chapter 6
By Nate's third visit, Ms. Graves had stopped discussing American history altogether and thus any topic that might appear on his exam. Jumping off from Wilson at Versailles, she had waded into the diplomatic correspondence that detailed Britain's haphazard Middle East strategy following the Armistice.
"It came down to a lack of troops. Their army was fading away, you see. Someone had to maintain law and order. And so the British did what empires always do - they installed puppets. The Hashemites! Losers to the Sauds in the battle for the Arabian Peninsula! Why not give them Jordan! Of course it was only supposed to be a temporary fix, six months of police work until the mandate could be rearranged, a gentlemen's agreement, but look what we got! What should obviously have been the Palestinian state run for eighty years by an imported monarchy. Cancer number one. But why stop there? Ms. Gertrude Bell is a very fine and knowledgeable woman but not quite fit to rule Mesopotamia and given that the French had chucked brother Faisal out of Syria, he was in need of a job, so why not give him Baghdad - another Hashemite installed to rule an incoherent people in an incoherent country! Truck in the Sunni elites! Throw in the Kurds! Can't you just picture it?" she asked, tossing her arms in the air. "Little Mr. Whatsit in his Whitehall office carefully drawing his map. If it weren't so lethal it could be read as farce."
When Nate ventured that the units he'd missed in class were on the Revolutionary War, Ms. Graves closed her eyes, held her palm out like a guard at a crosswalk instructing him to halt, and said, "I can't do George Washington. I simply can't. Triumphalist or otherwise. You'll have to go elsewhere for that."
Slouched again in the wingback chair, Nate let go of whatever responsibility he'd felt to prepare for the test. What did an AP credit matter when he hadn't even applied to college? It didn't compel. Not like the woman in front of him, who was so clearly driven by her own imaginings. It reminded him of the time his father had borrowed someone's yacht and sailed Nate out to Block Island to visit a businessman he had met on an airplane, a man who owned a paper company and might want to make a deal, only the businessman wasn't home when they arrived at his waterfront house; the maid said he'd gone to Brazil. And so they sat together on the empty beach sipping the gin his father had brought in a thermos, the liquid warm now and rather bitter.
Thus, while it surprised Nate when Ms. Graves asked at the end of the session if he would like to continue their work over dinner, it seemed to make an odd kind of sense, and he didn't hesitate to say yes.
At five thirty on a Friday afternoon they were the only customers at Finden Szechwan. A sunken-eyed waiter greeted them and the two dogs with a resigned nod of the head, directing them toward a banquette in the corner.
"At least their prices don't seem to have changed," Ms. Graves said, studying the menu through her reading glasses. "But you shouldn't worry about that. I'll take care of this. I'm celebrating, you see. I got a letter today about this suit I've filed. There's going to be a hearing soon and it turns out that the case has been assigned to the perfect judge. You noticed, I'm sure, that enormous house next to mine."
"Yeah. It's pretty impressive."
Her head recoiled, as if he'd tossed a rat onto the table.
"Of course," she said, slowly gaining hold of herself, "there's no reason you should understand. I forget so easily - the ignorance of the young. How would you know these things? No one's taught you." She put down her menu and leant across the table toward him. "In which case, allow me. That house," she said, her voice dropping, "that house is an abomination!"
"It was just an opinion," he said.
"No!" she cried. "That's precisely what it isn't! That's precisely what's become so endemic. That cheap, mindless relativism. You're all awash in it. Of course it's a pluralist society. So we're modest. In the big things: religion, metaphysics. We're non-absolutists. That's secularism. That's maturity. That's what the zealots can't abide. But this business of opinions. As if the world had no discernible qualities. As if there were no history. It's a disaster. It's an abandonment of the Enlightenment. All in the name of individualism. And they expect people to just stand by and watch. I was run out of my job on this sort of hogwash. The whole four-hundred-year effort sacrificed on the altar of the inoffensive. It's unspeakable."
"Right," Nate said, afraid of the woman for the first time.
"But that's just it!" she exclaimed, thrusting her hands out to her side, knocking Sam in the face. "You're agreeing with me because you think that's what I want. That's the problem. Do you think I was the one who brought The Autobiography of Malcolm X into the classroom? No. That's what they forget. It was students, black students God forbid, bused out from the city, who told me they'd stop coming to class if I didn't assign it as a counterpoint to King and the nonviolent wing of the movement. And more power to them. They were right. But by the time the authorities got rid of me those children were swallowing that book down like just one more palliative drop of minor guilt and minor catharsis, one more petty event in their two-bit little moral Olympiad, where everyone always wins gold. The young limbs of the body politic cleansing themselves for future efficiency. I played them the tapes of his speeches, and even met them halfway by showing the damn movie. But it was all just one big entertainment to them."
