The Affairs of Others: A Novel (21 page)

A rustling of paper of some sort on her landing upstairs. A sniff and a hot breath let go. I could hear even his heartbeat, I could feel him sweat, and with his hard-soled shoes once more tapping over my floors and trouser fabric swishing, all broadcasting his intentions, he took off down the stairs.

Quickly closing my apartment door, I flipped the DVD back on, and tossed into my seat. A gulp of wine. A prayer. I crossed legs and arms, hugging myself. Let me be wrong. Let him just go. Go away.

C’mon, baby.

He treated my door with the formality he reserved for strangers. Knuckles only glancing the surface … One-two. How foolish I’d been to put the movie back on in a show of what? Normalcy or nonchalance? Another barrier between us, of sound? For he could hear it as well as I could. Where was the golf club? They’d returned it to me when it appeared no charges would be filed. This time, I assured myself, I could strike harder and keep on hitting. There was a history of recorded facts to draw from, a script, predictable, at least until you were inside it, playing it out.

Again the hard back of his hand in a one-two that was there and gone. No escalation expressed in the speed or force applied. I took the chance I could forestall it if I responded just then, “Yes?” through the door.

“It’s Les,” he said matter-of-factly, as if we were equal parts in a conspiracy, as if I didn’t need more.

“Yes?”

“It’s Les.”

He sighed and paper or plastic fluttered on the other side of the door.

“I can’t seem to get any women to open up today,” he said to himself for my benefit. He regrouped: “Hey, look, I came to apologize.”

“Big of you.”

“What?”

I did not repeat myself.

“Is that the TV?”

Nothing from me.

“I acted … I was blotto, you know? I can’t remember, but I know it was crazy. I was…” His voice arched up in query. “… An ass, right?”

I held my breath for as long as I could.

“Yeah, well,” he laughed, but tension began to file in behind his words, “I have an egg on my head that leads me to think you might have something to say to me.”

“You’re lucky to be alive,” I told him loud enough to be heard.

“Yeah,” his voice still louder, the run of laughter this time for show, “well, shit, aren’t we all, lady?”

I didn’t respond.

“I have flowers here. Two bouquets and from the looks of it, no takers.”

I squinted a look through the eyehole. He had one arm extended, a giant hand I could not see resting against the door, his great head hanging down, and enormous tumid apricot roses punctuated by irises grew from his other side.

“I didn’t press charges,” he said. “I wouldn’t.”

“I didn’t either,” I said.

We breathed at each other through the door. His was loose and even.

I opened the door before I could reconsider and startled him so his handsomeness had to resettle on his face.

He wore a light gray suit, expensive. His handsomeness shocked me still—his every line spoke of its privileges, that he could be hard or soft and life wouldn’t penalize him. And his height lent him force even when he wasn’t asserting it, even sober and contrite or trying contrite on. He’d shaved—his jaw was no less an object of masculinity, as inflexible as ice, but today the skin that dressed it was unexpectedly smooth and taut and unmarked as a young man’s. Today, as he bid for composure, his free hand unmoored and flying awkwardly, straightening his tie, then hiding in his pant pocket, I saw something of a boy in his manner. Bashful, maybe nervous. Surely it had always been there and he worked against it, to be what was expected, a man of business, who dictated to the world, to women.

He talked of the flowers, that he’d visited the best florist in the city, on Fifth Avenue, at the end, near Washington Square. Did I know it? Still, he wasn’t sure if they’d do the trick. He never was one for flowers though he’d bought them often enough. He spoke as if we were friends now that I’d opened my door and stood before him. He was good on the high wire and went on with relief, unused to being on the losing side of things, and gaining in assurance, knowing that if he aimed his mood high, I or anyone listening might be taken up there with him, with his charm.

“What are you watching in there?” And somehow he and his delicious strength were in my living room looking at my old TV and the barrenness I’d chosen to outfit the room in. “No frills, eh?” he said. “I get that. I can see it.”

Why didn’t I throw him out? Because I’d bested him before, because she was safer with him here than anyplace else, and because, most surprisingly of all, I wasn’t afraid of him, and I liked it.

“What are you watching?”

I told him. He asked what I was drinking. I held up the wine bottle. “Have anything stronger?”

