The Affairs of Others: A Novel Read online

  “It’s a little annoying, too.”

  “The film?”

  “I mean, look at them go,” he said.

  “They don’t quit or can’t. That’s the idea.”

  I turned up the volume as Hildy hollered, Do you hear that? That’s the story I just wrote. Yes, yes, I know we had a bargain. I just said I’d write it. I didn’t say I wouldn’t tear it up—

  His body in the too small chair tensed. All of him coiling around an idea, real or imagined. She didn’t let him in. I didn’t either, at first, and now there was a mere hand’s length between us.

  —It’s all in little pieces now, Walter, and I hope to do the same for you someday. And that, my friends, is my farewell to the newspaper game. I’m gonna be a woman, not a news-getting machine. I’m gonna have babies and take care of them. Give ’em cod liver oil and watch their teeth grow—

  How long would it take Brazo to pick up my message? And would he come? Yes, odds were … The script. He would not fail to play the part assigned him; it would say too much about Brazo as a man.

  “Does it have to be that loud?” he asked.

  I didn’t turn it down.

  He gulped again, emptied the glass, and hunching over his knees, elbows posted on his thighs, he rolled the whiskey glass between his palms, back and forth, picking up speed.

  Only one dull lamp lit the room. It gave off as much dimness as clarity and had no effect on the shadows pooling in the room’s corners, at its edges. The screen jumped at us. I wrapped the hand farthest from him, my left, around the neck of the whiskey bottle, which I’d positioned between my legs. I was prepared to lift the bottle in an instant.

  They took him to the county hospital, where they’re awfully worried he’ll recover.

  Now Les simply held his glass in one hand and regarded it, as if it just spoke out of turn and he was deciding whether he should pitch it.

  “I love her and I fucked it up,” he announced. Arm outstretched, he extended his empty glass to me with his eyes on the room’s shadows or farther out still, on the progress of his confession.

  I poured for him and then myself.

  “I let her use me.”

  I turned down the movie’s volume then, though the images still raced at us. He drank. I drank.

  “I thought I was in charge, but I wasn’t. And I’m not now.”

  “She’s not herself.” I’d said this before, to whom? Leo? “What I mean is she doesn’t know what that is.”

  He shook his head. “We went too far.” He extended his arm to me again, and I poured again.

  “Why no furniture?” he asked.

  “More to clean.” And as I drank down my portion of whiskey, needing to keep pace, I thought more to ruin, to replace, to worry over.

  “Are you gay?”

  “No.” I wanted to editorialize but didn’t, only added, “I was married … To a man.”

  “So you like men?”

  “Some.”

  He finished his share again, shivered like a big horse, and then turned to trap me in his gaze for a moment, so unblinking and sure of itself, it burned. “But you love her, too?”

  I didn’t answer, though I saw what he was after—aligning the two of us, me with him, outside her, looking in with longing.

  “We were kids together,” he said. “She told you that, right? That we go way back?”

  I nodded.

  He closed his eyes, and my far hand gripped the bottle again, upside down, thumb extended to support my lifting it if I had to, as he recited: “I know the backs of her knees. I know the shape of her elbows. She used to eat tomatoes off the vine. She stole them in season and bit into them like apples. She climbed trees like us boys. She wore the same yellow bathing suit for years. A one-piece. She wouldn’t give it up.… Her father was in insurance, worked hard enough to get by, but he was a bohemian type at heart. Her mother was gorgeous, tall. Like her … She can draw, you know, pictures, and she sings. Have you heard that?”

  I shook my head. I wouldn’t tell him what I knew and did not; he meant to drag me back to the strangeness, convince me that I didn’t know her, couldn’t, not like he did. He meant to best me at last.

  “Hymns. She sang in church.”

  He could be lying. Who could say?

  “I loved her then. I’ve loved her as long as I can remember. I planned on marrying her.”

  In a theatrical gesture of a man confiding, he laid his mitt of a hand over mine, my right, nearest him. He hoped for sympathy, to disarm me with it. I took my hand away.

  After a showy sigh of disappointment, he punished me: “She told me you went into her place when she wasn’t home.”

