For Rent (Taken Down)

Theron

"It has a toilet," said Dell, with the heavy wonder of a man who had expected to find a bucket.

"Of course it has a toilet."

"It has a bathtub. With feet."

"Many of these houses do."

"And a stove." Dell opened the oven, peered into it, and shut it with a clank. "I'd say it's from the Truman administration. But it lights."

"That is a very great comfort."

"I'm not being sarcastic, Mr. Wexcombe." Dell turned to face him in the narrow kitchen, a massive gray-bearded figure in a black overcoat, and looked at him with an expression of grave, unmistakable pain. "I'm being worried."

They were standing on the third floor of number 14 Ives Street on the last day of November, at ten past nine in the morning, in the pale thin light of a city that had given up on autumn. The apartment was precisely the same shape as the one across the way: a railroad flat, long and narrow, with a front room, a middle room, a kitchen at the back, and a floor of wide pine boards worn pale in the places where three generations of Portuguese tenants had worn them with their feet. The ceilings were high and cracked. The radiators were painted silver. The wallpaper in the hall had been put up in 1962 and depicted, in faded gold, an endless repeating pattern of pineapples.

It smelled of cabbage, floor wax, and a century of other people's lives.

"It's quite adequate," said Theron.

"There's no furniture."

"There's a table."

"There's a card table. With one leg held up by a phone book."

"I shall purchase a chair."

"You don't have a bed."

"Mr. Okafor, I have not slept in a bed since October. I have slept in my study, in the Bentley, and once, for forty minutes, on the floor of the boat shed. A mattress will be a luxury."

"You've got a house with forty-one clocks and eleven bedrooms."

"Forty-one clocks," said Theron, "which now all tell the same time. I'm told it's a great improvement."

Dell said nothing. He walked into the front room and stood at the window, looking out, with his hands clasped behind his back, like an elderly admiral reviewing a fleet.

It was a long window, floor to ceiling, with a deep sill and a pair of heavy sashes that had been painted shut and then, at some point, unpainted by a man with a razor blade. The glass was wavy. The frame was gray. Through it, across a gap of perhaps thirty feet, a canyon of cold air and parked cars and a single bare maple, rose the front of number 13: a mirror, nearly exact, of the house in which they stood. Same gables. Same peeling gray. Same three porches stacked one on top of another like the drawers of a battered chest.

And at the top, on the third floor, a window.

It was her window.

He had known it would be. He'd known for eleven days, ever since Ansel's friend at the credit bureau had handed him a sheet of paper with an address on it, and since he had stood in the street one night, hands in his pockets, and looked up at a square of yellow light behind a thin white curtain. He had told himself it was a matter of information. He had told himself many things.

"Mr. Wexcombe," said Dell.

"Yes."

"I'd like to say something."

"You've said it. In the car. Three times."

"I've said four things in ten years, and I've said three of them this week. I'm running out of steam." Dell did not turn from the window. "But I'm going to say one more."

"Go on."

"This isn't a good idea."

"No."

"She told you not to come near her building."

"She told me not to come to her building. I have not come to her building. This is a different building. It has a different number. It is on the opposite side of the street, and I am a tenant in it, in accordance with a lease I've signed and a deposit I've paid in full."

"That's a technicality."

"Technicalities are the foundation of the law."

"It's a shabby technicality."

"Yes," said Theron. "I'm aware."

Dell turned. In the gray light, his lined face was set and heavy, and his eyes, which were an unexpected mild brown, held no anger at all.

"I drove your father for a year, before you," he said. "I want you to know that. Before I drove you, I drove him. Eleven months. I drove him to every meeting he ever lied at, and I held the door for every man he cheated, and I watched him sit in rooms that weren't his and take what hadn't been offered." He paused. "And he'd have rented the apartment across the street from her in a minute. He'd have thought it was clever."

The words fell into the cold air.

Theron stood very still.

"That," he said at last, "is a harsh thing to say."

"I know."

"I am not my father."

"I know you're not." Dell's voice was gentle. "That's why I'm saying it. A man like him wouldn't have heard me. You will." He shifted his weight. "I'm not telling you to leave. I'm telling you to know what you're doing. Because she'll look out her window, one day, and see you in this one. And she'll have to decide what it means."

