The Affairs of Others: A Novel by Amy Grace Loyd Read Free Book Online Page A

history—that long before I was born or dreamt of the building that I would own, it had been classified as a brownstone once, or so the record keepers indicated, but when the city bureaucracy was a network of cronies with itchy palms someone had looked the other way and its conversion began. Before there was a landmark preservation committee, before Robert Moses tried to raze much of downtown Brooklyn in favor of an expressway, the grand front stairs were disassembled and taken away. Fireplaces were closed up and what remained of them was encased in the walls. Stained glass was carted off.
    It must have taken more than a few pairs of hands to accomplish the theft—and so conspiracy—to strip this building of mine and make it something other than it was intended to be. In modern-day parlance, it became a walk-up and then came the complication of the elevator. No one had approved its installation, though someone, his pockets full, had known of it because then the official designation of the building changed to apartment building. Stolid. I could not restore all the Italianate touches that had been sanded down or removed. I did my best by the ceiling moldings that remained, by the floors, the light fixtures, the banisters. What I could not restore, I replicated; what I could not replicate, I left simple but clean. I could feel the bones of the place—that I’d fortified them. And me. But now Hope rattled them through the night, and my head was not clear.
    When the heat cycled on at 6, I was awake to hear it. Outside, birds complained of what continued to be a cold March—as the light gained, they did too in their fussing and calling and bickering. Still, my ears picked out Mr. Coughlan’s approach. He was not a heavy man, but as he went up or down the stairs, it was never hard to make out his reckoning with what it was to convey his body around now and the care he assigned to every step.
    Soon after came Mitchell Braunstein’s feet. The soles of his sneakers barely landing on the wood. He bounced down, leaving little evidence of himself behind him, already envisioning himself moving with the morning on the other side of the door, and full of the sort of energy that shamed me sometimes.
    I struggled to drag myself vertical, telling myself that the early light is so often the answer to confusion.
    I’d had to visit a sleep clinic; in my first year alone, when insomnia had become a constant, and I could not keep from remembering for fear I’d forget. Evidently I had to reteach my body what time it was, reset its clock. If we let them be, our bodies can be simple mechanisms, as responsive to light and dark as tulips. Did Hope know this? To force herself into the light for at least twenty minutes every morning? How essential routine was to keep us upright? I listened for her as I forced a cup of black tea down, made myself as presentable as I could in a light coat and jeans, and still I listened for her and could not find the door. It was my habit to go out just before or after rush hour. I hesitated and as I did was put in mind of a woman, a stranger to me, who announced she’d never sleep again. “It’s not safe,” she explained.
    Yes, it was years ago, before I bought my building, when I was still not my own entirely. I’d been tricked into attending a support group for the recently bereaved by my well-meaning sister-in-law, Maureen. A newly minted trauma counselor, she came to the city from Boston often after 9/11, to suss out the varieties and degrees of trauma felt by her even in the sidewalks. She wanted to put her face into the epicenter of it, taste the mess of it. I did not, or not more than living here required of me or anyone. But would I come and observe her conducting a group therapy session? Give her feedback? Meet some like-minded women? Who else could she count on? I didn’t have it in me to say no. Not then. She’d been suspicious of me, maybe she was yet. He hadn’t wanted to die in hospice, and I