Free Seven Good Reasons Not to Be Good by John Gould Page A

have lugged her laptop to the dining room table, thrown open the funky French doors (Saint Francis and his birds in stained glass) so she can commune with Mother Nature while she works her digital mojo. As Matt squints his mind’s eye, his diminutive wife seats herself in peasant blouse and karate bottoms, folds her bare feet up under her tush, takes a sip from her herbal tea. She bends prayerfully into the glow of her little screen. The tips of her black hair swish across her … blonde hair. The tips of her
blonde
hair swish across her shoulders. Sheesh, Matt’s having a heck of a time getting this new picture into his head. The dye job’s a recent thing, since Sophie. With Mariko’s mostly Japanese features the new hair looks collaged, Photoshopped. It looks trashy too, in a disturbingly hot sort of way.
    how’s zane? ya know i admire him more every time i think about what he’s doing. better not tell him that tho!!! or maybe you should?
    and i admire you too. how many friends would do this?
    the other day you asked me why sophie, and i think i know what you mean. you mean is it sophie because sophie’s a woman or because sophie’s sophie. the thing is, i don’t know. i didn’t used to say that so much did i, i don’t know? that’s you, thanks!!!
    listen hon that couple’s coming back to see the place again this aft. ron thinks they’re going to make an offer. i’ll call you at zane’s if something happens. shanti m
    Right, that was one more reason (did he really need it?) for Matt to hit the road this week. His home was being sold out from under him.
    Not that he’s particularly wild about the place. He wants to be wild about it though, he’s
desperate
to be wild about it—the way his dad would be, for instance, if he ever made it out to the coast—and the fact that he’s failed to feel that way, that he’s proven too weird or wonky to fall for such a “bucolic gem” (Ron’s irritating ad) makes the loss even harder to take. If you aren’t at peace in paradise, then what?
    It’s been five years. He and Mariko bought the place on a whim of hers, an infatuation she took, typically, as a sign from the cosmos. They weren’t yet midway through their time together—this was ‘98, so they’d been squished into her Vancouver condo for about two years. Matt still believed he could coerce himself into a Mariko-style moment of faith. If he acted in accordance with a certain belief—in this case the belief that the home into which they’d just peeped was perfect for them, was indeed their destiny—then surely he’d come to
possess
that belief, no?
    Well, no. But why not? What’s not to love? It’s the Garden of Eden, or “Lair of Lilith” as Mariko dubbed it, scorching these words into a slab of driftwood at the bottom of the drive, city girl gone über-country. Three acres of tangly new forest, the odd mammoth stump still around to hint at a pre-paleface world, a world in which trees were gods. The house itself isn’t really a house at all but a series of cabins leaned one against another: the draft dodger who settled the place (folks still wax sentimental about the cheeky yet charming buzz produced by his weed) started out with a single room and just kept adding on as his grow op prospered. The place is an architect’s nightmare, the kind of what-next house so many people dream. Its kookiest feature is that it’s made of straw, great stacks of stuccoed bales. Since Matt and Mariko have lived there the place has been written up half a dozen times, in magazines with titles like
Share
and
Home Planet.
The articles never mention the sagging walls, the riotous rodents. They focus instead on the feel of the place, which admittedly is pretty darn good. Being cuckolded has of course complicated things for Matt, but until then he found himself prone, in the Lair, to mystifying bouts of the warm fuzzies.
    The thing is though, what are you supposed to do there? Granted it’s always a pleasure