The Affairs of Others: A Novel (7 page)

I tried to focus on the girl but found myself scanning for the source of the fragrance—their scent is sweet, thick as musk. The girl said, “I’m Danielle Boxer. My mother has said so many lovely things about you.” Her kindness had no body to it. She extended her hand, not to shake, but to introduce me game-show style to the food forming a battalion around the teapot, a pile of enormous scones, fruit, Camembert, a quiche. “We have so much to eat,” she declared in a tone that asked “What will we do?” The daughter’s large eyes were a diluted blue; they skittered over things, and her skin was milk-pale and so given to showing every emotion, the action of blood in her veins. Her cheeks were fuller than either her mother’s or her brother’s, yet when she gave me her profile, it was sharp and Roman. She had two faces competing in the one—a girl’s and a woman’s. When her baby fat burned off in her cheeks (where the last of it remained), she’d be striking in an austere way, but for today, perhaps owing to circumstance, she was plainer and frailer-seeming than her mother. And her outfit—recalling Audrey Hepburn, a high-collared sleeveless blouse with flounced bow and twill gray cropped pants—looked expensive, as formal as mourning clothes, and painfully grown-up.

“Feel free to sit—everyone’s here or around here—I mean if you’d like to sit.” Danielle said this with a fluttering gaze that expected anarchy or disaster of me, all while her hand kept reaching to ensure her chestnut hair was not escaping the tight ponytail she’d assigned it to.

“Mother,” she called to the kitchen, “Your
friend
—”

“Celia,” I helped and sat on the edge of the footstool.

“Yes,
Celia
is here.”

“Good, good,” called Hope. “Be right there.”

“Can you believe all these gorgeous books?” the girl asked, though her tone once again betrayed her; it suggested that the books unsettled her.
So many books.

“George is a reader,” I told her.

“A collector. He has Simone de Beauvoir and Colette. A first edition of
The Second Sex
. Yes.” She nodded to herself, surveying, blinking, then, “It’s a nice apartment,” but there was such querying force in this too that I could easily take it to mean she didn’t care for the apartment at all or wanted, powerfully, to be elsewhere. Suddenly so did I.

“Here I am.” Hope swanned in, hair swept up without one dissenting strand, at once full and contained, lipstick on. She wore a man’s white dress shirt, blue trouser pants, and a silk ivory scarf tied around her neck.

“Leo?” she called.

He emerged from the bedroom. “Sorry, I was—”

“Indisposed,” his mother supplied.

“Right.”

“Celia, welcome.”

I stood.

“You met my children.”

“Yes,” I said softly. “A pleasure.”

“Come, everyone, sit. Let’s eat. Let’s get to know Celia. She’s been very generous to me, allowed me to stay at George’s.”

It was an overstatement, it embarrassed me. Perhaps that was the point of the invite.

A stream of commentary accompanied Hope’s movements as she poured tea, offered cream, sugar, honey. “Leo has always loved honey.” The scones were almond and cinnamon, respectively. “And Danielle wouldn’t eat anything but bread as a baby.” Hope did not rush. She’d done this before and did it commandingly. I wanted to ask after the gardenias—I still could not pinpoint their source—but I didn’t, relaxing instead into Hope’s patter. There was song in her voice and pleasure—the pleasure of being a hostess, mother, of demonstrating this. The marks on her neck were covered by the scarf and may have healed. Whatever their state, this was meant to be a new day. Her skin was unblemished; her eyes were clear. “The tea is called Thé de Fête, party tea. We bought it in Paris at Mariage Frères, this wonderful teahouse in the Marais. You have to go if you haven’t been.”

“I haven’t.”

“I took the kids when we’d go every year, but now they’re selling tea all over the world and it’s lost its specialness a little, hasn’t it?”

Danielle nodded at her mother and said vacantly, “Globalization.”

“Or progress,” said Leo, without contention. “I mean they have a good thing.”

“Yes, but that doesn’t mean they should just give it away,” said Danielle, blinking, “to anyone.”

“They’re not giving anything away,” said Leo calmly.

“We haven’t been to Paris this year. The kids’ schedules have been harder. Danielle’s finishing her senior year. Leo has a job.”

“We were there last year,” Danielle said. “I studied there. At the Sorbonne. All of us were there … All
four
of us.”

Hope’s back stiffened. “Yes, that’s right. Well, Celia, you’ll have to tell me if you like the tea—it’s got a lot of vanilla in it. Can you smell it?”

Here was my chance. “Yes, now that it’s in the cup. It smells delicious, but I keep smelling gardenia. That can’t be the tea.”

