Rebecca Makkai: Music for Wartime

She stood on Vanessa Dillard’s welcome mat and stared through the open door. She saw brown plants on the windowsill, and felt a dull anxiety that there might also be a dead cat somewhere. She didn’t see one, but she saw a blue couch and sunlight and dishes still on the counter. A print of an O’Keeffe painting, the one of white jimsonweed.

Melanie waited for some dramatic feeling to wash over her. But she hadn’t registered much emotion that summer, unless numb was an emotion. Grief would be an embarrassing surrender, considering the new facts. Rage was inappropriate, given Michael’s death. The two reactions had stalemated each other. She was an abandoned chessboard.

She walked in.

Here is all she’d learned in the time since the leak: It was true that Michael and Vanessa were married from 1998 to 2003, as he’d told her. It was true they’d met in college. She produced educational films. She was survived by a mother, a brother, a niece.

Here is what Melanie learned in her ten-minute search of the apartment: Vanessa had no pictures of Michael on display. She had beautiful shoes. She was asthmatic. She read crime novels. Her bra size (one still hung on the shower rod) was 34B. She liked James Taylor and white wine and Japanese art. She chose photos of herself with her head turned, smiling. Her hair was wavy and chestnut and long.

The sheet lay bunched at the foot of the bed, but this might have been the work of the EMTs. Melanie suddenly wanted to sit, and although there couldn’t have been gas still in the apartment — not with people living here again and a new furnace and updated ventilation — she imagined she could smell it, and that she was passing out or maybe dying. She took her key and sat out in the hall, head between her knees.

She clung to a possibility her friends had offered: What if Michael had come over just that once, to tell Vanessa he was getting married? And then when the leak started he felt so tired that he lay on the bed. (In this scenario, her friends helpfully surmised, he still co-owned the place only to take care of her, the woman he’d once loved.) But why, then, had he been there at two a.m. on a weeknight? Why had he told Melanie this woman was dead? Why hadn’t Vanessa changed her will? Michael’s personal effects, handed over at the hospital, weren’t clues: a T-shirt, boxer briefs, running shorts. What he slept in, but also what he exercised in. She’d been given no shoes.

The man she’d seen before — the one with the long hair — came up the stairs, moving like a sleepy and comfortable animal. He started up the second flight, then saw her and turned back. “Do you need help?” he asked. “You want me to go in there for you?” He seemed recently practiced in his grief counseling.

He sat beside her and told her his name was Jed, that he was a grad student at the School of the Art Institute, that his grandparents had left him their apartment. “I threw away their sheets.” As if the fact would make her feel better. Oddly, it did. “I’m using their furniture, but I couldn’t keep those.”

She said, “Could you just stand here? Stand in the doorway and wait for me.”

He did, and Melanie went back to the bedroom and around to the far side of the bed. She knelt on the floor and looked underneath. Michael’s shoes. His khaki pants, belt still in the loops. His blue striped shirt. His bag.

Jed, in the hallway, heard what sounded like a scream held underwater for years that had finally, violently, bubbled to the top.

When Melanie returned two days later, she walked up to the third floor to thank Jed for the Kleenex and to return the umbrella he’d loaned her when she started home in the rain. He invited her in, and she was glad for the delay in getting back down to the empty cardboard box she’d left outside apartment D. Jed was a lovely distraction. At thirty-eight Melanie figured she had a good fifteen years on him, though, and she shook herself of the notion that his grin was a flattering one. He divided a beer between two glasses painted with oranges.

He said, “How goes the aftermath?”

“I like that word.”

Jed gestured around the apartment, by way of a tour. He’d pushed most of his grandparents’ furniture against the north wall to make a studio space by the southern windows. “I don’t mind it,” he said. “It’s a little boring, compared to yours.” She’d told him, between sobs the other day, the basics of the story. “I did find an old bottle of antidepressants. That’s the only surprise up in here.”

They sat on a red velveteen couch with wooden armrests too ornate to rest their glasses on. Jed had gathered his hair with an elastic, a look Melanie hadn’t seen much lately. Her own college boyfriends all had long hair, and maybe this was why she felt so instantly comfortable with Jed. That and the way you could tell just by looking that his blood pressure was low, that he slept well at night.

Melanie said, “You don’t mind living this far from school? From your friends?”

“I’ll be honest with you. There was a, uh, ill-timed tryst , let’s call it, with my roommate’s sister. It was a good time to move.” He laughed and shrugged.

It was momentarily beyond Melanie’s comprehension, how silliness between young single people could necessitate a move across town. Had she once cared about things like that?

He said, “How much hunting are you going to do in there?” He waited, squinting his eyes and widening the hole in the knee of his jeans with one finger. He was pure empathy, and she almost couldn’t stand it. She might cry again, or run out the door.

Instead she said, “The problem is I don’t know what I’m digging for. I mean, I don’t know what physical objects I’ll find, but beyond that — I don’t know if I’ll find peace, or just more disturbance.”

“Like what if they had a kid.”

“They didn’t.”

“Right. Sorry, right.” He looked lost. “Have you tried talking to the Hungarian couple downstairs? The guy doesn’t speak English, but his wife does, and they’ve been in the building forever.”

She said, “The ones they interviewed in the Trib . The ones who didn’t know.”

“László and Zsuzsi. It’s like Zsa Zsa, but different vowels. She was an opera singer. Holocaust survivor, too.”

“Yeah. The article said that, about the Holocaust. Can you imagine? I just — it’s hard to explain, but I think I need to compartmentalize. Whatever was wrong with my fiancé, that was one thing he clearly did very well.”

“Compartmentalize?”

“I’m just here to sort objects.”

“Listen,” he said, “speaking of which. I’ll take anything you don’t want. I’m doing a project.” The grin was back, and he led her past the kitchen to what had once been his grandfather’s study. Jed lifted the flap of a cardboard box and pulled out a handful of LPs, their jackets sun worn and softened. “These are from Brooke, on the ground floor. She lost her aunt. She kept the collectible ones, but this crap”—a mangled Burl Ives—“is more valuable to me.” He showed her a manual Smith Corona, a bag of old shoes, a stack of TV Guides , and a chess set, from the inheritors of apartments C, F, G, and H. “I’m sure your person’s family wants her stuff. But if there’s anything extra, or anything you can’t deal with. I’m crazy about this project.”

She swallowed the urge to point out that Vanessa Dillard was not “her person.” She said, “What will it be?”

“It’ll be… part of my thesis show. Other than that…” He threw up his hands. She realized, when she smiled, how unaccustomed to it her muscles had grown.