The Winter Girl (3 page)

It would have been a great photograph. Even though I never snapped it, the image sticks in my mind, is always the same beautiful thing, just as real as the mundane facts of what really happened that night. We argued a little, lightly, over things we couldn't care less about. We poured ourselves more wine and sat silently through muted commercials.

I've never really taken my best photographs, but I can tell you what each one is:

A boy who fainted at the Fourth of July parade and was carried away by his father. The look of protectiveness, anxiety, and love in his father's eyes. The way the boy's sneakers dangled over his father's forearm.

Elise smiling at me from across the table, that day I brought her to meet my parents in Boston. A warm haze visible around her face, because we had been swimming in the ocean all day long and the salt was still drying in my eyes.

The curving road and the river of turning leaves above us, the net of shadows thrown over our laps, as we drove back from the Catskills one afternoon in October.

And then there are the ones I really would take a few days later. The ones that would change everything.

A
t 10:58, I stood by the bedroom window, watching the same lights in the same window of the house next door.

“Two minutes,” I said, looking at the clock on the bedside table. Elise was flipping through
Elle Decor,
already in her nightgown.

“Two minutes to what?”

“Two minutes till those lights shut off automatically. That's real great security. Same time every night.”

“I don't think they were counting on a guy who spends his evenings watching the house,” she said, tossing the magazine on the nightstand.

“One minute and forty seconds,” I said, standing closer to the window.

Elise turned the bedside lamp off.

“Don't you want to see this?” I said.

“I believe you,” she said, turning on one side and pulling the blankets up to her neck.

At 11:00 p.m. on the dot, the lights in the window of the house next door shut off. My breath stretched an oval on the cold glass as I watched, and I wandered through a succession of dark, unknown rooms in my mind before finally returning to the one I was in. I took off my clothes and climbed into bed.

In the morning, I took the half-full coffee cup that Elise had left behind before going to the hospital, and I microwaved it until it was scorching. I turned on CNBC and aimlessly watched stock symbols crawl by, which reminded me of my own dwindling checking account. No matter how much pasta we ate, we were still going through our money. Her father hadn't paid for a thing. The phone rang, but I didn't pick it up. I listened to her father's scratchy voice on the answering machine.

“Where is she?” he demanded. “Where's my daughter?”

I listened to him hang up, involuntarily replying.

“She's on her way,” I said out loud. “God knows why.”

The phone rang again. It was Victor, just beginning to get himself worked up. His voice had a thick, clotted sound, an almost sexual tint to it, as if anger and arousal had crossed wires a long time back.

“You think you've got it made,” he said. “You're in for a surprise. You're in for a very nice surprise when I die. You don't know anything, yet. You don't know what's going on right under your nose, do you?”

I didn't care about the colon cancer and the drug-addled state he was in. I'd had enough. I picked up the phone.

“Hi, Victor,” I said, almost casually.

“Who is this?” he said, sounding meek and disappointed that I had dared to answer in real time.

“Your fucking son-in-law,” I said.

I had a long list of things I was going to say to him. A surgically dismissive treatise of his entire life up to then and the awful things he had done to his daughter. I was going to pry it all open one last time and then slam it shut. I was going to close the case on him while he was still alive.

“It's my turn, Victor,” is what I said first.

But I didn't get my turn. Victor hung up.

T
here's a note somewhere, deep in some landfill, that I wrote to myself that day. I remember the words exactly. It said:

STOP BEING YOUR SAME OLD SELF.

I remember writing those words, and then I remember being my same old self and crossing them out. I crumpled it up, threw it in the garbage, and pulled on my sweatshirt. The last place I wanted to be that day was in Victor's home. Surrounded by his mothballed sweaters and Dunlop tennis rackets and old shoes and pill bottles, and deeper in his closet, an old shotgun zipped up in a beige bag. One afternoon, crushingly bored, I had been tempted to pop two shells into it and bring down one of the endlessly gliding seagulls that always floated over the property. I stood there for a few minutes, raised the gun, but I didn't pull the trigger. I preferred my Nikon.

The house I was living in would never be mine. It was dry, with overgrown ghost grass leading to a deer path and another alien house. It was as if I were standing on a bridge that was being burned at both ends. I told myself that if her father would just die and we could get back to Park Slope, I'd feel settled again. But what roots did I really have there? I was a laid-off photographer of Asian newlyweds. It depressed me just remembering the hand signals I had to use, the frozen smile on my face, the frozen smiles on theirs. I might as well have been living on Mars.

To think that I had arrogantly put off having kids just so I could focus on photography. I told Elise we had plenty of time. We weren't even thirty yet. What would the child we might have had thought of that elm and the bridal parties I led across its scattered, bright yellow leaves? The worst decisions never let you go. They come circling back, even on the best days, to find you.

As I made my way up the deer path, camera in hand, attacked by the usual gangs of thorns, I tried to trace the lie of my talent. It might have started with my fifth-grade teacher, who, frustrated and a failure himself, had encouraged me and ordered me to always put art first. It might have started further back, when I laid out my drawings like stepping stones, so my mother would be forced to admire my one-hundredth version of a fire-breathing dragon when she came home.

