The House Page 5

  She wasn't sure she was ready for the responsibilities of taking care of a kitten, let alone a baby.

  What if she was pregnant? Would she abort it? She wasn't sure. She didn't think so, but she couldn't rule it out. At this point, she had no feelings for whatever might be growing inside her, no protective maternal urges, no bond of any sort. But how could she tell? She might keep it and it might turn out to be a good thing.

  It might force her to make just the changes she needed in order to slough off this midlife malaise or whatever it was that seemed to "be afflicting her.

  Or maybe not.

  Laurie looked once more out the window, once more toward the bay, then walked back over to her desk and tried once again to get through theMieger file.

  Before heading home, she stopped by the bookstore.

  Josh was busy, discussing Taoism with an obviously likeminded customer. She wasn't in the mood to hang around for an hour or however long it took for him to wind down, so after browsing politely, waiting a respectable ten minutes, she smiled at him, blew him a kiss good-bye, and started out the door.

  "Wait!" he called after her, holding up a hand.

  She mimed dialing a phone. "I'll call you," she said in the exaggeratedly simplistic tone she'd use on a deaf person attempting to read her lips.

  Her brother nodded from across the store, circled his thumb and forefinger in an "OK" gesture, and turned back toward the customer.

  It was late afternoon, the sun already hidden behind two of the taller buildings, and in the shadows of the city this morning's cheerful warmth had disappeared.

  Above, the sky was still blue and cloudless, but the hidden sinking sun had robbed it of its attraction and Laurie felt cold, lonely, and curiously uneasy as she walked down the littered sidewalk toward her neighborhood.

  There were a lot of cars on the street but very few pedestrians, and something about it all didn't seem right to her.

  Maybe she was pregnant. Maybe her hormones were all out of whack and affecting her emotions.

  Twenty minutes later, she was out of the downtown business district and passing through an interim area of old buildings and Victorian homes that had been converted into boutiques and coffeehouses when she saw up ahead, parked by the curb in front of Starbuck's, Matt's Mustang.

  Her heart started racing. Maybe it wasn't Matt's.

  Maybe it was someone else's, someone who had the same car in the same color and a similar bumper sticker on the back window. She took a few steps forward, then stopped, looking at the license plate.

  It was Matt's.

  What was he doing here? He didn't even like coffee.

  He was probably here on a date.

  But why was he staying this close to her neighborhood?

  She'd expected him to keep as far away from her as possible, had assumed that out of common decency he'd relocate to another area of the city. The last thing she figured he'd do was hang around here. Didn't he have any shame?

  Maybe the bitch he was with lived in this area.

  That would make sense. He'd probably met the slut when he'd been off one day, cruising around the neighborhood, pretending to work on his art, while she really had been at work at Automated Interface.

  She thought of waiting for him by his car, embarrassing him, causing a scene, informing him loudly in front of a group of strangers that she was pregnant, but she knew that was just a fantasy. Even now, looking at his car, her heart was pounding so hard it was interfering with her breathing, and there was no way she could get up enough nerve to face him. Not now. Not yet.

  She considered continuing down the sidewalk, pretending as though she hadn't noticed, ignoring him if he happened to walk out to his car at the exact moment she passed by, but she decided against it and opted for crossing the street and cutting down the alley that led to Union.

  The alley was dark, the flanking buildings blocking out what was left of the late afternoon light. Her uneasiness returned. The shadows here made her nervous, and she hurried over the pitted, eroded asphalt toward the opposite end, not running, not wanting to make that concession to fear, but striding quickly, hoping that her anxiety did not show. She pretended as though it was only the normal physical dangers of the city that worried her, that she was afraid of gangs and muggers and derelicts and drug addicts, but that was not the case. She could spin it that way, rationalize it, but her nervousness was based on something less concrete, something ephemeral that she could not even put her finger on, and whether it was stress or hormones or another entirely unrelated cause, all she wanted was to get out of this alley and off the streets and back home.

  The girl was waiting for her at the alley's end.

  Laurie was almost to Union, about to step off the rough asphalt onto the sidewalk, when she saw movement in the shadowed darkness to her right, a flash of white that startled her and made her suck in her breath.

  It was a girl of about ten or eleven, a thin waiflike child with dirty hair and face and even dirtier clothing:

  a white party dress covered with smudges and handprints and mud-edged rips. Her physical appearance resembled that of someone who'd been beaten or abused, but there was no sense of victimization about her, no fear or hesitancy or the sort of emotional withdrawal that would be expected after such an attack. Indeed, the child seemed remarkably self-possessed, and she stepped in front of Laurie, looking up at her. "Hello."

  "Hi," Laurie said, and she wasn't aware of it until she'd spoken the word, but there was something old fashioned about the girl, an anachronistic formality evidenced by her "Hello," by her purposeful walk and self-assured bearing, that under other circumstances would probably be cute and charming but here, in the alley, seemed unnatural and more than a little disconcerting.

  There was also something vaguely erotic about the child, something sensual in the way her hair fell over the left side of her face, the way she stood, hips out, bare legs slightly spread beneath her dirty dress.

