She was eager to see the house. This was what he hoped to delay, having not kept up with the housekeeping. When he suggested they sit down together first, she made a little noise of compliance and then stalked off while he was setting out the fig cookies he had been saving for this purpose. When he found her in the living room there was a strange look of satisfaction on her face, an expression that didn’t diminish as he followed her from room to room. Plates crusted over with the previous night’s dinner, unmated socks strewn at the base of the washing machine, worms of toothpaste that had calcified along the bowl of the sink—all of these she confronted with a remarkable lack of judgment, as if they were familiar landmarks that helped her to understand where she was headed. When she opened his refrigerator and saw the half-eaten can of tuna fish and the unwrapped block of Emmental, the only comment she made was that she liked the same cheese.
She offered to go to the store for him and when she came back she prepared food by the pound, a lasagna with seedy green and yellow squashes, and vegetables washed and diced and frozen in small sealed bags equivalent to a serving, so that all he would have to do later was empty a bag into a bowl he could microwave. She threw out shriveled apples and a blackened banana; took all the silverware out of the silverware tray and wiped out the little brown shavings of crud; and dusted in the living room, including the computer and the TV, which had odd dust-collecting vents built into their sides that had convinced him they weren’t really meant to be cleaned. At three o’clock, her hour of departure, she changed back into her sneakers and left the rubber sandals sitting by the front door.
Dary called that evening to find out how the first day had gone.
“You don’t have to worry about me,” he said. “I’m not an invalid.” He was still raw about not appearing in her eulogy. He hadn’t brought it up with her—he didn’t want to bicker about what couldn’t be changed—but some part of him insisted he continued to have a right to those sore feelings.
“Look, if you didn’t like her,” Dary said, “I’ll repost the ad.”
He said he liked her well enough. “But I still think I could manage on my own. And besides, I have Gayle.”
“We talked about this already,” Dary said. “Gayle has a life.”
Part of his resistance to accepting help was that he didn’t want to become a manager. He had managed various employees at his store over the years, many of them teenagers in high school, and by the time he had them thoroughly trained, they tended to quit on him. He didn’t want to invest the energy in grooming someone to help around the house if in a month’s time she was going to disappear.
But of course, an adult woman was nothing like a teenage boy. Gene had found that most women, once they were inside a house—it didn’t matter if they had never been inside it before—instinctually seemed to know where everything went and how it was all to be coordinated. As when after the memorial some guests had come back to the house to continue to visit with the family, and a small group of women led by Gayle had produced trays of miniature sandwiches and plates of cookies and pastries and carafes of hot and cold tea from the kitchen and afterward had packaged up all the leftovers and sent people home with the ones the Ashes couldn’t possibly eat in the next few days and labeled the rest for the refrigerator and washed the plates and drained and stored the carafes back in the dining-room cabinets and found the unlikely drawer where the good teaspoons were kept and rubbed them dry with a soft cloth that didn’t mark and then stashed them away. Whatever that special transmission was that women received to know their way assuredly and unobtrusively around another person’s house, Adele had gotten it too.
He had figured it would take her about a month before her presence was more of a help to him than a hindrance, but within her first week, she managed to detect several sources of annoyance in his life and frictionlessly remove them. She collected his mail and presorted it for him, saving him from encountering the junk, and she noticed the clogged strainer basket in the sink and replaced it. The oven rack too small for the oven had puzzled him, but she figured out it was an accessory to the microwave. When she was tossing out expired items in his pantry, she found the canister of instant coffee containing Maida’s ashes. Another person might have neglected to open the can, or having opened it, simply thrown it out. But without making a remark, Adele wiped down the outside of the can and returned it to its original spot at the back of the shelf. Not knowing for sure if she had recognized what she saw, Gene felt an obligation to explain. But as soon as he began to say something, she cut him off. “You won’t catch me snooping,” she said. “For all I care, you can run around in a dress pretending you’re Miss America.” They agreed she would work three days a week, and by the end of the first week he found himself forgetting she was his employee, because she had so little in common with the people who had worked for him in the past.
On the days she didn’t come to see him he found himself storing up things he could tell her, little things that didn’t seem worthy of existing in his mind for his own benefit or entertainment, though as soon as he imagined himself telling them to her they seemed exciting and interesting. He found her easy to talk to, partly because she could listen for long stretches without needing to assert her own opinion, and partly because she didn’t know any of the people he talked about. If he portrayed his daughter as self-serving, Adele accepted this version of Dary without challenging him. And if he said his wife had made the best strawberry-rhubarb pie in New Hampshire, she didn’t doubt this was true.
One day, when she informed him he had received a letter from Esther Prince, Gene asked her if she would read it to him. He explained that he had written the woman, his wife’s old college roommate, a letter after his wife’s memorial, and he expected this was her response. He didn’t know why it helped to hear the letter in Adele’s voice, but it did. When she finished, there was just one part he wanted to hear again:
I’m sorry you felt disappointed with my remarks. That was not my aim, and I am genuinely sorry for my role in that, if any. But life is full of disappointment. I assumed you of all people would know that.
