by Dan Mooney
Plasterer would have hysterics on seeing this photo, and the others would likely follow suit. He could almost hear them laughing now. He told her to take it down. She smiled sweetly, like only she could, and ignored him.
The second photo was of the two of them with two friends of hers from college. They were sitting on the lawn outside the library building, books arrayed before them, not studying. He had been in the middle of saying something, and even then he was grinning like a fool. No one should show off that many teeth that often. She was listening to him talk. Her face was serious, with just a hint of unimpressed. He had been explaining why he’d chosen to climb up the side of a construction site the night before. They ended up having a real argument about that, but as they always had, they made up soon after.
“I don’t see what the problem is. The frames are classy. They’ll class up the place.”
“It’s fine the way it is, Rebecca.”
“Call me Becks.”
“No.”
“What’s wrong with photos? Our old house was covered in them.”
“This isn’t our old house.”
“No doubt about it. It’s way cleaner.”
“Right. And it belongs in this universe, not the other one.”
“Other universe?”
“Nothing. I just meant that it doesn’t fit on the wall.” He swallowed hard, the word universe was a poor choice.
“I like it. Reminds me of the old days.”
“I hate it. Reminds me of the old days.”
She looked at him for a long moment, taking in the last sentence with a face so full of sympathy that he had to look away.
“Just one?” she asked.
“Just one,” he said, sighing.
She chose the Ferris wheel picture. The argument had cut into work time, and Denis found himself somewhat alarmed. Rebecca’s arrival had been hard to take, and it was still early in the day.
After he’d worked for the appropriate amount of time—with time added on for stoppages—Denis made them dinner. A simple stir-fry. It took twenty-two minutes to prepare and serve. It took twenty-six minutes to eat it. While they ate, they talked. Sometimes about college, a little about work. They were still talking when Rebecca made tea and brought it to him just before his cop shows started. She picked a spot on the armchair by the fireplace and curled up her bare feet to sit on them. Her dark brown curly hair spilled over her shoulders, and she rested her chin on one hand that was propped on the arm of the chair. She looked beautiful. He felt like telling her this but held his tongue. Just as he did so, he spotted movement in the doorway. Deano was on the Professor’s shoulders. They teetered precariously and wobbled from side to side. He started to get up to help them.
“Everything okay?” Rebecca asked.
“Hmm. Yes. Of course,” he replied, waiting for the crash. It didn’t come. He sat back down again. The show started, and a ball of fur rose up behind Rebecca’s head, so close he was sure that the hair would fall down over her eyes.
“Are you staring at me?” she asked.
“No. Yes.” Deano dropped down behind the armchair. “What’s the appropriate answer to that question?” he asked glibly.
She smiled at him mysteriously and turned her head back to the TV. The fur ball that was Deano slunk quietly out of the room. Denis heaved a sigh of relief.
The rest of the night passed without incident. It didn’t pass without the dread of incident, which had taken up residence in his head, but it was quiet enough. When the time came for him to call it a night, Rebecca opted to stay awake and watch TV. Denis considered staying up too, but that would cut into the four hundred eighty minutes of required sleep. So he decided not to and simply headed for the door.
“Denis,” she called after him softly.
“Yes.”
“I liked it earlier when you called me Becks.” She was smiling at him again.
He nodded.
It was never going to work. In one night she had already threatened to turn his entire life upside down. He wouldn’t last a week. Two would be a disaster without a doubt. And what if she needed three? His house would be full of pictures and smells before he knew it. What if she decided to decorate it? There’d be colors and paint drips everywhere. A tight fist of panic made a small ball of worry out of his stomach. His housemates were waiting in his room. Penny O’Neill sprawled across the end of the bed; Deano curled up in a ball on the floor. The Professor stood, frozen in the corner, like a terrible statue of a respectable zombie. Plasterer reclined on the bed.
