The Rental

The problem was one of theme. It should be unique but comforting, playful but not vulgar or loud. With the property’s location, success would be a cinch if they could only hit on the correct décor.

“How about bicycling?” Paul asked. “We’re right near the trails.” He was sitting with Ang in their breakfast nook, drinking his coffee, taking a backseat.

“Too obvious, probably.”

He watched her eyes dance around the listings for short-term home rentals on her laptop screen.

“Yeah, here — Be-spokes Hideaway. It’s just around the corner on Maple Grove.”

“Village artists, then? We could buy up pieces from their shops, hang a few in every room. I could probably talk us into a discount with the exposure we’d give them.”

“Maybe…” He knew this was a brush-off; a polite lie that meant his idea was already vetoed. “I was thinking we’d find some local art once we settled on a theme, but putting the focus on the art district itself? It just seems…”

“Generic?”

She scrunched up her nose. “Is that rude of me to say?”

“Not at all. I was only trying to help. I’m sure you’ll think of it.” He rose and stretched, took his mug to the sink. “I might head over there to see about that bathroom wiring. If you’re interested in doing some deep cleaning, you could walk over with me.”

“Mm,” she said, hunkered down, lost in her search.

After grabbing his toolbox from the garage, he came back through the kitchen to say goodbye to her before heading out. She stopped him with the radiance of her smile.

“I’ve got it,” she said. “Mountain climbing.”

He nodded, drew his eyebrows together. “Well, it probably hasn’t been done, considering we’re two states away from the nearest mountain range. Wasn’t the point to celebrate local culture?”

She tossed her hand. “Most owners do, sure. It doesn’t mean we have to.”

“No, I suppose not. It’s just that it’s all you’ve talked about for months.”

“That’s because I forgot about your mountain climbing things. These rentals are mostly full of kitsch, so kitsch was where my head was. But you have all that real gear — crampons and harnesses and everything, and it’s all just packed away in bins. I see it, Paul. I can see it in my mind.”

“And I’m guessing it looks awesome in there?” He smiled, charmed.

“Ours will be unlike any other rental cottage in the village — unless you have a problem with displaying it. In that case, we can go a different direction, obviously.” She bit her lower lip, awaiting his answer.

“I mean, yeah. It’s fine with me. It will be cheaper, and I’ll be glad to have the extra space in the garage.”

She beamed. “This feels right to me. This feels very right.”

“Hotdog!” he said to be cute, like a kid from an old movie, then he kissed her on the head and set out on the short walk to their rental cottage.

 

Paul wasn’t an electrician, but he was a master tinkerer, and he saw right away that a loose wire was the culprit behind the flicker in the cottage’s bathroom. “It just happens over time,” he said to himself as he set about tightening the connections. “Even Buckingham Palace deals with loose wiring now and again.”

The job took him 45 minutes, which wasn’t too bad given his shaky hands. He wasn’t quite 65, but sometimes, when he saw his hands tremble, he felt a decade older. A professional couldn’t have done it faster, though. An electrician would likely still be messing around in the back of their truck, searching for just the right conduit coupling, stretching out the job to pad the bill. Not today, bucko. Not while Paul was still upright and able to hold a screwdriver.

When he was through, he checked his work by flipping the light on and off, on and off; then he packed up his tools, raised the toilet seat, and urinated with the bathroom door open. He whistled a little tune as he did, delighted by the cheekiness of taking such liberty. Someday, this place would feel like his, but it didn’t yet, so he felt as if he were flagrantly pissing in the home of a stranger. It was odd to think of himself that way — a stranger to the man he would be in a few months’ time when the rental felt familiar and mundane. That was just the way of things, he supposed.

When he was young and traveling the world — living out of a backpack and convinced that a communal room in a youth hostel was the height of luxury — he couldn’t have been further removed from the man he would become in only a few years’ time, a married desk jockey at the city waterworks, a lifer who put in 33 years staring at the same beige office walls. Hell, until a few months ago, he didn’t expect that he would ever own a second property. It had been Ang’s dream since their early days together, after they stayed at a different rental a few streets over, the one that made them fall in love with this little village in the first place. That was the property she truly wanted, and it was the reason she’d developed her habit of scouring the local real estate listings. In all those years, it never came up for sale. Paul assumed he had put the matter to rest when he agreed to move to a house in the village. He hadn’t, though, not as far as Ang was concerned. She still longed to operate a rental, believing that they would never truly be locals until they could share their charming community with outsiders, the same way it had been shared with them.

