But in that moment of wild optimism, the doorbell rang. It was the middle of the day. Visitors had never arrived unannounced before. There were no packages due that I was aware of. The bell rang again and someone knocked—urgently, as if they were in trouble. I gripped my thin resume, worried that Zoe was out there, or Kim, or the wraithlike superintendent—hammering on the door with her knobbly fist. The bell rang five more times in rapid succession. Then everything went quiet. I eased over to the window and pried the curtains apart the thinnest of slivers. Two small boys in hockey jerseys were walking away from the house with bulging garbage bags. A bottle drive. I looked down at my resume, wondering how I would ever hold down a job, when a couple of seven-year-olds could make me cower.
I might have put this humiliation behind me if it hadn’t been directly followed by Meredith’s first real loss of patience—a stress fracture that had been building for months. She’d just come home from a gruelling fourteen-hour shift when a shout came from the bathroom, followed by an unprecedented “Fuck!” and the sound of water hitting tile. I went in and found Meredith jamming a plunger into the toilet, dirty water and shit—my shit, it had to have been—all over the floor. “Can you get me a towel, please?” she said, pumping the plunger.
I stared at the mess on the floor, a lump of fecal matter touching her clean white sock.
“Felix!” She glared at me. “A towel!”
“Right, sorry.” I hurried out of the room.
By the time I got back, she appeared to have calmed down. She took the towel from me and patted at the sewage on the floor. “I’m sorry. It’s been a long day. I didn’t mean to take it out on you…”
“I can clean it.”
“No, no, it’s fine. I’ve seen worse at the hospital, believe me.” She looked over. “Are you all right?”
I nodded. But the reproachful look she’d delivered as I hovered in the doorway doing nothing had stung. It was the exact look that Dad had always given me, a look that communicated a silent rhetorical question. How could anyone be so stupid? That was what she really thought of me. She’d kept it hidden better than most, but all this time she’d held me in secret contempt. And now that I’d glimpsed her true face, her true feelings, nothing could ever be the same.
A few days later, I woke to find Meredith unpacking groceries from reusable canvas bags, filling the fridge with organic produce and good-quality meat. She might have been frugal in other areas of her life, but she made an exception when it came to food. “Hello,” she said cheerily. I responded with a halfhearted smile. I’d been planning what I wanted to say all night and was starting to worry that I’d lose my nerve.
“Do you want some help?” I asked.
“No, I’ve got this.”
She finished stocking the fridge, then neatly refolded the bags, while I sat at the kitchen table, skating a salt shaker in circles. “So… I was hoping to talk to you about something. I don’t quite know how to say this…”
“Did you remember to take your meds today?”
“What? Okay, see, that’s exactly what I wanted to talk about.”
“Your meds?”
“No, the way you look after me. It makes me feel… inadequate.”
“So you took your meds.”
“Yes, I took my meds.”
“Good.” Meredith stuffed the folded bags in a drawer and gave me a shrewd smile. “I like looking after you.”
“Seriously? You come home from a twelve-hour shift and find a crappy meal on the table, some fat middle-aged guy living on your couch…”
She laughed. “Stop it.”
“Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed me getting fat.”
“As a matter of fact, I hadn’t.”
“I don’t contribute.”
“Sure you do.”
It was true that I chipped in a little from the rent I got from Dad’s house, but she wasn’t taking me seriously, idly going through the mail while we talked.
“Don’t you find it galling?” I persisted.
She made a dismissive noise, then looked up to see if I was serious. “Felix, I make good money. I love my work. The house is paid off. You give what you can. It’s fine. Your being here isn’t a burden. I like having you around.”
“You say that like I’m a houseboy or something.”
“Hey,” she said, with a light frown. “Why are you trying to pick a fight?”
I slouched in my chair. Everything had been fine up to that point. I’d been making genuine progress with Meredith’s help, but suddenly I wanted to take a sledgehammer to the whole thing.
Meredith sighed and set the mail aside. “Maybe it’s time to make an appointment with Dr. Howard.”
“No,” I said quickly, remembering the psychologist’s plunging necklines and naked calves, the tantalizing spot of darkness between her folded thighs. I gave my head a firm shake to banish the image. When that failed, I hit myself—nothing serious, just one good blow to the forehead with the side of my fist, the way a person might bang on an old flickering television.
“Don’t,” Meredith said sharply, grabbing my hand.
“It’s okay,” I assured her.
“No. It isn’t.”
But it was okay. It was exactly what I needed. If she’d have let go, I would have done it again, with a little more force. She held both my hands until the tension left them. A familiar heaviness came over me.
“Do you want to break up?” I asked, almost hopefully.
“What? No, I want you to feel better.”
“This is better,” I said. And I meant it. Compared to the state I’d been in a few months before, an occasional knock to the head didn’t just feel healthy, it felt downright therapeutic. Meredith didn’t seem to know what to say to that. She deserved so much better than me: a kind, gregarious man, with an unusually light-hearted disposition.
She sighed and glanced at her watch. “Survivor’s on in ten minutes. It’s the season finale. Do you want to watch?”
I nodded, deciding that there was nothing in the world that I’d have rather been doing at that moment than watching Survivor.
Meredith made popcorn and I turned on the television. Dramatic theme music boomed out of the surround sound. A montage of beautiful mud-streaked people flashed across the screen. We sat on the sofa together, the popcorn bowl between us, and for the span of an hour, everything was okay.
After Survivor’s final tribal council, we turned off the TV and headed for the bedroom. This was the routine. For whatever reason, sex and Survivor always happened on the same night. We undressed in the dark—kissing the way we always kissed, touching where we always touched. Then I was on top, riding the rhythm without protection, the way Meredith had always preferred it—trusting me to withdraw in time. I started to crest more quickly than usual and stopped. Meredith encouraged me to continue with her hips and I leaned back to look at her face. Her eyes were closed. I assumed she understood the situation and quickened my rhythm, watching her closely, wondering how I could be certain that she was actually there, that this wasn’t just another ghost, another fiction I’d built for myself. Pleasure flooded my body and her eyes snapped open. She stopped moving and stared at me in surprise.
“Did you just . .?”
A terrible clarity came over me. “I thought that you wanted…”
She looked more confused than angry, our bodies still locked together, our faces inches apart.
“No,” she said. “I didn’t.”
I lay there for a moment, wanting to reel back the last thirty seconds of my life.
Meredith put her hands on my chest. “Excuse me. I need to…”