CHAPTER ELEVEN

As the days passed they nodded and spoke when they saw each other on the sidewalk. More frequently Payne called out as he left home, his voice carrying through the open windows to where Nick, seated at his desk, slogged through page after page of Renaissance love poetry. A quick wave through the window, a returned greeting from Nick, and Payne would be gone for the day. Nick didn’t know where nor did he ask.

After a while, so gradually that neither noticed that a choice had been made, they began meeting once or twice a week at one of the houses for an evening together.

When they were at Nick’s, they played chess or just talked. Payne had attended a community college back in Pennsylvania long enough to be able to trade stories about gruesome profs or talk reasonably intellectual shop. These evenings began early and ended early. Nick was sticking to his reading schedule, which surprised him no end, and Payne kept busy around The Greer’s place…Nick still had trouble thinking of it in any other terms. Payne wasn’t working an outside job, though, Nick discovered, at least not yet. The Greer’s estate could carry Payne through a decade or more of absolute indolence if he chose, so he was taking a few months to sort out the contents of her study and catalogue everything the old woman left him, generally getting a sense of the estate and what he might do with it. Certainly there would be some cash value in the film collection and equipment, he mentioned to Nick one day, if he could work out arrangements with the lawyers to liquidate it.

On other nights, the two would meet at Payne’s. The first time, a week or so after their first chess match at Nick’s, they fully intended to play chess. Payne’s first additions to the house’s sparse furnishings were a couple of extra chairs, one in the living room and one in the kitchen. That way, Nick could at least sit in comfort. Payne added a small table in the living room as well. Nick noticed it right away.

“Something new?” he said as he stepped through the entryway. Payne kept the heavy curtain tied back with the bit of white braided cord, making the transition from dark entry into brightly lit living room less of a psychical and neurological shock.

“Yeah,” Payne said, almost as if he were embarrassed. “I thought it might be helpful if we wanted to play chess over here to have somewhere to play. The kitchen didn’t seem right.”

Nick glanced around the room. The white curtains at the living-room windows hung three-quarters open, grudgingly allowing the remnant of late afternoon to spill inside. The room seemed alight with a soft golden glow that reflected from every surface as if the walls themselves were incandescent. Intrusive glimpses of leaves and hedges and yards through the spotless windows created a carnival of colors and shapes and textures juxtaposed to the Arctic sameness of white draperies, white carpet, white walls, white furniture.

The new chair was white, too. It didn’t match the old one, though Nick, except in color; the style was subtly but definitely wrong for the room. The small table between them was white also. It looked plastic, modernistic, too much like a squat cube. Somehow it was not what Nick would have expected Payne to buy.

“Why did you choose that one?” he asked pointedly, gesturing with his thumb at the chair and allowing Payne to interpret the “that one” to mean either color or style. Both seemed wrong.

“It is pretty awful, isn’t it,” Payne said with a boyish grin. “But it fits the room. The white. I saw others I liked better, but they would have stood out too much in here.”

“Then change the room. Add color. New carpets. Prints on the walls. Repaint if nothing else.”

“I can’t.” There was an odd timbre in Payne’s voice when he spoke, as if he were not feeling quite well.

Nick looked at Payne. Standing as he was next to the wall, with the light reflecting onto his face and burnishing away planes and angles, blotting out shadows, Payne didn’t look all that well either.

“You don’t want to? You like this…sterility?” Nick was aware suddenly of what he was saying. Payne could very well take it as an intrusion. Nick wished at once that he hadn’t begun this line of conversation. After all, it was Payne’s home. And Payne was his landlord.

“Hey, I’m sorry for blurting out like that. It’s just that….”

Payne didn’t take offense. In fact, he nodded his agreement. “You’re right, though. It is sterile. I don’t like it. I think I dislike it more each day.”

“Then change it. Do something to it.”

“I can’t.” This time his voice was low, almost a whisper.

Nick started to say something, but Payne cut him off.