  What kinds of thoughts were these?

  Laurie looked into the girl's face, saw raw beauty beneath the dirt and grime, saw a knowing, adult expression on those child's features, and she felt a strange and unfamiliar stirring within her, a feeling that was almost... sexual.

  Sexual?

  What the hell was wrong with her?

  The girl smiled up at her slyly. "Do you want to see my underwear?"

  Laurie shook her head, backed away, but the girl was already lifting up her dirty dress, exposing clean white underpants beneath, and Laurie was looking. She didn't know what was going on here, but the tight cotton and clearly outlined private parts were somehow arousing, and she was unable to turn away.

  The girl laughed, a high child's giggle that segued halfway through into a woman's throaty chuckle. She turned around in a circle, still holding up her dress, exposing her pantied buttocks.

  Laurie was frightened more than anything else. She did not know what was happening, but she had the sense that she should, that she was supposed to know who this child was and why she was doing this.

  The girl was once again facing her, and she smiled knowingly. "Do you want to see my pussy?"

  Laurie turned and ran.

  She was almost to Union and could've walked around the girl and out to the street, but even the idea of running back through the shadowed alley and perhaps meeting up with Matt seemed preferable to moving any closer to the child and risking accidental contact.

  She was out of breath when she reached the sidewalk, but she turned left and kept running, past Matt's unmoved car on the other side of the street, past businesses and houses, up the hill, not stopping until she was home.

  She locked the doors, drew the drapes.

  She dreamed that night of the girl, and in her dream the child was naked and in bed with her. She was kissing the girl on the lips, and those lips were soft and knowing, the girl's smooth body warm and deliciously sensual, the feel of her budding breasts achingly erotic.

  Laurie had never been th
is aroused before, and though she became aware at some point that this was not real, that she was dreaming, she did not want it to end and she purposely tried to prolong the dream, to manipulate its specifics in order to draw it out. She was rubbing herself against the girl, feeling soft femininity between her legs, and she was wet, wetter than she had ever been in her life, her lubricating juices dripping down her thighs, smearing the skin between them. There was no penetration, but she was already reaching orgasm, and she bit her lip to keep from crying out, involuntary spasms wracking her body as wave after wave of pleasure coursed through her, spreading outward from between her legs.

  When she awoke, her period had come.

  Norton Fall had arrived early this year. It was the end of August and school had just started, but already the trees outside the classroom window were a red and yellow rainbow against the flat gray of the Iowa sky.

  Norton Johnson hated to be inside on a day like today. It ran counter to every impulse in his body, and it was on days like this that he seriously considered taking the Board up on their offer and retiring.

  There was no way he could retire, though. He turned back toward his class, stared out at the blank bored teenage faces before him. These kids needed him. They didn't know it, but they did. The other teachers in school might think of him as a dinosaur, a relic from an earlier age, but he knew that the only way these students would ever learn anything, the only way they would ever overcome the lax parenting and media overstimulation that was their world, was through someone who cared enough to hold their noses to the grindstone.

  Straight teaching. That's what they needed. Lectures, note taking , reading, essays, tests. Not this "cooperative learning,"

  not the current fads of the current educational "experts."

  He'd been here before. In the late sixties, early seventies.

  When teachers had "rapped" to their students.

  When one of the English classrooms had had beanbag chairs and pillows instead of desks. When students had been allowed to design their own course curriculum and grade their own papers, giving themselves the scores they thought they deserved. He alone had resisted that foolishness, had insisted that there was nothing wrong with the tried and true methods of teaching to which he'd been subjected and that he'd been successfully using for years.

  He'd been laughed at then, too. But those days had come. And they'd gone.

  And he was still here.

  The current educational fallacy was that facts and dates weren't important, that students were better off learning "concepts" rather than information, and he was determined to wait out this trend as well, to remain at the school, to continue on as department chairman until this too had passed.

  Still . . .

  He looked wistfully out the window. The air probably smelled like fireplace smoke. The slight breeze rattling the trees was probably brisk and cold.

  He forced himself to continue on with his lecture.

  The fact was, as much as he hated to admit it, his mind wandered more often these days than it had in the past. He was not senile or unfocused or unable to concentrate. It was not that. It was simply that his priorities now were different. Intellectually, his work remained paramount, but emotionally his needs were shifting. He no longer received the same satisfaction from teaching as he had before. He sometimes found himself wanting to gratify simpler, more basic desires.

  The verities of old age.

  Norton glanced up at the clock above the blackboard.

  The period was winding down, so he gave a short talk on Mengele and Nazi experimentation and, as always, there was an appreciable increase in the level of attention paid by the class.

  He attempted, as usual, to place the information in historical perspective, to give it some context, to impress on the kids why this subject was important. To make them think.