Paul was the one who noticed the for-sale sign on this place. It wasn’t her dream cottage, but it would do. Their offer was accepted, and they signed the lease a little over a month ago. Now, finally, as of this morning, they had a theme for their interior design.

Paul was happy for her and pleased that he would have something to do with his time now that he was retired — the thousand little projects that would crop up to keep his hands busy and his mind sharp. He discussed the matter with some of their neighbors over lunch a few months back, and they all confirmed that managing a rental was easier than ever in this time of home-sharing apps. And it was only a certain type of person who visited their village anyway — soft-spoken liberals with a love of health and art and nature. “As long as the toilets flush and the lights turn on, you’ll have nothing but five-star reviews from these hippies,” Tycho Jauch told him. Tycho was a 48-year-old white man with dreadlocks down to his ass, so Paul doubted he meant “hippie” as a derisive characterization.

With the bathroom light fixed, he spent some time puttering around the cottage, opening and closing drawers, testing the fortitude of the trim in each room with the toe of his shoe. Mostly, he was waiting for Ang. He’d mentioned doing a deep clean hoping to plant the seed in her mind. He was willing to roll up his sleeves and do the work himself, but not without her direction. Ang had standards that were mysterious and inaccessible to him, and, if he surprised her by cleaning the place, she would express her gratitude before quietly spending hours redoing the work herself. Eventually, he gave up on her and headed home.

He found her crouched in their garage, digging through boxes. “Look at these spikes and ropes,” she said when she saw him, lifting them above her head for him to see.

“Pitons,” he said, identifying the spikes.

“They’re marvelous. I was thinking we could hammer nails randomly around that longest living room wall then wind this rope around them to make an art piece.”

“Hammer random nails into our new wall?”

“To make an amorphous piece. Don’t worry,” she said, “it will look great.”

As it turned out, she was right. Once she’d hammered in the nails and wound his climbing rope around it, Paul had to admit that it did look great. She’d even looked up a knot-tying video online to secure the pitons here and there as accents. They were just figure-eights; he could have taught them to her, but he supposed she wanted to surprise him. The display was touching, but it was odd for him too, being memorialized in this way while he was still around to see it. “Celebrated” was likely how she would have put it, had he voiced this feeling.

“Well?” she asked, sliding beside him, wrapping her arms around his waist.

“It’s cool. It’s really very cool.”

“Good. There are two more bins in the garage. You can go grab them while I get started cleaning.” Then, with an outstretched finger, she poked him in his ribs.

 

Once, back in 1983, Paul and his climbing partner, Franco, ascended Utah’s Moonlight Buttress. It wasn’t among his most impressive climbs — he had free-climbed El Capitan in Yosemite and Cerro Torre in Patagonia — but it produced his favorite photo from those years. Franco snapped it just before dusk on their first night, at around 183 meters. They’d stopped for sleep, hanging their portaledges off the rockface. Franco was a few meters above Paul, and he’d peeked his head over the edge of his bedding to gab until dark, like an older brother whispering from an upper bunk after lights out. He told Paul a story about a girl he met in Belgium, a sweet but filthy recounting that left Paul howling. It was then, as his laughter echoed down the cliffside, that his partner took the photo. In it, Paul was lying on his back, his eyes closed, his mouth open, the Beehive State visible at what looked like a million miles below him. He found this photo in the first bin he opened. It was in a cracked plastic protector with a magnet on its backside. A wedge of plastic was missing from its corner, and there was a corresponding crease in the photo itself, though not one that affected the image. Paul was glad about that. Staring at it caused an ache in his shins and shoulders as if his muscles were reminding him that climbing was a young man’s game and not to get any ideas. He could have continued for a decade or two longer than he had, but those days would be well behind him now in any case. He had given them, instead, to Ang and the waterworks. She hadn’t asked him to; that decision had been made by the intensity of their early days together, by the fire that burned for her in his chest.

He placed the photograph back into the bin and then loaded it and the other onto his dolly and toted it across the alley.

