the eighty pounds I’d lost, that the case for my guilt was about to get stronger.
And my real troubles had not even begun.
On Tuesday, after finishing and sending the Danforth file to Mr. Raven, I asked my coworkers if they wanted to go to a bar after work to unwind, but everyone either had plans or was too tired or had stopped drinking. At eight o’clock, with nothing left to do at the office, which was empty—Alfredo had come and gone early—I went home and downed three tall whiskeys and put a corned beef in the oven, along with rice on the stove. A radio show broadcasted news that Greenland was splitting apart due to softened permafrost from rising annual temperatures; the war had claimed another 107 lives; an earthquake near Seattle was reported, the size and effects of which weren’t known; and there was now consensus among economists that we were in the middle of a recession, housing market slump, and dollar devaluation that hadn’t spurred a consequent rise in demand for U.S. exports. A terrible trifecta. The alcohol relaxed me, and the hours until I could return to work in the morning—when I would again be around people, with a purpose, liberated from my own thoughts—seemed endurable.
As I refilled my glass with ice, the doorbell rang. I thought it might be my brother, Sid, stopping by to borrow money or set me up with another of his girlfriend’s friends (as payback or pay forward), but it was Conrad’s student from the night before. She wore tight brown slacks and a short white blouse with stressed buttons, and her shiny straight black hair brushed the top of her shoulders and cut across her forehead with Cleopatra precision. Her name was Teresa, and she had come to apologize for keeping me awake during her lesson. She knew what I’d suffered because a neighbor of hers who built birdhouses was always hammering something at odd hours. She shouldn’t have agreed to a lesson so late at night.
“It’s not your fault for agreeing,” I said. “It’s Conrad’s for suggesting.”
She tugged on the bottom of her blouse, bringing her nipples into bas relief, and wedged a thumb into her front pants pocket. “Thanks for understanding.”
“Sure.”
“I was afraid I’d have to beg.”
“No.”
“Can I use your bathroom?”
“Right now?”
“I just drank a big bottle of water.”
Although I usually welcomed the chance to let beautiful young women into my apartment—despite its rarely, actually never, happening—I hesitated. She was lying. I couldn’t say how or why I knew this, only that it was so. Heat gathered around my neck and crept slowly up my face like an allergic reaction.
“I’m in the middle of making dinner,” I said, not widening the door.
“I’ll be half a minute.”
“My toilet isn’t completely reliable.”
“Please.” She smiled and revealed two rows of evenly set, glistening white teeth, evidence of great luck or money or discipline as a child. The radio was an indistinct babble in the background. Maybe, I thought, I was being irrational and drunk, and there was nothing suspicious about this woman or her request. She bit her lower lip and I stepped aside to make way for her.
Back in the kitchen I found milky water bubbling from the rice pot into a moat around the burner’s flame. This was typical of how ineptly I cooked, because of which I had recently contracted with the woman who cleaned my apartment every other week to make and deliver frozen batches of food—enchiladas, chicken mole, lasagnas—on her workdays. The last of her latest delivery was gone, though, and I didn’t remember when she was scheduled to return.
A minute later Teresa stood framed in the kitchen’s entrance, wiping wet hands on her hips, imprinting black finger marks on her slacks like daguerreotype shadows. “I hate leaving someplace and then realizing I should have used the bathroom. My family never went on vacations, so as a kid I wasn’t trained to always go before getting in the car. A lot of what we do instinctively comes from our nine-year-old self.”
Again I felt a slurred apprehension and concentrated on cleaning the stovetop. The water had evaporated to leave a layer of dried white froth like old sea foam cobwebbed on the beach. From the beginning there had been so much longing that I could hardly bear it. “You remembered to use my bathroom.”
“That’s because of the water. It’s like an alarm clock for me. Did you know that on nights before they were going to wage battle, Native American warriors drank gallons of water so they’d wake up early and get the jump on their enemies?”
I grunted no and pulled from the oven the corned beef, a loaf of grayish meat with a scrim of yellow fat around its sides, as the radio announced that an Amazon-born virus with a thirty-six-hour incubation period had killed twelve people in the last week. Epidemiologists expected it to travel far and wide over the coming months. I flipped on the stove fan and trimmed off the fat and sipped at my whiskey while Teresa picked up a piece of junk mail lying on the counter.
Burning my thumb on the oven pan, I turned to her and shouted, “What are you doing?”
“Nothing.”
“That’s my mail.”
“It’s just a PASE brochure.”
“Please leave it alone.”
“Are you a Paser?”
“That’s—Why are you still here?”
“I want to help you clean up.” She indicated the dishes in the sink, torn seasoning packets by the cutting board, blackened hand towels, and a grease-spattered calendar tacked above a sink full of brackish water.
“Why would you do that?”
“To make up for last night. Because I’m nice.”
“I don’t think so.”
She let go of the brochure and lost her veneer of friendliness and the pain in my thumb seemed unimportant. Conrad, when talking on the phone to his first-ever student, would not have vetted her closely, and in the final analysis nobody could safely say what another person wasn’t capable of. She stepped forward and I braced myself, my right hand a foot from the knife block, ready for what might follow, be it loud or quiet, and the moment was starting to feel very drawn out when she leaned in and kissed me. A button of her blouse came undone at the sternum, pressed against my chest.
“There’s no need to be hostile,” she said, pulling back as a thread of saliva bridged our lips, her green eyes as limpid as a secluded pool. She held the intimacy for twenty seconds and I grew painfully erect. “That’s why I came over, so we could be friends.”
“I don’t understand,” I said, wiping my mouth.
“Yes, you do.”
“Women don’t just walk into strangers’ apartments and kiss them.”
“How do you know?”
“Everyone knows.”
“Maybe everyone’s not as smart as they think they are.” She turned around. “At this rate, you have a minute to stop me from reaching the front door.”
She
