by Kyra Wilder
But really probably, I was going there because once, through my window at night, when I’d been cleaning, I’d seen Nell walking past the cafe alone. At least I’d thought it was Nell. What I’d seen had been a woman alone that really could have been her, and she had hurried past the window, almost you could say stumbled past the window, and I had said, Oh, and put down my rag and spray and almost opened the window to say, Wait, let me, but of course she was already gone.
7
On Saturday M took us to look at the lake and to ride in the yellow boats that taxied people across. We all dressed as if for a picture. I put E in a white dress and braided her fine blonde hair, first one side, then the other. B was put in a blue romper and settled into his stroller. I smoothed his hair with a licked finger. I wore a dress that I’d brought with me, that I’d bought at the last minute, just before we left, when all of our things were gone or in boxes, and we’d sold the house.
Normally, I didn’t wear dresses. This dress was a dress that I’d bought for someone else, a new person, a person that was not yet me. I bought it for a person living in some place I had never yet been, and yet here I was living in that place. I had yet to really become that new person I suppose because the dress caught me in the wrong places. It gathered me up, pinched me. Wearing it, I was turned this way and that on the end of its finger. I hesitated before I left the apartment. I thought about changing into something different but B began to cry. There was no time.
The lake was beautiful, dotted with the white sails of boats manned by people who looked good in any kind of light, people who maybe didn’t even need a boat to float across the water. People who packed champagne in picnic baskets and found it still cold when they were ready to drink it. E waved at these people from the side of the lake, some of the people on the boats waved back, everyone was so good-natured. M smiled at me, seeing E in her white dress by the lake all the way here in this different place, and we were just like that for a while, smiling and being smiled at.
We bought an ice cream for E, pink, two scoops piled high on top of a waffle cone. The lake was so clear that we could see the birds diving all the way to the bottom, scrabbling against the rocks on the lake bed with their bills. Their feet pumping underwater, we could see every bit of them. Nothing was a mystery to us.
There was so much sun. I knew that I would begin to sweat, knew that there was only minutes, perhaps seconds, before terrible stains would begin advancing across the fabric of the dress. The dress that was not proving after all to be for me. The treacherous stains would creep out from underneath my arms, they would stretch across my back.
We watched the other families, hand in hand like us. We smiled at sticky-cheeked children running along the white stones by the lake. We cooed at the strollers gliding by on all sorts of wheels. It got hotter and hotter. The heat was like a hand held tight over my mouth.
Women floated by all around me in billowing dresses. They looked serene, they looked like well-lit jellyfish. I needed not to be caught in the sun. I needed to find shade, ice, the dark inside of the apartment. M continued on ahead, running with E, pointing at the birds. A headache drifted across the bridge of my nose. We got in line to ride the boats. We would spend all day by the lake however we were.
Later, we had dinner at a pizza place in the old town. There were so many people crammed around the little tables, and into all the spaces between the little tables, that it was hard for the waiter to find us. We waited for a long time at the table, E colouring, M and me saying what a good job she did. How nice this was, and that.
When the waiter came M ordered a bottle of wine, a good one, from a region in Italy that we could now one day go to, that we were now living somewhat close to. We drank it knowing this and smiled at E and B and at each other. When a man came by the table holding a dozen or so plastic-wrapped roses, and asked M if he wanted to buy some ‘for the beautiful ladies’, M replied in perfect French that he would. That he definitely would, and bought them all. M and I laughed and piled the roses up high on our table in such a way that when our food came the plates had to be placed here and there among them. We laughed again and looked at each other and knew that we were lucky because here we were right in the middle of such a wonderful minute of our lives.