  “Landladies do that sometimes.”

  “Not without notification.”

  “I thought I smelled something. Gas. It was a precaution.”

  He laughed without looking at me. “Bullshit.”

  He was instructing me on my trespasses; I was no better than him, no different. I drank again. I’d already had too much.

  “You drink like a man.”

  His hand on mine again. I closed my eyes and fought back, imagined collaring him—an unforgiving strap of leather around his neck, a rusty leash. Or chains. Yes, better. Hope and I had talked about him and turned him into a joke, hadn’t we? Should I tell him? She didn’t love him any more than she did me; we were necessary distractions, a jigsaw she was arranging like a hobbyist.

  I let her use me, he’d said. Yes, a man who could be led. I’d not known the varying possibilities of a man’s strength or lack of it in so terribly long. Hope hadn’t been able to bridge the distance necessary to get to me on the other side, to put her hands on me with any real ease, but maybe she could cause him to. Hope could. He was desperate to please her now. He would be her body, her intention. This is how we would domesticate him at last. The long man between my legs, doing what he was told.

  My head fell back into my chair. My hips moved, up, down. I’d lost them to the reverie. His hand rose and smothered my breast.

  “So you said you like men?”

  His hand was so big—the physical presence of him expanded—how did one not shrink when confronted with it? His palm pressed in, then eased up to press and circle again, a rhythm. I had to be in charge or else disappear into his voracity, but I did not speak as he lifted the bottle posted between my legs—“What were you going to do? Hit me with this?”—and pulled me toward him and onto his lap.

  “Yeah, that’s right, come here.… Shit,” excitement on his breath on my face, “how old are you anyway?” Something was taking place that I dreaded as much as I seemed to need. A sickness muddled in and around the words ranging all through me, fuck and then fuck me, fuck me; how the words communicated NOW and don’t stop and every other expression of obliterating time and me, me with it … But then a knock on the door. Polite. I almost did not believe in it. And then it came again—remarkable for its care. Hope saving me from something I might not come back from or not wholly. Or Brazo. Yes. At last.

  “Ignore it,” Les said.

  “No.”

  Somehow I was up, I stood and worked my legs.

  I opened the door. The light of the hall hurt my eyes.

  Mr. Coughlan like a ghost if not for the light, if not for his solicitousness. Mr. Coughlan apologizing. His door was locked. He did not remember locking it, and while he had one key, the other wasn’t on hand. Could I perhaps help? He’d been traveling and now …

  Mr. Coughlan back again.

  * * *

  Life could be benevolent. I’d forgotten. A reversal. Mr. Coughlan here: as surprising and unlikely as Melville’s captain surviving his obsession or, better, Odysseus’s return after so many years and trials met. Life making returns—returned loved ones, returning with them, to you, a part of yourself you did not know how much you missed. His face before me, set on mine, one covered in tributaries of red rushing through and around patches of brown, beautiful scars, whitened nicks and deep scores as if h
e shaved on choppy waters too often or had liked to put his face in the gale, never-minding the consequences. How gorgeous scars can become once you’ve survived them or when in some fashion you choose them, and would again.

  Was that what we were missing through the collecting of our disappointments, that life had as many gains as losses as long as we were willing to tally them, each side, with clear-sightedness? But were we ever clear and did we often seek to be? I was clear enough at seeing him to throw my arms around him to hold him there, to make sure I was not dreaming him up, my ferryman always in motion, wind on him even now, a chill on his clothes. I held on to that, too, and the smells of ash and salt all over him. Where have you been? Where? Where?

  It was Les who said give the man some room, let him breathe, but Les was already fading. Les no longer mattered, and he knew it. The battle was over, its spell. Brazo came as Les was leaving, forgetting his expensive bouquets. Brazo standing in my hall upright with alarm, his limbs itchy and alert with blood. A protector by nature and trade, ticking. A man good in crises, who thrives in them. “You think it’s wise to come back here, buddy? You think you can just go anywhere you want, huh?” Les stared him down briefly, snorted a little, and, brushing past the detective, was gone. Like that. More than merely subdued—vanished.

