The Affairs of Others: A Novel Read online

  Our hospice nurse, Helen, believed in generous doses of palliatives for everyone, the terminal patient, the family of the terminal patient. She didn’t believe pain had to be tolerated, or not forever. She’d send me to bed telling me I looked ratty, placing a pill square in my palm. “Grab on to it,” she’d say. I had liked her—she was less reverent of death than the other nurses we auditioned. “You have some say in all this,” she’d say, squeezing my arm. “So does he.” She rarely spoke in a whisper or mooned at me sympathetically and always laughed with her mouth open—and I’d let myself fall asleep for short runs with her in the next room with him; I’d sometimes wake with the pill, having melted some, stuck to my hand. Now I swallowed a Xanax. I ran a bath.

  I tried not to imagine where Mr. Coughlan could be or the variety of ways a city like this might harm him. I tried not to recall the smell in my elevator. The water ran too hot. I let it. I took a Seconal before I eased my way in.

  * * *

  The bell—my husband was meant to ring it when he needed me or the nurse. He used it to joke, ringing it when he knew I was on the toilet or phone, ringing it to show me this could all be a game until it wasn’t and he rang for meds, to stop the pain. Why don’t we end this? Leave me with the bottle, baby. C’mon, this is nonsense. C’mon, he’d urge, like we could shuffle this off, like, yes, of course, we had some say. At that stage he couldn’t do it without me—he couldn’t hold things in his own hands for long; sometimes he had difficulty swallowing and the coughing hurt. And so I told the noise—what I thought was him making his case again with the bell—a little longer, I’m not ready. But the sound kept at it until it became a bleat, then a buzz, teeth bared, cutting into my sleep just enough for me to feel the bed was damp, the ends of my hair too, and to see the light in the room was high and splashing, outlining a moving tree copse on the wall beside my bed, pressing the shadow of the windowpanes into the shade. Late-morning sunshine and what I knew now was the persistence of the outside door buzzer, someone wanting into my building, without delay.

  I stood into a whirling; the room spun with me in it. I sat back down to stop it. I stood once more, reaching out to objects that seemed to shy and float from me. I made my way to the door, reassembling what I could of last night so that where I found myself now, as I pressed the front-door entrance release, could begin to feel real and firm, could matter again. The absence of sound, its teeth, slackened me, and when, at the sink, I brought cold water to my face, inside my mouth, my insides went cold and liquid, too. I put on my robe to warm myself, combed my hair away from my eyes, but everything lifted and sloshed as if in an Atlantic tide. He loves the Maine coast and likes to tell me Long Island Sound is a sad dirty little pond. Who was I telling? Helen. Maybe we could bring him to Maine one more time.

  The bell rang again, but I noticed that now the sound was different, trilling, without that mad jangling. My own doorbell. Someone at my door. Pressing at my bell and then knocking. Alternating. Whoever it was didn’t want to express politeness but that there was no time. I held on to the doorknob and felt the chill of its metal rush in waves into the current around me, pulling me away.

  My mother can drive us up there so we can see to him, Helen. We can do it, for him. His last trip to the ocean.

  If I could open the door, the thought occurred to me I could let the water out of the room, of me, but I risked letting something else in. Even so, I couldn’t bear the cold—in me, in him—for much longer; his hands had become brittle icicles. And his coughing became choking—liquid where it should not have been. His body empty as a barrel, as rigid, too cold, yet flooding.

  I made the decision, leaned into it, and before I’d fully opened the door, she was charging me—her face to mine already. Black hair moving, brown eyes flashing, as if with her wild pulse; her mouth open, wet and red inside with anger. “Why haven’t you called? I’m sick, sick with worry!” Jeanie Coughlan stood as her father did—wide-stanced but in her case not to withstand outside weather but the weather inside her.

  I struggled to find the thread that connected me to this—“I did call last night,” I stammered, “but I hung up. It was late. I didn’t realize how late. I intended to call first thing—”

  “Did you? First thing? It’s nearly noon.”

  “I was up late. There was an incident or I mean something happened.”

  “To him?”

  “No, no. It’s nothing. Nothing. I’m sure he’s fine. But the police. Have you called?”

  “Do you even know when you last saw him?”

  “Several days, maybe a week—” Dizzy, I was, remembering, trying to wake, his breathing so ragged.

  She reared back. “A week?!”

  “I cannot keep tabs on all my tenants—”

  Her face aimed for mine, closer still. “But you can take their money, his money. That you would miss.”

  “Don’t be silly. I care about your father.”

  “How dare you! You care about him and you let him come here? Where he’s alone, where’s there’s no one to watch, to protect him. You don’t bother to return my calls. Really, this is too much. I mean, who are you, anyway?”

  I could not match her speed. “I’m not here to surveil your father. He came here because he didn’t want that. He’s capable—”

  “Capable? How would you know? What do you know about him—”

  “I know he loves his freedom, his privacy—”

  She spoke over me: “Who are you but the woman who takes his money? Who has no care for his family’s wishes? A parasite, that’s what you are, a goddamned—”

  We shouldn’t live like this, Celia. C’mon, honey.

