The Affairs of Others: A Novel Read online

  In the new silence, I said, “I’ll call the police.”

  His oxford shirt was not buttoned fully or correctly. His feet were bare. His belt was unfastened under his untucked shirt, his fly half-zipped. He drove his hands into his pockets, as I’d seen him do before. A default position for him. He was trying to compose himself.

  “I don’t think you will.”

  “Try me.”

  Another slow-forming smile. He moved back into the apartment, opening the door wide behind him. “Tell her. Come in and tell her.”

  His smile vanished as he watched me.

  I took two steps toward him.

  I stood on the threshold.

  She was in a costume that trussed, crisscrossed, and bisected. A woman turned into parts, done up in black—black garters, held up with black straps, a black collar of some sort around her neck. Porn fantasia. She’d not been up to returning his gifts after all, and now she leaned to face the only wall that did not house bookshelves, bracing herself against it, legs spread. Her skin was mottled a startled pink on the exposed cheeks of her rear and down the lengths of her thighs. Her back where it was bare glistened with sweat and/or saliva and showed hand marks. Her arms above her head appeared thin and a shocking pale against the rest, the blood leaving them to travel elsewhere, to evidence of the alarm and heat of so much friction and more. The fury of her skin. “Come on, babeeee,” she intoned. “Where did you go…?” Her head lolled forward and hung. I could not see her face. She breathed in and called just above a whisper, “I’m cold. I’m so cold.”

  She was miles gone inside herself and the scenario they’d been playing at; for all useful purposes, she was blind. “Baby, baby, babeeee,” she hummed.

  I made to go.

  He pursued me, my back to him. “She told me about you,” he said, “that you’re a fighter.”

  In the hall, steps away from him, I came to a standstill, deciding, trying to decide.

  “Beautiful and a fighter.”

  “I don’t like you here.”

  “She does.”

  “She doesn’t know up from down.”

  “If I go, she does. You want that?”

  My extremities, particularly my hands, started to twitch with the adrenaline that had found them again. I caught them, knotted them in front of me, held on to them; if I turned around, they would lunge for him.

  “Goodbye, fighter.” He shut the door, locked it. Music broke out again—as suddenly as laughter might.

  * * *

  Once behind my own bolted door, it was a torch song that came swelling through their floorboards, my ceiling. That was what he’d decided they’d play to now, as they found new positions or so I gathered from the thuds. Then the thrashing, to the round tones of a crooning voice. A standard with a bouncy bass. (Nightmares, waking or sleeping, are made of this sort of incongruity—of pieces that don’t, and shouldn’t, be fitted together.)

  Under my door awaiting me, I’m not sure how long, was a pamphlet on PCBs and animal fat. Angie was recycling her causes; I’d seen this one before; still it was a vestige of a world, the world of this building that I had understood, that had since been altered.

  Also on my floor—passed under the door and unseen by me earlier—a note on the back of an opened envelope: “I was here—Marina.” Had she cleaned or simply wanted to see me, letting herself in with the key I’d given her? I had forgotten to return her call.

  I washed my hands, put my groceries away and out of sight. Corked the wine, wiped the counter.

  I took a milk glass of whiskey to my bed. It was Tony Bennett, I think, singing to them, me. In other words, I’m yours.

  It occurred to me to leave, but I couldn’t; I wouldn’t be forced out of what was mine, even as my bed rolled with them. I stood, swallowed a mouthful of whiskey, and turned the bedside radio on. NPR reported on antibacterial products, how some experts maintained they were a detriment to the function and development of healthy immune systems in children. “Overkill,” someone said. “Next up we’ll talk to our commentators about the Geneva Convention and Guantanamo Bay.” I switched to a classical music station—cellos huffing low and long—and got up to lie down on the oak of the floor, as far from them above me as I could get; the wood was cool against everything overheating in me. Above me now: Yes, it’s only a canvas sky, hanging over a muslin tree along with gleeful horns and was it? Yes, scatting. C’mon, baby. We can’t. My husband that day. Hollow as a barrel.

