Living Together

The Ark

T H E A R K Lisa and Ralph had been married for three years. In the past when Ralph traveled, Lisa remained at home, but these breaks in their relationship had become more and more like putting down an uninteresting book: there seemed to be little reason for taking it up again. They were afraid another separation would be mortal. Ralph suggested Lisa travel with him on his upcoming trip. Instead of staying at a hotel, they were renting a house while Ralph revised the psychological testing program of a Philadelphia firm. A number of employees of an unacceptable strangeness had slipped past the personnel director. Ralph knew what cunning questions might be asked to keep from the sales departments employees who set fires in wastebaskets or whose obsessions would not allow them to ride in elevators. Lisa, a freelance interior designer, had hoped their quarters in Philadelphia would be sparsely furnished. She could then add a few touches. The white canvas sheets painters used could be thrown over the sofa, a cheap straw rug, and a pillow or two in a rough hand-loomed fabric of no color would work wonders. Among these light furnishings they might survive, like butterflies loose in some airy enclosure where there was no danger, the fine, necessary dust of their wings rubbing off on each other. 9 4 Perversely, the company settled them into a cluttered house, which had been lived in by the same family for years. Lisa found the presence of the family stifling. There was not a square inch of the house on which she could make an imprint. Chairs awkwardly placed looked more awkward when she tried to rearrange them. The house refused to submit to her. It had a stubborn rhythm of its own that waited for her to take up. Everywhere she looked she was confronted. Tables were littered with bits of puzzles, coy china animals, vases of dried flowers faded into ghost colors, dog-eared playing cards, and half-finished needlework. Everything was ordinary—or worse. There was actually an ashtray in the shape of a bird whose crest was made up of safety matches. Discarded dog collars lay about. Old knobby bones turned up under the couch cushions. Their books were hopeless: Louis Bromfield, Edna Ferber, Readers Digest condensed novels, a heavily underlined chemistry textbook, copies of Black Beauty and Eight Cousins with free pages. The children of the house had evidently grown and left—but not entirely. In one bedroom she found a shell collection leaking sand, in another, tennis and swimming trophies. In the kitchen, hardly anything was whole. Spoon handles had been bent in the disposal. The glasses were chipped. The teakettle was scorched and the counters covered with indelible rings. Looking through a card file, Lisa found recipes for Jell-O salads with marshmallows and casseroles made with canned soups. A river had surged though the rooms, leaving behind the detritus of years. It was painful for her, committed as she was to the ir9 5 reducible. She wondered how people could live in a house and not be crushed by so much evidence of one another’s presence. It was high summer and she thought to escape into the yard, but the disorder pursued her. Violets and lily of the valley crept into the flower beds. Wild grapevine twined around the roses. The lawn was weedy and there were worn patches to mark the spot where on summer afternoons a perpetual baseball game must have been played. A swing with a broken seat dangled from a tree branch. A rusted rake lay on the ground next to a deflated inner tube. The house itself was substantial, but Lisa could see no grace in it and nothing but ugliness in its miscellany. In Lisa and Ralph’s New York apartment, she had placed everything so carefully—the movement of a single ashtray resulted in instant disorder. In this house, disorder, even chaos, might exist undetected for long periods of time. One evening she found Ralph looking into one of the boys’ rooms. He appeared interested. She and Ralph decided before their marriage not to bring children into so unpromising a world, a world that any day might be destroyed by a tyrant’s short temper. Lisa felt betrayed. Why didn’t he look around the house and see the mess that became of two lives when they expanded...