The Tell Read Free Page B

even, that Mira’s father, grandfather, and great-grandfather had used. Two tall windows faced Whittier Street, their dusty velvet curtains pulled apart like revealing skirts. Every Thrasher male must have watched his own timely parade pass by and felt like its master and leader. Mira’s family was like that—proprietary and boastful. Owen, though, felt more like a parade follower, still an intruder in this house, in this city and state—and on rare and troubling days, even in Mira’s life. It appeared that no woman, in generations of high-minded Thrashers, had ever claimed a single room as her own study. Even Mira used the bed or the kitchen table when she was working even though there was plenty of other space. Was it because every woman already thought of the house as entirely hers?
    He turned in the desk chair, still not sure after five years of marriage how he was to think of this house and its contents. Whose cracked rubber bands were these, whose blackened and ancient pennies in an ashtray from the Hope Club, whose keys without locks? Whose marble busts, Chinese porcelain bowls, inlaid boxes, and masterly paintings? Were they his, too? Most of the books on the shelves were not his, and neither were the many pieces of art that interrupted the room’s green-banded wallpaper, not the oak desk with its cavernous drawers, not the swiveling leather chair grown shiny from years of commanding, virile body heat. He didn’t know much about the endless booty in the rest of the house either. He slept in a bed that had belonged to people long dead. He was surrounded by their bureaus and pillows, wrapped in their linen sheets. He bathed and shaved and shit where they had. He made love to their very last daughter. Mira’s father’s family—a long line of aggressive lawyers and businessmen with too much city influence—had been single-mindedly acquisitive. They’d hoarded and stuffed every room in the house, even the far back ones never used, as if collecting were a family disease passed down. His own father, Edward, covered the splintered sills of his aging pond-side cottage with an ever-changing collection of the natural: sticks, shells, bleached fish skulls, shriveling apples. When he was bored with it, he just opened the door and tossed the junk out. Nothing was ever tossed out here; it only grew in value and inapproachability. Owen didn’t know anything about the one object he coveted in a dark, felonious way: he’d named it the squid pen. Tentacles were etched onto the silver sheath, and two red enamel dots on the tapering cap were collusive eyes. The fountain pen’s long black bladder was cracked and limp, vaguely sexual and bereft. He was fairly certain Mira didn’t know the pen existed, resting in a velvet-lined coffin at the very back of the desk drawer where it had probably been forever, and where she had no reason to venture.
    Tonight, though, his students’ papers, soft pencil on smudgy lined sheets or florid pink or purple ink, were definitely his and needed to be read for tomorrow. He looked at the one on top: My mother washe peoples haredos in a store. Her shirts is always covered with hares . He asked his students to tell the stories of their lives, but sometimes reading them made him feel hopeless. It was the one crucial lesson he could give his sixth-graders—how to explain who they were and where they came from, what encouraged them—but he was stolen away now from their accounts by the long absence of his wife. He knew that his growing disquiet was apelike and primal, his woman with another man. Wilton was strange but not exactly a stranger, and he had the indemnity of fame. It would be easy enough to go next door and yell for Mira, but to do that would be indelible and he would be the macho, barking husband forever. The jealous one. Neighbors had only first impressions and gestures to go on; everything after that was silence and spying. He