The Night Villa Read online

  Once, when Ely had locked himself in his study to meditate and chant, I pressed my ear to the door to listen to what he was chanting. At first all I heard was a low rhythmic hum and then, when I realized there were words beneath the hum, I couldn’t recognize their language. I thought for a moment that he’d added speaking in tongues to his repertoire of miracles, but as I listened I realized he was chanting three repeated lines of Greek hexameter verse. It took me another hour to transcribe and translate the three lines. I don’t know what I was expecting. A summoning of Satan? A prayer for help? An invocation to the dead? Certainly not these three questions:

  Where did I go wrong today?

  What did I accomplish?

  What obligation did I not perform?

  Later I found out that they were a fragment from a Pythagorean text called The Golden Verses—reputedly the lost work of Pythagoras, or possibly a third-century-AD forgery. Practitioners of Pythagoreanism were supposed to ask themselves these three questions every night. I never came across a classical reference to using them as a chant. That must have been an innovation of the Tetraktys, the particular Pythagorean cult that Ely had joined.

  I hadn’t thought about the questions in years, but when I opened my eyes in St. David’s Hospital I could have sworn that the sweet red-haired nurse standing over me in her surgical green scrubs asked me, “Where did you go wrong today?”

  I tried to answer—I was pretty sure the right answer was “By getting out of bed”—but I discovered that my mouth was taped shut. Two vertical lines, like quotation marks, creased the young woman’s brow and, consulting her chart, she tried another question.

  “What did you accomplish?”

  She smiled at the end of this one as if we were sharing a joke. “Getting myself shot” was one obvious answer, but then the other possibilities—getting Barry Biddle killed and Odette Renfrew shot—pushed up my throat and struggled against the plastic and tape strapped over my mouth until I could feel myself choking.

  The nurse reached over my head where a crescent moon gleamed in the pale green light and performed some motion that released a stream of hot molten silver into my veins. I could taste it at the back of my throat. When her face reappeared above me, she looked weary and many years older as she posed the third question.

  “What obligation did you not perform?”

  Although I couldn’t speak I found I could move my head slightly up and down—a motion that caused me great pain but brought a beatific smile to the nurse’s face. Yes, I imagined her thinking, you see where you failed! If only you had heeded the portents and signs! The code of rings, the message of the tower, the sign of fire in Odette’s skin! Only a blind person could have failed to see what was coming! The nurse turned to summon an audience for my confession. I didn’t mind, I was prepared to come clean, it was a relief really, but when a trio of masked men arrived at my bed I found my courage failed me. What good did it do to confess my sins now? What good did it do Odette and Barry? I tried to convey an expression of regret before I sank back into the embrace of darkness that lay like a cave beneath my rib cage. A place I could see, by the tubes attached there, had been hollowed out in a vain attempt to lighten my burden of guilt.

  The next time I woke up my aunt M’Lou was there. The tape was gone from my mouth, but tubes still ran from below my ribs to a pump beneath me that gurgled and rasped like a giant mouth sucking in seawater. I told her that a nurse had been there asking me questions.

  “Yeah, honey, that’s what they’re trained to do. They just wanted to see if you knew your name and all. Do you? Remember your name?” She smiled to make a joke of it, but I could see she was dead serious.

  “Sophia Anastasia Chase,” I told her, surprised my lips could still fit around the syllables. “Who could forget being saddled with a name like that? Thank God you made the nuns just call me Sophie.”

  “Well, I’d had experience dodging ‘Mary Margaret Louise.’” M’Lou stroked my forehead just like she used to brush the hair off my brow when I had a fever. “You were lucky, Sophie. If that bullet hadn’t first gone through the back of Dale Henry’s head and two inches of mahogany table it would have shattered your chest. As it is, it broke two ribs and punctured one lung. But you’re going to be fine. You just have to try a little to get better.”

  “Dale Henry turned the gun on himself? So Agnes is okay?”

  She nodded. “Agnes is fine, but her daddy swooped her on back to Sweetwater—out of the big bad city. She’s called me every day to see how you were doing.”

  I try to ask about the others—Barry and Odette—but the whirlpool beneath my bed is sucking too hard on my chest. M’Lou sees that I’m having to struggle and calls in a nurse. She reaches above my head and I realize what I’d thought was the crescent moon is really an IV bag. She injects something into the tube that runs into my arm and I feel that same rush of silver through my veins and taste the metal at the back of my throat. M’Lou squeezes my hand and locks her eyes on mine, making the same two promises she made to me when I was ten and my mother died and my dour German-Catholic grandparents adopted me. “I’m sticking around,” she says. “We’re going to get through this together.”

  I nod, but I still have to ask. I manage just the name. “Odette?”

  I see M’Lou’s lips move but I can’t hear her over the roar of the whirlpool. I can only make out the word questions.

  I knew then that the Charybdis beneath my bed was sucking me down into Hades and that the three questions were a test to get past the ferryman. If I could answer them correctly I could go down and bring someone back. I hated knowing I might have to choose between Barry and Odette because I knew that Odette would insist I take Barry even if he was an idiot. But still, having to make a hard choice was better than not having a choice at all. I just had to figure out where I had gone wrong.

