“Where’s your wife?” Meg asks after lunch. She answers her own question with a laugh. Wide-mouthed, white-toothed. Loud. Her ha ha’s bleed together, sound more like ah-ha!
“She’s at work,” Dan says.
Meg smiles. Dan follows the long leash from Meg’s hand to Jack, a small, frail breed. Meg calls him “Jackie,” and for all her money, you’d think she’d have a healthier, happier dog. Jack’s fur is patchy and matted, and the thing doesn’t shit so much as tremble and beg his body to perform.
She runs her fingers through her hair. A few zigzagged strands of magenta. She walks toward her house, giving Jack a sharp tug, breaking the sniffing trance he was enjoying. Meg opens her front door, turns to face Dan on the lawn, and laughs again.
“You coming?”
The front of her house is the same blunt, brick face from the cover of her husband’s memoir: While We’re Young. In the photo, Meg stands in high-waisted bell bottoms, a white blouse with ties on the chest, sleeves flowing over her hands. Richard Reed’s arms are wrapped around her. He is a bearded barrel of a man, his smile scrunching his flushed face. She rests her head on his chest the way a reluctant rider leans back on a rollercoaster. We’re going places, he says. Where? she wonders.
“Come, Jackie.” Meg unclips the leash. Dan stands in the open doorway. She walks down the hall, through blades of sunlight. Jack click-clacks behind her. Dan’s sad, silver sneaker of a vehicle in the driveway, Meg’s black Audi almost touching his back bumper. He steps in. Takes off his shoes. The door clicks.
Meg didn’t go to parties. She “attended affairs,” and mostly they were “abysmal.” She got away with phrases and alliterations Dan never could. Dan wanted to talk the way Richard talked. From what Dan read–and what Meg, after a few glasses of wine, would tell and retell–Richard had a remarkable way of shifting linguistic gears, of adapting phrases, speech patterns, cadences to navigate various events and gatherings. A kind of socioeconomic code-switching. According to Meg, Richard could keep up with her Manhattan friends and relatives on topics like real estate, boarding schools, politics, but usually, by the end of the affair, when most of the guests had left, she’d find him on the fire escape, sharing a joint with one of the waiters.
Some of those affairs were held here, in this same house, though it’s hard to imagine people having fun here. Dark wood floors. Antique couches with ornate wood trim. A brass rolling bar holding empty crystal decanters. A wrought iron sign on the front lawn proclaiming this property part of the National Register of Historic Places with a short paragraph about the wealthy whaling tycoon who once called this site home.
As the hallway leads Dan deeper inside, he passes photos of Meg and Richard on the wall. A sepia-toned shot from their wedding day, Meg straight and rigid in her bright white dress, her hair long and brown. A much slimmer Richard, more hair, eyes preserved in amber aviators, a thin, handlebar mustache curving around his grin like an upside-down horseshoe. He bares his teeth. Meg’s lips are sealed.
Other photos show them on different vacations—beaches, mountains. A shot of Richard Dan recognizes from the Vintage printing of his collected short stories. The original on the wall is untouched, unfiltered, but the pose is iconic: Richard sitting on a wooden bench swing, back against one armrest, feet up on the other, arms folded across his chest. His white cable-knit sweater is yellowed from nicotine and coffee and age. On the book cover, the sweater is bright white, blue eyes hazy like polished aluminum. Not a smile exactly but not a scowl. Something in between.
Dan hears Jack’s food tinkling into his bowl like coins from a slot machine. Meg opens and closes cabinets, runs water. The last wall before the kitchen holds photos of their daughter, Noelle. Dan had read about her, and Meg had mentioned a few clipped details about Noelle’s meandering careers in New York–a production assistant on a documentary, a dog-walking business, a dozen or so hours away from her yoga instructor certification. It’s creepy how much she looks like Richard. Shave his wedding face, throw on a curly wig, add a few more freckles and some makeup, and you have Noelle. In one photo, she’s in a park, tall buildings jutting up behind her, a pensive dog’s face pressed close to hers. Another small breed Dan can’t identify. It’s clear from the angle, from Noelle’s slightly upturned stare, that she is taking the photo herself.
“Daniel,” Meg says. “I’m going to change.”
“Oh, ok.”
“Meet me in the kitchen.”
The whole thing seems too cliché to happen in real life, but here Dan is, an aspiring writer following an older woman into her home, an older woman who was married to “the master of the short story” for twenty-five years until, a few weeks after winning the National Book Award, he shot himself in the face in one of these rooms. Which one? Dan wonders.
