The night we met, at an art-house screening of The 39 Steps, Ed and I compared histories. My mother, I told him, had weaned me on old thrillers and classic noir; as a teenager I preferred the company of Gene Tierney and Jimmy Stewart to that of my classmates. “Can’t decide if that’s sweet or sad,” said Ed, who until that evening had never seen a black-and-white movie. Within two hours, his mouth was on mine.
You mean your mouth was on mine, I imagine him saying.
In the years before Olivia, we’d watch a movie at least once a week—all the vintage suspense flicks from my childhood: Double Indemnity, Gaslight, Saboteur, The Big Clock . . . We lived in monochrome those nights. For me, it was a chance to revisit old friends; for Ed, it was an opportunity to make new ones.
And we’d make lists. The Thin Man franchise, ranked from best (the original) to worst (Song of the Thin Man). Top movies from the bumper crop of 1944. Joseph Cotten’s finest moments.
I can do lists on my own, of course. For instance: best Hitchcock films not made by Hitchcock. Here we go:
Le Boucher, the early Claude Chabrol that Hitch, according to lore, wished he’d directed. Dark Passage, with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall—a San Francisco valentine, all velveteen with fog, and antecedent to any movie in which a character goes under the knife to disguise himself. Niagara, starring Marilyn Monroe; Charade, starring Audrey Hepburn; Sudden Fear!, starring Joan Crawford’s eyebrows. Wait Until Dark: Hepburn again, a blind woman stranded in her basement apartment. I’d go berserk in a basement apartment.
Now, movies that postdate Hitch: The Vanishing, with its sucker-punch finale. Frantic, Polanski’s ode to the master. Side Effects, which begins as a Big Pharma screed before slithering like an eel into another genre altogether.
Okay.
Popular film misquotes. “Play it again, Sam”: Casablanca, allegedly, except neither Bogie nor Bergman ever said it. “He’s alive”: Frankenstein doesn’t gender his monster; cruelly, it’s just “It’s alive.” “Elementary, my dear Watson” does crop up in the first Holmes film of the talkie era, but appears nowhere in the Conan Doyle canon.
Okay.
What next?
I flip open my laptop, visit the Agora. A message from Mitzi in Manchester; a progress report courtesy of Dimples2016 in Arizona. Nothing of note.
In the front parlor of number 210, the Takeda boy draws his bow across the cello. Farther east, the four Grays flee the rain, charging up their front steps, laughing. Across the park, Alistair Russell fills a glass at the kitchen tap.
8
Late afternoon, and I’m pouring a California pinot noir into a tumbler when the doorbell chimes. I drop my glass.
It explodes, a long tongue of wine licking the white birch. “Fuck,” I shout. (Something I’ve noticed: In the absence of others, I swear more often and more loudly. Ed would be appalled. I’m appalled.) I’ve just seized a fistful of paper towels when the bell rings again. Who the hell? I think—or have I said it? David left an hour ago for a job in East Harlem—I watched him from the study—and I’m not expecting any deliveries. I stoop, cram the towels against the mess, then march to the door.
Framed within the intercom screen is a tall kid in a slim jacket, hands clasping a small white box. It’s the Russell boy.
I press the Talk button. “Yes?” I call. Less inviting than Hello, more gracious than Who the hell?
“I live across the park,” he says, almost shouting, his voice improbably sweet. “My mom asked me to give you this.” I watch him thrust the box toward the speaker; then, unsure where the camera might be, he slowly pivots, arms orbiting overhead.
“You can just . . .” I begin. Should I ask him to deposit it in the hall? Not very neighborly, I suppose, but I haven’t bathed in two days, and the cat might nip at him.
He’s still on the stoop, box held aloft.
“. . . come in,” I finish, and I tap the buzzer.
I hear the lock unbuckle and move to the door, cautiously, the way Punch approaches unfamiliar people—or used to, back when unfamiliar people visited the house.
A shadow piles up against the frosted glass, dim and slim, like a sapling. I turn the knob.
He’s tall indeed, baby-faced and blue-eyed, with a flap of sandy hair and a faint scar notching one eyebrow, trailing up his forehead. Maybe fifteen years old. He looks like a boy I once knew, once kissed—summer camp in Maine, a quarter century ago. I like him.
“I’m Ethan,” he says.
“Come in,” I repeat.
He enters. “It’s dark in here.”
I flick the switch on the wall.
As I examine him, he examines the room: the paintings, the cat spread along the chaise, the mound of sodden towels melting on the kitchen floor. “What happened?”
“I had an accident,” I say. “I’m Anna. Fox,” I add, in case he goes in for formalities; I’m old enough to be his (young) mother.
We shake hands, then he offers me the box, bright and tight and lashed with ribbon. “For you,” he says shyly.
“Just set that down over there. Can I get you something to drink?”
He moves to the sofa. “Could I have some water?”
“Sure.” I return to the kitchen, clear up the wreckage. “Ice?”
“No, thanks.” I fill a glass, then another, ignoring the bottle of pinot noir on the counter.
The box squats on the coffee table, next to my laptop. I’m still logged in to the Agora, having talked DiscoMickey through an incipient panic attack a little while ago; his thank-you note is writ large across the screen. “Right,” I say, sitting beside Ethan, setting his glass in front of him. I snap the computer shut and reach for the gift. “Let’s see what we’ve got here.”
I tug the ribbon, lift the flap, and from a nest of tissue remove a candle—the kind with blooms and stalks trapped inside like insects in amber. I bring it to my face, making a show of it.
“Lavender,” Ethan volunteers.
“I thought so.” I inhale. “I lav lovender.” Try again. “I love lavender.”
He smiles a bit, one corner of his mouth tipping upward, as though tugged by a string. He’s going to be a handsome man, I realize, in just a few years. That scar—women will love it. Girls might love it already. Or boys.
“My mom asked me to give this to you. Like, days ago.”
“That’s very thoughtful. New neighbors are supposed to give you gifts.”
“One lady came by already,” he says. “She told us that we didn’t need such a big house if we’re such a small family.”
“I bet that was Mrs. Wasserman.”
“Yes.”
“Ignore her.”
“We did.”
Punch has dropped from the chaise onto the floor and approaches us gingerly. Ethan leans forward, lays his hand on the rug, palm upward. The cat pauses, then slithers toward us, sniffing at Ethan’s fingers, licking them. Ethan giggles.
“I love cats’ tongues,” he says, as though confessing.
“So do I.” I sip my water. “They’re covered in little barbs—little needles,” I say, in case he doesn’t know the word barb. I realize I’m not certain how to speak to a teenager; my oldest patients were twelve. “Shall I light the candle?”
Ethan shrugs, smiles. “Sure.”
I find a matchbox in the desk, cherry red, the words the red cat marching across it; I remember dining there with Ed, more than two years ago now. Or three. Chicken tagine, I think, and as I recall, he praised the wine. I wasn’t drinking as much then.
I strike a match, light the wick. “Look at that,” I say as a little claw of flame scratches at the air; the glow blossoms, the blossoms glow. “How lovely.”
There’s a soft silence. Punch figure-eights around Ethan’s legs, then vaults to his lap. Ethan laughs, a bright bark.
“I think he likes you.”
“I guess so,” he says, crooking a finger behind the cat’s ear and gently niggling it.
“He doesn’t like most people. Bad temper.”
A low growl, like a quiet motor. Punch is actually purring.
Ethan grins. “Is he an indoor-only cat?”