The Affairs of Others: A Novel Read online

  She’d made sure to let me go with marching orders last night—indeed with order set against the confusion of our intimacy. I agreed to her conditions, to plans. A kindness; how generous she was with her affections when her most long-held ones had been so affronted.

  And I was more youthful than I’d been in years and famished, and every time I heard her move upstairs I blushed or laughed out loud or ran to tunnel into my bed—I could not stop eating the leftovers she’d packed me off with and I sipped whiskey to calm myself; I was careful only to sip; I could not lose my head and reduce this solitude that I was collapsing into gratefully to a prison or a rejection. I had more than a meal with her, one I’d not foreseen, and my delight flooded through me and filled the empty spaces of my apartment and climbed the walls to her feet and higher, the whole building hugged into me, into my delight. I had discovered I had a sort of life here—one I’d planned and not. There was the horror of not being able to affect one’s plans in life, but then there was the relief at times of being released from them, from a world you predicted, mastered too well.

  I had never been with a woman, and though she didn’t say, she hadn’t either or not recently enough for her to draw on. But I supposed there are things all adults come to know about the body, male or female, or want to know; and once appetite has been admitted to once, asked and answered for between two people (along with its parade of sensations), summoning appetite again isn’t hard. I gave her what I knew to give, again, what had been given me, and it was a revelation. But when she tried to answer in kind, her hands became shy. She could not work the buttons of my shirt or the front latch of my bra without her fingers getting in the way. Impatient, she shoved my shirt and bra up to my neck like a teenage boy might. She needed force to overcome and discount the awkwardness, to recall a part in a performance with which she was familiar. (What had someone said at George’s party? It’s all performance; it depends if one believes in the delivery.) At the sight of my breasts, she started, mine so unlike hers, smaller, paler, a girl’s rose nipples, and it was what they told her of my age rather than of my sex that stopped her and broke whatever spell she’d wanted to generate. She bent to examine them more closely and then cupped them as if they were each as soft and vulnerable as the head of an infant, as if they were too precious, and then she became dazed. Another woman. Away and into another woman. A younger woman.

  I took her hands in each of mine. The meal between us had been affection and that’s all I’d intended as it was happening, or hoped for.

  “You’re like a girl, your body,” she said, “and yet you seem so old, but you’re not really, are you? How old are you?”

  She’d bumped into the strangeness of it, of me, the young widow, and what we had done, just as the day only yesterday gave up outside the windows and began to retract its expanse. The windowpanes already foreshortening the room and reflecting the bedroom back at us.

  Her cell phone had been humming and beeping in the other room, and every time she did not answer it, did not notice it, I had become more confident of my own hands, that I didn’t need to see her face to know it, with us arranged on our sides with her back against the front of me, as before. Yes, we’d been in step and it didn’t occur to us to question it. But when her cell rang once more, she turned her head to it. I pushed my bra back down, rearranged my shirt.

  She sighed a laugh that wasn’t really a laugh at all: “You know my son has a crush on you.”

  “I have a crush,” I said but wasn’t sure she’d heard, “on both of you.”

  “That’s probably my daughter.”

  “You should probably answer—”

  She interrupted with “Is it hot in here?” and was up to open the windows wider so that night came in the room and the wind; then her phone, which had gone mum, started again.

