6

I AM TEMPTED TO SKIP THE ENSUING ARGUMENT, WHICH was perhaps not even an argument exactly. More a general sense of disagreement. In short, why the marriage plots end with the marrying and forgo the marriage. Here we were in our new home, as Manny had pointed out repeatedly. Finally, after our frenzied planning and wistful dreaming. Only it felt more like suddenly than finally. I was alone, or alone-ish, standing in front of our first house, not even really ours. Though we’d been living more or less happily together for three months as a married couple, and for years longer unmarried, our official life together seemed more momentous at having a whole house to ourselves. I scanned the other cabins, which formed a semicircle around a green field dotted with avocado trees and odd sculptures. At the start of a trail, a gray fox sat upright and watched us.

I recalled the magazine features that I had scoured about their bungalows. Ours was the sole octagonal structure among the cottages. The nearness of the forest cast an undulating shadow that transgressed the barbed-wire fence edging the forest. What lay beyond must have been dangerous for the Roses, for Mia, to choose such a blunt, unattractive border.

The Roses had turned to walk back to Rose Manor. I took Guy’s hand. He squeezed but didn’t look at me. “I had sort of hoped that we might have our first night to ourselves.” I pulled his arm around my waist and ran my hand under his shirt. “You know, to get to know the place. Like Mia suggested.”

“We can’t turn down their invitation, Tansy. It’s a chance to be a part of the community here. Isn’t that what you’re always saying you want?”

Actually, it was Guy who had begun to say that what he wanted most was to be part of a community, whatever that meant. We already had a network of friends and colleagues and neighbors in New York. It became a word I grew to hate, community, so frequently did he expound on its insipid necessities.

Guy walked toward the door without me. From inside the house, he yelled, a muffled call lifted by excitement. He was no longer annoyed with me, and I breathed away my sadness. Had I expected anything to be different? Well, yes. A new home was a blank slate. We had been so happy on our honeymoon. Here, I could be the perfect wife. In the country, in bucolic and romantic isolation, perhaps Guy might give me just a bit more of his attention. That’s all I wanted. Just a few more glances. For him to look at me with the rapt and undistracted adoration of the moment he suggested moving to Bellinas. What would it take for him to choose me over whatever entertainments were outside our togetherness? I don’t suppose I’ll ever find out now.

Just as I was beginning to panic again, to feel alone with the consequences of our choice to leave everything and start a life on the West Coast, Guy flew out the door and picked up our suitcases. “Where are my books?” I asked, doing a little spin. No box. But he didn’t hear me, and I never found them.

“I was calling for you, Tanse,” he said. He was breathless and happy, leaving a quick kiss on my cheek. I could tell he was excited by the bounce in his step and the lifted left corner of his lips, one of his most endearing traits. Had I been worrying for nothing, all along?

The door drew back of its own volition to clear space for him as he entered our new home with the bags. I hesitated at the threshold, my hands shaking. Vertigo like on the winding drive on midsummer’s day a few weeks ago. A touch of dread or nausea. Again, my body was putting up one last act of defiance, eyes refusing to let me walk willingly into the belly of a hungry beast. We were so close to the boundary of the Hidden Coast and its wilderness that the barbed-wire fence often scratched the window of the bathroom downstairs. Only at night, of course, in those windiest conditions that arose without fail when I was there alone, which became most nights. Guy claimed never to hear the scratching at the window. The winds have a sense of humor, I will say that about them. Anna Nováková says that a laughing wind brings smoke or a nest of birds in the chimney.

If I have just made it seem as if the wind in Bellinas were a living—well, not living, exactly—creature, I will make plain my views now. After much research and thought, and with the help of Anna Nováková’s works, I believe I know on whose behalf the house, the winds, the town watched. It was an outlet, an arm, an expression for the energy summoned from the good townspeople of Bellinas. It, and so they, were watching always. It, that is again to say they, spied on my conditions and indeed did their best to shake my sense of reality, to invade my private thoughts, the only sanctuary I had left by the time I escaped to my schoolhouse reprieve, just a few days ago after what happened to Guy on Harvest Day. Does the schoolhouse watch me, as the wind on Rose Lane did? I think not. Our bungalow seemed built to turn every breeze into a screeching gale for the purpose of unbalancing the body, disquieting the mind, and cracking open the spirit.

