Thy Neighbor Read online

  But Monica was just bullish in her quietude, like a T-shirt that says, GO FUCK YOURSELF IF YOU CAN’T TAKE IT, except that she was much too confident to swear or need signage. The announcement made itself in slow moves and few words, and in her dancer’s posture, which, to be honest, was just a bit too this side of Mia Farrow unhinged for my taste, but not enough to tear me from the pull of her. There was something creepy there, no doubt, as if she had a plan and was taking her time, or like she knew she could have you killed with a nod, so why hurry? Why even raise your voice? It was weird, but good cult movie weird, and I liked it.

  I just did.

  It fit into the part of me that no one sees and that the foulmouthed clown in the polo shirt strenuously conceals. With her, I was coming as close as I ever have or can to being myself. Whoever that is.

  And ain’t that love?

  By definition?

  Or something like that?

  Maybe. But I couldn’t have said so.

  She had been through way too much already in her young life, or so it seemed, to tolerate romance. Hadn’t I? She had a soured view at twenty-something. Long before that, probably.

  I didn’t ask her how old she was. That was damning frivolous speech, or so her poise implied. If you can’t deduce even the obvious, buster, don’t advertise your ignorance.

  But I did deduce enough. She had those wisps of golden hair all over her belly and her inner thighs and forearms, the ones that line with tiny bubbles in the bath, and turn coarse and black or break off on a girl’s thirtieth birthday, so I knew she was well south of that mark.

  She also had that soft, forgiving roundness in all her limbs, all the way down to her knuckles, which were plump and barely creased and which, if this weren’t worldly Monica we were talking about, you could still almost see clutching a purple pen and writing, “Dear diary.”

  But that innocence was long gone, or time-lapsed in the past-life portion of her brain, inaccessible to the adult.

  So what do you say to someone like that? Seeing the scar tissue and the baby fat both at once, or thinking you do?

  You say something tired, of course, but something you actually mean, so it’s not a total disaster.

  “Are you okay?” I said to her figure in the window, knowing full well that, where it counted most, she wasn’t.

  She didn’t answer.

  “Monica?”

  “Yes, yes,” she said, annoyed. “I’m fine.”

  “Did I hurt you?”

  “Of course not.”

  There was a long pause, and then, more softly, with kindness in her voice, she said, “I’m glad we met. I’m glad we did this. It’s good.”

  And then she eased herself away from the window and began putting on her clothes. I watched her. Every motion, every choice of garment, and in which order.

  She put her socks on first, which I’d never seen anyone do, especially after sex with a stranger, and she sat to do it, very deliberately, raising one foot at a time to the seat of the chair, resting her chin on the bent knee, exposing the cleave of her vulva without modesty or guile. She gathered each sock with her thumbs and forefingers into concertinaed rolls around the toe, then unfurled them gingerly, hunch by hunch, over the arch, around the curve of the heel, and up the bend of the ankle, straightening her leg for the last pull, like a ballerina at the barre.

  I loved it that she wore socks, plain black socks that she’d probably bought at a street fair in packs of six. And I loved it that her bra had no underwire or clasp. She slipped it on over her head and slid the stretch cotton over her breasts, untwined the slender straps across her shoulders, and wrestled abruptly into her shirt, a tank, formfitting, flattering, but in no way crude like the hooker halters the sluts wore at the Swan.

  Her underwear was as sensible as the rest. Hipsters, white. Probably also bought in packs. Her jeans were loose and worn, hanging low and boyish on her narrow hips and ripped around the hem where they’d dragged on the ground. Her sneakers were black and plain, canvas slip-ons with a white rubber sole.

  All simple easy wear. No advertisement for any kind of cool or attitude or need to be seen. Still she was beautiful, and she made you look. The kind of person who could wear a sack and have allure, because the signal was coming from her mind and beaming right to your mind, if you had one, or bouncing off and bewildering the vacuum it found there instead.

  * * *

  It was the same every time we met. The sex that somehow retained the anonymity of the first attempt, but also gained familiarity over time, and then the sitting mostly in silence—we did this, as I did almost everything else, in my study—she at the window, I on the couch watching her or half dozing. And then she would get dressed and go, stopping to put her hand on my shoulder on her way out the door.

  She did this each time. Stopped, placed her palm on me, let it rest there for a beat, consolingly, as if she knew I was grieving and wanted me to know that she knew, even if she didn’t know what for.

  That came to be my favorite part, the part I waited for and needed the most. It meant a thousand times more than anything she could have said, or anything anyone ever had said, about my parents or about me. There was so much care and camaraderie in it, like a curative laying on of hands between the sick and dying.

  I never moved when she touched me. I never looked up at her in recognition. I just stared at the place where she had been near the window, or at the weak reflection of her in the window, framed by the doorway and backlit by the light in the hall: her figure, my darker mass below, her arm between us.

  We looked like we belonged in this house with the other partial residents. Ghosts at the window between worlds, passing across panes of glass as plays of light and shadow that would shatter with a carelessly tossed stone. I looked at our reflections, and in my head I always said something to her, as if I half believed she could read my thoughts, or receive them through her arm in the flesh.

