59

Affenlight sat in the Audi, surreptitiously smoking a cigarette, looking out across quiet Main Street at the Bremens’ place, its expansive porch, its uneven cupolas, its manicured lawn sliding from green to gray in the thickening twilight. After Pella left he’d remembered that Professor Bremen was retiring from the Physics Department this spring; was moving to New Mexico to play golf, walk around in the desert with his wife, teach for kicks at an online university. Bremen was a few years younger than Affenlight, but he’d made a killing.

Sure enough, there it was on the lawn, a FOR SALE sign.

Pella had found a room for the remainder of the semester, with some Westish girls off campus. She’d left Affenlight a message to this effect, on the apartment’s voice mail when she knew he’d be in his office. There was a landline there, but she hoped he wouldn’t call it soon. She wanted some time alone.

Affenlight stubbed out his cigarette in the Audi’s ashtray, stared at the Bremens’ facade. It was a big white whale of a house, fit for a president, but there was something appealingly quirky about it as well, a kind of ad hoc austerity. Even when it seemed a foregone conclusion that he’d stay at Harvard forever, he’d never come anywhere near buying a place. Rented halves of Cambridge houses had always seemed permanence enough.

He’d intended only to drive by, to see whether there would indeed be a sign on the lawn, but now he found himself strolling up the front walk to the porch steps. The silhouette of Sandy Bremen, Tom’s wife, appeared behind the front door before he could ring the bell.

“Why, Guert,” she said. “Fancy meeting you here.” A large dog shot out of the small gap she’d made by beginning to open the door, reared up to paw at Affenlight’s chest. “I was just about to take Contango for a walk.” She grabbed the dog by the collar and yanked him backward. “Sorry. He’s awfully rambunctious today.”

“Quite all right.” Affenlight offered the dog his hand to sniff. He was a beautiful animal, old and noble, a sugar-furred husky with one blue eye.

“Tom’s out for a run,” Sandy said. “Is it something urgent?”

“No, no. Not urgent at all. You see, actually… I stopped by because I was curious about the house.”

“Ah-ha.” Sandy smiled in the slightly flirty but mostly proprietary way that the faculty wives, at least the more secure ones, liked to smile at Affenlight. She was a seal-sleek woman in a monochrome tracksuit and fresh white sneakers. He wondered, not for the first time, what it would have been like to spend a few decades with a woman like that—a woman who turned family life into a smooth-running corporate entity, whose genius was to take a sizable income and make it seem infinite, who knew how to convert money into pleasure and pleasantry. “You’re finally thinking of taking the plunge?”

Affenlight shrugged. “I saw the sign,” he said. “It made me a bit curious.”

“Well, come on in. I’ll give you the grand tour. Contango, buddy, I’m sorry—false alarm on that stroll of ours.” She shooed the dog through the door, planted a hand in the small of Affenlight’s back to do the same to him. “Is beer okay? I can’t join you because I’m halfway through a juice cleanse, faddish girl that I am, but I’m sure Tom will partake when he gets back. He’s been logging a lot of miles these days.”

Affenlight, clutching the sweaty neck of his Heineken, dutifully trailed Sandy throughout the first floor and then the second as she explicated the virtues of California Closets, natural light, their recently remodeled kitchen. The Bremens’ two children were both graduated from college and gone, their bedrooms converted into spruced-up, stripped-down pieds-à-terre for holiday and summertime visits. “Lucy’s wedding is in October,” Sandy said as they stood on the threshold of the more extravagantly pillowed of the two rooms. “Old time she is a flyin’.” She turned to lead Affenlight back down the stairs. “As you can see, the place is big but not that big. Three bedrooms, Tom’s office, one bath up, one down. It’s really a very functional house, because it’s so old—it’s more on the model of the farmhouse than the mansion. Not outlandish for one person.” She gave Affenlight that sly look again. “You are still living alone, aren’t you, Guert?”

“More or less.”

“Ah, the ambiguities! Meaning what?”

They sat at the kitchen table. Affenlight accepted the second beer Sandy handed him, reached down to ruffle the dog’s belly. Pella had begged for a dog throughout girlhood, but they’d never quite gotten around to it. “My daughter’s considering enrolling at Westish,” he said, knocking a knuckle softly against the wooden table so as not to jinx that prospect. “We wouldn’t necessarily be living together, but…”

“Ah, but she’d need her own room, certainly. Pella, is it? Such a lovely name. But I thought she was at Yale? Or even finished by now?”

Affenlight had for years brought a deliberate vagueness regarding Pella’s whereabouts to cocktail parties. It felt like a betrayal now. “Yale didn’t entirely pan out,” he said.

Sandy nodded sagely. “Few things do,” she said, her beaming, impossibly hale face suggesting just the opposite. “So what else can I tell you?”

Affenlight gazed through the patio door at the groomed and moonlit backyard, the lake beyond. It was a beautiful house. Big but not outlandish, as Sandy said. But why even consider it? He’d been in the quarters for eight years, had hardly felt cramped or dissatisfied. If the garbage disposal broke or there was a problem with the heat, he just called Infrastructure and they sent someone over. Here there was no Infrastructure. He’d have rooms to paint, a furnace to replace, property taxes to pay. Not to mention the fact that he owned so little furniture, not nearly enough to fill so many rooms. What kind of condition was the roof in? That was the kind of question he needed to ask Sandy, the kind of question that, if he bought a house, he’d be asking himself forever.