“It’ll work, Boss,” the clown told him. “Stick to your guns and it’ll work. You can do this. We got your back.”
He nodded again.
“And, Boss,” he added, his tone unfriendly. “No more Ollie in the house.”
He nodded once more.
And so he stuck to his guns. Through Thursday, when she put the small square pepper mill on top of the salt mill and he almost fainted, and into Friday when she insisted on watching a reality TV show about someone building a house and he thought he’d die of shock. Through all of it, he found a pattern slowly emerging. A pattern of seeing her chaotic ways as her own warped kind of order. Like the antiorder. It had a shape, if you looked hard enough for it. Throughout the invasion, the housemates’ heads popped around corners and floated up from behind couches, always attached to bodies of course, but those bodies always in places that they never should be. She never saw them, and they made a game out of not being seen. Skulking, one would emerge from the bedroom they now shared, declaring themselves to be “On a mission,” and they allocated points for how close they could get without being spotted. Denis remained remarkably calm on such occasions. He was beginning to get a grip on this ridiculous domestic espionage. For her part, when she wasn’t attempting to destroy his entire world, Rebecca just smiled and talked and played her guitar. She chatted about the great big things in her life, and the plans and ambitions. She talked about the small little details concerning her job and her daily motivations. She washed her hair and even dried the bathroom floor after herself—after she’d spotted Denis on all fours drying it while trying to stave off the panic attack. She smelled like lemons sometimes and oranges other times, and often she smelled like a strange kind of woodsy incense that tantalized his nostrils. She had always smelled like that. He had always loved that smell. Every afternoon she’d go to her room to practice her music, and her voice would float down to Denis from upstairs. When she began singing, there was no way he could work. He sat, transfixed, moving only occasionally to scrub at his eyes.
Through the weekend they continued the dance, but now they could escape from the house since neither of them had to work. They drank coffee and chatted some more. There seemed to be an endless supply of things to say to each other. On Saturday afternoon he went for his paper, and she insisted on buying chocolate. Thomas, who worked behind the counter, took one long look at her, then him, and then smiled broadly and winked at him. Denis found himself smiling sheepishly as he felt his cheeks redden. It was the first time he’d properly blushed in recent memory and would be recorded as such in the Denis Murphy Book of Records. They met Frank and Ollie for coffee, and Denis was struck by a perplexing sense of déjà vu. They’d sat like this, the four of them, too many times for him to recall. Only the last time Jules and Eddie had been there too, their fingers intertwined. He and Eddie typically led the charge in all matters of joking and messing, with Frank often the butt of jokes and Ollie helpless with laughter while Rebecca punched his arm and scolded him to be nicer. Jules, the youngest of them, was always the quietest. Now, four of them sat here again. It was not an unpleasant feeling, and Denis leaned back in his seat and crossed his outstretched legs before him in comfort. It’s a universally understood truth that a man sitting with his legs crossed and stretched out in front of himself is extremely comfortable.
*
* *
That Sunday morning his mother arrived as she always did, rang the doorbell as she always did, but this time she was smiling broadly when he answered. As she always didn’t. Clearly Frank and/or Ollie had told her about the return of Rebecca. He had forgotten, as he worked double time to keep his life intact after she had smashed into it, that Rebecca adored his mother and his mother adored Rebecca. The hug he once again refused her was instead returned by his ex-girlfriend. It was a bitter thing to watch that someone gone so long from this frail woman’s life could give her more love than her own son was capable of. Denis swallowed his shame. He had grown a great skill at that. His mother was still beaming as he handed over her tea on its little saucer, which was both wonderful to see and galling a little too. Denis couldn’t give her such satisfaction. So he sat in silence while the two women in his life—not counting women who were also cats—caught each other up in whirlpools of conversation that seemingly would never run out of energy.
This isn’t a bad thing you know. This a good thing. A healthy thing.
