Cold air rushes into her lungs, and Flora pushes the speed dial on her phone to call downstairs to Rock — just Rock, not for Rock Hudson, not for rock ’n’ roll, just Rock, as in stone, as in mountain, he explained to her the first time she called him to complain about something. He is eighteen and lives alone — Flora sometimes catches glimpses of his spiky hair through the hole; on her days off, she listens to him pour his bowl of cereal for breakfast, and again for lunch, and again for dinner. Flora has decided, after careful consideration, that she loves him.
His mother used to live in the apartment above Flora until very recently. Flora never heard a sound. She suspected the mother did not move once she was in her apartment; she imagined her sitting in a wooden chair, immobile. There were no problems — no leaks, no crumbling grout — when the mother was here. One day Flora heard her yell down to Rock, “The more I do, the more I hate.” Flora couldn’t imagine what she did sitting in that chair. “Then leave,” Rock said flatly, and she did. Flora has decided that Rock would understand this important question: How old were you when you realized life didn’t necessarily get better? She feels sure he understands that there isn’t necessarily an accumulation, a building of one thing upon another, until you reach the end as your best self. She thinks he understands that you may in fact reach the end as someone quite different from your best self. You may even arrive at the end so many rungs down from your best self that you can’t even see what your best self looks like.
A year ago Flora and her friend Peter ate in the same cheap Indian restaurant every night, talking about the directions their lives might take. Then Peter’s life, like the lives of other friends of Flora’s over the years, actually took a direction. His screenplay about lovable losers like himself and Flora was picked up; he was introduced to a crowd of formerly-nerdy-now-excruciatingly-hip writers; and he met a woman who was just like Flora only not Flora. Peter invited Flora to parties and screenings, but Flora found that she lost her bearings in public, that she couldn’t be funny the way she could in private. She and Peter went back a few times to their Indian restaurant but it wasn’t the same. Their relationship had revolved around possibility, not achievement, and they weren’t equipped for the change. While Peter had been waiting to someday leave the confines of the restaurant for the bigger world, Flora had been happy sitting there at the table across from Peter.
There is a pulse of sound downstairs as Rock turns on his TV, which he often does, sometimes in the middle of the day, halfway through a soap. Don’t leave me but you must because we are in love, because we are related, because, because, because, don’t leave. Now the saccharine-sweet soundtrack — Jim Croce or someone trying to sound like Jim Croce — of a Sunday afternoon movie about somebody dying of an incurable disease drifts up through the hole.
Flora goes to the phone. She has learned the power of using the telephone, the way she can cradle Rock’s voice against her ear. There were days, after all, when the phone was the only way to reach him, especially right after his mother left him and he wouldn’t even answer the door. Often, Flora will put her ear to the hole in the floor to hear him opening a cereal box, or rearranging his toolbox, or humming a tune that sounds like wind caught somewhere. Then there is Flora’s letter-writing campaign. With increasing frequency she composes eloquent diatribes on clogged drains, sporadic hot water, poor water pressure, chipping paint, the way the kitchen window doesn’t fit in its frame and clangs in brutal wind.
Strangely, her interest in Rock, her love for him, manifests itself in complaints. She’s like a little girl who shows she likes a boy by hitting him. She can’t stop herself. These days a thin film of poison coats Flora’s words whenever she speaks to anyone. It wasn’t always like this. There was a time when Flora was considered funny, a real crack-up, but over the past year her sense of humor has gradually been stripped of its graceful acrobatics, its fanciful costumes. There is a nugget of rage at the heart of it that Flora has struck upon and she can’t help touching it again and again, like checking a canker sore with her tongue. But today, she thinks. She is unable to finish the thought. She’s not sure exactly what she has in mind, but today she will make true contact with Rock. The winter chill that has crept into her body wells up inside her like a storm.
“Uh-huh.” Rock answers the phone, mouth full.
“Rock,” Flora says. She wraps her mouth carefully around the word, hopes that he’ll hear more than just his name in the way she speaks it. “Rock, have you seen the hole in my kitchen floor?” What she means is: Have you noticed my beating heart in your sink?
“Get to the point, Flora. I’ve got new tenants — a young married couple,” and Flora wonders if he’s emphasizing this to spite her. “They’re moving onto the third floor any minute now,” Rock says wearily. Then, pausing as if to decide whether to offer her the next sentence, “I haven’t been feeling so well.”
“I’m not giving you breaking news here, Rock. This is the same hole that’s been here for a week now,” Flora says, ignoring his complaint and raising him one. She’s practiced other words in bed in the dark—What kind of cereal do you like the best? Are you lonely? — but they are lost inside of her somewhere. She peers down into Rock’s kitchen to a single white tile with blue trim. She is not so sure that she wants him to fix it, or what it is precisely that she does want him to fix. She imagines Rock laying his spiky head in her lap and falling asleep, snoring a little. She’d shake him awake to tell him tenderly to be quiet.
“Listen, Flora, I really have something wrong with my head. Terrible headaches,” Rock says, also the sort of person who doesn’t need another person to carry on a conversation. With Rock and Flora, there is always one extra person.
“If you look at your ceiling, you will see what I mean,” Flora says, waiting for Rock, who now stands right below her, to look up through the hole, but he doesn’t. He moves, and there’s just that one blue-trimmed tile.
“Every day for the past week I have headaches,” Rock says.
“Don’t think I don’t know about you,” Flora says, hanging up the phone. It sounds good, like she has something on him.
She looks out the window at the terrible cold sky going dark. The gray shadows of winter fill her with a boredom that drills into her bones. The world lit like the apocalypse at dusk. Every day threatens in its cold murkiness to be the last. She said this to the deli guy on her corner, but he just looked at her blankly and then stared past her to the next customer. She was practicing to say it to Rock because she suspects that he would appreciate the images she uses to articulate loneliness. This winter, cold air sneaks in through her ears, nose, and mouth and sets her on edge, makes her shiver from October until April, and she is not an old woman. She is still of marrying age, her cousin Carol said, hopeful when she called today, her obligatory Sunday call. Carol lives in the city, though Flora hasn’t seen her in years. A year ago Carol became a devotee of a self-help guru among whose directives was: Find someone less fortunate than you and be charitable. So Carol calls each week to see if something miraculous has happened to Flora, and if nothing miraculous has happened, then Carol offers herself as that miracle. “You look thirty-seven,” she said today. “Not a day older than thirty-seven.” Flora is thirty-nine.
“I’m thirty-six,” Flora said. “Thanks a lot. And besides, how do you know? You haven’t seen me in years. I may have aged beyond recognition.”
But she was sorry when Carol made an excuse to get off the phone.
Leaves mixed with gusts of city dirt blow mercilessly down the street. It makes Flora want to blame someone — the deli man who doesn’t understand her and whose fruit is rotten; scaredy-cat widowed Carol, who sends checks faithfully (the self-help guru encourages this along with the monthly donation to the guru’s institution); Samson, her boss at the art gallery where she works part time taking calls from creditors; the man who is pulled by his leggy Great Dane puppy down her street every morning. He once asked her the time, still moving as his dog dove into a hedge after some quick movement.