A new house

After the death of his mother, a forty-four year old scholar, well known for his book, The Geography of Golf (1996), decided to use his inheritance to buy a beautiful old three-story house in the south side of Chicago. He moved all his things into a tiny bedroom on the second floor. It had originally been a kid’s room, squashed between a closet and a large open room. He pushed in his two orange tables and an old green chair. This was the only furniture he had brought from his previous apartment. The Murphy bed was already built in to the wall. He found an old pink comforter in a closet filled with junk and threw that on top. The shelves above the bed were filled with old dolls and romance novels. Someone had carved in a pornographic picture into the wall with a penknife. There was a rotary phone by the bed. He stacked his files up on and under the tables. He worked day and night from that room: pinning together his notes, creating bibliographies and reworking old publications that had received rejections. He went to sleep early. He drank Seagram’s gin and Schweppes tonic. The snow fell. He took his vitamins. He became thin, carving a path only to the tiny bathroom with a stand up shower and the kitchen on the first floor, where he ate mostly from tins delivered from a call in service. The dust settled in the other rooms. They were giant rooms. He was afraid to even look in them. He paid his taxes. In the evening, sometimes he would built a little fire in the backyard, surrounded by slums, and smoke hand-rolled cigarettes. And as the fire dwindled he would close his eyes and imagine that his mother was telling him that he would catch cold, and that he’d better come in.