Author Bio

ANDREW COMINELLI

PRESERVATION

 

The man who said he would be here is twenty minutes late. Neil sits in his car and stares at the old duplex and waits. He’s called the man twice since he arrived, but the man did not answer. Neil thinks maybe he wrote down the wrong date or the wrong time. But no: he is certain he did not. When he and the man spoke on the phone, Neil had double- and triple-checked the details with him. And the man is now twenty-one minutes late.
       Neil watches the windows of the house for signs of life. A storm is rolling in. A set of bamboo wind chimes hanging over the house’s front door blows sideways. There is no sign of life in the house. Neil watches. The man is twenty-two minutes late.
       Neil thinks to call again, but three calls feels extreme. He does not want to push him away. The man might be his last chance at getting the duplex’s owner to agree to sell. Neil has made a series of maneuvers to try to buy the house over the last four years. His many attempts to knock on the door have been met with total silence. The house seems abandoned. He has gathered the house’s zoning and sales records, printed them out and organized them into their own file folder. Years ago he found the owner’s name and various phone numbers, called them all without success. He has sent perhaps two dozen letters to various addresses attached to the owner in various states. But the owner is impossible to reach—it’s like sending letters into a void.
       But this other man, the one who was supposed to meet him here at one p.m., is a relative of the owner’s, a second cousin. Neil met him by chance, at a fundraiser for a local historic preservation society. Neil recognized the surname on the man’s nametag, pulled him aside and asked if he knew the owner of the duplex. Neil explained his situation to the man, careful not to sound like he was begging, and quoted a figure. The man had raised his eyebrows.
       Now the man is twenty-three minutes late.
       The duplex has declined radically in the quarter century since Neil lived in it. He and Daniel. They rented one side of this house for only a year, but in that year their partnership was ignited, their lives were welded together. This year is luminous in Neil’s memory, a set of radiant images and tender feelings that all have their root and setting here at the house where the man said he would meet him.
       But the man is twenty-four minutes late.
       Neil has driven by the duplex every few weeks or so, over the past four years. He includes a stop here on his trips to Daniel’s gravesite. It’s not too far out of the way. He used to stop at the duplex first, cemetery second. But he likes it better reversed: cemetery, then duplex. Seeing the house sometimes lightened the solemn weight of the gravesite. The bright memories fired by the sight of the house burned off the gloom. Quick sharp images shooting forth from the past. Their young bodies entangled in the bedroom. The sound of Daniel’s voice carrying across the house. Neil could feel Daniel here. Sometimes, just staring at the house for a few minutes, from his car, propped up something rickety in him.
       But the duplex is falling apart. For four years Neil has logged each detail of its decline. He has noted how the porch’s decorative brackets have lost their shape. He has noticed every time a new tile has blown off the roof. He takes photographs, which end up in the file folder. Sometimes he’s so bold as to walk a full circle around the house to gather data on its failing condition. Cracked pipes, molded siding, points of crumbling foundation. All the windows are covered over. He can never see inside, but he imagines, with disdain, the very worst. One afternoon he pulled up to see that a wooden beam, held in place by a series of metal clamps, had replaced one of the fluted columns: a dismal tragedy. He thinks it’s a shame, a fucking shame that people cannot care for their things.
       The man is twenty-five minutes late.
       The sky opens up. Rain begins to pelt Neil’s car. Soon water begins to spout violently from the duplex’s broken gutter. He clicks his tongue and starts the car.

