FIFTEEN

Harry

M ay, and the drowsy blur of spring: we buried Meredith, Hal and I. The funeral was held at St. Thomas’s on Fifth Avenue—gigantic and faintly frenetic, like a huge, grieving carnival, though for most of our friends, Meredith was already a memory, gone for years. When this was done, we traveled together the next morning, just the two of us, to Philadelphia, where we planned to bury her beside Sam.

It was just past noon when we arrived. I hadn’t been back to the cemetery for several years, not since the worst of Meredith’s illness had consumed me. As the limo pulled up, I saw the funeral director waiting for us at the gravesite. Beside Sam’s small headstone was Meredith’s casket, suspended on a metal bier with straps to lower it, and next to that, a mound of freshly turned, coffee-colored earth. It was a strange and unsettling experience to see these things, a feeling I had not prepared for—this place that had for so long been the site of one grave, now remade for two, like a hidden symmetry revealed.

But something else was different, wrong. A sky too abundant, and a feeling of exposure; the air itself seemed distorted, hazy with dust and unfiltered heat. As we stepped from the limo, the full magnitude hit me like a fist. Not a hundred yards away, where before had stood a field of headstones, there now was naked earth. A fleet of bulldozers, giant earthmovers with their beetlelike carriages and wide gleaming blades: half the cemetery had been scraped away.

“What the fuck,” Hal said.

He was wearing sunglasses, his chest and shoulders broad as a bodyguard’s inside his dark suit; his anger seemed fierce, a black force uncoiling inside him. Days and days of grim death—the awful phone call he surely knew was coming, then the bleak journey down from Williamstown, and of course the funeral itself—and now this. I actually worried that he might hit someone, or else turn and strike the car. But then he shuddered, reaching a hand out to brace himself against the limo’s gleaming fender, and I saw his strength was false; there was nothing at all behind it. The slightest puff of air might have brought him to his knees.

“Jesus.” He shook his head despondently. “What the fuck.”

“I know.” I put a hand on his shoulder. “Wait here.”

I left him at the car and approached the funeral director, a man with long gray sideburns who was wearing a slightly too-tight suit of blended navy, a suit he must have had dozens of. Under the warm sun, his brow was glazed with sweat. Without pausing to shake his hand I pointed past him toward the construction site.

“You mind telling me what that’s all about?”

He turned, a quick dart of the head to follow my gesture.

“I’m sorry,” he said nervously. “I thought you knew.”

“Knew what?”

The color had drained from his face. “The new interstate, Mr. Wainwright. The Blue Route. It’s going to run from Conshohocken all the way down to Chester. They started work last fall.”

The air was so full of grit I could taste it, feel it grinding between my teeth. “No, I sure as goddamn hell did not know.”

Hal had stepped away from the car to join us where we stood, under the wispy shade of a threadbare hemlock—just a sapling when we had buried Sam, but now thirty feet tall. The plan was that we were going to read a poem: Emily Dickinson, a little thing without a title, not a dozen lines long, about death coming in a carriage. That was all: no priest or other mourners, no long line of cars in the dust, just the two of us and the warm spring wind and these words of good-bye. Now we would have to read it over the roar of heavy machinery and men in hard hats yelling to one another about the baseball scores.

“How can they do that? It’s a cemetery, for god’s sake.”

“Eminent domain, Mr. Wainwright. I’m afraid it means the state can do whatever it wants.”

A bolt of raw anger surged through me. “I know what eminent domain is. Who the fuck do you think you’re talking to?”

He stiffened his back and swallowed. No doubt he wanted to tell me to go to hell, and he wouldn’t have been wrong. But his voice when he spoke was calm, professional. “I’m truly sorry, Mr. Wainwright,” he said. “If you wish, I’m sure we can make other arrangements.”

“Our son is buried here. He’s been here twenty years.”

He nodded. “And believe me, I do sympathize. You’re not the first to complain. But the state’s promised to build a retaining wall to deflect the noise and fumes. If you came back a year from now it would all be different. It’s really just a question of the timing.”

Timing, I thought. Good God. But it was Hal who spoke next.

“What’s to stop them from digging up this end of the cemetery?”

“Well, technically nothing.” The director took a handkerchief from his back pocket to mop his forehead. “But as far as I know, the state has no plans to condemn any other parcels. This area should remain just as it is.”

