Love and trespass: "The Houses That Are Left Behind" by Brenda Walker

First things first: this story is set in Australia. I was confused both times I read it, because the writer used "boot" for the "trunk" of the car, and seemed to be describing places that are not in the U.S., but at the same time, when the narrator went from one side of the country to the other, she crossed a "continent." I couldn't tell if the story was set in the UK or America, and then I read the author's bio and remembered there's a whole other place in the world that was once part of the British Empire.

I wasn't much smarter trying to figure out the setting of the story.

Okay, I solved one mystery. The story's other mysteries are much harder to crack. That's not entirely my fault: the story wants to both keep its secrets and give them away, just as the narrator both wishes to conceal herself within her home and also to be seen. There is a tug-of-war going on between the narrator and the people she fears are trying to invade her privacy--she senses them trying to spy on her, but she is also trying to spy back. The narrator is a writer, and her outward circumstances of dealing with a stalker who may or may not be looking into her window is not unlike what a writer deals with in a story. Writers rely on readers trying to pry into their secrets, but also want to keep some things hidden. At the same time, writers have to struggle to unlock the hidden inner lives of the people they write about, and often those subjects will not keep the shades open so writers can see in.

Trespass

From the first moments of the story, surveillance, trespass, and invasions of privacy dominate the narrative. The narrator is cooking dinner for her husband and her "husband's children"--a phrase that might just be there to let the reader know in a verbally economical way that this is not a first marriage for him, but might also tell us something about the emotional distance the narrator is keeping the children at--when someone buzzes the intercom in the lobby of their apartment building. They look at the security camera feed, the first appearance of surveillance, and see a distraught young woman. They go down to investigate--because no way is she coming up to their place--and she's got a crazy story. She bought a phone from someone she says lives in their apartment. Now the phone doesn't work and she's out a bunch of money. The husband tells her to call the cops and the phone company, and they seem to get her to move on. The woman notices in passing that the upset woman caller has dirt all over her fingers, and the narrator wonders what the woman lost that has her digging in the dirt so much.

The narrator and her husband have different theories why the distraught caller ended up in their apartment building. Maybe she confused it with another place, since there are a lot of similar high-rises in that part of the city. The narrator thinks the visitor lost money. He has another idea, though. The woman was the mistress of someone in the building, someone who gave her the wrong apartment number. He had given her a cellphone, but now it's cut off and so is she.

And then comes the line that really pulls us into the story: "We had some experience with this kind of thing."

What she means is this. They haven't lived in their apartment that long. When they moved in, they bought some of the previous occupant's furniture for convenience's sake. There are long, fair hairs on the couch. They clean the couch, but the hairs keep appearing until one day the man changes the locks and the hairs stop reappearing. Maybe they've had a stalker of the previous resident, someone who had a key and came in to lie down on the couch where she once met for rendezvous with him? If so, it isn't the woman they saw in the foyer, because she had dark hair.

The narrator imagines this woman meeting up with her lover  in the apartment that is now her home:

Sometimes I wonder about the woman who met a man in our apartment. How they must have rushed past our things, hand in hand, how she flung herself beneath her lover, overjoyed, laughing, both of them laughing at love and trespass. 

We soon realize that the narrator has a stalker. He's someone from the life before she moved into this place with her husband. At first, all we know is his name is Neil and he's waged a "long campaign of threats" against the narrator. The narrator goes to another room to escape being seen, but also refuses to hide: "I was always slightly afraid, but I was also defiant, determined to be seen, even if the viewers were barking men or solitary lying girls or sad alcoholics, and I never drew the curtain."

Just as she is torn between hiding and being seen, she is also both victim of surveillance as well as perpetrator of it. She imagines her stalker "like a military officer on duty," but she, too, is "vigilant about all witnesses." She realizes that in daylight, nobody can see in, but she can see out at them.

