The Affairs of Others: A Novel (17 page)

It felt a miracle when he got up and limped out sniffling and saying nothing. He’d wanted a woman he could dominate—who was willing to let him dominate. Yes, I’d been that woman by choice elsewhere, in the submerged parts of me, on the subway, and if I was led up and out, I was still submerged—so sore was I from mourning. I’d needed to be something else, someone else, but not in my own home and not here, not here. You see, I was no different than Hope, no less a danger to myself and others—I had given myself away, to harm, to unknown appetites—but here, in my own building, I meant to practice life differently, in my way, no one else’s.

I brought myself to look at Les. At first I saw nothing, and was confirmed in my fear. I directed myself to blow air into him, to try to resuscitate him with whatever I had in my lungs, and just as I leaned in to turn him over, put his face to mine, he puffed out his lips with a fetid vapor, his dark nostrils opening with it. My hand still shook as I touched his face; it was waxy but warm, blood there, moving under his skin. I’d not been as strong as all that or not stronger than him. I cried then, shaking all over again, this time from joy, and was crying like this, hiccuping, face sweating, nose running, when two uniformed policemen arrived with hands on their guns and eyes twitching. And as I stepped aside to let them in, everything and everyone came with them, time coursing now and making demands—a story. The requisite story in which to package myself, insulate myself from them, a story arranged in an order but not too orderly, with only so many details and those chosen with care. I kept my arms wrapped around my chest, hugging myself, hugging my relief to me to help me, keep me safe, as I asked them first
please
to call the paramedics.
Please, hurry.
He was trying to break the door down, you see, and when I opened the door for fear he’d hurt himself, he threatened to kill me. I had to defend myself. I really had no choice. I did not hit him hard, I told them—I wouldn’t.
I’m not that strong, not given to violence.… But I didn’t have to, you see, he was so drunk or stoned or, god, I just don’t know what. Such a big man. So very scary.
I almost laughed when I said it.
I’m all alone here, you see. A widow.

*   *   *

I lived inside that story for hours into days. I told them I wouldn’t press charges, though I fully understood that he might opt to. I worried aloud about how tricky head injuries could be. He hadn’t meant harm, had he? He was not himself. I gave the officers the club before they asked for it. I handed it over as if it were the troublesome piece and looked away from it as if it had disappointed me. When they took me to the station to make a statement, they gave me tissues and water in a paper cup, and before we got in too deep, I asked for Detective Brazo. This prompted some surprise. I did not elaborate how I knew Brazo and they did not ask. They simply double-checked to see if I had a record.

Brazo wasn’t there at that hour, too late and too early, but he called the next day and when he did I asked if he would intervene. Les was under the influence or influences, and I had been unreasonably afraid.

“Who wouldn’t be?” Angie Braunstein snorted at me, appearing at my door the next day, my champion now. She’d heard the yelling that night. She’d come out to the hall—not sleeping. No one slept much in my building anymore. (Those of us who remained, anyway.) She’d sidled down the stairs, seen the paramedics take Les away, seen me leave flanked by the officers and their obligations to procedure, their youth. “What’s going on? What the hell is going on?” she called to us. Les snored on the stretcher, which put everyone at ease and made the paramedics snicker softly. They’d not been gentle with him. They’d moved the tall man like oversized luggage.

“What’s going on here?” Angie insisted from the top of the stairs again, and I said, “There’s been a little incident.”

“Where are you going?”

“Not far. Not far.”

And I didn’t. At the station, under the fluorescents at 3:30 and 4
A.M.
, they all relaxed into my version of things. The officers and the desk detective joked about the club being a Calloway. “Not too heavy a feel, for an old driver,” said the lankier and more reserved of the two young officers. “Good club.”

“Lucky for him,” said the shorter and wider of the two, the one who couldn’t stop fidgeting with his belt, who’d frowned at me back at my apartment, who’d been so suspicious. “Man, the guy was huge. Center at the Garden huge.”

Then, playing my part, I said it, “He wasn’t himself.”

Brazo said on the phone the next day, “I met that guy, right? The touchy type from upstairs?”

“A friend of one of my tenants.”

