Chapter 6
Six
Clemence goes home with books clutched to her chest, and a third of the way up her second set of stairs, she’s stopped by a pair of denim-clad legs topped with the most terrific rear end she’s ever seen.
Clemence is not normally a butt-marveller, but this one is right at eye level, though whomever it belongs to is doubled over and struggling to breathe.
“Are you okay?” she calls up. Could this be a heart attack? Clemence feels her own heartbeat speeding up, though whether its due to panic or attraction she cannot discern.
But it’s probably the latter, for that butt belongs to Charles, the landlady’s son.
Charles, whose existence Clemence had been wondering if she’d only imagined, with a derrière she’d taken no note of at all at their first encounter, so focused had she been upon the fineness of his upper body.
Where has he been all her life? Or at least lately …
Charles, fortunately, does not seem to be having a heart attack at all, has simply been burdened with a heavy load and now he’s taking a necessary breather halfway up the stairs.
He’s practically panting. “I’m fine,” he’s answered her.
“Really. Just needed to put this down for a minute.” It’s steamy in the stairwell.
There’s a filthy window at the top letting in dim light, but you’d need a ladder to climb up and open it. Or to clean it.
Clemence asks Charles what he’s hauling.
“An A/C,” he says. He’s caught his breath, and picks it back up again, muscles flexed, now carrying it all the way up to the top.
Clemence hurries up behind him, pulling out her key.
“I’ll get the door.” Angling around him delicately, difficult with an armful of books.
His T-shirt is wet, and no doubt she’s sweating, too.
She unlocks the door and he uses his hip to nudge it open, bringing the air conditioner inside.
It’s on little wheels, so portable, supposedly, except that it weighs a ton.
“Are you okay, really?” she asks, dropping her books to the floor.
Charles’s face is red and he is twisting his remarkable body with a grimace as though his back is strained.
“A lot of stairs,” he says.
“I didn’t order an air conditioner,” says Clemence.
“You didn’t?” He gives her a withering look. “Oh, well, I’ll carry it all the way back down then. Must have got the wrong address.”
“I didn’t mean that,” she says. Charles is touchy. “I mean, thank you. Obviously. I just don’t understand …”
“My mom,” says Charles.
He’s still sweating and now his face has gone a funny colour.
“Oh my gosh,” Clemence says. “I should get you a glass of water.” She has become unaccustomed to hospitality, and the only available drinking vessel is a giant plastic beer stein.
On the side is a cartoon of a huge-breasted woman, her words in a speech bubble: I’ve got no time for small talk.
Your place or mine? Inappropriate, perhaps, but it had come with the apartment, so Clemence takes no responsibility, telling Charles as much as she hands him the glass.
He gulps the water down. “Thank you,” he breathes.
She gestures toward the air conditioner. “You really didn’t have to.” The appliance is bigger than her fridge.
He shrugs. “My mom insisted. It’s hot up here.”
“And I’m a girl.”
“That’s part of it.” He smiles. “She means well, my mom. She’s a bit hard to take. But I think she thinks that with a girl, you have to worry more.”
“We should probably tell her that I’m thirty-three years old.”
“It won’t make a difference,” he says. “I’m almost forty and she still makes me soup.”
“And you’re not even a girl.”
“It’s how she shows she cares,” says Charles.
He puts the glass down on the counter, and then pulls the air conditioner over to the small window in the corner.
“And this is how she shows she cares.” He starts pulling out the tube that will fasten to the window, setting up the entire arrangement.
“Good thing, too,” he says. “It’s sweltering. ”
“So you grew up here?” Clemence asks him while he works, and he murmurs an affirmative.
“We lived in the basement,” he explains as he places the panel in the window frame. “Didn’t need an A/C down there—it was always freezing. And my parents rented out the rest of the house.”
“Your dad?”
“He died when I was seven,” says Charles.
“Lung cancer. And my mom’s been running the show ever since.
” He is bending over again, plugging in the air conditioner, and Clemence can’t stop staring at his body, and then feeling guilty for objectifying him, because he seems like a nice guy and he has just delivered her an appliance.
“There we go,” he says. The tube fits into a panel that sits neatly in her window, and they’re all set.
He presses the On switch, and the machine begins its roar—followed by the blast of an explosion, and then silence.
The fridge cuts out. Somebody downstairs is yelling, “What the hell?”
“You blew a fuse,” says Clemence, figuring it out.
