Rose walked on. She figured she must remind the boy of an aunt or family friend. Then she wondered if she was emitting a signal that young children—fresh arrivals from the ether—recognized. To get completely irrational about it, she wondered if her stomach hadn’t captivated him because he knew about Harriet’s threatened abortion and as a recent fetus himself was expressing his alarm.
What can I do? Rose thought. It’s her body. All the same, she couldn’t help feeling she had a stake in this pregnancy. It might even be argued that during the episodes she was pregnant, she and Harriet together, conjoined mothers.
No students were loitering in front of the theater, not today. Rose headed straight for her office and checked Victor’s forecast on Environment Canada. Like his counterparts at 680 News and the Weather Network he was calling for the storm to hit around noon. A little over an hour to go, then.
She took out the hanger and squeezed the padding and rubbed it on her face. To anyone else it was just a hanger. To her it was a physical object that had crossed the uncanny chasm between Harriet’s life and her own.
Once, watching a dish detergent bubble sail around the kitchen, her father, the avowed atheist, said, “For all we know, that’s an angel.” Rose also identified as an atheist, and yet from her mother’s lapsed Catholic side she petitioned God in moments of spiking want or fear. So did most people, she suspected. People might not say, “Please, God,” but when they said, “Please,” and “Come on,” weren’t they appealing to a force capable of affecting outcomes?
She put the hanger on the sofa, where she could see it from her desk. She opened the windows and turned on the air conditioner. Normally she was careful about wasting electricity, but a few dollars down the drain was preferable to her mother smelling cigarette smoke. She read comments on the Regal’s website and found a debate in progress as to whether or not the residents of the Rear Window apartments were exhibitionists.
“Even the murderer doesn’t shut his blinds at crucial moments. For example, when he’s washing blood off his bathroom walls! What’s with that?”
“It’s boiling outside. 92F!”
“People were more open in those days. They were only a generation or two removed from the intimacy of life in shtetls and rural villages.”
“But the characters aren’t open. Their blinds are! Leaving Jimmy Stewart out of it, they’re closed off from each other.”
“They take for granted that their right to privacy is respected by their neighbors. Stewart violates a tacit code.”
Again, Rose felt morally challenged. Okay, she was violating somebody’s privacy, but not deliberately, she didn’t make the episodes happen. On the other hand, she couldn’t wait for them. Being in that streamlined, percolating body with its loose joints and eagle vision was an indescribable thrill, beyond anything she had ever felt or imagined feeling.
A stunning thought came to her. Harriet might have gone into work. She might pick up her phone.
Rose dialed Goldfinch’s number. Two rings, three. She reached the directory, typed H-A-R. The message clicked on, and she listened just long enough to hear Harriet’s name being said. A split second before the beep, she hung up.
Now she was too restless to work. She needed a cup of chamomile tea, she decided. But once she was downstairs a different impulse struck her, and she switched on the houselights and entered the auditorium. Down the aisle she went, to row H, seat eleven, the best seat in the house according to her father, although whenever he had watched a movie in here he’d sat in the back row of the balcony to be inconspicuous and to survey his empire.
Rose stroked the armrests. She ran her fingers between the brass lion claws that covered the ends. Thousands upon thousands of fingers had felt these grooves. Rose lifted her hands and put them down again more lightly. She became aware of the springs beneath her hips and how lumpy they would feel to hips as fleshless as Harriet’s.
She pulled down the seats on either side of her. She studied the red leather, worn as a rock face but not cracked, not yet. She pushed the seats back up, pulled them down again. She was thinking of a game she and Ava used to play, where they flipped down certain seats in certain rows to make giant patterns—triangles and crosses and letters—which they then admired from the balcony. They spoke to each other in sexy French accents in the balcony because the man who designed the wrought-iron railing had been French and had also invented the underwire bra. They treasure-hunted throughout the theater, digging between the cushions for pens, jewelry, money; there were always a few coins. Once they found a silver matchbox containing only a piece of paper that had the word menstruation written on it. The girls knew what menstruation was, and they laughed giddily, but then, impressed by the box’s navy velvet lining, and also by the formidable, still-perplexing business itself—monthly, unstoppable bleeding—they were solemn. Ava said, “A lady must have dropped it.” Rose said, “Or a vampire.”