As I stood on the patio of the house next door, the bay flashing beneath me, I pictured hurling my nine-hundred-dollar Nikon D70 as far as I could. It would crack through some branches below and disappear in the brush, along with a memory disc full of photographs the world could probably do without.

But the camera stayed strapped around my neck as I leaned up against the cold windows of the house, cupping my hands to eliminate the glare. Inside, in the enormous living room, I could see the staircase winding down. A low coffee table. The fake ficus, its leaves blown across a tan, wooden floor. A stack of coffee-table books tilting behind a chair, the top one blandly titled
Impressionism.
It looked a little like a stage set. Later, I would sometimes think of everything that happened in that house as a kind of play. A performance that neither of us knew we were capable of.

I tried the usual door, pressing down that half-inch before I felt the lock. I sensed my curiosity change. I was becoming impatient. I wanted to find a way into the house that was much more subtle than breaking a window. I tried each door on the bay-facing side and then I walked toward the driveway, stopping to press my face against another window. The master bedroom. Three photographs on a dresser: a plain-faced middle-aged man and a blond wife, but through the screen I could barely make out their faces. Some photo with a horse in it. One on a beach. I cupped my hands again and peered in another window. A pink Jacuzzi bathtub. Bath-oil beads in a jar and designer shampoos. A terry-cloth robe hanging on the door.

Under a pine tree about twenty yards away, more lawn furniture had been piled up, the plastic covered with a fine layer of dead pine needles. There was a Weber grill, uncovered, with a pair of rusted tongs hanging from its side. There was something about trespassing that aroused me in a slightly disturbing way.

I walked around the front of the house, my feet crunching on the blue gravel, and suddenly heard a noise in the dry leaves. I immediately thought someone was watching me, but it was a deer, bounding away. I took a deep breath and continued walking toward the front door, wondering what I would have said if I had seen a person there instead.

The clouds, which had been thick for two days, split enough to momentarily whiten the driveway, and the sun briefly flashed in the windows above me. I waited a moment, and then I walked up to the front porch steps, surprised that the iron railing was slightly loose. I tried the front door and was actually half turning to walk away when I realized it was unlocked.

I don't know why I did this. But I shook my head as I walked into the house for the first time. If someone were watching me, they might think I was silently cursing myself for forgetting my keys.

Once inside, I carefully closed the door, my heart knocking against my chest, blood fizzling in my ears.

“Hello,” I actually said, panting. “Is anybody home?”

M
y first visit didn't last more than five minutes. I felt as if, at any second, someone might appear behind me and ask me what the fuck I was doing. I think everybody should have a what-the-fuck-are-you-doing? moment in their life. I highly recommend it. All my overrefined worries dropped away as I stepped into the living room.

I had not been invited into this house, so at first I stood there, like a deer, waiting to hear if there was anyone there but me. There wasn't a sound. Not inside, or outside, only the bright afternoon light shifting slightly over the furniture in the living room. For days I had been wanting to touch these objects, and now I did. I walked slowly across the living room floor—it was a parquet floor, painted white—until I reached the glass coffee table where the small black statue of Cleopatra sat. From the window, I hadn't been able to see her upturned breasts and wide, hollow eyes. I leaned over and touched the top of her wooden head, smiling to myself.

Above the fireplace, there was a white orchid. I rubbed a petal between my fingers. From the outside, I had known it was fake, but now I felt the slightly coarse fabric between my fingers.

I trailed my index finger across the dust of a coffee-table book titled
Rodin
that had been left on the seat of an upholstered armchair. I picked up the heavy book and sat down, listening to the fancy frame of the chair creak underneath my weight. I crossed my legs and turned a few stiff pages, as if my being there was the most natural thing in the world. I noticed a faint burning smell coming from somewhere, not entirely pleasant, like singed rubber or plastic.

I stood up and passed through the dining room, rubbing my thumb against the beveled edge of the glass table. A small platoon of tacky, flowery plates hung on a wall. I suddenly had the urge to take one and send it flying into a wall, a small act of destruction I'd never contemplate in Victor's house.

A handful of different-sized crystal decanters sat on a sideboard, all filled with amber-colored cordials. I lifted out a crystal stopper and poured the darkest one into a dusty snifter, swirled it around and sniffed it. I took a small sip, felt the warm alcohol slide under my tongue.

Then I heard a noise, upstairs, and I swear, for three or four seconds, my heart didn't even beat. I didn't even swallow the alcohol left in my mouth. The small snifter stayed frozen in the air, as if I were toasting someone. I pictured some man coming down the winding staircase, tying some silk belt around a silk robe as he made his way toward me.

I think I waited a minute, but there were no more sounds. I decided not to push my luck. I told myself that this was far enough. I could always come back.

I had entered mumbling to myself, still pretending I was someone else, but I left without saying a word. I just closed the door and calmly walked away. Looking back, I realize I hadn't changed yet. It was too early for that. But there was something natural about the way I walked away. Upright, unhurried, aware. It's the way intruders walk, and I swear, you either have it or you don't. It can't be taught.