built the house right on top of the road. Just, plop, right in the middle of the road. Kind of like he came walking up the road with the house on his back, got tired, and just dropped it.”
“Not very good feng shui,” Pete says.
Pete has read a book. He’s got a theory about picking up women, which he’s always sharing with us. He goes to Barnes & Noble on his lunch hour and hangs around in front of displays of books about houses and decorating, skimming through architecture books. He says it makes you look smart and just domesticated enough. A man looking at pictures of houses is sexy to women.
We’ve never asked if it works for him.
Meanwhile, we know, Pete’s wife is always after him to go up on the roof and gut the drains, reshingle and patch, paint. Pete isn’t really into this. Imaginary houses are sexy. Real ones are work.
He did go buy a mirror at Pottery Barn and hang it up, just inside the front door, because otherwise, he said, evil spirits go rushing up the staircase and into the bedrooms. Getting them out again is tricky.
The way the mirror works is that they start to come in, look in the mirror, and think a devil is already living in the house. So they take off. Devils can look like anyone—salespeople, Latter-day Saints, the people who mow your lawns—even members of your own family. So you have to have a mirror.
Ed says, “Where the house is, is the first weird thing. The second thing is the house. It’s like this team of architects went crazy and sawed two different houses in half and then stitched them back together. Casa Del Guggenstein. The front half is really old—a hundred years old—the other half is aluminum siding.”
“Must have brought down the asking price,” Jeff says.
“Yeah,” Ed says. “And the other thing is there are all these doors. One at the front and one at the back and two more on either side, right smack where the aluminum siding starts, these weird, tall, skinny doors, like they’re built for basketball players. Or aliens.”
“Or palm trees,” Bones says.
“Yeah,” Ed says. “Sure. Palm trees. And then one last door, this vestigial door, up in the master bedroom. Not like a door that you walk through, for a closet, or a bathroom. It opens and there’s nothing there. No staircase, no balcony, no point to it. It’s a Tarzan door. Up in the trees. You open it and an owl might fly in. Or a bat. The previous tenant left that door locked—apparently he was afraid of sleepwalking.”
“Fantastic,” Brenner says. “Wake up in the middle of the night and go to the bathroom, you could just pee out the side of your house.”
He opens up the last beer and shakes some pepper in it. Brenner has a thing about pepper. He even puts it on ice cream. Pete swears that one time at a party he wandered into Brenner’s bedroom and looked in a drawer in a table beside the bed. He says he found a box of condoms and a pepper mill. When we asked what he was doing in Brenner’s bedroom, he winked and then put his finger to his mouth and zipped his lip.
Brenner has a little pointed goatee. It might look silly on some people, but not on Brenner. The pepper thing sounds silly, maybe, but not even Jeff teases Brenner about it.
“I remember that house,” Alibi says.
We call him Alibi because his wife is always calling to check up on him. She’ll say, So was Alec out shooting pool with you the other night, and we’ll say, Sure he was, Gloria. The problem is that sometimes Alibi has told her some completely different story and she’s just testing us. But that’s not our problem and that’s not our fault. She never holds it against us and neither does he.
“We used to go up in the orchards at night and have wars. Knock each other down with rotten apples. There were these peacocks. You bought the orchard house?”
“Yeah,” Ed says. “I need to do something about the orchard. All the apples are falling off the trees and then they just rot on the ground. The peacocks eat them and get drunk. There are drunk wasps, too. If you go down there you can see the wasps hurtling around in these loopy lines and the peacocks grab them right out of the air. Little pickled wasp hors d’oeuvres.