The Resident

by Francis Cottam

Suddenly her heart was beating at double its normal rate. She had barely taken in what he had said about the probable cost of heating the place. Her mind was on a rent she could afford for a living space that was positively palatial compared to what she had seen over recent days. She felt as though a burden was being lifted she had almost been unaware of the true weight of, until this joyful moment of relief in escaping it.

  She approached the bedroom window, taking in the epic view beyond the glass: the East River flowed beneath the Brooklyn Bridge and beyond, the Manhattan skyline rose uneven and majestic in the brightening day. It was mesmerising.

  ‘This is the best view in the building,’ the man said.

  ‘Are you the super?’

  ‘I own it.’

  ‘Oh, right.’ Juliet wondered if she should apologise for her lack of tact and the assumption that had prompted it. She looked at him through more objective eyes. He had a salt and pepper beard under eyes of vivid green, she noticed; they were magnetic, attractive, even.

  ‘My family bought this place in the forties,’ he said. ‘And to answer your question, no nightclub downstairs. That wouldn’t be my style at all. I’m kind of allergic to crowds. I’m gonna start restoring some of the apartments ’cause some of the tenants have finally moved out. But until I’m done, it could get a little crazy with the noise during the day. And I figured even a pain-in-the-ass tenant would keep his – or her – mouth shut at that price.’

  Juliet said, ‘I’m not a pain in the ass.’

  He smiled slightly at that. ‘My name is Max.’

  ‘I’m Juliet.’ They shook hands. The gesture seemed awkward, formal, Max wiping wood dust from his palm before offering it. She liked the way his grip was strong and dry. From what she could tell he seemed capable, dependable, the sort of man who had the physical strength necessary to tackle manual work without any twenty-first-century whimpering. She guessed he was roughly the same age she was, but there was something old-fashioned about him. Perhaps a more accurate word would be traditional.

  ‘After a twenty-hour shift, I typically go comatose for eight hours,’ she mentioned.

  ‘Twenty hours?’

  ‘I’m an ER doctor.’ She did not try to disguise the pride in her voice; she’d been qualified for years now, but it still gave her a thrill.

  Max took off his glasses and wiped the paint off the lenses. Juliet saw that his eyes really were an arresting shade of green. But he avoided looking straight at her.

  ‘There are a few things about the place. Cell phones don’t get the best reception. That bothers some people.’

  ‘Not me. I’ll get a landline.’

  At that moment a deep rumble vibrated through the building. It thrummed through her feet, startling Juliet.

  ‘And the F Line,’ Max said.

  ‘Jesus …’

  He walked into the bathroom. She followed him. The rumble of the train beneath them continued, then faded and was gone. ‘It’s a maintenance track that runs under the building,’ he explained. ‘Usually it’s used at night. You might not think so, but you do get used to it. And then one day you find that you don’t even hear it at all.’

  He turned and she was right on his heels. She thought that this invasion of his personal space might have irritated him when she saw the look on his face, but she really could not help herself. She was eager. In fact, she was desperate.

  ‘I’ll need your social security number and three references.’

  ‘I can get you all of that, plus records of my taxes for the last five years if you want.’

  Max hesitated. He appeared to come to a decision; she could see it in the relaxed way his shoulders dropped. He blinked and smiled slightly and she could hear it in the gentler tone of his voice. ‘I prefer no pets.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘The heaters are of a certain vintage. They bang in the morning. Loudly.’

  ‘I like loud heaters.’

  Max put his hand into his pocket and pulled out the key and dropped it into Juliet’s palm. Her fingers closed around it. The metal was cold and solid and heavy and real in her grip. A surge of pure relief engulfed her.

  Just like that, she thought, easy.

  Just like that.

  Seven

  JULIET WENT BACK to Sydney and Mike’s place clutching the key to the new apartment in her right hand like a priceless relic. It was a tool, obviously, a useful, practical item, one of the necessities of life. It was also a little brass metaphor, wasn’t it? It was the device that would unlock the route to the rest of her life.

