Rental house, p.10
Rental House, page 10
“Then what do you want to do?” she asked, karate chopping a V into a pillow. “What’s on Nate’s fun plan for the day?”
He said why they couldn’t just stay indoors, cook, and do their own thing. Why pay all this money to stay at this ridiculous compound if not to at least enjoy the space and each other’s company?
“Unless you don’t think my company is enough,” he said offhandedly, as if this were not his deep-seated concern.
“Amazing that you keep calling it a compound,” she said.
“But that’s what it is.”
“A compound makes it sound like jail.”
“Does it feel like jail?”
She ignored his comment and sat down among all her karate-chopped pillows to read a book. The book did well to cover her face.
“That doesn’t look comfortable,” he told her.
“Who needs to be comfortable in jail.”
He did some imperceptible eye rolling. “We could stroll down to the lake.”
She said she was currently more interested in her book.
While Keru read for the next hour, Nate sat with his phone. The internet was truly high speed, and that nothing lagged for even a millisecond soon began to bother him. After doom scrolling through the headlines, he decided a better use of his time was to shut himself in the bedroom and call his mother. He made the effort each week, and each week they had the same conversation. Perfunctory updates. Discussions about current and future weather patterns. His mother was in remarkable health. No high cholesterol, hypertension, or dental problems, no heart attacks.
When he described their accommodations, his mother was also confused. “How can a bungalow be fancy? That’s an oxymoron.” She asked if all the oxymoron bungalows were filled. He said most weren’t.
“Because who can afford it,” she said. “The economy is tanking.”
“It’s not, actually.”
“Not for you guys.”
“Right, okay.”
“A nice thing would have been to invite Ethan.”
“Ethan?”
“The son I had before you.”
“Oh, that guy.”
She told him that Ethan was “doing good” again. He’d found landscaping work at some prep school, in one of those nice areas of Connecticut. “Found a lady friend already, of course,” and while these temporary girlfriends used to bother their mother, she was glad now that Ethan had company.
“You should’ve invited him and the lady friend to your bungalow,” she said.
“That’s an option.” He had no intention of inviting anyone. But he told his mother that they weren’t alone, they had Elena and Mircea, fine, reliable neighbors who napped, hiked, and insisted on having coffee.
“What kind of name is Mirka?” his mother asked.
“Mircea. It’s Romanian.”
“They flew all the way from Romania to the Catskills?”
“No, they’re from Park Slope temporarily but actually from Rotterdam.”
“Where’s that?”
“Brooklyn.”
“Rotterdam is in Brooklyn?
“Rotterdam is in the Netherlands. Park Slope is in Brooklyn.”
His mother was quiet. Then she said, “I find that very confusing.”
“Not really,” he said. “Not if you just think about it.”
“A person should come from one place. I don’t understand why some people need to come from more.”
His mother asked if Mircea’s wife was also from Romania or Park Slope or Rotterdam.
He said yeah.
His mother asked if Mircea’s wife was Asian.
He said no.
“But these are just neighbors, not friends.”
“Correct.”
His mother sighed, and Nate knew what she was thinking. They’d had a version of this conversation many times before. “You used to have lots of friends, Nathan. What happened to all of them? You had friends in every grade.” Nate wasn’t in school anymore, except as a professor. “Parents have friends,” was his mother’s other line of argument. “When kids go to school together, you naturally make new friends. Dad-groups. Mom-groups. It’s all very organic.” When Nate asked where all her parent-friends were, she said, “They moved away.” A few years back, it had finally dawned on her that he and Keru weren’t having kids and that had sent her into a deep depression. “I guess I will never be a grandma,” she’d said. “I guess you’re dead set on denying me that chance.” His mother’s sister was already a grandmother thrice over, and his mother had never imagined that she would be permanently behind. “When Faye sends me pictures of her grandbabies, what am I supposed to show her?” Nate suggested the tulip garden or pictures of her two cats. His mother called him facetious and asked, “Who are you going to talk to when you’re my age? Who are you going to call?” Facetiously, Nate said, “No one,” which aggravated his mother further and caused her to rant. “Most adults on this planet are parents, and to understand most adults and your own parents, you must become parents. Else you will never understand anything, Nathan. You will be completely oblivious to everything that’s good.” She then railed against the liberals and how their cynicism for traditional family values was destroying society, like aphids destroyed plants. “Kids are the future,” she said. “An objective truth, not an optimistic one,” Nate replied. “The world isn’t all bad,” she said, and Nate asked if she had had kids for the world. “Well, no,” she started to say, but then informed him that this was beside the point, he was missing the point, the big picture, the grand scheme of things, and no good came from his acting this way.
When Keru took the Chicago post, his mother had assumed that they were on the brink of divorce. Something must have prompted the move; something must have changed.
“You would tell me if she was leaving you?”
“You would tell me if she ran off with someone?
“You would tell me if she got pregnant and didn’t want the child?”
