The Affairs of Others: A Novel Read online

  I looked to the daffodils and tulips and hyacinth. The tiny plots of soil before the buildings and brownstones along the streets had broken open at last, wishing they were bigger. Within their confines, they ran with color and life, and how I missed George, yes, keenly, within mine. He had kept his dramas close, let the walls between us be walls. Grief carried on too long is a self-indulgence. George had said that to me once. Yes, some weeks after his lover had left him, after he’d paced my ceiling long enough. We don’t always have a choice, I told him in reply then. Some things are sacred to us because, well, they are. Did I say that? Words like it, I recall, but I did not go on. Yes, to describe certain things aloud was to give them and yourself away, to cheapen them. My grief was mine. We can claim that about so little, really, especially on a day like this where the world was so alive that it reverberated and re-created at a frantic pace. I continued my letter, There are certain rules of behavior that are consented to … No, that wasn’t right. Neighbors or good ones … Good neighbors shield one another from certain behaviors, from certain choices we cannot help but make. We are not expected to be … What? Perfect? We are not expected to be without our … releases, but perhaps merely mindful … mindful of others.

  I sounded like a prig.

  The sun blinded me as I followed the sidewalk, so I could not gauge if I’d made sufficient room for others and brushed into someone’s shoulder as he or she passed. “I’m so sorry,” I said. I used my hand to shield my face, to see an attractive man in his late thirties or early forties. He wore a ragged Rolling Stones T-shirt and had a hard-boned, lately unshaven face, soft shaggy auburn hair.

  “Don’t worry about it.” He grinned fully to his ears. I expected him to rush off, but the day, its volume, possibility breaking over us—“What a day, huh?”

  “Oh, yes, the sun. I couldn’t see.” I grinned back for him and did not move off as I should have. The pill slowed my common sense, my body, the day. I knew that’s all it took at times—an expression on the face, staying in proximity to someone a second or two too long, looking into, really into, someone’s eyes with feeling—any feeling, it didn’t matter which—as he was doing with mine now. I let him. It had been a good while since my eyes played at playing with a strange man’s, and then the anti-anxiety medication could turn the course of a day into a series of loose, unhurried queries, the stuff of curiosity and all seemingly harmless, especially today, today.

  “Hey, can you tell me if there’s an Internet café around here somewhere? I need to get online.” He tapped his computer bag with his tapered fingers. “I have no connection at the place I’m staying.”

  There was an invitation: for me to ask where he was staying, to begin the parsing and swapping of personal information, the letting go of priorities or the reshuffling of them. “No, I don’t know,” and I didn’t know and felt foolish suddenly. I was not in the world the way others on these streets were and didn’t want to be. I gave my face back to the bright of the sun, stepped back, preparing to set off. “Maybe on Court Street,” I said. “Everything seems to be on Court Street.” How silly it was, standing in the middle of a day that had so much to do. With a palsied wave, I forced myself to return to George with more concentration this time: I am sorry, George. I hate to disappoint you. I wanted our building to be a safe place, a quiet place for her. Isn’t that what she had said? A place apart … But she is not well and is making decisions or failing to make decisions … How to say it? That she herself is not safe?… that are jeopardizing … The walls? Yes, she did not respect the walls, had made them so pliant, half liquid, and barely there so that I was forced to see things in her that are better not seen … jeopardizing the privacy that is so necessary in a building like ours, in a city like ours. I simply cannot condone this, George. To do so would mean I do not care and I do. Do not think me cold … Around me the trees shushed in a new gust, and the thousands of fallen petals from those pear and cherry trees, spring’s mess, still stuffing up the cracks of the sidewalk and collecting in the gutter moved over-ground puffing briefly into mad little cyclones. Oh, George, it’s so beautiful here now. I wish you could see it. Did I ever tell you my husband wanted to be a writer? But then in New York commerce is so beguiling. It catches you from just about everywhere. Commerce that can’t help but attract the most energy and creativity these days, as if dollars were being imagined into existence just for those willing to get in, stay in. Yes, commerce with its own violent heartbeat, and then the stakes were real for my husband as they had once been for my father. A New York game he wanted to play and win, keep up and claim. He designed programs and applications for traders whose needs were unfailingly immediate. NOW. NOW. NOW. He made money, saved money, yes, but one day when he’d had the outsize success he wanted here, we’d be free. We intended to live abroad. Turkey. Italy. Maybe even France. Can you imagine such freedom, George? Was it ever possible?

