The Affairs of Others: A Novel (18 page)

“I should probably speak to Hope alone,” I said.

Darren lit his contraption, which prompted Josephina to open windows, huffing. “You are a selfish ass,” she told him.

“And you’re a beautiful piece of ass.” In short order, he took a drag of what I understood was pot, again pot, and then blew a voluptuous plume of smoke above our heads. “And she’s fine, right, Hope, darling? Doesn’t she look fine? Shouldn’t we celebrate? I’m happy to share.” He turned to me. “My God, what a few days.”

Hope pulled her robe up around her throat. “It’s about Les,” she said to them, nodding toward me.

Josephina sat down beside Hope and tossed her hands toward her friend. “
That
man. That
man
.” She had such a talent for exasperation and went on, scoffing, “A fever so high as that.” To me she said, “A urinary tract disturbance, she had, and did not address it? How?” She faced Hope, her voice almost gentle. “How does a woman not know? There are indications.” To me, “We feel
everything,
no?”

“A free woman,” Darren said, smoke coursing from his nose, “who couldn’t leave the buffet. Who can blame her with all that she’s been through? Where is he anyway, your Goliath?”

Hope leaned herself into Josephina, though her posture remained brittle. She leaned in to hide her face in her friend’s neck as she said, sighing, “I expect he’s just getting home from the hospital.”

“What?” laughed Darren. “Did he pull his groin?”

“I should probably explain this part,” I told them, and I did. I laid it out in a few short statements, spare of detail or editorializing or emotion, and as I did—
he wouldn’t be reasoned with, wouldn’t leave, so when I opened the door and he charged me, I hit him, with a golf club
—I grew more certain and more relaxed, and Hope more faraway, obscure. I had not been distracted by her or any of them, and I knew that this story, with every telling, meant my own story was safe. The story I would not tell. It signaled a victory of boundaries held at whatever the cost and in that propriety, my brand of it, yes, mine as told, broadcast, was the necessity that she, Hope, would have to leave.

She stood up abruptly but still did not look me in the eyes. “I have to rest now. I have to shower.”

Darren was slow to move. “You’d rather break his head than let him break your door?”

I made them wait for my reply as I waited for Hope to look at me; when she did, I said to her: “I didn’t think he would stop with my door.”

“Well, brava, landlady. I tell you if there were any booze left in this place, I’d raise a glass to you.”

“Get up, you idiot,” Josephina said. “We have to let her alone.”

“Time to go already?” he said, eyes and smile loose as yolk.

“We can come back anytime, give me a moment’s notice and I am back,” Josephina said, kissing Hope lightly on both cheeks. “Drink water. Sleep a lot.”

Hope breathed a thank-you but did not hold anyone’s eyes or take her hands from the base of her throat, where she still held her robe closed.

“Goodbye, baby.” Darren gave her a loud kiss on her cheek. “Behave a little, huh? I’ll come back in the morning.”

“Call first,” Hope told him.

They moved to the door but stopped short to wait for me. “Shall we go now?” said Josephina to me.

“In a minute. I have a matter I must discuss with Hope.… Alone.”

They hovered until Hope gave her okay and pointed them to the door with her chin. “Go,” she said.

“She needs her rest,” Josephina reproved. She would hold her ground.

“She does. I know. I won’t stay long.”

“Go,” said Hope again. “Go. I’m tired.”

Josephina inched out while staring back at me; a barrage of black daggers from her black unmoving eyes.

The door shut, I looked at Hope and past her: “I’m sorry, Hope, it’s awkward timing—” I began, just as I’d rehearsed, “but I think we both know—”

Her hands went up in front of her, chest high. “Wait!
Wait.
Please. I know this will sound crazy, but I’m not going to be able to do this without a shower. I have to … I need to be …
clean.
”

I paused, regarding her with her hands still up, her head to one side. She expected me to argue. I didn’t have to. “I can wait,” I said but did not move, would not.

“Here?” She cocked her head at me.

“Yes.”

“Fine.”

“Good.”

