The Women Read Free Page A

with myself, anxious and queasy all at once—and where was it, where was this architectural marvel I knew only from the pages of a book, this miracle of rare device, the solid heaven where I’d be living for the next year and quite possibly more? Where? I was cursing aloud, the engine racing, the vegetation falling back along the sides of the road as if beaten with an invisible flail, and yet I saw nothing but more of the same. Fields and more fields, stands of corn, hills rising and dipping all the long way through whatever valley I was in, barns, eternal barns—and then, suddenly, there it was. I looked up and it materialized like one of the hidden temples of The Genji Monogatari , like a trompe l’oeil, the shape you can’t see until you’ve seen it. Or no, it didn’t appear so much as it unfolded itself from the hill before me and then closed up and unfolded and closed up again.
     
    Was I going too fast? Yes. Yes, I was. And in applying the brake I somehow neglected the clutch—and the wheel, which seemed to come to life all on its own—and my Bearcat gave an expiring yelp and skewed across the road in a tornado of dust and flying litter, where it stalled facing in the wrong direction.
     
    No matter. There was the house itself, an enormous rambling place spread wide and low across the hill before me, struck gold under the afternoon sun, a phoenix of a house, built in 1911 and burned three years later, built again and burned again, only to rise from the ashes in all its golden glory. I couldn’t help thinking of Schelling’s trope, great architecture existing like frozen music, like music in space, because this was it exactly, and this was no mere chamber piece, but a symphony with a hundred-voice chorus, the house of Wrieto-San, his home and his refuge. To which I was invited as apprentice to the Master. All right. I slapped the dust from my jacket, worked a comb through my hair, tried above all to get a grip . Then I started up the car and drove off in search of the entrance.
     
    It wasn’t as easy as all that. For one thing, in all this hodgepodge of roads and cart-paths I couldn’t determine which one led into the estate, and once I did find what I took to be the right road, wending through the muddy chasm of a hog farm, I was arrested by the proliferation of signs warning against trespass. These could hardly apply to me, I reasoned, and yet an innate uncertainty—shyness, if you will, or call it an inborn cultural reverence for the rules and norms of society—held me back. The automobile shivered in the mud. I jerked the gearshift to the neutral position and stared for a long moment at the nearest sign. Its meaning was quite plain—incontrovertible, in fact. NO, it read, TRESPASSING.
     
    It was just then that I became aware of a figure observing me from behind the slats of a wooden fence on my left periphery. A farmer, as I took it, in spattered overalls and besmeared boots. He was standing ankle-deep in the ordure of the hog yard—right in the heart of it—the very animals nosing around him and giving rise to one of the rawest and most unpleasant odors I’d ever encountered. I watched him watching me for a moment—he was grinning now, something sardonic and judgmental settling into his eyes—and then I raised my voice to be heard over the engine and the guttural vocalizations of the animals. “I wonder if you might—” I began, but he cut me off with a sharp stabbing laugh. “Oh, go on ahead,” he said, “—he don’t care for nothing like that. That’s just for tourists.” He gave me a long bemused look. “You ain’t a tourist, are ya?”
     
    I shook my head no and then, thanking him with an abbreviated bow, I found the lowest gear and started up the hill, which seemed, unfortunately, to grow ever steeper even as the limestone walls and terraces and broad-hipped roofs of the house drew closer. But there was gravel under the wheels now and the prodigious Bearcat seized it, the