought I was I’d have employed John Lautner or Buckie Fuller or somebody, but they were kind of occupied. So I used your father instead. He also had the great advantage of promising to be cheaper, though I don’t think that necessarily means anything much, and in the end he wasn’t cheap at all. And together we learned.
‘I learned that having a house built for yourself is a great way to lose money and not get what you want. And I guess your father learned that he wasn’t cut out to be an architect. In retrospect, I figure those are things well worth knowing.’
To Kelly it all sounded too glib and finished. She wanted to come to her own conclusions, and it sounded as though he wanted her to share his.
‘I’ll show you something else I learned too,’ he said.
He finished his drink and got up from the counter. He beckoned for her to follow him and, while Dexter stayed in the kitchen having another drink, he led her through the hall to a door that went into the rear of the house. They entered a small, bright office, infinitely less stark and ordered and much less ‘designed’ than the rest of the house. There was a lozenge-shaped table at the centre of the room, stacked with untidy piles of books and papers, and the walls were lined with cluttered, stuffed bookcases. There was some impressive-looking computer hardware, business machines, a big screen television.
‘Look around,’ said Dexter’s father, so she did, at the rows of art, photography and architectural books, glossy coffee-table volumes mostly, though they’d been well read and there were endless slips of paper and dog ears marking pages in them. And then she saw a big glass vitrine, museum style, that lived by the window, displaying a collection. Inside were scores of miniature buildings: tiny versions in metal and stone, plaster and plastic, glass and crystal, of all manner of famous buildings. There was the Colosseum, the Taj Mahal, the Chrysler building, the Coit Tower. There was a group consisting of multiple versions of the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty. There were collections of Sphinxes and Eiffel Towers and Seattle Space Needles, miniaturized versions of St Peter’s Basilica, the Brandenburg Gate, the Hoover Dam, the Lion Fortress. There, in easy reach, were the Kremlin, Antwerp Cathedral, the ruins of Hiroshima City Hall. There were buildings as paperweights, as inkwells, as salt and pepper shakers, as cigarette lighters, as bookends; buildings as clocks and thermometers. There were ashtrays in the shape of stadiums, banks in the shape of banks. There were generic, idealized log cabins, thatched cottages, Greek temples, diners, pyramids and pagodas. And each one of them could be easily held in the palm of one hand.
Kelly looked and she found herself laughing. There was something so frivolous about taking such huge edifices and reducing them to ornaments. She thought that Bob Dexter must be quite a joker to have assembled this metropolis of souvenirs.
‘The thing I learned,’ he said, ‘is that wanting to control the world is a pretty soul-destroying task. The world has a way of getting up and biting you in the butt. Asking your father to build a house for me was an act of youthful hubris. I thought that if I had my own little patch of land and my own little house I’d be in control of everything and that would make me happy. The fact was I couldn’t even control your father and the contractors and suppliers. It was too hard. I was no good at it. So that’s why I started amassing these things.’
He opened the door to the vitrine, picked up the Sacré Coeur in one hand, and a section of the Great Wall of China in the other, and weighed them against each other.
‘These things I can just about manage to keep under control,’ he said.
She thought of the model of the Cardboard House, still on the bed platform in her chapel back home, and wondered if perhaps it belonged here with all its stunted cousins.
‘Your father and I fell out in the worst way,’ said Bob Dexter. ‘We fought about everything: the design, the materials, the way he worked, the people he employed. We argued about art and we argued about money. It was a mess, a nightmare. But, let’s face it, that was a long time ago. And we weren’t exactly the first architect and client ever to have a disagreement. We got over it. I came to have fond memories of him. I was pretty devastated when I heard he’d died like that.’
What could Kelly say? That she was sorry he’d been devastated?
‘I sincerely hope you’re not going to be disappointed when you get there,’ he said gently. ‘It’s a long time since anybody lived in the Cardboard House. I couldn’t even guarantee it’s all still standing.’
He must have seen the pained expression on her face as he said that, but he continued, as though wanting to prepare her for the worst.
‘And frankly, the house wasn’t exactly perfect when it was brand new. So you could be disappointed.’
She felt defensive, of herself, of her father, of his building, but she didn’t feel weak. She said, ‘I think I’m expecting to be disappointed. In fact, in a way, I think I want to be disappointed.’
Dexter’s father nodded. ‘You’re smart,’ he said.
He put the Sacré Coeur and the Great Wall of China back in the vitrine, and closed the glass doors.
‘You know, some of this computer technology is pretty scary,’ he said, slapping his hand on a monitor. ‘They can do computer modelling of just about anything. You could take some of your father’s unbuildable buildings, put them in the computer and go for three-dimensional tours around them.’
‘I’ll settle for the real one just now.’
‘Yes, you’re smart.’
