The Book of Other People (6 page)

Like that evening with the blood - he couldn’t very well have been expected to deal with those circumstances by himself.

He’d done all he could, waited in the kitchen and kept the soup on a low heat so that it would be ready for her. Except that wasn’t the main point.

His finger was the more important detail. He washed that under the tap and then wound it round with an adhesive dressing from the first-aid kit. He’d used the kit in the hallway cupboard rather than go and maybe disturb her in the bathroom.

The bathroom, that was more important than his finger. He’d been guessing she was in the bathroom, because the hot water was running, he could tell from the boiler noise, and she’d probably be in there adding bath oil, enjoying the steam, getting the temperature right for steeping in - he hadn’t known. He never had seen her bathing, the details.

The bathroom was connected with his finger because he’d bound his injury downstairs so as to avoid her and had possibly not done this well, maybe he should have taken better steps to close the wound, because the scar that he’d eventually grown was quite distinct. If anyone examined his hands closely they would see it - an identifying mark.

Then - a key detail - he’d noticed that his shirt was bloody and he should change it, padded upstairs, and that had meant changing his plans and going upstairs, sneaking into their bedroom, pulling out any old sweater and wrestling it on.

The smell of her in the bedroom. Same thing you’d get when you hugged her, or rolled over on to her pillow when she wasn’t there. Frank had seen men hug their wives, the way they’d fit their chin down over the woman’s shoulder and there would be this smile, a particular young-seeming grin with closed eyes - always made him think -
bliss
.

That one soft word, which in every other context he did not like or use.

Going up to the bedroom had been a risk - she might have been there, too, resting on her pillow, or undressing and having some kind of large emotion that she didn’t want to be observed. But he’d been careful to listen at the bathroom door as he passed it and had heard the sound of her stirring in the bath, a rise and fall of water, some kind of smoothing motion.

Somehow, that was another point to emphasise. It should not be forgotten, that moment of leaning beside the door and listening to a movement he could not see and imagining his wife’s shoulder, side of the breast glimpsed, her cheek, the lift of her ribs - always a slim girl - and a glimmer of water chasing over and down, being lost.

Once he’d put on his sweater, Frank thought he was hungry and so he’d gone down to the kitchen, cut into the bread he’d baked - a moist, yeasty loaf made with spelt, which was a little difficult to get, but worth the effort - and he’d ladled out some soup. When he took the first spoonful, though, it tasted salt, peculiar, and a fierce weakness of his arms and throat disturbed him and he ended up throwing his soup away.

It wasn’t that he didn’t realise she was upset.

He did know her and did understand.

She’d brought no one home and they had no children, no child, and she was the only person who’d seen him, just her, and they were married, had been married for years, so that should have been all right. But her feelings did exist, of course, and should be considered. She was upstairs bathing and having emotions. Undoubtedly the most important thought that he could have, should manage to have, would be that she had feelings. These feelings meant she didn’t like his soup, or his bread, or his hat, and she blamed him for terrible things, for one terrible thing which had been an accident, an oversight, a carelessness that lasted the space of a breath and meant he lost as much as her, just precisely as much.

He wanted to go to her and say:
I’ve watched this before, been near it - the way that a human being will drop and break inside, their eyes dying first and then their face, a last raising of light and then it goes from them, is fallen and won’t come back. They walk into our building and whatever they think and whatever we have told them, there is a person in their mind, a living, unharmed person they expect to greet them and return their world. Then our attendants lead them to the special room, to the echoing room, and they see nothing, no one, no return, a shape of meat, an injury. Some of them cry, some accept the quiet suggestion of tea and the plate of biscuits we set down to make things seem homely and natural and as if life is going on, because it is, that is what it does - picks us up and feeds us with itself, drives us on until we wear away. Some of them are quiet, inward. Some I can hear, even in my office. They rage for their lovers, their loves, for their dead love, their dead selves. And they rage for their children. And they fail to accommodate their pain. And they leave us in the end, because they cannot stay. They go outside and fall into existence. Our town is full of people running back and forth in torn days and every other town is like that, too. Our world is thick with it, clotted in patterns and patterns of grief. And, beyond this, I know you’re sad. I know your days are bleeding, too. And I know I make you sad. I don’t understand how not to, but please don’t bring in more of the grief, don’t add to it. If there is more, then I won’t be able to breathe and I’ll die
.

