Banishing Verona

by Margot Livesey

  Zeke set the spackle down and approached. “How do you do,” he said. “I’m Zeke Cafarelli, a friend of Ms. Irving’s. I’m giving her a hand. Was your father a gambler?”

  “A gambler? Oh, you mean my name. No, my mother said it as a joke when the nurses at the hospital kept pestering her about what to put on my wristband. As she points out, at least she didn’t say mistake. So”—he consulted the notebook—“there’s painting the living room, the taps, some problem with the showerhead and the grout in the bathroom, the floors. And it says fluorescent lights—allergic.” He looked up from the book, his brown eyebrows raised beneath his brown fringe. “That’s a new one on me, but I suppose it’s possible. I’m allergic to sunlight. Even when I was only four or five I got terrible headaches in summer. I would lie in bed longing for rain. How does she manage with shopping?”

  “Shopping?”

  “Most stores have fluorescent lights. It seems like it would be quite restrictive.”

  “I think,” said Zeke carefully—this was not his area of expertise—“she may have been speaking metaphorically.”

  “Oh.” Chance’s whole body rocked back and forth. “I get it. She hates the lights, and she thinks if she pretends it’s medical, we’ll fix them. I don’t see why not. Do you mind if I check out the bathroom?”

  As he turned to leave the room, Zeke saw that his hair hung halfway down his back in a neat braid. Two pools of water marked the place where he had stood; a trail of smaller damp patches led toward the door. Zeke went back to filling a row of holes at eye level where something, a shelf probably, had been removed. Six holes later, Chance returned and announced that he would arrange for a plumber and an electrician to come as soon as possible. “And you’re painting the living room?”

  “Yes.” Then he remembered that assurance was not his to offer. Verona might summon him at any moment. Once again he felt resentment at the uncertainty that now governed his life. “That is, I plan to but it’s possible that I’ll be called away.”

  “Called away? Are you sick? religious?”

  “Not that I know of, but I’m only in America for a few days.”

  “Lucky you.” Again Chance’s whole body moved up and down in what Zeke understood to be approval. “I’ll put in a work order to have the living room painted, and Ms. Irving can always cancel it.” He scribbled a couple of lines in the notebook and returned it to his pocket. He pulled on the jacket, becoming once again his burlier self, and approached Zeke, hand outstretched. “Nice to meet you, Mr. Cafarelli. If you ever need a job in the U.S., give Mr. Wolfberg a ring. We can always use a good painter. Have a nice day.”

  Reluctantly, Zeke took his hand. He would have liked Chance to unzip his jacket again, sit down, and talk about what it was like to be allergic to sunshine and how long it took to grow his braid. As they were shaking hands, he remembered one of the few jokes he understood. “When a person says that to my friend Emmanuel, he says, don’t fucking tell me what kind of day to have.”

  Chance’s lips parted revealing two rows of completely white teeth, his hands came together in a clapping motion, and his heavy cheeks shook. Oh, thought Zeke, American laughter.

  By the time Jill returned, all four walls were covered with two coats of magnolia paint and he was standing on a chair, working on the ceiling. But while he applied the paint some comparable process seemed to have occurred inside his head; all his hopes about Verona, which he had carried so carefully around London, across the Atlantic, and through the highways and byways of Boston, had been obliterated by a single question: why hadn’t she phoned? He remembered the story she’d told that first afternoon about getting rid of people by writing their names on the wall and painting over them. As he ran the roller back and forth, he could not imagine that he would ever find her in this strange place, that they would ever be reunited, and even if both of these were to occur he could not believe that anything good would come of it. What on earth was he doing here, inconveniencing himself, his parents, and his customers?

  “This is fantastic,” said Jill. “It looks so much better.” She stood in the middle of the room, her glasses shining with droplets of water.

  “I’m going home.”

  “You must be tired after doing all this. Do you want to get some supper? I could walk part of the way with you.”

  “Walk?”