“No, I probably wouldn’t have,” he said to the abortion question. That was his limit. But he’d explained that Chicago was a good opportunity and placed Keru closer to her parents, who were aging. His mother said she was aging at the same rate and asked why Keru was allowed to be closer to her parents but not him. He said he would move closer if he could (a lie). But why did Keru need to work at all after he’d been tenured, his mother pressed, why couldn’t she stay on part time and have kids, she pressed and pressed, until one day, he said, quite plainly, that they could live on her income but not the reverse. His mother seemed shocked by this, and Nate tried to defend himself. Industry has always paid more, but academia offered prestige, ideals, a chance to chase knowledge for knowledge’s sake and pass that knowledge on. “Prestige,” said his mother, in a manner so ridden with doubt that Nate filled in the rest. You can’t live off prestige, can you? You can’t physically scoop it out of the jar like caviar and feed yourself with it, and you certainly can’t afford rent, food, leisure activities, or save enough for retirement in the most expensive city in America without a spouse who also works and ideally makes more. Not that his mother would ever belittle him, but when he mentioned the high cost of living, rising inflation, she did say, “No one forced you guys to live in that city. No one made you stay in school.”
From the bungalow bedroom, he said he would talk to her later. She said they’d hadn’t been talking that long to begin with.
He said he was going to hang up now, which caused her to ask, “What’s gotten into you lately” and whether he was seeing a therapist.
A pause for both sides to collect themselves and remember that they were two adults without therapists.
“Oh Nathan, don’t be so down on yourself,” she said in a tone that filled him with woe. “I felt inferior to your father for years. I was perpetually in his shadow. But at the end of the day, remember that you’re your own person and that you do great work too.”
He regretted telling his mother too much and not enough. Either was a betrayal, and always he was stuck in the middle. But he did feel inferior to Keru and could not admit this so frankly to anyone. To anyone except his mother, he would sound at best like a man-child and at worst like a misogynist. He hoped he wasn’t a misogynist, but the possibility couldn’t be ruled out completely, so at his annual physical, Nate told his PCP that sometimes, without cause, he got nervous and produced more palm sweat than usual and had trouble falling and staying asleep. “I worry I’m just puttering around,” he couldn’t bring himself to say. “I worry nothing I do really matters.” Within ten minutes, the doctor had diagnosed Nate with anxiety and written him a script for Xanax that Nate never filled. The doctor found nothing abnormal with Nate’s vitals or blood panel, but suggested that his patient exercise more, and to sleep better, completely exhaust himself before bed.
“I’m already completely exhausted before bed,” Nate said. “I just lie there thinking.”
“Yeah?” said his doctor, with his back to Nate, typing at his computer. “And what exactly are we thinking about?”
“Nothing of value,” said Nate. “Just noise, dread. Like I’m hurtling toward some great disaster.”
His doctor kept typing. “And by great disaster, we mean?”
“Death, mortality, nothingness.”
His doctor noted these down.
That night, at home, Nate made himself a salad. While washing and dressing the lettuce, he thought about death—his father’s and eventually his own—and overwhelmed by inevitability, he overdressed the salad and had to wash the leaves again. On the day of his father’s funeral he’d been exceedingly anxious. Anxious about his mother, his brother, about his wife being in the same vicinity as his other relatives, who knew about Keru but had never met her. Before setting the funeral date, he’d called his brother six times and left five voice messages. “Seems short notice,” Ethan said on the sixth call, and had concerns over the high price of airfare, of gas, and that he was currently between jobs. Nate paid for Ethan to be there. Then, once Ethan arrived, their mother wrote him a check from their father’s life insurance. At the service itself, he and Ethan each said a paragraph. Their mother read from the Bible. Their paternal aunts were late. As his mother read through Scripture, she took dramatic pauses to look up, over her reading glasses, at the family. He could feel her speaking to him. “It’s just you and me now, Nathan. Don’t let me down.”
* * *
On their website, the alpaca farm forbade dogs, and after reading the policies, Nate called to confirm. “Not even well-behaved dogs on leash?” The woman said no and directed him to the same page that Nate had just read. “It’ll only be a few hours,” Keru said, and had set up in the living room a revolving camera that linked to an app on her phone. They would check in on Mantou in real time.
“But what if she goes into another room?” Nate said.
“Then she goes into another room,” Keru said.
“We could not go to the alpaca farm,” he said.
“I would like to go to the alpaca farm,” she said.
As they debated which room their dog would go into, and in each room, which surface she would lie on, a knock came on their door. It was Elena without her husband or child. Her hair was uncombed and wild-like. She was dressed in thin, flowy garments from which Nate had to look away because the light was coming straight through the fabric, and she wasn’t wearing a bra.
“Sorry, we didn’t see you again yesterday,” she said. After the nap, they had, as planned, gone on the hike. After the hike they had, unplanned, taken another nap. Then suddenly it was the next morning.
“Shall we all have coffee again?” she asked sleepily. “Luka woke up asking for Mantou.”
“Actually, we’re on our way out,” Keru said.
“Out?” said Elena, with a frown. “Why out? You only arrived yesterday.”
Keru clarified and mentioned the alpaca farm. Elena exclaimed that she had not known about such a farm.
“Do they allow children?” Elena asked.
“Children, but not dogs,” Nate said from the kitchen area, as far as he could be from the door but stay within earshot.