  Sydney and Mike were both out when she returned. It was unbearable. For the first time in ages she had good news and there was no one to share it with. She paced impatiently, waiting for one of them to get back.

  Syd got back first, holding a hand up as Juliet came rushing into the hall and running straight to the toilet. ‘Sorry, Jules,’ she called through the door. ‘You know how it is. My bladder has been squeezed down to the size of a peanut. I’ll be with you in a minute.’

  Juliet went and made some coffee for something to do. She had two steaming cups ready by the time Syd finally came into the living room and slumped onto the sofa, groaning as she dragged her shoes off her swollen feet.

  ‘You want to soak those?’ Juliet was suddenly too excited to tell her.

  ‘No. I want to know what’s put that look on your face.’

  Juliet grinned. ‘Nothing much. I just found an apartment overlooking Brooklyn Bridge today. Great views, huge rooms, freshly decorated …’

  ‘Right, and how much?’

  ‘Oh, thirty-eight hundred,’ Juliet replied airily

  Syd sat forward. ‘You have got to be kidding me.’

  Juliet pulled the key out of her pocket and waved it enticingly in front of Syd.

  ‘Nope. See this? This little object is the key to the rest of my life. You are not going to believe this apartment, Syd. It’s totally insane.’

  Mike insisted on dinner at a place in SoHo with a jazz pianist and a young Italian chef fast making a hot name for his new restaurant. The food was delicious but Juliet felt so stunned and excited by her success in finding the perfect home that she could barely eat. She could not bring herself to drink much, either. She felt drunk already on the intoxicating thrill of her triumph in finding her apartment.

  Sydney said, ‘When do you move in?’

  ‘Max says a week.’

  Mike raised an eyebrow. ‘Max?’

  ‘Maybe less if he gets through the re-wiring tomorrow.’

  ‘He’s going for a total refurb?’

  ‘The place is decorated to a really high specification, Mike. You would not believe the floors and ceilings and the detail of the plasterwork. I think he just wants to do a job in keeping with what’s already there.’

  ‘Makes sense if he owns the building,’ Mike said. ‘Chunk of real estate like that, the guy must be worth a fortune.’

  ‘Millions,’ Sydney said.

  ‘You wouldn’t know it to look at him,’ Juliet said.

  Sydney pulled a face. ‘Dog meat?’

  Juliet laughed. It was the first time she could remember having done so since before her separation from Jack. It felt good, liberating. ‘No airs and graces is what I mean,’ she said. ‘I mean his demeanour. He affects this surly, blue-collar persona. I don’t think it’s necessarily the real him. I get the impression he’s quite shy and reserved. He has these startling green eyes.’

  ‘One of those still-waters-run-deep types,’ Sydney said. ‘They can be rewarding if you’re prepared to put the necessary effort in. They can also be a slog. You have to concentrate so hard with them. Personally I prefer shallow, superficial men who wear their hearts on their sleeves because their feeble intellect doesn’t really provide them with the luxury of a choice.’

  ‘Thank you, darling,’ Mike said. ‘I love you too.’

  Juliet said, ‘Romancing my landlord is the last thing on my mind. I could have hugged him, though, whe
n he dropped the key into my hand.’

  ‘Power,’ Mike said. ‘It’s an aphrodisiac. At least, that’s what I’m told. I wouldn’t know, because I’ve never had any.’ He winked at his wife and then refilled their glasses and proposed a toast to Juliet, her new home and her golden future.

  There was a lull after that. The pianist on the podium, bathed by a single spotlight, played something with a spry, syncopated rhythm. The tune was familiar to Juliet, but she could not have put a name to it.

  She was aware of the clatter of cutlery on expensive plates and the chatter and laughter of people enjoying themselves. For the first time in what felt like ages, she realised she was looking at life beyond the hospital as something more than just a condition to be endured.

  She was excited and unsure about the direction events might take. Liberation and independence and adventure beckoned. She was still young. She was healthy and attractive. Suddenly happiness was a possibility again.

