On a Tree-Lined Street - Page 3

Our new home awaited us. Marianne took two weeks off work to prepare for the move. We spent most of our time together, as if neither of us were willing to let the other out of sight completely.

By then it was November.

Hoping that a show of strength would keep Marianne in check, I insisted on renting the moving truck, loading and unloading everything myself. The work was brutal, but I made sure to refuse any help she offered.

At the house, the tension abated somewhat. Marianne set about decorating, while I unpacked my office into a small room at the front of the house. I again had the feeling that this was not quite what I wanted, but I dared not speak after all my groveling and complaining in the city.

From my office window, our new neighborhood spread out over the hillside below. All of the houses were similarly modest, one-story affairs with small, well-kept lawns and short driveways.

Across the street, movement caught my eye.

In the window of a small tan house, a curtain was pulled aside and a man looked up at me.

I took a step back. For a moment, I thought I recognized the man, but that was impossible.

A smirk creased his face, and he winked once, then raised a long finger and wagged it playfully.

“Marianne,” I called out.

When she didn’t answer, I ran upstairs and found her crawling around in a closet.

“Marianne,” I shouted.

She jumped, knocking her head on a shelf.

“Paul? What on Earth is it?” she said.

Her tone stung me. There was frustration in her eyes, as if she expected me to start sobbing and was in no mood to deal with it. Hadn’t I tormented her enough? At some point, I would need to give up and surrender or accept a détante.

I gave a pitiful smile and shrugged innocently, then slunk back to my office. When I looked out onto the neighborhood, there was no sign the man had ever been there.

I opened my computer and looked at my screenplay. Was I the man in the bomb shelter? The suburbia I had imagined for my character’s one-man apocalypse was hardly different from the one I now inhabited. In that case, maybe I had more control over my destiny than I had originally thought. I would not be defeated so easily.

In the coming days, I was on guard. I hoped to catch sight of my strange adversary across the street and speak with him, but he kept away. What had he meant by that wave he gave me? I waited for more information to present itself.

The houses on our street all had at least two cars that would disappear and reappear throughout the day, though I never saw anyone enter or leave. Dogs barked day and night, and I could only assume that they were kept in a backyard pen. Though the windows on the block all had privacy curtains, they could not hide the glow of the television screens that flickered until well after midnight.

In the city, the forces working against me had been so vast, I was never able to put a face to them. Far from that open-air prison, my new jailers wielded a different kind of violence that loomed in the hidden quietude. The expectation of an unknown threat fermented in my thoughts.

Whenever I saw Marianne, I was sure to put on a brave face and offer some cheerful platitude. Behind my smile, my thoughts coalesced like particles spiraling toward order in some neglected galaxy.

I resumed work on my screenplay, making sure to be hard at work whenever Marianne was near. I needed her to think I was grateful in order to quell any suspicion. What if she decided to return us to the city? I pictured the empty rooms of our old apartment layered in soot, cockroaches running rampant in our absence, the walls bubbling with mold. In my screenplay, the man sat in his bomb shelter day and night, eating canned rations and pining over the life he had once lived before he locked himself away. But his memories went nowhere and lacked specificity, it was as if he refused to recall better days and accept his punishment. For hours I wrote long monologues, but when I read them back, everything was vague. I was treading water, afraid to face conflict: I did not have the will to put my character in harm’s way.

Despite Marianne’s optimism about the town, it was clear to me that the place was in the midst of prolonged economic decline. “For sale” signs hung everywhere, and the town center was largely vacant. Hardly anyone walked about, and the evenings were lifeless and forlorn. In addition, I saw few indications of communal ties; people spent all of their time indoors, though aside from the television screens, I could only guess at their activities. After the extroversion of the city, I found myself on the periphery of a world of secrecy.

The town’s insularity began to infect me. I avoided passing in front of our windows lest some agent of the neighborhood catch sight of me. I told Marianne that our own lives were too exposed.

“We need curtains, new locks, a home security system. We can’t be so cavalier about our safety,” I told her one day. But when she asked me for my reasons, I held my tongue, lest any mention of the man across the street and his comrades frighten her.

In the end, I only came up with:

“Our neighbors wouldn’t have security systems if there weren’t a good reason for it. What other explanation is there for all their sneaking around?”

