Sometimes he thought he was Faulkner.
I had good days and I had bad days. Sometimes my headaches knocked me out for hours. Sometimes they kept me up. I wandered around the apartment, spent hours looking at his shelves and all his collectibles—the first editions and the special bookcase by the stereo that he reserved for the hundreds of opera librettos that, he told me, comprised the most extensive private libretto collection in the Americas. All this pacing ought to have made me stir-crazy, but I still felt under the weather. Boris—to undercut my concern—bought me some fancy iron supplements that came with an eyedropper.
He said, “Take it with orange juice.” Boris was occupied with his new writing project, a novel called The Little Vagrant. It was best for him to assume I was in good health and so that’s how it was. He actually found my pallor appealing.
He told me, “In the old days, women drank arsenic to look like that.” Then he disappeared back into his study. He was there from about eight in the morning until four in the afternoon. I made him sandwiches and brought them in, but he didn’t want to talk. He usually yelled at me, “Leave it. Leave it.” But if I didn’t bring him lunch, he’d ask me if I was trying to starve him. At night, he read.
At the time, I had a weird affection for Boris, for everything about him. Even the way he looked. The hair on his chest and shoulders was soft and gray, like cobwebs. His teeth were yellowed and crossed in the front. When he smiled, his mouth pulled downward, which made him look in pain, bothered by the possibility of happiness. The top of his head was completely bald, but the hair that stretched around it—the foothill vegetation—sprouted wildly. There were shallow, polished lines on his forehead, but his face still looked fresh and pink, like a baby’s. He had soft, pudgy hands with short fingers. He gestured with these hands, stretching them into the space between us with splayed fingers, as if he were presenting me with two starfish. With these hands, he reached out to me. With these hands, he fended me off.
With a fifty-dollar bill in his hand, he was almost handsome.
We were content and amicable, although after the first month I became aware of discord—an abstracted, patient discord—that was hovering around the apartment just as the ghost of Boris’s old pipe-smoking habit lurked in the rugs. To make myself useful, I had started organizing his libretto collection but soon found myself being drawn into their pages. Quick melodrama. Almost instant gratification. Boris was on the cold side, but I didn’t take this personally. Boris was not even warm with himself. Joy was not elusive, it was irrelevant. Boris considered himself an Epicurean, but anything past base sensual stimulation—a good cheese, Callas singing “La Wally”—was beyond his capacity for enjoyment. He did not know how to enjoy himself. He had learned what was enjoyable by studying others and took pride in this, since it was intellectual. One Thursday night he took me to the opera—Madame Butterfly—which was a great three-hour opportunity for him to meditate on the discomfort of his seat. He thought he might have hemorrhoids. While the soprano was still in the “di” of “Un bel di” he turned to me and said, “She’s weak in the high register.”
People peered over their opera glasses at him and he scowled back. He ruffled noisily through his score, although he couldn’t read music.
“Shut up, Boris,” I whispered. I rested my head against the scratchy wool of his jacket and fell asleep. I didn’t know how else to deal with him when he was aggravated. I didn’t want to make a scene. I couldn’t imagine anyone being able to sustain a relationship with Boris, then I realized that I was doing just that and it surprised me.
Boris had been involved with a woman a short time before. Ann. An artist. For fifteen years. I was seven years old when they got together. One afternoon when I’d run out for cigarettes, I returned to find Boris and Ann sitting together at the dining room table. Boris must have been in the middle of explaining our relationship because my entry caused a deep silence. At first I thought she was just a friend. But she was looking at me as a man would look at me. Her eyes kept moving to gauge the length of my legs, or just stopped on my face, even though Boris was speaking. She was looking through a man’s eyes, Boris’s eyes, to see what he saw in me. And I think all she was coming up with was “young-young-young,” with an occasional “thin” thrown in just to make the situation intolerable. I say this because she seemed to wilt in the few minutes we sat there as if having consumed an aging potion that caused her cheeks to sag and her eyes to sink. I saw a Night Stalker rerun like that.
“Is Ann a good friend of yours?” I asked.
“Ann is my oldest friend,” he replied. “You have to make peace with her.”
“Oh. I have to make peace with her. I don’t know if you noticed this, but Ann’s the one who has a problem, not me.”
“I will not involve myself in such pettiness,” he said.
“But you are involved in it Boris. She’s your ex.”
“This jealousy is ugly,” said Boris.
“Jealousy?”
Boris took my chin in his hand and walked me in this manner over to the mirror. “Not becoming,” he said. “It mars your features.”
Sometimes I thought I’d like to mar Boris’s, with an ax.
Ann stopped by about once a week to check up on Boris. One day, a Wednesday, she stopped by and Boris wasn’t there. He had a meeting— lawyers, editors, I don’t know—so I invited her in for coffee.
Ann walked around the living room as if she were a real estate agent. She looked out the window, then at the built-in shelves, as if she’d never been in the apartment before. Ann was attractive in a stocky, Swedish peasant sort of way. She had intelligent gray eyes and thick lips and nostrils. She was dressed in a bolt of earth-toned fabric that was pinned on the shoulder by a large bronze fist. Her hands were stained vibrant primary hues and I remembered how Boris referred to her work as “Ann’s finger painting.”
“Ann,” I said, “how do you like your coffee?”
“Black,” she said. She smiled in a dismissive way. “Katherine, what do you do?”
“Day to day?” I set down Ann’s mug on the table and sat catty corner to her. “I’m organizing Boris’s librettos. There’s a lot to read here. I just read Moby-Dick.”
“I’m glad to hear you’re not illiterate.”
“Well, I have read Moby-Dick.”
Ann smiled coldly. “Not a complete moron.”
“Although very young.”
Ann set down her mug. “I’m making you uncomfortable. And I’m making myself look like a fool.” She stood up. “Thanks for the coffee.”
“Ann,” I looked at her beseechingly, “don’t go. I’d like you to stay and finish your coffee, at least.”
Ann stopped to look at me.
“I mean it. I have no one to talk to except Boris. And you know Boris. I just sit there… and I brewed that pot fresh, just for you.”
Ann was momentarily stunned. “What are you doing here,” she indicated the ceiling, “with Boris?”
I contemplated this. “Boris and I have a symbiotic relationship.”
“You’re using him.”
“He’s using me.”
Ann regarded me thoughtfully. “Couldn’t you find someone more your speed to float you?”
“I suppose I could. I don’t know.” I spun the mug in my hands. “I like Boris.”
“Why?”
“Do you know Boris’s story about the masturbating orangutan?”
“No.”
“Then you wouldn’t understand,” I said. “Why do you come back to Boris?”
“This is it for me, honey,” she said, although neither of us believed it. Ann looked deeply into her coffee as if it held the answers. She was almost pretty like this, quiet, gentle. Her immense gray eyes looked vulpine and northerly, as if I should see snowdrifts reflected in them.