If Andrew checks in again, I’ll ignore him for now. Maybe for good. Classic cinema: That’s what I share with Ed. No one else.
I UPEND the hourglass on my desk, watch how the little pyramid of sand seems to pulse as the grains dimple it. So much time. Nearly a year. I haven’t left the house in nearly a year.
Well, almost. Five times in eight weeks I’ve managed to venture outside, out back, into the garden. My “secret weapon,” as Dr. Fielding calls it, is my umbrella—Ed’s umbrella, really, a rickety London Fog contraption. Dr. Fielding, a rickety contraption himself, will stand like a scarecrow in the garden as I push the door open, the umbrella brandished before me. A flick of the spring and it blooms; I stare intently at the bowl of its body, at its ribs and skin. Dark tartan, four squares of black arranged across each fold of canopy, four lines of white in every warp and weft. Four squares, four lines. Four blacks, four whites. Breathe in, count to four. Breathe out, count to four. Four. The magic number.
The umbrella projects straight ahead of me, like a saber, like a shield.
And then I step outside.
Out, two, three, four.
In, two, three, four.
The nylon glows against the sun. I descend the first step (there are, naturally, four) and tilt the umbrella toward the sky, just a bit, peek at his shoes, his shins. The world teems in my peripheral vision, like water about to flood a diving bell.
“Remember, you’ve got your secret weapon,” Dr. Fielding calls.
It’s not a secret, I want to cry; it’s a fucking umbrella, wielded in broad daylight.
Out, two, three, four; in, two, three, four—and unexpectedly it works; I’m conducted down the steps (out, two, three, four) and across a few yards of lawn (in, two, three, four). Until the panic wells within, a rising tide that swamps my sight, drowns out Dr. Fielding’s voice. And then … best not to think of it.
A STORM. THE ASH TREE COWERS, the limestone glowers, dark and damp. I remember dropping a glass onto the patio once; it burst like a bubble, merlot flaring across the ground and flooding the veins of the stonework, dark and bloody, crawling toward my feet.
Sometimes, when the skies are low, I imagine myself overhead, in a plane or on a cloud, surveying the island below: the bridges spoked from its east coast; the cars sucked toward it like flies swarming a lightbulb.
It’s been so long since I felt the rain. Or wind—the caress of wind, I nearly said, except that sounds like something you’d read in a supermarket romance.
It’s true, though. And snow too, but snow I never want to feel again.
A PEACH was mixed in with my Granny Smiths in this morning’s FreshDirect delivery. I wonder how that happened.
THE NIGHT we met, at an art-house screening of The 39 Steps, Ed and I compared histories. My mother, I told him, had weaned me on old thrillers and classic noir; as a teenager I preferred the company of Gene Tierney and Jimmy Stewart to that of my classmates. “Can’t decide if that’s sweet or sad,” said Ed, who until that evening had never seen a black-and-white movie. Within two hours, his mouth was on mine.
You mean your mouth was on mine, I imagine him saying.
In the years before Olivia, we’d watch a movie at least once a week—all the vintage suspense flicks from my childhood: Double Indemnity, Gaslight, Saboteur, The Big Clock … We lived in monochrome those nights. For me, it was a chance to revisit old friends; for Ed, it was an opportunity to make new ones.
And we’d make lists. The Thin Man franchise, ranked from best (the original) to worst (Song of the Thin Man). Top movies from the bumper crop of 1944. Joseph Cotten’s finest moments.
I can do lists on my own, of course. For instance: best Hitchcock films not made by Hitchcock. Here we go:
Le Boucher, the early Claude Chabrol that Hitch, according to lore, wished he’d directed. Dark Passage, with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall—a San Francisco valentine, all velveteen with fog, and antecedent to any movie in which a character goes under the knife to disguise himself. Niagara, starring Marilyn Monroe; Charade, starring Audrey Hepburn; Sudden Fear!, starring Joan Crawford’s eyebrows. Wait Until Dark: Hepburn again, a blind woman stranded in her basement apartment. I’d go berserk in a basement apartment.
Now, movies that postdate Hitch: The Vanishing, with its sucker-punch finale. Frantic, Polanski’s ode to the master. Side Effects, which begins as a Big Pharma screed before slithering like an eel into another genre altogether.
Okay.
Popular film misquotes. “Play it again, Sam”: Casablanca, allegedly, except neither Bogie nor Bergman ever said it. “He’s alive”: Frankenstein doesn’t gender his monster; cruelly, it’s just “It’s alive.” “Elementary, my dear Watson” does crop up in the first Holmes film of the talkie era, but appears nowhere in the Conan Doyle canon.
Okay.
What next?
I FLIP open my laptop, visit the Agora. A message from Mitzi in Manchester; a progress report courtesy of Dimples2016 in Arizona. Nothing of note.
IN THE front parlor of number 210, the Takeda boy draws his bow across the cello. Farther east, the four Grays flee the rain, charging up their front steps, laughing. Across the park, Alistair Russell fills a glass at the kitchen tap.
LATE AFTERNOON, AND I’M POURING a California pinot noir into a tumbler when the doorbell chimes. I drop my glass.
It explodes, a long tongue of wine licking the white birch. “Fuck,” I shout. (Something I’ve noticed: In the absence of others, I swear more often and more loudly. Ed would be appalled. I’m appalled.)
I’ve just seized a fistful of paper towels when the bell rings again. Who the hell? I think—or have I said it? David left an hour ago for a job in East Harlem—I watched him from Ed’s library—and I’m not expecting any deliveries. I stoop, cram the towels against the mess, then march to the door.
Framed within the intercom screen is a tall kid in a slim jacket, hands clasping a small white box. It’s the Russell boy.
I press the Talk button. “Yes?” I call. Less inviting than Hello, more gracious than Who the hell?
“I live across the park,” he says, almost shouting, his voice improbably sweet. “My mom asked me to give you this.” I watch him thrust the box toward the speaker; then, unsure where the camera might be, he slowly pivots, arms orbiting overhead.
“You can just …” I begin. Should I ask him to deposit it in the hall? Not very neighborly, I suppose, but I haven’t bathed in two days, and the cat might nip at him.
He’s still on the stoop, box held aloft.
“… come in,” I finish, and I tap the buzzer.
I hear the lock unbuckle and move to the door, cautiously, the way Punch approaches unfamiliar people—or used to, back when unfamiliar