67

Late that night, after the team returned from Chute, Owen came. And as they made love, and afterward, as they lay together in the dark, Affenlight kept one ear open, listening for Pella. It was unlikely she’d show up unannounced, after so emphatically declaring she wanted a few weeks to herself, and now past midnight it grew less likely with each passing moment. Even if she did come she wouldn’t barge into his darkened bedroom. And yet. Every voice that floated up from the Small Quad seized his senses. Every standard nighttime sound produced by the apartment—the crack of frost in the back of the fridge, the chiropractic groans of walls and floors, the scratch of the mouse Affenlight had never seen but knew existed—caused his breath to catch, just for a second. His breath caught a lot; there were lots of sounds.

“Are you all right?” Owen asked. “You seem tense.”

“I’m okay.” He felt guilty more than anything. Guilty to Pella for having Owen here; guilty to Owen for the way he himself was absent, his attention scattered like pollen over the quad.

“Tell me about the house.”

Now that he was no longer in the house, knee-deep in the Bremens’ belongings, distracted by Sandy’s superior saleswomanship, surrounded and perplexed by their superfluously detailed lives, the place had begun to take shape in Affenlight’s mind. He began to talk about it to Owen, haltingly at first, but as he got rolling he started to remember and describe the shapes of rooms, the size of windows, the shaved-wood smell of the kitchen’s ancient buckling cedar floor. Soon he was verbally ripping up carpets, repainting rooms, converting the Bremens’ den into a proper library with custom bookshelves. The backyard was even expansive enough that you could build a little writer’s shed there at the back edge of the property, overlooking the lake; perhaps that would be profligate, given how big the house was already, but it might also be fun, and clarifying to the mind, to have a spartan outpost back there, a spot without comforts or distractions, in which to sit and write. Perhaps—he couldn’t believe he was saying this aloud—he would even be moved to revive the novel he’d begun so long ago, Night of the Large Few Stars, the 153 pages of which were still sitting in a drawer somewhere. Or, better yet, to begin something new—no use chasing the dreams of so long ago. But to have the shed, to bundle up and stoke a tiny stove and look out at the lake and write, would be good. And if visitors with writing projects to pursue—here he glanced at Owen—would make use of it too, well, all the more reason.

“Sounds like you want to buy it.”

Affenlight hesitated. “I do.” His eyes flicked anxiously to Owen’s face. He felt like he was suggesting that they break up, though Owen looked supremely unconcerned, and in truth Affenlight knew that he was as capable of breaking up with Owen as he was of sawing off his own leg with his letter opener: he’d do it to save Pella’s life but probably not his own.

“I think it’s a great idea,” Owen said.

“You do?”

“Certainly. This apartment is, as my mother has noted, a bit dismal. I think you’d benefit from having some more space to roam around in. Space that’s brighter, and really yours. And Pella would like it too. Especially if you let her decorate.”

“What about us?” said Affenlight, stressing us.

“What about us?” replied Owen, stressing about.

“I mean… you’re going away.”

“That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t buy a house. Unless you’d like me to talk you out of it? Is that what I’m supposed to be doing?”

“Yes please.” Affenlight lay on his side, one hip rolled over on top of Owen’s thigh, one cheek on Owen’s shoulder. It was a quintessentially feminine posture, or had been throughout his forty years of sharing beds—the man on his back with hands behind his head, the woman nestled against him—and yet he slipped into it naturally now. With his free hand he caressed Owen’s belly, which itself felt almost feminine, not muscled but soft with the strong, invulnerable softness of youth. His senses remained on high alert, but for the moment the quad had slipped into silence. It was too late for the students to go out to the bars, too early for them to come home.

Owen assumed his lecturer’s tone. “That’s easy, Guert. What you so blithely call a house would better be termed an ecological disaster. How many barrels of oil does it take to heat a big old place like that through a bad winter, not that we have bad winters anymore? Just to keep a couple of bodies warm?”

Affenlight couldn’t help wondering which couple of bodies he meant. Two Affenlights? An Affenlight and a Dunne? “ ‘I have heard that stiff people lose something of their awkwardness under high ceilings, and in spacious halls,’ ” he said, quoting Emerson’s The Conduct of Life.

“I’d hardly describe you as a stiff person.” Owen slid a hand down between Affenlight’s legs, toyed with him gently. “At least not right now.”

“We just finished,” Affenlight protested, not wanting to be mentioned even jokingly in the same breath as that particular ailment of age, but in fact he was already thickening under Owen’s touch.

