The Resident Read online

  ‘You too.’

  ‘The guy from Juliet’s apartment building?’ Sydney asked Max brightly.

  Juliet thought too brightly. To Max she said, ‘This is Sydney. We work together, and I was staying with her when I was looking for somewhere to live, so I told her all about you.’

  Sydney turned to Max. ‘So, nice night, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘It most certainly is,’ Max agreed, nodding. He rocked on his heels. He took a sip of his beer. Juliet had not seen him like this before. He seemed at ease, confident, almost a different man to the taciturn workaholic she had met in his apartment building.

  He said, ‘Sometimes it seems all I ever do is work. Twenty-four-seven. So, I decided I wanted to stop, come out, feel Brooklyn. You know …’

  ‘Why don’t you join us for a drink?’ Sydney said.

  ‘Oh, thanks,’ Max said. ‘That’s very kind of you, but I’m good.’

  Juliet had her eyes on Max. ‘Maybe you could walk me home,’ she said.

  ‘Sure.’

  Sydney kissed Juliet goodbye. ‘He’s cute,’ she whispered, with a confidential squeeze of Juliet’s hand.

  The early evening was fine and mild as they walked through the New York streets. Juliet had too much on her mind to talk. Max was easy company in the silence; quiet rather than taciturn or tongue-tied, someone who spoke when he had something to communicate, she thought, appreciatively. And Sydney was right. Objectively, away from the dust and clamour of the building he was renovating, tailored and groomed, he really was cute.

  ‘You’re an unusual man in some ways, Max,’ she offered eventually.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘You seem sort of … solitary,’ she said. It was the subtlest way she could think of, to try to find out whether he was unattached. She didn’t even know for sure whether he was straight or gay.

  ‘August worries about me,’ he said. ‘People from his generation were already married with ten children by the time they got to my age.’

  Juliet thought about the tea and whisky clutter of August’s apartment; about the innocent intimacy of her gift package. ‘He is a unique kind of guy, isn’t he?’

  ‘You could say that. Unique. Difficult. Given to eccentricity. Temperamental. A pain in the ass, would be another way to characterise him.’

  ‘Is he OK?’

  Max walked beside her, head bowed, eyes focused on his feet, pausing before he answered her. ‘Until six months ago, he and I were partners in the building. We fixed everything together, made all the decisions collectively. Then he suffered a stroke.’

  ‘And your parents?’

  The question inflicted a pained look on Max’s features. He said, ‘I don’t talk about that much. My parents both died when I was very young.’

  ‘I’m so sorry.’

  Max stopped. ‘My father died instantly. According to my grandfather my mother was in surgery for six hours before the doctor came out and told him they couldn’t save her.’

  Juliet could read the damage this memory caused him in the pain on Max’s face. He was wounded, she thought. But he was wounded because he was sensitive. He was truthful, a sweet man. ‘I’ve been there,’ she said. ‘I’ve been that doctor before, delivering that awful news.’

  ‘But you have also saved lives.’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  Max smiled. ‘And your parents?’ he said, his tone lighter, a deliberate changing of subject.

  ‘My parents? Kind of after-the-fact hippies.’

  ‘So you were the black sheep of the family.’

  ‘For me, rebellion was going to med school. Free love sucked, as far as I could see. My parents were shiftless, rootless people. I never knew what a stable home was, not until Jack and I moved in together.’

  There. She had said it. She had said her husband’s name.

  ‘Jack,’ Max said, softly.

  ‘My ex,’ Juliet said. ‘He was attracted to me and my ambitions, but when it came down to it, he wanted me at home with an apron, cooking dinner and having babies, instead of out stitching people together, so he found someone else.’

  She didn’t really know if this was true. She thought it plausible. Something had come between her and Jack, forcing them apart. The TCB had not been the cause of what had gone wrong, she had been a consequence. Whether it was true or not, it made Max smile softly, to himself. She thought there was a shared wavelength, an attraction between them.

  Max said, ‘I thought hippy kids had weird names.’

