The Affairs of Others: A Novel Page 19

  “Well, then…” I said. And was lost, too, calculating for her all the ramifications. Mitchell gone. I didn’t congratulate her. I offered, “Well, then, you’ll be needing hot water.”

  She looked at me for the first time and laughed in an uneven puff of air that got away from her, then stopped herself abruptly.

  “Big news.” I grinned, and when her face did not reply in kind, I stopped.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Not planned,” I said.

  She shook her head. Bewilderment the color of yellow rose up from inside her or from the daffodils reflecting up into her sea-glass green eyes. She stared down at the flowers, concentrating, talking herself out of tears or more. She breathed her big bosom up and down, up and even deeper down.

  “There are flowers in front of every apartment,” she said. “Left with the invitation.”

  “Hope. She’s very excited about the party. Will you come?”

  She became exasperated then—I was obfuscating, wandering from the matter at hand, and the world was too altered, flowers in front of every door! Some woman let loose in our halls. “My god, Celia. I don’t know! I don’t know. I just don’t—” She pushed the ragged bouquet and the invitation at me, into my hands, and then, at a loss, put her hands on her hips that may have not felt quite like hers, only to let her limbs drop as far as they would go, not far. Small arms, small hands. She’d probably never felt so small. She closed her eyes. Steadying herself.

  “That man, our neighbor, is back, isn’t he? I can hear him walking over me. He’s okay?”

  “Mr. Coughlan? Upstairs? Yes.”

  “I don’t know whether to tell him,” she said.

  “Mr. Coughlan?”

  “No.” She opened her eyes to scold me with her regard. “Mitchell, who else?”

  I felt the invitation in my hand, the texture of the stiff ivory paper. Hope had shown it to me with the trill of a bride-to-be—“It fits the event perfectly, doesn’t it?” she said. “So simple and elegant and full of the season—I couldn’t resist. And I’m going to cook for days…” The fullness of her excitement had surprised me. With her garden as she had composed it gone but for where it was preserved in her mind, for her to map all alone, she’d been made lighter, and like a girl rushing to share her fantasy of how one greets the spring with adults who badly needed to be reminded, she insisted on leaving bundles of flowers tied in a cotton string at every door, even her own and mine—we could not be left out, after all. Her happiness at the prospect of what was to come, a party to begin, curled into the building, into the lines of the leaves pushing and squeaking at the windows, and into me, too. How could I tell Angie what I’d seen—that a woman embarked finally on something new, giddy with courage, could mean everything? And in the last few days the mouth of my backyard had been opened so it would take in all the flowering plants we had for it; roots snug in foreign clots of dirt were secured in its soil and in new soil brought in in bags dense as bodies. Yes, its mouth was full and could speak only of abundance. I had not foreseen how transformed it would feel. How to explain to Angie that you could love what you could not foresee, that we are all shape-shifting whether we want to or not? Hope put her married name on the invite, alongside mine, Boxer and Cassill. They were our names after all, even if the men who’d given them to us were not anymore or not in the way we’d imagined.

  “You have to tell him, Angie. You were a family, the two of you, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “And he’s always wanted this?”

  “Yes, of course, yes, but he’ll come back for the baby. I want him to come back for me.”

  “Tell him that, too.”

  “I’m—” She touched her stomach again. She might have said exhausted, scared. I could see both. Or disappointed. I saw that there, too, or I think I did. I saw it everywhere if I chose to. I handed the daffodils, the invitation back to her.

  “Hot water will improve things.… Let me attend to it now—” I reached out to touch her arm, but she’d already moved off, toward the stairs.

  “Thank you,” she said, gone into a fog again of scenarios, conversations, conflicts.

  “Provisions have to be made,” I called to her. “And some improvisation is required. You don’t have to be together to be parents together. And there are other forms of support, other people out there just waiting to be in a family—”

  She didn’t believe me so the words just dissolved, flimsy, no matter my conviction. Her small round back to me, she sighed, found another mechanical thank-you and went up and away as I made for the boiler, something I knew how to care for, something that even in its failures didn’t surprise me.

