* * *
Two weeks later, my father climbed the steps of 308 Pine Ridge Road in an advanced state of dishevelment, dragging his battered yellow steamer trunk behind him. His shirt was misbuttoned and his face was unshaven and his hair stood out straight in the back, where his headrest on the train had ionized it. He’d returned home for one reason only, after all — to get his book finished — and his seediness was both a reminder and a caution: a message to neighbors and friends (if he had any left) to leave him in peace. Like untold writers before him — science fiction writers, especially — he’d begun to fancy himself a lone mystic, a hermit of sorts, and Pine Ridge Road was now his hermitage. It was just as possible to be a mystic in the suburbs, after all, as on some mountain in the wilderness. Retreat was the main thing: withdrawal from the struggle. What mattered was that you were left alone.
Orson unlocked the door in a rush, buzzing with anticipation, and pushed it gently open with his foot. Dust revolved in the air — the lazy, protozoan dust of wooden houses — and the afternoon sun turned the foyer the color of beer. It had been more than a decade, to the best of his reckoning, since he’d had that house completely to himself. He estimated the hour at four o’clock — half past at the most — and went to check the mantel clock, but found it stopped at 08:27 EST. An omen of some kind, no question about it, but for the moment its meaning escaped him.
He set his trunk down at the foot of the stairs and stood, beguiled and delighted, listening to the house shift and settle around him. If a single object had been added or removed since he’d left for New York, the change was too minute for him to see. Nine years had come and gone without a trace. There was something deliciously morbid in that: something unnatural, even perverse. I could never have predicted this, he thought. Not this changelessness.
“Nine years,” Orson said to the stillness. “Nine years and no time at all.”
He took off his peacoat and hung it on the mahogany head of the banister, whose burnished roundness made him think — as it had when he was small — of an old man’s bald crown. He slipped out of his loafers, then out of his socks. His feet stank agreeably. He crossed the frayed Persian carpet, feeling its coarseness against his instep, and laid his palm against the kitchen door. He felt the urge to strip completely — a thing he’d never once done in those rooms — and saw no earthly reason to resist it. Starting tomorrow I’ll write naked, he said to himself. That ought to keep the brush salesmen away.
The rumbling of his stomach brought him back into the present. There was bound to be food of some kind in the kitchen: canned corn or beets or string beans, maybe even a jar of preserved eggs. They were a family of picklers, after all. He pulled up his shirtfront and patted his belly and opened the door with his knee. A girl in a snow-white dashiki was eating a sandwich at the kitchen counter.
“Shalom,” said the girl.
“Jesus Christ!” said my father.
“As you prefer,” she replied.
He stood frozen in en garde position, half upright, half crouching, his right hand braced against the door behind him. The girl had the palest face he’d ever seen — a genteel, almost medieval shade of ivory — framed by distinctly Continental-looking glasses. Everything about her was so wildly implausible that the unlikelihood of her presence in his childhood kitchen slipped his mind completely.
“This is my house,” he said finally.
“You must be Orson, then! Such a relief.” She spoke with an accent, a thick one, but he could take in only one thing at a time. Her hair was black and thick and spherical, a topiary cropped into the shape of a planet. He’d never seen curls that curly outside of a Little Orphan Annie comic strip.
“I wasn’t expecting anybody,” said Orson. “To be here, I mean.”
“I can see that,” she said, glancing down at his feet. From anyone else this might have seemed teasing, even flirtatious, but not from this girl. She was tracking him as closely as a sniper.
He tucked his shirttails back into his jeans. “What’s your name? I wasn’t informed—”
“Ursula.” Her accent softened slightly. “I’m in the second bedroom past the stairs.”
“Do you mind if I sit down, Ursula? I feel a bit woozy.”
“Please.”
“My sisters didn’t tell me you were here, you understand. In this house. I wasn’t expecting anybody.”
“You’ve said that already.”
He hesitated. “Were you expecting anybody?”
“Oh, yes. They told me at the start.”
Orson rested his elbows on the counter and attempted to think. “When was this, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“When was what?”
“When — when exactly—did my sisters let you know that I’d be coming?”
She pulled one of her geometrically precise curls into her mouth and chewed it thoughtfully. “The morning I got here,” she said. “Six weeks ago today.”
* * *
Ursula was not a projection of my father’s libido, or a comic-strip character, or a pleasure android from the distant future. She was an exchange student from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem (which, as C*F*P would have it, had been cofounded by the Patent Clerk a few decades earlier) working on her Ph.D. in chemistry — and on her English — at the State University of New York at Buffalo. It was a mystery to Orson how she’d come to Cheektowaga, of all places, and the idea of Enzie and Genny taking in boarders, Israeli or otherwise, was so contrary to his conception of his sisters that his conscious mind refused to entertain it. But it didn’t much matter, Mrs. Haven, by what back alley of circumstance she’d arrived at his house. As long as Ursula continued to occupy the second bedroom past the stairs, he had no further questions for the court.
She turned out to be older than she looked, to his considerable relief; and she seemed to accept his attentions as a matter of course, which he wasn’t quite sure how to feel about. Her girlish gravitas at their first meeting had not been a form of politeness — she was to remain, for the entirety of their shared duration, the most poker-faced woman he knew. In spite of Orson’s twenty-six years, moreover, it was clear that any awkwardness would be coming from his side of the counter, not hers. Within a week he knew the details of her doomed love affair with a young Mossad operative, and of its sequel with a middle-aged Tel Aviv dentist; he knew what she would and wouldn’t do in bed well in advance of their first kiss (which was unexpectedly helpful, like taking a sample test before the true exam). Science fiction interested her — even, in a sense, excited her — which surprised him most of alclass="underline" he’d resigned himself to the idea that Ewa Ruszczyk was the only girl this side of Alpha Centauri who’d ever read his work.
True to Tolliver tradition, it was Ursula, not Orson, who finally brought the beaker to a boil. The year was 1969, after all, not 1904, and my father’s shyness bordered on effrontery. Although he wrote compulsively and virtuosically about fornication, Mrs. Haven — or perhaps for precisely that reason — he’d done precious little himself. Ursula seized him by the scruff of the neck, as if he were a kitten; there was something feral about her in that moment, and Orson’s first thought was that she meant to tear his throat out with her teeth. The body that had appeared so childlike seemed another body altogether when he held it in his hands, and by the time she was naked (which was not too long after) the last traces of girlishness had vanished. She left her clothes on the floor of the kitchen — he himself, laughably, was still fully dressed — and led him through the swinging door into the parlor. The goose bumps on her forearms and on her meaty blue-white haunches made him feel oddly top-heavy, and he followed her with his arms outstretched, to catch himself if he should start to fall.