NOTE: If you haven’t been following this from the beginning, and if you want to know the full sequence of events, start with the introduction. Click on Archives on the right.
Yesterday Derwent Sloot celebrated his eighty seventh birthday behind the row of prickly holly trees that partially screen his living room window from the Trips’. It faces the Trips’ three story kitchen-dining room with large windows flooding the banana trees, and orchids with light and colorful fish swimming in a huge plexiglas cylinder that rises from its sand stone foundation to the second story gallery, all visible through a thin patch in the holly trees. This view is also an advertisement for high-end Snaz Super Stores, where so many of the Trips’ accoutrements were purchased. I knock on the Sloots’ door which opens directly into the living room. He opens up and I stand facing his modest picture window, momentarily absorbed by the vision of Trip’s mansion, when Sloot brings me back;
“If you are so fascinated by that sickening extravagance next door, why didn’t you knock on their door?”
“If you remember, you had invited me over. I am Fred, your new neighbor.”
“Hi Fred.” said Derwent quietly with no sign of impatience.
“What is new in Fauxmont?” I asked Mr. Sloot.
“It is pronounced Foxmont, like the fox”, he corrects me sternly.
“Sit down why don’t you?” He said politely. Derwent waved at a couch and two armchairs in the living room. The back of his thin hand was bruised purple. His fingers stiff and bent could suggest nothing but a general direction by their limited extension.
I sit on the couch and Derwent takes to a stained wingback chair that cuddles him with extended arms in the hollow of its sunken upholstery. He brushes back some thin white spiky hair that falls across his brow as he leans forward to sit down. It looks slightly wet. He is still exercised about his neighbor’s new house, and tells me he has expressed his objections to Trip about the new construction on a number of occasions, and then more heatedly he says; “It’s a megalith, not a house. I can’t look up without seeing it!”. He goes on: “Yes, Jake’s dream, his fantasy, his fancy, as told by his builder, not in words: what words could describe that thing? That idiot Planck built it dumb, and mindless. Kept adding on without thinking. I stood there and watched one morning while Trip sketched his changing notions on a plywood off-cut, and Planck explained what he could build. He should have refused to build it! All that architectural chaos wasn’t designed. His conniving architect, who seldom showed up, contrived it into a towering suburban status symbol for a fee. That’s it. Jake’s ambition expressed in all the things he can buy and in his expansive gestures to his neighbors. Let’s talk about something else!”
Derwent is out of breath. His lip is wet, and he wipes some drool off his chin hurriedly turning away into his cavernous chair.
He is also annoyed by a row of French doors opening onto a spacious deck, with a gazebo built like a three level pagoda thankfully near the thickest healthiest hollies at the property line. The granite base of the eight-story tower, which gives the building an inappropriately medieval presence, further outrages him. Diddlie told me that Trip, after an altercation, had given Derwent a hundred dollar gift card redeemable at any Snaz outlet. Some call it vulgar bribery; Steve Strether, another neighbor, called it a neighborly show of good will. When asked about it, Sloot snarled that he didn’t know where the place was, and didn’t intend to find it. The doorbell rang. He excused himself graciously, and soon returned not with his new visitor but to introduce his daughter Rosalba, explaining he had a chess game in the other room with the caller, a child he didn’t introduce.
“Call me Rosie” she said as Derwent and the child visitor went out.
“I am visiting my folks here.” she explained and went on that Derwent is giving his weekly chess lesson to Heidy Guderian, a five-year-old neighbor.
Sloot has lived in his one story slab built home for fifty odd years. He is a world authority on some microbe living in sub arctic soils, and still enjoys making occasional appearances with environmental groups. During the pre-election period he pulled up one of Jake’s Bush/Cheyne posters, which he claimed was on his property. Derwent was not happy when Jake replaced it with a larger one several feet back.
Derwent used to know everyone in the neighborhood, but the recent housing boom changed things radically. He had already told me heatedly that he didn’t ’know” Trip, “I only know of him”. Rosie told me how the community had grown up in the late 1940s. The owners put up most of the simple single story homes in the space of a few years, and a strong sense of community grew out of that experience.
Rosalba did allow, out of Derwent’s earshot, that her son had a very good time riding in Jake’s Hummer last weekend. Apparently Jake had taken them all to Cyber Kids out at Snaz. Rosie giggled: “No one over fourteen really understands how much of Cyber Kids is virtual and how much is actual, and no one under fourteen really cares.”
Rosie’s son, Serge, who was eavesdropping in an adjoining room, came in and told us that his Mother is living in the past. “Such questions are really meaningless” he pronounced with the precocious authority of a preteen expert. Derwent is blissfully unaware of the threat to his progeny.