“I always say neighborhoods don’t matter as much as the characters in them. And that guy was trouble looking for trouble.”

I protested but not much. Les was in the hospital while Hope was. Trouble looking for trouble.

Different hospitals, the same. I didn’t know.

“That’s my father’s club. Do you think I’ll get it back?”

“I’ll make it my business to get it to you.”

I asked after Mr. Coughlan, but from the distance of the story in which I lived, I could not afford to lose focus too much, to forget a detail, that, for instance, I had been frightened when I hit Les instead of what I was—enraged.

“Yeah, I’ve been tracking Coughlan.”

“So you think he’s okay?”

“What he is is on the move.”

“Will he come home?”

“Well, to be honest, I’m not sure he knows where that is.”

I didn’t pursue this or look for fault or tragedy in the reply. I couldn’t. What I knew that the detective did not was that there was no chance Mr. Coughlan would come home whole or in pieces while the building was in the state it was in. George had opened a door and let someone in as he let himself out, for more, better, and then a jagged physics took over with the spring egging it on, tossing human appetite in with the copses, in changeable wind and growth so vivid it could barely be believed. If Hope would go, I might have some say. I might have him back. It was not a reasonable supposition but one I could not shake.

I waited and recited my story over and over; everything held in the wait and the telling.

THE SCRIPT

M
ARINA CAME
. W
E TALKED
as I followed her through her cleaning, the tying of her dark and graying hair away from her face, away from work, the unrushed sweeping of her thick ruddy arms over the floor. She asked, as she scrubbed so rhythmically, if her boy could be employed by me. They needed money—more money, she stipulated. Mesmerized, I said,
Sure,
then,
let me think about it.
There was the roof to be repaired. Other things. An old building … Always so much to do but not quite yet. We had to wait, though I didn’t say this out loud. She looked less sure, less sturdy, Marina did, but I told her my story—of the new tenant and her lover. How he’d threatened to kill me when he had not. I told her how horribly I felt for having to hit him when I did not. “But there was no choice there. Women must defend,” she said in her Ukrainian English. And I loved her then and wanted to hug her and let go into the sweat and Pine-Sol stickiness of her as Angie had into me, but I did not. I simply agreed and paid her in advance. I thanked her for coming and asked that she do so as regularly as she could. For the first time ever, because I was shocked to feel the rush of my affection, of my need, I said, “Marina, you must call when you can’t come, the day before or, if you have to, the day of. You must give me notice and you must then make up the time. Come another day. Do you understand? If I am to depend on you? Or your son? I’d like that. I do the cleaning when you’re not here, but I’d rather you were here doing it.” She nodded at me before she murmured,
Of course.
I could feel her marveling at me as I looked away and into my story:
I am all alone here. A widow.
Then she squeezed my wrist as Hope had once done—to show agreement or that she understood or maybe to apologize for not observing our relationship better. I had rarely confided in her and my demands had been few. I had not asked much of anyone since my husband died and now that everything seemed to be asking so much of me, never leaving me alone, I had to be alert. I had to keep score better, draw visible lines.

I did not swallow a pill or sleep well or very long for days. Yes, I waited for Hope, but at night I also waited for Les, Mr. Coughlan, my husband.

I went up to the storage space beside Mr. Coughlan’s empty apartment. I selected a few books from my, our, past. A few movies, old, yet on video. Part of a collection I rotated and varied, restricted my access to. This was how I remembered. Remembered so well. Keeping some things close, others out of reach, alternating. It took practice. Discipline.

I got my mother on the phone. We made plans to make plans to visit, and she reported on dances and new shoes and movies she’d seen—had I been to the movies lately? I did not tell her about Les. I listened to the stream and bubble of her voice, let myself be taken away into her cadence, how everything could be coaxed into freshness if you kept moving and dancing and buying beautiful things, until I heard footsteps overhead. It wasn’t even noon; Hope was back. Hope was home.

*   *   *

At her door, I discovered she was not alone. On the other side of her door, conversation was animated, brisk, designed to create cheer or something in its range.

Her friend Josephina let me in. Josephina in black eyeliner and a long black linen top that cinched under her breasts and hung over a long strait of denim skirt. She composed a white smile of greeting under her big, unmoving ringed eyes—“Ah, hello, the lady of the building,” she called to me and the others behind her, Hope and Darren.