And there it was again, that feeling stabbing at him. Jealousy. Like a bristle growing in his belly. He couldn’t understand its source. Perhaps it was Rebecca, who could connect so easily with his mother. Perhaps it was his mother, who was stealing his time with Rebecca. He couldn’t tell, but it was attacking his insides. He tried to remain calm. He put on his best smile and excused himself politely so that he could go to the kitchen and examine his illness more closely. There would always be a logical way to deal with such things, and rational thought was the cure for what he had. He was alarmed to find Plasterer standing by the table. Waiting for him. Something about the way he stood was wrong, shoulders hunched over slightly, as though he was ready to compress and then explode. He gestured toward the living room angrily. The Professor stood in the doorway, shaking his head sadly from side to side. Denis wrinkled his forehead at them; it seemed like the thing to do. Something was most certainly amiss. Plasterer pointed accusingly at Denis, who wrinkled his forehead a little more. Plasterer stooped his almost ungainly clown body over and took a stack of crockery from the lower cabinet. He walked with the armful of plates right into the center of the kitchen, his stride purposeful. He extended his arms fully and then tipped his head at Denis warningly. The Professor moved to put himself between the two, one hand reaching toward Plasterer, the other toward Denis.
“They’re upsetting him. He doesn’t like it when they do this,” the Professor told him in a whisper so low that he seemed to be talking to himself.
Denis shook his head at Plasterer. “No,” he whispered.
Plasterer nodded at him insistently.
“Please,” Denis whispered intently. “Not now. They’re having so much fun. Please. You promised.”
“This isn’t their house,” Plasterer told him angrily. “It’s ours. We don’t want either of them getting too comfortable. That’s not part of our plan.”
“Why is he doing this?” Denis asked the Professor, close to tears.
“It’s unnatural to him. He doesn’t like feeling this way. They’re hurting him, so he’s hurting you.”
“Make him stop,” Denis implored.
“I cannot,” the Professor whispered. “He’s doing it for you, you know.”
“Not like this, please,” Denis begged Plasterer.
“Necessity is often a cruel and demanding mistress,” the Professor whispered sadly.
Denis shook his head helplessly.
“Will you make them leave?” Plasterer whispered.
“I’ll make them leave, very soon. I promise.” Denis’s voice was strained as he whispered.
“I don’t believe you, Denis. This is for your own good. We stick to the plan. This is not their home.”
Plasterer released the plates and they plunged into the ground with a sickening crash, spraying shards in all directions.
The room next door went quiet for a moment before Rebecca called out, “You okay in there?”
“Er, yes. Fine,” Denis replied. “All is fine. I’m just a little clumsy. Ignore me.”
“They better not,” Plasterer whispered in his ear as he bent down to collect the larger shards. “No one ignores us.”
“You want a hand?” his mother called.
“No. No, it’s fine. You two carry on,” Denis called back.
“They really better not,” Plasterer whispered again. “It’ll only get worse.” He was leaning right into Denis’s ear.
“Let me help you,” Rebecca called. He heard her teacup being placed on the side table. Plasterer smirked at him and backed out of the room far too casually.
“No,” Denis shouted, much harsher than he’d intended to. A stunned silence answered him.
“I’d better leave,” his mother said eventually.
“I think she’d better too,” Plasterer agreed, as he moved toward the utility-room door.
The two in the other living room said their goodbyes in low murmurs as they headed for the front. The plates had been smashed in the middle of the floor. There was no way of explaining why he’d taken them out of the press, or what he was doing with them. He simply kept his head down and cleaned. His mother had been so happy talking to Rebecca. Finally, some happiness for the woman whose life he’d ruined. It had been so long since he had seen her happy. If he could remember what crying was like, he’d have done that then and there. Instead, he cleaned. He cleaned often, and more and more it seemed like he cleaned in place of doing things he’d long since forgotten to do.
