Devil House(24)

Its name sounds like a vague promise of luxury living, but it’s still cheap in 1972. However grand the visions of its landscapers, nobody local sees it and thinks, That’s where the rich people live. They know better. Your near neighbors down the hallway, in fact, are graduate students and new divorcées, people trying to live in as nice a place as they can afford while looking forward to something better. You know each other—from the parking lot, from the hallway, from the pool. Next door, in Apartment 9, there’s Thomas, a dairy tech student cutting corners until he can finish his master’s degree; across the hall, in 8, there’s Don, whose wife served him with divorce papers last fall. He’s seldom here on weekends anymore. It’s a good time to be a bachelor in America.

The others, around the corner, you know by name and face only: Gladys, who looks too young to have her own apartment and also too young to be named Gladys; Milt, who looks to be your age; and an older man you call “Mr. Adler” even though he always corrects you: “Call me Max.”

“Right! Max,” you say. He smiles.

“Good to see you, Miss Crane,” he says with a genuinely harmless wink as you turn the key in your door, opening onto the small world you’ve made of the interior of your apartment.

There will be much talk, in days to come, about the interior of your apartment.



* * *



SOME PEOPLE ARE COLLECTORS. They seek outstanding examples of things tailored to specific interests: a bust of the Frankenstein monster, production run unknown, sold through the mail in the early sixties and now seldom seen except at yard sales; issue #9 of Vampirella, with the cover story and art by Wally Wood; Japanese swords from specific dynasties. These are destined for display cases, most often, or for boxes in the garage should things get out of hand. Collectors are curators: they arrange their finds with a specific purpose in mind, even if it’s only, Look how much of this stuff I have all to myself.

You’re not a collector. Like anybody else, you decorate your home with personal touches, things that might give a guest an idea or two about who you are; but here, as in all things, you’ve tried to embrace chance a little, to let your whims speak for themselves. Decorations are as likely to have entered your house by accident as by design, and few of them last longer than a season or two. They get donated to church bazaars when you’re done with them; you like to imagine the former things of your daily routine going on to new lives about which you’ll never know a thing. Should thieves besiege your apartment tomorrow, there isn’t much you’d miss.

Take, for example, this gnarled chunk of driftwood later marked Exhibit 3-B by the prosecution. It caught your eye one morning at the shoreline: you were looking down, and you thought you saw a miniature canoe, possibly an abandoned child’s toy. It was an elongated arc of wood about a third the length of your arm, twisting a little midway through; but something had eaten dozens of holes in it: Insects? Tiny sea worms? Some pattern of accelerated decay brought on by long immersion in water?

Whatever the cause, the surface of the wood had been so thoroughly riddled that its composition was now more air than solid substance. What remained of the wood was a memory of its former condition, a reminder of its own past. You held it in your hand for the rest of your morning walk, and then it sat on your coffee table for a month, until you burned a steak one night and, needing something to mask the smell, remembered those tiny holes and thought of a use for them.

In a drawer, you located sticks of incense, also chance accumulations, fished from a glass case near the cash register of a San Luis Obispo record store by a clerk who cracked a smile when he asked: “Anything else?” The incense sat alongside pot pipes and hippie jewelry. The smile was because you didn’t look like the type.

But it appealed to your taste for hidden things. Its packaging was musty paper lettered from top to bottom in tiny clusters of italic text, devotional outpourings you sometimes skimmed but never really read: quotations from the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads, something called the Ten Virtues of Koh that delineated the specific benefits of burning incense; and, from Second Chronicles, this passage:

Every morning and evening they burn to the LORD burnt offerings and fragrant incense, and the showbread is set on the clean table, and the golden lampstand with its lamps is ready to light every evening; for we keep the charge of the LORD our God, but you have forsaken Him.

Two packages, Celestial Sandalwood and Dragon’s Blood, sit open on the kitchen counter behind your ad hoc censer. The sandalwood is a disappointment: it smells like men’s deodorant. But the other one’s sweet. You think you might buy another package of it when it’s time to replenish the supply, unless you feel like trying out another one with a fancy name: Vrindavan Flowers, or Night Phoenix. Possibly—probably—you will have moved on from incense by then. But, for now, there’s the driftwood and the Dragon’s Blood, a sweetly spicy smell that also reminds you a little of vanilla ice cream, just the thing for a lazy Tuesday afternoon.

Beneath the counter, the drawers: this one holds the cutlery, that one the spatulas and slotted spoons. Across the small space of the kitchen, there’s an extra bit of countertop next to the refrigerator—it looks like a space-filling afterthought. The single drawer underneath it stores dishrags and dry sponges; on the wall above it, there’s an antique knife rack, another of your serendipitous finds. Who knows how old this knife rack is? You found it at a yard sale for seventy-five cents; it was quite dirty, and probably long past its proper days of usage. But it was hand-painted, and you can never resist old hand-painted things, though it feels like the rest of the world is running out of patience with their kind.