  Juliet blushed and rolled her eyes.

  He laughed. ‘You do, don’t you? What’s your real name?’

  ‘Juliet is my real name.’

  ‘What’s your middle name?’

  The blush on Juliet’s cheeks deepened. ‘No way.’

  Across the street, some kids were playing on a fire escape. They were igniting bits of paper and watching them flare into life in the dusky half-light. They would flame up and rise in fierce orange flight and then dim to red and descend, disappearing as ash as they fragmented in the breeze towards the ground. It was an old game, a simple pastime, guileless and beautiful in its brief, incandescent magic.

  Max followed Juliet’s gaze. Then they both looked through a window further up the building, at a family having dinner, old and young people together in the shared, messy joy of domestic harmony.

  Juliet said, ‘When I was little, I used to walk around the neighbourhood at night. Not my neighbourhood, obviously, I never had one, but the settled homes wherever we’d fetched up. I’d look into windows. At families around televisions. You know, brothers, sisters, parents, talking, eating … I couldn’t touch them.’

  Max looked fascinated by this admission. Juliet felt the need to qualify what she had just confessed. ‘I mean I knew I couldn’t be part of a family. But I could imagine in my mind that I was.’

  He nodded.

  ‘Bliss,’ she said after another moment’s silence. She was in a confessional mood.

  ‘Bliss?’

  ‘Yup.’

  It took him a moment. Then he got it. ‘God, I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I think it a very good thing that you dropped your middle name.’

  ‘I told you they were hippies.’

  ‘Deliberate humiliation was probably the furthest thing from their minds.’

  ‘I’m sure.’

  ‘I mean, hippies and sadism don’t really go hand in hand.’

  ‘Not generally.’

  They had reached their building, and walked into the elevator. They exited on their floor and Juliet took out her key and unlocked her door and then turned to Max. ‘Thanks,’ she said. She felt shy. But the shyness was a reaction to what she was suddenly aware she was about to do. She leant in and kissed Max on the cheek and closed her eyes and inhaled his scent. Her lips moved towards his mouth and he recoiled.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Juliet said, opening her eyes. ‘God, I’m an idiot.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Don’t be sorry.’

  ‘It’s a bad idea. You’re right. Of course it’s a bad idea.’

  ‘No,’ Max said, ‘I didn’t mean it that way. I really didn’t.’

  ‘I’m confused, out of practice,’ Juliet said. ‘I’m reading the wrong signals.’

  ‘You’re not, really.’

  She bit down on her lip. She smiled at him, sadly. Whatever the truth was about their instincts and impulses, their crossed wires would not be straightened out tonight. The moment had gone. The evening had begun well and offered intriguing promise and had then very suddenly unravelled in clumsiness and embarrassment. Juliet entered her apartment and closed the door behind her leaving Max in the corridor outside.

  Twelve

  JULIET KICKED OFF her shoes and discarded her coat. She unbuckled her wristwatch, poured a glass of wine and sipped it, looking out of her bedroom window at the view of Manhattan twinkling in the night. She marvelled at the uncountable vastness of its steel and stone constructions and the windows dotting that vastness in shimmeri
ng pinpoints of silver and gold. She would have another bath, she decided. This time it would be for pure pleasure and she would luxuriate in the soap and bubbles of a deep and scented tub. It was exactly what she needed.

  Juliet’s muscles still ached slightly from the run of the previous night and the heat of the water bled away the tension. She lay immersed neck-deep, the bathroom illuminated by candlelight, her limbs floating, her eyes closed and the surface of the water perfectly still, glasslike in its unruffled smoothness. She felt drowsiness slip over her like gossamer. She could almost have descended into sleep.

  The flames of the candles flickered. She opened her eyes and reached for her wine glass resting on the edge of the tub. As she did so she sensed low vibrations move across the floorboards and into the bath water. The tranquil surface shivered slightly and then began to ripple as the subsonic noise stirring it grew stronger beneath her.

