The Affairs of Others: A Novel (22 page)

Brazo stepped closer, leading with his long nose to the real object of his interest: “I’ve been tracking you, sir.”

“Whatever for?” said Mr. Coughlan, genuinely surprised.

“Your daughter and your landlady here. They were concerned. A report was filed.”

Coughlan breathed out and scratched loudly at the back of his head: “My daughter makes a life out of worrying. That’s probably my fault.” He drifted for a moment thinking of it, then rubbed his eyes as if they were full of grit, and blew out another sigh. “But I am sorry. I’ll tell her, and let me convey it to you, Miss Cassill. I didn’t want to worry anyone. I wasn’t coming back till I looked into a few things. I couldn’t stay put anymore.” He searched my face while forming a grimace that meant to be a smile. “Now I need to rest. I’m tired.” And having admitted it, his posture untied and drooped. He raised a hand, not high. “Thank you both.”

“I have to call your daughter. And maybe a doctor?” Brazo said.

“Tell her I am going to bed. And I’m not paying for any doctor. There’s nothing wrong with me but old age and I’ve got that beat for now.” With effort he twisted his shoulders toward the stairs. I ducked in to get his key.

He stood before the stairs when I came out.

“Wouldn’t the elevator be—” I started.

But he’d taken the first step up. Maybe because Brazo was there or maybe because this was the last test in a series he’d set for himself, that coming back had to be earned just like everything else, he would take the stairs to the top. He did not hurry, couldn’t, and only half-noticed that Brazo and I trailed behind.

“You were in Maryland two, three days ago. You took the bus there. How did you get back?”

“By boat. Ship … Cargo.”

We listened to him breathe every step, to the effort of his joints.

“What sort of cargo?”

A step considered, climbed, then another: “Old men,” he said.

“C’mon.”

Finally, on the landing of the third floor as he was sizing up the next and last flight, he answered without looking at us: “Cargo was old man and some lumber.”

We waited with him and then having taken one, then another step, he paused again. “I wanted to see if an old man could find work.”

“Were you able to?” I asked.

“Yes and no. Everyone fears a man my age.” He turned from two steps up and took inventory of me once more, my eyes, my mouth, as if to make certain I was all there. And then looked Brazo over, the size of his hands and shoes, the dense black of his hair: “Liability. A man my age.”

The very last of the stairs were accomplished efficiently and quietly to underscore his point—he was no one’s weak link, no matter how worn.

I unlocked the door and switched the light on for him. Only one bare bulb responded, a sore-making light. Without permission I scooted in first. I cracked the window nearest the harbor, to let in the ferry sounds, the night and its rain now, yes, raising the mineral smells of the season. I put fingers to the radiator, which was warm but not too hot on an April evening that promised to be no colder than fifty degrees. It wasn’t such a bad place after all, was it? Warm and dry? And out of the rain?

“I thank you both—” His voice wavered, went out. “I thank you both,” he uttered again, clearing his throat, and extended his coarsened hand to each of us, as if I had not hugged him and fussed, as if we’d lost reality for him once more, “and now, if I might, I must rest.”

Outside his door, the two of us alone, Brazo and I turned shy.

“Well, he’s home, safe and sound,” he said, but he didn’t smile and his words were slack, and he blinked and blinked under his heavy, live brow, because I guessed he felt as I did, that he wanted more: We wanted a meal of him; we wanted him to tell us stories, wag his head, his calloused fingers at us; to raise a glass for homecomings, for our worry, how needless it had been after all; we wanted to be comforted, we didn’t want a door between us and for him to disappear again.

“Yes, a happy ending,” I agreed.

A CITY ARRANGEMENT

H
OPE ASKED, AT NOON
, when she came for me, if I was okay.

