The Affairs of Others: A Novel (12 page)

“Ma’am, one of the guys thinks he saw your man. An old captain, right?”

I nodded.

“He went over and back. Got off, got back on. Three or four times, they say. He talked up the guys, they let him shadow the deckhands. But that was a week or more ago. There’s been no sign of him since.”

“But he was all right?”

“Seemed to them he was.”

“To who?”

“Frank,” he said, pointing. Frank waved. “And Bobby, a deckman.”

“Is Bobby here?”

“Not today. He’s off today but usually he’s on one of the boats.”

“Can I speak to Frank?”

“I don’t see why not.”

“He’s my tenant, Mr. Coughlan, my tenant. He’s not come home in many days now. His daughter is worried. The police have been called.”

“His home is that.” He pointed to the water. “Or that’s my guess. Those old captains?” He smiled at something unseen. “They got balls.”

*   *   *

I walked back home this time—I didn’t need the subway anymore; I walked over the Brooklyn Bridge. You were made to climb the bridge, up to its high suspension over the river, the cables gleaming just as they were designed to, and because as you walked, climbing, you could not yet see the bridge’s midpoint, its other side, you could fool yourself into believing you were traveling into something unforeseen. The tourists and strangers climbed with and around you; people covered their faces with their cameras or aimed their one-eyed cell phones at the view. Windbreakers and khakis, western travel gear. All of us with either nothing in common or so much, depending on your vantage, at least sharing a direction, to climb and cross.

When a girl approached me to take a photo—
would you? please, thank you
—I didn’t consider refusing her. A university-age girl from somewhere Scandinavian, from the looks of it, traveling with her mother and younger sister through New York’s cold spring; all three made me think of oversized daisies and of the boons of being foreign and blond, of living out of reach of or at least some distance from urban American habits and our overweening American expectations.

The currents of air switched and tossed their yellow hair—they laughed at this and couldn’t stop laughing; their laughter so much the same. I had to move them against the stanchion my husband had often touched as we passed, out of the way of the wind and the foot and bike traffic, so I could capture all three faces without obstruction or eyes squeezed shut with hilarity. I laughed too and still had Frank’s voice in my ears instructing me just before I had moved on that Mr. Coughlan was “a tough old guy.” The sentiment relaxed me, so I did not mind the small talk on the bridge.
We are on holiday. We’ve left the men at home.
Brothers or boyfriends or a father. I didn’t know exactly and it didn’t matter.
New York we find so very loud and pretty,
and I agreed because it was right then, with the water ruffling below us, tugs muscling through the harbor, the old bridge seeming so resolute underfoot.
I hope you have a lovely visit,
I told them, and as the women gave me more pleases and thank-yous, I heard Frank the security guard assure me, “He’s no fool and sometimes we all want to walk out, you know? Vanish. Like that.” All his peers standing with us had assured me, just as the first guard had done, that ferry captains needed more freedom than most of us. I chose to believe them and now smiled through my goodbyes and the girl handing me her e-mail on a blue scrap of paper.
If you’re ever in Aarhus, let me know. We will show you around. Come in the spring! Oh, of course,
I said, as if that was as likely as anything else. Denmark in the spring.

CONSENTING ADULTS

A
S SOON AS
I was on land again, cutting home through Cadman Plaza Park, I felt my stomach go into crisis. I had forgotten to eat. I bought a roast chicken, cooked just that afternoon and warmed under lights; a hunk of hard Gruyère; celery and carrots; hummus; freshly baked, soft-in-the-middle chocolate-chip cookies; and a slice of blueberry pie. I had those Danish girls in mind when I detoured for a bottle of Argentinian Malbec. I imagined I’d somehow invite the girls to my building, lead them into my garden with wineglasses overflowing, and tell what I planned on planting, daisies, hydrangeas, and Bermuda freesia, even if freesia would not survive here. Yes, I felt magnanimous, and when I made it home and laid my groceries out on the table, I ripped a leg off the chicken and ate it as if I were an amiable giant with an amiable giant’s appetite. The warm oil of the dark meat slipped down my throat and gave me more license, breaking open a current of thrilling prerogatives. Yes, men like Mr. Coughlan need more air. Denmark in May or early June. How long had it been since I’d traveled or taken a photo? I drank the Malbec from the bottle. Though I tried not to gulp, I was yet a contented colossal who’d agreed not to step on anyone, to break ceilings or walls or the backs of bridges or squalling men, as long as I was fed, watered, and spoiled.

