The humming in her ears went on.
5
He took a cab from the station to his apartment in Chickasaw Gardens. The cabbie and he traded remarks about the surprisingly cool, dry air for mid-September in Memphis, and it felt refreshing to be talking about something other than the attacks and the coming war in Afghanistan. Except that he knew the cabbie was carefully avoiding all of it, and so the overall feeling was of complicity in a kind of ruse. At his apartment, he dropped off his bags, then called the hotel in Jamaica. “You choose,” she had said about a place for them to live, and he heard the note of apathy in her voice, wondering at it, almost as though he were admiring a quality of hers. He thought of her there, alone, marooned, and felt all the more powerfully the will to protect her. Finally he got in his car and drove straight to Iris’s house. She opened the door as he came up onto the stoop. “I’m so glad to see you safe,” she said.
He followed her into the kitchen. She moved well with the cane.
“I’ve been sleepless this whole awful time,” she told him. “I close my eyes and dream I’m sleeping and then I wake up.”
“I guess nobody’s sleeping very well.”
“You too?”
“Me too.”
Sun shown through the white-curtained windows of the patio door. She had made coffee, and she poured him a cup without asking if he wanted it, supporting herself with one hand on the countertop. Her knee was in a brace, and he thought it must be difficult to maneuver with it. But it didn’t seem to bother her at all. She came over to sit across from him with her own cup of coffee.
“I know I’ve fallen asleep for little spells, but it sure doesn’t feel like it.”
He looked at her thick fingers with their chewed nails and the slight arthritic curvature of them.
“How did you fall?”
“Which time?”
“The most recent one.” Faulk knew of the original injury.
“I’d thrown my bedspread off in my sleep, and it was bunched on the floor. I caught my foot in it getting up. If it had happened ten years ago and if I wasn’t already hurting from this other one, it wouldn’t even have been noticeable.”
They drank the coffee in silence for a few moments. It struck him that, apart from the fact that in the normal outward way she had been his parishioner, there wasn’t really very much they knew about each other.
“I’ve got several houses to look at,” he said. “I’ve been researching it. But there’s not much I can do really until Natasha gets back.”
“No.”
“You’re sure you don’t need us to stay here. Because we will, you know. I’m perfectly all right with that.”
She smiled. “It’s the word perfectly in that sentence that gives you away.”
“No,” he said, and he repeated it while she laughed quietly. Her laugh was that of a much-younger woman.
“I am perfectly all right with it.”
“I don’t need you to stay here.”
He sipped the coffee. She looked out the window at her small flower-bordered lawn and sighed. “I don’t like the way our girl sounds on the phone.”
“She just wants to be out of there. And home.”
“Something’s different.”
He had felt it, too. But he did not show this to Iris. He desired to reassure her, and he took some of the reassurance for himself as he spoke: “Coming back home will help her get back to herself. Must’ve been awful being that far away and not knowing, not being able to get through.”
“Best medicine,” Iris said. “People you love around you.”
“Everybody safe.”
“Nothing feels that way, though, now, does it?”
“No.”
“I haven’t felt this apprehensive in a long time.”
“It’s all of us.”
When he left Iris’s he drove to Chickasaw Gardens, intending to arrange his move from the apartment. He had taken the apartment less than six months ago, and there was the problem of the lease. Also, his landlord knew about him and had let it be known that he considered him some sort of renegade. The landlord, Mr. Donald Baines, was by his own conception of himself a devout Christian. The lease was for one year.
“One year,” Mr. Baines said. “Not five and a half months.” He was fifty-something, balding, with an outsized, eerily corrugated beer belly. He wore knit shirts that made the heavy, dimpled, drooping shape of the belly all the more noticeable. There were thick pouches under his small eyes, like emblems of his general flabbiness. Everything about him suggested immobility. He did not drink much, he had told Faulk, but he liked food. He was, he said, addicted to food. It didn’t really matter what it was. He had continually to resist the urge to satisfy not his hunger but his taste buds. It was that simple. Many things, to Mr. Baines, were “that simple,” and anything that wasn’t, he let alone. He had a habit of talking about himself in the third person.
“Of course, I’ll be looking for someone to sublet,” Faulk told him. “But we don’t have much time.”
“You can bring your lovely bride to the apartment and live with her there until the lease is up. Then you’d have time to find a nice place for yourselves. Donald Baines isn’t that much of a stickler about the fine points of the lease.”
“Well,” Faulk said. “I’ll work something out.”
“A person has to keep his agreements. But as long as Mr. Baines gets his rent payments — you know.”
“Yes, I do know.”
The apartment was in a box-shaped brick row of them across the street from Donald Baines’s cottage-sized house. Faulk crossed and let himself in. He looked at the rooms — the barren place where he had lived through these months. How Natasha would hate living here. Cracks lined the ceiling, and a sheen had developed in places over the old paint, as if the humidity of the town had begun some process of melting in the walls. He cleaned the floors and the fixtures in the sinks and dusted the surfaces, then packed laundry in a bag and spent time on the telephone, calling in the ad about subletting. The inheritance from his mother paid nine thousand dollars a month. It was enough for them to live on. He could, if he had to, afford two rent payments for a while. Natasha would want to find something to do, to support her painting, until they could have their spring in France. This was a vague fancy at the edge of his consciousness. He was not thinking practically, since there would be a lot of matters to address if indeed they were to decide to live in France for a few months. He put details aside and told himself that things would be all right. And he felt a wave of excitement, thinking of her walking the beach in Jamaica and wanting to come home.
In the morning he tried to call her, but the line was busy. He tried four times and then left a message on the room phone. “I bet you’re on the phone with Iris, or with the airlines. I can’t wait, babe.”
6
She was indeed on the phone with the airlines, getting her flights rescheduled. It took an hour. The woman who helped her was very kind but spoke with a slight indistinguishable accent that made certain words hard to understand. Natasha guessed, using context, but felt the frustration of it. Now, certainly, you had to bring forth all the generosity you could muster. But she couldn’t shake the annoyance. She could hear Constance talking on the phone in her room, the voice strangely antic, as though she were addressing a small child. This was the third day of slow time.
Mrs. Ratzibungen had let everyone stay the extra days without charge, even as she was losing money steadily. People sat in the lobby and watched the news reports of the aftermath and the investigation. Natasha wanted none of it. She took another walk, this time on a path leading toward the mountains, the path rising steadily to a level nearly at the height of the palm trees, where she paused and looked at the country and the shoreline. In her travels in Europe she had never felt the slightest hint of the alienation and isolation that gripped her now. She wanted to be home. She wanted Memphis, the house where she had grown up — though that house was now occupied by others, and she had not been near it in almost ten years. But far more than anything now — oh, more than breathing — she wanted the affair with the photographer never to have been, those nights in Adams Morgan, and the beach, here. She wanted the whole of it obliterated, erased, rubbed out. Gone. The drinking and the unhappiness and the not caring what happened, the throwing away of hours, the sinking, all the weeks of deadening intoxication and self-loathing. These last three days.