  Juliet moved her stuff into her new apartment four days later. Max had finished his work a couple of days ahead of schedule. Her heart might still be in limbo but her belongings would no longer be in storage and that would be a blessing. Actually, there wasn’t much in the way of belongings to move. The ordeal of dividing the spoils between herself and Jack had not seemed worth the possessions she had accrued as a consequence.

  She was not someone really very hung up on material things; antique vases moved her no more than did the latest designer chairs. But she needed somewhere to lay her head and the space she had rented was vast and would require some furnishings just so that it did not look empty. Anyway, Juliet thought that she deserved some home comforts. God knows she’d earned them after the last few weeks.

  It was just her luck, though, that she seemed to have hired the removal man from hell. Everything she owned occupied no more than a third of the capacity of his truck. Cardboard boxes were neatly piled. A standard lamp and a refrigerator and a spotless new double-bed mattress were secured by grey tape to wooden ribs along the sides of the vehicle. The man pulled a loading ramp out of the rear, pushed a dolly in her face and checked his watch. ‘I gotta be uptown in exactly a hundred minutes, so you got sixty to get this shit out of my truck or I gotta charge you another day.’

  Juliet looked at him in disbelief. ‘Take a deep breath. I don’t want you to strain yourself talking.’

  He ignored her sarcasm and returned to the driver’s cab where he sat back and pointedly opened his newspaper.

  Juliet swore softly to herself and looked up at the sky. It was overcast but the clouds were light, benign. Rain looked unlikely, which was something, when everything she had to her name was about to be dumped on the sidewalk.

  ‘You hired the only moving man in New York who doesn’t actually move the furniture?’

  Juliet recognised the voice behind her: Max. She turned round to see him. As he was when they first met, he was covered in plaster and wood dust and spattered with paint. He was a picture of practical competence and, she hoped, certainly able to help.

  ‘I could really use a hand here,’ she said.

  ‘Evidently.’

  ‘Are you very busy?’

  He appraised the hill of stuff obstructing the sidewalk in bubble-wrap and brown paper and adhesive tape. ‘If I wasn’t, I’m about to be,’ he said, smiling at her.

  Item by item, they brought the furniture from the sidewalk to the apartment on the ninth floor. Juliet couldn’t help feeling that there was something quite intimate about the procedure, as if in handling her possessions, this man she did not really know was familiarising himself with her. That couldn’t really be the case, she knew. He knew nothing about the history of what she owned and the circumstances in which these things had been used. Still, she couldn’t shake the sense that he was learning things about her that she would not have chosen to reveal.

  Last, they moved the new mattress to her bed. The aperture of the elevator was much smaller than its interior space and the mattress would not fit through it. There was no alternative but to haul it nine flights up the stairs. Juliet guided while Max followed below bearing the bulk of the weight. The mattress was a good one. Its fabric and springs were substantial and heavy. Sleep was precious to Juliet, a commodity she was prepared to invest in.

  On the eighth-floor landing, Juliet called down, ‘You OK?’

  ‘No, but it’s only one more flight.’

  Tightening her grip on their burden, Juliet lifted her head and suddenly, two steps away, at the top of the flight and far too close, an elderly man stood peering intently into her upturned face. She was aware of white hair and wrinkles and the intense gaze of bloodshot, baggy eyes. Startled, she gasped and the mattress slid from her grip, banged and slithered and almost toppled over Max, who was wrestling now below her with the whole of its unwieldy weight. Juliet grabbed her end and they set it down gratefully for a rest.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ Juliet called down to Max.

  He looked up and past her to the elderly figure on the landing at the top of the flight. ‘It’s not your fault,’ he said. He blew out air, exasperated. Then he said, ‘This is my grandfather. August, Juliet. Juliet, August.’

  Juliet looked up at the old man and said, rather redundantly she thought, ‘I’m the new tenant.’

  ‘You got pets?’

  His voice sounded gruff. And not just with age. ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘Are you loud?’

  The question was so baldly put that Juliet could not help but giggle. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Not at all.’