“Christ,” I said. “They better not.”

I felt completely powerless. How had I missed this? What else had escaped my attention? What would Meredith have said, if she’d known we were going to bury her within a hundred yards of the Pennsylvania Turnpike? A canvas tarp was spread on the ground around her casket, dressed with flowers, banks and banks of them piled high, and on the casket too—all of their petals coated with a film of gray dust.

“Mr. Wainwright? Shall we go ahead with the service, then?”

I turned my eyes to Hal. He knew nothing of what had happened that night in the library. No one did, except for Elizabeth, who probably had guessed, and perhaps Mrs. Beryl as well, who would have wondered why Meredith had given her that particular night off. But I knew neither would ever say a word. Nobody official had bothered to examine the situation more closely; as far as the world knew, Meredith had died in her sleep.

“Pop?”

I managed a nod. Hal turned on his heel to the director.

“All right then,” he said. “Let’s do this.”

We decided to stay the night in Philadelphia. I can’t recall whose idea this was, but I think we both knew, instinctively, that it was the right one. The long drive home, and the eerie quiet of the house on our arrival, the specter of Meredith’s bedroom still waiting to be dismantled; the two of us puttering around the place, trying to figure out how to occupy ourselves, what or even if to eat and whether or not to turn on the television, and when to go to bed. It was a prospect I dreaded almost physically; surely Hal had envisioned these things too, and the idea of a night in a good hotel, and a meal together in a city we hadn’t lived in for years, seemed like just the ticket.

We rented a suite at the Rittenhouse and decided to send the car away; it would be a simple enough matter to take a train back to New York the next morning. We’d brought no luggage with us, but even this odd fact seemed unimportant. At the front desk we gave the concierge a list of things we’d need for the night, toiletries and fresh shirts and underclothes for the morning, and rode the elevator up to our two-room suite, so neutrally decorated we could have been just about anywhere: San Francisco, Paris, even Bangkok. I went to the windows and opened the drapes. It was midafternoon, a Friday in spring. Our suite overlooked Rittenhouse Square, a section of town that always reminded me of certain parts of London: polished and old-world, its slope-shouldered brownstones and old churches laid out on a grid of hushed, well-planted streets that radiated from a central park with pathways and green lawns and, at the center, a pool with a sundial and a sculpture of a lion. From where I stood at the wide windows, eleven stories up, a soft haze of pink-and-white dogwood blossoms seemed to float over the square, punctuated by an understory of red azalea bushes in riotous bloom. A scene of mute activity, like the opening shot of a movie: men in shirtsleeves, hurrying to and fro; the usual lovers lazing on the lawn; women in scarves and spring jackets, some pushing strollers or accompanied by young children, bits of birdlike color that seemed to gather and disperse according to some unseen physical principle; a pair of long-haired college boys tossing a Frisbee, and, hunched over a cluster of concrete tables, a group of black men playing chess. Upon everything the sun poured down like a golden liquid. After such a day, it was a handsome sight—a vision of human life that seemed to hold the properties of eternity—but soon the scene would change: between the buildings and above them, a billowing bulk of storm clouds had sailed into view. First the puffy crowns, churning heavenward on waves of heat; and then, as I watched, the dark prow and undersides, dragging a blade of shadow, like a great ship docking over the city. A spring thunderstorm: of course. The heat had been building all day. As I watched, a greenish gloom descended over the park, into a hundred upturned faces, and then the wind arrived. It raked the dogwoods like a claw, swirling the air with petals; the Frisbee, ripped from its trajectory, squirted upward and shot out over Walnut Street, away. I turned from the window as huge, penny-size drops of rain began to thud against it.

“Hal?”

A moment of inexplicable panic: my heart contracted with a fear as biological as breathing, as if he were a little boy again, and I had lost him in a crowd. But when I looked through the door I found him, stretched out on one of the room’s two big beds. He was still wearing his tie, though he had taken off his jacket, which hung from the corner of a chair. One foot was bare, the other clad in a sock he hadn’t managed to remove before unconsciousness had taken him. A minute passed as I watched him sleep. Outside, the sizzle of lightning, and moments later, the rattling afterthought of thunder. I selfishly wished the noise would rouse him, so we could watch the storm together, but all he did was turn against the pillow. At last I closed the drapes and pulled a blanket over him and sealed the door behind me.

