Free The Affairs of Others: A Novel by Amy Grace Loyd Page B

and high whines, scraping—the rearranging of things, heavy pieces. It sounded like furniture. The Braunsteins underfoot at their own adventures. It was just after midnight. Late for redecorating. I stood and surveyed the place before leaving. The only window he’d left open was the one with the view. On a calm night you could hear the ferries sounding. I heard the roll of wheels outside on the street, a cart or skateboard, the chirping signal of a car locking, and finally with the Braunsteins agitating again, I knew some defeat. I would have to call his daughter first thing. She’d want to call the police and she’d be right to. I in turn would have to talk to my tenants about rules and order, about quiet and prudence.
    Turning off his lights, locking two and so all of his locks, I took a right in the short hall outside and tried the door to the storage room beside his apartment; it was the reason his place was smaller than the other units, that and the lower ceilings. Inside, things from a former life. Books, tapes, CDs, old movies: His Girl Friday, Wings of Desire, Notorious . Things I could not give away, that I didn’t want to risk to dampness in the basement, but that, looked at too often, might become as common to the eyes, and heart, as wallpaper. Then I called for the elevator. If ever I needed to be carried it was now. It woke from its waiting and climbed to me with a whirring that soothed me until I remembered Mr. Coughlan relied on the elevator when he was tired. I hadn’t checked it or even cleaned it in days. It was a graceful antique, a workhorse. On its ceiling was a ring of old lights fit for a carnival, a merry-go-round. It had two doors. You could not see whether it was empty or not until you pulled open the first door with its gold-plated handle and small window, then the next, a slider that retreated automatically when the first door opened, and was fitted with the same window. My hands began trembling again. The hinges creaked, the aging sliding door serpentined slightly in its narrow tracks. No one there or not quite, for when I stepped inside, taking a full breath of what I thought would be relief, I took in an odor—ammonia first, the first note of what I recognized to be urine. It was so powerful, having been trapped, left to fester, that I stepped out and leaned back on the first thing I could. Mr. Coughlan’s door, where his absence was now as alive, as unsettling, as the smell of piss in my elevator.
    *   *   *
    I used bleach. I did not care if it was remarked by the environmentally sensitive in the building. The discovery required something that matched, even overwhelmed it in its noxiousness. As I mopped out the elevator there was a suspension of noise, of everything, as if the building, out of respect, contained all its annoyances, all the nerves that were my tenants and their guests or the one guest. I thought of waking them, every single one—the vision of it gave life to my body—asking them without prefacing apologies when they’d seen Mr. Coughlan last. I wanted to draw them out of their dramas as surely as they’d wanted that of me on occasion, but I wouldn’t. I would call his daughter directly, perhaps I would call the police myself—what was the etiquette? I did not know, but I knew the body’s defections had to be addressed with efficiency and already I was behind. I still remembered my father cleaning up my vomit when I was a child, in the sore-making hours of the night or early morning; I remembered my mother’s cool, thin hands on my hot face, steadying me through what she assured me was temporary. I held on to that sort of sweetness back when I contended with my husband’s accidents, one after another. For him the messes his illness made were indignities and so it was up to me to wipe them away as quickly as they happened, as if they never had, this vigilance the only answer to the body’s failures.
    Back in my apartment, I peeled off my clothes and left