*

Neil still sleeps in the bed where one day he woke up to Daniel dead beside him.
       A new development of the past four years—Neil is often struck dumb by the fact that he is still alive. Standing at the sink scrubbing dishes, watching nightly news, searching for a garden trowel or a paintbrush in the shed, the uncanny realization will take hold, that his body has carried him all this way, through nearly half a century of frenetic activity. He’s spent most of that time engaged in the maintenance of all the threads his life has accrued: managing his one-man historical preservation consulting business, his financial affairs, his house, his rental properties. Always there are clients on the phone, paperwork that needs filing, walls that need painting, A/C units that need servicing, gardens that need trimming. Latent in each year is a fixed schedule of major tasks and turnovers; latent in each day is a path from disarray to order, a path that Neil must navigate swiftly and efficiently if things are to be properly preserved. Every task, however menial, is of primary importance. His life is a protracted affront to entropy. In in-between moments he repairs a clicky doorknob, rotates a mug in the cabinet so that it stands at a uniform angle with the rest. But those other moments, those uncanny moments when the life coursing through him becomes apparent—when he is freighted with the sudden fact of his physical existence; these moments disturb him.
       There is, too, the recurring nightmare which has him waking up, thinking that it’s happening again, his body gripped again by the shatter and crumble, the chaos. He will claw at the empty space beside him, feeling for Daniel, the sweat cold on his brow, and he will scream until he realizes it’s the dream again.   
*There is a second house holding his attention—his current consulting project, the Hill-Northrup house. An old colonial which has languished in decrepitude for decades. Neil has come highly recommended to his client, a surgeon who counts on him to prove the building’s historical importance, which will secure the surgeon state tax credits toward its renovation.
       Neil buries his head in research. He goes to the university library, follows leads to the city zoning office, to the records rooms of county and state courthouses. The story of the Hill-Northrup house comes into shape, scattered facts aligning into a narrative as he collects them, arranges them in circuit. All it takes is his attention.. He unearths the colonial’s sales records, random blueprints, work orders, zoning committee filings dating back nearly a century. He finds news articles about former owners. A socialite and arts patron who used the house to host a kind of literary salon there in the 1930s. A pair of sisters who inherited the house in 1899 from an oil baron uncle, but allowed it to fall into disrepair before losing it during the First World War. A news article from 1955 tells of a plastics executive, then-owner of the colonial, getting harassed in the street by a group of neighbors and “concerned citizens” who charge him with “communist sensibilities,” odd comings and goings in the night, homosexuality.
       It is exhilarating, how it all begins to come together, how he can see the legwork paying off. It’s like he’s manipulating time. The Hill-Northrup house springs up before his eyes, holistic, its many versions superimposed into a completion which is new. No one else has ever seen the house this way before, built in four dimensions, speaking to itself across decades, centuries. Neil feels the pleasant vibration of historical facts scuttling toward one another, starting to interlock. He pumps a fist in the air when he finds, in the musty zoning office, a file folder containing a set of photographs: a blank postcard depicting the block that includes the colonial, which he ballparks as from the late 1960s; a grainy news photo from 1949; and, the jackpot, an entire spread cut out from a regional homemaking magazine from May of 1977, including photos of exteriors and interiors.
       But the crown jewel of his research is a short item from the New Haven Register, dated July 3, 1908. It describes the Hill-Northrup house’s first owner, the man it was built for, an eccentric colonial judge who never married, and who had a secret sideline as a muralist. This latter fact was not known until after his 1805 death, when the murals, filling the walls of his home like Goya’s, were discovered. The Register article, from over a century later, describes “a veritable labyrinth of hand-painted murals depicting bucolic scenes from life in our region,” along with plans to preserve the house—plans that were never put into motion.
       These murals, Neil feels he must find them. He wants to know what they looked like. A near impossibility as no drawings of them exist in the colonial-era records, and they were painted over long before photographs came into being.
       The next time he walks through the Hill-Northrup house with his client, the surgeon, Neil runs his hands over the walls as though trying to coax forth the centuries-old paintings. He says to the surgeon, “It would be amazing to uncover them, don't you think?”
       The surgeon, sharp-featured and severe, squints at the disrepair all around them through his eyeglasses. “How much would that sort of thing cost?” says the client. “There must be a dozen layers of paint on these walls by now.”
       “Well, sure,” Neil says. But they were still there, beneath it all.
       At home, Neil combs through his copies of records, his scans of photographs. He writes down names, dates, titles of books, all on sticky notes that he arranges and rearranges on a corkboard in his office.

