Robert Wilson: The Affinities

I caught a last glimpse of Amanda Mehta as she left the house. Dismayingly, she was on the arm of someone I hadn’t been introduced to. A big guy— huge , actually—with a shaved head and black Maori-style tattoos all over his face.

“Is that her boyfriend?” I asked Lisa Wei, who had come to stand beside me, looking at the end of the evening like a slightly tattered apple doll.

“That’s Trevor Holst. Amanda’s roommate.”

Lisa registered my questioning look but wouldn’t say more. Amanda waved to the room as the door was closing—at everyone, but I chose to take it personally.

“I should have thanked her,” I said.

“Thank her next time.”

“And, I mean, you, too. And Loretta. And Walter. For, well, everything .”

“You’d do the same in our place,” Lisa said calmly. “And sooner or later, you will.”

The first big storm of the winter announced itself on a Friday in December. For two days a low-pressure cell rotated over the city like a millstone, grinding clouds into snow. All weekend, those of us who lived in the house and a handful of our tranchemates took turns excavating the driveway. Lisa and Loretta could have afforded a removal service, but we wouldn’t let them pay for labor any able-bodied Tau could perform. By Monday morning the streets were mostly passable and I was able to get to work; at the end of the day I made my way home under streetlights that bled a muddy orange glow, the color of pill bottles and chronic depression.

But I wasn’t depressed, just tired. Tired enough to slow down for the familiar quarter-mile walk from the subway; tired enough to be, as Amanda liked to say, in the moment, thinking about nothing in particular and paying casual attention to the street, the sidewalk, the few flakes of snow silting from a cloud-locked sky. I cataloged the cars parked by curbside, some still cloaked in the white burqas of the weekend blizzard. Which is how I happened to notice a Toyota Venza idling in the curb zone not far from the house. The skin of snow adhering to it suggested it had been in place for at least an hour. Much of its glass was opaque with condensation, but the moisture had been swiped from the side windows and windshield. Which meant I could see the shape of the car’s sole occupant: a man in a navy-blue parka who quickly turned away when he saw me looking.

There was nothing very unusual about this, but the long shadows of the streetlights gave it a film-noir ambience, a hint of mystery, enough so that I mentioned it to Lisa when I came into the house and found her in the kitchen fixing a paella de marisco so fragrant I wished I had something better in store for my own dinner than ramen and bagged salad. “There’s enough for three,” she said, tranche telepathy operating at optimum sensitivity, but I shook my head and asked whether she knew anybody who drove a green Venza.

She put her spoon on the counter and gave me her full attention. “Why do you ask?”

Which caused my own tranche telepathy to emit a cautionary buzz. “Because it’s outside idling, and the guy at the wheel looks,” I tried to make this light-hearted, “furtive.”

“Oh. I see.” Lisa exchanged a look with Loretta, who had come in from the next room with her finger marking her place in a hardcover novel.

“What? Is it somebody you know?”

“Adam, did you happen to notice the license number?”

“No—why would I notice the license number?”

Like two gray-feathered birds of distinct species cohabiting a single telephone wire, Lisa and Loretta frowned in concert. Lisa, ordinarily the voluble one, seemed reluctant to speak. Loretta, who seldom opened her mouth unless a word seemed urgent, said, “I’ll call Trevor. Should we tell Mouse?”

“Maybe not,” Lisa said. “I mean, until we’re sure …”

“Sure of what?” I asked. “What’s this all about? What did I miss?”

“I’ll let Trevor explain,” said Lisa.

I had learned some basic truths about what it meant to be a Tau in the three and a half months since I moved into the tranche house. One of those truths was Taus don’t gossip .

Much. We were human beings; we talked about each other. But given how much time we spent together, I had heard very little malicious talk—and none that was really malicious. Our boundaries were pretty carefully respected, in other words, which was why I didn’t know a whole lot about Mouse, the woman who lived in the basement.

Lisa and Loretta currently had three tenants including me, all Taus. One was a middle-aged used-bookstore owner with an income so sporadic that the money he saved by boarding here made the difference, some months, between eating and going hungry. I liked him, but we weren’t especially close. The third tenant was Mouse. She was maybe thirty years old, and Mouse was a name she had given herself; I knew her by no other.

But she wasn’t “mousy” in the ordinary sense of the word. She said she had taken the name because she was shy and liked enclosed spaces. (She had chosen her basement room over a more comfortable third-floor bedroom.) She was so obviously working her way through some deeply personal crisis that I had been careful not to ask about it. I had seen her in close conversation with Loretta several times, but they generally clammed up when I passed by. Which was fine: it was really none of my business.

Nor was this. While Lisa got on the phone to Trevor Holst, I set about fixing myself dinner. Lisa and Loretta were generous with living space but they weren’t running a boarding house, and apart from a few planned communal meals it was pot luck and fend for yourself. Although I was allotted a few square inches of the big kitchen refrigerator, I was saving money for a bar fridge of my own. More space for palak paneer and freezer bags of homemade chili. All I heard of Lisa’s conversation was the worried tone of her voice.

She handed me the phone as I forked the last noodle into my mouth. “Talk to Trevor,” she instructed me.

Back at the end of August, when I saw Trevor leaving the tranche party with Amanda, I had guessed they were lovers. (And I had felt a pang of jealousy so unjustifiable that I was instantly ashamed of it.)

But I was wrong about their relationship. In my first month in the tranche I learned that (a) Amanda was as interested in me as I was in her, and (b) Trevor wasn’t just her roommate, he was her gay roommate. Trev himself had detected my surge of jealousy and thought it was wonderfully funny, and I eventually managed to see the humor in it too.

Which wasn’t too difficult, because I liked Trev. I liked everybody in the tranche, of course, but I felt a more immediate connection to some, and Trev was in that category. Not that we were much alike. He worked by day as a freelance physical trainer and on weekends as a bouncer at a Queen Street dance club, and his facial tattoos, which he called kirituhi , reflected his Maori ancestry on his mother’s side. In fact he was so many things I was not that our friendship felt almost supernatural, as if each of us had befriended a creature from Narnia or Middle Earth. All we really had in common, beyond our Tauness, was our love for Amanda Mehta.

So I took the phone. “What’s up? Something about Mouse?”

“Yeah,” he said. “And we might need your help. Are you okay with that?”

“Sure, yeah.” Of course I was. He didn’t really have to ask, and I didn’t really have to answer.

“So take your phone up to the second-story bedroom facing the street.”

Lisa and Loretta’s bedroom. “Why?”

“It’s kind of urgent, so just do it and I’ll explain as we go.”