The Affairs of Others: A Novel (6 page)

Yes, it was years ago, before I bought my building, when I was still not my own entirely. I’d been tricked into attending a support group for the recently bereaved by my well-meaning sister-in-law, Maureen. A newly minted trauma counselor, she came to the city from Boston often after 9/11, to suss out the varieties and degrees of trauma felt by her even in the sidewalks. She wanted to put her face into the epicenter of it, taste the mess of it. I did not, or not more than living here required of me or anyone. But would I come and observe her conducting a group therapy session? Give her feedback? Meet some like-minded women? Who else could she count on? I didn’t have it in me to say no. Not then. She’d been suspicious of me, maybe she was yet. He hadn’t wanted to die in hospice, and I defended that choice as if I were defending his life, rather than his death. And just when I might have listened to reason, to Maureen, and handed him over to steadier hands, he had died suddenly. Or not suddenly.

No, it was a lifetime in that room. When I did manage to sleep then, I could feel myself slipping back into that room, counting his breaths. Alone with him again. And even if I told myself it was his choice, I had done it: deprived Maureen a place there.

So I watched as the women—it was a women’s group—formed a circle; I remember being amazed that they could keep their seats even as rage choked the air around them.

One woman reported her husband had worn dirty underwear that September day. They’d been too busy for laundry. Another that her husband had eaten his favorite breakfast that morning. Maple-flavored oatmeal a consolation to her even still. When someone asked me to share, mistaking me for one of them, I told them out of politeness, with Maureen nodding her encouragement, that my husband was gone over a year ago by way of a protracted illness. Each in their different way looked at me as if I’d betrayed them, and I hated Maureen then as I did when she had insisted he die in a hospice and I denied her every entreaty, no matter how polite, or when she called wanting to talk about her brother since then—to catalog his habits, his affections, the set of his eyes. Yes, I’d say, his eyes were brown; yes, he loved music, books, the northern Atlantic coast, but I would not give her Coltrane, Bowie, Bill Withers, or Coney Island in high season or York Beach, Maine, just after the tourists left in the fall or how he smelled of summer all year round and loved Melville for his recklessness and made me love him, too, or that I’d read Proust and Jane Austen to him even while he rolled his eyes at me, pretending he didn’t like it, testing my commitment, touching me in places I liked to be touched to distract me. Because he could quote from
Moby-Dick
I came to as well. I didn’t anymore or only rarely, though I kept copies on hand, within reach to test my memory.…

I did not talk of my husband. People wanted details. I had millions more, and they were greedy for them, for news of a love I still observed, but something hard and visceral in me refused to give it. He belonged to me alone. That was the price of his leaving me as he did, when he did. Privacy is not something Americans understand well anymore: You are only as real or worthwhile as the stories you surrender and even then, even if you’re willing, there’s no guarantee you’ll pass. Especially with women my age, any age, really, who too often trafficked in feelings for leverage. You see, I didn’t want these sorts of tests to factor into my days. I did not care for expectations now. I couldn’t afford to.

Years ago, I read a review of a reissue of a book by a German writer, Peter Handke. It was a memoir about his mother and her suicide. The reviewer, a novelist, wrote that Handke’s mother’s sort of death didn’t rank as much of a tragedy in the scheme of things, in the face of mass murder, genocide, famine. One aging middle-class woman taking her life was prosaic. Too small. And the widows in that support group probably would have agreed, that certain griefs trump others. But they did not know my husband, what I lost, or what I had done, and I could not, would not, tell them.

Upstairs came a clatter, a pot or pan hitting the floor, the metal reverberating. Hope did not rush to collect it. Likely she was watching it try to settle. When it did, when I heard nothing more for a space of a few minutes, I made it to the door, and out of the building. There were the birds again—so loud with their business that for a moment I thought the world was theirs, but then with the chilled air finding its way through my clothes, I had to walk, and there on the corner I saw the cars and taxis and delivery trucks climbing Clinton Street; they were panting and hollering, brakes trilling, overwhelming the birds.

