It was as close as they would come to a real vacation. Leslie did not earn enough money for a rental in the mountains or even a share on Fire Island. Not that she missed Fire Island (strictly Yuppyville), though her husband said the sunrises there were the best. House-sitting, even on the north shore of Long Island, was not her idea of a holiday, but it beat spending August in Brooklyn.
All day the cicadas droned. She had never heard cicadas, or if she did she had assumed they were some kind of bird. One didn't hear cicadas in the Bronx, where she had grown up, or on the Upper West Side, where she had lived with her first husband. But Ted assured her they were common as ragweed. "A real small-town girl. Take you out of your neighborhood and you're on Mars."
He talked like that all the time. He teased her about her Bronx accent and mongrel ancestry. When he was in one of his paranoid funks, he accused her of hypocrisy, neglect, even of mistreating her first husband, whom he had never met. She suffered his abuse until he finally ignited her anger. Then his wit suddenly became tongue-tied, his insults childish, and his belligerence turned to self-pity. Soon she was feeling sorry for him and imagining it was she who was at fault. But he refused her attempts to make it up, and she had to resign herself to a day of cold silence. Throughout this emotional roller coaster—six years—she never ceased to be amazed that a man so tormenting and tormented could produce such delicate still lifes. It was like living with a fallen angel.
"What are you working on?" she asked, taking care not to come too close to his easel. He hated having someone watch him paint. The house they were minding was located close to some of the prettiest harbors on Long Island, but he wouldn't budge from the clump of impatiens in the back yard. He sketched, painted, and sketched it again. If he didn't choose to show her his work, she did not dare look for herself, even if he was out for one of his midday strolls. Nor did it surprise her if, as now, he failed to answer her inquiry or replied with a wisecrack. She considered his talent justification for almost any disagreeable behavior.
She had sealed off the living and dining rooms, not because Fran had asked her, but because she couldn't bear even to dent the throw pillows on the sofa. But now, having nothing else to do, she decided to take a tour.
Fran's Belleek china resided in a glass hutch occupying an entire wall (the Waterford was relegated to an ordinary kitchen cabinet). On the opposite wall hung her husband's antique clock collection. Two brass candelabra floated in the deep polish of the mahogany table. Leslie would no more think of eating off such an artifact than she would consider using the oil painting hanging on the wall over the sideboard for a serving tray.
She touched the gleaming wood, taking care not to leave a finger mark. An unfamiliar face, blurred as if under water, stared up at her. Even allowing for distortion, there was no mistaking it for a young face. The cheeks had begun to sag, and there were thick pouches under her eyes. In his better mood Ted told her she had the body of a 20-year-old. That was an exaggeration, but even though her figure was still good. The woman staring up at her was no 20- or even 30-year-old. Where had her time gone? Two decades wasted on one man and his graceless son—the boy sometimes refused even to talk to her—another six summers devoted to her present spouse. Soon she would be 50, not old age, but far enough along to have something to show for her years besides this sagging flesh.
"Are you planning to make lunch, or am I supposed to subsist on air?"
She could tell his work had gone well. Otherwise he would be in the kitchen himself, banging around Fran's new stoneware. Just last night he almost shattered the glass shower door because he was not able to adjust the hot water to his satisfaction. He also stepped on the cat, an old female used to people walking around her. When Leslie heard the shower door slam, she flew up the stairs in a panic (he hadn't actually broken anything; he was very good at knowing just how far to go), but all she could do at the sight of the limping animal was weep and pray there was no permanent injury.
She blamed herself. By now she should be able to anticipate his reactions: with charm when he was among equals or a pretty woman was present; taciturn when the company did not come up to his standards or he felt intimidated; infantile, violent, or both when he felt he had the upper hand. But just as she could not easily "interiorize" (a word she had heard a lot of at the support group Fran got her to join) her idea of herself as a competent professional, she also could not deal with her husband face-to-face the way she did in her imagination when she was out for a walk or searching for a book at the local library. In those moments of seeming objectivity, she could work out their relationship to a T. But as soon as she confronted the real man again, her resolve vanished and she quailed at his harsh greeting as if she had never had any insight at all.
She didn't feel this way with other people—cowed, insignificant, dependent on constant expressions of approval. Fran challenged her to be her best self, and when they were sharing a tuna salad at one of Fran's midtown watering holes, she felt she was. They even talked about starting a business, not the usual consulting firm but something altogether novel, a service using the latest computer technology, Fran's wide-ranging business sense, and her own raw smarts. Other women launched such enterprises and succeeded. Why not they?
But by the time she had returned home, the idea seemed just an invention of Fran's imperious personality, a kind of contact high, and she sensed she must choose: Ted's wife or Fran's partner. But there really was no choice. She could not bear to sever herself from Ted even for one day. It was no use talking about interiorization and "building ego-strengths." She knew he was bad for her. But it was as if the air itself, the only air available, were unwholesome.
The telephone rang in the small office Fran and her husband shared.
"Hello, Mrs. Cunningham. This is Joe Setzer."
"This isn't Mrs. Cunningham. It's her house-sitter."
"House-sister?"
"Sitter. I'm looking after Mrs. Cunningham's house while she's away."
"She's on vacation or something?"
"May I take a message?"
"Message? All I been doing is leaving messages on that damn machine. Every time I call, it's the same deal: 'Mrs. Cunningham ain't home. Will I please leave a message after the beep?' This is the first time I got a human being on the line."