  I’LL WAIT FOR YOU

  WHAT I HAD KNOWN of happiness was that it sat best in small cups; it was designed for the sprinter or the wave destroying itself on the rocks; it couldn’t be clutched at or too carefully observed; and its departure couldn’t be guessed at; but still the day of the party I tried to charm it with bargains, promises; if it would stay just long enough, I would do anything.

  On that day, a Saturday, from mid-morning to late afternoon feet scrambled overhead, as if in gossipy conversation with one another. Hope came in and out of my apartment as did her children and her friends, each toting something for her or for the party, a gift of wine—sparkling, pink, white, red—thick cloth table napkins, paper lanterns to hang from the trees so we could brave the dark when it came; they rolled a grill the size of an old jukebox on wheels seven blocks from Hope’s former home. (Darren, I was told, wanted to christen it with champagne. Expensive champagne. Hope would have let him, but Josephina would not.) I’d insisted on contributing cash for my part in the food and rented the tables and chairs, swept and bought white candles. I found a dress almost the color of Angie’s eyes and made for a long neck like Hope’s. Its neckline scooped and its cool summer cotton followed me closely from my breasts down across my stomach and hips before it flared gently and told anyone who cared to look that the shape of me had nothing to hide. When I put it on, it brushed against the back of my knees to remind them what it was to be bare so I took it off, only to put it back on again. The air was fresh, its temperature circling seventy; the light was lemony and mixed with clouds bright and sluggish and as top-heavy as mountains.

  “I’ve never seen you in a dress,” Hope said, carrying in supplies hidden in Tupperware for storing in my fridge. The free fingers of her right hand, which was bandaged around her palm from our exertions, absently traced my rib cage and waist as she fell into reporting on the food she’d prepared: foie gras arancini, pan-fried baby artichokes and arugula with lemon aioli, quail egg canapés. And cheese, of course cheese: Hudson Valley Camembert, Grafton three-year cheddar, Nettle Meadow Kunik (Kunik? A triple crème cheese made from goat and cow’s milk, she explained, it will get you high, it’s so good; I’m not kidding). Grapes, walnuts, and baguette, not crackers, never crackers; soufflé aux épinards (you know that’s spinach of course), a roasted trout with herbs and lemon for the non-meat-eaters, and for the omnivores, a baby rack of lamb. And mussels. An enormous bowl. There would be sparkling water and lemonade; and Muscadet for the mussels. Sancerre goes with pretty much everything and there’s Châteauneuf-du-Pape for the lamb. My son grills with the patience of a civil servant. She’d chosen Gosset Rosé Champagne—to drink with the dessert or anything else—fruit tart and petits pots de crème in ginger, passion fruit, and noisette—noisette? Hazelnut, you silly. You know that. Yes, I did, but I wanted her to tell me, to slow her down. Please, slow down. But I did not say that out loud, to her or the day. I simply wished for it.

  “I think it will be enough, don’t you? But will your tenants like it—they are coming? Oh, I hope so. The party’s for them as much as anyone else. And for them to see your garden. Won’t they be amazed? That sweet plump girl on the floor above me—I saw her in passing just yesterday. She looked like a motherless child.”

