15
We were both nervous. Twice we started to talk at the same time and laughed.
“Okay. You go first,” I said.
“I was just going to say that I’ve avoided going home so long that I feel like a stranger to the place, too,” he said.
“Weren’t you home during the summer?”
“Just for a few days. I attended a seminar in international politics at Antioch University in New Hampshire. Actually, I chose it for the ride. I spent three days on the road enjoying the trip. I had just gotten this car. But I am interested in the subject, and it was a great place to be. There were students from a number of states and two from the U.K. Both were attending Oxford. We’ve stayed in touch. They’re both guys,” he added for my benefit.
“Did you tell your mother you were going to be at the house tonight?”
“Sorta.” He smiled. “I said I would drop in to get some things I need and might hang out. She just told me she would be out until eleven or so and not to leave a mess. She refuses to acknowledge the mess has been there for years, only it’s not dust or smudges on the windows.”
“I think I’m just as nervous about going to your house as I’m going to be about returning to mine,” I said.
“Relax. My house is a mind blower. You won’t have time to be nervous. You’ll be busy gobbling up everything with your eyes.”
When we arrived at the large, scrolled black iron gate and it opened slowly to reveal the long, winding driveway, I couldn’t help but agree about that. As we went up, the house was more and more impressive. It seemed to rise higher and higher. Beside it, something I couldn’t see from the road below, was a four-car garage. Windows were lit above the garage in what Troy explained was the house manager’s apartment.
“House manager?”
“Dean Wagner. He was here before we bought the house, and my father kept him working for us. Lucky he did. My father is barely capable of changing a lightbulb, not because it’s too difficult, but he doesn’t have the patience for anything mechanical, and there is a lot of technology equipment involved with this house and the grounds. The sprinkler system for the lawns is as elaborate as the ones on most golf courses, and there are literally three hundred different lightbulbs to change inside the house and on the outside of the property. Dean takes care of the pool as well. Of course, he has a half dozen on his staff. He’s a tough boss, and any one of them is lucky to last six months.”
“He was here before? How old is he?”
“I think Dean’s about seventy, although you’d never know it looking at him. He’s not a weight lifter or anything; he’s naturally strong. I’ve seen him lift stuff that would take two or three men to budge. He keeps to himself. All I really know about him is that he was married, but his wife died before their second wedding anniversary, and as my father once told me, he stepped out of the world and married the property. He’d be lost without it.”
He parked in front of the large, short but wide tiled stairway that led to the front entrance. Two deliberately weathered-looking sconces were hung on both sides. The arched brass doorway was at least nine or ten feet tall.
“Dean doesn’t respect my father,” Troy added. “He obeys him only because he respects the property.”
“How do you know that?”
“I can tell by the way he looks at him. I could practically write his thoughts. Dean thinks that a man who can’t tighten a screw is worthless, regardless of how much money he’s earned. It’s funny,” he continued, still not moving to get out of the car, “but when I was growing up, I wanted to prove myself to Dean more than I did to my father, and that was even before the incident I witnessed. I would fix anything I could just to impress him.”
He turned to me. “I suppose that’s sad, a young boy looking up to an employee more than to his own father.”
“I don’t know, Troy. I love my father, and I suppose I respect him, but he did disappoint me when he chose to flee rather than stay and fight for us. I know he’s trying to make up for it. I guess we have to start thinking of them as people flawed as much as anyone and not heroes.”
He smiled. “When I’m right about someone, I’m right,” he said. “And I’m right about you. C’mon. Let me show you Kublai Khan’s Xanadu.”
He came around to open my door and led me up the steps. Instead of a key for the lock, there was a box with numbers on it. He punched in the code, and the door clicked open.
“Magic,” he said. “Otherwise, you can be sure my mother would have a butler.” He opened the door for me.
The foyer was half as big as most homes I knew. The black marble floor glistened. Immediately on the right was a shelf for shoes and what looked like the slippers worn by nurses and doctors during surgeries.
“What is all this?”
“My mother insists that anyone who doesn’t take off his or her shoes wear them. See why I compared the house to an operating room?”
He handed me a pair. We sat on the black leather settee and took off our shoes.