“No, Nick. I mean it.” He turned away to stare at the blank white wall. “I really can’t.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s in the will.”

“In the…?”

“Yeah. It’s really strange. I get the house...both houses plus some property downtown that’s worth as much as these pieces and a whole lot more. And a wad of money that the lawyers found a couple of weeks ago in some long-term investment accounts. They think there may be some more property up north, too. All that from an old woman I never met and barely even heard of.

“Funny,” he added, looking back to Nick then away again to resume staring at the same blank spot on the same blank wall. “I lost my mother to cancer....”

“I’m sorry,” Nick said. “I didn’t know. You never said anything.”

“It was a long siege, painful for both of us, and a relief in some ways when it was finally over. One week later, I lost my job when the mill shut down. Then another week and POW! I get a letter addressed to my mother from some attorneys in California. In spite of cousins and nephews and nieces all over the place, Mom was named specifically as sole heir to everything Great-Aunt Emilia owned, and I was her only heir. Suddenly, out of the blue, I’m rich. I mean, really rich. Filthy rich.” He tried to laugh, but the sound strangled.

“And the only restrictions in the will,” he continued, “were that Mom…that I must live here, in this place. And that I can’t remove anything from the house, can’t change anything down to the paint on the walls. Would you believe it, there are a dozen cases of white paint stacked up in the garage, along with a formula for making more when that’s gone.

“The same goes for the furniture. I had to argue with the lawyer for an hour before he allowed me to bring in these two things. And then he had to pass on the materials—just metal and plastic, no natural woods, etc.”

Nick whistled, the sound low and chilling even to his own ears. He looked around the room again with a new eye. “No pictures? No new paint?”

“Nothing. It apparently has something to do with the sound system Aunt Emilia was developing. I think she stopped actual work a year or so ago, but by then it was pretty much in place. Pounding nails or hanging pictures or even using any other kind of paint would foul things up. So I’m stuck with this. Through the whole house.”

Nick shivered. Someone’s walking on my grave, he thought, remembering his grandmother, she of the warmly cluttered cottage with its massive dark oak furniture clustering along each wall, its worn braided rugs made from bits and pieces of her lifetime—even at ninety-two she had been able to tell him where each piece of material had come from, who had worn this suit to Great-Great-Grandma Kerr’s funeral during World War I or that dress to a senior prom at the Grange Hall in the fifties or that pair of pajamas the night his youngest died of diphtheria during the depression.

Nick overlaid the richness of those memories onto the emptiness of Payne’s house and shivered.

“Come on,” Payne said quickly, smiling broadly as if to bridge an uncomfortable moment, “let’s forget all that weirdness and get down to some serious chess. Wait here.”

He disappeared into the hallway. When he returned a moment later, he had a large, flat cardboard box tucked under his arm.

“Got this yesterday.”

He set the box onto the white carpeting. It created an ugly splotch of brown against the whiteness. Payne squatted next to the box and lifted the top. Nick noted that Payne didn’t drop the top to the floor; he laid it carefully on the new chair.

White tissue crackled loudly against the silence as Payne folded the edges to the side to expose a chess set as starkly simple as the room itself. The kings were almost featureless columns, their surfaces faintly rippled by swirls that implied rather than defined faces. The other pieces were equally abstract, equally suggestive of forms without actually being forms. The pieces gleamed in flawless porcelain, white and black. Payne lifted them out and pulled the board from the bottom of the box and unfolded it. It was made of heavy cardboard overlaid with fine-grained leather, luxurious smelling, obviously expensive, with white and pearl-gray squares.

Payne set the board on the small table, placing each piece painstakingly, precisely in the center of its square. Nick waited to one side, watching. When the game board was ready, Payne straightened and grabbed the empty box. He stuffed the wrinkled tissue to the bottom and slipped the top carefully over each edge.

“Just a minute, huh? Be right back.”

