Outage
by John Updike
The weatherpersons on television, always eager for ratings-boosting disasters, had predicted a fierce autumn storm for New England, with driving rain and high winds. Brad Morris, who worked at home while his wife, Jane, managed a boutique on Boston’s Newbury Street, glanced out his windows now and then at the swaying trees—oaks still tenacious of their rusty leaves, maples letting go in gusts of gold and red—but was unimpressed by the hyped news event. Rain came down heavily a half hour at a time, then pulled back into a silvery sky of fast-moving, fuzzy-bottomed clouds. The worst seemed to be over, when, in midafternoon, his computer died under his eyes. The financial figures he had been painstakingly assembling swooned as a group, sucked into the dead blank screen like glittering water pulled down a drain. Around him, the house seemed to sigh, as all its lights and little engines, its computerized timers and indicators, simultaneously shut down. The sound of wind and rain lashing the trees outside infiltrated the silence. A beam creaked. A loose shutter banged. The drip from a plugged gutter tapped heavily, like a bully nagging for attention, on the wooden cover of a cellar-window well.
The lines bringing the Morrises’ house electricity and telephone service and cable television came up, on three poles, through two acres of woods. Brad stepped outside in the storm’s lull, in the strangely luminous air, to see if he could spot any branches fallen on his lines. He saw none, and no window lights in the nearest house, barely visible through the woods whose leaves in summer hid it entirely. The tops of the tallest trees were heaving in a wind he barely felt; a spatter of thick cold drops sent him back into the house, where drifts of shadow were sifting into the corners and the furnace ticked in the basement as its metal cooled. Without electricity, there was nothing to do.
He opened the refrigerator and was surprised by its failure to greet him with a welcoming inner light. The fireplace in the den emitted a sour scent of damp wood ash. Wind whistled in crevices he had not known existed, under the eaves and at the edges of the storm windows. He felt impotent, and amused by his impotence, in this emergency. He remembered some letters he had planned to mail at the post office in his suburb’s little downtown, and a check he had intended to deposit at the bank. So he did have something to do: he collected these pieces of paper, and put on a tan water-resistant zippered jacket and a Red Sox cap. The burglar alarm by the front door was peeping and blinking, softly, as if to itself. Brad punched the reset button; the device fell silent, and he went out the door.
It seemed odd that his car started as usual. Wet leaves were plastered over the driveway and the narrow macadam roads of this development; the neighborhood had been built all at once, twenty years ago, on the land of an unprofitable farm. He drove cautiously, especially around the duck pond, beside a vanished barn, where, in a snowstorm ten years ago, a teen-ager had slid through a rail fence and sunk his parents’ Mercedes up to its hubcaps. The downtown—two churches, a drugstore, a Dunkin’ Donuts, a pizza shop, a mostly Italian restaurant, two beauty parlors, a dress shop, a bridal shop, a few more stores that came and went in the same chronically vacated premises, an insurance agent and a lawyer on the floor above a realty office, a dentist, a bank branch, and a post office—was without electricity but busier than usual, the sidewalk full of pedestrians in this gleaming gray lull.
Brad was startled by the sight of two young women embracing, before they began to converse, as if renewing a long-neglected acquaintance. People stood talking, discussing their fate in small groups. Shopwindows usually bright were dark, and it occurred to him that, of course, people had been flushed onto the sidewalk by the outage. The health-food store, its crammed shelves of bagged nuts and bottled vitamins and refrigerated tofu sandwiches, and the fruit store, its rival in healthy nutrition across the street, were both caves of forbidding darkness behind their display windows.
But it did not occur to him that the bank, usually so receptive to his deposits, would have a taped notice on its glass doors declaring the location of the nearest other branch, and that, although he could see the tellers chatting on the padded bench where applicants for mortgages and perpetrators of overdrafts customarily languished, he could no more gain access to his money than he could have laid hands on the fish in an aquarium. The bank manager, an excitable tall woman in a severe suit, was actually patrolling the sidewalk; she told Brad breathlessly, “I’m so sorry, Mr. Morris. Our A.T.M., alarms, everything is down. I was just checking to see if the hardware store had any power.”
