Anxious People(32)
Roger was kicking the baseboards and muttering: “This one’s loose,” and didn’t hear a word of what Anna-Lena said. The baseboard may possibly have been loose because Roger had spent ten minutes kicking it, but for a man like Roger a truth is a truth, regardless of its cause. From time to time Anna-Lena whispered to him about what she thought of the other prospective buyers in the apartment. Sadly Anna-Lena was about as good at whispering as she was at thinking quietly, so it was pretty much the sort of shouted whisper that’s the equivalent of a fart in an airplane that you think won’t be noticed if you let it out a little bit at a time. You never manage to be as discreet as you imagine.
“That woman on the balcony, Roger, what does she want with this apartment? She’s obviously too rich to want it, so what’s she doing here? And she’s still got her shoes on. Everyone knows you take your shoes off at an apartment viewing!” Roger didn’t answer. Anna-Lena glared at Zara through the balcony window as if Zara were the one who’d farted. Then Anna-Lena leaned even closer to Roger and whispered: “And those women in the hall, they really don’t look like they could afford to live here! Do they?”
At this Roger stopped kicking the baseboard, turned toward his wife, and looked her deep in the eye. Then he said four little words that he never said to any other woman on the planet. He said: “For God’s sake, darling.”
They never argue anymore, unless perhaps they argue all the time. When you’ve been stuck with each other long enough it can seem like there’s no difference between no longer arguing and no longer caring.
“For God’s sake, darling, remember to tell everyone you talk to that this place needs serious renovation! That way they won’t want to put in an offer,” Roger went on.
Anna-Lena looked confused: “But that’s good, isn’t it?”
Roger sighed. “For God’s sake, darling. Good for us, yes. Because we can do the renovations. But the others—you can tell from miles off that none of them knows a thing about renovation.”
Anna-Lena nodded, wrinkled her nose, and sniffed the air demonstratively. “There’s a definite smell of damp, isn’t there? Possibly even mold?” Because Roger had taught her always to ask the real estate agent that question, loudly, so that the other prospective buyers would hear and be worried.
Roger closed his eyes in frustration.
“For God’s sake, darling, you’re supposed to say that to the Realtor, not me.”
Wounded, Anna-Lena nodded, then thought out loud: “I was just practicing.”
* * *
Zara could hear them from where she was standing looking out over the railing on the balcony. The same swirling panic inside her, the same nausea, the same quivering fingertips every time she saw the bridge. Maybe she was fooling herself by thinking that one day it would feel better, or perhaps worse, so unbearable that she herself went and jumped. She looked down from the balcony but wasn’t sure it was high enough. That’s the only thing someone who definitely wants to live and someone who definitely wants to die have in common: if you’re going to jump off something, you need to be pretty damn sure of the height. Zara just wasn’t sure which of those she was: just because you don’t much like life doesn’t necessarily mean you want the alternative. So she had spent a decade seeking out and attending these apartment viewings, standing on balconies and staring at the bridge, balancing right in the middle of all that was worst inside her.
* * *
She heard new voices from inside the apartment. It was the other couple, the younger pair, Julia and Ro. One of them was a blonde, the other had black hair, and they were squabbling noisily the way you do when you’re young and think that every feeling fluttering about in all your hormones is completely unique. Julia was the one who was pregnant, and Ro was the one who was irritated. One was dressed in clothes that looked like she’d made them herself out of capes she’d stolen from murdered magicians, the other as if she sold drugs outside a bowling alley. Ro (that was a nickname, of course, but the sort that had stuck to her for so long that even she used it to introduce herself, which was just one of the many reasons Zara found her irritating) was walking around and holding her phone up toward the ceiling, repeating: “There’s, like, no signal at all in here!” while Julia snapped back: “Well, that’s terrible, because then we might actually have to talk to each other if we lived here! Stop trying to change the subject the whole time, we need to make a decision about the birds!”
They very rarely agreed about anything, but in Ro’s defense she didn’t always know that. Fairly often when Ro asked Julia “Are you upset?” Julia would reply “NO!” and Ro would shrug, as carefree as a family in an advertisement for cleaning products, which obviously only made Julia even more upset, because it was perfectly obvious that she was upset. But this time even Ro was aware that they were arguing, because they were arguing about the birds. Ro had had birds when she and Julia got together, not as lunch but as pets. “Is she a pirate?” Julia’s mom had asked the first time it was mentioned, but Julia put up with the birds because she was in love and because she couldn’t help wondering how long birds could actually live.
A very long time, as it turned out. When Julia eventually realized this and tried to deal with the situation in an adult way by sneaking out of bed one night and letting them out of a window, one of the wretched creatures fell all the way to the street and died. A bird! Julia had to invite some of the neighbors’ children in for a soda the next day when Ro was at work so she could blame one of them when Ro found the cage open. And the other birds? They were still sitting in the cage. What sort of insult to evolution was it that creatures like that managed to stay alive?