I did not talk of my husband. People wanted details. I had millions more, and they were greedy for them, for news of a love I still observed, but something hard and visceral in me refused to give it. He belonged to me alone. That was the price of his leaving me as he did, when he did. Privacy is not something Americans understand well anymore: You are only as real or worthwhile as the stories you surrender and even then, even if you’re willing, there’s no guarantee you’ll pass. Especially with women my age, any age, really, who too often trafficked in feelings for leverage. You see, I didn’t want these sorts of tests to factor into my days. I did not care for expectations now. I couldn’t afford to.
Years ago, I read a review of a reissue of a book by a German writer, Peter Handke. It was a memoir about his mother and her suicide. The reviewer, a novelist, wrote that Handke’s mother’s sort of death didn’t rank as much of a tragedy in the scheme of things, in the face of mass murder, genocide, famine. One aging middle-class woman taking her life was prosaic. Too small. And the widows in that support group probably would have agreed, that certain griefs trump others. But they did not know my husband, what I lost, or what I had done, and I could not, would not, tell them.
Upstairs came a clatter, a pot or pan hitting the floor, the metal reverberating. Hope did not rush to collect it. Likely she was watching it try to settle. When it did, when I heard nothing more for a space of a few minutes, I made it to the door, and out of the building. There were the birds again—so loud with their business that for a moment I thought the world was theirs, but then with the chilled air finding its way through my clothes, I had to walk, and there on the corner I saw the cars and taxis and delivery trucks climbing Clinton Street; they were panting and hollering, brakes trilling, overwhelming the birds.
And on the sidewalks came the first wave of the morning’s rush-hour pedestrians. I remembered what it was like, the competition with the lights, the awareness of the clock in every part of your body, and all the calculations going in your head despite you. Brooklyn Heights, Cobble Hill, Boerum Hill, Carroll Gardens, all of downtown Brooklyn into Park Slope was populated by variations of middle class, from low to high. The neighborhoods had become so desirable, for the proximity to Manhattan and the prettiness of the streets, the quality of the schools, that people did what they had to to stay, and, more, to belong; they paid in iPods, iPhones, and BlackBerrys, in fashionable shoes, handbags, and jobs, with the highlights in their hair, the cut of their dresses and suits and pants, the contributions to the Botanic Garden, Housing Works, NPR, and Doctors Without Borders. Never mind the rents, the condo and parking fees. I could almost hear the arithmetic that meant more tender considerations were left behind, that got them to the subway and into their offices.
But I could stroll. I could walk away from the subways on Montague Street, and as I turned to do so I saw a young woman walking toward me, marching really, shoulders up by her ears, face a knot, math going. How much time, how many blocks, when could she afford a building with a doorman, laundry, a view? Not yet. She was not many years out of college. She’d foregone stockings and her legs under her skirt were pink with the cold, though she would not concede to it. Spring meant no stockings. She gripped a magazine in one hand like she might hit someone with it and glanced at me dismissively. Hadn’t I somewhere to go? For as long as our eyes met I knew a moment’s panic. And with guilt I thought of my own bills. I had a new roof to put on the building. I could afford it. Over time. Yes. There was time.
I watched her as she crossed Atlantic Avenue into Brooklyn Heights, where I used to live with my husband. I had considered moving farther away but only made it to the other side of Atlantic. To Pacific Street. From Atlantic to Pacific, no real distance at all.
I almost didn’t see Mitchell Braunstein making his way down the street. Even from two blocks and some away, I could observe how he had challenged his leanness. His head and arms, hanging, looked carelessly attached; his steps were smaller than usual for a man of his height, six feet or so. I do not know how far he’d run, but it looked as though he’d gone full out and was accounting for it now. He hadn’t seen me yet, and before I could decide to avoid greeting him or not, he appeared to remember something; he looked stricken with the remembering and went back in the direction he’d come. It was his urgency that made me follow him. Perhaps he’d dropped his key or his wallet. Perhaps I could help. Landlords had some obligations, and my head was not clear.
