“He could be sleeping. He had an eventful day.” The girl raised her brows.
“What happened?”
“Sometimes there’s an adjustment period.”
“What happened?”
“He had to be restrained. He didn’t want to be changed. He’s a little younger than our average patient. He’s got more pop in him.”
She felt a twinge of pride beneath her concern. She ached to see him. She walked down the hall and found him staring at the ceiling, the radio at his bedside playing at a low murmur. After a couple of seconds she realized it was tuned to a rap station. She shut it off angrily and headed back to the desk.
“There was a rap station playing on my husband’s radio.”
The girl gave her a blank look. Her straightened hair—whether it was her own or not—was piled on her head in a colorful tower that looked like a piece of glazed ceramic. She should have known better than to think this girl would understand.
“There should never be a rap station on his radio.”
“I’m sorry about that, Mrs. . . .”
“Leary. Eileen Leary. My husband is Ed Leary, and I will be here every day. And I do not want rap music on his radio.”
“I’m sorry—”
“I’m a nurse. I understand they may put the radio on when they’re changing the sheets, doing up the room. Under no circumstances should the radio in his room be set to a rap station.” She could feel herself sweating. “I’m trying to make myself perfectly clear.”
“Would you like to speak to my supervisor?”
“I will call tomorrow,” Eileen said. “Thank you.”
“This won’t be a problem,” the girl said, “I assure you.”
“I know it won’t,” Eileen said, and she went back to Ed. She could hear in her head all the things that nurse was thinking about her. She’d heard this narrative in her head for as long as she had been supervising nurses, and she was fine with it.
Somewhere deep down, she knew that if Ed were his former self enough to take in the rap music with all his faculties, he might very well be curious enough to give it an honest listen. There had been times when she had suffered Ed’s open-mindedness like a thousand little cuts, but it was tolerable because he gave in to moments of tribal loyalty himself sometimes, and even displayed occasional ill-temper about the things that got her blood going—like that night she’d never forget, when a couple of Hispanic kids, who had been leaning against the streetlamp in front of the house for an hour, cursing up a storm, drew Ed out to the stoop. He dressed them down and told them to take that kind of low-class language elsewhere, because this wasn’t that kind of house, and she stood in the vestibule and watched over his shoulder as they skulked away. Now, though, that he could hardly discern the differences between things, there was no appeal she could make to a reasonable, mutual, even generational abstention from the noise around them. The silent radio reproached her. She put on a Nat King Cole CD for him.
At the end of her visit, she had a hard time navigating her way out through the identical hallways that seemed to loop back on each other. She asked for the “front entrance” because that was what she’d heard it called, even though it was at the back of the building, and even though facing the street was an entrance she imagined should have been called the “front entrance.” That entrance was the “back entrance,” and if she went out that door, she would have had to walk all the way around the facility to the “front entrance” to get to her car.
The place seemed designed to make you crazy. Maybe the idea was to make you want to stay away. Judging from the sparse population of visitors in the television room, most people obliged them.
She wasn’t visiting. What she was doing was seeing her husband after work. It was simply a part of her day. She was showing them that Ed might be there with them instead of home where he belonged, but nothing else had changed.
They could put his room in the middle of a maze and she would find her way to it every night.
She was going to be the woman who wouldn’t go away, in the marriage that wouldn’t die. Her idea of her husband wasn’t going to be diminished when orderlies looked at him as if he was just another old fool. They had no clue what kind of man had fallen into their lap, but she wasn’t going to explain it to them, because they didn’t deserve to hear it. She was content to let them think he was a gibberer, an invalid, an idiot, because she knew better. She would always know better than them.
