The Household Spirit (11 page)

Which is to say, Emily immediately liked him. And she couldn't help wondering whom he'd lost.

“Hello,” she said. “Can I help you?”

He was heavyset but tall. Huge, actually. He smiled goofily at Emily and continued walking straight toward Les French's back room. The staff room.

Shit, Emily thought. Drunk homeless guy after all.

“Hey,” Emily said. His hand on the doorknob. “Uh, excuse me?”

He put his finger to his lips, shhhh.

“That's the—”

He mouthed,
I know
.

Emily picked up the phone so she could threaten the man with Boston Police Department.

“Oh, God, I'm sorry,” he whispered. “She's not back there, is she? I wanted to surprise her.”

“Boo?”

“Well, I'd planned on saying it louder.”

Emily said, “Mysonethan?”

“Just Ethan.” He tossed her a small, effeminate wave. Still whispering: “Thing is, there's a taxi out front holding my stuff for ransom. I didn't have enough cash. They charge extra for boxes.”

“Boo's doing deliveries.”

“I probably don't need to whisper anymore, do I?”

“It's up to you.”

Ethan slipped past Emily and went to the cash register, punched in the code, removed some bills, and strode back out onto Centre Street. Emily opened the register. He'd taken all the twenties. I just let a handsome homeless person take all the twenties.

Ethan's head popped back into the shop, silly little bell ringing above him.

He smiled, again, then a demonstratively woeful glance up at the bell. “Em-ill-ee,” he said. “Emily, hey, I'm sorry, but would you mind giving me a hand?”

It didn't occur to her until later that she hadn't told him her name. On the sidewalk were three large suitcases and a few cardboard boxes. Ethan sat on one. Emily stood above him, waiting. His head lightly tilted in the afternoon sun, like he'd been there all day. He had that lipless thing that bearded boys have—where the hair stopped, teeth began. “She didn't tell you I was coming?”

“I thought next week?”

“Yeah,” Ethan said. “Me too. Long story.”

“I thought you were Korean.”

“Like just now?” Ethan said. He laughed. “What changed your mind?”

“No, I mean—” They both laughed.

“I'm joking. I'm sorry. It's been a long day and I'm wrecked. My mother's told me all about you, you know. She thinks that you know how to talk to plants.” He stood up. “Thank you for taking such good care of her.”

“I don't know how to talk to plants.”

“That's what I told her.”

“I love your mother.”

“Me too.”

That was weird. Emily said, “So, um, you want to get this stuff inside?”

Ethan nodded. “If you don't mind, maybe you could help take the two small suitcases up to my apartment? I'll get these boxes.”

Forty minutes later the Les French phone rang. Boo had not yet returned; Ethan was upstairs. Emily answered.

“Hello, Emily Phane? Sorry to bother you, but is my other bag, the small green one, still on the sidewalk outside?”

Emily looked out the window. It was. She'd forgotten it. “Well,” she said. “I mean, I don't think…”

“Shhhhhhh.” Ethan was standing behind Emily. She jumped, tensed, turned. He smelled like a shower. He put his stupid phone in his pocket, though Emily remained on hers.

“I'm sorry, Ethan,” she said into the phone. “Can I call you back? It's not a good time. I've got to deal with this customer—kind of a jackass, actually.”

Ethan turned Emily back around to face the window and the little green suitcase on the sidewalk. “Look,” he said. “Beautiful, isn't it? Don't make any sudden moves—we don't want to spook it.”

They stood next to each other and watched the suitcase.

“I worry about it, though,” Ethan said. “Do you think it'll be OK?”

Emily smiled. “They grow up so quick.”

E
ight days later, Boo told Emily that Ethan would be taking her out for dinner. “Guess what?” she'd said. “Something nice for you, Emily!”

Emily hadn't seen much of Ethan since his return. She mostly heard his feet. “I don't know, Boo. I've kind of got plans tonight.”

“I make plans.”

“Well, I guess.” Wait a second. “Wait, does Ethan know?”

Boo said, “I go tell him.”

