The Affairs of Others: A Novel Read online

  Angie blocked her, “I’m sure you’ve heard by now: They’ve raised the terrorist alert to orange—or I think it’s orange, the color right below red. It’s elevated, one step away from scrambling those fighter planes. The news is running all over the place with rumors or what they’re calling unsubstantiated reports that the Brooklyn Bridge is the target.”

  “Really?” said Hope, repeating it to the table. “Did everyone hear? About the bridge?”

  Blake called: “No one’s leaving!”

  “The colors dictate!” howled Josephina. “What power colors have today!”

  Darren: “Let’s all stay the night! We’ll outwait those terrorists with wine and see the dawn together!”

  “If there are much wines to keep us warmed,” said Jorge’s heavily accented voice, “I will stay here and make toastings to the terrorist: May he find his virgin wives and leave the bombs to Uncle Sam.” He had the look of a happy derelict about him. His voluptuous hairy belly shoved through the front seam of his buttoned shirt; his English was rudimentary and rude (cheerfully): “Now I will eat this mussel of the sea as I would the muscle of a woman. To women!” He raised his glass, and Leo, out of duty to a guest, did too.

  Hope huddled Angie to her: “They may seem like beasts, my friends, but they’re very well-intentioned or most of them.…”

  “It’s very changed back here,” I heard Angie say and it was.

  The music, Cole Porter’s, had Blake and Andrew taking turns singing verses to one another, leaving Leo to make for the grill.

  Hope had disarmed Angie enough that now she was addressing herself, for privacy and from the noise, to Hope’s ear, confessing, surely, letting every detail go. How easy it looked.

  Danielle’s guest, whose name was Jeff or Jess, resembled her, built with lines that were all straightaways ending in youthful jutting joints. But against Danielle and her porcelain skin, his tan was so deep and honeyed so early in the season that it was, more than anything else, the color of affluence. He grinned and nodded and laughed before a sentence or witticism was completely expressed, too ready to please all these adults, yet running over with opinions and self-promotion. He could be heard to say, “the Hamptons,” and to me and Darren he said, “they are the cure given us for Manhattan.”

  “Do we need a cure?” asked Josephina and he only laughed as he explained earnestly about the death of Wall Street as we’ve known it—9/11 showed just how defenseless we are, “We can’t rely on the old systems. They’re too corrupt frankly, too entrenched. And it’s all illusion anyway, right? If a company’s paper goes up or down? It’s manipulated.”

  Danielle, a complicit member of his self-promotion team and more exuberant than I’d known her to be, reported to Darren and me, “He studied Mandarin Chinese at Yale. He’s taking me to China this summer, just the two of us. Jess says high tech is our common language now, that we’ll all be working for China—”

  “We already are,” he assured us, breaking in. “All we have is our high-tech companies left, where this country’s money is hiding—the high-tech guys are just holding on to it, hedging their—”

  Darren craned in. “How do I get some of that money, short of stealing it?”

  “Investment. Good stock choices,” said Jess.

  “But Wall Street is dead?”

  The young man chuckled nervously. “Well, it still has its place.”

  “And your father?” Darren spoke while chewing. “What does he do? Don’t tell me he works in investments?”

  Before Jess could answer, Hope reappeared, a hand on my shoulder. “Who will have fish? And who will have meat?”

  Jorge and Josephina did not hear—they bickered in Spanish and the music worked in between us all, making for lapses. Jorge reached for Josephina’s breast. She slapped his hand and then leaned across the table to me and Danielle to say, “If he were not so ravenous in bed, I would send him out on the street.” In the glare of the sunlight, the black eyeliner ringing her black eyes looked costumey and tribal; it made everything she said grave and impossible to argue with.

  “Would you turn that music down, please?” Hope called. Andrew did her bidding and the garden opened a shade—one less element stirring its contents into a froth for which I knew I had little stamina. I had nowhere to hide—there was no clear exit for me on this occasion. I had all but trapped myself here.

  I had left my apartment door unlocked, as well as the door to the corridor beside my apartment; the corridor joined the front hall to the garden as an independent access for tenants. Whichever route you took, there were two doors to pass through, to get to us, but it was the corridor door on which Hope had written on a piece of paper in her looping, exclamatory script: “Party today! All welcome.”

