The Affairs of Others: A Novel Page 8

  Yes, yes, as soon as Mr. Coughlan’s daughter marched off to call the police, and Hope and I were alone, Hope had given me a crackling smile from the top of the stairs. Her eyebrows lifted, her aspect gaining in glee, she looked about to laugh or clap her hands or both. Before she could, I said, “I’m sorry you had to see that.” I said this as solemnly as I could given how my insides jumped.

  “I’m not!” she called—her delight charging my door as I swung it shut.

  In the bedroom now, smelling her rose and rosemary scent, the stubborn savory and sweet of her, the room content to be in league with the new trees, I resisted straightening the bed, but once my hand touched the cool of the bedspread’s cotton, it gripped and tugged in favor of a little symmetry, just enough not to be noticed. When I moved closer to make a few adjustments, I kicked something—an open notebook that had been concealed under the bedcover—a pretty leather-bound thing with the outline of a tear-shaped leaf stamped into its front. On the visible pages was a long list, banal enough at first.

  Dentist appointment

  Lawyer’s fee

  Buy Danielle boots, Bendel’s

  My garden

  Her handwriting varied from neat to loose—ends of words became lines, longish dashes, best guesses as to what they spelled out. I puzzled it through.

  Metrocard/subway

  Gynecologist

  A good stew with sirloin? Clark Street butcher. Grass-fed.

  Black-eyed peas?

  HIS favorite

  Gray hairs on his earlobes. Two hard gray hairs on one lobe, three on the other. How long have they been there now?

  Five years? Six.

  Not a young man anymore. He can’t bear it.

  She left the rest of that page blank. The next began with

  K-Y

  Call D’s lawyer

  Leo and gallery opening

  Bendel’s?

  J’s birthday

  Mole by his heart. It started to feel like a scab under my finger. The appointment I made with the dermatologist. Did he remember to go?

  And the blue suit. The suit he’d walked home to us in. Will he ever wear it again?… No.

  How to shake him out, out, out?

  Les.

  I turned the pages, went backward and found more lists of chores and reminders and then interruptions of prose, sometimes long, sometimes short, not always entirely legible—I couldn’t be sure of what I read.

  That vein on your calf, climbing up the inside of your leg. Every year it is darker and thicker and you rub it like it’s a rash. You and our children and every room we’ve lived in under my skin.…

  Lester. A man outrunning his name. Has he? Yes.… Money and adventure for him. He tells me I can be any woman I want to be. I cannot open my legs for long before he hits against old habits and you with me everywhere inside me and everywhere I go. Your preferences, 25 years of what makes you laugh, what pleases you. You walking home to me in a blue suit covered in dust, when so many husbands did not …

  A page later after a reminiscence about a meal had in Rome where the truffle oil was like “heaven poured into me”:

  To be made ashamed of years lived, of the commitments we’ve made. We have our experience but are not to show it. It can’t live on the face or sink the breasts. If it does, it’s our fault. Our shame. To age means we are not doing things right, not loving ourselves as we are asked to love others, everyone, our children, our friends, his friends, his family, their children, taking them in, all their problems, their empty stomachs, their dirty laundry. Danny scrutinizes my skin, my hair, as if an answer is there. Les slapped me across the face. I did not feel it or not as pain. He fucks a dead woman.

  Isolated on its own page, left in the middle of it:

  He says he loves her. I fell in love. I fell in love, he says. After all these years. How could this happen? Love her out of my sight, I told him.

  And from an entry I took to be more recent:

  Les has bought me clothes. The silliest stuff. Porn fantasia extraordinaire. I will return them.…

  I must tell D to wear her hair down more often. All I see is her father’s ears.

  Script for sleep.

  Lawyer

  Neosporin

  I closed the book, held it to me. My heart beat against it. I opened it again to look for my name. I then pieced together the details of a spaghetti squash recipe, just as she had, out of order. A half hour in the oven at 350. And I found a list for George’s party, of food and people. My name was there and “stern creature??” and after it, “sad.”