And on the sidewalks came the first wave of the morning’s rush-hour pedestrians. I remembered what it was like, the competition with the lights, the awareness of the clock in every part of your body, and all the calculations going in your head despite you. Brooklyn Heights, Cobble Hill, Boerum Hill, Carroll Gardens, all of downtown Brooklyn into Park Slope was populated by variations of middle class, from low to high. The neighborhoods had become so desirable, for the proximity to Manhattan and the prettiness of the streets, the quality of the schools, that people did what they had to to stay, and, more, to belong; they paid in iPods, iPhones, and BlackBerrys, in fashionable shoes, handbags, and jobs, with the highlights in their hair, the cut of their dresses and suits and pants, the contributions to the Botanic Garden, Housing Works, NPR, and Doctors Without Borders. Never mind the rents, the condo and parking fees. I could almost hear the arithmetic that meant more tender considerations were left behind, that got them to the subway and into their offices.

But I could stroll. I could walk away from the subways on Montague Street, and as I turned to do so I saw a young woman walking toward me, marching really, shoulders up by her ears, face a knot, math going. How much time, how many blocks, when could she afford a building with a doorman, laundry, a view? Not yet. She was not many years out of college. She’d foregone stockings and her legs under her skirt were pink with the cold, though she would not concede to it. Spring meant no stockings. She gripped a magazine in one hand like she might hit someone with it and glanced at me dismissively. Hadn’t I somewhere to go? For as long as our eyes met I knew a moment’s panic. And with guilt I thought of my own bills. I had a new roof to put on the building. I could afford it. Over time. Yes. There was time.

I watched her as she crossed Atlantic Avenue into Brooklyn Heights, where I used to live with my husband. I had considered moving farther away but only made it to the other side of Atlantic. To Pacific Street. From Atlantic to Pacific, no real distance at all.

I almost didn’t see Mitchell Braunstein making his way down the street. Even from two blocks and some away, I could observe how he had challenged his leanness. His head and arms, hanging, looked carelessly attached; his steps were smaller than usual for a man of his height, six feet or so. I do not know how far he’d run, but it looked as though he’d gone full out and was accounting for it now. He hadn’t seen me yet, and before I could decide to avoid greeting him or not, he appeared to remember something; he looked stricken with the remembering and went back in the direction he’d come. It was his urgency that made me follow him. Perhaps he’d dropped his key or his wallet. Perhaps I could help. Landlords had some obligations, and my head was not clear.

He walked quickly and so did I. When he broke into a trot, I did the same. Then he halted just short of Atlantic Avenue, as if he’d run into something or someone. His body reared up slightly. He paced, appeared to catch his breath, then bent to put his hands on his knees, his elbows making dangerous angles for anyone who came too close. His head lowered again. It looked like he might let it fall at last, let it go, that great heavy head of his, and just when I thought so, thought I should turn back before he saw me seeing him, turn into the tide of commuters who did not have time to take Mitchell or me in, he set off again. This time, thankfully, he simply walked at a pitch. One I could match, at a remove.

He led me across Atlantic. I could not pass from Cobble Hill into the Heights without feeling a slippage, sometimes light, sometimes severe, into the past. I did not do it often. But if I kept my focus on him, on what was new, the new chill, the forsythia with its whiplike limbs tipping a new yellow, trying to bloom despite the cold, I could navigate it, yes, with Mitchell, my tenant of over four years, on Henry Street, turning on Montague, past the used bookstore from which my husband and I had taken home so many books, past the Polish diner where we ate boiled pierogi and suffered the indifference of the bored Polish waitstaff, to the Promenade.

It was cantilevered above the Brooklyn–Queens Expressway, which, along with all the city streets, fumed with the new day’s exhaust, its noise and ambition, but Mitchell never minded this or the view of the harbor and lower Manhattan, as if he had no room for any of it now, as if he had no past or future. It was lovely to witness, this race of his, until he found his object, sitting in the middle of the line of benches. He stopped to see her fully first and so did I. A woman who was as lean as he, nearly as tall, as poured out from exertion, in her running clothes, her nose and cheeks ruddied; her damp dark hair seeping out from an unremarkable woolen cap to her jawline. Before I could properly size her up, decide if she was merely a sister or a running friend from work or college with whom he’d just quarreled maybe, he wrapped himself around her and she curled into him. They held on as if someone threatened to come and pry them apart. Or as if they were freezing. They hid their faces in the other’s dampness, what had to be a cold damp now. Salty. They did not see me. How could they? A woman standing where she did not belong.

