Conscience

by Alice Mattison

  “I was here this time.”

  “Yes, yes, of course.”

  “The note,” I say, beginning to understand. “It’s your book?”

  “Olive’s book. My wife’s. I lost it.”

  “You left it here when you wrote that note.”

  “Apparently I did,” he says. “Don’t tell me how it ends!”

  “I’m only at the beginning.” I don’t want to let him take it, and I find myself mentally trying out lies: I bought this copy years ago! Your wife gave it to me last week!

  “I was reading it,” he says. He puts the book on the corner of my desk and rests his hands on his thighs. His face is not tearful, but he’s smiling with disarming frankness. He’s older than I. His wrinkles are concentric circles, deep clefts in his forehead and cheeks. He was a smoker once. And he’s a worrier.

  “What an idiot I am,” he says.

  I am happier having an acknowledged idiot as the president of my board than someone who thinks terribly well of himself in all circumstances, like the old president or like my idea of Joshua Griffin. But I still don’t want him to carry the book off, whether it’s good or not. It seems unfair. It is unfair.

  I smile in my turn. “You can’t have it. It’s interesting.”

  “I will overnight you a copy,” he says.

  “Don’t be silly!” I say, standing. I have remembered Ingrid.

  “I must get it back to Ollie. She’s writing about it.”

  “She’s a writer?” I say. Joshua’s wife must have written the comments in the book.

  “Yes. She’ll want to know what you think. She knew the author.”

  “She knew the author?” I say.

  In the end, he extracts my street address, because he insists on sending me the book—which I’ll now have to read whether I like it or not, I note, so as to report not to the poetry teacher but to this Olive of his, and to the president of my board.

  “I have your email address,” he says. “We’ll invite you over. We should know each other. Now that I—”

  “Have the legal right to fire me?” I say, and immediately regret that. It is not the sort of mistake I ordinarily make.

  “Hardly!” says Joshua Griffin, but he does. I still shouldn’t have said it. When I stay too late at the office, my judgment goes.

  The meeting ended more than an hour ago. I see that I’ll have to answer those emails at home. Living alone, without people to distract me with what’s on their minds, I have to work to keep my house from becoming an extension of the office. Writing emails in the evening makes me wake in the night, imagining the answers and checking my phone. But Ingrid needs me. I hustle Joshua Griffin out. He turns and shakes my hand, then holds up the book like our secret.

  Ingrid lives near Wooster Square, and when we meet for a drink at her place, we mostly end up eating pizza or pasta on Wooster Street, which is all Italian restaurants. As I climb the wooden steps of her porch, I decide that I won’t go to dinner this time. I’m tired. And there are those emails.

  Ingrid has a mass of brown curls, with gray hairs here and there, that she brushes back and keeps neat with metal clips at work, but when she’s relaxed, she runs her fingers through her hair, and one by one the clips fall out. They hold her thoughts in place, and now she can think whatever she wants. She sprinkles hair clips over her car and her house, and other people’s houses, if she’s comfortable. I save them and return them after she visits me. They look old—silvery things with curlicues. When she opens the door this evening, her hair is about half free.

  “I’m sorry!” I say, and step forward to hug her. “I wanted you to win!”

  “Less work,” she says. “It’s okay.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “That’s true, it’s not. Griff—well, he’ll be fine.”

  “Griff?” I say.

  “That’s what he’s called.”

  “You and I would have had long spaghetti dinners, figuring things out.”

  “No,” Ingrid says, running her hand through her hair. A clip falls, and she stoops to pick it up and puts it into her pocket. “Now we can have long dinners. If I were president, I’d distance myself.” She’d have had to keep her barrettes in place, she seems to be saying.

  I sit on a soft chair, and she hands me a glass of cabernet. My back relaxes into the upholstery, and I notice again how tired I am. “How do you know Joshua Griffin?” I ask.

  “He’s controlling,” she says, answering the question I haven’t asked. “I love him—but. Did you ever hear his father preach?”

