The Futures(54)

He glanced ahead. “That’s our exit,” he said. “Next one.”

The sign said we were entering Alpine, New Jersey. We swung around the bending off-ramp, the car handling the curves as beautifully as Bruno had promised. The busy highway vanished, and moments later we were driving down quiet streets. There were high, manicured hedges and towering old trees, wrought-iron gates at the end of every driveway. You couldn’t even see the houses. These were rich people. I wondered if this was where Michael lived.

We came to a dead end, a cul-de-sac. Michael stopped the car in front of a gate, one even higher and grander than the others we’d passed. “We’re here,” he said, turning off the engine. “Get out of the car.”

My legs were shaking as I climbed out. Michael stood in front of the gate, hands in his pockets. It was dark—cloudy, no moon, no streetlights—but Michael seemed to know what he was looking at. I stood next to him, and after my eyes adjusted to the darkness, it materialized. The shape of a house in the distance, down the long driveway.

“A few years ago,” Michael said, “my wife told me she was tired of the city. She was sick of all the noise, the honking, the traffic. She wanted a yard. She wanted to be able to go outside in the morning and look at trees and flowers. She said she missed having nature around her.”

He shook his head. “I grew up on a farm. You knew that, right? In the middle of South Dakota. You want nature? That’s all there is out there. I had to get up every morning at dawn. Milking the cows, shoveling manure, waist-deep in shit before the sun came up. And after school, there was more. There was always more. It was mud and dirt and hay and shit everywhere. This”—he gestured at the boxy hedges and clipped grass—“isn’t nature. Not to me.”

“But my wife…” He laughed, shook his head again. “My wife grew up in the suburbs. This is practically the wilderness to her. Me, I like the city. I like taxis and elevators and restaurants. But she wanted to move. She said she wasn’t going to raise our kids in some apartment. So we bought this place a few years ago. Renovated, fixed it up, redid the yard. You want to see it?”

It took me a second to realize the question wasn’t rhetorical. “Oh, um, sure,” I said.

Michael punched a four-digit code into the keypad next to the gate. A moment later, it opened with a mechanical screech. He’d left the keys in the Maserati, in the cul-de-sac. I guess the chances of it getting stolen were low in this neighborhood. People here already had their own fancy sports cars. Michael kept talking.

“When she first raised the issue, I shut it down. I told her no: it’s my money, I’m going to spend it the way I want. And we have a penthouse, for Christ’s sake. It’s not like the kid would be deprived. But she pushed and she pushed. And then I realized—it’s like when you have something and it doesn’t mean too much to you. But it means a lot to the other person. It means an enormous amount to them. And if you give it to them, maybe it’s a little sacrifice for you, but they are going to owe you for the rest of your life. You let them have their way now, and you’ll have the upper hand on everything else. Leverage, right? So I told my wife okay. Let’s pick out a house.”

We were finally there. The house was enormous: a circular driveway with a fountain in the middle, a grand entrance flanked by tall columns. It looked like one of the old French castles that Julia and I saw during our summer in Europe—the same kind of expensive-looking stonework and old-fashioned architecture. But the fountain in the driveway was empty and dry. Every window in the house was dark.

“That’s the thing, Evan.” Michael turned to face me. “Sometimes you have to do things in life that you don’t really want to do. But you have to bear in mind that there’s a bigger picture. Do you understand what I mean?”

I was newly aware of how quiet it was. How we hadn’t seen a single person since we exited the highway. At least the dark concealed the nervous swallow in my throat. But if Michael was going to do something to me, I realized, he would have done it by then. “Yes,” I said. “I think I do.”

He gestured at me to follow him down a path around the side of the house, which opened out to the backyard. Actually, it wasn’t a backyard. It was more like the grounds of a country club: tennis courts, a pool, terraced stone patios. The yard was immaculate, but it was obvious that no one was living there. There should have been some sign of life. A chair on the patio, a toy or a ball left in the middle of the lawn. A smudge on the windowpane from a curious hand pressed against it. Anything.

“What do you think of it?”

“It’s really nice.”

“I never even spent a single night out here. My wife didn’t, either. It was a good thing we didn’t sell our place in the city.”

“Why didn’t you move in?”

He shrugged. Michael looked human-size, for the first time, like an ordinary man. One whose life contained mistakes, maybe even regret. “Like I said. She wanted to live out here to raise our kids. When that didn’t materialize, we didn’t have any reason.”

He stared at the back of the house. A long moment passed. The wind rustled the nearly bare branches of the trees. It felt like we were a thousand miles from Manhattan. Then Michael smiled that disturbing grin of his. “Well, I got my way in the end.”

As we skirted the side of the house, back toward the driveway, I slowed my pace to look through one of the windows. Gradually the room came into focus, like a darkened fishbowl. It was completely empty. The walls blank, the floor bare and uncovered. There was one lonely drop cloth in the corner of the room. A ladder and a bucket of paint. It looked like the job had been abandoned halfway through. Like whoever it was couldn’t get out of there fast enough.