The Affairs of Others: A Novel Read online

  Once she began breathing more steadily, I walked her up the stairs, saw her to her door. A bad day, I told her, trying not to give away the full rough weariness in my voice. A bad day. Sleep it off. It’s never too late, I reminded her, though I knew better. She paused. She couldn’t go in. I should have asked if she wanted me to come in, but I could not. I was wet with her, my arms, chest, and neck, and knew, again, too much. More perhaps than she did. Yes. The woman on the Promenade, whose vigil was over, whose note it may have or not have been, but then what I most required was Angie’s door, which was my door, to swing shut between us. One world effectively separating itself from another. I would not mourn it.

  I COULD KILL YOU

  THE BANGING INTERRUPTED my father playing the piano and me as a girl listening and wanting, there in our house, for that playing, and the hour in which he played, to draw everything into it.

  He would play “Edelweiss” and “Moonlight in Vermont,” a sentimental man, especially after an evening drink, unashamed to be so, playing to relax himself away from banking and its politics. I said no or dreamed I did to the noise intruding. I held up my hand. He stumbled on the keys, looked at me with eyes that were also mine, puzzled and faraway, and then the bareness of my room—barer and unfriendlier in the dark—was all around me and with it the recollection, like a slap to rouse me, that my father had always loved my mother more than anyone else, even his daughter with his eyes. I think he was relieved when my husband arrived, and my love for another man floated me away; or maybe not, maybe I had that wrong, but the doorbell serrating into the dark, then the thudding—someone at my door again—wasn’t giving me the chance to set it right or give it the fullness of consideration it merited. The glowing digits of my clock reported it wasn’t quite 3 A.M. Who would come to me now? It was the dark that brought me all the possibilities—Jeanie Coughlan raging, her father dead, everything my fault. No. I couldn’t face that. Maybe Leo had had the drink he proposed to share with me alone, then another. Or worse, an unwelcome ghost from my past. I’d been followed home by one of my subway adventures once. I’d still lived in Brooklyn Heights then. A neighbor had let him into the building. He had waited outside my door, and when I opened it to go out, he’d pushed me back in. He had me flattened beneath him so fast, cursing me, laughing at me, explaining already how our time together would go. He’d made me get up to wash. That was the first time I used the golf club, my father’s, given to me as a keepsake. I grabbed it again now.

  At 3 A.M. there was rarely good news or a welcome guest, especially with the recklessness in the banging and ringing. Whoever it was had little care for me—even ardor at this hour, so expressed, came as an assault. I gripped the club in my right hand, prepared myself, checked the peephole—a man’s Adam’s apple right there on the other side, a man with shoulders as full and as impossible to argue with as the side of a barn. Les.

  “What do you want?” I called to him. “How did you get in?”

  “Where is she?”

  “Who?”

  “Who else? Jesus!” He gave the door a hard jab. “You think you can keep her away from me? Open up! Now!” I peered at him. His hand was still fisted, his knuckles abraded now, just on the other side of my door. Hope must have given him a key.

  I tried to calm my voice, my delivery: “Have you been drinking?”

  “I can stay out here all night. Tell her to come out! I need to see her.”

  “She’s in the hospital. Leo told me, okay? She’s not here, I swear.”

  “Let me in before I break this fucking door down! I can smell her. I can.”

  “She has a kidney infection. Her son told me. And you should go, Les. Go before I call the police.”

  Through the peephole I saw his body sway faster and faster, not from disorientation, but to build momentum, as if to a beating of a thousand goading hands on his back.

  “You!” he boomed. “You are so full of shit. So full of fucking, fucking shit. I am not the problem here.… Go ahead and call the police, call them right fucking now. I’ll be in there before they’ve picked up, before they can … can … fucking … bother with you. Then we’ll see what kind of fighter you are.”

  It wasn’t alcohol or not only—he ran fast and wild and what he imagined was more real to him than anything else. Gratification had to be instant.

  “Go home now, you goddamn fool. GO HOME!” I hit my own door. “Do you hear me?”

