The Affairs of Others: A Novel Read online

  All these years she only lived a mere seven blocks from me, into Cobble Hill, in a stately four-story town house I’d admired for its Gothic Revival touches—the cast-iron railings and metalwork gas lanterns to either side of its grand arched Tudor doorway, an imperturbable front. We were stalled outside as she considered it and what she might find inside.

  “He’s not home?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “Does he know you’re coming?”

  “Yes. To collect some things. He’s at work, but to be on the safe side I asked that he not be here as a courtesy to me.”

  As she unlocked the door, she said, “We deal in courtesies. I have to try or else kill him.”

  Through the door, there was lustrous wide timber on the floor already, an oriental runner in braiding browns and blues which led to the base of a staircase of painted white wood that curved up and away like a swan’s neck.

  She stood at the living room’s threshold and made more lists, out loud, as introductions for me and probably as an act of reclamation for her. The sunlight surged through the tall windows, making it all glow in collusion with her list-making: Bergère chairs and an ottoman, another oriental in coral and sage, and “in there”—her hand lifted to indicate the dining room—an Aubusson rug gotten at a reduced price in the South of France because of the slightest flaw, “imperceptible really,” she said, a chandelier from Murano, where “we visited on our honeymoon.” “He never refused me anything or not in a long time. We stopped worrying about money years ago.” Lamps with beaded shades, fat gilded frames and the paintings they contained, the odd bits of sculpture—a disembodied hand, a bust, a Buddha—even driftwood on the marble-mouthed mantel of the fireplace (a touch of her shabby chicness where France met the American seaside). The majority of these things were older than she was and yet were brought to life, breathing and contemporary because of how she’d arranged them, and even the most austere pieces—“this is a Restoration secretary”—were disarmed by a countryscape hung over it done in chewy impressions or a fraying basket stuffed with weary yarn—“I knit when I think of it.” Books were laid out on the coffee table, some distressed with age, others as shiny and expensive as appliances, like gaudy memorials to their subjects. The ceilings on the parlor floor had to be fourteen or fifteen feet high, the moldings intricate and paneled on the front and rear walls of the long room.

  “It’s otherworldly,” I said, awed to foolishness and ready to admit I thought a place like this an impossibility in New York—a home so spacious and, whenever it required it, quiet; I heard no footfalls, no car traffic, no ferry horns. Over time I no longer could conceive of a place without warrens for solitary bodies because that’s all I could conceive for myself now—a body alone and mostly wanting to be. But the house I’d grown up in had been like this, with rooms that promised expanse and as many chairs, tables, plates, and glasses as needed for social gatherings, dizzyingly bright with natural or manufactured light, with improvisation, and lousy with art gotten through family, auctions, galleries, filthy antique shops, elegantly contrary—an Asian scroll painting of bird and bamboo beside an English seascape. My mother like Hope was in charge of a room’s currents and conversations. Yes, this was Hope’s own, all of it, a live tribute to her powers and tastes, the drive to have taste in fact, the right to it.

  She’d left me at the threshold to pick up an empty glass left on a coaster on her coffee table in the middle of the room. She held the glass to the light—a half-moon of lipstick.

  Laughter, full of shards: “Do you think he left this out for me to see?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  She laughed again in a way that sounded like it pained her.

  “Could it be your daughter’s?”

  “Oh, I doubt it. She’d never wear such a horrid shade of pink.”

  She set the glass back down with mechanical care as if she were exhorting herself not to break it.

  She surveyed the room and hugged her arms around her chest, and I observed something go out in her eyes—where I saw love and admirable confidence in every choice she’d made to make this room, and surely this whole house, what it was, she saw the magic that bound it together and to her evaporating before her.

  “This is all you,” I told her, because its truth seemed so obvious to me. “He’s living with you, whether you’re here or not.”

  Lines formed in trenches in her brow, and her mouth became tiny as if she was struggling not to spit something out.

  “That’s why he can do it, Hope. You’re his foundation, even now, what he’s pushing off from.”

  “This is already gone,” she said simply. “All this, but until then it’s the garden we have to contend with. Come.”

