The House

The House

From the first the house was human in its differences. While the others facing us expanded wide upon the banks and breadth of land, high on the hill, our house and rooms were fitted down into the steep drop of hillside, protruding from the land of rocks and trees like an arm waving from its attached body; and the short front of grass, what was seen on the street, was just enough to serve as frame about the azaleas and nothing more; yet this seemingly outer modesty would lead to the embedded quiet of many halls and passages to attic top, where alone and above, its golem chased the trees and kissed,then found its way down again through layered space and steps and hiding places of escape where bottomed in the hill, a gated back opened upon a narrow path, that grown apart from all the rest, we would secret to its end.

But it was the face,itself, that to my mind was novel and so much mine,of rounded fieldstone as far high as the slated roof that sat like a peaked hat atop the rest, while under the hat were the eyes we call windows,and in them lay the mystiques we call chance, buried where dream and reality are the same and denial is not a lie; yet in letting something as fragile as hope feed upon itself, my fantasies would turn to horror in the fiction I myself was writing.

For finding the house had nurtured in me the optimism that fate had been weaving a new cloak for me, as he constellated his many threads and plots since I was the very first buyer to arrive, the only one, and finding the asking price so ridiculously fair I was able to buy it in minutes myself. The owners were a middle-aged doctor and wife who had many times before tried to flee the place for a new beginning; and now, mindful of the many steps and hesitations that had then ruined their flights, were offering a deal no one would refuse. So the house became ours,for Jerry had little interest in these things.

And to this happenstance, what was mere luck, I attached the romance of childhood about treetops and home, where always and in all of them, promises find their hero, where beneath these terraces my Shirley would be a bride as we would sit young to old among the smells of earth and hearth,our kids inheriting,as was the custom among the privileged in our town,the house known by our name father to son; for in all beginnings and in all loves, we find beauty: From Billy’s attic I looked down upon the thick and greening trees standing on this hillside, those patroons of authority who’d owned this plot long before my birth and I was happy,for Billy so loved his attic; and when I summoned chimney sweepers,with the sight of blackened faces from story land,I was charmed for my children.

So I would prepare the meal that through all the years Jerry did not eat at 7 or 8 or 9 or 10, then sit beside the quiet pool lying modestly on the side along the sturdy trees that had grown as though planted by god and remember how I’d promised the kids love and safety in our cloistered dark. And I would wait,the kids in bed, my work done, in the rear of the house at the bottom of hillside looking up at the layers of terraces reaching to the top that were framed in stone arches that gave a Mediterranean cast to the hanging plants and roses, the shrubs that seemed to soften one into the other as though they’d forgotten all beginnings and had instead found happiness in some tangled anonymity. I could hear the earthen life about me kissing, …..My Napoli…my own wildness which I sniff but hide in silence amongst the greens”... and then in muteness draw down the veil again upon the clock, and once more plan my new beginning until I began hearing myself say more than once, “Billy, mommy’s so tired tonight, I’ll make it to the attic tomorrow night with a better story”, which was no longer the truth for hadn’t my feet informed me they’d been pawned?

Though I had sensed that the door with its rounded arch and nose of darkened wood, however its beauty, however much it was mine, was to be my last begetting and though I no longer fooled myself about his fans, the patients who looked at him with biopic wonder, particularly the women, who with all the buzzing round him of nurses, secretaries and clean-up squad,in honest faith believed him an angel, adoring him, spoiling him and even paying him it went on. For my marriage had become a litany of new beginnings primed in fresh paint, forever moving our bed across the room to under the window then away from the draft to try a new mattress beside our trees when with sorry regret I would come back again. And so it was that upon hearing his steps one night in the hall I wanted to ask him, “Do you like the purple sheets? Have you noticed that I’ve washed the walls?” In the darkness of the room compounded of losses, in the bed stain of lies I’d cover my nakedness as he fixed his contempt to the wall; and when one day my friend Bonnie confronted me, “If my husband had an office like this I’d be dressed a hell of a lot better”it was the first time but I remembered

Then again, Jerry did love his pool and he found time among his gadgets and cleaning devices to be in the back alone, and I watched how with pleasure he’d stroke his machinery whispering into the water the secrets he would not share… With the same pleasure he’d take from my hand the bread knife and having sliced in the perfection of his trade, raise his fingers into my face, saying “look, look at my hands?” Years before when we had tried tennis together, and I remember this because my Shirley was standing on the court with her eyes upon us, I stood pretty in white and excitement and then about to leap forward, suddenly I put my head down. I never confronted him about the way he looked at me because his answer could only be that I was out of my mind, which frightened me. And the times he showed himself before others, I found, as in the case of Shirley on the court, my embarrassment so great that I chose my silence. So I stopped asking him when he would be home, and before him, with the children in the kitchen, I managed to rarely speak. Nor did I ask about office or patients as I had in our early days since his disinterest in my interest had left me with little pride in the efforts, sacrifices and hope I had called marriage. For in every room and at any time in the duel without voice, I could either opt for anger or humiliation within the limits of my box.

And then I began hearing talk about “Doctor’s Wife Syndrome”, whether a genuine term or not, that pretty much defined my malady to myself and not so incidentally the happenings on my street: the successful husband and his unsuccessful wife, the Barbie house where privately in tears and wine she would ply her mop among the empty rooms and endless steps that had become an irony and a rebuke, drowning, for want of the door that had been destroyed by an inner flame ……in the burbs where the shrink, coach-guru/doctor had warned me,“An independent woman fulfills her own needs”……. “you’re the one who’s sitting here, it’s you who has the problem”; and it was with this man that I had entered into a “solemn” agreement, an “honest” partnership, in consideration of my responsibilities as parent and in view of my very first words to him; “I want a divorce…my parents, no body helped me before” which he immediately dismissed among my other paranoia.

Until the last days, I did not know that it had been Jerry all along who had defined the length of my therapy, naming his expectations and not I, and that despite my objections, behind my back my mother had managed to visit my shrink too; and when I confronted the later about his ethics his answer was true, “Who’s been paying me all along, you?”

Amongst the synapses of betrayal and humiliations what is the truth? In these gas lighted passages what should I have done? To the world outside I know I appear weak and must admit to having, myself, chosen two of the triumvirate before me. And now so many years past which truth would I tell Shirley? But if I had gone out alone, that is, without money, my husband would have managed with his to take the children away from me; and if I had gone out prepared and with someone he would definitely have taken the children from me; and now my expert witness? We can say that, perhaps, I’d become the metaphor for the walls and stone of my house, or indeed the reverse, but in any event,it is I who will wait and it is upon my waiting, the story ends.