apparently had something to do with the poetry she read aloud describing Adam’s conversation with God: “‘In solitude / What happiness, who can enjoy alone / Or all enjoying, what contentment find?’ Can you hear that?” she asked. “He’s asking God how a person can be content alone.”
With her voice veering from angry to elegiac, she sounded as if she were narrating stories brought to mind by family photographs, the actors all intimates, their deeds still full of consequence and culpability. At the end of an hour or sometimes two, as Nate sat at her kitchen table drinking tea or stood in the doorway to go, rather than offering him some blandishment or goodbye, she would announce without transition what she saw in his expression.
Once, she said, “Boredom is easy. Which is why sadness hides there so readily. But don’t be fooled for long. Dying of boredom. There’s reason behind that idiom. It’ll kill you sure enough.”
Her peculiar affect freed him to ask things he otherwise wouldn’t.
“What if I don’t meet someone?”
“Then you won’t. And that will be the condition under which you’ll live. But remember: people won’t save you.”
Each time, on his way to and from her house, Nate would pause at the top of the hill to see if there were any signs of life down at the big house along the river, a car in the driveway or a light on inside. No for sale sign had appeared in the yard and yet there was still no evidence anyone lived there. Since that first day, he hadn’t been able to get the place out of his mind.
Finally, on the last Friday in May, after Ms. Graves had rattled on till nearly six and Nate had left more tired than usual by her river of words, he decided there would be nothing wrong with having another look. And so he headed down the slope in the rich light of the spring evening, the grass beneath him freshly cut. Mounted on the corner of the garage, he noticed a surveillance camera and wondered if it fed its images to a screen in the house or to some security firm’s office hundreds of miles away.
He passed out of its range, walking around the far end of the mansion which consisted of a glassed-in sunroom, unfurnished, with an open-air deck above. At the rear, a brick terrace extended onto the lawn, which ran forty yards or so down to the riverbank. Nate looked through one of the smaller rear windows into a pantry lined with bare white shelves. Next to that was a room whose perfectly polished wood floors glinted in the sun. He came to a set of French doors off the kitchen, which was a huge space with a slate counter island, two stoves, two sinks, and a double-wide fridge. In the corner stood a small wooden table with one chair, dwarfed by the room they had been placed in.
There were no cameras that he could see along this stretch of the house. He tried the door handle. To his surprise, it moved smoothly downward, the door coming open a few inches. He shut it again immediately, terrified of setting off an alarm.
A minute or two passed and he heard nothing.
What harm could it do, he thought. No one was here and he wasn’t going to steal anything. He cracked the door just wide enough to listen. No sound but the hum of the fridge.
As soon as he stepped into the kitchen and closed the door behind him, he could feel blood rushing to his head from the excitement. He walked to the counter and paused there to listen again. The room smelled of wood wax and cleaning fluid. Moving farther into the house, he crossed the marble floor of the front hall and proceeded into a room nearly as large as the downstairs of his entire house. The outsize fireplace had no grate in it and its mantel was bare. Beyond this was the room with the couch placed at an angle facing the giant TV in the corner. The beer bottle he’d seen on that first day that he’d peered through the windows was gone and there was a stack of files on the floor.
He had never trespassed before. He had no idea it could be so exhilarating, all his senses alive with anticipation. The fear of being caught was close to exquisite. And who was it that lived like this? What kind of life did it