Dinner was eaten at an austerely fashionable restaurant close by. Kelly felt uninvolved in what was happening around her, as though watching a cartoon. It was all two-dimensional and brightly coloured and inconsequential. She felt tired out yet manic, fascinated but unable to concentrate. She found herself ordering food she knew she didn’t like.
Dexter and his father talked about people she didn’t know, about things she didn’t understand. There was some discussion of the real estate business – Bob Dexter had recently sold a house to a hot young movie star – and there were several mentions of Dexter’s ex-wife. It appeared Bob Dexter was still in touch with her, had eaten lunch with her. This seemed to count for something, to demand some response from Dexter that he was unwilling or unable to give.
After the food, as they drank decaff, Dexter’s father placed a key on the pristine white cloth of the restaurant table.
'For you, Kelly,’ he said. ‘It opens the door to the Cardboard House, the door in the Norman arch.’
She took the key. It felt cold and looked too big for any domestic door. She gripped it tightly until it had taken on the warmth of her hand. She wanted to cry. She was barely aware of the drive home, and then she was back in Bob Dexter’s house, in bed, and it seemed to be the next day.
The dust storm moved in, a swirl of sand that enveloped her and then cleared, and a mountain became visible: steep, inhospitable, rising like a crusted brown molar from the desert around it. They were driving. Dexter was at the wheel of some decrepit military vehicle, wearing goggles, his face and hair matted with dust, Kelly strapped in beside him.
They came to the base of the mountain, to a flight of steps cut into the rock, a frayed rope for a handrail, and suddenly Dexter was gone and she was alone climbing up and up the steps, the treads getting narrower, the rope getting flimsier, birds of prey circling overhead. Her legs were like soft rubber. There were bleached bones on the mountain side, the teeth of dead critters, but it was all right, she was in the right place, being drawn to her father’s house which was up on this mountain top. She felt she’d been there before, the route gouged in her memory like a line drawn in the dirt, up these last few steps, over the rim of the summit, and she knew she’d soon be there. She would see the house. It would reveal itself, throw open its doors and winch her in.
And there it was, she saw it, her father’s house, the Card board House, exactly as she’d imagined, exactly like the model she knew so well, and then she was looking down on it as though from an aeroplane. The space in front of her rippled with heat, played tricks with distance and perspective. The house seemed so small from this height, so far away, it looked like a toy. The light was flat, sunless, soft and shadowless, yet for all the tricks of distance and heat, the house was truly revealed. And that’s when she realized it was only a toy.
She had come all this way to discover that the little doll’s house her father had given her was an absolutely exact replica of the house itself, in one to one scale. Here on this mountain top he had built his only building, but as another architectural model, a maquette, as something a child could pick up or stamp on or toss down the mountain side or turn into a home for birds or desert lizards.
She felt betrayed (though by whom?), homesick, woozy, barren, and she turned around hoping for support, for something enveloping and upholstered like leather car seats, and all she saw was Dexter and his father, and they were laughing at her. This was their punchline, the whole point of the experiment, to see how she’d react. They were slapping each other on the back in what seemed to her a crude, fake display of manly father and son bonding; and only then did she notice they were both naked, well, naked except for ornate black cowboy boots, and they both had springy, absolutely identical erect penises.
Everything became softer then, and curiously consoling. She understood. Only a movie; only a dream; only the backwash of anxiety, the scrambling of charged possibilities; and as she turned over in the strange bed, turned her back on the mirage, she knew this had been an act of potent, strengthening magic. She had imagined the worst, the most trivial. She knew that when she got to the desert, the house would be there, not absolutely as she imagined it, not absolutely as it appeared in the glossy architectural photographs, but it would be real and important, not just a fantasy, not a bad dream brought on by jet-lag and unfamiliar food. Her time would not have been wasted, and Dexter and his father would not be standing behind her offering up their identical erections.
She felt as though she hadn’t slept, but suddenly she was awake and it was late and she could smell coffee and hear male voices. Now everything seemed rushed and difficult; getting washed, getting dressed, the hurried, ham-fisted repacking of her bag. She wanted to be up and out of there, on the way to their final destination. Drinking coffee and eating a perfunctory breakfast and saying goodbye to Bob Dexter, only a temporary goodbye he insisted, all took much too long for her tastes, and even though she knew it was only a few hours’ drive to the Cardboard House, the delay seemed to threaten the whole enterprise. What if the car broke down on the way? What if they had a crash? What if Dexter lost his way?
At last they were travelling in a shiny red pick-up truck borrowed from Dexter’s father. She hadn’t imagined him to be the kind of man to own a pick-up but it was just another thing she didn’t understand, or need to, and in truth it was a clean, pampered vehicle. The interior of the cab seemed needlessly plush, the stereo unnecessarily high quality. Dexter chose to play Haydn.