The waiter had come over to take their order but in her enthusiasm Ms. Graves failed to notice him.
"However, I digress. The point is, that house, you mark my words, it'll be gone. This town, those selectmen - they broke the law."
Nate glanced at the idling waiter, trying to clue his tutor to his presence.
"Oh, hello there," she said, reaching into the pocket of her cardigan, from where she produced a faded newspaper coupon advertising a two-for-one entree special. "We were wondering," she said, handing it to the waiter, "which of your dishes qualify?"
The man's already sagging countenance drooped. He took the worn clipping from her and turned it back and forth a few times, as if delay might save him from this final indignity.
"This is no good," he said. "It expired. Three years ago."
"Well that's rather silly. It certainly succeeded in luring us in here. Are you saying you have no special offers at all?"
"Oh, no. We got specials. We introduced pad thai. It's right up there on the board. Special. Seven ninety-nine."
"But this is a Chinese restaurant."
"Not next week it won't be," he said. "We're closing."
The Doberman had spotted a cat on a windowsill across the room and begun to snarl.
"I agree, Wilkie," Ms. Graves said, "this is ridiculous. We came in here with the perfectly reasonable expectation of a discount. But never mind. On we go."
When the moo shu arrived, she barely touched it, pouring herself a cup of tea instead.
"So. Tell me. Why is the world a problem for you?"
"How do you mean?" Nate asked.
"Well, for some people the world is a more or less obvious place. It's transparent to them. It isn't, in itself, a conundrum to be overcome. Which means their interests are simply tastes or preferences. But if the world's a problem to you, your interests are different. You're conscripted by them. You know what conscription means, don't you?"
"I think I'm registered for it."
"You understand my question. What interests you involuntarily?"
Smearing plum sauce over his third pancake, Nate tried to surmise what exactly she was after.
"You mean, like, what makes me unhappy?"
Wincing slightly, Ms. Graves said, "I suppose that will do, but you understand I'm not asking about the trivial here. Failing to win some prize, or that sort of thing. I ask because you listen to me in a rather particular way - and believe me, I spent years being listened to by people your age - and it suggests to me the world's not obvious to you. I simply want to know why."
When he asked if it would be okay if he finished the lo mein, she fluttered her hand dismissively, never removing her eyes from his face.
Seeing no reason not to, Nate mentioned his father.
"Yes. I imagined it was something along those lines. Where did he do it? In your house?"
"No, in the woods."
She considered this for a moment.
"Inverting for you, I would imagine, the standard inquiry, Why kill yourself? to the less often asked, Why not? A sophomoric question, but then there are times in life when that makes it no easier to avoid."
Nate nodded slowly. It was weird to be talking about this to Ms. Graves but she wasn't wrong and she wasn't pretending. In fact, it was a relief to tell someone about it and not receive in return awkward condolence. To just say it and have it heard.
"Mostly it's just lonely," he said.
"You'll get used to that. Maybe you'll meet someone one day. Which may or may not ameliorate the feeling. When did you say this happened?"
"Last September."
"Ah," she said. "You're in the early stages. When you get to my age, the borders open up a bit. The barriers between times aren't so strictly enforced, which is a problem that you might say I'm conscripted by. This way in which we're not just dying animals. Do we have souls strapped to our bodies? That division seems too neat to me, but that's an intellectual matter. It lacks force in the end. But decay - rot - that's more complicated. It has a purpose, after all. It leads to new things. To other life."
A few minutes later the waiter approached to ask if they would like dessert. Ms. Graves shook her head and the waiter went to fetch the bill. The remains of their food had quickly congealed. She placed a few dishes on the floor for the dogs and for a while their lapping tongues were the only sound in the dining room.
___________
BY THE MIDDLE of May, the AP exam had come and gone. But still, each Friday afternoon, Nate went to the old woman's house. He had stopped giving her checks but she didn't appear to notice. Her lectures, if you could call them that, grew more disjointed as the weeks passed. Comments on Henry II's abrogation of jurisdiction from the ecclesiastical courts of twelfth-century England led into a discussion of precursors to the English Revolution four hundred years later, which apparently had something to do with the poetry she read aloud describing Adam's conversation with God: "'In solitude / What happiness, who can enjoy alone / Or all enjoying, what contentment find?' Can you hear that?" she asked. "He's asking God how a person can be content alone."