I slept two hours on the sofa, dreaming of rain, and awoke to darkness and the knowledge that the storm had passed. Beyond the window the evening sky was the color of a bruise; a single star glittered in the twilight. Voices reached me from the bedroom, and then the vapid music of a commercial. I checked my watch; it was nearly eight thirty.

Hal was sitting up in bed, watching television. His eyes flicked toward me as I entered the room.

“News flash. You snore, Pop.”

I sat beside him on the bed. Time seemed to have slipped its moorings entirely; it seemed like whole days had passed since we’d visited the cemetery. My body was suffused with an unexpected physical contentment, as if I’d received an injection of iron. I gave Hal’s knee a shake. “Hungry?”

Hal’s eyes had returned to the television: Star Trek. He nodded slightly, his mind still lost in the program. “God, will you get a load of this guy.” He gestured dismissively toward the screen, where the actor Leonard Nimoy, wearing a Greek robe and laurel wreath, was strumming on a lyre. “Oh,” Hal said, as if he’d just thought of something. “The concierge dropped off our stuff a while ago.”

“Really? I didn’t hear a thing.”

“Well, we all heard you, like I said.” He cheerfully tapped the wall behind his head. “The people next door called to ask if somebody was strangling a walrus.”

“Very funny.”

I rose and stretched. Atop the bureau I found a shopping bag from Brooks Brothers—the fresh shirts and underclothes we’d requested—and a selection of toiletries on a glass tray: toothbrushes and paste, razors, a tin of old-fashioned beard cream. My desire to leave the hotel room was suddenly acute; even to remain another minute would steal some essential energy from us. Though the shirts were for the morning, I opened the bag, removed the one I knew to be my size—a robin’s-egg blue, with some bit of white snaking through the weave—and changed quickly. The room had grown dark, save for the flickering, fish-tank glow of the television.

“What do you say, Hal?” I clapped my hands together. “Turn that thing off and let’s get some dinner.”

At last he pulled his eyes from the television. A thin smile crossed his lips. “Okay,” he said. “You know me. I can always eat.”

We set out into streets washed clean as laundry by the rain. The air had cooled and smelled of damp concrete. We walked up the block to a brasserie the concierge had recommended, the sort of restaurant he would probably suggest to two men, but not a man and a woman together: dimly masculine, with a long mahogany bar and just a few tables pushed against the wall. The menu was written on a chalkboard the apron-clad waiter brought around to each table and propped on a folding chair, waiting with a look of boredom while we read. We ordered quickly and each drank a beer while we waited for our meal: a plate of oysters followed by slablike chops of veal and heaps of mashed potatoes in a dark, smoky gravy. We were hungry and spoke little, saying just enough to keep silence at bay, but the truth was, it was not an evening for talk; I was satisfied for the moment just to share Hal’s company. All day, since the cemetery, the feeling had grown within me that I was leaving the world, and that it would be Hal’s from now on. It was not a feeling I knew or had a name for. But as I sat in the restaurant watching Hal eat, each measured portion finding its way from plate to fork to mouth, the sheer fact of his physical existence seemed as inseparable from my being as my own flesh, my blood and bone. Our time together would be short. In two days, he would be returning to Williamstown, to take his final exams and finish out the semester. I had called the dean, to ask if he could be somehow excused from this obligation, and though I was told that under such circumstances arrangements could be made for him to take makeups at some later date, Hal had refused. The last thing he wanted, he said, was to have a bunch of tests hanging over him. He’d made plans to spend the summer on Martha’s Vineyard, where a group of his friends from the lacrosse team had rented a house and planned to get jobs—construction, bartending, whatever they could find. It didn’t matter; the point was to be together, I knew. So there was this, too: the emptiness, oddly pleasurable, of missing him.

When the waiter came to clear our plates, Hal settled back in his chair and issued a small, satisfied groan.

“How about some dessert?” He had always loved sweets, could pack them away like a longshoreman.

He shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

I lifted my face to the waiter. “Just coffee, then.”

The waiter marched briskly away, returning moments later with cups and saucers and a small pitcher of cream.

Hal shook his head with a bitter laugh. “A fucking freeway.”

“I know.”