  “To the hotel. I looked at a map today and it’s not that far. We don’t need to keep taking taxis.”

  “I mean to London.” Even his only friend in America no longer understood him. Beneath his feet the chair creaked, and drops of paint sprayed from the roller. Later, he could neither remember nor repeat the speech he had made as he struggled to explain how useless his presence here was: how he couldn’t sense Verona in any shape or form, not in the Fogg Museum, which he knew she had visited, and not in the hotel, where he knew she had stayed; how his parents needed help. “I made a mistake,” he said. “I thought she cared for me.”

  “Can I see her letter?”

  “Her letter?”

  “You told me when you got to the hotel she’d left a letter for you. I don’t mean to be nosy, but if you were willing to let me read it … .” She spread her hands, and he caught a whiff of disinfectant. “Maybe I could tell you how it strikes me.” Her normally pale face was flushed. Was that just the effect of coming into the warmth? No, she was saying something else now, about how when she’d gone back and reread Leslie’s letters it had been obvious that she was being given the brush-off; she simply hadn’t wanted to acknowledge what any stranger would have grasped in a nanosecond.

  “Nanosecond?”

  “A very short period of time. When I asked one of the nurses on the orthopedic ward where they kept the splints, she said, ‘I’ll be with you in a nanosecond.’ She was ten minutes, but that’s not what it means.”

  “It’s at the hotel.” He climbed down from the chair and bent to wipe up the spots of paint. “I’d like that.”

  While Jill went to change her clothes and he rinsed the roller, a few shards of his feelings for Verona emerged. He remembered his Uncle Stephen, the one who had dropped dead of a heart attack, pointing to the smallest patch of blue sky and saying look, enough blue sky to make a pair of sailor’s trousers. He and Jill would go to the hotel; he would produce the letter, which he had folded into his last clean shirt; she would read it and pronounce, irrespective of his longings. He could still recall his first glimpse of the astonishing truth that his thoughts and feelings made no difference to other people. His third-form teacher, Miss McCallum, had written on the blackboard the sentence, Douglas ate his porridge.

  What does porridge do in this sentence, she asked, head swiveling like a periscope above the pond of pupils.

  Don’t let her pick me, thought Zeke. He stared at his desk, shaping the five words so that even busy Miss McCallum would understand them. Then he wondered if pick was ambiguous. Don’t let her ask me, he thought. He tried to make his thoughts like the Viking shield he’d seen in his history book, strong and invincible. Don’t let—

  Zeke?

  On the faces of his fellow pupils he saw an expression that over the course of the next decade he had ample opportunity to learn to recognize as a mixture of glee and relief. Miss McCallum had ignored his sturdy well-formed sentence and was staring at him with her colorless eyes while he scrambled, undefended, around the empty rooms of his brain. In one of the rooms he stumbled upon a saying of his father’s: Nothing like a bowl of porridge to stick to your ribs. Porridge, he said, sticks to Douglas’s ribs.

  The class shrieked.

  Quiet, girls and boys. Zeke, don’t be cheeky. I’ll ask you one more time. Given that Douglas is the subject and ate is the verb, what is porridge? We studied this last week.

  Trying not to move or breathe, he stared at the top of his desk, waiting for the storm to pass. He did not bother to think anything at all. What was the point if no one paid attention? Miss McCallum had sent him to the punishment desk, the wo
oden desk in the corner with so much chewing gum stuck underneath that sometimes, revoltingly, a wad brushed his thigh. And then Caroline Power, whose eyes had a glassy look that had made him believe she was thinking a sentence similar to his own, volunteered that porridge was the object. How could something so formless be an object?

  Only years later, after university, after his breakdown, did he grasp that even at their most vivid, their most neatly organized, his thoughts were invisible, not only to teachers and tyrants but to everyone from the most perceptive doctor to the driver of the 73 bus.

  While Jill waited in the lobby, he went to his room to retrieve the letter. The first thing he saw was that the bed had been remade with the pillows under the counterpane. Then he noticed the red light on the phone, blinking. Almost on tiptoe, he approached. He raised the receiver and heard only the usual high-pitched note.