  * * *

  I daydreamed extravagantly; my recall went off in unpredictable bursts. And between errands I ran in Brooklyn, April in Brooklyn, to the grocery, to Macy’s for new linens and down pillows (why not?), to the liquor store for bottles of red wine from exotic places, a girl’s face came to me—I’d not reassembled it in years. The slight overbite, the deep brown of her small thickly lashed eyes, the straight hang of her dirty blond hair. Daphne Rogers. She and I had had an addicting complicity that could only end in heartbreak for one or both of us—but for over a year we passed clothes and magazines and secrets between us; we saw one another or talked by phone every day, used the same cloyingly scented shampoos, Finesse or Suave, the same neon nail polish, and powdery deodorants, and were still young enough that we slept in the same bed, encircling each other with limbs and promises of all we’d do together, things no one had ever done, creating symmetry in every way we could against the disorder of being teenagers. We did not regard each other sexually, or not as sexual destinations or opportunities, but as partners in the adventure of adolescence, of becoming female in a way that thrilled and terrified us but did not yet shame us. She was darker, her breasts already fuller, waist longer, her thumbs curved back in a way mine could not. I thought her prettier and she was quick to say the same of me, and during the second summer of our friendship we lay on the beach for hours, sacrificing every teenaged bit of us to the sun, and one afternoon when we’d both turned improbably brown, though she browner, always, we held hands as we fell asleep and woke after sunset, when the world over that truncated Long Island Sound beach had turned vast and pink and a purple-stained gray; and we laughed and laughed, crying and falling off our bikes from laughing, never-minding shoes or cover-ups, as we bolted from Weed Beach to get to my house for dinner, to my mother who scolded less, who let us sip white wine, Sancerre or Chardonnay, from my father’s shot glasses.

  It was me who was left for a boy. That separation had instructed me on loneliness but also on the pleasures of longing. Daphne held on to that unremarkable boy through high school, off and on through college. She insisted on marrying him at twenty-three, even though she and Paul had nothing in common save endurance and a first love that had become, it seemed to me, something of a sentence. Daphne appeared determined to become unremarkable with Paul in every way. She still lives in our hometown or she did last I heard. But for a long time, through my teens, and especially when I made a new friend, she was all I thought I needed to feel whole again.

  * * *

  I could hear everything Hope did above me—my hearing her interrupted me mid-cleaning or eating or trying to wash or sleep. I heard her singing through my open window. I heard her vacuuming. I heard the race of her shower water shoosh through the plumbing in the walls, the toilet flush. I gathered up some movies I’d longed to watch, missed like you missed old friends, from my storage space—My Brilliant Career, Notorious, Wings of Desire, and His Girl Friday. I entertained inviting her down to encounter some of Cary Grant’s exquisite face, but my apartment’s spareness might translate to her in ways that would be distracting, and I heard her friends and family coming and going, laughter, and her doorbell, which had the same stuttering high bell as my own, trilled through the walls. She came down to my door three times in three days. She’d baked zucchini bread “to keep busy” and late morning wanted me to have a loaf “while it was still warm.” The next day, after I’d returned from the grocery, she needed to borrow soap for the dishwasher. And then, on the last visit, she came to set a day for us to go to her home or “what was my home,” she said, trailing off. “Can you still come?” Yes, of course, day after tomorrow, certainly, see you then, but I would not stand outside her door and knock; I would not telephone. I had seen the look on her face when she was confronted with me beneath her. To pursue her in any way risked pressing on that foreignness again. I had to know better by now.

  * * *

  Last night she tapped on the floor of her bedroom, over my own, or I think she did. A one-two-three, pause, and another one-two-three. Was I inventing it, half-asleep? With a broom handle I tapped back. Yes, I was here. I was there.

  THE HIGH WIRE
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br />   THE DIALOGUE IN MOST FILMS, I had read, runs at a speed of roughly 100 to 140 words a minute. His Girl Friday runs at upwards of 240—it’s a herky-jerky race toward the finish at which a man and a woman marry or at least pledge to, once again, in this case a divorced couple taking another shot at union. But the speed, the inside jokes making reference to Cary Grant’s real name—Archie Leach—and the uninviting look at small-town domestic life, and even at its opposite—a professional life as newspaper reporters in the city filthy with egos, runarounds, corruption, and, again, such haste to get the story, meet the paper’s deadline—signal that the film is first and foremost about the absurdity of valuing any role above another or even believing in them, or not for long. What Hildy the woman reporter—played by Rosalind Russell for all the part’s grit and myriad frustration and strength—or Walter, played by Cary Grant, can choose is speed and excitement, outrunning thinking about anything for too long. They choose the high-stakes, excessively caffeinated (if not by coffee then by competition) world of the human city with its often inhuman demands; so much like the world New York lived in now, post-9/11, streaming with the need to survive, and one, since I was widowed, I had long felt reaching for me everywhere, waiting at the building’s entrance, and one I had resisted, opted out of. But now with the film in my DVD player, the fast cuts, the speeches, one overlapping with another, I kept up. I had a glass of wine and a slice of store-bought quiche, the sort (apart from the store-boughtness) I was sure Hope would approve of, and I trapped every word, trying hard not to listen to the movements above and around me and what their speed or lack of it might mean for seeing Hope tomorrow, when we’d go to her home, or what was her home, on an errand that was still not clear to me because, the truth was, I didn’t care what it entailed.