I’m not sure if the problem was that they had put a lot of spice in my pizza. I’m not sure if perhaps they had made me the wrong one, and M the right one, because we’d both ordered the same, the house special, but I found I could hardly eat without choking. Without my eyes burning, without tears coming out of my eyes and I kept laughing and wiping the tears on my napkin and drinking more wine. The more I tried to bite the pizza, though, the more impossible I found it even to bring it near my mouth. More and more there at the table, among the roses, the scent of the chillies seemed to find me, or the cheese, or whatever it was that was making me cry and sweat and dab at my face with my napkin until it was wet and ruined and to laugh and take E’s napkin and make a who-knows face at M. Finally I just left the pizza where it was on the plate, almost untouched, the cheese going all cold and hard and ruined at the edges. Something wrong? M asked me, his plate was empty. Of course he’d loved it, of course it had been wonderful, and perfect, and really I felt stupid and entirely unable to say.
When we walked back to the tram stop we filled B’s stroller with the roses. I carried B soft and sleeping in my arms. E ran alongside and M pushed the stroller and people looked up from their tinkling tables and smiled at us as people do when everything is wonderful, when everyone has found a shade of lipstick they are really pleased with and the moments seem to be already photographed, already cut up into instants and tucked away for later, for looking at and showing. When we got back to the apartment E and B went straight into their beds and M and I unwrapped the roses and piled them into the vase and gave them water.
I had drunk more wine than I realized and of course, I had eaten less than I meant to, and I began to feel it now. The alcohol buzzing and humming me along as if I stood on a boat’s deck. I slipped a little. M put his hand on my back, I leaned into him and kissed his neck, and suddenly I couldn’t tell if these things were choreographed. The way I pressed against him, the way I slipped a shoulder out of my dress. We had done these things so many times before that it was hard to tell. Want versus habit, desire versus something else, routine maybe. My fingers here, and his here.
He kisses me twice here and I kiss him back. One. He puts his arms around me. Two. He leans in to drop his lips to my neck. Three. Now we would move to the bed. M would suggest this. Should we move to the bed? he would say. And we would leave the kitchen and I would slip the other shoulder out of my dress, my dress that I’d been longing to get out of anyway, and it would fall to the floor and we would fall onto the bed and quietly try to find something of each other there. To make of it what we could without waking E, B, the neighbours. Even in this, we had to be careful, composed. There was even now, a certain right way to proceed.
Instead, M stopped, lifting his fingers, his lips, from my skin so suddenly that I shivered, felt cold. I have something for you, a surprise, he said. My eyes must have gotten wide, maybe I looked suddenly greedy because he laughed a little to make it casual. It’s nothing really, he said, just something I picked up for you in Rome, while I was away. And, well, I meant to give it to you when I got back, but, he hesitated, trailed off. Looked at me.
But what, I said, starting to feel, well, a sharpening. A turning or a descent maybe. The conversation shifting. Suddenly I didn’t like M looking at me.
It’s just, he said, hesitating again, drawing the words out, making everything take a long time. What happened tonight, he said, at the restaurant.
It wasn’t a question.
And when I got back, he said. From the trip, I mean, I don’t know, he said.
Ask me to go to bed I thought, right now, feeling hotter and hotter, wishing the conversation would swing away from wherever it was going. Why were we still standing in the kitchen. A
sk me to go to bed, I said urgently without moving, without moving my lips.
Something was off wasn’t it, M said. When I got back, I could feel it. There was something about the air in the apartment, it was so, I don’t know, so stale. What happened, he asked, while I was gone?
I took a breath and refused absolutely to remember any details about the way my hands shook during those days, about the feeling of flying and falling at the same time inside the apartment, about being unable to brush my teeth. Take me to bed I wanted to scream at him.
When I didn’t answer, M said, Sorry. I don’t know what I was thinking. He hugged me and kissed me on the shoulder and slipped the strap of my dress back up onto it. Anyway he said, about the present. Wait a second, he said, leaving me in the kitchen, spinning, trying to catch my breath.
M came back holding a long trench coat draped in his arms like a fainted woman or a bride. It was beautiful, soft camel, wide lapels. A double row of buttons just itching to be touched, to be done up, to be undone. The coat’s waist would touch exactly my waist.
