Next To You

by Sandra Antonelli

  ‘It was very nice to meet you, Mrs. Chesterman,’ Caroline said, edging backward, up the steps, letting Batman pull on his leash because he wanted to get away as much as she did.

  Mrs. Chesterman advanced, pushing past her on the stairs, stepping over Batman before she turned back and blocked the escape route.

  ‘Bonnie,’ she said. ‘Call me Bonnie.’ Bonnie pursed her lips again, looking Caroline up and down. ‘Have you met Mr. Shultz? I know you haven’t met Helen and Spirio Dimitrios. They’re visiting their son and won’t be back for another month. I heard you taking to Will on the terrace the other night. If you need a hand with changing that burned-out lightbub on your terrace you can ask him to fix it. Those damn bubs must have the lifespan of a mayfly. Anyway, he may look a little different, but I’m glad you’re not put off by that. I know he’s a little scary, but he’s so tall he doesn’t need a ladder to pull out the old bub. You know, my daughter’s about your height. Of course, she has a bigger caboose than you. Goodness you’re skinny. You’re not one of those thrower-uppers, are you? I’ve seen you running in the morning. I bet you do that pie-la-dees stuff or yoga too. Well, I’m sure I’ll see you and Superman … sorry, what was your first name, honey?’

  ‘Caroline.’

  ‘I’ll see you around the building, sweetie.’ Bonnie went inside her apartment, her door slamming.

  With a laugh snorting through her nose, Caroline went upstairs. She glanced at a pamphlet about domestic violence awareness week, a menu for a local pizza place, and a pricelist from the satellite TV operator. Thank God, there wasn’t a single bill in the pile of junk.

  Batman pulled his leash from her grip and raced up the last flight ahead. He scampered back and forth on the landing before flopping over at William’s door. Then he wiggled around, rubbing his back on the fibrous mat at the threshold.

  ‘All right now.’ Caroline unlocked her door and opened it. ‘Come on. Come on. This way.’ The dog rolled over, bolted into the apartment, and took off down the hallway, immediately attacking the ragged towel William had given him.

  She had quick shower, put on casual leggings and a pink oversized blouse, and went to the kitchen. Before she got down to installing the dog flap on the French door, she pulled dog food from the pantry.

  Batman dropped his rag toy and began spinning in excited little circles. He kept spinning until she set down his bowl, then his tags ting-tinged against the edge of the stainless steel.

  For a dog so small, he ate remarkably fast. Once every speck had been gobbled he took off down the hall, grabbed his raggedy towel rat from the living room, and raced back to the kitchen to play. He shook the ratty thing in his mouth until Caroline took hold of one end and pulled hard. Batman hung on tightly, jerking.

  ‘Give,’ she said.

  He dropped his favorite new toy at her feet. She picked it up and tossed the towel through the open French door. The dog tore outside. She followed him. That was when she heard it, heard him, William singing he how wanted to get on the ‘Cover of the Rollin’ Stone.’

  Amused, she leaned against the doorframe, listening. Batman dropped the rag back at her feet. She tossed it into the house. William sang every word and changed his voice for each Dr. Hook member, singing harmony, inserting the spoken comments, even the little aww beau-di-ful line at the very end.

  He was very good. Better than very good, he was marvelous.

  He started Johnny Nash’s ‘I Can See Clearly Now,’ and as she stood in the doorway and listened, she wondered how Bonnie Chesterman could be frightened of a man with a voice like that. What was there to be afraid of?

  Caroline crept to the ivy-covered lattice and joined in, singing the part about seeing obstacles in the way.

  Will burst out laughing. ‘I didn’t know you were out here,’ he said. His chair scraped over tiles, and he made his way to the trellis.

  ‘You said you like to sing, but you could have mentioned how good you are.’

  ‘Oh, I’m very musically inclined. I can even play air harmonica.’

  ‘I thought your snapping along to Dr. Hook was pretty impressive.’ Caroline peeked at him through the ivy.

  Will caught a glimpse of her black leggings. ‘Hmm, you heard that as well?’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘Did you catch my Motown dance moves too?’

