The Clairvoyants(76)

I’d waited long enough to uncover William’s connection to her death. I owed her the truth. And I was going to live my life. He’d accused me of seeing Charles Wu—as if something that preposterous had been the reason for his misery. I’d give him something to be miserable about.





30




It was after I saw William across the street that things began to melt. Icicles dripped audibly onto the front porch. They hung from the house’s eaves, deadly threats we ducked under or knocked off with a shovel. It was time to clean house. I left the windows open and let the cold air blow through the place. I thought of the miniature book by Maurice Sendak my mother had read to us as children, Chicken Soup with Rice. It told its nonsensical story month by month, the months personified, and March blowing down the door and lapping up spilled soup. I shoved William’s things—papers, bills, clothes—into boxes and put them in the closet. I used bleach and scrubbed. I went to Geoff’s door and asked to borrow his mop, and then later, his car. I loaded the blankets and sheets in the trunk and drove them to the Laundromat, maneuvering around the potholes in the streets, the slush spraying onto the windshield. Outside, without William Bell, the world was changing.

At the Laundromat, a boy I’d met when I first came to school recognized me and called my name. He asked me what I was reading, and what courses I was taking this semester, and then asked me more things. I’d forgotten his name but didn’t ask him for it. The big hot dryers rolled and tumbled. Pieces of lint floated past. The boy’s expression was earnest, his eyes lit with genuine interest. My hair was too long, uncombed, my wool sweater’s hem unraveling, my hands smelling of bleach. But could he be attracted to me?

“Help me take my stuff to my car,” I said.

He grabbed armfuls. I opened the trunk and we put the sheets and blankets inside. And then we stood in the slush in the cold, filling the space between us with our fogging breath.

“Come home with me and help me make the bed,” I said.

He scanned the parking area, as if someone might witness all of this occurring, as if he’d stepped into a play and been asked to read a part.

“Are you serious?” he said, quietly, covertly.

“Sure.” I jingled the car keys in my hand.

Climbing into his car, he was eager and quick. He drove that way, too, following close behind, almost hitting me once at a stop sign. At my house I parked at the curb and he carried everything in his arms up the stairs. His footsteps were light, glancing off each step, careening up to the landing where he had to wait for me to unlock the door. He caught his breath behind the pile of laundry.

Inside, the breeze had whipped things into a frenzy. Magazines and papers had blown onto the floor. The curtains were caught up in their rods. All of the old smells seemed resurrected—fireplace ashes, oak polish, the walls’ dampened plaster, not unpleasantly. The apartment felt cold and fiercely alive.

“It is freezing in here,” the boy said.

I shut the windows and the room stilled. His name still eluded me. We were in the Women and Grief class on the third floor of the Andrew White House. He had lost his father recently, he’d admitted in class. He had no idea what to do now that he was here in my apartment and, without any complicity, neither did I.

“This is the bed,” I said. The mattress was thin in the pitiless March light. He grabbed an end of a sheet, and we stretched it out from either side. From the pile of bedsheets we found the one to go on top, our heads bumping, sorting through everything. His hair smelled of shampoo. The room filled with the smell of clean laundry. We made the bed. He was very competent and serious, as if this were really what he had expected. When we were done, he sat down on the edge.

“I want a cigarette,” he said. He looked up at me, apologetically.

“I don’t smoke,” I told him. I sat down on the bed next to him.

“Maybe we should go out and have a pitcher of beer,” he said.

I took his hand and placed it on my leg. We both looked at it, a fine hand with long fingers and bulky knuckles. “There isn’t a set way to go about this,” I told him. “Either you want me more than a cigarette, or you don’t.”

He snorted and ran his free hand through his hair. “Do you do this a lot?” he asked.

His face was fine-boned, his eyebrows drawn together. “No, not really,” I said.

“Didn’t you go to Wellesley?” he asked.

I told him he must have me confused with someone else.

“Didn’t you go to Yale?” I said.

He laughed. “No, I didn’t,” he said.

“Well then,” I said. “We aren’t who we thought we were.”

The spot of sun on the bed was almost warm. “We are just imitations of what we thought,” he said.

“Apparitions,” I said.

His hand on my leg heated it up. Our bodies touched at the shoulder and hip. They sank at varying depths into the too-thin mattress.

“What if we kiss?” I suggested. Anything to stop his musing.

He put both of his hands on my face then and held it like a bowl you might tip and drink from. I felt my body thaw, my heart shift and give, dislodged from its winter hibernation. I would come to learn that most men exhibited at least one endearing gesture, and this was his. His mouth was soft and he closed his eyes. We kissed for a long time on the clean-smelling bed. He whispered my name like a summoning spell. I wouldn’t have said his if I’d known it, anyway. While we kissed I felt an anxious tightening, and I imagined William had slipped into the room and taken a seat in the duck-carved chair. I sat up and looked over, and was disappointed that he wasn’t there. The boy watched me, his bare chest rising and falling under my hand.