Jack lifts and tilts his head, chewing with eyes clenched. Meg is upstairs by the time Dan enters the kitchen. A faint scent of cinnamon. Steam rushing from a black kettle on a black stove. A long row of brass handles. Dan turns one, then another, pilot lights clicking until he finds the right one and the flame disappears. He opens cabinet after cabinet. Dishes, serving platters, wine glasses. Where does she keep the food? No cans or boxes. Spices in labeled silver canisters. Three white jars on the counter. As he opens one, he has the odd feeling he’s playing some kind of carnival game, a small crowd forming around him. The first jar contains sugar. The second, flour. He reaches for the third.
“Daniel.”
“Oh, yes?”
Meg stands in the doorway in shorts and a white tank top. Barefoot.
“What are you doing?”
“Sorry, I was looking for the tea, but I couldn’t find any.”
“We’re not having tea.” She moves like a dancer from cabinet to cabinet, reaching and turning, bending and lifting. Her body seems to change the dimensions of the room, the composition of the fixtures and furniture. It’s as if Dan had been fiddling with a piano, and now it is in the hands of a master.
Jack pauses his crunching, then bows and resumes. How can she stand to live with something in such pain? Jack laps his water, then lifts his head. His throat distended, Dan certain the creature is about to vomit. But whatever coursed through him passes. He walks out.
Meg places two tall glass mugs on the counter. She uncorks a bottle of tequila and splashes a generous portion into each glass. Then she pours the hot liquid from the kettle, which isn’t water after all but a spiced cider. The clear and brown tumble together, Meg’s face hazy in the steam. She places a spoonful of whipped cream on top and dusts it with cinnamon. The cream is half-sunk by the time she hands it to Dan.
He almost declines. Almost says something stiff like, Oh, I really shouldn’t or I’m driving. He should say that, say anything, but instead he takes the glass and holds it as Meg pushes hers against his.
“To new friends.”
Dan was turned on to Richard Reed by Mr. Driscoll, his high school English teacher. Driscoll turned him on to a lot of things: Tom Waits, Eric Bogosian, Terrance Malick. “The Burgeoning Loner Starter Pack.” All through class, Dan felt like he was the only one listening, but Driscoll didn’t care. He taught as if he were standing in front of a crowded amphitheater.
They often talked after the bell rang. Dan in the first row, Driscoll pacing in front of the blackboard like a panther, bellowing, brushing his long hair back with both hands and nodding when Dan told him about a story he was working on. To top it all off, Driscoll and some of the other English and art teachers formed a punk band called the Split Infinitives. “More Lou Reed than Iggy Pop,” Driscoll said. Dan nodded as if he knew either of those names.
“You should check this out,” Driscoll said after class one day, handing Dan a battered copy of Reed’s collected short stories. The same face that would later stare at him from the hallway photograph watched him from the book cover.
Maybe it was weeks or months before Dan finished the collection, but in memory, he devoured the book in one night. Dan’s stories often featured an introverted, high school protagonist whose greatness was only appreciated after his untimely death, yet somehow he could see himself in Reed’s stories about Midwestern married couples. Men who worked jobs Dan didn’t think anyone had in real life: door-to-door vacuum salesman, traveling knife sharpener, ice fisherman. There were lots of cigarettes and gin and wives in sheer sundresses standing before their husbands in kitchens. Children who spied and crept through shadows in hallways and basements. Or only children, skipping school to watch a dirty movie or vandalize an abandoned house. Each story a polaroid within Reed’s mosaic universe.
Even now, as Dan carefully carries this elaborate cocktail into the living room, when he spots Reed’s books on the shelf, he feels exposed. It’s as if Meg has unearthed his high school journals and splayed them under a spotlight. He stops short in the doorway. A thin droplet of whipped cream rolls over the rim of his glass.
Meg places her drink on the coffee table and sits in the loveseat. Dan takes a slow walk around the room. He sips, then bends toward glass cabinets full of porcelain dolls and crystal serve ware. Dried roses lean in a vase on a baby grand piano. White curtains droop across the windows like heavy eyelids. The longer he stays, the harder it is to leave.
He’s wasted hours of his life trying not to offend people. Trips to museums he secretly hated–the cold, sparse rooms, the obligatory reading of placards, the side glances from sleepy security guards. And yet many times he’s found himself, feet aching, stomach rumbling, following Rebecca through a marble maze. A few massive oil paintings of ancient battles or looped closeup footage of people laughing or crying usually carried him through the visit, but most of the time, he felt like he was wandering an expensive showroom full of items he could never afford.
