Later that evening, she entered her apartment feeling just a little trepidation, reminded by the long shadows of the encroaching evening of the events and suspicions of the previous night. She was just lacing her running shoes when her phone rang.
It was Jack, and she hesitated before she took the call.
‘I want to see you,’ he said.
Yes, she missed him, but pride and anger made her stubborn. ‘I’m busy.’
‘I need to see you.’
‘Have your lawyer arrange a meeting. I’ll bring mine.’
‘I’ve offered you the house.’
‘And I’m supposed to live there? With a sign screwed to the front door saying “Strictly No Admittance to Tennis Club Blondes”?’
‘The offer was made sincerely.’
‘And crassly. And with strings attached. I don’t want you in my life, Jack. I’ve moved on in mine.’
‘Just hear what I have to say.’
‘No.’
‘Juliet, please.’
‘What? What exactly, Jack?’
‘I miss you.’
‘You miss me.’
‘Yes. I do. Terribly. Unbearably.’
‘Yes. Well. You should have thought of that. But then self-obsessed people rarely consider the consequences of their actions. It’s why they usually end up leading solitary lives.’ She could hear her own voice begin to break as she concluded this sentence. She did not want Jack to hear her start to sob. She stayed silent with the cell phone in one trembling fist, trying as hard as she could to discipline her breathing.
‘Please,’ he said eventually. ‘Please, please let me see you.’
‘No,’ she said.
He stayed on the line. She could hear him breathing. He did not say anything more though, and she closed her eyes and bit down on her lip and after a few seconds of silence, she broke the connection.
Juliet ran as she knew she would, at the lung-bursting limit of her own endurance. She ran through the wet glitter of the early evening streets, through the rowdy, gaudy tableau that was Brooklyn at dusk in the autumnal rain, enjoying every muscle jarring yard.
Her phone rang again as she sprinted along a dirt path on the waterfront. She glanced down to see who it was who had called and saw that it was Jack again. She felt stronger now than she had earlier, more disciplined, steelier willed. She ignored the call.
By the time she got back to her apartment building she was utterly spent. She did not have the energy after her run to climb the steps to the ninth floor. She took the elevator, still panting, the sweat drying on her warm skin, her heart thumping rhythmically, feeling good. Jack would call again. Persistence was a necessary element of penitence. And if he didn’t call again, so what? If he wasn’t truly sorry for what he had done, he definitely wasn’t worthy of her.
Someone had left a gift basket outside her door. Wine bottles were cradled in it against CDs, toiletries, a fluffy hand-towel rolled and tied in a ribbon, fruit carefully packaged in tinted cellophane, a box of chocolates. A card was attached. It read: ‘Welcome to the building.’
It was a sweet gesture, but also odd. There was an assumption of intimacy about some of the items it contained. There was a sense in which it breached her privacy a little. It was thoughtful; it was also rather presumptuous. She picked it up and carried it into her apartment.
Later, at the start of an evening that was blissfully uneventful, she opened a bottle of the wine and drank two glasses, listening to one of the CDs, a Gershwin collection with Bernstein on piano that wasn’t really her thing but suited the grandeur of her night view towards Manhattan. The wine was really very good. For a while she just stood and sipped and savoured her view. Jack did not call again. And she did not pace the floor waiting for him to do so.
When Juliet returned from the hospital the following afternoon, Max was on the stairs above the vestibule, talking to a man in a fashionably tailored suit. She could hear their conversation and paused to listen. It wasn’t any of her business, but she was becoming intrigued about her landlord. She felt that there was much more to him than met the eye.
Max spoke, his voice emphatic. ‘I want to use the original plans. I’d do it myself, but I need drawings for the city.’
Juliet inferred from that that the man in the stylish suit was an architect. He said, ‘There are significant dead spaces here and along these walls. There’s a lot more we could do to maximise your property’s potential. Knock them down, open up the space—’
‘We’ll stick to the plans,’ Max said. ‘My grandfather wants to keep it that way.’