‘That’ll be okay, then.’

Frank saw the young man’s sneakers, the intentionally bedraggled cuffs of his jeans. Frank looked at them through his fingers, keeping his head low. ‘I’m sorry.’ This emerging less as a question than a statement, a confession. He rubbed his neck, his helpless sweat, and said again, more clearly and correctly, ‘I’m sorry?’

‘The projectionist’s just coming back. You can go in and wait.’

Frank swallowed while his anger crested and then sank. These spasms were never long-lasting, although they used to be less frequent. That could be a cause for concern, his increased capacity for hatred.

‘Are you okay?’

The boy staring with what appeared to be mild distaste when Frank straightened himself and looked up. ‘No. At least, yes. I am okay. I have a headache, that’s all.’

Standing seemed to take an extremely long time, Frank trying not to fall or stagger as he pressed himself up through the heavy air. He was taller than the boy, ought to be able to dominate him, but instead Frank nodded, holding his cap in both hands - something imploring in this, something anachronistic and disturbing - and he cranked out one step and then another, jolted back to the doorway of the cinema and through.

The dark was a relief, peaceful. He felt smoother, healthier as soon as it wrapped him round, cuddled at his back and opened ahead to let him pad down the gentle slope and find a new seat.

It was actually good that his film had been delayed. This way, his evening would be eaten up - back to the hotel after and head straight for bed. Double bed. Only one of him. No need to pick a side: her side, his side. He could lie where he wanted.

She preferred the left. He’d supposed this was somehow to do with the bedroom door being on the right. Any threat would come in from the right and he would be set in place to meet it. Frank had thought she was letting him guard her while she slept: Frank who was perfectly happy on whatever side was left free, who might as well rest at the foot of the bed like a folded blanket. It didn’t matter. He didn’t mind.

Really, though, she didn’t expect Frank to defend her. Her choice had nothing to do with him. In fact, they’d had other bedrooms with the door in other places and with windows that could be climbed through, you had to consider them, too - their current window was to the left - and she’d still always lain on the left. She was left-handed, that was why. Easier to reach her book, her water glass, her reading lamp if she was over there.

She hadn’t read on their last night, at least he didn’t think so. He’d waited for her in the kitchen with the soup and she’d never come down. He’d cleaned up his blood and repotted the plant and listened to the sound of the water draining from her bath and her naked footsteps on the landing, not moving towards the stairs. Then he’d decided his first cleaning hadn’t been thorough and he’d scrubbed the place completely - work surfaces, floor, emptied out the fridge and wiped it down, made it tidy. The cupboards needed tidying, as well. That took quite a time. Finally, he decanted the soup into a container, washed the pot, looked at the container, emptied it into the bin and washed the container.

It was two in the morning when he was done.

And when he had slipped into bed he had expected her to be sleeping, because that would be best.

‘What were you doing?’ Only she wasn’t asleep, she was just lying on her back without the light on and waiting to ask him, ‘What were you doing?’

‘I . . . cleaning.’

‘What’s wrong with you.’