  So I spent whatever time I was conscious—and some time I suspect I wasn’t—trying to identify the crucial moment that I started down the wrong path. I thought it might have been when I found Agnes chewing her cuticles outside my office door. I should have sat down right next to her on the dirty linoleum floor and asked her what was wrong. To hell with the interview, I imagined myself saying, we’re going to call my lawyer friend Mary Ellen right now and get an order of protection sworn out against this Dale fellow. The details of what would have happened after that remained a little hazy in my head. Each time I thought I had it all figured out a nurse would come in and, mistaking my moans of anguished conscience for pain, give me a shot of morphine.

  The whirlpool would open up then, threatening to pull me into its maw. Could I really assign the moment of error to ignoring Agnes’s problems with Dale? Wasn’t there an underlying reason for my callous disregard of her emotional crisis? A root cause? I could feel the whirlpool pulling me back in time. In the perpetual artificial day of my hospital room, I felt myself slipping back to the last, and only, time I’d been hospitalized before. Only then I had been in the maternity ward.

  That first time Ely and I had slept together had come as a surprise. Neither of us had birth control. So I’d counted back the days to my last period and decided it was too late in my cycle to get pregnant. I was wrong. By Christmas I knew I was pregnant. When I told Ely he said that some of the greatest discoveries in the history of math and science had been made through error. Why shouldn’t we have a baby conceived in error? That I was in my first year of grad school and he hadn’t even graduated college yet weren’t good enough reasons not to celebrate the random. He wanted to take some time off before going to grad school anyway. So he got a job at the Harry Ransom Center, the university’s rare-book library, and moved into my Hyde Park bungalow. Clare, the psych major, said she’d been thinking of moving to a feminist co-op across town in Clarksville. Before she left she sat me down on the glider on the porch and asked me if I was sure I knew what I was doing. Was it because my grandparents had raised me a Catholic and I thought abortion was a sin? Was it because my mothe
r had me when she was only seventeen and if she hadn’t let her parents talk her out of an abortion I wouldn’t be here? Or was it because I wanted to relive my mother’s story, only this time keep the baby and not let some crazy religious fanatics get ahold of it thus rewriting my own childhood crisis of abandonment?

  After swearing to myself I’d never tell another soul about my childhood, I asked if she would please make sure she returned M’Lou’s truck when she had finished moving her stuff. Then I went inside and translated Horace until she finished packing and left, reassuring myself that Clare had it all wrong. I wasn’t trying to relive my mother’s story—she’d been seventeen when she got pregnant with me and I was twenty-four. And she’d been sleeping with so many men that she didn’t know who my father was. My grandmother believed he was Hispanic because of my coloring, or maybe, she’d add ominously, a Jew. My mother had had no plan beyond dropping me off with friends while she cocktail waitressed at night, which quickly evolved into dropping me off at my grandparents’ when she wanted to go to a concert or to Santa Fe to sell jewelry. She left me there more and more until I was ten and she drowned tubing on the San Marcos River during a seven-year flood—an act so silly and frivolous it was as if she didn’t even want to be taken seriously in death. I wasn’t anything like her. I had a teaching assistantship, a scholarship, and, most of all, Ely. And my grandmother had been dead for three years, my grandfather for two, so there was no question of dumping our baby with them.

  Ely and I settled into the little house as though burrowing down for the kind of northeastern weather Ely was used to instead of the brief cold snap that Austin called winter. I had a desk in an alcove off the front porch and Ely took Clare’s old room for a study. I traded my creaky old futon for a real bed with a box spring. When the baby came, it would sleep with us. We bought books on attachment parenting and breastfeeding at Starwoman, the New Age bookstore just down the block. The campus shuttle let Ely off right by the store and he often stopped there on his way home and bought me something—a crystal to hang in the window or a scented candle. He poked gentle fun at the lesbians who ran the shop and their Wiccan beliefs.

  “You know we’re living in a New Age triangle,” he pointed out on one of our evening walks. We’d fallen into such routines quickly, as if we were an old married couple who’d been living together for fifty years. “There’s Starwoman’s on Forty-third Street; that Jungian bookstore, Archetypes, over on Guadalupe; and then this place.”

  He was pointing to a house on the corner we were passing. It looked like all the other clapboard bungalows in the neighborhood that had been shipped west on railroad cars during the Depression, only this one was a little better cared for than the student rentals—the paint fresh, the grass neatly trimmed—and instead of a street number painted on the front porch there was a triangle made up of ten dots.

  “What is that?”

  “A tetraktys,” Ely told me. “It’s a Pythagorean symbol. There’s something strange going on here. I think this place is some kind of church.”

  “Maybe the owner’s a math teacher,” I said. “What makes you think it’s a church?”

  “Look at all the cars,” he said.

  I glanced up and down Avenue H and saw what he meant. The street was lined with cars all the way down to 38th Street, but there was no sound of a party coming from any of the neighboring houses. The double-wide driveway to the Triangle House (as I’d already started to think of it) was packed like a parking lot.

