18

ONE AFTERNOON IN LATE AUGUST, AS I SAT ALONE AT THE desk beside the fireplace—crackling with warm greetings in the morning and smoldering sleepily by evening—I heard someone inside the house. The front door was always so loud with its squeaks and scrapes and slams, it was impossible for anyone to enter without its hateful taunting alerting me.

“Hello?” I called out. No one answered, though I could hear the steady thud of footsteps. The bells answered before he did. It was Manny at the front door. At his door.

“Knock, knock,” he said, after walking the length of the entry hall, though I had heard no knocking. He was practically behind me before asking for permission to enter. “How’s our little Hemingway doing this morning? Working on the great American novel?”

As was typical around him, I felt compromised. Unlike those woozy, half-remembered Sunday evenings, the dizziness that set in was not accompanied by “heart-centered” thinking, but by an immobilizing vertigo. How could I reproach him in a space that belonged to him? I smiled, a tight smile that said many things, but not “I am happy to see you” or “Welcome.” I wish there were an Anna Nováková book for women’s smiles in my threadbare anthology. For my introduction to her work, at least, I owe him some thanks. “I was wondering if you might want to help Mia in the kitchen? Most of the other girls go in and out. They think it’s fun to test recipes for the brand. Guy said you loved to cook.”

That was true. I had loved to cook back in New York. Except for Guy’s breakfast, cooking was another facet of myself I let go since coming here. There seemed little need, with Guy socializing most nights and the snacks that appeared in the kitchen. I had barely bought groceries at the general store since we arrived, going in occasionally to browse for some small thing, a bar of chocolate or gum I knew I wouldn’t find. Pantry staples had appeared in our cupboards and refrigerator, and though they mostly bore the increasingly unwelcome face of Father M, it was easier to make do with what was there.

My agitation must have shown as he came closer. I had gotten so used to the bells that I heard the jangle only when he was standing right over me. I have described him as not a tall figure, not like Guy or Mia, but he was broad through the chest. Strong. What else was there for him to do all day but to exercise? To optimize. Certainly not to read, despite his Hemingway jab. He mentioned often the names of wellness jockeys he felt “in alignment with” in the endless quest for self-optimization. To make themselves as much like a computer as possible, to eliminate their most human qualities, seemed the goal, though they apparently thought little of computers, as they were toxic to cell structures. In some ways, the control he exerted on his Bohemian Club, on the town itself and its people, seemed like the most human thing about him.

“Are you happy here?” he asked without preamble, laying a hand on my open notebook. I must give him, like a lot of leaders, credit for emotional intelligence. “Because I want you to be happy, Tansy. I knew the first time I saw you that you wouldn’t ever do anything to upset us here, but it’s so important to me that you are happy.”

He knew far more about me than I did him, despite his fame. “Have you been saying your prayers for your husband?”

“Is there no comparable prayer for men to say?” I had asked at a Sunday meeting.

“Women are the most powerful creatures in the universe, remember? You have the power to create life. You are, like, the ultimate artists, you know? You’re a goddess. That’s why you have to put all of your energy into lifting men up and creating a beautiful world. Man can’t do that.”

I bet you could, I thought to say then, but did not for Guy’s sake.

If only to avoid looking at his waist only inches from my nose, I looked up at him as he looked down on me. Had I wanted to speak, I would have found it difficult. My neck was exposed at the angle of one of Mia’s lambs. My back burned and ached, as it had on midsummer night and the morning after the hot springs. His hand lay on my desk, which was really his desk. It was all his. I was his, like any other object. More his than my husband’s. More than my own, I feared. I smiled and smiled so that he would understand that I knew my position. Maybe then he would advance no further. One. Two. Three. Four.

“Of course,” I managed in what must have been a whisper. “You and Mia have been so generous. I don’t think there’s any way we could ever repay you. We’re so grateful to be here.”

“You know, Tansy,” he said, running his hands so lightly over my hair that I am still not sure I didn’t imagine it. “You’re an attractive girl, Tansy. You should act like it. Have you been getting into your body, like I asked you to?” I felt his breath on the top of my ear in what I can only guess was an attempt to laugh. “You can practice on me, you know, if you ever felt like it.”

My throat caught on every fold inside my neck as I tried to swallow. One. Two. Three. Four. When I refocused, he no longer looked at me, but down. Reading the words on my paper. Perhaps trying to decipher them through my scribbles and hatch marks. His hand had lifted slightly, and his fingertips sailed back and forth over my notebook again. That was mine, at least. The one thing that was mine in the room, and I’d done my best to ignore it since our arrival. Had I been really writing, it might not have taken me so long to remember. The words would have come, and then I would have realized that the images from my dreams were real.