“Mom hated freeways,” he said. “She hated driving.”

“What could we do?”

He shrugged. The answer was what it was, though I also felt his disappointment: I was his father, I should have done something, carried an entire highway in my hands if that’s what the situation required. He took a sip of his coffee and returned it to its place on the table. A shadow fell over his face.

“You know, maybe I shouldn’t say this. But when we got to the cemetery, I realized I’d forgotten all about Sam. I mean, I knew he was there. But somehow it hadn’t really sunk in that we were burying Mom in the same place.”

“That’s perfectly understandable. If you want to know the truth, I thought the same thing.”

“Yeah, well. Even so. He was my brother.” He frowned, disconcerted. “Just that word. Brother. Even to say it.”

It was almost eleven; the room was nearly empty. At a long table in the rear of the restaurant, a group of busboys were smoking cigarettes while they rolled out clean napkins and silverware for the next day.

“This may sound, I don’t know, kind of weird,” Hal said, “but did you ever think I was him?”

“How do you mean?”

“Not that I believe in reincarnation, any of that. It’s probably the stupidest idea I ever heard of, that you come back as a bug or something. But still, it must have seemed strange, the timing of it. His dying, then me born right after.” He stopped and shook his head. “I don’t even know what I’m saying.”

In fact, the idea was not so surprising. Once or twice Meredith and I had even said as much, not really believing it, but trying to take some small comfort in the idea. Over time, though, as we spoke of Sam less and less, the notion had faded away.

“Never,” I said, and did my best to smile. “Not once.”

“Not at all?”

“I promise. Sam was Sam, you’re you. That’s the whole story.”

Silence fell again. “You know,” Hal said, “sometimes Mom, I don’t know, she would look at me. Just look at me. And I would feel like she was seeing somebody else.”

“Sam you mean.”

He shrugged a little nervously, his eyes cast down to the table. “Or maybe me, but also not me. I remember once when it happened, I was doing homework in the kitchen, back before she got so sick. I looked up and she was watching me, you know, that kind of intense look she sometimes had? And I thought, ‘I’m Sam. I’m not Hal. I’m Sam, right here.’ Like I knew. I almost told her.” He lifted a little in his chair. “Crazy, huh?”

In the split second that our eyes met, I saw how painful this memory was for him. It came from a place inside him that I had never seen.

“I don’t think it’s crazy at all. I wish you’d told me.”

He laughed uneasily and looked away. “Now, that would have been some conversation.”

We paid our bill and left. The sidewalks were empty, like the corridors of an abandoned city. A crisp breeze made me pull my collar around my neck as we walked: a last vestige of the spring chill, sneaking in behind the day’s departed heat. When we reached the door of the hotel, Hal stopped and took my elbow.

“Listen,” he said, and looked at his watch. “I probably should have said something before. But if it’s okay, I’m going to go meet some people.”

I was astonished. “What are you talking about? Who do you know in Philadelphia?”

“You remember Dave Rosen, Josh Miner, those guys? They both go to Penn now. I called them when you were asleep just to say hello, and they said they were planning to go out later. They asked if I wanted to come along.”

“Where would they be going? It’s nearly midnight.”

He tipped a shoulder, doing his best to look as if the invitation was inconsequential to him. “Some place on South Street. I don’t think it’s far. I can grab a cab. I think Josh has a car; he can drive me back to the hotel.”

Now that we were standing still, the air was so brisk I shivered. I felt a little ridiculous—because I was so disappointed, but even more, because I’d let Hal see this. I shook my head to clear this thought away. “Never mind. Of course, go ahead. It’s probably just what you need.”

“You know, you could come if you want, Pop. I’m sure those guys would get a kick out of seeing you.”

A kick. I let the word hang in my mind and thought about his friends. Loud voices in the kitchen and car doors slamming in the drive, strange coats and piles of books in the hallway, the tang of animal sweat when I entered a room they had just departed and the feeling that the electricity humming off their bodies still crackled the air. For years they had moved on the periphery of my life like a pack, young men so brimming with life that being in their presence was like standing beside some muscular spectacle of nature, a geyser blowing its top or a hive of swarming bees. Josh was a tall kid, slender with hair the color of a lit match, like his father, a lawyer whose path I had crossed a few times in the city; Josh had played on the basketball team with Hal, all elbows and long limbs crashing under the boards. The other boy I couldn’t remember, but didn’t need to; he was part of the herd. The invitation was not really meant to be accepted, of course. Still, on another night, I might have called Hal’s bluff and gone along.

