“That was a love song to a chef. Before I knew you.”
“It’s good. It’s got existentialism and advice.” His eyes avoided hers.
“You’re pimping me. Is this what you call your ‘talent for life’?” He had once boasted he possessed such a thing.
“It’s a working view.”
“You’d better be careful, Dench. I take your suggestions seriously.”
He paused and looked at her, sternness in one eye and gentleness in the other. “Well, my first piece of advice is don’t take my advice. And there’s more where that came from.”
“There’s a smell in the house. Yeasty and sulfuric. Can you smell it?” She looked at Dench with concern, but he seemed to have none.
“The zeitgeist!”
“Something rotting in the walls.”
“Meat or shoe?”
“Something that died in the winter and now that it’s spring is decaying in the floorboards or some crawl space or one of the walls of this room.”
“Maybe my allergies are acting up. But I think I have smelled it along this side of the house, on warmer days, out there trying to get better cell phone reception. A cabbagey cheese smell: goaty with a kind of ammonia rot.”
She reached for a sip of Dench’s coffee.
“He probably has adult children who will inherit everything.”
“Probably,” said Dench, turning away and then looking back at her to study her face.
“What?” she asked.
“Nothing,” he said.
Dench’s sexiness, his frugal, spirited cooking (though he was no Jim Barber), his brooding gaze, his self-deprecating humor, all had lured her in. But it was like walking into a beautiful house to find the rooms all empty. In those beginning years she often saw him locking eyes with others, as if in some pact. He still had no money. She paid. At times he glanced at her with bewildering scorn. There was, in short, little romantic love. No conversation of tender feelings. Just attachment. Just the power of his voice when it spoke of things that had nothing to do with them, when it churned round and round on its loop about his childhood dogs, misdeeds, and rages at his lot. He was attractive. He was amusing. But he was not emotionally well. Intimacy was not his strong suit. “Clubs and spades,” he joked. “Not diamonds, not hearts. Red cards—I just see red. They throw me out of the game every time.”
“Shut up and drink your beer.”
Where were the drugs?
She could see he felt sometimes that he could prey upon her insecurities and still be taken in and cared for by her. Was not the news always full of one beautiful young movie star after another thrown over for some younger and more beautiful movie star? What hope was there for ordinary women? He required a patroness but had mistakenly auditioned for her. If she possessed fewer psychic wounds than he had hoped for in a woman her age, or at least different ones, he would attempt to create some. But she was less woundable than he might think. She had not had a father who had to see a man about a horse. She in fact had a father who’d been killed by a car named after a horse. Along with her mother. A Mustang! How weird was that? Well, she had been a baby and hadn’t had to deal with it.
Her grandmother had almost never mentioned her mother. Or her father. They had been scurrying across a street to get home, holding hands, which had fatally slowed them down.
Where were the drugs?
Patience was a chemical. Derived from a mineral. Derived from a star. She felt she had a bit of it. But it was not always fruitful, or fruitful with the right fruit. Once she had found a letter in Dench’s coat—it was a draft in his writing with his recognizable cross-outs and it began, It has always been hard for me to say, but your love has meant the world to me. She did not read to the end but stuffed it back inside the coat pocket, not wanting to ruin things for him or the moving surprise of it for herself. She would let him finish his composing and choose the delivery time. But the letter never arrived or showed up for her in any manner whatsoever. She waited for months. When she finally asked about it, in a general way, he looked at her with derision and said, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Inside the old man’s house wide doorways led to shaded rooms, corridors to stairways to more corridors. Whole areas of the house were closed off with ivory quilts hung with clipped rings from fishing spears—to save on heating, she quickly surmised. There were stacks of reading material—a not uncozy clutter of magazines, some opened and abandoned, and piles of books, both new and used. On top of one was a dried-out spider plant that looked—as they used to say with blithe heartlessness of all their dying spider plants—like Bob Marley on chemo. She recognized the panic at even a moment’s boredom that all these piles contained, as well as the unreasonable hopefulness regarding time. In a far room she spied a piano, an old Mason & Hamlin grand, its ebony surface matte with dust, and wondered if it was tuned. Its lid was down and stacks of newspaper sat on top.
“Don’t mind the clutter, just follow me through it—the muffins are in the kitchen,” he said. She followed his swaying gait into the back of the house. Beneath the wisps of white hair his skull was shiny and his scalp had the large brown spots of a giraffe—if only they weren’t signs of looming death they would look appealing and whimsical and young people would probably want them—give me a liver spot!—as tattoos. Smaller versions freckled his hands. “I keep hoping this clutter is charming and not a sign of senility. I find myself not able to tell.”
“It’s like a bookstore or a thrift shop. That kind of clutter is always charming.”
“Really?”
“Perhaps you could go all the way and put little price tags on everything.” A shaming heat flushed her face.
“Ha! Well, that was partly the idea with the book nook out front. That I could put some of this to use. But feel free to add your own. All contributions welcome.” The muffins were store-bought ones he had reheated in a microwave. He had not really made them at all. “I shop sparingly. You never know how long you’ve got. I don’t even buy green bananas. That’s investing with reckless hope in the future.”
