“Everything is still the same,” she answers him, curling her hand back to cup his cheek. “It will always be the same, if I have anything to do with it.”
We glide to the end of Church Street, going past the yarn shop and the bead and millinery store and the cleaner’s Renny mentioned, whose Vietnamese owners I met only recently when I went around soliciting donations for the local boys’ and girls’ soccer league, which I have long and enthusiastically supported. The couple at the cleaner’s didn’t seem to understand, staring at me stonily and wondering why I would be requesting such a thing, to give me money for others’ children to play. I did not attempt to explain how this could benefit them in the end, as I believed it had benefited me and my business, at least in feeling and reputation. The man and his wife, their faces shiny from working the clothes press and extractor, did not say no or ask me to leave; they did not reply much at all, and we three stood there in the heavy, almost tropical, starch-laden air of the shop, waiting for something to happen.
On Mountview Street the trees are just of that color and scale Liv is talking about, and though it has been but a few days, the pleasing bulk and hang of the limbs makes me homesick for what lies in wait over the first rise of the street, and I feel doubly sorry for my carelessness in overstoking the fire. Liv is perfectly right in describing to Renny what store of happy goods I possess, my house and property being the crown pieces. And though it does occur to me as somewhat unfortunate that this should be so strictly true, I cannot help but feel blessed that I have as much as I do, even if it is in the form of box hedge and brick and paving stone. There is, I think, a most simple majesty in this, that in regarding one’s own house or car or boat one can discover the discretionary pleasures of ownership — not at all conspicuous or competitive — and thus have another way of seeing the shape of one’s life, how it has transformed and, with any luck, multiplied and grown. And as we approach I can already see the red maple I planted in the front yard the first days I lived in the house, a mere sapling that has widened and vaulted up to be much larger than it should be, its surprising increase mirroring, I suppose, everything else I’ve invested in the last thirty years — the values of the property itself, the blue-chip stocks I bought intermittently, the store and building I sold to the Hickeys, whatever I put time or money into ballooning inexorably, magically, to great reward. It seems I have always been fortunate to be in a certain provident time and place, which must be my sole skill, and worth, and luck.
Liv slips the Saab gently into the driveway, and Renny lifts himself from the backseat before I can open the passenger door. He’ll bring the bags and flowers, Liv announces, and the two of us will go directly inside. She wants me to see the work they’ve done, she can’t wait to see what I think.
The keys (hers?) are in the door and she swings it open with ceremony. The lights are all on and there are flowers in the foyer and kitchen and on the hall table. There is music playing, an étude of Chopin from one of the many classical records Sunny left behind, its sober phrases leading me to the family room, the site of the trouble. I see there is a neat stack of split wood in the vacuumed and polished hearth, and that the Berber carpet is new and the same top brand as what was there before the accident, the curtains also having been replaced, as has the singed wall board above the mantel. The whole room has been repainted in the exact shade of pastel moss green Mary Burns once chose for me from a special home decorator’s palette book, the window mullions, too, damp-dusted and sparkling, and the tile floors sheened. Everything appears fresh and vibrant but unmistakably familiar, of certain and actual living.
Which strangely haunts, because as Liv Crawford guides me through the rooms pointing out the distinguishing features of the renovations, I have the peculiar sensation that this inspection and showing is somehow postmortem, that I am already dead and a memory and I am walking the hallways of another man’s estate, leaning into rooms to sniff what lingering notes of his person may remain, the tang of after-shave or slivers of soap, the old wool of his coats and leather shoes, the dust and spice of the cupboards. And I notice, too, the spareness of the rooms aside from the major furnishings, the few photographs showing him among groups of five or six in business attire or settings, and none including anyone who looks like him, distantly or otherwise.
This is my very house, my Mountview house in Bedley Run, understated and grand and unsolicitous of anything but the most honorable regard, and despite how magnificently Liv Crawford has directed its exacting restoration, I cannot escape feeling a mere proximateness to all its exhibits and effects, this oddly unsatisfying museum that she has come to curate for this visitation and the many that will someday follow. I cannot blame her, for there is nothing to assign blame about. It is the case that I have not been a man who has cultivated the relations that would make such a homecoming full and sanguine and joyous, and if anything occurs to me it is deep-felt gratitude to Liv Crawford and to Renny Banerjee as well, not only for the work and the ride home and the help with my things, but for the simple fact that they are present, walking the floors, pulling knobs, speaking and moving and filling the house with the most pleasing, ordinary reports.
Anyone, too, can glimpse through the wide doorway how they are lingering over each other in the kitchen, leaning up against the island counter from either side, and though Liv keeps asking to heat up the casserole dish of chicken cacciatore that she’s brought for me, I insist that I can do it myself, so they might feel free to leave and go out together and do whatever they may. Liv and Renny are in their early forties, neither having ever married, and though they’re certainly attractive people, it could also be said that they are approaching a critical time of middle age, when they should make clear decisions about their living situations. Whether they continue to live alone or not isn’t my interest, as I don’t have purpose or reason to hold a general opinion, but I do believe that they should choose one path without reserve and stay to it until the end.
I think the source of my trouble with Mary Burns — or her trouble with me — is that although I had decided to be a lifelong bachelor, I kept finding myself straying in both thought and deed, even so much as wondering aloud to her one night if she should sell her house down the street and move her things into mine. We were sitting intimately in the family room, enjoying, in fact, a fire and our customary pot of tea. When I spoke the words she had to stop sipping and put down her mug. Her usually placid expression broke open first in shock and then pleased wonder, and I knew I had slipped most horribly. In the ensuing quiet I already sensed that cold pitch of gravity and dissolve, as though something was dying in a corner of the room, invisibly and wordlessly. I didn’t actually retract my suggestion, then or in the following days, nor did I repeat it, simply hoping instead for a gradual expiration. Of course, the whole thing did expire, and without further discussion, and almost exactly in the manner one would have wished.
“Hey, Doc,” Liv calls out, in an airy voice provisional and solicitous, “I finally remembered something I meant to ask you about.”
I enter the kitchen again from the family room. Renny is making ready to leave, putting his wallet and keys back into his pockets, while Liv is lifting the white casserole dish into the wall oven. The cacciatore (from Di Nicola’s Deli) will be my dinner, along with a demi-bottle of Valpolicella and chocolate-dipped hazelnut biscotti, wrapped in picnic cloth and tucked by Liv into a wicker basket. I don’t normally drink red wine, but tonight I am feeling particularly curious and unfamiliar to myself, and all I can do is try to recall if I even have a corkscrew somewhere in this house, left over from long past evenings of mirth and company.