  I turned up the film’s volume once, twice, while the wine softened my nerves, but despite all this, I heard him at her door.

  Or felt him—maybe when you nearly kill someone or wish to, you are joined in ways that one cannot name or know.

  I heard the bell upstairs go once. Then nothing. I lowered the film’s sound to make out a determined but controlled rapping at her door, but the door would not open so the bell was sounded again, a long report traveling the walls to me. Then his voice calling, calling to her in a way I recognized. Words which might have been C’mon, we can’t live like this to nothing but a door between them. Did he use his key or did she buzz him in through the building’s entrance? Did she mistake him for someone else? Or was she playing at something?

  Odds were if she kept the door closed, he’d come to me next. There were certain scripts that we all keep playing at, and I understood Les’s character that well—that someone had to be accountable when events did not go his way. What I took to be Hope’s lightly insistent one-two-three came over my head and then again. Was I imagining it?

  Either way, I turned off the DVD and went directly to my phone, scanned the numbers on the call history until I found Brazo’s. “The man who tried to assault me is back in the building,” I said to his voice mail. “I do not know who let him in or why. Can you call or come, yes, maybe that? Can you come?”

  I found the broom and tapped back to Hope. I’m here. I’m there.

  She called back to him, reasoning, perhaps trying to be gentle. I opened my own apartment door so that I could decipher it all better. If I heard any violence in him or his hands, I’d race there, but I did not. He said please. Please, baby. I just want to see you for a minute. Please. What is all this?

  He waited. In silence. So did Hope. So did I.

  She’d read to me before I left her. She chose an American novel set in France. It starts by describing an American man taking a train into the French countryside, away from Paris, descending into color, alongside shocks of hay and trees and village roads and their intimacies bending away and out of sight. “Les offered to take me to Autun,” she said to me beside her, yet in her bed. “But I think he’d be uncomfortable. He doesn’t like France. It’s too small. I mean physically mostly; he thinks it’s a country of no consequence really—everything for him is about conquest. He can’t help it; he’d sneer at it. Isn’t that awful?” And because we wanted a laugh, we envisioned how one would go about domesticating Les, how we’d tie and collar him and order him about. Put him on his knees. “Sex as a prize for good behavior” for a man like Les, who she said could dazzle a woman’s body by doing so little, just a word, a tone of voice. She said, “My god, the delicious strength of men,” and then she thought about it, “if they know how to use it.”

  A rustling of paper of some sort on her landing upstairs. A sniff and a hot breath let go. I could hear even his heartbeat, I could feel him sweat, and with his hard-soled shoes once more tapping over my floors and trouser fabric swishing, all broadcasting his intentions, he took off down the stairs.

  Quickly closing my apartment door, I flipped the DVD back on, and tossed into my seat. A gulp of wine. A prayer. I crossed legs and arms, hugging myself. Let me be wrong. Let him just go. Go away.

  C’mon, baby.

  He treated my door with the formality he reserved for strangers. Knuckles only glancing the surface … One-two. How foolish I’d been to put the movie back on in a show of what? Normalcy or nonchalance? Another barrier between us, of sound? For he could hear it as well as I could. Where was the golf club? They’d returned it to me when it appeared no charges would be filed. This time, I assured myself, I could strike harder and keep on hitting. There was a history of recorded facts to draw from, a script, predictable, at least until you were inside it, playing it out.