“Myra, I think we’re all in the same boat,” Brad reassured her; yet he understood her incredulity. He himself did not expect that the post office, though open to box users and seekers of the inside mail slots, would be also closed to transactions; everything had been computerized by a United States Postal Service zealous to modernize, and now not a single letter could be weighed or a single stamp sold, even had there been light enough to see. The afternoon was darkening. In danger of completing no errands at all, he tested the door of the health-food store. The latch released, and he heard a giggle in the shadows. “Are you open?” he called.
“To you, sure,” answered the voice of the young proprietress, curly-haired, perpetually tan Olivia. Brad groped toward the back, where a single squat perfumed candle illuminated bins of little plastic bags; they shimmered with blobby reflections. He brought to the counter a bag of what he hoped were roasted but unsalted cashews. “The register’s out. All contributions accepted,” Olivia joked, and made change out of her own purse for what he, holding it close to his eyes, verified was a five-dollar bill.
The transaction had felt flirtatious to him, and the atmosphere of the downtown, beneath its drooping festoon of useless cables, seemed festive. Automobiles paraded past with burning headlights. The ominous thickening in the air stirred the pedestrians to take shelter again. There was a brimming, an overflow of good nature, and a transparency: something occluding had been removed, baring neglected possibilities. Hurrying back into the shelter of his car, Brad laughed with irrational pleasure.
Fresh drops speckled his windshield as he turned in to his neighborhood, through a break in the stone wall that had once marked the bounds of the farm. “Private Way,” a painted sign said sternly. A woman in white—a shiny vinyl raincoat and silly-looking white running shoes—was walking in the middle of the narrow road. With fluttering gestures she motioned him to stop. He recognized a newish neighbor, a wispy blonde who had moved a few years ago, with her husband and two growing boys, into a house invisible from the Morrises’. They met only a few times a year, at cocktail parties or zoning-appeals-board hearings. She looked like a ghost, beckoning him. He braked, and lowered the car window. “Oh, Brad,” she said, with breathy relief. “It’s you. What’s happening?” she asked. “All my electricity went out, even the telephones.”
“Mine, too,” he said, to reassure her. “Everybody’s. A tree must have fallen on a power line somewhere, in this wind. It happens, Lynne.” He was pleased to have fished her name up from his memory: Lynne Willard.
She came close enough to his open window for him to see that she was actually trembling, her lips groping like those of a child near tears. Her eyes stared above his car roof as if scanning the treetops for rescue. She brought her focus down to his face and shakily explained, “Willy’s away. In Chicago, all week. I’m up there all alone, now the boys are both off to boarding school. I didn’t know what I should do, so I put on sneakers and set off walking.”
Brad remembered those boys as sly and noisy, waiting in blazers for the day-school bus at the end of the road, just outside the tumbled-down fieldstone wall. If they were now old enough for boarding school, then this woman was not as young as she seemed. Her face, narrowed by a knotted head scarf, was white, except for the tip of her nose, which was pink like a rabbit’s. Her eyelids also were pink; they looked rubbed, and her eyes watered. “I like your hat,” she said, to fill the lengthening silence. “Are you a fan?”
“No more than normal.”
“They won the World Series.”
“That is true. Get in the car, Lynne,” he said, his powers of reassurance deepening. “I’ll drive you home. There’s nothing downtown. Nobody knows how long the outage will be. Even the bank and post office didn’t know. The only thing open was the health-food store.”
“I was taking a walk,” she said, as if this hadn’t been quite established. “I can keep going.”
“Don’t you notice? The rain is starting up again. The skies are about to let loose.”
Blinking, pressing her lips together to suppress their tremor—the lower had a trick of twitching sideways—she walked around in front of his headlights. He leaned across the seat to tug at the door handle and push open the passenger door for her, as if she couldn’t do it for herself. Sliding in, with a slither of white vinyl, she confessed, “There was a beeping in the house I had to get away from. Willy’s not even in Boston, where I could call him.”
“I think that’s your burglar alarm,” Brad told her. “Or some other alarm that doesn’t like losing current. I’ll come inside, if I may, and look at the problem.”
