Everyone but You

by Sandra Novack

  Dobbin adjusts the phone against the crook of his neck. A new pain cuts through him. He can feel the burn of the whiskey in his throat and a heaviness in his limbs and voice. “Julia,” he says. “I was just thinking about you.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” she says. “Are you blitzed?”

  “Blitzed, bombed, would it matter? Because, yes, all of the above.”

  His words are met with silence and he strains to hear Julia breathe. “Look,” she begins finally, her voice shaking. “I’m not saying it’s all because of Annie. Do you understand?” She pauses, and then, in a vague way, she tells him that she knows what it’s like, that new attraction, that wanting someone different, that needing to start over again. “Really, it’s impossible to speak of staying together when so much has changed,” she says. “For both of us.” From her conciliatory tone, from her hesitations, he understands, implicitly, that Julia has slept with Poe. Dobbin also understands that she’s stopped loving him, that she probably has not loved him for quite some time, though when pressed, she cannot or will not pinpoint when exactly her feelings changed. Nor will she admit that she’s had any part in their undoing. If there is in Julia any sense of failure, any thought that there might be something she’s done to concede or retract, it never seems to occur to her to confess this now, in the moment.

  “There was a distance,” he says finally. “Which I regret.”

  With that, Julia takes in a sharp pull of air, and Dobbin hears a distant kind of muffle, a click, and the abrupt flatline of the phone. He stares at his large hands, aware that they seem strangely disembodied. He goes to the kitchen for another shot of whiskey. Then he calls Annie and invites her over to the house.

  “Finally,” she says. “I was wondering about you.”

  “Just come over,” he says.

  An hour later, love, his life has gone diffuse again. He thinks of Julia, how he once stood in a room full of people and promised, yes, of course he would treat her right—always. He thinks then on random things: weekends holed up in the house, painting walls; nights lying next to her, that familiar warmth. He thinks of this all, sees it in black and white, as if in a movie. He sees, too, bombs and plumes of smoke and skylines that suddenly collapse. He wants to hide, he wants it all to be over, and he wants—he simply wants—to be new and blameless again.

  They—he and Annie—are in the bedroom, the bed rumpled from the night before, from Dobbin’s own restless sleep. He feels tired, heavy. His head throbs under the weight of Annie’s flowery perfume. She’s near him, warm, her look beguiling. She caresses his arms and shoulders. She’s already unbuttoned her blouse, stepped out of her skirt. He kisses her, feels a subtle thrill, those sensations that aren’t yet diminished, those feelings that are still new.

  “Yes,” she says, and she begins to murmur in his ear. He holds up his finger to his lips. “Shhh,” he says. He sways a little as if he is dancing with her now. The room pulsates with white light. Dobbin can almost hear the bombs being set off, one by one, feel the trench he—they—are digging, deeper, deeper, between him and the life he’s known. He hears Annie whisper something about protection, so he staggers to the closet and steadies himself against the doorway. From the shelf he takes down the gas mask and fits it over his face. He breathes and turns to see Annie, half naked, through the collusion of time and yellowed glass. He likes her like this—hazy, distant. “Okay,” he says. “Protection.”

  Annie wears a bemused, slightly cryptic expression. “Oh my,” she says. She unhooks her bra, watches him. “You are just a little drunk.”

  “Pretend I’m someone else,” he says. “An infantryman.” He salutes her.

  Annie moves toward him. “A history fetish,” she says. “Well, then, let’s get those clothes off right quick, soldier, before the next battle begins.”

  WITH ANNIE, in the coming months, Dobbin feels a certain measure of emotion, though nothing as strenuously labored as love. It’s more as though he feels the mechanisms of love, the machinery of it, and the slow chug of time. Some nights he still dreams of Julia and he wakes, weeping.

