We Are Not Ourselves(176)

“I like this neighborhood,” he said, to fill the gap her thoughts had opened up.

“You’re not paying me,” she said. “You can continue to do jobs around this house while you get your feet under you.” She felt her heels come together involuntarily. “That will be compensation enough for use of the room. Eventually you’ll have to find your own place, of course.”

? ? ?

She made a sign for him with her home number on it, though she didn’t include her name. She photocopied it and put it up on the tackboards at Slave to the Grind and Lawrence Hospital. She placed an ad in the Pennysaver circular. She knocked on the doors of the neighbors who had asked about him.

Calls started coming in. She dropped him off at Smith Cairns on her way to work and he bought a used Taurus. Most mornings he left before she was awake. Usually he put a pot of coffee on for her. He never drank coffee himself.

She stopped feeling guilty about having kept him away from home in the run-up to his separation. Leaving his wife had been his business; it had nothing to do with Eileen, and from what she understood it had been a long time coming. If some time apart every week had been enough to drive a wedge between them, then maybe a separation had been in order.

He left more than enough money every Friday to cover his portion of the food. He hardly used any electricity.

It would have been too intimate for them to eat meals together. They would have had a lot of time to fill across a table. When she cooked, she ate first and left it for him on the stove; when he did, he left it in the fridge. She would knock and tell him through the closed door that there was something for him downstairs. He would leave a note for her in his pidgin English: “Am make dinner tonight. Don’t you do it.”

He took his clothes into the bathroom with him when he showered, and he dressed before he emerged. Once—he must not have known she had come home—she watched from the base of the stairs as he took a few thunderous steps into his bedroom, around his waist a dull white towel that might have been taken from a gym. Its ends met in a strained cinch at his hip, his abdomen pushing against it but not hanging over, as if his excess flesh were made of sounder stuff than her own. Remnant steam trailed him into the hall. The ruddiness of his face and chest suggested a lobster that had survived a boiling, while the whiteness of the rest of him ran almost alabaster.

He did his own laundry and often hers as well, though he never mixed their clothing in the same load. She didn’t have to ask for this hermetic separation; he had arrived at it independently.

They watched television in their own rooms. The set in the den was almost never used, except sometimes in the late hours, when, assured that he was tucked into his quarters for the night, she padded downstairs and turned it on, keeping the volume low and the lights off. She heard the stairs creak with his weight and muted the volume, but it was a phantom creak. The tenebrous dark in the kitchen fluttered for a moment, as if he had entered that space, but he never did.

She took the Times with her to work, not because she needed it during her shift but to be able to leave it for him in its entirety later and avoid awkward negotiations about sections. She dropped it on the island when she came home, and he was discreet enough to collect it when she was out of the room and put it in the recycling bin when he was done. Most days he left the Post for her in turn, which was a guilty pleasure she hadn’t indulged in since the days in Jackson Heights when she used to retrieve Connell from whichever Orlando apartment he was at. She’d forgotten how much she’d enjoyed sitting at the Orlandos’ dining room table, flipping idly through the Post’s pages and chatting while Connell made his entreaties to stay.

? ? ?

The prospect of Thanksgiving had been haunting her for a while. She would have to justify Sergei’s continued presence in the house to Connell. Somehow she had managed to keep it from him. It helped that he didn’t call much. She had also told Sergei not to answer the phone, though she knew she needn’t have bothered. Finally, she called Connell and told him not to come home and to apply the credit to another flight. Money was tight, she told him, and he’d be home in a few weeks anyway. He protested, though halfheartedly enough to allow her to feel a little better about what she was doing. She could tell he felt guilty, but his guilt wasn’t just about not being there; it was also about not feeling more guilty about not being there.

Several well-meaning friends invited her over for the meal, but she told all of them that she was going out to her cousin Pat’s. She went up for breakfast that morning with Ed and then made Thanksgiving dinner for herself and Sergei, the full orchestration, with all the sides and a bird large enough to yield leftovers for weeks.

It was the first American Thanksgiving meal Sergei had ever eaten. She watched him assemble on his plate a heaping mound of the offerings. After he had devoured it, he filled his plate again. When he reached for a third helping of marshmallow-topped sweet potatoes, she felt a warm pride settle into her, like a sip of mulled wine. He ate a whole can of cranberry sauce himself.



One night in early December, after a few frustrating hours at Maple Grove, during which Ed refused to eat and emitted a persistent, plaintive whine, and an enervating day at work before that, while she was washing the pan from a meatloaf whose crusted end she had polished off without so much as sitting down, she heard Sergei walk into the room behind her. She looked up into the window and saw his reflection standing in the doorway. After a few moments she couldn’t pretend she didn’t know he was there; his steps had been too heavy, and now there was an electric charge in the air. She put down the scrubber and took a fortifying breath, then turned to face him. He was perfectly silent, looking at her with a strange intensity. He began to walk toward her. She had rubber gloves on her hands and raised them instinctively. He came around the island and stood before her. She could feel her own breath coming fast. He inched closer to her. The tentativeness she detected in him alarmed her; it was as if he feared for both their fates, as if he couldn’t help whatever he was about to do. She reproached herself for sheltering this stranger in her house. He could do anything he wanted to her and she would be powerless to stop him.