  This time I said, “Tell me,” because I knew she was hiding so much. The hidden things were gaining weight with every contact. Her past would make its way into every acquaintance, as mine had, and it would come, as it always had for me, to a breaking point. Either you shared or you turned away.

  I didn’t want her to turn away, and I knew that this time I couldn’t.

  I had given up.

  When I met Monica I was already too weak with the wear and dissolution of the past thirteen years to do anything but lean passively away and scratch casually at anyone who tried to get under my skin, until they atrophied with neglect and fell off like a scab. But I couldn’t do that with Monica, obviously. Because she’d gotten in. Or, more to the point, because she knew something.

  That’s what infatuation always feels like. Like the other person knows something, or maybe a lot of things that you just have to find out. Things that seem crucial, or meant for you alone, and the whole point of the game is for them to keep the files from you and for you to hack your way in.

  Monica was a skilled enigmatist.

  Actually, that’s not quite right. She was a maze and a puzzle to herself as much as to me. But she made me feel as though I had the encrypted map or the hidden piece that would set it all out in the open and cure her. And the reverse was also true. She seemed to have my missing information, the bit that would finally, mercifully put me down for good.

  And that’s what I was looking for. Something to finish the goddamned endless purgatorial pause of my stopgap junior-grade life. Something sure enough and with a steady hand that could achieve the desired effect with one blow. I kept Monica around for that.

  Whenever, if ever, she got around to it.

  3

  I was up all night again with Dave. I woke again on the couch.

  This time, no puke, and no lunatic notes from myself. Just the usual morning sickness that comes of not having
been sick the night before.

  My head is like an anvil, and I could swear that my mouth and my asshole have changed places. My entire alimentary canal feels as if it’s been scoured with steel wool, sphincter to sphincter.

  And so it goes.

  Manikin me has stamina if nothing else. We’ll give him that. Dedication to the cause of progressive dehydration, cell death, and episodic amnesia. Self-absorption remains intact and growing. Waking suicidal fantasy robust.

  It must be getting on toward eight. I’ve been lying here for hours. Dusk is settling around the window casements and in the corners of the room. I can see from here that Mrs. Bloom’s kitchen light is on across the street, and her weak porch light, too. She always turns that on at dusk, and then the kitchen light after, fortifying the house for the long night alone.

  In recent years, on winter afternoons, when it got dark early and I would be lying here, as usual, in state, half waking, it became a ritual to look across the street and watch Mrs. Bloom moving around her house turning on lights. Now I wait for it in summer, too, as I have tonight, even if I’ve been awake for some time.

  She turns on a lamp in the upstairs window, a single candle bulb like the ones people put up at Christmas. But she puts it only in that one corner window upstairs, and she keeps it there all year long. Every night it’s the last light she puts on, and every morning it’s the last light she turns off. On the nights when I haven’t passed out, usually when I’m with Monica or I haven’t been with Dave, I see her do this just before I go to bed, just as the light is coming up.

  I find it calming and reassuring, as if the night watchman has been on duty. The last light going out is his signal that it’s safe to sleep.

  As a kid, on summer nights around this time, in early June, when my parents put me to bed, I would lie in my room and look out across the street at the line of trees behind the Blooms’ house, bulbous black silhouettes against a lilac sky. In their shapes I traced the profile of a sleeping giant lying on his back: Afro hair, short forehead, long nose, chin, chest—even legs that disappeared behind the houses next door and reemerged down the block as upturned feet. In a breeze it looked as if the giant’s hair was rustling or his chest was moving up and down, breathing. I imagined that he was there to protect me, and so long as he was asleep, all was well with the world and our piece of it.

  The Blooms still lived there then. They’ve lived here since the development was built nearly fifty years ago. Mr. Bloom died a few years back, and since then Mrs. Bloom has been making her night and morning rounds.

  But the candle bulb has been in the window for a lot longer than that. It’s been there at least as long as I’ve been back. I remember seeing it the night of my parents’ funeral. For thirteen years or more that bulb has been lit every night and extinguished every morning at dawn.

  As for the other lights staying on all night, that started only after Mr. Bloom’s death. She must be afraid to sleep in a dark house alone, or she thinks the lights will deter burglars. Then again, maybe she’s like me and stays up all night for other reasons, except instead of throwing herself blindly into the bull run of human debauchery, as if she thinks the angel of mercy is in the oncoming traffic, she’s reading calmly by lamplight, sipping a glass of sherry and waiting patiently to die with some dignity.

  That’s how I feel, anyway, dignity or not. And I had my parents for only twenty-one years, a quarter of which I was too young to process or intelligibly record, and another third of which I spent away at school. But the Blooms were married for fifty years, or thereabouts. Maybe more. Fifty fuckin’ years. And they were there for all of it.

  Ten years in, they had one daughter, Karen, who grew up way too fast and took off pregnant at seventeen or eighteen. Dropped out of high school in her senior year, hooked up with a bad crowd, left, and never came back. Except once, about a year later, to dump the kid she didn’t want and couldn’t rear. A girl. The Blooms named her Robin and raised her as their daughter. Karen fell off the map until a few years later, when the Blooms got word that she’d died of an overdose in a squat somewhere out east, Baltimore or Philly.

