Letters from the Bissett

I turned twenty-eight in March, which is about the least interesting fact about me, but I mention it because my mother asked if I was having a midlife crisis when I told her I'd taken the Bissett Place listing. A 1920s foursquare in a suburb where nothing sells fast, sitting empty since November, six weeks of Thursday open houses with nobody coming. That's what I signed up for. My ex-wife would have called it typical.

The house is called the Bissett Place, named for the family that built it, and it has that heavy, patient smell old houses get when nobody lives in them. Dust and floor wax and something floral underneath, like the wallpaper gave up its scent decades ago and is still leaking it. I got so I could stand in the master bedroom and breathe it in and feel like the whole day was somehow justified.

Weekday open houses are a strange kind of lonely. You drive out, you unlock the door, you put out the little sign-in sheet and the cookies nobody eats, and then you sit for three hours while maybe four people wander through. Most weeks it was two. One week it was zero, and I sat on the stairs and read the entire back half of a paperback I'd been carrying around since my divorce, which was two years ago now and still the last serious thing I'd been part of with another person.

It was during week two, I think, that I found the first letter. I remember it was under the baseboard in the master bedroom, folded into a tight square and wedged where the wood had shrunk away from the wall, and honestly I might never have seen it except I dropped a pen and went fishing for it on my knees like an idiot. The paper was good paper. There was no name on it, inside or out.

I should describe what it said, because it deserves describing. It was from a woman, that was obvious from the handwriting, a slanted looping hand, and it was addressed to me by description rather than name. It began with the man who does the Thursday open houses, which told me she'd seen me and hadn't asked my name, which stung a little and then, somehow, didn't. The body of the letter was three pages. She described, in patient and unhurried detail, what she would do to me if I stayed past closing. Not vague stuff. Exact. Where she would put her hands. What she would do first and what she would make me wait for. I read it standing up, then I sat down on the edge of the bed, the stager's bed, made up tight with a quilt nobody had ever slept under, and I read it again.

I locked up that night and drove home and did not sleep much.

* * *

Here is what I want to get across about me, since the letters are going to make me sound like a different person. I spent four years in a marriage where nobody wanted anybody, and I got out of it at twenty-six feeling like a piece of furniture that had been reupholstered by somebody with bad taste. I hadn't been looked at, really looked at, in so long that when a stranger on the street made eye contact I assumed they wanted directions. So finding that letter, being described that way by somebody who had watched me from across a room or a curb, did something to a part of me I'd written off as closed for repairs.

I wrote back. Of course I wrote back. I would like to say I hesitated, but I didn't, not really. I couldn't leave a reply under the baseboard, people might tour the house, so I tucked mine into the radiator grille in the master bedroom, which has a gap wide enough for a folded page, and I told myself she'd find it because she clearly knew that room better than I did.

My first letter was careful. I pretended I had no idea who she was, which was true, and I pretended I was amused rather than half out of my mind, which was not. I kept it almost proper. I told her the house thanked her for the company. And then, near the end, I told her about my hands. That was the part I wrote last, at my kitchen table at one in the morning, and I described them the way she had described things to me, slow and specific. What they looked like. What I did with them in the shower that morning, thinking of her letter, the water running and no hurry to anything. I don't think I'd ever written a paragraph like it in my life. I sealed it and felt like I'd committed a crime in a nice way.

* * *

The second letter was there the following Thursday, same grille, folded square. She signed this one with a single initial, a D, which felt like trust being extended in my direction, and she admitted what I'd already figured out. She had watched me lock up. She said she stood at the curb across the street and watched me check the back door twice, because she liked the way I moved through the empty rooms like I was apologizing to them.

Then she got specific about my shirt. She described exactly how it had come untucked, how I'd reached up to adjust the sign in the front window and the hem pulled loose on one side, and how I never fixed it, and how she had thought about that untucked hem for six days. She wrote that she had stood on the curb and made a plan, and that the plan was getting longer every week, and that she hoped I was the kind of man who wrote back instead of the kind who called the office and had the letters treated as a security problem.

I sat on the bedroom floor reading it and laughed out loud at that, alone in an empty house, which tells you the state I was in.

* * *

My second reply was not careful. I wrote it the same night and I pushed it under her door, so to speak, into the grille, and in it I told her something I hadn't told anybody. I told her about coming back to the Bissett after hours the previous Monday, how I'd let myself in with the lockbox key at nine at night just to stand in the rooms without the pretense of selling, and how I had ended up on the hardwood floor of the master bedroom with my belt open, thinking about her curb and her slanted handwriting and the exact and patient things she'd written. I described it. All of it. My hand, the cold floor through my trousers, how fast it happened because I'd been carrying it around since Thursday. I told her the floorboards creaked when I shifted and that I'd stopped caring.

That was the boldest thing I had done in two years, and I did it in ink.

* * *

Her third letter changed everything, the way she probably planned it would. It started soft. She said her name was Doris, just Doris, that she'd moved to the city six months ago for a design job and that she was thirty-one and had no business doing what she was doing and was doing it anyway. Then she said the thing that made me put the letter down on the floor and just breathe for a minute.