Alternate Side(4)

“It is a big house for only two people,” Nora had said to Sherry. “When the twins are away there could be somebody on the top floor and I wouldn’t even know it.”

“If I lived with her in a two-bedroom apartment, I might kill her,” Jack Fisk said. Nora laughed nervously. Jack rarely laughed at all.

The Fisk house was bracketed by that of the Fenstermachers, who were perfect and hosted the holiday party every year, and a house that had been owned for ages by people who lived in London and rented it out. The renters never had enough stature on the block to gossip with their more durable neighbors, and Alma Fenstermacher never gossiped at all. But Nora suspected that while Charlie sometimes complained about TV noises rumbling through the common wall from the Rizzoli house next door, the occasional child screaming at a sibling or toy dog yipping at nothing, the Fisk neighbors heard more than that, and more often.

Nora looked at her husband. He was not even admiring the rear of the young woman as she turned and went back the way she had come, hand in hand with the young man. Charlie was too mesmerized by his good fortune, staring through the narrow opening at his car in its space, a faint smile on his face. With his thin, sandy hair, round blue eyes, and pink cheeks, he looked like a small boy. He was one of those people whose baby pictures looked more or less like his driver’s license photo. He even looked boyish when he was unhappy, his full lower lip protruding a bit when he talked of someone at work who was being unfairly elevated, one of the guys he had come up with who had just gotten a big promotion.

“Congrats, party people,” Nora heard from behind her, and she clenched her molars as she turned.

“Major league congrats,” repeated George, the most irritating person on the block.

Another of Nora and Charlie’s marital agreements was that social intercourse with George Smythe must be avoided at all cost, but this morning Charlie shook George’s hand warmly, as though they were concluding a particularly lucrative business deal. Nora supposed they were, since George seemed in some peculiar and unstated way to be the keeper of the parking lot as well as the majordomo of the block, slipping printed notices through their mail slots about everything from street trees to trash disposal. George-o-Grams, Rachel called them when they appeared on the floor of their foyer. Nora thought that Charlie didn’t mind George because he reminded him of the sort of guy who was the social chairman at a fraternity house. Nora couldn’t bear George for precisely the same reason.

George sensed her dislike, and was galvanized by it. Soon after Charlie and Nora had moved to the block, when it became clear that she was unlikely to meet George’s practiced (and often early-morning) bonhomie with more of the same, George had fastened on her as his project, the way men fasten on a woman who will not sleep with them, or a client who proves elusive, or a marathon, or Everest.

“Ms. Twinkletoes,” he would say as she sped by on her run to the park on Saturday mornings. “Madame Miler.” “The Harrier.”

“Harrier,” he had said to his son, Jonathan, one morning years before, the boy curved into a question mark beneath the burden of his backpack. “There’s a word that might be on the SATs. You know what a harrier is, son?”

Nora had never once heard Jonathan respond. George’s only child gave off an aura of unwashed T-shirt and contempt. His silence made no difference; George was the kind of man who could carry on both sides of a conversation. In fact he seemed to prefer it. Jonathan had left for college in Colorado three years ago and, as far as Nora knew, had never been seen on the block again.

“Living the dream,” George said when someone asked him about Jonathan. “Mountain air, hiking. None of this Ivy League slog. He’s living the dream.”

“He got rejected at most of the places he applied,” said Oliver.

“He works in a pot dispensary,” Rachel said.

“Cool job,” said Oliver.

“We’re not sending you to MIT so you can wind up selling sinsemilla in Denver,” Nora said.

“Okay, Mom, but how come you even know what sinsemilla is?”

Charlie waggled his eyebrows and grinned. “Don’t encourage them,” Nora said when the twins went upstairs.

“Relax, Bun,” Charlie said. “You’re always so uptight about stuff like that.” They had quarreled about whether the twins should be given wine at dinner now that they were away at college and doubtless drinking, but not yet of drinking age. It was notable because they rarely quarreled anymore. Their marriage had become like the AA prayer: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change.” Or at least to move into a zone in which I so don’t care anymore and scarcely notice. Nora had thought this was their problem alone until she realized that it was what had happened to almost everyone she knew who was still married, even some of those who were on their second husbands. At her women’s lunches they talked about the most intimate things, about errant chin hairs and persistent bladder infections and who had a short haircut because she just couldn’t be bothered and who had a short haircut because she’d just finished chemo. But while they were willing to talk about marriage generally, they tended not to talk about their own husbands specifically. Marriage vows, Nora had long felt, constituted a loyalty oath.

“As long as he doesn’t set anything on fire, I’m satisfied,” Elena had said one day, and all the other women chuckled drily, since Elena’s husband had in fact once set their screened porch in the country on fire when he brought the barbecue grill inside during a thunderstorm. There had been a prolonged fight with the insurance company, which didn’t consider saving the spareribs enough of a reason to use hot charcoal in a confined space. The dispute was ongoing, Elena said, because Henry enjoyed telling people about it, mainly other guys who cheered him on.