She couldn’t remember what they did with that note. The box they would have put in the lost-and-found drawer.
It was 11:45 but already dark outside when she left the auditorium. She hurried up to her office, retrieved the hanger, and held it with both hands like a divining rod. A divining rod whose curved end pointed back at herself. She sat in her chair. The thunder sounded far away, but her vision was crisp and the flecks were appearing. During the nausea, she shut her eyes.
She was standing in the same bathroom from her third episode. She had on white underpants and an orange T-shirt. The thunder here was closer: long, booming rolls.
Her feet were icy. Her nerves were frayed. She lifted her shirt, angled herself, and pushed her belly out. She wasn’t showing, or hardly at all. She pulled the shirt higher. One juvenile breast came into view.
I shouldn’t be seeing this, Rose thought. Look up, she implored. Look in the mirror.
She looked in the mirror. She held her own gaze. Rose tried to catch herself, the slightest, lurking presence.
But just as in the second episode, it was Ava’s eyes Rose saw. Not simply eyes reminiscent of Ava’s, but the same green with the fold underneath, the same shape and restless frown.
Other resemblances between Ava and Harriet now rushed at Rose: the eagle vision, the cold extremities, the anxiety, the meticulousness, the nail biting. Why hadn’t she recognized any of this before? If it was possible to cry inside another person’s body, Rose cried.
Harriet was still agitated. She turned from the mirror and went down the hall to her bedroom. The calico cat was sleeping on the bed again, and she lay alongside it and scratched its head. It had fishy breath and fish-shaped eyes ringed with black lines that extended from the corners like tail fins. Its purr was a racket but calming to Harriet. She rolled over and reached for the phone.
“Harriet,” answered a thick male voice.
“Oh, no, I woke you.”
“I’m awake. Theoretically.” It was Marsh.
She slid a cigarette from the pack on the bedside table. “What time did you get in last night?”
“Late. Quarter to three.”
“Yikes.”
“I’m guessing the manuscript kept you spellbound till the wee hours.”
A fluttering in her belly told Rose that there was no manuscript. “I packed it in around midnight,” she said. She got her cigarette lit and exhaled away from the cat. “A quarter to three. That’s a lot of karaoke.”
“Like you, the machine failed to make an appearance. We danced. I danced. I was the belle of the ball.”
“Of course you were.”
“I scarcely missed you.” He yawned. “Someone else did, however.”
“Who?”
Rose felt as if she held her breath.
“A flower name.”
“Daisy?”
There was a roar of thunder. “Is that at your end?” he said.
“You’ll be getting it soon,” she said.
“Rose,” he said.
“I don’t know any Roses.”
&nbs
p; “She had a manuscript for you. She wanted your address.”
“You didn’t give it to her, I hope.”
“Certainly not.”
“What did she look like?”
“What did she look like.” More yawning. “Tall. Voluptuous. Dark, curly hair. Medusa hair. Soulful eyes.”
“Soulful eyes.” She smiled and tapped her cigarette above the ashtray. “Everybody you meet has soulful eyes.”
“Can you hold for two minutes?”
“Go pee. I just wanted to know how the party went.”
“Two minutes.”
“It’s okay. I’m going to try to work. I’ll call you later.”
She took the ashtray and lighter and left the bedroom. The cat trotted ahead, tail high. Past the bathroom, past a narrow office (desk, stacks of books and papers), into a kitchen with vacant counters and a round wooden table. Harriet seemed to be thinking hard. Rose was thinking, soulful eyes. She was marveling at the coincidence of being in Harriet at exactly the moment she heard herself described.
