The Affairs of Others: A Novel (16 page)

“I’ll take a rain check.”

I watched him swallow with difficulty. He waited—I waited—until he was ready to say: “When?… When can we have a drink?” he asked.

He stepped toward me so I’d have to look at him. He hadn’t the right words for what he wanted and was too new to the traffic between men and women, or too alive for pacing himself, for delay. What he had was the desperation and intensity of youth and he wore it all over him and held it there for as long as he could for me to see.

“Not today, but soon,” I said and without thinking reached my hand to pat at his arm and offer small, benign reassurance. I didn’t expect that he would cover my hand with his and hold it there. I began to breathe unevenly for him to hear as I let him press my palm and all five fingers into him—how long had it been since I touched someone for more than an instant? Hope, yes, her hand as hot as his was now; the blood in mother and son overwhelming and real and as enveloping as flame.

*   *   *

It had to be me who pulled away. Propriety. Yes. How could I ask for it from anyone if I could not give it? But I ached and every bit of me was damp with the ache. It hurt and kept hurting, yes. A cold shower, the efficacy wasn’t lost on me, to make me shrink, fit better into the role that was mine here in this building.

I ran the stairs, too aware of how much I’d been running lately when the aim of my life since I settled on this building had been not having to run. The shower first and then the question of failed experiments later. But before I could get behind lock and key, there was my tenant Angie Braunstein on the landing of my floor with all the indications of having waited for me, agitated and pacing with something in her hand.

“Celia! There you are.” Such relief in her voice. “I wanted to apologize—I forgot the rent, on the first.”

I’d lost track of the dates. I’d not remarked that March was gone. Already gone.

“Oh, yes, Angie. Don’t worry. Please don’t. I didn’t. You’re always so conscientious—”

“I’ve been so—like on another planet—” At that her face reddened, her mole on her full cheek deepening in color. When she handed me the check, folded once in half, her hand trembled.

“Is everything all right?”

“Yes, or well,” she paused. “No.” And then in what sounded like a series of feigned little coughs, she began to cry. “
No.
No! I don’t want to do this! I’m so sorry.”

“What is it?”

Her plump, small hands tried to catch her tears. She looked at me and away, anger brightening her sea-glass-green eyes. “It’s— It’s—”

My legs felt hollow. My hair stuck to the back of my neck. I formed her husband Mitchell’s name, was about to say it for her.

“It’s— The polar bears!”

“The
what
?”

“They’re dying. So many are already dead. The ice—there isn’t enough ice anymore. They can’t hunt. They can’t get what they need to … to … live
and
reproduce. They’re abandoning—” She started with the little coughs again.

I struggled to prove myself a good student: “Global warming?”

“Yes,” she sobbed. “We’ve been so
selfish
. Selfish! Selfish! Selfish! It’s unforgivable, isn’t it? I
know
it is. God,
I
know!”

Even as her nose ran and her heavy bosom shuddered, never had she looked more like a doll—a facsimile of a little girl, vulnerable, precious, in need of petting.

“We didn’t know,” I told her. “We’re animals, too, surviving. With our own purposes and ideals—”

“No, we’ve been wrong,
very, very
wrong, Celia,” she cried. “All he wanted was a family. To have a family! And I wouldn’t—”

“The polar bear?” I asked, to bring her back to me.

She looked at me like I was mad, and then, yes, recovered herself enough to say, “No, or yes, the polar bear. I could have done more.”

“Maybe,” I told her. “But maybe it’s bigger than just you and surely it’s not too late, Angie, is it?”

She covered her face with her hands.

“It’s my fault and I can’t stand it, Celia.
I can’t!
” She dissolved again and her body shook with violence. I held my face away as I situated my arms around her, elbows locked. I did so less to comfort her than to stem the heaving, to contain her. She would hurt herself.

*   *   *

Hot shower. Bed. As I fell asleep, I drifted with Leo in my arms, then his mother, who he so resembled, then my husband who chased them both away, who stayed and stayed, stayed, who told me again,
C’mon, baby. We shouldn’t live like this.
I started a few times, sat up with a terror of the clock and the silence in the room. I saw myself before the medicine cabinet. There was enough in there to send me away, even for good. Of course I’d considered everything, for years now, everything, but no, not tonight. I lay back down, still as a corpse. I had not invited Angie in, though I’m sure she hoped for it. She had soon fallen into me, bucked into my neck and chest with “no’s” and tears and snot and the full streaming of her pores. The smell of her upset, the full density of her stout small body and her upset. Angie who I could not say if I liked, ever, in my arms, forgetting propriety. Angie whose belongings I touched, to whom I was sorry and not. What had I told her? We are animals, too, trying to survive? Full of biology’s imperatives. Yes. I could make out the pungency of the oil of her hair. I told it, and her, her name, Angie,
Angie.
It will be all right.
We shouldn’t live like this, baby.

