The Apartment (14 page)

I nudged Mark. “I sat next to that guy on the plane. He told me he was—”

Mark squeezed my wrist so tightly I winced. He was staring straight ahead at something—or someone—in the throng of people around us. His eyes tracked the progress of a preteen girl with mousy braids.

“What is it?”

“I thought she'd…” He released my arm. “Nothing,” he said with a strained smile. “Nothing at all. Really. Let's go home.”

“Top you up, darling?”

I should get back home, but the hot afternoon sun has thawed me out and I'm lethargic. I'd like to go home and help with Hayden's bath time, but I know Steph's happy for the quality time alone with her. When Jan and Rina delivered her back home from the B and B this morning, Steph was so relieved her eyes started to well up. I made up a pretext to come and see Carla—“I should go and fetch the keys and thank her for her time”—and Steph almost bustled me physically out of the house, she was so keen to have a break from me.

When we got in yesterday afternoon, she dropped her bag and started stalking around the house. “This has been moved,” she said, pointing at the dressing table that's always been under the window in our bedroom. Before I could even come over, she was across to the bookshelf. “Someone's laid these books on their sides.” Perhaps it was Hayden, I said; perhaps Carla took them out while she was here, but she was off again. “Do you smell that?” “Is this where we left it?” “We closed this blind, didn't we?”

Having been through the week we just had, I know I should have been more sympathetic. Steph was right: things in the house did look different—they felt different—but I was so exhausted by our constant traumatized hyperawareness, I willfully ignored it. If I couldn't feel at home there, where on earth could I? I wanted so urgently to be lulled. So I've run out to this soul-thawing café with my comforting old friend and I'm leaning back in my chair as if I have no bones, instead of staring down this trauma by the side of my wife and child.
Good going, Mark.
I really should get back now, but rich summer light is glinting off the ocean, and a stiff breeze cools my skin. I can see half the sky from here. “Sure, thanks,” I tell Carla.

She leans over and fills my glass with chardonnay from the ice bucket, and a skein of hair loosens from behind her ear and falls across her face, catching the light. Though it's hennaed with beetrooty-red highlights, there's still some of that rich bronze in it—her natural color.

I've always been a sucker for pretty hair. Odette's hair used to make her look like an American beauty queen, like the sun shone into every room she graced; it was thick, lustrous, effortless, and when we made love she'd run it across my body and I could feel the warm life stroking into me. I'd try to smother myself in its scent. At times like that, Odette embracing and covering me, shielding me from the world, I could have died happy over and over again. When Odette's hair grew back, it was strangely curly and mousy brown.

Even though Odette tried to keep up a brave face, once Zoë caught her crying at her mirror during one of the chemo courses, grasping a hank of hair in her hand. “What's wrong, Mommy?” Zoë asked. “I'm so ugly,” she said. Zoë just shook her head, and five minutes later she determinedly returned, clutching all of her dolls, each of them shorn. “See, they're pretty, Mommy, just like you.” Later, Zoë had gathered all of the dolls' plastic hair trimmings into a small Tupperware, “for later, when they feel better.”

Perhaps it's the wine, the sun, the breeze, the distance from Steph—but I don't stop myself reaching out to feel the ends of Carla's hair. “This is nice,” I say. “New color?”

She pulls back gently and frowns at me, but with a—suggestive? indulgent?—curl of the lips. “You sounded so strange when you called that day”—she does her cheeky impression of my voice—“ ‘We need to get out of there,
now,
Carla.' What happened?”

I take a deep, slow sip of my wine—suicides, ghosts, dead cats. Where do I start? And if I start, where will I finish? I put down my glass, hoping the heat of the day will counteract the nauseating chill that's returned to my blood just thinking about that place. “Let's just say the apartment was not as advertised.”

“You told me that, remember?”

“I did?”

“Mark, darling, we had a long Skype convo about it. There was hair in the closet or something.” She shuddered. “Ugh. You shouldn't have made light of it. You should have moved to the hotel straightaway.”

“You know how it is. You think you'll settle in, that things will be okay. Until they're not and it's too late.”

