The Dwelling: A Novel (15 page)

“You at work?”

“Yeah, where the hell else would I be? How far did you get on the storyboards? You got any more?” Dan ignored the question. He was just making conversation anyway.

“What time are you taking off?”

“Probably at two. I’ll go from here to Jester’s. Katie’s not coming to meet the Apex guy. She’s got some grant thing at three-thirty. You might as well show up around two, two-thirty, hey? We should go over our shit—our
presentation.
I gotta stop using ‘shit’ as a noun, man. I gotta go. I’ll call you later,” he said, and hung up.

He had to drop Becca’s clothes off at her office before he met Max. He looked at the clock on the mantel. It was ten-thirty. Becca’s office was across town—of course—from Jester’s. He would need a half hour, minimum, for that. Fifteen minutes in the office, yadda-ya, twenty minutes from there to Jester’s. Meeting Max at two-thirty. He would have to leave the house by quarter past one, just to be safe. Eat, shower, pack. Get the portfolio, the sketches.

He dialed Becca’s office.

Becca answered on the first ring. “Rebecca Mason, Patient Services,” she said authoritatively into the phone.

“It’s me,” he said.

Her voice changed immediately. “You gotta stop this, Daniel Mason! You are freaking me out. I just had the worst experience in traffic—”

“What happened?”

She sighed into the phone angrily. “Never mind. Nothing. But you’re creeping me out. So stop it.”

“All right. Tell me later. I don’t have time now, anyway. What should I bring you to change into?”

“I’m just going to go home and change.”

“Becca, come on. You promised.”

“I didn’t promise anything. You
promised
. I have to check the work the painters did. I have to make sure the door is locked. I don’t want to jump in the car and drive to some bar. I need a buffer.”

He made a face into the phone, pressed his lips together hard. “Fine. I’m packing something for you and I will drop it off at your office. I’m also packing stuff for the weekend. We’ll go to a hotel—”

“We can’t
afford
a hotel!”

“Then we’ll crash at Max and Kate’s. We can talk about it when I get there.”

“Do not come to my office!”
She almost yelled it into the phone. He imagined her face, red, angry. He held the phone away slightly from his ear. “This is out of control,” she said. “I’m hanging up now. I will see you later at Jester’s. Good luck with your meeting. Good-bye.” She hung up.

What exactly was he supposed to tell her by way of explanation?
Honey, sometimes I hear music coming from the room under the stairs. Oh, and also—there’s a woman in there and she makes me—

There was no way to explain it. He would pack a bag for himself, nothing too dramatic. It wasn’t like he was going to start throwing everything back into boxes. Just a fresh T-shirt, clean jeans, socks, underwear. He’d get his toiletries after his shower. Enough for the weekend. Maybe after the weekend they could get someone in and—

What? Exorcise the place?

Maybe Becca was right. It was nuts. The living room had the unlived-in look of a place that had yet to hang pictures or toss magazines around. There hadn’t been time to live in it yet. The TV aerial was down. The VCR wasn’t even hooked up. Pieces of art he’d been collecting since college leaned up against each other, and the walls, unhung. The rug bore traces of popcorn Styrofoam from packing boxes.

All the windows except the living room were uncurtained.

Post-traumatic stress syndrome. Sleep paralysis.
And nothing actually happened last night, except for a bad dream. It was just a bad dream.

What about the door? The bedroom door was open last night. He closed it.

The house shifts. It’s old. The doors in old houses—especially on the second floor—must be hard-pressed just to stay hung. The latch could be loose; the tongue-in-groove thing could be off. It could be anything.

(Hello, sailor)

He could be losing his mind.

But Becca had something happen in the bathroom. And the footprints, water. She hadn’t said she’d come down. What about that?

He stared at the phone in his hand, tempted to call her back, demand she tell him what had happened in the bathroom. What had frightened her? His thumb played across the on/off button, but he didn’t press it.

Zeb Connelly rubbed the grizzle on his chin. He hadn’t had a chance to shave that morning. He and his partner, Norm, had been finishing another job until after eleven. Zeb had pretty much fallen asleep eating the reheated roast beef his wife had nuked for him. She’d made him get right to bed. The alarm had rung at six forty-five. There hadn’t been time.