  I crawled partially under my bed. An island of dust there and a lone paperback, a Signet edition of Moby-Dick. I had several editions. His. Ours. Mine. But I always kept one within reach. A trick. To time travel. I held the book to me, smelled it, and tried to piece passages together from memory. The soliloquies came easiest—some ridiculous if taken out of context. My resplendently healthy husband reading to me, alive and laughing with amazement at Ahab’s address to the head of a dead sperm whale: “Speak, thou vast and venerable head, which, though ungarnished with a beard”—Celia! Ungarnished with a beard?! Can you believe this guy?—“yet here and there lookest hoary with mosses; speak, mighty head, and tell us the secret thing that is in thee.” I had known this bit by heart for so long, as well as the next lines: “That head upon which the upper sun now gleams, has moved amid this world’s foundations—” Moved amid the world’s foundations? I mean, this guy was fearless! I checked myself against the dog-eared page, touched each line: “Thou hast been where bell or diver never went … Thou saw’st the locked lovers when leaping from their flaming ship; heart to heart they sank beneath the exulting wave; true to each other, when heaven seemed false to them…” Melville’s captain calling to the carcass as if it were an oracle. My husband reading those long, propulsive sentences with the thrilled breathlessness Melville hoped for. The author’s daring. His excess and live fancy set against such homeliness, all the minutiae of whale fishery and functions of the blood. You like the gore, baby. It was true.

  On another dog-eared page, I read to myself: “In most land animals there are certain valves or flood-gates in many of their veins, whereby when wounded, the blood is in some degree at least instantly shut off in certain directions. Not so with a whale; one of whose particularities it is, to have an entire non-valvular structure of the blood-vessels, so that when pierced even by so small a point as a harpoon, a deadly drain is at once begun upon his whole arterial system … Yet so vast is the quantity of blood in him, and so distant and numerous its interior fountains, that he will keep thus bleeding and bleeding for a considerable period; even as in a drought a river will flow, whose source is in the well-springs of far-off and undiscernible hills.” The wonder at it—the author’s, my husband’s, mine, how even in the details, yes, of the gore I’d come to love then, he is looking for mystery, for God or gods; Melville was extravagant. My husband loved him for that, how the reader was necessarily lifted off the page, up and out of time.

  A howl from upstairs. Unmistakable delight in it. I covered my ears. I shut my eyes and saw Starbuck confronting Ahab in his cabin. “The oil in the hold is leaking, Sir.” I didn’t need the page; I recalled Starbuck’s urging, though, admittedly, in my husband’s excited voice: “We must up the Burtons and break out,” yes, before all the oil on which the owners of the ship were depending was lost. Ahab nearly shoots Starbuck at the suggestion; it meant they’d have to pause in their hunt for the whale. Ahab rails, sends Starbuck off, but then in a remarkable turn, just after the first mate is gone, Ahab relents. Like that. Ahab’s passion needing Starbuck’s pragmatism, needing reprieve from a goal so driving and depleting, needing to gather the steadier breath back to him long enough to query what is worth saving? What is worth chasing? What is real?

  Les had called me beautiful. He couldn’t have known that no one did anymore, nor did I want that word from anyone except someone who had given it to me in a way I understood—who liked to encounter and re-encounter even the skin in so slight and forgotten a spot as my earlobe. I held my earlobe
between my thumb and index finger now. It was the skin just there, the tiny pulse; before he became too ill, it could begin there between us, depending on his mood. At any given time I had been a woman whose neck was knotted, whose hair probably needed a washing, whose feet hurt from shoes not designed for her comfort, but wherever he touched me, I could not help imagining something delicate against everything hewn and rough around it. Everywhere along the Maine coast he loved, there were crowds of sea roses. I could not help but think of them—those sturdy roses. In Vacationland. His salt in my mouth, his tongue. C’mon, baby, let me in. Soon I was made of those seaside petals; his own skin and body waking and warming, as mine began to turn, to give way. He lifted my hips and cradled my lower back, making it feel at once small and as expansive as sky, and then making it vanish into his touching me, his hands that knew where to go on me, when to wait and when to forget waiting, to forget himself. His lips and teeth mapped the last of my skin on the back of my neck—yes, there, one of the places my nerves always called to the rest of me most emphatically, that sent live threads to my toes and heart, fingertips and stomach until toes, fingers, and more dissolved, too. My beautiful. His word, his possessive. Not beautiful girl or wife or woman, no domesticated adjectives, but his simple descriptor, more timeless, at least to me, breaking time even now. Let me in. Yes, I was no longer reducible to parts. I was no longer merely female. I was alive under him, coursing and losing surfaces to sensation: my breasts just breasts before the lines everywhere tense and electric inside me claimed them too, and as his mouth pulled on them, the communication of lines pulled me into them and into feeling. Between my legs, he ran fingers between lips, inside inside-lips, for me, reminding me of the contours going liquid there, of all the ways I could know them and them me, not for theater, but because they were mine and he loved what was mine. And so he could be my strength, the hard part of me, inside me, riding the coursing and the melting and the pounding—of his body and mine, yes, but especially of blood—his blood and mine under skin that was no longer skin. So much blood between us. My beautiful. Eyes closed. Eyes opened. It did not matter because either way he was all through me, even his voice reddening in my veins, and I was everywhere him, a body turned inside out for him because he had loved what was mine. I remembered. Yes, he loved what was mine.