"What do you think it will mean?"

"That depends entirely on what you do next."

Theron looked at the window. At the pale hanging curtain. At the lamp, not yet lit, on the table inside.

"I intend," he said slowly, "to do nothing."

"Nothing."

"I'll be here. That is all. I won't speak. I won't call. I won't leave a card on her doorstep. I'll come and go like any other resident. If she needs something, if she's ill, if there is an emergency, I'll be thirty feet away and able to come in thirty seconds. If she never needs anything, then I will have wasted four thousand dollars on a flat with a cabbage smell, and I will have lost nothing she was ever going to give me."

"And if she sees you?"

"Then she sees a man."

"A man in her window."

"A man in a window."

Dell sighed. It was a deep, rumbling, surrendering sigh, like a ship's engine going slow ahead.

"I'll bring bedding," he said.

"Thank you."

"And a kettle. And a decent lamp. And a heater, because that radiator's going to knock like a drunk in a church. And a chair."

"One chair is sufficient."

"You'll have two," said Dell. "You'll need somewhere to put your hat."

…

The landlady's name was Mrs. Ferreira, and she lived on the ground floor with a canary, a statue of Our Lady of Fátima, and a television permanently tuned to a Portuguese-language game show in which people in sequined suits tried to guess the weight of a pig.

She had interviewed Theron for twenty-two minutes on Friday afternoon in a kitchen the size of a coat closet, with a plate of custard tarts between them, and he had understood from the first minute that he was not being assessed as a tenant. He was being assessed as a man.

"You are not married," she had said.

"No, ma'am."

"You have a girlfriend?"

"No, ma'am."

"You drink?"

"Occasionally."

"You play the music loud?"

"I have never in my life played music loud."

"You are police?"

"No."

"You are with the government?"

"No."

"You are a Jehovah's Witness?"

"I'm—" He had hesitated. "I'm a boat builder, Mrs. Ferreira. Of a kind. I own a shipyard."

"A shipyard." She had narrowed her eyes. "Why does a man with a shipyard rent the third floor of a house on Ives Street, with the toilet that runs?"

He had considered lying. He considered, in fact, several lies, each more elegant than the last. A renovation. A work project. A man separated from his wife.

"Because there is a woman across the street," he had said, "whom I wronged. And I would like to be near enough to be of use to her if she needs it. Without her knowing it is I."

There had been a long, long silence.

The canary had trilled. On the television a woman in gold lamé had begun to weep over a hog.

"Ah," said Mrs. Ferreira, finally, and her small black eyes had softened, "um arrependido."

"I beg your pardon?"

"A man who is sorry." She had patted his hand with a small, plump, powdery palm. "My Joaquim, God rest him. He was also sorry. Forty-one years." She had pushed the custard tarts closer. "Eat. You are too thin. I will take seven hundred cash for the month. You will not tell the girl I said yes."

He had paid for six months in advance.

"Why six?" Mrs. Ferreira had said, counting the bills.

"I don't know how long it will take."

"For what?"

"For her to forgive me. Or to ask me to leave."

"Hm." She had tucked the money into her apron. "In my experience, it takes longer than six months. But it is a start."

…

He moved in on Monday.

It required, in total, two bags: one of clothes, one of books. He had considered bringing more and decided that more would look like intent. He wore a gray sweater and a pair of old corduroys, both of which he'd found at the back of a closet in the house at Ledge Point, and he felt, standing in the doorway of the flat at noon with the sun coming through the dirty glass, as unsuited to his own body as a man wearing a borrowed coat.

Dell arrived at one with a bed.

It was not a good bed. It was a plain twin mattress on a plain metal frame, bought at a store on Route 6 whose entire stock seemed to consist of items that could be assembled with an Allen key. Dell carried it up three flights of stairs, alone, with the enormous patient dignity of a man hauling a coffin, and set it down in the middle room, and stood back, breathing heavily.

"There," he said.

"Thank you."

"It's got springs. Mind them."

"I will."

"I put a blanket in the bag. And a pillow. And the kettle. And a lamp. And—" he reached into the canvas duffel at his feet, withdrew a small cardboard box, and set it carefully on the kitchen counter "—this."

