Roommates

        The only photo was of the piano, as if in anticipation of doubt.
        “Are you thinking about moving?” asked David, in a familiar strained register Isaac hadn’t heard in a while.
        “No, no,” said Isaac. “This must be a joke.” He didn’t play piano.

        Flushed, Walt wanted to distract from his winning hand. “Isaac, whadja think,” he bellowed suddenly. “About that guy on the Internet.”
        Isaac folded.
        “A bit old, to be looking for a roommate,” he offered.
        “This guy,” Walt explained, “is 67, puts up a classified ad to share a bedroom—I say this guy is smart. I say he’s looking for a hot little co-ed to move in.”
        “Who says it’s a guy?”
        “No woman does that,” demanded Walt. “Are you kidding? No chance a woman does that.”
        But there was a chance, thought Isaac, who had been unable to stop thinking about the apartment. Morningside Heights, a nice gentle part of the city. Not far from David and Jennifer and the twins. Or maybe they could take his place. A big comfortable house for them. He knew Jennifer wanted to put him in a home, the evil huge Dane. I am Sixty-Seven and living Alone. Must be a woman. No man would put it that way.

        Both grandkids were planted in front of the TV in the next room, motionless and bulb-headed like mushrooms.
        “I thought maybe, if you want to move in here, it might make a lot of sense,” Isaac finished lamely. His ass was killing him.
        “We’re not worried about money,” emphasized David. “There’s not enough room in here anyway. Dad, you are thinking about moving.”
        “There’s room,” Isaac insisted. “You and Jennifer get a bedroom, the kids get another one. This place is too big, I don’t need it.”
        The size of the house contained somehow everything that he needed to escape—it was its big mournful roominess that allowed the dull resonance of death, that every hour was drowning his thoughts. Everywhere he went, there were huge and tiny flags that Sarah had placed, the markers of her small-footed curly-headed life—the coffee jar, the spidery vines atop the bay window, the little rounded trench in the mattress, an echo of his own massive one. Echoes of her dying, increasing in number daily. Doubling and tripling. Metastasizing.
        “Dad,” said David. “I’ve been talking with Jennie about this, actually—if you really want to move out of this place, you might want to think about moving in to a community.”
        “The hell with that,” said Isaac immediately.
        “It’s not a home,” said David quickly. “Dad, I just want you to go see one. That’s it. We can go there, you can see that everyone’s just living normally, you know, just, I just want you to think about it.”
        “No way in hell,” said Isaac, hoarse.
        “Dad, why not.”
        “I’m not doing it.” The kid just gazed at him, wanting a reason. He didn’t understand how hard it was to argue with such a pain in your ass. “It’s demeaning,” Isaac said finally. “I’m not sick, and I’m not even that old.”
        “You’re older than Mom.”
        “That’s irrelevant.” For David, it was always about Sarah, always. She was much closer to David than he had been. Both always reading, frail, the same crooked oddly grateful smile. “Irrelevant,” he repeated. “My parents were never put in a home.” Although they had escaped to Florida, birds ducking an endless winter, and they had had something like live-in help.
        “Just promise me you’ll think about it,” said his son, never much of a salesman.

        At 4am, woken suddenly by a phantom noise as always, unable to return to his dim uneasy sleep, Isaac wandered over to the computer like a slow ghost. He clicked the hyperlink. There was the plea again, and the piano. I am Sixty-Seven and living Alone. Another hyperlink beckoned him. There was something reckless about the blue gloaming that he hadn’t yet gotten used to, waking at 4am every morning. It was the right time to talk to a stranger.
        He clicked the hyperlink and the computer, alarmed, spewed a box at him, an email window with the address filled in already.

        “Hello,” he typed. “I am interested in moving in.” No. This was too forward. He didn’t want to scare her away. He hit backspace.

        Something about “clean and friendly” made him sound like a hooker. He deleted it.

        Already weary, he returned to bed and gazed into the colorless gloom. He tried to picture the owner of the apartment. Short. Women his age became shorter than they were. Pleasant-looking? Unlikely if she has to go to the Internet, swabbing a Petri dish of strangers, to find a roommate. A giantess, possibly. Or a wincing little crone. Guiltily, he had never accepted the wizening of his friends. Or Sarah’s friends. The shriveling and shrinking they did, or else the thickening and mutating. The bellies slowly puffing up saggily like air mattresses, the heads gone sparse like dying lawns. Ears and noses continuing to grow, oblivious: unharvested tubers.
        His computer burbled, a harp from Mars.