He walked quickly and so did I. When he broke into a trot, I did the same. Then he halted just short of Atlantic Avenue, as if he’d run into something or someone. His body reared up slightly. He paced, appeared to catch his breath, then bent to put his hands on his knees, his elbows making dangerous angles for anyone who came too close. His head lowered again. It looked like he might let it fall at last, let it go, that great heavy head of his, and just when I thought so, thought I should turn back before he saw me seeing him, turn into the tide of commuters who did not have time to take Mitchell or me in, he set off again. This time, thankfully, he simply walked at a pitch. One I could match, at a remove.
He led me across Atlantic. I could not pass from Cobble Hill into the Heights without feeling a slippage, sometimes light, sometimes severe, into the past. I did not do it often. But if I kept my focus on him, on what was new, the new chill, the forsythia with its whiplike limbs tipping a new yellow, trying to bloom despite the cold, I could navigate it, yes, with Mitchell, my tenant of over four years, on Henry Street, turning on Montague, past the used bookstore from which my husband and I had taken home so many books, past the Polish diner where we ate boiled pierogi and suffered the indifference of the bored Polish waitstaff, to the Promenade.
It was cantilevered above the Brooklyn–Queens Expressway, which, along with all the city streets, fumed with the new day’s exhaust, its noise and ambition, but Mitchell never minded this or the view of the harbor and lower Manhattan, as if he had no room for any of it now, as if he had no past or future. It was lovely to witness, this race of his, until he found his object, sitting in the middle of the line of benches. He stopped to see her fully first and so did I. A woman who was as lean as he, nearly as tall, as poured out from exertion, in her running clothes, her nose and cheeks ruddied; her damp dark hair seeping out from an unremarkable woolen cap to her jawline. Before I could properly size her up, decide if she was merely a sister or a running friend from work or college with whom he’d just quarreled maybe, he wrapped himself around her and she curled into him. They held on as if someone threatened to come and pry them apart. Or as if they were freezing. They hid their faces in the other’s dampness, what had to be a cold damp now. Salty. They did not see me. How could they? A woman standing where she did not belong.
TEA AND WHAT WAS EXPECTED
I WOKE LATE, and as the morning became midday I could still inhabit a dream and it me and I could see my husband reaching for me with both arms, but they were black with this new green, inky with it, and he was laughing. The phone rang. I didn’t answer it, and when it rang again, this time in a way that struck me as plaintive, I unplugged it. I thought to go back to bed, but I threw water on my face, attended to my teeth, made coffee, still seeing him reaching for me so when the knock came at the door, my door, I could not but think for the interval it took to turn the knob, the lock, that it was him, that he’d managed to find me here. I hadn’t gone too far away. I’d stayed just close enough, on the other side of Atlantic. But a young man presented himself instead. Hope’s son. Unmistakably. The one I’d seen pulled into her on the street once months and months ago.
“Hello,” he said. “Good morning.” Measured. Almost decorous. Had he been taught not to fidget or was it his nature to stand so still?
I caught myself staring, said hello back.
“My mother, upstairs?”
“Yes, oh, yes, is everything okay?”
He paused to consider that. Oak and sand winding through his brown hair. Eyes like his mother’s, though darker overall a
s if someone had thrown in bits of peat. And so solidly made through his trunk and well-formed limbs. Young, yes, but a man already in body.
“With the apartment?” I clarified.
“Yes, fine, or I think so.” A dazed something in his manner caused him to pause again. “Thanks, I mean for the apartment. Thanks for the apartment.” There was a scent of pennies, of copper, coming from him and something cedary in his sweat. He rolled forward on the balls of his feet, then stopped, catching himself.
“You’re welcome. I’m sorry, I didn’t get your name.”
“Sorry, yes, I’m Leo.”
“I’m Celia.”
“She told me. The landlady.”
“Yep.”
