The Affairs of Others: A Novel Read online

  I went up to the storage space beside Mr. Coughlan’s empty apartment. I selected a few books from my, our, past. A few movies, old, yet on video. Part of a collection I rotated and varied, restricted my access to. This was how I remembered. Remembered so well. Keeping some things close, others out of reach, alternating. It took practice. Discipline.

  I got my mother on the phone. We made plans to make plans to visit, and she reported on dances and new shoes and movies she’d seen—had I been to the movies lately? I did not tell her about Les. I listened to the stream and bubble of her voice, let myself be taken away into her cadence, how everything could be coaxed into freshness if you kept moving and dancing and buying beautiful things, until I heard footsteps overhead. It wasn’t even noon; Hope was back. Hope was home.

  * * *

  At her door, I discovered she was not alone. On the other side of her door, conversation was animated, brisk, designed to create cheer or something in its range.

  Her friend Josephina let me in. Josephina in black eyeliner and a long black linen top that cinched under her breasts and hung over a long strait of denim skirt. She composed a white smile of greeting under her big, unmoving ringed eyes—“Ah, hello, the lady of the building,” she called to me and the others behind her, Hope and Darren.

  “The greeting committee,” called Darren, who clapped his tidy toy soldier’s hands and gave off a patina of something newly polished—his closely shaven face, his gel-sheened and neatly combed hair, a crisp white and green plaid shirt, a belt buckle flashing like chrome in the light, and white snakeskin loafers. “Another country heard from to welcome our patient home,” he went on, drawing me into their project as facilely as that.

  Someone, Leo, I suspected, had made piles—a pile of unshelved books, of pillows and throws, CDs, a row of his mother’s unpaired shoes—to one side of the living room in order to attack the task of cleaning it. As part of this he’d sprayed Lysol—a gesture of someone who didn’t know the smell, which spoke of public lavatories and neglected waiting rooms, was not worth whatever the stuff’s benefits. Or maybe he did know but meant to punish the rooms for what had become of his mother in them.

  That woman, uneasy, had situated herself in the middle of George’s leather couch, which, thanks to Leo, was naked of pillows and throws and other softening influences. She sat with her back painfully straight, unwilling to give herself to the couch or the room. She looked at me as if she had difficulty focusing her eyes on the figure of me, as if I were too bright or hard to imagine. She looked at me with reluctance. Misgiving, yes. Yet outfitted in a silk pale blue robe, she managed to conjure Lauren Bacall or Rita Hayworth, a woman at a dressing table, pretending to arrange the luxury of her hair, of her. She’d flung off the clothes she’d worn to and from the hospital, surely, and this robe was chosen by her or Josephina to usher her back to a version of herself that merited silk, that liked it against her bare skin; for the material was thin enough to show her body’s lines, the forwardness of a nipple, the shape of a rib cage, hips.

  I took all of her in—her bare feet, the chipped pink toenail polish, the untidiness of hair held up by a wide silver barrette on her head and into a twist, of a face that was drawn but for the live embarrassment there; because if she would not look at me, I would look; and as she shrank from me, I grew and filled the room. I knew my object and would not vary it or my route to it, however imperfect.

  “Hope has been in the hospital,” Josephina reported.

  “I heard,” I said. “What a thing.”

  “She’s in good shape now,” said Darren. “She had a rough go. We worried.” And then to throw that sentiment aside, away, because they could now, at last, he added, “She had a little? What?… Sex sickness?”

  “No,” said Hope too quietly. “Don’t.”

  “We have been teasing her,” said Josephina, grabbing a pillow to insert behind Hope and so tempt the straight-edge of her into the couch. “Behaving like a teenager was what did this so we cannot resist.”

  Hope lowered her head, already tallying, I imagined, the cost of letting herself become so vulnerable.

  “Good lord,” Darren exhorted, “her daughter Danielle was at the hospital day and night for what? Four or five days? What a kid. Have you met her?” He eyed me.

  “Oh, yes,” I said.

  “A beauty,” he offered, waiting for me to elaborate or at least agree, and when I didn’t, he went on with the thoughts running in his head. “But acting for all the world like her mother was already gone and carting in enormous bouquet after bouquet of these terrifying lilies that smelled like an ancient funeral parlor.”

