The World Below Read online

  When I got news of the house then, my grandmother’s house, it seemed connected to all this in a way I couldn’t have given words to and maybe didn’t understand. A kind of answer, perhaps, though I wasn’t sure to what. In the end I decided not to decide anything right away, just to go east and see. See the house and see what happened. I arranged for a half-year sabbatical from my teaching job; I was long overdue anyway. I rented my own house out for the fall months, which was surprisingly easy: the real estate agent had a family with three teenage boys no one was eager to have crashing around in their home while they were gone. I told her I didn’t care, which was almost true. I let the real estate agent in Vermont know that I was coming just after Labor Day. The tenant would have to leave by then.

  My daughter Karen had said she’d pick me up and take me out to the airport. I was in my bedroom at the front of the house when she drove up. I stood still and watched her getting out of the car. She was about three months pregnant, just beginning to show. She’d always been the less conventionally pretty of my girls, tall and big-boned and slightly ungainly, but the pregnancy had already softened the way she looked.

  She wore a big man’s shirt today, crisp and white, over black leggings. Her long dark ponytail fell halfway down her back. As she came up the walk, she stopped to bend over and talk to a neighbor’s cat, making a kind of music even of this—she was a composer: a solitary, eccentric life—though the man she was married to, Robert, was the essence of stability: a lawyer. An estate lawyer—he made a great deal of money—and adoring of her in a way that would have made me slightly claustrophobic.

  She let herself in, calling out hello, and I answered her. As I shoved the last few items from the bathroom into my bag, I heard her walking through the other rooms of the tiny house. She appeared in the bedroom doorway.

  “Where’s all our stuff?” she said. I looked at her. She, of all the children, always wanted things to stay exactly the same in our lives, and she was vigilant and critical of me in my role as guardian of all that: her past, her history.

  “Oh, all that junk!” I said. “I chucked it.”

  “Mother!” she said, and then was silent for a moment, thinking about it. “You did not,” she said.

  “You’re right.”

  “So where is it?”

  “It’s in the basement, of course. Put. Away. We’ve got teenagers coming in here. You know what they’re like. Having been one.”

  She shifted in the doorway. “I don’t think I was that kind of teenager, was I?”

  I thought of her at that age, so careful and sober and responsible, always trying to get me to be stricter with the other two. “No, you weren’t,” I said.

  Her hands lifted to the faint curve of her belly then, and I felt I was seeing her train of thought: What kind of child was I? What kind of child will I have? I felt my heart squeeze for her.

  On the way to the airport, she quizzed me repeatedly about various arrangements I’d made for my absence, as though she were the parent and I the child, at risk of leaving loose ends. She wanted to come in with me to the gate, too, but I pointed out that I had just the one bag, a bag with wheels at that. Reluctantly she pulled up alongside the departure curb and got out. Her hair had begun to escape in wisps from the ponytail, and she was slightly flushed as she embraced me.

  “You look so pretty,” I said to her, gently stroking her hair back over her shoulder.

  She laughed. “You say that ’cause it’s your job to think so, Mom.”

  “I say that because it’s so true, Karrie.”

  She made a face and I walked away, into the terminal. When I turned to look back as I stepped onto the escalator, I saw her still standing there, her hand raised to shadow her eyes, looking big and girlish and almost frightened. I had a twinge of regret for what I was leaving behind, a twinge that vanished almost immediately.

  At any rate, it was gone by the time I buckled myself in on the plane. And though I knew the flight would be long and boring, I felt excited, as though I were stepping into some new, unknown world that would change my future, my fate.

  I flew into Boston, where I’d leased a car. I stayed there for two days, most of that time in a room near the airport in the Bostonia Hotel, in bed with an old lover, Carl Olney. I had called him a few days after I heard about the house, and it might have been the case that his availability was a small part of what drew me east.