Rebecca walked back into the room, having seen his mother out, and gave him a look. He imagined it was equal parts pity, scorn and anger, but in reality it was utterly unreadable. He couldn’t stand it for more than a few seconds, and so he turned his attention back to the broken plates. She stood in the doorway for a few minutes more, not saying anything, and then abruptly turned and walked up the stairs. Denis scrubbed the wetness off his cheeks and went to fetch a brush.
It was later that afternoon before they spoke again. Denis spent the intervening time polishing and carefully cleaning all eight pairs of shoes in his bedroom. Penny O’Neill lay on her stomach alongside his bed, her knees bent so that her feet could kick absently behind her. Her tail seemed to flick from heel to heel as she kicked. He couldn’t see her from the far side of the room, the bed was in his way, and so her voice seemed to come from nowhere. From Rebecca’s room, the sounds of some mellow singer-songwriter emerged into his hallway, a hallway that hadn’t heard the sound of music until she had invaded with her army of memories and smells. He tried not to hear the lyrics, all lost loves and unrequited passion. For some reason it stung the inside of his brain.
“Why did he have to go and do that?” Denis asked Penny O’Neill bitterly.
“Oh you know him. Action man himself. He told you that it had to be done, and I don’t like agreeing with him, but that kind of behavior can’t be tolerated,” she told him.
“I could have gotten them to leave,” Denis replied.
“But would you have? There’s the thing, Denis. You were enjoying their company. It’s a terrible habit to form. Where’s the control?” Her voice was patronizing.
“It wasn’t a big deal. You guys are making a way bigger deal out of this than is necessary.”
“It’s because we love you, Denis,” she purred at him. “We only want what’s best for you.”
“Yeah, well I—”
There was a knock at the door. The music was no longer playing.
“You talking to someone in there?” Rebecca’s voice called out.
“I was just talking to myself,” Denis replied. “I was thinking of an apology, actually. For my clumsiness earlier.”
“Really?” she asked, sounding unconvinced.
“Honestly,” Denis lied.
“You’re sorry?”
“Absolutely.�
�
“Good. You can make it up to me. Frank and Natasha are having dinner at their house and we’re going.”
Denis groaned inwardly. She had very neatly trapped him with that one. Saying no now would make his apology seem insincere. Saying yes would mean eating a dinner that could potentially be a disaster. There’s no way to tell someone that you only want peas if none of the peas mix with the rest of the dinner and you can guarantee that there’ll be an even number of them on the plate. This is why the outside world remained a constant mess to Denis. Peas. And other things of that nature.
“Of course. I’d love to go.” He grimaced as he said it. Penny O’Neill was chuckling quietly to herself on the floor.
“Turncoat,” he muttered at her.
“What was that?” Rebecca asked.
“I said where’s my coat,” Denis replied, as if he didn’t know.
“It’s in the exact same place your coat always is, Denis. It’s never anywhere else. Now let’s get moving. I don’t want to be late.”
* * *
For a man who wears politeness as a form of armor against judgment, Denis Murphy was particularly aware of the social graces that go with being a dinner guest. He brought a bottle of wine with him to the table, though he drank absolutely none of it. The effect it had on Rebecca, however, was much more positive. She hadn’t been hostile on the way to Frank’s place, not exactly anyway, but it was clear she was still annoyed. As dinner went on, and Natasha’s charming ability to put people at ease kicked in, she mellowed, and once again, Denis found himself in a social setting that he didn’t find repugnant on every level. In fact, he was beginning to enjoy himself a little, which on a Sunday, when he should be watching one of his movies with his housemates, was a serious break from the norm. He wondered if this is what normal people felt like every Sunday. He grimaced; it was one of his natural gifts as well as his default reaction to everything outside his home. “Normal” was that other world he used to live in, and thinking about it too much was dangerous. He tried it on sometimes, and he almost made it appear as though it fit, as long as no one looked too closely, but it was seldom comfortable. In just a week he had managed to lose a part of himself and couldn’t tell if that was a good thing or a bad thing.