The sun was still hurting her eyes. The surface of the freeways was blindingly white. She put on sunglasses so that the world retreated a couple of shades. It didn’t feel as though they were leaving Los Angeles but rather as if the city itself was retreating, gradually slipping away from them, reducing in density, becoming sometimes suburban, sometimes industrial, until eventually the buildings would thin out completely and the desert begin to show through.
She looked at it all, at the curvature of bridges and exit ramps, the busy disorder of gas stations and fast food restaurants, apartment houses and motels, and it was simultaneously familiar and disorienting. Yes, she had known it would be more or less like this, she had seen enough movies, and yet from England it had all seemed mythic, or at least fictional. To see all the clutter of roadside architecture made real was to see it lose some of its power.
She looked at the car washes and strip malls, buildings stranded in expanses of car park, edged by roads without pavements. There was an empty lot with a glorious sign that said, ‘Will Build To Suit’. She imagined being alone on foot somewhere in this low, flat, inhospitable complication and she felt lost and isolated.
‘Your father seems like a very nice guy,’ Kelly said to Dexter.
‘Yeah, he does seem that way, doesn’t he?’
‘Meaning?’
‘Meaning that people seem different to their sons than they do to the rest of the world.’
‘But you were in the family business. You wanted us to stay with him. You must like him.’
‘Must I?’
After a couple of hours’ driving, they stopped for petrol on a blank stretch of road, and even the petrol station was disorienting, offering strange cultural challenges, strange-looking pumps, payment required in advance. They appeared to be absolutely nowhere, just a desert roadside, but the desert wasn’t quite as she’d anticipated. She’d imagined it only as absences and vacancy and yet the territory around her was not empty at all. There were abandoned shacks, now without roofs or doors or windows and yet still four-square and sturdy, and in the distance, set back a long way, were ranch houses, one of them with a geodesic dome. There was a lot of clutter out there in the emptiness.
Finally, or at least penultimately, they were no longer on the freeway, not on any sort of main route, but heading along a dwindling empty road that curled between low, scrubby mountains. The lower slopes were scattered with single buildings, surprisingly elegant bungalows with pitched, red-tiled roofs and double garages, and then the land flattened, opened up and there was a sign that said, ‘Welcome to Frontier Town’.
Up ahead, set back a few hundred yards from the road, were two rows of buildings, a cowboy main street, the former movie set with some houses, a saloon, a church, a jailhouse, all built of wood, with an unpaved road running between them ready for the shoot out, and there too was the Rocket Motel, the one her father had described in his article, six quaint little log cabins and an elaborate neon sign on the office with its trail of stars.
Dexter parked in the dirt beside the saloon. It called itself the Rocket too, though its name was painted on wood, not etched in neon. Dexter sensed Kelly’s bafflement.
‘Believe me, Kelly, this place seems as strange to me as it must to you.’
Kelly couldn’t come up with any words, but she nodded, finding his disorientation reassuring.
‘We’re really pretty close now,’ he said. ‘The house is about ten miles or so up the road. I could do with a beer before we get there.’
Kelly didn’t know what she wanted. Delayed gratification had been no part of the plan, and yet an interruption, a pause in the syntax of the journey, now seemed appropriate and welcome. They headed for the Rocket Saloon.
The interior was darkly cavernous, filled with the chilly flap of air conditioning; a clustering of tall, wide rooms, their exact dimensions and shapes deceptive. Apparently it had once been a kind of themed cowboy bar with saddles and pictures of Roy Rogers. They were still there, but recently there had been other influences. It was now bedecked with techno-hippie paraphernalia, wall hangings in imitation of the work of threatened tribes, an oil painting of Jerry Garcia, photographs of desert sunsets and fractals, a small stage at the end of the bar and a wall of fame with signed, framed photographs of unknown rock and country performers. In the far corner was a kitchen and a sign that said they served food at any time of day or night: steak, chicken, Texas burgers, pinto beans. Kelly and Dexter were the only customers. A tough-looking young woman served them with bottles of beer, and Kelly slumped on her stool, elbows on the bar, sullenly peeling the label off her beer bottle.
‘How does it feel?’ Dexter asked.
‘I don’t know. How should it feel?’
‘You’re free to feel any way you like.’
She said, ‘I wish I was already there at the house, but I’m scared of being there. I wish it was over but I don’t want it ever to be over. Sometimes I think it would have been better if you’d never even told me about the house. But I don’t really think that.’
‘This is a weird place,’ Dexter said, looking round the saloon.
‘Yes,’ said Kelly. ‘I like it.’
‘It used to be a real dive but every few years it changes hands and the new owners do some remodelling and build on an extra couple of rooms. I guess that’s what people do.’
He became aware that he was talking to himself, that Kelly had drifted away into her own, more elaborate, world.
