The Return of Service

A Moving Story

We leave the old house, my wife and I, without looking back. Our possessions remain behind as hostage to former commitments, all our things: furniture, books, clothes, child, dog, cats, important papers. The movers, according to arrangement, will bring them later. First we have to show our good faith by entering the new house and declaring our intention to take possession. As prospective owners, we are constrained (for our own good, says our lawyer) “to establish a relationship with the property” before the deal can be consummated.

We have talked about it at length, lying in bed back to back unable to sleep, and both of us feel that rituals, even when their application has long since become vestigial, can be satisfying in themselves. Buying a house is not unlike a marriage as selling a house is not unlike a divorce. We have talked about all this on many a sleepless night and are prepared to fulfill the forms of our decision.

The new house is dark when we arrive, the street itself dark, boards over some of the front windows. The boards are unexpected. The external darkness we put down to a quirk in the weather. “Perhaps we’re at the wrong place,” says my wife, only partly serious. We are both tremulous with excitement. I ring the bell, producing a nervous laugh from one of us. “You can use the key,” she says. “It’s our house now.”

“I don’t have the key.”

She presses a ring of keys into my hand. “One of them,” she says, apparently amused at my confusion, “is the right one.”

The door opens at first try. “It must be the right house,” I say, “though someone seems to have taken the bulbs out of the fixtures.” I try a few switches with no results.

“It has nothing to do with the bulbs, honey. The electricity’s been turned off.”

I wonder how she knows that, though decide it is not the time to ask.

The first room we enter is the first floor parlor. Some clutter has been left behind, odds and ends of broken furniture, cat shit, trash piles, wire hangers, dress store dummies. “It’s not what I had in mind,” says my wife.

“Aren’t they responsible for cleaning everything out?”

“I don’t remember,” she says. “What did the lawyer say?”

The lawyer said not to worry, he would take care of everything.

He had been adamant from the start on that single point.

The cat shit seems antique, is solid and easy to dislodge with the toe. I move the trash, most of it — some candy wrappers float in the air as if resistant to displacement — to the far corner of the room. “We’ll get a cleaning lady,” I say, “and charge it to the former owner.”

My wife doesn’t seem to be listening, stands with her back to me staring disconsolately at the floor.

“At least the floors are good,” I say.

“Would that they were,” she says. “Look closely, Jack. That’s not the original parquet, but a cheap imitation. It wasn’t like that when we bought the house.”

We have the idea that the former owners have taken the original floors with them, though it seems a lot of effort to no useful purpose.

“The house,” my wife says sotto voce, “is nothing without them.”

What could have possessed them to go off with the parlor floor?

It seems, putting the best possible light on it, some kind of moral deficiency.

The people we bought the house from strike us as somewhat like ourselves, middle class, civilized, bookish, modernists yet concerned with the traditions of the past, capable of righteous indignation, sensitive to the plight of the poor and the disadvantaged, serious yet fun loving, concerned about the environment, opposed to sex without love and violence without justification. It is hard to imagine them doing something we would not consider doing.

I offer an explanation. “Perhaps their movers moved it by mistake.”

“That doesn’t explain the substitute floor,” she says, “which is an exceptional imitation of the original, done I would guess by a master craftsman used to working with inferior woods.”

We go into the next room which, despite my recollection otherwise, is also a parlor, though there is a standing sink in one corner, an apparent disparity.

“It’s for the baby,” says a voice. “It’s a bathtub specially for the baby.”

A woman introduces herself. She is a tenant of the former owner. Her name is Doris, she says, and she will be out in a day or two, as soon as she can get her act together.

“My name is Doris also,” says my wife, a curious lie.

“We were told the house would be empty,” I say, somewhat apologetically.

“I’m a trifle behind schedule,” says Doris, sitting on a low chair next to the sink. “I split with my husband two days ago, then my girl friend moved out, then my baby left. I’ll be gone one of these days and my loneliness will be complete. Please go about your business as if I were barely available to the naked eye.”

The floor in this room is on a slight bias and we tend to find ourselves, no matter which way we go, crowded into the same corner.

