It wasn’t her bathroom. The electric toothbrush, the hair dryer, these particular soaps—these were not her toiletries. For an instant he thought, desperately hoped, that they might belong to her mother, but there were too many other discrepancies: the shower door was different, its glass frosted; now he smelled the lemon-scented gel beads in a jar atop the toilet; alien dried flowers hung from a purple sachet on the wall. In a single shudder of retrospection his impressions of the house were changed: Where was the piano (that nobody played)? Wouldn’t he have seen the electric chandelier? The carpet on the stairs—wasn’t the pile too thick, too dark in the dark to have been truly white?
Along with the sheer terror of finding himself in the wrong house, with his recognition of its difference, was a sense, because of the houses’ sameness, that he was in all the houses around the lake at once; the sublime of identical layouts. In each house she or someone like her was in her bed, sleeping or pretending to sleep; legal guardians were farther down the hall, large men snoring; the faces and poses in the family photographs on the mantel might change, but would all belong to the same grammar of faces and poses; the elements of the painted scenes might vary, but not the level of familiarity and flatness; if you opened any of the giant stainless-steel refrigerators or surveyed the faux-marble islands, you would encounter matching, modular products in slightly different configurations.
He was in all the houses but, precisely because he was no longer bound to a discrete body, he could also float above them; it was like looking at the miniature train set Klaus, his dad’s friend, had given him as a child; he didn’t care about the trains, could barely make them run, but he loved the scenery, the green static flocking spread over the board, the tiny yet towering pines and hardwoods. When he looked at the impossibly detailed trees, he occupied two vantages at once: he pictured himself beneath their branches and also considered them from above; he was looking up at himself looking down. Then he could toggle rapidly between these perspectives, these scales, in a relay that unfixed him from his body. Now he was frozen in fear in this particular bathroom and in all the bathrooms simultaneously; he looked down from a hundred windows at the little boat on the placid man-made lake. (Touches of white paint atop the dried acrylic add a sense of motion and of moonlight to the surface.)
He swam back into himself. He felt like a timer had started somewhere, that he had minutes, maybe only seconds, to flee the house into which he’d unintentionally broken before someone emptied a shotgun into his face or the cops arrived to find him hovering outside the bedroom of a sleeping girl. Fear made it difficult to breathe, but he told himself that he would press rewind, quietly walk back out the way he’d come, disturbing no one. That’s what he did, although now the little differences called out to him as he descended: there was a large L-shaped couch he hadn’t seen before; he could tell the coffee table here was glass and not dark wood like hers. At the bottom of the stairs, he hesitated: the front door was right there, beckoning; he’d be free, but his Timberlands were downstairs where he’d left them. To recover them he’d have to pass the sleeping stranger.
Despite his fear that he might at any moment be discovered, he decided he must go after his boots, less because they were evidence, could be traced to him, than because he felt that he’d be risking ridicule, humiliation, if he returned to her barefoot. He could intuit the shape of the story, could sense that it would spread—how she’d left him first to mishandle the boat and then to lose his fucking footwear in the midst of whatever misadventure. Hey, Gordon, you got your shoes tied on? Got your slippers? A memory from middle school of Sean McCabe, coming home in socks, in tears, after he’d been jumped for his Air Jordans, flared up before him; Sean still got shit about it and Sean could now bench three hundred pounds.
The young man who had been her brother had turned his face toward the back of the couch; the pillow had fallen to the floor. The giant head of Bob Dole moved its lips on the screen as he crept past. He picked up his boots and slowly slid open the door; the rollers jammed a little; he had to apply some force, causing a loud squeak; the body on the couch stirred and started to sit up. (All over Lake Sherwood Housing Community the bodies stirred and started to sit up.) Without closing the door, he bolted, boots in hand, over the wet grass—indifferent to uneven ground, to sticks and stones—at a speed he might never match again, his body grateful for something to do with its adrenaline. No one yelled after him; there was only his footfall, blood thundering in his ears; he triggered a few motion lights and so moved closer to the water; he ran at full force for a minute before he realized he wasn’t sure where he was going. He dropped to a knee, lungs burning, looked behind him to make sure he wasn’t being followed. He pulled his boots on over his wet socks. Then he got up and sprinted between two houses until he reached the street.
His only goal now was to find his red ’89 Camry parked in her driveway and go home, to bed. He was still scared—at any moment he might hear sirens—but away from the water and the scene of his ridiculous trespass he felt the worst was over. He patted his pocket to confirm the presence of his keys and walked quickly along the curb—there were no sidewalks—but he did not run, so as to minimize suspicion on the off chance he was seen. He walked and walked, ashamed to be on foot; he could not find his car, her house; he must have pointed the boat in exactly the wrong direction. After he’d searched for almost half an hour, had circled half the lake, he saw, was overjoyed to see, his car where he had parked it some hours before. The sound of the doors unlocking was deeply reassuring. He got in, found his pack of Marlboro Reds on the passenger seat, and shook one loose; he turned the key to the on position but did not start the engine. He lowered his window and lit his cigarette with a yellow Bic he took from the cup holder and inhaled what felt like his first full breath since he’d discovered her absence on the boat.
He started the engine and turned the headlights on to discover that she was standing, had been standing, in the threshold of her front door wearing an oversized sweater. Her almost waist-length dark blond hair was down. He cut the engine reflexively, turning off the lights. Barefoot, she walked to the car and opened the passenger door and got in. She helped herself to a cigarette, lit it, and said, as though he were a few minutes late for an appointment, Where have you been?
He was furious. He could not admit that he’d been scared, couldn’t say he’d been unequal to managing the boat, or that he’d almost confronted the wrong young woman in another house. He demanded an explanation, What the fuck is wrong with you? I wanted to swim, she said, and shrugged and smoked when he pressed, tobacco mixing with the smell of her conditioner. Absently, she began playing with his hair.
My stepdad used to give these like endless speeches at dinner. Now he barely talks and anyway we don’t eat together. I think he’s depressed, like he should have a therapist, see your parents at the Foundation. It’s weird now that he’s quiet, because before he would make dinners into these long fucking discussions, except not really, because nobody discussed anything; he just talked in our direction. He’d ask my brother a question every once in a while, but it was always like, Pop quiz: What did I say made this a hard time for the aeronautics business? (You know he got rich off somebody else’s invention. Some kind of screw that doesn’t weigh anything.) And my brother would never have to answer because my stepdad answered his own fucking questions. The answer was always China, basically. Then there was this one night last summer when my mom was letting me sneak white wine and my brother was out and I had to be the one at the table getting talked at and it was getting on my nerves for real. Maybe it was because I was a little fucked up or because I’m just older now and so like more aware of my mom. What she’s been through, starting with my dad. But anyway I did this stupid also kind of awesome thing. Really, really slowly I started lowering myself in my chair, like sliding down out of it, while he was eating his ravioli talking about whatever. My mom was already in the kitchen, loading the dishwasher; she never eats. It required a lot of core strength going down so slowly. All those crunches. All that crystal (joking). At dance they are always telling me to visualize a movement as I do it and I was visualizing myself as a liquid flowing down the chair. All the way down off my chair until I was literally under the table and my stepdad still hadn’t noticed anything, and my mom was in there cleaning, and I was trying not to laugh.