“Just tired,” I told her, but finally resigned and so calmer in a way I hadn’t been all through the night. The rain had come and stayed. And the thunder—so long it had lasted, more than an hour, two, rumbling low and long like god’s vast empty stomach hanging over us, me. I was queasy well until the morning, motion sick from one man’s return, others going, gone—Brazo looking momentarily unsure of his balance, telling me
take care
before wandering off—and of course from my having let the alcohol run into me without the care of food or water or other insulation. I directed myself to stay in my bed through the night and then was up opening the windows to the rain, cold April rain, and back again and up again, riding the motion, arguing with myself that all was well. It’s true that twice I went to Coughlan’s door to see if he was still there, part of the argument with myself. The first time at one o’clock, roughly, opening his door a crack to hear him, if he could be heard, and he could be, still there, asleep and issuing robust scouring breaths. And when I woke with a start at 4 or 5
A.M.
, I got up and dressed for the rain, which had reduced to misting, the thunder passed. I went to an all-night market for groceries: a loaf of bread; two ripe tomatoes; four spotless bananas; eight cans of soup; five cans of tuna; cold cuts; a dozen eggs; a quart of milk; mayonnaise; as much as I could carry, as much as would sustain him up there.

I knocked this time, so I could be heard, but not enough to startle him. He did not answer. I knocked again. Then I went in, whispering, “Hello, hello?…” Hissing with my version of a landlady’s cheer done in a whisper, “I’m sorry to disturb, I have food for you, to welcome you back…” to hear him still snoring heartily in his bedroom—the most gorgeous sound. I then put the perishables in the fridge; the rest I left on the counter for him. And having made my delivery, I still worried but less, and I slept till the light found my face and roused me. The sun was back and I readied myself for Hope.

*   *   *

“It’s best if you dress for mess,” she said when she arrived. Then laughed: “We’re sort of going back in time. Clearing up.”

I was wearing nothing that I worried about ruining and so we set out, lightly bumping into one another, as we moved into the hall, brushing arms, once, then twice, as we got in step into an outside shining with puddles, wet trees, slick bark, and leaves sodden and plump, still so newly and freshly green it was hard not to put them in your mouth. I wanted to remark this to Hope, who was telling me about Darren and Josephina, a quarrel over the Hamptons, Josephina saying all the wealth there has impoverished the place of its beauty. She was laughing again, head high, quoting them (“So few public places,” Josephina had said, “so few wild”). Of course I remembered Les telling me that Hope knew I’d gone into her apartment. I’d been waiting for it to come up, but what was clear as she distracted us with conversation was that if she did know, she never cared. All her resources and queries were dedicated elsewhere.

She looped her arm in mine, pulling me to her. She couldn’t know that when she did, with the smell of her invading, how immediately and irrepressibly I recalled her body. What a beautiful woman I had been permitted to travel, cave deep, survival hard, a purple bruise on the crook of her arm where the IV had gone in during her hospital stay, a scar above her pubis, another on her knee, skin knotted, tight and then loose. A complicated landscape. No two women the same … But as we walked she couldn’t have known. She couldn’t be blamed. If she trapped any details of my body, any evidence of its or my reality, it was only to stop seeing the loss for a time, a reprieve, but I’d already been floated away, even as I kept pace with her long strides and she spoke in lists:
Darren wants what everyone else has. Josephina scoffs at what everyone wants. My daughter wants everyone to want her, and to think of her wants first. My son tries not to want too much, tries not to be disappointed.
I should have volunteered, “Me, too. I’m like Leo,” but I’d not earned my place on her lists, and I was tired and intoxicated, too, even as I understood I was a comfort, one easily enough replaced, as she’d replaced Les, valuable largely for my willingness to do what she needed now, not to say no to her. And why would I? That my fingers knew her, corners and textures, patchwork and depths, that she held my arm in hers as we walked now, so that I could see outside me, to her regal profile, to the wet, verdant streets of Brooklyn, the uneven pavement and faces passing us, it was yet a pleasant dislocation. And I looked to see who looked at her, whose oblivion to passersby was nearly total (to New Yorkers who avoid eye contact or risk becoming oversaturated in the effort to trap things and faces familiar and unfamiliar, that are often gone before they’ve arrived). And it was true that despite themselves they looked, at her amiable hauteur, her purpose. How could they not?

All these years she only lived a mere seven blocks from me, into Cobble Hill, in a stately four-story town house I’d admired for its Gothic Revival touches—the cast-iron railings and metalwork gas lanterns to either side of its grand arched Tudor doorway, an imperturbable front. We were stalled outside as she considered it and what she might find inside.

