The Household Spirit (23 page)

—

That first week. They were more like refugees who happened to be shuffling in the same vague, unknown direction—
away
—than
longtime neighbors or friends or even people who knew the other's name. They sat on the sofa. The sofa was not the past, and, for now, it was safe. The sofa was more movement than either of them had had in years.

They liked each other. Especially after they realized that the other was not the same person they'd lived next door to for twenty-five years but someone else entirely and that, because of this, they didn't really need to draw attention to the fact that they had been neighbors to that other person for so long and never spoken or sat next to him or her on the sofa. Emily thinking: There's only this present moment, anyway, and even that doesn't matter or really exist since everything is an illusion and I am insane. Howie thinking: She needs to eat. I need to go grocery shopping in Vermont.

They kind of had an understanding.

The simplicity of Mr. Jeffries's strangeness was almost ideally suited to Emily's internal and external disconnection. Their paralyses fit. They lived; they didn't assume. Sometimes they even communicated.

Howie helped Emily with her sleeping. Howie made dinner.

“You're like one of those dogs that knows when someone's going to have a seizure,” Emily said, several days after she'd moved in. It was the first time she'd really mentioned the issue.

“I don't know,” Howie said, uncomfortably. He did not want to speak about this.
Dogs?
Was that what had been happening here? Seizures? Perhaps it made sense.

She asked, “How
do
you know?”

“Know what?”

Emily sighed; scrunched her face. You're right. OK. Moving on.

Howie said, “Do you want to watch TV?”

Technically, they were already watching TV. She'd been talking about their routine, which had begun in earnest on the second night, sometime after Howie had gone up to bed.

There was a knock on his door. Howie had not been sleeping. He had been thinking with the lights off.

That night, Howie had sent Harri a number of texts. Seven. This is what Howie had been thinking about; his phone was still in the pocket of the trousers that he was still wearing, under the covers, for propriety's sake. Maybe his phone would buzz. New York was the city that couldn't sleep. But maybe he had sent the texts wrong.

Howie still had not plugged his internet computer back in because Emily had become agitated at the very idea; just that afternoon Howie had taken it to the living room. He had thought that she might enjoy it. But she had asked him with bossy urgency if he would please,
please
take that thing somewhere else. Emily had, as Harri might say, kind of freaked out, looking at the computer as if it were a window to someplace bad, and so no problem: without another word, Howie had taken the computer up to Harri's empty bedroom. He put it on her bed. Howie looked forward to opening his e-mails and Facebook, seeing the promised stone anniversary photographs, maybe send some to Harri, and, what with Emily Phane recovering on his sofa downstairs, he felt that it might be time to write some of his pals, let them know that nothing out of the ordinary was going on here, everything hunky-dory on Route 29. Mostly, Howie wanted to write his daughter a longer, more accurate thank-you e-mail for the painting. It had been unkind of him to thank her with telephone texts. He thought about writing her another text to apologize for the other texts. Emily continued to knock. Howie continued to think.

The door opened.

“Mr. Jeffries?” Emily whispered.

“I'm in here.”

“I know.”

“OK.”

“Can I come in?”

Howie had not completely removed his clothing since Emily arrived at his house. He had been responsibly prepared for just this sort of thing. “OK,” he said.

“There a light?”

Howie turned on his bedside lamp. Light. He felt like something slapped on a grill. Emily was standing in the doorway, maroon BU hoodie up.

She had not yet seen Mr. Jeffries's bedroom. She'd come upstairs because she needed help. How exactly he was going to help her, she didn't know. She'd fallen asleep in front of the TV and, apparently, this time he'd left her there, alone, and so when the paralysis came, so did the footsteps. The attack had been fierce, eternal.

But she already felt better, looking at poor Mr. Jeffries. He appeared to be fully dressed. But that was the least of it.

“Oh my God,” she said.

“It's a chandelier.”