  August looked probingly into Juliet’s face. She thought that he was probably about eighty years old, tall and gaunt and with the frailness of old age, but with a strong mental energy, an emotional alertness that came off him like heat.

  He said, ‘I’m sorry I scared you.’

  He stretched out his hand to her and she shook it, surprised at the strength of his grip. It was much stronger than she would have expected. He looked glaringly past her down at his grandson but he did not say anything further. Max said, ‘Ready?’ and they began to haul the mattress the thankfully short distance to her apartment and the bedroom where it would lie.

  *

  They were both sweating when they finally made it inside the apartment. Juliet looked at her small huddle of belongings, shrunk even further by the palatial scale of her enormous living room. The apartment still seemed empty. It would look different when she had unpacked and arranged the contents of the boxes. It might never be exactly homely; the dimensions of the place were too extravagant for that, but Juliet didn’t think her new address needed to look cosy to be her home. To her, it seemed perfect.

  Max was looking at the pile of boxes against the far wall. ‘You travel light,’ he said.

  Juliet exhaled. She dabbed at her moist forehead with the cuff of her shirtsleeve. ‘I needed a new start. So I had to get rid of a lot. I would have liked to saw the bed in half and burn it, but I need a place to sleep at night.’

  In the charged, silent aftermath of her own words, she realised that she had said far too much. She added, ‘I’m not quick at forgiving.’

  ‘Well,’ Max said, ‘I think new starts are good.’

  Juliet smiled. She had left him with little alternative but to say that to enable an escape from the mutual embarrassment that her gushing admission had provoked.

  She was certain she would not have been so forth-coming were it not for her gratitude to the man. He’d been her saviour, first in renting her the apartment, and then again when he’d rescued her belongings from the sidewalk and helped her move in.

  In his dusty clothes and paint-spattered spectacles he did not look much like a knight on a white charger, but there was a sense in which he had galloped to her rescue, wasn’t there? And there was something winningly self-deprecating about him. After the betrayal her husband’s vanity had led to, there was something attractive about the modesty which seemed to characterise Max.

  Eight

&n
bsp; JULIET WAS DETERMINED to enjoy her first night in her new home. She decided to begin it with a cleansing, scalding-hot shower. The vaguely adventurous feeling she had experienced in the restaurant with Sydney and Mike had clarified into something more purposeful. She wanted to properly settle in, to restore her emotional stamina and rebuild her self-esteem to the point at which she would be able to deal with what had happened to her and see herself as someone more than just the victim of a sexual betrayal.

  Sydney was right, after all, she mused, studying her naked body in the full-length mirror on the bathroom wall. She was, by any objective measure, physically attractive. She had a good mind and a good job and a cheery disposition, in normal circumstances. The business with Jack had bruised her; it had not turned her into a man hater.

  She was still musing on this, lathering her body under the showerhead with a sort of luxurious guilt, when the mirror on the wall inches in front of her began to tremble, almost imperceptibly. She put out her hand and touched the steamy glass. She was not imagining it. She could feel it shivering against her fingertips. She could see the tremor running through it as her blurred reflection jittered, though under the showerhead, her body had become motionless. Suddenly, the mirror shook violently in its frame. Juliet noticed with a calm detachment that was almost cold, that if she screamed, no one would hear her.

  She tried to control her breathing, to make sense of what she was seeing. Water gurgled down the drain with a groan that sounded almost human. And the entire building started to rumble as a subway train roared and juddered along underneath it.

  She turned off the shower and hopped dripping to the towel rail, grabbing a big bath towel and throwing it around her shoulders. Shivering with shock, she ran into her living room and switched on the radio. She suddenly and urgently needed something mundane to help grip her mind and harness her imagination before it skittered out of control.

  She punched buttons until she got a weather station and listened to talk of anti-cyclones and isobars until she was dry and had stopped shaking. The voice on the weather station talked blithely on about the chance of early snowfalls on the East Coast. It didn’t help; shock and surprise had made her feel very vulnerable.