I settled into my chair, yes, not unlike Mr. Coughlan’s chair upstairs really, a relic, too. I had almost as little furniture as he did, as little clutter, yet today there was not enough space in here, either. Still drinking, eating, my hands a mess, my tongue thick and purpled from the wine, I went to the window. Outside white pear-tree petals flurried in the day’s breath, I wanted to laugh out loud at myself but more than that I wanted to catch the white bits in my mouth. I leaned out the window, face up to the sky. When was it that I could hear her? Was my mouth already open, catching more than it bargained for, just as the sounds above me formed into something hard and undeniable, that when pitched at my head woke me?

“Hit me,” Hope cried. “Now!” Then a scream that tightened the skin on my body. “Do it again!” she commanded.

And I became small again like that, so small I do not know how I swallowed the last of what was in my mouth or gathered the strength to leave my apartment with the intention of stopping it and stopping her.

*   *   *

Music met me as I climbed the stairs. A cover newly thrown over the couple. I knocked. I rang the bell. But the music percussed and shouted; it absorbed everything. I leaned into the bell again, as long as I could to put off, moments longer, opening the door that I guessed would not be locked. My hand was on the knob. I had only persuaded myself to turn it; it felt inert, a brick in the hand; but then it flew away, was pulled from me, and he became the door—Les as molten and obstructing as the first time I saw him.

His eyes flew over my head, narrowed, and he leaned his torso into the hall just perceptibly as if looking first for an adversary, a body roughly his size. He blinked before he lowered his gaze to me, blinked again, then sniffed as if he was not certain that who and what he was seeing was me. Then he hunched over me, and smiled slowly the smile of having discovered a practical joke, one he’d puzzled out before it could harm or humble him. He smiled like I was a woman swatting at gods, and then he sighed, and on his breath came whiskey and pot and the high tide of a woman’s sex. I stepped back, he stepped forward.

“It has to stop,” I said.

“What?” The music surrounded us.

“It has to stop,” I called over it.

“What does?”

“What you two are doing.”

He drew the door closed behind him to fend off the music’s volume. He returned to face me as he ran his great hand through his hair, pushing it into form. Red knitted through the whites of his eyes; his pupils were overlarge and blunted. He looked again somewhere above and beyond me, his focus going, and then striking on a notion that appeared to delight him, he found my face again and offered, “But we are consenting adults.” He was drunk. He was stoned. Behind him, the music ended.

In the new silence, I said, “I’ll call the police.”

His oxford shirt was not buttoned fully or correctly. His feet were bare. His belt was unfastened under his untucked shirt, his fly half-zipped. He drove his hands into his pockets, as I’d seen him do before. A default position for him. He was trying to compose himself.

“I don’t think you will.”

“Try me.”

Another slow-forming smile. He moved back into the apartment, opening the door wide behind him. “Tell her. Come in and tell her.”

His smile vanished as he watched me.

I took two steps toward him.

I stood on the threshold.

She was in a costume that trussed, crisscrossed, and bisected. A woman turned into parts, done up in black—black garters, held up with black straps, a black collar of some sort around her neck.
Porn fantasia.
She’d not been up to returning his gifts after all, and now she leaned to face the only wall that did not house bookshelves, bracing herself against it, legs spread. Her skin was mottled a startled pink on the exposed cheeks of her rear and down the lengths of her thighs. Her back where it was bare glistened with sweat and/or saliva and showed hand marks. Her arms above her head appeared thin and a shocking pale against the rest, the blood leaving them to travel elsewhere, to evidence of the alarm and heat of so much friction and more. The fury of her skin. “Come on,
babeeee,
” she intoned. “Where did you go…?” Her head lolled forward and hung. I could not see her face. She breathed in and called just above a whisper, “I’m cold. I’m so cold.”

She was miles gone inside herself and the scenario they’d been playing at; for all useful purposes, she was blind. “Baby, baby,
babeeee,
” she hummed.

I made to go.

He pursued me, my back to him. “She told me about you,” he said, “that you’re a fighter.”

In the hall, steps away from him, I came to a standstill, deciding, trying to decide.

“Beautiful and a fighter.”

“I don’t like you here.”

“She does.”

“She doesn’t know up from down.”

“If I go, she does. You want that?”