  The music low, we could hear birds again, cars streaming on the nearby street, and we could hear a door opening and closing; we could hear footsteps making down the wooden floor. Darren’s eyes widened at me, mine replied in kind. We were both thinking Les. Of course, Les.

  But before us stood a reed of a man, his head too big for such an intersection of sinew, seen in his thin exposed arms and neck and guessed at elsewhere. It was Mitchell, nervous, balancing on the balls of his feet, carrying daisies and looking into a field of faces he did not recognize save mine and Angie’s, though hers was blank with shock.

  “Mitchell!” I declared.

  “Oh, this is Mitchell?” said Hope.

  “Who is Mitchell?” asked Darren.

  “Angie’s husband,” I reported.

  But Angie said nothing and stared at him and then away as if she did not want to believe in the sight of him. Had she told him she was pregnant after all? And was that why he’d come without warning? Or had the threat of terrorism made him sentimental?

  “Sit right here by your wife,” said Hope. She introduced herself, told him how glad she was he’d found us. “And you brought flowers. We are just lousy with flowers. Aren’t we lucky?”

  “I saw the sign,” he said. “I came to see Angie. She wasn’t home.”

  “She is home,” I said. “She’s home out here with all of us.”

  He barely glanced at me and extended the bouquet to Angie, who received it as if he had handed her exotica or a rabbit straight out of his ear.

  Darren’s shoulders folded in, in relief, and Hope, a marvel of social intelligence, set after describing the food in all its particulars again, meaning to distract from the couple who did not embrace or greet each other but sat each as ramrod as rockets waiting to launch. More wine was opened. Danielle ran, as directed by her mother, to retrieve new courses from my kitchen. Leo sliced the lamb.

  When Hope filled Darren’s glass with Châteauneuf-du-Pape, he looped his hand in the belt of her dress to bring her near:

  “Did you invite him?”

  “This man?” Hope asked.

  “Don’t be coy,” he said.

  “If you mean, Les, no. He’s not invited, Darren.”

  “That’s not stopped him before.”

  She laughed as if delighted, maybe flattered, as if Les were merely an incorrigible adolescent, then shook her head, shook off that laughter, while watching me watch her. “He won’t come. Not today. I’ve explained it to him: Things have changed.”

  But I knew, as Darren surely did, that things could change again. That man would never stop, couldn’t. He was a constant in that way, of nature or chaos. His appetite, his forward motion in service of it, he couldn’t best it, not at this stage in his life when he feared losing too much. To win on the terms he’d strategized—that was the ideal in which he was held, to which he aspired, and there was Hope at the center of it, giving it human meaning, beauty. She’d let him in, ostensibly to comfort her, and he too willingly became part of the assault. But it wasn’t fear I felt so much as resignation: It could be anything or anyone, couldn’t it? You had to wait only so long for the assault on your perception of how things should go, of who you are, the disruptions, the upsets and losses. It fel
t nearly impossible to stay the course, whatever your course. Even our great bridge wasn’t safe today, and perhaps tomorrow: Armed men crawled all over it; helicopters beat its piece of sky.

  Angie had started weeping into the bouquet she’d balanced on her lap. Mitchell lifted a hand on her shoulder and hung over his own lap. Everyone looked away.

  Jorge crawled his hand to Josephina’s breast in antic fashion, fingers creeping and stumbling, and this time she sat back in her chair, chewing her meat, not resisting him or the joke.

  Danielle asked, “Should we put on the news? If it’s really the Brooklyn Bridge, I mean, maybe there’s something we should be doing, Mother?”

  “Not today, darling. No. This is a party. How about that music?” Hope said, but before Andrew effected it, again the creak of a door—all welcome!

  I bowed my own head and told myself I could simply walk out, walk the streets and leave them to their party, go to Montague Street and the old bookstore, to the magnolia way past bloom on the corner of Clinton. Reenact different days or see the bridge for myself. Keep to my course, my counsel. I’d tell Hope I needed to walk off a headache, to get some air. They’d talk of me, the strangeness of my empty apartment, and Hope would struggle to quiet the gossip. A widow, yes. And she’s so young. But she couldn’t explain how the lilac was too sweet and full in my throat and nose, and how there was no room back here, a place so changed.

