LITMIR.BIZ

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      Christy laughed, through her nose, and then sadly shook her head.

      “I hope he’s all right.”

      “I think he just needs a drink.”

      “Hush, Daniel, please.”

      “Do you remember the toast he gave at the wedding?”

      “Did he make a toast?”

      “It was ‘To our wives and lovers, may they never meet.’”

      “I don’t remember that.”

      “Pretty fucking appropriate wedding-toast material, I thought.”

      “Daniel.”

      “This is a waste.”

      “Daniel, please don’t say that. We’re going to work this all out.”

      “Christy,” Daniel said. “Please don’t say that.”

      “What else can I say?”

      “Nothing,” Daniel said. “I don’t think you know how to say anything else.”

      “Found it!” Hogue came back around the house toward them, favoring the young couple with his realtor’s smile – the smile of someone who knows that he has been discussed unfavorably in his absence. He was brandishing a medium-sized, mottled gray stone, and for a wild instant Daniel thought he intended somehow to smash his way in. But Hogue only turned the stone over, slid aside a small plastic panel that was attached to it, and pulled from its interior a shiny gold key. Then he slipped the false stone into the hip pocket of his jacket.

      “Neat little things,” he said. He slid the key into the lock without difficulty, and let them into the house. “Don’t worry, it’s quite all right,” he added, when he saw how they were looking at him. “I’ll just have to call about the lockbox. Happens all the time. Come on in.”

      They found themselves in a small foyer with plaster walls that were streaked like thick cake frosting, fir floors, and a built-in hatstand festooned with all manner of hats. Hogue hitched up the back of his trousers and stood looking around, blinking, mouth pinched, expression gone blank. The profusion of hats on the hatstand – three berets in the colors of sherbets, a tweedy homburg, a new-looking Stetson with a snakeskin band, several billed golf caps bearing the crest of Mr. Kite’s club – seemed to bewilder him. He cleared his throat, and the young people waited for him to begin his spiel. But Hogue said nothing. Without gesturing for them to follow, he shuffled off into the living room.

      It was like a page out of one of Mrs. Kite’s magazines, furnished with a crewel love seat, two old-fashioned easy chairs that had been re-covered with pieces of a Persian kilim, a low Moroccan table with a hammered-brass top, an old blue Chinese Deco rug, and a small collection of art books and local Indian basketry, arranged with mock haphazardness on the built-in shelves. The desired effect was doubtless an eclectic yet contemporary spareness, but the room was very large, and to Daniel it just looked emptied.

      “Are you all right, Mr. Hogue?” Christy said, elbowing Daniel.

      Mr. Hogue stood on the Chinese rug, surveying the living room with his eyes wide and his mouth open, a hand pressed to his midsection as though he had been sandbagged.

      “Eh? Oh, why, yes, it’s just – they just – they changed things around a little bit,” he said. “Since the last time I was here.”

      From his astonished expression it was hard to believe that Hogue had ever seen the place before. Daniel wondered if Hogue hadn’t simply plucked it at random out of a listing book and driven them over here to satisfy some sense of obligation to Christy’s parents. Clearly the owners had not been expecting anyone to come through this morning; there was an old knit afghan lying twisted on the love seat, a splayed magazine on one of the chairs, and a half-empty glass of tomato juice on the brass table.

      “Mr. Hogue?” said Christy. “Are you sure this is okay?”

      “Fine,” said Hogue. He pointed to a pair of French doors at the far end of the living room. “I believe you’ll find the dining room through there.” Daniel followed Christy into the dining room, which was cool and shady and furnished with whitewashed birch chairs and a birchwood table with an immense glass top. In the center of the table sat a small black lacquer bowl in which a gardenia floated, its petals scorched at the edges by decay.

      “Nice,” Daniel said, although he always misgave at the odor of gardenias, which tempted with a promise of apples and vanilla beans but finished in a bitter blast of vitamins and burnt wire.

      “Come on, Daniel. We can’t afford this.”

      “Did I say we could?”

      “Please don’t be a bastard.”

      “Was I being a bastard?”

      Christy sighed and looked back toward the living room. Hogue hadn’t joined them yet; he seemed to have disappeared. He was probably back in the foyer, Daniel thought, looking around for the fact sheet on the house, so that he could pretend to be knowledgeable about it. Christy lowered her voice and spoke into Daniel’s ear. Her breath played across the inner hairs of his ear and raised gooseflesh all down his forearms.

      “Do you think he’s not supposed to be doing this anymore?”

      “What do you mean?” Daniel said, taking an involuntary step away from her. Her scarf had come loose at the back, allowing a thick lank strand of her unwashed dark hair to dangle alongside her face. It was not healthy to overwash the hair – that was why she was wearing the jazzy scarf – and Daniel imagined he could still smell smoke on it from the Astronomy Department barbecue they had attended the night before.

      “I mean, with the lockbox, and all – do you think he’s been disbarred? Or whatever they do to realtors?”

      “They make them unreal,” Daniel suggested. He reached up and took hold of her scarf, and teased it loose. All of her smoky hair spilled down around her head.

      “Why did you do that?” she said.

      “I don’t know,” he admitted. He handed her the scarf, and she bound up her hair once more. “I’ll go check on Mr. Hogue.”

      He went through the French doors back into the living room. Hogue was standing at the far end, where it opened onto the foyer, with his back to Daniel. There were built-in shelves on this side of the room, also, peopled with a sparse collection of small objets and half a dozen framed photographs of infants and graduates and an Irish setter in an orange life preserver. As Daniel came in, Hogue was fingering something small and glittering, a piece of crystal or a glass animal. He picked it up, examined it, and then slipped it into the right hip pocket of his jacket.

      “Coming,” he said, after Daniel, rendered speechless, managed to clear his throat in alarm. Hogue turned, and for an instant, before his face resumed its habitual clenchjawed jet-pilot tautness, he looked grimly, mysteriously pleased with himself, like a man who had just exacted a small and glittering measure of revenge. Then he accompanied Daniel into the dining room, and Daniel tried to think of something plausible to ask him. What did normal husbands say to normal real-estate agents at this stage of the game? It occurred to him that Hogue had not yet mentioned the asking price of the house.

      “So what do they want, anyway, Mr. Hogue?” he tried.

      “God only knows,” Hogue said. He reached down toward the black lacquer bowl and picked up the gardenia, holding it by the clipped, dripping stem underneath. He brought it to his nose, took a deep draft of it, and then let out a long artificial sigh of delight. With Daniel looking right at him, he slipped the flower into the pocket of his jacket, too. “Let’s have a look at that kitchen, shall we?”

      So Daniel followed him into the kitchen, where Christy was exclaiming with a purely formal enthusiasm over the alderwood cabinets, the ceramic stove burners, the wavering light off the lake.

      “What a waste, eh?” Hogue said.

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