Pieces for the Left Hand: Stories (23 page)

I asked her if that was more of her own laundry she was folding, and she said that it wasn’t. She told me that she liked folding laundry, it calmed her and she enjoyed imagining strangers discovering their folded clothes. She said she did it all the time.

I invited her back to my apartment and one thing led to another. For several days we carried on, calling in sick to work and making love at all hours. Lying by my side in my bed one night, the Mad Folder told me that she was glad to have met me when she did, because she was not getting on so well with her roommate and in fact was planning on moving out of the building. Did I mind if she stayed with me for a few days? Since our affair had been nearly unceasing and was conducted exclusively at my place anyway, I agreed to her plan.

That was a mistake. I came back from work the next day to find all my clothes washed and folded and put away in my drawers. Furthermore, the bed was neatly made and my closet rearranged and organized. My books had been alphabetized and kitchen implements sorted and secreted in the cabinets; and the refrigerator, purged of its rotting food and scoured clean, looked almost completely empty.

I told the Mad Folder that it wasn’t working out, and after a terrible fight—I had, after all, promised to let her stay—she stormed out, never to be seen again.

When I told my friends what had happened, they refused to believe it. Then the folding stopped. At first, our relationships went on as they had before my affair: in fact, our socializing seemed to intensify, as if in compensation for our loss. But soon the Folder’s disappearance began to take its toll. In the hallway, conversations stopped abruptly when I appeared. The laundry room took on a new desolation, and people walked around in wrinkled clothes. Eventually I spied several floormates doing their laundry two floors away, in a foreign laundry room.

That ought to have been my cue to move away, but instead I haunted the laundry rooms each night for weeks, folding whatever dry laundry I found. This continued until a woman caught me folding her underwear, and I was informed that if I didn’t put it down immediately, she would call the super to beat me up.

Until I left the city for good, I did my wash at laundromats, a different one every week.

Sickness

A friend of ours lost a small child to a terrible disease. So awful was this illness, and so prolonged the child’s death, that his wife suffered a nervous breakdown and, since she and our friend had ample money for professional help, checked herself into a spa to recover. She asked our friend, however, to remain at their palatial home and eradicate all traces of the child’s existence. Such was the depth of her grief. When he had completed this task he was to contact her, and she would return. We spoke to him at the time and he seemed confident that he would finish quickly.

However, the job was not as simple as he had anticipated. He had no trouble dispatching baby toys and clothes, photographs and crayon drawings. He hired a cleaning service to rid the house of the child’s smell. But it quickly became evident that items less directly involved with the child nonetheless stirred up painful memories, and he had to dispose of these as well: his own clothes, upon which the child had spit up; their furniture, on which she had played and slept; the car that had ferried her to and from the hospital; the kitchen appliances, which they used to prepare her meals. It wasn’t long before our friend was having the floors removed and the lawn and shrubs torn up. We saw him very infrequently during this period. Though he was compelled by what obviously had become a kind of sickness, he always looked clean and neat, doggedly on his way somewhere related, no doubt, to his mission.

Just recently we noticed that a wrecking ball was at work knocking down our friend’s house, and bulldozers were chugging across the property, flattening the landscape. We have also heard from our friend’s wife. She checked out of the spa within a month and in time divorced our friend, for which we can’t blame her, given that she would likely have found herself on our friend’s list of things to eliminate. She has remarried and is planning on starting a new family.

Our letters and phone calls to our friend are not returned. Once we baby-sat for the doomed child, in the days before she grew ill, and it seems likely that we are regarded as too closely affiliated with her memory. This suits us well, however, as it seems possible that our friend, if given the opportunity, might kill us.

Unlikely

M., once our close friend, gradually became unbearable as her life’s disappointments led to bitterness, finger-pointing and crude gossip. We took our time returning her letters and phone calls, finally refusing to answer them at all, and eventually the letters and calls stopped entirely.

Then, just when we thought we would never again hear from her, she contacted us with the terrible news that she had been diagnosed with cancer, and was beginning treatment immediately. Horrified, we apologized for our past inattentiveness to her problems, promising to stay in close touch during her time of need. It seemed to us now that our complaints about her personality had been petty and perhaps even inaccurate; indeed, it was hard to remember exactly what we had found so unappealing about this friend, whose bravery in the face of death revealed her as a woman of strong, even extraordinary, character.

