Between Husband and Wife
When John called to say he was coming over I made a point of breaking out the good port and cigars. There was not a shred of snobbery in this man but he had worked hard over the years and had acquired a taste for the good things in life. My budget hardly stretched to a percentage point of his but he had always been generous to me and I felt the least I could do was stretch myself a little to return his many favours.
The call was a surprise as it had been over a year since he had last been in touch. It was welcome, though. I missed him and have to admit that the thought worried me that I had somehow offended him.
I need not have worried. When he turned up, dead on seven in the evening as arranged, he seemed genuinely pleased to see me. There were none of his usual smiles and he looked dreadfully tired, but his bear-hug was as crushing as ever and just as sincere.
He declined the offer of something to eat and we got straight into the drink and cigars. In no time the room was hazy with drifting streamers of blue smoke. My sitting room is a hovel compared with his but, with the lights suitably dimmed and the coal fire properly set, it has the proper feel for a room where gentlemen meet to smoke and talk.
I had little to say. The preceding year had been something of a non-starter. The only difference at work was that another zero-rated pay-rise had left me poorer in real terms. Oh, and my wife had finally left me. I reasoned that he would not want to hear this so left him to work out for himself why she was not there.
For his part he spoke slowly about business, but it was all details about the activities of the growing number of people who ran his companies for him. He no longer took any active part in things and said that he was considering retiring as soon as possible.
The conversation was dull, I finally concluded. Up till a year before we had been in the habit of visiting one another regularly and by now the conversation would have turned to female anatomy or Pittsburgh’s chances of a play-off slot. I detected nothing in John other than dejection. There was absolutely no sense that he had any hidden purpose in visiting me until the fourth generous glass broke through some invisible line of reserve.
“I’m thinking of getting rid of the house, Phil.”
This shook me out of the pleasant fuzz that the port was spreading round me.
“But you love that place.”
“Loved. I sit there now and every night it feels more and more like someone else’s property. I thought I had the upstairs living room just perfect; voice controlled dimmer switches, remote controlled media systems, a knee-high bar within reaching distance of my arm-chair, and the big plasma TV.”
“The plasma TV,” I sighed leaning back into my fake leather chair. It really had been too long since I had visited. That screen was like being at the cinema but with all the booze in the world at your fingertips. I had to talk him out of abandoning that wonderful room.
John saw the remembering in my face and smiled for the first time that night.
“It is wonderful, Phil, but it just seems like someone else’s. It’s strange but for all its comfort I would rather be in a hotel room. You expect nothing from a hotel so you’re always pleasantly surprised by any little touches that make for a more homely feel. I expect a sense of being completely at home in my own living room and it just isn’t there any more.”
I recalled the house, a mere thirty-minute walk from my own home. I really should have made more of an effort to contact him. The house, though, was completely built from scratch. The ground floor comprised two garages, a kitchen and a utility room the size of New Hampshire. Upstairs were three bedrooms and two living rooms, all with full length windows that opened out onto wide, wood floored balconies. The living room John was describing was the larger of the two but sparsely furnished, practically only what he had just described; chair, bar and wall-mounted plasma screen. With the room darkened apart from low-angled street lights shining in it was like a retreat from the world.
The port was finished so I got up and fetched another bottle from my small kitchenette which was simply a closet sized room sitting open to the living room.
“Of course Nanette was never particularly pleased about my having a separate living room of my own,” I heard him say as I wrestled with a large plate of crackers and cheddar cheese. I teetered back to my seat, grateful that he took the bottle from my struggling fingers.
“I never understood why she was so upset about that, John. Your tastes were so totally different that the notion of two living rooms seemed pretty sensible.”
He poured two glasses of port, handed mine across, and sat back with a sigh.
“You would have thought so, wouldn’t you? I thought more or less giving her the rest of the house would be enough but I guess she just wanted to rule the roost completely.”
I paused before replying cautiously,
“Some people are just like that, John. I guess it’s a security thing.”