“He’s not home?” I asked.

“No.”

“Does he know you’re coming?”

“Yes. To collect some things. He’s at work, but to be on the safe side I asked that he not be here as a courtesy to me.”

As she unlocked the door, she said, “We deal in courtesies. I have to try or else kill him.”

Through the door, there was lustrous wide timber on the floor already, an oriental runner in braiding browns and blues which led to the base of a staircase of painted white wood that curved up and away like a swan’s neck.

She stood at the living room’s threshold and made more lists, out loud, as introductions for me and probably as an act of reclamation for her. The sunlight surged through the tall windows, making it all glow in collusion with her list-making: Bergère chairs and an ottoman, another oriental in coral and sage, and “in there”—her hand lifted to indicate the dining room—an Aubusson rug gotten at a reduced price in the South of France because of the slightest flaw, “imperceptible really,” she said, a chandelier from Murano, where “we visited on our honeymoon.” “He never refused me anything or not in a long time. We stopped worrying about money years ago.” Lamps with beaded shades, fat gilded frames and the paintings they contained, the odd bits of sculpture—a disembodied hand, a bust, a Buddha—even driftwood on the marble-mouthed mantel of the fireplace (a touch of her shabby chicness where France met the American seaside). The majority of these things were older than she was and yet were brought to life, breathing and contemporary because of how she’d arranged them, and even the most austere pieces—“this is a Restoration secretary”—were disarmed by a countryscape hung over it done in chewy impressions or a fraying basket stuffed with weary yarn—“I knit when I think of it.” Books were laid out on the coffee table, some distressed with age, others as shiny and expensive as appliances, like gaudy memorials to their subjects. The ceilings on the parlor floor had to be fourteen or fifteen feet high, the moldings intricate and paneled on the front and rear walls of the long room.

“It’s otherworldly,” I said, awed to foolishness and ready to admit I thought a place like this an impossibility in New York—a home so spacious and, whenever it required it, quiet; I heard no footfalls, no car traffic, no ferry horns. Over time I no longer could conceive of a place without warrens for solitary bodies because that’s all I could conceive for myself now—a body alone and mostly wanting to be. But the house I’d grown up in had been like this, with rooms that promised expanse and as many chairs, tables, plates, and glasses as needed for social gatherings, dizzyingly bright with natural or manufactured light, with improvisation, and lousy with art gotten through family, auctions, galleries, filthy antique shops, elegantly contrary—an Asian scroll painting of bird and bamboo beside an English seascape. My mother like Hope was in charge of a room’s currents and conversations. Yes, this was Hope’s own, all of it, a live tribute to her powers and tastes, the drive to have taste in fact, the right to it.

She’d left me at the threshold to pick up an empty glass left on a coaster on her coffee table in the middle of the room. She held the glass to the light—a half-moon of lipstick.

Laughter, full of shards: “Do you think he left this out for me to see?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

She laughed again in a way that sounded like it pained her.

“Could it be your daughter’s?”

“Oh, I doubt it. She’d never wear such a horrid shade of pink.”

She set the glass back down with mechanical care as if she were exhorting herself not to break it.

She surveyed the room and hugged her arms around her chest, and I observed something go out in her eyes—where I saw love and admirable confidence in every choice she’d made to make this room, and surely this whole house, what it was, she saw the magic that bound it together and to her evaporating before her.

“This is all you,” I told her, because its truth seemed so obvious to me. “He’s living with you, whether you’re here or not.”

Lines formed in trenches in her brow, and her mouth became tiny as if she was struggling not to spit something out.

“That’s why he can do it, Hope. You’re his foundation, even now, what he’s pushing off from.”

“This is already gone,” she said simply. “All this, but until then it’s the garden we have to contend with. Come.”

She led me to a wide porch overlooking a yard two to three times the size of my own. A privilege she had not wasted, a long-standing arrangement between her and nature in a city so stingy with nature held privately.

“A gardener did this?”

“Me,” she said. “I’m the gardener.”

“No help?”

“Some in the beginning and occasionally I’d call in reinforcements for the weeding, a friend, my kids, but mostly it’s me. I feel no-account if I’m not managing it on my own.”