Theron opened the box.

Inside, wrapped in newspaper, lay an enormous, hideous, strangely beautiful ceramic mug, glazed in a swirl of brown and ochre and green. It was the sort of thing a child might make at a summer camp. On the side, in wobbly white letters, someone had scratched the words WORLD'S OKAYEST UNCLE.

Theron looked at it for a very long time.

"It was in the kitchen at the house," said Dell. "On the top shelf. Behind the Waterford. I found it when I was looking for the thermos." His gruff voice did not shake. "Your brother made it. He was eleven. He said it was for you."

"I never saw it."

"He hid it. He was embarrassed. He said you'd make the face."

"What face?"

"The one you're making now."

Theron put the mug down on the counter, very carefully, with both hands. It rang once, softly, against the formica.

"I don't have a face," he said.

"No, sir."

"I haven't got any face at all."

"No, sir." Dell reached over, with great delicacy, and straightened the mug so that the handle pointed to the left. "I'll go and get the groceries."

…

He called his mother at six.

He did it from the front room, sitting on the floor with his back against the radiator, because the single chair was still in its wrapping and the card table was covered with a map of the Rhode Island coast he had unfolded for want of anything else to do. A lamp stood on the floor beside him. The kettle muttered in the kitchen. Outside the long window the dusk was coming down blue over Fox Point, and across the street one by one the lights were coming on in number 13, a square on the first floor, a square on the second, and, last of all, high and small and yellow, one on the third.

He did not look at it.

The phone rang four times.

"Theron."

"Mother."

"I was beginning to think you'd forgotten me." Constance's voice was thinner than he remembered, and drier, and there was a faint wheeze in it that had not been there at Thanksgiving. "Mrs. Aldrich says you haven't been home since Friday."

"I've been in Providence."

"On business."

"Yes."

"With whom?"

"The bank. And some contractors for the Bristol drydock. And Ansel, on a matter relating to Kit's estate." The lies came one after another, smooth as pebbles, and he heard each one drop. "I've taken a short-term rental. It's more convenient than driving down every day. I'll be here until the new year."

"A rental."

"A small one."

"How small?"

"Small enough that I can't have you to visit."

"Hm." A pause. He could hear the old chair creak. "And the girl?"

He closed his eyes.

"She isn't a girl, Mother. She's thirty."

"Is she the girl?"

"There is a woman who may be carrying Kit's child. Yes."

"And you've met her."

"I have."

"And?"

He had thought, for four days, about what he would say. He had composed a number of versions, each of them accurate, each of them evasive, each of them designed to protect a single thing. In the end, sitting on the cold boards, he found that he could not remember any of them.

"She's remarkable," he said.

A silence.

"Remarkable."

"She's very intelligent. Very careful. She read the memorandum aloud, every clause, and found eleven things wrong with it. Ansel is in love with her."

"I should like to meet her."

"I know."

"Is she well?"

"She is well. She is twelve weeks. The baby is healthy. She had an ultrasound and the heartbeat was one hundred sixty-two."

He had not meant to say that. It came out of him in a rush, and he heard his mother's breath catch on the other end of the line.

"One hundred sixty-two," said Constance.

"Yes."

"How do you know?"

"She—" He stopped. He had been about to say she told me. But she hadn't. She'd said nothing. He had learned it from a Lumen-adjacent file on a server owned by a man named Wade, who had, in a fit of nervous generosity, added a postscript: Update, FYI: first scan notes attached, she gave consent to be contacted by the lab for cohort data. It was an ugly thing to have read. He had read it eleven times.

"From the clinic," he said.

"The clinic told you?"

"In a manner of speaking."

"You are an appalling liar, darling," said Constance. "You always were. You go very quiet and very precise, and you use the word 'manner.'"

He winced.

"But I won't ask," she said, "because I find that I'd rather not know. I'm sixty-two and I've buried a son. I'm allowed to be selfish." There was a pause, and a small, dry cough. "Did she take the offer?"

"No."

"I thought not."

"You did?"

"I wrote it for her to refuse." The wry bleak humor of it startled him. "I wanted to see what she would do. I have known many women, Theron, and a certain kind of woman, when you hand her a great deal of money, will take it, and a certain kind will take it and despise you. And a very rare kind will tear it in half and throw it back. I should like to meet that one."