She did not bother to shut the door completely, as if to prove to me she would not run. I heard the water go on with the robust pressure I’d intended for these apartments, for my tenants; steam would rise fast and reliably. I touched the books in their piles. I reshelved some. I put another pillow on the couch, folded an afghan over one of its arms. I was not her jailer. I was something else entirely. I paired the shoes that had mates and segregated those that didn’t. Somehow I would teach her about order. For courage, I leafed through George’s Simone de Beauvoir, an old Franklin hardcover edition of
The Second Sex,
trying to concentrate on the words, succeeding and failing, mostly failing. It was a long shower. In the kitchen, I washed several glasses and filled two with tap water for us. Then I sat as comfortably as I could to one side of the couch and breathed through any agitation, breathing the room, even the Lysol that went in sharp, taking the room back, even the building, the right to my sanity or my version of it. After we’d come to an understanding, I’d go back to my apartment and watch an old film; I’d give myself that. One watched with him. Yes.
His Girl Friday
with its snapping speeches or
Wings of Desire
to see that girl swing from her trapeze, to watch an angel fall, willingly. I’d take
Lady into Fox
from its Ziploc bag, try to scent the day I shared it with him last.

“Sorry,” she said, emerging. “I needed it to be,” she searched for the word she wanted, “thorough.”

Her wet hair had been combed away from her face and down her back in a dark channel, dampening the silk of her robe over her shoulders and in the space between them. She was makeup-less, making an exhibit of all the lines around her mouth and between and around her large gold-blue eyes, of the shadows under them, in the hollows of her cheeks, stealing over her upper lip. This was her show of starkness, but it didn’t work, because in giving up on any defense and the tension that that required of her face, even of her carriage, she appeared tender. The lines that her face had earned looked impossibly yielding, and she smelled so fiercely of her—her perfume in the soap or shampoo she’d used, but also of something essentially her; yes, a high richness, as of good soil and sea salt. I sipped my water, suddenly realizing I’d let go the thread I’d held in my head for days. I waited too long searching for it so that she spoke before I could:

“Did you hit him hard?”

“No. Or, well, I did what I had to.”

“He has a concussion, you know. But they’ve let him go.”

“He’s called you?”

“Exactly a hundred times.”

“That many times?”

“A lot. Too much…”

“Did you give him keys?”

“Yes. No.” She sat next to me on the couch. “He took a set and I didn’t stop him.”

I cleared my throat; I pushed through the static of all the questions I wanted to ask: Was he angry? Was he coming here? “He urinated in my elevator,” I announced.

She checked my face to see if I was inventing this. I was, or in part. I’d nearly forgotten, and I didn’t know who had done it. It was merely a test, of my nerve, hers.

She shrugged. “I don’t know about that.”

“But it’s possible?”

“Yes, I suppose anything is. We got pretty high. Pretty out there.”

I could see him in the act. The arrogance. The indifference. I breathed in, out. The horrid Lysol in the room. “I think we both know you have to go, I mean, to leave here.”

She nodded, hands in her lap, face pointed there again.

I went on: “It’s been a bad time, a hard time for you, no one blames you, I don’t, but this place, my home, can’t continue to be a stage for all you’re doing to yourself.”

She held herself in, barely seeming to breathe.

“I won’t judge, or not beyond admitting I can understand everything you’re going through enough that I can’t live in proximity to it. Can you understand why…” I had to swallow. My voice had turned tiny, a whisper, like hers only moments ago. “… Why it is I must ask you to go?”

“I’ll go. Of course.”

We sat listening to each other’s silence. We sat for several minutes.

I felt exhausted. I seized on the thread again and let it pull me: “I’ll give you the time you need. Any help. I won’t ask for money from you or George. Money is—has never been—the issue. It’s…”

“
Separateness
. Respecting each other’s
separateness
.”

She was quoting me, from the first day George had brought her to me. I did not know if she was mocking me, but the listlessness of her voice said otherwise.

“He called you Celie that day. You didn’t like it, did you?”

I didn’t answer. I was too amazed.

“I think you didn’t like it.”

She had taken notice of me that day. Creating intimacies where there were none, then; but now, now was something else entirely.

“Of course I have offended you, Celia, in your home, but do I have to tell you that I’m not like this, not usually? And that Les—I know it will sound incredible—but that Les is a good man?”

“You have nothing to apologize for. Not to me. And Les? I don’t know him, and I don’t need to.”

She sniffed once, and I stole another look at her to see tears now. She let them fall into her lap and sink into the fabric of the silk.

“A tissue? Can I—”

“I’ll be okay. I’m all right.”

Was she quoting me again?

“Yes,” I said. “Yes.” She would make me cry. I did not want that. “You have good friends. Lovely children. Leo—”

“He is a miracle, my son. My daughter, too, but he’s always been so complete, so completely himself—”

“Yes.”