Once she began breathing more steadily, I walked her up the stairs, saw her to her door. A bad day, I told her, trying not to give away the full rough weariness in my voice. A bad day. Sleep it off. It’s never too late, I reminded her, though I knew better. She paused. She couldn’t go in. I should have asked if she wanted me to come in, but I could not. I was wet with her, my arms, chest, and neck, and knew, again, too much. More perhaps than she did. Yes. The woman on the Promenade, whose vigil was over, whose note it may have or not have been, but then what I most required was Angie’s door, which was my door, to swing shut between us. One world effectively separating itself from another. I would not mourn it.

I COULD KILL YOU

T
HE BANGING INTERRUPTED
my father playing the piano and me as a girl listening and wanting, there in our house, for that playing, and the hour in which he played, to draw everything into it.

He would play “Edelweiss” and “Moonlight in Vermont,” a sentimental man, especially after an evening drink, unashamed to be so, playing to relax himself away from banking and its politics. I said no or dreamed I did to the noise intruding. I held up my hand. He stumbled on the keys, looked at me with eyes that were also mine, puzzled and faraway, and then the bareness of my room—barer and unfriendlier in the dark—was all around me and with it the recollection, like a slap to rouse me, that my father had always loved my mother more than anyone else, even his daughter with his eyes. I think he was relieved when my husband arrived, and my love for another man floated me away; or maybe not, maybe I had that wrong, but the doorbell serrating into the dark, then the thudding—someone at my door again—wasn’t giving me the chance to set it right or give it the fullness of consideration it merited. The glowing digits of my clock reported it wasn’t quite 3
A.M.
Who would come to me now? It was the dark that brought me all the possibilities—Jeanie Coughlan raging, her father dead, everything my fault. No. I couldn’t face that. Maybe Leo had had the drink he proposed to share with me alone, then another. Or worse, an unwelcome ghost from my past. I’d been followed home by one of my subway adventures once. I’d still lived in Brooklyn Heights then. A neighbor had let him into the building. He had waited outside my door, and when I opened it to go out, he’d pushed me back in. He had me flattened beneath him so fast, cursing me, laughing at me, explaining already how our time together would go. He’d made me get up to wash. That was the first time I used the golf club, my father’s, given to me as a keepsake. I grabbed it again now.

At 3
A.M.
there was rarely good news or a welcome guest, especially with the recklessness in the banging and ringing. Whoever it was had little care for me—even ardor at this hour, so expressed, came as an assault. I gripped the club in my right hand, prepared myself, checked the peephole—a man’s Adam’s apple right there on the other side, a man with shoulders as full and as impossible to argue with as the side of a barn. Les.

“What do you want?” I called to him. “How did you get in?”

“Where is she?”

“Who?”

“Who else?
Jesus!
” He gave the door a hard jab. “You think you can keep her away from me? Open up! Now!” I peered at him. His hand was still fisted, his knuckles abraded now, just on the other side of my door. Hope must have given him a key.

I tried to calm my voice, my delivery: “Have you been drinking?”

“I can stay out here all night. Tell her to come out! I need to see her.”

“She’s in the hospital. Leo told me, okay? She’s not here, I swear.”

“Let me in before I break this fucking door down! I can smell her. I
can
.”

“She has a kidney infection. Her son told me. And you should go, Les. Go before I call the police.”

Through the peephole I saw his body sway faster and faster, not from disorientation, but to build momentum, as if to a beating of a thousand goading hands on his back.

“You!” he boomed. “You are so full of shit. So full of fucking, fucking shit.
I
am not the problem here.… Go ahead and call the police, call them right fucking now. I’ll be in there before they’ve picked up, before they can … can … fucking …
bother
with you. Then we’ll see what kind of fighter you are.”

It wasn’t alcohol or not only—he ran fast and wild and what he imagined was more real to him than anything else. Gratification had to be instant.

“Go home now, you goddamn fool. GO HOME!” I hit my own door. “Do you hear me?”