The architect began to descend the stairs. He said, ‘I’ll call you on Monday with a bid.’
‘Thanks,’ Max said, as Juliet climbed the stairs to where he stood.
‘Hi.’ She couldn’t explain why, but there was an awkwardness in her greeting, something she’d never felt before. Somehow the gift basket had destroyed the ease she’d felt with him until now.
‘Hi.’ He seemed to sense her mood and held back.
‘About to start to make a lot of noise?’
‘After I get the city’s approval. Lots of dots and crosses to do around here.’
It was the reason she had climbed the stairs to talk to him but now that the moment had come, Juliet hesitated, before saying, ‘Thank you.’
‘Hmmm?’ Max looked totally nonplussed.
It had already been an awkward moment, before her expression of gratitude, but she felt compelled to persist. ‘For the gift basket,’ she said. ‘It was incredibly sweet. Really generous.’
Max cocked his head. He looked as though he didn’t know what she was talking about. She was evidently making no sense to him at all.
‘Outside my door? Yesterday?’
The look of confusion remained on his face a moment longer and then it lifted as he smiled and said, ‘Ahhh.’
‘So, thank you.’
‘It wasn’t me.’
‘Then who was it?’
‘I’ve no idea.’
The grandfather, she thought then. August had delivered the gift. Who else could it have been? It was the sort of courtly welcoming gesture a man of his generation would perform. He was too old, surely, to have meant the gift flirtatiously. It had been a present as innocent and thoughtful as it was kind.
‘I think I can guess who left the basket,’ she said, smiling at Max. ‘I’ve worked it out the way detectives do, by the process of elimination.’
‘Impressive. I admire your deductive skills.’
She smiled. ‘I use them on patients. All the time.’
‘I’m glad they’re put to productive use.’
‘I must go and thank him.’
She began to climb the remainder of the stairs to the old man’s apartment. It was a long climb, which would not hinder her because her legs and lungs were strong from all the exercise she did. But Max overtook her and stood in her way.
‘Now is not ideal,’ he said.
‘Oh?’
‘My grandfather is not robust. He tires easily. He has good days and bad days. Today is a bad day. Tomorrow might be better.’
‘What’s a good time to catch him?’
‘I’ll see he gets to bed early and make sure he takes his medication. This time tomorrow will probably be fine.’
‘Great,’ she said. ‘Tomorrow it is.’
Eleven
TWENTY-FOUR HOURS LATER Juliet knocked on August’s door. As though vigilant to the unlikely possibility of visitors, he answered it promptly. She stood facing him.
‘There you are,’ he said.
‘Here I am indeed. It’s overwhelmingly thoughtful, the gift.’
‘I simply put myself in your shoes.’
‘You did what?’
‘I thought what would I want, as a woman, alone? A new apartment. New neighbours. I’d want familiarity. A glass of wine. Some music. Bath salts, laundry detergent, a bath plug.’
Juliet had to suppress a giggle. There was something
so inappropriate about this octogenarian man discussing laundry detergent, as though he might as well have gone the whole hog and bought her sanitary towels and extra-strength deodorant.
The whistle of a kettle sounded shrilly behind him. ‘Tea? With whisky.’
He grabbed her forearm and began to usher her into his apartment.
‘Oh … I can’t,’ she said. But his grip, as she had earlier discovered, was strong. His momentum guided her in.
‘I don’t get much company.’ He busied himself making the tea.
Juliet took a look around as he did so. The place was so crowded with stuff it was more an emporium than a home. Actually, it was more like a junk shop. Several decades’ worth of artefacts and souvenirs and keepsakes cluttered the place completely. Every shelf seemed filled with bric-a-brac. And it was dirty; grime and dust and stains layered surfaces and soft furnishing fabrics like the spread of decay.
