People Who Live Near Glass Houses Shouldn’t Throw Shade
Picture This
It was a mild winter when the vacant lot across the street from Bea and Foster finally sold and the new neighbor, a nondescript man about their age, thirty-eightish, began showing up mornings in a black puffer to poke little orange construction flags into the soft earth.
Bea watched with disdain as Foster stood at the front window, palpating a worn football in his hands. He reminded her of a squirrel clutching and spinning a walnut, its terror wholly unmanaged.
“Why so square?” Foster asked no one. “Gimme a rectangle. Gimme a story-and-a-half the color of sweatpants. Heather gray, white trim, center door. Let’s not reinvent the wheel if I’m the one that has to look at it.”
On that first, warm day of flagging, when the sky was full of synchronized starlings and the air smelled of faraway beach, Bea knew, unequivocally, that the lot, the build—the change—would nudge Foster fully into the neurotic void he’d been forever toying with and her into permanent numbness. There had been a time when she’d been capable of a startle reflex, of gasping both in bed and at movies. But she knew by the time the excavator showed up, those days would be dead and gone like Foster’s once-slim capacity for flexibility. He’d never been the same since the crash. And while there had been a long chapter where Bea had been angry at the accident, at what it had taken from Foster, she was now angry at him and what his inability to move on had stolen from her.
“See. What I need here is, is to wake up every morning and look across the street and see house numbers in Helvetica. I need a Japanese maple,” Foster said to the window. “Save the experimentation for your graphic design job, my man. Save your quirky shit for your bistro menus. For some woodworker’s website.”
Bea shook her head. “He’s not design,” she said. “He’s tech.”
“Do you know him?”
“No,” Bea said. “But also yes. I mean clearly, it’s the coat. It’s tech. It always is. If it didn’t have sleeves, if it was a vest, it’d be banking. If he had on a beanie, then maybe you’d be onto something, but the guy never wears a hat. His ears are always cold and red. Painfully so. Really that, his ears, are what should be bothering you more than anything.”
Foster gave the scowl Bea had been fishing for. Emboldened, she added to the moment by glancing down judgmentally at her husband’s slick football, then blankly up at his face before excusing herself to her home office. At her desk, Bea felt a perverse glimmer of lust, for whom or what she wasn’t sure. Maybe herself.
A few weeks later, when Bea pulled onto the street one evening, she saw two unexpected things in the lamplight. A roofless glass box on the vacant lot and her husband in front of it, smoking. Foster hadn’t smoked since his nicer days and something about it softened Bea’s heart. She rolled down her car window and smiled. “Wow,” she nodded. “At least we won’t have beef with his paint color.”
Foster turned from the transparent structure, ferocious. “This can’t be code,” he seethed. “There has to be some sort of overlay being breached here. A glass house? You’ve got to be goddamned kidding me.”
Bea’s heart hardened back up, even as she remembered the airbags, the blood, the luggage that had flown from the roof of the minivan they’d collided with. She remembered, had never forgotten, the child’s pajama top dotted with robots in the median. “I don’t know of any building restrictions,” she said sharply. “I’m fairly certain anything goes in this zip. We knew that when we moved in, remember?”
Foster glared at her and fate. He took a wartime drag of his cigarette. “Maybe this guy is on the registry,” he said, waving at the see-through cube. “Some sort of sexual degenerate. Are interior walls going up? Are we going to have to watch this maniac striding to and fro in his Jockeys every night?” Foster flicked his Winston onto the new neighbor’s mud where it gave a little hiss. “No one wants a computer store on the street. This is a fucking computer store, is it not?” Bea kept her mouth shut. What she wanted to say but didn’t was: Jesus, Foster. Nobody died. Nobody was paralyzed. Get the hell over it or get the hell out. Foster continued. “I don’t see any wall studs. Do you? I’m trying to figure this out architecturally. Structurally. There has to be more to it than this.”
Within two weeks, Foster’s fears were realized. No real walls went up. A few mirrored interior columns were installed to support the flat roof. Inside the glass cube, a smaller one, a bathroom, was enclosed with textured glass bricks that still allowed one to see the mottled flesh of a squatting image, a showering image. But no one from the city came by with a clipboard and insisted a proper ranch be built instead. No one put an end to anything, and Foster leaned deeper into his outrage, his stupefaction.
During this time, Bea retreated to her home office on the back of their house, where her personal window featured a view of white pines and factory-bred arborvitaes whose eternal green reminded her of her one semester in Vermont, her freshman fall. She’d had a brief crush on a boy with hair the color of sand who smoked pot, grew pot, sold pot. Subscribed to magazines with centerfolds of pot. This boy had taken her home one weekend to meet his mother, an ineffably beautiful hippie who’d made Bea and the boy lacy omelets packed with white cheddar upon arrival.
“Let’s sit at the Bigfoot window,” she suggested, handing them plates. “Maybe we’ll get lucky.”
Bea and the boy and the beautiful mother went to the back of the farmhouse, to a rough-hewn table that faced a stretch of plate glass. Beyond was an Edenic meadow, edged with thick pines and maples firing up.
“She says she saw an ape once,” the boy snorted. “But even I’ve never been that high.”
Bea ate and stared out at the view, not because she believed she’d see something but because she believed the mother had, and she wanted the mother to see her faith. Eventually, the boy got up and went off to smoke, and the mother, barefoot, leaned back in her chair and crossed her long arms over her flannel shirt.
“Picture this,” she said. “A woman leaves a man because she can see inside of him what he never will, and then she buys her first house, her own house, and it comes with a window like this. And on her first evening there, she sees something else no one will ever see. Picture that.”
Bea hadn’t known what to say, but in that very moment, she’d quit liking the boy, which she sensed was the mother’s fervent hope. For a time after that weekend, Bea wore flannels and practiced effortlessly draping her limbs in chairs. She’d held a vision for a while of what it would be like to be a woman for whom everything was a window. But the vision had been hard to hold. There had been boys and then men and then Foster.
On the day the neighbor moved in, in his black puffer with his black Eames couch, Foster, seemingly repulsed, took two days off work and spent it unshaven, compulsively glancing at the front window as if beyond it were another accident he could not leave be. On the third day, Bea heard an audible groan from the kitchen, followed by the jingle of car keys. She watched as Foster went out to his car, his hair a madman’s, and screeched away. An hour later he returned with binoculars. Wordless, he moved his and Bea’s couch to face the front window and began surveying the neighbor. For a while, Bea watched what Foster watched: the man, pacing, gesturing—either wearing earbuds and negotiating something of great import or suffering a mental episode. Then Bea’s vision blurred from disinterest. She went to the kitchen and made herself eggs. She thought of the pot boy’s beautiful mother, the auburn hair that reached her waist. She remembered her standing at the window with binoculars, still as a hunter pointed at the maples. She also thought of the accident, the pajama top, how Foster, for months afterward said: “I never saw them. I never saw it.”
Ultimately, Bea knew she’d lose her husband to the glass house. Before long, she’d be sitting at the bay window looking across the street at him and the neighbor on the couch and they’d be looking across the street at the bay window, not at her, but through her, while she alone could see clearly what was and what could have been.