“No, Phil, this is more than that. It’s pure territory, pure control. I put millions into that house and its grounds. The rest of the city could be brought to a stop, power gone, gas gone, phones gone, but the house has the most expensive independent utilities imaginable. I designed whole areas of it, poured huge amounts of money into redundant structural features. A small aircraft could hit it head on and it would hardly be scratched. I paid for and I designed a place of comfort, security and luxury and Nanette took one look at it and straight away wanted to change it.”
I didn’t like the way the discussion had suddenly found its way onto bad ground.
“I’m sure she just wanted to personalise it to make it nice for both of you.”
He sat gazing vaguely at me, puffing gently on a cigar and rolling the half empty port glass in his hand. Lit from below by the fire his face looked old and empty.
“I sat last night, Phil, in my leather arm-chair, in my own living room, in the dark. I used to do that after a hard day and it used to relax me. Nanette kept to her living room while I unwound and we would meet up later in the bedroom. Lately, though, she has taken to standing out on the balcony outside my living room and gazing down at the street. At some level I don’t mind. She has lost all that weight she was carrying a couple of years ago, so the view is quite pleasant, and there’s always a nice promise for later on.”
He took a puff of his cigar just as it dawned on me what he had said.
“Nanette stands out on the balcony?”
“Every blessed night, Phil. I know what you’re going to say, buddy. I should be grateful. She’s here, she’s trim and sexy and she does keep a pretty tidy house. It’s funny, though…”
I wanted to break that pause, didn’t want to hear any more.
“…well, I know I can tell you intimate stuff. I know you wouldn’t go telling anyone else. It’s just she used to be pretty tight and tidy downstairs, if you follow me. Only now, well the sex is better than ever, but she leaves a fearsome mess on the bed-linen. Time was she could get up afterwards and get all the way to the bathroom without so much as a drip, now it’s practically plastic sheets we need.”
The gruesome detail was actually not that out of character. We had known one another for a long time and personal matters were definitely not out of bounds. If it had not been for such personal conversations I would not have gone to my doctor about a lump on one of my testicles. John probably saved my life with that conversation.
“I just wish she would leave me to the small part of the house that’s mine. She has the run of every other part of it.”
I felt sick. The deadpan, lucid quality of his speech stopped me dead in my tracks from blurting out the truth to him. What was wrong with him? How could he not recall, even at some deep level of his mind, in someplace quarantined from whatever madness had a grip of him, that Nanette was dead. Eighteen months dead in the small crypt behind the house that had been her pride and joy. Apart of course from the one room that John called his own.
I could think of nothing to say as he calmly spoke of the long days and nights in his living room, no work commitments to drag him away any longer, and Nanette’s thin frame leaning patiently on the railing outside.
I wanted to weep for this wonderful man who had supported me so often. I wanted to shake him out of this madness but his calmness told me that there was no way back.
I drove him home as the rain began around midnight. My beat-up old VW must have looked horribly out of place as it wound through John’s neighbourhood of parked BMWs and Rolls Royces. I admired these cars and prided myself that there was no envy in me for the people who owned them. Good for them; I just hoped I might someday be so lucky or successful.
The house that John built and Nanette took over was at the end of a winding stretch of road that rose into the hills to the south of the city. Trees had been carefully planted to restrict any view of the house until you were parked outside. As it was the rain was hammering down by the time I pulled up and the sky was being split apart by lightning.
We talked for a while but the racket from the growing storm eventually made this impossible. I leaned forward and looked up through the windshield.
“Christ, I never thought storms like this happened outside of movies.”
“Maybe Nanette’s getting impatient,” said John quietly. “Goodbye, Phil, and thanks for tonight.”
Before I could reply he had opened the door and stepped out into the downpour. I leaned over to the passenger window and watched him walk up the path that led under an arch of trees.
