Chris frowns. “And you chose history?”
“I like history. I like old things. I know they wanted me to take bookkeeping or supply side economics or something practical, but fuck that noise. Can you see me in a cubicle? I’d have opened a vein by the end of the first week. It all turned out cool anyway, because I got a job modeling for the life classes and Becky needed someone to deal with her backyard. She was fun to hang out with. Told interesting stories. At first I couldn’t figure out what she was doing teaching community college in New Hampshire, but then I realized this wasn’t her first time at the old chemo rodeo.”
He nods. “Yeah. When she went into remission the first time…she ended up hating New York. And Columbia. I thought she was insane at the time – walking away from a job at an Ivy League – but I get it now. It turns out there’s only so much New York you can take, especially when your life feels like an open wound.” Chris sighs. “And then when she got sick again we all proved her right in her thinking that New York people are garbage people. We all kept our distance, because we’re assholes.”
I don’t say anything, and eventually he nudges me. “You’re supposed to say something comforting at this point,” he says.
“I know, but you forget: I’ve met your family.”
He sighs again and pulls the parka tighter around himself. “I know,” he says. “We’re terrible. I let her die up here all alone because I was too busy trying to get married to Satan himself.”
“Satan?” God, what happened in New York to send him bouncing back up here like a ping-pong ball? Zoolander’s revenge?
“Yeah, I don’t want to talk about it,” he says.
Fair enough. “Look,” I say. “You shouldn’t beat yourself up about it too much. If I know Becky she probably played the whole thing down. You know how she was about asking for help.”
“Yeah.”
“She could have been lying here for days with a broken hip before she finally panicked and called the paramedics.”
He stares at me in horror. “She did what?”
There’s no way to sugarcoat this, so I take a deep breath and dive in. “Apparently the kind of fat embolism that killed her can take, like, forty-eight hours to happen after a bone breaks. That’s the usual time window – between forty-eight and seventy-two.”
“Oh my God,” he says, turning pale. I take his hand and squeeze it. His fingers are even colder than mine.
“She insisted she’d fallen that same night,” I say, my eyes starting to fill again, but this time I can feel it coming. Not like the damburst before. “But you only had to look at her, but you only had to look at her to know that was bullshit. They’d cut away her leggings to get a look at her…” This hurts. “And her whole hip and thigh was just…black. Old bruising.”
“Jesus Christ,” he says. “I knew she was stubborn, but I had no idea…”
“No, I know. She must have been in agony, but she really didn’t want to go back to the hospital. She’d always had this dread of being hooked up to machines and being kept alive when all she was doing was suffering.” I shiver, and I’m not sure it’s the cold. He puts his arm around me. “Afterwards this paramedic told me that it was unlikely she would have survived the embolism anyway, even if she hadn’t had a DNR in place. And I guess she got what she wanted, which is something. She wanted to die at home, right there on the floor where she fell, because she knew if she laid down on a bed—”
“—it would be her deathbed,” he says, striking a chord of recognition. He’s crying now and his eyes have that pale grape sheen that is so pretty. “Elizabeth the First. I remember. That was one of her favorite stories.”
“Favorite historical figure.”
“Hands down. Tough, stubborn, flirtatious, scary-smart…”
“Sounds a lot like someone we knew.”
I offer him a Kleenex from his own pack and he takes one. “Thank you.”
“Hey, they’re yours.”
“No, not for that,” he says, with a soft laugh. “For being here. For being her friend. I guess I have something to be thankful for after all, that she had someone with her at the end. Someone who cared for her.”
My eyes are wet all over again. “Okay, stop now – because you’re going to set me off again, and if I cry any more I’m gonna turn this place into a whole big Alice In Wonderland pool of tears, and I’m pretty sure this house doesn’t need any more damp problems than it has already.”
He nods. “You want to help me bring the tent in?”
“Sure.”