My ankle slipped beneath me when I saw it. It was that much. With a coat like that around me, I could have been anyone underneath. It was a thing of myth. If I had been an armful of hay it could have spun me into gold. I almost fell but caught myself on the counter. For a moment the glass vase and I occupied exactly the same space, for a moment I was eye to eye with all the roses and it was unclear which one of us would fall. I recovered though and the vase slipped off the counter and smashed into a thousand pieces on the floor. Water, roses, glass. A tiny flood. The little glass shards worming themselves into every corner of the kitchen as quick as that. Shards that could creep into E’s feet, B’s hands, all their tender so soft skin.
M left with the coat, to hang it up somewhere, and I dropped to my knees, sweeping, cleaning, wiping. Care had to be taken. M helped a bit and then went to bed, saying something about work in the morning. Saying, stop cleaning, it’s fine. Saying stop. Saying come to bed. I stayed in the kitchen, I needed to be sure everything was clean, ordered. When I was done I peeled off my dress, finally, finally, and threw it into the garbage bag with the glass, the roses. The expensive fabric floated in the bag for a moment rippling like moonlight on dark water, just pouring itself out under the black plastic sky, the glittering chipped glass stars.
I cinched the ties around it all and knotted the bag tight. I slipped on an old T-shirt and sweats and pushed my feet into the lovely leather loafers that M wore to work. I grabbed the bag and headed out to the bins. It was better to have it all over and done with, put away, disposed of, to wake up to a morning in the apartment with no evidence of any day before.
On my way to the bins I passed the sign forbidding the disposal of garbage after nine o’clock, stepping softly on the thick soles of M’s beautiful shoes. I pushed open the top of the garbage bin and threw the bag down inside. It was amazing how still everything was. The big concrete buildings all around me were filled with families. Kids, dogs, cats, washing machines, all different kinds of lives stuffed into one, two, three bedroom boxes, and yet after ten o’clock everyone was quiet in exactly the same way. Just the way, I thought, that everyone either was or would be dead in the same way too. When we’re quiet we’re dead! I might have yelled, but didn’t.
There was a rustling behind me and I spun around. Over on the far side of the bins, by the paper recycling, crouched the woman from the cafe. She was squatting in a pile of garbage, opening boxes, running her fingers inside them. She pulled a crust from a wet-looking pizza box and began to eat it with one hand while she continued to search through more boxes with the other. A box of matches fell out of her sleeve and she snatched it back up again and dropped it into the pocket of her coat. She pulled pieces of what must have been some kind of sandwich from a small box lying on the ground, these too she shoved into her pockets. She finished the pizza crust and began chipping something off one of the other boxes, dried cheese maybe. She licked her fingers, ran her fingernails along her gums. Her eyes shot up to meet mine and she smiled at me, a finger still in her mouth. I could smell her breath, the things caught between her teeth, the damp rottenness of her gums. I felt gutted. Rooted and gutted and gasping.
I stumbled back and crashed into the garbage bin behind me. The noise was like snow cracking in the Alps. An avalanche. A noise that promised casualties. A light flicked on in an apartment above us. If I was seen, I could be reported, denounced. I jumped sideways into the shadowed grass, onto the carefully tended grass where it was forbidden to go. There was a sign posted by the concierge, promising terrible things to those that stepped off the concrete. One of M’s beautiful loafers sank into a pile of fresh dog shit.
I ran across the lawn that was not to be run across. When I reached the safety of the covered concrete walkway that led back to the apartment I looked back and saw the woman in the purple coat watching me. Light from the street spilled onto her, pooling in the folds of her coat, she hadn’t moved and as I watched she pulled another crust out of a box and began eating it. I ran back to the apartment and locked the door, stopped my ragged breathing in my throat. I would have to tell the rental company about the vase.