*

Neil meets Daniel’s sister in downtown New Haven, to see a performance at a club off Yale’s campus. Rita is the only person he sees socially, anymore, mostly out of a sense of obligation. The closeness they shared during Daniel’s life expired with him.
       Rita has no idea how he struggles. She looks almost nothing like Daniel, but Neil is attuned to deeper similarities: a certain way Rita has of setting her jaw when listening to him talk, the way she moves her body with Daniel’s languid confidence. Neil knows that siblings share half of each other’s DNA. Half of Rita’s DNA matches exactly half of Daniel’s; in a strand of her hair, half of the instructions for Daniel’s body exist.
       In front of the club Rita smiles at the sight of Neil, kisses his cheek.
       From their seats at a small table near the stage, they watch the performance artist give a forty-five-minute dramatic monologue about her body. The artist’s voice is deep, rich; her body seems an instrument for it, expertly carved and hollowed to project its precise sound. Her monologue surges forth without pause, without the slightest slackening of pace or volume, in a desperation that soon includes the entire audience. She describes the history of her body, how it has grown from childhood into womanhood, how it has changed, aged, birthed two children, hosted infections, fallen under mortal threat, survived, renewed itself countless times. Her voice maintains its pitch, its cadence; it never stumbles or wavers.
       Neil looks around. Every face in the club is rapt. Rita is completely absorbed, her face lit red by the cabaret lighting. Neil, agitated, bounces both his knees beneath their table.
       Nearly thirty minutes in, the woman begins to raise her hands. Very slowly, as though some private wind is gently pushing her hands higher and higher, a fraction of an inch at a time. Light glints off the rings on her fingers. It is the simplest possible motion, but it alarms Neil: it is the first time she has moved anything but her mouth since she got on stage. Rita seems to be holding her breath. Neil can see beads of sweat roll down the artist’s forehead. He has completely lost track of the monologue, he’s too absorbed in the slow movement of the woman’s hands, in the disharmony composed by the ferocious movement of her mouth, the muscles in her face, the long red arc of her dress. The monologue continues, but Neil does not hear a word.
       Suddenly, silence. The woman, her hands stretched high above her head, has stopped talking.
       Neil stands and, without a word to Rita, hurries out onto the street.
       Afterwards, he and Rita sit at the patio of a nearby bar.
       “I had to,” Neil says. “It was driving me nuts.”
       “I thought it was incredible,” Rita says.
       “It wasn’t going anywhere,” says Neil. “It was driving me crazy.”
       Rita clicks her tongue, smiles. “You don't know how to lose yourself in the moment,” she says.
       “I just appreciate it when things go somewhere. When they have a format, or a structure that you can follow. But that, to me, was just shouting.”
       “I didn’t need it to go anywhere,” Rita says. “It was her body, the way she looked and moved, the way her voice sounded. Somehow it snapped me out of the usual flow of time, and I became totally absorbed in the present.”
       “Well,” Neil says, with irony, “I’m happy for you.”

*

Neil sits in his car outside the duplex. The man is late again, but shows up this time. He climbs out of his truck and saunters toward Neil’s car, smiling. Neil shakes the man’s hand. Failing to hide his annoyance, Neil says, “Did we say one, or one-thirty?”
       Clouds ride the blue sky, sliding behind the roof of the duplex as they approach the front door. The man knocks. He rings the bell, but no bell sounds from within. “Broken,” the man says, shaking his head. He knocks again, leans to look into the window, but a dark shade blocks his view. He knocks a few more times.
       “Don’t you have a key?” Neil says.
       “Hell, no,” the man says.
       At a nearby diner, Neil buys the man a coffee, a donut. “He’s a hard nut to crack,” the man says. “But I’m telling you, he needs the money.”
       “I’m willing to up my offer,” Neil says.
       “I’ll tell him that,” the man says. “If I ever get in touch with him.”
       “He doesn’t answer your calls?”
       “It’s been a couple weeks,” the man says, and shoves the rest of his donut into his mouth.

*

Neil’s client, the surgeon, calls.
       “You have any updates for me?” the surgeon asks.
       Neil tells him he’s been trying to find out more about the murals, scouring old records for mention of them and the judge who painted them.
       He hears the surgeon sigh. Isn’t it enough, the surgeon wonders, that the Hill-Northrup house belonged to this historical figure, this judge? Isn’t it enough that it dates back to colonial times? Aren’t these facts alone, and all the solid research backing them, enough to secure the tax credits from the state? Did they really need to be dicking around about the murals?
       “Don’t you want to see them?” Neils says, trying to sound playful, light. “Aren’t you curious?”
       “Not really,” says the surgeon. “Not when it’s gumming up the works like it is.”
       Neil assures him that it isn’t. He recommends, once again, that the surgeon put up the money to strip the layers of paint—money that, once the paintings are revealed, the state might consider reimbursing him. “I highly, highly recommend paying the extra now to try to expose these paintings,” Neil says. “It would be a shame not to.”
       “I’m going to be honest here, Neil,” the surgeon says. “This just isn’t what I hired you for.”
       Neil manages to work out a deal: he will put up his own money to have a conservator come to the colonial and strip the walls back down in search of the mural. The surgeon is convinced by the chance at an increased tax credit, if the murals are exposed, and by Neil’s agreement to a strict deadline.
       “You’re the expert,” the surgeon says.

*

At home, in the bed, Neil masturbates in the dark. Tears escape his eyes as he nears climax. He shuts his eyes tight, his vision going bright white, and comes into the balled-up pair of Daniel’s briefs.
       The room resolves back into shape, dim outlines of furniture blooming back outward from the center of the whiteness. Neil zips his pants, thinks, I know how to let myself get lost.