  She led me to a wide porch overlooking a yard two to three times the size of my own. A privilege she had not wasted, a long-standing arrangement between her and nature in a city so stingy with nature held privately.

  “A gardener did this?”

  “Me,” she said. “I’m the gardener.”

  “No help?”

  “Some in the beginning and occasionally I’d call in reinforcements for the weeding, a friend, my kids, but mostly it’s me. I feel no-account if I’m not managing it on my own.”

  The yard was as generous a space as the footprint of her brownstone. Two estuaries of flat blue stone ran down the level length of it, creating thick rising beds to either side. Between the paths was a swath of grass fresh as a river and every day more so, its plushness and volume the new season’s. In the middle of the grass was a weathered stone birdbath fountain, in two tiers; it had not been turned on yet and it sat on a circular bed of soil broken by shoots and blossoms. Toward the rear of the yard was an old cedar gazebo, small for a gazebo in that it would seat two or maybe three and was handmade from the delicate look of it, listing under a thicket of vines covering it. Behind it, reaching to the yard’s corners were trees, a tall birch unfurling itself thirty feet or more to the sky; another tree’s blue-green leaves looked maple, but its bark was cinnamon-colored and its base made up of not one trunk but many dividing trunks spreading out like a hand to keep what was private private; then on the other side next to a stolid evergreen there stood an astonishment of fine white blossoms that comprised a tree of fifteen or so feet.

  “That tree there, with the white—”

  “A Japanese plum,” she told me.

  “Wow.”

  “Yes … He saw it in China first years ago—that’s where they originated, not Japan—and then I think he saw it again in a garden in England during his business trips, so many trips he’s taken.” She was merely reciting now, not editorializing. “And he thought of me each time he saw one. He was amazed to find the tree for sale here, as if it couldn’t travel. He didn’t know the Botanic Garden has them, like an army of them. And it wards off evil or that’s the story. Plant it in the northeast, they say, because that’s the direction evil comes from. He said it was our duty to grow it and keep it well—to protect us.” She took time to look at it. “It’s sensitive. It didn’t thrive at first. I took it personally.”

  And then: “You know, I didn’t garden as a kid. My mother did. My father, too. He liked to help. I wasn’t at all interested and now I sometimes wake up worrying about what the frost may do. I had no idea I’d take to it as I did or how gratifying I’d find it out here.”

  I remembered a line from Here Is New York, a pleasing compact send-up of the city by E. B. White. A Connecticut neighbor sent it to me when I first moved to New York, and one of White’s pronouncements had stayed with me ever since: “No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky.” I thought I was willing back then, and now standing on Hope’s porch, as on a prow of a ship, I was reminded that both of us had invested all our luck in whom we’d chosen to love, to align our lives with. Our husbands were both men who had ambition for making money, had no shame in its pursuit, in a crowded field of commerce, in constant and unforgiving competitio
n. Her husband had survived, and to anyone’s eyes, it would appear Hope had gone so much farther in her commitment to their life together than I had; I hadn’t had the same chances and maybe I wouldn’t have had the same drive to nourish dynamic life into the income my husband had generated as Hope had—an extraordinary home, two feeling children, a garden that made demands she was happy to answer for; she’d given all her imagination to it, and in the lists she was making for me again now were all the evidence of that commitment, how fluently she was naming the parts, pointing to daffodils there, common primrose, hellebore—do you see it from here, it’s just up?—crocuses, violets, grape hyacinth, tulips—“those bloom early,” she said, “those over there do not”—some plantings visible, alive for weeks: yes, modest tulips, yellow and slender, yet so tightly held in April, others gapping already, showing us the color of their insides—brash and kaleidoscopic in their honesty. There were plants and flowers still waiting to greet her under the soil; and she named these, too: hosta, lamb’s ear, blue fescue, moor grass, foxglove, “which is so temperamental, it grows in stages and only lasts about two seasons but what color…” or waiting within the lines of their branches: “That’s a paperback maple. Its red skin looks so stunning in the snow. I planted it when we bought this place twenty years ago. And that,” she looked at the gazebo, “will be covered in clematis.…” Her commitment set in motion, renewing itself in agreement with the seasons every year, yes, flattering her choices and her hard work, like dreams coming true over and over. Now with listless wonder she told me: “We used to say we had the whole world back here.”

