Olga Grushin - Forty Rooms

“So, no blockages, then,” the plumber said, unrolling his tools. “Just the smell.”

“Just the smell,” she confirmed, then continued in a helpful rush, “Something must be wrong with the pipes. I mean, I understand that in my condition all smells seem stronger than they really are, but you can smell it too, can’t you?”

He did not respond, did not glance up at her, did not ask about her due date, or whether she was having a boy or a girl. She had felt a little disappointed when she let him in the door, a flabby, sour-looking man past fifty with the hard bristle of a sandy mustache not quite hiding the downward turn of his mouth, and her initial assessment had proved right. The other plumber from the company, the one she had dealt with on the previous two occasions (there had been a leak in Emma’s bathroom and a dripping faucet in the kitchen), was an amiable, garrulous young fellow who would surely ask her how she was feeling and whether they’d picked a name yet. But this man went about his business in silence, tapping here, peering there, and she knew, just by looking at his stiff back, that he resented her presence in the bathroom and would have much preferred her to leave.

Pulling herself together, she made a new attempt.

“So,” she said brightly, “do you have any children?”

He grunted into his mustache, whether a “Yes” or a “No” she could not discern, and set about rolling his tools back up. (Sean O’Reilly’s only daughter had drowned at the age of eleven. Now she often came to him at night. They walked the deserted streets of his neighborhood side by side, talking about nothing much, the weather, a new hardware shop around the corner, their old cat. Her sneakers squeaked with water, her voice never aged. The following morning his pajamas were often muddy and his heart lagged exhausted in his chest. He suspected that each nocturnal visit was shaving days, if not months, off his life, but he did not mind. Aching with hope, he wondered if she was going to come tonight, then reluctantly turned his attention to the rich lady with the slight foreign accent and needy eyes.)

“Nice faucets you’ve got here,” he said, standing up with an audible creak, brushing off his knees. His tone, once again, carried a brusque undercurrent of hostility.

“I’m sorry?”

“Your faucets. Gold-plated. Very nice.”

“These faucets are gold-plated?” she echoed, incredulous. “I had no idea.”

He gave her a sullen look and walked out of the bathroom.

“But what about the smell?”

“The pipes are fine,” he said. She waddled after him across the bedroom, down the stairs. “You’ve got a dead animal in the wall. I still have to charge you for coming out, though.”

“A dead animal? You mean, like… a mouse?”

He turned to her in the entrance hall. “Judging by the smell, something larger. A rat or a squirrel, I’d guess, maybe a raccoon.”

“A rat? But… what do I do now? Do I call an exterminator?”

“I don’t know what you people do in such cases,” he said with a shrug, and opened the front door without waiting for her help with the lock, “but I’d call one of those animal trappers. No need to exterminate anything, it’s dead already.”

“You people,” she thought, stung—what did he mean by “you people,” I don’t have any “people,” one should never judge by appearance only, my real world is far away from here… Resisting the urge to chase the dour man outside and set him straight, she locked the door behind him and puffed her way back upstairs, stopping at the bathroom threshold, peeking in. When she had first seen the house, the whirlpool bath with its swan-shaped faucets, submerged in the deep basin between the two columns, beneath the two chandeliers, had struck her as the most marvelous of all the marvels here. Now, hidden behind its lustrous gray marble lay the decomposing corpse of some rat crawling with maggots—and so troubling was the image, and so unshakable her sudden sense of the entire house weighing down upon her, demanding to be maintained in a manner she was beginning to suspect beyond her, that she found herself reeling. Crumpling onto the gorgeously veined floor, she pressed her forehead against the cool side of the bathtub and burst into tears; and as she cried, she remembered last night’s dream, heroic and primary-colored, in which she had fought in some medieval battle in a green meadow under blue skies alongside fierce youths with lions’ manes and undying courage; and the memory of the dream made her cry all the harder. But it’s nothing, it’s only hormones, stop it this minute, she thought after a moist, confused moment, all at once angry with herself.

At least she had not been cowed into giving that unpleasant man a tip.

She called Paul, but he was in a meeting.

“Are you feeling all right, Mrs. Caldwell?” his secretary asked, her voice oozing solicitude. “Do you want me to page him?”

“No, no, I’m fine,” she said. “Maybe he could call me back later?”—but just then Emma woke up from her nap and Gene needed a snack, and her free half-hour was over.

The trapper arrived on Wednesday. He was a cheerful black youth dressed in a neatly pressed khaki-colored uniform with his name, some unpronounceable combination of d ’s and b ’s, embroidered over the breast pocket. He took the matter in hand with great efficiency, considered the angle of the roof, even went outside and climbed a ladder to probe around the skylights. “This is where it gets in,” he said, returning to the bathroom, pointing. He spoke confidently, flashing bright teeth in a dark face agleam with sweat, his words like solid blocks of wood, sturdy with some accent she could not place. “I must break the wall to pull it out. I’m sorry I do not fix the wall for you. Your husband, he will fix it, yes? It is easy, just drywall here, then paint over.”

She made a mental note to call a handyman as soon as the trapper was gone.

“You should leave now,” the young man said merrily. “Bad smells for a lady in your state. Boy or girl, you know?”

He looked smiling at her belly, and instantly she felt a rush of gratitude so strong it made her eyes sting a little.

“Actually, it’s two boys,” she said. “Twins. Identical.”

As always, when she said it (and she did not say it often, mainly to workmen who came to the house, and only if they were curious enough), she experienced anew that heady mix of terror, disbelief, pride, and wonder—just as she had felt when the doctor, studying the small black screen on which some white cobwebby lines shifted and curved, had said, “Ah, there it is, a nice, healthy heartbeat,” and frowned slightly, sending her own heart into a frightened lurch, then, an excruciating second or two later, beamed and said, “And here, surprise, surprise, we have another heartbeat,” so that in her first moment of pure incomprehension, she said stupidly, “The baby has two heartbeats?”—and as she was saying it, realized what the doctor had meant. She wept in the taxi on the way home. That evening, when she told Paul, dry-eyed but even more panicked, she wanted him to console her; but he only whooped and grabbed her and lifted her up, as though to whirl her about, then, recalling himself, set her down gently instead as if she were porcelain. “If one of them is a boy,” he had cried, “we should name him Richard. Dad would be thrilled!”

“Twins,” the trapper said, inclining his head in what seemed a small bow. He was no older than twenty-two or twenty-three. “You are blessed, Mrs. Caldwell. Twins are special. Sacred. Poets sing songs about twins. In Africa, I am a twin also. My father was king of my tribe, and my twin brother is king now. One day I will find a poet and tell him my life, and the poet will make me and my father and my brother into songs.”