Wood creaks behind Dan and he turns. Meg leans against the armrest, legs tucked underneath her.
“Most of this junk belonged to my mother. If you see anything you like, take it.”
Dan has no intention of touching, let alone taking, anything. In the bookcase, between and on top of some of Richard’s books, are marbled notebooks, legal pads, stacks of rubber-banded notecards.
“Were these his?”
Meg sips and nods without looking up.
“Wow, is this a first edition?”
Meg exhales. “Daniel, sit.”
The other chairs are on the opposite side of the coffee table, across from where Meg sit’s in the loveseat. Those few steps, under Meg’s watch, would be miles. He sinks onto the cushion beside her.
“Are you comfortable?”
“Sure, yes.”
Just above Meg’s knee, a blue vein flashes like a minnow as she turns toward the window. A thick scar up the side of her thigh. Her hand idly strokes the top of her leg, not unlike the way Dan’s grandmother would brush her palm along her forearm as they talked at her kitchen table. He thinks of his own mother’s habits, her ever-present need to self-soothe: the caressing, the humming, the lavender-scented body wash and chamomile teas and bergamot candles. All of it ritualistic. Compulsive.
“Have you traveled much, Daniel?”
“My brother and I backpacked through Europe after I graduated.”
She doesn’t say anything.
“Yeah, it was great, actually. We were in Amsterdam for a few days. Switzerland, Paris. Italy.”
The names of the countries impressed his old friends from high school or certain relatives, people who hadn’t traveled more than fifty miles from their hometown. Meg watches him.
“Hostels. Street food. Perhaps a few drunken walks through the Red Light District. Is that a fair summary?”
“Basically,” Dan says.
“And your brother. He’s older?”
“About ten years.”
Meg nods. “So, while he was out fucking different women, you were wandering the city alone? Reading in your room? Something like that?”
Dan laughs through his nose, though he finds nothing funny. He has the urge to see if someone is holding cue cards behind him, his history documented in black magic marker.
After a long pause, she laughs, loudly. That same ha-ah-ah-ha from the front lawn.
“You remind me of Richard when he was young.”
Dan smiles.
“That’s not a compliment.”
“You could just leave,” Dan whispers.
He stares at himself. A tired little boy. Not a twenty-six-year-old man. Water rushes into the toilet. The sound deepens as the tank fills, and an urgency overcomes him. His brain tells him to figure this all out before the water shuts off. He used to do things like this when he was a kid—get into bed before the door closed, race across the yard before a gust of wind died, finish his juice box before the green minute on the microwave changed. An innocent game that mutated over time and eventually led him to this moment, staring at himself in Meg’s bathroom mirror, heart pounding, mouth dry.
“You can just leave,” he whispers again.
He remembers her car blocking his in the driveway, how she had waved him in first.
He doesn’t move.
Jack sits in Dan’s spot on the loveseat. The dog lifts his head when Dan enters, as if to make sure Dan notices, then lowers his chin. Dan sits in one of the high-back chairs across the room. The cushions feel like two smooth stones.
“You can leave, you know.”
Dan straightens. “What?”
“If you’re uncomfortable. You can leave. You can just stand up. Say goodbye. Walk out the door.”
“Oh, no, I’m not un—”
“Daniel, please.” She brushes her hair back. The side Dan can see is completely gray. The magenta streaks face the wall.
“You don’t like it when I call you ‘Daniel,’ do you?”
“I don’t really mind.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake, you don’t like it, so why would you say you do?”
She takes a tiny sip from her water glass. Something else? More tequila? Maybe gin?
“This could go several ways, Dan. You could sit there and watch me drink. We could go upstairs. Or you could leave.”
Loops and whirls in the hardwood floor like fingerprints. Jack yawns, a moan of pleasure ending in a squeal.
Dan sits in his car, ears ringing. Windows up. He left the front door open. The house looks like it’s missing a tooth.
Meg appears, cradling Jack. She presses her lips into a dramatic pout, like a little girl whose playdate wants to go home. Then she storms down the steps, the driveway, and doesn’t stop at Dan’s car. Her shorts flash by his window. She tosses Jack onto her passenger seat, starts her car, and backs out without looking, then idles in the middle of the street. Dan puts his car in reverse and rolls down the driveway. A grinding squeak. He quickly releases the emergency brake and the car jolts back. Dan throws it into drive. As he pulls away, Meg waits in the street, hands on the wheel, leaning forward as if squinting at a road sign.