“Thoreau’s journals,” Owen said. “ ‘When a philosopher wants high ceilings, he goes outside.’ He doesn’t buy an oversize house that requires massive amounts of dwindling resources to heat in the winter. And to cool in the summer—let’s not even talk about air-conditioning. Why not just buy a McMansion out by the freeway, install a helicopter pad in back? Do you think you get a free pass because the house is old and lovely? It doesn’t work that way, Guert. Waste is waste, sprawl is sprawl. Your good taste doesn’t count. If there’s any kind of exclusionary, private-club-style afterlife, St. Peter won’t be asking questions at the gate. You’ll just be lugging all the coal and oil you’ve burnt in your life, that’s been burnt on your behalf, and if it fits through the gate you’re in. And the gate’s not big. It’s like eye-of-a-needle-sized. That’s what constitutes ethics these days—not who screwed or got screwed by whom.

“Perhaps you’re better off here, Guert. This place suits your spartan tendencies, which I much admire. You’re an especially unencumbered type of soul.”

“Jeez, O,” said Affenlight glumly. “You didn’t have to do quite such a good job.”

“Sorry.” Owen released Affenlight’s half-hard penis, kissed him on the forehead. “I get worked up.”

Sometimes Affenlight worried that Owen dallied with him solely so that he could whisper in Affenlight’s ear about campus-wide environmental initiatives. But that was probably reductive, if not downright paranoid, and anyway such things were worth being whispered to about. The schools Affenlight had been affiliated with—Westish in the late sixties and recently; Harvard in the eighties and nineties—were places where environmentalism had a modest presence, academically and publicly, and his work had tended in other directions, toward questions of political and social selfhood, male identity mixed with sex and a smidgen of Marx. But he was a farmer by birth, a biologist by undergraduate degree, a hippie by year of birth, and a diligent student of Emerson and Thoreau, and so Owen’s growing and insistent interest in ecology was easy for him to assimilate. Perhaps he was a trend jumper, in terms of intellectual preoccupations, a humanist back when humanity was popular, now moved on to bigger things, but certain trends were better jumped late than never.

“Now that I think about it,” Owen said, “this whole building’s on one thermostat, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“So every night and all weekend, when there’s nobody downstairs, the whole building gets heated just for you. And for me, sometimes. Which must be terrifically wasteful, given how drafty this place is and how old the furnace must be. You’d be better off with the house.”

“Yeah,” said Affenlight, “but they’d probably leave the heat on all the time anyway.”

“Who’s they? It’s your college.”

It wasn’t quite that simple, but Affenlight couldn’t disagree with the principle. Owen began enthusiastically concocting plots for the further greening of Westish, and for the installation of solar panels on Affenlight’s new house. Affenlight loved it when Owen grew enthusiastic, he even loved the plots, but his mind kept drifting away, away, away. Away to Pella. He was buying the house for her, in hopes that she would stay with him for four years. Or three—she might want to graduate in three. And then she could move on to grad school at Harvard or Yale, or even Stanford if she wished. Affenlight disliked the thought of sending her back to California, against which he harbored a grudge even though it was the source of Owen, because California had already once swallowed up Pella and kept her for four long years.

Not that grad school was the only respectable path in life; perhaps Pella would devise other plans. Affenlight, for his part, planned only to not be overbearing. She could visit the house whenever she liked—could come over for dinner, for pumpkin soup. Her rooms upstairs, should she choose to use them; his rooms down. Owen was right, it was a lot of space for two people, one of whom didn’t even live there, but the solar panels! He would install the solar panels, cost be damned, even if the cost-benefit analysis declared that they wouldn’t pay off until long after his projected life span had expired. He would outlive the actuaries’ projections, would leave the actuaries dejected and abashed at their own uselessness, would remain on this marvelous earth until his ingenious, responsible, not-quite-prohibitively-expensive solar panels had done the work of a thousand, of ten thousand, barrels of criminal oil. And by that time Owen and Pella would be nearing middle age themselves, and global warming—as Owen was now saying, though Affenlight was no longer more than half listening—would have accelerated its decimation of the world’s poor equatorial regions, and the true geopolitical shitstorm—as Owen was now saying, and Affenlight’s ears perked up because Owen rarely cursed—would be under way. Even as sleep closed in on Affenlight and expanded the realm of what was possible to include the stuff of dreams, there was no real way to incorporate Owen’s words into a rosy picture of what the world would be like after he, Affenlight, was gone, a world in which Pella and Owen, and any children Pella might someday have, would have to live, but at least he could bequeath to her (and maybe to them both, to share in some way, because who knew but that they’d eventually become close friends) a pretty white solar-paneled house near the lake in northeastern Wisconsin, and as the summers spoiled and the coasts flooded and the monocrops failed and the powers that be squabbled and panicked, as Owen was now describing in fearsome detail in his sonorous butterscotch voice, northeastern Wisconsin would probably not be the worst place to be.