AMOROUS WINDOW by Howard Norman
Last October in London David Kozel had a violent encounter with his father-in-law, William Field. They cursed each other in front of a café, then fell to blows, wrestling out onto George Street, where William was struck by a taxi. William had come to London to have an audience with the Queen’s swan-keeper. He had been caretaker of The Tecosky Estate near Plum Island, Massachusetts, for twenty-eight years. When David took over as caretaker, both of the estate and of his father-in-law, he was allowed to see his wife, Maggie, only through windows.
Seven months after the accident, on the humid evening of August 23, 1985, dressed in shorts, T-shirt and no shoes, David followed a line of nineteen swans up from the pond. He always walked behind, like a swanherd, if there was such a thing. At any rate, he enjoyed observing their awkward, comical swagger. Halfway to their roofed pen, he suddenly stopped, assumed the hieroglyphic posture of a fencer, thrust out his right arm, retreated two steps, lunged, retreated, parried a moment with his invisible enemy: corrosive, heart-sinking guilt at his intoxicated adultery in Durrants Hotel, and nearly having got his father-in-law killed.
Thrust, parry, retreat; if a private action cannot dignify pain, what good is it? No matter to the swans. They ignored all of this. They kept to their pace. Human folly did not hurry them. Once David got them inside the roofed pen and double-latched the door, he walked to the guest house, put on coffee, sat at the wooden table in the kitchen and read The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard, by Anatole France, the book Maggie was reading when he first saw her.
Before he met Maggie he had fallen off reading novels. But that summer on solitary evenings, he had worked his way through a number written by Anatole France. In June he had started out with The Queen Pédauque. Generally, his reading tastes did not run to such romantic plots or noble sentiment – “the forces of my soul in revolt.” The novels of Anatole France connected to his life because Maggie loved them. That was initially his one good reason to have purchased hard-covers from Nevermore Books, the used and antiquarian bookstore a mile from the estate. And yet as he finished The Queen Pédauque, followed it in July with The Red Lily; and then, in late August, halfway through The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard, he slowly came to realize, strangely enough, that the stories had stirred him and that he often thought about them during the day. Solace, however, was altogether another matter. Nothing solaced him. He felt generally on edge. He was convinced he had developed an arrhythmia, that his heart was wedging in extra beats or was otherwise oddly cadenced, something like Morse code, that without cease it distributed a sense of alarm through his entire self. He was loath to call anything familiar. He felt no comfort except in his routines with the swans. He hardly slept. When he did, he had a recurring dream that he was a disheveled waiter serving Maggie and some new husband in the restaurant of Durrants. Therefore, partly to avoid this dream, partly because he accompanied the avoidance with coffee, he stayed up reading the novels of Anatole France. He listened to Bach’s Suites for Cello, performed by the Hungarian Janos Starker, compositions whose effect was – as Anatole France said of a certain friendship – “like partaking of a duet, his melancholy and my despondency. How fortunate I am for such perfect companionship.” The long nights also afforded him the opportunity to write in his notebooks. He kept what he referred to as notebooks of remorse. If only I hadn’t had Katrine up to my hotel room, William could not have discovered her there; if I’d been alone, there would have been no quarrel; if there was no quarrel, the cab would not have struck him. In this heightened state of unforgiveness toward himself, such equations not only seemed endless, but provided a formal archive of self-indictments. In the months since the accident, David had filled a dozen spiral notebooks. He tried to get it all down on paper. In fact, by August 23, he had almost run through notebook 13. No matter. They were not hard to find. Grocery stores sold them.
He marked his place in the novels with a leather bookmark borrowed from the library in the main house. Since he was presently reading The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard, he kept it on the kitchen table. The other novels were stacked up on a counter next to the bread boards. He was grateful that Anatole France had written so many. He read by a floor lamp set next to the table. Since late June the nights had been muggy. The region was suffering an extended heat wave. He kept the screen door open. And heard the swans muttering.
Locally it was simply referred to as “The Tecosky Estate.” It consisted of 348 acres. The owners were Mr. Isador and Mrs. Madalyn Tecosky. “In our lives,” they said, “we have both traveled out of passion and fled out of necessity. Each more than our own parents could ever have dreamed.” In 1985 both were 73. Their permanent residence was on Islay in the Hebrides.