*

Neil raps on the door of the duplex. The sun dips below the jagged tree line, low clouds brushed pink and orange.
       He goes around back.
       He climbs the sagging porch to snoop at the one place where he knows he can see inside: a thin opening between a blackout curtain and the window frame. He places his eye against the glass. The angle is terrible, it only gives vantage of a thin slice of the laundry room. He can make out the corner of a jaundiced washing machine, clothes flung and braided all over the floor.
       Neil remembers himself in this very laundry room, his anal tendencies regarding the separation of whites and colors, the hot wash and the cold. Daniel used to make gentle fun of him for checking every garment’s tag before it went into the machine. The singular way Daniel had of acknowledging his agitations: a smile, an ironic remark, a kiss on the forehead, any of which could remind Neil that the universe contained a counterforce to all his frantic motion.
       He jiggles the handle of the door, curses loudly. He looks around, into the neighboring yards, fearful someone has heard him. No one has.

* Over coffee Rita describes an interview she’s read with the performance artist.
       “She talks about how it takes something like a tenth of a second for your brain to register a stimulus from touch. Doesn’t that seem like a long time?”
       Neil shrugs. “Longer than I’d have thought, sure.”
       Rita reaches across the table and sets the tip of her right index finger on top of Neil’s hand. “When I put my finger on your hand, a pulse had to travel up to my brain. From here.” Rita glides the left finger up her own right hand, onto her right arm. “To here.” The finger completes its journey at Rita’s temple.
       “It’s sort of obvious,” Neil says. “Isn’t it?”
       Rita sips her coffee. “What she says in the interview is: time is physical. Bodily. The body is the medium time moves through, and not the other way around, is what she says.”
       “But,” Neil says, “doesn’t time exist outside of a body? Outside of a living thing?”
       Rita smiles playfully. “Like, in a house, you mean?”
       “If I restore a house,” Neil says, “I’m returning it to what it was. I’m finding out as much as I can about its past, so that the present version can include that past.”
       “Are you though? It seems like there’s a clear difference between an original, from years and years ago, and a restoration.”
       “The point is to minimize those differences. To the highest degree possible.”
       “But the intention is different. Different people are involved, intending not to build something new, but to copy something that was only new once. Things are only really new for an instant.”
       “Is this your new way of telling me not to buy this house, because—”
       “I’m just saying, you know, trying to go back and—”
       In a rare lapse of control, Neil snaps his fingers. “You don't know what you’re talking about.”
       Rita stares at him, her mouth slightly open. “I’m sorry,” she says quietly. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”
       Neil leers out over the cafe. Beads of sweat shine on his forehead.
       “I miss him too, you know,” Rita says, gathering up her bag.
       Neil stares down at his hands, not turning to look at Rita as she hurries out of the cafe.

*

Neil is waiting on the Hill-Northrup house’s porch when Marie arrives.
       Marie is an old acquaintance, a conservator and art historian that Daniel was friendly with at UConn. She carries in a plastic toolbox and a brown paper sleeve with a baguette sticking out of it. “Tools of the trade,” she says, rustling the brown paper. Minutes later two of her students arrive: extra hands for a job that, Marie warns Neil, will be “pretty frigging tough.”
       Neil directs them to a wall he deems likely, from his research, to have an underlying mural. He sits in a chair all morning, watching Marie and her students as they run a UV lamp over the wall, as they pat the wall gently with paint-thinning solvents. The eggshell white fades like steam on a window, but much slower; it gives way to a layer of primer, which gives way to yellow, which gives way to another layer of primer. Marie gives Neil a surgical mask and a pair of goggles, identical to those she and the students wear. “In case of lead,” she says. “We’ll almost definitely hit some.” Not long after, she uses a kit to test for it: “Yep,” she says. The two students go around covering vents and registers with rectangles of plastic to prevent lead fumes from entering the house’s ventilation system.
       Marie and one student start removing the older paint, spritzing it with a spray bottle and then scraping it away. The jagged green chips fall to the floor, soon to be sucked up with a shopvac by the other student.
       After a while, Marie waves and the shopvac goes quiet. She turns to Neil. “Look,” she says.
       Neil steps closer. He can make out a shape, a pale finger or a thumb: hard to tell. But he says, “Oh my god,” because it’s something, proof enough of the mural below. He turns away from Marie: it feels ridiculous to be crying, and he doesn’t want her or her students to see. His goggles fog from the heat of his tears.
       Marie continues spraying, scraping. Neil can see a full hand now, then an arm. The artistic rendering is gentle, slightly faded, but clear. The arm belongs to a woman. She holds an infant on one hip, pale pink fingers wrapped around the child’s waist. Neil watches as more of the woman and child becomes visible: the baby’s closed eyes, the dark oval of its open mouth, the woman's pious bun and serene expression. In her other hand she holds a large wicker basket.
       “Here,” says Marie, ripping off a heel of the baguette and holding it out to Neil.
       He follows Marie’s lead, pressing the soft bread against the areas she sprays with the solution, removing tiny flecks of paint from the mural, clarifying the image by clearing off the last obstinate bits of green static.
       After a while, they step back. A portion of the wall perhaps six feet across and six feet high, irregular around the edges, now shows the woman frozen in the middle of a careful stride, baby in one arm and basket in the other, on her way down a steep sandy hill. She faces leftward; near the bottom of the hill, about three feet above the baseboard, a bit of distant blue water marks the horizon, and, above that, a lilac sky, softly clouded.
       “It’s beautiful,” says one of the students.
       The team breaks for lunch: Marie and her students leave the house, and soon a silence overtakes the sound of their leaving. Neil stands staring at the woman on the wall.

