“Nice try.”
“C’mon, it’s only fair. You had your turn at the fun job.”
“Overruled.”
As I set a bag of trash outside the front door, I thought—as I had many times before, and never without envy—about how Lillian and Darren spoke the same language. The jargon of the law, of American culture, the countless shared nuances of native English: they bantered and bickered and jousted and joked with nothing lost in translation. Whereas Stas and I—
“Hey, how’s it going?” It was Jack, raising a hand from the next yard.
“Oh, hey,” I said. “Well, there’s always something, I guess.” I mentioned the leak.
“I can probably help you out with that too,” he said. “I’ve fixed a lot of ceiling leaks in my time. Let me drop by when the work day’s done.”
I stepped back into the house and almost collided with Stas, who was just inside the front door.
“Leda,” he said, in a tone of clear reproof.
“What?”
“I don’t want this guy coming over every day.”
“You mean Jack?”
“That’s who I mean.”
“Uh...okay,” I said, trying to strike just the right note between amenable and bewildered, even as I fought off a secret sense of culpability. “But, I mean...where is that coming from? Do you dislike him?”
“Well, let me put it this way. I don’t ever want you to be alone with him.”
“What do you mean?” I asked. “What are you worried about?”
“I don’t trust him.”
“Trust him how? I mean, what’s he going to do? We know who he is. We know where he works.”
Stas was silent.
“We know his cousin,” I added.
“All right,” Stas said. “You don’t want to listen to me? Don’t listen to me then.”
He left the room and I didn’t go after him.
* * *
The tension lingered all afternoon: at the hardware store where we made copies of our new keys, at IKEA where we picked up a lamp for Clara’s room, at Home Depot where Stas thought someone could trim the ill-fitting marble surface of our kitchen counter.
“Can’t be done here, son,” a man in an orange apron told him.
“Well, where should we go?” I asked. “There’s an alcove for the fridge cut into our kitchen wall, but right now the marble’s overlapping it. We have our refrigerator out in the middle of the kitchen floor.”
“Ma’am, I don’t rightly know what to tell you. You need industrial machinery for that.”
“I cannot believe it is so difficult,” Stas said.
“It’s not as simple as you seem to think,” said another employee who’d stopped to listen. “You need a diamond-coated blade to get through that kind of stone, and you need a stream of water to cool the blade on its way through. It’s a highly specialized process. Might be easier just to replace it.”
A Slavic-looking man came over. Without preamble, without a glance at the other two men, he addressed my husband directly in Russian. The two conferred a moment in their native language and then the man wrote an address on a slip of paper.
Our destination turned out to be a low-slung, windowless building in the middle of a desolate parking lot. “Look at this place,” Stas said, cutting the ignition. “It looks like a mafia warehouse.”
Inside were stacks of stone, tile, and marble and dozens of Russian workers. One of them had a dramatic scar stretching from his left ear to the corner of his mouth. It was he who took the slab from Stas, set it on a nearby table, and drew a tool from his belt. The task took him less than ten minutes.
In the three years I’d known my husband, I’d never heard him say a good word about anyone or anything Russian. But as he replaced the marble on the counter and eased the refrigerator into its intended space, I heard him muttering to himself.
Highly specialized process, my ass...I spent more time talking to those fucking Americans than it took that Russian guy to get it done.
* * *
It was only after Lillian and Darren had left the next day, and Stas was at work, that I opened the book of poems. It was as if, without knowing why, I’d been waiting to be alone with it. I put Clara in the Exersaucer and, hoping that would keep her busy for ten minutes, turned to a poem called
Odysseus’s Secret.
At first he thought only of home,
it began.
But after a few years, like anyone on his own,
he couldn’t separate what he’d chosen
from what had chosen him. Calypso,
the Lotus-eaters, Circe;
a man could forget where he lived.
He had a gift for getting in and out of trouble,
a prodigious, human gift. To survive Cyclops
and withstand the Sirens’ song
—
just those words survive, withstand,
in his mind became a music
he moved to and lived by.
Not halfway through the poem, I became aware of the outline of a man through the window of the front door. Jack was on the porch, a tool belt slung around his hips and a slash of dirt under his left eye. “I can take a look at that leak now, if you want,” he said.