David had much biographical information about the Tecoskys from Maggie. And he had some things firsthand when they visited them on Islay while on their honeymoon. “We love Islay,” Mr. Tecosky had said. “But we still consider the estate home. All those years there, we were happy to be away from Scotland and missed Scotland terribly. We weren’t confused, though. We just had big feelings.” They last visited the estate in September of 1984. During their week-long stay, David received compliments on his upkeep of the five-bedroom main house, with its dining room walls featuring two small oil paintings by Soutine, its library with floor-to-ceiling shelves, rolling ladder, black iron table designed by Diego Giacometti, as well as the clapboard guest house and two-story dark red barn with shingled roof. Each morning the Tecoskys sat at William’s bedside, in the largest guest room of the main house. David brought them tea and left the room. They talked for an hour or so, then the Tecoskys took their first of two daily naps in the master bedroom upstairs.
William had recovered at an impressive rate, doctors said. However, he was a badly damaged man of age sixty-six, and that August still spent much of his time in bed, watching movies on television, reading, listening to opera records (Bizet’s “The Pearl Fisher” being his favorite) and the radio in general. Insurance had allowed him a private nurse until January and then David took over. He prepared and carried in breakfast, lunch, and dinner on a tray. The bathroom was a few steps from William’s bed. By March, 1985, William could get in and out of the bathtub on his own volition and began to take a morning constitutional to the mailbox and back, and late in the afternoon went into the kitchen for a hot chocolate. He lifted his legs fitted with two-pound ankle weights twenty times in a row after breakfast, lunch, and dinner, to keep the circulation going. Sometimes he walked in place next to the bed while watching television. The studied pace of painful recovery, getting back, as William put it, to fighting shape. His body had difficult work, mending broken ribs, a broken pelvic bone, a fractured left arm (he was right-handed) and, most complicated and worrisome, damage to his throat. The latter required reconstructive surgery to the larynx.
The large pond was where the nineteen swans with clipped wings could most predictably be found, spring, summer, early autumn. Each morning at 6:00 a.m. when David unlatched the gate, the swans formed a line, then walked single-file to the pond. They immediately pushed out toward the center, drifting lazily in preening armadas of four and five, with always a few individualists preferring the cattail banks, in and out of the mist that usually burned off by mid-morning. He might watch them awhile, not long, just ten or fifteen minutes. The sight could often be calming, after the kind of nights he had been having. Then he hosed down the pen and got to the day’s other chores, crossing off each task on a list he had written at a breakfast of oatmeal, raisin toast, orange juice and coffee, unvarying, except on Sundays when he replaced toast with a blueberry or peach muffin from the half dozen he had baked on Saturday afternoon. In the late autumn and winter months the swans, each identified by a thin leather collar, were featured in the indoor waterfowl exhibit at the children’s zoo in Boston. The contractual arrangement required that the Tecoskys’ swans be kept to the diet they were accustomed to, have a separate pond from the permanent ducks, geese, and loons, and that Plum Island’s veterinarian, Naomi Bloor, be allowed a monthly appraisal of the swans’ health. Last November, David had driven the estate’s Dodge pickup specially fitted with padded trailer sides and wire cage, and personally delivered the swans to the zoo. On the way back to the estate, he was surprised at how bereft he felt to be away from the swans.
Directly after the accident, David had taken a ferry to Islay, where he informed the Tecoskys of William’s condition. He left out any mention of his own involvement except as a witness to the incident. “It was horrible seeing him struck by a cab like that,” he said, a truth delivered in a choked tone calibrated for shameless persuasion. Then he had asked to substitute as caretaker of the estate. “I’m pretty handy – and it’d do all of us good if I could keep a close eye on my father-in-law, of course.” He had started work as caretaker on October 27, 1984. He sent the Tecoskys weekly reports, each typed on an Underwood manual (he used carbon paper for copies; dozens of new ribbons were kept in a bureau drawer) and mailed in a manila envelope. They included descriptions of repairs made to buildings, the tree surgeon’s reports, bills, bank statements, lists of the contents of packages that arrived (he was allowed to open packages; all personal correspondence was sent on to Islay), Naomi Bloor’s bimonthly reports on the swans when they were in residence at the estate, and publications from The Nature Conservancy, which had use of 80 acres of woodland and beach, primarily for bird watchers, school field trips, and visiting biologists. The Tecoskys were especially alert to mention of fox, bobcat, coyote, and neighborhood dogs off-leash, as those were the swans’ only real threats. Fox, dog, bobcat, coyote were not to be harmed, but severely discouraged, as Mr. Tecosky put it. There were also avian diseases, which is why Naomi Bloor received a Christmas bonus. Though he had to lie his way into it, David knew he was fortunate to have the work. He wanted to try and convince William in any way possible that he was still worthy of being his son-in-law. (Maggie had not filed for divorce, which he had expected every single day to happen.) Besides, though he was confined to looking at Maggie through windows, he at least got to see her. His salary more than met his needs. That August he had forty-one hundred dollars in a checking account. He also had use of a new Toyota pickup, in which to navigate the former logging roads on the estate. His report included odometer readings and gasoline receipts for both trucks.
