by Tod Wodicka
Steve Dube had gotten to Howie first.
“Just heard and thought I’d check in, see how you holding up? You OK, champ?”
“Yes.”
“Good for you.”
Howie said nothing.
“I mean, you don’t sound too hot, if you don’t mind me saying,” Dube said. Dube went with it: “Not the hot and bothered old Jeffries we know and love, anyways! Ha. No, but seriously, you don’t sound too hot at all.”
Howie had said no more than two words of, he thought, neutral temperature, but OK. Howie did not enjoy lying. He very nearly could not do it.
“You there, Jeffries?”
“Sure am.”
But it was also fun. Like a game: making sure that nothing he said was technically untrue—beyond the initial calling in sick, of course, but even then when his manager had asked what was wrong, Howie been able to say truthfully, “I don’t know.”
“Doctors, yeah. Tell me about it. Mine gave me six months to live but when I said I couldn’t pay the bill he gave me six months more.”
“What?”
Clearing his throat, “I mean, it’s not serious, is it? Um. They having you in for more tests?”
“No.”
On a telephone, Howie disappeared like a foot inside a shoe.
“That was inappropriate. I’m sorry. My doctor didn’t give me six months to live,” Howie’s manager said. “Just to be clear.”
“That’s good.”
“Right. Well then, Jeffries.”
But Dube tried to get to the bottom of it: “Don’t want to pry, but we were all wondering here, I mean—we’re all concerned. One week, huh? You must be pretty sick.”
“Mmm.” Because mmm wasn’t true or untrue.
“I hear you, man. Sure.”
Silence.
“Well, look, I guess, you need anything? Mean to say, is there nothing we can’t pick up for you? My wife, she’s making me ask, says if you need someone to come by, you know, cook you dinner? Burn you dinner, actually, between you and me.” Dube laughed. “Hey, serious though, maybe we could pick you up some groceries? You got a prescription you need filled?”
“I don’t need anything, Steve. Thank you. Thank Marcy for me.”
“DVDs, anything, Jeffries. You name it.”
“I have to get off the phone now.”
“Yeah you do. Just calling to say get better soon, champ. You call whenever you need anything, you hear me?”
The only problem was that Emily needed food. Emily did not like eggs. Howie also needed food, but then: What if someone saw him wheeling a shopping cart when he should have been at home, sick? Now, logically, if he thought about this, because he lived almost an hour from the GE Waste Water Treatment Plant he had only once in the last thirty years run into anyone from work up in Queens Falls—and not at Price Chopper but at the mall—well, this should not have been a genuine worry. He hadn’t told anyone how he was sick. He could have been mentally sick. He could be sick with something that didn’t prevent him from going to Price Chopper to purchase food. Howie saw coughing people at Price Chopper all the time. Howie was not in high school. Nobody was going to call his parents or expel him from GE for grocery shopping. But still. It troubled him. Because, further, what if they saw that he was shopping for two people now—what if they noticed that he was purchasing things that he didn’t normally eat? Handsome young lady things like clementines, zucchini, and the pineapple? What if they asked Howie about the pineapple he planned on buying Emily? Howie was unused to operating his life within the confines of an easily identifiable falsehood. He drove nearly seventy miles east, crossing the state line to Vermont. The grocery stores in Vermont were as bountiful as the grocery stores in New York, but navigating them, the ever so slightly offness of them, was exciting, and Vermonters, who resembled upstate New Yorkers crossbred with golden retrievers, made Howie feel elated in an embarrassing way. Lots of tail-wagging strangers. Howdy there! He’d been rattled at first. Maybe, he thought, they had known him from work, or from the internet, perhaps they were friends-of-a-colleague or relatives of friends-of-colleagues who had seen internet computer photographs of his stone anniversary party; who knew nowadays? Howie soon settled into the fact that this was just how Vermont operated. They said, How you doing? Howie told them that he was doing OK, that he was only looking through boxes of rice and grain. Tell me about it, they’d say. He did. They seemed genuinely engaged. They said, Two for the price of one, might as well get two, see what I’m saying? Sure. Some day we’re having.