“I think it’s a shadow,” Zeb said to Norm.

Norm tilted his head first one way, then another. He shrugged. “I dunno. She says it’s a stain.” The two of them looked behind them. The room was conspicuously empty. There was nothing, literally, to cast a shadow and, in fact, the way the light in the room was the two of them did not cast a shadow.

“It’s something,” Zeb said dismissively, and went back to covering it with a heavy, stain-special primer. The customer is always right.

“The customer’s right,” Norm said, grinning. “Fifty-two bucks an hour, I’m not arguing.”

Zeb nodded thoughtfully. “As long as she doesn’t come back to us in a week and tell us we didn’t do it right.”

“Should we get the husband up here, take a look? Back us up?”

Earl thought about it. Husbands were unreliable, as far as decorating work went. They could get him up there and point to the wall until they were blue. A lot of times they still didn’t see what they were talking about. You get a woman in a room and she could find a wrinkle in wallpaper from a hundred yards away. He shrugged helplessly.

“Looks like a bed,” Norm commented.

Zeb nodded. “Yeah, sort of.”

“Should we get the husband up here?”

“Nah. Let’s just get it done. I’ll leave her a note, like a disclaimer. We can stick it with the can of primer. We covered it. That’s all we can do.” They nodded, glad to have decided.

The two men worked mostly in silence. In their overalls, with the constant labor, neither of them remarked on how cold the room was.

In spite of what Becca had suggested, Dan figured he needed a toke if he was going to go into that room. And he had to go into the room. He needed a bunch of stuff. Especially the portfolio. It wouldn’t do to arrive at the meeting with a bunch of crumpled pages torn out of a sketchbook. Even if it was a comic book.

Graphic novel, he corrected himself. With a guilty glance over his shoulder, he slipped outside to the backyard—the nicest place in the whole house, as far as he was concerned.

He did everything else, first. He packed a small overnight bag, and after a serious amount of deliberation, he packed one for Becca too. He was alarmed at the variety of clothes that faced him in her side of the cupboard and her drawers. The underwear alone was daunting.

He picked out a set of casual clothes (did women change their underwear when they changed their outfits? He decided to be safe and packed a fresh brassiere and panties, and a package of pantyhose—adding a pair of socks at the last minute). He laid out a pale blue T-shirt, one that he liked on her, and a pair of jeans that he hadn’t seen her wear in a while.

For the weekend—and he did not think of anything beyond that—he packed her a nightgown, more socks, underwear and two more brassieres; he packed a blouse and another pair of jeans, and another package of pantyhose. Unopened.

That had seemed easy compared to what faced him on top of her dresser. There was makeup in a little case—he figured he would just take the whole thing. There were hairbrushes, three of them. He packed the one he’d seen her use that morning. Sometimes she wore her hair in a ponytail. He didn’t know if it was for practical reasons, or for utilitarian reasons, but he packed one of her cloth-covered elastics in case it was important. She had creams and lotions and
equipment,
and he had no idea as to what the essentials were. He had seen her use all of it at one time or another, but what was it she used every day? She was terribly fastidious. He debated just throwing all of it into a bag.

It was overwhelming. Finally, he went mentally through her routine, the parts of the routine he saw, and packed what was familiar. He wondered suddenly about tampons and pads and all that. As far as he knew, she didn’t have her period. Even if it seemed like it.

Satisfied, he separated it all into two piles, sending her makeup and a brush along with her change of clothes, pleased that he’d thought of it all.

Then all there was left to do was to get his stuff.
What can happen with the painters here?

He started into the little blue room.

Gordon Huff stopped by after lunch. He perched himself casually on the side of her desk, pushing aside some papers to do it. She was in the middle of a statement for the accountants on the Nutrition budget. Seeing him pleased her.

“How goes the afternoon for Rebecca?” he asked familiarly.

“Well, I think I just saved the Center about seven thousand dollars annually, on the Retirement Homes budget,” she said terribly pleased.

He raised his eyebrows. “Oh? And how did you do that?”

“I have included a codicil here for the individual homes to choose a picnic ham, instead of…the other kind,” she finished delicately. It wouldn’t do to say “real” ham. There wasn’t quite another word for it, though.