  Footsteps behind me. The man in the T-shirt walked two or so yards behind me and gaining. I’d seen that his pants had hung low enough to reveal the band of his underwear—briefs not boxers on a thin, taut man, veins boasting of his energies all over him. A man who could be out of his clothes in no time. Textures everywhere along the streets we all walked and stories too. Touch one. Choose one, as George had done. Come to Aarhus in the spring. Or choose what you cannot help but choose. What nourished you the most. Or what protected you? Yes. That. At whatever the price.

  I stopped and whirled round to face the man. “Can I help you?” I asked with a show of impatience.

  “You said Court Street, right?”

  “Right.”

  “And that’s this way, right?”

  “Yes. Yes, of course, it is.”

  “I didn’t mean to bother you.” His face had turned grave, his brow lowering and showing an overhang of forehead that suggested the durability of bone. He readjusted his bag on his shoulder. He had lovely hands. I never could keep from noticing hands.

  “You didn’t. You haven’t.” Even with the Klonopin numbing and numbing, sweat came out in pins all over the back of my neck. I couldn’t move.

  “Okay,” he said. “Okay,” again as a parting gesture and then he passed me as I stood still so that I had to watch him go. Away. Go away.

  I had no other recourse but to ask her to leave, George. She has resources and so many friends. There are other places for her where she’ll have all that she could want.

  I stood there too long. I did not know where to go, only that I was not yet prepared to go back to Pacific Street because when I did I would only be waiting for her and preparing the right words and tone with which to make her go. Go away.

  I detoured to a nondescript rectangle of a structure of gray and glass in Metrotech, ribbed inside with vibrating fluorescent lights. In front, the staff of Helping Hands, a lesser-known charity in the model of Goodwill, acknowledged me with shadows of smiles and nods—these workers were interchangeable, came and went—but in back my absence had been remarked by the matrons and mainstays of the place. These were Ruth, Marla, and Phyllis. Marla wasn’t there today but the other two, older women both, one a widow, the other long married, teased me, “We thought you’d run off with a man,” but that was all, and I smiled and shook my head, made up excuses of visiting family and friends, and then listened to them talk of children and grandchildren, a nephew in Iraq, a sister with Parkinson’s, and to commentary about a television dance show where that “blond girl,” “pretty as a church” looked “poor thing, like she was born without joints that bend” and how that “big boy” could really “go.” “He can eat and he can dance!” While they talked and laughed, our hands never stopped, separating the good items, many with price tags, never worn, from the passable, the passable from the irretrievable.

  * * *

  I did not bother to go to my apartment when I returned to Pacific Street. My arms aching, my hands, because I’d forgone gloves, oily from all that had passed through them, other people’s things, I went directly to Geor
ge’s door. The day was growing blurred and buttery. I had to try again while I believed in the urgency I felt. I knocked, rehearsing, I’m not here to judge, Hope. I know what a terrible time it’s been for you and your family. But you are exposing— It was Leo who answered the door. Exhaustion showed on his face, in the low-slungness of his shoulders, and in his composure that was even more uncanny. “Oh, hi,” he said as if he’d forgotten me entirely, as if I’d just occurred to him.

  “I was hoping I could talk to your mom?”

  “Oh, Mom … Mom, she’s sick. In the hospital.” His words were picked and placed side by side more than spoken and for himself first, to persuade himself it was so. I heard him and not—I watched him go still again as he appeared to digest the idea—Mom in the hospital.