You said it.
Some drive, too. Howie could have gone and driven another few hours to New Hampshire. Driving down a new road toward a new supermarket in a whole new state, it made Howie feel things he would be mortified to feel on his own road, or at home, or around other people. He thought: Maybe you are not as in over your head as you think. First the successful surprise party—he had been surprised, after all, and everyone appeared to have had a super time—and now this clandestine out-of-state shopping for two.
He could not get over how many new things he saw on the side of a new road. He thought: Wait until I tell Emily.
It would be weeks before he would be able to tell Emily anything of the sort, and even then, Howie, by design, would never be the most chatworthy companion. He did not share experience. Looking back, the first few weeks that Emily spent at Howie’s place were an accident of exhausted, nervy, almost stunned half conversations and haunted, nighttime TV marathons. Sofa; kitchen; sofa. TV TV TV TV. Sleep. Nightmare. Sleep. Emily made jokes, once in a while, and Howie got wedged up inside himself and, occasionally, even fought his way out with some of the more endearingly whacked-out statements that Emily had ever heard.
For example. Standing in the hall, out of nowhere, he said: “I don’t know where the stones on the kitchen table are supposed to go.”
“I was going to ask about those.”
“We need room on the kitchen table.”
“Uh-huh,” she said. Emily had not yet asked what they were doing there in the first place, or why they were smiling. Can of worms. Because you couldn’t stop there, could you? They’d managed thus far playacting normal, and she didn’t want to rock the boat or get any closer than she already was. The stones were harmless, endearing. She said, “We can put them on the counter?”
Howie thought about that. He said, “Would people be upset if I put them outside?”
“Like, the rock people?” Emily asked. “Would the rock people be upset?”
“What?” Howie said.
Pause.
“No, I don’t think people will mind,” Emily said, carefully. “OK.”
He had not asked for help, but she got up. She helped him carry the stones outside. This was the first thing that they did together besides watching TV, and it was the first time that Emily had been out of Howie’s house since she’d come over a few evenings before. She felt more solid than she had in months. She liked the solidity of the rocks in her hands; having a task. They’d brought them back by the creek. They followed an overgrown path behind Howie’s house. They made a pile. It was unspeakably odd, Emily thought, watching Mr. Jeffries put the stones down, one by one. He made sure that their smiles faced outward and when, once, Emily put a stone down with its face to the ground, Mr. Jeffries waited until he thought she wasn’t looking and, with a subtle twist, adjusted the stone so it faced him: big smile. That was something about him, Emily thought. Every movement. So serious. He didn’t waste himself. She not only liked him, but she realized that she believed in him. “You know what, Mr. Jeffries, we totally should have buried the fish under these stones. You know, like a grave marker?”
“Fish?” Howie said, as if surprised Emily was even there.
“The dead fish you have in the kitchen, yeah.”
Pause.
Howie said, “The fish isn’t dead.”
“I think maybe it is.”
Longer pause. Time enough for a breeze and, above them, s
ome kind of altercation between squirrels. Mr. Jeffries said, “Well, it shouldn’t be.”
“I guess.” Then, gently: “When was the last time you looked?”
Howie did not know. How often was he supposed to look? “Yesterday,” he supposed.
“Well, today it’s dead. But we can check together to make sure. I’m sorry.”
“OK.” Then, “Do you really think that we should bury the fish here?”
“It probably isn’t necessary.”
“OK.”
They finished piling the stones.
“I can’t tell,” Emily said. “I’m sorry, but was the fish meaningful? Like a pet?”
“It was a goldfish,” Howie said. “It was a gift. Maybe it was sick.”
“Probably it was just old.”
“It wasn’t old.”
“You could tell?”
Of course Howie could tell. He was deeply ashamed. He could not bear for Emily to think that he might be bad at taking care of things, that he let things die alone in jars in the kitchen. He said, “Jars are no place for fish.”
