The People in the Trees by Hanya Yanagihara Page B

for dinner at Smythe’s house, a tall, narrow brownstone on the edge of the medical school campus. In the front was a Japanese red maple, now bare (it was early March), a holly bush with glossy, sharp leaves, and a clump of veined crocuses peering through their halo of mulch. The rest of the garden was bare, just plain wood chips. There was no harmony or apparent order to the plants’ arrangement; they just were. Inside, the house was very much the same way: in one corner of the entryway sat, incongruously, a Japanese tansu of blistering, puckered camphor. In another, just as incongruously, was an old-fashioned English secretary desk, the grain of the wood patterning its surface with satiny stripes. The rugs that covered the dusty floors were old Orientals, and I saw what looked like cracker crumbs speckling their tassels. The walls were hung with black shadowbox frames backed with black felt upon which were mounted lockets, their gold dull and whitish, and little scrimshaw carvings (a gnome, his crudely carved hands slapping together in a gesture of merriment; a ship, its sails pooching out unconvincingly), and cameos showing dreamy, loose-curled girls gazing off to the side, their expressions vacant. They were deeply idiosyncratic touches, and yet there was something furtive and unspecific about the house as well—it looked like the showroom for a second-rate auction house specializing in estate sales. There was nothing there that echoed who Smythe appeared to be, with his birchbark-colored hair and his lined face and his tall, upright walk and his magazine articles. Behind the frames, the walls were painted, each a different, strange color: puce and teal and that bright light green particular to unripened fruit. I had expected beiges and browns and perhaps some unobjectionable blues, everything neat and in order, not an eccentric’s house, for Smythe was not an eccentric.
    And yet everything around him that night seemed to argue that he was. Dinner, when it was at last served, was as ill-organized and haphazard as the house itself, as if assembled from whatever had been found in the refrigerator ten minutes before. There was tomato soup, thick as gravy and tasting strongly of ketchup; game hens, so undercooked that I could see the red arteries marbling the flesh; carrots and onions, so overcooked that they overflowed the tines ofmy fork with the gentlest press; another soup, this one seeming to consist purely of boiled onions and leeks and topped with a wet, suggestive coil of mustard; and for dessert what Smythe proudly told me were persimmons, sitting prim and Oriental on their blue-and-white chinoiserie plates but as hard as green plums—they tasted, when I was finally able to saw off a bite, like grass but sour, and it would be many years before I would be able to correct this impression.
    It was only the two of us at the table. Smythe sat at the head, nearest the kitchen, and I sat to his right. With each new course, he popped to his feet, disappeared through the pocket doors behind him, and came back bearing two plates in triumph. It had occurred to me, walking up the path to his house with a bottle of wine I’d thought to buy at the last minute, that he might be interested in interrogating me, that this might be a test of some sort. I was not worried about passing, but the thought of sitting down with Smythe—and, I assumed, his family—and being interviewed about my thoughts on various scientific quandaries of the day did not exactly fill me with excitement. But these had been wasted worries, for Smythe spent the entire evening speaking, from the time I entered the door and he took my coat with one hand and handed me a juice cup of brandy with the other (I have never cared for the taste of brandy, so flannelly on the teeth, and I tossed it into the shedding ficus in the foyer when Smythe went to fetch himself another cupful), throughout dinner, and over the glass of sherry he placed before me afterward,