“She’d know if we didn’t,” he said, nodding at a security camera in the corner of the ceiling.
The foyer opened to a large living room on the right, with a fieldstone fireplace that took up most of the center wall and ran as high as the tall ceiling. I felt like I was looking at a room in a museum because of the statuary and the large paintings, most of which I recognized as realist art popular in the second half of the nineteenth century. There were even some woodcuts capturing country scenes. All the oversized furniture, tables, and rugs on the dark hardwood floor looked just delivered.
“It’s beautiful. Magnificent. But does anyone use this room?” I asked.
He laughed. “In the mornings, my mother goes in there with a white cotton cloth and checks the tops of tables and sofas, searching for evidence of dust. If you listen carefully, you’ll hear the hum of air filters.”
“Should I breathe?”
“I don’t,” he said, then took my hand and turned me toward the grand dual stairway. I had never seen one like it.
“Wow. Why two? Ascending and descending? And the way they arch, the work in those balustrades. I half-expect the queen of England to come walking down.”
“You’re not far off. The concept is known as an imperial staircase. It was originally designed for the flow of guests arriving and departing in palaces and theaters and such, but ours only leads to the bedrooms in this house, only my father or I could see my mother or the maids descending. But what’s a grand mansion without one of these?” he said. “Coal barons were like kings once.”
He led me left to the dining room, which had a gilded white marble-topped table that could seat eighteen, a mirrored wall, and an impressive Persian rug that nearly covered the whole room. On the other wall was a painting of a stern-looking man, appearing regal as he stood with a mountain range behind him.
“Who’s that?”
“Madison Morley, the original owner of the mansion. My mother thinks it makes the house more grand to keep him up there. I think he looks like someone who’s surprised he had blood in his veins. My mother gets angry when I ridicule him. C’mon,” he said, and we walked through the kitchen to a small dinette in the rear. Every place I looked and everything I saw sparkled and shone. Nothing was out of place. In fact, it looked more like a model home than a home in which people lived.
“It’s like growing up in a bubble,” I said, without thinking.
“Exactly. In many more ways than one. That was also the main reason I didn’t have many friends over. I was actually embarrassed. Before she was shipped off, Jo had friends over occasionally, but the maids were instructed to pounce the moment they left. My father claims one of the maids has been ordered to enter his bedroom when he gets up to go to the bathroom and remake his bed before he returns.”
“His bedroom?”
“As long as I remember, they’ve had his-and-hers bedrooms with adjoining doors. I think the door adjoining theirs these days has been cemented.”
“I wondered about that. I mean, since . . .”
“I never thought of my parents as a lovey-dovey couple. Sometimes I think theirs was an arranged marriage. You know, like royals used to have.”
“Oh,” I said, seeing that the smaller dinette table was already set with salad plates, main plates, water glasses, silverware, and, at the center, a stand for pizza like the ones in restaurants.
“Who did all this?”
“I emailed Martha, the head housekeeper. The pizza was delivered and is in the oven being kept warm. The salad is in a large bowl in the refrigerator. I asked that we be permitted to serve ourselves. Shall we?” he asked, and pulled a chair out for me. “I’ll show you the rest of the house afterward. Did I mention that we have an indoor pool?”
“No,” I said. “How could you forget to mention that?”
He shook his head. “We filthy rich take so much for granted.”
He brought out the salad bowl and placed it beside me.
“Help yourself,” he said. He returned to the refrigerator and brought out a bottle of Chianti. “My father gets this by the case.” He opened it and poured us each a glass. Then he took some salad for himself. “Let’s toast to something before I take out the pizza.”
“What?”
“Tomorrow,” he said after a moment. “As long as you’re in it.”
I smiled. We touched glasses and sipped, looking directly into each other’s eyes. Then he took out the pizza and put it on the stand.
“Wait,” he said after slicing it. He went to a console on the wall by the refrigerator and pressed a button. “We’ve got to have some Italian music to make this authentic.”
Almost immediately, I heard the famous Three Tenors.
“I can play this through the whole house,” he said. “There’s a remote in practically every room, too, and video security in each. Everything is on Wi-Fi.”
“Despite everything, I think you really like this place, Troy.”