        He was awake, too. Benny Gold. Somehow this was a relief. Walt was right: No woman does that. Not a chance.
        The gloom was lifting, but slowly. He felt daring.

        “If you’re like me.” They shared a secret, the two of them.

        He couldn’t wait at this computer. He got up slowly, hoping to ease past a twinge he felt looming in his back. He meandered to the kitchen in the lifting darkness for water.
        With an ache—everything happened with an ache, everything—it occurred to him that this sounded too sudden, too desperate. Driving into Manhattan before dawn, on a Saturday, no less. Four, five in the morning, some parts of Manhattan are like a war zone. This Benny won’t trust anyone so desperate. Or maybe it’s a scam. I could be probably anyone, thought Isaac. With a pang: He could be anyone.
        The alien ripple, when it came, sounded to him foolishly optimistic.

        Interesting. Benny’s tone was subdued, now. “All morning.” A rebuke? Too late, thought Isaac grimly, easing into Sarah’s boxy Kia. He was committed. A car that had never made sense for her, he had thought a thousand times. This was a sporty strange car, a car for Europeans and newlyweds.
        He hadn’t driven into Manhattan in a long time. The highway had unfamiliar stretches, now: housing projects and headquarters he didn’t recognize. Normally a thick lisping thing, his heart felt weirdly insubstantial. One of the advantages of being retired, his son married, had been that his time for worrying about the impressions of others was over. The time for putting himself behind someone’s eyes, over. It was only fair—68, sagging and slow-legged, he didn’t want to see himself as anyone else saw him. Thickened, mutated. His chin a wobbling undercarriage. He thought: At least Benny wasn’t a woman. Although somehow, picturing Benny, he didn’t feel reassured. He felt anxious. He ran a hand through his hair, smoothing it.
        The city didn’t match his recollection of it: his memories of loose-limbed junkies taunting the police under the streetlights. At least up in the 120s, all was quiet, save for a few stragglers vacantly roaming. Probably worse downtown.

        The garage attendant wouldn’t stop staring at him, a dark little Hispaniolan attempting to infer the motives of an old man driving into Manhattan at night’s end. His eyes widened with concern. This was the context of an emergency, the attendant had decided, or an emergency’s aftermath: a tragedy. Isaac surprised both of them by grinning, a huge cunning grin, and turned the whole thing to farce. The attendant beamed. Isaac had become a lecher, ancient, incorrigible. “A ha,” croaked the little man happily, and almost clapped him on the shoulder.
        The smile was somehow still on his lips when he buzzed up, and a piping tinny voice invited him in.

