The Resident

by Francis Cottam

  ‘Fuck it,’ she said to herself.

  She fingered the outer edge of the door, then gave it a firm push, stumbling slightly as it opened inward on a large space within her kitchen wall. There was no blue light beyond her kitchen, in the space. What light she saw by came from the kitchen to her rear, as she stepped into the closet and took in its dusty and neglected detail.

  Against the rear wall, there were piled wine racks with one or two bottles still in them. She groped for and found a light switch, the unfinished floorboards of the space she had accessed creaking under her feet. A naked overhead bulb flared into yellowy life.

  It was just a wine closet. Space was at such a premium in any rental apartment and yet this once had space to spare – secret space – space she could colonise and utilise for herself.

  ‘Wow!’ The sound of her own voice reassured Juliet, so she carried on talking to herself. ‘If I cleaned it up, got Max to fix the door, this would be cool.’

  Max stood only inches away from her. He was aroused, taut with excitement and fear. At any moment, he could be discovered, and you didn’t have to know precisely which of them you were, to enjoy the thrill of the cat-and-mouse game.

  It came to him then, that the solitary thrill was no longer enough for him. He craved a shared experience, now. With her beauty and sensuality Juliet had done that for him and among the mingling of emotions he felt for her, he felt a degree of gratitude. Many of his feelings for his tenant were selfless and even noble but the overriding one, at that moment deep in the night in his secret hideaway, was naked desire. It was time to take things further.

  No longer afraid, Juliet stood in the wine closet, wondering about its history, and thinking about how she could use this space. She yawned. Now the adrenalin had seeped away, she was exhausted. If she listened quietly and hard, beyond the familiar tick of the refrigerator, she could hear night traffic outside coursing through the city that never slept. But she needed to sleep, and in the morning she’d show Max the wine closet before she went for a run.

  In bed, Juliet thought about Max and how lucky she was to have him around to help her. The guy really was a godsend, she thought. It could have turned so awkward between them after the disastrous dinner the other night, but he’d cleared the air with her. Thank goodness for that, she thought as she drifted off to sleep. She would hate to have any unpleasantness between them.

  Twenty-six

  MAX WAS WAITING for Juliet’s call the next morning. He maintained the building, after all. He had risen early, as he habitually did, and had rehearsed his surprised expression as he prepared his tools after putting on his mundane, familiar, paint-spattered attire.

  Juliet met him at the door. ‘Hi, Max, thanks for coming. It’s strange that I never noticed this little place before. I had kind of a weird experience last night when I thought I heard something, and the door to it was just sort of standing open.’

  ‘Sounds interesting. So what scared you last night?’

  ‘Oh, nothing. I just thought I heard a noise in the kitchen and then I saw this light. But it was probably something outside. So, here it is. What do you think?’

  Max put his well-rehearsed expression of surprise on his face. ‘Wow! Look at this!’ Under the guise of examining the walls, Max surreptitiously made sure that the door from the wine closet to the passages was properly secured. It was. He noted with a grunt of satisfaction that it was so well concealed he would never have known it was there himself, had he not painstakingly crafted it.

  Juliet stood behind him as he looked. He could smell sleep and last night’s perfume on her. She planned to pound the streets in her Nikes and she would not shower until afterwards. After she showered, she would smell of that apple-scented shampoo she used. He fancied she was close enough behind him that he could feel her breath, warm as a caress on his neck. But he knew that was just a treat provided him by his imagination.

  ‘I never realised your kitchen had a wine closet,’ he said. ‘There’s one in August’s old place, but they must have covered yours up years ago.’ He turned to her. She was nodding, buying it. ‘Old buildings have secrets.’

  ‘And you like secrets.’

  ‘Do I?’

  ‘You told me yourself that you do. You told me over dinner.’

  ‘Yes, I did. I remember now.’ About a million years ago when I was something more in your mind and that moist place in your underwear than a handyman.

