Great House by Nicole Krauss Read Free Book Online Page A

up behind me, closed the book, put his two hands on my shoulders and held them strongly there while staring fixedly into my eyes, as if he had just applied glue to the bottom of my feet and needed to hold me in place, applying steady pressure until it dried.
    That was the end of the ficus, but it was not the end of my agitation. No, I suppose you could say it was just the beginning. One afternoon I was alone in the house. S was at work, and I had just come back from an exhibition of paintings by R. B. Kitaj. I made myself lunch, and as I sat down to eat I heard the shrill laughter of a child. The sound of it, its closeness and something else, something somber and unsettling behind that little ascension of notes, made me drop my sandwich and stand so suddenly that my chair fell back. I hurried into the living room and then the bedroom. I don’t know what I expected to find; both were empty. But the window next to our bed was open, and leaning out I saw a boy, no more than six or seven, disappearing alone down the block, pulling a small green wagon behind him.
    I remember now that it was that spring that Daniel Varsky’s couch began to rot. One afternoon I forgot to close the window before I went out, and a storm blew up and soaked the sofa. A few days later itstarted to give off a terrible stench, the smell of mold, but something else too, a sour, festering smell as if the rain had unloosed something foul hidden in its depths. The super removed it, grimacing at the smell, the sofa on which Daniel Varsky and I had once kissed all those years ago, and it too sat dejectedly on the street until the garbagemen came for it.
    Some nights later I woke suddenly out of a cavernous dream that took place in an old dance hall. For a moment I was unsure of where I was, and then I turned and saw S sleeping beside me. I was comforted for a moment until I looked closer and saw that instead of human skin he seemed to be covered in a tough gray hide like that of a rhinoceros. I saw it so clearly that even now I can remember the exact look of that scaly gray skin. Not quite awake and not quite asleep, I became frightened. I wanted to touch him myself to be certain of what I saw, but I was afraid to wake the beast lying next to me. So I closed my eyes and eventually fell asleep again, and the fear of S’s skin became a dream about finding my father’s body washed up on the shore like a dead whale’s, only instead of being a whale it was a decomposing rhinoceros, and in order to move it I had to stab it deeply enough that my spear would lodge there, allowing me to drag the body along behind me. But no matter how hard I drove the spear into the rhino’s flank I couldn’t get it in deeply enough. In the end, the decomposing corpse found its way to the sidewalk outside the apartment where the diseased ficus and the rotting couch had also been discarded, but by this time it had morphed again and when I looked down at it from our fifth-floor window, I realized that what I took to be a rhinoceros was the body of the lost, decomposing poet Daniel Varsky. The next day, passing the super in the lobby, I thought I heard him say, You make good use of death. I stopped and spun around. What did you say? I demanded. He looked me over calmly, and I thought I saw the hint of a smirk at the corners of his mouth. They’re fixing the roof on the tenth, he said. Lots of noise, he added, and clanged the gate of the service elevator shut.
    My work continued to go badly. I wrote more slowly than I ever had before, and continued to second-guess what I’d written, unable to escape the feeling that all I’d written in the past had been wrong, misguided, a kind of enormous mistake. I began to suspect that instead of exposing the hidden depths of things, as all along I’d supposed I was doing, perhaps the opposite was true, that I’d been hiding behind the things I wrote, using them to obscure a secret lack, a deficiency I’d