TEA AND WHAT WAS EXPECTED

I
WOKE
LATE
, and as the morning became midday I could still inhabit a dream and it me and I could see my husband reaching for me with both arms, but they were black with this new green, inky with it, and he was laughing. The phone rang. I didn’t answer it, and when it rang again, this time in a way that struck me as plaintive, I unplugged it. I thought to go back to bed, but I threw water on my face, attended to my teeth, made coffee, still seeing him reaching for me so when the knock came at the door, my door, I could not but think for the interval it took to turn the knob, the lock, that it was him, that he’d managed to find me here. I hadn’t gone too far away. I’d stayed just close enough, on the other side of Atlantic. But a young man presented himself instead. Hope’s son. Unmistakably. The one I’d seen pulled into her on the street once months and months ago.

“Hello,” he said. “Good morning.” Measured. Almost decorous. Had he been taught not to fidget or was it his nature to stand so still?

I caught myself staring, said hello back.

“My mother, upstairs?”

“Yes, oh, yes, is everything okay?”

He paused to consider that. Oak and sand winding through his brown hair. Eyes like his mother’s, though darker overall as if someone had thrown in bits of peat. And so solidly made through his trunk and well-formed limbs. Young, yes, but a man already in body.

“With the apartment?” I clarified.

“Yes, fine, or I think so.” A dazed something in his manner caused him to pause again. “Thanks, I mean for the apartment. Thanks for the apartment.” There was a scent of pennies, of copper, coming from him and something cedary in his sweat. He rolled forward on the balls of his feet, then stopped, catching himself.

“You’re welcome. I’m sorry, I didn’t get your name.”

“Sorry, yes, I’m Leo.”

“I’m Celia.”

“She told me. The landlady.”

“Yep.”

“My mother wants me to invite you to coffee, no, tea, that was it, tea with us, upstairs. With my sister and me. So we can meet you. She’d like that. In about an hour?” He was not used to being her emissary, or not in years, but he wouldn’t think of turning her down now. When I hesitated, he pursued me, for her. “Just for a minute. She has her mind set on it.” He did not resort to charm, as she did. He looked down as he reported, “She’s singing,” and then surprised me by looking at me directly. It woke me—that sincerity. There it was again, and with her eyes reimagined on him. I did not know how to reply except the way he most wanted. “Okay. In about an hour then.”

*   *   *

I thought I could manage it—do whatever was expected for an hour. I thought I was sufficiently alert when the door to George’s apartment opened and Hope’s daughter smiled through puffy eyes and blotched cheeks, threw her shoulders back and gave me a long neck, her mother’s, yes, a display of poise and simple courtesy.

I don’t know what I saw first once the girl moved off and let me in—that the place had now settled into a soft overgrowth, of flowers, some expensively arranged, some carelessly, and of more bright pillows and afghans, one hooked over the couch, another on the wingchair, another folded on a footstool I had never noticed before.

It was as if Hope was primed to put on an extended slumber party—something green, a soft something for the head, a coverlet reckoned for each potential guest. She or her children had also managed to displace books so that here and there they leaned into one another on the shelf like school friends or were littered around the room, a few abandoned mid-read, left wide open. And I smelled gardenias, a scent stronger than any other in that room, than the tea already set out and steaming in a white and rose-stenciled ceramic pot, than the perfumes of mother or daughter or the unmistakable scent of the boy.

The gardenia was my mother’s favorite flower and as such had been a burden to me and to my father when he was still alive. Gardenias, being tropical, don’t grow in the Northeast save in a hothouse or with concerted effort; and because they bruise easily, die quickly, florists don’t always favor them; they can’t be relied on to play their part. My father and I often watched Mother’s Day corsages, picked up that Sunday morning, turn brown right on my mother’s wrist even before the afternoon had fully arrived.