  “Hellfire?”

  “Oh, no. Not that kind of church—don’t you know that? Congregational,” Ingrid says. “Mainline Protestant. But the man was in charge. And this is his son—who somehow didn’t go to divinity school.” She pauses. “I hear he’s a damned good principal—but, what can I say, he’s a guy. He knows that he knows the answer.”

  Ingrid, like me, was married early, but she had two kids before she got divorced. Now she’s come out as a lesbian.

  “He just walked into my office without knocking,” I say.

  “There you go.” She kicks off her shoes. “Want something to eat? But what I was going to talk about,” she goes on, interrupting herself, “is security. I didn’t want to say it in the meeting—they’d get worked up.”

  “Security?”

  “Doors and windows. I heard something.”

  “Someone’s sleeping in the building?” Some homeless people avoid the shelters. We lock up, but anyone who figures out how to sneak in gets heat, water, toilets, even food, if he’s careful. Now and then, it happens.

  Ingrid says, “‘He sleep at Barker, you know?’ That’s what I heard. I thought you should know.”

  “Thanks.” I drink wine.

  “An excuse to get together,” she says.

  We end up at Pepe’s for pizza and beer. It’s late and cold, and for once there’s no line. We talk about family, then relationships. Ingrid’s had a couple of girlfriends but has been alone for years. I tell her about the Eight-Year Disease, and she says she has it, too. “It’s the worst,” she says. “Love that goes on so long you stop worrying about the future—and then it ends.”

  “It’s fun to feel sorry for ourselves,” I say, but it isn’t.

  She pushes her hair off her forehead as we gather our things to leave Pepe’s. “Any news on that grant?” she asks. She’s taming her hair—returning to the subject of work. She means the grant that would let me take over the third floor.

  “No.”

  “Does that mean you didn’t get it? It might be just as well,” she says.

  I’m surprised. “Just as well? But you were one of the few who didn’t scream at me.”

  “That’s true,” she says, “but Griff is so strongly against it.”

  “He is?”

  “You don’t remember?”

  “No.” I remember strong opposition from others at that meeting, but not from Joshua Griffin. “Was he even on the board yet?”

  “He tried to talk you out of it,” she says.

  As I remember it, the businesspeople led the fight. “I guess I thought Joshua was just trying to get involved,” I say.

  “I don’t think so,” she says.

  “Well, I don’t know if I got it. I wouldn’t expect to hear yet.”

  I’m a little annoyed. It will be—if we get it—a substantial grant from a foundation. I’m not confident because the value of the program I’ve planned is difficult to describe—subtle. Subtle doesn’t get grants. I want to set up small private rooms on the third floor, where, during the day, homeless people can have a few hours alone. I’m not sure how the rooms will be used—for naps, I guess, maybe for reading, crying, thinking. People with stomachaches or colds might rest on our third floor instead of going to the emergency room—and that would be a tangible benefit, but I can’t prove it will happen. Jason could finally get his raise.

  The plan wouldn’t give homeless people places to l
ive, and the board argued that that made it irrelevant. Someone said it would increase homelessness because it would make homeless people slightly less unhappy, so they’d resist change. I think homeless people with slightly easier lives will be likelier to change: that a taste of civilized living—for which privacy is essential—would give them the strength to ask for more. Of course, I can’t prove that either.

  The board doesn’t like to do what it hasn’t done before. I remember several negative comments—though not Joshua Griffin’s—about what might go on if we allowed clients to be alone in private rooms. Drug use was the obvious crime, but it’s impossible to prevent drug use anywhere.

  “I think it’s a good idea,” Ingrid is saying. “But I don’t think you’ll get the money.”

  The next day, I repeat to Jason what Ingrid told me about people sleeping in our building, and he says, “I’ll look around,” which I know means “So what?” If these intruders are so unobtrusive that we don’t know they’re there, they don’t matter. He’s said this before. It’s cold in our building at night—the heat is on, but just enough so the pipes don’t freeze. It’s not luxurious.