He disappeared into the hallway. Nick saw him turn from there into the kitchen. For a few moments, Nick stood next to the new white chair, oddly uncomfortable at the thought of sitting down. He paced, but only a few feet to either side of the small table now crowned with the abstract white and black pieces. He waited for Payne to return but the moments stretched into longer minutes and his patience suddenly wore thin. He hurried down the hallway and looked through the kitchen door, expecting to see the chess box sticking out of the waste can and Payne methodically setting out cheese, crackers, and beer for snacks and drinks.

“Can I give you...?” he began, then stopped. The room was empty. He glanced through the windows, cleaner now than they had been the first time he visited the house with Payne, but even so they were overlaid with an obviously fresh if thin coating of dust that made the back yard slightly hazy.

From the kitchen he could see Payne stuffing the chess box into one of the large, battered garbage cans lined like sentinels between the back fence and the alley. Payne replaced the lid carefully, rattling the can once or twice to make sure it was snug, as if he were deathly afraid that the box would come to life and climb out—or that someone would notice that it was in there to begin with. As Payne straightened and headed toward the house, Nick faded quickly into the hallway. By the time Payne entered the living room, Nick was seated, studying the chess set.

Situation A-OK, everything normal.

Nick heard Payne come in, knew that the man was standing just over his shoulder. He counted ten seconds, fifteen, and still Payne said nothing. Nick relaxed, waiting for the inevitable joke, the gag, the comment about the chess set and their last game at Nick’s and how badly Nick was going to get the pants beaten off him tonight.

“Mind if I sit there?” Payne asked quietly. Surprised, Nick looked up. He hadn’t consciously thought about where he was sitting; he had simply chosen the closest chair when he hurried back down the hall. As luck would have it, it was the old one. The Greer’s chair.

“Sure, help yourself,” he said, and he stood up and stepped around Payne. He moved to the new chair and sat down. He felt more comfortable there anyway.

Payne dropped into The Greer’s chair, literally dropped, as if he were a puppet and someone had savagely cut his strings with a single snip from a pair of shears. The springs snapped and groaned with the burden of his sudden weight.

“Okay,” he said, grinning as if nothing were unusual at all, “let’s get into some serious chess. I feel lucky.”

Without asking Nick to choose a color, he slid a black pawn forward two spaces.

“Your turn.”

Nick couldn’t move. Couldn’t raise his arm to touch the gleaming white pawn that would counter Payne’s opening. It was as if there were a threat emanating from the pieces, the ebony burning like Milton’s darkness visible in the brightness of the room. The gray squares almost disappeared from two yards away, blending with the white men. But the black pieces....

The game itself suddenly seemed sterile, the white pieces invisible, the black obscene intrusions. Nick’s head ached with a sickening, throbbing ache. His stomach flopped over once, twice. The room suddenly seemed hotter than a concrete sidewalk at noon in July.

“Hey, Nick,” Payne said, leaning across the board to rest his hand on Nick’s knee. “You okay?”

Nick looked up, his expression dazed. He barely felt the weight of Payne’s hand through the heavy material of his jeans. Someone had said something someone spoke to him he should answer. “Uh, what?”

“You okay? You’ve been sitting there for a minute or two, barely breathing. You feel all right?”

“No…yes. No, I guess not. Not for chess, anyway, not today. I’m...I guess I’m just not in the mood.” He massaged his temples with his fingertips, swallowing hard against the bile in his throat.

Payne looked at him as if about to say something, then shrugged and settled back into the chair and crossed his legs.

“Okay. Wouldn’t want to force anyone to get the pants beat off him. Another time?”

“Yeah. Sure. Tomorrow, huh?”

Payne nodded.

Ten minutes later, Nick was home, lying on his bed with a cold, damp cloth covering his eyes and shutting out the light. He lay quietly, his body barely moving except for the shallow rise and fall of his chest. But still he felt as if the bed were tossing in a gale. His head pounded more fiercely.