Ang got final say over his work that afternoon, but mostly she held her tongue and let him decorate while she cleaned. “Decorate” was, perhaps, an overstatement, since it mostly involved him nailing his gear to the walls — crampons and carabiners, ascenders and quickdraws, and, above the table in the little dining area, his helmet and dull ice axe, everything in the bins other than his boots. As he was finishing up, she came to his side.

“It looks good,” she said, squeezing him around his middle to prove she meant it.

“Are you sure people won’t misread the theme as S&M dungeon?”

She tickled his love handle, causing him to pull away from her.

“Oh, this is a wonderful photo!” she said, lifting his Moonlight Buttress portrait from a side table where he’d laid it. “I’d forgotten it. You look so young and handsome.”

“I was at least one of those things.”

She held the photograph up to his face. “You look the same. Less windburned.”

“More time burned.”

“Aren’t we all?” With that, she kissed his shoulder and headed to the bathroom, carrying bleach and a rag. His photograph was tucked under her arm.

He couldn’t see it, but he heard when its magnet tacked against the metal frame of the vanity mirror. “That’s the perfect room for it,” he said, though he didn’t mean it. He was proud of that photo, and since finding it, his thoughts had mostly been of Franco — wondering where he ended up, if he was even still alive. Not everyone from the old days was. Paul wondered if he could find him on the internet, on Facebook or whatever. What was his last name, though? Boucher? Something like that, something French, though he’d never seen it written. They’d just met at a base camp somewhere or other and found that they got along. It would be great to have a beer with him, but pursuing him wasn’t worth the sadness of learning he was dead. Probably, it was better to leave the past in the past.

“Are you done with this light?” she called to him.

“Yes. Why? Is it flickering again?”

“No, I just thought I heard it buzzing when I turned it on.”

He stared at the wall, at his memories, and shrugged for no one’s benefit. “Some lights buzz a little.” He turned when she popped her head out of the bathroom. She was grinning. Her fingers were hooked into the doorframe, and she was hanging by them into the hallway like a child. “Does that mean we’re ready to list it?”

 

It took only four hours to book the rental for the weekend. The couple seemed ideal — longtime members of the home-sharing app, nothing but positive feedback in both directions. Ang treated the matter with the seriousness one might employ when choosing an oncologist, vacillating between hitting the button to approve them and scouring the limited available customer data for a reason not to trust them. Paul sat with her in their living room, humoring her for the better part of an hour, then he excused himself to go and rearrange the garage, to address the hole where he’d once stored his past. In the end, she would approve them, he knew. When he finally returned to the house, dusty, with cobwebs on his skin and in his hair, she confirmed that she had.

With his work at the rental done for now, Paul spent the next couple of days reading and walking the village’s hiking trails. In bed, though, on the night before their first couple arrived, he tossed and turned. It was nothing specific, just a general sense of unease that kept him blinking in the darkness of their bedroom, growing jealous of the steady, heavy breaths of Ang’s sleep. It caused him to think of Moonlight Buttress, of how exhausted he had been on that night spent on his portaledge, hanging hundreds of feet above ground, sleeping like a baby; of how the hurt he used to feel from his climbs was so much worse and yet seemingly more manageable than the pains of old age that were his daily reality; and of how Ang had displayed his photograph all the way across the alley, left in the care of uncaring strangers. She hadn’t done anything wrong; he knew that. The photograph was just a stand-in for what really bothered him, something that couldn’t be blamed on anyone, certainly not Ang. Time or life, or possibly just the reminder that we can’t play out every possible version of ourselves to their natural conclusions, that our time on Earth is so very short — these were the real culprits.

He slid out of bed, careful not to wake her, and went to the kitchen for a glass of water. Staring at his reflection in the darkened window, he considered whether his face looked different from how he thought of himself. In his younger days, would he have jumped at the sight of this reflected ghoul, or would he have recognized him, the hollows of his cheeks and eyelids being just a trick of the glass? The hair would be a giveaway, he supposed. He attempted to replicate the photo’s expression of elated merriment but felt foolish and gave up before getting it precisely right.

Instead, he unplugged his phone from its charger, tucked himself into a corner of the room where he couldn’t see his reflection, and typed in Franco Boucher. There were dozens of hits for men with that name, but he still found him right away — or, at least, he found a bald and jowly version of the face in his memory. He was a real estate broker in Tempe. In his headshot, he stared into the void of the internet, wearing a cheesy smile and a funeral suit. Seeing him caused Paul’s heart to race, particularly because he looked so normal — boringly so, as if his life had been as starved for adventure as Paul’s in the time since they parted ways.