“That’s why it’s all so shaming, that it hurts this much, that I can’t seem to put what’s happened in my marriage in any perspective. Being replaced. It’s all so wretchedly common, and I have so very much to be grateful for. I guess that makes it a little worse. I can’t help it. I love my husband, our family as it was, and so it’s as though a part of me is gone, as though I have a hole here, where he was, we were, that everyone can see.” She placed her fist into her diaphragm. “Here.” She drew a circle around it, hit it once lightly, laughing an empty laugh. “Bull’s-eye,” she said, and then hit the spot harder still and so on with every “here, here, here,” escalating, the laughter giving way to protest and more tears, coming faster.

“Please,” I said. “I can’t,” and I stood and lurched for the door and my apartment and the movies I’d watch alone and a book that might still smell of the simple homeliness of bean soup and a time that had made perfect sense once.

But I did not get far. I turned back, knelt down, and took her fist in my hand, unfisted it, elongating finger by finger. “Stop. Stop now. I know about this, and I know this won’t help.” My hand went to her forehead, a fever maybe, however slight. “You’re not well, please,” I said into her weeping as it turned to moaning, her robe soaked in widening spots. She could not catch her breath. Her mouth wide open with sound. She jerked her hand away and collapsed onto her side, curling herself up, all of her into another fist. Both hands jammed between her legs and jerking into her with the complaint: “I wake up and realize, he’s
even here, here
where he is! I want him out of me!”

I slid in behind her on the couch and wrapped myself around her, endeavoring to still her. I stayed her hands by holding my hand to them, pressing them into her. She let me as she moved through the heaving she’d given herself to and couldn’t stop easily and then slipped her hands out so my hand was alone between her legs, over the silk of the robe and nothing else. “Les. Call Les,” she pleaded and, before I could take my hand away, she squeezed my hand between her legs, with her thighs, doing her pleading with them. “I need him.”

“No, no,” I breathed into her ear.

“It hurts. It won’t stop.”

I arranged myself like a vise around her, to remind her what it was to be contained—her upset, her desire, her choices, the bad ones too. Her salt in my mouth, I started to tell her about the Maine sea roses,
rugosa,
and how they grew like weeds, despite the elements, despite adversity; but she could not hear me over her complaints, the regular pleas and now the struggling, the struggling against me, to get away from me, to the phone. But I was a tourniquet, however poor, against the woundedness dissolving her into liquid that kept flowing into me. What had Melville said? She would keep me from remembering myself.…
A deadly drain,
yes …
Yet so vast is the quantity of blood … and so distant and numerous its interior fountains, that the animal will keep thus bleeding and bleeding for a considerable period; even as in a drought a river will flow.…
I had to bring her here, with me, I had to be ingenious enough to shut her up.

With my free hand I reached for the fleece of her earlobe; then I touched her breast, I touched her in all the places I knew to touch, places where her husband must have touched her with love once—her husband who touched someone else now. I made her feel the pressure of my palm and the strength of my arm—that not everything was lost, was draining from her, that she could be held, could be whole as she arched into me now wedged behind her on the couch. I had never touched breasts but my own, never felt a cunt, never known the incredible softness of a woman not just in these places but in her skin up and down the length of her long light bones pushing into me. I told her she was beautiful over and over. I became my husband and so became more of me and reminded her of tenderness’s returns; as she wept, I kept reminding her with my hand, cupping, tracing, and fingering her, to show her every expression of the extraordinary softness that was still there, still her. He hadn’t taken it or the grace of her long light bones. I reminded her that she’d been a woman loved and would be again and could be now, here, as my mouth found the nerves on the back of her neck, licking at the traces of her perfume, the stubborn sweet and savory of it, her sweat, her tears running from her eyes to my mouth. I did not say “my beautiful” but just
beautiful, beautiful
as I continued to tell her flesh of its gifts, such pleasure, gently but insistently given, even biting her earlobe with my front teeth, sweeping her hair from her face, her neck, as she cried and breathed less jaggedly, “It hurts, it hurts.” I did not stop until it stopped hurting, until I heard pleasure articulated from her. Her throat as open as her body, wet everywhere from tears and the coming, and I did hear it, a long high twisting cry and a twisting in my arms as my fingers dove up and up into the full expressive wetness of her.
Hold me, hold me. Here and here,
she said after she came, placing one of my hands between her legs to press again, another over her breasts.
Hold me tight.