Gargoyles (5 page)

His father bought carving tools and showed how every single cut had to be away from your body. He chainsawed the roughest of shapes for him, based on Richard's preliminary
sketch. Cedar was one of the easiest woods to carve, he explained, and had natural preservative in its sap, which was why it lasted so long, years and years, even unpainted, and which was why it was used for totem poles, and why it would be perfect for his gargoyle. This was Richard's proudest moment of the summer, hearing that his father wanted his gargoyle to last. His first, which did indeed end up on a corner eave of their cottage, had a single bent horn on his forehead. He was fat, and smiling. His impossible tongue was too big and fat to be a tongue at all and looked like a second head. Gouged eyebrows formed a V above his nose to show any evil spirits how mean he would be if they got close.

Even now, decades later, Richard can see every homely, botched detail of his first gargoyle. Whenever he smells cedar, he sees that face emerging, smiling and mean, from the tortured wood. What was frustrating, but then not, was how different it was from what he'd drawn. At first he hated that he couldn't carve very well. Then he learned to see that the gargoyle had always had its own idea of its face and it wasn't going to behave. Because that's what gargoyles were like. They might sit up on your house for you, but there's no way they would ever behave.

He hears faint footsteps and, he thinks, whispering. His thumb is bleeding pretty badly. He had momentarily sat himself down at his radio dissembly, inspired to pry the metal collar from a glass tube, and the glass gave way in his grip, imploding with a
chuck
, cutting his thumb. He has been sitting watching his blood, its beading up to form a drip, which grows heavy enough for gravity to take across his wrist, leaving a black trail, and
plick
, onto the tabletop. Five drips so far. It is slowing,
clotting. He smiles at the final bead. Will it or won't it? Such a tentative dissembling. He wouldn't have the patience for it.

So, the men are inside. They're in the house, he's in danger, and Eleanor was right. She is always right. The outside did come in. His guess had been that no one would dare.

He hears them down there whispering. Which means they are afraid. So he's still right. He's still right.

As is Eleanor. As are the men downstairs. Everyone's right. Everyone's always right. Isn't that funny? He does believe exactly this impossibility: one may be deluded or mistaken but at one's inmost core everyone's always right. He thinks he truly understands this to be the human condition. He also understands his version to be far more tragic than the other one, that of original sin, which is nothing more than the church's cheap bait. The tragedy is that, though we are all completely right, it's hard to know what to
do.

So the men are inside. So, his gargoyles have failed. But probably they were made impotent only because their secret was made known. His mistake had been to hire out labour, a carpenter with no allegiance to the project, and who no doubt had gone right off to the nearest pub to bellow details of this oddest of jobs, that he'd been well paid to haul away every door in the house, plus plaster over all recessions and screw holes, and replace these doors with nothing. And of course it would filter out that there was nobody inside this newly doorless house but a rickety old coot alone upstairs. Plus the carpenter had that little helper come out for the garage door, that's right, and it's not hard to imagine them in any number of bars, laughing about it. And so goes the secret behind the doorless house. Mystery is a gargoyle's only power.

You'd think the mystery of no doors would be limitless.

He should have done the damn doors himself. His mistake was to doubt that he was up to lifting doors and mixing spackle. No, his
real
mistake had been age.

He stands, almost falling. Stiff at the radio for too long, his shoulder has seized and he is crooked with no balance. He loosens up by the time he reaches the closet, where he chooses the gold silk robe instead of the white terrycloth. The silk robe lacks a waist tie, and he is wearing no underwear — he is glad and a little proud to see he still has a sense of humour despite three men crossing his threshold and invading his house.

He hears hoarse whispers —
laptop
and
cut the fuckin' cable
. They are taking the expected things. In their mousey rustling he can hear that his gargoyles worked in part. They aren't barging about fearlessly. Drawers are being slid out with care. Cupboard doors are silent on their hinges.

It doesn't sound like they will be coming upstairs at all. So he will go down to them. He will confront the men with openness, welcome them into the logic of expansion, wherein no evil can survive. The men will either run or become odd friends.

Richard watches his mother tilt her head back to empty the beer, the universal gesture so unlike her. She rises and takes the bottle to the kitchen, depositing it under the sink in a manner that tells him she won't have another today but will tomorrow.

At her new fridge she rests her fingertips on its surface as if to reacquaint herself.

“Are you hungry? Would you like something to eat?”

“No thanks. I ate on the flight.”

“You
did
?” Mock horror, an old family joke. He actually likes airplane food.

It's amazing she can find humour at all, given what has
happened. But maybe not so amazing, maybe it says that all her years with him have been an emergency and that yesterday's debacle was simply the emergency continuing. In fact maybe what he was witnessing here wasn't the collapse of a monumental relationship but rather a last shard hitting the ground, and the settling dust.

Richard can only imagine the two of them in recent years. His father growing quietly wilder, his mother concerned with security to the point of paranoia. He does see this all the time with older purchasers and perhaps it makes sense: the less life to lose, the more one wants to protect it. His mother has always been afraid of encroaching crime, the inner city crawling out. He remembers her locking car doors, even taxi doors, when she drove through a downtown, particularly its grubby perimeter. He recalls his father, in a family discussion about a next new place to live, asking if she would like him to design her “a castle with a clear view of the peasantry coming up the slope.”

Gazing out the window he eventually registers the school of kayakers he's been staring at. They look tentative. He thinks he can make out grey heads. His mother is slowly spooning and tinking something into a teapot. What was it like for her when the doors first came off and the blankets hung? Listening to his father during that call, Richard actually thought it a cool idea, at least a funny idea.