Hadn’t the myth of the glory of home ownership been debunked once and for all? Did he really want to trade his free time—and a formidable chunk of his savings—for a big white symbol of bourgeois propriety? Well, maybe so. And he couldn’t help thinking Pella would love the place. The entire upstairs could be hers: one room for sleeping, another for a study, the third small one for a studio, or a walk-in closet, or whatever. He himself would have plenty of space downstairs. She could take a room in the dorms too—a place where he could assume her to be when she wasn’t around, thus saving him plenty of worry and compromised sleep. She was upset with him now, and rightly so, but she’d love this place, he could feel it. Not that this was a plan to win her back.

And though it had been decades, he himself was no slouch mechanically—he’d grown up on a farm, spent years on board a ship. He wasn’t some kid who’d been raised by the internet. He could take care of a house. The Bremens maintained their yard in the familiar American style, a lush immaculate carpet, but that didn’t mean he’d have to do the same—he could dig up all that lushness and plant tomatoes, rhubarb, beans. Garlic in the fall. Hell, pumpkins. He could plant pumpkins, his favorite boyhood crop, crazy as that seemed. Who could stop him? Was there some rule that said a lawn had to be a lawn, with a prim staked garden tucked in the corner? Yes, most likely—the town of Westish probably had no lack of pointless regulations and nitpicky neighbors to enforce them. But those people would be confronted, stared down, chased off, by the grumpy Thoreauvian president with the pumpkins and the beans…

His phone trilled in his pocket. Maybe it was Pella, maybe he could convince her to come over now and look around. He smiled apologetically at Sandy, slid it out to peek at the caller ID: Owen.

“Don’t mind me,” Sandy said. “I know how in demand you are.”

But Affenlight let his voice mail absorb O’s melted-butterscotch voice. If this extempore scheme appealed to him partly as a declaration to his daughter—I’m here, I’m reliable, rely on me, I love you—it could only mean something entirely different with regard to Owen, something Affenlight wasn’t ready to formulate. Owen would be going to Japan in September, would come back to Westish for his commencement ceremony and little else. There was nothing for him in this part of the country, nothing at all. Whereas Affenlight had a college and a daughter, at least for the next four years, and then he’d be sixty-five. To buy a house would be a declaration that he could conceive of living without Owen—or at least that he was resigned to try.

Contango settled down on the pale kitchen floor inches from Affenlight’s chair, noble head on noble paws. The two of them watched as Sandy washed and peeled carrots and oranges and prepared to feed them into a juicer. “Looks like somebody’s made a friend,” she said. “Now, not to be crass, but should we talk about money?”

“I suppose it couldn’t hurt.”

She told him the list price. He whistled. “I thought the housing market collapsed.”

Sandy laughed. “You get what you pay for.”

Except when buying suits and scotch, Affenlight habitually thought and acted as if he were poor; this was one consequence of his upbringing he’d never quite kicked. But in truth he had plenty of money; his expenses were nil and his salary went straight in the bank. The Audi, his last extravagance, was six years old. The lake, through the patio door, felt near enough to touch.

“We can make this work!” shouted Sandy over the hum of the juicer. “If we move fast we can pull it from the realtor—the sign just went up this morning—and do it ourselves, chop off six percent that way. Lord knows Kitty Wexnerd doesn’t need the money. And all the red tape we can just leave in ribbons on the floor. I would so love to have you and Pella fall in love with this place. It pains me to leave it.”

The front door banged open and in came Tom Bremen, fit and bald and drenched in sweat. “Herr Doktor Presidente,” he said. “Let me wash my hand before I shake yours.”

“Guert stopped by to talk about the house.”

“Really?” Tom kissed his wife, took two beers from the fridge, set one down in front of Affenlight. “Did you gild the turd and gloss over all the flaws in this dump?”

“I certainly did not. Because there aren’t any.”

“I knew I could count on you. Like a sexy Ricky Roma. ABC, baby. Dump needs a new roof, though.”

Sandy rolled her eyes. “We put on a brand-new roof last summer,” she explained. “Tom and Kevin did it themselves.”

“Five weeks of fourteen-hour days. Almost cost me my life. And my relationship with my son.” He sat down at the table, clinked his Heineken against Affenlight’s. “Good to see you,” he said, plucking his sweat-wicking shirt away from his chest. “Did Sandy tell you the unburdened beast comes standard?”

Affenlight looked at Contango, who looked back. Maybe it was the third beer that made the latter’s expression seem so companionably wise. “Really?”

“How about I translate?” Sandy said, joining them with her juice. “Contango is Kevin’s dog. And Kevin’s going to be in Stockholm for a length of time he refers to as ‘indefinite to permanent.’ ”

“To what end?” Affenlight asked politely, reaching down to pat the dog again.

Tom, catching Affenlight’s eye, mimed a plenteous Swedish bosom.

“Thomas, please. And I’m actually terribly allergic to pets of all kinds, though I’ve been keeping a stiff upper lip about it. And Contango has grown very comfortable here in the past few months. So if the buyer of the house, whoever that may turn out to be, were really and truly interested in such an arrangement…”

“We’d throw in a year’s supply of Purina and flea shots,” Tom concluded. “How’s that for sweetening the pot?”

“Huh,” said Affenlight. “Wow.”