Charles finds her input unhelpful. “You think?” He disappears downstairs again, presumably into the basement where the fuse box is.
Alone now, Clemence opens the balcony door to let fresh air inside, which is all she needs anyway.
She’s already made it more than halfway through the summer without air conditioning—she looks at the machine hulking in the corner.
And then she regards the rest of the room which is, thankfully, tidy—she hadn’t been expecting company.
The great benefit of owning so little is that it’s easy to keep things in order.
Clemence straightens the pillows on her daybed anyway, admiring the effect.
She has started to love this space, which was never part of her plan.
So is it cheating? And wouldn’t an air conditioner, such a modern convenience, a comfort, make things even worse? She’s supposed to be abstemious.
She remembers the books she’d dropped by the door, and picks them up again, bringing them over to the empty shelf where she arranges them by author. It’s not much, doesn’t even begin to fill that one shelf, but this is just the start, and she’s looking forward to never charging her e-reader again.
Running her finger along the short row of spines, she turns when she hears Charles coming, taking the stairs two at a time. He’s no longer panting. The guy’s got great stamina, really, when he’s not bogged down by a hundred-pound weight. Clemence still has her hand on the books.
“You like to read?” Charles asks when he sees her. She guesses this is a world that’s foreign to him. Remembering that he’d known who Mr. Rochester was, but no doubt he’d seen it in a movie, or some old girlfriend had told him the plot of Jane Eyre.
She tells him, “I do. I’m kind of rebuilding my library. Starting over.”
“And you’re a writer?” he asks. No doubt, he remembers her and Jillian blathering on about Clemence living a life like a woman from a book.
“Well, I used to be.” Clemence steps away from the shelf now and walks over to the patio door, to put some space between them. “It was my job, but I got laid off last year.”
“Anything I might have read?”
Clemence hates that question. “I guess that depends what you read,” she says. While it was unlikely that Charles had subscribed to Wedding Belles, what did his proximity to her work have to do with anything?
He looks put out by her dismissal. Points at the A/C in the corner. “Listen, you’re going to have to hold off on using this for a while. I don’t know why, but it’s overloading the circuit. The wiring here’s a bit wonky.”
Clemence says, “I know.” The fridge is plugged into an extension cord running to an outlet in the bathroom. “But I mean, thank you. For trying. For dragging this thing all the way up here.”
He turns around on his way out the door. “I thought you were writing a book,” he tells her. “What your friend said.”
Clemence curses Jillian’s candour. “It’s more an experiential thing.”
“So you’re just doing a lot of eating and praying?”
“I mean,” says Clemence, giving what she hopes is a fey shrug. “What else is there, after all?”
He says, “I guess so.” He peels the sleeve of his wet T-shirt away from his biceps. “It’s really hot.”
“It’s not so bad as long as you don’t keep running up and down the stairs.”
He says, “Thank you for the water, though.”
“Any time.”
Naomi sends Clemence an Edible Arrangement, which Mrs. Yeung has to carry all the way up to her door.
“I could have come down to get it,” says Clemence. The arrangement is heavy, the stairs are a lot.
Mrs. Yeung follows Clemence into the apartment.
“Your friend says she’s worried about you.
That you’re isolated, and not working, and she can’t really get involved, because she’s too busy with her work.
” Clemence looks confused. “What?” says Mrs. Yeung.
“I read the card. Needed to see who it was for.”
“But my name was on the envelope.” Clemence pulls it out of the arrangement, her name prominently displayed.
“Okay,” Mrs. Yeung admits. “I also wanted to see who it was from. And why she had sent it. My house, my rules.” She points to the oversized citrus at the heart of the arrangement. “Are you going to eat the pomelo?”
“You want it?” A pomelo seems an acceptable payment for delivery, even factoring in the violation of privacy.
Mrs. Yeung accepts the fruit, holding it close like a baby, but she isn’t ready to go yet, looking around the apartment, peeking behind the bathroom door. “No rabbits,” she says, almost surprised.
“Not a single one,” Clemence affirms.
Mrs. Yeung rubs the knob at the end of the daybed. “This is a beautiful bed. It’s brass, just needs some polish. It’s high end. You’re lucky to have it.” Stopping at the shelf. “But this is new.”
“I found it.”
“Knock on wood,” says Mrs. Yeung, as she does so, humming her approval as she hears the solid sound. “This is nice. You could leave it when you go.”