Her bedroom was spare, with one window. It resembled her childhood room: a chair, a washstand; this one had a mirror. The bed itself was narrow and firm. It must have belonged to Esther at one time, but no trace of her presence remained. Louise hung a saint’s image over the dresser, though she didn’t know which saint it depicted. There had been no formal religion at Nan’s, a gospel of relinquishment only. She’d bought the picture at a jumble sale in the city, liking the gentle look of the face. At the boardinghouse, she had bragged of the move: no more rides on the bus into Glass, no more Mrs. Ashford smoking at table. On the first morning, she made Mr. Harris an egg and watched him put strips of toast in the yolk. “A hot breakfast is the key to long living,” he said. His appetite wasn’t large, but he took boyish pleasure in eating that way. For her own part, she took pleasure as well; a saint would have a pure soul as well as a body.
There were pictures of Mr. Harris’s wife in the house: dancing, walking at the seaside in Glass. There was a large one in the corridor from when she was young, seated in a dress with a collar; each time he passed it he would straighten the frame. Louise liked to stand before it, alone, imagining what sort of perfume she might once have worn, what shade of lipstick. In bed at night, she dreamed of the woman, and of Mr. Harris, charming and young. Libby he’d called her; a beautiful name.
There were doctor’s appointments, speech therapy sessions, bills to sort and be certain he paid. She bought food and the like with blank checks he had signed, filled prescriptions at the chemist’s in Glass. Her only indulgence was a book here or there, chosen from the rack near the front of the market.
She had grown to be more than a housekeeper. She was devoted as a mother, a wife. It moved her each morning when he tipped back his head to show how he’d swallowed all of his pills. From time to time he grew irritable, and when she asked what he wanted for dinner, or if the room was too drafty, he would wave his hand and dismiss her. She was stern with him in those moments, and it gave her heart a great thrill to say, “If you don’t tell me it will be tinned meat all week, Mr. Harris.”
At the interview, she had scarcely remarked it when Esther said her checks would arrive through the post, administered by a solicitor’s office. Now she was grateful for the arrangement. She would have felt wretched taking money from him. Like a thief she’d have felt. Like a swindler, a whore.
In December, she sent cards to several old acquaintances for whom she still had addresses. With one woman she’d worked in a paper goods shop; with another she had eaten lunch once or twice after meetings of a talking group they’d been in. She sent a card also to the boardinghouse girls, again boasting of how well things had turned out. “I tend house for a wonderfully kind man,” she wrote. “It is hard work, but I know I am doing a good thing. He hasn’t anybody else, I’m afraid.” She wondered what each of them would think reading this and if they’d remember certain things about her, the trembling of her voice when she spoke, the way her lips turned blue in the cold; the boardinghouse ladies would say, “Well, I never.”
She received only one reply, from a woman named Rae whom she’d known years ago at the girls’ home, near the end of her troubles. The other letters, it seemed, had been read and discarded, or perhaps had never found their way through the post. Nevertheless, she was pleased. She had once felt something like love for this Rae.
She did not open the letter at once, liking the look of it, the feel. Her friend’s handwriting was tilted and fine. The address specified Mr. Harris’s house. For a while she carried it in her handbag if she went out, hid it under her pillow when she returned. I only wish I had your courage, it might say. I always felt you were born a much older woman.
Of course, privately, she had known it wouldn’t say that, exactly; when she opened it, finally, some weeks later, it was with an anticipatory sadness. “I am married,” it said. “I’ve a girl and a boy. Things have got much better with me. We were always so sad then, weren’t we, dear? And for what? Ah, what children we were. I pity my girl she has still to go through it. It’s a wonder, having a child, Louise.”
She threw the letter away. With Rae, she had walked the bridge over a roadway and stood with their faces touching the fence, leaning into it, eyes closed, the roar of traffic below, imagining that they might fall any moment, open-armed like high divers or crop dusters, to earth. What children we were, Rae had said of that time. It made Louise feel there had been only falsehood between them, that she’d never had a friend in her life, after all.
“What is your favorite book?” she asked Mr. Harris one evening as he watched a football match on TV.
“I don’t know that I have a favorite,” he said. He paused thoughtfully. “No, I don’t think I have one.”
Louise longed for him to tell her. She felt lonely all of a sudden.
“Have you read all of these?” She indicated his shelf.
“Oh, I doubt it,” he said. “Some of them belonged to Libby, and I never did read them.”
“She must have had a good mind for books,” Louise said, thinking of the woman’s face in the picture. Kind, she imagined. Soft with her touch. Nan had been nothing but sharp tooth and bone. “I haven’t really.”
She wanted Mr. Harris to say something more—about Libby, or about her own unserious books—but when she looked up she found him engrossed in his match.
They burned wood every night, and soon the stack began to dwindle beside the front door. “We can neither of us chop a new stack,” Louise said. She was in the kitchen, washing a pile of dishes that had been collecting in the sink for some days. Mr. Harris was in the next room; he didn’t respond. Increasingly, she found herself carrying on one-sided conversation like this, addressing Mr. Harris but speaking as though to the walls of the house. “I’ll have to arrange a delivery soon.”
