I was looking out at the field across the street, where an eight-thousand-square-foot stone-and-stucco monstrosity would be going up in the spring, when Darla ran to the bathroom to be sick. I turned to Charles, who shrugged and looked at Vaughn, who went into the kitchen for more wine. Priscilla lit a cigarette. It was a nonsmoking house but I wasn’t going to say anything. What was I supposed to say? Smoke outside? We’d just gotten the autopsy results.
Darla was back in a few minutes, gaunt, damp-eyed, her face the color of old fondue. She smiled a weak smile and said, “It’s just so hard to believe.”
“I know it is,” Priscilla said absently. She was using my potted fig tree as an ashtray. “It’s like a dream.”
“A bad dream to be sure,” Charles said.
I asked if anyone wanted a hard-boiled egg. They all shook their heads at this preposterous question.
Just then my phone rang. I didn’t answer it. There was no one I wanted to talk to, no more news to be heard. I’d learned everything I needed to know in the last call I’d gotten, which had been from the morgue. They’d actually said, “Hi, this is the morgue,” as if they were a bakery and I’d ordered a cake.
After a time, Vaughn said, “He would have liked this view. He was big on views.”
The field glowed a deep gold in the late autumn sun. Beyond it was nothing but sky.
“He had a view of a dumpster, didn’t he?” Darla said.
“That’s what I mean. He wanted to move somewhere that looked out on something
like this. Something peaceful.”
“This view’ll be toast soon,” I said, sweeping my hand at the picture window.
“What, condos?” Vaughn said.
“Worse.”
“You should start a petition,” Priscilla said after lighting another cigarette.
Darla said she would sign it.
“It wouldn’t do any good,” I said.
“Probably not,” said Charles.
Everyone became silent.
Above the swaying grass a hawk or a kestrel wheeled and swooped.
Vaughn slammed his fist on the end table. “Goddamn it,” he said. “It makes no sense to me.” He was a large, sweaty, volatile man who’d supposedly tossed someone off a balcony once. “Does it make sense to you?”
“No,” I said. I wasn’t sure if he was talking about my soon-to-be-ruined view or the autopsy results, which were strange to say the least.
“There’s really no sense in trying to understand it,” Priscilla said.
“But, gasoline?” Vaughn went on. “I mean, come on. Why would someone do that?”
“It certainly would take a lot of guts,” Charles said. For some reason he’d taken off his shoes, expensive suede slip-ons that went not at all with his plaid drawstring pants.
“Guts or mental problems,” Darla said, gazing morosely outside, where it was starting to get dark.
“There are so many better ways to do it,” Priscilla said. “Better isn’t quite the right word, though. Less painful is what I mean.”
“We don’t know if there was any pain,” Charles said.
Vaughn snickered. “Do you know what gasoline is?” he said. He wiped his clammy brow on his sleeve. “I’m pretty sure it would hurt.”
I hadn’t been completely upfront about the autopsy results. Something besides gasoline had been found. That they’d narrowed it down to the exact brand—Mrs. Chattaway’s citrus-verbena-scent toilet bowl cleaner—was remarkable, but this was a detail I didn’t feel right mentioning.
“It would depend on how it was administered,” Darla said.
Despite all the schooling she’d had, the scholarships she’d won, the papers she’d published, the important people she’d met—she claimed to have danced with the Ambassador of Liechtenstein—Darla was kind of a nitwit.
“That makes it sound like somebody else administered it,” I said, a little too harshly. Something was winding me up.
“Impossible,” Vaughn spat. He was tilting his glass so that the wine, a 2004 Richebourg, was almost creeping over the rim and spilling onto the carpet. I was going to tell him to watch it but I didn’t want to get thrown through the window.
Priscilla and Charles had begun whispering to each other. She brushed her fingers through his lank hair, and he touched her leg with his sock foot and said what sounded like “My Portuguese Cattle Dog is smarter than your honors student.” Whereupon they went down the hall to my bedroom and closed the door.
