The Hundred-Year House by Rebecca Makkai Read Free Book Online Page A

gone, leaving his door closed but unlocked. It was lucky, but it also meant he’d be back: For years he’d done all his writing in his office at night. She had an hour though, at least.
    His computer was on, as she’d hoped. The air-conditioning blasted. The rumor, according to Chantal, was that he kept the room cold so he could see the girls’ nipples through their shirts.
    “Has anyone reported it?” Zee had asked.
    “Oh, it’s just what the kids say. How would they prove something like that?”
    Zee jiggled the mouse to wake the computer, and went online, relieved that his Internet was even hooked up. Cole was largely computer illiterate, using his new, department-purchased iMac for nothing more than typing.
    She spent the next hour downloading the most explicit free pornography she could find. She was careful to avoid anything potentially illegal (as much as she loathed Cole, she didn’t want him arrested), but focused on college-aged girls, on sites that claimed “She Just Turned 18 and She’s Wet for You!” The downloading was painfully slow, but she managed to save thirty pictures in a folder labeled “Photoedit”—easy enough to find if someone was searching, but nothing Cole would notice himself.
    It was funny: As she slunk out the door, she felt some feminist guilt over the pornography itself, the girls who probably weren’t eighteen at all but sixteen with drug problems, but she felt no moral guilt about the act of sabotage, about advancing her husband’s career by less than legitimate means. She felt less like Machiavelli than Robin Hood, taking from the rich and giving to the poor. And helping the department, too, and the students. Cole was a parasite, a toxin, a cancer cell. Zee wasn’t upsetting the universe, but balancing it.
    —
    She did the same thing on Thursday, when Cole simply left his office unlocked for the night, and again the following Wednesday. It would look better if they were downloaded on more than one occasion—less like sabotage, more like porn addiction.
    Meanwhile, she told the following story to her classes, to Chantal, to three different colleagues, and to all the college students she could find who’d stayed in town as lab assistants or nannies: “You won’t believe this, but I’ve heard one of oursummer kids has Cole using the Internet! He needed to buy pants, but he hates running into students in the stores, so apparently this lovely young woman showed him how to shop online at L.L.Bean. Really she did it for him, but he was sitting right there. He was worried about getting lost on the Internet, so she showed him the ‘Home’ button. He goes, ‘So I just click my heels together three times?’ He said he was going to look up White Sox scores. I think he might be hooked!”
    Her colleagues believed it, even Chantal believed it, because despite Zee’s abiding hatred for the man, she’d been careful never to say a quotable word against him, careful to throw him an acerbic line when she passed his office.
    If anyone teased Cole about online shopping he’d respond that he never used the Internet—but they’d take it as another of his jokes, more crustiness on top of the crust that was Cole.
    —
    On Sheridan Road, the traffic was stopped. No way to turn her Subaru around. She waited and cursed her luck and tried to see what kind of flashing lights those were, so far ahead.
    When the cars finally oozed forward, she rubbernecked with everyone else. A fire truck, and, in front of it, a little black BMW, its hood charred and smoldering. No collision, no dents. Just one of those burst-into-flame scenarios.
    She wouldn’t have recognized the man who sat folded on the curb, head in his hands, if it weren’t for the blue medical boot on his foot, the crutches stacked neatly at his side.

15
    D oug turned in Melissa Calls the Shots just twelve days overdue, and after he’d finished some quick revisions for Frieda he received an actual two thousand dollar check in the