In looking back on my first steps, freely taken, into the house on Rose Lane, I imagine how Iphigenia must have felt walking to the altar in Aulis. The excitement, in spite of what were less-than-ideal circumstances surrounding her. She kept walking even after realizing that she was heading not toward a joyous marriage, but toward her own murder. Oh, Achilles, that most celebrated and strongest of men. In this part of the story, he is reduced to bait, needed only as a pawn. Once the true prize has been claimed, he is pulled back to play the next role and then the next in the grand schemes of kings and goddesses. Perhaps the amusements tempted by all bridegrooms are indeed nature’s way of ensnaring brides for a lifetime of servitude and the continuation of the story. If I do not make it out of Bellinas alive, I would rather like a temple built upon the site of my slaying. Perhaps I am like poor Iphigenia, needed only as a sacrifice to gather the winds. My escape was unlikely enough, and to beg fate for a second favor so soon may well be pushing it. By now, I think I am more like her mother, Clytemnestra. I have always preferred the version where she kills Agamemnon, her husband, instead of those epics where her lover did the job. Alas, I do not exactly have a lover to dispatch in my place, and no son yet.

Signs I was able to deny under the influence of optimism, love, illusion, or my own ignorance on that fateful day of our arrival in July? How plentiful they were. On the hill overlooking town, just before the grass slopes into tumbling emerald ferns, twisting cypress, and poison oak that stops just outside the window of the very schoolhouse I hide in now, an arrangement of thirteen statues upset the lovely avocado trees. Each sculpted by Mia, who, like her husband, could afford to call herself an aspiring artist in addition to everything else. Supposedly, they were yoga poses, but from the disjointed angles and pained looks on the sinewy, stretched-out figures, I could only imagine scenes of Boschian torture. “My asanas, darling,” she said with pride as she showed off the horrors of her handiwork a few days after our arrival. She performed yoga in her atrium every day.

On that first entrance into the house, the feeling of its darkness settled upon me before I reached the end of the hallway connecting the front door to the living room. Why such a narrow artery was thought a necessary or pleasing addition to the structure, I cannot say. The bungalow looked exactly like the pictures, and yet different in its feel. The angles captured every shadow and held them like cobwebs. Instead of creating an open feeling, the roundness of the ground floor was flattened by angled beams that connected every few feet to other odd bearings. I felt dizzy standing in the living room, following the seams along the walls. I knew the space to be quite large and open from Mia’s lauding the holistic layout and artistic décor, but standing inside, I felt constricted. A wall poked halfway out into the round living room, marking the side of a steep staircase up to the bedroom, the only room on the second floor. Guy was already upstairs. I could hear his footsteps. Anxiety replaced my need to connect with him. The nausea and dizziness settled behind my eyes and in my jaw.

“C’mon, Tanse! Come see upstairs!” I climbed a set of steep, irregular stairs. Guy was, as I mentioned, a tall man, and how he didn’t hit his head on the various protruding beams of wood amazed me. In New York or if we traveled, like in the car on our honeymoon, he was always hitting his head and blaming the structure or me or whoever else happened to be in the vicinity of his clumsiness at the time. Yet, not once in the two months we spent in the house on Rose Lane did the broad steppe of his forehead collide with the crooked joints of the house. It was only me the house stuck its daggers into.

At the top of the staircase, I looked into our new bedroom, a small round room that topped the house like a hat. Guy led me to a four-poster bed in the center of the room, below a single skylight where I would spend countless hours staring at the coaxing fronds of neighboring firs that beckoned my attention. “Welcome home,” he said, imitating Manny’s seriousness and pulling my arms around his back.

“What do you think of him?” I asked.

“I mean, he’s a gazillionaire. There’s all those news stories about his philanthropy. Mia wouldn’t have married a jerk. He seems like a really good guy to me.”

“I’m not sure he’s such a good guy,” I said before I could stop myself.

“Not this, Constance. We are his guests.”

This was what he interpreted as my feeling of distrust and negativity toward some people, but especially certain men. In particular, friends of his for whom some perceived social capital made their aggressions invisible or ignorable. For what it’s worth, I was always right, even if it took years to reveal whatever small violence or nastiness I noticed. Like his acquaintance the real-estate developer, to whom he referred as a close friend if it would bolster his position in conversation with other acquaintances, who was outed as a serial predator. Who had once slid a hand across my back during a greeting to fondle discreetly the side of my breast. When I relayed this to Guy, he dismissed the incident as an accident.

“How can we be home and guests at the same time?” is what I wanted to ask, and looking back I should have jumped on his choice of pronoun—weren’t we their guests, if not Mia’s more so?—but I changed the subject.

“Do you think we’ll be happy here?”

I was breaking the unspoken and yet most important of marriage vows by not just allowing doubts to crack the loving visage of wife as clearly as the fine lines I’d begun to notice on my own face, but voicing them.

Guy ran a thumb across my brow, which must have creased. “Of course. Just relax.”