  Juliet did not flinch; it had become almost routine to her now, the travel of the heavy maintenance train as it trundled through the night on the subway line far below. Max had warned her about the effect. Then, in front of her mirror, she had witnessed it for the first time. Now, she pretty much expected it and felt the time would soon be upon her when she would not notice it at all. It was a tiny price to pay for the abundant charms of her gloriously sited new home.

  She closed her eyes again. The aftertaste of the wine was sweet and complex on her tongue. Her thoughts were complex too, but immersed in the cleansing water and the hot haze of the steamy bathroom they did not threaten, as they sometimes did, to overwhelm her. Life was more good than bad and it was intriguing too. Possibilities were what distinguished life from mere existence, and she felt they were opening up to her.

  She moved a bar of soap smoothly over her body, past a tiny, familiar mole on her upper back that she caressed lightly with her fingertips. Her hand slid down her legs, around her buttocks and she immersed her head in the water and then surfaced for air, moving an exploratory hand between her legs, touching herself, the touch of her soapy fingertips deliciously sensual, probing deeper with a caught gasp and shudder of arousal.

  Something moved, jerking Juliet out of her erotic reverie with a jolt of surprise and fear. The wine in her glass had moved, the surface of it shifting, dimpling as though some phantom hand had gripped and shaken the stem of the glass. Suddenly she was scared, truly scared. This was not the melancholy feeling of intruding on an unquiet ghost she had felt at the apartment of the mobster suicide. It was more threatening than that, less subtle and more real. It was as though some tangible force was stealthily approaching her, malevolent, unseen.

  She felt naked. She was naked. She could not have been more physically vulnerable, literally defenceless in her bath. She sat up, alert, straight-backed. She listened intently, slowly turning her head towards a faint and eerie noise coming from outside the bathroom door. Was it getting louder? Was it coming closer? She had to struggle against her own rising sense of panic to divorce what she was actually seeing and hearing from those sensations fear could make her imagine were real.

  Juliet’s hand brushed against her wine glass then and it toppled and crashed to the floor, a shimmering mess of purple liquid and shattered glass fragments spread across the tiles in the yellow candlelight.

  ‘Shit.’

  Cautiously, deliberately, she stepped out of the tub. She threw a thick bath towel over the broken glass and peered into the open doorway. She walked through it, the soles of her wet feet sucking at the wooden floor, leaving a trail of footprints in her wake. She entered her living room. Shadows played on the curtained window as headlight beams from traffic crossing the bridge skittered through its crisscross of iron girders. Her breathing, harsh, was her terror echoing in her ears, uncontrolled terror hammering at her chest, fast and hard and moistening her palms with it.

  She hauled in a breath and strode decisively towards the window and gathering the fabric in both fists, flung the curtains wide, flushing the room with the night light from outside.

  She turned around. The room lay exposed and innocent in pale moonlight. She could hear nothing but the faint traffic from below and the staccato drip of a bathroom faucet. When she held her breath and really listened, she could hear the hiss from the bathroom of one of her candles slightly guttering. There was no other sound, certainly nothing demonic or inexplicable or even slightly scary.

  There was no old man standing staring at her from a corner, no wild-eyed ancient with a whisky and spittle-matted beard prowling gauntly through her private space, spying lasciviously on her. She really, really needed to get a grip on herself.

  Her belongings lay where her own idleness and indifference had left them, still largely in the heap of boxes forming an uneven hill at the centre of the room. Nothing was out of kilter. Absolutely nothing was wrong.

  She shuddered out a huge, ragged sigh of relief. ‘Jesus Christ, Juliet. Calm the fuck down.’

  Turning on the overhead light, she blew out the candles in the bathroom. She cleaned the mess of glass shards and spilled Merlot from the floor. Then, switching off the light, she let her eyes grow accustomed to the darkness before roughly towelling her hair and going into her bedroom. She sat on the bed and pushed a strand of wet hair the towel had missed from her face. It left a single water droplet on her index finger that rolled off her skin towards the floor as she swung up her feet and lay, relaxed now, on the bed. She closed her eyes.