She had brought a pleasant smell with her into the car, a smell from his childhood, like cough drops or licorice. “You may,” she said, settling back on his leather car seat. “I got so afraid,” she went on, with a wry twist to her mouth, as if to laugh at herself, or in memory of a long-ago self.
He had never been to the Willards’ place. Their driveway was fringed with more elaborate plantings—gnarly little azaleas, bare of leaf, and euonymus still blaring forth that surreal autumnal magenta—than the Morrises’, and their parking area was covered in larger, whiter stones than the brown half-inch pebbles that Brad’s wife had insisted on despite their tendency (which he had pointed out) to scatter into the lawn during winter snowplowing. But the basic house, a good-sized clapboarded neo-Colonial twenty years old, with a gratuitous swath of brick façade, looked much like his. Lynne hadn’t locked the front door, just walked out in her panic. Trailing behind her, Brad was surprised by the lithe swiftness with which she climbed the steps of the flagstone porch and let herself back in, holding the storm door for him as she opened the other.
Inside, the beeping was distinct and insistent, but not the urgent, ever-louder bleating of alarm mode. He turned the wrong way at first; the floor plan of this house was different from his, with the family room on the left instead of the right, and the kitchen beyond it, not beside it. The furnishings, though, looked much the same—the modern taste of twenty years ago, boxy and stuffed, bare wood and monochrome wool, coffee tables of thick glass on cruciform legs of stainless steel, all mixed with Orientals and family antiques. These possessions looked slightly smarter and less tired than those in his home; but then Brad tended to glamorize what other people had.
“Over here,” Lynne said, “next to the closet”—the very front-hall closet in which she was hanging up her vinyl coat. The snug knit gray dress she wore beneath it looked to him as if she had come from a ladies’ luncheon that noon. Using her toes, she pried off her sneakers without bothering to unlace them—perhaps to avoid bending over beneath his eyes—and tossed them onto the closet floor.
“Yes,” he said, moving to the panel. “It’s just like mine.” He lifted his hand to touch it, then thought to ask, “May I?”
“Help yourself,” she said. Her voice, in her own house, had become almost slangy, shedding its quaver. “Be my guest.”
He pushed the little rectangular button labelled Reset. The beeping sharply stopped. Coming close up behind him, she marvelled. “That’s all it takes?”
“Apparently,” he said. “That tells it the current shutoff wasn’t a home invasion. Not that I’m much of a hand with technology.”
She giggled in obscure delight. What he had smelled in the car, he realized, had had alcohol in it, mixed with licorice from long ago. “Willy’s such a prick,” she told Brad. “He knows all this stuff but never shares it. Tell me,” she said, “as a man. Do you think he really has to spend all this time in Chicago?”
Brad said cautiously, “Business can be very demanding. At a certain level men—and women in business, too, of course—have to look each other in the eye. I used to be on planes all the time and have meetings and so on myself, but I found working at home was more efficient. With all this electronic communication everywhere, there’s really no need to get out all that much. But then I don’t know Will—Mr. Willard’s business.” His words, nervously excessive, seemed to have an echo in the unfamiliar house—or, rather, felt absorbed by its partial strangeness, the sounds falling into the many little differences between this house and his own. The rain, as he had foretold, had returned, whispering and drumming outside, and bringing inside a deeper shade of darkness. The wind whipped bursts of wet pellets across the windows.
“Me neither. Could I offer you a drink?” this woman asked, nervous herself. She added with another giggle, “Since you’ve gotten out.” She gestured toward her becalmed kitchen. “I can’t offer you coffee.”
“What have you been drinking?” Brad asked her.
Her eyes widened, as if to compensate for the lack of light. “How did you know it was anything? Some girlfriends and I finished off lunch with anisette.”
“In the car,” he answered her, “you smelled sweet,” and moved closer, as if to verify.
