The first days with Sveyta are like soft dreams, because Marion is proud that she is safe. She becomes familiar with her new room and the alley outside. Even though the window is nailed shut, she can hear voices from the other apartments and has a vague sense of where they are coming from. She believes she hears the voices from five other apartments. She hears a lot of sex, like at the Days Inn. It seems she won’t be able to avoid the sound of intimacy in her escape. The sex is a little different, because it’s between partners rather than people having affairs and people paying for sex. It’s less ecstatic, but the participants are also in less of a hurry. She is analytical of the breathy or guttural moanings and exclamations, which all sound somewhat similar, no matter the duration of the lovemaking; what she decides is that we have all been conditioned to sound the same way during sex. She wonders what sex sounded like before film stars, TV stars, and porn stars started showing us how it was done. Or we are all the same. That is what we all sound like.
She hears parties, televisions, long phone calls. She hears belching and furniture rearrangement. She’s heard long, keening sobs from a young girl who lives in the apartment directly above Sveyta. Or so she imagines. She doesn’t know if the girl is young or not. Across the alley, a couple has loud drunken arguments about their cat. What Marion has learned about drunks when they argue: they repeat themselves without awareness. “Why don’t you just go die?” the woman says on a loop. Marion is unsure whether she’s talking to her boyfriend or to the cat. Sometimes she finishes with “Why don’t I just go die?” but not always.
Sometimes she hears Sveyta speaking Russian down the hallway, and that is a luxurious sound. Sveyta makes her phone calls in the morning to various family members and friends in Moscow. She chats casually but is also businesslike on the phone. Sometimes she laughs. Marion doesn’t know if she’s telling jokes. It’s a possibility. Sometimes the phone calls have a deathly kind of seriousness. One call in particular made Marion worry. She gathered herself out of bed (where she has been spending most of her time since moving in) and poked her head into the kitchen. Sveyta saw her, smiled, and gestured with a cigarette between her fingers to a teapot of steeping tea. Marion poured herself a cup and added sugar, and the smile never manifested in Sveyta’s voice; the seriousness was throughout.
Sveyta is the caretaker for New York City apartments owned by fantastically wealthy Muscovites, who use the apartments two weekends out of the year to go shopping. These beautiful light-filled apartments furnished with gorgeous things accumulate dust. She tours the empty apartments once a week and manages a large team of cleaning ladies. Marion says that sounds like a good gig, but Sveyta corrects her. No, she says, it is difficult and thankless work.
Marion can’t understand why Sveyta doesn’t occupy the apartments when the Muscovites are gone. She could live rent-free in penthouses all year round and wouldn’t need to rent rooms to women who embezzle. No one would know. She would ask Sveyta this, but she’s concerned it’s a wrong idea, possibly amoral.
She’s read that the criminal mind is victim to poor impulse control. Her brain will look different from her husband’s. After fourteen years of marriage, Marion knows this to be true. Marion’s guilt has never really existed like other people’s. She’s heard a lot about guilt from her so-called friends. (Marion believes that the friends are friends with her husband and not with her. She is the limp side salad of the marriage.) Her husband’s guilt is somewhere. She could feel it at night when they slept in a house that he bought with money he never earned. When he wasn’t feeling proud that now women often wanted to fuck him, he was guilty about that too. Jane feels guilt like a disease; it wrecks her. Ginny’s guilt: maybe Marion and Ginny have more in common there.
But Marion is childless, so they have nothing in common. Ginny is Nathan’s daughter, she reminds herself.
Marion’s lack of normal guilt has given her some control in their marriage, and yet Nathan can surprise her with his reactions, and therefore she has always felt that he is in charge. She attributed it at first to the age difference, and perhaps that’s still all it is. But Nathan’s guilt matters too.
Marion Palm is not guilty, because the money was unwatched and therefore hers. All that is unwatched or unguarded belongs to Marion or should belong to Marion. She watches, therefore she owns. She sets her own perimeters. If others don’t, it’s not her fault for trespassing.
She’s not sure what this makes her. She’s never felt free or unburdened. She’s never gotten ahead, like hedge-fund managers or politicians. Maybe she is not very smart. The other possibility is that lack of guilt in men is socially more acceptable and admired. Or perhaps if Marion had no guilt and was very attractive, she might have made her way in the world. But since she is saddled with a wide dimpled ass, thick thighs, and a lacking chin, her diminished capacity for empathy sits unused because it is almost unusable. Even at her most attractive, she was voluptuous, not glamorous or mysterious. Her body made her intentions and thoughts more knowable, more familiar. Besides, she was young. She didn’t even know what she had, and couldn’t use it to her advantage. The guiltless have body-image problems too, she wants to write somewhere.
Sveyta leaves the apartment after her phone calls. She wears three outfits in rotation and they are stunning. When she returns, she takes the outfit off in her bedroom and puts on her robe to press the outfit and hang it up again in the small closet off the hallway. The outfits are composed of classic pieces by well-known designers. Marion inspects them when Sveyta’s out; each piece has been mended several times.
Marion is ashamed of her fabrics and cuts, and she wants to ask Sveyta how she maintains her beautiful wardrobe with such frugality. But if Sveyta told her, would Marion even be able to adopt such a skill? It could be beyond her. So she must wear the clothes she has, and she cannot explain them to Sveyta. Marion would like to tell Sveyta what she does well, what she excels at, but that, of course, cannot be mentioned.
Marion is woken from a midafternoon nap when Sveyta knocks on her bedroom door. Marion, still groggy with sleep, finds her landlady/roommate in the hallway. Sveyta’s blond hair is swept up from her forehead and pinned in the back in a delicate yet unmoving French twist. She wears a dark red wool pencil skirt and an off-white blouse with a gold necklace. She’s still in her slippers; she will put on her heels when she is on the doormat by the front door.
She looks into Marion’s eyes. “Marion. I would like to offer you a job.”
The cleaning lady who works Tuesdays at a midtown apartment has been unexpectedly deported. The owners of the apartment are returning on Wednesday for an extended stay, and Sveyta is consequently in something of a bind. She would do it herself, but she’s already booked uptown.
“Marion,” she says. “You must be honest with me. Can you clean?”
“Sure,” Marion says.
“No. I mean, I don’t mean ‘I put the book back on the bookshelf where it’s supposed to be’ or ‘I remember to wipe down counters.’ I mean, can you clean?”
“Yes. I can clean. Before I married, I managed a café. We had to meet the city health codes or we would be fined. I can clean.”
Sveyta looks behind Marion to her room. She sweeps her eyes over the floor, the windowsill, the mirror. She looks at the unmade bed, and Marion tells her she was just sleeping in it. It will be made soon.