  And it was a wonder: Spring performing for her when she could not help but feel winter all through her, a bruise on her arm where the IV had been, Les only a week ago fucking her to break her in two.

  “I have gloves, clippers and scissors, wheelbarrows, a cart and a wagon. I have aprons and hats and some dirty towels. I have plenty of pots. We’ll replant what we can in your garden. What we can’t replant we’ll cut for bouquets, which we can give as gifts or keep for ourselves. We’ll dig up all of it or most of it. What we can’t dig up, we’ll shear.”

  “Dig it up? Why?” I asked, dumbfounded.

  “He’s destroyed something.”

  “He has.”

  “And I’m making him see the casualties firsthand.”

  “But you created this. It’s your work.”

  “And I can undo it. I can’t say that about most things.” The sky was empty of clouds and blue and bright, and she led me down the iron stairs to her tools and supplies.

  My first response was no, we can’t, it’s simply too lovely, but I watched her unlock her shed and carry out all that we’d need with incredible calm. She was silent and sure and created an atmosphere of a woman determined and I wanted to live in that, join her there for as long as I could, more finally than I cared about the fate of her flowers, or even her trees. They say expectations of an experience guide and distort that experience. I had had none coming here. I had no real desire to say yes or no, to choose between those options, as life requires of us over and over. I had only a disposition to be partnered in something of consequence to someone I cared for and who in this moment anyway cared for me. Here, today, I could tell my mother I was not merely a spy. And I wasn’t afraid: I took up the clippers and cut the opened tulips clear through at the stem, letting them fall heavy-headed, and dug up the others and sat them in a pot of soil for replanting as I saw Hope do. She instructed by doing and gave me what I’d really been after: belonging somewhere that soon enough was a place outside simple time or anywhere recognizable to me, because we lost time together, as we set to work in the wet soil. We divided into halves, our most fundamental parts, as adults often do; we were the children we never stop being, marveling at the mud—fibrous, peaty, sandy, claylike—and also women worrying for it, negotiating with our worry, dirt in every crease, under every fingernail, in our hair, damp through to our knees already. We did not speak, for if we did we might falter and lose the urgency necessary to undo this world of Hope’s, a sanctuary that for so long she controlled but couldn’t anymore; and her stabbing the soil with her shovel, turning over the beds, was both her acceptance of and her rebellion against what wasn’t hers anymore, of what, as she said, was already gone.

  We filled over a dozen clay and plastic pots with plants and flowers to transplant and placed the cut flowers in her wheelbarrow. I’d chosen to take off my gloves because I was clumsy in them so had grasped the roots and filaments, pebbles and bulbs as I pulled them that felt in the hand like mammals’ veins and loose male genitals and tumors and plum pits. We worked efficiently and savagely, it was true, making our decision about what to preserve and what not to without fussing or consulting our consciences or one another, and so it took me longer than it should have to notice her hands were bleeding as she struck the soil to unearth the Japanese plum’s roots, assessing just how deep and far they reached. She’d taken off her gloves, too; maybe they were slipping or maybe like me she eschewed any barrier between her and the day’s intentions. Of course I had to stop her from hurting herself, and I saw myself get up and put a hand on her lower back, but in fact I didn’t move—it would break the spell. I waited until the violence I felt made the choice for me, for it was all through me and Hope surely; it had to be to do what we were doing. The black, black soil mostly empty now, and wanting, was like an invitation.

  “I didn’t tell you. I meant to,” I called to her over her heavy breathing and the shovel’s grunts. “That tenant of mine, the ferry captain, I may have told you about him? He came home last night. He’d been gone for weeks. Mr. Coughlan? I’d been worried and had thought he’d never come back and then he appeared at my door. He arrived just as Les was leaving.”