Just to say something, I asked again if anyone wanted a hard-cooked egg. This time Darla said yes. I got one from the fridge—I’d made a batch that morning—and put it on a plate. It looked odd serving it unpeeled, so I peeled it. Then, for reasons I can’t explain, I reached under
my shirt with the egg and held it in my armpit for thirty seconds. I put the egg back on the plate and brought it to Darla with a napkin and a shaker of salt.
“Bon appetit,” I said.
“Parlez vous Francais?” she asked.
Before I could say that I knew only a smattering of French, Darla, whose face had regained some of its flushed fullness, started speaking rapidly in that language. She spoke with a kind of psychopathic intensity, a demonic effusiveness, while I nodded dumbly and tried to get a word in edgewise, spluttering the few French phrases I remembered from high school. I had just asked her if she wanted to go to the pool or to the beach when Vaughn, who was frowning out into the dusk, as though he thought something was out there, a prowler or a ghost, let out a loud, long, not very hygienic-sounding fart.
I felt tired.
Finally Darla shut up and salted her egg. As she bit into it a heavy bang came from my bedroom, so strong it shook the pictures on the living room wall.
Vaughn said, “This is bullshit.”
Thinking the same thing, I went to investigate.
I tried the bedroom door and it was locked. I gave two hard knocks and said, “You guys
all right in there?”
There was some shuffling and thumping, and Charles said, “Yep, everything’s fine. You
can go about your business. Thanks for your concern.”
I knocked again. “Priscilla?”
“Yes?” she answered casually. Something shattered on the floor. I was getting extremely fed up with these people.
“I’d like you and Charles to come back out to the living room,” I said as calmly as I could. “Okay?”
No response.
I went to the kitchen and poured myself the last of the wine and drank it in a gulp.
Vaughn was studying a framed eight-by-ten of our dead friend. Darla stood by him, but she wasn’t looking at the photo. She was examining a boil on Vaughn’s neck. I hadn’t noticed it before, a huge shining thing that looked ready to explode. Darla pressed her thumb into it and that’s what it did—it exploded. Greenly, horribly. I thought, Who are these people? What are they doing in my house? I didn’t care about them. I didn’t even like them. I wanted them gone.
At last Charles and Priscilla returned. Charles’ collar was flipped up, his shirttail hanging out. He also had what looked like the beginnings of a fat lip.
Priscilla lit yet another cigarette. She raised her chin, puffed out a smoke ring, and said, “Is there any more wine?”
A wire pulled taut inside me. “No,” I said. “There is no more wine.” My scalp burned and I didn’t sound like myself. I sounded, don’t ask me why, like Richard Burton in Cleopatra. “There is nothing. Nothing, do you hear me? I want you out of here. All of you. Get out of my house. Now.”
“But what about—” Darla began.
“Now!” I screamed.
Charles put on his pricey shoes. Everyone gathered their coats. Without a word they filed out the door—Darla and then Charles followed by Priscilla and finally Vaughn, who punched the wall before he left, knocking loose a piece of plaster shaped like Argentina. I watched them get into their cars and drive off into the night.
The quiet rolled over me. The picture of our friend was crooked. I straightened it and then checked my phone to see who’d called earlier. It was the number for the morgue. They’d left no message. What could they have wanted? What more could they have possibly had to tell me? I wasn’t interested in finding out. I’d heard enough.
It was getting late. I wanted to go to bed, yet I found myself pulling on a sweater and going out into the cold.
I crossed the street and walked into the field. The sky was full of bright stars. I stood in the rustling grass, in the raw wind, looking back at my house, all the rooms lit, no one inside. In six months someone else would be doing what I was doing now, only they’d be standing at an arched window or in a gaudy turret, gazing at my home and wondering about its occupant, who that person was, where that person was from, what that person did for a living, maybe being a little suspicious of that person, perhaps even harboring animosity toward him for living there, for being in the way, taking up valuable space, blocking the precious view. Wouldn’t you?