“I don’t want this house,” my wife whispers in my ear.

The next room does no immediate violence to our expectations.

It is a guest bedroom, small though with a certain naive charm, a certain disingenuous cunning. When our eyes adjust to the dark we notice that in a corner of the room a three-quarter size bed has been left behind and that there are some people in it, an older couple, seemingly asleep. We conjecture as to who they are. Someone’s parents, my wife suspects.

No one told them apparently that the owners were moving out. We tiptoe out and close the door. “What a terrible thing for someone to do,” my wife says. “To just leave people like that. To just forget them.”

Doris sits with her ear to the door of the old people’s room.

“Every once in a while,” she says, “you can hear them having sex. It’s a lot of kicks if you happen to be lonely.”

I put my ear to the door to listen when my wife, buzzing with irritation, takes me by the hand and drags me away.

We are back in the first parlor, the room we had set aside in plans made during sleepless nights for entertaining friends. My wife is crying. “I don’t want this house,” she says for what may be the fifth time. “Do we have to take it? We can just give it up, can’t we, and go back to our old house.” She puts her head against my chest.

She knows we can’t, that we no longer own our old house, that the buyers, impatient people, may be taking possession at this very moment. “If we give this house up, we’ll have no place to live,” I say. I press her to go with me through the remaining rooms, remind her that it is a common phenomenon, predictable as death, that your first view of a house after you’ve bought it disappoints anticipation.

“I won’t live here,” she says, adamant” sitting down on the floor, crossing her arms in front of her. “I’d rather live nowhere than in a house like this.”

Her despair gave way to impassivity and then to functional catatonia. She has always, for as long as I’ve known her, wanted things to be right. It has made her restless, this pursuit of rightness, and has been productive of precipitous change in our lives.