Before Emily could stop her, Boo scooted into the back room and upstairs to Ethan's apartment. She returned shortly with the good news.

For dinner, they got drunk. They went up the street to a bar known for its LGBT softball team. Emily's choice. He was maybe a little too sure of himself—and maybe Emily liked this a little too much. She'd needed to destabilize him, but, in fact, he knew Spud, the trans-man bartender, and even a few of the regulars. Did that explain his pink flip-flops? Ethan was wearing pink flip-flops.

Halfway through their first beer, Emily said, “Ethan, are you gay?”

“Nope.”

He was unflappable.

“C'mon,” Emily said. “Not even a little?”

“Sure, if you want, Emily. I'm a little gay.”

Emily loved how he interacted with Jim Dew, whom she knew from his frequent, fussy visits to Les French Flowers. Jim would bitch, and Ethan, hand on Jim's shoulder, would genuinely listen and sympathize with the exquisite trauma of what it was like being Jimmy Dew all the time, day after disastrous day. Emily watched how people at the bar were drawn to Ethan; it was his wholeness, his slow, large, simple ease with himself. The lesbians most of all. Ethan told Jim to stop being such a queen. Buck up, man. Jim said, “I
know
, right?”

Emily pretended to be immune. Ethan would answer Emily's questions and then suddenly say things like, “Have you ever been to Ipoh?”

“No.”

“Really?” Like he was genuinely shocked. “You should go to Ipoh, Emily.” He looked intently at her, smiling, and she couldn't tell whether he was making fun of her or having fun. Because why? What or where was
Ipoh
? Why did she strike him as someone who should go to Ipoh? Ethan didn't expand, just kept the questions coming. It took her a while to fall into this rhythm of weird, unexpected revelations. He didn't ask about things he wasn't interested in, and, as yet, he wasn't interested in what she'd planned on him being interested in. He asked Emily if she'd ever dreamt in a foreign language, and, if so, if she thought that English dreams were messier. He asked if she was scared of China. Conceptually speaking, he qualified. Ethan Caldwell was a solid, heavy wooden box that, once opened, revealed buzzing multicolored plastic gears and wheels and clicking levers. Nerdiness, in a way, but a nerdiness that the gravity of his masculinity had warped into something winsome and strange. You never knew what he was going to say.

“I'm supposed to believe this worked on the grad school girls?”

It was kind of working on her and they both knew it.

“Grad school
women
.” Ethan smiled like the sun punching through a mass of cloud, Emily thought, but maybe that's because of the beard, and, also, she was a little smashed.

Midway through his fourth or fifth beer, Emily suddenly realized that he was actually listening to her, intently, and, moreover, that she was talking in a way she rarely talked. His eyes seemed alive to intricacies of her voice, as if his eyes were also ears. She was telling him about her garden, of all things, and her theory of plant communication, homologies between neurobiology and phytobiology, about how she understood plants and how she didn't think plants were what everyone thought plants were, and how, OK, she was kind of wasted here, but she really fucking hated Boston University and the stupid things they called plants at Boston fucking University, and then she calmed, and spoke about Peppy, the two of them living way out away from environmental science alone on Route 29. The seasons turning, soft and slow and explicable.

“I like that,” he said.

“Well, I'm glad you approve.”

“Don't be that way,” he said. “Nah. You don't need to be that way.”

Emily asked Ethan what he wanted to do now that he was out of school. “Go back to school,” he said.

“Like a PhD?”

“That's right.”

“What do you want to do after that?”

“I want to be the South Korean ambassador. Ideally. Eventually. I'd like to start off in the diplomatic corps. Or maybe work for the UN. Have you ever been to the UN, Emily?”

He wasn't joking
.

He ordered another round of beers.

“Make mine a mojito,” Emily said.

“Two mojitos, Spud. Please. Thank you.”

Toward what seemed like the end of the night, Ethan asked her,
quite simply, if she wouldn't mind coming home with him. Emily said that she would.

“Mind?”

“Come home with you, Ethan.”