I went for the Jameson and two short glasses. When I came back, he’d already situated the only other chair in the room next to my own. He’d seated himself and abandoned the flowers on the credenza.

“This is a funny film.”

“It is.”

I poured for him.

He sipped, then gulped, and, his head thrown back, his enormous Adam’s apple danced. He set about trying to acquaint his long trunk with the austerity of the high-backed chair, a dining room chair from a set I’d stored away.

“It’s a little annoying, too.”

“The film?”

“I mean, look at them go,” he said.

“They don’t quit or can’t. That’s the idea.”

I turned up the volume as Hildy hollered,
Do you hear that? That’s the story I just wrote. Yes, yes, I know we had a bargain. I just said I’d write it. I didn’t say I wouldn’t tear it up—

His body in the too small chair tensed. All of him coiling around an idea, real or imagined. She didn’t let him in. I didn’t either, at first, and now there was a mere hand’s length between us.

—It’s all in little pieces now, Walter, and I hope to do the same for you someday. And that, my friends, is my farewell to the newspaper game. I’m gonna be a woman, not a news-getting machine. I’m gonna have babies and take care of them. Give ’em cod liver oil and watch their teeth grow—

How long would it take Brazo to pick up my message? And would he come? Yes, odds were … The script. He would not fail to play the part assigned him; it would say too much about Brazo as a man.

“Does it have to be that loud?” he asked.

I didn’t turn it down.

He gulped again, emptied the glass, and hunching over his knees, elbows posted on his thighs, he rolled the whiskey glass between his palms, back and forth, picking up speed.

Only one dull lamp lit the room. It gave off as much dimness as clarity and had no effect on the shadows pooling in the room’s corners, at its edges. The screen jumped at us. I wrapped the hand farthest from him, my left, around the neck of the whiskey bottle, which I’d positioned between my legs. I was prepared to lift the bottle in an instant.

They took him to the county hospital, where they’re awfully worried he’ll recover.

Now Les simply held his glass in one hand and regarded it, as if it just spoke out of turn and he was deciding whether he should pitch it.

“I love her and I fucked it up,” he announced. Arm outstretched, he extended his empty glass to me with his eyes on the room’s shadows or farther out still, on the progress of his confession.

I poured for him and then myself.

“I let her use me.”

I turned down the movie’s volume then, though the images still raced at us. He drank. I drank.

“I thought I was in charge, but I wasn’t. And I’m not now.”

“She’s not herself.” I’d said this before, to whom? Leo? “What I mean is she doesn’t know what that is.”

He shook his head. “We went too far.” He extended his arm to me again, and I poured again.

“Why no furniture?” he asked.

“More to clean.” And as I drank down my portion of whiskey, needing to keep pace, I thought
more to ruin, to replace, to worry over.

“Are you gay?”

“No.” I wanted to editorialize but didn’t, only added, “I was married … To a man.”

“So you like men?”

“Some.”

He finished his share again, shivered like a big horse, and then turned to trap me in his gaze for a moment, so unblinking and sure of itself, it burned. “But you love her, too?”

I didn’t answer, though I saw what he was after—aligning the two of us, me with him, outside her, looking in with longing.

“We were kids together,” he said. “She told you that, right? That we go way back?”

I nodded.

He closed his eyes, and my far hand gripped the bottle again, upside down, thumb extended to support my lifting it if I had to, as he recited: “I know the backs of her knees. I know the shape of her elbows. She used to eat tomatoes off the vine. She stole them in season and bit into them like apples. She climbed trees like us boys. She wore the same yellow bathing suit for years. A one-piece. She wouldn’t give it up.… Her father was in insurance, worked hard enough to get by, but he was a bohemian type at heart. Her mother was gorgeous, tall. Like her … She can draw, you know, pictures, and she sings. Have you heard that?”

I shook my head. I wouldn’t tell him what I knew and did not; he meant to drag me back to the strangeness, convince me that I didn’t know her, couldn’t, not like he did. He meant to best me at last.

“Hymns. She sang in church.”

He could be lying. Who could say?

“I loved her then. I’ve loved her as long as I can remember. I planned on marrying her.”

In a theatrical gesture of a man confiding, he laid his mitt of a hand over mine, my right, nearest him. He hoped for sympathy, to disarm me with it. I took my hand away.

