The Ruined House Read online

  19

  October 22, 2000

  The 23rd of Tishrei, 5761

  Four p.m. The early, end-of-October twilight gilded the green latticework framing the main entrance to Wave Hill Estate, limning the dark red ivy and causing its leaves to glint mysteriously, like precious stones. Andrew and Ann Lee, both dressed in black, walked up the crunchy gravel path that led to the gate, holding hands. Pausing for a moment to admire the fiery beauty of the ivy that was at the height of its autumn color, they exchanged conspiratorial glances before unlacing their fingers, composing their faces in an appropriately blasé expression, and entering the grounds.

  WELCOME TO THE BRONX BIG RIVER CHURCH HAPPENING, said a sign. “Our local community,” the mailed invitation had read, “in collaboration with the Juilliard School of Music, invites the public to a musical and culinary event to be held on the grounds of Wave Hill. The artistic program will include a joint musical performance by Juilliard students and the Big River Church choir. All proceeds will go to the development of music education programs for the children of the Bronx and scholarships for young musicians.”

  The guests strolled on a large lawn with a dramatic view of the Hudson and the Palisades beyond it. The Juilliard Wind Orchestra filled the air with loud strains, accompanying a church choir that was singing a spiritual whose words seemed tarnished by time. Jordan River, I’m bound to go, bound to go, bound to go. The white-clothed tables, adorned with orange and yellow gourds, were heaped with a stylized assortment of traditional African and African American dishes. All kinds of tea were available, as was African coffee spiced with cinnamon, cloves, and something that tasted like allspice. There was even wine—organic, to be sure and not of the highest quality, but wine nonetheless, which wasn’t bad for a church affair.

  “Meet my dad! I’m just joking. This is my friend Andrew,” Ann Lee laughed, wrinkling her nose, in that charming and provocative way of hers. She had a taste for parody, pastiche, and the grotesque. She seemed to draw some twisted pleasure from these jokes; it tickled something within her. Her friends, all also in their twenties, echoed her laughter. Looking around him, Andrew thought that Wave Hill on this particular day looked like the animated campus of a school for the arts, brimming with young people dressed in a hand-me-down chic, which declared that they were—if not artists themselves—their future patrons. He felt a current of—no, not exactly of nervousness—but of a definite unease. He wasn’t accustomed to appearing with Ann Lee in public. On the rare occasions when they had allowed themselves to be seen together, a vague but caustic fantasy had lurked at the back of his mind like an incomplete hologram or the remembered fragments of a bad dream. An aging professor at a New England college, a dust-coated old owl in a faded tweed jacket, spins his sticky web around a helpless, tender young student thirty years his junior. Although the semester is over and everyone is on vacation, he forces her to remain with him on the empty campus and to invent lies to tell to her friends and parents, robbing her of the summer’s adventures: the wilderness treks, the beach parties, the healthy romances with boys her age. Compulsively, desperately, he sleeps with her again and again, clinging to her young body, plying her with his desiccated old man lust, holding her prisoner in his love, chaining her to him, sucking the youth from her while injecting her with his fustiness, his decrepitude, the death already forming within him. Such moments never lasted long. One glance from Ann Lee, a single syllable uttered in her voice, was enough to return him to the easy, lighthearted flow of their relationship. The unmistakable happiness this gave her, the love and passion she showered on him, were reassuring in the cold light of reason. The guilt was driven underground, to lie buried until the next time.

  Four twenty-five. When was the concert supposed to begin? The sun, a big, ripe, orange pumpkin itself, was already sinking in the west, dangerously close to the toothed crags of the Palisades. Andrew broke away from the crowd and strolled past the estate’s buildings, greenhouses, and gardens, instinctively drawn to the hedge overlooking the river. A fresh breeze blew in his face, ruffling his thick shock of hair. He drained the last drops of wine from his glass, placed it on a stone parapet, and leaned forward to examine the splendid view.