87
She had him pour a layer of blacktop in the driveway. She had him paint everything that could be painted, and then she had him move outside to paint the cedar boards, the fences, the window moldings, the heavy metal gate to the stairs, even the bricks. He removed the old wallpaper and installed new paper with fresh patterns. She had him rip out the attic insulation and replace it, haul junk from the basement and attic to the dump, and dredge the drainage gutter in front of the house. He ripped out the horrible toilet in the first-floor half bath and installed a bright new one, along with a new vanity. He didn’t need assistance for most jobs; for the biggest ones, she paid the gardener to help him off-hours. He used his own tools, leaving alone the ones she’d bought for Ed. He patched the waterlogged wall in the garage. He reinforced the retaining wall at the end of the driveway, where the property shot up into a slope, because it had begun to lean slightly and she had been told it would eventually give way if left untended. He erected a temporary wooden buttress to keep the wall from pitching forward, dug out the backfill down to the footing, filled in the resultant gap with concrete blocks and fabric to keep the silt out, and then repacked the dirt. For a platform top over the two layers of wall, he built a wooden frame into which he poured concrete that he smoothed out so faultlessly that it reminded her of fondant atop a fancy cake.
Her friends marveled at his work. In their marveling she could hear a hint of prurience, but if they weren’t going to make their surmises explicit, then she was content to let them harbor them silently. Maybe they thought he was taking Ed’s place. Maybe they thought that she was in some fundamental way out of control. Maybe they thought it was sad that she needed a bridge between her old life and her new one. Maybe they thought she was sleeping with him. Let them think whatever they want, she told herself. Let them speculate and conjecture and cluck their tongues and drown in pity or disapproval or whatever else.
She was proud of the caliber of improvements to her property. Neighbors who had never said two words to her began to ask who had done her work. She made vague demurrals about his being a friend, and when she relayed these inquiries to Sergei, he radiated a pride she hadn’t expected. She would have preferred him to stand aloof from appraisals of the quality of his labor, because if he remained eternally elsewhere in his mind, somewhere more rarefied and abstract, then she didn’t have to think of him as reduced to his circumstances. When she saw how delighted he seemed by the compliments, though, she decided to stop worrying that she was condescending to him when she assigned him tasks, which made her more comfortable keeping him in the house, which was what she had been trying to feel for a while. She didn’t know what she would do with herself once he was gone.
? ? ?
As October gave way to November and the stream of bigger jobs slowed to a trickle, the house began to take on the patina she’d envisioned when she’d signed the papers aligning her fate with its own. She understood that it would have to remain incomplete: she wasn’t going to launch into finishing the attic or basement. The electrical would never get upgraded or the oil tank dug up or the piping replaced or the asbestos hauled away. She wouldn’t be able to keep paying Sergei the nearly four thousand dollars a month she’d been paying him. The Medicare-paid hundred days were coming to an end soon, whereupon she would start paying six thousand a month to the nursing home, which would come right out of the retirement accounts and what was left of the home equity line of credit.
She wanted to talk to him about leaving, but it was easier each week just to spend down her income and dip a little into her savings and promise herself that she’d bring it up before the next payday. As long as I bring home money, she is happy, she remembered Sergei saying.
One day Sergei asked if he could stay at the house on weekends as well. The request dismayed her; she had been sure this would be the day she would say something to him about finishing his stint there; in fact, she had just been about to bring it up. Then he told her that he had left his wife a couple of weeks before and had been staying on his sister’s couch on weekend nights.
She was stunned. “I can’t afford to keep paying you full-time.”
“You don’t have to pay me,” he said. “I pay you to stay here.”
“Pay me?”
“I do handyman work,” he said. “I work for your neighbors.”
This radical-sounding proposal had about it the seductive reasonability of the most outlandish schemes. She affected a dubious air, but she knew its adoption was inevitable.
“I like this neighborhood,” he said, to fill the gap her thoughts had opened up.
“You’re not paying me,” she said. “You can continue to do jobs around this house while you get your feet under you.” She felt her heels come together involuntarily. “That will be compensation enough for use of the room. Eventually you’ll have to find your own place, of course.”
? ? ?