‘I was thinking that maybe we should check into the motel now,’ he said.
Kelly looked confused as though this was an impossible suggestion, as though the Rocket Motel was a place of fable, a site you might visit, but not a place you would actually stay.
‘Why?’ she said.
‘Look, Kelly, I know this is a big deal for you but the truth is, the world isn’t going to end the moment we get to the Cardboard House. We’re going to have to spend the night somewhere or other. I suppose we could drive back to LA, but something tells me you might want to stay around for a while, take more than one look at what your father made. Go back tomorrow. See it again. Hang out.’
Kelly said, ‘I suppose you’re right.’
‘And your father did write kind of interestingly about the Rocket Motel.’
They finished their beers and went to check into the motel. Business was slack and they had their choice of log cabins. The woman in the office found it touching that they wanted separate rooms. Even if she hadn’t read ‘Motel America’ she knew this was not a place people usually came to be chaste.
If the outside of the cabins tried to be rustic and cute, the insides tried to be garishly, datedly exotic: a blue vinyl headboard, carpet the colour of German mustard, plastic tongue and groove on the walls, a peacock etched into the mirror, a print of a coyote above the bed. Kelly dropped her bag on the shiny, quilted counterpane and was ready to go out immediately. Acclimatization was neither necessary nor possible. She would never feel at home here, nor would anyone else.
Then they were in the truck again and Kelly strapped the seat belt across herself, as though she was finally settling into a rollercoaster. The white-knuckle ride was in full motion. She had to grit her teeth and hold on.
It was a long ten miles, through land that became increasingly threadbare. Frontier Town was the last late burst of civilization before the Cardboard House. She carefully watched the truck’s milometer creep round, saw the tenths of miles slowly adding up, and she didn’t understand why they couldn’t see the house yet, and then she could see it, not the whole house at first, just a familiarly complex roof line, a hint of shape and outline that could only be the Cardboard House.
Dexter put his foot down and the truck’s tyres bit into the earth, bouncing over rocks and sand, and soon the house was wholly visible. It was raised up a little, held on a low pedestal of grey and red rock, so that she saw it from below, a view she’d seldom had of her doll’s house. It was so familiar yet so strange; just the sight of the doors and windows, the way the walls fitted together, the way the balconies and gargoyles hung off the edges of the building. When they were still about a hundred yards away Dexter stopped the truck, turned off the engine, said, ‘I think you should go the rest of the way by yourself.’
‘Why?’ said Kelly. ‘Don’t you want to see my first reaction? Wouldn’t that be good for your article?’
Dexter said nothing.
She unfurled herself from the cab, landed awkwardly on the sand and began to walk towards the house. She felt like a pilgrim, a tourist, maybe like a prospective house buyer. She had been quite prepared for the house to be incomplete or badly damaged, for chunks of it to be broken away or falling down. Perhaps, she thought, it would have been appropriate to discover it was a vandalized ruin, although she sensed that would have been too neat and easy. Most surprisingly of all possibilities it looked whole and intact, and just as she’d imagined it.
Then she felt as though she was approaching an information desk or a visitors’ centre, the first room of a museum where she might find a useful introduction to the subject, a place where there’d be maps and leaflets, a short video programme, postcards for sale; her father’s life commemorated and explained, made simple and digestible. She thought of her mother alone in Suffolk and felt a soft, unworthy sympathy for her.
The house looked neglected but not abandoned, and not so much decayed as gently faded. There were no flowerbeds, no paved driveway, no cheery postman, as in the model, but that was all right. For all the intensity, for all the strange luggage of confusing emotion she was dragging with her, she found herself smiling. The house made her happy. The match between reality and maquette was perfect, and for a second, as though in a different dream, she was no longer sure which was which, which was the original and which was the copy.
For a long time it was enough to be there as a spectator looking at the outside, walking around, seeing the planes, the contours, the shaped mass, but she knew that sooner or later she’d have to go inside. The barrier was permeable. She was too much of a coward not to do what she had come for. She took Bob Dexter’s key from her pocket, went up to the Norman archway and tried the lock. She struggled with the door, couldn’t tell if she was locking it or unlocking it, but something clicked and it swept open. The door felt light and lacking in substance, but that seemed appropriate, a sign that she was welcome here.
She entered the Cardboard House and found herself in the hall, taller and narrower than she’d have imagined, with rising, converging walls that met high above her to form a sloping, trapezoid skylight of gold and pewter-coloured glass. The ecclesiastical effect was not wasted on her, but underfoot she felt gravel and rubble and in a corner were a couple of crushed beer cans. Well, she could hardly be surprised, could hardly expect that in all these years somebody’s curiosity hadn’t brought them this way; tough young boys perhaps with their girlfriends, having their first alcohol, their first joints, their first sex. Her father would no doubt have approved, and she couldn’t feel too bad about it either. What else were houses for?