The next day she made a telephone call, and the day after that a man arrived in a truck. He was young, but Louise felt he had an old face: dark eyes, whiskers on the line of his jaw. She met him in front of the house. He had his hands in the pockets of a corduroy coat, his shoulders hunched against the cold and the wind.
“I can help you stack the wood,” was the first thing she said.
“I’d better not let you, Miss,” the man replied. He looked at the ground and then back at Louise. “Only because it’s my job.”
Being called “Miss” made the color rise to her face. She hurried back into the house. From the window, standing obscured by the curtain, she could see him lifting logs from the bed of his truck. Never had she had a proper affair. There had only been a boy in a youth hostel once, and that had been a furtive thing in the dark. Of all things, Nan could not abide sex: the filth, the stark carnality of it. At thirteen, the start of her first monthly bleeding, she’d been made to drink spoons of vinegar, lemon. You’d wonder how your own mother came to be born. Her knickers had been burned in the grate.
She said to Mr. Harris, “He’s handsome, that man.”
He teased: “You should go on a date.”
Louise said nothing to that, only carried on watching the young man at work. She imagined herself a woman from one of her novels, inviting him in for coffee or tea. She would offer to add a splash of whiskey to his, and they would stand, brought close and warmed by the drink. In her mind, she traced the angles of his face with her fingertips, a boldness he did not turn away. When he reached for her, his hands spanned the cage of her ribs. She imagined him kissing her there in the kitchen, lifting her onto the counter as though she were as light as a seashell.
When the job was finished, Louise paid the man with a check signed in Mr. Harris’s earnest, uneven hand. Her voice quavered as she offered to make a hot drink; behind her, she could hear Mr. Harris’s laugh.
“I’m afraid I’ve got another job to get to,” he said, again looking at the ground when he spoke.
At the bend in the road his white truck disappeared. She watched, relieved to see him depart, to think that he would never be back.
One
night after dinner, reading her book, Louise heard a sound like the grinding of stone.
Mr. Harris sat upright in his chair, twitching gently through the shoulders and hips. She watched him, curious, strangely detached: The television light made his face appear pale, but the cheek nearest her was lit warmly by fire. She noted that odd and haunting effect and the lurching, rhythmic motion of him; he might have been a child asleep in a car, traveling over uneven road.
“Are you all right, Mr. Harris?” she said.
Belatedly, panic took hold. She crawled across the carpet to him, trembling as she came to his side. He wasn’t shaking very much anymore. His eyes rolled back and forth in their sockets. She placed her hands on his shoulders, his wrists, gripped him. Slowly, the tension dissolved. He was breathing as though after exertion. Already, the seizure had passed.
“All right now?” she asked.
“I’m frightened,” he said. He blinked his watery eyes.
Some days later something similar happened. Over breakfast he put his spoon back on his plate and bit down, bits of egg coming out through his teeth. This time, Louise knew at once what had happened. She touched his face with a cloth.
She knew it wasn’t right to keep the episodes secret, but neither could she bring herself to tell anyone. Not even his daughter. It worried her heart. Secrecy was the sort of thing that caused trouble, that made people think she might have hurt Nan. At his appointment the following week, the doctor asked if she had noticed a change. She thought of the timidity that had come over him, how if she asked him a question, he was slow to respond, seeking the words.
She shook her head, cast her eyes at the floor. “His appetite is a bit down, perhaps.”
After that, she sat nearer to him in the evenings, and when she looked out the window the glass seemed a border between worlds. She spoke more than ever and asked bolder questions.
“How did your wife die?”
“Libby?” he said.
“Did you have another?” The idea seemed a kind of betrayal.
“I never did.”
“How did she die, Mr. Harris?”
He spoke as though just roused from a dream. “Very quietly. She was asleep for many days before it happened.”
“Did you love her very much?”
“Oh, yes,” Mr. Harris said. “I never loved another woman. Never loved a dog, never loved a car or a boat. Never loved anything but Libby. Libby and the girl. Have you seen her picture in the hallway?” he asked.
Louise had moved very close to his chair, and she rested her chin on the arm of it. The wrinkled skin around his eyes appeared terribly soft. With one forefinger she reached up to touch it.
“Yes,” she said, taking the finger away. “I have seen it. She was a beautiful woman.”
At Christmas, she bought a small tree, which she placed on a table in the corner of the living room. She spent afternoons and evenings poring over catalogs, trying to decide what she would buy Mr. Harris. She had saved a good deal of money, but she did not yet have the courage to give him something very dear. One catalog offered wood chess and backgammon boards. She had never learned to play either game, but she smiled imagining herself sitting opposite the old man, her elbows on the table, studying the board as she had seen others do in parks or cafés. Other catalogs offered colognes and neckties, monogrammed wallets and handkerchiefs. In the end, she bought him a model sailing ship inside a glass bottle, a gift without utility but one that she liked and thought suitably dignified for him. It arrived in the post, and she placed it, in its simple brown wrapping, beneath the tree. At Nan’s house, gifts had not been exchanged.