A black-and-white cat slept on the window ledge. She put the ashtray down and massaged its haunches. Its fur was sleek, as if oiled. Out the window, rain drilled a band of lawn beyond which stood a squat, redbrick apartment building. She herself appeared to be on the third floor of a house, a Victorian house: the old sash windows, the high ceilings and baseboards.
A man and a dog exited the rear of the apartment building. The man wore a red anorak. His dog, a beagle, had the long teats of a nursing mother. Rose wondered about the puppies, how many there were and what had become of them. She got the impression that Harriet was wondering the same thing. She extinguished her cigarette and crossed to the cupboards. All there was in the cupboard she opened was a tub of Smarties and a bottle of Keen’s mustard. She took out the Smarties and ate them in a tranced sort of way.
A buzzer sounded. She held a Smartie at her mouth. The buzzer sounded again, and she dropped the Smartie in the tub and went out to the hall. She pushed the speaker button. “Yes?”
“It’s me,” said a man.
Her heart leapt, then sank. She leaned her forehead against the doorframe.
“Can I come up?”
She pushed the button again. She opened the door. There was the quick, light step of someone taking the stairs two at a time.
He saw her and halted. He wore a Dodgers ball cap, olive-brown chinos, and a tan T-shirt. He carried a dripping black umbrella. He looked taller to Rose than he’d looked at Goldfinch, his skin paler. He was a tall pale man with a large, distinguished head, like royalty from another century. The sight of him agonized Harriet. “What are you doing here?” she said.
His eyes sprinted up and down her body. “Were you asleep?” He climbed the last few stairs. “Are you alone?”
“See for yourself.”
He set his umbrella on her shoe mat. In three strides he was at the entrance to the living room. He swung around. “I don’t know what you want.” He made the stiff-fingered, gathering motion rappers make, and Rose revised his age downward a couple of years. “Just tell me what you want.”
She shut the door. “What I want . . .” Her voice cracked, and she started over. “What I want is for you not to have told me you were separated from Lesley.”
“We were, technically. A trial separation.”
“You made me think it was for good. You only said yesterday it was a trial.”
“I just—”
“What I want is for you not to have told me that every time you leave here you’re so psyched, you go home and jump Lesley.”
“That was . . .” He took off the cap. “It isn’t even true. Yeah, I’m psyched from you and me, but I don’t have sex with her. She’s out to here.” He indicated a huge belly.
Did he know that Harriet was pregnant? Rose doubted it. Nothing about his or Harriet’s demeanor indicated such knowledge, and, in fact, Harriet, pulling on her hands, seemed to be resisting the temptation to cup her own belly. “So you lie to me,” she said sadly.
He shook his head.
“Do you tell Lesley you love her?”
“No.”
“When she asks if you love her, what do you say?”
“She doesn’t ask.”
“She’s afraid to.”
“Could be.”
“I hate this.”
“I’m sorry, babe.”
She shrank from him. “Don’t call me babe.”
“Do you want me to go?”
“Yes.”
He tried to kiss her. She jerked away. He nuzzled her neck and touched her face. His fingers smelled of oranges. He kissed her. She went limp. Inside her, Rose went limp, and inside Rose another woman seemed to go limp, and then another, inward and smaller, a nested gang of swooning women.
He helped her get her T-shirt off. She lay on the rag rug, and he stripped and knelt beside her. “Yes,” he said, surveying her like a man in possession of a nice plank of wood.
He tugged down her underpants and licked the inside of her thighs. He kissed the flesh around her sensitive nipples. He kissed her rib cage, her belly. A twinkling light came on under each place. She stuffed his shirt beneath her head to watch, turning Rose and all the nested women into voyeurs. Rose had a mental image of the twinkling lights and their filaments and braided green wires. She’s an alien, she thought. It made sense. It answered everything: the overamped nervous system, this unearthly pleasure now spreading from the center of her body in concentric waves.
