WHEN ADAM HEARD her voice and then her steps on the wooden stairs, it came to pass that he squeezed behind the cupboard to the right of the door. Squatting in the bathtub, frozen with fear, Lilli stared at him. There was a knock, Lilli turned the sprayer off. Evelyn entered.
“I just quit,” she announced—and then almost toneless—“my job.”
Foam clinging to her arms and shoulders, Lilli got out of the tub.
“I’m sorry,” Evelyn said and turned around.
“Adam?” she called as she left. “Adam, where are you?”
She climbed to his workshop. He knew what it looked like up there. Lilli tried to pull up her panties, which had got rolled up and twisted at her knees. Adam looked over her glistening back and out to the garden. Hopping about on the freshly mowed grass were blackbirds, sparrows, and a magpie. Over the last few days he had weeded the bordering flower beds, the fence had been freshly painted in May. The garden hose lay neatly coiled up between the driveway and the spot where he burned trash. The turtle in its little pen had crept out of sight. Evelyn came slowly down the stairs. She stopped at the bathroom door.
“Adam, are you in here?” She opened the door. “Adam?”
“I’m sorry,” Lilli whispered. She had yanked her panties up to where they hugged her hips like a cord, and was now clamping a towel under her arms to cover her breasts. “I’m sorry,” she said again.
Lilli glanced toward the window as if she might find him there in the garden. Why didn’t she say something? I’m far, far away, Adam thought. There was Evelyn standing right in front of him now. He couldn’t help smiling—she still had on her white blouse, black skirt, and waitress’s apron.
“Who’s she?” Evelyn asked, jerking her head back toward Lilli. She picked up a towel draped across the washbasin and threw it at Adam’s chest. It fell to the floor.
“Who is this woman?”
He picked up the towel and held it to him like a loincloth.
“I’m sorry,” Lilli whispered.
“Is this your fitting?”
Lilli looked up briefly, then back at the floor.
“It was so hot,” Adam said.
“Tell her to finish her shower, that won’t make any difference now either.”
Evelyn hesitated briefly at the door and gazed at Lilli, who with upper arms pressed to her body was standing there bent slightly forward, trying to unroll her white panties and tug them up over her butt.
Adam counted Evelyn’s steps. They seemed to linger at the threshold to her room. He was afraid she might turn around and return to the bathroom. Then the door slammed. Her old sofa groaned audibly in the silence of the house.
Adam was sitting at the kitchen table, brushing at breadcrumbs with his fingers. It felt good to prop his head in his hands. In front of him, beside the opened jar of stewed quince, was a paper bag of fruit that looked like little purple onions but felt soft through the paper. He didn’t want to risk taking any out. Maybe he had gone too far just carrying the bag up the steps into the kitchen.
Adam, barefoot, a towel around his hips, had gathered up his and Lilli’s things in the workshop, but she had to send him upstairs again because he had returned without her bra, and without the photograph too. He had to pass Evelyn’s room again, move up and down the creaking stairs again—but only with the photo. Evelyn had probably stashed her new bra somewhere, Lilli had hissed, and then broken into tears.
She kept saying, “What can I do? What can I do?” to which Adam could only respond with whispers of “It’s not so bad” and “It’ll be all right.”
But what he had really wanted was for Lilli to finally shut up. Every word she spoke only chained him to her all the tighter. And no, he hadn’t been in his right mind. Otherwise why hadn’t he put clothes on, instead of trailing after Lilli in his bathrobe, and then picking up Evelyn’s bike from where it had slid down to the base of the quince tree. So that his bathrobe had spread wide open. He couldn’t have made it any clearer to the neighbors what had just happened. Lilli should have done her talking before, not after it was too late: “He’s in the garden. I think he’s outside in the garden.” Just that. He would have slipped upstairs to his workshop—and fine. Nothing would have happened, not one thing.
Back in the house, Adam had for one brief moment actually believed that everything would be all right—just as everything was always all right once he was inside his house. That’s why he had hung up Evelyn’s keys and carried the bag into the kitchen. She was always leaving stuff lying around. He had found the half-eaten bowl of quince preserves on top of the breadbox and put it in the fridge. Instead of the cutting board, she had sliced bread on a newspaper—she had taken to buying a copy of that fish wrap of late. As usual it had been left to him to shake the newspaper out over the sink, fold it up, and add it to the stack in the cellar. He’d been brought up short by the felt-tip circle around the museum tour: “History of the Laocoön Group,” even though Evelyn knew she wouldn’t have time for it.
Upstairs Evelyn was moving back and forth. She had slammed doors and flung them open again, books had fallen to the floor. Hadn’t it been his responsibility to go upstairs, to take that first step?
But it was quiet again now, except for the hum of the fridge. Now and then Adam would brush more breadcrumbs away, only to return to the same position. He was thankful for every minute that he could sit at the kitchen table without having to say anything.
Suddenly he felt the pain. A burning under his breastbone, as if a hard lump had got stuck there. Adam could see himself stretched out on the kitchen floor, unconscious, Evelyn at the door.
Suddenly he became frightened that Evelyn might harm herself. But then almost immediately came the sound of the toilet flushing and her footsteps, and that was just as frightening. Adam stood up. Holding the bag in one hand, massaging his chest with the other, he looked up at the ceiling as if he could see Evelyn. All he could think to do was say he was sorry, to apologize. He went to the stairs, sat down on the second step, and placed the bag beside him. Adam was disappointed to notice the pain easing. His elbows on his knees, he propped up his head, which felt unnaturally heavy the longer he held the pose.