“I think it’s a little late for me. Just don’t stay out all night. We have a long day tomorrow.”

His face was delighted. “You’re really okay with this?”

“Hal, enough,” I said, and waved him toward the taxi stand. “I’m fine. Go before I change my mind.”

He got into a taxi and sped off. The hotel lobby was empty, except for the desk clerk and a lone porter, a black man in uniform, dozing on a stool by the elevator. Even the bar was dark, closed down for the night. Upstairs, I undressed and got into bed, my mind humming with wakefulness. I didn’t have anything to read, not even a newspaper. The television glared at me from across the room, but the thought of turning it on, as tempting as this was, filled me with a kind of nausea. At last, not knowing what else to do, I turned out the light.

When I awoke, it was after three. I’d neglected to close the drapes, and the ambient light of the city pulsed across the ceiling. The bed next to mine was empty. I lay still for a moment, gathering myself. I realized it was Hal’s voice, coming from the other room, that had awakened me. Who could he be talking to?

I rose and opened the door. The lights were off, and for a moment I just stood there, uncertain of what I was seeing. Hal was on the couch. Somebody was with him—a girl. The same ghostly light flickered across them. The image and the sounds I was hearing suddenly coalesced in my mind, a feeling like falling, as if I’d placed my foot on a step that wasn’t there.

“Hal?”

“Jesus!”

A burst of activity on the sofa, and a flash of light-glazed skin; I turned away quickly and shut the door behind me. I sat on the bed, my heart hammering in my chest.

“Dad?” Hal was standing in the door. His shirt was on but unbuttoned; his belt hung loosely at his waist. If there had been light to see his face I knew it would have been flushed red with desire, embarrassment, a thousand agitations.

“Goddamn it, Hal.”

“Dad, I’m sorry. I thought you were asleep.”

“I was asleep. What were you thinking, bringing a girl here at, what . . . three in the morning? Who the hell is that?” I shook my head. “Forget it, I don’t even want to know.”

“We met at the club. She’s a friend of Josh’s.” He stood another moment. Part of him was deciding, I knew, what right he had to be angry with me, for bursting in.

“Look, I said I was sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you. I don’t know what else to say. She has a car, she can just go if you want.”

“Of course that’s what I want. Jesus Christ, Hal. What the hell is on your mind? A girl like that.”

“She’s nice, Dad. Okay? It’s not what you think. She’s a fine arts major.”

“I don’t care if she’s the president of the United States. Just get her out of here.”

He turned and left the room. I heard the two of them talking, low enough so that I couldn’t make out the words, then the sounds of their departure. I lay back in bed, not knowing if I would see him again that night, or even the next morning. But then, just a minute later, Hal returned. Without a word, he undressed and got into bed.

“Dad? I’m sorry. Okay? I wasn’t thinking, I admit that.”

I took a deep breath and held it. I had no idea what to say. The fog of anger had passed, and I knew I had handled the situation badly; the truth was, if I were Hal, I might have done exactly the same thing. A feeling of desolation burned through me, but something else too. That flash of skin, the soft murmurs my body knew but hadn’t heard in years—I realized they had aroused me.

“That’s all right,” I said. “Just . . . forget about it.”

I watched the ceiling, the drifting light. Time seemed to have bent under the weight of the evening’s events, so that the morning was both hours, and minutes, away. I closed my eyes to will away the image of what I’d seen, our day in the cemetery, the remembered taste of dust in my mouth—all of it. Even the thing I could not name: the stream of gritty milk on her chin, the feel of the rubber sheet beneath me, M’s slow breathing against my chest, those long waves, fading and fading.

“Dad?”

My eyes popped open; amazingly, I had dozed.

“Dad, are you awake?”

From across the gap separating our beds came a soft, damp sound of breathing. It took me another moment to realize Hal was crying.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right, son.” I rose on my elbows. He was facing away. “Really, it’s okay.”

“Not about the girl.” He shook his head against the pillow. “About before, what I said in the restaurant.”

I felt completely at sea. “What are you talking about?”