  ‘No, and I’m really sorry missed them. This ivy hides a lot. For all I know you could be stark naked over there.’

  ‘How’d you guess?’

  ‘I didn’t guess. My money’s on you still being in a jacket and tie.’

  ‘I’ll have you know I took off my jacket a full fifteen minutes ago. Hey, did you find your toolbox?’

  ‘No, but I’ve got a good broken steak knife. I was about to start on the door when I heard you out here.’

  ‘I’ll bring my tools right over.’

  ‘The door’s open, Lucy. Unless you’d prefer to be Ethel?’

  ‘I think Fred probably suits me better.’ Will picked up his jacket, slid it on, and took his empty plate inside, depositing it in the dishwasher. He snagged the red toolbox he’d left near the front door, went over the landing to Caroline’s and let himself inside.

  Batman greeted him, rolling at his feet. Will bent to rub the dog’s tummy. A moment later he scooped him up and cuddled him like a baby. The dog licked his face and nuzzled beneath his chin. With Batman snuggled up, Will regarded Caroline’s décor.

  There wasn’t much furniture. She’d arranged things in the living room to look cozy, adding pillows to the yellow-striped sofa. A lumpy-looking cream armchair was covered with a cotton throw that matched the sofa pillows. Various sized Delft ginger jars were displayed on one shelf of the built-in bookcases beside the fireplace, while books and DVDs lined the others. Her mail—the pamphlets he’d stuffed into her postbox—sat in a pile on a small wooden end table, next to the lamp he’d seen the moving guys carry up a few days back. Beside the mail was a stack of framed photos.

  Curiosity piqued, Will set down Batman and pulled a large, pewter-framed photo from the top of the pile. It was a studio portrait of her parents. He looked at it from an angle, cocking his head to the left to see as much detail as possible, and he smiled. Caroline had her mother’s hair and father’s pointed chin. The next photo was of Reg swinging a golf club.

  The last photo, encased in a silver frame, was Caroline’s wedding picture. She wore a full-length, fitted white dress and a short veil.

  Alex was a surprise. His beard was missing; his auburn hair was much shorter. The standard black tuxedo he wore lent him an air of dignity Will knew didn’t exist in the man.

  Ideas turned over in his mind, ideas about why she’d left her husband and how things might have gone wrong, until Batman pawed at him. The button brown eyes that looked up at him told him he was being intrusive.

  Will set the photos back into a stack. ‘Luuucy?’ he called out like the Cuban Ricky Ricardo.

  ‘I’m in the kitchen,’ Caroline hollered, pulled the dog-flap frame from the box, and set it near the left side of the French door. She ripped open the tiny plastic bag containing screws and nuts, dumping them into the palm of her hand. When she turned for the instructions, William was there. Startled, she dropped the screws and nuts. They rolled across the floor and dropped out the door.

  Flawlessly dressed in the same suit she’d seen him wearing this morning, William stood with his feet slightly apart, hands behind his back. She reached for the stray hardware, and said, ‘This is getting to be a habit, you sneaking silently like a shadow. If you don’t speak up, some day somebody might be startled enough to slug you,’ she said.

  ‘Is that what you wanted to do?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Which is why I stood this far back.’

  ‘So it’s happened to you before? Someone’s hit you?’

  ‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘You turned around before I had a chance to let you know I was here. I know I tread softly. I’m sorry. My mother told me,
when I was about ten, just because I was a big boy I didn’t have to stomp about like a white elephant. She used to say, “Who wants a white elephant in their house?” She told me I should try to walk like Chingachgook from the Last of the Mohicans, which was my favorite book when I was ten. Periodically my mother tells me when she thinks I’m behaving like a white elephant. She still says, “I don’t care to have a white elephant in my house, William Terrance,” when I’m annoying her.’

  Caroline arched her brows. ‘Your mother said things like that to you when you were a child?’

  ‘Yes.’ William pulled a small toolbox from behind his back—she hadn’t seen it there—and put it beside the French door. He knelt and opened the box. Then he fished out a pair of blue-rimmed magnifying glasses, put them on, and lifted out the top tray to reveal a small drill, a collection of yellow-handled screwdrivers, and boxed set of drill bits at the bottom.

