The Affairs of Others: A Novel (25 page)

Blake and Andrew brought show tunes on CD and asked me where the stereo was: I had moved the old machine, my husband’s once, by the window.

“Anything Goes” soon barked at us, upbeat, egging us on.

“Oh, Patti LuPone! She’s a fucking genius!” cried Darren.

Andrew sang along, “The world’s gone mad today and good’s bad today and black’s white today and day’s night today,” while tossing an arm over Leo, addressing the words to him, pulling him to him, the glorious substance of a healthy young man, who had carried the plates down, the serving dishes, the flatware, the bottles, who had snuck traveling looks at me in my dress each time, stealing high, stealing low, and the last look hanging on for as long as it took him to work his vigorous lungs an extravagant slow cycle, and me, despite myself, feeling his regards like two-fingered caresses.

Angie landed at the party in increments as if side-stepping. Dazed, I did not hear the door that would have warned me of her arrival and did not see her at first—her whole makeup a frown and a fidget and so tinier than ever. Once I was sure she’d decided not to run, I stood from my seat, found my voice, announcing her to everyone: “One of my tenants, Angie! A crusader and a model tenant!”

Blake raised his glass. “Hoopla, to Angie the crusader! Wine for the crusader!”

“Food first,” said Hope, opening her hands to Angie, who had rooted herself in place. “Why haven’t we met properly before now? I’ve been subletting for weeks and weeks and it seems so odd we haven’t spent time together.…” Hope, with some gentle tugging, maneuvered Angie to a chair, telling her about the food options—“Do you eat cheese? Quail eggs? Oh, yes, organic, humanely treated, I’m all for it…”—while talking on as if shame and its gravity had been banished from her constitution for good. “Well, I know why we haven’t chatted. I’ve been a positive wreck. My husband and I are parting ways and, really—Angie, is it?—that’s putting it delicately.…” Hope laughed, tall in her own dress, royal blue and belted and plunging with a full 1950s-style skirt; her hair piled into its high twist. Her lipstick a dark shock. Impeccable. The only perceptible makeup. The lines around her eyes creasing deeply with her admission, “Yes, it’s been an endurance race, one I almost lost—”

The old Angie would have been fast to say “Me, too,” and chimed away in kind or better, faster certainly, but Angie was round-eyed and, like all of us to varying degrees, prostrate before such charm, so generous you had to follow it attentively to believe it.

When Hope offered her wine, Angie finally spoke, “Oh, no. I can’t now,” and without thinking shielded her stomach with her hand.

“Don’t tell me,” Hope burst out, “you’re expecting a—”

Angie blocked her, “I’m sure you’ve heard by now: They’ve raised the terrorist alert to orange—or I think it’s orange, the color right below red. It’s elevated, one step away from scrambling those fighter planes. The news is running all over the place with rumors or what they’re calling unsubstantiated reports that the Brooklyn Bridge is the target.”

“Really?” said Hope, repeating it to the table. “Did everyone hear? About the bridge?”

Blake called: “No one’s leaving!”

“The colors dictate!” howled Josephina. “What power colors have today!”

Darren: “Let’s all stay the night! We’ll outwait those terrorists with wine and see the dawn together!”

“If there are much wines to keep us warmed,” said Jorge’s heavily accented voice, “I will stay here and make toastings to the terrorist: May he find his virgin wives and leave the bombs to Uncle Sam.” He had the look of a happy derelict about him. His voluptuous hairy belly shoved through the front seam of his buttoned shirt; his English was rudimentary and rude (cheerfully): “Now I will eat this mussel of the sea as I would the muscle of a woman. To women!” He raised his glass, and Leo, out of duty to a guest, did too.

Hope huddled Angie to her: “They may seem like beasts, my friends, but they’re very well-intentioned or most of them.…”

“It’s very changed back here,” I heard Angie say and it was.

The music, Cole Porter’s, had Blake and Andrew taking turns singing verses to one another, leaving Leo to make for the grill.

Hope had disarmed Angie enough that now she was addressing herself, for privacy and from the noise, to Hope’s ear, confessing, surely, letting every detail go. How easy it looked.