“I never thought it, about Sam.” I heard him sniff, then rub his face on the sheet. “I don’t know why I told you I did. I sometimes wished it was true. But it never was.”

My heart was pierced with a sadness I’d never known before. The feeling, always, of a shadow over his life: I’d thought it was his mother’s illness. But it was Sam.

“What did she say?” Hal asked quietly. “Mom, at the end.”

I paused and thought. “She said that she loved you. She said she wished she could have seen your game.”

“Did she say she loved Sam?”

“Yes, she did. She loved you both.”

The clock said it was just past four A.M.; the night seemed endless, not a thing merely of time but also space, like a vast ocean spreading over the world.

“That’s good,” Hal said finally. “I’m glad she said that too. Dad?”

“Yes, Hal?”

He rose on his elbows and turned to face me; his cheeks were streaked with tears. “It’s okay, about Mom. I don’t want to talk about it, but I just wanted to say that.”

I don’t want to talk about it. My breath caught in my chest; I closed my eyes. The words seemed to swirl inside me, releasing a memory, from years ago: Meredith and that first night, when we’d returned from her doctor in New York. I don’t want to talk about it. Not now. Not tonight. Maybe not ever.

I opened my eyes: Hal.

“How did you—?”

He shook his head to cut me off. “She told me, that’s all. Months ago. She knew what would happen, and she told me. I promised I wouldn’t say anything more about it.”

Here is grief, I thought, here is grief at last: the full measure and heft of it, the warp and woof. I watched myself enter it as if I were stepping into a pool of the calmest, darkest waters, the surface reaching to my knees, my waist, the point of my chin—a feeling like happiness, everything drifting away, the weight of my body and its parts dissolving into the great sea of time and all the world’s sorrows. I paused to breathe. How strange, even to breathe! The tip of my nose, my hair and its roots, my solitary, beating heart: each detail of my physical existence had become both part of me and also not, as vivid as a jewel on felt and just as elsewhere. I had begun to sob, tears pouring forth at last, but even this—the sounds of my weeping and the rough unveiling of each breath sweeping through me—seemed to be happening to another man. My face was in my hands.

“Pop? Pop, what is it?”

I tried to answer but failed, and then Hal was beside me. I missed him, as I missed everyone, and as he put his arms around me, all I could think was, how strange he doesn’t know. He doesn’t know I’ve died.

After that night, it took me just a month to dismantle what was left of my life. Hal returned to school, took his exams, stopped at the house to deposit his belongings before driving off to spend a week in the city with friends. We talked a few times on the phone, always in bright, clipped sentences, speaking only of schedules and who could be reached where on which days. There were simply no more words for what had happened, no sentences to add to the recognition that had passed between us. He returned to the house for Memorial Day weekend and then, on Tuesday, packed up his suitcases and headed off again, crammed into the back of a friend’s Volkswagen that announced both its arrival and departure with a single beep of its horn. I stood in the driveway and watched him go, then went inside to my office and called a realtor to put the house up for sale. How much was I thinking, the woman asked excitedly, in terms of price? And what were my plans, where would I be looking to move? I had already forgotten the woman’s name; though I told her she had come recommended to me by friends, in fact I had taken her right out of the yellow pages, giving the matter less thought than hiring a plumber. Well, I said, I didn’t really know. I was going away, I told her, and gave her my lawyer’s telephone number; get the contracts over to me right away, I instructed, and I’ll sign them and he can take it from there.

When this was done I wrote letters to the housekeeper, the cook, and my secretary, letting them all go; I cut each one a check for five thousand dollars, put them in envelopes wrapped by their individual letters, and left them where they would be easily found on the kitchen table. I was completing this task when the bell rang: the realtor. When I opened the door I was immediately pleased; before me stood a woman about fifty, her face plain as a schoolteacher’s. Though she’d done her best to look presentable, putting on lipstick and heels, she possessed none of the high sheen of someone who sold upmarket real estate. Her car sat in the drive, an ancient Volvo with rust on the quarter panels where road salt had gnawed through the paint; one of the tires was missing a hubcap. Up close she smelled a little of liquor, some candy-sweet cordial that probably came in a bottle shaped like a mermaid. A listing like mine must have felt like she’d won the lottery. Her face fell with confusion when I didn’t invite her in to have a look around—I could already hear what she would say when she returned to the office: Harry Wainwright! That huge place on Seminole! And he didn’t even ask me in!—but she brightened when I took the contract from the leather folder she held under her arm and signed it on the spot, giving her an exclusive, with a six-month time frame. We shook hands—hers a little damp in the summer heat, though that could have been my own—and I sent her on her way.