“Okay, Richard, picture this,” was how his father put it, his voice pocked with the years but his confidence as robust as ever. “You're a thief, a bad guy. You're walking down a street, a suburban street. You're casing it. You pass a house with
no doors
. Instead it has
blankets
hung over the door holes. You're a thief. Is that the place you pick to rob? Would you rob that
place?” The question's rhetorical, but his father waits. All his life, Richard has had to answer the rhetorical questions too.

“I dunno.”

“No. You wouldn't. Why? Because a person who uses only a blanket has no worries about safety. You're a thief and you see this house and you imagine this unbelievable monster living in there behind those blankets. Right?”

“I guess.”

“Maybe it's a guy just waiting for someone to
try
. You wouldn't go in there if you were paid to. Someone who feels safe living behind a blanket is a witch or a maniac. No way you're wandering in there to steal their stuff.”

He had a carpenter lift the doors off, up went the blankets, and his mother had stayed for a while. It must have been a final torture for her. Apparently the blankets were authentic Navajo, flown in on this whim of his, and expensive. And then a month or so later — his mother isn't clear on this, though his father had phoned her at her new condo to explain — he'd had the carpenter come back to remove the blankets, and the garage door too, even plastering over all the holes from screws and hinges and locks. Smooth, pristine entranceways.

Richard knows her torture was only a side issue, a by-product. Of his art. His art was all. It always had been. In fact it was maybe her paranoia that triggered this particular project in the first place. Him trying to prove something to her. It was perverse and juvenile and it failed. Richard remembers another prank that was also probably a reaction to his mother, in that house — they called it a hacienda — his father reno'd while they lived in it, on the north California coast. He built a family room extension to include a living redwood tree that was four feet in diameter. To accommodate movement, not so much from growth but
from wind, he found some kind of space-age gasket for the roof-hole, a kind of putty that adjusted itself. Grandson of Flubber, his father called it. Richard grew to love that tree, its cavernously grooved bark. It had as strong a presence as a person. But he suspected even then — and he's more suspicious now — that the idea arose out of his mother's loud fear of ticks in the area and the serious fever they gave you. Is it possible the tree was his father's perverse response? That his bringing the threat inside was just another sign of his parents' nauseating marital warp?

“It's reebus,” says his mother, and Richard has no idea what she means by this. Perhaps it's the tea she's making.

Richard tries to make what he says next sound as little like criticism as possible and it comes out almost chatty. “So you haven't seen him yet?”

His mother turns from the kitchen counter. Kettle steam tumbles up beside her face. She takes Richard in, not answering, but her expression is plain. Why would she visit him, no matter what shape he was in? Why visit a man who, after fifty years of marriage, would treat her this way? Despite her pleas, despite her promise that she would leave if he actually did remove the doors — he just went ahead and removed them. Should she visit such a man?

“I haven't.”

“Do you think you might want to?”

Again no answer. He is afraid to tell her that in ten minutes he is going to leave, and visit him. He hasn't foreseen this, that she might feel as deserving of his time as his father, though he lies wounded and deranged in a hospital.

“Mom. Obviously he hasn't been himself. What he did was cruel, I know, but he isn't cruel. He hasn't been himself.”

“Well, maybe it's time I wasn't myself too.”

He thinks for a moment that she is going to stick her tongue out.

“Mom, I'm not going to try to talk you into it. But they say he might have had some sort of stroke. He has a head injury. And a hand injury.”

“They've kept me informed.”

“Well. Okay.”

“He can visit me when he's better.”

“Well, no, I think he's sick, Mom. Before this.” He doesn't want to say what he thinks, because to insult him is still to insult her.

“He doesn't have dementia, Richard.”

“You don't think?”

“He was cruel to you too. He was. You know he was. And now, now he's been very cruel to me.”

Richard rises and passes her in her small kitchen, her “galley” it's probably called in this oceanfront building. He can come to her kitchen and root around in a cupboard because she's his mother and that's what sons can always do. He puts his hand on a can of bing cherries. He knows she means his father mocking him, early on, for choosing to sell real estate. For selling instead of creating. Choosing, as his father put it, “to drive people around, wipe their bums, take their money.” But he never thought his father was shaming him so much as he was trying to get him to change his mind. There's a huge difference. In any case, if shame is what it was, it didn't stick. And it's hard to say that to a mother, that a son could live a few thousand miles away and no longer think of his parents much, even if he's been shamed. Perhaps especially if he's been shamed.

It hasn't occurred to him in years, but when he first started selling, he did feel shame because of his father, though a different
sort. It had to do with what he had learned from him. When he took clients into a backyard, shrugged at a tangle of wild shrubs and described a tight bank of cedar in its place, or pointed out a bay window or deck where there wasn't one, and he saw the buyers' eyes fix and understand, he was seeing the world as his father saw it and using his father's words. He was also proving again one of capitalism's open secrets, that fortunes are made from others' lack of imagination. That he was straight and male seemed to add credibility: if
he
could see aesthetic improvements they must be essential. It happened again and again. How many times had he made a sale and gained the seller fifty thousand by insisting they first spend ten thousand to add a dropped half-deck and hot tub? Timid purchasers would step through the sliders and see not a shitty backyard neighbourhood but instead a dropped deck and tub, and a little breathlessly see themselves as wine-clinking success stories, naked and beautiful in their tub, and they could see friends and bosses seeing them too. It was all about painting a picture for those who couldn't paint their own. Sometimes he left his black convertible in the client's driveway, nose pointed out, and sometimes he didn't. Sometimes he insisted that certain curtains be closed. He installed tastefully unique screen savers on his clients' computers. Essential oils — tangerine was best — he dabbed under homely kitchen counters like perfume near an armpit. He always suggested there be no children around, and that all but one good toy be hidden. It was what his father called “the built environment.” In Richard's business, colleagues saw it both as manipulation and as service, and no one — not even purchasers these days — saw any contradiction.