She went into the living room. It was big and tranquil. One undulating glass wall opened on to the desert, and overhead a glass dome gazed up at the clear sky. It was a room she felt she could be content in. Some of the furniture was still in place, a sofa and chairs recognizable from the photographs in Dexter’s portfolio. There were even books on the table and a pile of old newspapers. She found that a little creepy, as though something had been interrupted, as in an architectural Mary Celeste. She felt too a sense of the people who had previously lived here, Dexter and his family, and she was becoming aware of how much she wanted the place to be hers alone, to have always been hers, just waiting for her arrival.
Then, as she returned to the hall she saw through into a back room, one with an oval window and a sloping ceiling made out of galvanized iron, and her eyes picked out a bundle of rags in the corner, some dirty clothes, a thinly quilted sleeping bag. She went to the threshold of the room, peered in and saw a pair of old sneakers and a transistor radio and a plastic tumbler half full of dusty water. There was another pile of newspapers right there by the door and she picked up the top copy, looked at the headline and the date. Oh fuck. It was three days old. She was standing on the brink of someone’s improvised bedroom. Someone was sleeping in her father’s house. Who? She tried to imagine. Some old tramp or old hippie. A crazed junkie? A moody loner? Well, why not? This was America, after all. But why was she trying to work out his identity? What did it matter? The mere fact of invasion was enough to send her running out through the door.
Dexter was sitting on a rock halfway between the truck and the house. The speed of Kelly’s exit told him something was wrong. He got to his feet and ran towards her, a sight she didn’t find especially reassuring.
‘What is it? What’s up?’ he shouted, a little over-dramatically it seemed to her, and she could hear the protectiveness, the fierce concern in his voice, his willingness to try to fix things, but she had no faith in that either.
‘Someone’s been living here,’ she said. ‘In fact, it looks like they still are.’
Dexter assimilated the information quickly and started checking the ground around the house as if looking for clues, and indeed there were footprints and what looked like bicycle tracks.
‘OK, so we’ll wait for him,’ Dexter said. ‘We’ll have a little house-warming party.’
He had quickly become the aggressor rather than the protector. It was his territory that had been invaded, his pride that was affected. He went inside, in search of more clues, and after the briefest reconnoitre returned. He said nothing at all this time but went back to the rock he’d been sitting on, and Kelly saw no option but to join him. They waited an hour or more in the hot, dry wind, doing and saying nothing, absorbing the silence.
They saw their man coming from a long way off, an angular, tattered desert rat on a mountain bike. His progress through the difficult terrain was slow but measured. He looked relentless. There was a bandanna round his forehead and a flag waving from the handlebars of the bike. And he was waving too, a bony arm reaching out in their direction. It was a gesture of ambiguous welcome. To be out here in this patch of desert ostensibly gave them a common purpose, but it also brought them into a dangerous proximity. He didn’t want to appear threatening but neither did he want to be threatened.
He was not young. His skin was leathered and shrunk by the sun, pulled tight round the bones of his unshaven face, an old man’s face, but his long hair was bleached by the sun and without grey, and when he got close and swung down from the saddle of his bike, his body and the way he carried himself were fit and loose.
‘Please don’t do anything crazy, will you?’ Kelly whispered to Dexter.
‘Like what? Beat the scumbag’s brains out with a rock? No, I’ll leave that to you.’
The man let his mountain bike fall over in the dirt and he walked up to them, in a display of exaggerated casualness.
‘You here for the tour of the house?’ he asked eagerly. ‘I only charge a token fee. I normally ask five dollars, but if you’re really hurtin’ we can negotiate.’
Kelly thought at first this must be a wry, California desert joke, an oblique way of asking them what the hell they were doing on what he no doubt thought of as his domain, but he carried on talking and there was nothing wry about him.
‘I don’t get too many visitors out here,’ he said, ‘but the ones who make the effort are always impressed. Some people look at this place and say it must have been built by aliens. I tell ’em they’re wrong. I say it was built by a visionary.’
Neither Kelly nor Dexter wanted to argue about that. The stranger’s good opinion of the house was disarming.
‘Some folks say it’s an eyesore. I say it’s a fuckin’ work of art. Some others say they like it but they wouldn’t want to live in it. I say that’s OK ’cos they’re not gonna get the chance.’
He laughed too long and too shrilly at his own joke, trying to encourage Dexter and Kelly to join in. He looked bemused rather than disappointed when they didn’t.
‘What’s your name?’ Dexter asked.
‘They call me Buster,’ the man said and he found that funny too. ‘So you want the tour or not?’
‘Sure,’ said Dexter. ‘Why not?’