Her kisses did not taste of licorice. There in the family room, where the great plasma TV screen stared blankly and the morning Globe lay, still in its plastic wrapper, where it had been tossed onto the sofa unread, Lynne kissed dryly, tentatively, as if testing her lipstick. Then her lips warmed to the fit; her face pushed up at his and her fidgety hands went around his back, to its small and the nape of his neck, and Brad dizzily wondered if he wasn’t too far, too suddenly, out on a limb. But no, he reassured himself, this was human and harmless, this sheltered contact while the rain thrashed outside and the light inside the rooms dimmed by imperceptible notches. His impulse was to keep smoothing her hair, where it had been tangled and pressed flat beneath her head scarf. His hands trembled, as her lips had. Their faces grew hot; their caresses through their clothes began to feel clumsy. “We should go upstairs,” she said huskily. “Anybody going by could look inside.”
“Who would go by in this weather?” he asked.
“He gets a lot of FedExes,” she said. Climbing the stairs ahead of him—carpeted in pale green, where his and Jane’s were maroon—Lynne continued the unidentified pronoun. “He calls me every day, often around now. I guess it leaves his nights free.” Brad, slightly winded at the head of the stairs, from having held his breath while admiring her haunches as they moved in the snug knit dress, asked, “Did you mean it, that your phone doesn’t work, either?”
“Yeah, some penny-pinching system he got installed, so it’s all the same wires. I don’t understand it exactly. In our new car, I can’t do the radio stations. They give you too many options now.”
“Exactly,” he agreed.
The rooms upstairs had a different layout from those in his house, and the one she led him into was barer and smaller than the master bedroom would have been. Photographs on the bureau showed her boys, at various stages, and older people, though still young, in fifties clothes, perhaps her parents, or Willy’s. The color in various framed vacation snapshots had bleached out, shifting register. On the wall a paper poster showed a woman draped only in a tiger skin stretched out on a Lamborghini. Lynne stood a moment by the window. “Look,” she said. “You can see your house, now that the leaves are down.” It took Brad some seconds to make it out—a pale shadow, the tint of smoke, through the intervening trees.
“You have good eyes,” he told her. He did not want to feel that this neighbor was much younger than he, but an age difference was declared in how calmly and quickly she shed her clothes, as if it were no big deal. Oh, but it was a big deal, she was so lovely, all bony and downy and pale and fat in the right places, drifting back and forth in the shadowy room to put her folded clothes on chairs, simple straight-backed boys’ chairs. When he had seen her in the center of the road he had thought for an instant she was a ghost, and there was a ghostly detached quality in the way she moved, her lips crimped in that twist of self-criticism he had noticed in the car, when she had slid in beside him.
She came to him to help him undress, something Jane never did. This servile act, her small face frowning as she worked at his shirt buttons, excited him so that he ceased to feel nervous, out on a limb—ceased to listen to the rain and wind. The storm of blood inside him drowned them out. The tip of her tongue crept out between her lips in her concentration. The front fringe of her hair, which the scarf had left uncovered, showed a few gleaming droplets and smelled of rain, another scent from boyhood. “God,” he said. “I love this.” He had kept himself, with an effort, from saying “you.”
“It’s not over,” she promised, in the light voice of a woman talking to a girlfriend. “There’s more, Brad.”
The electricity came on. All over the upstairs, wallpaper patterns and wood moldings popped into clarity. Downstairs, in the kitchen, the dishwasher surged into its next phase. By the front door, the burglar alarm resumed its beeping, at a shriller pitch. The furnace in the basement, at a pitch below that of the wind, ignited and began, with a roar steadier than the wind, to reintroduce warmth into the cooling house. Amplified, eager voices downstairs proclaimed that Lynne had been watching television news an hour ago, before she panicked. Her face, so close to his that their breaths mingled, jumped back, like a cut to the commercial. “Oh, dear,” she said, her rubbed-looking eyes coming back into focus.
“To the rescue,” he said. He began to redo his buttons.
“You don’t have to go.” But she, too, in her nakedness, was embarrassed; her cheeks blazed as if with a rash.