Maggie and David had met in London on April 9, 1984. He was living in a tidy three-room flat on George Street, a block from Durrants Hotel. Yet he was often in Prague taking photographs. He had a woman friend there. Her name was Katrine.
At one point he had hoped to publish a book of his own photographs. His mentor was the Czech genius Josef Sudek. David had become something of a scholar of Sudek’s life. In Prague he had visited every house Sudek had ever lived in, every building in which he had had a studio, and so forth. He had constructed a Sudek tour for his own edification. He had visited private collections, pored over books and articles about Sudek, even commissioning translations of exhibition catalogues from French, Japanese, and Czech. It seemed to David that the one thing most persistent in Sudek’s work was that his melancholic nature (he had read much about him) was the intensifying element, no matter what the chosen subject. So many of Sudek’s photographs struck him as individual moments or frames from a fifty-year-long film noir; each image contained a mysteriousness at once seducing and exacting an emotional price from viewers, one they had long desired to pay in order to feel things deeply. To David, even Sudek’s still-lives had about them an atmosphere of intrigue, as if in the next room life was not so still. He had published an article saying this.
His last name, Kozel, was Czech. His father’s father was in fact born in Prague. It was a short-lived delusion, but David had thought that he somehow might bring to his photography an originality that would dignify a sense of provenance. After a few years of photographing in Prague it became evident, however, that his own work was at best third-rate Sudek, all inherited sensibility. Sudek’s influence was insistent in just about every photograph he had taken, even those he meditated about for weeks in advance. He could not get past or around Sudek; figuratively speaking he could only sit by Sudek on a bench, stand up when Sudek stood, follow him a few steps behind, nod to the same passers-by, similarly adjust his hat, and so forth.
Eventually he started to organize his research on Sudek with the intention of writing some sort of biography or intimate study. It was the better choice. Because he had to admit that, despite his technical skills, as a photographer he had failed to discover a haunting aesthetic; he was a striver. Still, in London he kept around photography. He taught a course, “History of Photography,” at the Tate Gallery. The regular teacher, Mitchell Bowen, whom he had met during rented darkroom hours at the Center for Photography, had fallen ill and suggested that David fill in at the last moment. Bowen’s illness proved more serious than anticipated. He simply retired and David had stayed on. He knew that for the gallery it was a matter of convenience, but things worked out. By the time he met Maggie he was in his third year of teaching the course. Each class comprised fifteen students of greatly varied ages, but generally over the age of thirty, as it turned out. The class met on Monday from 6–10 at night, September through May. The thoroughness of David’s preparations for class often overcompensated for any ambivalence. His teaching reviews were more than favorable. He enjoyed the actual interactions in class and, though he did not come naturally to the profession, over the semesters he had learned to spice his lectures with enthusiasm. He seemed all right with the students. He would take a late dinner in a restaurant with a few after class, whoever wanted to come along. No rhyme or reason to it, but pot roast and beer became a tradition of sorts. It was enjoyable. He was not all that social, so the nice thing was, teaching kept him in touch with people. Both of his parents were dead and buried in British Columbia, where he had been raised. He had a modest inheritance, and along with the small teaching salary, managed quite well. He liked living in London.