  Although a lifetime seemed to have passed since then, he had been, by chance, in this exact place just two months ago, at the wedding of Linda’s nephew Jason. Linda had arranged to pick Andrew up on her way from Brooklyn. Expertly maneuvering her station wagon through the Manhattan traffic, past yellow cabs madly cutting in and out of lanes, trucks parked in the middle of streets, and pedestrians dashing from sidewalks without warning, she arrived in her endearing, it’s-just-family-anyway manner, a mere half an hour late. Sweating lightly in his summer suit, Andrew spotted her car two blocks away; he knew her by her driving, its particular combination of determination and hesitancy that reminded him of his own mother’s driving. Linda recognized him at a distance, too. His dignified shock of gray hair, perfect posture, and, of course, white summer suit all stood out from the drab street like the Rock of Gibraltar rising from the sea—who else but Andrew would stand like this in the middle of Broadway, at three in the afternoon? His daughters, dressed in evening gowns, waved to him as the car approached, and even George could hardly suppress an affectionate smile.

  “Hi, Dad! You look great.”

  “Look who’s talking, you bevy of beauties!”

  Andrew squeezed into the backseat between his two daughters, giving Alison a big hug, Rachel a kiss, and George a warm handshake.

  “Sorry we’re late. You wouldn’t believe the traffic in midtown.” Linda glanced at him in the rearview minor, her unapologetic apology another ritual. “Are you okay back there? George volunteered to sit up front—isn’t he the perfect gentleman! After all, someone had to do the dirty work of guiding us through the infinite gridlock known as Manhattan.”

  Andrew smiled back at the mirror. “I’m fine. There’s enough room back here for a whole family. It’s good to be crowded together, going nowhere fast in this high yellow afternoon light. That’s our neighborhood Jeremiah, over there. He’s outdoing himself today. On his knees in the street, arms out and eyes lifted to heaven—it’s pure Hollywood. You’re best off taking Broadway to 125th and making a left to the northbound entrance of the parkway. Can you believe Jason is getting married? And in Wave Hill, just like his parents! If anyone had told us when he was in rehab two years ago that he would end up working for a big-time ad agency and marrying a girl who looks like a magazine cover, we would have thought it was a bad joke. What’s she like, by the way? Has anyone met her?”

  “Yes, Dorothy. She said she and Jason seemed very well suited to each other. Coming from her, that doesn’t sound like a compliment. How exactly do we get there? We were told to come early for photographs before sunset. It’s lucky it didn’t rain today, it’s so nice outside on the lawn. George, do you have the map?”

  “No, Alison has it. How do you think we made it so far?”

  That had been two months ago, only two months, but everything had changed since then. Andrew let his gaze take in the grand view of the river. It flowed lazily, sprawled like an old hippopotamus between dark green cliffs speckled with the orange, yellow, and scarlet of autumn leaves. Glossy angel’s trumpets stood regally in heavy terra-cotta pots, their large, sensuous flowers hanging mouth-downward. The evening light painted the pine trees a deep green, filling him with a mixture of melancholy, elation, and something else . . . might it be longing? For a moment, the unseen matrix holding the disparate elements of the universe together seemed to have become visible, its unspoken promise suddenly within reach. Consider the ripe fruit of autumn, in which is conserved icy Februaries, fickle Mays, and lethargic, heat-stricken, desire-laden Augusts; recall the unclouded intoxication of your twenties, the intense activity of your thirties, the joys and anxieties of fatherhood, sex, ambition, honor, success—all now of one piece with the white wedding cake you stretched an eager finger toward when you were four, the pale ne
ck of the girl who sat in front of you in sixth grade, and the soft, almost transparent, old woman’s skin of your mother’s sun-weathered hands; reflect on the searing, tormenting beauty of your older daughter and the still incipient graces of your younger one; see the blaze in the heavy boughs of the pine trees and the sparkles dancing on the river like fish in a net. An elderly, almost doddering man was pointing with an ungainly walker at a magnificent tree whose lower leaves had turned an incandescent yellow, while its upper ones, still a fresh green at their center, held gamely on. How beautiful are the hundred and one yellow-to-scarlet hues burning on the hills across the river? It’s not just the wine. It was that, too, but not just.