  I looked up resigned to see the figure of Les, eclipsing us, taking what little air we had back here. Surely the wine had made me maudlin or it was Mitchell’s face, on it the look of someone who could not win. But there was Mr. Coughlan: “I hope I am not interrupting you people. I got this very handsome invitation. I wanted—I mean I came to thank you for your kindness, but I am not one for parties, you see—”

  Hope got to him first, enveloping him in her voice, her long bare arms, before he could finish making his excuses. She wouldn’t miss the chance to steer the party somewhere new.

  “Won’t you at least let us feed you? I’ve worked so very hard on the food and Celia”—I stood from my chair and waved so he could see me—“has told us all so much about you. A man of the sea, if I recall right. A captain.”

  “Well, for a minute, for a minute then, for Miss Cassill’s kindness. I did shave,” he laughed. No one had anticipated the likes of him today, not even me: a man out of another time and glad to be. Yes, he wore his seaman’s cap, the structure of which had held but whose fabric color was diluted, grayed, by sun and wind and sea and rain. His white cotton collared shirt and chinos were clean—crisp—but if you looked closely enough you’d find they were faintly spotted with the work he’d done, rust stains, oil, paint maybe; work he’d do now, if asked. He didn’t need us or if so, for only so long. He was here on a lark or because he was hungry or curious. He was in no hurry. Hope loved him immediately, perceiving something in him more real and no-nonsense than she’d seen in a long time. She sat him at the head of the table and when he protested she said, “What if I share it with you?”

  “It is Miss Cassill’s table, isn’t it?”

  “I’ll sit here, on the corner, next to Hope,” I told him.

  “And I’ll sit next to you,” said Leo, suddenly beside me, close to my ear.

  Hope introduced everyone, and Mr. Coughlan nodded at every smile given him and said, “I am no good with names. Not because I’m old. I never have been.”

  “It’s okay,” said Darren. “We aren’t very memorable.”

  “Is that so?” Mr. Coughlan asked and squinted at him, at everyone briefly, his hazel eyes more opaque in the sunlight than I’d remarked before, a blue cloud mixing through them as if to protect him from this day, maybe from the likes of us, preserving his sight for distances and views and places that lived inside him, that none of us would ever be in a position to know in the same way.

  When he was offered wine, he asked for scotch. When I asked him how he liked it, he said, “Neat and hard and no trouble to you good people.”

  I told them all that Mr. Coughlan had been a merchant marine and ferryboat captain. I told them he’d been on a trip and had only just gotten back, and that he lived on the top floor. “You can see a bit of the harbor from there,” I explained.

  “Are you two related?” asked Darren.

  “I have a daughter Miss Cassill’s age,” Mr. Coughlan answered. “She’s not fond of her father. She’d like me to do as I’m told. I’m not so good at that either.”

  “Ah, a true man!” said Jorge, raising his glass and spilling his wine on his shirtfront. Two small birds, swallows maybe, dashed over our heads, complaining, a car horn sounded, and food was served to Mr. Coughlan, whiskey set next to his plate. “I feel like a king,” he said to Hope, now seated beside him.

  “A king returned from a crusade,” I said.

  “Another crusader?!” Blake interjected, lifting his glass.

  “Well,” he chewed slowly, “an inquiry maybe.… Thank you, Miss Cassill, for all you do, and you, ma’am. This is very good food.”

  “Hope can do anything,” I said.

  “What did you inquire about?” asked Jess.

  “Work on ferryboats. Some beautiful boats operating right out there.”

  Evidently, Jess had been waiting for the right moment to say that he was a distant relative of Robert Fulton on his mother’s side. It tumbled out of him.

  “That so? He didn’t invent the steamboat so much as make it better. He sank one of his first go’s in a river, in France. It sank like a stone,” Mr. Coughlan told us.

  “He went there to be a painter. That’s how he supported himself, doing portraits,” said Jess.

  “I think I heard that. My, this is the best food I’ve had in a long time.”

  Hope lit up: “No, no—”

  “You couldn’t support yourself as a fine art painter anywhere now. Could you?” Darren queried.

  “Why not?” said Mr. Coughlan. “It depends on how grand you want to live.”

  “Did you find work?” Leo asked.