  He threw himself, shoulder first, into my door. Once, then twice. My locks—two deadbolts—didn’t give, but the hinges shifted, sifted out dust. I squinted through the hole to see him rear back and do it again, the first time from disbelief, the second from blind animal anger: “Let me in! I need to see her now.”

  Yes, we can’t live like this. I dialed 911, reported to the flat inquiry—“What is your emergency”—that someone was working to break down my apartment door, gave my name and address with slow deliberation, interrupting myself to yell at him to please lay off, and held the receiver up for them to hear him refuse me: “I’m coming in after her, goddamn you, you goddamn, fucking … obstructionist!”

  I repeated my address, set the phone down.

  Leaning into the door again, I could hear his breath beating there. I told him I had called. He backed up again, taking the noise of his chuffing with him. I waited, listened, for his next surge and a sort of groaning, drunken battle cry. He didn’t see that I’d opened the door, and so intent was he on his version of things that he didn’t see me as he charged in, his eyes fixed on looking only for her. But I saw him, and I struck him on the back of the head as hard and as high as I could with my club.

  * * *

  He went down hands out, reaching for her or for me, or to defend himself against the floor. But once his chest hit the ground, he spread the arms that had already buffered his fall out to either side, as if he were tilting into a bed. He turned his head to one side, then he was out. I stood over him, but he didn’t get up, and I could see no evidence of pain on his face or of lungs working. I put down my club, unclenched myself and began to feel the tension in my arms, my jaw, the heat in me receding and a new tide coming in—so cold; the shivering started in my knees, rattling my teeth. And time seemed to seize up for me so that I could feel and hear how much I’d offended: It would stop for as long as I believed I’d killed him.

  I had seen dead bodies—my husband’s, my father’s, a stranger’s in a Connecticut coroner’s office for the sake of an ambitious AP biology teacher and a good grade. I knew how inert they became, how they cooled and dulled, eyes, skin, lips, how familiar they were as they became something entirely different from animated material like me, yes, like me who could still recall the heat that attended the need—and it was a need—to hit him. I wanted him dead as desperately as I wanted an end to all these intrusions, to be master of myself and my property again—all that was there, rigid in my arms, as I had swung up to the back of his head. The weapon I had, my position relative to his, made me as strong as a giant of a man, stronger, and I had relished it. But now I crouched down, sat beside his big unmoving head and made myself as small as I could, knees up to my chest, my arms around my knees, my head buried into them. A host of excuses and revisions and prayers deluged me as I held myself. My mind skittered other places before it circled back to digest what had happened—forming a story. We all are writing and rewriting—so that we might be acceptable to ourselves and others, especially others. Even I was not immune … I could not look at him even as I smelled him, the alcohol leaching from him, everywhere. I hated him still, and I had to contain it, me, keep cooling and wishing myself something else, anything or anyone else. But, no, I had to reassemble things. The back of his head before me like a gorgeous, dumb target while he charged like a starved monster. I could not see Les’s face, but I could see, as if it had happened today, the face of the man who’d managed to find me at the Brooklyn Heights apartment I’d shared with my husband years ago, which by then had become mine alone. His seeth
ing pleasure at having tracked me. Yes, he’d ordered me to wash myself for him—I had to be fresh as a flower, he said scornfully. But you’re no flower, are you? I knew the stock language, the parts assigned. I’d submitted to it before and not merely with him. I went to the bathroom, shut the door, ran the water, and came out to see him sitting on our couch, touching our things, leafing through a pile of our books, the ones I’d kept on hand to read to my husband before he passed: that fairy tale or anti–fairy tale Lady into Fox, not yet stored safely away then, C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters (which made my husband laugh), poems by Neruda and Sexton (who both understood flesh, its passions and perishability so well), our Moby-Dick, the Odyssey, and a mystery by P. D. James. I had already planned to go for the club, but outraged I couldn’t see and still don’t remember the steps to it, to finding it. It was simply in my hands, as if it grew from them, and I held it over him sitting on the couch. I told him I was no flower, no whore, I was no one to him. I explained he was never to come back—when he stood and came at me smiling, thinking this part of the game, I stuck him with the head of the club, straight into his gut. He managed to catch it in his hands, but I was strong then, too, ready to hurt and be hurt, and I ripped it from him and swiped his knees from the side so he’d fall. He did. I stepped on one of his hands, hung over him. “I could kill you,” I told him. “I could but I won’t. Go away now. If you come back, I will kill you. Whatever you think I am or was, I am not. Do you hear me?” I ground my heel into his hand. “You are not safe here.” I pushed the club’s head into the back of his neck to force his head down. “Not here,” I repeated until he cried out. I moved off his hand.