She made a sign for him with her home number on it, though she didn’t include her name. She photocopied it and put it up on the tackboards at Slave to the Grind and Lawrence Hospital. She placed an ad in the Pennysaver circular. She knocked on the doors of the neighbors who had asked about him.
Calls started coming in. She dropped him off at Smith Cairns on her way to work and he bought a used Taurus. Most mornings he left before she was awake. Usually he put a pot of coffee on for her. He never drank coffee himself.
She stopped feeling guilty about having kept him away from home in the run-up to his separation. Leaving his wife had been his business; it had nothing to do with Eileen, and from what she understood it had been a long time coming. If some time apart every week had been enough to drive a wedge between them, then maybe a separation had been in order.
He left more than enough money every Friday to cover his portion of the food. He hardly used any electricity.
It would have been too intimate for them to eat meals together. They would have had a lot of time to fill across a table. When she cooked, she ate first and left it for him on the stove; when he did, he left it in the fridge. She would knock and tell him through the closed door that there was something for him downstairs. He would leave a note for her in his pidgin English: “Am make dinner tonight. Don’t you do it.”
He took his clothes into the bathroom with him when he showered, and he dressed before he emerged. Once—he must not have known she had come home—she watched from the base of the stairs as he took a few thunderous steps into his bedroom, around his waist a dull white towel that might have been taken from a gym. Its ends met in a strained cinch at his hip, his abdomen pushing against it but not hanging over, as if his excess flesh were made of sounder stuff than her own. Remnant steam trailed him into the hall. The ruddiness of his face and chest suggested a lobster that had survived a boiling, while the whiteness of the rest of him ran almost alabaster.
He did his own laundry and often hers as well, though he never mixed their clothing in the same load. She didn’t have to ask for this hermetic separation; he had arrived at it independently.
They watched television in their own rooms. The set in the den was almost never used, except sometimes in the late hours, when, assured that he was tucked into his quarters for the night, she padded downstairs and turned it on, keeping the volume low and the lights off. She heard the stairs creak with his weight and muted the volume, but it was a phantom creak. The tenebrous dark in the kitchen fluttered for a moment, as if he had entered that space, but he never did.
She took the Times with her to work, not because she needed it during her shift but to be able to leave it for him in its entirety later and avoid awkward negotiations about sections. She dropped it on the island when she came home, and he was discreet enough to collect it when she was out of the room and put it in the recycling bin when he was done. Most days he left the Post for her in turn, which was a guilty pleasure she hadn’t indulged in since the days in Jackson Heights when she used to retrieve Connell from whichever Orlando apartment he was at. She’d forgotten how much she’d enjoyed sitting at the Orlandos’ dining room table, flipping idly through the Post’s pages and chatting while Connell made his entreaties to stay.
? ? ?
The prospect of Thanksgiving had been haunting her for a while. She would have to justify Sergei’s continued presence in the house to Connell. Somehow she had managed to keep it from him. It helped that he didn’t call much. She had also told Sergei not to answer the phone, though she knew she needn’t have bothered. Finally, she called Connell and told him not to come home and to apply the credit to another flight. Money was tight, she told him, and he’d be home in a few weeks anyway. He protested, though halfheartedly enough to allow her to feel a little better about what she was doing. She could tell he felt guilty, but his guilt wasn’t just about not being there; it was also about not feeling more guilty about not being there.
Several well-meaning friends invited her over for the meal, but she told all of them that she was going out to her cousin Pat’s. She went up for breakfast that morning with Ed and then made Thanksgiving dinner for herself and Sergei, the full orchestration, with all the sides and a bird large enough to yield leftovers for weeks.
It was the first American Thanksgiving meal Sergei had ever eaten. She watched him assemble on his plate a heaping mound of the offerings. After he had devoured it, he filled his plate again. When he reached for a third helping of marshmallow-topped sweet potatoes, she felt a warm pride settle into her, like a sip of mulled wine. He ate a whole can of cranberry sauce himself.