  ‘I think it’s kind of cool,’ Juliet said. ‘Can I use it?’

  ‘Sure,’ Max said. ‘It could do with a little neatening up, though. I’ll do it while you’re out today.’ He swung the closet door back and forth. ‘This needs to be fixed. I don’t want it coming off the hinge.’

  Juliet smiled. ‘Thanks for being such a friend,’ she said.

  Max felt so crestfallen at her expression and tone as she said this that the return smile he felt obliged to offer froze like a rictus on his face. He did not want to be her friend. He did not have any interest in being sweet, dependable Max, the caring and capable guy who cosseted her building. There was nothing in the role for him but disappointment and frustration.

  ‘Sure,’ he said. Pulling himself together he treated her to his most sincere smile, the one he had spent much time perfecting. ‘A friend in need,’ he said.

  He remembered the night gleam in her eye when she shrugged off her blouse and her breasts were revealed before him and it now seemed like a beautiful dream. He wanted to get back to that mood between them, charged with passion and possibility and sexual danger. But he didn’t know how to. He did not know whether it was possible to conjure it up again.

  He was furious after she left, venting his anger by using his cordless nail gun, triggering each nail with a percussive whump as he secured fallen shelves and strengthened the wine closet door-frame and made a rattling beam on the ceiling rigid and stiff. When he had completed this work, he put the nail gun high up on one of the newly fixed shelves and stepped back to examine the racks, making sure that they were correctly aligned and concealed the hidden door. They were. A curious cop would never find his hidden portal; a master carpenter wouldn’t spot it now.

  Max switched off the wine closet light and closed its newly hung door and got a flowered mug from one of Juliet’s kitchen cabinets. He filled it with coffee. He toured the rest of the apartment, leisurely, sipping the strong black brew in the chintzy mug. He had a plan for the place. It was formulating neatly in his mind and he was not a man to squander opportunity.

  Twenty-seven

  JULIET WAS ON a break on her own in the small ER staff room when she surrendered to the impulse to contact Jack.

  There was a dead guy on a gurney under a taut sheet on the other side of the wall, about two feet from where she stood. Blood had leaked in big crimson blossoms through the sheet. He had been stabbed in a bungled street robbery for the fifty dollars he had just taken from a cash machine.

  Juliet had tried to save him but the blade of the knife had nicked an artery; the bleeding had been catastrophic. She had held his hand as he died, his grip on hers growing weaker as life leaked away. He had been aware that he was dying until the moment that the light dimmed in his eyes and they closed and he was gone.

  Being surrounded by death made you aware that life was short; too short for prevarication or for wasting time not doing what you really wanted to. And the dead guy on the gurney had reminded her of Jack. They had the same colouring and hairstyle and had been roughly the same age.

  There was nothing to link the two of them except a chance resemblance. There was no real rationale to calling Jack because she had lost a patient only moments earlier. It just felt overwhelmingly to be the right thing to do. An orderly came by and nodded deferentially to her then went next door and rolled the gurney and its stiffening human cargo away.

  She dialled. Then she snapped shut her cell phone before the call registered. She rolled her eyes in exasperation at her own lack of courage. She hit redial and then al
most instantly disconnected again.

  ‘Oh, my God,’ she said to herself. She felt nervous and stupid, embarrassed and girlish, excited and somehow determined. She typed a text into the phone: I miss you. Then she sent it and suddenly vulnerability was added to the stew of all the other things she was feeling. She glanced at the door, glad at least that she was alone.

  She poured coffee from the machine into a Styrofoam cup, aware of a slight tremor in her hand she would have to bring under control before returning to her shift. She sipped at the lip of the cup. The coffee was tepid. Her cell phone, in the pocket of her white coat, signalled an incoming text. She drained her drink and threw the cup into a trashcan and took the cell from her pocket and looked at the caller ID. The message was from Jack: I miss you too.

