We Are Not Ourselves(175)

The place seemed designed to make you crazy. Maybe the idea was to make you want to stay away. Judging from the sparse population of visitors in the television room, most people obliged them.

She wasn’t visiting. What she was doing was seeing her husband after work. It was simply a part of her day. She was showing them that Ed might be there with them instead of home where he belonged, but nothing else had changed.

They could put his room in the middle of a maze and she would find her way to it every night.

She was going to be the woman who wouldn’t go away, in the marriage that wouldn’t die. Her idea of her husband wasn’t going to be diminished when orderlies looked at him as if he was just another old fool. They had no clue what kind of man had fallen into their lap, but she wasn’t going to explain it to them, because they didn’t deserve to hear it. She was content to let them think he was a gibberer, an invalid, an idiot, because she knew better. She would always know better than them.





87


She had him pour a layer of blacktop in the driveway. She had him paint everything that could be painted, and then she had him move outside to paint the cedar boards, the fences, the window moldings, the heavy metal gate to the stairs, even the bricks. He removed the old wallpaper and installed new paper with fresh patterns. She had him rip out the attic insulation and replace it, haul junk from the basement and attic to the dump, and dredge the drainage gutter in front of the house. He ripped out the horrible toilet in the first-floor half bath and installed a bright new one, along with a new vanity. He didn’t need assistance for most jobs; for the biggest ones, she paid the gardener to help him off-hours. He used his own tools, leaving alone the ones she’d bought for Ed. He patched the waterlogged wall in the garage. He reinforced the retaining wall at the end of the driveway, where the property shot up into a slope, because it had begun to lean slightly and she had been told it would eventually give way if left untended. He erected a temporary wooden buttress to keep the wall from pitching forward, dug out the backfill down to the footing, filled in the resultant gap with concrete blocks and fabric to keep the silt out, and then repacked the dirt. For a platform top over the two layers of wall, he built a wooden frame into which he poured concrete that he smoothed out so faultlessly that it reminded her of fondant atop a fancy cake.

Her friends marveled at his work. In their marveling she could hear a hint of prurience, but if they weren’t going to make their surmises explicit, then she was content to let them harbor them silently. Maybe they thought he was taking Ed’s place. Maybe they thought that she was in some fundamental way out of control. Maybe they thought it was sad that she needed a bridge between her old life and her new one. Maybe they thought she was sleeping with him. Let them think whatever they want, she told herself. Let them speculate and conjecture and cluck their tongues and drown in pity or disapproval or whatever else.

She was proud of the caliber of improvements to her property. Neighbors who had never said two words to her began to ask who had done her work. She made vague demurrals about his being a friend, and when she relayed these inquiries to Sergei, he radiated a pride she hadn’t expected. She would have preferred him to stand aloof from appraisals of the quality of his labor, because if he remained eternally elsewhere in his mind, somewhere more rarefied and abstract, then she didn’t have to think of him as reduced to his circumstances. When she saw how delighted he seemed by the compliments, though, she decided to stop worrying that she was condescending to him when she assigned him tasks, which made her more comfortable keeping him in the house, which was what she had been trying to feel for a while. She didn’t know what she would do with herself once he was gone.

? ? ?

As October gave way to November and the stream of bigger jobs slowed to a trickle, the house began to take on the patina she’d envisioned when she’d signed the papers aligning her fate with its own. She understood that it would have to remain incomplete: she wasn’t going to launch into finishing the attic or basement. The electrical would never get upgraded or the oil tank dug up or the piping replaced or the asbestos hauled away. She wouldn’t be able to keep paying Sergei the nearly four thousand dollars a month she’d been paying him. The Medicare-paid hundred days were coming to an end soon, whereupon she would start paying six thousand a month to the nursing home, which would come right out of the retirement accounts and what was left of the home equity line of credit.

She wanted to talk to him about leaving, but it was easier each week just to spend down her income and dip a little into her savings and promise herself that she’d bring it up before the next payday. As long as I bring home money, she is happy, she remembered Sergei saying.

One day Sergei asked if he could stay at the house on weekends as well. The request dismayed her; she had been sure this would be the day she would say something to him about finishing his stint there; in fact, she had just been about to bring it up. Then he told her that he had left his wife a couple of weeks before and had been staying on his sister’s couch on weekend nights.

She was stunned. “I can’t afford to keep paying you full-time.”

“You don’t have to pay me,” he said. “I pay you to stay here.”

“Pay me?”

“I do handyman work,” he said. “I work for your neighbors.”

This radical-sounding proposal had about it the seductive reasonability of the most outlandish schemes. She affected a dubious air, but she knew its adoption was inevitable.