Buying Houses

He turned on the lamp with the switch on its gold-leaf pole. It immediately destroyed its own shadow, somehow startling the rest of the dormant, furnished room. If that room had been a person, you could imagine how it would be easily startled. It was over-clean, afraid of being anything less, craving for echoes and passages through. It was rare to show a house like it whilst the night was at its harshest. ‘This bannister does not feel the way I want it to when I slide my hand down it.’ The viewer said. ‘Try this glove.’ He said. ‘How wonderful.’ She said. The glove was filled with Vaseline and E45. She would never even know. He plodded casually around the room clutching his black brief to his suit-pressed stomach. He acted nonchalantly when he stroked the real bronze drawer handles with his hips. He did not want her to know he was merely a salesman, burdened by his superior’s expectations. The night beat against the new windowpanes like a fluid flung from an endlessly deep bucket. ‘Of course, the view will only get better when this night is done.’ He lied, joining the viewer at the glass doors that overlooked the scaffolding, replica houses and tidied-away wilderness which lay tucked inside the blackness. It was a full black, not chipped by stars or streetlamps or other people’s lives behind their own windowpanes. The horizon was nowhere. The house was cupping them. ‘I think I will rearrange the living room when this house is mine,’ The viewer said, ‘I will put the television on the chest-of-drawers away from the fireplace, and the L shaped sofa against the wall so it knows what it’s like.’ To this he only nodded. It was the sixtieth house he would sell that year. ‘Recently, I put down our cat.’ The viewer said. She said it without bridging the previous things together. ‘Sorry?’ He said. ‘My husband didn’t have the heart to do it. Though what he said was he had to leave early for work.’ She said. He did not reply this time. He shared her view into the darkness. A flawless reflection of the room and its occupants stared back at them via the light from the inside; it was hard to tell who of the two worlds was the reflection. ‘I put a dosage into her food because the lumps on the inside of her stomach had grown to the size of cotton balls, but they were not soft like cotton balls.’ She said. He pretended something had stained his stainless, pointy shoes. He couldn’t tell if he had sealed the deal or not. ‘You know, my mother tried to buy a house once,’ The viewer said, ‘She listened to her husband’s voice complaining about the kitchen surfaces and hand-wept tabletops for the first years of my childhood, and then she surrendered to the sound itself.’ He could imagine this viewer’s childhood so easily, somehow. As plain to picture as a dune inside the desert that grips it. The viewer continued, ‘She disappeared one night wearing a white nightie, my mother. They told me it was cancer in the gut that had secretly played out for months. But I think she died in somewhere else. I think it took years.’ The viewer paused. She did not seem to care that he was uncomfortable. She lit a cigarette. ‘You’re not meant to smoke in-‘ He started to say. ‘Kids with no mothers are so ageless.’ The viewer said, cutting him off. Her voice snapped out of her mouth and back in like lightening. ‘No smoking in here.’ He muttered, defeatedly, finishing his dull sentence partially because he was right – it was a rule – and partially because he wanted to say something normal. ‘I’ll smoke in here all the time when it’s mine.’ She said.