He drives down wide streets. Many of the homes have gated driveways. Fences of wrought iron spears, little red and white jockey statues holding lanterns. He recalls reading something sinister about them, some cruel history hiding in plain sight. His heart thumps in his throat.
Lefts and rights, the road a black river carrying him into a different neighborhood. Until he reaches a dead end. Two boys, middle school aged, playing basketball. The hoop is portable, the plastic base filled with water or sand to keep it stable. Behind the hoop, a silver guard rail. Beyond that, a thin stretch of trees. And beyond that, the steady rush of traffic.
Dan idles in the road. The chugging and puttering of the exhaust sound like he’s sinking into water. One boy retrieves the ball from the bushes. The other boy turns toward Dan. The boy with the ball joins the other and stares. They turn toward one of the houses and a woman appears. Flannel shirt and jeans. Gardening gloves. She raises one gloved hand to shield the sun, to get a better look at this stranger in the street.
Meg picked the place. Dan usually ate a tuna fish sandwich at his desk or ran out for a slice of pizza, but today he parted a heavy red curtain and found himself in a dimly lit dining room. Dark wood and brass fixtures. Waiters in white shirts and bowties.
“Steppin’ out on your wife?” Diane Lanford said, when she saw the pair waiting for a table. She clutched her monogrammed tote bag, sunglasses in her hair like she was strolling to the beach. Diane oversaw all the case workers at Bristol House and had done so for the last twenty-seven years. She happily supported Dan’s workshops for the residents, his book clubs and writing groups; he was still young enough for his incompetence to be interpreted as shyness. And she was the one who hired Meg, who thought the residents would enjoy a watercolor class between AA meetings and anger management classes.
Dan laughed and blushed.
Diane smiled at Dan, but when she turned to Meg, her lips tightened. Her expression changed so suddenly and drastically, she looked like a different person. Meg laughed her laugh.
“No, no, not stepping out,” Dan said. “Just grabbing lunch.”
Diane nodded. She seemed like she was trying to tell Dan something with her eyes.
“Bye, Diane,” Meg said. She turned, and Dan followed.
The host greeted Meg by name and escorted them to a curved booth at the back of the room.
“I’ll have a bourbon.”
“Very well, madam. And for you, sir?”
“Just water, please.”
“Sparkling or tap?”
Dan looked at Meg. She raised her eyebrows.
“Sparkling, I guess,” Dan said.
“Excellent, sir.” The way he said excellent made Dan think of stickers elementary school teachers put at the top of spelling tests.
“You know,” Meg said, “the first time I brought Richard to a place like this, he took his boots off under the table.” She covered her mouth with her hand but that only deepened the sound of her laugh.
“That was one of the things I loved about him,” she said. “He was blue-collar, and I was just so tired of everyone in my life behaving. With Richard, I never knew how the night would go. I mean, I had an idea, but I was never quite sure how we’d get there.”
The waiter returned with their drinks, and as he poured Dan’s sparkling water, Meg said “And it turned me on.” The waiter’s hand went still. Dan stared at the unlit votive candle as if trying to light it with his mind.
“I’ll be back to take your orders.”
Meg leaned forward and pat Dan’s hand. Her skin was rougher than expected. Colder.
“So,” she said. “What do you make of Diane?”
Dan’s head spun. He tried focusing on the bubbles in his glass, following each one to the surface, watching them pop.
“I don’t know,” he said. “She seems like a nice person.”
“She does?”
“I mean, from what I know. I don’t know her that well. But she’s always been nice to me.”
She sipped. “To hell with nice, Daniel. Nice is boring.”
This could have been one of Richard’s stories. That detail about boots under the table reminded Dan of similar details about class, money. Fish-out-of-water moments. And aggressive women. Women who talked like Meg. Women who were always half-drunk, spoke with sweeping hand gestures, and no matter the topic, always seemed one sentence away from emotional collapse. Like actresses in old movies, the kind who slapped their husbands one minute, fainted into their arms the next.
“You’re a thinker,” Meg said.
“I am?”
“Yes.”
She traced the rim of her glass, then cleared her throat.
“I am, too,” she said. “People like us—”
“Are we ready to order?”
