I Hate to Leave This Beautiful Place (21 page)

I opened a lot of windows, put an LP of Chopin's nocturnes on the old-school record player, and stood for a moment at the entrance to the dining room, looking at the new shellacked floorboards I'd ordered to replace the bloodstained boards. I looked at the houseplants that university colleagues had delivered. I set my Olivetti down on the dining room table. Facing the corner of the dining room where the bodies had been found, I began typing letters. I wrote to William in Hawaii; Stuart and Caren in Michigan; Rick and Rhea in Vermont; Bill and Trish in Vermont; Alexandra in Vermont; David in California; Mr. and Mrs. Malraux in Paris; Peter on Long Island; Jerry and Diane in California; my old ornithology professor Dr. Cleveland in Vancouver; Melissa Church in Seattle; Michael in Toronto; Deborah in Woodstock, New York; Michael, a portraitist of birds in St. Johns, Newfoundland; my college friend Richard in Florida; Mona in Paris; my mother, Estella, in Michigan.

I do not fully understand why I went on such an epistolary binge—all told, perhaps thirty letters, the briefest five single-spaced pages and some as long as twenty. Naturally, besides the fact that letter writing had always helped organize my emotions, I trusted that my friends would tolerate moodiness, outright despair, exhausted humor, philosophical nonsense, and everything else. I was drinking espresso after espresso; letters were stacking up next to the typewriter; I switched from Chopin to Bach's compositions for cello and works by Kodály, all performed by János Starker—these selections obviously not seeking ebullience but rather an accompaniment to melancholy. Sleep was out of the question. Letter after letter after letter.

At around three
A.M.
, with cicadas whining in the enormous tulip poplar tree in the front yard, which especially during high winds I had always felt was too close to the house, I was suddenly famished and—quite surprised to have an appetite at all—decided to make spaghetti, which in any season I considered comfort food. With the heat and humidity still coming in through the nighttime screens, I started to boil water in a big pot and took some spicy meatballs out of the freezer. I opened a bottle of red wine. The recipe would be makeshift. I emptied a can of tomatoes into a saucepan and added tomato paste and spices.

All of this had great possibilities, I felt, and then, as the saying goes,
right
out of nowhere
—this is impossible to capture—I “felt” something was terribly wrong in the house. Not that something terribly wrong
had
occurred; needless to say, I already understood that. No, the definite sensation, but with an indeterminate source, was of something occurring.
In progress. What is more, I had suddenly contracted a blistering headache. What else could I do but question my own exhaustion. Was I thinking clearly? What trick was my mind playing? No matter, no matter. I stopped cooking and—again, I cannot pinpoint the reason—was drawn upstairs to my third-floor attic study.

I switched on the desk lamp and immediately noticed a novel on the floor. I cannot recall the title, but the author was Penelope Fitzgerald. How odd, I thought, because whenever I left for the summer, I would without fail clear my desk, file away papers, put pens and pencils in a jar, everything neat and clean and in its own place. Yet here was a novel on the floor.

I picked it up and absent-mindedly flipped through the pages. I stopped at an arrow pointing from a passage Reetika Vazirani had underlined to her comment in the margin:
How could she write sentences like this? She should be pilloried on the TV news. It
can't be forgiven.
I thought that this might have been laughable, evidence of a critical mind in high dudgeon or an exasperated bitchiness, yet given the circumstances, I had to sit down.

Turning the swivel chair to face the desk, I went through the novel page by page, discovering numerous underlined sentences and seemingly endless comments, some tactful and erudite, most expressing over-the-top outrage and dismissal of all worth. The inventory of suggested punishments for “poor sentences” was truly mind-boggling.

Sitting there, I happened to glance at the bookended line of upright black notebooks I had filled. Tucked in among them was a much smaller, squarish notebook. As I eventually discovered, this was one of thirty-three three-by-five-inch black notebooks that Reetika Vazirani had hidden throughout the house. Ultimately they required a macabre sort of treasure hunt whose negative reward was a gut-wrenching and permanently regretful reading experience. In that one notebook alone, amid drawings of Medusa heads, gargoyles, and clearly identifiable Hindu gods—some devouring children—were succinct rehearsals of the murder of her son, mentioning him by name. This writing was so penetratingly grotesque that all I could manage was to stumble down to the second-floor bathroom and vomit for a good half hour.