  HELPING HANDS

  I HADN’T REALLY WOKEN or perhaps I was barely awake. I moved through the morning’s rituals and requirements; my husband’s hands following me, caressing me, as I dressed. Some days, not as many as I would have liked, I could have him back. For a few hours or longer, I could see myself through his eyes, feel myself humming as he’d made me hum, feel held in his regard. And however long it lasted, this sensation, it was more dramatic than anything else around me. In here. Why shouldn’t my past, as I’d known it to the detail, be as real as anything else? As habitable? Didn’t I owe him that?

  When my bell rang, I doubted it, didn’t care to hear it. When it rang again, I put my back to it, ran my fingers through my hair, and stirred a density of ambered honey into my tea. The third time it sounded I saw Mr. Coughlan’s face and then wondered about the temperature outside. It was yet a cold spring. I set my tea down and worked the intercom. The voice, one I’d heard before, issued statements: “Detective Brazo. Here about a missing persons complaint.”

  I hesitated.

  “Hello?” he called through the box of wires. “This is the NYPD. I’m looking for the landlady, a Celia—”

  I buzzed him in. Too quickly was he at my door. I opened it but stood in the frame. I rarely allowed anyone in my place, and now here was a man who smiled just as readily as Les had, at something as flimsy as a woman alone.

  “Are you—?”

  “I am the landlady here.”

  He told me my name again. I nodded. More establishing facts. “Mr. Coughlan’s your tenant.” I nodded again and again. Because I didn’t move aside, he smiled less and less. A silence hovered, landed. “Can I come in?”

  Did he have to? Would he think it, me, suspicious? Did it matter what he thought? I expected the police at my door before. I would have welcomed them. But now? I was better defended. I had practice.

  “Sure.” I shrugged; oh, but I moved aside with well-broadcast reluctance as he pulsed past me and roamed feet from me; a wiry man, it appeared, with the city all through him. He had a long bone of a nose on a short face, a smallish cleft chin, a profusion of eyebrows, bouncing with the roaming of his eyes, looking for anything, everything. I tried not to see so much, not today, not the wave in his thick hair or his sun-loving skin and the wide pores there, or the day-old beard coming in that was a field of hard black pushing and pushing.… But I always had—gathered details to me, even the ones I did not want, so many—and in the last five years the tendency had only increased. I did not enjoy visitors, and unexpected visitors, unless it was Marina or her family, felt particularly unkind.

  “You look familiar,” he said, eyes and brows running away from me, around the room.

  “Huh.”

  “You moving in or moving out?”

  “No.”

  He eyed me, from my feet up this time. “Which one?”

  “Neither. I like to keep things spare.”

  “This Jeanette Coughlan, the daughter, is no fan of yours. She thinks you’re involved in her father’s disappearance.” He held himself as motionless as he could to see if I’d react.

  “Involved is one thing I am not.”

  He mistook the comment for levity, flirting. “Really?”

  His eyebrows climbed.

  I knocked them down, crossed my arms over my chest: “No, I mean, I believe in privacy, respecting it.”

  “She thinks you’re taking his money.”

  “I’ve taken some. The rent every month.” I did not tell him that Mr. Coughlan hadn’t paid the rent consistently in a year or so. I did not tell him I did not care whether he paid or not, or not in some time. Perhaps I should have explained, but I needed my privacy, at that moment more than ever.

  He pulled out a sad-looking notebook, and we traveled more facts: How long had he been renting here? Four years. How long since I’d last seen Mr. Coughlan? Two weeks. How would you describe your relationship? Cordial. Rent—how much? Below market. Any disputes in the building? None. I gave only what the detective asked for because I couldn’t give more—I so wanted him to go.

  “Will you excuse me for a moment?” I asked.

