The Book Club Next Door Never Read a Single Book

For two years I envied the book club next door. Every third Thursday, six or seven couples would arrive at the Bergstroms' house around eight, and there would be wine and laughter and the warm gold light of people who genuinely liked each other, and I, watching from my window like the lonely divorced man I was, would think: that. I want that. A circle of friends who read books and drink wine and grow old together on a nice street.

I should have wondered why a book club needed such heavy curtains.

I met a few of them over the fence and at the mailbox, and they were lovely, glossy people, the kind with good teeth and boats. When I mentioned once, wistfully, that I loved to read and would happily join a club, the temperature dropped about ten degrees and the woman I was talking to laughed and said, oh, it is really more of a private thing, and changed the subject so smoothly I almost did not notice I had been shut out of a book club, which is a genuinely humbling thing to be shut out of.

The book club was loud, is the thing. Not offensively -- it wrapped up by midnight, mostly -- but loud in a specific, telling way. There was a lot of laughter early and a strange quiet later, and cars that arrived together but, if you were paying attention, and by year two I shamefully was, did not always leave with the same people they came with. But I told myself I was a bitter man inventing drama to explain why the happy people would not let me in, and I mostly believed that, until the night Karen Bergstrom dropped her phone in my yard.

She had come out to the shared side fence to take a call, away from the noise, and afterward her phone must have slipped from the fence rail into my hostas, and the next morning I found it and, being a decent person, I picked it up to return it. It was not locked. It lit up. And I did not go looking, I swear I did not, but the screen was just there, an open thread, and the words on it were not about books. The words on it made it very clear what the book club was, and it was not a metaphor, and it involved most of the couples I had spent two years envying, in arrangements I had not known adults on nice streets actually made.

I put the phone face-down on their porch and knocked and left before anyone answered. I did not want to know more. I already knew far too much, and the knowing was heavy, because you cannot un-know the private architecture of six marriages you have to wave at every morning.

It came apart on its own, in the end, the way these things do. Not through me -- I told no one, and I am telling you only because you are strangers and it was years ago and the street has completely turned over since. It came apart because arrangements like that are stable right up until they are not, and one Thursday there was shouting, real shouting, the kind that does not stay behind heavy curtains, and then there were two For Sale signs within a season, and then the book club, whatever it truly was, simply ceased to meet. The gold light went out of the Bergstrom windows. The wine Thursdays ended. The circle I had envied for two years dissolved like sugar in the rain.

I moved a year later myself, for unrelated reasons, though I will admit the street felt different after that, thinner somehow, the way a place does when you have seen the wiring behind its wall. And I have never envied a happy-looking house since. I look at glowing windows full of laughing people now and I do not think that, I want that. I think, I hope that is exactly what it looks like, and I keep walking, because the one thing I learned from the book club that never read a book is that you should be very, very careful about wishing your way into other people's golden light. You have no idea what they are actually reading.