*

In a few days’ time, Neil finishes the last of the paperwork for the Hill-Northrup house. He makes the found mural the centerpiece of his report. To a printout of his studied, organized argument outlining the building’s historical importance, he appends scans of the appropriate news articles, photographs, official records. All of it goes into a big brown envelope, which he mails to the state’s historic preservation office.
       As Neil drives home from the post-office, his realtor calls about the duplex. “It’s going on the market. The owner’s been living somewhere out-of-state, buried in debt.”
       “When can I see it?” Neil says.
       “I can get you in tomorrow,” says his realtor.

*

A thunderstorm rages as Neil and Rita arrive at the duplex. They scurry across the front lawn through the downpour, the tails of their raincoats flapping.
       Inside, in the front room, a man in boots and Carhartt khakis and a T-shirt stands on a ladder.
       Neil’s realtor stands at the base of the ladder, his yellow polo tucked into dark blue jeans. This man’s face looks rounder, larger, than the one on the realty sign on the lawn outside, from which the same face stared at a more photogenic angle. Panic flashes across the realtor’s face, but he quickly replaces it with a professional smile. “I tried calling you,” he says to Neil. “A few times.”
       Right away Neil registers what has happened. Water has leaked into the roof and soaked through the ceiling, forming a shallow puddle that now covers most of the hardwood floor. Hundreds of white paint chips, fallen from the ceiling, float on the puddle’s surface, swaying softly, gathering and separating. The ceiling bows under the weight of stormwater. A single, rapid drip filters through the center of this convex portion of sheetrock, into a blue plastic bucket.
       Up above, bigger swaths of separated paint hang from the ceiling like ragged curtains around the central leak. The man on the ladder stretches his arm to tear one off, and then lets it flutter downward to land silently on the water. He twists to look over his shoulder at Neil and Rita. “Isn’t this a hell of a thing?” he says. “Isn’t this a bastard?”
       Neil scans the room. He remembers where all the furniture was twenty-five years ago. The couch, the coffee table. Simple enough. But now much smaller details, unthought of for twenty-five years, spring back to mind as his eyes move over the room: the area rug that Reba the cat’s hair clung to incessantly; the precise patterns hand-stitched into a pair of white curtains; the shelves and the books they held, the spines of the books and the way the books leaned.
       Rita follows Neil around the room’s perimeter, water splashing beneath their rain boots. “The crown molding’s completely gone,” he says. He seems to be speaking from a trance. “It was already in bad shape when we lived here.”
       They wander deeper into the house. Of the filthy baseboards Neil says, “These will have to go,” tapping them with the toe of his boot. The kitchen countertops, he says, can be restored from granite to their former woodblock. The cabinets he calls “horrible,” but assures Rita that he has something better in mind. He remembers so much. To his eye every surface is laden with potential, every inch of the space overlaid by his restorative vision. Deeper into the house they go, Neil narrating his plans. He will tear up the tiles in the mudroom, tear down and rebuild the sagging back porch.
       In the hallway Rita jumps at a thundercrack, louder and closer than any before it.
       Back in the front room, the realtor has his hands on his hips, his neck craned to watch the workman tear away the ceiling paint and toss it to the floor.
       Neil, by reflex, takes Rita’s hand and squeezes it.
       It's then that the ceiling ruptures. Water streams through the crevice, gallons and gallons of it onto the workman's head—it nearly knocks him off the ladder. It keeps coming: so much water that it seems a static column enclosing the man, rather than an oncoming flow. Neil sees an arm inside this column, a hand, the man's yellow T-shirt, even the black lettering across the chest. And something inside Neil finally buckles, and begins to collapse, at the sight of the workman's face, blurred and distorted by the viscous flow, as though the man has been encased for all time in thick glass.