The Affairs of Others: A Novel Page 11

  “Ah, you’re back,” I said.

  His mouth and hands flew. He went at a speed I could not fathom now, that seemed comic. Another cartoon. This was the police? Law and order?

  “I figured out where I’ve seen you. Helping Hands. You work there?”

  “I volunteer.” Yes, I had given much away when I moved, much of my own wardrobe, but there was an Irish sweater of my husband’s I’d included in the donations by mistake. I went back in tears, and I was led to piles as big as me, to search and sift until I found it, through hundreds of sweaters discarded, homeless, now unbelongings, and somehow comforting, as were the women in charge of the piles. They chatted, laughed, as they sorted with gloved hands. They understood duty as I did and chose their own pace, were kind, and so I went back for their fellowship and to be reminded how we let go, if we can, and in what vast quantities. Mountains of unbelonging.

  “My wife—we’re separated—she takes stuff there religiously. She is religious. She likes Jesus a lot better than she does me. Can’t say I blame her.”

  I was supposed to laugh here so I did. My face loosened in front of him, the rest of the taut strings in me loosening too. My knees laughing even. I braced myself against the credenza by the door. I laughed longer than I should have.

  “Who writes on the soup?” he asked.

  “Soup?” What a strange word that was and how right it seemed then—soup, a warm marsh. I was soup. Who could write in soup?

  “His daughter?” he asked.

  “Oh, yes, maybe,” I said, though I immediately doubted it.

  “The writing looks a lot like the writing on the mailboxes in the entry hall. I took that to be your handwriting.”

  “Oh, yes, I’m sorry. The cans, you mean? On them? Yes, yes, it is mine.” I nearly giggled. This was the police? Finding me out? Pursuing the soup-can writer? Years too late.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I’m better. I was lying down. I’m just, you know”—I smiled into his eyes, hoping to hold on to them and those bouncing eyebrows—“out of it, pooped, really.”

  “So you write on the cans?”

  “I date them. I want to make sure he eats.”

  “Does anybody know this?”

  “You and me.” I pointed to him, then to me, feeling a savage silliness. “You and me.”

  He stepped closer to me, smiling again, breathing his mustard at me. “Do you buy the soup?”

  “I replace the soup when it needs replacing. Simple as that. I lock his door when he forgets. I throw out the sour milk. I buy more milk.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “I’m not … nice.” I meant to say something about duty, responsibility, but I couldn’t get it out of me fast enough.

  “I think you are nice.” He straightened up, put his hands in his pockets, became expansive to prepare for his speech. “I think some people don’t expect people to get them. I think you’ve been alone a long time and have gotten used to it.” His Adam’s apple rolled and pointed. “I won’t argue with you about that, right? Not my business, though maybe it’s a shame, you know? Maybe. Maybe not. Hey, don’t let me overstep here. But I think Mr. Coughlan’s daughter and probably everyone has got you all wrong.”

  The detective looked proud of himself, with his flashing face and unmoving hair. Who was everyone, I wanted to ask but didn’t. I couldn’t locate the words in the warm marsh.

  “I knocked on a few doors. One place. Nobody home. At this hour, I expected as much. But another apartment, a lady answered the door—a Hope something? And some tall guy coming out quick to check me out, you know? Sure. They asked if you called about noise. I told them, no such thing—” He went on, and I saw Les as a wall again, fending off this odd character with his sad-looking notebook, building his assumptions, and Hope walled in. Hope in costume. Hope without hope.

  How suggestible I was and suddenly how weary. Hope and Les stood on my shoulders. I held on to the credenza. These people. The detective had to go now; before he did, I had to say one more thing: “I went looking for him, Mr. Coughlan. He was seen at Whitehall, at the terminal there, a week or so ago. He rode the ferry back and forth, chatted the men up. A man named Frank saw him, and someone else did too—a Billy or Bobby. They tell me he’s fine. I don’t know, but they say a man like him needs—”

  “A regular Nancy.”

  “Did you say Nancy?”

  “Nancy Drew.” He laughed.

  “No, no, air, and I’m … I was—” I could barely stand. I saw Hope with her back to me, giving me the pink of her flanks. That music from last night, played too loud, surely in part for me, because of me. Fatigue reduced me; I knew only two things: I had to sleep, and I had to ask Hope to leave my building as soon as I could. “I try not to involve myself,” I said to the detective and to Hope. “But it is so important that we all respect each other’s—”

  “Space.” The detective peered into my face. “You really don’t look so good. You’re dead on your feet. Something you ate? A bug?”

  “I am just so tired…”

  His mouth made the smallest of talk, too small to follow. Old man, his age, he said. Why hasn’t he come home? He’s vulnerable, sure. Anything could have happened between then and now or maybe not … I’ll check it all out. I leaned into the credenza and away from his talk of new risks to my tenant. The pale green pill was a sedative. I whispered, “I’m not so strong.” He didn’t hear me; he was going of his own momentum now, a man full of purpose, show, and back in my bed, the sheets having turned cold, in full daylight, I tumbled and went out.

