A couple of gay guys have moved into the Berlin house. As far as I know, this is something new in the neighborhood.
The houses in our neighborhood go by the names of the families who lived in them. There’s the Whittaker house, the Hawkins house, the Stahl house. We’ve lived in the Hawthorne house for twenty-six years. Before us were the Youngs, who didn’t stay long enough to give their name to the house. You have to live in the house for years and fill it with kids and then empty it of kids. Once it’s empty and you’re left wandering around listening to echoes, it gets your name. I guess we’re there.
But I’ve thought lately, especially since I’ve been watching a lot of Doc Martin, that it might be nice to just drop the “The,” elevate the “H,” and call our place “Hawthorne House.” Have a little sign painted and nailed above the front door. The shortened name would give our house a kind of stature, make it seem English-y. “We’re having a little gathering at Hawthorne House on Saturday. Care to join us?”
For about ten minutes I entertained the idea of giving the house its own name. I found an English-house-name generator online. I was asked to choose three terms I could associate with the house. I chose “good view,” “trees,” and “sheep.” Okay, there are no sheep around, but the atmosphere is bucolic, so think metaphorical sheep. See those squirrels? Next, what is the house near? Down the hill behind us is a minor pond that gets warm and gicky in August, home to a couple of large, primordial turtles. “Pond” was not a choice. I went with lake. Finally, a color that relates to the house. When our son was three, he always referred to it as “our blue house,” possibly because at that time the leaky cedar shakes, once slate-gray, had been so weathered and generally sun-blasted they appeared kind of blue.
I clicked “Okay” and then came the names, none of which seemed apt. “House at the End of the Vale.” Too isolated. “Court of the Rushes.” Too bustling. “Lake of the Swan.” Too Yeats. “Blue River.” Huh? Was I supposed to put “cottage” or “house” on the end of these? Blue River Cottage? Lake of the Swan House? House at the End of the Vale . . . House ? There were lots more choices, all of them terrible. I had a feeling we were heading for “Love Shack in the Glen . . . House.”
No sooner did the gay guys move into the Berlin house I began to notice traffic over there, first cars, then trucks. On the side of the trucks I saw the future: marble countertops, hardwood floors, elite plumbing. Yard lights squirted out of flower beds newly plump with impatiens. Urns and potted plants appeared.
I rode by on my bike one day. One of the new owners was outside applying sealer to the paving stones with a roller.
“Rick.”
“John.”
“You live in the Berlin house,” I said.
“The Berlins,” he said.
“Three owners back.”
“Well, there’s a lot of work to do.”
“It’s looking good,” I said. Before the Berlins was the guy from FEMA. Before him the FBI agent. Ten years back, in its prime, it was the Berlin house because the Berlins had lived there forever.
He said he liked the Berlin house better than the FBI house.
While we were talking, a van pulled in the driveway. Custom Kitchen and Bath.
So there goes the neighborhood, I thought, but in a good way. Except pretty soon, our house would start to look so dowdy and ordinary and, well, hetero.
There are also new occupants in the house directly across the street from us, in the Baker’s house. It’s called that not because of a family named Baker. The historical owner was a baker, an Armenian kind-of-misanthrope who left for work in the predawn hours for twenty-five years, walked his black dog in the yard, and did not respond much to friendly overtures. I only know his name was Mike. I never wanted to say “Mike’s house.” It seemed familiar.
These new residents of the Baker’s house are shadowy figures. They are young. They have lots of cars. They never seem to be home. I think they are renters. Occasionally I see a young man smoking on the sidewalk outside the garage. When I walked out to get the newspaper one morning I heard him talking on his cell phone. Actually, he was yelling. “How the fuck can someone make that much money in sales?” It was 5:00 a.m.
I was getting ready to water the rhododendrons and geraniums the other day when, looking out the living room window, I saw a lawn chair in the Baker’s yard and a young woman lying on it, in a swimsuit. I don’t know what I saw, I really don’t, but what I thought I saw was a young woman sunbathing topless in the Baker’s yard. That would also be something completely new in the neighborhood. What about the small children living next door, in the Adida house? What if they saw a sunbathing topless woman? We have binoculars, strictly ornamental things, sitting on a windowsill in the living room. For a second, I considered fetching them, just to verify. Was that a strap I saw on her right shoulder? I pictured the young woman sitting up, applying lotion to her bosom, and then looking across her lawn, across the road and our lawn, meeting my binocular eyes and waving, holding up her hand, making a loose fist, and extending her middle finger in my specific direction. I didn’t look. Really, I didn’t.
The baker was still living in that house when my wife and I backed down our driveway early one morning some twenty years ago. We drove south to the airport, boarded a plane, and flew to New Jersey. Alan, a friend of ours, was dead. Maybe our most important friend, the one responsible for bringing us together in college. We landed in Newark and drove to the Jersey shore, to the home he had shared with Allen, his partner.
It was our first time meeting this new Allen, who told us that he had bought a funeral plot close to a big tree in the cemetery, which he thought Alan would like. He told us that before his final hospitalization, our Alan had flown to Arizona to see his parents, to try again to explain his life to them, to try to reconcile and to prepare both them and himself for his death, and that he had been once again terribly, even brutally rejected.
On this a warm summer day we sat on the porch drinking lemonade. We met surviving Allen’s parents, who were warm and gentle and, like their son, haunted by the terrible last weeks and days. When the time came, we drove to a funeral chapel. The casket was closed. There was no ceremony. We just had time together, with our Alan’s small acquired family.
Before we left, Allen pointed at a table and told us we could take some photos of our Alan. There were a lot of them. Help ourselves.
We approached the table. There were, indeed, a lot of photos. In all of them, our Alan was dressed as a woman. He wore a blond wig, a sleeveless dress. He mugged lasciviously at the camera. We picked up one image after another, looked at each other, and set them down. That wasn’t how we wanted to see him. It wasn’t how we remembered him.
I wish now that we’d taken one of those photographs. I would have put it away, probably with the letter he wrote telling us he was sick, a letter I’ve never been able to read a second time. Probably I wouldn’t ever look at that photo again, either, of his other self, the one he evidently wanted to leave us with, but it would be there.
Old houses, new residents.
One Thursday morning I’m taking trash down to the road. It’s 6:00 a.m. The residents of the Baker’s house set their trash out the night before, in flimsy plastic bags the crows plunder. It’s not uncommon to see bones and eggshells in the street in front of their house. I glance over at the Berlin house and check out their garbage can, which is brand new, more like a vase (rhyme it with Oz) than a can.
Who are these people? Do we want to know? Can we ever know?
We could try.
“Hey, we’re having a little gathering at Hawthorne House on Saturday. Care to join us?”
And they might say, “Sorry, we’re busy.” Or they might say, “Who are the Hawthornes?”
Our response would have to be, “Really, we have no idea. For the time being, it’s our house. Come to our house.”