Andrea Barrett - The Middle Kingdom

I stood outside. ‘Really,’ I said. ‘I’ll come back.’ The scene reminded me all too much of how I’d left Randy — dramatically, publicly, all the neighbors watching. I didn’t want to get caught in this.

‘Please,’ he said. ‘Come in. It’s so strange, you’d think she’d toss my things — she could have just packed up her own. Why do you think she did that?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said.

‘So come in,’ he repeated. ‘Look at the room. She won’t act so crazy if there’s someone else around.’

I stepped inside the fence. The flagstone path was cool, shaded by a pair of tupelos. The front door was old and made of oak; it was also locked. Walter stood with his hand on the brass knob, turning it again and again. ‘Really,’ he muttered. ‘Really.’ He turned to look at me. ‘Come around to the garage,’ he said. ‘I’m sure the kitchen door’s open.’

Eileen had either forgotten the kitchen door or had failed to reach it yet. I heard her upstairs, slamming doors and drawers.

‘We usually rent the extra room to a student,’ Walter said, as he led me through the kitchen and the living room. The walls were tan, the upholstery beige, the curtains cream; suburban good taste overlaid with filth, which somehow, even then, I suspected had come from Eileen. I couldn’t believe Walter was showing me this.

‘I am a student,’ I said, trying to fix on what was important. ‘Or I will be this fall. I did my first two years a while ago and now I’m going back.’

‘Oh?’ Walter said. He stood at the foot of the stairs, perhaps afraid to go up. On each step was a pile of magazines: first Scientific American , then Science , then Nature , then more I couldn’t see. And yet he struck me as a man who, in better times, would have filed them in matching binders.

‘That’s right,’ I said, with more firmness than I felt. ‘My student loan came through, and they’re giving me credit for all the courses I completed. All I have to do is find a summer job and some part-time work for the fall. And a cheap place to live.’

‘You don’t have a job?’ he said.

‘Not yet.’

He picked at the chipped stair railing and listened to the noises above us: crash, bang, rustle. He shook his head. ‘That woman,’ he said. ‘Can you cook?’

‘Of course,’ I said, caught by surprise. ‘I was married for almost three years.’

‘Do you like being outside?’

I didn’t know what he was getting at. ‘How do you mean?’ I asked.

‘Out side ,’ he said impatiently. ‘Plants, animals, rivers, fish — you know. The woods. Camping. Have you ever slept outside?’

‘Once or twice,’ I told him, stretching the truth.

‘Maybe we can work something out,’ he said. And with that he turned and started up the stairs, leaving me to follow. The master bedroom was at the top of the stairs, with Eileen inside, wild-eyed and furious and muttering to herself. She wasn’t crazy — I knew how crazy looked — but she was pissed. Her drawers were open and her closets were empty, stripped of the things she’d thrown from the window. Eileen was pacing back and forth and trying at the same time to fix her hair and do her face. She had a tube of lipstick in one hand and a hairbrush in the other. I was standing in the hall behind Walter, and so she didn’t see me at first.

‘… and I mean it this time,’ she was saying, either to Walter or to herself. ‘This is it, this isn’t like the other times, I’m not coming back this time. I’m going to Boston. I have a lawyer. I have a life. I’m not putting up with this shit anymore and there’s nothing you can do …’

She broke off and looked over Walter’s shoulder and then pointed her lipstick accusingly at me. ‘Who are you ?’ she asked.

I wanted to see how Walter would manage this. Quietly, he said, ‘She’s a student at the university. She’s come to look at the room.’

Eileen pushed him aside to get a better look at me. ‘ Your student?’ she asked, eyeing me up and down. I let my stomach out and dropped my chin so that a fold of flesh appeared below my jaw, knowing I wasn’t a threat to any decent-looking woman. Eileen’s face relaxed.

‘No,’ Walter answered. ‘She’s just an undergraduate. She’s majoring in — what did you say you were taking?’

‘Early childhood education,’ I said vaguely. ‘Or maybe art education, or maybe art … that’s what I used to do. Art. I thought maybe I’d try teaching art to kids …’

I was nervous, I was rambling. Walter cut me off. ‘Whatever,’ he said firmly, and then he turned to Eileen. ‘You’re really leaving?’ he said. ‘Again?’

‘For good,’ she said, pacing the room as she drew on a pair of angry red lips. ‘Absolutely permanently for good.’

‘Fine,’ Walter said, with the first trace of anger I’d seen him show. ‘Fuck yourself. Go. You’re crazy if you think you can jerk me around like this again — I’ve had it.’

‘I’ve had it,’ Eileen said, mimicking Walter’s tight, trembling voice.

Walter clamped his teeth together and turned and headed down the hall without another word. I stared at his back — was that it? Surely he meant to do something else. Randy — even Randy — had painted my breasts green, and although that hadn’t been an attempt to keep me at least it had been a response. Eileen looked up and caught me watching Walter. Her hair was cut in a shag and she was dressed like a student, but I saw in her face that she wasn’t so young. Thirty, thirty-five — she had a fan of fine wrinkles around her eyes and her neck was gaunt. She picked up a purple satin pillow and clutched it to her chest. ‘Trot after Walter, fat girl,’ she said, waving me away.

I blushed and did as she said. Walter stood at the end of the hall, waiting patiently at a door set perpendicular to the others. When I reached him, he opened it.

‘The room’s above the garage,’ he explained. ‘So it’s a little cool in the winter, but I’ll give you a space heater and an electric blanket. The other students have liked it fine.’

I shuffled past him and looked in. My room — a narrow bed covered with a rose-print quilt, a desk, a chair, a reading lamp, a closet, and a small counter with a hot-plate and a sink. Cream-colored walls that sloped toward the roof and a worn hooked rug worked in faded pinks and greens. My room.

‘There’s a bathroom next door,’ Walter said. ‘We don’t use it. The hot plate is only for boiling water, but you may use the kitchen downstairs, within certain guidelines. We — I — travel a lot, and you’d be expected to look after the house when I’m away. That’s why we rent this.’

I was faint with hope, giddy with desire. I wanted this room more than I’d wanted anything in years.

Walter ticked off the rules on his fingers. ‘No loud music,’ he said. ‘No male visitors. No visitors at all when I’m away. No smoking. No drugs.’

‘No problem,’ I said. ‘All I want is a quiet place to work and sleep.’ I took a breath and asked the big question. ‘How much?’

‘Depends,’ he said.

‘On what?’

He looked down the hall. Eileen had finished stomping around and was headed for the stairs, her purse and her purple silk pillow under her arm. ‘She’s leaving,’ I pointed out, thinking, Go. Go after her. Do something.

‘I know,’ he said. He crossed his arms over his stomach, holding his elbows in his hands, and when I looked at him quizzically he shook his head. ‘What am I supposed to do?’ he said. ‘She’s crazy. She hates men. This is the fourth time she’s taken off, and I hope to hell she stays away this time. You can’t imagine what it’s been like, living with a loony-tune who blames you for every goddamn thing in her life. That women’s group of hers, they’ve got her so twisted around she thinks I’m the anti-Christ.’