But she only rolled her eyes and shook her head.

That day, I found a set of dusty blinds in the basement that the previous owners had left behind. While Marianne was at work, I hung them in my office window, then I installed a new deadbolt on the office door. I kept the only key in the coin pocket of my jeans. The rest of the day, I peered through the blinds for a glimpse of my mysterious neighbors, all the while the character in my manuscript remained inert in his self-made prison.

Other worries plagued me. For the first time in my life, my concerns about money did not originate in fear of destitution, but rather that our financial advantages would be cause for contempt from the other residents in town. If we were under scrutiny already, as I was convinced we were, it followed that the resentment of the less prosperous would eventually come bubbling to the surface.

I told Marianne that we should keep a low profile, live modestly, not make too many improvements to the house too quickly. Privacy was really just a symptom of caution, I reminded her, and I tried to explain that the townspeople should be admired for exercising restraint among themselves, and that we should follow suit.

But Marianne, ever community-minded, insisted that the real way to gain the town’s trust was by patronizing local businesses and restaurants and venturing into town as much as possible. In the first month, she opened an account at the local bank, signed us up for library cards, took us to the farmer’s market. With each foray amongst the locals, my discomfort grew, and though I tried to keep my anxieties to myself, I knew Marianne was wary of my moods.

I spent more and more time in my office with the door shut. At times, I convinced myself that we had never left the city, that I was back in the apartment with the entire population erased except for me, the last person alive. But why did the dead smell of wood stove smoke and car exhaust?

Quickly I began to suspect that there was more to Marianne’s local interest than mere altruism, and that our arrival at this particular town was far from coincidental. I felt scrutiny from passing cars whenever we left the house, and I was sure that the clerk at the pharmacy was keeping some kind of ledger of my activity after I saw him writing in a notebook one morning. I no longer took walks around the neighborhood, all too aware that curtains were moving wherever I passed. Whatever Marianne expected to find amongst these people, it would only bring us anguish.

Marianne suggested we eat at the local pub down the street. In spite of myself, I was afraid of showing my hand and reluctantly agreed. The pub was only ten minutes from our house, a short walk down the hill beyond a zone of low brick warehouses that now stood empty, their yards silent.

The pub looked like a typical house with vinyl siding and a steep, triangular roof. Inside, the decor was banal in the extreme, the walls adorned with posters for alcohol brands and local sports teams. I sensed that I was stepping onto a film set where anything could happen. On one side of the room, a family with young children ate hamburgers around a large oak table. A half dozen work-worn men sat at a long wooden bar, and several of them turned as we entered, their hooded eyes lingering on us. I wanted to turn back, but Marianne was already following the host to our seats. She seemed overly comfortable, and it suddenly occurred to me that she had been there before, likely on one of her house-hunting trips during my convalescence from my wrist injury.

To my relief, the host sat us in the corner away from the other patrons. Or was this a symbolic gesture, designed to remind me of the divide between us? The young woman handed us oversized menus, hovering nearby until I ordered a whiskey to get rid of her.

After a sip, I relaxed somewhat, and for a moment I allowed that the tension was of the kind found in cliched movies, not in real life.

“Isn’t this nice?”

I jumped at the sound of Marianne’s voice.

“It’s great to have this place right down the road, we can come here anytime.”

My patience dissolved. I said: “You really like this place, don’t you? Is there something here that you recommend?” But she only furrowed her brows and made no comment.

We ate in silence. Anything I had to say would only come across as combative, and I was beginning to loath the sound of my own voice.

“Hello, you two. You must be new in town.”

An old man from the bar stood before us looking down with bloodshot eyes, a glass of dark ale in his gnarled hand. He spoke in a heavy drawl, and I had the impression that he was slurring his voice deliberately, perhaps to lull us into a false sense of security.

Before Marianne could respond, I blurted:

“We’re tourists passing through.”

The old man grinned at me knowingly.

“Is that right?” he said, and to my horror he winked at Marianne. The room reeled, nausea clenched in my abdomen.

“That’s not true, we live up the hill,” Marianne said and placed her hand on my arm, her signal for me to keep quiet. “We just moved in a few weeks ago.”