“My mother wants me to invite you to coffee, no, tea, that was it, tea with us, upstairs. With my sister and me. So we can meet you. She’d like that. In about an hour?” He was not used to being her emissary, or not in years, but he wouldn’t think of turning her down now. When I hesitated, he pursued me, for her. “Just for a minute. She has her mind set on it.” He did not resort to charm, as she did. He looked down as he reported, “She’s singing,” and then surprised me by looking at me directly. It woke me—that sincerity. There it was again, and with her eyes reimagined on him. I did not know how to reply except the way he most wanted. “Okay. In about an hour then.”
* * *
I thought I could manage it—do whatever was expected for an hour. I thought I was sufficiently alert when the door to George’s apartment opened and Hope’s daughter smiled through puffy eyes and blotched cheeks, threw her shoulders back and gave me a long neck, her mother’s, yes, a display of poise and simple courtesy.
I don’t know what I saw first once the girl moved off and let me in—that the place had now settled into a soft overgrowth, of flowers, some expensively arranged, some carelessly, and of more bright pillows and afghans, one hooked over the couch, another on the wingchair, another folded on a footstool I had never noticed before.
It was as if Hope was primed to put on an extended slumber party—something green, a soft something for the head, a coverlet reckoned for each potential guest. She or her children had also managed to displace books so that here and there they leaned into one another on the shelf like school friends or were littered around the room, a few abandoned mid-read, left wide open. And I smelled gardenias, a scent stronger than any other in that room, than the tea already set out and steaming in a white and rose-stenciled ceramic pot, than the perfumes of mother or daughter or the unmistakable scent of the boy.
The gardenia was my mother’s favorite flower and as such had been a burden to me and to my father when he was still alive. Gardenias, being tropical, don’t grow in the Northeast save in a hothouse or with concerted effort; and because they bruise easily, die quickly, florists don’t always favor them; they can’t be relied on to play their part. My father and I often watched Mother’s Day corsages, picked up that Sunday morning, turn brown right on my mother’s wrist even before the afternoon had fully arrived.
I tried to focus on the girl but found myself scanning for the source of the fragrance—their scent is sweet, thick as musk. The girl said, “I’m Danielle Boxer. My mother has said so many lovely things about you.” Her kindness had no body to it. She extended her hand, not to shake, but to introduce me game-show style to the food forming a battalion around the teapot, a pile of enormous scones, fruit, Camembert, a quiche. “We have so much to eat,” she declared in a tone that asked “What will we do?” The daughter’s large eyes were a diluted blue; they skittered over things, and her skin was milk-pale and so given to showing every emotion, the action of blood in her veins. Her cheeks were fuller than either her mother’s or her brother’s, yet when she gave me her profile, it was sharp and Roman. She had two faces competing in the one—a girl’s and a woman’s. When her baby fat burned off in her cheeks (where the last of it remained), she’d be striking in an austere way, but for today, perhaps owing to circumstance, she was plainer and frailer-seeming than her mother. And her outfit—recalling Audrey Hepburn, a high-collared sleeveless blouse with flounced bow and twill gray cropped pants—looked expensive, as formal as mourning clothes, and painfully grown-up.
“Feel free to sit—everyone’s here or around here—I mean if you’d like to sit.” Danielle said this with a fluttering gaze that expected anarchy or disaster of me, all while her hand kept reaching to ensure her chestnut hair was not escaping the tight ponytail she’d assigned it to.
“Mother,” she called to the kitchen, “Your friend—”
“Celia,” I helped and sat on the edge of the footstool.
“Yes, Celia is here.”
“Good, good,” called Hope. “Be right there.”
“Can you believe all these gorgeous books?” the girl asked, though her tone once again betrayed her; it suggested that the books unsettled her. So many books.
“George is a reader,” I told her.
“A collector. He has Simone de Beauvoir and Colette. A first edition of The Second Sex. Yes.” She nodded to herself, surveying, blinking, then, “It’s a nice apartment,” but there was such querying force in this too that I could easily take it to mean she didn’t care for the apartment at all or wanted, powerfully, to be elsewhere. Suddenly so did I.
“Here I am.” Hope swanned in, hair swept up without one dissenting strand, at once full and contained, lipstick on. She wore a man’s white dress shirt, blue trouser pants, and a silk ivory scarf tied around her neck.