  She collected the screws that had tumbled outside. ‘Isn’t a white elephant something no one wants? You said when you were little—’

  ‘I was never what you’d call little, Caroline.’

  ‘Still, you said you had kids calling you names, and that the TV was your best friend. To have your mother say something like that sounds kind of cruel.’

  His head at an angle, his eyes magnified behind the lenses, he took a screw from her hand and began to try different bit sizes to fit, wiggling things until he found a match. ‘If you’re worried I was the family joke, well, I suppose copped a lot of ribbing. For a while I felt like the Doors wrote ‘People Are Strange’ about me. But families tease each other. My sister Rebecca used to tell her friends my mother picked me up at a White Elephant sale.’ He glanced at her. ‘I gave as good as I got. Trust me, Rebecca made out far worse than I did. I may have grown up in this skin, but she had to put up with being the Abominable Snowman’s older sister. She had one dating disaster after another and got into far more fights than I ever did. Plus she was the one who had braces.’ He paused to look at the drill bit. ‘This one should do the trick. Does it look right to you?’

  Caroline nodded.

  He twisted the bit into the drill, locked it in place, and held it up. ‘I’ll do it if you’d like me to,’ he said, ‘but it might be a challenge to my vision. I can’t guarantee it will sit straight, even with the method I use.’

  Caroline looked at him, the cordless drill in his hand. He seemed perfectly comfortable kneeling on the kitchen floor, getting dog and leftover cat hair all over what she knew was a thirty-seven-hundred dollar suit. She smiled. ‘I’ll hold the door for you if that would help. Since I didn’t have a drill, I was going to try the old-fashioned elbow grease way.’

  He pulled out a sheet of colored circular stickers. ‘If you did that you’d be here in your apartment screwing for days.’

  ‘Some people like doing it that way, don’t they?’

  ‘I suppose they do, but it’s usually more fun when there’s two of you because you have four elbows and a whole lot more grease.’

  Her chuckle was energetic. ‘For a man so seemingly reserved by all appearances, you come out with good ones, William.’

  ‘Well, you know what they say about the quiet ones.’

  ‘The quiet ones?’ Caroline climbed to her feet and looked at the bright blue stickers he’d placed over the red dots she’d made with a marker. ‘You’d know all about that.’ Before he started to zip a screw into the frame, she said, ‘You’re The Quiet Man. You ever see that movie? You’re just like the Duke. You’re both Irish, you’re tall, you’re big …’

  ‘I do not swagger like John Wayne.’

  ‘Only because your feet are so small. You have very small feet.’

  ‘I assure you that myth about foot size is totally false.’

  She shrugged. ‘Personally I find the L-Rule more applicable.’

  ‘The L-Rule?’

  Caroline held up her finger and thumb in the shape of an L. ‘Tall men,’ she said. And then she pointed as if she were making a gun. ‘Short men.’

  ‘Oh, my. You’re not quite as shy and conservative as you look, are you?’

  She smirked.

  ‘Have you done a lot of research into this rule of yours?’

  ‘I’ve dressed a lot of men, William, a lot of tall men.’

  ‘Yes, but I’m big and tall.’

  ‘And your feet are still too small to be able to swagger like John Wayne. I bet you would if you could. You’d probably love to swagger up to someone instead of suddenly appearing like you do.’

  ‘I thought you were troubled about my being teased.’

  ‘I guess I realized you are a big boy.’ She shrugged.

  He grinned and then made a lot of noise with the drill, zipping in a screw.

  When he was through, she said. ‘Would you like payment for services rendered?’

  ‘Payment?’

  ‘I have ice cream.’

  ‘Ice cream? Where have you been all my life? I’d service anyone for ice cream. In fact I almost had some for dinner.’ The drill buzzed to life again. Will made short work of the dog flap. He’d drilled through the blue stickers and secured the interior portion of the frame to the door. He shifted to start on the other side and reached for the stickers again. As he faced the inside of the kitchen, he glanced over the top of his glasses. He watched Caroline stand on her toes to take two glass ice cream dishes from a high cupboard. ‘Did you grow up in the city, Caroline?’

