The Affairs of Others: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

afternoon.” I do not think she stopped long enough to look him in the eye. She and the tall man had momentum. The door shut behind them. Darren put his face in his hands.

 
    THE PLEASURES OF FALLING
    I WOKE TO A CHILL the next day, in my body, in the building.
    Spring was coming, but winter hung on through the night into the morning. I felt the radiator in my bedroom, and when its heat did not feel emphatic enough, I pulled my sweater and jeans on, stuck my feet into slippers, and went to check the boiler. The quiet in the building was total, the stillness as full as it could be with me there as witness, so I stood in it, with it, in the empty hallway, and felt the radiator there. It was warm too, but not what I wanted, not enough. I could smell the party on my sweater—food and smoke and other people—and then my own smell, from last night, in my hair, on my body, me having abandoned caution, in increments. I could not say if I was glad, nor could I explain the goose bumps breaking over me, retreating then returning. Steam heat was expensive, but replacing the system I had with hot water seemed too extravagant when I was renovating. I had regretted the decision here and there since. Steam worked fine, though it had to cycle more to get the job done.
    Once down in the basement, I saw that the old boiler, a thrumming centrifuge, was doing what it always did for me, behaving in the expected way.
    I did not return to my bed right away. In the hall again, I couldn’t yet face the sheets and covers thrown to one side, open and losing heat. In increments. Last night Hope’s hand had been so hot in mine; it had begun to burn with that man beside us, his enormous hand collaring her neck. At first I had felt the structure of her there, the light length of the bones of her fingers, the width of her palm; but with her temperature changing so, the flesh overwhelmed the rest; it was what communicated to me; even stoned, drunk, I could feel it, but I couldn’t have asked her to stay with us. Who was I? It wasn’t my place. I shouldn’t even have been there, but it was mine to feel the chill left when her hand was gone and my hand was made a vacancy, something that had to cool and keep cooling. And it wasn’t my place to explain to her that when someone is falling, when someone is startled with pain, it is surely better to have someone there who will steady rather than destabilize you or teach you the pleasures of falling.
    I knew something about this, sorrow’s peculiar altitude and how disorienting it could be; how the descent into it, through it, can go on and on. You’ll grab for anything. The day my husband died, all I could feel was absence, his and my own. I held on to him until he became something other than he had been, and then I could not sit still, but neither could I clean or make phone calls. So I rode the subway. I waited for his body to be covered and removed, signed the papers given me, splashed water on my face, and then I got on the R train at the Court Street stop on Montague Street in Brooklyn Heights, where my husband and I lived at the time. I rode it through rush hour to its terminus at one end in Queens and then to the other, back in Bay Ridge. I did this at least twice. The R was a local, in no hurry; that suited me until I got off at Times Square to transfer to the 2 train. I had thought I might take this back home, but home wasn’t home anymore—and I wasn’t who I had been even that morning—so impulse dictated that I take it north, all the way above ground to its terminus in the Bronx, which looked more suburban than urban, with more sky than neon.
    I had never been to any of these subway line ends; never seen the train pause and seem to take a breath and sometimes admit a new conductor before it went back the way it came. It was nearly evening when I started riding, but bright—it was July. I wore a tank top bought in Ogunquit, Maine, that advertised “Vacationland” and some drawstring