  “She loves lilies,” whispered Hope. “Not gardenias,” she added, perhaps for me.

  “She is a strong girl,” said Josephina, her accent taking most of the sting out of her observations. “She sees tragedy for her everywhere. Life is more exciting like this. Can I get you a drink? We have emptied many bottles—she shouldn’t drink—but water maybe, with bubbles?”

  “No. I’m fine. I came to talk to Hope. Something has come up.”

  Darren fell into a wingchair—“Ah, news! Tell us! Tell us.” Excited, he leaned forward and pulled something shiny from his pocket. “May I?” It looked like a lighter but wasn’t, because he lay it flat in his palm, and brought it to his mouth.

  “Don’t fill the room with your herbs. She’s been sick to death,” scolded Josephina.

  “This is prescribed for the sick, all kinds of sick.”

  “I don’t care,” said Hope, head still bent and her voice so devoid of inflection that the words went up like a tired wall and then just fell over. She could have been addressing Darren, herself, or no one.

  “I should probably speak to Hope alone,” I said.

  Darren lit his contraption, which prompted Josephina to open windows, huffing. “You are a selfish ass,” she told him.

  “And you’re a beautiful piece of ass.” In short order, he took a drag of what I understood was pot, again pot, and then blew a voluptuous plume of smoke above our heads. “And she’s fine, right, Hope, darling? Doesn’t she look fine? Shouldn’t we celebrate? I’m happy to share.” He turned to me. “My God, what a few days.”

  Hope pulled her robe up around her throat. “It’s about Les,” she said to them, nodding toward me.

  Josephina sat down beside Hope and tossed her hands toward her friend. “That man. That man.” She had such a talent for exasperation and went on, scoffing, “A fever so high as that.” To me she said, “A urinary tract disturbance, she had, and did not address it? How?” She faced Hope, her voice almost gentle. “How does a woman not know? There are indications.” To me, “We feel everything, no?”

  “A free woman,” Darren said, smoke coursing from his nose, “who couldn’t leave the buffet. Who can blame her with all that she’s been through? Where is he anyway, your Goliath?”

  Hope leaned herself into Josephina, though her posture remained brittle. She leaned in to hide her face in her friend’s neck as she said, sighing, “I expect he’s just getting home from the hospital.”

  “What?” laughed Darren. “Did he pull his groin?”

  “I should probably explain this part,” I told them, and I did. I laid it out in a few short statements, spare of detail or editorializing or emotion, and as I did—he wouldn’t be reasoned with, wouldn’t leave, so when I opened the door and he charged me, I hit him, with a golf club—I grew more certain and more relaxed, and Hope more faraway, obscure. I had not been distracted by her or any of them, and I knew that this story, with every telling, meant my own story was safe. The story I would not tell. It signaled a victory of boundaries held at whatever the cost and in that propriety, my brand of it, yes, mine as told, broadcast, was the necessity that she, Hope, would have to leave.

  She stood up abruptly but still did not look me in the eyes. “I have to rest now. I have to shower.”

  Darren was slow to move. “You’d rather break his head than let him break your door
?”

  I made them wait for my reply as I waited for Hope to look at me; when she did, I said to her: “I didn’t think he would stop with my door.”

  “Well, brava, landlady. I tell you if there were any booze left in this place, I’d raise a glass to you.”

  “Get up, you idiot,” Josephina said. “We have to let her alone.”

  “Time to go already?” he said, eyes and smile loose as yolk.

  “We can come back anytime, give me a moment’s notice and I am back,” Josephina said, kissing Hope lightly on both cheeks. “Drink water. Sleep a lot.”

  Hope breathed a thank-you but did not hold anyone’s eyes or take her hands from the base of her throat, where she still held her robe closed.

  “Goodbye, baby.” Darren gave her a loud kiss on her cheek. “Behave a little, huh? I’ll come back in the morning.”

  “Call first,” Hope told him.

  They moved to the door but stopped short to wait for me. “Shall we go now?” said Josephina to me.

  “In a minute. I have a matter I must discuss with Hope.… Alone.”

  They hovered until Hope gave her okay and pointed them to the door with her chin. “Go,” she said.