“I think I do. He,” he said, “might call. Even she might, if the outage has made the news in Boston. You’ll be fine now. Listen. Lynne. The alarm has stopped beeping. It’s saying, ‘All is well. All is normal.’ It’s saying, ‘Get that man out of my house.’ ”
“It’s saying, ‘I’m in charge now.’ ” Brad turned his eyes from her nakedness, his wispy blonde’s. “It’s saying,” he told her, “ ‘This is how it is. This is reality.’ ” ♦
by John Updike
The weatherpersons on television, always eager for ratings-boosting disasters, had predicted a fierce autumn storm for New England, with driving rain and high winds. Brad Morris, who worked at home while his wife, Jane, managed a boutique on Boston’s Newbury Street, glanced out his windows now and then at the swaying trees—oaks still tenacious of their rusty leaves, maples letting go in gusts of gold and red—but was unimpressed by the hyped news event. Rain came down heavily a half hour at a time, then pulled back into a silvery sky of fast-moving, fuzzy-bottomed clouds. The worst seemed to be over, when, in midafternoon, his computer died under his eyes. The financial figures he had been painstakingly assembling swooned as a group, sucked into the dead blank screen like glittering water pulled down a drain. Around him, the house seemed to sigh, as all its lights and little engines, its computerized timers and indicators, simultaneously shut down. The sound of wind and rain lashing the trees outside infiltrated the silence. A beam creaked. A loose shutter banged. The drip from a plugged gutter tapped heavily, like a bully nagging for attention, on the wooden cover of a cellar-window well.
The lines bringing the Morrises’ house electricity and telephone service and cable television came up, on three poles, through two acres of woods. Brad stepped outside in the storm’s lull, in the strangely luminous air, to see if he could spot any branches fallen on his lines. He saw none, and no window lights in the nearest house, barely visible through the woods whose leaves in summer hid it entirely. The tops of the tallest trees were heaving in a wind he barely felt; a spatter of thick cold drops sent him back into the house, where drifts of shadow were sifting into the corners and the furnace ticked in the basement as its metal cooled. Without electricity, there was nothing to do.
He opened the refrigerator and was surprised by its failure to greet him with a welcoming inner light. The fireplace in the den emitted a sour scent of damp wood ash. Wind whistled in crevices he had not known existed, under the eaves and at the edges of the storm windows. He felt impotent, and amused by his impotence, in this emergency. He remembered some letters he had planned to mail at the post office in his suburb’s little downtown, and a check he had intended to deposit at the bank. So he did have something to do: he collected these pieces of paper, and put on a tan water-resistant zippered jacket and a Red Sox cap. The burglar alarm by the front door was peeping and blinking, softly, as if to itself. Brad punched the reset button; the device fell silent, and he went out the door.
It seemed odd that his car started as usual. Wet leaves were plastered over the driveway and the narrow macadam roads of this development; the neighborhood had been built all at once, twenty years ago, on the land of an unprofitable farm. He drove cautiously, especially around the duck pond, beside a vanished barn, where, in a snowstorm ten years ago, a teen-ager had slid through a rail fence and sunk his parents’ Mercedes up to its hubcaps. The downtown—two churches, a drugstore, a Dunkin’ Donuts, a pizza shop, a mostly Italian restaurant, two beauty parlors, a dress shop, a bridal shop, a few more stores that came and went in the same chronically vacated premises, an insurance agent and a lawyer on the floor above a realty office, a dentist, a bank branch, and a post office—was without electricity but busier than usual, the sidewalk full of pedestrians in this gleaming gray lull.
Brad was startled by the sight of two young women embracing, before they began to converse, as if renewing a long-neglected acquaintance. People stood talking, discussing their fate in small groups. Shopwindows usually bright were dark, and it occurred to him that, of course, people had been flushed onto the sidewalk by the outage. The health-food store, its crammed shelves of bagged nuts and bottled vitamins and refrigerated tofu sandwiches, and the fruit store, its rival in healthy nutrition across the street, were both caves of forbidding darkness behind their display windows.
But it did not occur to him that the bank, usually so receptive to his deposits, would have a taped notice on its glass doors declaring the location of the nearest other branch, and that, although he could see the tellers chatting on the padded bench where applicants for mortgages and perpetrators of overdrafts customarily languished, he could no more gain access to his money than he could have laid hands on the fish in an aquarium. The bank manager, an excitable tall woman in a severe suit, was actually patrolling the sidewalk; she told Brad breathlessly, “I’m so sorry, Mr. Morris. Our A.T.M., alarms, everything is down. I was just checking to see if the hardware store had any power.”