  She straightened and, still breathing hard, looked at me as if she’d forgotten all about me or at least about speech and, marveling at the lapse, searched for decorum. “You let him in, after he came to me, did you?”

  “Les? I opened the door so he’d quit beating on it.”

  She gave out a loose laugh and sighed. She saw her hands and the state of them and laughed again. “My God … He doesn’t learn. Well, so, did he behave?”

  “No.”

  “Did you?”

  “I didn’t hit him this time. I invited him in. I certainly didn’t want him to stay, but he—”

  “He imposes,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “And sometimes it’s good.” She surveyed the ground, then looked up at all the tree’s blossoms, squinted at the sky.

  “Yes,” I agreed.

  She leaned her shovel against the fence. “And sometimes it’s not.”

  “Yes.” And because alone with her I was possessive and gleeful in a way I could barely disguise, I looked to kill him again, but this time it was his chance with her, any future for them that I was after, and so I said, “He’s an animal.”

  But she resurrected him. “We all are, darling. Animals. We’ve all done things we’re ashamed of, but we survive. Or most of us.” She wiped her hands on her khakis, staining them. “I don’t think I can dig this tree up, or not without brawn; that means a few tree men. It’s just too big now. Do you want it at your place very much?”

  I did want it suddenly, terribly, this part of Hope and her husband’s life, but I did not trust the lust in my heart, and Hope had just put me in my place rather neatly. I thought of my own little yard, which had never been mastered because I hadn’t wanted to. I wanted something of that wildness that I’d known only moments ago, before I’d broken the spell. I wanted to be surprised.

  * * *

  And I was. Less than a week later, Angie appeared at my door with a printed invitation from Hope and me in one hand and a stout bouquet of daffodils in the other. She held them up for a moment so I could see and then lowered them.

  “A party?”

  I confirmed it. She did not interrogate me, restraining, for now, her uncomfortable-making curiosity. The par
ty was a pretense for coming down. Her voice was thin. I could see, though her face was flushed and her mole bright and beating with the blood all through her, that she was working on a problem inside her and all her resources were there. She clasped her hands over her stomach, covering it with the flowers and the invitation, an odd enactment of composure.

  “There doesn’t seem to be hot water or not much.”

  The past several days had been unseasonably warm for April, and the boiler, my centrifuge, my friend, stopped making heat just as it should, but its thermostat was too sensitive, a design flaw I’d meant to address, and it told the equipment to go too far—no hot water. A rare thing but not unheard of during a change of seasons when even dead wood swells and sweats, has complaints. It had happened last spring, but I had noticed before anyone else and so did not hold the boiler or me accountable or even remember till now.

  It was barely 7:30 in the morning. I told her I’d go directly. Apologized. Landlords must be prepared to apologize as much as possible; it needs to be the punctuation to every reply to a tenant or nearly. But Angie did not seem to hear.

  She had jeans and flip-flops on under a stiff white cotton nightgown, the stuff of choirs and virgins. I moved to go, but she was not quite ready to let me.

  “The invitations are printed and embossed. This paper is recycled and pretty expensive. You paid for them to be printed? For this party, out there in your yard?”

  “No, not me. Hope, the woman who is subletting George’s place.”

  She nodded.

  I said, “The flowers are from her garden.”

  Absent, she nodded again.

  “We replanted a lot in my yard.” And we had—it took two days, a sunburn, sore hands, necks, and backs, and a decision to leave her Japanese plum behind. “You’ll see if you come to the party.”

  Even this information did not catch in her. What notice she’d taken of the building’s newest occupant and what questions she had about her didn’t matter now. Angie tacked there, squeezing her full hands into her stomach over her gown now, rubbing slightly, crushing the daffodil stems, then making an effort to stop herself. I knew then, I suppose, or maybe just before, grace of what? The warmer days, sensations new to me, the beautiful circuity of recent events? Yes, I felt Angie’s physicality between us like a mass of breathing vines taking over, gorgeous and sightless and frightening in their intelligence and direction. I knew before she told me, which she did: “I’m pregnant.”