And as I rose from my chair, I felt a twinge of my previous unease. The day before, surrounded by my family and absorbed by moving in, it was easy to brush off Stas’ misgiving. Today I felt the emptiness of the house at my back and the desolation of my sister’s departure. Still, I couldn’t think of a polite way to refuse. I showed Jack into the guest room and, to keep Clara from escaping, pulled the door shut.
“It’s been a while since a girl took me into a room and closed the door,” he said.
This startled me into silence for a moment. “I don’t want the baby to get out,” I said finally, picking her up for good measure and moving toward the window. “Not with that flight of stairs so close by. So do you see the stained part of the ceiling, above the bar? That’s where the water was coming in.”
He glanced at the ceiling and then back at me while Clara tugged at my shirt.
“Why are you trying to undress your mommy?” he said to her. Then to me: “Why do they do that?”
The false innocence of this question seemed to alter the air in the room. It occurred to me that Jack was between me and the door now.
Oh,
I thought.
Oh. So Stas was right about him.
But at the moment—because I hadn’t listened to Stas; because I was, in fact, alone with Jack—it seemed essential not to show alarm, essential to be calm and casual.
“She’s probably hungry,” I said.
“Oh...so you’re still...”
“Yes.”
“It always makes me feel funny. To see a woman doing that. I mean, I know it’s natural and all, but still. There was a woman once, I was working on her house, and I walked in on her just after she finished feeding her baby. The baby was done drinking but she hadn’t put herself away yet.”
“Anyway,” I said. I set Clara back down. “There’s the spot where the leak was.”
Slowly Jack brought his gaze around to where the water had come in. “I’d have to break into that part of the ceiling to see what’s going on,” he told me. “Is that all right?”
I was glad when Clara wandered toward the door, giving me a reason to follow her. So far, I wasn’t afraid as much as jittery, skittish; Jack seemed more off-putting and overbearing than truly menacing. But I didn’t want to prolong his visit.
“Let me call Stas,” I said, reaching for my cell phone, “to make sure he won’t mind.”
Just mentioning Stas was a relief. It was a way to remind Jack that I had a husband: a man whose consent was needed before anything could proceed.
“Tell him to wait until I get home,” Stas said immediately. “Just tell him I want to be there to look at the pipes with him.”
“All right,” I said gratefully. “So when do you think that might be? Around six?”
“Stas wants to get a look too,” I reported after hanging up. “He’s hoping you can come back later.”
Jack regarded me with an expression I couldn’t read. “All right,” he said finally. “I’ll come back when he gets home.”
On the threshold of the front door, though, he turned to face me once again. “Man, where the hell have I seen you before?” he asked. “It’s driving me crazy.”
I lifted a shoulder as if to say
no clue
, and waited until he was out of earshot to slide the metal bolt across the door.
No sooner had he disappeared than my phone rang. It was Lillian, calling from the road. “I didn’t say anything yesterday,” she said, “because I didn’t want to get between you and Stas. But I thought he was right, actually, about the man next door. That you shouldn’t be alone with him.”
I moved to the front window, feeling the first pang of real foreboding. “Yeah, I’m starting to get it,” I said. “But what happened yesterday, to make you say that?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I didn’t like the way he was looking at you.”
“Well,” I said. “Okay, then. I’m on board with you guys now. Don’t worry.”
I folded the phone and stood holding Clara in the middle of the room.
If I repeated Jack’s remarks to my husband, then Stas would turn him away when he showed up, and we would have an enemy before we’d lived here a week. Jack would be next door every day while I was home alone, and who could say what he might do? For the time being, he was essentially our neighbor.
But not telling Stas seemed tantamount to a kind of complicity with Jack. It meant keeping a secret from my husband. How had I gotten into this position?
At last I resolved to avoid any future commerce with Jack. To say hello and goodbye in passing, if I had to. Nothing more.
“What are you doing?” Stas asked, upon coming home to find me at the kitchen table with a microcassette recorder and the Stephen Dunn book.
I explained about the poetry project.
“Seventy-five dollars?” Stas clarified.
“Yes.”
“I don’t understand,” he said.
“Understand what?”
“Understand why you would bother.”