The orgasm brought Rose back to Harriet’s flesh and blood with a wrench, like grief. He nudged his penis into her mouth, and she held it hand-over-hand. At the point of ejaculation he entered her. He came in silence, a thousand miles away, Rose felt, from Harriet and even himself.
They lay on their backs. “Well, that was something,” he said.
Harriet’s spirits were already plunging.
“You’re so unbelievably fit,” he said. He put his arm around her, and she stroked the craters and stubble that were his acne scars and bristle. She seemed stranded there, in that no-man’s-land.
“We’re acting out Lesley’s worst fear,” she said.
“What’s the time?” He twisted his watch around.
“We’re monsters,” she said.
“Twelve thirty.”
“What if I was pregnant?”
“You’re on the pill.”
“It isn’t foolproof. Especially if you miss a day.” She raised herself to see his expression.
“You missed a day?”
She held up two fingers.
“You missed two days?”
She nodded.
“So you’re saying you’re pregnant?”
“Do I look pregnant?” She was truly curious.
Tell him, Rose thought.
He glanced down at her body.
“Don’t look at my breasts. Look at my face. Is this the face of a pregnant woman?”
“What are you doing, Harriet?”
Tell him.
She slumped onto her back. “Fucking with you.”
“Okay, you just scared the crap out of me. Jesus.”
She nibbled at her fingernails for any bit she could get her teeth into. Rose had never chewed her own nails, but chewing Harriet’s she felt the solace of a great need being met. David said “Jesus” again. From outside came the occasional sizzle of a passing car.
“I should take the job in London,” she said.
“Didn’t you turn them down?”
“The trouble is I’ve developed this fear of flying, of being crammed in. They’d have to pay for a suite on an ocean liner.”
“You’d hate London, it’s—” The buzzer cut him off. “Are you expecting someone?”
“No.”
They waited. It buzzed again.
“Aren’t you going to answer?”
“No.”
Through the floor they heard the faint noise of another intercom.
“It’s for downstairs,”
she said.
“There should be names under those doorbells,” he said.
“Why would I hate London?”
He relaxed. “There’s no room. Talk about being crammed in. You’d never find a place this size.”
His buoyant tone hurt Harriet. “I don’t need a place this size.”
“They might put you up somewhere. You could write it into your contract. Accommodation demands, so many square feet.”
“You sound like you want me to go.”
“I don’t want you to go anywhere.” He patted her stomach. She rolled into him, and he kissed her, and Rose felt it all starting again, the weakness, the sinking.
But then he tensed. There was a noise in the stairwell, footsteps slowly thudding up. “Is that coming here?” he asked.
She moved out of his arms. “Shh.”
Something fell right outside, some solid, light thing. The person knocked. They stayed still. The person knocked again, harder. David gave his head an impatient scratch.
“Harriet!” the person called. “It’s Lesley Novak!”
“Fuck,” David mouthed.
They began to gather their clothes.
“Your downstairs neighbor said you were home!”
David was as white as his socks. “Bedroom?” he mouthed.
“Office.” She tiptoed after him. She opened the closet, took out a green denim dress, and pulled it over her head.
David hopped around, trying to get his foot through his pant leg. “That’s her umbrella,” he whispered.
“It’s black.” Harriet was alarmed, but his greater alarm steadied her. “It’s generic.”
“What’s she doing here?”
“The baby clothes, I don’t know.”
“Christ.”
“Shh. Don’t move.”
Lesley was sitting against the banister, her legs stretched out, her hands resting on a soccer-ball-sized belly. Harriet felt a flustering ache of pity, and stepped forward. “There should be a chair here. Are you okay?”
The black umbrella—it must have been what had fallen—lay on the ground. A dripping blue-and-green-plaid umbrella hung from the railing. “You took your time,” Lesley said in a friendly enough voice.
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