  It felt a miracle when he got up and limped out sniffling and saying nothing. He’d wanted a woman he could dominate—who was willing to let him dominate. Yes, I’d been that woman by choice elsewhere, in the submerged parts of me, on the subway, and if I was led up and out, I was still submerged—so sore was I from mourning. I’d needed to be something else, someone else, but not in my own home and not here, not here. You see, I was no different than Hope, no less a danger to myself and others—I had given myself away, to harm, to unknown appetites—but here, in my own building, I meant to practice life differently, in my way, no one else’s.

  I brought myself to look at Les. At first I saw nothing, and was confirmed in my fear. I directed myself to blow air into him, to try to resuscitate him with whatever I had in my lungs, and just as I leaned in to turn him over, put his face to mine, he puffed out his lips with a fetid vapor, his dark nostrils opening with it. My hand still shook as I touched his face; it was waxy but warm, blood there, moving under his skin. I’d not been as strong as all that or not stronger than him. I cried then, shaking all over again, this time from joy, and was crying like this, hiccuping, face sweating, nose running, when two uniformed policemen arrived with hands on their guns and eyes twitching. And as I stepped aside to let them in, everything and everyone came with them, time coursing now and making demands—a story. The requisite story in which to package myself, insulate myself from them, a story arranged in an order but not too orderly, with only so many details and those chosen with care. I kept my arms wrapped around my chest, hugging myself, hugging my relief to me to help me, keep me safe, as I asked them first please to call the paramedics. Please, hurry. He was trying to break the door down, you see, and when I opened the door for fear he’d hurt himself, he threatened to kill me. I had to defend myself. I really had no choice. I did not hit him hard, I told them—I wouldn’t. I’m not that strong, not given to violence.… But I didn’t have to, you see, he was so drunk or stoned or, god, I just don’t know what. Such a big man. So very scary. I almost laughed when I said it. I’m all alone here, you see. A widow.

  * * *

  I lived inside that story for hours into days. I told them I wouldn’t press charges, though I fully understood that he might opt to. I worried aloud about how tricky head injuries could be. He hadn’t meant harm, had he? He was not himself. I gave the officers the club before they asked for it. I handed it over as if it were the troublesome piece and looked away from it as if it had disappointed me. When they took me to the station to make a statement, they gave me tissues and water in a paper cup, and before we got in too deep, I asked for Detective Brazo. This prompted some surprise. I did not elaborate how I knew Brazo and they did not ask. They simply double-checked to see if I had a record.

  Brazo wasn’t there at that hour, too late and too early, but he called the next day and when he did I asked if he would intervene. Les was under the influence or influences, and I had been unreasonably afraid.

  “Who wouldn’t be?” Angie Braunstein snorted at me, appearing at my door the next day, my champion now. She’d heard the yelling that night. She’d come out to the hall—not sleeping. No one slept much in my building anymore. (Those of us who remained, anyway.) She’d sidled down the stairs, seen the paramedics take Les away, seen me leave flanked by the officers and their obligations to procedure, their youth. “What’s going on? What the hell is going on?” she called to us. Les snored on the stretcher, which put everyone at ease and made the paramedics snicker softly. They’d not been gentle with him. They’d moved the tall man like oversized luggage.