  In conversations that happen with greater infrequency, Julia never mentions reconciliation, and that, too, gradually begins to seem like a dream. She never discusses their past or goes into details about her life apart from him, her time with Poe. She tells him only that she’s writing, and eventually will find a new place to live. On those occasions when he sees Julia and Poe across the quad, she sometimes glances in the direction of his building and office, but never for long. After a while any talk between them peters out, and Julia changes her number at Poe’s, does the usual things. Dobbin sometimes drives by Poe’s house, but he dares not stop. Rumors persist on campus, of course. Julia, he’s told, shows up less and less for classes; she leaves her students waiting on her for inordinate amounts of time. Dobbin listens with interest, though he seldom says anything. Gradually whatever pain he feels turns into a dull ache, not exactly a forgetfulness but something that keeps life moving along at a functional pace.

  In June, Julia relocates back east and Dobbin receives paperwork in the mail. He feels almost relieved, as if there is something accomplished in the simple signing and fragile markings of the pen—a forgiveness, an absolution, even a certain amount of generosity. Any regrets he has are eventually tempered with a feeling that everything turned out for the best. He finds comfort in this thought and does not indulge other possibilities, because he’s certain that if he did, he’d be forced to admit that everything, our lives, our love and happiness, only straddles the thin border between here and disaster.

  WHITE TREES IN SUMMER

  Even with his bedroom window open, Viktor had heard no noise during the night, not the tree branches that scraped against the exterior of the house or the neighborhood teenagers’ laughter as they gathered outside with rolls of toilet paper in hand. He was not ordinarily the type of person who, at eighty-two, found that a restful sleep came easily, but that night Viktor had barely tossed or turned, so close was he to a hopeful dream in which he heard Bella’s voice calling to him. It was a simple dream, really, but he woke crying and, chastising himself, he wiped his eyes, got up, showered, and dressed. It was not until morning coffee that he looked outside and found that everything had turned a furious white—the tree, the rosebushes, and the hedgerow of privets that separated his small yard from the house next to his. The paper hung in long, flowing loops that billowed unpredictably in the June breezes, just when the sky above Viktor had seemed almost bright, the trees green in their hopefulness. From his window on this Saturday morning, he surveyed the yard and was reminded of winter, just when he had resolved himself to life pushing forward again.

  Though he was confident many were involved, he suspected a certain Ryan, a troubled boy with dark hair and a nose ring that Viktor found repulsive. Ryan was living with a foster family down the street. And if Ryan was involved then surely Ruth Powell’s daughter, Trish, was involved too. Ryan and Trish were dating, pooling their individual resources of friends into a collective free-for-all. Since March there had been gatherings on Trish’s front porch, twenty or so seniors who smoked herbscented cigarettes, who laughed noisily through the dark hours of night. Viktor would raise the blinds and gaze down to the street, to the solitary porch light, the silhouettes leaning against the banister. It bothered him, the noise, but it bothered him less than it would have bothered Bella. Still, he huffed irritably about his bedroom each time the teens woke him, even though Bella was not there to hear his inarticulate complaints.

  He considered retrieving a ladder from the garage and disentangling the paper from the leaves, but reaching and grabbing all of it seemed only a remote possibility, a difficult venture at best. His eyesight was poor. His legs might have managed well enough, but surely his knee would knot up and his fingers would, with one grasp, curl and tighten.

  He called the police instead. A retired security guard for the high school, Viktor knew most of the officers at the station. By eight in the mo
rning Officer Bryant showed up, just as he did six months prior—when he worked the night shift, when the snow fell furiously and Bella had to be taken from the house. Bryant was in his midthirties and had a responsible, serious-looking face, and glasses that pinched him at the nose and temples. Still, when he got out of his car and inspected the yard, he smirked. “So,” he inquired. He draped his arm around Viktor, even though Viktor was a slight, frail man who didn’t liked to be touched. “Who the hell did you go and piss off this time?”

  Viktor ignored Bryant’s profanity. He gestured down the road, toward Ruth Powell’s house. “The Powell girl, Trish is her name. I would like you to go over to her house and talk to her.” He held up his hands beseechingly. “She will respect you, your authority.” He pronounced his words carefully, with the faintest hint of a Russian accent; it was a stiff formality that lingered in him, one left over from years ago when his parents, now dead, first arrived in this country.