Kelly gave a low yelp of alarm. She’d been expecting something very different from Dexter though she didn’t know what. It was surprising to find that at this moment, of all possible moments, he was prepared to hold back and see what developed, not to look for an instant solution. She watched him take a ten dollar bill from his pocket and hand it over. Their prospective tour guide received it and fastidiously folded it in half, then into quarters, into eighths and sixteenths, and then slipped it into the top of his sock.
‘OK, let’s go,’ he said, and he moved towards the house with Dexter in his wake. Kelly was reluctant to go back, but staying outside while the two men went in would have been intolerable.
‘Step right up,’ said the man. ‘You’ll have to forgive me for the state of the place. The maid hasn’t been here in days. They say a man needs a maid, but I figure all he needs is a strong right hand.’
Even then she knew it was going to end in trouble, though she didn’t know how far away that end might be. She suspected that humouring this man was not going to help much, and the longer Dexter remained passive the more fearful she became. But at least she got to see the rest of the house.
‘You know, when I first moved in,’ the man said, ‘I figured I’d do something about them walls, you know, paint some murals, stick up some posters and brighten up the joint. But the longer I been here the less I felt inclined. Now I figure it’s best leave well enough alone.’
‘That’s a great philosophy,’ said Dexter.
‘It’s a pretty good house to live in,’ Buster continued. ‘It can get pretty hot and the air don’t circulate too well, and if it ever rains which, let’s face it, it don’t do too often, the roof leaks like a sieve. But that’s the price you pay for living in a national treasure.’
He took them from room to room: to the kitchen, from which all the appliances had been removed; to those bedrooms he wasn’t using; to the sunken, purple-tiled bathroom; to a wedge-shaped study and out on to a shaded, jagged-edged balcony. Kelly observed it all intently, as though she might have to sketch it later, or give a description of the scene of the crime. This was not how she would have chosen to see the house, how she would ever have dreamed she’d be seeing it.
She found herself looking at details that were too small to have been included in the model: the light switches, the door handles, the taps. She tried hard to shut out the presence of their guide but she couldn’t quite succeed. At times he prattled on about balance and proportion, the ingenious use of materials, about the way the sun moved through each room. Much of it sounded perfectly rational; but at times he became more disturbingly personal and anecdotal.
‘It’s a good house to get drunk in, a good house to get stoned it. Yep, I admit it, I’ve imbibed and ingested and even inhaled in this house. It’d be a real good place to have parties in, ’cept I don’t know nobody and nobody wants to know me. How about you folks? Want to party? Want to get high?’
‘No,’ said Dexter.
‘Pity. And another thing, it’s a great house for being naked in,’ he said. ‘You move around and the sun hits your body and it feels great. And it’s a great house for jerking off in. You lie on your back and look up at all the weird angles and the way the light shines in, or you look out of a window at the sky and the clouds and you come like a train. Fact is, I must have jerked off about a hundred times in each and every room in this house. What do you think about that?’
Kelly felt he was trying to provoke her, trying to desecrate her father’s house, and yet he couldn’t know it was her father’s house. The prospect of this unlovely man wandering naked from room to room and masturbating wasn’t exactly appealing, but it was too pathetic and laughable to be genuinely offensive.
‘I said what do you think of that?’
‘I think that’s not at all surprising,’ Kelly replied.
‘So how long have you been living here?’ asked Dexter.
‘As long as I can remember.’
‘And how long’s that?’
The man pretended to be racking his memory.
‘You know, I forget,’ and he laughed too hard again. ‘Do you own this place?’ Dexter persisted.
‘I sure do. And the land all around it. Everything you can see from the house is mine.’
‘Is that right?’ said Dexter.
‘I know I don’t look much like a landowner, but that’s because I’m a rich eccentric.’
‘And tell me, who designed this house?’
‘Designed?’ the man said, not quite grasping the idea that a house might need to be designed.
‘I mean, who was the architect?’
The man stuck his chin out and said heroically and proudly, ‘Me, man. I did it all.’
Dexter grimaced, looked serious. Kelly feared the worst.
‘OK, here’s the deal,’ Dexter said. ‘I realize you’ve been out in the sun too long, and apart from a little trespassing I don’t see that you’ve done anything too terrible here, but, the fact is, you know and I know this house isn’t yours. You have no right to be here. You didn’t build it. You don’t own it. And I happen to know who does own it: my family – and that’s really about all there is to it. So I’m going to give you about ten minutes to pick up your stuff and ride your bike out of here. OK? Do you have any problem with that?’
The man looked thoughtful and melancholy and his head swayed in a slack, floppy rhythm. ‘Yeah, I guess I do have a problem with that,’ he said, and somehow, from somewhere, he’d got a big black gun in his hand and he was pointing it at Dexter.
‘Not again,’ said Kelly.
