An Aversion to Ladders 13b

Within twenty minutes Michael was barreling down the Dan Ryan Expressway. He pulled up in the driveway of the old family house and was surprised to find all the windows dark; it seemed odd his sister would not be at home on a school night. On getting out of the car, the brother straightened the realty sign in the yard before proceeding up the porch steps to the door. He felt under the flowerpot for the spare key; to his bewilderment it was missing. This was his only way into the house—as Miranda well knew. Confused, he circled the property to the backyard patio and discovered sliding doors had been fortuitously left unlatched. The ceiling in the den rumbled with a rhythmic noise, and following the discordance he passed through the dark living room to the foyer where a desk lamp on the bureau was switched on. It uncovered not only the spare house key lying in a glass ashtray but also the note he wrote Miranda several days earlier—still under the paperweight. It occurred to him that when he spoke to his sister over the phone the previous evening, she had no idea he was calling from a different town. He could not decipher the disturbance overhead, but it was probably his hyperactive nephew galloping around in one of the second floor bedrooms.

“Aaron…?” he called out.

The heavy tread stopped, as though issuing from exercise equipment.

It was only with a late thought the brother remembered about the boarder moving in; the lamp was turned off.

A door creaked upstairs. A muffled voice was heard. Or perhaps there were two voices. The whine of floorboards told the trespasser someone was sneaking his way. Michael retreated into deeper shadows, and was befuddled to see the muddy outline of a nude woman emerge at the stair rail above. She peered down into the foyer, but it was doubtful she could see him. He thought for a moment it was his sister, but surely Miranda would have recognized his voice. It had to be another woman—one who gained access to the house with the spare key while his sister was away. The “invalid” boarder apparently had a lover. The woman slowly melted from view, and shrinking away from the compromising details Michael sought a hasty exit.

The house in Stonesthrow he thought would be his new home (and maybe even his first home) was hardly built on bedrock, and in giving up the tenant house to lay claim to it he willingly burned a bridge, however inadequate a bridge it might have been. Yet the only other bridge at his rear flank, one he took for granted as always being there, was suddenly in danger, too. The brother could not say whether events taking place at his sister’s house bore any relation to his current struggles, but the idea his childhood home was invaded by strangers only added fuel to the fire in his brain. There could be no going home, even in the rudimentary sense of the word, and not simply because the spare house key was missing. In his hesitant embrace of change he had taken on more change than he bargained for.

With one sleeping option removed, Michael drove into The Loop in search of another. He walked into the lobby of Omar’s rundown hotel and felt its dire décor instantly pressing in on him. The burnished ceiling smelled of old pipe tobacco; candleholders, with long arthritic fingers of wax, drooped from the cornice. The visitor moved up to the front desk to find a row of security monitors nodding behind a counter. They were bulky relics from a bygone age of technology: clumsily heavy and impaired with cataracts. Cattycorner to them, a mangy stuffed owl beckoned with outstretched wings over a gloomy archway. A screw was missing from its brass plaque, though the inscribed words were just discernible in the low light:

The bird of prey was the most conspicuous creature on the premises, given its perch, but there were others. A huge display of stuffed animal heads covered every conceivable nook and cranny of the cherrywood walls. These were not your typical bucks with antlers, but large game animals, including buffalo, rhinoceroses, and wildebeests. They resembled paintings of Oudry rescued from the French salon and layers of darkening varnish. There was not enough room on the walls to accommodate them all, so some were stacked two deep between divans and fake roman busts.

The bell on the serpentine marble top desk was rung, whereupon an elderly, dapper man, pickled in odoriferous mothballs, came out of a back room. He looked like a funeral director summoned inconveniently from his dinner.

The man looked up, thinking he was being set up for a punch line. “We only have one room available at the moment, sir. On the top floor.”

The painter hesitated, but was anxious to see his friend. He placed his credit card on the counter.

The stoop-shouldered concierge finished up with a blue carbon slip. “Would you care to take advantage of our wakeup service, sir? Or our gentlemen’s library?”