  “Sort of.” Mr. Coughlan explained that they’d hire him to babysit deckhands or assistant captains. They didn’t know knots like he did. They weren’t trained on the instruments much anymore, didn’t have to be with the new technology, GPS. “They don’t have the same respect,” he said. “Not their fault. Computers make them lazy.”

  He chewed, swallowed. “One woman who has two touring boats—a sailer and a pleasure cruiser—said she might take me on if I subject myself to some tests.” He sipped his whiskey. “But I’d be a fool not to fear those tests. And it’s not a ferry, is it? I worked the Staten Island route many years ago. No one there remembers me. No one left to. But those ferries, those ferries are a marvel.”

  “Ugly,” said Andrew.

  “Maybe, but the Barberis, the two big ones?” He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “They have an eggbeater drive. Know what that is?” He looked at Jess.

  “No, sir.”

  “A German design. Goddamn Germans.” He grinned as he shook his head. “There’s no rudder, no propeller in the normal sense. There are these big circular plates flush with the hull. From each plate comes down a number of paddles, six feet by two feet or so. They go into the water and by altering the pitch of the paddles and the speed they turn the plates, you go forward, back, slow, fast. Those big orange monsters can turn a 360 in their own length.”

  “Did you ever pilot one?” Leo asked.

  “Not legally. They weren’t in service when I was around. But on my recent trip I made some friends. They took pity on an old man. I held the wheel so to speak. Not for long.”

  “They could get in big trouble for that,” said Jess.

  “What are you?” Jorge asked of Danielle’s young man, in the full swing of his drunkenness. “A woman?”

  “Pay no attention to Jorge,” said Josephina. “He is a big, stupid testicle.”

  Darren spit out his wine. “Darling!”

  “Well,” Mr. C
oughlan said, “we won’t tell on my friends at Whitehall. Will we? And who would believe me anyway?”

  “I would. I do,” said Hope, lightly bumping her shoulder to his. She loved the hardship his face showed it had survived, that he had the wrists and arms of a bigger man.

  “And where did you captain?” asked Leo, plainly fascinated.

  He recited places that most of us knew, but in this city backyard turned riotous garden with the afternoon light coming in sideways, it sounded the stuff of fantasy: Lake Champlain, Woods Hole, New London. New England by sea and lake. He told about the Adirondack, the oldest ferry in operation, how she’d been converted from steam to diesel. “She’s still on the lake in Vermont. They know what they have in her. They take good care of her. My wife and I met on that boat, long before I became its captain.”

  “And where is your dear wife now?” asked Josephina.

  “Buried with her family upstate.”

  “Ah, I’m sorry to hear.”

  “It’s been a long time, but I dare say she loved the Adirondack as much as I did.”

  Hope’s bandaged hand found my own under the table and gripped it as if to say, like you, maybe, yes, another widower, another loss observed, a course set. She didn’t let go, and I felt the excitement and heat vibrate through her and through her son to the other side of me, whose hand had landed on my knee, when Mr. Coughlan had said Lake Champlain for the second time. I thought it an accident at first. I tensed but only for a moment, as Leo began to feel my knee’s contours, bending time for me suddenly with the pressure of his fingertips, collapsing days. For me, and for Mr. Coughlan surely, even as we sat here so brightly well companioned, we were yet keeping our vigils. Death wasn’t an abstraction. I’d done more than watch my husband vanish into it. I had gone there with him, as far as I could go, and in resurrecting him as I did, even now, I resurrected myself. A man more full of life than I was then or now, as alive as Leo’s hand restless and oily from the food on my knee. Melville said that nothing exists by itself. “To enjoy bodily warmth, some part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast.” Or by likeness—I would forever locate my husband in others, and in me, when anyone touched me with anything like love or loving desire. There was nothing to regret in it—or I could find nothing suddenly, nothing at all. Mr. Coughlan might have compared Hope’s food to his wife’s, whose cooking never came up wanting. We held on to our ghosts as we held hard to each other. My husband had not lived as long as our love had, not long enough to disappoint me in real ways. I knew that by now. We weren’t tested by boredom or the demands of raising children, but even if we had been, for however many years, it may have only increased the fact, or what was to me a fact, that it’s never easy to separate the living and the dead—we living are in some part best expressed by our dead.