  “Sick?” I managed to understand. “How sick?”

  “Kidney infection, they say. Probably avoidable. I don’t think she’s been taking very good care of herself. She’s on antibiotics. They want to keep her for a day or two.”

  He ran a hand through his hair, not to smooth it but to feel it (a gesture so opposite his sister’s, one I remembered from our strange tea too full of tensions, that ponytail of the girl’s a sort of captivity she’d needed). Under his hand came the sand and oak I’d traced on our first real encounter at my door; and soon the cedar and copper that his body gave off so generously surrounded me. Everything about him seemed always there to be seen and read; he had nothing to hide or if he did, he didn’t yet know how.

  “No, she hasn’t been feeling herself.” I nodded and hid my face. It must have had my speech all over it and my disappointment. Nothing would be resolved today.

  He straightened and then sniffed as if he’d seized on a concern that had just been out of reach: “She hasn’t been, I don’t know, creating problems for you, has she?”

  “I should talk to her.” I forced a smile over my closed lips. “But it can wait,” I lied. “There’s no real hurry.”

  I did not know what else to say, and though I should have retreated, my body dug in to be near the smell and open length of him. I should have known better. Only hours ago, I’d misread a man or I’d mistaken my own desire for his. I flushed, blood rushing from my knees up to my face already burning, and even then I did not go. He flushed too, adjusted his shoulders, cleared his throat.

  It was a sort of admission from both of us, that we continued to stand there. I hadn’t imagined until now that I affected him in any way, that there could be something between us that may have required only nudging. Shy, he had to exhale a reedy breath before he could speak. “You know, I was going to have a drink. A small one. It’s been stressful. And then my sister, Danielle—you met her—”

  “Yes.”

  “She’s been upset.”

  “You all have been.”

  “I appreciated what you did that day when we—”

  “I didn’t do anything.”

  He shook his head to dismiss the suggestion. The things he did not know about me, the homeliness I preferred, the simplicity, what in my life, at my age, I’d managed to store and hide and partition, didn’t matter against whatever idea he had of me, an idea apparently that moved him. He squinted at me and straightened again. “So that drink?” When I said nothing, he went on, “The place is kind of a mess. I tried to pick up the living room.” He looked back over his shoulder, sighed. It wasn’t like her, this mess, and he still marveled at it. “Nothing’s broken.”

  Again, his hand went absently to his hair. More than anything suddenly I longed to follow his hand there, get him between my fingers, take Hope’s twenty-something son into my arms, lick the cords of his neck and the fullness of his mouth like a calf licks salt. I was hungry and thirsty and so tired of the day and myself, all the effort. And the Klonopin had blunted and cushioned all this till now so that I’d been able to make it outside and into the course of the day and the promise of something new. Away and into another woman. Had he seen Hope’s journal? Had I put it back where he couldn’t see it? I blushed again. My embarrassment volleyed into and burst the cocoon of the last few days. “You can have all this and more”—that line hanging on, lying in wait for me. Was this the more? This unspoiled, defenseless young man in George’s apartment? My part in, reward for, this sordid story?

  “I’ll take a rain check.”

  I watched him swallow with difficulty. He waited—I waited—until he was ready to say: “When?… When can we have a drink?” he asked.

  He stepped toward me so I’d have to look at him. He hadn’t the right words for what he wanted and was too new to the traffic between men and women, or too alive for pacing himself, for delay. What he had was the desperation and intensity of youth and he wore it all over him and held it there for as long as he could for me to see.

  “Not today, but soon,” I said and without thinking reached my hand to pat at his arm and offer small, benign reassurance. I didn’t expect that he would cover my hand with his and hold it there. I began to breathe unevenly for him to hear as I let him press my palm and all five fingers into him—how long had it been since I touched someone for more than an instant? Hope, yes, her hand as hot as his was now; the blood in mother and son overwhelming and real and as enveloping as flame.