That out of the way, they continued talking. They talked about North Korean dynastic squabbles. They talked about films that Emily hadn't seen. Ethan wasn't a cat or a dog person—he was a fish person. “We don't get a lot of press, but we're out there.” Ethan told Emily about how Korean felt like his native language. They talked about how long it might take for fish to become as domesticated as dogs or cats and it was unbearably sexy. Their eyes locked perfectly. They hadn't even touched hands, brushed elbows, knees, let alone kissed, and Emily began to think she'd misheard this whole coming back home with him thing, or, worse, that he was a psycho as well as a weirdo, and this was some kind of Korean power game, preemptively slut-shaming his mother's new flower girl.

They stepped out into the empty weeknight Jamaica Plain sidewalk. They still hadn't touched. Was this a platonic sleepover, Emily wondered, and would that even be a bad thing?

They whispered through Les French Flowers, as if the flowers were sleeping guard dogs. Into the back room. Upstairs. Into Ethan's apartment. It smelled like musty tea, shampoo, wet paint. Ethan disappeared immediately into the bathroom. The only light came from under the bathroom door and the weak yellow streetlights out on Centre Street.

Emily undressed. It was intuitive, and was easier, somehow, than making the first move and touching him. Power needed to be rebalanced. Ethan returned from the bathroom, leaving that light on and the door open
—Ethan was wearing slippers
—and there Emily was, standing without clothing in the middle of the room.

Lit as he was from behind, Emily could not see Ethan's eyes, and what she saw was drunkenly shifting anyway. She laughed. Ethan
laughed, too, but in Korean. Emily was certain that he laughed differently in each language, and here was his intimate, true laugh. Boo's laugh.

Slowly, then, too slowly, Ethan's right hand went to her waist—
they touched
—and Emily shuddered, her heart kicked up, and then his left hand, which couldn't have been larger than his right hand but felt larger, hotter, moved onto her left breast, then up her breast, past her nipple, on up to her neck until he held her there, slightly less gently, then up from her neck and onto her cheek until he was holding the side of her head, gripping her hair, twisting it a little. Then a lot. He looked down at her. Emily had never been this close to this large a man. He was looking right into her eyes with his no eyes, with where she imagined his eyes must be staring directly into hers, and she tried to move forward and turn this off with a kiss already, please, but Ethan wouldn't allow it—until he did—and then it began.

The next morning, getting dressed, Emily said, “What will we tell Boo?”

Ethan lay in bed sipping from a big, manly mug of herbal tea. “What makes you think she doesn't already know?”

—

“You wearing same as yesterday,” Boo noted. And that was that.

Pretty much from that day forward, Emily stayed with Ethan. It was impossible to know what Ethan thought about
them
. She told her friends that she was dating an
unclassifiable
and that it wasn't serious. He thinks he's Korean. He's big but not fat. He's a UN geek.
UN geeks are a thing
. The relationship was open, she'd say, because this was something everyone was saying at the time and they'd never said that it was exactly closed. She even insinuated to some of her girlfriends that she was still seeing other, unspecified men. They'd just smile.

The sex got better. Her friends told her that she'd started talking in clichés, acting all gooey, moony, gross, but they were just jealous because
it was true
. It was like she'd never had sex before Ethan
Caldwell. The way he flipped his own switches. Maybe this had something to do with his upbringing, the losses he experienced, or the way he switched between English and Korean. They'd be out all night and they wouldn't touch, not a hand on a shoulder, nothing, like he was testing her. But he wasn't. Then, back in his room, a switch would flip and everything opened up, rushed in, taking them with it.

Ethan's mother had left when he was a few months old. Her name was Sandra. That's pretty much all he cared to know. Were drugs involved? Probably not; who could say? But you know her name, she's alive, you know California. Did I say California? Well, you
implied
California. What, how, so I have a West Coast tone of voice now? OK, but what about Sandra's family? He must be curious. He didn't need to know, he said, and Emily thought that this had more to do with Boo and a childhood fear of being taken from Boo, probably, than anything else. His love for Boo was fierce. Ethan's father had worked for the State Department and had died in Indonesian traffic. Emily soon started calling her own mother Nancy.