  Bryant looked up at the tree branches, and squinted. Above them, the sky had accumulated moisture. Swirls of gray clouds mounted atop one another. “Well, first we better get this all down before it rains,” he said.

  “You don’t think it’s in my right, to have you go over there and talk to those children? My right as a citizen?”

  “It is. But there’s nothing like wet paper, and you could use a hand, I bet.” He went to the back, where Viktor told him the ladder was stored. He came back around, leaned it against the trunk, and climbed.

  “Last week,” Viktor said, calling up to him, “after nightfall, I was watching the CBS news and I heard a flat-sounding thud. I thought perhaps there was an intruder, so I took my gun down from the closet. This is no longer a safe town.”

  “Can’t be too careful,” Bryant agreed. “We get a lot of calls worse than this.”

  “Yes,” Viktor said. “I read the paper, and that is why I have a gun.”

  The officer glanced down. “Alarm system would work, too.”

  “Alarms,” Viktor said, waving the officer off. “A waste.”

  Bryant ripped down more paper. “So what was it, the sound?”

  Viktor leaned closer to make sure he’d heard him. “Nothing. Only eggs, smeared down the window. A waste. These children do not understand hunger. They do not understand need.”

  “I don’t know what to say about that,” Bryant told him. “And I’m not going to be washing windows today, either.”

  “I washed the windows,” Viktor said irritably. “Wire brush, soap, water.”

  Bryant came down the ladder and picked up the piles of paper from the ground. “Hey, look,” he said, “you can report this, but things like this aren’t what I’d call a priority around here, just kids being kids.”

  PERHAPS THE PAPERING had meant nothing. Perhaps it was simply an act of boredom, one brought on by the end of school and the easing of curfews. Didn’t Viktor, when he was young, sometimes play silly pranks on others, with his friends? Perhaps in this town one might expect—should expect—small, random acts that bordered on the criminal. But still, he felt certain it was more, an outright retaliation. Who couldn’t tell, as they passed by the street littered with cigarette wrappers and dime bags and used condoms, that Viktor’s garden was a prized possession? Bella’s garden. He still tended to it after her death, breaking up roots with a small shovel, pruning back thorny stalks with his bare hands. It was Bella who planted the roses years ago, the peonies and laurel and lady’s mantle. It was Bella who cut clusters of lilacs before they drooped and rotted, who brought them inside and arranged them in vases. She was a big woman, thick around the waist, and she had capable, strong hands. Around her, the garden bloomed, the sweet smells felt as deep as promises.

  When they’d first married, over fifty years ago, gardens filled the entire neighborhood. Neighbors shared tomatoes that split apart on the bottoms. They gave gifts of jellies, jams made from grapes they grew in their backyards. Now the town was considered old and historic, both of which translated to run-down and forgotten. Plywood covered up buildings that once housed small boutiques and bookstores. The only people who came through town were those on their way to someplace else, those who traveled with the windows up and the car doors locked. Even the high school where Viktor had worked most of his life had become a haven for problems—mold in the heating systems, funding that over the years had dwindled, halls where fights erupted that involved knives or guns. The people who lingered on the streets so often haunted Viktor. Their faces reflected a pinch-eyed anger, one raw and exposed, the kind that comes from being forsaken.

  Things changed. That seemed simple enough. The town. The people in it. Bella was dead, had been dead since winter. Viktor now lived alone. He felt frightened by the people around him. He even felt frightened by the teenagers, by their raw defiance when they walked down the street late at night, smoking. And watching them, Trish and Ryan in particular, he also felt a pang of jealousy, not because Trish was a particularly pretty girl—she was tall and thin and often seemed angry—but because both she and the boy had everything ahead of them still, possibilities they seemed content to squander, and all the time in the world, it seemed to him, for living.

  THE TERRIBLE HEAT gave way to showers, and by noon rain pounded the pavement. A few remaining strips of paper first stuck to the uppermost branches and leaves then fell and dappled the grass and ground. Viktor left his house and walked the length of Irving Street. He had given up umbrellas years ago, and now, as he walked, the rain fell on his scrawny tanned arms, his silver hair. He crossed the street and headed a few doors down, to where Trish and her mother, Ruth Powell, lived. He climbed the rickety porch steps, and, at the front door, he ran his hand across his forehead. He had not been to the Powells’ in many years, since they’d first moved in and Trish was a round-faced, plump-looking girl who hid behind her mother. Bella had ushered Viktor over with a homemade pie, a welcoming present.