“That so. It must be the old Branston house,” the man said, grinning again. I shuddered at the sight of his smoker’s teeth. I was sure he wanted to sit with us, but I refused to make the offer.

“We would have come by earlier, but we’ve been busy settling in, unpacking,” Marianne said pleasantly.

As Marianne went on making excuses for our absence, the old man watched me. I kept my head down, pretending to be absorbed in my French fries.

“Welcome to town anyway,” he said, giving me a defiant look. “I’m the owner here, my name is Tompkins. I expect we’ll see you again.”

Tompkins turned to go, but my relief was short lived: he stopped and appeared to think for a moment. Then he said:

“You wouldn’t by chance have come up from the city?”

I looked up sharply. His eyes, more rheumy than drunken, were fixed on me. A cruel intelligence inhabited those eyes, like the corrupt sheriff in a small-town Western movie.

“What makes you say that? We could be from anywhere. Maybe we’re retired farmers,” I said. “Anyway, we do happen to be from the city, but I can’t imagine what difference that would make. Did someone tell you that?”

Marianne shuddered in her chair.

But Tompkins only smiled again as if he had heard enough, and walked away to rejoin the men at the bar. The old man gestured toward us several times with his chin, and the men burst out laughing.

“I really wish you hadn’t done that,” said Marianne as she signaled to the server for the check.

To my horror, I recognized instantly the way she raised her fingers and moved them from side to side as the young woman approached our table. It was the same gesture our neighbor across the street had made to me.

Unless the signal had not been intended for me, but for Marianne.

In a daze, I followed Marianne into the cool night.

Weak kneed, I barely keep up with her as she trudged up our hill. I had witnessed something significant in the restaurant, and her silence only confirmed my suspicions.

Though it was barely eight o’clock, the houses were dark as if abandoned. Mailboxes seemed to sway like mounted cameras turning to watch us pass. I all but jumped when a dog, the first I had seen since our arrival, darted across the road and vanished behind an unlit house.

I could not hold back any longer.

“You’ll never believe it. The creepy guy across the street waved at me last week. I tried to tell you, but when I looked back, he was gone, and I haven’t seen him since. The strange thing is, it was the same wave you gave to the server in the restaurant tonight.”

Marianne made no reply. The wind was cold, but sweat was dripping down my back.

“Well, do you deny it?”

When I turned to her, her shoulders were slumped forward, her head bowed. For a terrible instant, I thought she was going to cry, but she sighed loudly and reached to take my hand. Her eyes were in shadow, her teeth reflecting the streetlight that had just come on.

“You’re talking about Tom, I assume.”

“Tom?” I said, choking on the name. It was all I could do to put one foot in front of the other.

“He’s a nice guy, he’s helped me with a few things in town. You should talk to him, I think you’d get along, he’s an interesting man.”

My mind reeled. I couldn’t believe my ears. Here she was, ready to confess everything.

“When did you meet this guy?” I managed to say.

“Don’t get all suspicious, Paul. I met him when I came to see the house with the real estate agent.”

The real estate agent. While I had been incapacitated with my wrist injury, Marianne had come up here several times with an agent to look at houses. Somehow, during that time, she had formed clandestine alliances that she was only now telling me about.

I made some comment to show I was satisfied with her answer, while inside, my thoughts continued to cartwheel. There was so much I didn’t know. I had been a fool. All this time while I was moping about absorbed in my own problems, Marianne had been maneuvering herself into a position of power and respect amongst the community. For all I knew, she had put her plan in motion years ago. Now I was outnumbered and entirely at her mercy.

The walk home seemed interminable. When we finally arrived at the house, I said I wasn’t feeling well and was going to bed. Marianne joined me, claiming she too was exhausted, though it was well before the hour either of us typically went to bed. I made a show of taking some painkillers but spit them out when she wasn’t looking and hid them under my pillow.

Once I was certain Marianne was asleep, I crept out of bed.

In my darkened office, I raised the blinds and looked out onto the neighborhood.

But the town was darker than ever. In the dreadful stillness, electricity pulsed through the overhead wires along the street, charging the night with barely-contained, violent energy. Then it dawned on me: the sound was actually crickets crying out into the darkness. Tree frogs were shrieking too, and who-knew what other creatures.

I had no better understanding of my new world than I had of the last one.