  Her mouth became a bell, jangling—alarm, alarm.

  C’mon, this has gone on too long.

  I could not conceive of killing my husband, but I could arrange a last ocean view. Jeanie could not keep her father safe or make him heed her, but she could scold me, turn me villain, make me share the awful pressure of her fear. Our half measures, our bait-and-switches in the face of suffering which are themselves a sorrow, a provocation.

  Her mouth could not stop. It spit and sprayed my face as she tried to climb inside me and turn me interior side out, to locate the size and range of my culpability.

  I broke in, “I’m sure he’ll be fine. I’m sure he is fine.”

  I was not certain she heard me even as I tightened my jaw, gritted my teeth, endeavored to form a smile that would reassure as I had done for my husband. More time, darling, we need more time, my jaw aching, counting his breaths … I interjected again, with determined lightness, “You two will laugh—” but before I could finish, I saw Mr. Coughlan’s daughter’s hand shoot up from her side; I saw an instant of white palm and then took the hot flat of it to my face. My jaw rattled open, my neck twisted as my head, loose and wet, bounced to the side. She’d hit me hard and knocked the water out of me and the sting she left on my cheek spread like wildfire through my face into my body. I was finally awake and perceived just how close she was to me as she strained to dive inside me; I saw the pattern of pores in her skin, stray blood vessels, and freckles on her nose, which had amassed to form a shadow of pigment; I saw scarlet fissures in her eyes, clotting them; and that she would keep coming, that she couldn’t help herself. I found my balance, checked the solidity of the wood under my feet, and struck her in the same manner as she had me, as hard and as completely. My whole arm tingled; my hand smarted; it had found bone under the softness of her cheek. No, no, we shouldn’t live like this.

  She stepped back then, and then again, covering the spot where I’d hit her with both her hands, as if to preserve the sensation. She had been shocked elsewhere, forcibly brought here, just as I had been. She was calm when she said, “I’m going to call the police.”

  “I think you should,” I told her, swallowing, pretending poise, even as I was on fire. I nodded at her, but not just her, because when she retreated from me I could finally take in the fullness of the hall. We were not al
one. Hope stood at the top of the flight of stairs there, a hand on the banister, watching and seeing all there was to see.

  LADY INTO FOX

  I WAS, OR HAD BECOME, a woman who if hit, hit back. And a woman? I’d hit a woman. I let this dawn on me not once but as many times as it took to address what assailed me next—remorse, pleasure, fear. More fear.

  The adrenaline. The sudden strength in my arm, and then the terror of it. My own unpredictability, something I thought I’d mastered in these years here, in my building. I’d chosen my tenants with care. I’d kept to myself. These choices had contained me, but now? I was failing somehow. We were not safe.

  The next day, once all my tenants were gone, I didn’t hesitate: I gathered all the keys to the apartments (keys, after all, that were mine as much as theirs). I had little choice. That delicious and horrible adrenaline a threat. I couldn’t sit still now. Yes, I’d wanted certain barriers, believed in privacy, the right to it, but as landlady I decided who had earned that right from me. Certainly I did not think Mr. Coughlan’s disappearance directly related to my other tenants, but the tenor of the building had changed so much lately, and I needed to take the care I had failed to in the last few weeks. I had to see everything there was to see. Get clear. Some things we are helpless before; other circumstances require agency: acting before we are too alone with our choices, or lack of them. Mr. Coughlan had stepped out of the building as if stepping off a cliff and no one had been alert enough to remark it or stop it.

  I knocked before I unlocked the Braunstein door. I gave a hello as I moved into the living room and was confronted not just by how entirely these rooms had been claimed from me but with what confidence. Furniture had been shoved into the middle of the room. Lamps without lampshades had been posted around to better light the walls. Each of these was freshly painted again; each room yet a new and emphatic color—the orangest orange, a cerulean blue, a brick red; this time, she’d not spared the moldings I had stripped and sanded to wood years ago. Angie was experimenting and didn’t see the use in asking permission now, four years in. She’d supplied herself with what the cans told me was the sort of paint that wouldn’t harm fish or fowl and gave the rooms a peppery new-car smell; she’d taken down her Amnesty International map of the world that I’d noticed on my last visit when a hissing radiator valve needed replacing. She’d removed her tribal masks from what she once told me was Papua New Guinea and placed them on her coffee table face up in a neat row as if to make sure they were comfortable, had enough air (“You never hear about the AIDS epidemic in PNG because its geography isn’t relevant to U.S. interests, but it’s like totally out of control”).

  In a cursory glance at the kitchen I saw dishes piled in the sink, herbs drying on the windowsill, and at least four or five instances of “non-toxic” or “organic” advertised in bold and in bolder colors on labels—on dishwashing soap, rice protein powder, bread, and apples as big as a man’s fist. On the table was a box full of handouts, how-to’s, how not-to’s, sign-up sheets, ragged pens, along with an ancient-looking steno pad. I scanned it to find a catalog of statistics on infant mortality rates, CO2 emissions, and clitorectomies as well as names, even mine, alongside of which she recorded the info she had shared. Mr. Coughlan’s name was not there, as if he didn’t exist anymore or perhaps never had, but Hope’s was, already; beside it Angie wrote in red ink with exclamations, “recycling procedures—update building.”