        Benny was a little fish, a minnow, trim and tiny.
        “You’re Isaac,” he almost whispered. “Come in, come in.”
        “Yeah,” said Isaac, at once sensing he was cruder, perhaps less educated than this silvery fellow.
        “Come in, have a look around,” expanded Benny. His words were light lilting things, bowed in the center, rising and fading into the quiet.
        The light of the morning was filling it. A courtyard in the center of the building allowed windows on both sides. There was a relaxed scuffed tidiness to things, the magazines in a carefree pile shunted neatly to one side of the coffee table, the curtains worn but colorful, comfortable-looking.
        “Mmmm,” said Isaac, looking around.
        “Here’s the kitchen. Do you drink tea? Coffee?”
        “Decaf.”
        “No sugar,” said Benny apologetically. “Diabetes.”
        This was a surprise—you didn’t think of a small guy like Benny as getting diabetes. You pass an invisible threshold, sixty, sixty-five, and suddenly there’s no rhyme or reason to what might happen to you. All bets are off.
        “That’s fine,” Isaac said.
        “See the room?”
        It was spare, somehow touching in its austerity. Furniture containing nothing: a bed with no mattress, a squat dark dresser, a heavy-looking bedside lamp of brass and bulging blue stained-glass like bunches of blueberries.
        “A widower, I think you said,” said Benny from the doorway, as Isaac looked out the window, into the courtyard—a cramped vortex of stone and vines.
        Isaac turned and saw him sadly smiling, a small smile. He didn’t feel like a widower, that was for sure. “Widower” had a womanly, spidery feel to it. The word didn’t match his bulk.
        “As of about six months ago,” he said. But Sarah had been dying long before that. Around Benny he wanted to hold nothing in. “It felt like longer than that, though,” he heard himself saying. “Breast cancer. Sort of drawn out.”
        Benny nodded. “You can tell.”
        “Eh?”
        “I can tell, you’ve been through a long death. You can see it in people.” He pronounced it like an axiom, a natural law.
        “Where do you see it,” Isaac said, vaguely worried.
        “You just see it,” asserted Benny, serene. He rationed his words, gazing at the window. “In the eyes, maybe. You look tired. It takes the fight out of you.”
        “What do you know.” Intended to wound, this came out playful, or perhaps it was the opposite.
        “My mother got the same look, taking care of my father. And then, I’m sure I probably got the same look taking care of her.”
        “I got plenty of fight.”
        Benny opened his mouth to smile, now, showing neat rows of gray teeth.
        “Kids?”
        “I have a son.”
        “That must be wonderful.” Shaking his head with the wonder of it. Isaac, meanwhile, returned to the view. It could be his view for years to come. It seemed fitting, actually. It occurred to him suddenly that he had been thinking about his final years all wrong. He had been boxing himself in, somehow. Even thinking of them as such was wrong: his Final Years. They were just years.
        Benny was watching him patiently.
        “It’s okay. He’s an okay kid. Two grandsons, twins. Their mom’s a big blonde bitch.” This sounded harsh, meaner than he felt. Saying “bitch” in front of Benny felt like a mistake. He strove to return focus to David, the grandkids, his genetic wealth. “He’s a stay-at-home dad, can you believe it. He blogs.”
        “Who would have thought!” said Benny. He seemed tickled absolutely pink by all this. “That you could make money just typing up your own little newsletter, sitting in your room. Unbelievable!”
        “He doesn’t make any money.” Isaac knew there was a decent chance this was untrue. “She brings in all the money. She’s some kind of marketing veep. He spends most of his time with the kids, anyway. They have signs of autism. I think,” finished Isaac, wanting to hedge against what was another possible lie. Benny seemed to recognize that this should be allowed to pass, unremarked upon.
        They walked to the kitchen.
        “What about you,” said Isaac.
        “I never married,” said Benny.
        This was thrilling to Isaac. The life he had never led.
        “Girlfriend?”
        “I’ve had a few,” admitted the minnowy little man. “A few.” He was picturing them, it was clear.
        “Had, eh.”
        “I find that you get too old for all that,” said Benny, pouring coffee into a little mug with a shield. He handed it to Isaac, peering upward at him, seeming to glow, gathering himself for a soliloquy. One of his eyes was cloudy, Isaac noticed. The other burned.
        “No wife,” said Benny. “No children. No brothers and sisters, no nieces and nephews. And no pets.” There was an uncertain defiance in him, as if he had been waiting to test these words on someone. As he spoke, a wheeze crept into the ends of his sentences. “I’ve always enjoyed sharing this apartment with people. It’s a lovely apartment, in a lovely neighborhood. I’ve had friends stay in the room you’d be taking, from time to time. In fact I regret not sharing it more. I hate the feeling of regret. Don’t you?”

        Under natural circumstances, they would not have become friends. During the first few weeks, they didn’t know how to communicate. They danced an uneasy ballet around the single bathroom, giving each other unnecessarily wide half-hour berths, suffering silently at the pits of themselves. Benny, in his oblique way, refused to allow the television in the living room. Instead it stared Isaac down from opposite his own bed, as though he were in a hospital.
        “I don’t trust this Obama,” he announced to Benny one morning. Breakfast was the one meal they shared.
        Isaac nodded sagely. “But who else are you going to vote for.”
        “McCain’s not going to back down on Israel.” He was suddenly aware of how other people, people he had never met, had assembled his words for him. Cunning smooth-haired men and women, half his age, eyes twinkling.
        “McCain,” sighed Benny. He did a lot of sighing. “He’s older than us, you know.”
        “Obama, I feel like he has no experience.” Feeling naked, he added, “I gotta be honest with you.”
        “Yes, but these new Republicans.” Benny let this hang in the air, a taunt. “The new Republicans don’t know how to govern. The old ones had some discipline. They could compromise.”
        “You know what I think?” said Isaac. “Here’s what I think. Obama doesn’t want to defend Israel. He’s not going to do a thing. He wants the Islamists to win, in Iraq, everywhere.”
        “You can’t possibly think that.”
        “Of course I think that,” retorted Isaac. “Barack Hussein Obama, for Christ’s sake. Hussein, like Saddam.”
        Benny’s sad lamb’s eyes communicated surrender. It made Isaac want to continue, to pillage and gorge.
        “He was raised a Muslim, for Christ’s sake. You read the Koran, it’s a religion of hate. Islam is a religion of hate, of intolerance. It’s about revenge. There isn’t room for that in this world anymore.”
        Benny remained silent, sipping.
        “The things they do to women,” protested Isaac.
        But Benny was lost in thought. Isaac realized with a pang that he hadn’t, technically, read the Koran himself. The silence endured. It intensified. Benny was its slate-gray heart.