“Myra, I think we’re all in the same boat,” Brad reassured her; yet he understood her incredulity. He himself did not expect that the post office, though open to box users and seekers of the inside mail slots, would be also closed to transactions; everything had been computerized by a United States Postal Service zealous to modernize, and now not a single letter could be weighed or a single stamp sold, even had there been light enough to see. The afternoon was darkening. In danger of completing no errands at all, he tested the door of the health-food store. The latch released, and he heard a giggle in the shadows. “Are you open?” he called.
“To you, sure,” answered the voice of the young proprietress, curly-haired, perpetually tan Olivia. Brad groped toward the back, where a single squat perfumed candle illuminated bins of little plastic bags; they shimmered with blobby reflections. He brought to the counter a bag of what he hoped were roasted but unsalted cashews. “The register’s out. All contributions accepted,” Olivia joked, and made change out of her own purse for what he, holding it close to his eyes, verified was a five-dollar bill.
The transaction had felt flirtatious to him, and the atmosphere of the downtown, beneath its drooping festoon of useless cables, seemed festive. Automobiles paraded past with burning headlights. The ominous thickening in the air stirred the pedestrians to take shelter again. There was a brimming, an overflow of good nature, and a transparency: something occluding had been removed, baring neglected possibilities. Hurrying back into the shelter of his car, Brad laughed with irrational pleasure.
Fresh drops speckled his windshield as he turned in to his neighborhood, through a break in the stone wall that had once marked the bounds of the farm. “Private Way,” a painted sign said sternly. A woman in white—a shiny vinyl raincoat and silly-looking white running shoes—was walking in the middle of the narrow road. With fluttering gestures she motioned him to stop. He recognized a newish neighbor, a wispy blonde who had moved a few years ago, with her husband and two growing boys, into a house invisible from the Morrises’. They met only a few times a year, at cocktail parties or zoning-appeals-board hearings. She looked like a ghost, beckoning him. He braked, and lowered the car window. “Oh, Brad,” she said, with breathy relief. “It’s you. What’s happening?” she asked. “All my electricity went out, even the telephones.”
“Mine, too,” he said, to reassure her. “Everybody’s. A tree must have fallen on a power line somewhere, in this wind. It happens, Lynne.” He was pleased to have fished her name up from his memory: Lynne Willard.
She came close enough to his open window for him to see that she was actually trembling, her lips groping like those of a child near tears. Her eyes stared above his car roof as if scanning the treetops for rescue. She brought her focus down to his face and shakily explained, “Willy’s away. In Chicago, all week. I’m up there all alone, now the boys are both off to boarding school. I didn’t know what I should do, so I put on sneakers and set off walking.”
Brad remembered those boys as sly and noisy, waiting in blazers for the day-school bus at the end of the road, just outside the tumbled-down fieldstone wall. If they were now old enough for boarding school, then this woman was not as young as she seemed. Her face, narrowed by a knotted head scarf, was white, except for the tip of her nose, which was pink like a rabbit’s. Her eyelids also were pink; they looked rubbed, and her eyes watered. “I like your hat,” she said, to fill the lengthening silence. “Are you a fan?”
“No more than normal.”
“They won the World Series.”
“That is true. Get in the car, Lynne,” he said, his powers of reassurance deepening. “I’ll drive you home. There’s nothing downtown. Nobody knows how long the outage will be. Even the bank and post office didn’t know. The only thing open was the health-food store.”
“I was taking a walk,” she said, as if this hadn’t been quite established. “I can keep going.”
“Don’t you notice? The rain is starting up again. The skies are about to let loose.”
Blinking, pressing her lips together to suppress their tremor—the lower had a trick of twitching sideways—she walked around in front of his headlights. He leaned across the seat to tug at the door handle and push open the passenger door for her, as if she couldn’t do it for herself. Sliding in, with a slither of white vinyl, she confessed, “There was a beeping in the house I had to get away from. Willy’s not even in Boston, where I could call him.”
“I think that’s your burglar alarm,” Brad told her. “Or some other alarm that doesn’t like losing current. I’ll come inside, if I may, and look at the problem.”