August handed her a cup of tea. The china of the cup was tortoiseshell with tannin and the lip of it was grubbily chipped.
There was a stale, sour taint to the air in there, which combined with the grime made August’s apartment creepy and claustrophobic; Juliet wanted to escape it as quickly as courtesy would allow. ‘I’ve really got to go,’ she said. She hoped the look on her face as she said the words would be somewhere between an apology and a plea. She really did have to get out of there as fast as possible.
August lurched forward with the whisky bottle he held. He poured a slug of it into Juliet’s cup. ‘Consider it tea to-go,’ he said. His voice was guttural with phlegm.
She remembered her vision of him, the secret vigil of staring in the darkness beyond her door; the glistening drool. ‘OK,’ she conceded, taking the cup.
Juliet brought the drink August had given her back to her apartment and poured it down the kitchen sink. She felt ungrateful doing so, but she had paid lip-service to politeness; it was too early in the day for hard liquor and besides, she did not like the taste of whisky. And anyway, she was far too fastidious to drink from so dirty a vessel as the chipped cup.
Her apartment did not just seem nakedly empty after the one she had just left, it seemed almost unnaturally quiet. There had been a radio blaring in the old man’s living room, competing voices debating some issue so emotive they sounded close to hysteria. It had been very loud. He was probably deaf, the reason he tended to bellow out his words.
I don’t get much company.
Had it been him? Had he been her elusive peeper of two nights ago, watching her, silent and still, while she suspected a presence she had not been able to prove to herself was there? She thought about the broken veined cheeks above his straggly beard and the carious teeth exposed in his grin. It was not a charitable way to think. A man couldn’t help it if age and perhaps loneliness had contrived over the years to give him a sinister appearance. But he was creepy-looking and there had been something desperate about his urgent desire to have her stay and share his time and space and the contents of his whisky bottle.
Max was cautious around him. She had picked up on that straight away. Maybe there was something about the old man’s character or behaviour that his grandson found distasteful. There was something austere, she felt, about Max and his values. Age and blood would not justify to him actions or impulses in the older man he thought deviant, or worse, perverse.
But this was just speculation. She looked at the chipped mug, empty now, in which she had been served the laced tea. And the sight of it, grubby and damaged, but probably blameless, made her shudder.
The following evening was the night of the opening. Juliet had no intention of going. She had performed a long and demanding emergency operation throughout the afternoon and was exhausted. Physically and mentally, she felt spent. She sat on a bench and wearily removed her surgical mask, wondering whether she was still on Holstrom’s unofficial probation. Her phone buzzed in her breast pocket but she ignored it. She knew who the call was from – Jack – and she was in no condition to speak to him right now.
Sydney ambushed her, right there at the end of her shift. ‘Heard you had a long one,’ she said.
‘Insane day,’ Juliet confirmed.
‘Mike can’t make tonight, he’s putting a deal together with a ten p.m. deadline so Corey is catching up on her culture instead.’
Corey was a colleague they both liked. She was fun.
‘It’s a shame Mike can’t take you, Syd.’
‘He needs his self-esteem,’ she said. ‘He needs the drama of conference calls and urgent cut-off points in his life. They make him feel important. A man who can’t be trusted at the dinner table without wearing a bib has to find some way to compensate for that.’
Juliet laughed. ‘I don’t know how he puts up with you,’ she said.
‘Want to come?’
‘I think I’m just going to go home and get to bed early,’ Juliet said.
‘OK, Grandma.’
Juliet did not respond to the jibe. Sydney just looked at her, a look Juliet avoided returning.
‘You’ve got to stop thinking about him,’ Sydney said, eventually.
Juliet sighed. She tried to smile up at Sydney but did not look at her directly and could achieve nothing more jovial than a twist of her lips. ‘The love of my life cheated on me,’ she said. ‘In my own bed. Every time I look at myself, I see someone who wasn’t enough.’
‘Don’t say that.’