But this time Dexter’s reaction was very different. In fact he barely reacted at all. He backed away a little from the man but he appeared alarmingly at ease, unafraid, and quietly resigned, as though he’d lost some tiny, insignificant argument and was perfectly happy to accept the fact.
‘It’s OK,’ Dexter said. ‘I hear you. We’re out of here.’
He turned as casually as could be, offering his back as a target and, without looking at Kelly he walked from the house. She felt stranded but Dexter was clearly her lifeline, and although she was unable to shrug off the stranger and his gun in quite the way Dexter had appeared to, she followed his orderly withdrawal. The man stood in the doorway and watched them walk away. They had just about got to the truck when he fired his gun. He shot straight up in the air, and the desert space and silence absorbed the worst of its blast but it was enough to send Dexter and Kelly bolting, panicking, into the cab of the truck. The rush of adrenalin converted itself into engine noise and acceleration, and Dexter powered away from the house, everything loose and uncoordinated, the truck barely under control. Only then did he feel free to be angry. He was cursing to himself, partly taking his fury out on the desert road and the truck’s suspension, and partly on Kelly.
‘OK, so I didn’t do anything crazy,’ he shouted. ‘That make you happy, did it?’
‘Not especially,’ said Kelly. ‘But it wasn’t a situation where I was likely to be very happy, was it?’
Dexter grunted and punched the boss of the steering wheel.
‘But you could drive a little slower,’ she said. ‘That would make me happy.’
Dexter said, ‘Fuck it,’ and slammed on the brakes. The pick-up slewed across the road, almost went out of control, then righted itself.
Kelly felt sick, scared, excited. She was still strapped into the rollercoaster, the belt was stuck, she couldn’t get out and was going round for the third, fourth, fifth time.
‘I guess we can call the police and get rid of him,’ Dexter said. ‘Breaking and entering, criminal damage, trespass, threatening somebody with a gun. Even out here in the desert they take that stuff pretty seriously. This is still California, after all.’
‘The Suffolk of America,’ said Kelly.
After they’d driven a few miles in the direction of Frontier Town Dexter stopped the truck dead and sat still, taking deep lungfuls of the hot air, his hands hung over the top of the wheel. Kelly looked at him with some sympathy. She was impressed by his weakness, his uncertainty. She said, ‘As a matter of fact, I don’t think we should call the police.’
‘Is that so?’
‘It doesn’t seem right somehow. I came here wanting something very personal, very private. I don’t want it turning into cops and robbers. I don’t want the police crawling all over my house.’
‘Whose house? Whose fucking house?’
‘Oh shit. Did I really say that? My father’s house. Your father’s house. Your house, I suppose. Oh shit.’
Dexter laughed. He enjoyed her confusion, and that changed his mood, burnt off some of the fog of anger.
‘So, do you have any bright ideas?’ he asked.
‘Maybe we could go back later and talk to him again.’
‘Yeah. Right. Nothing he’d like better than a fireside chat.’
‘Or,’ said Kelly, ‘we could go get a beer. Or three.’
‘Kelly, am I bringing you down to my level?’
‘I was already down at your level, I’m afraid.’
The Rocket Saloon had filled up. There was a group of young guys with long hair and khaki shorts and one of them was absent-mindedly playing a guitar. There were a few middle-aged men who might once have been Hell’s Angels. They’d kept their Harleys and their beards but had lost their power to disturb and now looked like freakish but avuncular old cowboys. There was a trio of airmen with razored haircuts and shades, and there were other, less identifiable, stragglers whose presence seemed as inexplicable as Kelly’s and Dexter’s; maybe tourists, maybe people who liked to make a visit to this bar an excuse for driving through the desert. Kelly didn’t feel at home exactly but she didn’t feel conspicuously out of place either. People regarded her with the same degree of interest that she regarded them; local colour, if not necessarily from this locale.
‘Welcome to America,’ said Dexter. ‘Beer, motels, guns.’
‘Something tells me this isn’t quite your America, Dexter.’
‘It’s as much mine as it is anybody else’s.’
Kelly pressed her beer bottle to her forehead and let her skin leave its imprint on the condensation of the wet glass.
‘What are we going to do, Dexter? What are we going to do?’
‘I have a great idea,’ said Dexter. ‘Let’s finish our drinks, go to our respective motel rooms, get a good night’s sleep, then in the morning drive back to LA.’
‘And then?’
‘Then nothing. That’s it. We leave things exactly as they are. You wanted to see the house and you’ve seen it. OK, so there’s some old weirdo living in it, but so what? He’s not hurting it. In lots of ways it’s probably better with him in it. It’s not like you were planning to live there, were you?’
