Here Until August. Josephine Rowe

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СКАЧАТЬ and a couple of something else for good measure. Partaking? he’d ask, and I would, and we’d drift off together, a tangled raft of random beach junk. He’d rouse when the girls downstairs were at it again. Waking me with a little shove, Hey, what’s that? What’s she saying?

      A game he called Fucking or Fighting? I’d listen a minute and then translate as best as I could: One of them wants to get a dog, I think, or: The Husky One thinks the Unhusky One has slept with somebody else.

      The Husky One and the Unhusky One. We’d hear them all the time, but their names remained a mystery. Possibly they knew mine, with Jody so courteously hollering it.

      That last one, he’d ask. What’s that mean?

      Mille-feuille? It’s a kind of pastry, but the way she’s saying it probably just means pussy. But a bit sweeter than pussy. I mean, nicer than. Ah. You know what I mean.

      He did not laugh. He took it all very seriously. Repeating in that methadone drawl of his, milfoy, milfoil, millfoey. French by tenement osmosis.

      Five days out of seven I was still getting up early to go and fold towels into pleasing shapes and wonder about the kind of women—mostly women—who would unfurl and ruin them without a blink. Men came too, but not many or often, and I didn’t fall to measuring my life against theirs in the way I did with women. Especially the women my age, the ones I encountered mostly in the things they left behind: La Prairie hand creams, lipsticks in obnoxious forty-dollar shades, designer underwear, magazines commodifying mindfulness and self-love.

      There was a lost-and-found, of course, but usually I either pocketed things or simply unfound them into the trash with disgust.

      As winter deepened it seemed crueler and crueler to sacrifice the meager quota of daily sunlight in the service of these women.

      On those night-dark mornings, the radio of our next-door neighbor was a kind of static rope I’d use to drag myself from bed, from Jody, to the kitchen. From there I hoped inertia might do the rest. The radio was loud and clear; I suppose it traveled through the plumbing, sink to sink, like the tin-can telephones we used to make when we were kids. I toasted bagels to a patter of rapid-fire Quebecois; a man’s voice and then a woman’s. Topical talkback. Something about the Charter of Values, military suicides. The weather report: neige neige neige, le vortex polaire. I was okay in high school. I got prizes in French. Now, when I tried to speak it, the words would fall out of my mouth like clumps of half-chewed bread. There was better luck listening: the words, more and more of them, floating back up towards their meanings like free divers’ balloons and then hanging there, swollen and luminous. Turnstile. Shooting. Embezzlement.

      I’d roll these words dumbly around my mouth, waiting for the coffee to brew, staring out into the dark street to see how much snow had fallen overnight. Marie’s bike was useless now, chained to a railing, squirrel amusement.

      Afternoons I’d come home to find Jody compulsively refreshing a web page, following the frenzied final moments of bidding as though it were an NBA playoff game he’d placed big money on. I’d empty my coat pockets of tips and tiny soaps and miniature bottles of rich body lotion, then walk around turning all the thermostats down by five degrees.

      If you’re cold, I’d say, why don’t you put on a fucking sweater?

      If you hate your job, he’d say, why don’t you fucking quit?

      I glanced over his shoulder. On screen, Ramblingmike73 was winning Memphis Minnie at $392, and there were still ten minutes of scrummage left.

      I got us, Jody said.

      But I was uncertain whether I wanted to be got. In the bathroom I arranged the gleanings from my shift into the medicine cabinet, where a few of Jody’s toiletries were neatly lined up along the top shelf. Mostly this was comforting. A cottonwool-swaddled thought: How sinister a spoon looks, lying all alone on a windowsill.

      Early one morning, as though a dream had leaked down into Rue Cartier: an old man, dressed in peacock green, gliding across the pond-chain of streetlights. Past the soft mounds of cars, long before any traffic came to churn up the night’s pure drift.

      Jody saw this, not me. I just heard about it. He’d caught sight of it from our terrarium window when he got out of bed for a glass of water. That same afternoon he went out and found a flea market on St. Laurent and came back with a pair of cross-country skis.

      You can ski?

      We’ll find out.

      Jody had never skied in his life, but neither of us doubted he’d have a knack for it. He picked up a lot of things with a striking nonchalance, drawing on a latent grace he never promised to any particular pursuit with any seriousness. Or maybe it’s agility I’m talking about, not grace. He still ate like a drug fiend. Indiscriminate combinations of overprocessed, microwaveable god-knows-what. A tendency to knife-lick. Didn’t your mother ever … But I could watch him move across a dark room forever.

      I championed the skis. I mapped out the trails around the mountain. It wasn’t as generous as wanting him to be happy; I wanted him to not be sorry that he had come. He felt asleep here, he’d said. Dimmed and dense-souled, like on dirty horse tranqs, more ketted than benzoed.

      You know you burn up just as much energy treading water as you do swimming towards something?

      This was information, not a question. I’ve since looked it up and I know for a fact it isn’t a fact, generally speaking. But it was true enough for Jody.

      He said he felt dried out, alligatored by the heating system, left an apple out on the sill to show just how he meant. We watched it shrivel and leather to become a grotesque little face. Accusing.

      Late into January, throwing up became my new morning ritual. In the kitchen, quietly so as not to wake Jody. The steel belly of the sink was like an amphitheater, and from within it I listened to the ghost broadcasts from next door.

       … a confirmé plus que mille planètes extrasolaires …

      Providence. Marie had promised. This wasn’t it. Or it depended on your definition of providence. The blessed piece of scallop shell had long disappeared by then; I turned out all of my pockets but it never tumbled out.

      I don’t know how she knew. I didn’t even know know; I was still hoping I was suffering from some kind of virus. But she knew. She saw me out her kitchen window one morning before work, on the balcony, inviting icy air onto my damp face, and she came out still wearing floral dish-washing gloves carrying a thermos, workman’s style. Once her husband’s, I figured. It was roughed up with the scratches and dents of a day laborer, or a fisherman.

      English is better for you? Maybe you cannot keep anything in your stomach, but this you will manage. I know; often I can manage nothing else myself.

      I wasn’t showing, it was much too soon. Even if I had been, there was so much winter goosedown to disguise it. She’d heard me, then, through our little two-way sink system? Or she could tell just by looking. Maybe you gained that power of insight after seven or eight decades in the world. Maybe life knows life, I thought, feverishly sentimental.

      You like it, you just say and I will bring more, she said, placing the thermos in my hands. AYLIFFE in faded black marker down the side.

      You knock here, like so, Madame Ayliffe said, rapping at her own kitchen window, startling a small tuxedo cat off СКАЧАТЬ