I came around a bend in the road, and on the right a narrow private drive, also unpaved, angled up through the growth of cypress and fir trees on the hillside. There was no name on the postbox at the drive’s entrance, but the number was the one I wanted; I swung past it, onto the narrow roadbed. After about a hundred yards, the drive leveled off into a gravel parking area big enough for maybe a dozen cars. The far end of it was bordered by a whitewashed stucco wall that curved away into the woods on both sides. The wall was about eight feet high, so that you couldn’t see over it, but the double-doored gate in the middle was made out of filigreed wrought iron and gave you a clear view of what lay within: a garden dominated by rosebushes and big ferns and a modernistic two-story house. The house, as far as I could tell, was all the same whitewashed stucco as the wall, with roofing that was part redwood shake and part Spanish tile. There was a squat, tower-like thing on the far side, and some odd angles here and there—as if its architect had begun taking hallucinogenic drugs halfway through the drafting of the plans.
I put the car up next to the gate and got out. Two other cars were parked there—a dust-streaked but new BMW and an elderly Fiat that needed body work and that may or may not have belonged to the maid/housekeeper. Set into the wall on one side was a bell-button and one of those speaker things. I pushed the button. Pretty soon a woman’s voice—the housekeeper’s, I thought—came through the speaker, asking me who I was and what I wanted. I told her. Nothing happened for maybe thirty seconds; then there was a buzzing and a click and the gate parted inward in the middle, an odd effect like something solid and substantial breaking open. Before I could take a step, the woman’s voice said imperiously, “Please close the gate again when you come through.”
I went in and closed the gate. A crushed-shell path bisected the garden to the front entrance. On both sides of the house, I saw as I followed the path, more cypress and fir trees rose up to give the place an even more secluded feel. But there were no trees to the rear; the ones that had grown there had been cleared off so as not to spoil the sea view. The other thing I noted was that the path branched near the front door, with the branch leading around on the north side to a kind of covered porch. Another path led away from the porch at right angles, into the woods.
The door opened just before I got to it and the housekeeper looked out. You’d have known she was a housekeeper anywhere you saw her; she was about fifty, she was dumpy, she had fat ankles and gray hair and the kind of mouth that seems always to be on the verge of shaping the words “Wipe your feet,” and she was wearing the kind of shapeless, nondescript dress nobody but a domestic would wear. She said, “Come in, please,” in the same imperious way she’d told me to close the gate. I went in, smiling at her on the way as a sort of experiment. It proved out, too: she didn’t smile back.
She led me down a hall to the back of the house, into the sort of room people like Alicia Purcell would call the “sun room.” There was no sun in it now, but there would be plenty later in the day, splashing in through a wide set of sliding glass doors. Outside the doors was a cobblestone terrace with a swimming pool at the far end and, closer in, some funny-looking tubular outdoor furniture—the umbrella over one of the tables had an artistically crooked pole and was made out of sparkly cloth the color of a loaded diaper. Nobody was on the terrace. Nobody was in the sun room, either, except the housekeeper and me.
Just me five seconds later. She said, “Mrs. Purcell will see you shortly,” and went away without waiting for a response.
I crossed to the glass doors and looked out. Fishing boats on the ocean, the tip of a point to the south—that was about all you could see of the surroundings from in there. Beyond the terrace were some scrub cypress and then the cliff that fell away to the sea. The land bellied out to the north, though, where the woods were thickest, to provide another hundred yards or so of clifftop in that direction.
It was quiet in there; whatever Alicia Purcell and the housekeeper were doing, they weren’t making any noise in the process. When I turned from the window my shoes made faint hollow thumps on the hardwood floor.
The furniture was all modernistic, and for my taste just as weird-looking as the outdoor stuff. The paintings on the walls were modernistic, too—abstracts or whatever. One of them caught my eye. Smacked my eye might be a better term. It was of a being with two heads. One of the heads was human enough and had red squiggles splashed down over the nose and mouth and chin; what the squiggles looked like was blood dripping from a wound on his forehead. The other head was that of a green horse. The name Chagall was painted in big childish blue letters across the bottom. If the two-headed thing was supposed to signify something profound, I couldn’t even begin to figure out what it was. And if this was great art you could have it and welcome. I’ll take vanilla.