He dumped the books at the thrift store, hid the “Bible” pages among some old tax forms, then went to the library every day for a week to skim the series.
And meanwhile, the little house was strangling him, tightening its screws and hinges. There was an infestation of ladybugs that spring, a plague straight out of Exodus. Not even real ladybugs but imposter Japanese beetles with dull copper shells, ugly black underwings jutting out below. Twice a day, Doug would suck them off the window screens with the vacuum attachment, listening as each hit the inner bag with a satisfying thwack. The living ones smelled like singed hair — whether from landing too close to lightbulbs or from some vile secretion, no one was sure. Sometimes Doug would take a sip of water and it would taste burnt, and he would know a bug had been in that glass, swimming for its life and winning.
There was a morning in May — notable only for Zee storming around in full academic regalia, late for commencement — when Doug, still in bed, nearly blurted it all out. Wasn’t it a tenet of a good marriage that you kept no secrets beyond the gastrointestinal? Hundreds of movies and one drunken stranger in a bar had told him as much. And so he almost spilled it, casual-like, as she tossed shoes from the closet. “Hey,” he might have said, “I have this project on the side.” But he knew the look Zee would give: concern just stopping her dark eyes from rolling to the ceiling. A long silence before she kissed his forehead. He didn’t blame her. She’d married the guy with the fellowship and bright future and trail of heartbroken exes, not this schlub who needed sympathy and prodding. When she dumped her entire purse out on the bed and refilled it with just her keys and wallet, he took it as a convenient sign: Shut the hell up, Doug. He might have that tattooed on his arm one day.
Zee’s mother, Gracie, would sometimes include the two of them in her parties, where she’d steer Doug around by the elbow: “My son-in-law Douglas Herriot, who’s a fantastic poet, and you know, I think it’s wonderful. They’re in the coach house till he’s all done writing. It’s my own little NEA grant!” Doug would mutter that he wasn’t a poet at all, that he was a “freelance PhD” writing about a poet, but no one seemed to hear.
The monograph was an attempt to turn his anemic doctoral dissertation on Edwin Parfitt into something publishable. Parfitt was coming back into style, to the extent that dead, marginal modernists can, and if Doug finished this thing soon he could get in on the first wave of what he planned, in job interviews, to call “the Parfitt renaissance.” The dissertation had been straight analysis, and Doug wanted to incorporate some archival research, to be the first to assemble a timeline of the poet’s turbulent life. In her less patient moments, Zee accused him of trying to write a biography — academically uncouth and unhelpful career-wise — but Doug didn’t see what harm it would do to set some context. And the man’s life story was intriguing: Eddie Parfitt (Doug couldn’t help but use his nickname, mentally — after nine years of research he felt he knew the guy) was wealthy, ironic, gay, and unhappy, a prodigy who struggled to fulfill his own early promise. He committed suicide at thirty-seven after his lover died in the Second World War. Parfitt had left few personal records, though. Nor had he flitted about the Algonquin Round Table and cracked wise for posterity. Entire periods — the publication gap between 1929 and late 1930, for instance, after which his work became astonishingly flat — lacked any documentation whatsoever.
Not that it mattered now.
Each morning, as Doug switched off his soul and settled in to write (“Twelve-year-old Melissa Hopper didn’t take ‘no’ for an answer,” the thing began), he imagined little Parfitt stuffed in the bottom desk drawer on those diskettes, biding his time between the staplers, choking with thirst. The ladybugs hurled their bodies against his desk lamp, and it sounded like knocking — like the ghost of Parfitt, frantically pounding against the wood.
—
In the brief window between commencement and the start of Zee’s summer teaching, Gracie invited them to the big house for brunch. They ate on the back terrace overlooking the grounds — the paths, the fountain, the fish ponds. It was like the garden behind a museum, a place where art students might take picnic lunches. Bruce, Gracie’s second husband, had conveniently excused himself to make his tee time when Gracie announced that she had invited Bruce’s son and daughter-in-law to move into the coach house too.
“It’s really a two-family house,” she said, “and what was done, way back, was to keep the gardener’s family there as well as the driver’s, and they all shared the kitchen. Can you believe, so many servants? I couldn’t manage.”
Zee didn’t put the butter dish down. “Mom, I’ve met Case twice. We’re strangers.” Bruce’s children had always lived in Texas.
“Yes,” Gracie said, “and it’s a shame. Didn’t you dance with him at our wedding, Zilla? You’d have been in college, the both of you. He’s quite athletic.”
“No.”
“Well he’s out of work. He lost five million dollars and they fired him. Miriam’s a wonderful artist, but it doesn’t support them, you know how that is, so they need the space as much as you.”
Doug managed to nod, and hoped Zee wouldn’t hold it against him.
“So they’ll both hang around the house all day,” Zee said.
“Well yes, but it shouldn’t bother you, as you’ll be at work. It only concerns Douglas. He could even write about them!” Gracie rubbed the coral lipstick off her mug and smoothed her hair — still blonde, still perfect. “And something will open up at the college for Douglas, I’m sure of it. Are you asking for him?”
“Really,” Doug said, “I don’t mind. I can get used to anything.”
—
That afternoon, Doug watched his wife from the window above his desk. She stood on the lawn between the big house and the coach house. Anyone else might have paced. For Zee, stillness was the surest sign of stress. She stared at the coach house as if she might burn it down. As if it might burn her down.
She wouldn’t let herself pitch a fit. At some point she and Gracie had come to the tacit agreement that no actual money or property would pass between them. It was the apotheosis of that old-money creed that money should never be discussed: In this family, it couldn’t even be used. Doug had doubts whether Zee would even accept her eventual inheritance, or just give it directly to some charity Gracie wouldn’t approve of. She was a Marxist literary scholar — this was how she actually introduced herself at wine and cheese receptions, leaving Doug to explain to the confused physics professor or music department secretary that this was more a theoretical distinction than a political one — and having money would not help her credibility. But she had accepted the house.
And now this.
—
The Texans were just there one Tuesday in June when Doug returned from the gym. He picked a box off the U-Haul lip and carried it up to the kitchen, which sat between the two second-floor apartments. Doug loved the feel of an upstairs kitchen, of looking out over the driveway as he flipped pancakes.