А Финн - The Woman in the Window

“They’re uppers,” I say, uncorking a second bottle. Merlot this time.

“Now it’s a party.”

As we drink, as we play, we chat. We’re both mothers of only children, as I knew; we’re both sailors, as I hadn’t known. Jane prefers solo craft, I’m more into two-handers—or I was, anyway.

I tell her about my honeymoon with Ed: how we’d chartered an Alerion, a thirty-three-footer, and cruised the Greek Isles, pinballing between Santorini and Delos, Naxos and Mykonos. “Just the two of us,” I remember, “scudding around the Aegean.”

“That’s just like Dead Calm, ” Jane says.

I swallow some wine. “I think in Dead Calm they were in the Pacific.”

“Well, except for that, it’s just like Dead Calm .”

“Also, they went sailing to recover from an accident.”

“Okay, right.”

“And then they rescued a psychopath who tried to kill them.”

“Are you going to let me make my point or not?”

While she frowns at the chessboard, I rummage through the fridge for a stick of Toblerone, chop it roughly with a kitchen knife. We sit at the table, chewing. Candy for dinner. Just like Olivia.

Later:

“Do you get a lot of visitors?” She strokes her bishop, slides him across the board.

I shake my head, shake the wine down my throat. “None. You and your son.”

“Why? Or why not?”

“I don’t know. My parents are gone, and I worked too much to have many friends.”

“No one from work?”

I think of Wesley. “It was a two-person practice,” I say. “So now he has a double load to keep him busy.”

She looks at me. “That’s sad.”

“You’re telling me.”

“Do you even have a phone ?”

I point to the landline, lurking in a corner on the kitchen counter, and pat my pocket. “Ancient, ancient iPhone, but it works. In case my psychiatrist calls. Or anyone else. My tenant.”

“Your handsome tenant.”

“My handsome tenant, yes.” I take a sip, take her queen.

“That was cold.” She flicks a speck of ash from the table and roars with laughter.

After the second game, she requests a tour of the house. I hesitate, just for a moment; the last person to examine the place top to bottom was David, and before that . . . I truly can’t recall. Bina’s never been beyond the first story; Dr. Fielding is confined to the library. The very idea feels intimate, as though I’m about to lead a new lover by the hand.

But I agree, and escort her room by room, floor by floor. The red room: “I feel like I’m trapped in an artery.” The library: “So many books! Have you read all of them?” I shake my head. “Have you read any of them?” I giggle.

Olivia’s bedroom: “Maybe a little small? Too small. She needs a room she can grow into, like Ethan’s.” My study, on the other hand: “Ooh and aah,” says Jane. “A girl could get stuff done in a place like this.”

“Well, I mostly play chess and talk to shut-ins. If you call that getting stuff done.”

“Look.” She sets her glass on the windowsill, slides her hands into her back pockets. Leans into the window. “There’s the house,” she says, gazing at her home, her voice slung low, almost husky.

She’s been so playful, so jolly, that to see her looking serious produces a kind of jolt, a needle skidding off the vinyl. “There’s the house,” I agree.

“Nice, isn’t it? Quite a place.”

“It is.”

She peers outside a minute longer. Then we return to the kitchen.

Later still:

“Get much use out of that?” Jane asks, roaming the living room as I debate my next move. The sun is sinking fast; in her yellow sweater, in the frail light, she looks like a wraith, floating through my house.

She’s pointing to the umbrella, leaning like a drunkard against a far wall.

“More than you’d think,” I reply. I rock back in my chair and describe Dr. Fielding’s backyard therapy, the unsteady march through the door and down the steps, the bubble of nylon shielding me from oblivion; the clarity of outside air, the drift of wind.

“Interesting,” says Jane.

“I believe it’s pronounced ‘ridiculous.’”

“But does it work?” she asks.

I shrug. “Sort of.”

“Well,” she says, patting the umbrella handle as you would a dog’s head, “there you go.”

“Hey, when’s your birthday?”

“You going to buy me something?”

“Easy there.”

“Coming up, actually,” I say.

“So’s mine.”

“November eleventh.”

She gawks. “That’s my birthday, too.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I am not. Eleven eleven.”

I lift my glass. “To eleven eleven.”

We toast.

“Got a pen and paper?”

I fetch both from a drawer, lay them before her. “Just sit there,” Jane tells me. “Look pretty.” I bat my lashes.

She whips the pen across the sheet, short, sharp strokes. I watch my face take form: the deep eyes, the soft cheekbones, the long jaw. “Make sure you get my underbite,” I urge her, but she shushes me.

For three minutes she sketches, twice lifting her glass to her lips. “Voilà,” she says, presenting the paper to me.

I study it. The likeness is astonishing. “Now that is a nifty trick.”

“Isn’t it?”

“Can you do others?”

“You mean, portraits besides yours? Believe it or not, I can.”

“No, I mean—animals, you know, or still lifes. Lives.”

“I don’t know. I’m mostly interested in people. Same as you.” With a flourish, she scribbles her signature in one corner. “ Ta-da. A Jane Russell original.”

I slip the sketch into a kitchen drawer, the one where I keep the good table linens. Otherwise it’d probably get stained.

“Look at all those.” They’re scattered like gems across the table. “What’s that one do?”

“Which one?”

“The pink one. Octagon. No, six-agon.”

“Hexagon.”

“Fine.”

“That’s Inderal. Beta-blocker.”

She squints at it. “That’s for heart attacks.”

“Also for panic attacks. It slows your heart rate.”

“And what’s that one? The little white oval?”

“Aripiprazole. Atypical antipsychotic.”

“That sounds serious.”

“Sounds and is, in some cases. For me it’s just an add-on. Keeps me sane. Makes me fat.”

She nods. “And what’s that one?”

“Imipramine. Tofranil. For depression. Also bed-wetting.”

“You’re a bed wetter?”

“Tonight I might be.” I sip my wine.

“And that one?”

“Temazepam. Sleeping pill. That’s for later.”

She nods. “Are you supposed to be taking any of these with alcohol?”

I swallow. “Nope.”

It’s only as the pills squeeze down my throat that I remember I already took them this morning.

Jane casts her head back, her mouth a fountain of smoke. “ Please don’t say checkmate.” She giggles. “My ego can’t take three in a row. Remember that I haven’t played in years .”

“It shows,” I tell her. She snorts, laughs, exposing a trove of silver fillings.

I inspect my prisoners: both rooks, both bishops, a chain gang of pawns. Jane has captured a single pawn and a lonely knight. She sees me looking, swats the knight onto its side. “Horse down,” she says. “Summon the vet.”

“I love horses,” I tell her.

“Look at that. Miracle recovery.” She rights the knight, strokes its marble mane.

I smile, drain the last of my red. She eases more into my glass. I watch her. “I love your earrings, too.”

She fingers one of them, then the other—a little choir of pearls in each ear. “Gift from an old boyfriend,” she says.