My extremities, particularly my hands, started to twitch with the adrenaline that had found them again. I caught them, knotted them in front of me, held on to them; if I turned around, they would lunge for him.

“Goodbye, fighter.” He shut the door, locked it. Music broke out again—as suddenly as laughter might.

*   *   *

Once behind my own bolted door, it was a torch song that came swelling through their floorboards, my ceiling. That was what he’d decided they’d play to now, as they found new positions or so I gathered from the thuds. Then the thrashing, to the round tones of a crooning voice. A standard with a bouncy bass. (Nightmares, waking or sleeping, are made of this sort of incongruity—of pieces that don’t, and shouldn’t, be fitted together.)

Under my door awaiting me, I’m not sure how long, was a pamphlet on PCBs and animal fat. Angie was recycling her causes; I’d seen this one before; still it was a vestige of a world, the world of this building that I had understood, that had since been altered.

Also on my floor—passed under the door and unseen by me earlier—a note on the back of an opened envelope: “I was here—Marina.” Had she cleaned or simply wanted to see me, letting herself in with the key I’d given her? I had forgotten to return her call.

I washed my hands, put my groceries away and out of sight. Corked the wine, wiped the counter.

I took a milk glass of whiskey to my bed. It was Tony Bennett, I think, singing to them, me.
In other words, I’m yours.

It occurred to me to leave, but I couldn’t; I wouldn’t be forced out of what was mine, even as my bed rolled with them. I stood, swallowed a mouthful of whiskey, and turned the bedside radio on. NPR reported on antibacterial products, how some experts maintained they were a detriment to the function and development of healthy immune systems in children. “Overkill,” someone said. “Next up we’ll talk to our commentators about the Geneva Convention and Guantanamo Bay.” I switched to a classical music station—cellos huffing low and long—and got up to lie down on the oak of the floor, as far from them above me as I could get; the wood was cool against everything overheating in me. Above me now:
Yes, it’s only a canvas sky, hanging over a muslin tree
along with gleeful horns and was it? Yes, scatting.
C’mon, baby. We can’t.
My husband that day. Hollow as a barrel.

I crawled partially under my bed. An island of dust there and a lone paperback, a Signet edition of
Moby-Dick
. I had several editions. His. Ours. Mine. But I always kept one within reach. A trick. To time travel. I held the book to me, smelled it, and tried to piece passages together from memory. The soliloquies came easiest—some ridiculous if taken out of context. My resplendently healthy husband reading to me, alive and laughing with amazement at Ahab’s address to the head of a dead sperm whale: “Speak, thou vast and venerable head, which, though ungarnished with a beard”—
Celia! Ungarnished with a beard?! Can you believe this guy?
—“yet here and there lookest hoary with mosses; speak, mighty head, and tell us the secret thing that is in thee.” I had known this bit by heart for so long, as well as the next lines: “That head upon which the upper sun now gleams, has moved amid this world’s foundations—”
Moved amid the world’s foundations? I mean, this guy was fearless!
I checked myself against the dog-eared page, touched each line: “Thou hast been where bell or diver never went … Thou saw’st the locked lovers when leaping from their flaming ship; heart to heart they sank beneath the exulting wave; true to each other, when heaven seemed false to them…” Melville’s captain calling to the carcass as if it were an oracle. My husband reading those long, propulsive sentences with the thrilled breathlessness Melville hoped for. The author’s daring. His excess and live fancy set against such homeliness, all the minutiae of whale fishery and functions of the blood.
You like the gore, baby.
It was true.

On another dog-eared page, I read to myself: “In most land animals there are certain valves or flood-gates in many of their veins, whereby when wounded, the blood is in some degree at least instantly shut off in certain directions. Not so with a whale; one of whose particularities it is, to have an entire non-valvular structure of the blood-vessels, so that when pierced even by so small a point as a harpoon, a deadly drain is at once begun upon his whole arterial system … Yet so vast is the quantity of blood in him, and so distant and numerous its interior fountains, that he will keep thus bleeding and bleeding for a considerable period; even as in a drought a river will flow, whose source is in the well-springs of far-off and undiscernible hills.” The wonder at it—the author’s, my husband’s, mine, how even in the details, yes, of the gore I’d come to love then, he is looking for mystery, for God or gods; Melville was extravagant. My husband loved him for that, how the reader was necessarily lifted off the page, up and out of time.