“Good stuff here. I’ve got writing in my blood, you know,” he said, reminding me of his ancestor the poet, the inspiration for his club. “They say creativity is linked to the second chakra, Tansy. Same one as the sex drive. There are no coincidences, right?” He winked. “Let me know if you want help with anything,” he offered benevolently, ever of service to his subjects.

As he walked back to the door, I flinched at every footstep, every terrible jingle. The brush and scuff of the door against the tile in its arc and return. I could make out the crunch of gravel and squish of grass until he came into view at the edge of my window. He didn’t go straight back to his house, his manor, but meandered across the top of the hill, stopping in front of each of the statues. He ran his fingers over their naked bodies, twisted as they were, with the leisurely pace of ownership, as he had my words in my notebook.

I found myself shaking. My teeth chattered as if I were freezing cold. The fire laughed in crackles behind me. Was the whole house laughing at me? Obviously, it was. The wind would not start up again until sunset, but I thought I heard sputters and whips. Standing, I unbelted my bathrobe, a luxurious terry that draped clean and crisp every morning from bathroom hooks, and threw it into the fire. A loop of thread caught on my wedding ring, as if the robe were trying to save itself. Was everything of theirs alive and watching? I gave my wrist a shake and the fabric dislodged and landed in the flames. Ash flew across the perfect white rug. The smell of burning hair replaced that of scented oils, and then the fire blazed. The fabric curled and blackened in the fireplace so big I could have followed the robe into the flames, if I had the inclination. Regret bloomed in pink welts across my chest and arms, but only for a moment. I had become practiced lately in ignoring the hives and heat accumulating over my skin. Or was I always practiced at it? Was it learned or in my blood, this ignoring? Part of women’s power. Well, yes, I suppose denial is a woman’s birthright. How else can we live among men and be happy? There’s also the blessing of forgetting. How I wish I never remembered.

I was angry at Manny for the intrusion into my space, for the reminder that it was not my space. But I was angrier with Guy for his absence. For so much else, I must be honest. I was not happy here, or with him. When had I last been? In New York? Planning our life here? On our honeymoon before we arrived in Bellinas? Yes, that had been a happy week, but even those memories felt heavy. Tainted by their proximity to this perfect place where I would never belong.

Guy came home with dusk and the wind. Just before dinner, as usual. Instead of having him find me at the desk pretending to have had a good day of writing, I had taken to bed with a volume of Anna Nováková for protection after watching the robe burn. I watched the fir trees peek occasionally over the skylight. Checking on me, I imagined. There is nothing so friendly as a tree when feeling alone. How they swayed in the windless, still afternoon, who knows. Forests are bound by a magic all their own. Every scratch of branch against the windows and the walls or creak of floorboard lifted my heart into my throat, while the rest of me froze. And then I would imagine that sharp smell of hair burning, and I would leap down the stairs to double-check the fire. To make sure that my guilt and shame had not set the whole house alight. But everything looked perfectly in place. There was no trace of my transgression. The soot that had fallen across the carpet and tile was gone. No evidence of my unhappiness, except the smell of smoke. Strong and thick, instead of the distant hint of disaster I usually caught in the wind.

“Hello?” Guy called out.

I said nothing from the cocoon of the bed. I didn’t have the energy to raise my voice. It felt as if hearing the sound of my voice in this place would trap me here forever. His footsteps echoed slow and unworried up the stairs. His shadow crept closer to the bed. He laid a hand heavy and hot across my shin from a perch at the foot of the bed and waited for me to say something. I could only stare at the box of sky, a portal through which I wanted to fly away, to escape.

“What’s that smell?” asked my husband finally. Proof that I had not imagined my sacrifice of the bathrobe to the fire!

The wind was beginning to pick up, and the strange, looping call of an unknown bird was snatched up by a cold gust.

“Can we get out of here? Do something, just the two of us?” My request came out in one long exhale. I had not known I was going to say it. What part of me, my body or my mind, knew to choose these words? It was what I needed, though, I knew as soon as I heard myself.

Guy looked confused and said nothing at first. His chin pulled back, and he removed his hand from my leg. He saw my distress. I could tell from his face that he was concerned. Even if his days and his attention, his ideas and his beliefs, were undergoing a shift, or a refinement of what he always was, he was my husband. In some part of him was the man I married, who had wanted to marry me and who knew me better than anyone left living.

“Sure, Tanse. Why don’t we plan a trip to the city. Go down to the Wharf. Take a boat out to Alcatraz. Next week, there’s a show at a gallery Mia was telling me about . . .”

“Can we go right now?”

“Did something happen, Tansy? Are you all right?”

How to answer? “I just need to be in my own space or something.”

“We are in our own space.” He looked at me and started to shake his head. “Tomorrow’s Sunday. We can’t miss a session.”