        But David wasn’t going.
        “Dad,” he said, again in that nervous higher register, “you have a really strange setup with this guy. Jennie and I have been talking about it—I mean, this is someone you met on Craig’s List.”
        “We get along great,” said Isaac. It had been three weeks.
        “I just,” said David. “I don’t know.” Suddenly around Isaac no one was saying what they wanted to say.
        “Spit it out.”
        “No, it’s just strange.”
        “I think it’s strange that your calling in life is just typing nonsense into a computer all day. You’re talking to me about strange, I think that’s pretty goddamned strange.”
        “I,” began David, and then there was a hissed consultation in the background.
        “Is that Jennifer,” said Isaac, seeing her; her savage little glinting eyes, her broad bull terrier’s face.
        “It’s not safe,” said David. “You just don’t know this guy.”
        “He doesn’t know me, either.”
        “Well maybe he doesn’t care, Dad. Maybe he doesn’t care who he steals from, you know. Or who he attacks.”
        “David, Benny is practically a midget. You saw him! If you’re worried about him attacking me, I mean, you can’t be serious. He’s this puny little midget. This is just a ridiculous conversation to be having.”
        A silence. Then something rustled in the next room: a page turning. I’m being loud as hell, thought Isaac. For Christ’s sake.
        “Dad, it just makes me uneasy and I wish you had thought a little bit more about this before doing it.”
        “Come on,” said Isaac. He had calmed down. The kid got strange anxieties. “You should really come over and play some piano for us.”
        The phone enhanced the clippedness of it, the muttered begrudgement: “I’ll think about it.”

        He was so loud on the phone. It was his hearing, fading from him. “Midget.” In his heart of hearts, Isaac didn’t see Benny as a midget; far from it. He was like a small silver statue, all dignity, untouchable. There was something exotic about the fineness of his features, the delicacy of his wrinkled skin. But he had heard Isaac trumpeting “puny little midget,” he must have, because now they didn’t speak at all.
        For that first three weeks, Isaac realized, they had lacked a defining moment; they didn’t know what to make of each other. It was all hesitancy and tiptoeing. Doing things separately, getting only vague ideas of the other one. Now they had their defining moment, and it was Isaac bellowing into a phone about the pathetic feebleness of his bookworm roommate. Isaac the trumpeting oaf, Benny the shrimp. Isaac the asshole and Benny the silent little Narcissus—because who fucking cares, thought Isaac furiously after a silent morning breakfast, each eating cereal frostily, in isolation, if another man calls him “puny little midget,” at their age, except for a vain little bastard. A narcissistic little prick.
        It was rent day.
        “Oh,” said Isaac, as if it had just occurred to him, “I’ll go get next month’s rent.”
        “About that,” said Benny. There was a thinness to his voice, a stretched quality.
        “What.”
        Benny gathered himself.
        “I think it’s best if you moved out.” Cold, clear.
        “Move out?” Slow. A parrot.
        “Well, do you think this is working out? Is this working out for you? It doesn’t seem like we fit together.”
        Lamely, Isaac said, “Well it’s not so bad.”
        “We should be friends,” said Benny. “But we have nothing to say to each other. Don’t you agree? We don’t talk, and we don’t get along. Isaac, I need to live with a friend.”
        “Why didn’t you get one of your friends to live here then,” said Isaac. “If that’s important.” He didn’t know he could get all angry and flushed like this.
        “I don’t have many friends.”
        “Well then.” You couldn’t really blame him for this. But you could. If he was so quiet with everyone, so reluctant to open up and give any part of himself, you could blame him for that.
        “Why did you come here?” asked Benny.
        “Hey, look,” said Isaac loudly. “You put up the goddamn thing on the Internet.”
        “You don’t even play piano.”
        “Oh for Christ’s sake.”
        What was it with the stupid piano, Isaac wanted to know.
        He thought of what it could have possibly been. The piano surviving a fire. The piano, which his mother had always wanted him to learn, and he never did. The piano, mocking his mother’s encroaching deafness.
        Glancing up, he saw Benny staring at it and saying nothing. It was clear that he wasn’t going to continue.
        “Fine,” said Isaac, “Fine. I’ll move out. Fine,” and like a slow-moving teenager he plodded into his room, and turned on the television, and waited for David to wake up.