He tapped the image, but there was no information other than his office and cell numbers. Tempe was, what, three hours behind them? Four? It was just after midnight in their little eastern village, which surely wouldn’t be too late to reach out to a friend out west. He tapped the cell number and set about composing a text message. Something funny. Something cool. Something that made Paul seem like the man he was when they were still tight, when they regularly risked death together, each of them entrusting their life to the other. He stood for minutes, his thumbs hovering over the keyboard on his screen. What could he say? Are you the Franco Boucher who I used to cheat death with a million years ago? I can’t tell for sure because there’s a fat old man in your work photo.

No. Obviously, that wouldn’t do. Nor would any of the other messages he could think of. He decided that the right course would be to send a picture of the photograph, no text, no explanation. If the man was his Franco, he would understand and respond. If not, he would likely just block Paul’s number, and life would move on.

He hurried to the foyer and stepped into his sandals. Usually, he thought of those slip-on shoes as being part of an old man’s uniform, but they didn’t seem so now. Youth was a mindset, maybe. It certainly felt that way as he hurried out into the night.

The cottage was spooky after dark, quiet and unfamiliar. Earlier, as he’d appraised his displayed climbing gear, it occurred to him that his youth was spread all over those walls like blood spatter at a crime scene. Now, he passed those trinkets without a second thought.

In the nighttime quiet, the buzzing of the bathroom light was undeniable. It stopped him cold, brought him out of his own head. How had he not noticed it earlier? Old ears or a foggy brain, maybe. Happens to the best of us. He stretched and reached and tapped the globe with his knuckle, but the sound persisted. His tools were back home in the garage, and it would be crazy for him to go back for them now. The renters wouldn’t arrive until after eleven, which gave him time to come back at a reasonable hour to fix it. Or maybe there was nothing to fix. Some lights buzz a little, he reminded himself.

After grabbing the photo from the vanity mirror, he took a quick picture of it with his phone’s camera and sent it on its way to Tempe, Arizona. Once done, he replaced the photo. Ang hadn’t been wrong to leave it there. He’d been a hero once, sort of. At the very least, he’d once done stupid things that passed for heroism. He didn’t need proof of it displayed in their home, always in reach to make him jealous of his younger self. Let their guests be jealous of him, that was the better way.

Paul checked his phone once before returning home. He’d received no new messages. It might be that Franco was an early riser and wouldn’t see the message until the morning. Silence didn’t necessarily mean that he had the wrong man.

When he headed out, he opted to leave the light on so that he could judge in the morning if the buzzing was a constant or just something the fixture did while it was warming up. If the latter was the case, there was probably nothing that could be done about it, and he would know not to mess around with it, possibly making the problem worse for the effort.

He checked for Franco’s text a few more times on his walk back to the house, and then again after he crawled into bed, causing Ang to stir and mutter his name before returning to sleep.

The response woke him when it came through several hours later. The phone buzzed on his nightstand — once, then again, and then for a third and final time. He pawed for it with a reflexive movement of his hand. Beside him, Ang snored. The Tempe real estate agent was, indeed, his Franco. He’d sent full paragraphs expressing his excitement to hear from his old friend and climbing partner, asking questions, willfully oversharing in a way that made Paul wonder if his text might have given the man a reprieve from a late-life crisis. Franco asked if he had ever gotten back into climbing, told him how he’d lost a leg in an accident a few years after they’d parted ways and been forced out of the game, mentioned that he’d turned to alcohol for several years but that this had been many years ago. Now, he understood that nothing lasts forever. Nothing but memories and your love for the people you collect along the way.

It would be days before Paul would have the presence of mind to respond or even get to the end of Franco’s texts because it was while he was reading them that the first sirens sounded. Close and getting closer. Ang awoke with a start. Paul was already at the bedroom window by then, staring at the excitement across the alley. She came to the window beside him, looked, gasped, took his hand. He squeezed. The fire burned. His past and her future. In the aftermath, in their new life, when he finally got around to sending his reply, it wasn’t entirely with kindness when he confirmed that Franco was right.