Too fucking weird: this dowager ice spider hanging above Mr. Jeffries. Emily knew better than to meddle, because, again, questions were a slippery slope at this stage in their cohabitation, but you try and take your eyes off
that
. She said, still whispering, “It's beautiful.”

“I hate it.”

Dressed and tucked neatly into bed, Howie looked like a cross between an open-casket corpse and a little boy waiting to be read a bedtime story. About fish.

“You hate it?” she said.

“I hate it very much.”

For once, speaking felt like the least vulnerable action that Howie could currently take: he couldn't otherwise survive being seen like this, trapped in bed, silent, and so he tried to smile, said, “I think that I keep it there because I hate it so much.”

“Why?”

“Because I hate it so much.”

Emily nodded rapidly.

“It's the only thing that I hate,” Howie said. He hoped that she would leave his bedroom now. Take that and go. Scram. He considered turning the dark back on. What else did she want from him?

“The only thing you hate? Really?”

“Well,” he said. How many things could one person hate?

“So what would happen if you got rid of it then?” Emily asked. But she knew: nothing good. The chandelier was homeopathy. It was like one of those strips of poisonous tape you hang from the ceiling in order to collect and kill insects, and, once again, Emily saw the Howie behind the Mr. Jeffries. The guy she'd seen the night before asleep on the sofa. Howie was shy, subtle, and deeply, dreamily weird. There was probably a planet of shit that a guy like Howie could legitimately despise if he'd wanted to.

“Was it your wife's?”

Howie could almost be said to have flinched. “It hasn't worked in almost twenty years.” Then, “I still don't know why she put it there. I told her not to. I said put it in storage for when we got a bigger house. Suppose she always knew that we would not get a bigger house. Maybe she put it there to show me.”

“Mr. Jeffries,” Emily said. “Do you want to come back downstairs and watch TV with me?”

Howie did not. He needed to sleep, but now that her delight concerning his ex-wife's grandmother's chandelier had dissipated, Emily, he saw, was in a very bad way. “You need to sleep,” he said. Because she wasn't going away until he said something.

“I know,” she said.

Howie understood. She was not going to go away at all. “OK,” he said.

—

This began their arrangement. For the first week it was touch-and-go; it was good that Howie had taken off work. He stayed by Emily's side when she was most tired. He knew when this was, usually, but if not, if he had gone upstairs or outside or to the kitchen, she'd come and say, “You want to watch TV with me?”

He would watch TV with her.

She would close her eyes, and he knew that if she began to have
one of her nightmares, or whatever—seizures, ringing disturbances—he would firmly shake her shoulder. Easy as peasy. Eyes flicking on: white as headlights, then filling with color, relief.

Then sleep again.

Howie usually knew—and, again, they never actually spoke about how or why. Certainly not what. In fact, he had decided that he knew not because of the strange, creeping feeling that always alerted him, but because maybe her breathing changed, or her face twanged, something imperceptible, a twitch or a catch of her breath that he picked up on, exactly like with fishing, how if he waited long enough he usually knew exactly where the fish were. Howie had no good reason to believe in anything else. Emily's sleep problems did not, in the end, warrant much reflection. You did things that needed doing. That was that. He sat. She sat. She slept. He woke her up if she started ringing, and then she sometimes said something, but more often she did not. She might smile. No biggie.

He gave her space in which to get better without the least bit of interest in what she happened to be getting better from. None of your business. She started properly sleeping. She washed herself; she began eating a little. Then a whole lot. Emily was not well and did not like the pineapple, but she was not going to die.

By the second week, Howie had gone back to work. He explained to Emily about his shifts, and exactly when he would need to sleep, when he would leave for work, and when he would be home, awake, and able to watch TV with her on the sofa. He knew that she would not sleep while he was at work. She would wait for him, even though that first week back was night shifts. The second as well. This was OK. They would both get less sleep than they needed, true, but it was only for the time being, until Emily was a little further from a death that could be legitimately blamed on his inattention. It would have to work and it did work, for a few days, until the morning that Emily, apparently exhausted and spooked, came into Howie's bedroom during his four-hour sleep shift. He was wearing his clothing, as usual, even a belt; he awoke immediately.