  Availability I say. In truth, he was not available at all. He was married, which I’d known very well when I called. But I asked anyway, and he said yes. I asked because I knew he was kind of a rat—he’d certainly been a rat with me in San Francisco years earlier—and it seemed to me that might be useful to me now. I asked because he’d always been an enthusiast about women, about sex, and I was in need of enthusiasm. I hadn’t had a lover in the two years since Joe, and our lovemaking—our companionable, rather functional love-making—had been only very occasional for some time before we separated. I asked—I risked asking, a fifty-two-year-old woman—because I yearned to be touched passionately again, to feel another’s body, another’s skin, pressed against me in need and hunger, and I thought that Carl, who’d known me when I was young and pretty, might see through all the changes in me and still want to press his body, his flesh, against mine.

  Carl’s body had changed too—he’d grown a little round paunch just below his rib cage, and a bald spot was widening at the back of his head. At first he was apologetic about himself, but we quickly adapted to each other and found our old rhythms again, if not our old frequency; and eventually we were able to joke about the sense of hungry sorrow with which middle-aged lovemaking begins.

  I’d called Carl because I’d missed sex, but I found I had missed more simply lying next to someone and talking in that desultory postcoital or precoital way. You could speak of anything then, which I’d forgotten. I told him how hard it had been for me to call him. How all the things that had once seemed to me potentially charming about myself now felt like liabilities—certain expressions, certain habits. He talked about his marriage to a difficult woman, something I would normally have discounted, but I’d known Carl’s wife in San Francisco before they married and she was difficult. He said he was doing better now “with the fidelity thing.” When he said this, I happened to be lying naked on top of him, and I started laughing. After a moment, he joined in.

  We laughed about the hotel too. Our room was small and tasteful and pretty, but it looked out over the expressway. The flow of traffic and its noise seemed to come from the world of cheap roadside motels, so we made jokes about our $250-a-night cheesy flophouse.

  The whole thing felt illicit, as it was, and slightly tawdry, as it also was, but I have to say that this was part of its pleasure for me. I had an odd sense of betrayingjoe too, but I tried to enjoy that. I did enjoy it, in fact. Take that! I thought at least a few times as Carl and I heaved and jolted. I could have done with even more, really, though I was swollen and felt well used after just the first night.

  I’d been about to leave on Friday morning, literally almost out the door, when Carl started in again, kissing me, pushing my skirt up, sliding his fingers into me. I was still wet from the night before, from my eagerness now, and his fingers in me made a light, slipping noise. We made love one last time, partly dressed, sitting on the edge of the bed, my skirt pushed up around my waist, Carl making enthusiastic yelps. I was so pleased by all this activity that I didn’t even try to find my panties again before I left. Let Carl discover them, picking up his scattered clothes—a kind of calling card.

  I got into the leased car with my thighs still wet, still sliding smoothly against each other as I moved. From time to time as I drove north, I became aware of the faint odor of sex rising from my lap. Once or twice I slid my hand under my skirt and let my fingers play over my own swollen flesh. I was excited by the thought of how I’d spent the last two days, but that was only part of it. I felt a kind of general eagerness, the sense one has only rarely in lif
e, of starting anew, of a new adventure beginning, and it roused me sexually, this excitement. My first husband had sometimes said of me that I thought with my cunt. Unbelievably, he meant this as a compliment, and perhaps more unbelievably, at the time—a very different time—I took it as one. No longer. For some reason I remembered this abruptly now and it sobered me. It stopped me.

  To distract myself, I turned the radio on: NPR, talk of the current political state of affairs. I listened responsibly until the signal faded. Then I turned off the radio and drove on in the silence of the rushing road. I’d swung to the north now, and the highway had emptied out; it had been a long time since I’d driven on such empty roads. The woods, touched with the earliest hint of fall color in the flare of a maple here and there, pushed in on either side of the blacktop.

  It was midafternoon when I arrived. I’d made several stops along the way, once for lunch, once for wine, and then again for groceries. The air outside was so cool by now that I’d had the heater on for the last hour or so.