  Downstairs Jill was nowhere to be seen. For a moment, as he scanned the crowded lobby, he was afraid she had left. But no, she wouldn’t do that. He forced himself to walk slowly around the perimeter, looking at the different people: a group of men holding briefcases and phones, two women in fur coats, a couple with several children. At last, in one of the armchairs near the fire, he saw a familiar pair of legs emerging from beneath a newspaper.

  “Jill.” He tugged at the front page. “The light is flashing, in my room.”

  “What light?” She lowered the paper and, at the sight of him, dropped it. “Let me come up and take a look.”

  In his room she picked up the receiver, pushed a button, which he now saw was labeled MESSAGES, and held it out to him. “You have one message,” said a mechanical American female. “I will now play your message.” With the first syllable, the first fraction of sound, he knew that the caller was not Verona. He sank down on the bed, so disappointed that he didn’t care who or what was coming next. “Hello, Zeke? It’s Gwen, your mother. I got this number from Emmanuel. I can’t believe you’re in a hotel in Boston. But they put me through so I suppose you must be. Anyway, I need to talk to you. Call me on my mobile.”

  The American voice returned with instructions about repeating, saving, or deleting. He put the receiver back on its cradle. “My mother wants me to call,” he said.

  “Oh,” said Jill, clasping her hands. “Is everything all right?”

  “She didn’t say. She seldom does.” And it was true: Gwen’s messages were almost always commands—call me, come round—with neither reason nor explanation. “What time is it in London?”

  Jill looked at her wrist. “Ten to ten. I can wait downstairs.”

  “I’d rather you stayed.”

  “I’ll go over by the window and practice my yoga. May I use one of your towels?”

  Then he had to ask her how to telephone London and she wrote out sixteen numbers. I don’t want to do this, he thought. Jill emerged from the bathroom with a towel and lowered herself to the floor on the far side of the bed. He heard a huh sound and her legs in their black leggings appeared above the edge of the bed, toes pointed toward the ceiling. He picked up the receiver and dialed, twice fumbling a digit and having to begin again.

  “Took you long enough,” said Gwen. “What if your father had had a relapse?” She was off, like a greyhound after a rabbit. When finally he could get a word in, he begged her to slow down. Maurice had delivered an ultimatum; meanwhile Don, thanks to Zeke’s warning, was being nice as pie. “Why couldn’t he have been like this all along?” she said. “Cooking meals, taking me to the cinema.” And then, the day Zeke left, she had found something while checking her breasts.

  “Something?”

  “A lump, a lump that wasn’t there before. I don’t know what to do.”

  “Go to your doctor.”

  “I meant about Maurice. I worry he’ll do a bunk. It seems too much to ask. I’m married, I’m forty-five, I’ve kept him waiting all these months, I have a husband who’s ill, and now this. Though I won’t really know anything until they do a biopsy. The doctor did say most of these things turn out to be benign.”

  Even over three thousand miles, he could feel her longing that this should apply to her. From the floor came a series of huhs; the black legs dipped out of sight. And in the midst of his despair he had a moment of illumination. His condition, which sometimes made him feel so different from other people, was only one bend on a winding road along which many other people wandered. “I’ll be back soon,” he said.

  “What use is that?”

  “Well, you phoned me. You seem to want my opinion or something. So I’m asking, can you wait for a few days? Tell Maurice you don’t want to do anything that might upset Dad while I’m away.”

  “How long is a few days?”

  By the weekend, he promised, and said he had to go. For several seconds he luxuriated in the silence. Then he crawled across the bed until he was looking over the edge. Jill was lying on her stomach with her head and feet raised, bowlike. He could hear her rhythmic breathing. Presently she lowered her head onto her folded arms.

  “Did you finish?” she said. Slowly she rolled over so that she was looking up at him from a distance of a couple of feet. Her eyes were large and dark, like those of some nocturnal animal.