The balcony caught my eye as another flash of lightning lit the sky. It stretched across the front of the house above the tops of the trees. As the view dimmed I made out the lights behind the curtained windows. There were two part-time servants but I couldn’t see why they might be working this late.
As John vanished into the house I stepped out of the car to get a clearer view of the house. I always wore a hooded top but this proved unequal to the relentless rain. I consoled myself with the thought of a hot shower once I got home. The lights from the street cast enough light after my eyes recovered from the lightning flashes. To the left was the master bedroom. The centre had been Nanette’s living room and the right was John’s. Large potted plants were placed randomly along the length of the balcony, all looking like bushy gargoyles in the strange light.
Seeing no shadows behind the curtains I reached for the door handle and then froze as the potted plant outside John’s room stood up from its reclining position on the railing. A flash of lightning, for a mere moment, seared the image of Nanette onto my mind forever.
I could almost live with what I saw up there if it had been a glimpse of something about its business and oblivious to me, but it was certainly not oblivious. She looked down at me through eye sockets that had long since lost anything resembling eyes but I knew in those vacant black spaces that she could see me and that she knew me and that she still did not like me one bit.
The hooded garment she was wearing was not any shroud that John had buried her in. It was the long, baggy, hooded house-coat that she always wore as she scooted about her domestic empire. The remains of hands poked out from beneath the sleeves and gripped the banister in a talon-like grip.
I opened the car door and slid behind the steering wheel, locking the door with my elbow. I then reached across and locked the passenger door. Then I started the engine and reversed back down the narrow road without attempting to turn. At a distance my racing heart and loosening bowels told me might be safe I stopped and looked back at John’s house.
She had watched me retreat, just as I had left so many times before, when she was alive and clearly not wanting me about the house. Satisfied that I was gone and undoubtedly sure that I would not be telling anyone about her she turned from the railing and stepped into John’s living room.
As I think on this I really believe that I would have been happier if he had died that night. He did not, and I find that I can no longer sleep for the thought of my poor friend, thirty minutes away, night after night locked in the fetid, noisome embrace of that thing.
And each morning carrying his bed-linen, soiled and dripping, to the utility room. Where he undoubtedly laments the effects of age on his thin, trim and demonically territorial wife
End
The call was a surprise as it had been over a year since he had last been in touch. It was welcome, though. I missed him and have to admit that the thought worried me that I had somehow offended him.
I need not have worried. When he turned up, dead on seven in the evening as arranged, he seemed genuinely pleased to see me. There were none of his usual smiles and he looked dreadfully tired, but his bear-hug was as crushing as ever and just as sincere.
He declined the offer of something to eat and we got straight into the drink and cigars. In no time the room was hazy with drifting streamers of blue smoke. My sitting room is a hovel compared with his but, with the lights suitably dimmed and the coal fire properly set, it has the proper feel for a room where gentlemen meet to smoke and talk.
I had little to say. The preceding year had been something of a non-starter. The only difference at work was that another zero-rated pay-rise had left me poorer in real terms. Oh, and my wife had finally left me. I reasoned that he would not want to hear this so left him to work out for himself why she was not there.
For his part he spoke slowly about business, but it was all details about the activities of the growing number of people who ran his companies for him. He no longer took any active part in things and said that he was considering retiring as soon as possible.
The conversation was dull, I finally concluded. Up till a year before we had been in the habit of visiting one another regularly and by now the conversation would have turned to female anatomy or Pittsburgh’s chances of a play-off slot. I detected nothing in John other than dejection. There was absolutely no sense that he had any hidden purpose in visiting me until the fourth generous glass broke through some invisible line of reserve.
“I’m thinking of getting rid of the house, Phil.”
This shook me out of the pleasant fuzz that the port was spreading round me.
“But you love that place.”
“Loved. I sit there now and every night it feels more and more like someone else’s property. I thought I had the upstairs living room just perfect; voice controlled dimmer switches, remote controlled media systems, a knee-high bar within reaching distance of my arm-chair, and the big plasma TV.”