  Again the hard back of his hand in a one-two that was there and gone. No escalation expressed in the speed or force applied. I took the chance I could forestall it if I responded just then, “Yes?” through the door.

  “It’s Les,” he said matter-of-factly, as if we were equal parts in a conspiracy, as if I didn’t need more.

  “Yes?”

  “It’s Les.”

  He sighed and paper or plastic fluttered on the other side of the door.

  “I can’t seem to get any women to open up today,” he said to himself for my benefit. He regrouped: “Hey, look, I came to apologize.”

  “Big of you.”

  “What?”

  I did not repeat myself.

  “Is that the TV?”

  Nothing from me.

  “I acted … I was blotto, you know? I can’t remember, but I know it was crazy. I was…” His voice arched up in query. “… An ass, right?”

  I held my breath for as long as I could.

  “Yeah, well,” he laughed, but tension began to file in behind his words, “I have an egg on my head that leads me to think you might have something to say to me.”

  “You’re lucky to be alive,” I told him loud enough to be heard.

  “Yeah,” his voice still louder, the run of laughter this time for show, “well, shit, aren’t we all, lady?”

  I didn’t respond.

  “I have flowers here. Two bouquets and from the looks of it, no takers.”

  I squinted a look through the eyehole. He had one arm extended, a giant hand I could not see resting against the door, his great head hanging down, and enormous tumid apricot roses punctuated by irises grew from his other side.

  “I didn’t press charges,” he said. “I wouldn’t.”

  “I didn’t either,” I said.

  We breathed at each other through the door. His was loose and even.

  I opened the door before I could reconsider and startled him so his handsomeness had to resettle on his face.

  He wore a light gray suit, expensive. His handsomeness shocked me still—his every line spoke of its privileges, that he could be hard or soft and life wouldn’t penalize him. And his height lent him force even when he wasn’t asserting it, even sober and contrite or trying contrite on. He’d shaved—his jaw was no less an object of masculinity, as inflexible as ice, but today the skin that dressed it was unexpectedly smooth an
d taut and unmarked as a young man’s. Today, as he bid for composure, his free hand unmoored and flying awkwardly, straightening his tie, then hiding in his pant pocket, I saw something of a boy in his manner. Bashful, maybe nervous. Surely it had always been there and he worked against it, to be what was expected, a man of business, who dictated to the world, to women.

  He talked of the flowers, that he’d visited the best florist in the city, on Fifth Avenue, at the end, near Washington Square. Did I know it? Still, he wasn’t sure if they’d do the trick. He never was one for flowers though he’d bought them often enough. He spoke as if we were friends now that I’d opened my door and stood before him. He was good on the high wire and went on with relief, unused to being on the losing side of things, and gaining in assurance, knowing that if he aimed his mood high, I or anyone listening might be taken up there with him, with his charm.

  “What are you watching in there?” And somehow he and his delicious strength were in my living room looking at my old TV and the barrenness I’d chosen to outfit the room in. “No frills, eh?” he said. “I get that. I can see it.”

  Why didn’t I throw him out? Because I’d bested him before, because she was safer with him here than anyplace else, and because, most surprisingly of all, I wasn’t afraid of him, and I liked it.

  “What are you watching?”

  I told him. He asked what I was drinking. I held up the wine bottle. “Have anything stronger?”

  I went for the Jameson and two short glasses. When I came back, he’d already situated the only other chair in the room next to my own. He’d seated himself and abandoned the flowers on the credenza.

  “This is a funny film.”

  “It is.”

  I poured for him.

  He sipped, then gulped, and, his head thrown back, his enormous Adam’s apple danced. He set about trying to acquaint his long trunk with the austerity of the high-backed chair, a dining room chair from a set I’d stored away.