Back at my desk, I wrote a note to my lawyer, explaining my plans to sell the house, and one to my accountant, saying more or less the same; I wrote a check to Williams, Hal’s tuition for the coming year, and another to the lawn service, to carry them through till fall. By this time it was early evening; I made myself a sandwich, poured a glass of beer, and took it back to the office, to continue my work. I paid my taxes, made a promised donation to Hal’s private school, resigned from the country club and the board of the local hospital, and fired the gardener, for stealing tools. When this was done I washed a load of laundry, reading a magazine while my clothes flip-flopped in the damp heat, then descended the stairs to the basement, to extinguish the pilots and shut off the gas. I thought for a minute about draining the pipes, thinking this customary, but how this was accomplished was a mystery to me, a thing I’d never learned; and in any event, the house would certainly be someone else’s before winter. I turned on the sump pump, opened the fuse box—not even certain what I was looking for, though it seemed fine—and checked the bulkhead door.

Upstairs, I emptied the contents of the refrigerator into garbage bags and hauled these to the garage; I filled the cans and dragged them outside where the carting service would see them and sealed the lids tight with rubber cords, so the raccoons could not get in. I stacked the patio chairs and covered them with a tarp. In the backyard, I saw that a large limb had fallen from the big oak that stood beside the garden; it was too heavy to move on my own, so I retrieved an axe from the gardener’s shed, whacked it into smaller pieces, and carted them beyond the house’s circumference of light, where the lawn met a tangle of woods, and left them in the weeds.

The work had made me sweat, and I thought to take a shower before I remembered that I had already shut off the water heater. No matter; the house was cool and dry. I changed my shirt and poured myself a Scotch and ascended to the attic to fetch a suitcase, brought this down to the bedroom, and packed it quickly. It was a little after nine, later than I’d hoped, but to consider this contingency too closely seemed fraught; one moment of doubt, and my courage would collapse. I carried my case downstairs, out through the breezeway to the garage, where my car, a Jag, was parked; I went back into the kitchen, made a pot of coffee to fill a thermos, retrieved a warm jacket and a pair of boots from the hallway closet, then moved through the house one final time, top to bottom and back to front, dousing the lights as I went. When I reached the door connecting the house to the garage, I removed my key from my ring, placed it on the little table by the door, and set the lock; I stepped through the door and closed it behind me, listening for the little click as the mechanism dropped into place—an irrevocable sound, final as a plunge. I placed the jacket and boots on the backseat with my suitcase. Then I got into the Jag and started the engine.

It took only a minute, what happened next. Sitting at the wheel, the engine roaring under me, I lifted my eyes to the mirror and saw, with mild surprise, that I had neglected to open the garage door. Ah, my mind said, the door is closed; I never opened the door. My right foot pressed the gas pedal, pressed it again. The car was fussy as a thoroughbred; half the time, the damn thing wouldn’t start at all, or else the choke would stick and flood the carburetor. But not that night. The engine eased onto its idle, pushing more gray exhaust into the air of the sealed room. I pressed the gas again and watched the tachometer leap. A wondrous calm had eclipsed my awareness of events, floating inside me like a bubble. The windows of the car were open; I felt a tickle in my nose, accompanied by a curious lightening of the senses, and heard this as a sentence: My nose is tickling. In the rearview mirror, the image of the closed door wavered like a mirage as the garage filled up with smoke.

Another ten seconds, twenty, thirty. It’s hard to say how long I sat. Long enough, and then I wasn’t sitting anymore: I was outside the car in the smoky garage, hauling the door open to a blast of evening air. Twice I coughed, but only twice, and before the air had cleared—quick as anything, quick as death—I was back at the wheel. I put the Jag into reverse, the smooth engagement of its gears like something snapping into place inside me, and backed away; my head still roaring with the fumes, I turned the wheel and gunned down the drive, lifting my eyes quickly one last time to see the garage door—a message to any who might care to look—standing open behind me.