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FIVE
When I called Paul from Manhattan that night he took the news that I’d accepted the job at Fairwick surprisingly well.
“I’ve been asking around and the school has a pretty good reputation. They have an honors program with very generous financial aid that draws some top students from around the country and the world,” he told me. I could hear his fingers tapping on his laptop keyboard in the background. He must have been Googling the college and town for hours. “And according to MapQuest it’s only three hours from the city. When I can get a job there next year it’ll be an easy commute. In the meantime it looks like the closest airport is Newark…”
He was less than thrilled when I told him I’d bought a five-bedroom Victorian house.
“I thought we were going to use that money to buy a bigger apartment in the city when I moved there,” he said, his voice sounding young and wounded. “You could have at least discussed it with me.”
I argued that we’d always agreed we should each take the job—or graduate school offer—that was best without worrying about what the other one thought.
“Yes, but ahouse,” he said. “That’s so…permanent.”
“Tenure’s permanent,” I countered. “A house is…” I wanted to say that a house could be bought and sold, but I knew already that it wasn’t ever going to be easy to sell Honeysuckle House. The very thought of letting the house go alreadygave me a strange pang. “…it’s a vacation house. You’ll come up on weekends. We’ll spend our summers there. You’ll see, once you’re in the city full time you’ll be dying to get out of it like all good New Yorkers.”
“You should have at least talked to me first,” he said with uncharacteristic hurt. Paul was generally the most easygoing of guys; we hardly ever fought. And we didn’t now. Paul got off the phone saying he had papers to grade.
Looking for some girlfriendly support I took the subway to Brooklyn to my friend Annie’s bakery to tell her what I’d done. She’d been my best friend since high school and even though she didn’t date men herself (she had come out when we were in tenth grade) she always had good advice about them. And she’d been after me for years to ditch the long-distance relationship with Paul and go out with someone in the city.
“Sorry, Cal, I’m with Paul here,” she told me while squirting yellow icing on a row of sunflower-themed cupcakes. “You acted like a man—all high-handed. And I don’t buy all this crap about doing what’s best for each of you, damn the relationship. That just sounds like neither of you care enough about the relationship to make a sacrifice to make it work.”
I’d forgotten that since Annie had moved in with her girlfriend, Maxine, she’d gotten a bit sanctimonious about commitment.
“You think I should sacrifice my career and move out to L.A.?” I asked, nabbing one of the half-finished cupcakes. I had a sudden urge for sugar, which I blamed on all the sweets I’d consumed at the Hart Brake Inn.
“I didn’t say that. But if you both really wanted to be together you would have found a way by now, and buying a house for yourself doesn’t sound like the kind of thing a person does when she’s in love.”
Unless she’s in love with a man who appears in a dream, I thought but didn’t say.
Strangely, it was the same view that my grandmother Adelaidetook when I called her up in Santa Fe (where she had retired when I graduated high school) to tell her my news. “Fairwick’s a second-tier college with a second-rate staff,” she drawled in her starchy New England voice. It was the same voice she had once used when she spoke of my mother’s decision to go to college in Scotland (“The women in our family have always gone to Radcliffe or Barnard”), my mother’s marriage to my father, my decision to go to NYU, and my choice of scholarly concentration (“Fairy tales are for children!). When she’d finished belittling my new employer, she asked if this meant I’d broken up with “that boy in California.” When I told her no, she said it was only a matter of time; if we were serious about each other we would have managed to live on the same side of the country by now.
Adelaide’s and Annie’s verdicts haunted me on the way to visit Paul in California. Oddly it was the dream I’d had at the Hart Brake Inn that made me feel like they might have a point, as if I’d been unfaithful to Paul and bought Honeysuckle House so I could be with that moonlight lover. The fact that my knees turned to water every time I remembered the dream seemed to corroborate that theory, as did the fact that the moonlight lover reminded me of the fairytale prince of my adolescent fantasies. I felt like I’d betrayed Paul with my ex-boyfriend. It made me wonder if a part of me hadn’t always been waiting for the return of my fairytale prince—the same part of me that was okay with living three thousand miles away from my boyfriend.
When I got to L.A., though, I explained to Paul about the boxes of Dahlia LaMotte’s papers in the attic and he began to relent.
“You mean you can write about them—even reproduce them—as long as the originals stay in the house?”
I showed him the codicil to the deed that said so.