  Still, unobtrusive break-ins can lead to bad break-ins: thefts, vandalism. I say some of this aloud, and Jason interrupts me: “Okay, Jean, I get it. I just don’t like barring people if they need to be in.”

  The next day, he says, “It was true.”

  “What was?”

  “Somebody was sleeping here. The lock to the door into the laundry room was taped in a tricky way.”

  “You fixed it.”

  “I fixed it, and I think I know who it was—it was that Arturo.” It takes me a minute. Paulette’s volunteer—the stranger. “He was mopping,” Jason is saying. “He watched me when I took the tape off.”

  “That doesn’t mean he was the one . . .,” I say, but I think it probably does mean that.

  A few days later, as I eat salad downtown between meetings, checking messages on my phone because I’m not sure where I’m supposed to go next, I get the email I’m not thinking about at that moment, from the foundation—the big grant. They’re giving us 80 percent of what we asked for. I read the message three times, making sure I haven’t overlooked a “not.”

  The afternoon meeting is at an agency across town, and by the time I arrive, I have several ideas I hadn’t thought of when I wrote the proposal, some because I have to make changes now that I know exactly how much money we’ll get, some that come with a rush of excitement. The receptionist tells me where the meeting is, but the room is empty, so I sit there making lists about this great luxury: additional space for an agency that people think has too much space already. I think of a woman with menstrual cramps lying down until a pill kicks in, which seems like the essence of civilization. The one time I mentioned this idea to Jason, he said, “Those ladies have dealt with that problem,” as if homeless women weren’t women. It will be better not to start with that.

  Simply put, I want a place where people can be alone when they can’t manage whatever they can’t manage. Homeless people are often alone, but rarely when they’re comfortable or when they’re getting help. They line up for handouts, eat at communal tables, get flu shots in church basements, sit in clinic waiting rooms, reveal their pain in groups. We who have houses can go inside and close a door. I can’t argue that homeless people should be let into the respite rooms so nobody can talk to them if they want to read, though I know some of them want that, too.

  I don’t want to offer people privacy in which to drink, sell drugs (and take them), plan crimes, or participate in unsafe sex. But I have some ideas about how a space can be private for naps, crying, or daydreaming yet open enough that it wouldn’t feel welcoming to crime or even sex. I think of the privacy in an office—at least when the board president isn’t barging in. I can read or cry in my office, but I wouldn’t take off my clothes or do something illegal. When I look up, the paper I’d found in my purse is full of writing and a half hour has passed. The meeting must be elsewhere. I find someone who knows and go to the right room.

  In the next days, four of us—Darlene, Paulette, Jason, and I, occasionally joined by the outreach workers—begin figuring out how to make the project work. I get to know Paulette Strong in these meetings about what we call “upstairs,” with a glance at the ceiling, as if to invoke the Lord. She listens intently, back stiff, never leaning into her chair. She knows she will object but doesn’t yet know about what. We’re usually in my office, with extra chairs if Tommy or Mel, the other two outreach workers, are there. Tommy’s an Iraq war vet who’s been homeless himself. He’s good with clients but can’t help changing the subject in meetings. When I sit near him, I’m tempted to pinch him when he does it.

  “What I think Jean is saying . . .,” Jason says, just about every time I open my mouth, turning his large, shaved head to look slowly around the room. At first I think, Wait a minute, didn’t Jean just speak English? Then I realize he’s slowing the pace, holding Tommy to the topic, postponing Paulette’s objection. “We tried that where I was before, and it didn’t work,” she loves to say. If her contribution is postponed, she’s likelier to say something worth hearing.

  Jason used to argue for whatever he believed and considered it dishonest to do anything else. But if there was one thing I learned when I worked in business, it was to choose when to argue—to figure out what I might actually get and how I might get more if I waited. Once, I said to Jason, “You argue so hard because you think we can’t do anything!” He thought all anyone could do was shout the right answer, hoping to be remembered for it when everything came apart. Now he pretends not to understand me to give Paulette time to puzzle it out—a trick I didn’t think of.