Given all this, it may sound unlikely to suggest that anything I found in one of her notebooks could offer the least solace. But as I knelt on the cold tiles (themselves soothing to the touch) I noticed, atop some magazines and books on a small shelf, a much larger blue notebook, a journal, and I opened it at random and read:

 

You have given me the greatest gift, to be led into a house full of light & comfort, paintings, photographs, cd's, tea, books books books I am at peace now.

This has been the greatest gift of all—to make a home like this

Perfectly suited for Jehan and me Two rooms to grow into (top floor)

5:30 up

6:30 Yoga

8:00 breakfast

read & write

1:00 lunch

laundry

4:00 Jehan napped till 7:00

squandered most of the time piddling

(a good day)

 

Which at first glance seemed addressed to my family, though it may have been a generalized, prayerful inventory. I just cannot know.

In that blue notebook—whose paper-clipped note cynically read
Save for Howard
—were theological and fantasy-erotic musings, literary quotations, accounts of dreams, arguments with a certain “Gremlin” (both sides of their dialogue recorded), professional to-do lists, domestic to-do lists. A lot of obsessive consideration was given to her “roller-coaster” experience of the humiliating vicissitudes and elusive rewards of a writing life: “My ambitions are poison.” To her quoting of Borges's “Life is truthful appearances,” she had added, “I prefer untruthful appearances.”

 

After I had recovered a little—I was less dizzy and had gotten to my feet—my clearest reasoning was, if there are two such notebooks, there might be others, and if there are others, I had better try and find them. I started out frantically and without design, moving through familiar rooms but motivated by something both unprecedented and completely alien to my sensibility, and felt within minutes that I was more or less ransacking my own house. I sat on Emma's bed (where Jehan had slept), taking deep breaths and understanding the need to ratchet things down to a slower, more methodical pace—and then got down on my hands and knees and found a second three-by-five notebook under the mattress. The specific hostility implied in that placement sickened me all over again. I went down to the kitchen to drink a glass of ice water. When I opened the freezer compartment to get some ice, there was a notebook; I hadn't noticed it earlier, there amid the cartons of sorbet, sticks of butter, containers of pasta, and bottles of vodka.

I extended my search to the living room, where I found a notebook between two big books about Matisse I'd bought in Vermont. And inside the piano bench were three notebooks held together by a rubber band. Later, upstairs in the guest room, I found a notebook under a New Testament Bible she had borrowed from a neighbor. In the utility closet a notebook waited on top of the vacuum cleaner.

I cannot bear to complete this search in writing here, except to say that I saw and read enough in the first six or seven notebooks to be more than convinced that I did not want to know what was in the rest. In time—and I will get to this later—I realized that certain passages in these notebooks forced themselves into my memory. It was as if they had immediately graffitied themselves on a blank wall in my brain. These obscene, insistent mnemonics were in the form of sentence fragments and every sort of bizarre non sequitur, each with its resident aspect of malignant aphorism and disconnect:

I have a devotional nature but my eye pencil draws tarantulas; I'm a chameleon selling my face; God is at the height of pretentiousness and balloon-faces shouldn't suffer that; take Pratma's Himalayan valium in order to talk
in rectangles; flee from the post-traumatic muse-snatcher; Yoga didn't dispel biting trees; Lord
I'm an unlucky detective; sleep in the kitchen but running low of jars to fill with unhappy days;
nobody but me realized Buddha came back as a drawer; all gratitudes are now Gremlins buying
organic for the church.
And:
inevitably I will derange my sanctuary.

At the end of that long day, did I suspect I would find more notebooks? There is no rhyme or reason to the fact that I didn't. I could have been quite wrong and my family may have suffered for it. I put the notebooks on the living room couch. It was still light outside. Through the window I noticed a few neighbors walking past, on their way to the bus or the metro, or to the local Starbucks for a coffee, or breakfast at the diner.