“Why didn’t you say so in the first place?” he asked, rewarding me with the wry crooked smile that had first warmed me tohim in our sophomore English class. “That’s brilliant, Cal. We’ll have enough to buy a place in Manhattan when you publish your next book!”
As much as I was relieved that he’d forgiven me, I still had the uneasy feeling that my rashness (and the spectral infidelity he didn’t know about) had been forgiven because it had been judged profitable. So I spent the two weeks in L.A. feeling a little like a high-priced hooker, trying to convince myself that having erotic fantasies about an imaginary lover wasnotthe same as cheating. So what if I recalled the way the moonlight had carved sinuous muscles out of shadow when I looked at Paul? Or that I remembered the touch of those pearly lips when Paul kissed me? It was only a dream—and one I hadn’t had again since that night at the Hart Brake Inn. And if I cut my trip a day short so I’d have time to settle into the new house before term began, it didn’t mean I was longing to be back at Honeysuckle House to see if the dream would come back there.
Did it?
If I’d believed in the pathetic fallacy—that the weather in a novel reflected the emotions of the heroine—I’d have had to suspect that my purchase of Honeysuckle House had indeed been dictated by a malevolent force. I drove up to Fairwick in a torrential rainstorm that threatened to blow my new green Honda FIT off the highway. When I got to Fairwick all the houses on my street were dark. The power must be out, I thought, wondering how oftenthathappened. I considered going first to the Hart Brake Inn and asking Diana for a room—or at least a flashlight and candles—but when I drove up in front of Honeysuckle House I knew I couldn’t wait any longer to claim it as my own. Even the wind seemed to be pushing me up the front steps (there was that pathetic fallacy again!), urging me to the front door. I glanced up at the fanlight, but the face was dark and somehow brooding, with nolight shining through the stained glass. Like the lover in my dreams before the moonlight awakened him. I had a feeling thathewas somewhere in the shadowy house, waiting for the sound of my key to awaken him. I now held the big old-fashioned key that Dory had sent me in the mail wrapped in brown paper and twine, poised centimeters from the lock. It felt heavy in my hand, weighted with all the questionable decisions I’d made over the last month.
I’d passed up a possible career in Manhattan—the center of my known universe—for a job in a second-tier college in a podunk town where I knew no one. I’d bought a hundred-year-old house which, despite its sterling inspection report, was likely to require maintenance that I, a lifetime apartment dweller, couldn’t even begin to imagine. Although I’d planned to keep the Inwood apartment I’d sublet it at the last minute when my TA admitted she didn’t have anywhere to live, so now if I decided to go back to the city I’d have no place to stay. Worst of all, I’d put stress on an eight-year relationship with a decent man whom I believed I was in love with. And all because of a dream that reminded me of the fairytale prince of my teenaged dreams.
I should turn around right now, get in my car, drive back to New York City, tell Dory Browne to put the house on the market, and take adjunct teaching jobs until I could reapply for next year at a college within commuting distance of Manhattan. Yes, that’s what I should do, only…
Something clicked. Something metal.
I looked down at my hand and saw that the key was now in the lock. How hadthathappened? I pulled the key out and held it half an inch in front of the lock. It quivered in the air. Was my hand shaking? Or…I touched the key to the keyhole, which I noticed now was surrounded by an iron plate shaped like a rooster. I felt a tug at my hand as the key leapt forward and slid smoothly into the lock.
Damn!I stared at it for a full minute until the idea clicked inmy head with the same resolute sound the key had made when it slid into the lock. The lock must be magnetic. It seemed like pretty sophisticated technology for a nineteenth-century house, but then I remembered what Dory Browne had said about Silas LaMotte: he liked everything shipshape, he’d built this house to last, and, according to the inspector I’d hired, it was in pristine condition. “A little paint and some caulking and you’re good to go,” he’d told me, recommending his cousin Brock Olsen for the repairs. Dory had let Brock in last week and offered to oversee the work. I had nothing to worry about. It hadn’t been crazy to buy the house, but it would be crazy to walk away from it now.
I turned the key. The tumblers turned smoothly in the lock and the door opened silently on well-oiled hinges, not at all like the creaking doors of Gothic romance. Nor was I greeted with cobwebs and dank miasmas. The house smelled like fresh paint and varnish. A clean, practical smell that vanquished the ridiculous notion that I’d bought the house because of a dream.