        “Dad, this is going to have to wait,” said David.
        “What in the hell for,” said Isaac.
        Over the line, there was breathing.
        “Someone’s gotten hold of my credit card number, and social security number, and a lot of other things, and I really have to take a day or two and sort that out.”
        “Identity theft,” said Isaac.
        “Sure.”
        “That’s what it is,” said Isaac, triumphant. “Identity theft, all right.” He couldn’t help it: “I knew this would happen.”
        “What the hell does that even mean.” The kid sounded tired. “What do you mean, you knew this would happen. You have no understanding at all of how computers work. You have this vague, this fear of them, this stupid fucking mistrust. You knew this would happen. You didn’t know fucking anything. And you still don’t.”
        Chastened: “All right.” Rarely did David talk to him this way. It would never strike him as normal, “fucking” coming out of his child’s mouth.
        “So, yeah.”
        “So maybe you can move me tomorrow?”
        “We’ll see.”
        “You need me to watch the kids?”
        “Jennie’s here with the twins. She took the day off.”
        “All right.” Without knowing why, Isaac said: “Those kids, huh.”
        “Yeah, those kids.” He was on the warpath, as Sarah used to say. His words took a downward sniping motion. “Dad. You know what. Let me tell you something. You have to stop treating them like they’re retarded.”
        “I don’t treat them like they’re retarded.”
        “You do. You think they’re retarded. I can tell, Jennie can tell.”
        “I think they’re maybe a little slow—”
        “They’re not slow. They’re not, fucking—.” Another hissed consultation. “I have to go.”
        “Go then. Maybe tomorrow?”
        “We’ll see.” Pointedly: “Say hi to Benny for me.”
        I can’t, thought Isaac. He’s taking a walk.

        It was a dumb experiment. Anderson Cooper strode in front of some wreckage, as Isaac thought about it. You never heard of guys his age just getting an apartment with a stranger, the way kids did, kids with no concept yet of the value of the months of his lives—signing away six of them to a total stranger, some alcoholic or control freak or dullard. Tossing another twelve down the hole, an irrecoverable year of their lives slipping away like drainwater. He flipped over to the food channel and there was Emeril, his shoulders level with his ears, smiling his President Bush smile, the crescent-eyed smirk, pushing his underbite at you like an elbow in your ribs.
        A stupid experiment, and only undertaken because he couldn’t sleep that night, or any night, and he was alone, and it was a new part of his life that he was unprepared for. You don’t suddenly become old, but the realization that you’re old: that’s sudden. He was facing the house, in his mind. Returning to it seemed harder than burying his own wife.
        He got up, peered into the courtyard. The most beautiful places in the world are made by people. It had rained, recently, and the green of the vines was brilliant, the dark crumbly stone setting it off.
        He had only done it because it had been 4am, when he wrote that email in Outlook, setting it all in motion. He had been feeling like a different person, just upon waking up. That early in the day, it was possible to forget everything he had learned, about people and how exhausting it was to deal with them, to get to know them and run through all the little alleyways of their lives, like memorizing a map of a metropolis. Yes. And that early it was possible to pretend that he could make a new beginning at 68, with a stranger. A would-be friend.
        He fell asleep somewhere during Rachael Ray or Giada De Laurentiis, the round-faced American and the hook-nosed foreigner, a pairing that blended in his dreams into a beaming titan who had invited him into her monstrous gleaming kitchen. She was indefatigably creating mountains of food, plate by plate, surrounding him with it and smiling eagerly with flashing teeth and lips and insisting that it wasn’t difficult, none of it, it could be anyone doing it.

        He awoke around 9pm or 10pm, the sun gone, an ashen stillness in his mouth and eyes. He was awake for about half an hour in the darkness, hoping to return to sleep, knowing it was futile. The television was off.
        It took him a long time to remember what he was doing there, why he had stayed in his room all day: Benny wanted him to leave.
        As if cued by his thoughts, the door opened. It made no sound. He knew it was open only because of the light, from some distant room at the other end of the apartment, around the walls and perhaps from behind a door.
        Wordlessly the figure of Benny crept to the bed. Isaac felt this rather than saw it. He was incapable of movement. He was facing away from the door.
        His body shifted as the bed yielded to the weight of the second man, easing himself onto it.
        Moving low and slowly, as if in penitence, Benny’s body curled around Isaac’s, his chest nestling into Isaac’s back, his hand clutching the crook of Isaac’s elbow.
        Somehow, Benny thought nothing; he focused only on the body outside of his own, the interface of papery skin and the expansion of warmth of bodies in a bed.