Always men came to fix these problems, and looked pleased when Rhea—with her dark hair and wide-set, if slightly uneven, eyes—answered the door. The man from Allston Electric hadn’t even swaggered into the apartment the way the men usually did, winking and wielding tools. He had knocked lightly on the door, twice, with a slight pause in between. When Rhea opened the door, he was holding a battered black toolbox, perfectly still, with his feet apart in a way that made him look like someone had told him not to move. He said, “Allston Electric,” and followed Rhea to the living room. There he had worked conscientiously, quietly. But it hadn’t paid off; the line was still dead.
“I came with a Band-Aid, and what you need is open-heart surgery, you see what I’m saying?” he told her now. “Replacing the dead wire, that’ll mean knocking out the whole wall.”
“But I need to be able to use that outlet.” Pear juice was dribbling down her wrist, and Rhea felt, if only for a moment, utterly discomposed.
“The best I can do for now is tie up the dead wire and connect the existing line to the busted outlet. I just gotta call my boss now, though. To let him know that it’s surgery, not a Band-Aid. Mind if I use your phone? He always has me check in.”
The man from Allston Electric held the phone to his ear a few moments before someone picked up. Rhea watched him speak into the receiver. He was slight and freckled, in his late twenties like her, Rhea guessed. As he spoke to his boss, the muscles in his jaw tensed. “Swear to God,” he was saying, “I checked everything. Line’s dead, man, I swear.”
There was something almost handsome about him, Rhea decided, but in a way that more than anything proved the great distance between “almost” and “handsome.” A perfectly nice nose, but too big for the fine-boned face. Rhea watched the man’s lips move and noted that although he had a nicely dimpled jaw, his mouth was small in relation. She felt inexplicably saddened, watching this face with its various pleasant features. They were features that must have once seemed to hold much promise, but that he had somehow never grown into. Probably, Rhea concluded, people had told him when he was a child that he was good-looking, and now he was spending the rest of his life realizing that it wasn’t necessarily true.
“He wants to see for himself,” he told Rhea when he put down the receiver. “He’s coming here—Mike, my boss. He wants to make sure.” The man bit at the corner of his lip. “It’s like he doesn’t believe me.”
“I’m sure you did everything right,” Rhea said, though she had no reason to think that, really. To demonstrate her reasoning, she added, “You were in there a very long time.”
“Yeah, thanks,” the man said. “I don’t know why Mike doesn’t trust me. He gets that way sometimes. But I don’t say anything about it. Mike, he’s my fiancée’s brother. I don’t want to cause any problems in the family, see.”
“When are you getting married?”
“Two months. We’ve been together two years. Lucky for me. My mother was really starting to harp on me, and then Laura, she was, too, talking about her biological clock, you know.”
Rhea nodded. She had recently turned twenty-eight and was certain that she wouldn’t fall in love with anyone in time to create a baby.
“Well, yeah, so there was some pressure to, you know, tie the knot.”
Rhea was going to tie the knot with Gregory, and then one night three months before the wedding, when they were driving home from a late movie, Gregory pulled his car over just off Storrow Drive, put on the parking brake, and said in a frightened voice, “I can’t do this.” Rhea thought she would probably wonder for the rest of her life if throughout the entire movie he had been worrying about what he was going to say to her.
It had now been over a year since Gregory had left, over a year since Rhea had felt a man’s bare arms around her. Over a year since she had felt the sureness of sitting next to Gregory at a party or in a restaurant and knowing that afterward, without awkwardness, they would go home and get into the big, messy bed and make love. In the morning she used to wake up and, always, find him already awake, composing ideal mates on a miniature magnetic chessboard. Even if she didn’t move, just opened her eyes, he would always notice the moment she awoke, reach over and clumsily brush his palm along the side of her head.
Now there were just men. Rhea had gone on dates with a number of them in the past ten months, at first with something close to enthusiasm, and later with something more like dread. The last date she had agreed to was weeks ago, a friend from an internship back in grad school. He took her to a South End restaurant, and when they finished eating, Rhea checked the time and said with surprise, “It’s later than I thought.”