  The town, once I got past an ugly little mall just to the south, seemed unchanged. The cemetery was as neatly groomed as ever, flowers and flags planted here and there on the old graves with their tilting stones. The frame buildings on Main Street still leaned together as if for warmth. It was quiet this afternoon, no one around. A large yellow dog slept in the road. He got up slowly and moved when I honked. I turned right at the only stop sign in town and drove downhill, toward the river—and suddenly there it was: the house, with its white clapboards, its steeply sloped roof with the curling wooden shingles, its sagging black shutters that hadn’t been closed ever, in my memory. A low slanted sun blazed in the windows at its front.

  The yard was slightly overgrown, the driveway two narrow dirt paths in the tall grass. The splayed blue asters under the burning windows were still in bloom. When I opened the car door, the chill of the air struck me, and then the old, old smell, some combination of pine with the farm life in the fields that started just outside town. I stood, simply breathing, for a moment. I crossed the damp grass. The key was on the lantern to the right of the doorway, as I’d asked the real estate agent to leave it, and I let myself in. A musty, familiar odor greeted me as the door swung open: mostly woodsmoke and ashes. For years I had thought it was my grandfather who gave the house this odor; he was the one who tended the fire, and that smell was embedded permanently in his clothes. It was only after he died that I realized it was the smell of the house too—along with years and years of certain perfumes, certain teas, certain kinds of cooking odors.

  As I stepped into the hall, I was immediately startled by something I sensed in the room to my left. I turned to look, and stood, probably gaping.

  It was utterly changed.

  What I remembered best of this room—this front parlor—were the years it had served as my grandmother’s bedroom. She’d moved down here the last decade or so of her life, when the steep stairs became too difficult for her. It had been papered then, and thickly curtained for privacy from the street.

  Now it was reclaimed as a living room, with front-parlor furniture. But it wasn’t just that that had caught my eye—it was everything else. The walls were stripped to plaster and painted white, the windows were half-shuttered in white too. I noticed now that the floor here and stretching back to the rear of the house ahead of me had been sanded and refinished. The old dark stain was gone and the pine was now a light amber color. The new surface gleamed dully.

  The place was transformed. It looked like the summerhouse it was, not the dignified old residence of a country doctor. I went to the back parlor and found the thermostat. It clicked as I turned it up, and then after a few seconds I heard the distant rumble of the old furnace starting. I looked around, taking in the pared-down quality of this room too. I was thinking that my aunt Rue must have replaced most of the old furniture over the years; when I suddenly realized that the pretty chair I was looking at was my grandmother’s: a wicker rocker. She’d loved to sit in it back here when the room was still papered in repeating palm branches. The chair had been painted black then, or perhaps dark green or brown, I couldn’t quite remember. Now it was white, with big bright-pink tulips printed on its cushions.

  Slowly I walked back through the rooms that led from one to another, taking everything in, doing a kind of inventory. The old floorboards creaked as I made my way around. A few pieces were just the same, unchanged, unrenovated. Others—most—were transformed by paint or reupholstering or slipcovers. Everywhere it was the same: things had been lightened—sanded, painted white—and then the shocks of color added: green-and-white striped curtains, a wild flowered slipcover, fuchsia pillows, light straw rugs.

  I went back through the kitchen, past the back storeroom and two steps down into the little addition to the house that had once been my grandfather’s office. Here too the dark old cabinets and curtains were gone, the no-color walls were white. What had been a somber, gloomy office—though that was not how I thought of it then—had become a pretty, airy space.