  “She needs her rest,” Josephina reproved. She would hold her ground.

  “She does. I know. I won’t stay long.”

  “Go,” said Hope again. “Go. I’m tired.”

  Josephina inched out while staring back at me; a barrage of black daggers from her black unmoving eyes.

  The door shut, I looked at Hope and past her: “I’m sorry, Hope, it’s awkward timing—” I began, just as I’d rehearsed, “but I think we both know—”

  Her hands went up in front of her, chest high. “Wait! Wait. Please. I know this will sound crazy, but I’m not going to be able to do this without a shower. I have to … I need to be … clean.”

  I paused, regarding her with her hands still up, her head to one side. She expected me to argue. I didn’t have to. “I can wait,” I said but did not move, would not.

  “Here?” She cocked her head at me.

  “Yes.”

  “Fine.”

  “Good.”

  She did not bother to shut the door completely, as if to prove to me she would not run. I heard the water go on with the robust pressure I’d intended for these apartments, for my tenants; steam would rise fast and reliably. I touched the books in their piles. I reshelved some. I put another pillow on the couch, folded an afghan over one of its arms. I was not her jailer. I was something else entirely. I paired the shoes that had mates and segregated those that didn’t. Somehow I would teach her about order. For courage, I leafed through George’s Simone de Beauvoir, an old Franklin hardcover edition of The Second Sex, trying to concentrate on the words, succeeding and failing, mostly failing. It was a long shower. In the kitchen, I washed several glasses and filled two with tap water for us. Then I sat as comfortably as I could to one side of the couch and breathed through any agitation, breathing the room, even the Lysol that went in sharp, taking the room back, even the building, the right to my sanity or my version of it. After we’d come to an understanding, I’d go back to my apartment and watch an old film; I’d give myself that. One watched with him. Yes. His Girl Friday with its snapping speeches or Wings of Desire to see that girl swing from her trapeze, to watch an angel fall, willingly. I’d take Lady into Fox from its Ziploc bag, try to scent the day I shared it with him last.

  “Sorry,” she said, emerging. “I needed it to be,” she searched for the word she wanted, “thorough.”

  Her wet hair had been combed away from her face and down her back in a dark channel, dampening the silk of her robe over her shoulders and in the space between them. She was makeup-less, making an exhibit of all the lines around her mouth and between and around her large gold-blue eyes, of the shadows under them, in the hollows of her cheeks, stealing over her upper lip. This was her show of starkness, but it didn’t work, because in giving up on any defense and the tension that that required of her face, even of her carriage, she appeared tender. The lines that her face had earned looked impossibly yielding, and she smelled so fiercely of her—her perfume in the soap or shampoo she’d used, but also of something essentially her; yes, a high richness, as of good soil and sea salt. I sipped my water, suddenly realizing I’d let go the thread I’d held in my head for days. I waited too long searching for it so that she spoke before I could:

  “Did you hit him hard?”

  “No. Or, well, I did what I had to.”

  “He has a concussion, you know. But they’ve let him go.”

  “He’s called you?”

  “Exactly a hundred times.”

  “That many times?”

  “A lot. Too much…”

  “Did you give him keys?”

  “Yes. No.” She sat next to me on the couch. “He took a set and I didn’t stop him.”

  I cleared my throat; I pushed through the static of all the questions I wanted to ask: Was he angry? Was he coming here? “He urinated in my elevator,” I announced.

  She checked my face to see if I was inventing this. I was, or in part. I’d nearly forgotten, and I didn’t know who had done it. It was merely a test, of my nerve, hers.

  She shrugged. “I don’t know about that.”

  “But it’s possible?”

  “Yes, I suppose anything is. We got pretty high. Pretty out there.”

  I could see him in the act. The arrogance. The indifference. I breathed in, out. The horrid Lysol in the room. “I think we both know you have to go, I mean, to leave here.”

  She nodded, hands in her lap, face pointed there again.

  I went on: “It’s been a bad time, a hard time for you, no one blames you, I don’t, but this place, my home, can’t continue to be a stage for all you’re doing to yourself.”

  She held herself in, barely seeming to breathe.

