By the time he celebrates his first anniversary online, with his super-powered ISP “Equity,” Luke regularly eases his way into the virtual lives of almost every woman on the local sector of his interweb network. He basks enchanted by the joy of chatting with all of them but thrives on conversation with the ones from his block in Washington Borough. He masterfully maintains dozens of disparate, online personas. His technical prowess, and the shrewd humility, he carries over from teenhood, keep him busier than a character in a Dylan song.
No matter the conversant, everyone invariably relays to Luke the same, exact themes: The pleasure over the ease with which they seem able to relate to him, and the dissatisfaction with their spouses. Luke chats up women usually but knows the men on the block quite well by now, too. Unlike with their spouses, he (or she, as Luke plays anonymous women as well as men online), “is so easy to talk to ….” Luke loves that.
He serves up psychological, even physiological, and philosophical slices of liberation. He is masterful in the art of non-threatening condescension and is peacefully invasive. Night after night Luke effortlessly hosts, as people spill their guts to him entirely, as trust appears built into the abandonment cyberspace lends to the ego. Writing alone, behind the curtain of anonymity, as opposed to speaking, helps many to open up, let alone that anonymity they believe exists there. Self-serving circumlocution.
#
She rearranged nap schedules, to set the monitors up at peak times, and in the living room, most afternoons, she sits and listens to the baby monitor to anonymous half conversations that she plays with completing in her mind. Blatant eavesdropping keeps Annie wonderfully entertained and before long she comes to know and recognize who is who from the neighborhood, and when.
The voice she hears now, however, does not sound familiar. The voices in the conversation she is listening to are unlike any she heard thus far. It was a woman and a man–that much, she could tell–but the sound was not near as clear as other conversations she had heard. Listening carefully, she makes out the woman repeatedly calling the man “Daddy.” She listens on; noting the man repeatedly addresses the woman at the other end, “Baby.”
The conversation continues, but unpredictably so. The scratchy distortion is frustrating. She thinks she recognizes the voice belonging to the male, but there is a definite discrepancy, so she tries to think of any man in the neighborhood with a daughter having a voice that matches the one she hears. The female voice is soft and lilting, as a child’s might be, but the chuckling laugh she coughs out after every “Daddy” gives the woman away. It is driving Annie crazy that she cannot, for the life of her, figure out who belongs to that fucking voice!
“I need to have a cup of tea.” She’s been talking to herself ever since she began hearing the voices.
She turns the volume up higher on the monitor before walking into the kitchen. As she paces back and forth, waiting for her water to boil, Annie sees Stone sitting on the picnic table behind his house.
“I am not watching the kettle – why won’t it boil already?!”
Passing by the window, still pacing, she gazes through all that is out back. Past the direct scene peripherally, she looks beyond to the mucky creek, wrapped up in the frustration she feels. She knows she has heard that voice before. She walks by the window quickly, and pretends not to look out, as her guard is almost always up. Why, neither can she have any neighbor thinking the good Mrs. L’Italian spies out her windows.
Hurrying by the back door window again, the impact of what she thinks she sees brings Annie’s defenses urgently down. She, this time, stops directly in front of the windowpane. She hastily turns to her left, switches on the kitchen monitor, and then rushes back ducking to the window. Stone stands up, which makes Annie jump back behind the curtain’s hem. The teakettle whistles. It instantly gets louder.
“Shit!”
The only louder noise is the abrupt crackle and pop coming through the monitor, as Stone looks down at the phone in his right hand, and pushes the off button with his left.
“Oh …
“My …
“God!”
Annie shakes with tension, as she absorbs and processes what she believes she just witnessed. Luke is aware of the possibility all along, but not until this does Annie discover the monitors can pick up cordless phone bleed, too. Validating the male, whose voice she thinks she heard, however, makes her tremble more.
“… but Kat and Stone do not have a daughter …”
“ … And that voice did not belong to Kat …”
#
The monitors innocently set in the other neighborhood homes continue to send syllabic messages of stimulation to the bored and nosey homemaker. Annie finds comfort on those nights Luke taught at The Institute, usually honing in on pillow talk. She adores the phone calls of women endlessly complaining with girlfriends over their matrimonial and sexual frustrations. They tend to validate for Annie the notion that Kat was not alone.
Luke typically pretends to detach himself from all that, but finds it difficult to brush off the debriefing on the conversation between Stone and the mysterious “Baby.” Secretly, Luke enjoys the occasional, useful tidbit Annie inadvertently throws out. He can always use some hot information online, although most of what Annie had thus far was old news to him. This time, he does not even hear the end of Annie’s news broadcast, finding it difficult to concentrate at all after the debriefing on Stone with “Baby.”
It is a logical continuum of growth; Luke points out to himself. He can imagine the weight, sometimes the horrible stress and humiliation behind the forced facades. The coded elements of the language and abbreviated actions impose the sincerity factor, which he knows well. He sees Stone in this light merely as one closer to Kat than he is. Luke’s approach toward the infatuation with Stone’s slender dancer builds uncomfortably but makes him feel invigorated, excited, and challenged.
#
“Luke!”
Annie yells often, so this one is futile.
“Luke!” This time, she yells down into the reclaimed pumpkin-pine kitchen floorboards, as if that may offer a different response.
“Come up here! Now—And hurry!”
Luke hears her but selectively ignores her at first but finally, her stomping, full force on the floor gets Luke’s attention. That’s the move that gets him out of his office chair every time, and it is enough to get his gander going:
“Bitch,” he mutters under his breath. He has been doing that a lot lately.
When Luke bought the old home, there was no way to get to the basement without going out the back door, down the deck steps, and back in through the old, rickety cellar door beneath. Remedially, while remodeling the basement for his office space and network hardware, he cut a hinged trap door in an upstairs closet floor. To completely allow passage down to and up from his new office space, Luke mounted a hardwood ladder-type stairway to a joist.
The hatch, canal, and ladder stairs he finished in an attractive, dark oak stain. It is a fun idea for a transition, but does not change Luke’s hatred of having to respond to her bothersome outbursts. The built-in convenience of his cool trap door did not make him want to jump up to deal with her any more than it made the laborious ascent seem attractive to him.
The floor door slowly opens, wider with each step up, inch by inch of Luke’s head appearing through it. It swings back on the hinge over the crest of the arc, hitting the wall behind it with a bang, as Luke’s shoulders appear through the hatch. Every trip up was like a birth—the cellar hatch door delivering the soul of the man Annie can recognize.
#