  It’s a happy time. Paulette has a snarky way of saying something helpful just when I’ve given up on her. “I don’t suppose you think it makes sense to give a woman with cramps a place to lie down for a couple of hours?” she says one afternoon. I almost kiss her. She continues, “When I was homeless, my periods—the worst. You know what I’m sayin’?”

  “You were homeless?” I say, caught off guard.

  “Nothing I’m ashamed of,” Paulette says.

  “Of course not,” I say, hoping I haven’t lost her confidence just when I’ve decided she’s indispensable.

  The hardest problem is access: who’ll get in, how we’ll decide. It won’t be hard to throw them out when their time is up—if they’re trouble, Jason can walk in on them after a knock (I keep thinking of Joshua Griffin) and escort them out, firmly. But the method of choosing is difficult. I figure we can put twelve small rooms with cots up there and two bathrooms. We’ll assign rooms first-come, first-served—or possibly allow people to reserve a space in advance.

  By the end of March, the snow is diminishing, the upstairs tenants have moved out, and we have figured out what we want. An architect Mel knows comes to a board meeting.

  I don’t talk to the board about the project for as long as I can hold off, but when I do, Lorna says immediately, “Girlfriend, all you want is to give Jason more money!” But she’s impressed, not angry. The others look nervous, and somebody laughs when nothing is funny, as if I’m hilariously naïve. They’re worried, skeptical, and afraid of crime, danger, and lawsuits. But Joshua’s eyes sometimes brighten. The discussion goes well—until access comes up. Then they agree that what I propose will certainly not work.

  “You may be wrong,” Joshua says, looking around the table at them.

  “Sex?” Lorna says. “We’re going to send them up there—”

  He ignores her. “Even a lottery would be better than nothing,” he says. “People understand luck.” Then he says, “The doors won’t lock, Lorna, and sounds will carry. Are we agreed that the walls won’t go quite to the ceiling? Sounds will carry over the tops of the partitions.” I acknowledge that partitions instead of walls will solve potential problems.

  Joshua follows me to my office after the meeting. “It’s good, it’s good,” he say
s, as we mount the stairs. He takes the extra chair without being invited. “Did you read the book?”

  “Oh. I forgot,” I say. Bright Morning of Pain, as he promised, arrived at my house the day after he carried off his copy. It’s a used paperback with a different cover—a picture of a woman who looks distraught or deranged—and it doesn’t appeal to me the way the old hardcover did.

  Joshua now invites me to a dinner party—something that hasn’t happened to me in years—and I remember that he said something before about having me over. The party, he explains, is because someone won a dinner with him at an auction to raise money for his school. His wife has offered to cook.

  “I don’t know why I agreed to have it in the first place,” he says. Two strangers have won, and he has decided that the only way to endure the evening is to include other people as well.

  It doesn’t sound wonderful, but I’ve already said yes.

  “So I’m supposed to protect you from the strangers?” I say, unable to not tease him.

  “Of course not,” he says seriously, drawing himself back, offering a little less than he seemed to offer. “It’s a chance to know you better.”

  The renovations will take time. We four keep meeting, and what we plan to do becomes clearer. One thought I haven’t said out loud: someday, maybe we’ll use the respite space overnight. How much of a respite can you get if you’re thrown out at 6:00 p.m.? The question of overnights had come up when I talked to the board about applying for the money in the first place, and I assured them it was not what I had in mind. What we did plan required quite enough work and money as it was.

  Several times I’ve noticed the man named Dunbar this spring, the man who joked about eating my sandwich. I hear his deep, humorous voice as I pass through the lunchroom one day: “And we have no proof—no proof that the sandwich is made of human flesh.” I don’t wait to find out if the sandwich is the one he has just eaten or whether others disagree. I don’t eat our cheap lunch meat, even though it’s elitist to carry salads of mixed baby greens to my desk.