  AWAY INTO ANOTHER WOMAN, ANOTHER MAN

  WHERE I WENT, I couldn’t say. Where I returned I did not recognize at first. I smelled Pine-Sol and had to keep blinking to make out the time on a clock I didn’t believe in. I lay there debating every thing around me, even the daylight and a terrible absence that made even the empty air around me too full. The danger of suspending reality or your more banal agreements with it was that you couldn’t call it back when you chose. It had to be courted, wooed. It took work. I knew the regimen: A shower, caffeine, the sun full in your eyes if you could get it, all this helped, but above all you had to be willing to make new agreements and to keep moving without thinking too much, to see and register the world around you for its absolute surfaces, for its mute particulars, without resistance or much internal conversation, and especially without longing for something else.

  I saw numbers indicating 1:30 in the afternoon become 2:30 before I decided I was willing to move. But my body remembered better than anything conscious in me the sweetness of what had been restored to me, and it dragged behind my directives to wash and drink black tea into what I had finally agreed, yes, was afternoon. My body’s reluctance stood me before a mirror to look at it after I’d showered; I wore my husband’s eyes to study my body as he did, the unblemished white of it, the leanness, the length of my neck. A body that was neither young nor old, though I could see textures in the skin across my stomach and over my knees that hadn’t been there before and different contours along muscles in my arms, new hollows, and that my hips and breasts were fuller, the lines of my jaw and nose sharper. Cold traveling from my feet standing on the uncovered floor nearly drove me back to bed, but I shook it off and at my bureau dutifully found underwear, a bra, and in that same drawer, barely buried, a note I’d taken from the Braunsteins’ apartment: I’ll wait for you in a stranger’s hand. I stared and stared at it, as I had the clock, waiting for it to make sense of itself, why I’d taken it. All that I could come up with, agree to, as I dressed, was that it shouldn’t be here any longer.

  I made myself presentable and approached my door. It required a few attempts and one trip to the medicine cabinet before I made it out. I placed one pill, an ancient yellow Klonopin, in my windbreaker pocket, as a companion, a sort of encouraging talisman, nothing more. Backup I wouldn’t need.

  I exited to clean hall floors. Marina had been here—used the Pine-Sol she and I had agreed
to years ago. If she’d come knocking or ringing, I’d been insensate. The stillness in the halls told me she was gone now. No one was about.

  Absence again, widening and widening before me. I hurried past it to the front door and flung myself outside.

  But the day ran too high. It was radiant and boasting, making a parade of its assets and so required cheering bodies and attitudes. The birds screamed. I stepped back inside. In the empty halls, scrubbed nearly to sterility by a Marina so starkly gone, the building did not breathe. Beside my own, it seemed to have no human breath in it at all. It felt sealed, even to me. A distortion maybe, one of any number I’d left myself open to by needing ghosts and going away as I had, part of the cost, but one I could not brook for long if I meant to decipher between what was safe in these walls and what was not.

  I got all my keys. I took the elevator. There was nothing to remark inside it; it seemed impossible that anything untoward had ever happened in it. At Mr. Coughlan’s door, I knocked as a formality, part of the work, the means of meeting superficies. On the other side nothing moved, nothing could. I touched every piece of his furniture. New York dust of streets and bodies and traffic and buildings had settled on everything already. The city shedding even here, in empty rooms. In his fridge, mold had taken over most of the cheese and bread. I left them for now. I didn’t want to argue or fuss. My job was to see what was; that he’d never meant to stay long; that the rooms meant nothing to him—just the solitude they offered and that view of the harbor.

  At the Braunstein door, I knocked harder and repeatedly. When I opened the door, I called, “It’s Celia. I smelled gas in the hall.” And I proceeded in: “Anybody home? Hello? Hello? So sorry to intrude—” The paint cans had been stored away or disposed of; the furniture and lamps were restored. The colors Angie had newly applied were just as glaring as on my last visit, but the odd tidiness of the place now, the fact that all the wall hangings, the masks, and more were not yet rehung but stacked to face a corner, seemed a chastisement as if some life or quality of home was now to be withheld.

  In the kitchen the surfaces were bare and faultlessly clean. Wasn’t the absence of Angie’s militantly healthy products, and her pamphlets, equal to her own absence?

  In the bedroom, I discovered the cause—Mitchell’s things were gone. The tapestry over the bed, even the photo on the bureau that recorded a man in love’s compliance, had all been removed, making the room at once bigger and smaller. I opened the bureau drawers. Angie’s underwear was uniformly cotton, plain and white with only one interruption of something more conspicuous. I dug for what I found was a lace DayGlo fuchsia thong, and then hit something else, what looked like a lavender compact. I popped it open. Beige birth control pills arranged in a tidy circle. She’d already taken today’s dose. Angie? Who decried chemicals in the environment manipulated her own body’s?

  I opened another drawer and felt through her no-frills bras, another drawer of her sloganed T-shirts, her jeans. Just Angie. I had the note I’d taken in my pocket still. I had nowhere to return it now with the closet emptied of Mitchell.