  I made for the bathroom, tried not to run. I plucked at the bottles in the cabinet, decided on Xanax, this one prescribed to me, and represcribed, since expired, yes, but not long ago. Only months. Here and there I had needed help to sleep, to relax. I’d been confident I didn’t need more. Or rarely. I sucked on the bitterness of the pill as I sat on the toilet and imagined my husband’s strong hands holding my rib cage, to steady my breathing, my heart.

  I had felt the rainbow of my husband’s body, his everything, awake and asleep. All night I had sunk back into him, and he’d let me. And all morning while drifting and dreaming him, I had listened to public radio’s Saturday early show, to their version of the world—books, sports, politics; a conversation with a guitarist whose fingers found the songs for him, with a novelist who believed the novel dead, with a Republican congressman turned Democrat turned Republican.

  Now, here, these people kept coming. Hope. Mr. Coughlan. His daughter. A policeman. Years later. Upstairs more news from worlds that should not be bearing down on my own. These people. I have not harmed them. I wouldn’t or not intentionally. That was never the idea. To harm anyone. When the taste became too much, I drank from the faucet to chase the pill down my throat. I breathed in, out.

  “Everything okay in there, ma’am?”

  These people.

  “Yes.”

  I emerged to his roaming eyes. “A little under the weather,” I told him.

  “Stomach thing?”

  “Would you like to see his place? Mr. Coughlan’s?” I rummaged in
a drawer of keys in a credenza by the door. “Top floor.” I placed my hand on my stomach. “I hope you won’t mind if I don’t join you.”

  He shifted from foot to foot, deciding whether to go alone. His brown jacket sleeves were too long and his blue pants shone from too many visits to the dry cleaner’s. His Adam’s apple was so sharp it looked like it would hurt to touch it.

  “I’ll come back after I’ve looked around.”

  “Fine,” I said. “Great.”

  “You’ll be here?”

  “Yes.”

  He turned to go. Turned back. “Are you sure we haven’t met?” His breath smelled of mustard.

  “I’m sure.”

  I locked the door behind him, put my hand on it to ask it to stay, to protect me as well as it might. I thought of my husband’s hand on the Brooklyn Bridge stanchion, thanking it, comforting it. His imagination extending to everything alive and inanimate.

  I flushed another pill into me, choosing for color, another color, this time pale green, and I called my husband to bed and waited for the medicine’s effects and the sensation of heat, his, to come and climb my spine. What is better than a solid, willing man lying behind you, cupping his body around yours? In no hurry. Forgetting time. One person stacked securely into the other. When my husband passed, at first, I couldn’t be inside and wandered outside too much, the whole of me an open mouth, an open pair of arms. My welfare scarcely an afterthought. Then I wouldn’t go out or rarely. I had scared myself into seclusion. I avoided friends or they, increasingly, avoided me. I saw doctors who enumerated the stages of grief, of trauma—as if the predictability of emotions should provide succor. No one asked me about his last day. No one cared to. They handed me slips for the pharmacy. To and from the Rite Aid I passed a Realtor’s office, and there, photographed, was the façade of my building—brownstone, which is of course brown hard stone. Resilient old Brooklyn replete with its own stories, but how slender and unassuming this building looked compared to its neighbors, more durable than grand, yes. I arranged to see it, bought it, moved, and asked myself for courage. I took enough medicine to help me sleep and walked every morning. In the light. My portion of it. My share, learning if not to like then to abide my own company again. I tried not to look for you on the streets or in other men’s bodies. They were my punishment for finding myself so alone. Oh, darling, darling. Here I am now. A chill of joy at feeling something remarkably like his full, hot breath on the back of my neck. The drugs began to subdue and widen the currents in me. Yes, I took them as little as possible because after they wore off, often, there was a price; the world lost all its vividness for a time, but today they gave me the richness and possibility of my own company, and his, which I could conjure as lushly and fully as I needed. In less than an instant, my tenants struck me as cartoons, then became shadows, as I led him to touch all the places in me that most needed to be touched. I was cherished in my bed by me, by him, by memory. I fell into an exhilarated state, part sleep, part charge in my lungs. “You can have all this and more,” he said, confiding, filling my ear. “What is more?” I asked him. He didn’t answer. “What is more? More of you?” I asked again as knocking came. It sounded from miles away. Across distance. More knocking. I got up to address it. I’d managed to forget the policeman.