What the Walls Hold

The evenings were the worst part of it, and I want to be plain about that from the start, because people assume retirement is all golf and grandchildren and it turned out mine was mostly sitting in a kitchen at six in the evening wondering whether I wanted to cook or just stand there holding a beer until it was late enough to go to bed. I was fifty-two that spring, fifty-two and healthy and completely out of things to do, and my ex-husband would have said I was being dramatic, but he'd been gone three years and his opinion was strictly theoretical by then. So when I drove past the old St. James house on a Thursday and saw the hand-lettered OPEN HOUSE sign nailed to the oak at the bottom of the hill, I didn't have a single good reason not to turn around, and I didn't have anything waiting for me at home either, so I turned around.

The house sat up on a wooded hill maybe four miles out from the small city limits, a big crumbling Victorian with a wraparound porch and shutters hanging at angles that suggested they'd given up sometime in the nineties. I'd seen it from the road for years the way you see things you live near, that is to say not at all, and walking up the gravel drive I noticed the yard had gone to weed and the paint had gone to gray and the whole place had the specific loneliness of a building nobody had touched in a while. Two cars were parked in the turnaround, one of them presumably belonging to the agent, and I remember thinking that an open house with one visitor and one agent was either very sad or very efficient depending on your mood, and my mood that day tilted toward sad.

The front door was propped open with a brick and I let myself in and called out a hello that came back to me off high ceilings and bare walls.

"In here, follow the voice," a woman called from somewhere deep in the house, and I followed it through a parlor with rotting drapes and down a hallway past a staircase that creaked even though nobody was on it, which I decided not to think about, and found her in what had probably been a ballroom, standing in the middle of a floor that had a small stage built against the far wall.

"Juan Lennon," I said, and stuck out my hand because my mother raised me right and then died before she could see what I did with the upbringing.

"Tasha Foster." She shook it and gave me the agent smile, the one that comes pre-installed, and then something about my face or my face about something made the smile go a notch more real. "Okay, honest question, are you actually looking or are you just a curious person with a Thursday?"

"Honest answer, I'm a curious person with a Thursday." I put my hands in my pockets. "I drove past the sign and I've always wondered what this place looks like inside. I'll try not to waste your evening."

"You're not wasting it, you're the entire attendance record." She waved at the empty ballroom. "Three hours, you're visitor number one. I was starting to write this place off in my head and compose a very bitter email to my broker." She was forty-one, she told me later that same evening, forty-one with dark hair going gray at the temple and letting it, and she had the kind of energy where her hands were always slightly in motion, and I noticed all of this while also trying very hard not to notice it, which is how I noticed it most.

She gave me the tour, or the sketch of a tour, wandering from room to room with less sales pitch and more commentary, telling me the house had been built by a shipping family, then sold to a school, then sold to a theater troupe, then abandoned, and every new owner had left their junk behind, so the rooms were full of school desks and shipping crates and theater props all stacked together like an argument between three different centuries. There were costumes on a rack in one bedroom and a trunk of masks in another and at one point she handed me a false mustache from a box, deadpan, and I put it on, and she laughed, an actual laugh, and I took the mustache off feeling like I'd won something small.

"So who are you when you're not haunting empty houses," I asked, on the landing of the second staircase, because we'd been talking for forty minutes and I knew her broker's name and her divorce was nine years back, which came up somehow, and she knew nothing about me at all.

"Realtor, reluctantly. Actress, reluctantly unpaid." She leaned on the banister. "I do improv. Have for years. Corporate gigs, a troupe in the city, the usual starving-adjacent arrangement. Why, are you hiring?"

"Retired army, currently unemployed at life." I shrugged. "Twenty-six years in, got out, discovered I don't know how to have a hobby. So I drive around looking at houses I can't afford and flirting with realtors, apparently."

She raised an eyebrow at apparently, and I realized a half second too late what I'd said, and instead of backpedaling I just stood there and let it sit, because backpedaling at fifty-two looks worse than standing still.

"Well," she said, drawing it out, "you're doing okay at the flirting, for an amateur." And then she was moving again, down the stairs, tour over apparently, except at the bottom she stopped and looked back up at me with an expression I couldn't file anywhere. "You want to see the basement? It's technically the worst part of the property, which is why I save it for people I like."

* * *

The basement was not the worst part of the property, or it was and she knew I'd disagree, because down there, under the ballroom side, behind a door that had a proper lock on it while everything upstairs hung open, was a theater. A small one, a real one, a stage maybe twenty feet wide with actual curtains and two banks of work lights and folding chairs in rows facing it, maybe forty seats, all of it dusty except the stage, which was swept clean and had fresh tape marks on the boards in different colors.

"You've been rehearsing down here," I said, and it wasn't a question.

"Nobody came today," she said, which was a different answer, and then she laughed at herself. "Yes. I've been rehearsing down here. The owner knows, technically, he gave me a key years ago when the troupe was still renting the house for events, and when it stopped selling and everyone stopped coming, I just. Kept coming." She clicked on one of the work lights and the stage lit up warm and gold and suddenly the whole basement had a pulse. "There's something about an empty house. An empty audience, I mean. You can try things you'd never try with people watching."

"But there's nobody watching," I said. "There's just me."