“The plasma TV,” I sighed leaning back into my fake leather chair. It really had been too long since I had visited. That screen was like being at the cinema but with all the booze in the world at your fingertips. I had to talk him out of abandoning that wonderful room.
John saw the remembering in my face and smiled for the first time that night.
“It is wonderful, Phil, but it just seems like someone else’s. It’s strange but for all its comfort I would rather be in a hotel room. You expect nothing from a hotel so you’re always pleasantly surprised by any little touches that make for a more homely feel. I expect a sense of being completely at home in my own living room and it just isn’t there any more.”
I recalled the house, a mere thirty-minute walk from my own home. I really should have made more of an effort to contact him. The house, though, was completely built from scratch. The ground floor comprised two garages, a kitchen and a utility room the size of New Hampshire. Upstairs were three bedrooms and two living rooms, all with full length windows that opened out onto wide, wood floored balconies. The living room John was describing was the larger of the two but sparsely furnished, practically only what he had just described; chair, bar and wall-mounted plasma screen. With the room darkened apart from low-angled street lights shining in it was like a retreat from the world.
The port was finished so I got up and fetched another bottle from my small kitchenette which was simply a closet sized room sitting open to the living room.
“Of course Nanette was never particularly pleased about my having a separate living room of my own,” I heard him say as I wrestled with a large plate of crackers and cheddar cheese. I teetered back to my seat, grateful that he took the bottle from my struggling fingers.
“I never understood why she was so upset about that, John. Your tastes were so totally different that the notion of two living rooms seemed pretty sensible.”
He poured two glasses of port, handed mine across, and sat back with a sigh.
“You would have thought so, wouldn’t you? I thought more or less giving her the rest of the house would be enough but I guess she just wanted to rule the roost completely.”
I paused before replying cautiously,
“Some people are just like that, John. I guess it’s a security thing.”
“No, Phil, this is more than that. It’s pure territory, pure control. I put millions into that house and its grounds. The rest of the city could be brought to a stop, power gone, gas gone, phones gone, but the house has the most expensive independent utilities imaginable. I designed whole areas of it, poured huge amounts of money into redundant structural features. A small aircraft could hit it head on and it would hardly be scratched. I paid for and I designed a place of comfort, security and luxury and Nanette took one look at it and straight away wanted to change it.”
I didn’t like the way the discussion had suddenly found its way onto bad ground.
“I’m sure she just wanted to personalise it to make it nice for both of you.”
He sat gazing vaguely at me, puffing gently on a cigar and rolling the half empty port glass in his hand. Lit from below by the fire his face looked old and empty.
“I sat last night, Phil, in my leather arm-chair, in my own living room, in the dark. I used to do that after a hard day and it used to relax me. Nanette kept to her living room while I unwound and we would meet up later in the bedroom. Lately, though, she has taken to standing out on the balcony outside my living room and gazing down at the street. At some level I don’t mind. She has lost all that weight she was carrying a couple of years ago, so the view is quite pleasant, and there’s always a nice promise for later on.”
He took a puff of his cigar just as it dawned on me what he had said.
“Nanette stands out on the balcony?”
“Every blessed night, Phil. I know what you’re going to say, buddy. I should be grateful. She’s here, she’s trim and sexy and she does keep a pretty tidy house. It’s funny, though…”
I wanted to break that pause, didn’t want to hear any more.
“…well, I know I can tell you intimate stuff. I know you wouldn’t go telling anyone else. It’s just she used to be pretty tight and tidy downstairs, if you follow me. Only now, well the sex is better than ever, but she leaves a fearsome mess on the bed-linen. Time was she could get up afterwards and get all the way to the bathroom without so much as a drip, now it’s practically plastic sheets we need.”
The gruesome detail was actually not that out of character. We had known one another for a long time and personal matters were definitely not out of bounds. If it had not been for such personal conversations I would not have gone to my doctor about a lump on one of my testicles. John probably saved my life with that conversation.