I glared at him. “Obviously it’s not about the money.”
“All right,” he said. “I did not mean to make you angry.”
“Well, you did.”
I picked up the book and recorder, went into the bedroom and closed the door. It was twenty minutes before he knocked.
“Leda. May I come in?”
“I’m busy,” I told him, not lifting my eyes from
Different Hours.
“I came to apologize to you,” he said. “Please forgive me for what I said.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “I don’t care. Just, I need to concentrate on this, so could you leave and close the door behind you?”
“You are still angry. All right, I understand. I have realized that my words were insensitive. You are trying to take part in a charitable endeavor.”
“Okay. I’m glad you get it now,” I said, even though that wasn’t it at all.
Once the door had closed behind him, I returned to the page in front of me, where I’d been midway through a poem called
Their Divorce.
It means no one can know what goes on
In the pale trappings of bedrooms,
In anyone’s secret, harrowed heart.
A little later, when I heard Jack arrive, I emerged just long enough to take Clara. Then I withdrew to her room with the excuse of putting her to bed. In the nursery, I sat in the pink armchair long after she fell asleep, distantly listening to the men confer. I heard them turning on different sources of water and finally there was the sound of our front door opening and closing.
Stas was alone in the kitchen when I finally ventured downstairs, but that didn’t dispel my feeling that Jack was watching me, listening to me. I felt worn out with all the tension of the past several hours—depleted, on edge, nerves frayed. I couldn’t tell whether my mounting fear of Jack was exaggerated or realistic. I felt alone with it.
“Is he gone?” I asked in a hush.
“No, he is under the house,” Stas told me. “In the crawl space, looking at the plumbing system.”
Under the house.
Suddenly it was as if I could see this scene as it unfolded on a stage or screen: the vast house, lit from within but surrounded by darkness. The troubled wife treading lightly on the kitchen floorboards, whispering to her husband. And the workman beneath her feet, beneath the house, staring overhead: all knotted muscle and clenched teeth, mythical and bristling. A member of the underworld, bent on mutiny.
“I’m so tired,” I said to Stas. “I think I’ll go to bed.” And I climbed the stairs to the uppermost floor.
* * *
In the morning, Stas told me that Jack had fixed the leak. That he’d waved away an offer of payment. And that he’d then put in his bid for the work on our would-be nursery. He would strip the walls, then patch them, prime them and paint them. All for only two hundred dollars.
Under the circumstances, Stas added, it was hard to turn him down. After all, he’d just done us a second favor.
“He is going to start tonight,” my husband said. “But I told him not to come over until seven. I said I would go next door and get him when I am home from work.”
At six, there was a knock at the door.
“Look,” Jack said, filling the door frame and wiping sweat from his forehead. “I know we said seven, but I’ve been at it since five this morning. I’d really like to get started earlier so I can finish earlier.”
I stood there at a loss for what to do. I did not see how I could tell him,
After yesterday, I’ve decided never to be alone with you.
I let him in, resolving to stay on the ground floor while he worked on the level below.
“I gotta sit down for a minute,” he said as soon as he was in the door. He grabbed a kitchen chair. “And hey, could I trouble you for a glass of water?”
For the next forty-five minutes he complained about his boss
(that cheap back-stabbing punk-ass motherfucker).
It seemed the guy had loaned him the money for a used truck and Jack was supposed to pay it back in labor.
“Sweat equity,” I said.
“What?”
“Never mind. You were saying...?”
“I thought I’d have to put in eight or nine weeks on this job. He’s holding back half of my hourly but paying me half too, because I have to fuckin’ eat, right? But he just keeps messing with me. The first week he paid me for seven hours a day instead of eight just because I took a lunch hour when he did. After that, I caught on and started brown-bagging it, but then he called it quits for four days when his mom had an operation. He said he wants to be on-site for every step of the job, but I know what his deal is. He didn’t trust me to put in an honest day’s work and keep track of my hours while he was at the hospital. I told him,
Why don’t you just call me a liar to my face?
And what am I supposed to do while he’s kicking back with his mom? Just fuckin’ sit around with my thumb up my ass? I can’t get another job for just four days. It’s like he has me by the fuckin’
balls
, man.”