  “What’s going on here?” Angie insisted from the top of the stairs again, and I said, “There’s been a little incident.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Not far. Not far.”

  And I didn’t. At the station, under the fluorescents at 3:30 and 4 A.M., they all relaxed into my version of things. The officers and the desk detective joked about the club being a Calloway. “Not too heavy a feel, for an old driver,” said the lankier and more reserved of the two young officers. “Good club.”

  “Lucky for him,” said the shorter and wider of the two, the one who couldn’t stop fidgeting with his belt, who’d frowned at me back at my apartment, who’d been so suspicious. “Man, the guy was huge. Center at the Garden huge.”

  Then, playing my part, I said it, “He wasn’t himself.”

  Brazo said on the phone the next day, “I met that guy, right? The touchy type from upstairs?”

  “A friend of one of my tenants.”

  “I always say neighborhoods don’t matter as much as the characters in them. And that guy was trouble looking for trouble.”

  I protested but not much. Les was in the hospital while Hope was. Trouble looking for trouble.

  Different hospitals, the same. I didn’t know.

  “That’s my father’s club. Do you think I’ll get it back?”

  “I’ll make it my business to get it to you.”

  I asked after Mr. Coughlan, but from the distance of the story in which I lived, I could not afford to lose focus too much, to forget a detail, that, for instance, I had been frightened when I hit Les instead of what I was—enraged.

  “Yeah, I’ve been tracking Coughlan.”

  “So you think he’s okay?”

  “What he is is on the move.”

  “Will he come home?”

  “Well, to be honest, I’m not sure he knows where that is.”

  I didn’t pursue this or look for fault or tragedy in the reply. I couldn’t. What I knew that the detective did not was that there was no chance Mr. Coughlan would come home whole or in pieces while the building was in the state it was in. George had opened a door and let someone in as he let himself out, for more, better, and then a jagged physics took over with the spring egging it on, tossing human appetite in with the copses, in changeable wind and growth so vivid it could barely be believed. If Hope would go, I might have some say. I might have him back. It was not a reasonable supposition but one I could not shake.

  I waited and recited my story over and over; everything held in the wait and the telling.

  THE SCRIPT

  MARINA CAME. WE TALKED as I followed her through her cleaning, the tying of her dark and graying hair away from her face, away from work, the unrushed sweeping of her thick ru
ddy arms over the floor. She asked, as she scrubbed so rhythmically, if her boy could be employed by me. They needed money—more money, she stipulated. Mesmerized, I said, Sure, then, let me think about it. There was the roof to be repaired. Other things. An old building … Always so much to do but not quite yet. We had to wait, though I didn’t say this out loud. She looked less sure, less sturdy, Marina did, but I told her my story—of the new tenant and her lover. How he’d threatened to kill me when he had not. I told her how horribly I felt for having to hit him when I did not. “But there was no choice there. Women must defend,” she said in her Ukrainian English. And I loved her then and wanted to hug her and let go into the sweat and Pine-Sol stickiness of her as Angie had into me, but I did not. I simply agreed and paid her in advance. I thanked her for coming and asked that she do so as regularly as she could. For the first time ever, because I was shocked to feel the rush of my affection, of my need, I said, “Marina, you must call when you can’t come, the day before or, if you have to, the day of. You must give me notice and you must then make up the time. Come another day. Do you understand? If I am to depend on you? Or your son? I’d like that. I do the cleaning when you’re not here, but I’d rather you were here doing it.” She nodded at me before she murmured, Of course. I could feel her marveling at me as I looked away and into my story: I am all alone here. A widow. Then she squeezed my wrist as Hope had once done—to show agreement or that she understood or maybe to apologize for not observing our relationship better. I had rarely confided in her and my demands had been few. I had not asked much of anyone since my husband died and now that everything seemed to be asking so much of me, never leaving me alone, I had to be alert. I had to keep score better, draw visible lines.

  I did not swallow a pill or sleep well or very long for days. Yes, I waited for Hope, but at night I also waited for Les, Mr. Coughlan, my husband.