“What time is it?” the man had asked, and then reached over and turned Rhea’s wrist toward him to glance at her watch. Afterward, in her mind, Rhea saw this action over and over again, this perfectly nice young man reaching over before she could realize it, taking her wrist in his hand, and each time she disliked him even more, until she knew that she never wanted to see him again.
There was another man, too, whose phone calls Rhea wasn’t returning. He was a good seven years younger and ended his telephone messages by saying, “Later.” He wrote little e-mails titled “Howdie!” and “Chow!”
The one she liked was the one it could never work out with. He was the former boyfriend of her best childhood friend, so that even now that he was single there was no chance of a future with him.
Rhea hadn’t had sex in over a year. It struck her as phenomenal that she had survived, that people all around her were somehow surviving alone in single beds. Not so much without sex; what surprised Rhea was the fact that she had gone for over a year without feeling her hand in another warm hand, or her arm about another’s waist, had not leaned over to quickly kiss Gregory on the cheek, just a momentary, automatic, almost involuntary action. That unwanted hand on her wrist at the restaurant was nothing like Gregory’s easy, relaxed hand on her thigh, or her neck, or her shoulder, which had known it had a right to be there.
Rhea hadn’t felt anything like that in more than a year. There were moments when such thoughts were enough to stop her mid-motion. She would find herself staring at the kitchen cabinet, reaching up for a bottle of vitamins, and then realize that her arm was sore: how long had she been standing there like that?
The man from Allston Electric was leaning on the Formica counter. “Mike said he’d come here as soon as he could, but I don’t know how soon. I’m really sorry about this. Man, I hope he doesn’t find some way to fix it that I didn’t see.”
“What if he does?” Rhea asked. “Can he punish you?” She didn’t mean for this to sound menacing, but it came out that way. The man from Allston Electric stood up straight and raised his eyebrows.
“Well, he can’t fire me, since he’s Laura’s brother. What he’ll do is, he’ll tell Laura, and then Laura’ll say, when I get home tonight, ‘Mikey says you screwed up big-time at work today,’ and then she’ll look at me like this and wait for me to explain myself. Like she wants me to prove that I’m worth marrying. And I’ll have to say something smart back. To reassure her.”
Never had a repairman been so forthcoming, Rhea reflected. But the man continued.
“One time Mike clipped the wrong wire, and I caught it. Sort of saved the day. And I told Laura, and she looked so relieved, like it was all she wanted to hear. Like she’d had doubts about me, you know?”
“My ex was like that,” Rhea said, surprising herself. “I think he needed constant proof that he’d made the right decision in falling in love with me. I remember one day I complained about a professor of mine. I thought that Gregory would comfort me. He just gave me this look, as if maybe the whole time he’d been wrong to think that I was intelligent.”
“I know that look,” said the man from Allston Electric.
“I could tell what he was thinking,” Rhea continued. “That maybe I was just some mediocre student. And the thing is, that made me start to wonder if maybe I really was me
diocre. And that made me start to doubt Gregory himself: because why was he with me, if I was mediocre?” Rhea remembered what had happened next. How, if only momentarily, their entire relationship had seemed to her nothing more than a union of two unworthy souls, a mistake that could be snuffed out with the tip of a finger. But Rhea had never acknowledged to Gregory this pattern of thought, and so they had never spoken about it.
She supposed that Gregory had had no such doubts about Jeannine Piolat. He had met her while in Paris for a conference on Contemporary Phenomenology. This he told Rhea that same night after the movie, as the Honda deposited exhaust at the side of the road. No, Jeannine was not a philosopher or an academic. She was a dancer in an avant-garde troupe whose performance he just happened to have seen. Rhea imagined a long-haired woman with a translucent scarf around her neck.
Rhea tried to halt her thoughts. “Where’s the wedding going to be?” she asked the man.
“Mike’s wife’s parents’ house. They have a big yard. Out in Woburn. Listen, I’m really sorry about the wait. But when Mike’s doing other stuff—well, he takes his time.”
“It’s okay.”