  “I’m surprised they can all fit in there,” I said, looking toward the house. Then I realized what Ely meant by strange. The windows of the house were completely dark. Not a crack of light seeped out, nor any sound. The Church of the Tetraktys was packed with silent congregants praying in the dark.

  The night was mild, but still I shivered. “How creepy,” I said, turning away from the darkened house.

  “I don’t know,” Ely said, lingering behind me. “The lack of light and sound probably make it easier to concentrate. Pythagoras said that his disciples should be silent for five years while they absorbed his teaching.”

  Of course we’d discussed Pythagoras before, but I think this was the first time I heard Ely cite a saying of the philosopher as if he were quoting a prophet. Was that the moment when things began to change? Would I have been able to make a difference if I had paid closer attention to Ely, if I had noticed that the books he brought home from Starwoman were no longer on childbirth and natural parenting but instead were about reincarnation and numerology?

  But my focus had turned inward that spring, as if the baby needed all my attention just to grow. Outside the world was bursting with color. Our unmown yard was a riot of evening primrose and bluebonnets, wisteria and coral vine crept over the roof and hung like a curtain in front of the glider, turning the porch into a fragrant grotto. On our evening walks the air was scented with mimosa and night-blooming jasmine. We talked less and less on the walks, a silence I thought of as companionable. When we came home I didn’t want to disturb that communion, not even with the buzz of electricity. I’d move around the house lighting candles that released their Eastern perfume—sandalwood, pachouli, myrrh—into the southwestern night. I said prayers of thanksgiving to each flame while Ely withdrew into his study. To prep for his finals, I thought. Sometimes I would hear him humming. I thought it was a sign of how intent he was on his work.

  One day at the end of the semester I walked to the campus. It was only June but the temperature was already in the eighties. I could have taken the shuttle, but I’d grown a little alarmed at how much weight I’d gained with the pregnancy, so I thought I could use the exercise. I was dropping off a paper at the Classics Department—it was on the lawsuit waged by a Roman slave named Petronia Iusta to regain her freedom, a paper on which I got an A+ and later formed the basis of my thesis—and then I thought I’d surprise Ely at the library. I had just gotten my check for my teaching assistantship and figured we could splurge on lunch out at Les Amis.

  The library was blessedly cool after my long walk in the heat. It was built of the same limestone as most buildings on the campus, the thick yellow walls imprinted with the fossils of ancient seashells, and kept dim to protect the valuable manuscripts and photographs in the collection. Ely was lucky to have gotten the job here, I thought as I took the elevator up to the fourth floor, it was the kind of plum university clerical post that Austin slackers kept for decades. Not that he’d need it for that long. I was sure he’d get into the graduate program here at the university and be offered a teaching assistantship, but it was a good job to have in the meantime and in a way I envied him. There had been many days this spring, standing in front of a poorly air-conditioned classroom full of first-year Latin students, that I would have preferred being immured within the library’s calcareous carapace.

  It was so chilly, in fact, that the receptionist on the fourth floor was wearing a cardigan and drinking a mug of hot tea. It was like I had wandered into the Cotswolds.

  “Hey,” I said, “Noreen, isn’t it? Is Ely in the stacks?”

  “Ely gave up his Wednesday hours a month ago,” she said, blowing on her tea and looking embarrassed.

  I pretended that I’d gotten the wrong day. Then I pretended that he’d told me about the change of schedule but it had slipped my mind.

  “Pregnancy hormones,” I told Noreen, and then asked to use the bathroom.

  I threw up for the first time since my first trimester. The only explanation I could imagine for Ely changing his schedule without telling me was that he was sleeping with someone else. I rifled through the people we knew—the Classics and Math students, neighbors and shopkeepers—and my brain latched on to the checker at our food co-op. I’d noticed lately that she always bagged our groceries when Ely was there—and Wheatsville was a strictly bag-your-own establishment. She never bagged my groceries when I went in alone. She also worked at Starwoman. Maybe she was the reason Ely was always lingering there on his way home. In fact, I’d
seen her coming and going from an apartment near Ely’s shuttle stop on Speedway. It would have been easy for Ely to stop at her place on his way home.

  I left the HRC without saying good-bye to the receptionist and without stopping for a sip of water at the cooler even though my mouth was as dry as dust. Outside the day had grown sultry and humid. A green pall hung over the live oak and pecan trees and the air smelled like grackle droppings and sulfur. I got on a shuttle but its swaying made me feel sick so I got off at the first stop and set off walking north at a quick clip. I remembered that Ely had taken his bicycle with him today instead of riding the shuttle. Would he be careless enough to leave it outside the girl’s apartment? And if he had would I have the courage to knock on her door? I imagined myself standing there, big-bellied and sweating, and realized what a spectacle I was making of myself. But I couldn’t stop. I walked faster and faster, ignoring the first drops of rain and the wind that picked up the fluffy white spores from the cottonwood trees and set them flying around me like snowflakes.