  An image came to her then, an involuntary recollection that was as vivid as it was totally unexpected, of her and her mother in their family trailer. Wan sunshine from some piece of southern California scrubland spread through the net curtain covering the scooped-out oval of metal framed window and glazed the old Formica of their breakfast table with its million tiny scratches. Her mother was seated opposite Juliet, sipping from a glass of lemon tea, her smile as pale and insipid as the morning sunlight. It had been winter, Juliet remembered. The sky was an unsullied blue, but the weather had been chilly that morning.

  Her father was not there. It had been in the time of their free-love period, when her parents swapped partners with a hippie insouciance. Except that her mother, that morning, had not looked insouciant. Her mother had looked wistful and even sad. The dark patches age and a rackety lifestyle were putting prematurely under her eyes had looked like tender bruises. A song had been playing on their tinny little transistor radio, Stevie Nicks singing something by Fleetwood Mac, a yearning, melancholy ballad.

  Her mother had sat and sipped her lemon tea, wearing an unbleached cotton smock and twists of ribbon and coloured string in her artfully plaited hair. And she had looked totally bereft, and Juliet, who had been ten or eleven at the time, had resolved to herself: I will never let this happen to me. When I grow up, I will never allow myself to become as lonely as this.

  And now, with the blood of a stab victim freshly scrubbed from her hands, and the awareness of Jack’s absence from her life like a hole at the centre of her world, she finally understood exactly how her mother must have felt that day. And she did not want to go on feeling this way. She could not let pride get in the way of her happiness, and with her new insight into her own behaviour, she finally made a decision. If Jack was truly sorry, she would forgive him and take him back. They would make a real go of things. She missed him because she loved him and the text he had just sent, in its truthful brevity, told her that he felt exactly the same way she did.

  Max opened Juliet’s closet to reveal her clothing, the individual items hung neatly on their rails. She favoured a simple wardrobe; at least where the palette was concerned. She did not wear vibrant shades. Her clothes were monochromatic; black, grey, ivory, cream. He ran a finger along the line of garments. It stopped when it stroked something silky to the touch, a blouse. It was the same blouse she had shrugged from her pale shoulders when he had almost made love to her.

  He gathered a bunch of the slippery fabric in his fist. It was hard to get a good grip on, as she was herself. He brought it up to his nose and sniffed its scent, its residue of Juliet. He breathed in, burying his face in it, allowing it to unfold and envelop his features, his face wearing an expression close to bliss.

  He examined the contents of her underwear drawer. There was not much of the exotica in there. She was a practical sort of woman, wasn’t she? The queen of the emergency room.

  There was a pair of sheer silk stockings and the suspender belt to hold them up. The stockings were black. He supposed she had worn them on special, romantic occasions but it hurt him to speculate about exactly what those occasions had entailed because he had not been involved in them. There were two lacy slips it thrilled him to touch because she wore them under her clothing, where no one could see them. He pressed his lips into the cups of her bras. She was shapelier than Kate O’Donnell had been, but Kate had only been fourteen years old the last time he had been privileged to study her in her nakedness.

  He used Juliet’s hairbrush to brush his own hair, carefully removing the two or three strands plucked from his scalp from its pad of bristles when he had finished.

  He spent quite a long time in her bathroom, just staring at the empty tub. There were some strands of hair caught in the circular metal grid of the plughole and he teased these out between his fingers and put them in his pocket to keep. It was early days for souvenirs of her and where she was concerned his ambitions were much greater than the hoarding of a few intimate keepsakes. But he considered it only human nature to take of her what he could, when the opportunity arose.

  It was exciting being in her bathroom. It was much better than spying on it from a passage peephole, separated from it by the obstruction of a wall. That was OK, but this was infinitely better. Spontaneously, without really knowing he was going to do it until it was done, he climbed fully clothed into her tub, lay down and stretched luxuriantly there. The sheer thrill of lying where her naked form had been was overwhelming, and he closed his eyes for a while, savouring the memory of his first view of Juliet in the bath, soaping herself, her hands wandering down between her thighs.