She had brought a pleasant smell with her into the car, a smell from his childhood, like cough drops or licorice. “You may,” she said, settling back on his leather car seat. “I got so afraid,” she went on, with a wry twist to her mouth, as if to laugh at herself, or in memory of a long-ago self.
He had never been to the Willards’ place. Their driveway was fringed with more elaborate plantings—gnarly little azaleas, bare of leaf, and euonymus still blaring forth that surreal autumnal magenta—than the Morrises’, and their parking area was covered in larger, whiter stones than the brown half-inch pebbles that Brad’s wife had insisted on despite their tendency (which he had pointed out) to scatter into the lawn during winter snowplowing. But the basic house, a good-sized clapboarded neo-Colonial twenty years old, with a gratuitous swath of brick façade, looked much like his. Lynne hadn’t locked the front door, just walked out in her panic. Trailing behind her, Brad was surprised by the lithe swiftness with which she climbed the steps of the flagstone porch and let herself back in, holding the storm door for him as she opened the other.
Inside, the beeping was distinct and insistent, but not the urgent, ever-louder bleating of alarm mode. He turned the wrong way at first; the floor plan of this house was different from his, with the family room on the left instead of the right, and the kitchen beyond it, not beside it. The furnishings, though, looked much the same—the modern taste of twenty years ago, boxy and stuffed, bare wood and monochrome wool, coffee tables of thick glass on cruciform legs of stainless steel, all mixed with Orientals and family antiques. These possessions looked slightly smarter and less tired than those in his home; but then Brad tended to glamorize what other people had.
“Over here,” Lynne said, “next to the closet”—the very front-hall closet in which she was hanging up her vinyl coat. The snug knit gray dress she wore beneath it looked to him as if she had come from a ladies’ luncheon that noon. Using her toes, she pried off her sneakers without bothering to unlace them—perhaps to avoid bending over beneath his eyes—and tossed them onto the closet floor.
“Yes,” he said, moving to the panel. “It’s just like mine.” He lifted his hand to touch it, then thought to ask, “May I?”
“Help yourself,” she said. Her voice, in her own house, had become almost slangy, shedding its quaver. “Be my guest.”
He pushed the little rectangular button labelled Reset. The beeping sharply stopped. Coming close up behind him, she marvelled. “That’s all it takes?”
“Apparently,” he said. “That tells it the current shutoff wasn’t a home invasion. Not that I’m much of a hand with technology.”
She giggled in obscure delight. What he had smelled in the car, he realized, had had alcohol in it, mixed with licorice from long ago. “Willy’s such a prick,” she told Brad. “He knows all this stuff but never shares it. Tell me,” she said, “as a man. Do you think he really has to spend all this time in Chicago?”
Brad said cautiously, “Business can be very demanding. At a certain level men—and women in business, too, of course—have to look each other in the eye. I used to be on planes all the time and have meetings and so on myself, but I found working at home was more efficient. With all this electronic communication everywhere, there’s really no need to get out all that much. But then I don’t know Will—Mr. Willard’s business.” His words, nervously excessive, seemed to have an echo in the unfamiliar house—or, rather, felt absorbed by its partial strangeness, the sounds falling into the many little differences between this house and his own. The rain, as he had foretold, had returned, whispering and drumming outside, and bringing inside a deeper shade of darkness. The wind whipped bursts of wet pellets across the windows.
“Me neither. Could I offer you a drink?” this woman asked, nervous herself. She added with another giggle, “Since you’ve gotten out.” She gestured toward her becalmed kitchen. “I can’t offer you coffee.”
“What have you been drinking?” Brad asked her.
Her eyes widened, as if to compensate for the lack of light. “How did you know it was anything? Some girlfriends and I finished off lunch with anisette.”
“In the car,” he answered her, “you smelled sweet,” and moved closer, as if to verify.