“Especially all alone. How sad.”
“It was a gift.”
“I know, I didn’t mean that as a criticism.” But Emily saw an opening: “Who was it from?” she asked.
Howie bent down, adjusted one last stone that didn’t need adjusting. He said, “I don’t remember.” He really didn’t. Lots of folks had been giving him gifts that Tuesday evening. But the shame was now complete. He turned and walked back to the house.
—
That first week. They were more like refugees who happened to be shuffling in the same vague, unknown direction—away—than longtime neighbors or friends or even people who knew the other’s name. They sat on the sofa. The sofa was not the past, and, for now, it was safe. The sofa was more movement than either of them had had in years.
They liked each other. Especially after they realized that the other was not the same person they’d lived next door to for twenty-five years but someone else entirely and that, because of this, they didn’t really need to draw attention to the fact that they had been neighbors to that other person for so long and never spoken or sat next to him or her on the sofa. Emily thinking: There’s only this present moment, anyway, and even that doesn’t matter or really exist since everything is an illusion and I am insane. Howie thinking: She needs to eat. I need to go grocery shopping in Vermont.
They kind of had an understanding.
The simplicity of Mr. Jeffries’s strangeness was almost ideally suited to Emily’s internal and external disconnection. Their paralyses fit. They lived; they didn’t assume. Sometimes they even communicated.
Howie helped Emily with her sleeping. Howie made dinner.
“You’re like one of those dogs that knows when someone’s going to have a seizure,” Emily said, several days after she’d moved in. It was the first time she’d really mentioned the issue.
“I don’t know,” Howie said, uncomfortably. He did not want to speak about this. Dogs? Was that what had been happening here? Seizures? Perhaps it made sense.
She asked, “How do you know?”
“Know what?”
Emily sighed; scrunched her face. You’re right. OK. Moving on.
Howie said, “Do you want to watch TV?”
Technically, they were already watching TV. She’d been talking about their routine, which had begun in earnest on the second night, sometime after Howie had gone up to bed.
There was a knock on his door. Howie had not been sleeping. He had been thinking with the lights off.
That night, Howie had sent Harri a number of texts. Seven. This is what Howie had been thinking about; his phone was still in the pocket of the trousers that he was still wearing, under the covers, for propriety’s sake. Maybe his phone would buzz. New York was the city that couldn’t sleep. But maybe he had sent the texts wrong.
Howie still had not plugged his internet computer back in because Emily had become agitated at the very idea; just that afternoon Howie had taken it to the living room. He had thought that she might enjoy it. But she had asked him with bossy urgency if he would please, please take that thing somewhere else. Emily had, as Harri might say, kind of freaked out, looking at the computer as if it were a window to someplace bad, and so no problem: without another word, Howie had taken the computer up to Harri’s empty bedroom. He put it on her bed. Howie looked forward to opening his e-mails and Facebook, seeing the promised stone anniversary photographs, maybe send some to Harri, and, what with Emily Phane recovering on his sofa downstairs, he felt that it might be time to write some of his pals, let them know that nothing out of the ordinary was going on here, everything hunky-dory on Route 29. Mostly, Howie wanted to write his daughter a longer, more accurate thank-you e-mail for the painting. It had been unkind of him to thank her with telephone texts. He thought about writing her another text to apologize for the other texts. Emily continued to knock. Howie continued to think.
The door opened.
“Mr. Jeffries?” Emily whispered.
“I’m in here.”
“I know.”
“OK.”
“Can I come in?”
Howie had not completely removed his clothing since Emily arrived at his house. He had been responsibly prepared for just this sort of thing. “OK,” he said.
“There a light?”
Howie turned on his bedside lamp. Light. He felt like something slapped on a grill. Emily was standing in the doorway, maroon BU hoodie up.