  “I won’t judge, or not beyond admitting I can understand everything you’re going through enough that I can’t live in proximity to it. Can you understand why…” I had to swallow. My voice had turned tiny, a whisper, like hers only moments ago. “… Why it is I must ask you to go?”

  “I’ll go. Of course.”

  We sat listening to each other’s silence. We sat for several minutes.

  I felt exhausted. I seized on the thread again and let it pull me: “I’ll give you the time you need. Any help. I won’t ask for money from you or George. Money is—has never been—the issue. It’s…”

  “Separateness. Respecting each other’s separateness.”

  She was quoting me, from the first day George had brought her to me. I did not know if she was mocking me, but the listlessness of her voice said otherwise.

  “He called you Celie that day. You didn’t like it, did you?”

  I didn’t answer. I was too amazed.

  “I think you didn’t like it.”

  She had taken notice of me that day. Creating intimacies where there were none, then; but now, now was something else entirely.

  “Of course I have offended you, Celia, in your home, but do I have to tell you that I’m not like this, not usually? And that Les—I know it will sound incredible—but that Les is a good man?”

  “You have nothing to apologize for. Not to me. And Les? I don’t know him, and I don’t need to.”

  She sniffed once, and I stole another look at her to see tears now. She let them fall into her lap and sink into the fabric of the silk.

  “A tissue? Can I—”

  “I’ll be okay. I’m all right.”

  Was she quoting me again?

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes.” She would make me cry. I did not want that. “You have good friends. Lovely children. Leo—”

  “He is a miracle, my son. My daughter, too, but he’s always been so complete, so completely himself—”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s why it’s all so shaming, that it hurts this much, that I can’t seem to put what’s happened in m
y marriage in any perspective. Being replaced. It’s all so wretchedly common, and I have so very much to be grateful for. I guess that makes it a little worse. I can’t help it. I love my husband, our family as it was, and so it’s as though a part of me is gone, as though I have a hole here, where he was, we were, that everyone can see.” She placed her fist into her diaphragm. “Here.” She drew a circle around it, hit it once lightly, laughing an empty laugh. “Bull’s-eye,” she said, and then hit the spot harder still and so on with every “here, here, here,” escalating, the laughter giving way to protest and more tears, coming faster.

  “Please,” I said. “I can’t,” and I stood and lurched for the door and my apartment and the movies I’d watch alone and a book that might still smell of the simple homeliness of bean soup and a time that had made perfect sense once.

  But I did not get far. I turned back, knelt down, and took her fist in my hand, unfisted it, elongating finger by finger. “Stop. Stop now. I know about this, and I know this won’t help.” My hand went to her forehead, a fever maybe, however slight. “You’re not well, please,” I said into her weeping as it turned to moaning, her robe soaked in widening spots. She could not catch her breath. Her mouth wide open with sound. She jerked her hand away and collapsed onto her side, curling herself up, all of her into another fist. Both hands jammed between her legs and jerking into her with the complaint: “I wake up and realize, he’s even here, here where he is! I want him out of me!”

  I slid in behind her on the couch and wrapped myself around her, endeavoring to still her. I stayed her hands by holding my hand to them, pressing them into her. She let me as she moved through the heaving she’d given herself to and couldn’t stop easily and then slipped her hands out so my hand was alone between her legs, over the silk of the robe and nothing else. “Les. Call Les,” she pleaded and, before I could take my hand away, she squeezed my hand between her legs, with her thighs, doing her pleading with them. “I need him.”

  “No, no,” I breathed into her ear.

  “It hurts. It won’t stop.”

  I arranged myself like a vise around her, to remind her what it was to be contained—her upset, her desire, her choices, the bad ones too. Her salt in my mouth, I started to tell her about the Maine sea roses, rugosa, and how they grew like weeds, despite the elements, despite adversity; but she could not hear me over her complaints, the regular pleas and now the struggling, the struggling against me, to get away from me, to the phone. But I was a tourniquet, however poor, against the woundedness dissolving her into liquid that kept flowing into me. What had Melville said? She would keep me from remembering myself.… A deadly drain, yes … Yet so vast is the quantity of blood … and so distant and numerous its interior fountains, that the animal will keep thus bleeding and bleeding for a considerable period; even as in a drought a river will flow.… I had to bring her here, with me, I had to be ingenious enough to shut her up.