what I imagined was a sound.
I returned the letters and closed the drawer.
This moment felt too familiar. I was standing in a stranger’s house, looking through his things. In the past four months this had become standard. I would be naked, boiling a vendor’s kettle to make postcoital tea. And as I drank that tea, or helped myself to a green apple from a careful arrangement meant for display, perhaps Alexander would be wearing the vendor’s bathrobe.
Now, looking again at the computer screen, I felt a hit of self-revulsion.
Suddenly I was conscious of being beneath this sky moving in color-coded fronts across the weather radar. I was beneath Alexander’s clouds, his ozone, his atmosphere. With a rush of vertigo, I sensed my imprisonment.
In the entrance hall, I tried the door handle again, even though I knew it was locked. The reality of this situation struck me with a mixture of dread—fierce, immediate, intuitive—and something close to hilarity; a kind of sick humor, a humor that made me feel sick. Of course this would be happening, I thought, of course it would.Here was the punishment for my own transgressions. I was now utterly in a stranger’s house, and this time I did not have a key.
Laughing while feeling nauseous, I pictured a brothel’s panic button—the lesson I hadn’t learned—and again I tried the handle, and again. At school I’d laugh whenever the teachers reprimanded me, and my nerves came across as insouciance, and the teachers would get angrier, and the absurdity made me keep going—just as it did now. Of course this would happen. I pulled at the handle in case I had misunderstood its mechanism. No.
Had Alexander calculated no one would know where I was?
In the dining room French doors, sheathed in their moth-eaten velvet, led to the veranda. I pulled aside the curtains to try each door handle and found every one of them also locked. Last night’s silver candlestick was still in the center of the table, and just as I pictured myself smashing a window I noticed a little hook partly hidden behind the curtains, upon which hung a key. I stuck the key in the keyhole. Pushing out onto the veranda, I took in lungfuls of fresh air.
I rushed toward the driveway where the Mercedes, Alexander’s maroon sedan, was parked. I went to the driver’s side, thinking even as I did so, You’re overreacting. There’s no real problem; stay calm. My fingers on the cold handle, I attempted to open the door. It wouldn’t, of course. And what if it had? I wasn’t exactly going to hot-wire the car. I looked around. Just garden. A still and vast garden.
A bird flew overhead, and the day was so silent I heard its beating wings.
Spreading in meticulous symmetry from the house were the planting beds and pathways that had once been carefully designed and landscaped. They were now in disrepair, but I found the picture oddly reassuring.
Upon the lawn were trees set out like characters in a play: an elm, a chestnut, an oak, all sharing in the house’s air of regret, their canopies having fallen—and that was it. The plants were from an English garden. I could have been standing in a park back at home, one that no one visited. It was completely empty except for three or four wooden benches discreetly placed under the trees, and birds—the wrong birds. Gray parrots with hot-pink bellies strutted across the damp grass.
A wind came through and swung the empty branches. Then the stillness again, everything waiting. The view from my bedroom window had shown that beyond the garden was flat farmland as far as the eye could see. This was a little lesson on infinite-point perspective—I was standing right under those swirling electronic clouds surrounded now by vanishing points.
V
I returned the key to its place and waited in the kitchen. When I heard the sound of an engine approaching, I watched through the window as a dirty white utility truck pulled up with two lean black dogs chained to the back,
I returned the letters and closed the drawer.
This moment felt too familiar. I was standing in a stranger’s house, looking through his things. In the past four months this had become standard. I would be naked, boiling a vendor’s kettle to make postcoital tea. And as I drank that tea, or helped myself to a green apple from a careful arrangement meant for display, perhaps Alexander would be wearing the vendor’s bathrobe.
Now, looking again at the computer screen, I felt a hit of self-revulsion.
Suddenly I was conscious of being beneath this sky moving in color-coded fronts across the weather radar. I was beneath Alexander’s clouds, his ozone, his atmosphere. With a rush of vertigo, I sensed my imprisonment.
In the entrance hall, I tried the door handle again, even though I knew it was locked. The reality of this situation struck me with a mixture of dread—fierce, immediate, intuitive—and something close to hilarity; a kind of sick humor, a humor that made me feel sick. Of course this would be happening, I thought, of course it would.Here was the punishment for my own transgressions. I was now utterly in a stranger’s house, and this time I did not have a key.
Laughing while feeling nauseous, I pictured a brothel’s panic button—the lesson I hadn’t learned—and again I tried the handle, and again. At school I’d laugh whenever the teachers reprimanded me, and my nerves came across as insouciance, and the teachers would get angrier, and the absurdity made me keep going—just as it did now. Of course this would happen. I pulled at the handle in case I had misunderstood its mechanism. No.
Had Alexander calculated no one would know where I was?
In the dining room French doors, sheathed in their moth-eaten velvet, led to the veranda. I pulled aside the curtains to try each door handle and found every one of them also locked. Last night’s silver candlestick was still in the center of the table, and just as I pictured myself smashing a window I noticed a little hook partly hidden behind the curtains, upon which hung a key. I stuck the key in the keyhole. Pushing out onto the veranda, I took in lungfuls of fresh air.
I rushed toward the driveway where the Mercedes, Alexander’s maroon sedan, was parked. I went to the driver’s side, thinking even as I did so, You’re overreacting. There’s no real problem; stay calm. My fingers on the cold handle, I attempted to open the door. It wouldn’t, of course. And what if it had? I wasn’t exactly going to hot-wire the car. I looked around. Just garden. A still and vast garden.
A bird flew overhead, and the day was so silent I heard its beating wings.
Spreading in meticulous symmetry from the house were the planting beds and pathways that had once been carefully designed and landscaped. They were now in disrepair, but I found the picture oddly reassuring.
Upon the lawn were trees set out like characters in a play: an elm, a chestnut, an oak, all sharing in the house’s air of regret, their canopies having fallen—and that was it. The plants were from an English garden. I could have been standing in a park back at home, one that no one visited. It was completely empty except for three or four wooden benches discreetly placed under the trees, and birds—the wrong birds. Gray parrots with hot-pink bellies strutted across the damp grass.
A wind came through and swung the empty branches. Then the stillness again, everything waiting. The view from my bedroom window had shown that beyond the garden was flat farmland as far as the eye could see. This was a little lesson on infinite-point perspective—I was standing right under those swirling electronic clouds surrounded now by vanishing points.
V
I returned the key to its place and waited in the kitchen. When I heard the sound of an engine approaching, I watched through the window as a dirty white utility truck pulled up with two lean black dogs chained to the back,
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