I gathered the notebooks into five separate groups and wrapped each in sheets of newspaper sealed with Scotch tape. I hated these notebooks; I'd never hated anything so much in my life; I was deeply embittered by them; I was shaking. I took them outside and burned them to ash in the garbage can in the alley that ran between the rectory and my house. Peering through a window in the rectory, an Indian priest (in whom Reetika Vazirani had confided her mental precariousness; oh, had he only anointed Jehan with an intervention) watched the proceedings. A gaggle of kids on their way to Lafayette Elementary walked over to the garbage can. One boy said, “That's a pretty cool idea,” as if I'd started a bonfire on a lark, and his buddy said, “Yeah, maybe I should toss in my stupid take-home quiz!” They went off down the block laughing and talking.

Unnerved but also definitely relieved, I went to the porch and sat for a while and listened to the staccato cooing of the pair of mourning doves that often perched next to each other on the telephone wire. When I went back inside the house, it felt as if I had reclaimed the very air—the light was lovely against the pastel floral patterns of the living room's overstuffed chairs and sofa. After half an hour of dreamless sleep, I awoke to a hopeful sense of lessened sorrow.

 

Before Jane and Emma returned to Washington, I sent a message to an ornithologist friend traveling in Arctic Canada around Hudson Bay to tell her what had happened. She responded right away to inform me that a Quagmiriut Inuit shaman named Petrus Nuqac, whom I had known decades earlier, was “still very much at work.” To my astonished gratitude, two days later Petrus Nuqac flew by mail plane and jetliner from Churchill, Manitoba, to Winnipeg, to Toronto, and then to Washington, D.C. This was an arduous journey, especially considering that Petrus had never before boarded an airplane of any sort, let alone left the Arctic. Having traveled and sat in airports for much of a day and a night, he arrived by taxi at the house at about eleven
A.M.
Roughly seventy years of age, he was wearing blue jeans, a white shirt, shoes and socks, and a light brown sports jacket—“like a European,” as he put it. His red-brown face was deeply furrowed. He had some English and I had some Inuit and we could communicate nicely.

After I served him scrambled eggs with lox, potatoes, and black coffee, we went out on the front lawn. On their lunch break, five or six girls from the parochial school, each wearing a uniform of plaid skirt, black shoes, and white blouse, stood on the sidewalk out front, curious as all get-out, as Petrus ceremoniously dug a hole and buried a caribou shoulder bone (how had he managed to get such a thing through customs?), traditionally used to fend off malevolent spirits, and offered a high-pitched, full-throated chant. Then Petrus and I sat on the front porch for a couple of hours.

A young parochial school boy, probably detouring from some assigned errand, stood on the bottom step leading up to the porch and said, “I heard you're an Eskimo.” Petrus walked over to him and shook his hand and said, “It took me three airplanes to get here from Canada.” I then called a taxi. And Petrus, carrying no luggage except a change of clothes in a plastic bag, left for National Airport.

Later in the autumn, Rabbi Gerry Serota and a few other close friends gathered in the dining room, and while there were no forms of exorcism in the Jewish religion appropriate to the occasion, Gerry had chosen compelling and beautiful Talmudic and Old Testament passages to read, and firmly instructed us to “not let someone else's sickness drive you from your own home.” That is just how he put it, and I was grateful for his candor. It went pretty well, given the stressfulness and tears and not a little resurrection of unease, and it was nice to then have some food and drink in the living room and laugh it up a bit. What Petrus and Gerry had offered was poignant and necessary; we'd take every form of blessing we could get. That night I went back to typing letters at the dining room table.

There's a strong superstition in parts of Nova Scotia that if you want to keep unwanted ghosts out, and wanted ghosts in, you should place a pair of scissors crosswise so that it keeps an attic window shut. Seven or eight hours after the rabbi's house-blessing, I went up to my third-floor study and fixed a scissors crosswise in the small window, it being the topmost window of the house.