We live in a university town, my wife and I, and we live in a neighborhood within five blocks of the edge of that university. It's an affluent neighborhood, built on heavily wooded, well-manicured lots on the side of a ridge, with narrow streets running up and down and twisting here and there. Almost like the country, but a wealthy enclave right in the small city. Quite staid we are. Not ones for quirkiness. Almost all of our neighbors work for the university in some academic or administrative capacity. I, for instance, teach English literature, and my wife teaches French literature. Both of us have held deanships but quickly gave those up, preferring to spend our time on our own studies rather than the squabbling of other professors.
At one time the house on every lot touching on ours, on either side and along the back, was occupied by university couples. We serve in different departments, though, and both a university football team assistant coach and the women's basketball coach are living in the neighborhood, so our neighborhood gatherings aren't quite as stilted and inbred as our required-attendance departmental functions. On the whole, other than the women's basketball coach living with another woman, however, we're a pretty dull, vanilla bunch, full of pomp and circumstance and stuffy academic dignity.
Ours also is a pretty "in for the duration" neighborhood, university positions here being coveted and safe enough that, once acquired, they are not often given up. We've lived here nearly a decade now, and we are the next-to-newest residents for a block in any direction. It was the recent turnover in the house backing on the south side of our property that threw my world off balance.
When we moved in, Wilfred Singleton lived in that house, a brick Dutch colonial with little back yard to speak of at all, which, however, was so overgrown when we moved in that we couldn't even see his house from ours—nor did we hear anything from that direction, even though we had a screened garden pavilion almost abutting the fence between the side of our lot and the back of his. So peaceful and inviting was the pavilion, which overlooked our flagstone garden, with a fishpond and trickling fountain, that I immediately claimed it as my writing study during the warmer months of the year. The pavilion had electricity, with Wi-Fi connection, a grouping of comfortable patio furniture at one end, and a table at the other end big enough for me to lay out my laptop and all of the research material I might need. We lived in the lower middle south, so I could work, sometimes until 3:00 am, in the pavilion with just the sound of the fountain, crickets, the frogs in the pond, and the ceiling fan lazily whop, whop, whopping overhead.
Singleton had been an economics professor at the university—quite a well-known one too. I had heard of him before we came to the university. But he was retired and was a recluse—and obviously had done little or nothing to keep up what had once been an extensive rock garden, teeming with azaleas, rhododendrons, hemlocks, and Japanese maples surrounding his house. I was actually surprised he was still alive, as I hadn't heard anything about him for several years before we moved in.
I was told that he had resigned his professorship and become a recluse some five years earlier, when his wife, a Spanish literature professor, had been hit and killed while she was out for an evening walk by a car on the winding, narrow road in front of their house.
I did see him now and again, standing among the clutter of his back yard, blinking his eyes and looking a bit lost, and we did exchange brief pleasantries on some of those occasions. I think he knew who I was, but he was always vague enough that I wasn't sure. My pavilion was set high enough off the ground that I could clearly see over the wooden fence separating our lots.
Last year about Christmas time, though, I heard sirens on his street. It was cold enough then that I was working in my study on the second floor, which had a window overlooking his lot. I could see the flashing red light on top of an emergency vehicle through the trees and, both curious and concerned, I walked around the corner to see what was happening.
Singleton was sitting on the tailgate of an ambulance and several other neighbors had already gathered around him. He was wrapped in a blanket, but I could tell that he otherwise was naked. He had the vacant stare of someone who just wasn't there.
"My husband called 911," a neighbor, who was the director of the university press, was telling a small group of people when I walked up. "Wilfred was just out on the street, stark naked, and screaming for a car to run him over. Poor dear. It's happened before, but never this bad. I guess now he'll have too . . ."
I retreated, having heard what I needed to hear and not wanting to intrude any further into Singleton's melt-down or the grief he never had seemed to be able to recover from. I thought this was all very sad, but I knew that the neighborhood would be relieved—that Singleton had become much too shocking and unconventional for the comfort of the community and that now, naturally, he would have to be put in a nursing home.
The house sat vacant until the late spring—and quiet except for the three weeks in the last part of March, when a couple of middle-aged couples—probably Singleton's daughters and their husbands, went through an orgy of filling a dumpster in the house's driveway with what looked like perfectly good items. I remember nearly hyperventilating one day when standing at my study window and watching them toss in Singleton's extensive collection of books. I was sure that a small fortune in research material—and most likely the makings of a core library for an economics department in some university—was going to the landfill. But the couples were from out of state and I'd never seen them there while Singleton was alive. So, I guess their lives and interests had not intersected with the professor's for some time.
