blow-dryer. I thought of the fake eyelashes my mom peeled off after work and left on the coffee table in the living room. “Let’s not,” I said.
He made a face. “It can’t be that bad.”
“Our place is tiny. My mom will be all up in our business.” I hesitated. “Let’s go to yours instead.”
I waited for the sideways look, the one that would let me know I’d crossed a line. But he just flashed me a quick smile. “Sure,” he said. “Just promise me you won’t freak out.”
“I won’t freak out.”
His eyes were sad. “Yeah, you will. But that’s OK. I forgive you.”
This time, when we got to Tahoe City, instead of lingering in town, we changed buses and headed down the West Shore. Benny grew more and more animated the closer we got to his house, his limbs sprawling in every direction as he launched into an inscrutable lecture about comic book styles I’d never heard of.
And then, abruptly, he said, “OK, here,” and jumped up, signaling to the driver that we wanted to get off. The bus obligingly shuddered to a stop and ejected us out onto the icy road. I looked across the street at an endless-seeming river-rock wall, high enough to block the view, topped with iron spikes. Benny dashed across the road to the gate and punched a code into a box. The doors swung open for us, creaking as they scraped across the ice. Once we were inside, the afternoon grew suddenly quiet. I could hear the wind in the pine needles, the creak of the trees under their heavy mantle of snow. We trudged along the driveway until the mansion reared up before us.
I’d never seen a house like it before. It was the closest I’d ever come to a bona fide castle; and even though I knew it wasn’t that, exactly, it still gave off a foreign gravitas. It made me think of flappers and garden parties and shiny wooden boats speeding across the lake, and servants in uniforms serving up champagne in flat-bottomed crystal glasses.
“I don’t know what you thought I’d freak out about,” I said. “My house is bigger.”
“Haha.” He stuck out his tongue at me, pink and raw against his cold-flushed cheeks. “You should see my uncle’s place in Pebble Beach. This is nothing compared to that. Plus it’s so old. My mom is always complaining that it’s ancient and musty and she’s gonna redecorate, but I think it’s a lost cause. The house just wants to be what it is.” And then he ran up the steps and threw open the front door like it was just a normal house.
I followed him in and stopped just inside the entry. The inside of the house—well. My only comparison point, at that stage in my life, was the grand casinos of Las Vegas: the Bellagio, the Venetian, with all their gilt-veneered frippery, gargantuan tributes to trompe l’oeil. This was something far different: I didn’t know anything about the things surrounding me—the paintings, the furniture, the objets d’art cluttering the sideboards and bookshelves—and yet even in the gloom of that dark, cold entry I could tell that they glowed with authenticity. I wanted to touch everything, to feel the satin finish on the mahogany table and the distant chill of the porcelain urns.
From where I stood in the foyer, the house unfurled in every direction: a dozen doorways through which I glimpsed formal rooms and endless hallways and stone fireplaces so big you might park a car inside. When I looked up, to the ceiling that towered two stories above me, I could see wooden beams hand-stenciled with intertwining gold vines. The grand staircase that curled along the far wall was carpeted in scarlet and illuminated by an enormous brass chandelier dripping with crystal teardrops. Wood gleamed from every surface, carved and paneled and inlaid and polished until it almost looked alive.
Two portraits hung on the walls on either side of the grand staircase, giant oils of a man and a woman standing stiffly in formal wear, each staring disapprovingly at the other through the gilt of their respective frames. The paintings were the kind of thing that I’d look back at now and