If I was hard on him, it was because I'd wanted to deliver the big speech. I'd been planning on it since Paul was a boy, but nobody had asked me. Now I'd have to wait until his funeral.
At oneA.M. the room rental ended and plans were made to move the reception onto the beach. Kathy changed out of her gown while Paul and I took the dogs for a quick walk across the front lawn of the Atlantis. For the first time since the wedding we were alone, and I wanted to force a moment out of it. The operative word here, the source of the problem, isforce. Because it never works that way. In trying to be memorable, you wind up sounding unspeakably queer, which may be remembered but never the way you'd hoped. My brother had spent his life saving me from such moments, and now he would do it again.
A light rain began to fall, and just as I cleared my throat, Venus squatted in the grass, producing a mound of peanut-size turds.
'Aren't you going to clean that up?' I asked.
Paul pointed to the ground and whistled for the Great Dane, which thundered across the lawn and ate the feces in one bite.
'Tell me that was an accident,' I said.
'Accident, hell. I got this motherfuckertrained,' he said. 'Sometimes he'll stick his nose to her ass and just eat that shit on tap.'
I thought of my brother standing in his backyard and training a dog to eat shit and realized I'd probably continue thinking about it until the day I die. Forget the tears and brotherly speeches, this was the stuff that memories are made of.
The Great Dane licked his lips and searched the grass for more. 'What was it you were going to say?' Paul asked.
'Oh, nothing.'
From their perch atop an endangered dune, the Dudes emitted a war cry. Kathy called out from the door of her room, and together with his dogs, my brother set forth, spreading a love that could not be found under a tree, beneath a shell, or even in a treasure chest buried centuries ago on the historic islands that surrounded us.
Possession
FINDING AN APARTMENT is a lot like falling in love,' the real estate agent told us. She was a stylish grandmother in severe designer sunglasses. Dyed blond hair, black stockings, a little scarf tied just so around the throat: for three months she drove us around Paris in her sports car, Hugh up front and me folded like a lawn chair into the backseat.
At the end of every ride I'd have to teach myself to walk all over again, but that was just a minor physical complaint. My problem was that I already loved an apartment. The one we had was perfect, and searching for another left me feeling faithless and sneaky, as if I were committing adultery. After a viewing, I'd stand in our living room, looking up at the high, beamed ceiling and trying to explain that the other two-bedroom had meant nothing to me. Hugh took the opposite tack and blamed our apartment for making us cheat. We'd offered, practically begged, to buy it, but the landlord was saving the place for his daughters, two little girls who would eventually grow to evict us. Our lease could be renewed for another fifteen years, but Hugh refused to waste his love on a lost cause. When told our apartment could never truly be ours, he hung up the phone and contacted the real estate grandmother, which is what happens when you cross him: he takes action and moves on.
The place was dead to him, but I kept hoping for a miracle. A riding accident, a playhouse fire: lots of things can happen to little girls.
When looking around, I tried to keep an open mind, but the more places we visited, the more discouraged I became. If the apartment wasn't too small, it was too expensive, too modern, too far from the center of town. I'd know immediately that this was not love, but Hugh was on the rebound and saw potential in everything. He likes a wreck, something he can save, and so he became excited when, at the end of the summer, the grandmother got a listing for what translated to 'a nicely situated whorehouse.' His feeling grew as we made our way up the stairs and blossomed when the door was unlocked and the smell of stagnant urine drifted into the hall. The former tenants had moved out, leaving clues to both their size and their temperament. Everything from the waist down was either gouged, splintered, or smeared with a sauce of blood and human hair. I found a tooth on the living-room floor, and what looked to be an entire fingernail glued with snot to the inside of the front door. Of course, this was just me: Mr. Bad Mouth. Mr. Negative. While I was searching for the rest of the body, Hugh was racing back and forth between the hole that was a kitchen and the hole that was a bathroom, his eyes glazed and dopey.
We'd shared this expression on first seeing the old apartment, but this time he was on his own, feeling something that I could not. I tried to share his enthusiasm — 'Look, faulty wiring!' — but there was a hollowness to it, the sound of someone who was settling for something and trying hard to pretend otherwise. It wasn't a horrible place. The rooms were large and bright, and you certainly couldn't argue with the location. It just didn't knock me out.
'Maybe you're confusing love with pity,' I told him, to which he responded, 'If that's what you think, I really feel sorry for you.'
The grandmother sensed my lack of enthusiasm and wrote it off as a failure of imagination. 'Some people can see only what's in front of them,' she sighed.
'Hey,' I said, 'I have' — and I said the dumbest thing — 'I have powers.'
She pulled the phone from her handbag. 'Prove it,' she said. 'The owner has gotten three offers, and he's not going to wait forever.'
If finding an apartment is like falling in love, buying one is like proposing on your first date and agreeing not to see each other until the wedding. We put in our bid, and when it was accepted I pretended to be as happy as Hugh and his bridesmaid, the grandmother. We met with a banker, and a lawyer we addressed as Master LaBruce. I hoped that one of them would put an end to this — deny us a mortgage, unearth a codicil — but everything moved according to schedule. Our master presided over the closing, and the following day the contractor arrived. Renovations began, and still I continued to browse the real estate listings, hoping something better might come along. I worried, not just that we'd chosen the wrong apartment but the wrong neighborhood, the wrong city, the wrong country. 'Buyer's remorse,' the grandmother said. 'But don't worry, it's perfectly natural.'Natural. A strange word when used by an eighty-year-old with an un-lined face and hair the color of an American school bus.
Three months after moving in, we took a trip to Amsterdam, a city often recommended by the phrase 'You can get so fucked-up there.' I'd imagined Day-Glo bridges and canals flowing with bong water, but it was actually closer to a Brueghel painting than a Mr. Natural cartoon. We loved the lean brick buildings and the wispy sounds of bicycle tires on freshly fallen leaves. Our hotel overlooked the Herengracht, and on checking in, I started to feel that we'd made a terrible mistake. Why settle in Paris before first exploring the possibility of Amsterdam? What had we been thinking?
On our first afternoon we took a walk and came across the Anne Frank House, which was a surprise. I'd had the impression she lived in a dump, but it's actually a very beautiful seventeenth-century building right on the canal. Tree-lined street, close to shopping and public transportation: in terms of location, it was perfect. My months of house hunting had caused me to look at things in a certain way, and on seeing the crowd gathered at the front door, I did not think,Ticket line, but,Open house!
We entered the annex behind the famous bookcase, and on crossing the threshold, I felt what the grandmother had likened to being struck by lightning, an absolute certainty that this was the place for me. That it would be mine. The entire building would have been impractical and far too expensive, but the part where Anne Frank and her family had lived, their triplex, was exactly the right size and adorable, which is something they never tell you. In plays and movies it always appears drab and old ladyish, but open the curtains and the first words that