“Can I?” Emily asked.

He felt her body indent the mattress next to him.

He could not move.

She asked again, softly, “Mr. Jeffries, do you mind? I know it's weird but—”

“OK.”

But OK, he realized, wasn't the same as Mmm, it was more like a word, and, therefore, more like an actual lie. Howie was not OK. This was not OK.

Being asleep was as naked as Howie ever got with Emily, and that took him a few days. Co-sleeping with his neighbor really did a number on him. Colleagues, noticing his moderate decline, thought he must have been a little under the weather still, maybe terminal, nobody knew, so they let him take naps here and there. He hardly slept at home. He caught naps in his car, pulled over on the side of Route 29, or in front of the TV when Emily was cooking or tending her plants. But things soon evened out, and exhaustion helped Howie get used to it. Fine. He would come home from his shift and go upstairs and Emily would be waiting in bed, fully dressed. Emily wrapped in the Private Nathanial P. Sounes memorial afghan, above the covers. They only touched by accident. They touched when Howie had to wake her from one of her ringings, which he seemed to do instinctively here, too, even when he was asleep. He would reach over and shake her and go back to sleep. Soon just sleeping next to Howie helped Emily. She couldn't explain it either.

It was as though the living room flooded with light after that.

Howie's entire house changed, opened up. The TV was on less. Things quickened, felt good. Emily waited for him to get home. The drive to and from work, a drive that used to be exactly the same for Howie in terms of expectation and enjoyment, changed. Leaving the house was a loss. Returning home was something to anticipate. Time began to move differently. For example, the ten days it took Harri to reply to his follow-up thank-you e-mail—after she never replied to his several possibly ill-judged thank-you telephone
texts—seemed like a very, very long time. Inexcusably long. Ten days to wait for a reply used to be nothing, but now that Howie shared time, everything had slowed, become richer, more confusing, more alive, every single sound was different knowing that another pair of ears was hearing it, too. What the heck was that? That was an owl. It was a truck. That was the sound of wind moving through trees. You heard it, too? That was only the house. The house was settling. They were synchronizing their senses, deciding together what they saw, agreeing that the carpet was
yellowish
. That they should call the sofa a sofa, not a couch and never a love seat. Two days would feel like a month. Routines melted away, leaving their bones all over the place, jutting here and there, sharp, ungainly, embarrassing, but also leaving Howie with a kind of purity and newness of movement and thought along with the refrigerator full of new foods that Emily had escorted into the house. Fruits that might very well have been nuts. Diet Dr Pepper and cheese so blue it was green; frozen egg rolls, cilantro, Greek yogurt, brown rice, gourmet baloney. Flavors of Pringles that Howie was unused to.

Howie loved the underwater way a room full of plants sounded at night.

They never spoke about Howie's room, or sleeping. Nor did they speak to each other, ever, once inside the bedroom: no good night, good morning, nothing. Speaking in bed would have been beyond the pale, like using the same toilet at the same time.

In fact, the more awake with each other they became, the less they were able even to approach the subject of sleep, and the less they thought that this was odd, or that they needed to. Things were quite normal now thank you very much.

The month passed. They might not talk for a full day or two, but they were together. Emily bought things for the house and things that she thought Mr. Jeffries might like, like a baseball cap. She had wondered what he would look like in a baseball cap. Both of them cooked for each other even if they tended to eat separately. Emily in the living room, always. Howie in his kitchen. The baseball cap
made Howie look like an incognito Nazi war criminal on vacation. He wore it around the house, way too high up on his head, until, enough was enough, OK, creepy idea: Emily plucked if off. It was never seen again. They didn't talk much about their past and far less about their future; the present was just kind of there, all over the place, so what could they say? You want to watch TV? Sure do. They never spoke about Peppy. They never spoke about Harriet.