The Old Apartment by Maile Chapman / Fiction / Untitled Books

"I’m sorry for not coming to bed until you were already asleep. For closing the door when I worked in the other room."

The Old Apartment by Maile Chapman

The gate was open when we got there. Someone had plowed the driveway recently, and the front steps had clearly been shoveled, but more snow had fallen and every surface appeared unbroken in the moonlight. The lace curtains were hospitable at the front but we went around to the back of the building, leaving precise footprints that would later turn to ice. Everything was quiet, and the snow here too was undisturbed. Years earlier we had planted a rose bush near the back door, and it was still there, though understandably not in bloom; those deep coral roses had always been gone by autumn. Someone else had more recently planted another rose cutting, oddly tiny and close to our bush, and its miniature leaves were visible through a large pickle-jar half-buried in snow, placed like a small greenhouse for protection from the cold.

The back stair was unlocked, and littered with dead leaves and grass clippings blown in from some previous lazy summer. There was a pile of tools that we stopped to step over. He touched my arm; we looked behind us. Someone--the landlord? a current tenant?--was lying face down in a snowdrift beside the garage. Only the legs from the thigh downwards were visible. "Is that person drunk?" I said. No, he said. Dead. A long time ago.

At the juncture of the landing we stopped and stood. Our breath condensed in the darkness. I didn't want to keep going, but neither did I want to turn and leave, passing the body in the snow; I was at risk of grieving for that dead man, whoever he had been; loss would open me to the impending truth of other loss.

When we reached our old back door I looked at him, and this time he looked back at me and I could see that he was deeply embarrassed, and I moved my hand to see if we should continue, though I ask myself now, was it embarrassment he felt? Or something else that I didn't recognize? The cupboard on the landing was filled with broken terra-cotta pots and empty paint cans. We had kept a spare key there, on the bottom shelf among all that trash. All I wanted now was to get into the apartment and find everything in place as it had been before. Opening the door was difficult; I found that I was supporting him from behind, holding him so that we stood facing it together. It was dark, and I could scarcely see over his shoulder as I reached around to unlock the door that led directly into the kitchen. Still, it did not feel like I was forcing him.

There was that certain smell of gas and cold grease left behind in rental properties, and old linoleum, a smell I did not like, recognizable only when the rooms have been emptied, when the illusion of a home has been broken down. But despite the smell of vacancy I saw that some of what we'd had was still in place; photographs taped to the refrigerator, the maple kitchen table, a small red rug on the floor by the sink. There was a plate of breads and pastries on the table that I myself remembered, vaguely and at great remove, choosing from the glass counter of a cafe and bringing back here for his breakfast. I had arranged them carefully, but I'd left them uncovered, and now they were stale and hard; why had I been so wasteful, then?

I heard him walk away slowly through the front room, across the settling floorboards. The old bay window on that side of the apartment was poorly sealed, always freezing to the fingertips, but the glass had seemed pretty to us, once. The edges were beveled, casting prismatic sparks onto the rough wooden floor.

"It's painted yellow," I said in the bedroom. The walls were always yellow, he said, remember? I didn't think so. We'd had a smaller bed then, and he was sitting on the edge of it now. I sat too, and pulled the comforter up around us. I adjusted the pillows so that he could lean back. He asked me, Could I hear that?

"What?"

The woman downstairs was coughing still. And so she was, though in the interim I had long forgotten that cough.

"This isn't how I remember it," I said. The rooms were colder, smaller, the exposed wood was not as charming, and the dust from the furnace was everywhere. "This was bad," I said. My voice was tight. "This place was a hovel."

Stop saying that, he said. We were happy here. Try to keep that in mind.

The door to the second bedroom, where my desk and books had always waited, was closed, and neither of us acknowledged it. My impulse was to stand, leave him, and go there. But this wasn't the right action and I stayed where I was. The bulbs in the bedside lamps were burned out, but slowly the air, so dim and frigid despite the yellow paint, began to feel a little warmer. I felt sad, aware now that wood-lice were moving in the cold, damp interior of the walls. I said, "I'm sorry for not coming to bed until you were already asleep. For closing the door when I worked in the other room."

He said that in retrospect it did seem strange that we hadn't spent more time together, when we could have, so easily.

"I should have tried to work a little less," I said.

Probably, he said. But you were terrible when you weren't working.

We had hardly reached the middle of the night. A wave of sudden coughing underneath sounded as if four women were dying downstairs. "Did we hear her then? Did we sleep through those sounds?"

Yes, we did. She's dead now, too.

I should have known this. After all, we had heard that neighbor long ago, and she had been ill then, and old already.

I said, "You're right. About the work."

He said it was neither my fault nor his.

