Andrea Barrett - The Air We Breathe

“Are you all right?” Irene asked gently. The woman raised her head and Irene recognized Miles’s driver. Despite the Wednesday afternoon sessions they’d shared, Irene didn’t feel she knew her well. Naomi sulked, and had a biting tongue; sometimes she drew Eudora away from her work; otherwise Irene couldn’t figure her out. Still, she couldn’t work with Naomi sitting alone in the gloom. Lowering herself into a chair, she asked why Naomi was so upset.

“Because,” Naomi said, flinging her hands dramatically.

She leapt from the couch and began circling the room, touching the walls, trailing her fingers against the edges of the gray paper envelopes holding each patient’s films. We were all there, arranged alphabetically, our folders thicker or thinner depending on when we’d been admitted and what crises we’d had: lungs before, during, after, lungs scarred or healed or dense with fluid and deposits. Naomi circled counterclockwise, her right arm outstretched, fingers clicking over the edges of the folders and making a sound like a stick rubbing down a washboard, which at first Irene could only envy: it had been years since she could imagine doing something so harsh to her own scabby, truncated hands.

“What can I do?” Irene asked. In the kitchen where we listened to this, the radiators popped and hissed and we drew closer together, as if the anxiety Irene had felt, listening to Naomi, had made its way across the months to us.

A cloth bag hung from Naomi’s left shoulder, Irene said. The bag — some of us remembered seeing it — swayed back and forth as she moved. Her head was down, her arm was out, her dress was red and had a crisp white collar. Her fingers clicked against the films as she began to speak. Disjointed phrases, disjointed feelings. Her yearning for Leo and the signs he’d sent her, so surreptitiously, all through the winter and spring. His secret intention to meet her and watch the movies together, and the letter she’d sent him, which he pretended not to have seen. Eudora had tricked her, lied to her…

“Eudora would never do anything to hurt you,” Irene said. “If she deceived you at all, it would only have been to keep you from being hurt.”

“You would take her side,” Naomi said. “You’ve done everything you could to come between us, you took her. You took my friend.”

“That’s not true,” said Irene. Click click click click click, went the nails against the folders.

“Leo loves me,” Naomi said, “the way I love him. I see the way he watches me, I know . I made the mistake of telling Eudora and now she’s trying to take him for herself, just the way you took her. The way you two take everything.”

Irene drew a breath. How terrible, she thought, not to be able to see what was real. Gently — she wondered if she’d ever misread a person so badly — she said, “Leo has been mooning over Eudora for months now. He was watching her, not you. He’s told Eudora how he feels. And I think she’s beginning to have feelings for him as well. I don’t approve, I think she should keep her mind on her work, but—”

Naomi glared at her and then set her bag firmly on the floor. “Why are women like you so stupid?” she said. “You, my mother — both of you too old and dried-up to understand how anyone feels.”

Reaching down, she pulled a handful of papers from her bag and waved them at Irene. Chins, ears, noses, eyes; at first Irene wasn’t sure what she was looking at. Eventually, she made out Leo’s face.

“ This is what’s real,” Naomi said scornfully. “The way I feel about Leo. Not that you’d know what it’s like to look at someone’s mouth and feel it on you, or to know how his hands would touch you…”

For a second, Irene wanted to slap her. Of course she knew: when she and her husband were first married, the sound of his footsteps coming toward her in the dark could make her heart race like a greyhound’s. He used to tease her by holding his right hand over her breast, so close he was nearly touching it, hovering until she lifted her body to meet him. And then years later, after he’d died and she’d moved to Colorado and thought she was past all of that, she’d been startled by the fierce charge that leapt between her and her brother-in-law when they were first experimenting with the Roentgen rays. She’d taken the job Dr. Richards offered as a way of saving her sister; she was here because of just those feelings. How upsetting that, to someone Naomi’s age, she looked as if she’d always been old.

She calmed herself and raised her good hand to Naomi’s shoulder. “I do understand,” she said: sympathetically, she hoped. “I’m fond of Leo myself and I can see why you’d be drawn to him. His intelligence, and his desire to learn; it’s touching. He told me once that in Odessa he earned money for his laboratory fees by cleaning out latrines. You work hard yourself, I know. You must feel like that’s a bond between you.”

Naomi shoved the drawings back into her bag. “When,” she said — her hands were trembling—“when did he live in Odessa?”

“Before he moved here,” Irene said. “After his mother died and he left Grodno.” All those drawings, and yet Naomi seemed to know nothing essential about him; not even, perhaps, that he’d meant to be a chemist. “He told Eudora that during the first winter after he ran away from home, he slept on the floor in someone’s pantry.”

In response, Naomi burst into tears, heaved the bag at Irene, and ran from the room. Papers, and something that looked like part of a garment, fluttered past Irene’s shoulder. She had an instant to be grateful that the bag had missed her; there was something heavy inside, a book perhaps, which made a thudding sound as the bag hit the floor below the shelves.

We think the thudding sound was made by the antique fossil book given by Edward Hazelius as a Christmas present to Miles, which Miles then gave to Naomi and which Naomi must have wanted to give Leo. The stolen shirt lay on top of the book, along with the heap of drawings. Below it, we think, lay the third pencil. In the letters Eudora had started writing once she was over in France and working in the hospital, she’d tried to explain to Irene, and to herself, the evolution of her feelings for Leo. Without understanding the implications, she described the afternoon she’d found Naomi rummaging through Leo’s locker. I was ready to hit her, when I saw her there. I should have known then how I felt about Leo.

I should have known, Irene would tell us later, as we leaned against the kitchen counters and nibbled the sunflower seeds she’d brought. But on that May night all she knew was that Naomi was crying. She followed Naomi into the corridor, leaving the bag where it fell. Behind her, we hypothesize, the pencil crushed between the book and the floor let out a little spurt of exceptionally hot flame.

WE HAVE THE letter from Eudora’s brother; based on that we imagine Naomi’s life in New York. Probably, we think, she is fine. Upset, perhaps; grieving over the loss of Leo — but for all that basically fine. Unaware of what she has done, what she has caused. If she saw a report about the fire in the newspapers, did she figure out her own role? We think not; she paid no attention to anything but her own feelings, and it wouldn’t have occurred to her that her actions might affect other people. We imagine her dressed in a streetcar conductor’s uniform, collecting fares and smiling at passengers as the car traverses a stretch of Brooklyn, perhaps flirting with a young man who looks like Leo. A girl, still; not quite twenty years old. In time someone else will catch her eye. Who knows what will happen then? She doesn’t know that Leo was forced to leave, that Irene will always whisper, or that the clearing has expanded by three stones.