Meg exhaled, leaned back, and stared up at the waiter. She ordered for both of them in French that sounded authentic. The waiter nodded and left.
“People like us,” Meg said, “we feel more. Maybe we feel too much. But we can’t control it. We can’t control feelings. We wouldn’t want to. That’s the problem with the world today. Everyone trying to control everything. But you know what?”
“What?”
“It’s so much better to just. Let. Go.”
When Meg was in the bathroom, the spell broke. At least for a moment. And Dan could gather his thoughts. This was getting out of hand. He didn’t really want to be in one of Richard’s stories. Things didn’t end well. In fact, they often didn’t end at all, and sometimes Dan wondered what the hell the story was even about. But there was something hypnotic about Richard’s writing. The short declarative sentences. The hint of something sinister, some evil aura glowing at the edges of people, places. The way he transported a reader to a location both specific and vague. Never naming a state or town or street, and yet as he read, Dan was in his childhood neighborhood or in his car, on his commute to Bristol House. But then something horrific happens. A newlywed couple crashes their car, a jagged fence takes out a boy’s eye, an old man slowly turns off his oxygen. The end. What was Dan supposed to do then?
Before Meg returned, the waiter placed their food on the table. Some kind of pasta. Tentacles, like tiny rubber hands, reached up through the red sauce.
“Enjoy.”
Rebecca was probably sitting in the cramped breakroom at her office, taking the last few bites of her salad while catching up on email. What if she’s not, Dan thought? What if she’s some place he has never been, with someone he has never met? What if she is somewhere doing the same thing he is?
“Here we are,” Meg said in a sing-songy voice. She leaned over her steaming plate and inhaled deeply. “Wait’ll you try this.”
Meg and Jack are still in the car when Dan returns. He parks in the street and opens the door. Muffled jazz coming from Meg’s car in the driveway.
He walks toward the Audi and for a second, he’s eight years old, working up the nerve to knock on his neighbor’s door and ask if he can retrieve his baseball. Another thing he loved about Richard’s stories: His characters had the same secret thoughts and fears as Dan. Little private things. A character rehearsing his order before calling a pizza place. Things Dan did that he never told anyone. That’s what a real writer was—a clairvoyant stranger who knew all of the reader’s secrets.
Meg’s window whirs. Smoke rises around his face. The jazz louder, frantic.
“I had a feeling you’d be back,” Meg says. Another puff of smoke as she reaches over and rubs Jack’s belly. The dog rolls onto his side, one little T-Rex arm cocked in the air, his eyes closed.
“I’m sorry,” Dan says. For what? “I’m sorry I left so abruptly.”
She lowers the music slightly, then tosses her cigarette on the grass.
“You know what I’ve learned over the years, Daniel?”
He waits.
“There is no limit to the number of times we can change our minds.”
The sun casts new shadows in the hallway. He follows Meg and Jack, same as before, yet part of Dan expects change. For the eyes in the photographs to appear hollow and white, like raccoons caught in headlights. The living room will be where the dining room was. The bathroom and kitchen will have switched places. Lefts now rights; rights now lefts. He’ll try to follow her up the stairs but when he gets to the top, the ceiling will press against his back as her bedroom door shrinks to dollhouse size. Like the haunted house he once visited as a kid. Stare at the mirror long enough and a second version of himself would appear. This old house contained apparitions—hundreds of years of history emanating from the foundation. The Megs and Richards and Noelles and Jacks on the wall. Richard’s characters pressed between covers like over-stuffed boxes of nightcrawlers. Half-formed creatures scribbled in his notebooks. And the Dans—the one who ate lunch and followed Meg’s Audi to her house and the one who returned and now walks the hall.
He looks up from the bottom of the stairs. Meg walks from the bedroom to the bathroom without glancing down at him. The bathroom door, half-open, framed in light. Water rushing in the shower. Dan waits. He waits until the light is hazy with steam. He waits until Jack stops pacing in the living room and collapses. He waits for an omniscient narrator to speak to him, for him, to escort him to an ending that is unexpected and inevitable.
Anthony D’Aries is the author of The Language of Men: A Memoir (Hudson Whitman Press, 2012), which received the PEN Discovery Prize and Foreword’s Memoir-of-the-Year Award. His work has appeared in McSweeney’s, Boston Magazine, Solstice, The Literary Review, and elsewhere. He was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize and his essay, “No Man’s Land,” was listed as a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2021. He currently directs the low-residency MFA in Creative and Professional Writing at Western Connecticut State University.