  He shuddered and opened his eyes, now was not the time to give in to his arousal; he still had too much to explore. Turning his attention to Juliet’s bathroom sink and the items on the shelves below the mirror, his gaze alighted on Juliet’s toothbrush. It was an electric toothbrush and the urge to use it, to have the shuddering bristles that cleaned her mouth in his, was overwhelming.

  He was using the brush when he saw her through her apartment window, returning along the sidewalk from her hospital shift with a large bag of groceries between her hands. He had been using the brush for so long that his gums were sore and when he plopped it out of his mouth he saw that the head was pink with blood. He rinsed it quickly in her sink and shook and then blew the bristles as dry as he could in the time he had before he needed to make good his escape.

  Twenty-eight

  WHEN JULIET EXITED the lift, Max was standing at the entrance to his apartment across the hall. As she juggled with the grocery bag and the keys to open her door he said, ‘Hey.’

  ‘Hey.’

  ‘Let me help you with that.’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘I’ve got it, really.’

  But he was determined to help her, and more than that, he seemed agitated and nervous. His breath smelled of spearmint, as though he had recently brushed his teeth.

  He took her groceries. She unlocked the door and led the way into her apartment. He followed her into the kitchen. She knew that if he looked into the bag, he would see that she had bought the same ingredients for dinner that he had cooked for her the other night.

  He did look. And then he smiled that sweet smile of his. ‘Cooking?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  She walked out of the kitchen, discarding her coat as she went.

  He put the bag onto the counter and began to unpack the items it contained.

  ‘You don’t have to do that,’ she said from behind him. The words sounded funny to her own ears, her pronunciation weird.

  He turned to look at her. She was brushing her teeth. She had her toothbrush in her mouth. Max started and then staggered, his arm hitting the bag on the counter, tipping its contents on to the kitchen floor, bags of vegetables bursting, a roast chicken breaking free of its packaging in a richly aromatic cloud of onion gravy.

  Max stared at the mess, he looked mortified. ‘I thought I smelled chicken.’

  Juliet quickly spat toothpaste into the kitchen sink. She switched off the brush and looked at the mess. ‘Shit.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Max said. ‘Let me make it up to you. I can help make dinner.’

  ‘No,’ Juliet said, ‘
it’s really OK.’

  She picked the chicken up off the floor and tried to wash it off. She needed to busy herself or she thought she might lose her temper with Max. She did not want to do that after he’d been so helpful that morning, but she didn’t want him there now, inarticulate and clumsy and crowding her just when she needed the space to prepare and organise what he had just inadvertently sabotaged.

  She heard him gulp in a big breath and noticed drops of sweat gathering at his hairline. What’s eating at him anyway? she wondered. Surely it couldn’t still be the events of the other night?

  Then he spoke, and her heart sank. ‘I wanted to try and speak with you about something. It’s been a little confusing for me, because you kissed me first.’

  Fuck. She had thought them both reconciled to the fact that any chance they had of ever having a physical relationship was dead and buried. And there was something else; there was something stubbornly childlike about his logic. It sounded resentful. ‘What do you mean?’ She tried to keep the impatience out of her voice.

  ‘You made the first move,’ Max persisted. ‘And now you act like nothing happened.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘We were just getting to know each other.’

  Max was silent. It was a charged, petulant silence.

  Juliet said, ‘It’s seeing whether things work or not. That’s what people do.’

  ‘That’s not what I do,’ he said.

  ‘You need to be mature about this.’

  ‘Where is there a rule written that I need to be anything about this other than disappointed and upset?’

  ‘You’re blowing events out of proportion.’

  ‘I don’t believe that I am. You can manipulate my feelings, Juliet. You’ve proven to be very skilled at that. What you cannot do is dictate them to me.’

  ‘I have not tried to do either.’

  ‘Haven’t you? Forgive me if I beg to differ. Actually, forget I said that. Beg is the wrong word in this context.’