He threw himself, shoulder first, into my door. Once, then twice. My locks—two deadbolts—didn’t give, but the hinges shifted, sifted out dust. I squinted through the hole to see him rear back and do it again, the first time from disbelief, the second from blind animal anger: “Let me in! I need to see her
now.
”

Yes, we can’t live like this.
I dialed 911, reported to the flat inquiry—“What is your emergency”—that someone was working to break down my apartment door, gave my name and address with slow deliberation, interrupting myself to yell at him to
please
lay off, and held the receiver up for them to hear him refuse me: “I’m coming in after her, goddamn you, you goddamn, fucking …
obstructionist
!”

I repeated my address, set the phone down.

Leaning into the door again, I could hear his breath beating there. I told him I had called. He backed up again, taking the noise of his chuffing with him. I waited, listened, for his next surge and a sort of groaning, drunken battle cry. He didn’t see that I’d opened the door, and so intent was he on his version of things that he didn’t see me as he charged in, his eyes fixed on looking only for her. But I saw him, and I struck him on the back of the head as hard and as high as I could with my club.

*   *   *

He went down hands out, reaching for her or for me, or to defend himself against the floor. But once his chest hit the ground, he spread the arms that had already buffered his fall out to either side, as if he were tilting into a bed. He turned his head to one side, then he was out. I stood over him, but he didn’t get up, and I could see no evidence of pain on his face or of lungs working. I put down my club, unclenched myself and began to feel the tension in my arms, my jaw, the heat in me receding and a new tide coming in—so cold; the shivering started in my knees, rattling my teeth. And time seemed to seize up for me so that I could feel and hear how much I’d offended: It would stop for as long as I believed I’d killed him.

I had seen dead bodies—my husband’s, my father’s, a stranger’s in a Connecticut coroner’s office for the sake of an ambitious AP biology teacher and a good grade. I knew how inert they became, how they cooled and dulled, eyes, skin, lips, how familiar they were as they became something entirely different from animated material like me, yes, like me who could still recall the heat that attended the need—and it was a
need
—to hit him. I wanted him dead as desperately as I wanted an end to all these intrusions, to be master of myself and my property again—all that was there, rigid in my arms, as I had swung up to the back of his head. The weapon I had, my position relative to his, made me as strong as a giant of a man, stronger, and I had relished it. But now I crouched down, sat beside his big unmoving head and made myself as small as I could, knees up to my chest, my arms around my knees, my head buried into them. A host of excuses and revisions and prayers deluged me as I held myself. My mind skittered other places before it circled back to digest what had happened—forming a story. We all are writing and rewriting—so that we might be acceptable to ourselves and others, especially others. Even I was not immune … I could not look at him even as I smelled him, the alcohol leaching from him, everywhere. I hated him still, and I had to contain it, me, keep cooling and wishing myself something else, anything or anyone else. But, no, I had to reassemble things. The back of his head before me like a gorgeous, dumb target while he charged like a starved monster. I could not see Les’s face, but I could see, as if it had happened today, the face of the man who’d managed to find me at the Brooklyn Heights apartment I’d shared with my husband years ago, which by then had become mine alone. His seething pleasure at having tracked me. Yes, he’d ordered me to wash myself for him—I had to be
fresh as a flower,
he said scornfully.
But you’re no flower, are you?
I knew the stock language, the parts assigned. I’d submitted to it before and not merely with him. I went to the bathroom, shut the door, ran the water, and came out to see him sitting on our couch, touching our things, leafing through a pile of our books, the ones I’d kept on hand to read to my husband before he passed: that fairy tale or anti–fairy tale
Lady into Fox,
not yet stored safely away then, C. S. Lewis’s
The Screwtape Letters
(which made my husband laugh), poems by Neruda and Sexton (who both understood flesh, its passions and perishability so well), our
Moby-Dick,
the
Odyssey,
and a mystery by P. D. James. I had already planned to go for the club, but outraged I couldn’t see and still don’t remember the steps to it, to finding it. It was simply in my hands, as if it grew from them, and I held it over him sitting on the couch. I told him I was no flower, no whore, I was no one to him. I explained he was never to come back—when he stood and came at me smiling, thinking this part of the game, I stuck him with the head of the club, straight into his gut. He managed to catch it in his hands, but I was strong then, too, ready to hurt and be hurt, and I ripped it from him and swiped his knees from the side so he’d fall. He did. I stepped on one of his hands, hung over him. “I could kill you,” I told him. “I could but I won’t. Go away now. If you come back, I will kill you. Whatever you think I am or was, I am not. Do you hear me?” I ground my heel into his hand. “You are not safe here.” I pushed the club’s head into the back of his neck to force his head down. “Not here,” I repeated until he cried out. I moved off his hand.