  "We're facing the fallout even now," he said. "The Nazi experiments on human beings, onerous as they were, yielded valuable scientific information that could now be put to good use. Therein lies the dilemma. Is that knowledge tainted because of the way in which it was obtained? A lot of people believe that no good can come of evil and that recognition of the worth of this information would indirectly validate what the Nazis did. There are other people who believe that knowledge is knowledge, it is neither good nor evil in and of itself, and the method by which it was obtained should have no bearing on its validity. Still others believe that if any good can come of this evil, all of those people would not have died in vain. It's a complex question with no easy answer."

  The bell rang.

  "Think about it over the weekend. You may have to write an essay." He smiled as the students picked up their books and papers, groaning. "And enjoy your days off."

  "We always do!" Greg Wass yelled as he sped out the door.

  The weather was still gorgeous after school, and Norton cut across the football field to Fifth Street. At the edge of the field, in the dirt border adjoining the chain link fence that separated school property from the sidewalk, he saw a line of huge red ants marching from a hole in the ground to a discarded lunch sack, and he stopped for a moment to watch them. It had always seemed ironic to him that the ant, the Nazi of the insect kingdom, was the bug most frequently subjected to genocide.

  Flies and gnats, spiders and beetles, were usually killed individually. But ants were squashed or sprayed with poison, killed a hundred, two hundred at a time, entire colonies wiped out in one stroke.

  He frowned, recalling a memory from his childhood, when he and a neighbor girl had set fire to an anthill, dousing the small mound of dirt and the surrounding grassy ground with kerosene before dropping a match and watching the little insect bodies shrivel and blacken.

  They'd thrown other bugs into the fire as well, beetles and spiders, whatever they could catch, and they'd almost tossed in a kitten but the flames had sputtered out before they could capture the animal.

  He closed his eyes. Where had that memory come from?

  He felt suddenly ill at ease, slightly queasy, and he took a deep breath and walked through the open gate onto the sidewalk. The day no longer seemed so perfect, and instead of strolling slowly, enjoying the cool weather and the premature season, he hurried down Fifth Street toward home.

  Carole was cooking dinner in the kitchen when he arrived, but he wasn't in the mood to talk to her, so he called out a cursory greeting, threw his briefcase on the hall tree, grabbed a Newsweek from the magazine rack, and locked himself in the bathroom. He stayed in there for almost a half hour, until Carole knocked on the door and asked if he was going to spend the night on the toilet or come out and eat. He yelled that he'd be out in a minute, and when he walked into the dining room, the table was set and the good china was out. In the center of the table was a full salad bowl, a plate of mashed potatoes, and a small basket of rolls.

  Uh-oh, he thought.

  Carole emerged from the kitchen carrying a silver tray upon which sat a delicious-smelling roast.

  "What is it?" he asked as she placed the tray on the table.

  "What is what?"

  "This." He gestured around the table. "What's up?"

  "Nothing," she said. "I'm in a good mood and I

  wanted to have a nice dinner. Is that a crime?"

  "No, it's not a crime. But you don't usually go to all this trouble unless you want something. Or . . ." He looked at her. "Did you have an accident? Is the car dented?"

  She glared at him. "That's insulting. I told you, I was just in a good mood." She paused. "Was."

  They stared at each other for a moment, then Carole turned and strode back into the kitchen. Norton sat down to eat. The food looked delicious, and he piled his plate high with generous helpings of everything. Carole returned, placing a glass of milk before him.

  They ate for a while in silence, a welcome change and a state of affairs he thoroughly enjoyed, but Carole was obviously discomfited by the lack of conversation, and she finally broke down.

  "Don'
t you even want to know why I'm in a good mood? Why I'm happy?"

  He sighed. "Why are you happy?"

  "Because we had our first CLO meeting of the season."

  "So what are you doing this year? Annie again? The world always needs more amateur productions of Annie.'"

  She slammed her fork down on the table. "You pompous ass."

  "What are you talking about?"

  "Why do you always have to belittle everything that I do?"

  "I don't belittle everything you do."

  "What do you call it, then?"

  "I'm not--"

  "Not what? Criticizing? You sure the hell are. And for your information, we're doing Sondheim's Company this year." She glared at him. "And don't you dare say we don't have the talent for it."

  "I wasn't going to," he said.

  But he was. That was exactly what he'd been about to say. And he was only able to claim the high road now because she talked faster than he did and hadn't allowed him to put his foot in his mouth.

  Why did he do this? he wondered. What compelled him to attack her, to disparage her abilities, to mock her accomplishments, to denigrate everything she did?

  It wasn't that he thought himself superior, as she often suggested. It wasn't that he felt inferior and belittled others in an attempt to make up for it, either. No, it was simpler than that. Simpler, and at the same time, more complex.

  He liked to hurt people.

  The ants.

  He took a deep breath, stared down at his mashed potatoes. It was a hard admission to make, a clear-eyed yet withering self-assessment, an understanding of himself that he'd rather not possess. Not many people could recognize or acknowledge such a base and reprehensible motive Jesus, he thought. He was even using this as fodder for self-congratulation, complimenting himself for recognizing that he was a bastard.

  What the hell was wrong with him?

  It had all started with those damn ants.

  He looked across the table at Carole. "I'm sorry," he said. "I'm . . . I've just had a bad day."