"That's the point." She sat down on the edge of the stage, legs hanging over, and looked up at me, and her hands had gone still for the first time all evening. "I do this thing, on nights when nothing else is happening. I perform for nobody. Full scenes, all the characters, all the voices, complete nonsense and sometimes, honestly, the best work I've ever done, and it vanishes the second I finish it because there's no one there. It's like writing letters and burning them." She tilted her head. "Would you want to watch? A private show. It's an insane thing to offer a stranger, I know that, I hear myself saying it."

"You're not a stranger," I said. "You're a woman whose broker's name I know."

"That's basically a blood oath."

"I'd watch," I said. "I'd watch anything you did down here, to be honest, I've been enjoying just watching you walk through that house for the last hour, but I'd especially watch that."

She smiled, slow this time, and reached over and pulled one of the folding chairs out from the front row and set it facing the stage, square in the middle, and patted the back of it.

"Front row, then," she said. "One seat, sold out, standing ovation encouraged." She hopped off the stage and walked past me toward the light switch, and as she passed she said, quietly, close to my ear, "Fair warning, Juan Lennon. The last scene I was working on is not a nice one. It's about a woman who talks a man into something he's never done before."

I sat down in the chair.

The lights dimmed to half and Tasha walked out into the gold pool of it like she'd been doing it her whole life, which she had, just never for anybody, and I want to say the transformation was subtle but it wasn't, it was total, the woman who'd been cracking jokes about brokers on the staircase was gone and somebody else had borrowed her body and her voice and was standing in the middle of the stage looking at the empty seats, at my one occupied seat, like I was both there and nowhere at all.

"Good evening," she said, and it wasn't her voice exactly, it was rounder, older somehow. "I've been alone now for nine years, which is a fact I tell people at parties because it makes them stop asking questions."

I didn't move. I'm a man who sat in guard towers for entire deployments, so I know how to be furniture, and I was furniture.

"Alone is the wrong word. Alone is what you are at the end of an evening, alone is a room with the door shut. I'm not alone, I'm unaccompanied, which is worse, because it implies an event. A wedding, a dinner, a funeral, my own birthday, and me arriving and standing at the edge of it like a woman reading a menu in a restaurant she can't afford." She paced two steps left, two steps right, the tape marks catching her eye, and I had the feeling she wasn't deciding where to walk, she was walking the way a river walks, downhill, inevitable. "And here's the part nobody wants to hear. I like it. I like it so much it frightens me. I like coming home and not speaking. I like that the silence in my apartment has a shape now, I know its corners, I could draw you a map of my own loneliness like it's a place I own, like it's property, and God help me, I've listed it, I've staged it, I've held open houses in it every Sunday for nine years and nobody's ever made an offer."

She stopped center stage and the silence went on a beat longer than was comfortable and then a beat longer than that, and I realized with something like awe that she was doing it on purpose, that she was willing to stand there and let the dead air rot in front of a stranger because she trusted the material, and the material, it turned out, could carry it.

"That's the piece," she said, and her own voice came back, lighter, tired. "It's called Open House, because I have no shame." She wiped her face with the heel of her hand like she was clearing something off it. "Notes welcome. You're the entire review board."

"You held it too long," I said, "the silence," and she laughed, an actual laugh, not the staircase laugh.

"That's the note everyone gives. You're supposed to hold it longer, is the answer. The audience hates it. That's why I don't have an audience."

"That's a terrible business model."

"It's a terrible everything model." She was rummaging in a milk crate by the stage steps, pulling out a water bottle, half a roll of tape. "I've got one more. It's shorter. It's newer. It's the one I warned you about, actually, so if you want to call it a night and go back to admiring the water damage upstairs, now's the time, no hard feelings."

"I'm not going anywhere," I said, and it came out flatter than I meant it to, and she looked at me over the water bottle, and whatever she saw there, she nodded at it, once, and clicked the second work light on so the stage went white instead of gold, and the white was worse somehow, it was clinical, it was like the difference between a bedroom and an examining room, and she stepped into it and stood very still.

Then she spoke, quiet, almost conversational, like she was telling me a secret across a bar instead of across forty empty folding chairs.

"There's a thing I want," she said. "It's not a big thing. It's not the thing people think it is. People think desire is loud, they think it kicks the door in, they write whole movies about it kicking the door in. Mine knocks. Mine has always knocked and waited on the porch like a man selling something, and I open the door and I look at it and I say, not today, and I close the door, and I go back to my list of things that are safe, and the list is short, and the list is getting shorter every year, and the thing on the porch, whatever it is, whatever it's been all this time, it never leaves. It just sits down on the step. It gets comfortable. It knows my address."

She turned her face to the white light and closed her eyes.

"And last spring I caught myself leaving the porch light on for it. Just on. Nothing more. I told myself it was for the mailman. It was not for the mailman."

She opened her eyes and looked directly at me, the one occupied seat, and held it, and I understood that this was the scene, that the looking was the scene, that she'd built the whole thing to arrive at a woman in a white light looking at a man in a folding chair and telling the truth at him, and that she'd written it before I existed, and that it didn't matter, because right now, tonight, it was mine.

"That's the piece," she said, and the light clicked off and the gold came back and she stood in it breathing a little hard, like she'd carried something heavy down twenty steps and set it on the stage between us.

I didn't clap right away, because clapping felt like the wrong size for the room, and then I did anyway, slow, and she bowed, an actual bow, deep and formal and completely unserious