  ‘Yes, but I’ve been away so long it feels like a new town. How about you?’

  ‘Wilmette. I only moved into this building five years ago. Where’d you live?’

  Caroline pulled strawberry ice cream out of the freezer, set it on the counter, drew a metal scoop from a drawer, and ran it under hot water from the faucet. ‘We lived over near the old Odeon Classic. Do you remember that place? I loved going to the movies there. The Regent over on Dorchester reminds me a little of the Odeon.’

  He adjusted his glasses. ‘I thought the Odeon was well before your time. I took a lot of dates there. They always had the best film festivals.’

  ‘They did!’ She waved the scoop in the air, nodding. ‘They had the best movies. I went to film festivals there all the time. Sometimes I think I was the only kid in high school who didn’t go to parties and get stoned because I was too busy going to movies. My friend Jim and I would go out for pizza, and wind up at a Monty Python marathon or an Errol Flynn double feature. My husband told me I’d missed out on so much because I didn’t go to keg parties—like getting bombed was so educational. How’s this for educational? I learned how to dress and kiss from watching old movies at the Odeon.’

  He placed the other screws in position, zipped them in, and completed the job. He rose as she scooped out a ball of ice cream. ‘I met my wife there,’ he said. ‘At the Odeon. Her change tipped out of her purse in front of me, after she bought a Coke.’ He unscrewed the drill bit. ‘That’s interesting. I met Quincy when he dropped his keys, and I met you after Alex spilled milk on my shoes. I never realized how some things fall at my feet.’

  Caroline pushed a fat ball of strawberry into a parfait glass, oddly surprised and—rather bizarrely—disappointed, to learn he had a wife. ‘I didn’t realize you were married.’ She glanced at the dog. Batman stood on his hind legs, stretching up, hoping for a spilled blob of ice cream or utensil to lick, but she didn’t drip or spatter anything. The dog looked as disappointed as she felt. She fished a spoon out of another drawer and set it inside the dish.

  ‘I’m divorced.’ William waved the drill in the air. ‘How long before it all went to hell for you?’

  ‘A little over five years,’ Caroline said and the words came out a little far away, to her ears. For a moment, Drew and Alex floated past together on a little life raft in her mind. She swallowed, and turned to hand William his parfait glass. ‘I hope strawberry’s all right.’

  ‘Strawberry, oh boy!’

  She smiled weakly.

  Batman sat at Ca
roline’s feet, looking up, licking his chops. His hopeful, round eyes stared at her spoon, his little black nosed sniffing the air.

  ‘Be careful,’ she said. ‘If you give Batman the opportunity, he’ll snatch the ice cream right out of your bowl.’

  Her voice had been very soft as she spoke. Will pulled off his glasses and set the drill down, brushing her fingers as he stood to take the ice cream. He wanted so much to relieve the palpable uneasiness she had about herself and her relationship with Alex.

  Waving pages of the personal history of William Terrance Murphy so soon was atypical for him. He’d comfortably revealed a good deal about himself in a very short period of time. However, since he’d already cracked the spine on the book of his life this week, mentioned the title Growing Up With Albinism, told stories about his family, and brought up his divorce, perhaps offering more details would make her marriage, kicking and screaming its way to the grave, not seem quite so awful.

  With a thoughtful sigh, he leaned against the counter like she had. ‘Yvonne and I only lasted two years. We’re lucky to have been friends before we got married, as well as after we divorced. There was never any animosity. Our marriage sort of … relaxed itself to death. After all these years, I still love her, and she knows it too. There’s that infantile, fairy tale ending part of me that, way down deep, almost, almost believes that one day she’ll wind up back with me for the big happily ever after finish, but the intelligent grown-up in me knows we’re better friends than spouses.’

  ‘I wonder how many people still carry a torch for their exes.’

  ‘A torch? I wouldn’t say I carry a torch for Vonnie. It’s probably more of a used matchstick with one tiny unburned, spot left in the wood. We have a relationship that benefits us both exactly the way it is.’ He spooned a small mound of ice cream into his mouth, smashed it against the back of his teeth, and swallowed. ‘I just got a birthday card from her today. She’s on an Alaskan cruise.’