  I felt a pang of loss. My grandmother had always kept this room just as it was when my grandfather died, and in that form it had had a magical quality for me—and for my brother too, I think. He used to study there when he was home from college. I can remember going in to sit with him. He’d be at the rolltop desk, the light from the green-glass lamp falling white on his hands and his books, leaving his face in shadow. He and I would talk for hours; he never seemed to mind my interrupting him. Behind him in the dark shelves were the chemicals, the instruments, the organs. The white enamel scale still stood in the corner of the room then, with the metal arm that swung out on top of your head and told you your height; and the odd chair, a little like a dentist’s or a barber’s, where Grandfather had performed tonsillectomies or tooth extractions. My grandmother had been his assistant in the early days, she’d told us. She’d administered the ether, which you gave then by dripping it onto a gauze mask laid over the patient’s nose. As I looked around now, I was remembering my grandfather’s framed degrees that had hung on the wall, and next to them the huge chart of the human body—male, of course. There had also been, peculiarly, a few stuffed animals set high on top of his shelves—a badger and a great blue heron. Their fur and feathers were already, even then, moth-eaten and dull. Both were gone now. Sold, or perhaps just thrown away.

  I assumed the renovation had been Rue’s choice. Though maybe she’d paid someone to do it. She’d lived in Paris all her adult life, and I didn’t think she’d come back at all after the trip for her mother’s funeral. I hadn’t kept in good touch with her. The news of her death had startled me and then made me feel guilty for not having written her, not having cared enough.

  The truth was, I hadn’t liked Rue. For years when I thought of her, I pictured her alone in her apartment on the Right Bank, looking censoriously out her window at anyone passing, anyone who might be making some kind of social mistake, as she saw it. At some point, I realized where this image had come from: a photograph I’d seen of the Duchess of Windsor, her face seamed in bitterness, peering out from her window in Paris in her old age and widowhood. After I made this connection, my brother and I started calling Rue “the Duchess.” One or the other of us would have had a note to report from the Duchess, or a Christmas card, or, unexpectedly and often unaccompanied by any explanation, the gift of some piece of family history: a bunch of photographs, a stack of six mono-grammed coin-silver spoons tied with a ribbon. By the time of her death, she had faded in my mind to the slight pinch of dislike I felt when I heard her name—or nickname.

  I went back to the front hall and up the complaining stairs. There had originally been three bedrooms under the sloping roof in this, the oldest part of the house, but one had long since been turned into a large bathroom. Its door was open, and within it you could see another door, which gave onto the two attic bedrooms in the extension beyond. These small rooms had been mine and Lawrence’s when we visited and then came to live. There was anoth
er, steeper stairway that descended from between them into the kitchen. Lawrence and I used to leave its door open at night: our rooms were unheated, and what we said was that we wanted the benefit of the rising warmth. But I think too that we were comforted by the nighttime sounds of my grandparents moving around, talking intermittently and peaceably below us.

  The same revising touch at work downstairs was evident up here. The wide floorboards, brown then, had been painted a light blue-green. And I could see that our dark old nightstands were now a pretty gray.

  A faint scorched odor was spreading in the house from the heating ducts. I opened a few windows to air things out and then I went back downstairs, back outside, and started to unload the car: groceries, booze, and the single suitcase I’d brought with me—I’d mailed myself several other boxes of clothes and books and things I thought I might want, so that I wouldn’t have to lug them around. The air was even chillier now, and somewhere in the distance a dog was relentlessly barking.

  While I put things away in the kitchen, I started a small pot of coffee in an electric percolator I’d found set out on the counter. When it was done, I sat down at the dining room table with my cup. The coffee was terrible—it made me wonder how long the can had been sitting around—but I managed a few sips as I watched the light through the pinkish maple outside the window. It had been years since I’d seen trees this color. I was struck with a kind of grief, looking out the window—as though, even though I was here now, looking at it, this world was already lost to me.

  Ridiculous, I thought. I got up and took my cup to the kitchen sink. I dumped it out and went back to the front hall, where I’d left my suitcase. I lugged it up the steep stairs and began to unpack slowly in the room that had been my grandmother’s when I was young, putting my things away in her old bureau. The drawers were lined with paper that might even have dated from her day; it was browned and crumbling with age at the edges.