With each change came larger and larger disappointment, the ideal of rightness teasingly elusive. She discarded our old furniture when she saw that no matter how we lived with it, what spaces it displaced, it would never be right, and bought new which captured the spirit of the old while transcending its limitations. The new, though perhaps better, was worse because it violated the ideal by pretending falsely to approximate it. She moved things around, made the living room into a kitchen, the kitchen into a bedroom. While the renovation was in progress we slept on a rug on the floor of the bathroom, sometimes in the bathtub itself. At her urging, we acquired a dog and two cats, then gave away the dog and had the cats fixed. None of it was right. We shared disappointments, took a trip to Europe, had a baby, bought a previously owned Mercedes Benz, took lovers, fell in and out of love, not precisely in that order. We tried therapy. Tried the same therapist. It was the wrong kind of therapy, went wrong; the therapist died. His funeral seemed just right, though inimitable. It was then that she began to talk of moving. Between therapies, after the death of the first and before the ascension of the second, moving seemed something to do. Her second therapist urged her to relive birth trauma, threw pillows at her and sat on her stomach. Birth trauma seemed like old news. We took a vacation from therapy in southern France, stayed in a quaint sixteenth-century cottage and studied simplicity. Nothing lasts, she said. She longed to return home to see if our beautiful old house was as perfect as she remembered it. We returned in the fall. There were roaches in the kitchen and dust on the windows, a disappointment she took bravely. Nevertheless, she couldn’t forgive the house without giving up something of herself. The subject of moving returned to our conversation. For a while, while it was still fresh, we had no other subject. During sexual relations, she might say, apropos of nothing, “We have to move, Jack. We have to move.” We agreed that we were wasting our life (and that of our child) by living contentedly in the wrong house. The talk of moving got increasingly serious, traveled nowhere without us. When the talk began to lose its charge, began to seem stale and unprofitable, we undertook to look at houses that were up for sale. None seemed quite as remarkable as the one we were prepared to give up, though each had something to say for itself. If we could put together the kitchen of one house, we speculated, with the terrace of another, with the garden of a third, with the neighborhood of a fourth. Such idle speculations led to a reinvestment in the reality principle. Months passed. We denounced the notion of change for its own sake, continued to check out houses others were discarding. Tired of unrewarding pursuit, I suggested we buy one or get on to something else. She had faith, she said, that one day the right house would finally appear. More months passed. We repaired the sidewalk in front of our old house, did Transcendental Meditation, talked of relocating to Colorado. My wife cut her hair; I grew a beard. We moved into an era of accommodation. I missed her long hair. She preferred me without a beard. We were still the same people, we agreed by consensus, despite our changes. Compromise, whatever its short fall in the larger moral scheme, was not without its satisfactions. The old high standards, I thought with small regret whenever I thought about them, were a thing of the past. One day I got a call at the World Trade Center where my company had its offices. She had found the right house for us, my wife reported, although it had almost none of the qualities we had thought we wanted in a house. Would I come immediately and see it before it went off the market or someone else bought it. I chartered a helicopter and was there in fifteen minutes. “I’ll be heartbroken if I don’t get it,” she confided. It looked to me like any number of houses we had seen before. “This house makes me happy,” she said. “Don’t you love it? It reminds me of the houses I lived in as a child.” I didn’t know whether I liked it or not. I knew I would never come to love it. She took me by the hand from room to room, describing our life in that house. It sounded like a life in which we would be happier than we had allowed ourselves to be in any other house. I could see that she was right, that this was the house we needed. Yet whatever its charms, the house was not memorable. When we got home we disputed each other’s recollections. Neither of us could remember the details of the house, though each was embarrassed to confess this deficiency to the other. Our separate views of the same house were seemingly incompatible, barely susceptible to negotiation. “You’re not the man I thought I married,” she said. Before the fight was over a number of unforgiveable revelations came to light. We resolved our differences by deciding to buy the house. When we made our formal offer, using the agent as a go-between, which is the professional way of doing it, we were told that the owner was withdrawing the property from the market. The agent said he had done all he could on our behalf, had laid out our virtues before the owner like diamonds on a tray. “That’s our house,” I said to whoever would listen. I hated to be refused anything. “That house was meant for us.” “I told you that, didn’t I?” said my wife. We were not without untapped resources. The day after we had been turned down, using a different last name, we visited the widow who owned the house, bearing flowers and a six-dollar bottle of California wine. The woman, a bit vague around the edges, seemed to like us. We also seemed to like her. We sat in the kitchen, drinking wine, talking about the old days when the city was the kind of place where a decent person could live. We found ourselves on the same side on all of the essential issues of the day. We admired the widow’s wall hangings to excess, were given a demonstration of her washing machine, which was thirty-seven years old and had never needed repair. As we were leaving my wife said to her, “If you let us have this house, I’ll never ask you for anything again.” It seemed an odd thing to say to a stranger. The widow said to give her a week to make a decision, that she couldn’t imagine anyone she’d rather have in the house than us. When we got home we discussed the impression we had made, felt that there were things that each of us had said that were not quite right. In a weak moment I suggested that maybe we ought to invite the widow to live in the house with us. My wife said it was absolutely the wrong idea. She said she was sure that there was a man on the scene somewhere who figured large in the widow’s plans. When the week was over we got a call from the agent, saying that the house we had wanted had been sold, that he wanted us to be the first to know so that we might place our affections elsewhere. We were outraged. “They can’t sell that house to someone else,” my wife said. “I absolutely won’t stand for it.” The agent checked with the owner and called us back. There had been a misunderstanding, he said. We were the people to whom the house had been sold, though under a different name from the one he knew us by. The house was sold to us, he said or would be if we could satisfy the owner’s. terms. The widow had put all her holdings into the hands of her second husband, a celebrated trial lawyer known for his commitment to unpopular causes. She wants to be sure that she is selling the house she has given the best years of her life to to the right people. We were unfazed by terms, we said. We wanted the house and would do what was required of us to get it. For days, we marveled at how well things had turned out. What made the widow change her mind about selling? we wondered, posing the question in a variety of ways. Perhaps something unimaginable was wrong. We were in the process of reconsidering our offer when some strangers came along and bought our old house which had been, unremarked, on the market for half a year.