“I just wish she would leave me to the small part of the house that’s mine. She has the run of every other part of it.”
I felt sick. The deadpan, lucid quality of his speech stopped me dead in my tracks from blurting out the truth to him. What was wrong with him? How could he not recall, even at some deep level of his mind, in someplace quarantined from whatever madness had a grip of him, that Nanette was dead. Eighteen months dead in the small crypt behind the house that had been her pride and joy. Apart of course from the one room that John called his own.
I could think of nothing to say as he calmly spoke of the long days and nights in his living room, no work commitments to drag him away any longer, and Nanette’s thin frame leaning patiently on the railing outside.
I wanted to weep for this wonderful man who had supported me so often. I wanted to shake him out of this madness but his calmness told me that there was no way back.
I drove him home as the rain began around midnight. My beat-up old VW must have looked horribly out of place as it wound through John’s neighbourhood of parked BMWs and Rolls Royces. I admired these cars and prided myself that there was no envy in me for the people who owned them. Good for them; I just hoped I might someday be so lucky or successful.
The house that John built and Nanette took over was at the end of a winding stretch of road that rose into the hills to the south of the city. Trees had been carefully planted to restrict any view of the house until you were parked outside. As it was the rain was hammering down by the time I pulled up and the sky was being split apart by lightning.
We talked for a while but the racket from the growing storm eventually made this impossible. I leaned forward and looked up through the windshield.
“Christ, I never thought storms like this happened outside of movies.”
“Maybe Nanette’s getting impatient,” said John quietly. “Goodbye, Phil, and thanks for tonight.”
Before I could reply he had opened the door and stepped out into the downpour. I leaned over to the passenger window and watched him walk up the path that led under an arch of trees.
The balcony caught my eye as another flash of lightning lit the sky. It stretched across the front of the house above the tops of the trees. As the view dimmed I made out the lights behind the curtained windows. There were two part-time servants but I couldn’t see why they might be working this late.
As John vanished into the house I stepped out of the car to get a clearer view of the house. I always wore a hooded top but this proved unequal to the relentless rain. I consoled myself with the thought of a hot shower once I got home. The lights from the street cast enough light after my eyes recovered from the lightning flashes. To the left was the master bedroom. The centre had been Nanette’s living room and the right was John’s. Large potted plants were placed randomly along the length of the balcony, all looking like bushy gargoyles in the strange light.
Seeing no shadows behind the curtains I reached for the door handle and then froze as the potted plant outside John’s room stood up from its reclining position on the railing. A flash of lightning, for a mere moment, seared the image of Nanette onto my mind forever.
I could almost live with what I saw up there if it had been a glimpse of something about its business and oblivious to me, but it was certainly not oblivious. She looked down at me through eye sockets that had long since lost anything resembling eyes but I knew in those vacant black spaces that she could see me and that she knew me and that she still did not like me one bit.
The hooded garment she was wearing was not any shroud that John had buried her in. It was the long, baggy, hooded house-coat that she always wore as she scooted about her domestic empire. The remains of hands poked out from beneath the sleeves and gripped the banister in a talon-like grip.
I opened the car door and slid behind the steering wheel, locking the door with my elbow. I then reached across and locked the passenger door. Then I started the engine and reversed back down the narrow road without attempting to turn. At a distance my racing heart and loosening bowels told me might be safe I stopped and looked back at John’s house.
She had watched me retreat, just as I had left so many times before, when she was alive and clearly not wanting me about the house. Satisfied that I was gone and undoubtedly sure that I would not be telling anyone about her she turned from the railing and stepped into John’s living room.
As I think on this I really believe that I would have been happier if he had died that night. He did not, and I find that I can no longer sleep for the thought of my poor friend, thirty minutes away, night after night locked in the fetid, noisome embrace of that thing.
And each morning carrying his bed-linen, soiled and dripping, to the utility room. Where he undoubtedly laments the effects of age on his thin, trim and demonically territorial wife
End