Banishing Verona (26 page)

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Authors: Margot Livesey

BOOK: Banishing Verona
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“Amazing,” said Jill. “She pretended they were dead and they went along with it? My parents would shout the house down. It's one of my deep fears: that a friend or lover will turn out to be utterly different than I'd thought.” She tilted her head. “Has that ever happened to you?”
Zeke buried his face in his cup of tea. “Not yet,” he said.
Zeke was filling holes in the walls of Jill's living room, taking pleasure in every aspect of the familiar activity—judging the size of the hole and the amount of spackle needed, pushing it into place, smoothing it with the palette knife—when he heard a knock at the door. Before he could decide to answer, a key was turning in the lock.
“Hello. Anyone home?”
As the heavy footsteps approached, Zeke stood there uncertainly, palette knife poised, wondering whether to declare his presence. The footsteps carried into the room a substantial person wearing workman's boots made of leather the color of custard and a dark blue jacket, like the one he had bought. From his size and stance, Zeke guessed the interloper to be a man though his face was hidden by the hood of his jacket. Inside the living room door he stopped to fumble a large ring of keys back into a pocket and sniff once, modestly. At no point did the hood turn toward the corner where Zeke stood. He thinks he's alone, Zeke thought, knowing the man would be angry when he found he wasn't. At just that moment the man pushed back his hood. Everything about him that had been moving stopped.
“Who the fuck are you? I have the tenant down as Ms. Jill Irving.”
“She's at the hospital. I could ask you the same question.”
“You could, and the difference would be I'd answer. I'm Chance Donaghue. I work for Mr. Wolfberg.”
“Chance?” said Zeke. “Wolf?”
“Wolf
berg
. He owns the building. Ms. Irving phoned yesterday and had a fit about the state of her apartment so I came to check it out. I've told them before it's a mistake to rent to foreigners. They have unrealistic expectations.” The man reached again into a pocket of his jacket, not the one in which he had deposited the keys, and Zeke wondered if he was going to produce a gun, like people did in American films. If he does, he thought, I'll throw a chair at him and shout
Fire!
The man's hand reappeared, holding nothing more sinister than a spiral notebook. He put the book on a chair and removed his jacket. The person who picked up the notebook again was significantly smaller.
Zeke set the spackle down and approached. “How do you do,” he said. “I'm Zeke Cafarelli, a friend of Ms. Irving's. I'm giving her a hand. Was your father a gambler?”
“A gambler? Oh, you mean my name. No, my mother said it as a joke when the nurses at the hospital kept pestering her about what to put on my wristband. As she points out, at least she didn't say
mistake
. So”—he consulted the notebook—“there's painting the living room, the taps, some problem with the showerhead and the grout in the bathroom, the floors. And it says fluorescent lights—allergic.” He looked up from the book, his brown eyebrows raised beneath his brown fringe. “That's a new one on me, but I suppose it's possible. I'm allergic to sunlight. Even when I was only four or five I got terrible headaches in summer. I would lie in bed longing for rain. How does she manage with shopping?”
“Shopping?”
“Most stores have fluorescent lights. It seems like it would be quite restrictive.”
“I think,” said Zeke carefully—this was not his area of expertise—“she may have been speaking metaphorically.”
“Oh.” Chance's whole body rocked back and forth. “I get it. She hates the lights, and she thinks if she pretends it's medical, we'll fix them. I don't see why not. Do you mind if I check out the bathroom?”
As he turned to leave the room, Zeke saw that his hair hung halfway down his back in a neat braid. Two pools of water marked the place where he had stood; a trail of smaller damp patches led toward the door. Zeke went back to filling a row of holes at eye level where something, a shelf probably, had been removed. Six holes later, Chance returned and announced that he would arrange for a plumber and an electrician to come as soon as possible. “And you're painting the living room?”
“Yes.” Then he remembered that assurance was not his to offer. Verona might summon him at any moment. Once again he felt resentment at the uncertainty that now governed his life. “That is, I plan to but it's possible that I'll be called away.”
“Called away? Are you sick? religious?”
“Not that I know of, but I'm only in America for a few days.”
“Lucky you.” Again Chance's whole body moved up and down in what Zeke understood to be approval. “I'll put in a work order to have the living room painted, and Ms. Irving can always cancel it.” He scribbled a couple of lines in the notebook and returned it to his pocket. He pulled on the jacket, becoming once again his burlier self, and approached Zeke, hand outstretched. “Nice to meet you, Mr. Cafarelli. If you ever need a job in the U.S., give Mr. Wolfberg a ring. We can always use a good painter. Have a nice day.”
Reluctantly, Zeke took his hand. He would have liked Chance to unzip his jacket again, sit down, and talk about what it was like to be allergic to sunshine and how long it took to grow his braid. As they were shaking hands, he remembered one of the few jokes he understood. “When a person says that to my friend Emmanuel, he says, don't fucking tell me what kind of day to have.”
Chance's lips parted revealing two rows of completely white teeth, his hands came together in a clapping motion, and his heavy cheeks shook. Oh, thought Zeke, American laughter.
 