“Very funny.”
“Is it?” He was searching her face.
“Well, I mean … yes, it is.”
“Would you like some coffee, or do you want to just stick with your own?” He signaled with his head toward the paper cup she still held, with its white plastic top and its warted brown vest made of recycled paper bags. She looked on the counter and saw that it was instant coffee he meant, a jar of Nescafé near the stove. He turned the burner on, and gas flamed into the blue spikes of a bachelor’s button beneath the kettle.
“Oh, this is fine,” KC said. What did she care if Dench got no coffee today? He would prefer this mission of neighborly friendliness.
She sat down at Milt’s table and he placed the muffin on a plate in front of her. Then he sat down himself. “So tell me about yourself,” he said, then grinned wanly. “What brings you to this neighborhood?”
“Do I stand out that much?”
“I’m afraid you do. And not just because of those tattoos.”
She only had three. She would explain them all to him later, which was what they were for: each was a story. There was “Decatur” along her neck, the vow never to return there. There was also a “Moline” one along her collarbone—a vow never to return there. The “Swanee” along her left biceps was because she liked the chord ascension in that song, a cry of homesickness the band had deconstructed and electrified into a sneer. It was sometimes their encore. When there was one. It was also a vow never to return there. She mostly forgot about all these places until she looked into a mirror after a bath.
“My music career didn’t work out and I’m subletting here. I came back to this town because this is where I used to visit my grandmother in a nursing home when I was young. I liked the lake. And she was in a place that looked out onto it and when I went to see her I would go into a large room with large windows and she would race over in her wheelchair. She was the fastest o
ne there with the chairs.”
He smiled at her. “I know exactly the place you mean. It’s got a hospice wing in it called Memory Station. Though no one in it can recall a thing.”
KC stuffed the muffin in her mouth and flattened its moist crenellated paper into a semicircle.
“What kind of music do you play? Is it loud and angry?” he asked with a grin.
“Sometimes,” she said, chewing. “But sometimes it was gentle and musing.” Past tense. Her band was dead and it hadn’t even taken a plane crash to do it because they hadn’t been able to afford to fly except once. “I’ll come by and play something for you sometime.”
His face brightened. “I’ll get the piano tuned,” he said.
There was that smell again, thawing with the final remnants of winter, in their walls. This was the sort of neighborhood where one would scarcely smell a rancid onion in a trash can. But now this strange meaty rot, with its overtones of Roquefort.
“What do you really think that is?’ ” KC asked Dench through the bathroom door. The change of seasons had brought new viruses and he was waterboarding himself with a neti pot.
“What?”
“The smell,” she said.
“I can’t smell anything right now—my nose is too congested.”
She peeked into the bathroom to see him leaning sideways with the plastic pot, water running down his lips and chin. “Are you disclosing national security secrets?”
“No fucking way!” he exclaimed. “The netis will never learn a thing from me.”
“You can take a book or leave it. There is a simple latch, no lock.” The honey-hued planes of the hutch, angled like a bird feeder, might indeed attract birds if it didn’t soon fill up with books and the clasp was not shut.
“Let’s see what you have in there already.” She moved in close to him. His waxy smell did not bother her.
“Oh, not much really.” An old copy of The Swiss Family Robinson and one of Infinite Jest. “I’m aiming for the kids,” he said. He had put up a sign that said, TAKE IT OR LEAVE IT BOOK-NOOK: HAVE A LOOK. As with a community bicycle, you could take one and never have to bring it back. Dench himself had a community bike from several communities ago. “Now that the bookstore has gone under, and with the hospital so close, I thought people might need something to read.”
In addition to the elegance of the wood, there was something antique and sweet in all this—far be it from her to bring up the topic of electronic downloads.
“Probably there is a German word for the feeling of fondness one gets towards one’s house the more one fixes it up for resale.”
“Hausengeltenschmerz,” said KC.
But he did not laugh. He was thinking. “My wife would have known,” he said.
His wife had been a doctor. He told KC this now as she ate another muffin in his kitchen. It had been a second marriage for his wife and so there was a bit of sunset in it for them both: he had been stuck in his bachelor ways and hadn’t married until he was sixty.
(“Bachelor ways!” Dench would seize on later. “You see what he’s doing?”)
“She was a worldly and brilliant woman, an oncologist devoted to family medicine and public health policy,” said Milt.
There was a long silence as KC watched him reminisce, his face wincing slightly as his mind sifted through the files.
“I never got on with her daughters much. But she herself, well, she was the love of my life, even if she came late to it and left early. She died two years ago. When it came it was a blessing really. I suppose. I suppose that’s what one should say.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Thank you. But she was brilliant company. My brain’s a chunk of mud next to hers.” He stared at KC. “It’s lonely in this neck of the woods.”
She picked off a moist crumb from the front of her jacket. “But you must have friends here?” she said, and then she put the crumb quickly in her mouth.
“Well, by ‘neck of the woods,’ I mean old age.”
“I sort of knew that, I guess,” she said. “Do you have friends your age?”
“There are no humans alive my age!” He grinned his sepia teeth at her.