  How hastily these rooms could alter with their occupants and how much they took when they left. Mitchell had taken some of her color, her boldness, and now the light in the bedroom surging through the southwestern windows left nothing to darkness; everything was exposed, including what was sunk into every object and surface here—a sad bewilderment. It found an easy host in me. I did not want it or this note. I went to shove the piece of paper in the bureau under Angie’s clothes. It had belonged here, that it did not now could not be my puzzle to suss or work through.

  But I couldn’t do it. I’d missed my chance.

  I left the Braunsteins’ with the note still in my pocket.

  I recomposed myself at George’s door or struggled to—I reconstructed the other night, the indignity of it and Les looming over me. Les claiming where he stood and me backing away. I knocked politely. Yes, yes, even Hope would realize she couldn’t stay here any longer. She’d let loose too much of her. A monster in the building, in the halls, and now Mitchell gone, too. Mitchell given up the chase. A disciplined man. A man once so besotted. I’ll wait for you. I knocked harder. The woman on the Promenade who collapsed into him. She looked the part of someone waiting a long time, biding her days for one person. Willing. Regardless of the cost. The note meant nothing to them now. My knuckles stung. Clearly no one was inside George’s apartment, but I’d had to gather my forces. A landlady’s poise.

  “Hello, hello!” I yelled, as I unlocked the door. I repeated the line about the gas. I did smell something as I walked in, spoiling though not yet rotted food, garbage not yet disposed of. Pillows were scattered on the floor. On almost every table—kitchen, coffee, bedside—a used glass with the smear of lip- and fingerprints visible even at a remove. The kitchen counters housed a jumble of take-out containers, cookie and cracker boxes, a bland brick of aged cheddar cheese and the knife that had stabbed at it, empty vases and bottles—Dewar’s, Coke, cranberry juice, Prosecco, tonic. The gardenia was gone; maybe tossed or given away to more competent care?

  Even before I entered the bedroom, I could feel the bed sweating and swelling. It was stripped of all its covers so it could not hide and gave off sex in such a musk that one couldn’t stop the images of the opening and closing of bodies, mouths, armpits, legs, and suggestions that became impressions in the nose and throat. George’s orchids drooped like languid captives against the drawn shade and closed window. Their soil wasn’t dry—perhaps it had been, and Hope had overcompensated. I did not know how to cure this, to unwater, to unsaturate.

  I touched nothing except her journal, which I found again under the bed. She and Les had exploded my privacy without concern so if I had any lingering misgivings about dipping into the book again, they had no real voice in me. On the last recorded page were numbers—a salary with bonuses calculated, the estimated worth of a brownstone, a cottage in Rhinebeck, the value of a two-year-old Subaru, a Mercedes (30,000 miles, pristine she’d written and underlined). Millions of dollars tallied and retallied, records prepared, the price of her part in a shared life. She circled a sum and beside it: “How much is mine?” Below that, what I took to be a date of birth and a social security number. Hers? Making her official? And at the bottom of this page in a tight, shrinking script: “I am losing my mind.”

  I flipped two pages back, away from a list of paintings, silver, place settings, and glassware until I found some continuous sentences in a low long scrawl:

  I let him dress me up. I don’t refuse a thing now. He hits me when I ask for it. He wants to marry me. He thinks this is the stuff of marriage.

  He keeps talking about a ménage à trois, a kid in a candy store, eyes too big for his stomach or his cock. Another woman. He says, “It will be a trip.” Away. Away. Fly away into another woman—

  I found my name on the next page.

  Celia!? Must try to speak to her. The police were here. I half-hoped they’d take us away.

  Did Les tell Hope I’d come to them out of concern for her and was this next line written below the rest, after a series of ellipses and empty lines, evidence of it?

  I am humiliated. And what’s worse is that I don’t care.

  I brought the book to my nose. It smelled of her perfume. At the going-away party for George, I had marveled at her posture, the sureness of her shoulders. Her perfume defeating me now, I sat on the bed. I lay back into the slag of it. It disgusted me and—I could not help it—it titillated me. A trip into another woman, another man. Here was the longing I’d promised myself to abstain from. I drank down the bright yellow pill in my pocket with the remnants of the amber-colored water in a highball glass by the bed. “My darling, my darling,” I whispered, “she has to go.” I knew too much. I’d known it from the first but let myself be taken in. I drew my hand across the fitted sheet, then between my legs. I held the book to me with my other hand. I waited on the medication to open different currents in me, less
strange and starved, and easier to follow out of this suffocating place.

  * * *

  Dear George, I hope this letter finds you well. I have missed you. The building has—a bird went off in my ear, an ecstatic pointed call. Somehow I’d made it outside with the sun now driving into my eyes, the spring day’s fanfare swirling around me, taking me in and bumping me along as I composed the letter I’d have to send to George to explain, but I couldn’t say I missed him, could I? It revealed too much to a man I’d made it my business to reveal little to—as a courtesy. I could say I missed seeing him, yes—and the order of his rooms, his books. A man who thought to collect Colette and Simone de Beauvoir on his shelves as well as Auden and Chesterton; George, a man who never let dust collect or his plants suffer. What had he said? A sensuality of time and landscape that could not be had in America? Maybe so and maybe it could not be had in him while he was here.…