I didn't think more about Singleton or that house until mid summer. We always went to either England or France in May and June, officially to continue our own studies, but really because we loved being in Europe so much. We crossed the Atlantic together, but often, once in Europe, my wife, Joanne, and I went our separate ways. We weren't a close couple, but we were compatible; we liked and respected each other and our careers bolstered each others. We were both professors by the time we met, and both were people more focused on our individual lives and interests than on a significant other. But, teaching at the same university, we found we were comfortable with each other and we both had reached a stage in our life when we appreciated having a companion to share meals and discussion and little discoveries with. I suspected that Joanne was a lesbian, and, for all I knew, she was aware that I had only slept with men—seeking out a particular kind of man that would be an extra taboo where we now lived—and not even men for a few years before we married. At our stage of life it just didn't seem to matter. Not that we were old; we were both in our early forties. But because we were settled in our ways and happy with them. Or, in my case, resolved to be as happy as possible under the circumstances.
I'd kept my needs and wants private pretty successfully. In my twenties, I'd gone looking for what I wanted—and in some pretty dangerous areas. I don't think anyone who knew me now would guess at the peculiarity of what I wanted, what aroused me. As I'd gotten older and became more successful in academia, I increasingly realized that what I wanted just would not be acceptable in the world I was entering. I had wanted it so badly that I let myself be degraded to get it in my late twenties. As my career was firming up, I listened to myself when I was being satisfied the way I wanted to be. It wasn't dignified; it wasn't what a mature English literature professor should pant for. So, I slowly weaned myself off it, at least here in this town. But I still wanted it. I couldn't deny that. Marrying and settling down in this university town—in this particular neighborhood—was part of my campaign to overcome my latent desires.
But I—and I presume Joanne, as well—saved our pursuit of our fetishes for a time, she for her Spanish women, and me for my Francophoned young men from northern or central Africa, for our European springs. At least through my thirties. I had given up my short spring European affairs with young black men six years previously in a burst of self-control and denial. I didn't know if Joanne had given up her fetish too. I rather thought not.
I noticed the difference next door when I came back to our university town in late June. I suddenly—and a bit distressingly—could clearly see the back and back garden of the Singleton house. To my eye, it had moved a good twenty feet closer to our lot line while I was in England. Joanne was still in France, having secured a sabbatical there. She wouldn't be home until the fall. So I was batching it. There was a glassed-in sun porch on the back of the Dutch colonial, an addition to the house that I hadn't even been fully aware of while Singleton was in residence. I could clearly see into that from both my garden pavilion when I stood up as well as from one of the windows in my second-floor study in the house.
The house hadn't moved, of course. It just had sold and the new owners were having the gardens cleared, which made the house loom larger—and closer—visually. And they were having a stone patio laid to cover all of the back yard except for the bushes and ornamental trees that were being kept.
It was several days after I returned that I espied any activity over there, though. It was the sound of a woman's voice on the telephone—a voice that carried and a conversation that was interspersed with lilting laughter—that brought me to the window of my study.
The garden room of the Dutch colonial had been transformed into a usable den. Whoever the new owners of the house were, they had traveled and had eclectic tastes. The room was furnished and had touches of both the Mediterranean and the Orient. There was a desk in a rich rosewood color that, from its carvings, was probably from China or Hong Kong. There were fan chairs; some brass work, perhaps from Turkey; and what appeared to be a double-bed-sized studio couch with a flamboyant Indian-design coverlet on it and a profusion of pillows in a myriad of textiles and patterns. As jumbled as the sunroom space was, it all seemed to go together well.
Sitting at the desk was a trim brunette, perhaps in her late forties. She was having an animated conversation on the phone and doing much of her speaking with her hands, frequently tucking the phone receiver under her chin. I doubted she had any idea her voice carried as well as it did. I had been sitting in my wing chair just in front of the window and trying to read some pretty difficult poetry passages in Middle English when I had become aware of the level of sound coming from the Dutch colonial. Fully aware of it now, I found myself standing at the window, looking down into her back yard, and concentrating on what she was saying—and just not quite being able to catch the words. It might have been all right and I could have focused away from it on my own reading if I either couldn't discern any words at all or could clearly hear the conversation. But this middle ground just would not work.
Still standing at the window, I was becoming resolved to move to my wife's study at the other end of the bedroom wing, when my eyes caught movement outside of the neighboring house, in the garden. A man was there, working on clearing undergrowth in the far corner of the lot. He was black and not too young or too old, perhaps in his early thirties. He was tall and well built. Not heavy and not thin. But he was very well muscled. He was wearing shorts but otherwise was naked. The muscles of his arms and chest were well defined, tapering down to a slim waist and flat belly. He was an ebony black, but seemingly not of the American variety. He looked more Caribbean, the aspect of a Harry Belafonte or a Sidney Poitier. Which, to me, meant that he looked sensual and desirable.
I stayed at the window, watching his movements perhaps a moment too long, as, possibly sensing he was being watched, he looked up and saw me in the window. We both stood, transfixed, if for only a moment, and then he looked away and picked up a pair of hedge clippers and I turned away and went, almost reluctantly now, to my wife's study, my Middle English poems in hand.