I have rehearsed in memory the significant events leading up to the present moment, changing them slightly to permit (for myself) the pleasure of new discovery. My wife, as I look about me, is sitting on a three-legged stool, staring at the walls, hoarding her silence. I put my arm on her shoulder. “It will be all right,” I whisper. There is no response, not even a slight turn of the head.

I leave her reluctantly, go on through the remaining rooms, promising a full report when I return.

There is nothing wrong with the second floor that a little paint and plaster couldn’t make right. I hang my coat over a small hole in the east wall of the master bedroom. Why advertise disrepair.

The second-floor bathroom is being grouted, I discover, by a Sicilian with only two or three words of English at his command. “Who employed you?” I ask him.

“Is a equal opportunity,” he answers. “Who a demployed you?” “I’m the owner,” I say, “or will be after the closing ceremony which is going on, unless I misrecollect, at this very moment.”

“A Miss Recollect,” he says. “She a demploy.”

We discuss the films of Lucino Visconti, none of which he has seen, and how much of the plumbing is brass and how much lead. “All is van…” he says, referring to the plywood cabinet under the sink.

“We’ll tear it out,” I say.

The third floor, mostly glass and steel, is the showcase of the house, an extensive renovation “combining,” says the brochure on the end table in the hall, “the glories of the past with the luxury and elegance of the future.” The extended back room, which has a glass wall overlooking an overgrown English garden, is a painter’s studio. There is something familiar about its very unfamiliarity. The sun filtering through the large stained-glass skylight creates liquescent patterns of color on the white marble floor. This extraordinary studio moves me to regret. If this room had been available to me years back, my life might have moved in a wholly different direction.

I look out at the street from the third-floor terrace. The movers have just arrived, their truck double-parked in front of the house. My wife, or a woman who resembles her, is talking animatedly to a pencil-thin black man with a sofa strapped to his back. She is pointing toward the third floor. I try to get her attention, but she doesn’t notice my wave and the street noises drown me out. The mover nods and shakes his head, of two minds about whatever it is. My wife sits upright on the sofa, balancing herself against the angle of repose, and is carried inside on the mover’s back.

The house fills ups. I go down the stairs, looking for my wife.

The stereo in the first parlor is playing “When I’m 64.” The children, not all of them mine, are having a party in the kitchen.

I ask who’s supervising them; no one seems to know. “This is a housewarming,” the smallest of them says. “It’s cold outside.”

My wife is standing in the doorway, tears streaming down her face. The movers edge discreetly by, careful of her privacy.

“Now that I have everything I want,” she says, “I don’t know what to do with myself.”

This remark, coming from anyone else, would seem ironic.

“Everything you want?” I ask,

One of the movers, the thin black reed, invites her to run away with him to Harlem. (I plead with her to stick it out here.)

She is moved by his unexpected offer, she tells the mover, though she doesn’t see how she can accept, her life circumscribed by intractable patterns.

“You will not be asked again,” he says.

Our marble table passes, a jagged crack unknown to its past at the center.

We are talking about not moving again for five years, unless the unforeseen is manifest, when a crash interrupts and we turn as one to see a book box, the instant after it slides out from under the sash of the reedlike mover, bumping down the steps. My wife lets out a scream of alarm. Books fall in disorder at our feet.

We squat down on the floor, clearing a space, browsing among the fallen, looking for some words of counsel. A period of silence passes, each of us caught up in his own text, “Let’s not move,” I am prepared to say. Before I can find the words, before we can become aware of the ambiguities of my idle remark, she leans over and purrs an unintelligible secret in my ear.

I close my eyes, let exhaustion wash over me. This time, I think, I will not make the same mistakes, will not fall prey to indolence and cowardice again. I will be kind to my wife and child and kinder to myself. This is a new chance, I remember thinking, the same thought I had five years before when we moved into the other house and four years before that when we married, the same fresh moment gathered over and over in my life (and hers) going back as far as it goes.

The silence fails to contain our hopes, and we move, embrace, stand up, make idle chatter, and go on. In the abyss of a moment, all is forgotten.