“Please, Guy.” I must have been looking truly terrible. He gave in more quickly than I would have expected.

“I’ll go ask to borrow a car from Mia.”

I shook my head in quick little jerks. It felt as if all of my energy was going into protecting myself from something I could not name or see. I had to fortify some wall around my sense of self—my aura, for lack of a better word.

“Are you sure something didn’t happen?”

I was not sure that something hadn’t happened, but I was sure that he would not believe me. He would not want to believe me. About the encounter downstairs. About the fire lighting itself every morning. And the food appearing in the kitchen. About what my body remembered and dredged up each night. About Manny’s offer at my desk.

The scratching was beginning across the side of the house that backed up to the forest. The warming colors of sunset sunk into an inky blue, and wintry cold fell with the darkness. I missed summer thunderstorms. I wanted a warm ocean and a quiet night lit by the blinks of lightning bugs. I had not realized how much I missed the lush and sticky warmth I had always complained about. It was summer here, but the hills in the distance were brown. People call them gold, but they are dead and dry and brown. Fuel for fires.

“Where are all the lightning bugs? Is it too windy by the ocean here?”

“There aren’t any on the West Coast, Tansy. I hadn’t seen any until I went to school in New York,” he explained. “Is that what’s bothering you? Some kind of seasonal depression? I thought that was a winter thing.”

I could not answer him. I didn’t know. It got so cold here after dark, and the winds. They scratched and shrieked. The nights were not worth the perfect days.

“Every day is the same here,” was all I could say. “It’s too perfect.”

“That’s why people move here, Tansy. Isn’t that why we moved here?” He tried to laugh, but he could feel that I was serious.

“Every single day. Nothing changes. I want a thunderstorm.”

“They don’t have those here either.”

“You don’t think this whole thing is not normal? Tell me how their club isn’t some cult, Guy? Is it because they’re so rich?”

“Not this, Constance. I don’t want to hear it. Cults are creepy old men with beards and like twelve wives. Judgment Day and apocalypses. Not surfing and dinner parties and good vibes.” He stood as he spoke. “Let me go ask if it’s okay for us to use one of their cars, and I’ll be right back.”

I could tell he was growing irritated with me, but to ensure his willingness to leave, to get in the car with me, I would push him no further. I needed to be away, but I couldn’t be alone.

I knew he needed to get the keys were we to go, so I let him walk away. It felt like he took forever. I heard the door open and shut. And open and shut again. The wind, the wind. It’s just the wind. One. Two. Three. Four. I closed my eyes and tried to breathe in counts, as the psychiatrists advised, until I could take the scratching and the knocking no more. The patter of branches against the walls like children running through the hallways. Creak and scrape. Suck then slam. I was paralyzed with fear and frozen beneath the covers like a child afraid of the dark. I began to cry. Choking, angry, ugly tears of helplessness. The door continued to open and shut. The house taunted me in groans and titters. At how stupid I had been to think anything would change for the better in Bellinas, but especially to believe that I could ever belong among their community.

Guy finally came back. He brought with him one of Mia’s mugs, and I could see the wind batting the curl of steam back and forth.

“Tansy, what’s wrong? Can’t you tell me what happened?”

The door, the door! It continued to open and shut, to laugh openly at my distress.

“Don’t you hear it?”

“I don’t hear anything, Tansy.”

“The door keeps opening and shutting.”

“Tansy, the door is locked. I locked it when I left, and when I came back in. I made sure. I was only gone five minutes,” he said. “Mia said we should feel free to take her car and stay out as long as we want. We can go right now if you want, but I don’t know where to at this hour.”

His concern, his willingness to leave right away, surprised me. I must have been scaring him, and I worried suddenly that I was in danger of losing him. Even in our unhappy circumstances, I needed someone. I didn’t want to be alone. Trying to collect myself, I began to breathe and count. “First thing in the morning’s okay,” I said, wanting to reassure him.

“She gave me a cup of tea for you,” he said softly, as one speaks to a spooked animal. “She says she’s sorry you aren’t feeling well.”

I stared out the window all night, watching the fog as Guy slept. I could tell I had truly alarmed him, because for the first time since our initial night in the house after the hot springs, he kept me pulled close to him all night. I didn’t sleep, as usual. A nuit blanche, I learned in a French class. That is what it felt like, but not clean or blank. Like being lost in the fog. A truer term than insomnia. A word so clinical and mundane held none of the heaviness that dragged at my body like the chains on Victorian ghosts. Perhaps I was a ghost in the house opening and shutting the door. I could be a ghost right now, writing this, and wouldn’t even know it. Has my final confrontation with Mia come and gone? Have I forgotten that trauma too?