She had not yet seen Mr. Jeffries’s bedroom. She’d come upstairs because she needed help. How exactly he was going to help her, she didn’t know. She’d fallen asleep in front of the TV and, apparently, this time he’d left her there, alone, and so when the paralysis came, so did the footsteps. The attack had been fierce, eternal.
But she already felt better, looking at poor Mr. Jeffries. He appeared to be fully dressed. But that was the least of it.
“Oh my God,” she said.
“It’s a chandelier.”
Too fucking weird: this dowager ice spider hanging above Mr. Jeffries. Emily knew better than to meddle, because, again, questions were a slippery slope at this stage in their cohabitation, but you try and take your eyes off that. She said, still whispering, “It’s beautiful.”
“I hate it.”
Dressed and tucked neatly into bed, Howie looked like a cross between an open-casket corpse and a little boy waiting to be read a bedtime story. About fish.
“You hate it?” she said.
“I hate it very much.”
For once, speaking felt like the least vulnerable action that Howie could currently take: he couldn’t otherwise survive being seen like this, trapped in bed, silent, and so he tried to smile, said, “I think that I keep it there because I hate it so much.”
“Why?”
“Because I hate it so much.”
Emily nodded rapidly.
“It’s the only thing that I hate,” Howie said. He hoped that she would leave his bedroom now. Take that and go. Scram. He considered turning the dark back on. What else did she want from him?
“The only thing you hate? Really?”
“Well,” he said. How many things could one person hate?
“So what would happen if you got rid of it then?” Emily asked. But she knew: nothing good. The chandelier was homeopathy. It was like one of those strips of poisonous tape you hang from the ceiling in order to collect and kill insects, and, once again, Emily saw the Howie behind the Mr. Jeffries. The guy she’d seen the night before asleep on the sofa. Howie was shy, subtle, and deeply, dreamily weird. There was probably a planet of shit that a guy like Howie could legitimately despise if he’d wanted to.
“Was it your wife’s?”
Howie could almost be said to have flinched. “It hasn’t worked in almost twenty years.” Then, “I still don’t know why she put it there. I told her not to. I said put it in storage for when we got a bigger house. Sup
pose she always knew that we would not get a bigger house. Maybe she put it there to show me.”
“Mr. Jeffries,” Emily said. “Do you want to come back downstairs and watch TV with me?”
Howie did not. He needed to sleep, but now that her delight concerning his ex-wife’s grandmother’s chandelier had dissipated, Emily, he saw, was in a very bad way. “You need to sleep,” he said. Because she wasn’t going away until he said something.
“I know,” she said.
Howie understood. She was not going to go away at all. “OK,” he said.
—
This began their arrangement. For the first week it was touch-and-go; it was good that Howie had taken off work. He stayed by Emily’s side when she was most tired. He knew when this was, usually, but if not, if he had gone upstairs or outside or to the kitchen, she’d come and say, “You want to watch TV with me?”
He would watch TV with her.
She would close her eyes, and he knew that if she began to have one of her nightmares, or whatever—seizures, ringing disturbances—he would firmly shake her shoulder. Easy as peasy. Eyes flicking on: white as headlights, then filling with color, relief.
Then sleep again.
Howie usually knew—and, again, they never actually spoke about how or why. Certainly not what. In fact, he had decided that he knew not because of the strange, creeping feeling that always alerted him, but because maybe her breathing changed, or her face twanged, something imperceptible, a twitch or a catch of her breath that he picked up on, exactly like with fishing, how if he waited long enough he usually knew exactly where the fish were. Howie had no good reason to believe in anything else. Emily’s sleep problems did not, in the end, warrant much reflection. You did things that needed doing. That was that. He sat. She sat. She slept. He woke her up if she started ringing, and then she sometimes said something, but more often she did not. She might smile. No biggie.
He gave her space in which to get better without the least bit of interest in what she happened to be getting better from. None of your business. She started properly sleeping. She washed herself; she began eating a little. Then a whole lot. Emily was not well and did not like the pineapple, but she was not going to die.