“I was thinking we could put it in the dining room. If we put it at a safe enough distance from the fire…”
“No, put it in the parlor. It’s cool. I’m okay now. Think I just needed to talk it out.”
“We’ll put it in the dining room,” he says, and that’s the end of the discussion.
It’s a blue and gray dome-shaped tent, a kind I’ve erected before, but Chris is determined to do this according to the instruction book. “I know you’ve put up one like it,” he says. “But you haven’t done this particular model, so let’s just read the manual, okay?”
“Fine. Whatever.”
He’s kneeling on the rug in front of the fire, frowning into the instruction manual, his breath making little puffs of steam on his glasses. My fantasy of him spreading me out and licking me all over is fading now, replaced by a picture of him wearing nothing but his glasses and the same frown he’s wearing right now. Looking at me like I’m a tent he’s trying to assemble.
Oh God. Why is that hot? That should not be hot.
I give up trying to look like I’m useful and flop down into an armchair. Leon and his pube tattoo feel like something that happened in the last Ice Age. I’m having a hell of a day, and I really wish Chris would stop being so prissy about The Instructions and let me put up the tent. The sooner he does that, the sooner I can crawl inside and go to sleep.
“Okay,” he says, taking out the plastic corner pieces and setting them down on the floor, directly corresponding to the exploded diagram that tells you which bits you’re supposed to have. “So that’s A1 through to A4…”
“Uh huh.” I pinch the bridge of my nose and figure we’ve at least cleared one thing up. He’s definitely a top. He’s so goddamn anal that if he were a bottom he’d have sucked in the ex fiancé, his old apartment, the Chrysler building and the Statue of fucking Liberty. Possibly the entire state of New York.
“…and B1 through to B8.” He takes the poles from the box and sets them on the floor.
They roll.
He turns his head at the sound and we both watch as the tent poles roll across the dining room floor towards the wall opposite the fireplace. “What the fuck?” I say.
“The floor’s uneven,” he says, with a shrug. “I’m told it happens a lot with these old houses.”
The poles reach the other side of the room and I notice – with a jolt of alarm – that there’s a small gap between floor and wall where the baseboard used to be. I have a vision of the poles slipping down into it and into the cellar. And if the old servant’s staircase looks like something from Stranger Things then you’d better believe the cellar somehow looks even worse. I jump up from the chair and gather up the poles.
I’m about to say something about not taking them out of the box before you’re ready to use them when I have a sinking feeling.
Literally.
“Why are you getting shorter?” says Chris. “Stop it.”
The gap is widening. The whole fucking floor is starting to give way where I’m standing. “Fuck. What do I do?”
“Um…move?” he says, quickly tossing the tent box into the hall. The chairs start to scrape against the seesawing floor, moving towards me. If they slide far enough then there’s going to be enough weight on that end of the room for the whole thing to dump everything in here – including us – seven feet down into the depths of the cellar.
I reach up and he grabs my hand.
“Give
me your other hand,” he says, but I’m clutching those precious tent poles. They’re the only thing that stands between me and another night of freezing my ass off in an upstairs bedroom. The chairs scrape and rumble and the floor is now at a forty-five degree angle to the bottoms of the walls.
“Take the poles,” I say, and he grabs the poles, tosses them into the hallway and snags the back of my sweater with his now free hand. He hauls me up and we cling to the mantelpiece.
The chairs have stopped moving, but the floor is creaking in a way that says that very bad things could still happen. It’s still Wednesday. Seems like this Wednesday is really determined to keep happening to me.
“Great bones,” says Chris. He’s so pale he’s almost gray. “Everyone said this house had great bones.”
“Yeah. Unfortunately bone cancer is also a thing.”
The floor creaks again. He lets out a yelp and we watch in mesmerized horror as the chairs slide away from us as though they’re on board the Titanic. They gather speed and then wedge in the three-foot gap that’s opened up between floor and wall.
“So,” I say. “We gonna pitch this thing in the parlor after all?”