"Mother—"

"You've been lying to me for a week. I can tell. But I want you to know that I don't mind, as long as you are doing it for a reason I would approve of."

"I am."

"Then lie away." The wheeze deepened. "Only be careful, my dear. You were never a good liar. And she sounds as if she'd know."

"She would."

"Then you must be very good at something else."

"What?"

"At being there," said Constance. "At being there when the lying stops."

The line went silent. He heard, very faintly, in the background, the clocks of Ledge Point ticking in their different rooms, forty-one of them, all correct.

"Good night, Mother."

"Good night, my darling. Eat something. You sound like a man who has been living on air."

…

He sat for a while with the phone in his hand.

The kettle had boiled and gone off. The radiator knocked twice, with a sound like a shy visitor at a door. Outside, the dark had come down properly, a deep blue-black with the streetlights hanging in it like pearls, and across the gap the windows of number 13 glowed warm and close.

He did not mean to look.

He told himself he'd only turn his head to check the time. But the long window was there at his shoulder, and his eyes went to it as water goes to the lowest place, and he saw.

Third floor. Left. A kitchen window, with a white curtain half-drawn.

A woman was sitting at a table.

She was in a gray cardigan, with her hair down, a thing he had never seen: dark, heavy, falling to her shoulders in a loose wave. A lamp stood at her elbow. A mug steamed beside it. In front of her, open on the table, lay a notebook, a thin square-ruled blue one with a spine mended in tape. She was writing in it, slowly, one line at a time, with a pencil. Every few seconds she paused, and looked at what she had written, and her lips moved, and she wrote again.

He couldn't see what the pages said.

He could see only her face, in profile, in the lamplight: the straight nose, the stubborn chin, the scar through the eyebrow. She looked tired. She looked, he thought, as if she had been holding something up for a very long time and had at last been allowed to set it down. She wrote another line. She paused. And then, quite slowly, almost absently, she set down the pencil, and put her hand flat against her stomach, below the cardigan, and held it there, and tilted her head a little to one side, as if listening.

Theron did not breathe.

Hello, he thought. He did not know to whom he was speaking. Hello. I'm so sorry. I know I'm not meant to be here.

She sat that way for perhaps a minute. Then she picked up the pencil again and went on writing. She turned a page. She turned another.

And then, as if some animal instinct had touched her, she looked up.

She looked straight out of the window.

Straight across the thirty feet of cold dark air, past the bare maple and the parked cars, directly at the long window of number 14, where he sat on the floor in a gray sweater with his back to the radiator and a lamp at his side, in the full, shameless, glaring light.

He couldn't move.

She couldn't see his face, he told himself. It was dark. The glass was old. The reflection would blur everything.

But she was a woman who read the terms and conditions.

She did not rise. She did not shout, or throw the curtain across, or stride to the window with her arms folded. She simply sat there, perfectly still, with the pencil in her hand and the notebook open under the lamp, and looked at him for a long, long time.

Then she picked up the pencil.

She wrote something.

She tore a page from the notebook, slowly, neatly, along the perforation. She held it up. She pressed it against the glass, with the writing facing out, in letters large enough that even from this distance a man might read them.

He leaned forward. His heart was knocking in his throat.

It was a single line, in block capitals, in pencil.

RULE 1.

He stared at it.

She held it there, unsmiling, for a count of five. Then she lowered it. She picked up her pencil again, and wrote something else on the back, and held that up.

YOU HAVE ONE (1) MORNING TO COME UP WITH A BETTER EXPLANATION.

And then, very deliberately, without another look at him, she reached out and drew the white curtain across the glass.

Theron sat on the floor of the flat on Ives Street, in the lamplight, with the cabbage smell and the knocking radiator and the world's okayest mug glowing on the kitchen counter behind him.

After a very long time he realized he was laughing.

It was a low, helpless, rusty sound, and it frightened him a little, because he could not remember when he had last made it. It shook his shoulders. It wet his eyes. He put the back of his hand against his mouth and rocked, quietly, against the radiator, a tall thin man of thirty-six alone in a rented room, with no explanation at all.

One morning, he thought.

He would need to think of something very good.