The Dew Breaker Read Online Free PDF Page B

steps to the first floor to tell the landlady that his wife was coming.
    The landlady was heavyset and plain, almost homely, with deep ridges on her wide forehead.
    “I don’t have a problem with your wife coming.” She often closed her eyes while speaking, as if to accentuate the pauses between her words. “I just hope she’s clean.”
    “She is clean,” he said.
    “We understand each other, then.”
    The kitchen was the only room in the main part of the house he’d ever seen. It was pine-scented, spotless, and the dishes were neatly organized behind glass cabinets.
    “Did you tell the men?” she asked, while sticking a frozen dessert in her microwave.
    “I told them,” he said.
    He was waiting for her to announce that she’d have to charge him extra. She and her husband had agreed to rent the room to one person—a man they’d probably taken for a bachelor—not two.
    “A woman living down there with three men,” the landlady said, removing the small pie from the microwave. “Maybe your wife will be uncomfortable.”
    He wanted to tell her that it wasn’t up to her to decide whether or not his wife would be comfortable. But he had been prepared for this too, for some unpleasant remark about his wife. Actually, he was up there as much to give notice that he was looking for an apartment as to announce that his wife was coming. As soon as he found an apartment, he would be moving.
    “Okay, then,” she said, opening her silverware drawer. “Remember, you start the month, you pay the whole thing.”
    “Thank you very much, Madame,” he said.
    As he walked back downstairs, he scolded himself for calling her Madame. Why had he acted like a manservant who’d just been dismissed? It was one of those class things from home he still couldn’t shake. On the other hand, if he addressed the woman respectfully, it wasn’t because she had more money than he did or even because after five years in the same room he was still paying only two hundred and fifty dollars a month. He was only making a sacrifice for his wife.
    After his conversation with the landlady, he decided to have a more thorough one with the men who occupied the other two small rooms in the basement. The day before his wife was to arrive, he went into the kitchen to see them. The fact that they were wearing only sheer-looking loose boxers as they stumbled about bleary-eyed concerned him.
    “You understand, she’s a woman,” he told them. He was not worried that she would be tempted by their bony torsos, but if she was still as sensitive as he remembered, their near-nakedness might embarrass her.
    The men understood.
    “If it were my wife,” Michel said, “I’d feel the same.”
    Dany simply nodded.
    They had robes, Michel declared after a while. They would wear them when she got here.
    They didn’t have robes, all three men knew this, but Michel would buy some, out of respect for the wife.
    Michel, the youngest of the three, had advised him to pretty up his room, to buy some silk roses, some decorative prints for the walls (no naked girls), and some vanilla incense, which would be more pleasing than the pine-scented air fresheners that the people upstairs liked so much.
    Dany told him he would miss their evenings out together. In the old days, they had often gone dancing at the Rendez Vous, which was now the Cenegal nightclub. But they hadn’t gone much since the place had become famous— a Haitian man named Abner Louima was arrested there, then beaten and sodomized at a nearby police station.
    He told Dany not to mention those nights out again. His wife wasn’t to know that he’d ever done anything but work his two jobs, as a night janitor at Medgar Evers College and a day janitor at Kings’ County Hospital. And she was never to find out about those women who’d occasionally come home with him in the early-morning hours. Those women, most of whom had husbands, boyfriends, fiancés, and lovers in other parts of the world, never meant