He tried to remember what exactly he’d written in his letter, but that was almost two months ago. Of course he remembered the gist of it. He had made it plain he doubted the things Esther had spoken of in her eulogy had happened in the way she had related them. He didn’t spell out all of this in the letter, but Esther was no twit and she would have gotten the idea. Sending the letter was probably foolish, because Esther would never admit to being a liar. But there was a deeper problem the letter couldn’t solve, which was that Esther had caused Maida’s college crush, the art-history doofus, to become irrevocably mixed up in Gene’s mind with the superstar professor Esther had spoken about. The art-history doofus had never been young or handsome or tenured in Gene’s conception of him, suggesting they were separate people. But then how many men had Maida known intimately at Bates? Why had she told Gene that Gene was her first real boyfriend? No matter how he tried to explain away Esther’s lies, his questions persisted with their own stubborness.
“Does she have the hots for you or something?” Adele said, examining the envelope.
“Esther? No way.” He paused. “Why?”
“I thought maybe you had a girlfriend.”
“Not that I know of,” he said, with some embarrassment about the question. And then, because he thought the door had been opened, he added, “What about you? A boyfriend?”
“Oh, not me.”
She asked him what he wanted her to do with the letter and he told her to throw it away. He assumed that she wouldn’t—that she would put it somewhere inconspicuous, giving him the opportunity to decide about it later—but he was wrong. She threw it in the trash, and as if sensing this might not be enough, she tied off the trash bag and walked it outside to the bin. The simplicity of their communication—he asked her to do something, and she did it— thrilled him. It made him oddly aware of the way in which, in marriage, the sent mess
age was rarely received without a layer of interpretation.
She didn’t talk much about herself but he felt no less close to her because of this. He felt that her not wishing to discuss the details of her life expressed how she viewed her life more than any words. Instead she amused him with stories about her dogs, two old rescue greyhounds that had suffered a ravaging life at the races. She said they were the ugliest dogs you’d ever seen, and she showed him a picture: loose folds of skin where their muscles had atrophied and small wiry eyes in snouty heads. They were always causing trouble, stinking up the bedroom with their awful flatulence, or costing her $400 in antibiotics. She was unequivocal about their nuisance and yet you could tell she would never get rid of them. Once when he asked her why she kept them, she replied, “If I don’t, who will?”
He learned about her son in a roundabout manner. One day Gene received a phone call and a gruff, impertinent voice said, “Is she there?”
“Who?” Gene said.
“Who do you think? Put her on.”
Gene told the person he had the wrong number.
“God, you’re a selfish bastard,” the voice said. “You tell her she still has to pay me for the baby.”
It turned out that Adele’s thirty-seven-year-old son was living with her, and so was the son’s nineteen-year-old girlfriend, who was seven months pregnant. The son didn’t have a job and Adele had agreed to pay for the girlfriend’s prenatal care—“paying for the baby” was apparently paying for a visit to the obstetrician. Gene was too polite to inquire into the rest of the family’s financial arrangements, but from the way Adele spoke of the situation, he got the impression she was supporting the couple.
Occasionally something would remind him that there was a deceptive quality to their intimacy, because three times a week she dropped into his life from nowhere and withdrew just as abruptly. Sometimes, when she wasn’t working, he examined her rubber sandals. Her feet were considerably larger than Maida’s, both longer and broader, and she clearly overpronated. Maida would never have worn shoes like that, except possibly for a costume in which she was aping the frumpy version of herself she would never become. At times the sandals seemed to underscore the fragility of the happiness he was constructing. What was he thinking? He and Adele hardly knew each other.
Once, wanting to hear that she liked coming to see him, he asked what her favorite out of all of her jobs had been. She thought about it for a moment and then said it was the one she’d had before working for him, a domestic position with a man who had multiple sclerosis. This was news to Gene; he had thought he was her first. He asked her what was so good about that job.
“Well, he was depressed when I went to work for him,” she said.
“Some people would quit.”
“It made it easy,” she said. “Depressed people know what they want—they’d like to feel better. But they don’t actually expect any real improvement. They’re reasonable.”
She told him that when she had worked for the man with MS she had occasionally rubbed and oiled his wife’s feet as the man looked on and gave her pointers, because this was something he had once done in the marriage and now couldn’t do. Gene had never had his feet touched like this by anyone, not even his wife. It sounded demeaning. But from the way Adele spoke of her relationship with her former client and his wife, it was apparent she didn’t find anything odd about the situation. This was maybe the first indication to him that there was something loose in her, something not quite fixed in its proper place, a flash of what he had glimpsed in her relationship with her son. It worried him a little, this part of her that could be taken advantage of by someone inclined to exploit her unusual temperament.