  Was it instinct or imagination, that feeling she had of being watched? She did not know, not for certain. But she felt safe now and so assumed it had been the latter. There had been nobody there, had there? She had looked and there had been no one to see. Old buildings creaked and moaned; their foundations and masonry, their very fabric, continued to move and settle for as long as they stood. They had a life of their own and it was sometimes audible, that was all. She relaxed and let fatigue and sleep claim her.

  Thirteen

  JULIET DID NOT get a chance to talk to Sydney about the evening of the opening until they changed together after being on the same shift late in the afternoon a few days later. They were in the locker room. It was a location that lent itself to shared spoken intimacies and there was no real question that Sydney was, nowadays, easily her closest friend.

  She had been since that concussed distress call Juliet had made on the day her marriage collapsed. Maybe she had been even before then, when Juliet had fooled herself Jack was her closest friend. But she did not really know what to say to Sydney about Max, because she was not at all sure what she felt about what had, or more precisely what had not, happened.

  ‘I don’t know what I expected.’

  ‘You were expecting rebound sex, honey. Hot Landlord Rebound Sex.’

  ‘I think the whole landlord thing is the basis of the attraction, actually. I see him less as someone who pockets the rent than as a sort of knight in shining armour.’

  ‘You’re not wet enough to play the damsel in distress, babe.’

  Juliet smiled. She had been wet when she’d climbed out of the tub, later that same evening. She had been pretty damned distressed, too. Nothing odd had happened since, though. And she had seen nothing at all of Max either.

  ‘I was desperate for a place to live and this guy hands me the dream apartment, on a plate. He’s shy, unprepossessing, he’s almost awkward, actually. But he’s physically strong and capable. He’s dependable and I get the sense he’s just really solid inside.’

  ‘And he’s cute,’ Sydney said. ‘Don’t forget that shallow but crucial detail.’

  ‘He looked pretty good the other night,’ Juliet said.

  ‘He might be exactly what you need. I’m not saying he has to be for ever. I’m not saying it has to be for life or even for a month. But you need to move on, girl. Think of it as fate, doing you a favour for once. Maybe fate owes you a favour. You’ve sure as hell earned it.’

  Juliet smiled again. Sydney hugged her hard and then left. She looked into her still-open locke
r, at the sticky residue left by the tape that used to hold in place the photos of her and Jack. They had symbolised the optimistic promise of a shared golden future. Juliet had ripped them out and torn them to pieces, treating their photos with the same brutality her errant husband had shown her heart. Maybe Sydney was right and fate owed her a favour, and she owed herself the reckless passion of no-strings sex.

  Her phone rang. It was Jack, again, but this time she could not help herself. She answered it.

  ‘Jack.’

  ‘You picked up.’

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I just called to say hi.’

  ‘Hi’ would not do it. ‘Hi’ was wholly inadequate. He should be grovelling, pleading, shameful, shamed.

  All at the same time she felt pleasure at hearing his voice, pain at the loss of him and disappointment at what he was communicating. Nothing would ever mend things between them but an apology would be better than nothing at all. The only word she thought it appropriate for Jack to say to her was a sincere, two-syllable expression of remorse. He needed to say sorry.

  ‘Well, hi,’ she said.

  He was silent for so long, Juliet thought that the connection had been severed. Then he said, ‘Can I see you?’

  She didn’t reply. She couldn’t trust herself to, because she had missed him so much and wanted to see him so very badly she thought that if she spoke, she might weaken and accede to his request. In fact, she knew that she would. The only way at that moment to stay strong and resolute was to remain silent. She closed her eyes. She felt the phone shake in the grip of her hand with a tremor of trapped emotion.

  Then he said it. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  It wasn’t enough. Hearing it said just emphasised to her the enormity of the betrayal and the pain and humiliation he had caused her. She had been cheated on. The cheat was on the other end of the line, pleading for a second chance he did not deserve. ‘Sorry’ had just proven to be a pretty sorry word, in the face of what she had suffered. ‘I’ve got to go,’ Juliet said.