The man held out his right hand and breathed in. “I’m Lonny.” He pronounced it “Lowonny.” Then, sounding as if he were asking Rhea to a dance, he added, “Mind if I ask your name?” Rhea shook his hand and told him.
“Rhea,” he repeated. “That’s pretty. Does it mean something?”
“It’s from Greek mythology,” she said, but didn’t bother explaining. No one had ever called her name “pretty” before.
“My name just means Lonny. It’s not even short for anything.” He looked at her for a few seconds, and Rhea looked back at her computer screen, pretending not to notice that he was watching her. She felt a sudden craving for potato chips. “You alright working in here?” Lonny asked. “There’s barely any light.”
He was right. Rhea had moved her computer to the kitchen for the afternoon sun, but hours had passed, and the sky outside was now a dim winter pink. “I’m just staring at a computer screen anyway,” Rhea said. Lonny looked concerned that he had said something wrong, so that Rhea heard herself adding, “But you’re right, it’s pretty gloomy in here.” The walls, once off-white, had aged into a dirty yellow, and the cabinets were of a cheap dark brown wood. The fluorescent light tinged the room sallow. One of the overhead bulbs had burned out some time since Gregory left, and even standing on a chair Rhea couldn’t reach it.
She looked at Lonny and felt she should do something. “Would you like something to eat?” was what she came up with.
“Oh, no, that’s okay, thanks,” Lonny said bashfully. But Rhea felt certain Lonny was as hungry as she was. She stood and took a box of oatmeal cookies from a cabinet, saying, “Here’s a snack, if you’d like.” Then, without asking, she took a cookie out of the box, handed it to Lonny, and said, “It doesn’t really matter what Mike finds.” She had wanted this to be uplifting, but her voice, she decided, made it sound nihilistic.
Lonny said, “Thanks, thanks very much,” and immediately began to eat. Back in front of her computer, pretending not to see Lonny anymore, Rhea ate, too.
And then she found herself speaking. She didn’t look away from her computer screen. “I know you’re right,” she told him. “I’m sure of it.”
Why was she so sure, she immediately wondered. She must have just said it to make the man feel better. Without shifting her gaze, she could see Lonny stop chewing. He looked at her with wide eyes. “I appreciate it,” he said, almost in a whisper. And then he raised his voice a notch and said, “I’d better leave you to your work.”
Lonny went into the open hallway that connected the kitchen to the little sitting room and sat on the tweed loveseat Rhea had bought at the Salvation Army. His right leg began to jiggle nervously. Rhea could see this out of the corner of her eye. She could see Lonny get up from the loveseat and walk hesitantly to the open kitchen door, where he knocked twice on the outer wall.
“You want me to change that light for you? I noticed one of the bulbs is out. I can change it if you’d like.”
“Well, sure,” Rhea told him. She had bought a new bulb months ago, and its white cardboard box stared at her every time she opened the closet door.
Lonny pulled one of the two wooden chairs over to the center of the kitchen and stepped up onto the seat. He began to remove the fixture.
The small wave of relief she felt at having this attended to took Rhea by surprise. It was immediately followed by a small wave of shame. She was ashamed of needing him, of needing a man to step up on a chair for her. Ashamed to admit that her life had been fuller when she had had Gregory there to step on a chair for her.
Four months after that night in the Honda, he had called from France to tell Rhea he was married; he didn’t want her to find out some other way. She hadn’t spoken to him since that call, but she knew from friends that he and Jeannine were living in an obscure village in Brittany. That made it all the worse for Rhea, knowing that she couldn’t blame it on the lure of a glamorous city—knowing that Gregory was willing to spend cold winters in a small and probably boring place, as long as Jeannine was there. She could barely imagine the Gregory she had known being so confidently in love. According to friends, he always said that he and Jeannine were a “yin-yang” couple.
The day he called to let her know he was married, Rhea had gone and canceled all of her weekend plans. She wanted to force herself to be completely alone for a few days, to prove that she didn’t need Gregory or anyone else. And she had done it, spent two days and three evenings completely alone. At times it was fine, and at other times she thought she could no longer take it, her head full of the thought that no one loved her anymore, not really, not truly, not the way that Gregory had.