The immaculate man paused to consider his words judiciously. “Videos, sir. Videos of a particular nature. This is a gentlemen’s hotel. We offer it as a service to our guests and residents.”

Michael strolled up to the rickety elevator, but was spared the confrontation when a familiar voice sprang from a darkened lounge.

The pals headed down the sidewalk to a favorite tavern, and on settling into a booth in the back the lawyer ordered a round of beers. He probed the painter’s mood. “What would compel you to turn up here looking for a bed?”

Michael rambled. “You should move to Stonesthrow. Keep me on the straight-and-narrow before I end up a homeless wino badgering people with a metal detector.”

The friend rolled his eyes. “Don’t pull that Van Gogh number on me. I don’t want you FedExing me your severed ear in some pity-grabbing attempt to make me feel guilty. What’s wrong?”

Michael burrowed down deeper into his mood. “I thought moving to a new town would be a healthy change, but everything is confused. A dream-come-true and a nightmare—all at the same time.” He took a sip of his wheat beer. “The caretaker’s child next door has gone missing. I dreamt about seeing her asleep the very night she disappeared from her bedroom. I may have even heard her scream. But I can attest to nothing given my sleepwalking. And now the police have searched my house. I think I’m their prime suspect…”

Omar swelled in his take-charge way. “You know, Mike, I knew this whole inheritance thing smelled fishy from the get-go. I’ve got a number of friends out in Hollywood, and they hear things. Know things.”

“Fox is launching a new reality TV show in January. I don’t know what the title of it will be, but I do know the premise. And I know they’re filming it—as we speak—somewhere in the greater Chicago vicinity.”

“The show is about scaring people. More to the point, it’s about setting up hidden cameras and microphones in a house somewhere and luring some poor unsuspecting sap into it with a phony story, then putting him through the paces with spooks, goblins, and the works.”

“Admit it. It’s an uncanny coincidence, isn’t it? Considering what you’ve just told me.”

“Well, listen, asshole. Check out the house when you go back home. The place may be wired to the rafters.” He rattled off a to-do list. “Check your light fixtures, behind mirrors, your phone… But be careful about it. If they think you’re on to them, they might try something like sending another squad car by your house to cow you. They’ll make you think you’re under police surveillance.”

“I’m already under surveillance.” Michael was dreary for effect. “The police told me not to leave town. They may have even followed me up from Stonesthrow.”

“If they show up, we’ll say you came to consult with your lawyer. Don’t worry. I’ll come down in a couple of days and sort it all out.”

Michael took another swig of his beer, wanting to be comforted if not wholly convinced.

Omar leaned in to redirect his friend’s thoughts. “So... do you have a coffeehouse in this one-college college town of yours? Some place you can take me when I come?”

Omar knew his pal too well. “A few, my ass. You only say a few when you have only one in mind. Like you can blow smoke up my skirt, you bastard.”

“Hah!” The friend smacked the table with a laugh. “If you were anymore predictable, Greenwich could strap a goddamn clock to your back!”

The painter wanted to quibble. “I met her at a party before I met her at the coffeehouse. So it doesn’t count.”

“Nothing like that.” Michael could see his friend’s mind rushing ahead. He cut him off at the pass. “I think she’s fooling around with a college professor, though. A painting prof.”

“Then it’s not some blue-eyed college boy? She’s got a thing for older men?”

“He’s a married man banging a student and you’re worried about breaking up true love?”

Omar laid into him. “Even if she dumped this geriatric lover tomorrow and started parading around you in tassels and making little hearts in your latte foam, you wouldn’t do dick about it!” He thrummed the table in frustration. “Seize the day and stop looking for excuses not to act!”

Michael thought of more. “This may all be a power trip for her. She already has me sized up as a mentor. I mean, who am I to her, anyway? Just another aging guy with encroaching prostate cancer who leers at her between slurps of coffee.”