“Leo?” she called.
He emerged from the bedroom. “Sorry, I was—”
“Indisposed,” his mother supplied.
“Right.”
“Celia, welcome.”
I stood.
“You met my children.”
“Yes,” I said softly. “A pleasure.”
“Come, everyone, sit. Let’s eat. Let’s get to know Celia. She’s been very generous to me, allowed me to stay at George’s.”
It was an overstatement, it embarrassed me. Perhaps that was the point of the invite.
A stream of commentary accompanied Hope’s movements as she poured tea, offered cream, sugar, honey. “Leo has always loved honey.” The scones were almond and cinnamon, respectively. “And Danielle wouldn’t eat anything but bread as a baby.” Hope did not rush. She’d done this before and did it commandingly. I wanted to ask after the gardenias—I still could not pinpoint their source—but I didn’t, relaxing instead into Hope’s patter. There was song in her voice and pleasure—the pleasure of being a hostess, mother, of demonstrating this. The marks on her neck were covered by the scarf and may have healed. Whatever their state, this was meant to be a new day. Her skin was unblemished; her eyes were clear. “The tea is called Thé de Fête, party tea. We bought it in Paris at Mariage Frères, this wonderful teahouse in the Marais. You have to go if you haven’t been.”
“I haven’t.”
“I took the kids when we’d go every year, but now they’re selling tea all over the world and it’s lost its specialness a little, hasn’t it?”
Danielle nodded at her mother and said vacantly, “Globalization.”
“Or progress,” said Leo, without contention. “I mean they have a good thing.”
“Yes, but that doesn’t mean they should just give it away,” said Danielle, blinking, “to anyone.”
“They’re not giving anything away,” said Leo calmly.
“We haven’t been to Paris this year. The kids’ schedules have been harder. Danielle’s finishing her senior year. Leo has a job.”
“We were there last year,” Danielle said. “I studied there. At the Sorbonne. All of us were there … All four of us.”
Hope’s back stiffened. “Yes, that’s right. Well, Celia, you’ll have to tell me if you like the tea—it’s got a lot of vanilla in it. Can you smell it?”
Here was my chance. “Yes, now that it’s in the cup. It smells delicious, but I keep smelling gardenia. That can’t be the tea.”
“Oh, no, or yes, it’s in the bedroom. An adorable plant with what? Two blossoms?”
“Three,” said Danielle.
“A gift from my children.”
“Oh, how nice.”
“What a scent,” Hope marveled. She sipped her tea. “I grew up in North Carolina and under my bedroom window there was this old chicken coop that had been claimed by what I still swear was this wild growth of gardenias.”
“You still swear?” Danielle asked.
“Oh, well, I’ve since been told by someone who claims to be an authority on these things that gardenias don’t grow wild in North Carolina, that it couldn’t have been gardenias or that it’s unlikely.”
Danielle put her teacup down. “But you’ve always told us it was gardenias, Mother. I mean, that’s why we bought the plant for you. To remind you.” Color climbed up Danielle’s cheeks; her brow broke into lines.
“Well, it might have been. That was the scent or that’s what I recall. It was so powerful—”
“How could you get that wrong? I mean how could someone get that wrong? All these years, you told us that story, since we were little. Gardenias, gardenias and that seductive fragrance everywhere, just everywhere. That’s what you told us. They were there—”
“Danny, it’s okay. It was the right thought,” Leo put in. “It was Danny’s idea.” He became still, his head cocked with one ear higher than the other as if he were trying to make out more inviting sounds at some distance.
“I love gardenias, darling. I’m so grateful. Drink your tea before it gets cold. It’s your favorite.”
“No, this is Dad’s favorite.” Danielle used both hands to smooth back her hair, once, twice, three times.
“This tea? No, I don’t think so.”
“Yes, Mother. It is. You couldn’t have forgotten already. He’d order this and a—”
“Leave her alone, Danny.” Leo strained not to move, to keep his voice level.
The Affairs of Others: A Novel Page 5