“Oh, no, or yes, it’s in the bedroom. An adorable plant with what? Two blossoms?”

“Three,” said Danielle.

“A gift from my children.”

“Oh, how nice.”

“What a scent,” Hope marveled. She sipped her tea. “I grew up in North Carolina and under my bedroom window there was this old chicken coop that had been claimed by what I still swear was this wild growth of gardenias.”

“You
still
swear?” Danielle asked.

“Oh, well, I’ve since been told by someone who claims to be an authority on these things that gardenias don’t grow wild in North Carolina, that it couldn’t have been gardenias or that it’s unlikely.”

Danielle put her teacup down. “But you’ve always told us it
was
gardenias, Mother. I mean, that’s why we bought the plant for you. To remind you.” Color climbed up Danielle’s cheeks; her brow broke into lines.

“Well, it might have been. That was the scent or that’s what I recall. It was so powerful—”

“How could you get that wrong? I mean how could someone get that wrong? All these years, you told us that story, since we were little. Gardenias, gardenias and that
seductive
fragrance everywhere, just
everywhere
. That’s what you told us. They were there—”

“Danny, it’s okay. It was the right thought,” Leo put in. “It was Danny’s idea.” He became still, his head cocked with one ear higher than the other as if he were trying to make out more inviting sounds at some distance.

“I love gardenias, darling. I’m so grateful. Drink your tea before it gets cold. It’s your favorite.”

“No, this is
Dad’
s favorite.” Danielle used both hands to smooth back her hair, once, twice, three times.

“This tea? No, I don’t think so.”

“Yes, Mother. It is. You couldn’t have forgotten already. He’d order this and a—”

“Leave her alone, Danny.” Leo strained not to move, to keep his voice level.

“I just mean she should know these things. I do. You do. Daddy does.”

“Stop,” Leo almost whispered. “It’s not her fault.”

“I know that.” The girl’s eyes filled. “Of course. It’s that
all
the details are important. It’s how we know … what matters.” The blood took over her face entirely. Her mouth went into a tight, straight line—it was not her mother’s mouth; it had none of her fullness. It was prettily formed but thin and in its austerity reminded me of many of the faces of the Connecticut town I’d grown up in. She’d have to earn personality, find some generosity, for a mouth like that, her father’s perhaps. She was the only one who’d introduced herself using her last name, his last name.

“Danielle speaks a beautiful French. Eat something, darling. I bet you haven’t eaten today. She’s been studying a lot for her finals and it’s never easy to leave college behind.”

Danielle bit into an almond scone. It appeared to disgust her.

“What sort of work do you do, Leo?” I asked.

“I frame pictures.”

“He just started that recently. He’s very good with his hands. He even designs the frames. He works with artists, galleries.”

“My PR agent.” He nodded at Hope.

“He
was
in banking,” Danielle reported, sullen, chewing still.

“I worked with my dad, but I quit a few months ago.”

“He always wanted to try this, right, darling?”

“Right.”

“Blake—remember Blake? Who runs the gallery? From George’s party? He relies on Leo.” Hope aimed high, for buoyancy. “And my father painted, and he built his own frames. Leo comes by it naturally.”

“That’s great.” I slid a grape in my mouth.

“Right,” Leo said again.

“I have champagne if anyone wants some,” Hope offered. “And shall we have some music? George has all these great compilations.” She attended to the stereo, then turned to us. “Everyone try the quiche. I put Gruyère in it. Even if that’s sacrilege, to whom? Who can tell me?”

“Julia Child,” Danielle recited obediently, trying to recover her mood, though her voice was weary. She nodded at me. “Traditional quiche Lorraine requires no cheese.”

“That’s right. So I’m transgressing, and I
love
it, love it, love it. Leo, cut everyone a piece for me, will you?” To me she said, “It’s a wonder you know the scent of gardenias so well.”

“It was a family favorite.”

“You’ve got to see it.” Hope retrieved the potted plant. As she did, a man’s voice sang “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen” to an up tempo. She held it out in front of her. “Doesn’t it take you away, just looking at it?”

The dark shine of its full, dark green leaves, its cream-colored blossoms wide open and pouting extravagantly did belong to another climate where growing and dying happened all at once, in a tumble, where they didn’t wait for anything or anyone, let alone for seasons to change or for mourning. Its smell came at us from everywhere, seizing on every particle of the air we took in. I breathed through my mouth and saw that already one of the flowers had begun to curl into itself, turning dingy so quickly.

