Past the asphalt, down the hill to the pool, the sharp, stiff curls of dry oak leaves dug into my feet. The wind ruffled the leaves of huge trees around us. The path on the lawn sloped down to the pool and, beside it, the hot tub. In the moonlight I could see the hot tub was clean but the pool was filled with leaves.
My father took off his T-shirt and slipped into the hot tub. “Ah,” he said, closing his eyes.
I got in and said it too: “Ah.” I was sitting on the bench across from him. I leaned my head back: above me the whole vast sky was covered in stars. They ripped at my heart. I felt the cold wind on my face and listened to the crickets, the creaking of the trees. It was like being in the car with the top down and the heater on—the cold air, the hot water—two temperatures at once.
We sat in silence, the bubbles and mist on the surface of the water. I dipped my head underwater. I thought about doing a handstand, but with the current from the jets and the cement benches and the possibility of hitting his legs, I decided not to.
“All right, champ,” he said. “Ready to get out?”
“Okay,” I said. My fingers were wrinkled into hills. We wrapped our towels around us and walked back on the prickly ground. I felt that I was with him and also alone. On the asphalt where the car was parked, he pointed up to the second floor on the corner. “We should build a slide from the bedroom to the pool. What do you think?”
“Yes. I think we should, definitely,” I said. I wondered if it was just a joke. I hoped it was real.
His house was crumbling in places and tended to in others, a configuration of attention and neglect I didn’t understand. The toilets had rust-colored rings in the basins, and water dripped into the corner of a distant wing, while outside raspberries were trellised meticulously in the garden. He left the whole place empty, as if he didn’t own it but was a visitor or a squatter. When I asked him how many rooms there were, he said he didn’t know, he hadn’t set foot in most of them.
Later, I explored. Rooms and suites and dusty doors swung open to more empty dusty rooms, more tiled sinks and showers. Toward the back of the property was a huge building that looked to me like a church. It was meant to house a water tower, but inside it was missing the cistern, had only circles cut out of wood at every story, empty in the center where the tank would have been. These outlines of circles were covered in leaves and bird poop and cobwebs, silvering with age, like the abandoned bones of a huge animal. The whole time he lived there I don’t think I visited every last room—a kind of magic, to have unconquered space, to be past a frontier. I found a tennis court beyond the pool, with vines clogging the surrounding fence. Roots warped and cracked through the court’s green surface; in places the color had faded or worn away. The net was dirty and sagged between the poles all the way to the ground.
“Is the tennis court yours?” I asked him.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Do you know how to play?” I asked.
“Nope,” he said.
“I don’t know how either,” I said.
After the hot tub, we watched The Red Balloon and then we watched Harold and Maude, lying on our sides in his bed, him closer to the screen. I didn’t like The Red Balloon, because it seemed too young and immature for me; also, I had a feeling I was supposed to like it because he’d chosen it beforehand, the First Movie, and this made me self-conscious. Harold and Maude I loved. He paused the movie when I got up to pee. “That’s the church in Palo Alto,” he said, about the church where they meet.
Both movies were on laser discs, which looked like bright silver records. He held the disc from the center and edge, not touching the surface, and when the player closed, it made a series of mechanical sounds: four notes.
The laser disc insertion, the hydraulic thump of the car doors, the click of the lever that controlled the headlights—the noises surrounding him were different. Beside his bed was a lamp with a cloth shade and gold-colored base. You only had to touch the base to turn the lamp on and off. I tried it a few times. Ingenious. Why didn’t everyone have one? Why did we bother with switches and serrated knobs?
“Time to go to bed,” he said after the movie ended.
Was it late? I couldn’t tell. We existed outside regular time. The mornings with him, too, would have a timeless quality, more empty space and white light and silence—unlike the mornings with my mother, when we raced to dress in front of the heaters and ate toast in the car on the way to school, the windshield mostly white, waiting for the heat to work. Here there was no rush, no breathlessness.
At night the crickets made a roar I hadn’t noticed before lying in the bed. The sound would advance toward me over the dark land, the dark lawn, the big dark house, and press against my ears, but just when I thought I’d be swallowed up, it would stop, empty. It was terrible and lonely, I felt then, to be in this cavernous house with this man I hardly knew.
My mother had a string of lentil-sized bells on a ribbon she’d brought back from India, meant to be tied around the ankles of Indian dancers, and the crickets sounded like these bells—thousands of dancers moving vigorously almost in unison faster and faster until they all stopped at once.
“Why don’t you wear a watch?” I asked the next morning. I was already dressed for school. Fancy men wore watches.
“I don’t want to be bound by time,” he said.
“What’s that?” I was looking out the kitchen window, pointing to a tall structure that looked like a booth for a ticket collector, with a screen in the front so you could see in, topped by a minaret.
“It’s an aviary. For birds.”
“Are there birds inside?”
“No. A friend gave me a peacock once, but it wandered off.”
“Will you get some birds to put in?” I asked.
“Nope.”
I could tell he was getting annoyed by my questions. How big was seven acres, I wondered. If you stood on the huge lawn and looked toward the gathered hills with your back to the tennis court and the pool, and looked past the aviary, past a huge copper beech tree, the raspberries, more oaks, the building where the water tower would have been—maybe that was where the property ended, where the hills rose up and the forest began. “There,” he’d said once, pointing, but I wasn’t sure where he meant.
He put two apples and a handful of almonds in a paper bag, a grocery bag, not a lunch bag, and rolled up the top. “Here’s your lunch,” he said, handing it over. The almonds rattled around at the bottom of the bag.
I walked out ahead of him, through the pantry, the dining room, and into the huge room with the piano. On a small table in front of the couch was a coffee-table book called The Red Couch. The pictures inside were of a worn red velvet couch, upon which sat various famous people in different locations around the world. I flipped a page, and there he was. In the picture he looked dreamy, his eyes like vellum. Unlike the others in the book, he steepled his hands, the fingertips meeting, index to index, middle to middle, and so on, the wrists held out from each other like the rib cage of a small animal. Over the next few months I tried to incorporate the steepled hands into my own repertoire—on top of my desk in class, or on the table before my mother and I ate dinner, or on my lap sitting outside with friends at lunchtime. I could never make it look natural; in that position, ballooned out, my hands felt huge and foolish.