Love

The story's twin subjects are love and trespass, and while the creepy tones of trespass make themselves heard right from the beginning, love takes some time before its melody starts to make its way into the main theme. Loves comes in as the narrator is looking out her window, taking advantage of the clear view she has. She notes a few species of birds, but begins to wax philosophical when she gets to parrots:

Parrots fly in pairs, and so do small brownish-gray birds fast as darts, one leading and the other following a wing beat behind, gliding or climbing and dipping very fast. The second bird lags slightly, so if the first flies through a gap in a moving obstacle--traffic, for example--the second might not be quick enough to follow. Then the first climbs, bewildered, circling back over a mate crushed on the road.

She compares this situation to herself following her husband's car, how she almost ended up in a dangerous situation on the highway. The idea seems to be that it's unwise to be too heedlessly in love. The narrator contrasts this kind of love to crows, who woo each other cautiously and with great ceremony. Crows "are not easily led" and "don't take passionate and fatal risks."

I mean, that looks pretty passionate to me, but what do I know? 

No sooner has the narrator indulged in these thoughts than she arrives again at the subject of Neil. Why does Neil follow so soon for her after thinking about love, especially heedless love? Moreover, Neil is a gardener, we find out, linking him psychologically to the woman with the dirty hands and desperate story from the beginning, the one who had been digging in the dirt for something lost. There's more to Neil than the narrator is letting on, but she's not saying. The only words we get about him are intensely prickly and one-sided in their dislike. He keeps a P.O. Box for angry correspondences with women and a burner email account to send hate mail from an Internet cafe. He is quick to hold a grudge, and will stalk down and threaten people who cut him off in traffic. If you tell him you won't sleep with him, you need a good reason, or you'll get hate mail from him for years.

We wonder, was this why he stalked her? We don't know. She sees Neil when she goes back to the old neighborhood to get mail from a P.O. Box, and she is gratified when he looks away to avoid eye contact with her. She can't decide whether she hopes it's shame or fear.

She also sees Juliet, who has recently been let go from her long-time role as a rich man's plaything, who bore and raised his children. Yet another second bird smashed in the traffic that closed around her mate.

Love and trespass together

Suddenly, the entire story changes. The narrator tells us about the last three houses she has lived in before moving in with her husband in the new apartment. One was a house made entirely of wood that burned down. She somehow rescued a wooden dining room table from it, though. There is also some reason to wonder whether the fire didn't have foul play as a cause. The narrator's lesson from her time in that house was that she has "been protected by (her) own stupidity" her whole life, "unable to see malice until it was directly in front of (her), on paper, in (her) hand, unable to see flames until they formed above (her), creeping along the rafters." It could just be that she failed to heed warnings when friends told her the house's foundations were rotten, but is that "malice"? We never really find out, and the narrator moves on to the next house.

This is apparently in a tough neighborhood, where boys try to kick in the windshield to her Volvo every night and find they can't. She is working on a novel here. The neighborhood smells vaguely like jet fuel due to its proximity to the airport. The house is also haunted. The narrator's only explanation for this is a cold feeling she would get at night in bed. "Something in that house didn't submit to being dead," she says, without further explanation.

She introduces the third house almost as an afterthought: "I haven't mentioned the third house..." This is indeed a strange oversight, because this is the house where Neil was. Interestingly, her first thought when she moved into this stone (and therefore unburnable) house was one that would seem to increase her privacy. She wanted to plant a hedge of gardenias. Neil helped her to plant them. Eventually, a painter who kept her window open at night (suggesting openness the narrator does not share) got the gardenias to come down, but we learn, interestingly, that Neil was "somebody's husband, polite and handy, at first, willing to hang paintings and lift tubs of house plants from the boot of my car." There was apparently some intimacy between Neil and the narrator. I am tempted to believe the mention of him being "somebody's husband" is rather pregnant. We've had several affairs hinted at or openly acknowledged already, and it's not too great a leap to think the narrator has been displacing her thoughts about Neil's affair with her onto others.