  I scolded myself and put the book in the approximate position in which I found it, partially covered by the bed linens. When I pushed it perhaps a shade too far, its corner made an object roll, a glass from the sound of it—a wineglass in fact, on its side. A trail of dried red led out of the glass. I got on hands and knees to locate the stain, the extent of it. I made out one great drop the size of an Indian dollar deep as blood in George’s tan Kashan rug. I put my finger on it, could feel a trace of stickiness. I could get it out, if I was permitted. I carried the glass to the kitchen and slid it into the soapy water. I looked for it to settle, listened for it. Waited.

  I did not want to go—I half-willed her to walk in and discover me in the apartment—mine by rights and more so in George’s absence. Maybe I’d say I smelled gas or maybe I’d stand there in the middle of her tide and let her see it as I did, rising and rising unmindful of charts or the lives of others.

  * * *

  Back in my apartment an unfamiliar male voice greeted me. I went for my golf club, one of my father’s old drivers, until I put together that my voice mail, provided by the phone company, must have been full so the call had gone to my phone’s old answering system and was recording, out loud. The voice’s cadence and inflection was Bay Ridge or Staten Island and glad to be aligned there; it never-minded g’s at the end of words and rolled through consonants like they were buttery things in its mouth.

  It was a police officer. He was calling to “ask some questions about a Mr. Joseph Coughlan, to confirm specifics given to me by Jeanette Coughlan, about her father’s disappearance.” He spoke quickly so by the time I ran to the phone and picked up the receiver, the voice was gone, already on to the next call, the next set of inquiries. A checklist. Pro forma.

  I gripped the hard of the phone’s plastic in my hand and went blank, listening to the dial tone. There in that drift I saw myself call my husband’s sister, to tell her things that I had not. Did she know my husband had believed we would live in Umbria’s Valnerina or on Lake Como, maybe do a stint in Turkey or Greece one day? Where we’d raise children who spoke in English fizzy with foreign words? Or when we walked over the Brooklyn Bridge that he’d touch the Brooklyn-side stanchion, every time, to thank the bridge, reassure it?

  She certainly couldn’t know that the last book I read to him when he was still healthy enough to follow it was Lady into Fox, a slim fantastic story about a woman who transforms into a fox during a walk in the woods with her husband. Not a masterpiece but unexpected and sweetly mournful, so delightful to us both. I had the very copy, bought secondhand—it still smelled of the white bean soup he’d always make, that I prepared for him that day. I’d trapped it all, the book, its garlic aroma, in a Ziploc. And did she know how many times he’d asked me to restore him, healthy again, in my head and heart, giving not a cell, an inch, nothing to the wasting man who had, as he put it, only one good trick in him? No, she didn’t know.

  Neither did my mother.

  What I wouldn’t give to hear her voice just then. She’d be walking the beach or dancing or preparing to do one or the other. Heat coming off her skin.

  She drank for a time after my father died in his golf club’s bar seven years ago. He had loved golf and the one drink that he allotted himself after his eighteen holes—a Manhattan or a vodka martini depending on the season. He died of an aneurism before he finished it so my mother finished it for him over and over, f
or about ten months, with dedication, until without much planning she decided to fly to Florida to see a high school friend. She went dancing at a supper club early into the visit, went again. She stopped drinking the next day, and when her impulses quarreled with her she walked the beach until her legs hurt. A long weekend’s trip turned into a month’s stay and a condo rental. Within two weeks she met a man who liked to dance. Within a year she sold our house in Connecticut and moved to Venice Beach. Now she danced up and down the Florida coast, the Gulf side. She had shoes with silver bows and dresses with rhinestones in them. She could drink the occasional glass of champagne, took courage from the Oprah show, and was still beautiful. She hoped I would move down there one day; she sent real estate listings. Even though I’d visited only briefly, after my husband’s death, and not again in almost two years, she was undaunted. Once, after she’d learned I’d bought my building, she said, “He’s not coming back,” another time that Brooklyn was stale now, soured—didn’t I feel it? Where were my eyes? My nose? My heart? Why was I so rigid and, she said without saying so, unlike her?

