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

defended that choice as if I were defending his life, rather than his death. And just when I might have listened to reason, to Maureen, and handed him over to steadier hands, he had died suddenly. Or not suddenly.
    No, it was a lifetime in that room. When I did manage to sleep then, I could feel myself slipping back into that room, counting his breaths. Alone with him again. And even if I told myself it was his choice, I had done it: deprived Maureen a place there.
    So I watched as the women—it was a women’s group—formed a circle; I remember being amazed that they could keep their seats even as rage choked the air around them.
    One woman reported her husband had worn dirty underwear that September day. They’d been too busy for laundry. Another that her husband had eaten his favorite breakfast that morning. Maple-flavored oatmeal a consolation to her even still. When someone asked me to share, mistaking me for one of them, I told them out of politeness, with Maureen nodding her encouragement, that my husband was gone over a year ago by way of a protracted illness. Each in their different way looked at me as if I’d betrayed them, and I hated Maureen then as I did when she had insisted he die in a hospice and I denied her every entreaty, no matter how polite, or when she called wanting to talk about her brother since then—to catalog his habits, his affections, the set of his eyes. Yes, I’d say, his eyes were brown; yes, he loved music, books, the northern Atlantic coast, but I would not give her Coltrane, Bowie, Bill Withers, or Coney Island in high season or York Beach, Maine, just after the tourists left in the fall or how he smelled of summer all year round and loved Melville for his recklessness and made me love him, too, or that I’d read Proust and Jane Austen to him even while he rolled his eyes at me, pretending he didn’t like it, testing my commitment, touching me in places I liked to be touched to distract me. Because he could quote from Moby-Dick I came to as well. I didn’t anymore or only rarely, though I kept copies on hand, within reach to test my memory.…
    I did not talk of my husband. People wanted details. I had millions more, and they were greedy for them, for news of a love I still observed, but something hard and visceral in me refused to give it. He belonged to me alone. That was the price of his leaving me as he did, when he did. Privacy is not something Americans understand well anymore: You are only as real or worthwhile as the stories you surrender and even then, even if you’re willing, there’s no guarantee you’ll pass. Especially with women my age, any age, really, who too often trafficked in feelings for leverage. You see, I didn’t want these sorts of tests to factor into my days. I did not care for expectations now. I couldn’t afford to.
    Years ago, I read a review of a reissue of a book by a German writer, Peter Handke. It was a memoir about his mother and her suicide. The reviewer, a novelist, wrote that Handke’s mother’s sort of death didn’t rank as much of a tragedy in the scheme of things, in the face of mass murder, genocide, famine. One aging middle-class woman taking her life was prosaic. Too small. And the widows in that support group probably would have agreed, that certain griefs trump others. But they did not know my husband, what I lost, or what I had done, and I could not, would not, tell them.
    Upstairs came a clatter, a pot or pan hitting the floor, the metal reverberating. Hope did not rush to collect it. Likely she was watching it try to settle. When it did, when I heard nothing more for a space of a few minutes, I made it to the door, and out of the building. There were the birds again—so loud with their business that for a moment I thought the world was theirs, but then with the chilled air finding its way through my clothes, I had to walk, and there on the corner I saw the cars and taxis and delivery trucks climbing Clinton Street; they were