The lawyer’s eyes widened in amazement. “You’re psyching yourself out! Does it matter why she likes you?”

“It wouldn’t be ethical for me to act on this, anyway. She lost her father. Just last month.”

“She’s a daddy’s girl, then?” Cogs were turning in the friend’s mind. “She wants to be coddled and cuddled by a father—now more than ever—, and you want to get in her pants. It’s a slam-dunk.”

Omar sighed. “Agendas, conscious and unconscious, abound on all sides at all times. Reason and ethics are always afterthoughts in these matters. Instinct more than happenstance is why you’re in each other’s lives all of a sudden.”

The friend mapped it out. “Don’t look at this as yet another occasion to be humiliated. Look on it as a golden opportunity. You can play all this prof’s roles—mentor, father, flesh and blood lover—and without the complication of a clinging wife. There would invariably be transference of affections on her part, sooner rather than later. Love is one of those rare times in life where two wrongs often make a right. You would get your artistic ideal, and she would end up with the better man. What could be more virtuous?”

Omar thought to arrest his friend’s panic. “Look, Mike. There isn’t going to be a written invitation—ever. Every woman plays the percentage: the across-the-room stare, and then the icy shoulder when you’re at arm’s length. There has to be at least one hurdle for you to tackle, even though it is sometimes only inches high. Love easily won never wrote a poem. Every woman knows this. Desire is always your weakness and her strength.”

The friend waxed more philosophically. “Men live by logical deliberation, Grasshopper. But women live by intuition; and intuition puts them closer to the heart of things. Women don’t see what they do as manipulation. It never rises to the level of reflection for them: rationally or morally. And when confronted with it in those terms, women don’t understand it as such. Most men think women are stupid because they can’t name their motives. But men are the stupid ones because they think it all comes down to dotted i’s and crossed t’s.”

“Not cattle—sharks. I respect women more than you think. ‘Hold your friends close, but your enemies even closer’. For me that often comes to a couple of grand a night.” Omar finished the last of his beer. “Speaking of which, we need to get back to the hotel.”

The friend pulled in his talons. “In a manner of speaking—it can.” He then sounded a note of caution. “But that’s not what troubles me. Your tortured relationship with women would baffle an air traffic controller. Most men settle—and sooner rather than later. But you have so compartmentalized your needs and so cultivated elaborate screens to hide them, I fear not even you can fathom the Frankenstein your heart would likely create.”

Michael couched his dilemma in more practical terms. “I wish there were more older women of my acquaintance.”

Omar was not buying it. “That sounds like something a weasel would say to get laid by an older woman after a long night at striking out at the bar. Save the phony virtue.”

Omar was brittle. “How many attractive thirty-something women do you know who hang out in coffeehouses looking for a ‘good man’ with no economic prospects?”

“Look—it all comes out in the wash. In the realm of womanhood, there are pretty young girls and then there are frumpy, sweat-suited creatures of indeterminate age. There is a switch in women where they go from being lines of poetry in a book to being boarded-over storefronts—all in a sobering blink. It’s all a bait-and-switch, Mike, so get what you can while you can. By the time this bohemian goddess turns into a doublewide, you won’t be able to get it up anymore, anyway.”

“We’re all biology’s bitches. Everyone gets it up the backside in this world. No exceptions.”

“Listen, Mr. Darcy. Reality Check: Jane Austen never married.” Omar slapped a twenty down by his empty glass and stood up.

Michael rose with a smattering of resolve. “I hope, in the end, desperation will be enough of an incentive to make me act.”

Omar howled. “Only a pathetic loser like yourself would see being backed into a corner as a triumph of the spirit!”

Omar gave his pitiable friend some final words. “For such a passionate artist, you wield logic like an addict wields a needle. What you need most is to get laid. And I don’t mean fall in love and all that crap. I mean get your brains royally fucked-out. That would get you past all this self-defeating subterfuge. You need distance. And leverage. Neither of which you got.” He moved toward the door in a change of direction. “Will you be able to sleep tonight?”