  A stern creature, she wouldn’t argue, no, but my husband loved New York City, and I had made promises to him, to all his live affections. He even loved its subway when I did not, had not, even just to ride and watch, to be mesmerized bodily by its motion.… He knew the city’s history better than most—he’d grown up in two of the five boroughs till he was eleven and from the Detroit suburbs, where his family moved, read about New York like other boys read about Tolkien’s Middle Earth. It was his mythical place; he thought nothing more soothing or thrilling than the sound of the Staten Island Ferry’s blowing horns heard throughout the Heights every half hour. Perhaps that is why I could never refuse Mr. Coughlan—my ferryman. I replaced the receiver. The dial tone had become a warning.

  I still could find little impulse in me to justify to anyone the choices that shaped my days since I was widowed, matching them against convention. Lately, increasingly, events risked overwhelming any choice anyway, as if currents I could not see had been made to race. Hurry. Hurry. I took my coat. I’d find him or so I reassured myself. It was not impossible anyway.

  NO LOITERING

  OUTSIDE, THE WIND STILL ROILED the new green leaves. They filled out the world of the Brooklyn streets, making you forget all the spaces that only a short time ago were wide open with desolation, the sort particular to winter in the city: variations of gray, the hard outlines of branches, wires, concrete. Yes, all those open mouths saying nothing and everything for so long were filled to the brim, hidden, and so beside the point now. Faces on the street tried to register this, how everything had softened and with it, the faces, too, trying to keep up, with the new season and its requirements.

  I looked for Mr. Coughlan on benches, under them. I scanned the streets so refigured. I passed through Clinton Park and went north, into the Heights, to do a turn in Cadman Plaza Park. They’d put in a new jogging path made of what felt like cork underfoot.

  I forced myself to look into the diners on Montague. The bars weren’t open yet, but the pear trees up and down the street were still startling, as if someone had snapped a switch a week or so ago and shocked them all white, alive, otherworldly, and the magnolia so heavy with blossoms on the corner of Clinton had already dropped a few petals. The wind could not help but disturb it.

  I did not go down into the subway easily. Twice I started down and came back up. One last time, I stopped to breathe, waited to feel the wind stir my hair and the debris on the stairs to the R train. One stop to Whitehall—the Staten Island Ferry stop. I’d not ridden the subway in some time and only when I had no other option.

  What seemed another life, what was in fact, when I was married to a healthy young man and I worked an office job full-time, I took the subway every day. I rushed in, through the turnstile, into the elevator, its surfaces doused with ammonia, clock ticking in my heart, numbers—of time, money—full of significance to me then ticking too, adding up and up, so high where I had a vision of the future. Things I wanted to come true set up on stilts. I exited the elevator with other bodies, racing them down more stairs, hating the other commuters, as they did me, hating the train for not arriving as I did. On the platform, I always stared at a block of dark, from which the train would emerge, making bargains with it if it would come now, no, now, now. I avoided the dripping water deforming the tile and cement below, where it had landed over time, a long time it had been dripping. Already, the chalky captive air was in my nose, and I found myself watching the tails of the rats on the empty tracks waving at me, serpentining. I did not want to make a study of them or the endless patterns of ancient peeling paint overhead. The city never seemed to have enough resources to show these stations any love, not even in tony Brooklyn Heights. Now most of the city’s resources went to security. Men in uniform, whether NYPD or National Guard, with guns, sometimes dogs. More necessity. Another form of ugly. Alerts issued. Alerts distrusted.

  It used to make me laugh to watch the visiting Europeans; they were less fearful; as if New York was a European outpost and, when the dollar declined, a playground, a mall. In English, in French, Spanish, languages I’d studied, they dared to call the city beautiful. Yes, Fifth Avenue, the skyline, the Bridge, Central Park, what was left of the Plaza, the consuming energy, the efficiency of commerce even after 9/11. But I always wanted to correct them. Explain that they did not see what we saw every day—before and after the towers fell—or smell what we did and wear that smell on their clothes, in their hair. If there was beauty for its everyday citizens, it hid and threaded through the ugliness.