But I can tell from her expression that she's aware of what I'm not saying: we didn't have enough money for a hotel, even in an emergency, even if the bloody credit card had been working. That heavy weight sits between us—that she's still sitting in a well-paid professorship on the verdant UCT campus, while I've been downgraded to my poky cubicle in an office-park college. It's an embarrassment for both of us. She's moved up, and I've moved down; I'm no longer the impressive boy with a future she once knew; I'm a pity case. For a second, I'm tempted to stand up and leave, but the waiter comes around and offers us another bottle and I settle back into my chair. Here is still better than there, my body says.

One advantage of the week is that I'm still thinking in euros, and a bottle of wine here is as cheap as a glass there. I don't express this to Carla because I don't want to seem cheap.

She takes a swig of wine. “How was the hotel in the end?”

On the flight back home I had wondered whether it was deliberate, or at least some sort of Freudian slipup—because Carla is way too self-possessed to make mistakes like that. It's quite possible she wanted us to have a bad time, that she wanted our marriage-healing escape to fail. “We didn't stay there after all,” is what I settle on. “Things worked out differently.” With my dark glasses as a shield, I scan her face for any clue, but there's no admission in her features. She's always been there for me, and I don't think she'd ever want to sabotage my happiness.

“Did you hear from the apartment's owners again and find out why they never showed up at your place? Stephanie seemed so worried about them.”

“Yes, she was. She wondered if they'd got lost or hijacked here in Cape Town, but as you know they at least had the decency to let us know they were alive.”

“It's so weird of them not to show up, though, isn't it? Why advertise for a house swap, arrange for you to stay at their place, and then not turn up? It's a real mystery.”

“It is.” I fake a yawn, hoping it will dissuade Carla from probing further. Steph and I had been so fired up about getting to the bottom of the great Petit mystery, but now that we're back it seems pointless to obsess over it.

“It was nice of her to worry,” Carla says. “Stephanie's a nice girl.”

I ignore Carla's tone and replay our return for a moment. “You didn't happen to move things around at the house, did you?”

Carla peers at me over her sunglasses. “Huh?”

“We noticed some things were moved around a bit, as if someone had been staying there.” Carla eyes me. Maybe she brought that guy—what the hell's his name?—around for a bit of off-site adventure. “You were very welcome to, you know, make yourself at home.”

“I came in twice,” she says, “to water the plants and check on things for you. I didn't ‘move anything around.' ”

Her tone is cold, and I don't want her to be angry with me—the last thing I want today is another argument. “It's fine, really. Thank you for helping. You're always so…”

“So what?” she says.

“Helpful.”

Now she snorts with a sarcastic laugh, and she's back on form. “Yeah, right.”

I grin at her for a second, then swill my wine. “It wasn't all bad, though. I had a sort of epiphany there. A sense that the world is so much bigger and fuller than it seems when you're stuck in your everyday grind.” Carla leans forward and nods, encouraging me to go on, but I find I can't access that sentiment anymore; it feels like I'm grabbing at the threads of a long-ago dream. I look out over the parking lot below us, where a hipster is arguing with a car guard at the back of his Mini Cooper. “It was only a week, but it's strange to be back.”

“I know exactly what you're saying. After two days in Richmond, which was so peaceful…the air was clean, you know. Did I tell you that Jamie Sanderson was there? You wouldn't believe the new creature she has dangling on her arm. You'd think that she was thirty years younger. So on the first evening there, we're invited to this dinner. Richmond's version of a soirée, I suppose, and all the poets are supposed to come, only Terri and Marcia and their entourage have rented a minibus in Port Elizabeth and have got lost on the road. I can only imagine that a number of…” I stop listening as she launches into the full story.

What
am
I doing here, really, instead of at home with my family? I know it's nothing to do with infidelity. I'd never choose Carla over Steph if it came to that—and it's nowhere near coming to that. It never will. Carla sometimes reminds me of who I was when I was still young and powerful, before everything went bad, and that's the only reason I'm sitting here. And I miss Steph right now. The trip
was
supposed to heal us, but it just ended up a mess, and now we're worse than ever. When she took Hayden in her arms this morning, she turned her back to me, shielding Hayden from me. She doesn't trust me with my own daughter. I should feel glad that somehow she's convinced herself that the cat was dead already, that I'm only deranged rather than criminally insane, standing in my underwear in a courtyard in the rain.