  “I had an idea while I was on the phone,” he said. “I wanted to tell you.”

  “Go ahead. I am, as they say, all ears. Which is just as well given that, without my glasses, you’re a blur.”

  “I’m not sure if I can put it into words.” He told her about Gwen and the lump and how he had problems recognizing people, especially people he knew well, and that while Gwen was talking, he had had the thought that maybe he wasn’t so different from other people. They might behave as if they could walk through all the rooms of their brains and everything was in plain view, like the fruit and vegetables in the shop, but in fact lots of things were hidden from them: lumps, feelings, ideas. “So I’m not the only one,” he concluded, “who sometimes mistakes A for B.”

  Jill blinked, twice. “Of course not. I hope you can remember that.” She sat up, stretched her arms above her head, and yawned. “Has your mother seen a doctor?”

  “Yes. She’s having a biopsy. It’s funny, first my dad getting ill, now her.”

  “You’d be surprised how often I’ve seen these kinds of coincidences in hospital.” Her face was so close he could feel her breath on his cheek. “You meeting Verona, your dad having a heart attack, your mum having a scare.”

  “My meeting Verona is quite different.” He moved away, swinging his legs to the floor.

  “Still, it’s an upheaval. Do you want me to read her letter?”

  In the confusion of Gwen’s news he had forgotten their original plan. His first thought now was to refuse. Jill no longer seemed the ideal, sympathetic friend; besides, he didn’t want to betray Verona by showing her private letter to someone else.

  “You don’t have to,” she added. “I’m only trying to help.”

  She too turned away and, rising to her feet, bent to retrieve the towel. She is trying to help, he thought, as she returned it to the bathroom. He could not recall a single occasion when she had been less than encouraging about Verona. “What’s today’s word?” he said.

  She clapped a hand to her mouth. “I’d forgotten all about it. So much for improving my vocabulary. We could choose one together.”

  “Let’s, over supper.” He stood up, fetched the letter from its hiding place, and handed it to her.

  Verona

  23

  Verona stood at the front of the ferry from La Guardia Airport into Manhattan and held on to the throbbing handrail. Beyond the windows the water—fresh or salt, she didn’t know—shone darkly, and along the shore tall feathery rushes bent in the wind. The air smelled of diesel oil and bitter coffee and, just occasionally, the expensive perfume of the woman standing next to her; all the other passengers were either talking on the phone or reading. Verona couldn’t see her face, the woman was several inches shorter, but from her posture and the w
ay she watched the shoreline, she had the impression that her companion might be on the verge of tears. A lost lover? a lost job? a deviant child? All tragedies, Verona suddenly understood, that might befall her at any moment. My hostages to fortune have tripled, she thought, and was amazed at how swiftly her life had changed.

  A plane, coming in to land, passed overhead. As she followed its journey, Verona pictured Zeke perhaps even now flying toward her. What would he do when he found her gone, leaving only an awkward letter to welcome him? But how could she explain the complexities of the situation with Henry when she barely understood them herself? Turning back to the water, she saw a wooden crate floating toward the boat. She braced herself for the collision but, at the last second, it disappeared without a sound. I’ll see him tomorrow, she thought, trying to raise her own spirits and, through some miracle of telepathy, Zeke’s. In the anonymous hotel room she would tell him everything: Henry’s crimes and misdemeanors, Nigel and George’s relentless pursuit, her own disheveled romantic history, which had made her so stupidly reluctant to pick up the phone. She was still pondering the list when, off to their right, beyond the rushes, a throng of tall glittering buildings came into view.

  “Magnificent,” said the woman beside her. “I love being reminded that Manhattan is an island.” She raised her face, and Verona saw dark eyes made darker by the careful use of makeup, a small pert nose. “Forgive me asking, but are you all right?”

  “I’m fine,” said Verona, and nearly added that she had been wondering the same thing about her interlocutor. “I didn’t expect the city to look like an illustration for Pilgrim’s Progress.”