Since we’d graduated, though, 9/11 had happened and property values in exurbia had soared. The rustic farmhouses and shabby chic Victorian cottages we’d looked at today cost more than we’d get for the sale of our Brooklyn loft and Jess had immediately rejected the more affordable split-levels and sixties suburban ranches Katrine showed us.
“They remind me of my dismal childhood,” he said, staring woefully at the avocado linoleum of a Red Hook faux Colonial.
“There’s one more place I think you should see,” Katrine had said after Jess refused to get out of the car at a modular home. She’d turned the Suburban off Route 9G toward River Road. For a second I thought she was driving us toward the college and I tensed in the backseat. Jess might want to live in the area where we had gone to school, but he didn’t want to see those young hopeful college students loping along the shaded paths of Bailey College. At least not until he’d finished the second novel and he was invited back to do a reading.
But Katrine turned south, away from the college, and I heard Jess in the front seat sigh as we entered the curving tree-lined road. This was what I knew he had in mind when he talked about moving to the country: dry-laid stone walls covered with moss, ancient sycamores with bark peeling off like old wallpaper, apple orchards, clapboard Victorian farmhouses, and, through the gaps in the trees, glimpses of stately mansions and the blue ridges of the Catskills beyond the river. The road itself was filled with the light of a Hudson River school painting. I could see it reflected in Jess’s face, replacing the sallow cast it had taken on this winter as he’d labored over his long-unfinished work. Or the “unborn monster,” as he’d christened it. If only there were something we could afford on this road, but even the dreary farmhouse I’d grown up in was surely out of our price range.
When we pulled into a weed-choked driveway and parked outside a rusted gate, though, I immediately recognized where we were and thought Katrine had misunderstood our situation. Lots of people did. Jess was, after all, a famous writer. The first book had done well enough—and he’d been young and photogenic enough—to get his picture in Granta and Vanity Fair. He’d gotten a high-six-figure advance for the second novel—but that was ten years ago. The advance was long gone; the second novel was still incomplete.
But Jess had already gotten out, drawn by that golden river light, and gone to stand at the iron gate to gaze up at the house. Silhouetted against the afternoon light, so thin and wiry in his black jeans and leather jacket, he looked like part of the iron scrollwork. How thin he’s grown this winter, I thought. The late afternoon sun turned Jess’s hair the red gold it had been when we first met in college, banishing the silver that had begun, not unattractively, to limn his temples. His eyes were hidden behind dark sunglasses, but I could still read the longing in his face as he gazed up at the house. And who wouldn’t long for such a house?
It stood on a rise above a curve in the river like a medieval watchtower. The old brick was mellowed with age and warmed from centuries of river light, the windows made from wavy cockled glass with tiny bubbles in it that held the light like good champagne. The sunken gardens surrounding an ornamental pond were already cool and dark, promising a dusky retreat even on the hottest summer day. For a moment I thought I heard the sound of glasses clinking and laughter from a long-ago summer party, but then I realized it was just some old wind chimes hanging from the gatehouse. There hadn’t been any parties here for a while. When the sun went behind a cloud and the golden glow disappeared my eyes lingered more on the missing slate tiles in the roof, the weeds growing up between the paving stones of the front flagstones, the paint peeling off the porch columns, and the cracked and crumbling front steps. I even thought I could detect on the river breeze the smell of rot and mildew. And when Jess turned, his fingers still gripping the gate, I saw that without that light his face had turned sallow again and the look of longing was replaced with the certainty that he would always be on the wrong side of that gate. That’s how he had become such a good mimic, by watching and listening from the other side. It made my heart ache for him.
“No, not in our ‘price bracket’ I think.”
If Katrine noticed his mocking tone she didn’t let on. “It isn’t for sale,” she said. “But the owner’s looking for a caretaker.”
If I could have tackled her before the words were out of her mouth, I would have, but the damage was already done. Jess’s face had the stony look it got when he was getting ready to demolish someone, but as he often did these days he turned the rancor on himself. “I’ve always fancied myself a bit of a Mellors.”
I was about to jump in and tell Katrine that Mellors was the caretaker in a D. H. Lawrence novel but she was laughing as if she’d gotten the reference. “That’s just the sort of thing Mr. Montague would say. That’s why I thought you two might get along.”
“Montague? Not Alden Montague, the writer? This is