Danielle’s guest, whose name was Jeff or Jess, resembled her, built with lines that were all straightaways ending in youthful jutting joints. But against Danielle and her porcelain skin, his tan was so deep and honeyed so early in the season that it was, more than anything else, the color of affluence. He grinned and nodded and laughed before a sentence or witticism was completely expressed, too ready to please all these adults, yet running over with opinions and self-promotion. He could be heard to say, “the Hamptons,” and to me and Darren he said, “they are the cure given us for Manhattan.”

“Do we need a cure?” asked Josephina and he only laughed as he explained earnestly about the death of Wall Street as we’ve known it—9/11 showed just how defenseless we are, “We can’t rely on the old systems. They’re too corrupt frankly, too entrenched. And it’s all illusion anyway, right? If a company’s paper goes up or down? It’s manipulated.”

Danielle, a complicit member of his self-promotion team and more exuberant than I’d known her to be, reported to Darren and me, “He studied Mandarin Chinese at Yale. He’s taking me to China this summer, just the two of us. Jess says high tech is our common language now, that we’ll all be working for China—”

“We already are,” he assured us, breaking in. “All we have is our high-tech companies left, where this country’s money is hiding—the high-tech guys are just holding on to it, hedging their—”

Darren craned in. “How do I get some of that money, short of stealing it?”

“Investment. Good stock choices,” said Jess.

“But Wall Street is dead?”

The young man chuckled nervously. “Well, it still has its place.”

“And your father?” Darren spoke while chewing. “What does he do? Don’t tell me he works in investments?”

Before Jess could answer, Hope reappeared, a hand on my shoulder. “Who will have fish? And who will have meat?”

Jorge and Josephina did not hear—they bickered in Spanish and the music worked in between us all, making for lapses. Jorge reached for Josephina’s breast. She slapped his hand and then leaned across the table to me and Danielle to say, “If he were not so ravenous in bed, I would send him out on the street.” In the glare of the sunlight, the black eyeliner ringing her black eyes looked costumey and tribal; it made everything she said grave and impossible to argue with.

“Would you turn that music down, please?” Hope called. Andrew did her bidding and the garden opened a shade—one less element stirring its contents into a froth for which I knew I had little stamina. I had nowhere to hide—there was no clear exit for me on this occasion. I had all but trapped myself here.

I had left my apartment door unlocked, as well as the door to the corridor beside my apartment; the corridor joined the front hall to the garden as an independent access for tenants. Whichever route you took, there were two doors to pass through, to get to us, but it was the corridor door on which Hope had written on a piece of paper in her looping, exclamatory script: “Party today! All welcome.”

The music low, we could hear birds again, cars streaming on the nearby street, and we could hear a door opening and closing; we could hear footsteps making down the wooden floor. Darren’s eyes widened at me, mine replied in kind. We were both thinking Les.
Of course, Les.

But before us stood a reed of a man, his head too big for such an intersection of sinew, seen in his thin exposed arms and neck and guessed at elsewhere. It was Mitchell, nervous, balancing on the balls of his feet, carrying daisies and looking into a field of faces he did not recognize save mine and Angie’s, though hers was blank with shock.

“Mitchell!” I declared.

“Oh,
this
is Mitchell?” said Hope.

“Who is Mitchell?” asked Darren.

“Angie’s husband,” I reported.

But Angie said nothing and stared at him and then away as if she did not want to believe in the sight of him. Had she told him she was pregnant after all? And was that why he’d come without warning? Or had the threat of terrorism made him sentimental?

“Sit right here by your wife,” said Hope. She introduced herself, told him how glad she was he’d found us. “And you brought flowers. We are just lousy with flowers. Aren’t we lucky?”

“I saw the sign,” he said. “I came to see Angie. She wasn’t home.”

“She is home,” I said. “She’s home out here with all of us.”

He barely glanced at me and extended the bouquet to Angie, who received it as if he had handed her exotica or a rabbit straight out of his ear.

Darren’s shoulders folded in, in relief, and Hope, a marvel of social intelligence, set after describing the food in all its particulars again, meaning to distract from the couple who did not embrace or greet each other but sat each as ramrod as rockets waiting to launch. More wine was opened. Danielle ran, as directed by her mother, to retrieve new courses from my kitchen. Leo sliced the lamb.

When Hope filled Darren’s glass with Châteauneuf-du-Pape, he looped his hand in the belt of her dress to bring her near:

“Did you invite
him
?”