I have to make this right, get her to trust me and believe me again; I don't know how, but I do know that mentioning Zoë is not going to help, which is why I said nothing in the concourse at Johannesburg airport.

Sitting here with Carla might not help, but I fill my wineglass again and we call over for some snacks.

It's after nine when I get home. Someone has tipped over a trash can in my parking space and I double-park next to the neighbors' van, tripping somehow on the edge of the car as I get out to move the trash can. As I approach it, three massive rats skitter out of the mouth of the can, and I gag as I get a noseful of the putrid stench of rot emitting from it. Stumbling back to the car, I decide to park somewhere else and find a vacant spot a few houses down.

The house is quiet and all the lights are off; I fumble my keys into the locks and try not to slam the door as I finally get in, turning on the light in the living room as I pass. Upstairs, Hayden's curled up with Steph in our bed, both fast asleep. I watch them in the doorway for a minute, then head down to the kitchen and raid the cupboard for a bowlful of pretzels and peanuts and pour myself a large glass of whiskey. It's either pass out now and wake up feeling like shit at one in the morning, or keep the buzz going for a while longer.

Steph didn't want to move in here; she wanted us to buy a new place together. “Don't the memories make you sad?” she'd asked, back when she used to ask such things, back when she tried to tackle my past head-on, as if confronting and naming the ghosts was the best way to exorcize them. She was young, with a naïve, vigorous optimism. But she was no match for reality. The housing market was at an ebb, and what we'd clear for the house after taxes and fees, even if we managed to sell it in this climate, would barely get us a deposit on anything else livable. With my college wage, we'd never get a full mortgage. So we cower in this tainted house from the ghosts of Odette and Zoë and of those filthy invaders.

Perhaps I have it all wrong; perhaps we're the invaders in this house and they want us out. Perhaps we're the ghosts who need to be exorcized.

Taking another slurp of my whiskey, I turn on the TV to a repeat of an English soccer match and mute the sound. I don't know when last I had the living room to myself. By the time Hayden's asleep, Steph and I are either so exhausted we go to bed, or we sit up and talk. After all those times I've wished I had some space to myself, now that I have it, the silence is not exactly welcome.

As I settle into my usual chair, I kick off my shoes and peel off my socks, picking idly at the splinter wound in my sole. It's healing fairly well now that I've been applying disinfectant to it, but it's left a deep crack down the middle of my foot like the fissure of an earthquake. Looking back up at the game, I notice a glare on the screen—it's coming from the light fixture set into the wall behind me. I stand up, dim the light, and adjust the set, noticing that it does seem to have shifted from its normal position. The outlines of its stand are etched in dust and scratches on the tabletop. That may have happened before we left, anytime since the burglary in fact. But Steph was right about the books in the bedroom. We never pile them on their sides, and there's no reason Carla would have touched them. It might have been Hayden, I remind myself, but I'm not convinced. Hayden would have left them lying on the floor if she'd played with them, not stacked up neatly.

I glance around the room as colors from the soccer match flicker over the walls. With the alcohol beginning to sour in my blood, and without Carla to blame, I start to see the room like Steph saw it yesterday. Something
has
been moved on the bookshelf in here. There's a gap where there used to be something. I approach the shelf, aware of my own absurd timidity, but nothing leaps out at me. I crane over toward the shelf and my foot crunches on something on the floor. Crouching down, I retrieve the three photo frames from where they've fallen and line them back up on the shelf. The glass has come completely out of one that Steph's father took last year—Steph, Hayden, me, and Rina outside the B and B—and is spiderwebbed over the other two.

I put my drink down on the shelf next to the photos and go to the kitchen to fetch a dustpan. For some reason I remember Odette standing there, rolling pastry at the butcher block. This was before Zoë even. I remember those nights, my new wife standing in our new home, dusted with flour, sticky hands. I'd sneak up to her and lick her neck, knowing she wouldn't want to touch anything with her hands. She'd laugh and lean back into me.