  The bedroom appeared intact or to my eyes it was. The room had eastern and southern light, a constant companionable light, or that’s how I viewed it when I prepared the space for occupants years ago.

  George’s and my bedrooms fell in the same line as theirs, but trees and adjacent buildings kept us from having the same share of the day. I had hoped a room rarely cast in shadow would make life’s complications more tolerable, less monolith.

  On the dresser sat a framed photo of Mitchell standing with natives from a place from which I imagined celebrities stole children these days. There were two shirtless boys showing ribs with Mitchell between them. They all smiled but squinted and looked uncomfortable. Still they did what they were told—the husband in particular, on a trip arranged by his wife, did what he was told.

  Their bed, smothered in down comforter dressed in a light pink duvet, was only a double, though there was plenty of room for a queen or a king. Over the bed hung a tapestry. I took it to be contemporary Indian or a good imitation of it and something that maybe Mitchell had insisted on. The colors were calmer and simpler than any other in the apartment—a moon the color of rosy flesh bled in small streams into an expanse of blue.

  I searched for more of Mitchell in the closet—a walk-in. I’d provided two bars for hanging shirts and pants and a higher bar for women’s dresses, long coats. Mitchell had been apportioned less than half of the space yet his belongings were sturdier, stiffer, and more uniform. They had the authority of men’s clothes—fewer required to be well-dressed, suit jackets designed to suggest strength and symmetry in the shoulders. I put my nose to the tweed, the wool sweaters, the synthetic of his parka, his windbreaker. I still had some of my husband’s clothes, but I had put them out of reach, where I could not keep touching them and looking in his pockets for clues to days he could not have back. My hands now dug in Mitchell’s jacket pockets—they found change, a fortune-cookie fortune, an ATM receipt, a matchbook. All the comforting debris of a gender not given to carrying compacts or combs, those bits of reassurance to one’s appearance.

  Because I could not resist, I ran a seam of a pair of rayon dress pants between my fingers; at the pocket I heard a crunch of paper. I pulled out a note composed in a hand I didn’t know; it read, “I’ll wait for you.” I judged it a woman’s writing because of the way the letters swooped and danced yet were modest, not wide, minding the space they took up, but then I was no expert and couldn’t remember what Mitchell’s handwriting looked like. “I’ll wait for you” could mean nothing—I’ll wait for you at the dry cleaner’s or the dentist’s or after work—or it could mean everything—authored by the woman on the Promenade, who was as slight as Mitchell, perhaps as crowded by her choices. When I reached to return the note to the pants, I dropped it. It fell as open as a hand. I thought to leave it there. Instead, I picked it up, folded it in half, then quarters, and slid it into my own pocket.

  * * *

  Hope had left George’s door unlocked and the flowers she’d collected, days—even weeks—old now, to dry in their vases. I called out to her and felt how foolish it was to speak a name like hers out loud, to no one in particular.

  I nearly tripped over a cord connected to a vacuum cleaner. Though it was plugged in, it had been abandoned before it could do its job, judging from the petals and other detritus on the floor. A bottle of Pledge and a rag had also been made ready. Evidently she’d intended to tackle the place and the soft moss she’d thrown over it—tried to imagine something more orderly—but gave up before she began.

  I was glad to see George’s lamp was unhurt.

  In the kitchen wine bottles drained of wine—red and white—had been put in a paper bag, dishes soaked in soapy water, and the gardenia now sat on George’s cherry table. Its blossoms were gone (of their own accord or Hope’s I couldn’t say), but its leaves were still shining, making of their deep green a sort of decadence. There was a bruise on the wall where it had met the table over and over, but I told myself it was barely there and fixable besides. In place of that noise and motion—a scene I could still see in my mind’s eye—there was now this otherworldly plant, a well-intentioned gift from a daughter to her mother, that in doing nothing was doing everything—taking the light in the silence of an empty apartment.

  George’s orchids, three of them, every one temperamental, were arranged like carolers around the bedroom window closest to the bed. While they were not in full flower, buds dotted the stems and their pot soil was damp, attended to. Outside all the windows, the trees tossed—how quickly they’d come to us this s
pring and with what extravagance, and the room, its blinds open, now tilted with them, the sun and trees in competition for stretches of the room, turning shadows into liquid and the furniture into shapeshifters. Perhaps that’s why Hope had not made the bed with any real care—she’d been in a hurry to get into the day and thrown the covers up and over the pillows, but on one side they dragged and lumped on the floor. I watched her go that morning with her hands carting crisp-looking shopping bags; whether she was returning items or giving gifts I couldn’t say, though I anticipated it would take time, at least a ride to Manhattan and back. When I heard her rustle down the stairs and out the door earlier, I’d stepped out of sight. I did not want to invite any more commentary about yesterday’s incident.