  Some mornings, back then, not all, it depended, I saw it from where I stood on the subway platform. However many of us there were bent toward the tunnel, watching that same dense, dusty dark. So many mornings spent attending the dark there, praying to it, and just as impatience grew into shifting and sighing and swearing, there’d be an intimation of light on the tunnel wall. The darkness would jump and give way in a flash then return, only to be pierced by a sliver that became a fine line, all made from light and as delicate as anything was delicate. The light grew, in squares and streaks, agitating faster and faster, spreading in the way only light or joy can spread, catching and unpredictable, and unless you were insensate your body woke with it and vibrated with the metal and hot air and noise—such affronting noise!—that was the arriving train. You’d be exhilarated, or I was. All sorts of human traffic—need and boredom and anger—awaited you on that train, but for a moment, ears ringing, you ran in, delirious for motion.

  Today, rush hour over, the platform felt a vacuum, very little of the spring day could be felt, save perhaps in the clothing and attitude of a few stragglers, in no hurry at this hour. The train could soon be heard rumbling its way to us before it was visible. I’d forgotten that was sometimes so, here at the Court Street stop, when the system had calmed. Then the train pulled in, making its outsized racket, a hundred strongmen banging on steel, metal brakes turning banshees, piercing the soft parts of you. I leaned into its wind, as close to the tracks as I could. When the doors opened, I hesitated only an instant, catching my breath.

  Everything inside reflected, the ads for vodka and podiatric care, all the hard surfaces. The car was perhaps a third full. I sat diagonal to a young woman who dashed blush on her cheeks. It went on micaed and tropical. She held up a mirror, peered at herself with terrible seriousness. Lipstick came next. Another version of pink, of summer, of freshness. She did not seem to care who watched. I did in flashes. A Hassidic man, a seat over from me, with a dark beard, dark eyes, coat and hat, stared steadily. Not once did she give him the satisfaction of a look in reply.

  Elsewhere on the car, fingers twitched on gadgets, a few heads were plugged up with white earphones. At one end of the car, a lanky boy drew an electronic game to his nose; its screen lit his eyes and blued his forehead. His long thumbs never stopped; they beat and poked and jabbed, faster and faster, as if the train’s speed and not just t
he game he played dictated.

  So much potential energy expressed in the congress of person and device, designed to claim the entitlements of privacy in public, to avert the eyes and more. One man held up a Daily News. No books today. I used to keep track of what was being read: Dean Koontz, Patricia Cornwell, Nelson DeMille, Stephen King. I’d seen Woolf, too, Virginia, and Chekhov and Calvino, but admittedly not as often, and then there were so many books I was not equipped to categorize, many in other languages, alphabets. I worked in book publishing back then, for a small literary house, and I believed with a young person’s conviction that certain books, the right books, were a measure of a person’s ambition to engage with life rather than retreat from it. If I saw a book held up that I admired, I’d look to see if my face or one I’d recognize was there behind it. More often than not, I’d get warning looks. There was never enough distance down here, so we were meant not to be too curious, not to wonder at one another too long.

  The man a seat over from me now leaned into the aisle that separated him from the girl. He wanted her to see him. She still refused. She dug a nail around the outline of her lips to ensure her bright lipstick was not bleeding. Still he leaned, and my neck grew hot, itchy. I was a woman who hit back, or was I really? That anxiety. New unknowns and especially so here, on these live machines, where I’d given myself away before.

  * * *

  Five years ago, more, it had begun. Yes, my first long day as a widow. On that day, I had not held up a newspaper or hung over a book. I had death in my mouth, hands, hair, all over my skin. I had let go of all protections. I had looked at the man looking at me, for me. My clothes were thin, I was thin and thinning still, all of me untended to. I had goose bumps from the air-conditioning set for a July day in New York. Yes, the man whose cheeks looked freshly slapped had shifted his seat at least four times until he was next to me and breathing in my ear. He said, “I got fired today.” He had something Eastern European in his accent and in the wide set of his brows and straw-colored hair sticky with gel. When I did not look at him or say anything in reply, but nodded slightly and kept my eyes straight ahead, he went further: “I would like to get with you.” He smelled of Ivory soap and a persistent, vinegary sweat. “I think you would like that, too.” I still did not look at him, only nodded again, glad to be taken from the horrible repetition of my thoughts.