‘I don’t know if I want him dead or I want to marry him all over again.’
Sydney was quiet for so long, that eventually the silence forced Juliet to meet her friend’s eye. She saw obvious concern on Syd’s face.
‘It’s an art opening,’ Sydney said eventually. ‘It won’t kill you.’
’You won’t leave me alone until I agree to come, will you?’
‘Nope.’
‘OK, then. I’ll come. Just give me a bit of time to go home to shower and change.’
Sydney grinned. ‘You take your time, Jules. I want you to look your best.’
*
Back at the apartment, Juliet ran a bath. She needed to get rid of the tension in her muscles that a long surgery always produced. She stripped off her clothes, then stood and examined herself in the mirror’s image, barely a foot away from the glass. She was too pale; she needed a holiday. Apart from that, she could not find much to complain about. Quickly she got into the bath, feeling the warm water do its job, before getting out and pulling on her smart dress and jewellery, putting her hair up, spraying on perfume. She felt odd. Like a child putting on her mother’s clothes, and it made Juliet realise that she was really out of practice at grown up, sophisticated socialising. She had a lot of rust to shed and didn’t feel like shedding it at all.
She checked herself in the bathroom mirror in the moment before she was due to leave. She had put on a clingy black dress and she wanted to make sure that the lines of her underwear did not show. She didn’t look too bad, all things considered. Then she grabbed her coat, hurrying because she had made herself slightly late.
The gallery opening was one of those touchy-feely, interactive events meant to demystify art and make it seem unstuffy rather than elitist. Children milled around in happy family groups. Juliet mingled holding a cheese square on a stick, self-consciously alone in a crowd, trying and failing miserably to have a good time and knowing absolutely that attending had been the wrong thing to do.
She looked at her happily pregnant friend chatting to acquaintances. She watched Corey flirt and thought about Mike closing his deal and his devotion to his expectant wife. A little girl with a painted face covered another little girl with lipstick kisses to a smattering of delighted applause and laughter. Juliet rehearsed in her head the excuses that would allow her to leave before the event really got going. The number of couples there, their shows of contentedness and public intimacy was more than she thought she could take.
The song playing at that moment through the concealed speakers of the gallery was the Micha
el Bublé version of the classic jazz ballad, ‘Feeling Good’. It had been one of their favourites, one of the songs on Michael Bublé’s album Juliet and Jack had listened to together on the balcony of his apartment while the city lights twinkled at dusk around them and they shared shots of tequila in their carefree, loving courtship. Hearing the song made Juliet feel bereft. She had been comfortable at events like this one in Jack’s company, because he had an easy, cosmopolitan self-assurance that made him fit seamlessly into any social situation, regardless of how glitzy or stuck-up or sophisticated it was. He could mingle effortlessly and had a knack for small talk she did not share. It had been easy being half of a couple and it had been fun. She missed that confidence he had given her. Worse, she missed him.
She was backing off from a conversation in which she wanted to take no part, debating with herself whether a glass of champagne would enhance or sabotage her social skills, when someone bumped into her.
‘Watch it,’ Juliet said.
The someone she had collided with turned around. He wore a look of surprise on his face. She thought her expression probably mirrored it. It was Max.
‘Hey.’
‘Hey yourself.’
Except that a different Max stood before her. This version was neither dust-covered nor paint-spattered; his beard had been trimmed and he looked altogether smoother and better-groomed. He wore a well-cut jacket and open-neck shirt and looked downright handsome, she thought, with those vivid green eyes unclouded by lenses. He seemed relaxed and urbane with a glass of beer in his hand. He certainly looked to her to be more at ease and at home than she felt at that moment.
Juliet sensed someone sidle up alongside her. It was Sydney. ‘Who’s this?’ she smiled.
‘This is Max.’
Sydney beamed.
Quietly, intimately, Juliet leant towards Max. She put a hand on his shoulder and said, ‘I hardly recognised you, outside the building.’
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