  Brazo stepped closer, leading with his long nose to the real object of his interest: “I’ve been tracking you, sir.”

  “Whatever for?” said Mr. Coughlan, genuinely surprised.

  “Your daughter and your landlady here. They were concerned. A report was filed.”

  Coughlan breathed out and scratched loudly at the back of his head: “My daughter makes a life out of worrying. That’s probably my fault.” He drifted for a moment thinking of it, then rubbed his eyes as if they were full of grit, and blew out another sigh. “But I am sorry. I’ll tell her, and let me convey it to you, Miss Cassill. I didn’t want to worry anyone. I wasn’t coming back till I looked into a few things. I couldn’t stay put anymore.” He searched my face while forming a grimace that meant to be a smile. “Now I need to rest. I’m tired.” And having admitted it, his posture untied and drooped. He raised a hand, not high. “Thank you both.”

  “I have to call your daughter. And maybe a doctor?” Brazo said.

  “Tell her I am going to bed. And I’m not paying for any doctor. There’s nothing wrong with me but old age and I’ve got that beat for now.” With effort he twisted his shoulders toward the stairs. I ducked in to get his key.

  He stood before the stairs when I came out.

  “Wouldn’t the elevator be—” I started.

  But he’d taken the first step up. Maybe because Brazo was there or maybe because this was the last test in a series he’d set for himself, that coming back had to be earned just like everything else, he would take the stairs to the top. He did not hurry, couldn’t, and only half-noticed that Brazo and I trailed behind.

  “You were in Maryland two, three days ago. You took the bus there. How did you get back?”

  “By boat. Ship … Cargo.”

  We listened to him breathe every step, to the effort of his joints.

  “What sort of cargo?”

  A step considered, climbed, then another: “Old men,” he said.

  “C’mon.”

  Finally, on the landing of the third floor as he was sizing up the next and last flight, he answered without looking at us: “Cargo was old man and some lumber.”

  We waited with him and then having taken one, then another step, he paused again. “I wanted to see if an old man could find work.”

  “Were you able to?” I asked.

  “Yes and no. Everyone fears a man my age.” He turned from two steps up and took inventory of me once more, my eyes, my mouth, as if to make certain I was all there. And then looked Brazo over, the size of his hands and shoes, the dense black of his hair: “Liability. A man my age.”

  The very last of the stairs were accomplished efficiently and quietly to underscore his point—he was no one’s weak link, no matter how worn.

  I unlocked the door and switched the light on for him. Only one bare bulb responded, a sore-making light. Without permission I scooted in first. I cracked the window nearest the harbor, to let in the ferry sounds, the night and its rain now, yes, raising the mineral smells of the season. I put fingers to the radiator, which was warm but not too hot on an April evening that promised to be no colder than fifty degrees. It wasn’t such a bad place after all, was it? Warm and dry? And out of the rain?

  “I thank you both—” His voice wavered, went out. “I thank you both,” he uttered again, clearing his throat, and extended his coarsened hand to each of us, as if I had not hugged him and fussed, as if we’d lost reality for him once more, “and now, if I might, I must rest.”

  Outside his door, the two of us alone, Brazo and I turned shy.

  “Well, he’s home, safe and sound,” he said, but he didn’t smile and his words were slack, and he blinked and blinked under his heavy, live brow, because I guessed he felt as I did, that he wanted more: We wanted a meal of him; we wanted him to tell us stories, wag his head, his calloused fingers at us; to raise a glass for homecomings, for our worry, how needless it had been after all; we wanted to be comforted, we didn’t want a door between us and for him to disappear again.

  “Yes, a happy ending,” I agreed.

  A CITY ARRANGEMENT

  HOPE ASKED, AT NOON, when she came for me, if I was okay.