  “Aha, there you are, my brooding philosopher! Come on, the concert’s starting.”

  The smile in Ann Lee’s voice was infectious. Andrew roused himself from his musings, gave her his hand, and let himself be led back, not forgetting to take his empty wineglass from the parapet while wondering whether there would be time to refill it before the concert began. The wind instruments had fallen silent. The seated members of the church choir were carefully sampling teas, coffees, and assorted pastries never before seen on the near side of the Atlantic. A flock of gray and white pigeons performed an aerial somersault in midflight, circling the ancient slate roof of the estate manor like a small, elusive rain cloud. The air grew thick and electric. A storm was brewing. There was a stir around him. The audience regarded with anticipation the five stately black women who mounted the small stage in majestic silence. The lead vocalist, her large figure looking as though it were carved from granite, stepped to the front of the stage, took a deep breath, and began to sing in a deep, spine-tingling voice that might have been chiseled from ancient rock, too. Nobody knows when the sun goes down what’s going to be in the morning. The other women answered with a moan that seemed to come from deep in the ground. No, no, nobody knows. The bass rumbled like an avalanche, the alto quivered: nobody knows. Nobody knows, nobody knows, crooned the tenor. It was a song from the depths, the music of existence. The women drove their voices to the limit, wailing like a wind blowing down a canyon. Nobody knows! Nobody knows! Where were those voices coming from? From the bowels of the earth, from the world’s heart. Nobody knows when the sun comes up what’s going to be when it sets. They were almost visible, those voices. Granite and basalt, copper and iron, silver and gold. Nobody knows when the dawn breaks what’s going to be in the evening. The day suddenly grew dark. The sun foundered all at once on a crag across the river. Would it drown in the great waters, never to be seen again? The reds, yellows, and oranges on the other side of the Hudson vanished, melting rapidly into the muddy brown that descended on the Palisades. A damp, restless wind began to blow, lifting the flaps of Andrew’s light jacket. His thin shirt clung to his body and he shivered. Where had the fiery glory of the golden afternoon gone? Nobody knows when evening comes what the dawn’s going to bring. How, as though from an ambush, has autumn waylaid us?

  END OF BOOK ONE

  BOOK

  TWO

  1

  October 23, 2000

  The 24th of Tishrei, 5761

  Out for an early-morning bike ride, Andrew surrenders to the breeze, the light, the air, the sheer motion. He speeds past an avenue of ancient gray trees standing stiffly at attention like an honor guard of old soldiers, swerves to the right onto the curving underpass beneath the West Side Highway, and strikes out, in his own private dawn Eden, on the bicycle path leading north by the edge of the river. Mist rises from the ground into the sweet-smelling air, bathing him in its cool, moist freshness.

  He breathes in the morning deeply and pedals swiftly, effortlessly. In the phosphorescent light of late October, all seemed pure and primeval, a marvel to behold. The gray rocks are half-sunk in water. Fresh patches of grass sprout from the turf. The sky blue of the river meets the watery blue of the sky, divided only by the thin filament of the George Washington Bridge, stretching from bank to bank like the hint of a knowing smile: The day would come when all would return to what it had been and the world would revert to chaos. Water would cover the earth, the earth would be a vast sea. Sun, moon, and stars would flicker out. Day would turn into night.

  The sky above him a yawning abyss. The bicycle whirs; celestial beings clamor; the heavens stare down with all their hosts. The ground beneath him growls, like a hungry monster. The dead seethe in its swollen belly like undigested food. Adam, a gorgeous giant the size of the universe, lies like a babe on the earth that bore him; Divinity lovingly licks the dirt from his tender skin as a doe licks the afterbirth from her fawn. Cain rises against Abel to strike him dead in a field and flees in ignominy, a curse hanging over him like a storm cloud. The voice of Eve is heard on high, the lamentation and bitter weeping of the Great Mother for her children, the living and the dead. But Andrew hears and sees none of this. He flies along weightlessly as though on the wings of the wind. Soon, soon, he would shed his last material traces, leaving only pure motion, a perfect, bow-like arc like the line of the bridge in the pure blue haze above the river.