And Frank couldn’t tell her because he didn’t know and so he just said, ‘I understand why people look at fountains, or at the sea. Because those don’t stop. The water moves and keeps on moving, the tide withdraws and then returns and it keeps on going and keeps on. It’s like - ’ He could hear her shifting, feel her sitting up, but not reaching for him. ‘It’s like that button you get on stereos, on those little personal players - there’s always the button that lets you repeat - not just the album, but the track, one single track. They’ve anticipated you’ll want to repeat one track, over and over, so those three or four minutes can stay, you can keep that time steady in your head, roll it back, fold it back. They know you’ll want that. I want that. Just three or four minutes that come back.’ Which he’d been afraid of while he’d heard it and when he’d stopped speaking she was breathing peculiarly, loudly, unevenly, the way she would before she cried. So he’d started again, because he had no tolerance for that, not even the idea of that. ‘I want a second, three, four seconds, that would be all. I want everything back. No stopping, I want nothing to stop.’ Only he was crying now, too - no way to avoid it. ‘I want her to be - ’ His sentence interrupted when she hit him, punched out at his chest and then a blow against his eye causing this burst of greyish colour and more pains and he’d caught her wrists eventually, almost fought her, the crown of her head banging against his chin, jarring him.

Afterwards they had rested, his head on her stomach, both of them still weeping, too loudly, too deeply, the din of it ripping something in his head. But even that had gone eventually, and there had been silence and he had tried to kiss her and she had not allowed it.

That was when he had taken his bag and left the room, the house, the town, the life.

Behind Frank, the projector stuttered and whirred, light springing to the screen and sound this time along with it. He fumbled into his pocket and found his phone, turned it off. That way he wouldn’t know when it didn’t ring, kept on not ringing.

Frank tipped back his head and watched the opening titles, the mist, the trees, the older man’s face as it spoke to the small girl’s, as he spoke to his daughter, while the world turned unreliable and salt. And the film reeled on and he knew that it would finish and knew that when it did he would want nothing more than to start it again.

You know what I mean? I was nineteen and crazy back then. I’d met this Jewish guy with this really Jewish name: Gideon. He had hair like an Afro wig and a nervous smile that kept unfolding quickly, like origami. He was one of those white guys who had a thing for black women, but he’d apparently been too afraid to ask out anyone, until he met me.

That one day, when it all began to unravel, Gideon was working on his dissertation, which meant he was in cutoffs in bed with me, the fan whirring over us while he was getting political about something or other. He was always getting political, even though his Ph.D. had nothing to do with politics and was called ‘Temporal Modes of Discourse and Ekphrasis in Elizabethan Poetry’. Even he didn’t like his dissertation. He was always opening some musty book, reading it for a while, then closing it and saying, ‘You know what’s wrong with these fascist corporations?’ No matter how you responded, you’d always be wrong because he’d say, ‘Exactly!’ then go on to tell you his theory, which had nothing to do with anything you’d just said.

He was philosophizing, per usual, all worked up with nervous energy while feeding our crickets. ‘And
you
,’ he said, unscrewing a cricket jar, looking at the cricket but speaking to me, ‘you think the neo-industrial complex doesn’t pertain to you, but it does, because by tacitly participating
blah blah blah
you’re engaging in
blah blah
commodification of workers
blah blah blah
allowing the neo-Reaganites to
blah blah blah
but you can’t escape the dialectic.’

His thing that summer was crickets, I don’t know why. Maybe it was something about the way they formed an orchestra at night. All around our bed, with the sky too hot and the torn screen windows, all you could hear were those damn crickets, moving their muscular little thighs and wings to make music. He would stick his nose out the window and smell the air. Sometimes he would go out barefoot with a flashlight and try to catch a cricket. If he was successful, he’d put it in one of those little jars - jars that once held gourmet items like tapenade and aïoli. I’d never heard of these things before, but with Gideon, I’d find myself eating tapenade on fancy stale bread one night, and the next night we’d rinse out the jar and
voilà
, a cricket would be living in it.

Whenever he’d come back to bed from gathering crickets, he’d try to wedge his cold skinny body around my fetal position. ‘Come closer,’ he’d say. And I’d want to and then again I wouldn’t want to. He always smelled different after being outside. Like a farm animal, or watercress. Plus he had a ton of calluses.