What worried me was that I really couldn’t tell if it was a good reason, or whether I was just a nut like Paul Stewart and was obsessed with seeing Laura, or spying on her and trying to catch a glimpse of her sitting around in her undies watching TV, even though while we were together making out where she baby-sat I’d already seen her in her undies, or close to it, so it wasn’t like I had some special perverted need to see her like that again.
I mean, even though I’d thought already about how she was asleep up in her room—because I swear I could sort of really feel her there, like I could almost hear her breathing—I wasn’t planning to, like, wait for when everybody else was asleep and go peek in on her. True, she had told me that she slept wearing hardly anything; we were talking one day about it, and I forget how the subject came up—I think it was when she saw these pajamas I wear—and she mentioned that she always slept with no shirt on because she felt comfortable that way, but also I could sort of tell she wanted to impress me with how sexy and mature she was. And I must admit I did think about that—I mean I thought about her asleep up there with maybe no shirt on—and I have to admit that I thought that was pretty exciting and might be sort of nice to see—actually very nice to see—because Laura is really, really beautiful, like I said, but I mean only if she wanted me to see her that way, and not like I wanted to just go and peek in on her like some total weirdo.
I thought being down there was wrong.
I really did.
I felt really nervous and even had this weird sense of dizziness—from so much excitement I guess—and thought the best thing to do was just climb right back out of there.
But the feeling stayed with me.
I mean the feeling that there was a reason.
I felt extremely alert, as if something might be right out there in the dark, maybe so close that I could even bump into it. And it was so dark in there, and the smell of dead grass and gasoline was so strong, that I guess that’s also why I felt a little dizzy and unsteady on my feet.
I reached out my hands like a tightrope-walker so as not to waver back and forth and possibly fall—when all the frickin’ lights came on!
I didn’t move.
Well, I jerked my head.
I’d never been so surprised to see a room in my whole life.
Really it wasn’t much of a room. It was just a dirty basement. Clean, but dirty. I mean, what I saw was clean enough, organized enough: these glass cabinets along one far wall that were filled with papers and stuff; various tables and unused furniture, some of it under sheets to keep it from getting too dusty; a lot of gardening stuff hung on a rack and a rider mower with flat tires; a washing machine and a dryer; and some carpets—big rugs, really—rolled up and wrapped in brown paper, stacked like logs on a big shelf a few feet away from me.
The walls were just the reverse side of the building stones, and the mortar sort of curdled out of them like froth, and the floor was stone too, and covered in dust and drops of dried paint.
There were so many other boxes and pieces of sports equipment and various crates of old clothing that I was a bit surprised to see the room being so ordinary. It was like anybody else’s storage basement down the hill where I live, where all the houses are filled with so much random junk that if you looked at it long enough, you’d know everything about the family living there without their ever having to say a word to you, because you’d find photos and documents and letters and everything else people have done and used for years, until it’s almost like looking at a museum collection about them. Not that I saw anything too personal—I mean, it wasn’t like the junk at my house; it was all just stuff they’d bought and gotten tired of using, but the feeling was sort of the same.
I just couldn’t associate this kind of basement with Laura, whose life, as I guess you’ve gathered, I thought was only fun and really pretty glamorous, but this room kind of revealed that there was a lot of effort behind that, like machinery behind a curtain that keeps the rest of the palace—and I definitely thought of her house as a palace—in perfect shape.
Of course a lot of this is what I can tell you now just in retrospect, because at the second the lights went on—while seeing the basement so shabby was a bit of a shock—all I could really think about was how I might just drop a load in my pants if somebody actually came down the stairs, which was exactly what was happening.
I didn’t know if it was her dad or her older brother, Jack, but upstairs one muffled voice said something I couldn’t hear, and then this man, Laura’s dad or Jack, said in this very tired voice that almost sounded like a snore, “Yeah, I’ll get it,” and started coming down the stairs.
The stairs were about fifteen feet across from me—this was a very big basement; I guess that that makes it at least a little glamorous—and I was standing right in the middle of it, right in the clearest, most open visible place, exactly as if I had wanted to just put myself on display.
But that didn’t really matter. Because like I told you—like I had to tell you—I am good at hiding.
When the lights flashed on, I’ll admit I had a sort of subconscious reaction to the room,