After a showy sigh of disappointment, he punished me: “She told me you went into her place when she wasn’t home.”

“Landladies do that sometimes.”

“Not without notification.”

“I thought I smelled something. Gas. It was a precaution.”

He laughed without looking at me. “Bullshit.”

He was instructing me on my trespasses; I was no better than him, no different. I drank again. I’d already had too much.

“You drink like a man.”

His hand on mine again. I closed my eyes and fought back, imagined collaring him—an unforgiving strap of leather around his neck, a rusty leash. Or chains. Yes, better. Hope and I had talked about him and turned him into a joke, hadn’t we? Should I tell him? She didn’t love him any more than she did me; we were necessary distractions, a jigsaw she was arranging like a hobbyist.

I let her use me,
he’d said. Yes, a man who could be led. I’d not known the varying possibilities of a man’s strength or lack of it in so terribly long. Hope hadn’t been able to bridge the distance necessary to get to me on the other side, to put her hands on me with any real ease, but maybe she could cause him to. Hope could. He was desperate to please her now. He would be her body, her intention. This is how we would domesticate him at last. The long man between my legs, doing what he was told.

My head fell back into my chair. My hips moved, up, down. I’d lost them to the reverie. His hand rose and smothered my breast.

“So you said you like men?”

His hand was so big—the physical presence of him expanded—how did one not shrink when confronted with it? His palm pressed in, then eased up to press and circle again, a rhythm. I had to be in charge or else disappear into his voracity, but I did not speak as he lifted the bottle posted between my legs—“What were you going to do? Hit me with this?”—and pulled me toward him and onto his lap.

“Yeah, that’s right, come here.… Shit,” excitement on his breath on my face, “how old are you anyway?” Something was taking place that I dreaded as much as I seemed to need. A sickness muddled in and around the words ranging all through me,
fuck
and then
fuck me,
fuck me;
how the words communicated NOW and don’t stop and every other expression of obliterating time and me, me with it … But then a knock on the door. Polite. I almost did not believe in it. And then it came again—remarkable for its care. Hope saving me from something I might not come back from or not wholly. Or Brazo. Yes. At last.

“Ignore it,” Les said.

“No.”

Somehow I was up, I stood and worked my legs.

I opened the door. The light of the hall hurt my eyes.

Mr. Coughlan like a ghost if not for the light, if not for his solicitousness. Mr. Coughlan apologizing. His door was locked. He did not remember locking it, and while he had one key, the other wasn’t on hand. Could I perhaps help? He’d been traveling and now …

Mr. Coughlan back again.

*   *   *

Life could be benevolent. I’d forgotten. A reversal. Mr. Coughlan here: as surprising and unlikely as Melville’s captain surviving his obsession or, better, Odysseus’s return after so many years and trials met. Life making returns—returned loved ones, returning with them, to you, a part of yourself you did not know how much you missed. His face before me, set on mine, one covered in tributaries of red rushing through and around patches of brown, beautiful scars, whitened nicks and deep scores as if he shaved on choppy waters too often or had liked to put his face in the gale, never-minding the consequences. How gorgeous scars can become once you’ve survived them or when in some fashion you choose them, and would again.

Was that what we were missing through the collecting of our disappointments, that life had as many gains as losses as long as we were willing to tally them, each side, with clear-sightedness? But were we ever clear and did we often seek to be? I was clear enough at seeing him to throw my arms around him to hold him there, to make sure I was not dreaming him up, my ferryman always in motion, wind on him even now, a chill on his clothes. I held on to that, too, and the smells of ash and salt all over him. Where have you been? Where? Where?

It was Les who said give the man some room, let him breathe, but Les was already fading. Les no longer mattered, and he knew it. The battle was over, its spell. Brazo came as Les was leaving, forgetting his expensive bouquets. Brazo standing in my hall upright with alarm, his limbs itchy and alert with blood. A protector by nature and trade, ticking. A man good in crises, who thrives in them. “You think it’s wise to come back here, buddy? You think you can just go anywhere you want, huh?” Les stared him down briefly, snorted a little, and, brushing past the detective, was gone. Like that. More than merely subdued—vanished.