We were resting against the pillows. He wanted to get out of the bed. But he wanted to say something first. He said he knew this wasn't easy for me, but why couldn't I imagine, for my own sake, that everything had always been good between us? That whatever happened next was out of our control?

"Why?" I said. "What's happening next?"

He hesitated, and corrected himself, slightly. Whatever happened next would be out of my control. Because this was something he needed to do. He was sorry, but he couldn't explain it any better than this.

"You were never happy here," I said, bitterly. "You never wanted this life."

He looked puzzled. But then he understood that, if left to myself, I would naturally pick apart our former happiness until it no longer existed.

Relax, he said. Concentrate on the good memories. Like the fish, there, on the dresser, swimming around in their bowls. Didn't I remember how much I'd enjoyed the fish? The ritual of changing the water, cleaning the bowls? By the way, I could have them, he said, all of them. He would leave them with me.

"No," I said, refusing. "There were no fish until the new house."

Don't be negative, he said. The bowls are right there. On the pine dresser, the one we stripped and painted together.

I looked but the fishbowls were not there, even though it was the correct dresser, the same one sitting in the house we now owned across town with the bowls in question placed firmly before the mirror, to give the fish the illusion of a larger environment.

See? he said.

"No," I said, "I don't see."

He stared at the fish. Somehow I had forgotten, for a few minutes, what was happening, but with the appearance of the fish it came back to me.

"Don't look at them," I said. I took his hand and tried to squeeze the life back into it. His pulse was slow and loud, his hand unresponsive and heavy. I touched his forehead and then felt that the tips of his ears were cooling.

Still looking at the fishbowls, he said, Mitzie, did I hear Mitzie laughing in the living room? Along with...several other people...

I started to say that this wasn't possible, but it was; his grandmother had still been alive when we lived here. I tried to answer but my throat was caught in a spasm. "Not yet," I said finally. "Please, don't speak of her."

Unexpectedly, he laughed.

I said, "None of this is funny."

He said, Wasn't it ridiculous that now, at such a moment, suddenly the room was full of seamstresses? He raised his voice over the sound of the machines, but I couldn't hear them. He said, We've been walking right over them the whole time--he must have stepped on countless bolts of white fabric, all that silk and netting they were turning over into dresses. He hadn't realized until now what they were making, though really it should have been obvious...

"Don't!" I said. "What do you mean?"

But he'd gone quiet, mindful maybe of the big secrets of a new life, a new world poised to unfold. His head was tilted, listening. Then he looked across the hall in the direction of the second bedroom, with the focus of an adult who has been waiting to acknowledge some small, anticipated sound.

Outside I heard a scraping at the windows. Beyond the curtain I could see shadows, birds waiting at the glass, one or two, then more. He pushed back the covers to stand.

I reached to hold him back. "Don't," I said, again. "Please."

His voice was patient, but devastatingly neutral. Might as well get this part over with, he said. His hands were warm again, and he touched his face as if thinking about getting ready to shave, planning ahead, forgetting I was there. He slipped out of the bedding and left the room without looking back. His steps were heavy, not tentative. He closed the door behind him.

A sudden silence fell, cessation of the coughing, the sewing machines, the birds, all in an instant. And then, sitting upright in the bed, I understood that I was alone.

Outside the air was grey and filled with tiny bits of ice floating down from the roofs in a phantom snowfall. It was early, and all the resident families were still asleep; I had never imagined this street so silent. I pulled the front door shut behind me. For a moment I stood on the thin boards of the porch, my breath steaming. Then, surreptitiously, I turned the knob once, out of regret, but the lock was set against me, the key long gone. I thought he might still be somewhere inside, and there might be something more to say; I did not yet know that he was already living in a different existence, with a second wife, a younger woman I've never seen, in a city where she lived already when they first met, a city free of memories or associations. I came back to our house -- my house -- and I pulled the shades and slept.

I wish I'd taken up the rusted tools and tried to dig out the rosebush, even though the ground was cold and I might have killed it. I have my own yard to fill now, after all, and my own garden. Because I do all the work here. I do the shoveling. I rake the leaves and I cut the lawn. I hide the weeds and clippings under the trees, in a yellow heap of fermenting grass with a hot, dizzying smell, a place where insects rise and wait en masse when I come close. The coral roses are a bright, troubling presence in memory. They were mine. They don't belong there. Leaving them intact is a vestigial regret; it's one of many, and it lingers.

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Maile Chapman's stories have appeared in A Public Space, Literary Review, the Mississippi Review, and Post Road. She earned her MFA from Syracuse University and is currently a Schaeffer Fellow in Fiction at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Her first novel Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto is published by Jonathan Cape.

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Thursday, 5 August, 2010

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Issue 40 / January 2012

"I’m sorry for not coming to bed until you were already asleep. For closing the door when I worked in the other room."