“That’s Sam Cooke singing,” said Leo, but neither that fact nor the cheer of the song’s arrangement could quite strip the blues from the song; we heard “trouble” over and over; it snapped at us, and in a room so suffocated with so insistent and yet so fragile a fragrance there was nowhere to hide.

Danielle started weeping before Sam Cooke had finished; her posture crumbled and she said, “Oh, Mother, I’m sorry. I’m
so
sorry.”

Leo stood up from his hips, without leaning forward, as if he’d grown straight up from the chair, and then held himself there, frozen. I stood too. The boy hung his eyes on mine, didn’t blink. If I was invisible to the girl, I was not to him: I did not know whether I was meant to bolster him in some way, or act, if he was imploring me—
do something
. I watched as Hope scooped Danielle into her, and for a moment I was gone, seeing that embrace on the Promenade, Mitchell and that woman, how skin can and can’t give way, how you wish it could finally, give way. Hope spoke into her daughter’s neck and hair, “It’s okay, baby. It’s a hard time, but it’s okay. I’m here. Mumma’s here.”

At that, I walked to the gardenia directly, picked it up with both arms. Its foliage pressed into my mouth and nose as I carried it to the door—a green so dense. I put it outside, in a far dark corner of the hall. When I came back, I reported, “It’s too strong.” I did not say this loudly or wait for a reply. I reached and squeezed the solid width of Leo’s forearm once fast so as not to know his skin or temperature too well. I placed my hand on Hope’s shoulder as George might, gently, and whispered a thank-you. Then I left Hope to her children.

A MAN VANISHES

T
WO SETS OF FEET STEPPING
with care, as if afraid to agitate too much, over my head. Slippered or socked, padded anyway. March, as it turned into April, kept its bite at night and mother and daughter folded into one another. Two days and nights like this, the two alone, from what I could tell, growing quieter and quieter, as if the absence of noise might mean the absence of pain. The gardenia remained in the hall. I waited for it to die. Perhaps they did, too.

I reconnected my phone. I dialed in for my messages. Marina’s voice—heavy in English, revealing little, a flat hello and will you call.
Thank you
. Mr. Coughlan’s daughter, her voice as tight as a rusted screw. Two calls from her. The second screechy—
please let me hear from you
. False graciousness. The roofer wondering if I accepted his estimate: a businessman who knew to speak to me with friendly reserve, to keep his message short but lively, as if each word was a firm handshake.
I look forward to hearing back
.

Finally a message from Mitchell’s wife, Angie: I could hear her face opening and closing as she asked if we could discuss the building’s recycling policy again. She believed the definitions were expanding. She hesitated. “More plastics … Containers.” She rarely hesitated.

I tended to the building. I sorted the recycling as I always did, I tied the garbage bags, avoiding expanding definitions for now. I looked to do some weeding in the garden but was not sure which were the weeds and which weren’t.

One afternoon, having slept well, I volunteered as I sometimes did, several times a month, at Helping Hands, sifting the donated clothes, shoes, housewares. Then I walked Cobble Hill—away from Atlantic Avenue. I bought berries, pasta, tuna fish. I picked up a bottle of whiskey. Jameson. My husband’s brand when he had a taste for whiskey. Before it got too late, I returned the calls made to me the day before, relieved to get voice mails all around. No one answered their phone anymore.

I sat and listened for mother and daughter, for a third night of their sort of quiet. I ate tuna from the can. I let dark come in the apartment, bend its lines and cool my face.

How long did it take me to form the sounds I began to hear above me into a scenario? First there was a table scudding across tile, tile I had installed in George’s kitchen. Then the table, George’s exquisite cherry table, finally meeting the wall, hitting it again and again, being made part of a rhythm. Hope’s utterances, high and loud enough to reach me, giving volume and consequence to the rhythm; and a man’s voice shaping and directing all the noises. What was he saying? I couldn’t say, though it was two words. One syllable each. They didn’t have to have meaning up there or down here—what they advertised was his control and the pride in it. Her voice went off at longer intervals. Then I heard what seemed like a squeal. I stood. I could remember her son’s eyes on mine, the blooming color in his lips and along the edges of his nostrils. I opened the kitchen window for air, without thinking. Doing so brought them closer, with my kitchen right below George’s. The same alert night air reaching for them, reached me now. I could hear “please” from her, then the intelligible commentary that spoke of pain and pleasure, and from him, “That’s right.” Then loud, “Say it.” Not a yell exactly but delight in volume, in his freedom with it, with her. “Stay with me, damn it!” Hope falling wholesale into a place where words had no place. The table rocked and then seemed to lift; it barked against the surface and was held there: “Say it or we start all over again. The whole thing.”