  I wanted to elaborate and remark on the uncanniness of th
e comment, but already she was on to scaling other visions, aiming so high, announcing, “New air! How do you get it? Travel! George was showing me the way, but I wasn’t ready to see it then, but now where won’t I go? Why hadn’t I thought of it sooner? I have friends in Rome, Berlin, Brittany—oh, that rough coast! You have to see it, if you haven’t. And Turkey. I’ve been meaning to go for years. And Rome? Have you been? The colors of the old stucco structures—these pinks and yellows and nutty oranges—and the texture of the walls and roofs. My god, it’s like this labyrinth of ruins that shouldn’t be standing but they do, and with more solidity and grace than us, that’s for sure, and palm trees! Can you imagine?! Palm trees in the midst of this ancient Western city, the most impermanent sort of tree, don’t you think? And I read just recently that there’s some insect eating up those Roman palms, and you know the Italians won’t do a thing about it. Not so long ago now, Leo got on the bus in Rome with an expired ticket—without realizing of course—and the police who came on doing their fare checks took him off and told him fifty euro or prison. He paid them. Oh, it’s corrupt, that city, and lazy but glorious and overpowering. Meet me there? Why not?” She poured us both a taste of the champagne. “Or the Amalfi Coast?” Then she sighed herself into stillness, temporary, and drained her glass. “I won’t force you. You think about it. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I wouldn’t want to be, well…” She peered into her trip, a woman traveling by herself, perhaps seeing herself at a café taking espresso alone, or a glass of wine. “Men will look at me with pity but not all. Some women too, but if I want company and I may not, but if and when I do, I’ll look for the exceptions. Like you,” she said, turning to me and fitting her injured hand around the contour of my cheek with the plain affection of an older sister. Still goose bumps rose all over me like children jumping up to put their faces in the sun, and I was half-drunk at noon, exhilarated and queasy, certain already that the day and its gifts—and maybe its consequences, too—were greater than my ability to meet them.

  I said very little as I finished my champagne but smiled and nodded and gave yes-yes’s, thrilling to all of it with her. To meet her wherever she went or to tell her, as I wanted to more than once, please stay a while longer, Hope, to tell her anything more of my heart would mean sooner or later to tell her everything, what I’d chosen, who I’d chosen and still chose. To tell her, even five years after the fact, still felt a betrayal of all that I consented to on the last day of my husband’s life. You see, once I agreed to give him all the morphine he needed to die on a burning hot July day, a day so long that sometimes it felt I was still living it, once I agreed to let him go because his body had turned cruel and was tired and empty and leaking, I promised to restore him as he’d been. It wasn’t just a sentimental promise to my husband, who was so bitterly ashamed of dying when all he longed to do was live, but a promise I made to me, in order to survive what I agreed to do that day and then carried out. But it’s never so simple as all that. The body does not want to die. His breaths—I counted them until I couldn’t. They sounded hard-edged, they crackled inside him, dragged and plowed and wheezed—hundreds I counted, one more ragged than the next. He was hooked to a morphine drip, Helen had seen to that part, a baseline prescribed by a doctor. The extra, also prescribed as supplement to the IV, as needed, was given from a dropper; he sucked from it like a teat, but he had difficulty swallowing and choked. Broken blood vessels, petechiae, knit inside his eyes, around them from choking. And those breaths still came. Yes, the body wants to live, but my husband did not. C’mon, baby. C’mon. Enough of this before it takes us both with it. I took on the obligation that day to his stronger self, to all we’d had in store—children, travel, outsize freedom from everyday tedium—and to how much faith there was between us. Daphne, my childhood friend, hadn’t chosen her love well. She’d let it choose her. I had chosen well, and I’d prove it with my strength, my loyalty; and those breaths that kept coming were an affront to that choice, of him, one that I would make again, even with the illness, to a man who wanted to love me and be loved by me for so much longer than we were allowed. Those breaths wouldn’t stop even after I injected him—more morphine. He was not conscious, he could not hold my hand or feel my body cupped around his in that rented metal bed. I stood up—and my heart, the room, the very air began to speed up as I did—I stood up and took a pillow encased in a plain blue pillowcase and, everything moving now, with my own gaudy heartbeat, faster, too fast for uncertainty, I pressed it over those unconscious, unwanted breaths. Helen had not instructed me on this—only on the overdose, how to do it, over how much time, where to inject him if necessary, but you see I recognized that calm of Hope’s, the one she showed me in her garden, because I had had it once. I stopped those breaths that would not stop, and once I did that I owed him all of me every day, alive so he could be. That was how it had come to feel. At first, finding myself alone in that room, the shock had made me run. I could not contain the pain those first weeks. The guilt. I wanted to go with him. Obliterate me. But there was no going back and finally that choice, that day, and every choice that followed it, this building, the prayer for an orderly place, these tenants, even Hope and what we had stumbled into, would mean nothing if I did not keep him well, his youthful self, like a flame inside me, clarifying and burning. I had no choice, and I still didn’t.