“Come on.” Her muffin was gone and she was eyeing the others.
“I may be older than I seem. I don’t know what I seem.”
She would fall for the bait. “Thirty-five,” she said, smiling only a little.
“Ha! Well, that’s the sad thing about growing too old: there’s no one at your funeral.”
She always said thirty-five, even to children. No one minded being thirty-five, especially kindergartners and the elderly. No one at all. She herself would give a toe or two to be thirty-five again. She would give three toes.
He looked at her warmly. “I once studied acting and I’ve kept my voice from getting that quavery thing of old people.”
“You’ll have to teach me.”
“You have a lovely voice. I take note of voices. Despite my deafness and my tinnitus. Which is a nice substitute for crickets, by the way, if you miss them in the winter. Sometimes I’ve got so much whistling going on in my ears I could probably fly around the room if it weren’t for these heavy orthopedic shoes. Were you the singer in your band?”
“How did you know?” She slapped her hand down on the table as if this were a miracle.
“There’s a way you have of wafting in and hitting the sounds of the words rather than the words themselves. I mean to clean off this piano and get you to sing.”
“Oh, I don’t think so. I’m very much out of tune. Probably more than the piano. As I said, my career’s a little stalled right now: we need some luck, you know? Without luck the whole thing’s just a thought experiment!”
“We?”
“My musical partner.” She swallowed and chewed though her mouth was empty. He was a partner. He was musical. What was wrong with her? Would she keep Dench a secret from Milt?
Dench would want it. “What can I get for you?” she had asked Dench this morning, and he had stared at her balefully from the bed.
“You have a lot of different nightgowns,” Dench had replied.
“They’re all the dresses I once wore onstage.” And as she had gotten dressed for her walk, he’d said, “Don’t forget the coffee this time. Last time you forgot the coffee.”
“It’s good to have a business partner,” Milt said now. “But it isn’t everything.”
“He’s sort of a genius,” she lied. Did she feel the need to put Dench in competition with Milt’s dead wife?
“So you’ve met some geniuses.” He smiled. “You’re having fun then. A life with geniuses in it: very good.”
She lived with so much mockery this did not bother her at all. She looked deeply into his eyes and found the muck-speckled blue there, the lenses cut out from cataracts. She would see the cut edges in the light.
“Do you think our landlord, Ian, would miss a few of his books?”
“No one misses a few of their books. It’s just the naked truth. Look at the sign down the road,” Dench said.
The out-of-business Borders with its missing d: perhaps Dench had stolen it for himself, stashing it under the bed; she didn’t dare look.
“Old Milt has a little book nook—I thought I’d contribute.”
“I see.”
“I’d only take a few. I can’t donate my own since they all have the most embarrassing underlinings. In ink.” Plus exclamation points that ran down the page like a fence by Christo. Perhaps it was genetic. She had once found in her grandmother’s shelves her mother’s own frighteningly marked-up copy of The House of Mirth. The word whoa appeared on every other page.
“Come here. Lie on top of me.” Dench’s face was a cross between longing and ordering lunch.
“I’ll squash you. I’ve gained five pounds eating muffins with Milt.” He grabbed her hand, but she gently pulled it away. “Give me some time. I’m going to cut out the sweets and have a few toes removed.”
She had pu
t on a necklace, of freshwater pearls so small they were like grains of arborio rice decorating the letters of Decatur. She combed a little rat’s nest into the crown of her hair to perk it up. She dabbed on some scent: fig was the new vanilla! As she went out the door, Dench said, “Win them with your beauty, but catch them off guard with your soul.” Then there was the pregnant pause, the instruments all cutting out at once—until he added, in a chilly tone, “Don’t even bother with my coffee. I mean really: don’t bother.” After that she heard only her own footsteps.
“I brought you a couple books,” she said to Milton. “For your nook.”
“Well, thank you. Haven’t had any takers yet but there’s still room.” He looked at the titles she had brought: Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed and Lady Macbeth in the Gilded Age. “Excellent.”
They once again went inside and ate muffins. Forget coffee: this time she had not even brought the dog.
She began to do this regularly, supplying Milt with more of her landlord’s books. He had taken to looking so happy to see her, his eyes brightening (blue, she had read once, was the true color of the sun) so much she could see what he must have looked like when he was young. He was probably the bachelor that all the old ladies were after. And when he had married there were probably some broken hearts. He had the look of a gentleman, but one who was used to the attention of women, even as the uriny smell of an old man had crept over him. “Here we are: two lonely fools,” he said to KC once. It had the sound of a line he’d said before. Nonetheless, she found herself opening up to him, telling him of her life, and he was sympathetic, nodding, his peeled-back eyes taking on a special shine, and only once or twice did he have to lean forward disconcertingly to murmur, “Say that again?” She didn’t mention Dench anymore. And the part of her that might consider this and know why was overshadowed by the unknowing part, which she knew in advance was the only source of any self-forgiveness. Ignorance ironically arranged for future self-knowledge. Life was never perfect.
When she twice stayed into the afternoon to fix Milt something to eat and once stopped by later to cook a simple dinner, Dench confronted her. “Once more I must ask: What are you doing?”