  It seems that running away runs in their family, because the Blooms kept Robin only until she was twelve, and then she, too, just disappeared. Poof. Gone. Maybe she didn’t believe her mother was dead and went to find her. Maybe her father came and took her. Or maybe it was a pedophile with a ladder and some chloroform. No one knows. But that’s what the candle bulb in the upstairs window is for, I’m sure. For Robin. A reminder. A vigil. A signal, in case she’s out there watching, that says: You’re always welcome home.

  I hardly knew Robin, or even knew of her. By the time she was four or so I had headed off to boarding school and then college, and by the time I came back she was gone. But by all accounts she was a good kid. Sweet. Reserved. Excellent student. Precocious, actually. Read all the time—poetry especially, and stuff that was way, way above a normal elementary schooler’s level. Way above a high schooler’s level.

  I remember my mom telling me about one particular day when she’d gone out to get the mail—the mailboxes are clustered across the street on an easement of the Blooms’ property—and she saw Robin lying out on the Blooms’ lawn reading a copy of what looked like The Inferno. My mom knew a thing or two about Dante. She had a PhD from Barnard in English lit, and she was a voracious reader all her life, keeping up with trends in academic and trade publishing. She said she remembered having had enough trouble in her time as a TA getting her freshman charges to read The Inferno, let alone understand it. But an eleven-year-old? There was no way.

  She thought she was seeing things, so she asked Robin if she could have a look at the book. Robin handed it over with a shrug. Sure enough, it was the real deal—and the Pinsky translation no less, in a bilingual edition with the English on one page and the Renaissance Italian on the facing one. Both pages were covered with Robin’s childishly looped marginalia.

  Mom was very impressed by this.

  “Pinsky’s is the only English translation that comes close to preserving the delicate terza rima of the original,” she exclaimed. “It’s subtle and complex, and from what I could see, that kid was getting it. Really getting it. She wasn’t just carrying it around for show, scribbling hearts and love doodles in the white spots. She had actually written the word ‘TRUST’ in capital letters next to the first appearance of Virgil’s name.”

  Amazing girl, I guess. And a tortured one, if that’s the reading she was taking refuge in at that age. A really sad story. As sad as my own.

  After my parents died and I took over the house, the Blooms were the only people I felt comfortable with. Not that we spent long afternoons together over tea, but now and again, if we were both outside at the same time and happened to see each other—usually it was Mr. Bloom I’d see—we’d stop and talk for a few minutes.

  We’d stand in one or the other’s driveway, or on the curb near the trash cans and recycling bins that one of us was taking out or bringing in, and we’d talk in that liberating, socially graceless way that people who’ve lost everything do.

  I felt sorry for them. They’d had it rough, losing two girls, and they took it hard—on themselves—as if they’d done something wrong that had made it all turn out so badly. Only they didn’t know what that thing was.

  I felt a kinship with them, too, because they were the only people I knew who had been through anything remotely as painful and inexplicable as I had.

  The Blooms had no more answers than I did, and no more sense of reparation, or expiable fault, which they would have gladly taken as a substitute if it could have brought some relief. But no power can absolve an indiscernible sin. We were like overly conscientious kids in the confessional, feeling the dogmatic heft of human wrongdoing but unable to ferret out our own crimes.

  As a seven- or eight-year-old, when I first started going to confession, I ofte
n confessed to things I hadn’t done—small things, lies, impure thoughts, whatever came to me—because I hadn’t actually done anything bad that I could think of, and then I’d cry while receiving absolution, convinced that the black mark was still there on my soul.

  But then I was no great student of church teaching. Most of it was lost on me and left me bewildered in ways that made my parents pant and choke with laughter when I asked them about it. For the longest time, I thought the priest was saying Jesus and the twelve decycles, and I always wondered why the son of God was riding around with a bunch of clowns. At the time, I earnestly thought of running away with the circus, like it was a good deed I could perform during Lent. I never lived that one down—it was a family joke forever.

  But through the veil of humor and confusion, my remorse was real enough. Remorse over something I couldn’t understand.

  That was the feeling the Blooms and I shared in later life.

  After Mr. Bloom died, I never saw Mrs. Bloom, except obscurely, framed in windows, walking through the house and turning those lights on or off. I never rang her bell or peeked in. I respected her privacy and the web of grief that had spun itself and caught her as ill-fatedly and fatally as a hapless insect in spring flight.

  She’s the only one of my closest neighbors I haven’t spied on, and the only one I never will, on principle.

  As for everyone else? I despise their hermetic normalcy too much not to violate it, and for no better reason than the sheer pleasure of hearing it pop. They don’t deserve their happiness if that’s even what it is. To me it’s fake happiness. The margarine version of what the philosophers meant. But it seems to do for the majority, and all the quirks and bland neuroses that fill it up yield surprising substance if you look with hateful enough eyes, hear with spiteful enough ears. If you take a resentful interest, you can make it more than what it is. If you want to destroy it from the minutiae out, you will see the diabolical in the detail, and savor it. A voyeur’s incriminating pointillism. Connect the dots and make the damning picture.