Sometimes he tried to resist her kindness toward him on principle, to show her she didn’t have to do anything out of the ordinary for him. When she offered to bake him a pie to take to the Donnellys’ for Thanksgiving, he told her not to bother, since the main benefit so far of being a widower was that whenever he was invited anywhere, people emphasized he didn’t have to bring anything. Losing a spouse, and perhaps particularly a wife, appeared to be a temporary excuse for social irresponsibility. But having proved to himself his ability to resist Adele, he then relented and said it would be fine after all if she made him a pie. What kind of pie did he want? she asked. Any kind she felt like making, he said, though he found apple pie too much dominated by cinnamon and considered blackberries better suited to summer, while pumpkin pie was too much like sweet potato and pears were better for tarts.
“Strawberry-rhubarb, then?” she said.
“If that’s what you like.”
Whenever he found himself thinking of Adele, a voice inside him asked whether there was anything improper in his feelings toward her. The possibility made him uncomfortable. But the discomfort always yielded to a vigorous internal affirmation of his devotion to Maida, which was the same as his devotion to things exactly as they had been before she died. Then, having confirmed the appropriate feelings, he would allow himself to acknowledge that he derived some mysterious, benign pleasure from Adele.
Thanksgiving morning Adele stopped by to deliver the pie, a gleaming pouf of pastry with deep pockets of berry. It occurred to him then, in a way it hadn’t before, that she had made a choice to spend her holiday doing something extra for him. It gave him a jolt of esteem, restoring him to a sense of himself as someone worthy of such a gesture, and it awakened in him a curiosity for what this effort meant. He bowed before her and her creation and said, “I serve the mistress of sweet things,” because those were the first words that popped into his head.
She laughed a startled laugh, and he asked her if she wanted to come inside to sample her handiwork. She made a face that scolded him for threatening to slice up the pie before it arrived at its intended destination, but he could tell that beneath the scolding she was pleased that he was pleased.
Just then something made her reach out and graze the back of his neck with her hand. “Your hair’s gotten long,” she said.
He blushed and instinctively touched the spot where her hand had been. “I guess I’ll have to grow paws to justify it,” he said.
“Oh?” she said. “Are you more of a wolf or a bear?”
A thrill passed through him—she was playing along. “Just some creature that howls at the moon,” he said.
“Do you really?”
“Would it scare you if I did?”
“Oh, it takes a lot more than that to make me afraid.” She raised her eyebrows and looked askance, perhaps trying to look tough, but then she smiled anyway, as if she couldn’t help it. She offered to trim his hair before he went over to the Donnellys’.
They set up a chair on the linoleum floor in the laundry room. She wrapped him in an old sheet and pinned it at the neck with two clothespins. Beneath the sink, there was a spray bottle containing diluted vinegar. She emptied it and filled it with water.
She said, “It’s not my fault if you smell like a pickle all day.”
Before dampening his hair she ran her hands up and down the back of his head as if she was at once measuring the quantity of the hair and trying to coax the individual hairs to lie in the same direction. It was a shock to his system. When was the last time he had been touched, really touched?
She sprayed down his head and began to snip. The warmth of her fingers against his scalp alternated with the scissors dashing across his head, and he found himself anticipating the return of her hand. Every now and then she adjusted the angle of his head using a light touch along his jaw. It was this, more than anything, that made him feel how severed from human touch he had been. When you didn’t have a lover, no one ever touched your face.
When she was done, she made him look in the hand mirror. She put her face over his shoulder near his face, as if someone was preparing to take their photograph.
“Nice,” he said.
“Handsome.”
11.
AT THE DONNELLYS’, before the meal, Ed insisted on showi
ng Gene the new gas fireplace that had been installed since he’d last been there, as if it wasn’t right for there to be any changes to the house without Gene knowing about them. The fireplace was bigger than its predecessor, and Gene remarked on this, complimenting the installation. But it wasn’t enough that he was admiring. Ed made him flick the switch that produced the pumpkin flames that flickered over the pile of artificial logs.
After some talk of the fireplace (the models the Donnellys could have gotten but didn’t and why this one was paramount), Gene and Ed went into the kitchen to find some wine. Gayle filled their glasses and then informed them they had to get out of the kitchen because they would only be in her way. It was a pretense—Ed was a skilled cook—but years ago the Donnellys had decided this would be one of their standard performances in the presence of guests: Ed playing the role of the barbarous, untrained husband and Gayle playing the savior of the civilized party. The roles had been this way for so long that Gene sometimes found himself believing them. It was almost as if his retreat to the study with Ed was a thoughtful escape to make Gayle’s life easier.
Gene remembered when the study had been Brian’s bedroom and Ed’s designated personal area just a long folding table in the basement. Then Brian had grown up and an interior designer was brought in to advise the Donnellys on converting the bedroom to a study. As this room was resettled other rooms became ripe for renewal, and eventually it would be this room’s turn to be refreshed once more. The funny thing was that there was hardly any need for any of these improvements. The Donnellys had thought of everything already: recessed lighting, dimmer switches, a laundry station, built-ins for shoes, cookbooks, spices, and jewelry. If there was a junk drawer in the house Gene had never found it. The only misstep he had spied was a toilet in the guest bathroom that flushed by pulling the handle up instead of pressing it down, and it made him secretly happy every time he discovered it again.
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