 
By the time Jill returned, all four walls were covered with two coats of magnolia paint and he was standing on a chair, working on the ceiling. But while he applied the paint some comparable process seemed to have occurred inside his head; all his hopes about Verona, which he had carried so carefully around London, across the Atlantic, and through the highways and byways of Boston, had been obliterated by a single question: why hadn't she phoned? He remembered the story she'd told that first afternoon about getting rid of people by writing their names on the wall and painting over them. As he ran the roller back and forth, he could not imagine that he would ever find her in this strange place, that they would ever be reunited, and even if both of these were to occur he could not believe that anything good would come of it. What on earth was he doing here, inconveniencing himself, his parents, and his customers?
“This is fantastic,” said Jill. “It looks so much better.” She stood in the middle of the room, her glasses shining with droplets of water.
“I'm going home.”
“You must be tired after doing all this. Do you want to get some supper? I could walk part of the way with you.”
“Walk?”
“To the hotel. I looked at a map today and it's not that far. We don't need to keep taking taxis.”
“I mean to London.” Even his only friend in America no longer understood him. Beneath his feet the chair creaked, and drops of paint sprayed from the roller. Later, he could neither remember nor repeat the speech he had made as he struggled to explain how useless his presence here was: how he couldn't sense Verona in any shape or form, not in the Fogg Museum, which he
knew she had visited, and not in the hotel, where he knew she had stayed; how his parents needed help. “I made a mistake,” he said. “I thought she cared for me.”
“Can I see her letter?”
“Her letter?”
“You told me when you got to the hotel she'd left a letter for you. I don't mean to be nosy, but if you were willing to let me read it … .” She spread her hands, and he caught a whiff of disinfectant. “Maybe I could tell you how it strikes me.” Her normally pale face was flushed. Was that just the effect of coming into the warmth? No, she was saying something else now, about how when she'd gone back and reread Leslie's letters it had been obvious that she was being given the brush-off; she simply hadn't wanted to acknowledge what any stranger would have grasped in a nanosecond.
“Nanosecond?”
“A very short period of time. When I asked one of the nurses on the orthopedic ward where they kept the splints, she said, ‘I'll be with you in a nanosecond.' She was ten minutes, but that's not what it means.”
“It's at the hotel.” He climbed down from the chair and bent to wipe up the spots of paint. “I'd like that.”
While Jill went to change her clothes and he rinsed the roller, a few shards of his feelings for Verona emerged. He remembered his Uncle Stephen, the one who had dropped dead of a heart attack, pointing to the smallest patch of blue sky and saying look, enough blue sky to make a pair of sailor's trousers. He and Jill would go to the hotel; he would produce the letter, which he had folded into his last clean shirt; she would read it and pronounce, irrespective of his longings. He could still recall his first glimpse of the astonishing truth that his thoughts and feelings made no difference to other people. His third-form teacher, Miss McCallum, had written on the blackboard the sentence,
Douglas ate his porridge.
What does
porridge
do in this sentence, she asked, head swiveling like a periscope above the pond of pupils.
Don't let her pick me, thought Zeke. He stared at his desk, shaping the five words so that even busy Miss McCallum would understand them. Then he wondered if
pick
was ambiguous. Don't let her ask me, he thought. He tried to make his thoughts like the Viking shield he'd seen in his history book, strong and invincible. Don't let—
Zeke?
On the faces of his fellow pupils he saw an expression that over the course of the next decade he had ample opportunity to learn to recognize as a mixture of glee and relief. Miss McCallum had ignored his sturdy well-formed sentence and was staring at him with her colorless eyes while he scrambled, undefended, around the empty rooms of his brain. In one of the rooms he stumbled upon a saying of his father's: Nothing like a bowl of porridge to stick to your ribs. Porridge, he said, sticks to Douglas's ribs.
The class shrieked.
Quiet, girls and boys. Zeke, don't be cheeky. I'll ask you one more time. Given that
Douglas
is the subject and
ate
is the verb, what is
porridge
? We studied this last week.
Trying not to move or breathe, he stared at the top of his desk, waiting for the storm to pass. He did not bother to think anything at all. What was the point if no one paid attention? Miss McCallum had sent him to the punishment desk, the wooden desk in the corner with so much chewing gum stuck underneath that sometimes, revoltingly, a wad brushed his thigh. And then Caroline Power, whose eyes had a glassy look that had made him believe she was thinking a sentence similar to his own, volunteered that porridge was the object. How could something so formless be an object?
Only years later, after university, after his breakdown, did he grasp that even at their most vivid, their most neatly organized, his thoughts were invisible, not only to teachers and tyrants but to
everyone from the most perceptive doctor to the driver of the 73 bus.
 
 
While Jill waited in the lobby, he went to his room to retrieve the letter. The first thing he saw was that the bed had been remade with the pillows under the counterpane. Then he noticed the red light on the phone, blinking. Almost on tiptoe, he approached. He raised the receiver and heard only the usual high-pitched note.
Downstairs Jill was nowhere to be seen. For a moment, as he scanned the crowded lobby, he was afraid she had left. But no, she wouldn't do that. He forced himself to walk slowly around the perimeter, looking at the different people: a group of men holding briefcases and phones, two women in fur coats, a couple with several children. At last, in one of the armchairs near the fire, he saw a familiar pair of legs emerging from beneath a newspaper.
“Jill.” He tugged at the front page. “The light is flashing, in my room.”
“What light?” She lowered the paper and, at the sight of him, dropped it. “Let me come up and take a look.”
In his room she picked up the receiver, pushed a button, which he now saw was labeled MESSAGES, and held it out to him. “You have one message,” said a mechanical American female. “I will now play your message.” With the first syllable, the first fraction of sound, he knew that the caller was not Verona. He sank down on the bed, so disappointed that he didn't care who or what was coming next. “Hello, Zeke? It's Gwen, your mother. I got this number from Emmanuel. I can't believe you're in a hotel in Boston. But they put me through so I suppose you must be. Anyway, I need to talk to you. Call me on my mobile.”
The American voice returned with instructions about repeating, saving, or deleting. He put the receiver back on its cradle. “My mother wants me to call,” he said.
“Oh,” said Jill, clasping her hands. “Is everything all right?”
“She didn't say. She seldom does.” And it was true: Gwen's
messages were almost always commands—call me, come round—with neither reason nor explanation. “What time is it in London?”
Jill looked at her wrist. “Ten to ten. I can wait downstairs.”

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