He swallows hard a couple of times and carefully shifts his weight on the fireplace. “Yeah,” he says. “I think that would probably be best.”
*
It’s Thursday. I watch the clock tick over to midnight, glad to see the back of the scariest Wednesday since Ms. Addams.
“Finally,” says Chris, as the light on my phone winks out. “Can we please go to sleep now?”
I wriggle down into the sleeping bags. We zipped two together because he says it traps body heat better that way. If I didn’t know any better I’d think he was angling for something to happen, but we’re cold and tired and kind of traumatized by what went down in the dining room. He’s quiet, probably worrying about how much money this place is going to cost us. Will we even break even when we’re done? Or will they find us dead in here next spring? Did Becky know the place was in such a state of disrepair when she willed it to us? Right now it feels more like a curse than anything else.
“Do you think she meant this to happen?” I say. My voice seems loud in the confines of the tent. I’m that kid at the slumber party who gets everyone into trouble because he won’t stop talking.
“Who, what now?” says Chris. It’s very dark, but I can just make out the curve of his cheek against the side of the tent.
“Becky. Do you think she knew this place was such a mess? Can you think of anything you did to piss her off enough that she would do this to you? Because I’m racking my brains here.”
He starts to laugh, which doesn’t help the whole sleeping bag situation, because his laugh is amazing. Deep and warm, soothing as a hot bath. “That would be a little on the nose, wouldn’t it?”
“What’s that?”
“Being manipulated from beyond the grave by a woman named Rebecca.”
It takes me a moment to get it. “Oh. That. Yeah. Wasn’t there a really old house in that movie, too?”
“Manderley. Yeah.”
“Didn’t it burn to the ground?”
“Shh!” he says, half serious. “God. Jesus, Jody. Don’t tempt fate. I don’t think I could take any more after that Titanic nightmare in the dining room.” He pulls me closer to him and rubs my shoulder where it’s got cool. “Come here. Get warm…”
And then just like that I feel his breath against my cheek. It’s dark, but I know we’re close enough to kiss. I can smell his lip balm. He gasps like he can’t believe it, and I know just how he feels, because it’s like he turned me on like a light. The tip of his nose is cold against mine, and we’re breathing the same air. My heart feels like it just went from zero to sixty.
“Please don’t kiss me,” he whispers, and we’re so close I feel his lips moving against mine.
“Why not?” All I have to is open my mouth right now. Drag my tongue over his bottom lip. And I know he wouldn’t resist, because we’ve been dancing around this ever since he got here.
He breathes hard. His arms shake around me. “Because I don’t think my heart can take it.”
Somehow I pull away. It’s like tearing the flesh from my bones, but I get far enough away to roll over and turn my back to him. I try to think of something else to distract me from how much I just want to jump him right now, and the thing I reach for is that fireplace tile, the first one I uncovered. All those tiny cracks in the glaze. One of those restoration jobs you just can’t rush.
He’s still breathing too fast as he puts his arm over me, drawing me in against him. I can feel his cock against my ass, but from somewhere I summon reserves of self-control I didn’t even know existed in nature, never mind within the confines of the horny, impatient body I’ve occupied for the past twenty-nine years.
“There,” he says. “That’s better. No kissing.”
“Yeah. We’ll just cuddle.”
“We’re not cuddling.”
“Says you,” I say. “We are spooning.”
I feel his breath warm on my ear. “We’re not. We’re huddling together for warmth. In a manly way, like polar explorers.”
“Emphasis on the pole,” I say, wriggling my butt. “And it’s kind of hard to miss the manly part when you’re poking me in the ass with your boner.”
He prods me with it on purpose. “You have one, too. I felt it before you rolled over.”
“It’s a dick, Chris. It doesn’t know the difference between sexy cuddling and manly huddling. We’re just going to have to accept that these things happen.”
“Okay. Got it. Boners accepted.”