“The greeting committee,” called Darren, who clapped his tidy toy soldier’s hands and gave off a patina of something newly polished—his closely shaven face, his gel-sheened and neatly combed hair, a crisp white and green plaid shirt, a belt buckle flashing like chrome in the light, and white snakeskin loafers. “Another country heard from to welcome our patient home,” he went on, drawing me into their project as facilely as that.

Someone, Leo, I suspected, had made piles—a pile of unshelved books, of pillows and throws, CDs, a row of his mother’s unpaired shoes—to one side of the living room in order to attack the task of cleaning it. As part of this he’d sprayed Lysol—a gesture of someone who didn’t know the smell, which spoke of public lavatories and neglected waiting rooms, was not worth whatever the stuff’s benefits. Or maybe he did know but meant to punish the rooms for what had become of his mother in them.

That woman, uneasy, had situated herself in the middle of George’s leather couch, which, thanks to Leo, was naked of pillows and throws and other softening influences. She sat with her back painfully straight, unwilling to give herself to the couch or the room. She looked at me as if she had difficulty focusing her eyes on the figure of me, as if I were too bright or hard to imagine. She looked at me with reluctance. Misgiving, yes. Yet outfitted in a silk pale blue robe, she managed to conjure Lauren Bacall or Rita Hayworth, a woman at a dressing table, pretending to arrange the luxury of her hair, of her. She’d flung off the clothes she’d worn to and from the hospital, surely, and this robe was chosen by her or Josephina to usher her back to a version of herself that merited silk, that liked it against her bare skin; for the material was thin enough to show her body’s lines, the forwardness of a nipple, the shape of a rib cage, hips.

I took all of her in—her bare feet, the chipped pink toenail polish, the untidiness of hair held up by a wide silver barrette on her head and into a twist, of a face that was drawn but for the live embarrassment there; because if she would not look at me, I would look; and as she shrank from me, I grew and filled the room. I knew my object and would not vary it or my route to it, however imperfect.

“Hope has been in the hospital,” Josephina reported.

“I heard,” I said. “What a thing.”

“She’s in good shape now,” said Darren. “She had a rough go. We worried.” And then to throw that sentiment aside, away, because they could now, at last, he added, “She had a little? What?… Sex sickness?”

“No,” said Hope too quietly. “Don’t.”

“We have been teasing her,” said Josephina, grabbing a pillow to insert behind Hope and so tempt the straight-edge of her into the couch. “Behaving like a teenager was what did this so we cannot resist.”

Hope lowered her head, already tallying, I imagined, the cost of letting herself become so vulnerable.

“Good lord,” Darren exhorted, “her daughter Danielle was at the hospital day and night for what? Four or five days? What a kid. Have you met her?” He eyed me.

“Oh, yes,” I said.

“A beauty,” he offered, waiting for me to elaborate or at least agree, and when I didn’t, he went on with the thoughts running in his head. “But acting for all the world like her mother was already gone and carting in enormous bouquet after bouquet of these terrifying lilies that smelled like an ancient funeral parlor.”

“She loves lilies,” whispered Hope. “Not gardenias,” she added, perhaps for me.

“She is a strong girl,” said Josephina, her accent taking most of the sting out of her observations. “She sees tragedy for her everywhere. Life is more exciting like this. Can I get you a drink? We have emptied many bottles—she shouldn’t drink—but water maybe, with bubbles?”

“No. I’m fine. I came to talk to Hope. Something has come up.”

Darren fell into a wingchair—“Ah, news! Tell us!
Tell
us.” Excited, he leaned forward and pulled something shiny from his pocket. “May I?” It looked like a lighter but wasn’t, because he lay it flat in his palm, and brought it to his mouth.

“Don’t fill the room with your herbs. She’s been sick to death,” scolded Josephina.

“This is prescribed for the sick, all kinds of sick.”

“I don’t care,” said Hope, head still bent and her voice so devoid of inflection that the words went up like a tired wall and then just fell over. She could have been addressing Darren, herself, or no one.