  “You should take it over,” he’d told her in a firm way.

  “Oh, no,” Bella had blushed. “They will think I am vain, holding my own pie.”

  He thought, with an extreme sense of longing, that if Bella were with him now, she would have brought something to offer in advance of conversation. Without anything to hold, he rang the doorbell, then stuffed his hands into his trouser pockets.

  Trish held the door open and Viktor squinted to see her better, her bony shoulder blades. Recently, she had dyed her hair jet black, a change that made her skin seem stark, ghostly, her large eyes more deeply set in their sockets.

  He cleared his throat. He peered inside. “May I please speak with your mother?”

  Trish turned, looked up the stairs, then looked back at Viktor, unsure.

  “Do you remember me?” Viktor asked.

  She stood up straighter, anchoring herself against the door frame. “I know who you are,” she said after a moment. “You’re that man who lives down the street, the one whose wife died.”

  “Yes,” Viktor said, and he stepped forward a little. He felt compelled to jog her memory beyond the most recent fact of Bella’s death and all that had happened afterward, to remind Trish that they had ties—they were neighbors—and ties, however small, were things best left unbroken. “But do you remember me? Years ago my wife and I visited you, your mother.”

  Trish said nothing. She turned her head again, briefly. Then she looked at him in a blank way, refusing to acknowledge anything.

  “I have something to discuss with your mother,” Viktor continued. “There is the matter of my tree. Please. Get her.”

  “She’s not home.”

  It was a lie—Viktor could see it in the girl’s face, how her eyes darted away from his, toward the ground in an ashamed, adolescent way. And it was only a moment later, anyway, that Mrs. Powell called downstairs, asking who was at the door. When she appeared, Trish rolled her eyes and slunk away, leaving her mother and Viktor in the foyer. The air smelled musty, damp, though she kept the house neatly. The living room, off to t
he left, appeared dark, the large window draped with thick curtains. The room was sparsely decorated—a few photographs, a clock—but it was comfortable enough.

  “It’s Viktor, isn’t it?” Mrs. Powell asked. She was now a woman probably in her late forties, Viktor guessed, a woman with a sloped and wary look, though her voice was plain, direct, and more than a little tired. She worked nights, he knew. She’d pull her car out close to eleven in the evening and didn’t return until the morning. She probably hadn’t even been to bed yet.

  He smiled slightly. “Yes. Yes, Viktor.”

  “You live down the street, the house with the garden.”

  “Yes,” he said again, leaning forward, pleased that she noticed, pleased that she remembered. He thought of asking if she remembered Bella’s long-ago gift, but he refrained.

  “I was at work the night they brought your wife in,” she said now. “I’m sorry.”

  He said, “You work at the hospital, yes? A nurse?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ah,” Viktor said, nodding, thinking now of that night, the horrible pace of it all, the ambulance, the questions later posed to him by officers. “I do not often go there, myself, these days. I decided quite a while ago that I’m done with doctors, that when the Lord sees fit, then I will go.” He thumps his chest lightly in a smug, determined way.

  She glanced at her watch. “I haven’t slept yet,” she said. “And Trish has to eat lunch before heading to work.”

  “She works?”

  “During the summer, yes. If you call being in charge of the barista bar work.”

  “Ah,” Viktor said again. “Any work keeps a person out of trouble, my wife always said. I know you have things to do, so I will just ask: Did you happen to see my yard?”

  Mrs. Powell studied him. “Yes,” she said finally.

  “The children,” Viktor continued. He looked down at his hands, trying to find words that would sound less like an accusation, more like a polite inquiry. But this, of course, escaped him. He surveyed the living room, the curtained window, the moss-colored rug worn thin from use, the floral sofa that sagged in the middle. “Trish, has she been well? Sometimes children do things—stupid things—when they are upset.”