Garen Torikian

Weekend Home

Excerpt

It ends up being true that, from the front steps of the house, the couple can discern a thin layer of the waving Pacific. Vivian, overwhelmed by the sight, turns toward the front door; Bradley follows. He adjusts the duffel bag slung across his shoulder and exaggerates a glance behind his right shoulder, then peeks past his left, before crouching down and lifting the doormat. The host had already warned Bradley to be on the lookout for a suspicious neighbor, and instructed him to tell anyone who inquired that they were just friends, dispatched to water plants over the weekend. Vivian stands back with one hand on her hip. Bradley soon finds the key where he had been told it would be, and relief rushes over him. He pushes the key into the door lock with some difficulty.

Vivian drops her backpack on the floor and rushes straight ahead toward the bathroom. Bradley puts his duffel bag on the floor and surveys the living room. The apartment has immaculate hardwood flooring throughout, a luminescent bleached birch. There’s a gorgeous caramel molding, the walls are painted a soothing vanilla cream, and the rooms are partitioned with charming arched doorways. A bookshelf made out of actual wood serves as its main attraction; there’s a couch, a side chair, and a coffee table, but no television. There’s a recessed wall niche across from the bookshelf, holding two citrus candles, a clay frog squatting on what seems to be a lily pad, and a tiny golden easel framing a photograph. Bradley recognizes his host in the picture, his arm around the shoulder of a woman with an enormous grin. They sat at a picnic table, accompanied by two half-full glasses of red wine, with an old tree towering behind them. There aren’t any windows in the apartment, save one: the back wall of the kitchen-and-dining area has a sliding glass door that leads to a modest garden. A chocolate mulch covers the yard, and, other than a massive rosemary bush with tentacled branches stretching in every direction, nothing else grows there.

Bradley speaks aloud to his reflection in the window. “It’s a nice scene.” Water wooshes through the wall closest to him. “It’s a pretty nice place, isn’t it?” 

“What?” Vivian shouts, dialing the faucet down. “I didn’t hear you.”

“It’s a pretty nice place, I said.”

Vivian strides into the kitchen. She has a strange smile across her face, as if she were keeping a secret from him, and Bradley feels the urge to tell her she looks beautiful.

“Seems so,” Vivian says. “I love the tiling in the bathroom. It looks even better than the listing made it out to be. Simple black and white squares, exactly art deco. It looks like an old subway station.”

Bradley laughs. “And which station is that?”

“Don’t tease.” Vivian walks over to the backyard door, yanks it open, steps outside, and takes a fresh breath. She leaves the yard and stands behind Bradley, then hangs her arms over his shoulders and down his chest. “Well, what’s first on the agenda?” 

Bradley peels her arms off of him and moves toward the kitchen cabinets. He opens one, finds it empty, and reaches for another. Vivian studies his movements. He moves as if he’s looking for something specific, some critical flaw or evidence that their host is bereft of morality. “What is it exactly you’re looking for?” she asks.

“I just want to see what he’s got.”

Only two cabinets are full. One has a few boxes of instant rice, some cans of chili and tuna, some boxes of quinoa and lentils and bow-tie spaghetti. The other has flour and sugar, one bottle of balsamic vinegar, and another of olive oil. Inside the refrigerator he finds cloves of garlic, half an onion, and baking soda that expired over two years ago, its powder congealed into brick. Inside the freezer there’s an enormous plastic bag, and, after dusting off the frost, Bradley sees that it’s full of beef marrow bones. He remembers not so much a promise as an acquiescence to Vivian, earlier last year, that they should welcome a dog into their home, on a night when a storm knocked their power out, and she and he huddled together on the couch with a wool blanket wrapped around them. She’d made tea for them, each with a generous dollop of honey, and in the darkness they spoke about their childhood fears, ones that their siblings and parents had never understood, ones that they were told were irrational. As a young boy, Bradley had been afraid of the dark, so much so that he begged his parents for stronger and larger night lights plugged into every outlet in his room. Vivian once sat in the backseat of the family car when all of a sudden it began to roll and swerve; in the rearview mirror she had detected a look of panic in her mother’s eyes as she pulled over to the side of the road. It had only been a minor foreshock, but after that day Vivian feared that the ground could split apart and submerge her whole whenever it wanted to. “If there were a dog here,” Vivian had argued, “he’d tell us if there were intruders and warn us about earthquakes. Plus, he could sleep on top of us and keep us warm at night.” Bradley had tried to imagine it, training the dog to fetch slippers and shake hands, convincing his boss to let the dog come into the office so that it wouldn’t get lonely, all of the cascading rewards owning a dog would entail, but then also, everything else it entailed, waking up every morning and taking the dog for a walk, for example, or restricting the two of them to a housebound existence. When Vivian had asked what he thought about the idea, he hadn’t quite formulated a firm opinion, and only managed to nod his head. 

“Only the bare necessities here,” Bradley observes. “Do you think he lives alone?”

Vivian lets her silence indicate that she has no interest in another person’s life, and she moves towards the couch. Bradley taps at his duffel bag with his foot, then gives it a slight shove. It scoots along in the general direction of the bed, letting out a deep hiss.

“Don’t do that,” Vivian says.

“Why not?”

“Because it bothers me.”

Lacking the words to express his annoyance, Bradley studies the bookshelf. The majority of the books are anthologies, binding up a selection of literature from the seventeenth and eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He tries to remember the host’s emails. Were they written by someone who sounded like a university professor? The lowest shelf has two dictionaries, a book on number theory, and another about cartography. 

“He’s certainly a reader,” Bradley murmurs.

“What’s that?” Vivian asks.

“You know, this apartment isn’t so big that you can’t hear me.”

“Will you just say it again?”

“Our host, he seems like a clever person. The books he’s got,” Bradley says. “Some on literature, some on math. It’s a…varied collection.”

“I think anybody with some wild, Grand Canyon-esque divergence of interests is probably a jerk trying to show off.”

“Maybe he just wants to be educated. Who would he show off to?”

“To anyone who comes over. Friends. Dates. Guests.”

Bradley walks over to the bedroom and peeks around inside.

“What’s the bed like?” Vivian asks.

“Come see for yourself.”

“I want to relax. You were busy reading books, doing your own thing.”

“Just come here.”

“I want to hear it from you,” Vivian pleads.

“Bed’s a queen. Enough for two people, anyhow.”

“You think it’s comfy?”

He presses his fingers into the mattress. “Sure. There’s a duvet and two pillows. Everything’s a nice shade of blue.”

Vivian stands up and walks over to the room, confirming what was said. The cool linen sheets are not a vivacious color but instead the cloudy shade of a fading bruise. At her scrutiny, Bradley puckers his mouth. He thinks of asking one question, but chooses another instead.

“OK,” he says, full of cheer. “Ready to have some fun?”

About the Author

Garen Torikian is a fiction writer, essayist, and translator from Western Armenian into English. A graduate of the Master’s in Literary Translation program at the University of East Anglia, he’s currently an MFA candidate in Fiction at Columbia University.