I listen to his breathing slow. For the first time in ages I’m warm and dry and snuggled up, and it’s so, so nice. And all the while in my head there’s this soft, certain little voice that keeps saying slowly, slowly. He’s hurt and damaged and you can’t rush him. His thigh shifts against mine. I sigh and he echoes back with a low sound of contentment that melts something deep inside me.
“Do you think it was like this for Scott and Shackleton at the Pole?” he says.
“Dude, no way. If we’d been Scott and Shackleton we would have already hatefucked.”
His laugh is soft and sleepy. “Well, I’m definitely not going to hatefuck you.”
It takes me a minute. “Is that your backhanded way of admitting that you like me?”
“No. It’s my direct way of saying that I’m not going to fuck you.”
I sigh. “Your loss. I am filth between the sheets. There is nothing I won’t try at least once.”
Chris pats my hip. “I know. And you’re very cute, but you have the sexual morals of an alley cat and I’m on the rebound, so no – I won’t be sticking my penis in you any time soon.”
I’m sinking deeper into sleep, but I can’t resist pushing my ass against him one last time, give him a little taste of what he’s missing. “Shame. It feels like a really great penis, too.”
“It is. Thank you.”
“Are you sure you don’t wanna…”
He pulls me in tight. “Jody, stop flirting with me and go to sleep.”
I sigh again, defeated and too tired to continue. “Goodnight, Boo.”
“Goodnight, Pumpkin.”
8
Chris
The carpenter looks up and makes that now familiar noise again. Tssssss – a hiss of breath drawn slowly through the teeth. I’ve heard it from a lot of tradesmen lately, and I know exactly what it means. ‘Shit’s about to get expensive.’
We’re in the basement, where the remains of dining room floor are still hanging in tatters. Jody and I have spent the last few weeks sorting and cleaning and shoring up what we can in order to make the place presentable enough for building work to begin, but there’s only so much we can do. Floors are definitely a job for the professionals.
“Joists are gonna want replacing,” says the carpenter.
“Yeah. I gathered.”
He peers up and frowns. From tw
o floors up I hear a faint but distinctive moan: Jody’s upstairs making a porno.
“They’re wet, though,” says the carpenter. “And if they’re that wet you’re gonna need someone to take a look at the basement first. Get this place watertight, else you’re just going to be doing this all over again in ten years time. You know how long this damp’s been going on?”
“Uh, no. Sorry. No idea. I only got the place about a month ago.”
He sizes me up, taking in my dark skin, my black framed glasses and the haircut that – while it’s grown out – is probably still hipster-shaped enough to incriminate me as a hopeless white-collar dweeb. “You from around here?” he says.
“No. New York.”
“Nice. What do you down there?”
“I work in publishing.”
“Ah,” he says, leaning experimentally on one of the supports that are currently holding up my floor. “You hear the one about the Irishman on the construction site?”
“No,” I say, and my heart skips a beat as he leans once more and moves onto the next. Irishman? What is he talking about? Am I about to be treated to some seriously old school East Coast racism? I take a surreptitious look at his business card to remind myself I’m not going crazy; he did introduce himself as Jimmy Doyle.
“Irish guy goes looking for a job,” he says. “Gets to the construction site and the foreman is all ‘I don’t want any Irish. You potato eaters are dumb as goddamn bricks. I bet you don’t know the difference between a joist and a girder.’” He leans against another support and grins. “So the Irishman says ‘Sure I know the difference. Joyce wrote Ulysses and Goethe wrote Faust.’”
I laugh.
“Thought you’d get a kick of that one,” says Doyle, heading up the stairs. “Being a literary type and all.”
I’m about to tell him I’m relieved that the joke didn’t go in the direction I thought it was going, but as we emerge onto the first floor Jody lets out an X-rated moan. “Oh God, oh yeah – give it to me, fucking give it to me…” Upstairs the bedsprings have given up squeaking. They’re now flat out screaming for mercy, and out of the corner of my eye I see flakes of plaster rain down from the living room ceiling.
The Other Half Page 10