“Never as much as I do right now,” he replied. He poured us some more wine. “It’s Xanadu. How can we not like it? Everything unpleasant has been left outside the walls. There is only us in the here and now. We’ll make our own magic. At least for a night. Agreed?”
“Agreed,” I said, not sure what I was agreeing to but nevertheless happy to do it.
I wanted to help clean up after we had eaten, but he said Martha was waiting in the wings.
“No matter how well we did, it wouldn’t be good enough. Martha knows my mother. She’ll check everything with a magnifying glass. Not even Sherlock Holmes would be able to tell we had eaten here.”
“She sounds obsessive-compulsive,” I said.
He shrugged. “She’s something, but the truth is, I’ve never blamed her for being who she is. Everything is a defense mechanism when you’re married to my father. Maybe the best thing that could have happened for both Jo and myself was being sent to spend most of our lives at school and away from . . . from all this. You can imagine what our Thanksgiving is like.”
“Not any more intimidating than what mine looks like it might be,” I said.
“We’ve got to stop talking about family,” he said. “It’s like reliving the sinking of the Titanic or something. Let me show you the rest of the house.”
He took my hand, and we walked out another doorway from the dinette. He showed me the entertainment center, with a wide-screen television that looked as big as some small movie theaters. Instead of sofas and settees, there were large black leather theater seats. He pointed out the sophisticated sound equipment.
“This is impressive,” I said.
“Impressive waste is what it is. We don’t use it very much. Much of this house is for show.”
His father’s office was literally as large as our living room. As was every room in the house, the office was spotless, every book and paper neatly placed on desks and shelves. There was a conference table, settees, and some office equipment. There were the same realistic paintings, and to the right of the desk was a picture of a jet plane.
“My father is partners with some other guy on the plane,” he said, nodding at it.
“You don’t know who?”
“He bought it recently. I have yet to take a ride on it. I don’t ask him about his business. I don’t ask him about much of anything anymore,” he added.
I noticed that he didn’t really enter the office. He just stood in the doorway with me and pointed things out. Then he took my hand and led me farther into the house and to the right. We arrived at double bone-white doors within a gilded frame.
“The spa,” he announced, and opened the doors. The heat flowed out over us.
Directly before us was an oval indoor pool in light blue tile. There were chaise lounges to the right with towels rolled neatly on them. He played with some switches on the right, and the room darkened a bit, but the pool light came on.
“There’s a steam room over there and a sauna beside it. Another room has a massage table. My father, when he’s home, has a personal masseuse. Of course, there are showers and toilets. It’s as good as what you’ll find in any five-star hotel, believe me. When we were here most of the time, Jo and I used this. She had friends over. I didn’t. In fact, you’re the first person I’ve brought here.”
“I’m sorry. You could have had a lot of fun with friends here. You certainly would have been very popular.”
“But mostly because of this,” he said sharply. “Maybe that’s why I didn’t even mention it to my classmates.”
I stepped forward and knelt to put my hand in the water. “It’s warm.”
“Always,” he said. “Want to go in?”
“Really? But I don’t have a bathing suit.”
He shrugged and went back to the light panel. He turned off the pool lights as well as the lights illuminating the room. There were only emergency lights on over the doors, casting a dim orange glow.
Like bad food I’d eaten, my memory of being naked in the basement began to rise from the dark depths of my innermost fears. Troy turned up the music a little. He moved to the other side of the pool and began to undress.
“We can keep the water between us,” he said. When he was naked, he slipped into the pool smoothly. “You know, I just realized that I haven’t been in this pool for more than a year, a year and a half.”
He swam a little, then paused and bounced up and down. He began to sing with the Three Tenors. The flow of my terrible images began to slow. I laughed, and then, my fingers fumbling, I began to undress. He swam again, deliberately ignoring me so I wouldn’t change my mind, I’m sure. The moment I was naked, I slipped over the edge and into the pool.
“How’s it feel?” he asked.
“Delightful. It’s hard to believe how cold it is outside.”
“Don’t think about that, or you’ll start to shiver.”
I swam a lap and stopped. We were both in the shallower end.
“I know that took a lot of courage,” he said, stepping closer. “Was it me or the pool?”
“I’d be lying if I didn’t say both.”