The third house ends with the smell of the painter's turpentine, the thing she uses to clean up paint, urging the narrator to "clean up, start again." What has happened she needs to clean up and start again from?

She finally comes to live with her husband, where the two are generally private and happy not to know their neighbors. But after having lived there a while, the narrator takes her old dining room table, the survivor, out of storage and brings it into the new house. After locking out her old life, she is bringing some old piece of herself with her.

In the final page of the story, we get love and trespass coming together, as the narrator finally gives us something about Neil. She feels occasional dread, she admits, but so does Neil, who was given up for adoption as a child. She muses on how old houses carry so much of our old lives with them, and then she finally opens up to the big admission in the closing words:

...women--and by this I mean myself--fly across a continent, about to begin a long period of solitude, not realizing that that solitude will end and they are just one move away from lying on a sofa with their own hair untied, and laughing and talking softly to a man while the light fades with the traffic noise far below. 

What the hell does that mean?

The narrator's sudden turn halfway through the story to telling us all about the houses she's lived in is, in many ways, a huge turn toward her opening up. After all, it's her house she's been nervous about her stalker looking into, and now she's letting her readers look deeply into every place she's ever lived. That is, into all the past lives she's lived. But she only gives us an emotionally charged look into each place, not a factual one. She isn't out to tell us all the things that happened in each place. She wants to tell us what feelings she has when she thinks of those former homes. We know she's a writer and almost nothing else about her. The biggest fact we know has to do with Neil.

Did she have an affair with Neil before he began stalking her? Is his stalking psychotic, or is it somehow mournful and sad, like the girl in the lobby who had lost something? She has a lot of intimate knowledge of him, and it's questionable whether that all came from him hanging pictures for her. But we also have that line about him being angry at women who didn't sleep with him, which seems to come from first-hand experience. But how is he able to go on stalking women like this if he is (or was) "someone's husband"? What is (or was) his wife doing during all of this?

Women, meaning the narrator, end up on a couch with a man after flying across the continent. She did this twice, once before the second place and again before the third home, the one where she lived near Neil. That final happy image of the woman lying on a sofa isn't her with her husband now, because that wasn't preceded by a cross-country move. Remember, Neil is close enough she can see him when she goes to check her old mail.

I think she's remembering a happy moment with Neil when she was the mysterious other woman who left her hair on somebody's sofa.

The author said of this story that it's "about the strange alignments of different lives, about love and refuge, watchful judiciousness and, finally, unexpected happiness." But I don't think that final unexpected happiness is her with her husband. That initial "my husband's children" leaves me to think there is some coldness in this relationship. I think the narrator is pulling her memories of Neil out of storage, like she did her table. He might still be a stalker. He might be an asshole. But there was something she saw in him once, back when she was still foolish enough not to know malice before it burned her. It doesn't make sense for the man she's on the couch with to be the husband, because she hasn't spoken an affectionate word about him in the whole story.

Or not 

Or maybe the period of solitude was when she was living in place number three, and then she made her "one move" after smelling the turpentine, and it's the husband she's now lying with on the couch. Maybe she's erasing the hairs they couldn't get rid of by adding her own. Maybe her apparent lack of passion toward her spouse is just crow-love, her not being unwise and passionate but "watchfully judicious" about whom she now loves. I have to say, I find that reading a little duller, even if it allows us to think our narrator was always wise enough to have never gotten involved with a man who ended up stalking women. Either way you read it, there are some loose ends. If she's on the couch with her husband, what is the point of the dirt-on-the-hands connection between the girl and Neil? What with all the affairs and the "we have some experience with this"? But if she's actually remembering Neil with some kindness, how do we reconcile that with the fact she knows he is sort of crazy, and sends hate mail to women and chases down people who cut him off in traffic?

Either reading is a little fraught, but I favor the first. I'd guess the author probably feels that figuring out the details isn't the point, but rather the feelings associated with past lives we've lived and how they affect the present and future. But I need my stories to have a little more concrete in them. I'm not a big fan of wood.