“Well, well. Impressive. Have you saved any other fortunes today?”

She chuckled. He seemed very cheerful, almost as though he had a secret or something. “You’re in a good mood, sir.”

“Sir?” He leaned in discreetly toward her. “I thought we were friends. Call me Huff. I’m looking forward to dinner on Monday.” In spite of herself, Becca blushed, her cheeks heating up. She didn’t dare glance up at him, in case he took it for something that it wasn’t.

“Have you got plans for the weekend?” he asked. It sounded like pleasantries to her, rather than any sort of real question.
My husband may have sold his comic book. We’re going out to celebrate at a dirty, smoky bar where the only kind of cocktail you can get is a beer. And you?

“Nothing special,” she said. “What about your plans?”
And your wife? Will she be joining us for dinner?

He shook his head, dismissively. “Golfing with Paul Nusome tomorrow. Feeling pretty rusty, it’s a new season. Do you golf, Miss Mason?” She cringed at the error and did not correct it. She felt suddenly tired. Paul Nusome was head of their pharmaceutical division—everyone’s pharmaceutical division. Impressive.

She shook her head. “No. I haven’t had the opportunity, I suppose. I’m not very athletic.” She was sorry she had said it as soon as the words were out of her mouth, because they gave him an excuse to drag his eyes over her sitting form. Sitting duck.

“Well, we’ll have to get you out this season.”
The royal we? You and the missus? Does your wife golf?
She smiled sweetly.

“That would be a pleasure,” she said. She met his eyes. “Have you heard any more about Don Geisbrecht?” She tried to gauge his expression, but it was inscrutable.

“He’s still interested,” he said. His voice was controlled, his eyes steady on hers. She felt suddenly that it was true, that the great Geisbrecht was indeed going to apply. If that was true then, under ordinary circumstances, he would get the position. He was part of the Group. The Old Boys. He was a man. He was forty to her twenty-nine. He was old blood, and while in the real world new blood might have made a genuine difference in operations and in the future, in the world she moved in old blood ruled. Old
male
blood was at the top.

I am the logical person for the job.

That was of no consequence. She widened her eyes slightly in an age-old (old blood) way and smiled. “Will anyone else be joining us for dinner?” she said sweetly.

He let a grin spread slowly over his face. Not an unhandsome face. She glanced away demurely. Her eyes landed on his hands. They were large. Thick-fingered. Soft. His nails were clean. Hands of cell phones and palm pilots; hands of checks and credit cards. He drove a Jag. Not a new one, but a Jag. Thick-fingered hands on the leather-covered steering wheel. Briefly, without any control over it, she thought about them on her. For just a second, maybe less, she felt small, and submissive (powerless) and, maybe, just a little curious.

Maybe even aroused.

“No,” he said simply. “I was thinking Donovan’s. Have you ever been?” he asked.

I’m married.
It was on the tip of her tongue. Did he know? Maybe he didn’t. Maybe he didn’t. There was no wedding ring to tattle, a holdover from college days when neither she nor Dan wanted any of the usual conventions to hold them to each other or advertise ownership. She supposed she wished now (or not) that they had. He had access to personnel files. Surely, if he was interested, he would have looked. A woman would have.
I would know his sign,
she thought giddily. She snuck a look back up at him.
And where afterward? Hôtel de Chandai?
The Jag was a convertible. He drove it even in the winter. Dan behind the wheel of his old Mustang flew through her mind. Guilt colored her cheeks.
He’ll think it’s him.
Donovan’s was very expensive. She hoped he knew he was buying. At least.

“No, I haven’t,” she said. The fact that he might know and just not care was frightening and intoxicating.
I am here because I want to be. This is what I want.
The thought occurred to her all at once, and it was a relief.

She understood. Dan faded into the background. It was one-fifteen.

The house reeked of paint. After his shower, Dan had stopped in and said hello, again. He asked them if they wanted some coffee or something. They were eating their lunch, each of them sitting on the floor on a dust-sheet, old-fashioned lunchboxes opened beside them. Thermos caps filled with creamy liquid. Coffee and milk, packed by their wives.