He lowered himself and glided to my left, then behind me and to my right, each circle he made drawing him closer. Finally, he reached out, and I took his hand. Neither of us spoke as he gently pulled me toward him.
“Troy,” I said when we were inches apart.
“Don’t speak. I’m afraid I’ll wake up in bed and realize this was a dream.”
I was going to say I wasn’t ready, but he kissed me with our bodies softly pressed against each other. Then he lifted me unexpectedly and tossed me into the water.
“You creep!” I cried, and splashed him. He splashed me back, and I swam away. He dog-paddled up to me, spurting water like a whale, and when I tried to swim away again, he seized my ankle and drew me back to him.
“Right now, this is my birthday and Christmas wrapped into one moment,” he said, and kissed me again. This time, I was really kissing him back and welcoming his hands on my waist and up and over my breasts. He whispered my name and said, “Nothing has ever happened to us before this moment.” Then he lifted me in his arms, carrying me through the water to the steps. He brought me to a chaise lounge and immediately began to dry me with one of the thick terry towels, meticulously moving between my toes and over my legs. I reached for another towel and began to dry him.
We laughed, kissed, and held each other.
“Comfortable?”
“Yes,” I said.
He stepped to the side and brought back a thin blanket. Then he put his arm around me, and we lay there listening to the music.
“Can you forget enough to welcome me into your heart?” he asked.
“I think so. I’m trying.”
“Maybe we should pretend to be Adam and Eve, just created.”
“Yes, maybe.”
“God wants me to discover you, realize your beauty. He wants us to enjoy each other. They had to have some time like this before the snake came.”
“Maybe.”
His lips were moving over my neck and down over my breasts, gently lifting them with his cheeks and pressing his lips to my nipples. I felt his hardness when he moved against me. Memories flashed like hot sparks. I drove them back into the darkness by kissing Troy even harder, even longer.
“I am like Adam, and this is the first day,” he whispered.
“And I am Eve,” I said.
“Then you’ll believe me when I say I love you more than anyone in the world.”
I was able to laugh. I was able to be naked beside him, to feel his sex, to let him touch me and kiss me anywhere he wanted and not scream or cringe. This wasn’t simply two people making love. For me, it was a true rebirth. I wanted it more than he could. My legs relaxed and opened to him.
“Wait,” he said, and stepped off the chaise lounge. He was back in moments. I heard him tearing the wrapper. “I don’t want to tell you how long I’ve had this.”
“I hope it’s still good.”
“Oh, it is, and so am I,” he said, returning to me.
Was I too easy? Was I too eager? Was this simply part of an experiment to see if I could have a normal relationship, fall in love, marry, have children, and never think of what had happened to me years ago?
Perhaps.
But I did feel something deeper for him. He was vulnerable, too. He was looking for the same answers about himself, really. We were two explorers, discovering ourselves again. How could this be wrong?
Both of us feared that lovemaking would never work for us. We’d be afraid of the feelings and terrified of failing. I could hear that fear in every moan and cry, feel it in every long kiss. I was clinging to him as if he were a parachute and I was falling and falling, until the moment came, the moment of pleasure I feared I would never have. I cried out in both delight and relief, and afterward, we lay there holding on to each other as if we were afraid that if we let go, all of this, including ourselves, would disappear.
He turned onto his back and lay there beside me, smiling.
“You have a smug smile on your face,” I said.
“Yes, yes, I do. I’m an arrogant, confident, and happy bastard.” He turned to me. “And it’s all your fault for being so beautiful and intelligent and loving.”
I laughed, and I didn’t want to come down from the high I had reached. “You used a multimillion-dollar estate to seduce me,” I said.
“Guilty.”
“And wine and pizza and beautiful music.”
“Guilty.”
“But I’m not satisfied.”
“What?”
“I want something more.”
“You do?” He sat up and looked down at me. “What else?”
“Laugh if you like, but I want the best sundae in the world.”
He was silent for a moment and then broke into real laughter. “I don’t know if we can make it before they close. Let’s give it a shot. Everything you need is in the bathroom—hair dryer, body lotion, whatever. Wait.”
He rose and brought back a pink silk bathrobe for me. Then he went for his clothes. I got mine, went into the bathroom, and got myself ready in record time, I’m sure.