Of course not. Of course she wasn’t. Or was she? Maybe in some idiotic way that was what had been in her mind all along. Perhaps a part of her wanted to move in and be the curator of the Cardboard House, having renamed it the Christopher Howell Foundation or something like that; a sophisticated roadside attraction, a sort of museum, where she could show visitors her father’s glorious achievement, much like ‘Buster’ had done, without the masturbatory references but with the bonus of her family connection.
No, she didn’t really want that, not in the real world. In the real world she wanted a life of her own, not a life that was a footnote to her father’s. But she would have liked to have it as an option, to be in the house; not living in it, not staying in it, not necessarily making it hers, but just being able to be there. She knew she had no rights, moral or otherwise, and she didn’t much want Buster arrested or punished, but she wished he wasn’t there, had never been there.
‘It’s a reasonable idea,’ she said, ‘but I think I have a better one.’
‘Oh really?’
‘Yes. How about we get gradually and thoroughly ratted and then go back to one or other of our motel rooms and drunkenly shag our brains out. For old times’ sake, or something.’
Dexter swigged his beer.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘Not the final solution but OK.’
It didn’t take too long. A few more beers and a few whisky chasers later, having bought a handful of bottles to take back with them, they were in Kelly’s room and she was staring up at the crevices of the motel ceiling while Dexter toiled on top of her. Drunken sex, any sex, with Dexter had seemed inconceivable when she first decided to come with him to America, but plans were made to be changed, and now it seemed as though it had always been inevitable; not meaningful, perhaps, not exactly enjoyable, but somehow unavoidable. At that moment she needed to be in touch with someone so as not to feel utterly alone and defeated; and if Dexter was not the one she’d have chosen given an entire world of possibilities, then what were the alternatives – picking up someone in the bar? That would have been no good, and it would certainly have pissed off Dexter, and even though there had been times when pissing off Dexter had seemed a worthwhile pursuit, right now she wanted him on her side.
The bed was wide and ridged. Under the bottom sheet there was a layer of thick transparent plastic, protecting the mattress against spillages. It creaked thickly beneath her.
She thought of all the people who had slept in this bed, all the people who’d fucked on it, come on it, drunk beer in it. She wondered if her father had even stayed in this very room – the odds weren’t bad given the size of the motel – and had he really behaved badly like he said in the article, or was that just creative licence? And how precisely did she feel about that? She knew that fathers were allowed to be imperfect and, in any case, what exactly was supposed to constitute fatherly perfection? Chastity? Incorruptibility? Infallibility? The old, impossible values? But she wished he’d been a little less conspicuous in his imperfections.
Dexter was fucking her harder and faster now, sweating, getting ready to lose control. She put her hands round his neck and shoulders, holding on until this latest fairground ride was over. She knew she wouldn’t be sharing his abandon; too much beer, too much on her mind, but she enjoyed his enthusiasm and passion, and was glad that he seemed so eager for her. The bed twanged and Dexter came and then he slipped away and was quiet and heavy beside her and he immediately drifted off into sleep. She knew she was supposed to hate that sort of thing, but she really didn’t. She reached for the remote control, bracketed to the bedside table, and turned on the television.
She got herself another beer and shuffled through the channels, through the wash of food and car commercials, old sitcoms, a shopping channel, country and western videos. She was amused and appalled, simultaneously bored and overstimulated, wanting to be engrossed in something but wanting to search further through the mash of faces and voices and images. It seemed to be meaningless. She wanted it to be meaningless, and then suddenly there was some ridiculous commercial, she wasn’t even sure what it was for, life insurance or low-fat spread or a mail-order catalogue, something bland and inoffensive, but it showed a father and a young daughter in a rose garden and they were holding hands, and the father leaned over and kissed the little girl’s head, and suddenly Kelly began to lose it.
She propped herself up on the bed, crying quietly at first, but before long the crying got louder and louder, and her body began to quiver. She knew she was getting out of hand, sobbing, making a noise and a vibration that could shake walls.
Dexter woke up, and in a blurred, inept voice asked if she was all right. ‘No, I’m fucking not,’ she said, and even though Dexter must surely have been aware that nothing he could do or say was likely to make the slightest difference, he still tried. A hand, an arm, a shoulder, were all offered and rejected, and Kelly rolled away from him, over to the far edge of the bed. Dexter sat up, exasperated.
‘You’re going to tell me this is another one of those things I can’t fix, right?’
‘You’re so fucking perceptive, Dexter.’
He got up wearily, sadly, from the bed, and put on enough clothes so that he could leave her and go back to his own room. He closed the door behind him, almost a slam, though not quite, just enough to signal that he wanted her to feel bad for having rejected him, for having spurned his offer of comfort, but she couldn’t be bothered with all that stuff, not now. Once he’d gone something changed and lightened. She was alone, and empty, not quite whole but not quite ruined, damaged but not destroyed. In the circumstances she’d settle for that.