“Perhaps we’ll see you when we come back,” Keru said.
“Yes, perfect, that would be lovely, we would like that very much, especially Luka,” said Elena, swaying her hips slightly and biting her lips. The two women stood there awkwardly, said goodbye to each other, and then stood there some more. Only when Keru began to close the door did Elena remember that she was supposed to leave.
Not long after Elena left came another knock. It was Mircea this time, dressed in a vest over a checkered button-down. His hair was combed carefully and slicked back with gel. More so than yesterday, he looked like he worked at the Fed.
He said hello three times. “Hello, hello, hello. Elena was just here and too shy to ask, so I thought I would ask. The farm for alpacas sounds like a good idea. Mind if we came along? If not, please just let us know. We don’t want to get in the way of any romance.”
The last word made Keru laugh, which made Mircea stare intently at her before saying, “Okay, I had not meant that to be funny.”
Each couple took their own car, with Keru and Nate in front, their neighbors following behind. Keru and Nate drove a gray rental. Mircea and his family drove a red Tesla. In the farm’s parking lot, Keru admired the bold color and asked how they got it charged. “No need,” Mircea said. “At moderate speeds, the Model S can go for three hundred and ninety miles on a single charge,” and he had calculated that even with unexpected excursions, they should arrive back in Park Slope with forty miles left, plus or minus five miles. “If not, we call customer service,” he said. “Then Elon Musk himself will come rescue us in a helicopter.”
“That’s funny,” said Nate, but not laughing.
“Yes, I know,” said Mircea with a serious face.
At the ticket booth there were large signs that explained the crucial differences between alpacas and llamas. First, they were entirely separate species. Second, alpacas were friendlier and didn’t spit. A tour ticket included a walk about the farm with a friendly alpaca on leash, and 10 percent off the farm’s apple cider donuts. While Mircea and Keru went in to buy tickets, Elena and Nate waited outside. Because Elena was also carrying Luka, Nate offered to carry Elena’s bag. “That’s so kind of you,” she said, passing over the heavy tote. “Mircea never asks such things.” As Elena leaned in close to fix the straps of her tote that was now on Nate’s shoulder, she touched his shoulder and then, inexplicably, fixed his collar. Relinquishing the collar, she said, “Mom habit,” and Nate touched the part of the collar that Elena had just fixed. She was more dressed for the weather than she’d been in the morning. A jacket over a long-sleeve sweater, gray slacks, a scarf. Except for her hands and face, every part of Elena was covered, and Nate tried not to think about her breasts.
“Your wife seems always in a rush,” said Elena. “We noticed that she drives fast.”
Keru had driven them to the farm as she had to the bungalow. Keru drove whenever she could, citing motion sickness as the passenger.
“Yeah, well, she works a lot,” Nate said, and Elena nodded, as if that explained it.
Nate asked if Elena drove.
“In Europe, yes,” she said. “But there’s no point here. Why retake the test and learn a new set of rules just for two years. I can walk everywhere I need to go.”
Nate tried to think of more questions to ask Elena. Was she an artist full time?
“I’d like to be,” she said, setting Luka down. Luka called his mother “Mama” and, when being held, buried his head in her hair or whispered into her ear. When Elena spoke Romanian to her son, Nate had assumed Luka replied in Romanian as well. He commented on the child’s fluency. He wished that he’d grown up bilingual.
“Trilingual,” Elena said of her son. “That was Dutch, not Romanian. My boy sometimes only answers in Dutch.”
“Oh sorry,” said Nate, embarrassed.
“Don’t be. How could you have known?”
Yet Nate thought he should have.
Elena asked if Nate spoke Chinese.
He said, “No, not really.” Then, added, “Well, some.” But lessons he’d stopped taking a while ago, and he’d not kept up with practice, except to visit his in-laws once a year and sit in their presence. Retired, Keru’s father had less to say about fuel cells, and Keru’s mother rarely spoke to Nate directly. Though on occasion, she would ask, “Have you eaten yet?” a phrase she only said in Chinese, for it was her most intimate expression of care, and in not realizing he was being spoken to, that he was the recipient of this care, his face would remain vacant, as the eagerness drained from hers.
Elena asked Nate to say something in Chinese.
He tried but it came out gibberish.
“Yes, exactly like I remember,” she said, visibly impressed.
He felt like a fool.
When the others returned with tickets, the group made their way to the barn. A handler met them, a lad over six feet tall with the face of a child. His gloved hands looked like clown hands, and he clumped around in big leather boots, half unlaced. The alpacas had enormous eyes, round protruding black spheres that everyone else found delightful but that frightened Nate. He and Mircea each took identical brown ones that the handler said were sisters. The sisters liked to walk together, pressing into each other as if glued. At first Mircea tried to pull his alpaca away from its sister, but the more he pulled, the more his alpaca stalled and bared its teeth. “You see,” Mircea said to Nate. “She hates me.”
“Alpacas are herd animals,” said the handler from the rear. “They need to follow a leader.” The leader was Elena’s alpaca, strutting out in front, followed by Keru’s. The two women were talking and laughing. Lucian walked alongside them, holding his mother’s hand.