8
M was gone when I woke up. I had slept like a wall had been pulled down on top of me. Slept like I’d never not slept. I woke up and was a different person, someone who was definitely capable of moving through the day, of taking care of B and E, of sitting by the pump for hours smiling happily, of never wanting for any amount of time even for a single second to run away screaming from wherever I was, whatever I was doing. I had slept all night in the same bed as M. I wondered if we had touched, if we had drifted toward each other in some hour or other, if he had put his leg over mine, or me his. Surely such a thing was possible.
There was a note beside me on the side table but the ink was smudged. Be back late, it might have said. Or, I love you the same as always no matter what. Shoes? it might have said. WTF? it might have said. It could have easily said that. I could have called him and asked him, only he would be in meetings all day, and I hated to interrupt. Also, I had ruined his shoes. Of course I had, and the day, the real day as it would be and not my imagining of it, began to settle down on top of me like some great bird landing on my shoulders with all its unnatural weight.
The apartment smelled of dog shit. I opened the window in the living room and saw the concierge scrubbing at a line of brown stains, footprints on the concrete walk. He had hauled out steaming water, buckets of rags, telescopic mop handles and scrubbers of various sizes, the works. The footsteps as he cleaned them would lead, I knew, down the walk and into the building and straight to the door of the apartment. There would be no denying anything.
I wouldn’t be able to leave. We would have to hide all day inside where we could never be found. I almost couldn’t breathe, the smell was really horrendous, seeping into all the fibres and fabrics, the sheets, the curtains. How had I forgotten about it all while I’d slept?
Perhaps it was possible to construct a new world out of a smaller space, a whole world out of less. Perhaps it was possible to create a world that was less connected to other things. To make the apartment into a meteor: fast moving and unassailable. I lowered the aluminium shutters and shut out the concierge. Winked him out as fast as blinking.
The apartment was dark now, but cosy. A cave for us. We could play bears all morning. E would love it, we could have so many good hours like that, growling at each other, pawing at the rental-company sofa with our so big paws. I could smile so wide when we played, wide like I might tear my face at the corners and show the whites of my eyes and it would be OK because it would be part of a game. When E got tired of being a bear I would shout, Now we are underwater, now we are secret underwater things.
There were bananas for breakfast, just turning brown, milk. I made coffee and worked on my French exercises while I waited for B and E to wake up. Sleep filled the apartment like a magic spell. Soft breathing, the sweat of dreamin
g babies. Perhaps a wall of roses would spring up and protect me from the concierge. Perhaps there would never be a knock at the door. Perhaps we could stay here in this apartment and sleep for a hundred years. Perhaps we would never be unhappy. Malheur. Malheureux. Malheureuse.
I went to the bathroom to take a shower, leaving my coffee only half drunk on the table. This was of course a dangerous thing, a terrible thing, for a mother to do. A hot drink on the table, steam curling like a snake, tempting tempting little just-woken hands to grab it. I left it anyway, feeling already penitent. Already explaining myself to someone, the police maybe. I was often, almost always really, explaining myself to the police in this hypothetical way. Practising for disaster, for post-disaster, for the moment after, I guessed. Imagining my words, my hysteria. I had just stepped away for a moment! I would say, and I would be feeling like I did now, when I said it, with the panic rising in my chest, slipping its fingers between my ribs and cracking them open, or perhaps I would just be screaming when they tried to ask me. Perhaps I would be standing alone behind a wall of noise.
In the bathroom there was a mess of packets on the counter. A bottle of pills stood half open, painkillers that a pharmacist had prescribed to me for headaches. Packets of vitamin powder were spilled haphazardly in the sink. Several of the little foil and plastic squares that held M’s pink allergy pills were ripped open. The mirrored door of the medicine cabinet swung on its hinges. Bottles of shampoo lay on their sides, everything dripped. Everything was in disarray.
E? Had E done this? I should rush to her room, and wake her, take her temperature, make sure she hadn’t taken any pills, make sure she wasn’t now not sleeping, but drifting in some kind of drug-induced fever, unable to get up. I hesitated, waking a child was irrevocable. It could be nothing, the apartment was so quiet with the children asleep. I was in the bottom of a ship, I could have been all alone.