Her kisses did not taste of licorice. There in the family room, where the great plasma TV screen stared blankly and the morning Globe lay, still in its plastic wrapper, where it had been tossed onto the sofa unread, Lynne kissed dryly, tentatively, as if testing her lipstick. Then her lips warmed to the fit; her face pushed up at his and her fidgety hands went around his back, to its small and the nape of his neck, and Brad dizzily wondered if he wasn’t too far, too suddenly, out on a limb. But no, he reassured himself, this was human and harmless, this sheltered contact while the rain thrashed outside and the light inside the rooms dimmed by imperceptible notches. His impulse was to keep smoothing her hair, where it had been tangled and pressed flat beneath her head scarf. His hands trembled, as her lips had. Their faces grew hot; their caresses through their clothes began to feel clumsy. “We should go upstairs,” she said huskily. “Anybody going by could look inside.”
“Who would go by in this weather?” he asked.
“He gets a lot of FedExes,” she said. Climbing the stairs ahead of him—carpeted in pale green, where his and Jane’s were maroon—Lynne continued the unidentified pronoun. “He calls me every day, often around now. I guess it leaves his nights free.” Brad, slightly winded at the head of the stairs, from having held his breath while admiring her haunches as they moved in the snug knit dress, asked, “Did you mean it, that your phone doesn’t work, either?”
“Yeah, some penny-pinching system he got installed, so it’s all the same wires. I don’t understand it exactly. In our new car, I can’t do the radio stations. They give you too many options now.”
“Exactly,” he agreed.
The rooms upstairs had a different layout from those in his house, and the one she led him into was barer and smaller than the master bedroom would have been. Photographs on the bureau showed her boys, at various stages, and older people, though still young, in fifties clothes, perhaps her parents, or Willy’s. The color in various framed vacation snapshots had bleached out, shifting register. On the wall a paper poster showed a woman draped only in a tiger skin stretched out on a Lamborghini. Lynne stood a moment by the window. “Look,” she said. “You can see your house, now that the leaves are down.” It took Brad some seconds to make it out—a pale shadow, the tint of smoke, through the intervening trees.
“You have good eyes,” he told her. He did not want to feel that this neighbor was much younger than he, but an age difference was declared in how calmly and quickly she shed her clothes, as if it were no big deal. Oh, but it was a big deal, she was so lovely, all bony and downy and pale and fat in the right places, drifting back and forth in the shadowy room to put her folded clothes on chairs, simple straight-backed boys’ chairs. When he had seen her in the center of the road he had thought for an instant she was a ghost, and there was a ghostly detached quality in the way she moved, her lips crimped in that twist of self-criticism he had noticed in the car, when she had slid in beside him.
She came to him to help him undress, something Jane never did. This servile act, her small face frowning as she worked at his shirt buttons, excited him so that he ceased to feel nervous, out on a limb—ceased to listen to the rain and wind. The storm of blood inside him drowned them out. The tip of her tongue crept out between her lips in her concentration. The front fringe of her hair, which the scarf had left uncovered, showed a few gleaming droplets and smelled of rain, another scent from boyhood. “God,” he said. “I love this.” He had kept himself, with an effort, from saying “you.”
“It’s not over,” she promised, in the light voice of a woman talking to a girlfriend. “There’s more, Brad.”
The electricity came on. All over the upstairs, wallpaper patterns and wood moldings popped into clarity. Downstairs, in the kitchen, the dishwasher surged into its next phase. By the front door, the burglar alarm resumed its beeping, at a shriller pitch. The furnace in the basement, at a pitch below that of the wind, ignited and began, with a roar steadier than the wind, to reintroduce warmth into the cooling house. Amplified, eager voices downstairs proclaimed that Lynne had been watching television news an hour ago, before she panicked. Her face, so close to his that their breaths mingled, jumped back, like a cut to the commercial. “Oh, dear,” she said, her rubbed-looking eyes coming back into focus.
“To the rescue,” he said. He began to redo his buttons.
“You don’t have to go.” But she, too, in her nakedness, was embarrassed; her cheeks blazed as if with a rash.
“I think I do. He,” he said, “might call. Even she might, if the outage has made the news in Boston. You’ll be fine now. Listen. Lynne. The alarm has stopped beeping. It’s saying, ‘All is well. All is normal.’ It’s saying, ‘Get that man out of my house.’ ”
“It’s saying, ‘I’m in charge now.’ ” Brad turned his eyes from her nakedness, his wispy blonde’s. “It’s saying,” he told her, “ ‘This is how it is. This is reality.’ ” ♦
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