When they married, Maggie was twenty-seven and David was thirty-four. Neither of them had been married before. She had a wonderful character; her flaws – because she was the love of his life – to David seemed intrinsic to her strengths. She had an edginess but only now and then, and usually toward people who complained without wit about life. She could recite long passages from the books of Anatole France by heart. She was always to the minute on time for appointments as if that meant everything. She was half an inch taller than David, she was five feet nine. Their first night together she remarked, “I’m homely, with a few nice features; my hands have received compliments. My feet haven’t.” This appraisal for his benefit featured her typical, moderately self-deprecating honesty, comical because it did not beg a compliment and ended with, “. . . and that’s my hands and feet. We’ll get to the rest later.” However, he felt that he looked at her in such a way that it would have been hard for Maggie not to have seen that he found her absolutely beautiful. Admitting to one of many irrational truths, dark red hair was something he had always been drawn to, but he found Maggie’s, because of course it was hers, to be – and he felt this word was accurate – magnificent. She often braided it in different configurations; one day, shortly after they met, he found himself alone at a café table making drawings of braids on his napkin with a pen. “Like a school kid,” he thought, “distracted by moony love. Just like a school kid, doodling.” But then he admonished himself, saying, “No – why not just say it’s a 34-year-old acting that way. She might not care at all that you’re ‘older.’” The drawings were lovingly detailed but, as drawings, little more than technically proficient, like something you would find in an old ethnographic monograph, the caption reading, “Examples of local hair plaits.” Yet it was true that Maggie was quite inventive with braids, prided herself in them and had since childhood, she told him. “A vanity, I know,” she said. “But it helps me feel organized.” She was the most naturally kind person David had ever known, though not, for all that, ever to be taken advantage of. She served as Publicity Officer for the Berklee College of Music in Boston. At the time that they met, the BCM had a student-faculty ensemble touring Europe, first stop London. The ensemble put up at Durrants Hotel, a block from The Wallace Collection, where that morning Maggie had bought postcards.
At nearly 2:30 in the afternoon on the day they had met, it had been raining. He had gone into the bar for a ginger ale to soothe his stomach. Three window-washers scheduled for the outside windows had been given a free lunch by the hotel and now sat in the bar, smoking and talking. “Let’s not even suggest doing the inside windows,” David heard one say. “Just keep mum about it, eh?” They had then clinked glasses together. Their buckets and squeegees were in the corner. David stepped out into the lobby. He was going to try and catch a cab. Maggie sat on a brocaded, high-backed chair with freshly polished arm rests. She looked up from her book, checked her watch, then walked outside under the awning. That is where they met, waiting for the bellhop to flag each of them a cab.
Whenever he spoke of this moment using the words “love at first sight,” he did not mind how anyone took it. He had his own definition. He knew it was love at first sight because he felt a realignment of emotions, the unbearable foretaste of regret at not seeing this woman again, before he even knew her name. He felt it suddenly and almost hypnotically. He thought of embodying a cliché, getting into his cab and saying with stupefying urgency, “Follow that cab!” – if your heart is sinking, you must act on it – like a 1930s cinema detective trying to catch up with his own fate. Had Maggie not paid him any mind and gotten into her cab, he may have done that very thing. In a sense it was a completely philosophical moment, but the vocabulary for it was heart-swelled apprehension and nerves and bewildering abandon, all nearly enough to render him dumb.
“Hello,” he said.
They looked at each other’s faces; it was not “studying” as much as ten thousand dictionaries’ worth of speechless articulation. (He had no idea what she was thinking.)
“Actually, I can stand flirtation only in small doses,” she said. “So that sufficed.”
“My name is David Kozel.”
A cab pulled up. As the bellhop opened the cab’s door, Maggie said, “If I want to introduce myself, I’ll be back in about an hour. I’m not staying in this hotel” – which, as it turned out, was a protective lie. She crouched in and did not look out the window. The cab moved away from the hotel.
“I take it you won’t need a cab just now,” the bellhop said.
“Not just now,” David said.
He sat in the lobby. On the same chair Maggie had sat on. He realized that he had done that on purpose. (“I’ve just done a symbolic love-thing like a teenager” – that thought again. There were other chairs available.) The man he had met for lunch, portly Jonathan Macomb, a publisher of table books about painters and photographers, sauntered into the lobby. The day before, David had arranged an appointment to talk about his Sudek project, monograph, or biography, whatever it might become. Macomb was interested but could not commit without a detailed prospectus. He mentioned that his daughter Maude had taken “History of Photography” at the Tate and found it occasionally brilliant. “I don’t, of course, want a book from you that is only occasionally brilliant,” Macomb had said over lunch. Macomb had stayed after for a drink but David begged off. The conversation had twisted his stomach and he had gone into the bar for that ginger ale.
Then, tucking into his raincoat, retrieving his umbrella from the umbrella stand, Macomb saw David sitting in the lobby. “Ah, Kozel, still here?” he said. “Drop you somewhere?”
“No, thank you. I like hotel lobbies. I’ll sit here awhile.”
“I see,” Macomb said. “You’ll be in touch, then. A real understanding you’ve got about Mr. Sudek. I’m quite possibly interested.”
A chauffeur-driven vintage Bentley waited for Macomb out front. The bellhop escorted him under an umbrella the few steps, awning to curb, then held open the car door. David saw Macomb tip the bellhop.
Howard Norman’s most recent novel is The Haunting of L. His forthcoming book on Nova Scotia for National Geographic is My Famous Evening.