See You in Paradise (23 page)

THE UNEVEN HEDGE

HAIL

SEVEN HATS, knitted by the Retired Ladies’ League of Piedmont for a set of septuplets; two of whom die shortly after birth; one of whom grows up to host a nightly TV news broadcast in a small Midwestern city, until she is attacked and her face permanently disfigured one night outside the studio by a knife-wielding stalker, and is not rehired for the next season, because, according to her employers, “of cutbacks across the board,” and who in the ensuing lawsuit becomes very rich and endows a journalism scholarship in her dead siblings’ names; two of whom grow up to design and market a line of toys, furniture, and multimedia entertainments for the parents of multiples, including a kit, complete with iron-ons, for creating tee shirts that bear the message BABY, with an arrow, many times over, and who claim that the dead siblings never existed; one of whom grows up with some sort of persecution complex and fantasizes elaborate mass slayings of his siblings, then becomes briefly famous for his memoir about growing up as one of the so-called “Piedmont Quints” in which he claims to have been brutally tortured by the others and confesses his fantasies that the two dead siblings had become guardian angels who watched over him through his darkest hours, though a fat lot of good they did him; and one who grows up to become a late-night radio call-in psychologist specializing in sexual problems and who discovers the hats in her parents’ attic when her mother dies, including the two that were worn, very briefly, by the dead siblings for a newspaper article she still has a clipping of, but realizes she will never know which two, and so smells them all and crushes each to her breast for good measure

MY EYEGLASSES, covered with a thickening layer of dust that I never seem to notice, that I simply adjust to, until at last I clean them out of habit, and discover a new world sharp and filled with detail, whose novelty and clarity I forget about completely within five minutes

YOUR SIGNATURE, rendered illegible by disease

John Weber, the first person to answer my ad, appeared pleasant enough, tall and round-faced with a receding cap of curls, sloped shoulders, and an easy, calm demeanor. He nodded constantly as I showed him around the place, as if willing to accept and agree with every single thing in the world for the rest of his life. At the time, these seemed like good portents. I didn’t like looking for roommates, and I didn’t like dealing with people, so I told him he was welcome to the room and accepted his check.

He moved in the next day with the help of a wan, stringy-haired woman wearing hiking shorts, though it was late October and forty degrees outside. The woman did not smile and hauled his boxes in the door with practiced efficiency while Weber began unpacking in his room. I asked her if she wanted any help.

“No,” she said.

“Are you sure?” I wasn’t doing anything, just waiting for noon to come along so that I could catch my bus.

She said nothing in response, but shook her head vigorously, her hair falling over her face. I returned to my coffee and magazine and left her alone.

When I came home from work that night, John Weber was standing alone in the kitchen with an apron around his waist. Various things were hissing and bubbling in pots and pans on the stove, and he beckoned me over with his spatula. The kitchen table was set with two placemats—they must have belonged to him, because I had never owned any in my life—and there were separate glasses for water and wine. I didn’t recognize the silverware, either. It was heavy and bright and lay upon folded cloth napkins.

“Expecting a guest?” I was thinking of the woman from that morning.

“Nope. Just a roommate!”

He was grinning, waiting for a reaction.

“You mean me?”

“You’re my only roommate!” he laughed. “Take a load off!”

His manner could be described as bustling. He pulled out my chair for me, took the briefcase from my hand and set it on the floor behind me. He said, “Red or white?”

I looked at the table, and back at him. “What?”

“Red or white?”

“Uh …”

He rolled, jocularly, his large, slightly bulging gray eyes, then gestured toward the counter, where two bottles of wine stood, uncorked. One of them, the white, was tucked into a cylindrical stone bottle cooler, the kind you keep in the freezer. I had never seen one outside of a cooking supply catalog, and had never considered that somebody might actually own one.

“Uh … red,” I said.

“You sure not white?”

“Yes.”

“Because the white spoils faster once you open it.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “White wine gives me a headache.”

He rolled his eyes again, not so jocularly this time, and snatched the white wine off the counter. Into the fridge it went with a clatter, and the cooler into the freezer. He poured my red wine with unnecessary haste, and some of it slopped over onto the tablecloth, which must also have belonged to him.

“How was your day?” he asked a minute later, his back to me, his arms working over the pots and pans.

“Fine.” I took a swig of wine. It was not the gamy plonk I usually drank. “How was yours?”

“Exciting! I’m glad to be here.”

“Is your room all put together?”

“Sure!” He turned off each burner and began transferring food to a pair of china plates. “I don’t have many possessions,” he went on. “I don’t believe in them.”

“Well, what about the napkins and placemats and tablecloth and all that?”

“Oh, someone gave them to me.”

With a flourish, he whipped off his apron and hung it on a wall hook that I was certain he had installed there himself for this express purpose. In response to this effort, the landlord would no doubt someday withhold twenty dollars of the security deposit. Then John Weber lifted the two plates high into the air and glided them onto the placemats. With a similar motion, he seated himself, then grinned at me again, awaiting my reaction.

Before me lay a lovely-looking lamb chop, overlaid with a coarse sauce of what appeared to be diced tomatoes, onions, and rosemary. There was a little pile of roasted new potatoes and some spears of asparagus. It was really very impressive, and I looked at it in dismay as the sounds of rending and smacking reached me from across the table. It was quite a sight, John Weber digging in; he yanked shreds of lamb from the chop with his incisors, folded entire spears of asparagus roughly into his mouth. His jaw clicked and popped. He wasn’t a slob—on the contrary, he dabbed constantly at the corners of his mouth with his napkin—but his ardent champing had its closest analogue in the desperate feast of a hyena hunched over a still-twitching zebra. It was unsettling. I tried not to make any sound.

“Hey,” he said, his pupils dilated, his shoulders faintly heaving. “What’s the matter?”

“John,” I said. “I’m sorry to tell you this. I already ate.”

The fork slowly descended to the plate.

“Why didn’t you say?” he wanted to know.

“You’d already cooked it.”

“You could have called home.”

“John,” I said, meeting his hurt and angry gaze. “I don’t know you. You moved in this morning. Why would I expect you to cook dinner for me?”

He waved his hand in front of his face, sweeping the question away. “We’re roommates,” he said. “We have to show one another a little bit of respect.”

I should have kicked him out right then and there. But I didn’t. How could I? You don’t kick a man out of his home for making you dinner. And I had already cashed the check.

“All right,” I said. “I’m sorry.” And I picked up my knife and fork and went to work.

The apartment building in question stood, or rather lay, at the bottom of a mountain. It was a one-story strip of six units, with four arranged in a row and two more at an angle, to accommodate a rock outcropping in the back. Our apartment was one of the ones on the angle, and our back windows looked out at the outcropping. Even at the height of summer, we didn’t get a single ray of sunlight until midafternoon.

The mountain was called Mount Peak—a terrible name for a mountain. It didn’t even have a peak: it was rounded on top. It was part of the western foothills of the Rockies, and though this all sounds very bracing and natural, the fact is that Mount Peak was, in almost every sense, a thoroughly shitty mountain. The southern third had been completely chopped off to make way for a highway, its western face had been logged and stood bare and weedy. An abandoned housing project jutted out to the north like a tumor. In addition, about a hundred feet above our apartment, the local high school had spelled out the name of its mascot, BEAVERS, in white-painted stones, and a few of these would roll down each week and thump against our back wall. Sometimes one of them would ricochet off a tree stump and crash through a window.