“I called. They promised they’d stay open for us,” he said when I came out.
We hurried through the house, put our shoes on in the foyer, and got into his car, laughing most of the way. I felt like I was on one of those rafts navigating river rapids, incapable now of changing direction but screaming with glee at the dangers. Troy’s face was glowing, as I had seen mine was. Nothing now seemed too difficult to do, even having Thanksgiving dinner with my sister.
Later, when he finally brought me back to my dorm, we were still laughing and talking a mile a minute, as if everything that had bound and restricted our thoughts and dreams had been broken. For a moment after he had parked, we sat looking at each other. Neither of us wanted the night to end. We were clinging to every final second.
“Happy?”
“Very,” I said.
“As a rule, I don’t believe in luck. Coincidence, yes, but good and bad luck, no. But tonight, I have to thank some lucky stars that you were brought here. I suppose that’s selfish. I should think of why you were brought here.”
“Why stop now?” I asked.
“Stop what?”
“Being selfish.”
He laughed. “I can see my tombstone now: ‘Here lies Troy Matzner, teased to death.’ ”
We laughed and kissed, and then he nodded and grew serious.
“I’ll be thinking about you tomorrow,” he said, “but I’m confident you’ll be fine. Just say and do what you think is right.”
“I feel like my good and bad angels are wrestling. A part of me wants to lead Dr. Alexander to believe that permitting Haylee to go home for Thanksgiving will be a disaster because I’m not ready for it.”
“And a part of you wants to give her a chance?”
“Yes. Most of our lives, I’ve been the one who gives in. Especially during our early years, Mother wouldn’t let us do something if one of us didn’t want to do it. We had to like the same things. Haylee would always promise to like something I liked, even if she didn’t, as long as I gave in to her sometimes, but she had a way of showing her displeasure subtly, and Mother usually wouldn’t let us do what I wanted or get what I wanted. I used to believe, and now probably more than ever, believe that Haylee would get Mother to reject something I wanted just to prove she had more power than I did. There were lots of little things Haylee did to me when we were growing up, things I couldn’t think of doing to her.”
“Maybe you didn’t share the DNA the way you were told you did. Maybe you got most of the conscience DNA.”
I laughed, but this wasn’t the first time I had heard that. I had heard myself think it often.
“How do I look?” I asked him, thinking now of meeting someone in the dorm, especially Marcy and Claudia.
“As close to perfect as anyone I know.”
“No different?”
“Oh. Maybe a little more blossomed. And me?”
“Maybe a little more arrogant.”
He laughed and leaned over to kiss me, then opened my door and walked me to the dorm entrance.
“Call me when you get back,” he said.
“I will.”
We kissed again, and I went inside, pausing to glance at my reflection in one of the windows.
Here I go, I thought, feeling like someone who had been ordered to run barefoot over hot coals. Maybe I was always this way; maybe I was always afraid of revealing anything intimate. I didn’t have Haylee’s indifference and self-confidence. Humility was weakness to her.
My test was postponed for a while. Again, neither Claudia nor Marcy had returned yet. They’d push the curfew to the final seconds. I went about preparing for bed, and when they came into our room, they both stood there gaping at me. I was just pulling back the blanket.
“What?” I asked, my heart starting to pound. Was it true? Did I have a different look now? Was I like a blossomed flower? Was it simply impossible to hide what I had done, where I had gone, who I had become?
They looked at each other and nodded.
“You don’t have to say anything,” Marcy said. “We see it in your face.”
They didn’t look that sure.
“You’re just saying that to get me to admit it.”
They both laughed.
“And what’s so funny about that?”
“You just did,” Claudia declared.
I threw my pillow at them. Funnily enough, I felt relieved. I didn’t want to add any more deception to our relationships, and I didn’t want to constantly deny, deny, and deny. Besides, I was far from ashamed.
We stayed up well into the early hours, talking about ourselves, our feelings, and our fears. Sharing confidential innermost thoughts and actions with close girlfriends was another thing I had believed I would never do. I would always be the outsider, different, cold, and doomed only to observe, never to share.
But that had changed.
Maybe, I thought, just maybe, I’ve really defeated Haylee this time.