  2

  October 25, 2000

  The 26th of Tishrei, 5761

  Morning, Private Andrew!” A perfect row of white teeth flashed from the rugged face that seemed lit from within by a childish smile. “Up, up, up . . . How’s your energy today? You all warmed up?” Andrew Wilson, Andrew’s personal trainer, had the jovial innocence of those who are at one with their body. There was something refreshing about it, especially for Andrew, whose relations with his trainer had an unmediated quality missing from his contact with others. “Let’s go, Private Andrew! Up, up, up . . . Follow me, Private!” Wilson began to run in place, his big, muscular frame pounding in what might have been a spoof of a military sitcom. It never ceased to amuse him that he and Andrew had the same name. Hence, his insistence on “Private Andrew” and on himself as “Sergeant Andrew,” though Andrew never called him that and hardly spoke to him at all in the course of their weekly sessions.

  The woman trainer standing nearby gave Andrew an embarrassed smile and shrugged like a young mother apologizing for her wayward toddler—in this case, a powerfully muscled one standing over six feet tall. Andrew smiled back with friendly forbearance. There was always a woman around, usually young and good-looking. Sergeant Andrew liked to flirt, carrying on in his Caribbean lilt, never missing an opportunity to lay a large hand on the arm or shoulder of someone a head or more shorter, a habit that struck no one as intrusive because he seemed to have a child’s natural delicacy.

  A whole hour of total, meditative yielding to his physical well-being: Andrew liked Equinox with its slate floors, burnished wood benches, and piles of white towels in the showers; its dozen different televisions tuned to as many different channels; its long, symmetrical rows of machines and apparatus, and its exactly right amount of enough, but not too many, beautiful people. He liked his training sessions with Andrew Wilson, too. They went from machine to machine and from one set of exercises to another, his trainer’s soft, unceasing patter like harmless white noise as he was put through his paces. He enjoyed feeling his body, which was still reasonably strong, supple, and healthy at the age of fifty-two. “Okay, Private Andrew, that’s it for today. Roll call next week at ten sharp. Dismissed! And don’t forget your cardio.” Andrew smiled good-bye and headed with a rolling gait for the gleaming line of machines whose long levers protruded like the antennae of giant insects.

  Sweat trickled down his neck onto his T-shirt; his arm and leg muscles tensed and relaxed rhythmically; he breathed harder. The television screens danced in bright array, their monotonous stream of Technicolor information absorbed by his steady, trance-like breathing. These twenty minutes were an opportunity for Andrew, who had no patience for TV, to catch up on contemporary pop culture. Three or four times a week were all his incisive mind needed to process and distill their dominant metaphors, which he would transform, in the calm of his work space or while facing a classroom, into theoretical
and scholarly insights.

  Now, he found himself watching a reality show on one of those bubbly, music-driven, youth-oriented channels that homogenized the global scene while raking in billions for their shareholders. Its contestants were unfortunate-looking people from all over the country who sent in videos meant to persuade the viewers and a panel of judges that they, of all contestants, deserved the coveted prize: free plastic surgery. Wanting to be beautiful, however, was not enough; they were also required to name the celebrity they most wished to resemble. One overweight woman aspired to be Jennifer Lopez, while a heavyset, moonfaced man with huge earlobes that hung down like bell clappers, dreamed of passing for none other than George Clooney. There was also a pair of adolescent, identical twins, obviously Jewish. Large-nosed, scrawny-necked, and anemic-looking, they had something touching about them, an unforgettable, infinite sadness that hid behind the gawking optimism with which they faced the camera. Though it was not a nice thing to say, they truly were hideous; they made one think of birds of prey—no, of vultures, with their long, hooked noses, pointy chins, and exaggeratedly prominent cheekbones, generously strewn with bloody acne. Aaron and Jason. Like wretched caricatures from Der Stürmer, the fact that they were identical twins made them twice as monstrous and revolting. And in whose image did they desire to be re-created? Brad Pitt’s of course!