  GOODBYE FOR NOW

  THE YELLOW TABLECLOTH flew up and over the tables pushed together into the long, rigid backbone of a banquet. The chairs, some dozen, filled with bodies—so fast was the party populating and cheeks craning for the brush of lips, hands shaking, reaching for food, plates clacking, bottles hoisted and handled hard. One glass broke and quickly was swept up; it vanished into the relay of speech, words sent out as sentries, flares. Look here! Look at me! And this food! Oh, my god, what is in my mouth, Hope?! Hope, you sorceress! Effusive and at erratic speeds, as if our chances to be seen and heard were diminishing before us and we had to hurry. Ten people at table with their mouths moving, in a yard that had rarely seen more than one or two visitors at a time.

  Josephina had brought an artist friend named Jorge from Barcelona; Danielle had invited a boyfriend or a prospective one—I was not sure. And the flowers we’d planted crowded in around us, as if desperate to participate, some bending, dying already from the shock of their move. They suffocated me in their colors and number—how they instructed on perishability. My lilac bush was obscured in the thicket but fought for its pride of place with its full scent; my ginkgo and my sycamore seemed as shy as me, surrounded too suddenly and too lushly.

  Blake and Andrew brought show tunes on CD and asked me where the stereo was: I had moved the old machine, my husband’s once, by the window.

  “Anything Goes” soon barked at us, upbeat, egging us on.

  “Oh, Patti LuPone! She’s a fucking genius!” cried Darren.

  Andrew sang along, “The world’s gone mad today and good’s bad today and black’s white today and day’s night today,” while tossing an arm over Leo, addressing the words to him, pulling him to him, the glorious substance of a healthy young man, who had carried the plates down, the serving dishes, the flatware, the bottles, who had snuck traveling looks at me in my dress each time, stealing high, stealing low, and the last look hanging on for as long as it took him to work his vigorous lungs an extravagant slow cycle, and me, despite myself, feeling his regards like two-fingered caresses.

  Angie landed at the party in increments as if side-stepping. Dazed, I did not hear the door that would have warned me of her arrival and did not see her at first—her whole makeup a frown and a fidget and so tinier than ever. Once I was sure she’d decided not to run, I stood from my seat, found my voice, announcing her to everyone: “One of my tenants, Angie! A crusader and a model tenant!”

  Blake raised his glass. “Hoopla, to Angie the crusader! Wine for the crusader!”

  “Food first,” said Hope, opening her hands to Angie, who had rooted herself in place. “Why haven’t
we met properly before now? I’ve been subletting for weeks and weeks and it seems so odd we haven’t spent time together.…” Hope, with some gentle tugging, maneuvered Angie to a chair, telling her about the food options—“Do you eat cheese? Quail eggs? Oh, yes, organic, humanely treated, I’m all for it…”—while talking on as if shame and its gravity had been banished from her constitution for good. “Well, I know why we haven’t chatted. I’ve been a positive wreck. My husband and I are parting ways and, really—Angie, is it?—that’s putting it delicately.…” Hope laughed, tall in her own dress, royal blue and belted and plunging with a full 1950s-style skirt; her hair piled into its high twist. Her lipstick a dark shock. Impeccable. The only perceptible makeup. The lines around her eyes creasing deeply with her admission, “Yes, it’s been an endurance race, one I almost lost—”

  The old Angie would have been fast to say “Me, too,” and chimed away in kind or better, faster certainly, but Angie was round-eyed and, like all of us to varying degrees, prostrate before such charm, so generous you had to follow it attentively to believe it.

  When Hope offered her wine, Angie finally spoke, “Oh, no. I can’t now,” and without thinking shielded her stomach with her hand.

  “Don’t tell me,” Hope burst out, “you’re expecting a—”