The Plague of Doves - Louise Erdrich [129]
“You’ve done a beautiful job. I wish I could afford it, myself. We do have one interested party, but I’ve hesitated to mention him because he’s right up front talking about demolition.”
“Ted.” I knew. That he would want the house had, of course, occurred to me. I’d never sell it to him.
“Ted Bursap,” the realtor said, nodding. “He’ll give you your asking price.”
“The tear-down king. I don’t think so.”
“Well.” The real estate agent shrugged. “At least we’ve got him in our back pocket.”
“Yeah, sit on him! William Jennings Bryan stayed in this house when he came through on a stump speech. The windows were made out east and shipped here in huge sawdust crates. The interior moldings and woodwork are mahogany, the library panels—”
“You’re real attached, I know.”
I was too attached to give up the house—it was true. I figured and finagled, but all we had ever had was the house. My salary from the cemetery endowment was just enough through the years to maintain us, pay medical bills and my tuition, and keep the house in good shape, even though I did most of the repairs myself and had let the back wall go to the bees. I knew they were in there. In summer the wall vibrated with their sensuous life. All winter it was quiet as they slept. I had finished my law degree as I was waiting for the house to sell, and I decided to take the state bar exam. Perhaps I’d try to get a loan, I would take out a homeowner’s loan and pay it off once I’d hung out my shingle. In the evenings, I sat on the back porch studying like mad, listening to the bees gather the last sweetness before going to sleep. Their hum made the whole house awaken and I could not abandon it or them. After dusk, I sat in the paneled library, appreciating the stillness and the clean odor of the swept and dusted rooms. I thought how nice it would be to live there with C. I imagined it; I got lost in imagining it. I dreamed it when I fell asleep in my chair. All of a sudden I woke in blackness, alive to desolate knowledge.
In that moment, I knew what those who kill themselves over love know; I saw what passed before the eyes of dying men who fought idiotic duels. I’d wasted my life on a woman. All I had was this house. I called the agent.
“Okay,” I told him. “Sell the place to Ted.”
THE VERY NEXT day, I put all that my parents and I had ever owned into storage, and I moved out of the house into a motel. I soon heard that Ted had begun. I knew how he worked. His crew would dismantle the inside, prying off even the old bead board in the pantry, yanking out light fixtures, chipping the shadowy gold tiles from around the fireplace, disassembling the elegant staircase, packing up the stained glass. Once the inside was gutted, Ted would rent a giant new machine with a great toothed bucket that he operated to claw the shell of lath and plaster to splinters.
I sat in my room at the Bluebird, trying to read. I was scheduled to take the bar that week, but I couldn’t concentrate. It was as though the house was calling out to me, telling me that it loved me, that its destruction was a cruel and unnecessary adjunct to my decision to break things off with C. I couldn’t see what was happening to the house, but I could feel what Ted was doing as though it was happening to me. The poor motel room, so shabby with its faded wallpaper of fluttering swallows, the sagging mattress on its rickety bed, the sink of chipped gray porcelain, and worst of all—an attempt at cheer—a paper bluebird in a glassless frame, only filled me with low dread. I could feel myself chopped into, gutted, chipped out, destroyed. Finally, on the third day, reduced to bones or beams, I decided to act.
I left the Bluebird and walked in the warm summer air to C.’s. For the first time, I went in through the front door, the office door, without knocking. Her receptionist told me that she was busy with a patient, and squawked when I walked right past her into the examining room, which was empty. I shut that door and went out into the back, into her kitchen, where I surprised