“This light cover’s pretty dirty,” Lonny said when he had screwed in the new bulb. “Let me wash it for you.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“I want to.” Lonny stepped down from the wooden chair, went to the sink, and rinsed out the globe full of dust and dried-out bugs.
Where was the shame in needing someone? Rhea wondered as she watched him. And yet she continued to feel it.
“Wire’s dead,” Mike announced, as if it were a groundbreaking discovery. He was a tall, thick-limbed man in a Celtics sweat-shirt. He stood next to Lonny in the kitchen and told Rhea, “We’re going to have to connect the existing line to the dead outlet. Lonny here will take care of that for you.” His bright blue eyes sparkled. Did his sister—Lonny’s fiancée—have those eyes, too? Rhea wondered. Mike slammed shut his tool case and left.
“Whew,” Lonny said when Mike had gone. “I knew I was right. Well, we’d better work quick. The sun’s going down.” Even with the new bulb, the kitchen was wan now that the sunlight had gone. Rhea worked in the dusk, while Lonny did his own work across the hall. She could just barely hear him. It was pleasant, the din of human labor. Now she remembered what it had felt like: the comfort of silent, easy company, having someone nearby, with her in a way that was other than social, the two of them toiling away with care and concern. A sensation came to her, familiar in a long-ago way, a reminder of the time when Gregory would revise his papers quietly at his desk while Rhea worked on her dissertation at her own. It was the sensation of shared emotion—in this case a certain relief at having solved a problem, and a sense that something good might come of a bit of work.
When the telephone rang, it sounded louder than usual—an interruption of their quiet, common toil. Rhea made no move to get up, felt no urge to rise from her chair. She heard herself call out, “Would you do me a favor and answer that?”
Lonny appeared at the kitchen doorway, as Rhea added, “Could you tell whoever it is that I’ve moved?”
Where had the thought come from? Rhea wondered, watching Lonny raise the receiver. She wanted to move, that was it, she wanted to have already moved on, to a place with sockets that didn’t burn out, to a place where hard w
ork felt good and paid off, to a place where if you were alone it felt fine, and if you weren’t it was even better.
“Umm . . . she moved,” Rhea heard Lonny say. “Well, yes, I’m sure. Ummm . . . well, today. Yes, she moved. Uh, no, I don’t have the new address. No, I don’t have the number.” There was a brief silence. “I’m sorry.” Lonny hung up. He eyed Rhea doubtfully and said, “That was your landlord.”
Rhea began to laugh, first just from her chest and then from her belly. Lonny laughed, too. Then he looked at her in a puzzled way and asked, “Why did you do that?”
“I was feeling really fine right before that phone rang, and I guess I worried it would bring me back to my life.” She pursed her lips and added, “I didn’t mean for that to sound depressing.”
“I’d rather hear that than learn you’re on the run from the law.” Lonny smiled. “Well, I’d better get back to work.”
About thirty minutes later, he was back at the kitchen door.
“All set,” he told her. “If you’re worried about both sockets being on the same line, you can get a surge protector, but that extension cord should do just fine.”
Rhea thanked him and asked how much she owed. Lonny ripped a pink slip off of his clipboard and lowered his head, shaking it slightly. He explained the costs for labor and repairs. “I’m sorry, all that and I couldn’t even fix it, really.”
“It’s my landlord’s money, if that makes you feel any better.” Rhea handed him a check. He took it and looked at her signature in a lingering way, then put the check in a folder with the repair slip.
“Do you get to go home now?” Rhea asked him.
“Yup. Too late for any more repairs.”
Rhea thought about this for a moment and then added, “Will your fiancée be home?”
“Yup.” Lonny let his shoulders drop. “I noticed that the top of the window blind was stuck. In the living room. I’ll straighten it out for you.”
He left the kitchen for a few minutes. Rhea sat back down in front of her computer, but she couldn’t refocus on her work. He had been here long enough, she told herself. As soon as he left, she could move back to her desk in the living room, where the westward windows offered each day’s last light and stunning sunsets.
Calamity and Other Stories Page 8