  * * *

  It had to be me who pulled away. Propriety. Yes. How could I ask for it from anyone if I could not give it? But I ached and every bit of me was damp with the ache. It hurt and kept hurting, yes. A cold shower, the efficacy wasn’t lost on me, to make me shrink, fit better into the role that was mine here in this building.

  I ran the stairs, too aware of how much I’d been running lately when the aim of my life since I settled on this building had been not having to run. The shower first and then the question of failed experiments later. But before I could get behind lock and key, there was my tenant Angie Braunstein on the landing of my floor with all the indications of having waited for me, agitated and pacing with something in her hand.

  “Celia! There you are.” Such relief in her voice. “I wanted to apologize—I forgot the rent, on the first.”

  I’d lost track of the dates. I’d not remarked that March was gone. Already gone.

  “Oh, yes, Angie. Don’t worry. Please don’t. I didn’t. You’re always so conscientious—”

  “I’ve been so—like on another planet—” At that her face reddened, her mole on her full cheek deepening in color. When she handed me the check, folded once in half, her hand trembled.

  “Is everything all right?”

  “Yes, or well,” she paused. “No.” And then in what sounded like a series of feigned little coughs, she began to cry. “No. No! I don’t want to do this! I’m so sorry.”

  “What is it?”

  Her plump, small hands tried to catch her tears. She looked at me and away, anger brightening her sea-glass-green eyes. “It’s— It’s—”

  My legs felt hollow. My hair stuck to the back of my neck. I formed her husband Mitchell’s name, was about to say it for her.

  “It’s— The polar bears!”

  “The what?”

  “They’re dying. So many are already dead. The ice—there isn’t enough ice anymore. They can’t hunt. They can’t get what they need to … to … live and reproduce. They’re abandoning—” She started with the little coughs again.

  I struggled to prove myself a good student: “Global warming?”

  “Yes,” she sobbed. “We’ve been so selfish. Selfish! Selfish! Selfish! It’s unforgivable, isn’t it? I know it is. God, I know!”

  Even as her nose ran and her heavy bosom shuddered, never had she looked more like a doll—a facsimile of a little girl, vulnerable, precious, in need of petting.

  “We didn’t know,” I told her. “We’re animals, too, surviving. With our own purposes and ideals—”

  “No, we’ve been wrong, very, very wrong, Celia,” she cried. “All he wanted was a family. To have a family! And I wouldn’t—”

  “The polar bear?” I asked, t
o bring her back to me.

  She looked at me like I was mad, and then, yes, recovered herself enough to say, “No, or yes, the polar bear. I could have done more.”

  “Maybe,” I told her. “But maybe it’s bigger than just you and surely it’s not too late, Angie, is it?”

  She covered her face with her hands.

  “It’s my fault and I can’t stand it, Celia. I can’t!” She dissolved again and her body shook with violence. I held my face away as I situated my arms around her, elbows locked. I did so less to comfort her than to stem the heaving, to contain her. She would hurt herself.

  * * *

  Hot shower. Bed. As I fell asleep, I drifted with Leo in my arms, then his mother, who he so resembled, then my husband who chased them both away, who stayed and stayed, stayed, who told me again, C’mon, baby. We shouldn’t live like this. I started a few times, sat up with a terror of the clock and the silence in the room. I saw myself before the medicine cabinet. There was enough in there to send me away, even for good. Of course I’d considered everything, for years now, everything, but no, not tonight. I lay back down, still as a corpse. I had not invited Angie in, though I’m sure she hoped for it. She had soon fallen into me, bucked into my neck and chest with “no’s” and tears and snot and the full streaming of her pores. The smell of her upset, the full density of her stout small body and her upset. Angie who I could not say if I liked, ever, in my arms, forgetting propriety. Angie whose belongings I touched, to whom I was sorry and not. What had I told her? We are animals, too, trying to survive? Full of biology’s imperatives. Yes. I could make out the pungency of the oil of her hair. I told it, and her, her name, Angie, Angie. It will be all right. We shouldn’t live like this, baby.