With her voice veering from angry to elegiac, she sounded as if she were narrating stories brought to mind by family photographs, the actors all intimates, their deeds still full of consequence and culpability. At the end of an hour or sometimes two, as Nate sat at her kitchen table drinking tea or stood in the doorway to go, rather than offering him some blandishment or goodbye, she would announce without transition what she saw in his expression.
Once, she said, "Boredom is easy. Which is why sadness hides there so readily. But don't be fooled for long. Dying of boredom. There's reason behind that idiom. It'll kill you sure enough."
Her peculiar affect freed him to ask things he otherwise wouldn't.
"What if I don't meet someone?"
"Then you won't. And that will be the condition under which you'll live. But remember: people won't save you."
Each time, on his way to and from her house, Nate would pause at the top of the hill to see if there were any signs of life down at the big house along the river, a car in the driveway or a light on inside. No for sale sign had appeared in the yard and yet there was still no evidence anyone lived there. Since that first day, he hadn't been able to get the place out of his mind.
Finally, on the last Friday in May, after Ms. Graves had rattled on till nearly six and Nate had left more tired than usual by her river of words, he decided there would be nothing wrong with having another look. And so he headed down the slope in the rich light of the spring evening, the grass beneath him freshly cut. Mounted on the corner of the garage, he noticed a surveillance camera and wondered if it fed its images to a screen in the house or to some security firm's office hundreds of miles away.
He passed out of its range, walking around the far end of the mansion which consisted of a glassed-in sunroom, unfurnished, with an open-air deck above. At the rear, a brick terrace extended onto the lawn, which ran forty yards or so down to the riverbank. Nate looked through one of the smaller rear windows into a pantry lined with bare white shelves. Next to that was a room whose perfectly polished wood floors glinted in the sun. He came to a set of French doors off the kitchen, which was a huge space with a slate counter island, two stoves, two sinks, and a double-wide fridge. In the corner stood a small wooden table with one chair, dwarfed by the room they had been placed in.
There were no cameras that he could see along this stretch of the house. He tried the door handle. To his surprise, it moved smoothly downward, the door coming open a few inches. He shut it again immediately, terrified of setting off an alarm.
A minute or two passed and he heard nothing.
What harm could it do, he thought. No one was here and he wasn't going to steal anything. He cracked the door just wide enough to listen. No sound but the hum of the fridge.
As soon as he stepped into the kitchen and closed the door behind him, he could feel blood rushing to his head from the excitement. He walked to the counter and paused there to listen again. The room smelled of wood wax and cleaning fluid. Moving farther into the house, he crossed the marble floor of the front hall and proceeded into a room nearly as large as the downstairs of his entire house. The outsize fireplace had no grate in it and its mantel was bare. Beyond this was the room with the couch placed at an angle facing the giant TV in the corner. The beer bottle he'd seen on that first day that he'd peered through the windows was gone and there was a stack of files on the floor.
He had never trespassed before. He had no idea it could be so exhilarating, all his senses alive with anticipation. The fear of being caught was close to exquisite. And who was it that lived like this? What kind of life did it imply?
Entering the back wing of the house, he stood at the foot of a staircase, stopping once more, trying to detect the slightest sound.
Upstairs, he walked down a central hallway, passing more unfurnished rooms on either side. The scent of pine freshener and just a hint of paint hung in the motionless air. While the thrill of transgression still filled him, he was beginning to find the emptiness of the place almost soothing. A house so unmarked, so unstained by memory or disappointment. It didn't even feel like Finden anymore.
At the fourth door along the hall, he glanced through what seemed to be the entryway to a suite of some kind. Entering it, he came up short at the sight of a king-size bed, recently slept in, the sheets ruffled, the pillow still bearing the wrinkled impression of a head. On the floor, a cordless phone rested facedown, and next to that stood a water glass. The only other objects in the room were a television and a standing lamp.
For several minutes he stood motionless, staring at the bed.
Along the opposite wall was a walk-in closet. Ten or twelve suits, blue, black, and dark gray, hung in a row on one side while dozens of freshly laundered shirts still in their plastic were lined up along the other. At the back stood a dresser, a pile of laundry heaped against its bottom drawer. Dress shoes arranged beneath the suits gave off the scent of newly polished leather. Cautiously, his hand beginning to tremble, Nate reached out to feel the arm of one of the suit jackets, marveling at how smoothly the fine wool moved between his fingers. That's when he heard the sound of a car door slamming shut.