• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 874 0

upstairs. I was cooking dinner, a simple stir-fry, when I thought I heard some sound, a cry of some sort, coming from the living room. Thinking that it might be Bradley, I checked the room but found nothing out of place. Here on one side was the bookcase, and there against the west wall was the audio system. I shrugged to myself and soon forgot about it. As I was doing the dishes, my hands slippery with soap, the tap water splashing into the sink, I heard the cry again, more distinctly, and this time I knew that the cry had not been one of pain but of surprise. Pleasure was in it somewhere. I found this auditory memory quite perplexing.

Suspicious, I went into the living room and did a thorough search, the dog following me. Finally I turned up a slip of paper hiding under the corner of the rug. On it was some handwriting that I recognized as Chloé’s. It seemed to be in code.

Living room §

Kitchen §

Kitchen table ¤

Bedroom

Bathroom shower

Basement

It appeared to be some sort of checklist. At first I imagined that she had gone around the house checking to make sure that everything was where it should be. I tossed the paper into the wastebasket and went back to making my dinner.

After dinner I fished the list back out of the wastebasket and checked it again, peering at the arcane doodled symbols. These kids, what had they done in my house? Living room, they wrote, followed by the strange coupled § symbol. I walked into the living room and sat down, not on the sofa, but on the floor. I closed my eyes and imagined these kids, the house sitters, also in the living room, engaged with each other so that their bodies formed a §. They laughed, they came together, they were solemn, and then they rested.

I imagined them, these kids, these newcomers to love, doing what kids do, exploring a house, having sex in the rooms, then the girl making a list of where and how, and as I sat there I heard the happy cry again plain as nightfall, and I thought: this house isn’t haunted, but it does have a memory, this house remembers what people have done here, and then it plays back those sounds like a bored and absentminded African parrot. I moved through the rooms, feeling my way through the passions these kids had had, how they laid each other in bed, forming a

In the basement I felt the two of them passing by me, felt the memory of their having been physically present there as the boy, Oscar, teased the girl, Chloé, while they looked at my paintings and talked about them, the girl leaning over and the boy, behind her, reaching over to touch her — there — at the base of her neck, a delicate spot for her. Then he extended his arms around her, still standing behind her, as if grasping for her animal heart. Words were spoken. They made love quickly, standing up, I think, and Chloé’s back, when she came, got damp. Then they turned off the lights and went upstairs. They were still somewhat frightened and impressed by the size and the majesty of their attraction to each other.

I follow them up the stairs. I watch them go into the kitchen and observe them making a dinner of hamburgers and potato chips. They recover their senses by talking and listening to the radio. I watch them feed each other. This is love in the present tense, and finally I have had enough of them, and I close my eyes, and when I open my eyes again, they are gone, and the house is mine again, at least for the time being.

All the same, there is still no comfortable place for me in the house. I am not much of a king, in my present condition. Passion occupies a space that is not vacated until another passion occupies it.

EIGHT

SMELLING OF ONION and garlic, what we did was, we’d lie in bed together, jabbering about the future, Oscar and me. This was in his room, because I was moving out of my roommates’ palace into my own efficiency and spending more time just now in Oscar’s bedroom, except for those days we house-sat at Bradley Smith’s. Oscar’s bedroom: like I already told you: trophies with bronzed guys running in place up on the shelf, his track shoes still