  “Just tired,” I told her, but finally resigned and so calmer in a way I hadn’t been all through the night. The rain had come and stayed. And the thunder—so long it had lasted, more than an hour, two, rumbling low and long like god’s vast empty stomach hanging over us, me. I was queasy well until the morning, motion sick from one man’s return, others going, gone—Brazo looking momentarily unsure of his balance, telling me take care before wandering off—and of course from my having let the alcohol run into me without the care of food or water or other insulation. I directed myself to stay in my bed through the night and then was up opening the windows to the rain, cold April rain, and back again and up again, riding the motion, arguing with myself that all was well. It’s true that twice I went to Coughlan’s door to see if he was still there, part of the argument with myself. The first time at one o’clock, roughly, opening his door a crack to hear him, if he could be heard, and he could be, still there, asleep and issuing robust scouring breaths. And when I woke with a start at 4 or 5 A.M., I got up and dressed for the rain, which had reduced to misting, the thunder passed. I went to an all-night market for groceries: a loaf of bread; two ripe tomatoes; four spotless bananas; eight cans of soup; five cans of tuna; cold cuts; a dozen eggs; a quart of milk; mayonnaise; as much as I could carry, as much as would sustain him up there.

  I knocked this time, so I could be heard, but not enough to startle him. He did not answer. I knocked again. Then I went in, whispering, “Hello, hello?…” Hissing with my version of a landlady’s cheer done in a whisper, “I’m sorry to disturb, I have food for you, to welcome you back…” to hear him still snoring heartily in his bedroom—the most gorgeous sound. I then put the perishables in the fridge; the rest I left on the counter for him. And having made my delivery, I still worried but less, and I slept till the light found my face and roused me. The sun was back and I readied myself for Hope.

  * * *

  “It’s best if you dress for mess,” she said when she arrived. Then laughed: “We’re sort of going back in time. Clearing up.”

  I was wearing nothing that I worried about ruining and so we set out, lightly bumping into one another, as we moved into the hall, brushing arms, once, then twice, as we got in step into an outside shining with puddles, wet trees, slick bark, and leaves sodden and plump, still so newly and freshly green it was hard not to put them in your mouth. I wanted to remark this to Hope, who was telling me about Darren and Josephina, a quarrel over the Hamptons, Josephina saying all the wealth there has impoverished the pl
ace of its beauty. She was laughing again, head high, quoting them (“So few public places,” Josephina had said, “so few wild”). Of course I remembered Les telling me that Hope knew I’d gone into her apartment. I’d been waiting for it to come up, but what was clear as she distracted us with conversation was that if she did know, she never cared. All her resources and queries were dedicated elsewhere.

  She looped her arm in mine, pulling me to her. She couldn’t know that when she did, with the smell of her invading, how immediately and irrepressibly I recalled her body. What a beautiful woman I had been permitted to travel, cave deep, survival hard, a purple bruise on the crook of her arm where the IV had gone in during her hospital stay, a scar above her pubis, another on her knee, skin knotted, tight and then loose. A complicated landscape. No two women the same … But as we walked she couldn’t have known. She couldn’t be blamed. If she trapped any details of my body, any evidence of its or my reality, it was only to stop seeing the loss for a time, a reprieve, but I’d already been floated away, even as I kept pace with her long strides and she spoke in lists: Darren wants what everyone else has. Josephina scoffs at what everyone wants. My daughter wants everyone to want her, and to think of her wants first. My son tries not to want too much, tries not to be disappointed. I should have volunteered, “Me, too. I’m like Leo,” but I’d not earned my place on her lists, and I was tired and intoxicated, too, even as I understood I was a comfort, one easily enough replaced, as she’d replaced Les, valuable largely for my willingness to do what she needed now, not to say no to her. And why would I? That my fingers knew her, corners and textures, patchwork and depths, that she held my arm in hers as we walked now, so that I could see outside me, to her regal profile, to the wet, verdant streets of Brooklyn, the uneven pavement and faces passing us, it was yet a pleasant dislocation. And I looked to see who looked at her, whose oblivion to passersby was nearly total (to New Yorkers who avoid eye contact or risk becoming oversaturated in the effort to trap things and faces familiar and unfamiliar, that are often gone before they’ve arrived). And it was true that despite themselves they looked, at her amiable hauteur, her purpose. How could they not?