She was confused by the man's anger. She had connected with Fran's answering machine any number of times and always received a prompt call back.
"Please don't hang up. I got a real problem here. Six months ago I asked that lady, your Mrs. Cunningham, to fix my ceiling. It fell down. So, who's to blame? Well, maybe nobody. Except, where I come from, a landlord—excuse me, land-lady—is supposed to make repairs when something breaks through no fault of its own. So, does she? No. Even though she knows about it the next day, the very next morning. Okay, I says, give her time. Maybe she's got other places need repairs. Maybe some old lady got no heat. Maybe a blind man got a broken window.
"So I wait. I wait a couple weeks. Then I call again. 'Oh, the ceiling,' she says. 'I'm so glad you called. I'll have someone over to fix it first thing.' I should have asked which 'first thing'? First thing next year? First thing next century?"
"I don't see..."
"Wait. I'm almost done. I'm a reasonable man, miss. I don't expect somebody to run over every time I got a leaky faucet. As a matter of fact, I fix my own faucets, even though technically that's a landlord's—landlady's—responsibility. But a carpenter, a plasterer, I'm not.
"Look, I don't know you, lady, and vice versa. I got a three-foot hole in my ceiling for the last six months. Every time my upstairs neighbor sneezes, I get a mouthful of plaster. If it ain't too much trouble, would you mind passing the word on to Mrs. Cunningham? I'm at my wit's end."
She had had no idea Fran was a landlady, although she had heard her talk about an ambition to someday get into summer rentals. They had even joked about Fran finding a year-round shack for Ted and her out in the boondocks. At least to Leslie it was a joke, although Fran didn't seem to believe she and Ted could not lay their hands on a few thousand dollars for a down payment. But she had never associated Fran's ambition to wheel and deal in vacation homes with landlording, certainly not with the kind of landlording which had recently caused Leslie herself to lose half a dozen days from work in order to fight a whopping rent increase (Ted developed a sinus condition that lasted the duration of the court action).
She could see the gaping cavity above the caller's bed. She could smell plaster dust and even imagined a stench of garlic seeping through the rotten floorboards, just as it did from the apartment below her own.
"Have you been in touch with any tenants organizations?"
"What are they?"
"They give advice. Sometimes they'll even go to court with you."
"They could help?"
"It can't hurt to ask. Look them up in the phone book."
"I will," he said. "But, say, why are you telling me this? Ain't you supposed to be Mrs. Cunningham's friend?"
"I told you, I'm just the house-sitter. I'll pass your complaint on to her."
"Okay. Thanks, whoever you are."
Her heart was pounding the way it did after she had testified in Landlord-Tenants Court. Every word she spoke there that day was true. And yet she had felt deeply violated by the lawyer's snide interrogations and the judge's insipid pretense at impartiality. She had wanted to cry but restrained herself until she reached the grubby privacy of a public toilet. She did not now feel like crying, but she did suddenly want to get away from this cozy office, away from this suburban Xanadu, and at least for the moment, away from her impossible husband.
"So? Is lunch ready or not?"
She turned instinctively toward his voice, but her feet carried her to the house's front entrance.
More impatiens, darker than the ones in the back yard, were flowering in white tubs on each side of the stoop. To her left the lawn, recently manicured, fell sharply toward the street. There was no sidewalk. No one in this neighborhood walked.
She started down the flagstone steps. The cicadas were in full voice, a sound like rasping jungle birds. She sat down on the short stoop and wrapped her arms around her knees. All she had wanted for the rest of her life had seemed represented by this house—room to breathe, cleanliness (she had not seen a roach in a month), a place for Ted to work. She had even dared imagine how she might rearrange things—add some marigolds to the back garden and replace Fran's department-store art with real paintings. She had found an unexpected affinity in herself for shopping malls, a bourgeois amenity she had never dreamed she could enjoy, and had even fancied playing hostess in Fran's forbidding living room.
But now the house and everything about it seemed alien and ugly. Her shock was nothing so simple as finding out her friend was a landlord like any other, always putting her tenants' complaints on a back burner. But her disenchantment ran deeper than that, touching a part of her she thought she had buried along with her ingenuous youth. As she sat contemplating some debris on the flagstone steps, she found herself deeply regretting she had agreed to house-sit in the first place.
Some of that debris on the flagstones was moving. A piece of chalky protoplasm was waving its thin black appendages at her. It was not like any other bug she had seen. Apart from the disgusting whiteness of its belly, the thing was huge, an inch or more. She looked around and saw more of its kind. She picked up a twig and prodded one. The bug responded with a squawk echoing the shrill chorus in the trees above.
That anything so small could make such a racket, and that something so large could be just an insect, was revolting. She dropped the twig and stood up. Dozens of other dead or dying cicadas were strewn across the lawn. Why hadn't she noticed them before, or had they all fallen just this morning? Ants were already devouring some, not bothering to wait till the big legs stopped kicking. In the trees above, more cicadas—thousands of them—called stridently through the hot afternoon, each seemingly confident of its own immortality. But they had to be dropping, even now, all around her. The idea of one coming down near her, on her, made her shiver with disgust.
"Am I going to get lunch or not?"
Ted was standing under the short, peaked overhang sheltering the house's front entrance. No dying cicada could strike her there. She ran up the steps and threw herself against him. He hesitated, then reluctantly brought his arms around her. The embrace lasted only a few seconds, but it comforted, even seemed to reorient her. When it was over, she went willingly into the house to start his omelet.
