‘There are forces at work here that we do not understand.’ : Rain in the Walls

I am grateful to the contractor who reroofed our house some months ago and want to acknowledge publicly that, even in the storm that howled through the Santa Monica Mountains last week, the roof did not leak. The wall, however, did.

I’m not sure exactly what happened. I was standing in the middle of the living room exulting in the fact that no rain was seeping in around the skylights when I noticed water on the floor.

I, of course, instantly suspected our dog Hoover, who is known to urinate in terror in any weather beyond a windless sunny day with no clouds.

He refuses to leave the house even during the mildest breeze and, when forced out, whines and scratches at the door until he is let in again, whereupon he immediately wets on the rug.

I hope to God my life never depends on Hoover’s wit or courage, for we will end up with me dead on the floor in a puddle of dog urine and Hoover hiding under the couch.

This time, however, there was too much water to blame on the dog.

I looked around for the source of the liquid, but found nothing. It was a psychic mystery, like spectral sex and mass levitation.

“There are forces at work here,” I said to my wife, “that we do not understand.”

“I’m not ready to settle for water from the Twilight Zone,” she said. “It’s coming from someplace in the known world, and I intend to find it.”

Under normal circumstances, I admire persistence, but I do not admire it late at night when the result is likely to mean work for me.

I consider anything beyond taking out the garbage an affront to my scholarly nature.

“Here,” she said from the other room, “the wall’s leaking.”

I followed her voice. “You’re right.”

“Good,” she said, “we have a consensus. Now what?”

Water was seeping through a wall of stone at the corner of the house. It trailed around a table and reappeared in a hallway.

“Well,” I said, “now that we know the source of the water, we can rest in comfort during the remainder of the night. You want some warm milk?”

I hate warm milk. Well, I guess I don’t actually hate it, but I do regret the necessity to drink warm milk, like an old fool whose years of bacchanalian revelry have half-ruined his stomach, which is what has happened to me.

At first, I tried damping the fire of too many martinis by mixing the gin with milk instead of vermouth, until a city editor, watching in horror, threatened to destroy my career if I ever drank it in his presence again.

So I switched to vodka and vermouth at cocktail time, and warm milk before going to bed. During periods of voluntary abstinence not dissimilar to a Great American Drinkout, I skip the milk entirely.

Back to the leaking wall.

“Do something,” my wife said.

“Join me,” I said, falling to my knees.

“Prayer won’t hack it.”

“It always helped Ronald Reagan.”

“Not lately.”

Walls haunt my life.

The last household job I ever undertook was pounding a nail into a wall.

The reason for the nail has long since paled in importance to what happened next. The wall began to hiss.

“What’s that?” my wife asked.

“I must have hit a snake,” I said.

“That’s no snake.”

Women can’t help being certain about everything. Infallibility goes with the gender. It has to do with their ability to bear live young.

“It could be a python that escaped from the zoo,” I said defensively.

“A python that wiggled down the Ventura Freeway, past both the Hollywood and the San Diego, then up State Highway 27 to find an opening between two walls?”

“Well,” I said, “maybe it dropped into a milk truck and . . . “

“Just pull the nail,” she said.

I pulled the nail. A stream of water shot out of the hole, careened off my face and sprayed against the furniture.

“Put the nail back in!” she hollered.

“What?”

I tend not to hear in a crisis.

“Put the nail back in the hole!”

When I did, the water stopped.

“Nice going,” I said, with admiration. “What’s for dinner?”

“Do something,” she said.

I had to cut out a hunk of Sheetrock to discover that what I had done was find the one portion of wall with a quarter-inch copper water pipe behind it.

I had hit the pipe dead center. It was an almost spiritual accomplishment.

I fixed the hole by taping the nail to the pipe, putting the sheet rock back and hanging a picture on that portion of the nail that still protruded. I was never asked to fix anything again. Until now.

“You’ve got to do something,” she said, watching water seep in through the stone wall.

It suddenly stopped raining. And when it stopped raining, the wall stopped leaking.

“It’s a miracle!” I said.

She just looked at me.

We still have to get someone to fix the leak, but it won’t be me.

I was so pleased, I skipped the warm milk. God doesn’t grant miracles to men who drink warm milk.

Mud in your eye, Big Daddy.