After a battle of several years, M. succeeded in defeating the cancer, and her doctors reported with pleased surprise that the disease was unlikely to recur. We sent her a large fruit basket in congratulation, accompanied by a letter expressing our gratitude for her years of loyal friendship.

However, our friend’s restored health did little to prevent further personal and professional failures, which amassed in much the way they had before she was sick, and she again resorted to monotonous grumbling, accusation and slander. Once again she became difficult to bear, and again we cut her off, more confident than ever in the rightness of our reaction, even going so far as to surmise that her illness may have been the result not of random misfortune or genetic error but of her own bad habits, such as smoking, overeating and indolence. When recently we learned through the grapevine that she had suffered a relapse and was not expected to survive, we were saddened, but remained convinced that such a thing was unlikely to happen to us.

Smoke

A house to the west of ours cannot be seen from our windows, as it stands in a shallow depression surrounded by tall trees. But it is possible to observe, on cold mornings, the woodsmoke that rises from the house and disperses in the air. Since my study faces west, I have a good view of the neighboring property, and for years, when I found it difficult to concentrate or needed to relax, I would gaze out the frosted window at the endlessly rising and vanishing white smoke.

One winter morning some years ago, while watching the smoke rise from the trees, I noticed an abrupt change in its quality. It turned blue and then black, varying in volume from a thin plume to a heavy cloud, and back again. I studied the shifting smoke for the better part of an hour before returning to my work.

It wasn’t until a week later that our neighbor was arrested for murder. She had used a shotgun to kill her abusive husband and—with the help of her two children, an ax and a saw—chopped his body into pieces, then burned the pieces in the woodstove. The bone chips that remained were dropped down the outhouse pit. To my horror, the neighbor identified the morning I had been watching as the time of her crime. She is now in prison, and her children are under the care of foster parents and several psychologists.

New owners gutted the house, which sold for next to nothing, and furnished it with a fireplace where the woodstove, removed by police as evidence, once stood. White smoke has again appeared on the horizon. Consequently, I have installed a shade on my study window, which I pull down on cold mornings to obscure the sky. Only in summer do I raise the shade completely.

Flowers

We met an acquaintance on the street looking uncharacteristically glum. His face, usually animated and friendly, had become frozen into an attitude of misery, a condition all the more surprising because he had recently married a beautiful and intelligent woman, and had seemed deliriously happy in the immediate wake of the wedding.

Over drinks, our friend told us his tragic story. He had courted his wife with relentless abandon in the months after they met, and when it came time to ask her to marry him, he bought a gigantic bouquet, which he presented to her as he proposed. So eager was he to hear her accept his proposal, and so ardent was his love, that, without a moment of forethought, he promised to bring her flowers every single day they were married, should she say yes. Of course she accepted, and they were wed some months later.

The first weeks of their marriage were an unadulterated joy. They honeymooned in Italy in the spring, and every morning he rose early, went out and bought a bouquet, which he gave to her while she still lay in bed. The morning they left for home, he was too rushed to buy flowers, but their plane arrived in America with ample time to spare, and he bought her a rose at the airport. Upon their return to our city, he found a florist near the house they shared, and visited there every morning before the two left for work.

Soon, however, his office schedule was changed. He had to report to work an hour earlier than usual, well before the florist opened, and got off at half-past five, the very moment the florist closed. To get around this problem, he sometimes visited the florist on his lunch hour or, barring that, dropped in at the market on his way home. The resulting flowers were often less than fresh, but still fulfilled his promise.

When he went away to a business conference, he arranged to have flowers delivered to his wife at home each morning, and when his wife went away to visit her sister in a faraway town, he had them delivered to her there. But he was beginning to see how complicated life could be under this system, even in the best of times, and he found himself beset by worries that he would forget, or that, for some reason, cut flowers would suddenly become unavailable in our region. Then there were some close calls: a hectic day that ended with his snipping a rose from a bush in a public park; an evening of endless business meetings after which, near midnight, he brought her a plastic flower arrangement from his secretary’s desk; and a dreadful near-collapse that concluded with a fax of a drawing of a flower.