Once in a while, they'd hypothesize about their missing parents. Not Ethan's favorite thing, but he knew it was important to Emily. For her, it wasn't that Peppy didn't like to talk about it—though he didn't—it was that her grandfather really didn't know a single thing about Emily's father or much of what Nancy's life had been like before she returned home to die. Peppy had spent years looking into it, briefly reverting back to his investigative journalistic self that had so charmed the young Gillian, picking up on Nancy's bread crumbs, her unpaid parking tickets and her masterfully diffused unpaid credit card debts. New Mexico, Vermont, California; even London, England, for a few years. Portland, Seattle, Oakland. Denver? Even Denver.

Nancy, when asked, had only assured her parents that Emily's conception had been anything but immaculate. Perhaps Emily's father was part Latino, or Inuit, though a lot of people in Boston
assumed Emily's father was somewhat Navajo. Her cheekbones, black hair, something in her disposition too: this wide-plained and inscrutable thing people picked up on. But who knew where her constellation of brown freckles came from—and why
somewhat
Navajo and not a touch Apache or a tad Pueblo or a teeny bit Comanche? No idea. Because Navajo sounded cooler? Admittedly, Ethan kind of thought that it did.

In the past, with friends and lovers, Emily and Ethan had both sometimes acted as if whatever was peculiar about them was down to their orphanhood. Playing the orphan card.
It's not you, it's my dead parents
. Together they called bullshit on all that. Emily hadn't needed anyone but Peppy, and Ethan wasn't tormented by his deadbeat biological
Sandra
, not exactly, and he claimed that the loss of his father, though incalculable, was made bearable by Boo's love. It was both a relief and somewhat disconcerting to admit to each other that their problems, whatever they were, had nothing to do with their parents or lack thereof. They'd both had happy childhoods.

Emily spoke with her grandfather once a day. Usually for only a minute, maybe two. She talked, he listened and hummed, because he was good as gold thank you very much, good as gold. This was one of the prerequisites of her moving to Boston: the ninety-three-year-old would have to suffer these daily check-ins, no ifs, ands, or buts.

Until Ethan, none of Emily's Boston friends, let alone boyfriends, had ever been in the same room with her when she touched base with Route 29. It was too private. But then, one day, there they were: Ethan reading his hieroglyphs and Emily speaking with her grandfather, like no big deal. More than that, she'd just told Peppy a little about Ethan, couldn't help it, nothing really, just some anecdote, so that it didn't seem so weird when at the end of the conversation, just as Emily was wrapping up, saying so long, Ethan looked up from his book and waved at the phone, as in,
Tell your grandfather bye from me
.

“Um, Ethan's waving good-bye,” Emily told Peppy. “He's actually being kind of insistent and weird about it.”

“He's what? Waving to you?”

“To you.”

There was a pause.

Peppy said, “That's not how telephones work.”

—

Emily didn't know how relationships worked. She kept her secrets safe from Ethan. It was, she thought, the only way to keep Ethan as her safe thing.

Surely he picked up on this and, worse, seemed to like this about her. He enabled her. He told her that she felt intrinsically unknowable, and how he couldn't get enough of this.

“Intrinsically, Ethan?”

Foreign, differently sourced, like she was withholding from him her mother tongue. Ethan loved learning new languages and Emily hated how perceptive he fucking was, and what this said about their relationship. Because what would happen when he finally did know her? What if he someday became fluent in Emily Phane? Ethan, she thought, I need to tell you something important about myself.

Imagine what the sun would represent to someone without eyelids. That's where she should have started.
Ethan, I don't know how to sleep
. That people looked forward to sleep, fetishized and ritualized sleep and its accoutrements—what a joke. People doing it
soundly
? For Emily, listening to people talk about sleep was like the way human sexual behavior and mating rituals must seem to the genuinely asexual.
I can't wait to go to sleep
. Like it was a vacation, a safe, incredible destination that everyone knew how to arrive at safely but her. Seriously, where
was
this place? How did you get there from here? Emily's directions sucked, and so night after night she'd get lost and end up someplace else entirely. Someplace bad.