When Esther arrived, Christmas morning, Louise hardly recognized her. It was different seeing her now, being used to her face as it was in old photos. They embraced outside on the porch, like sisters; their breath could be seen in the cold.
All over Glass the air smelled of woodsmoke, of fir trees, and also of the dark, brooding sea.
Inside, Esther went to her father. He behaved as though surprised she had come. Louise removed herself to the kitchen and set about arranging a tray: the teapot, three cups and saucers, a plate of the dead fly biscuits he favored. Her gift to Mr. Harris was already on a high shelf; he’d been pleased, almost tearful, in fact. Perhaps Esther would see and remark it. Perhaps she’d be chastened by Louise’s generosity.
Their talk filtered in from the next room, halting, as though perhaps they had little to say. Already, it seemed Esther wanted to leave.
Over tea, they talked of their daily routines. “He’s known at all the shops,” Louise said. “Sometimes they won’t let me pay for his things. It’s true, isn’t it, sir? At Star and at Herville’s. The hospital, too. He gives cheek to the nurses. You do.”
Later, as she left, Esther took her aside. She said, “He doesn’t look good.”
Louise felt a sudden heat in her chest. “I know,” she said. “I should have rung.”
“I want to avoid big changes right now. For his sake and mine. Do you think you can manage?”
“Of course.”
They were silent a moment, and then Esther added, with a note of apology, “It’s the house I can’t give up, you know. The sensible thing would be to move him, of course.”
They were standing beside the window, just behind the sofa in the living room. They were near to Mr. Harris, but they knew he would not be able to hear them.
“You grew up here,” Louise said.
“I did.”
“I grew up in a house with my nan.”
“It’s not much of a house, actually,” Esther said. She glanced around it a moment. “I don’t know why I can’t give it up.”
Louise imagined Esther alone in this room, all the furniture cleared out and sold.
“I think it’s lovely. I usually keep it tidier than this, you know. I wanted to tell you that. With the holiday, it’s been difficult to keep up with the cleaning the way I’d like, but normally it’s quite tidy.”
Esther smiled briefly, as though unable to hold the expression on her face.
“I hope you’ll come more often,” Louise said. “Mr. Harris would like it.” She put a hand on the other woman’s shoulder, removed it. “He sure loves you.” The anger she’d felt earlier faded away. She felt sorry for Esther. “And he sure loved your mother.”
Esther reached into her purse for her cigarettes. “Oh, he loves her, sure,” she said. “Sure. He’s very devoted, now that she’s gone.”
As winter began to give way, the grass on the lawn grew unruly and bright. Mr. Harris wet his trousers once, then again. Seeing him try to hide what he’d done threatened to break Louise’s heart. She helped him undress and led him into the shower, averting her eyes as best she could. His body was pale white and spotted, ribs and thin muscles stark beneath skin. If only Nan could see me, she thought. He covered his face with his hands. She was very gentle about it, but still he flinched at the first touch of the washcloth.
“Well, don’t stare at me,” he said. “What are you looking at?”
She said nothing. His private place appeared heavy and soft, dampened by urine, achingly there. Seeing it, you felt the weight of yourself, the deep beauty and sadness of having a body.
She reached out and put the warm cloth in his hand.
“Wash your private place, Mr. Harris,” she said. Then, because she had dared herself to, she said, “It’s important you wash your penis as well.”
It made her feel brave, saying that word, brave and loving toward him. She looked away as he lowered the cloth. There was holiness in the decay of the body, the dry, fragile shell of it, brittle, intact. She felt this and again thought of Nan. The lie had been given to something, at last. Steam rose, hot water fell on her dress. She wept with joy for the living and dead.
The days grew warmer. Louise ventured outside. Increasingly, she took care with the lawn, ashamed of her prior neglect. It seemed a violation of their privacy that anybody driving by should be able to see such a
clear, simple measure of the old man’s decline. The work was arduous, but it was good to be out, and as she pushed the mower across the tall grass she felt the task was protecting them somehow, that its monotony helped to keep things in order.
She had gained weight during winter, cooking and eating proper meals every night. As a girl, she’d always been thin, even gaunt, and her appetite had been very poor. “Don’t brush your hair,” her nan had insisted. “Don’t be a piggy,” if she ate with relish. Thus had been Nan’s disdain for the flesh: obscene, likewise, in sickness or health. Nan’s life had been a project of slow self-erasure; Louise felt as though she were drawing herself. Before bathing each night she stood at the mirror, pale and naked, her arms growing soft at the shoulders. Her hands, scarred where she’d once chewed them raw, looked plump. Her wrists, too, where she’d cut them sometimes.
“Go out of the house when I’ve drunk the thing, girl,” Nan had said on that final morning. Her eyes by that time had been sunken and grey, their whites the thick yellow of old mayonnaise. “Be seen. You’re not to have touched anything.”
Later, she’d come home to red and blue lights, emergency rung, the phone off the hook. When they’d asked her whether the body was Nan’s, assent had seemed a betrayal of sorts.
Before the mirror now, she pinched the skin at her waist. “I can get a good deal fatter,” she said, “before I give a thought to slimming again.”
Other People's Love Affairs: Stories Page 12