I hadn’t yet recognized the relationship between what would become my prevailing sense of unease and being inside this strange house. I felt at first as one does when coming down with any kind of sickness. My neck ached just a little upon turning. The skin of my arms felt as brittle as the dry yellow grass on the hills we’d driven past. The hills were no longer the green I’d felt so at home among only weeks before. Guy’s caresses induced greater discomfort. Couldn’t it have been the ordinary bodily distress from the travails of flying, the stressors of moving? I pushed the feelings away, letting Guy continue. Even then I know the winds were hiding in the corners, asleep until moonrise freed them to roam and play.

I followed his lead, wanting to feel connected again. For a few moments, it was like we were who I wanted us to be. I was at home because I was with him.

“Does this mean you want to get started on a baby?” I asked.

“Don’t think we have enough time right now. We’d better get going if we want to make dinner,” he said, pulling himself away from me with an ease I couldn’t help but take personally. At the thought of the slightest infringement upon our hosts—or were they our neighbors?—he was now hurrying. “Come on, Tansy.”

“I’m coming, I’m coming,” I said, following him down the stairs. “Do you think they have my books?” I asked, but again, he didn’t respond.

Was I dragging my feet just a little? I’m sure that I was. I see the signs of my anger looking back. And why not? He had not answered me, and I understand now he had no intention of answering. In any case, once I was outside, I felt free of some tangle. My body seemed to feel normal again, and I stretched, feeling as if I’d freed myself from a knot of the thickest devil’s ivy, not unlike that in the atrium of Rose Manor, squeezing and holding me down.

I threaded my arm through his, taking in the pretty pastoral scene beyond our front door. It was early dusk, and Guy took in the view of his new community with such concentrated adoration that I admit I felt envious of the town. The whole scene from the hilltop of Rose Lane—its fringe of treetops, the tiny candy-colored pops of the houses along the coast, the glimmering Pacific—was like a painting. He stood so still, he might have been Narcissus fallen in love with his reflection in the sky. Perhaps now Guy is looking at his face in the River Styx. I hope he is comforted by his reflection. He was very tan by the end, from all the surfing.

Manny and Mia’s friends seemed to have been at the house for a long time when we reached the porch for the dinner party, though it felt like we’d just left them. The front door was open, and the windows were filled with laughter and swishes of long hair. “They’ll do perfectly, won’t they, darling?” I heard what must have been Mia and her husband consulting. We were to be initiates, and we didn’t know it. I can hear now the thud of our feet on the restored oak planks of the steps and then the porch, wide and Victorian with little creatures carved to adorn the lacy trim dripping from the arches and at the corners. Gremlins and cherubs at the intersection of wisteria and bougainvillea scrolls all carved and painted the same weathered white as the trim on the rest of Rose Manor, and all of their houses on Rose Lane. Knowing it would read “No Service,” I pulled my phone out of a pocket to check the time, for something to do with my hands. A flush of self-consciousness scratched at my skin. It had barely been forty minutes since they left us to ourselves; such was Guy’s eagerness to return to the group.

Mia waited just inside their oversize door, so unsurprised to see us, I half wondered if bells had been slipped somehow around our ankles. I gave my foot a little kick to see. She leaned against the frame with an arm raised to the top of the door. She accentuated the length of her body in a languid resting pose, much practiced in mirrors and camera lenses. In her right hand, she held a wicker basket outstretched at the ready, the kind of basket snake charmers filled with coils of serpents. “For your phone,” she said to me, the woven swirls of its matching lid tucked under her other arm. “Manny doesn’t allow anyone’s phones or computers in the house,” she added, taking the question off my tongue before I could ask it.

“You’ll soon forget you even own one.”

As happens when requests are made that take you by surprise, that count on their own strangeness to befuddle, my body complied before I could remember I had another option. The intended effect of surprising or outlandish revelations. Another technique, like starvation, acquired by either intuition or instruction to control the behavior of their followers.

It was a small group, just as the Roses had promised, three other couples I recognized from the midsummer birthday party. I knew the faces of the women, but they, of course, had seen all of me. Embarrassed, I twisted away from them. My face twitched at the memory. One. Two. Three. Four.

Our phones were now housed in the lidded basket beside our shoes at the front door. Just as at the midsummer party, the men and women socialized separately. Nothing so unusual about that, I suppose. It had happened often enough at parties I’d been to over the years. As we padded across the floors in our dirty socks, which just that morning had been picking up lint at the airport, the couples began coming back together with affectionate strokes and pats.

“They’re perfect for the Bohemian Club,” I heard someone say. I will never know who for sure. I fell to the ground, wilting in a faint.