“This man?” Hope asked.

“Don’t be coy,” he said.

“If you mean, Les, no. He’s not invited, Darren.”

“That’s not stopped him before.”

She laughed as if delighted, maybe flattered, as if Les were merely an incorrigible adolescent, then shook her head, shook off that laughter, while watching me watch her. “He won’t come. Not today. I’ve explained it to him: Things have changed.”

But I knew, as Darren surely did, that things could change again. That man would never stop, couldn’t. He was a constant in that way, of nature or chaos. His appetite, his forward motion in service of it, he couldn’t best it, not at this stage in his life when he feared losing too much. To win on the terms he’d strategized—that was the ideal in which he was held, to which he aspired, and there was Hope at the center of it, giving it human meaning, beauty. She’d let him in, ostensibly to comfort her, and he too willingly became part of the assault. But it wasn’t fear I felt so much as resignation: It could be anything or anyone, couldn’t it? You had to wait only so long for the assault on your perception of how things should go, of who you are, the disruptions, the upsets and losses. It felt nearly impossible to stay the course, whatever your course. Even our great bridge wasn’t safe today, and perhaps tomorrow: Armed men crawled all over it; helicopters beat its piece of sky.

Angie had started weeping into the bouquet she’d balanced on her lap. Mitchell lifted a hand on her shoulder and hung over his own lap. Everyone looked away.

Jorge crawled his hand to Josephina’s breast in antic fashion, fingers creeping and stumbling, and this time she sat back in her chair, chewing her meat, not resisting him or the joke.

Danielle asked, “Should we put on the news? If it’s really the Brooklyn Bridge, I mean, maybe there’s something we should be doing, Mother?”

“Not today, darling. No. This is a party. How about that music?” Hope said, but before Andrew effected it, again the creak of a door—
all welcome!

I bowed my own head and told myself I could simply walk out, walk the streets and leave them to their party, go to Montague Street and the old bookstore, to the magnolia way past bloom on the corner of Clinton. Reenact different days or see the bridge for myself. Keep to my course, my counsel. I’d tell Hope I needed to walk off a headache, to get some air. They’d talk of me, the strangeness of my empty apartment, and Hope would struggle to quiet the gossip.
A widow, yes. And she’s so young.
But she couldn’t explain how the lilac was too sweet and full in my throat and nose, and how there was no room back here, a place so changed.

I looked up resigned to see the figure of Les, eclipsing us, taking what little air we had back here. Surely the wine had made me maudlin or it was Mitchell’s face, on it the look of someone who could not win. But there was Mr. Coughlan: “I hope I am not interrupting you people. I got this very handsome invitation. I wanted—I mean I came to thank you for your kindness, but I am not one for parties, you see—”

Hope got to him first, enveloping him in her voice, her long bare arms, before he could finish making his excuses. She wouldn’t miss the chance to steer the party somewhere new.

“Won’t you at least let us feed you? I’ve worked so very hard on the food and Celia”—I stood from my chair and waved so he could see me—“has told us all so much about you. A man of the sea, if I recall right. A captain.”

“Well, for a minute, for a minute then, for Miss Cassill’s kindness. I did shave,” he laughed. No one had anticipated the likes of him today, not even me: a man out of another time and glad to be. Yes, he wore his seaman’s cap, the structure of which had held but whose fabric color was diluted, grayed, by sun and wind and sea and rain. His white cotton collared shirt and chinos were clean—crisp—but if you looked closely enough you’d find they were faintly spotted with the work he’d done, rust stains, oil, paint maybe; work he’d do now, if asked. He didn’t need us or if so, for only so long. He was here on a lark or because he was hungry or curious. He was in no hurry. Hope loved him immediately, perceiving something in him more real and no-nonsense than she’d seen in a long time. She sat him at the head of the table and when he protested she said, “What if I share it with you?”

“It is Miss Cassill’s table, isn’t it?”

“I’ll sit here, on the corner, next to Hope,” I told him.

“And I’ll sit next to you,” said Leo, suddenly beside me, close to my ear.

Hope introduced everyone, and Mr. Coughlan nodded at every smile given him and said, “I am no good with names. Not because I’m old. I never have been.”

“It’s okay,” said Darren. “We aren’t very memorable.”