Three

The night had chilled uncomfortably; Guillaudeu shivered in his thin coat, standing in the shadow of the building where he lived. Across the street, the grocer, Saul, watched him from between two pyramids of yellow apples. Guillaudeu affixed his gaze to the brass door handle three feet away, but he could not move.

Ever since his wife died there, he had been unable to enter his apartment without making at least two passes around the block. Even then he often stood just as he did now, poised on the threshold with his thoughts clouding over.

There was pity in the furtive eyes of his neighbors as he circled his home, and this night was no exception. He looked over his shoulder at Saul, who gave a barely discernible shrug before disappearing behind the apples. Finally Guillaudeu raised his arm, inserted the key, and propelled himself inside.

Death smells of pumpkins. After five months, the sweet, foul odor that had lingered in the apartment was certainly gone, but Guillaudeu was sure it had permanently destroyed his olfactory apparatus, if not his deepest core. As he climbed the narrow stairs to the second floor, he knew he would always remember that smell as he approached this place. His nose would always be testing the air: Is it gone yet? Is it truly gone? Could imagination alone conjure the stench? As time passed, he became certain that it did. The ever-rising bile was evidence. Or did he actually smell a far less dreadful scent and he was just twisting it in his mind? The grocery was right across the street, after all, and given his profession he was never far from dead things, the shreds of rot.

After she died, he sold all the furniture in the parlor. To pay for the burial, he told himself. But he surely did not have to sell the drapes for that, or every single lace tablecloth that she’d acquired over the years. The truth was that once he started, he couldn’t stop himself; it had felt profoundly right to him as he watched the heavy uncomfortable chairs, flowered rugs, and countless stools with their embroidered cushions disappear. Now that it was all gone and the parlor was empty except for his tall bookcases and their contents, the situation was better. The world, especially the museum, was crowded enough; this domestic emptiness soothed him. He had no plans to replace anything.

The disease had colonized Celia’s body and after two days of symptoms they both knew she would die. The only question left was whether it would be in a day, two, or just a few more hours. Actions were reduced to pathetic details: She could no longer bear to be moved, so Guillaudeu propped her up on every cushion he could find. By lifting his wife off the bed’s surface onto pillows, he was able to fit the chamber pot beneath her. He emptied it every half hour, turning his face away from the viscous, white-flecked fluid. Cholera was an efficient assassin. It drained its victims quickly, and without fanfare ferried them across the divide.

On the fourth afternoon of her illness Guillaudeu was stirring the bitters in the kitchen when he heard her half-choked breath. This is her last breath! Is this her last breath? She is gone! But he found her reading the newspaper. She was laughing.

“Emile,” she croaked. “This is too funny.”

She had vomited in such large quantities that her lips and chin were rashed and flaking. Beneath the skin, her flesh seemed to have been scraped away from the inside; he’d never seen the contour of her cheek and jawbone in such sharp relief. He almost did not recognize her, and her laughter, framed by this ghastly appearance and her white hair tangled by too many hours on the pillow, transformed her even more.

“What is it?”

“It says here that five hundred and seventy-six people have died in the last two days.”

Guillaudeu took the newspaper gently from her hands.

“Right here in Manhattan.” She turned her head slightly toward the window. She looked between the brick buildings up to the smoke-gray sky.

“I cannot distinguish myself even in my own death,” she announced. “My existence will be swept away. It will sink unremarkably. No children. No great works. Nothing to set me apart from five hundred and seventy-five other forgettable souls! The newspaper will not even have room for my obituary.” She laughed softly. The strange mask of her face swiveled toward him. “I’ve upset you.”

“It’s all right.” He braced himself, but could not keep his hand from shaking as he offered her the tea. “You know how the papers exaggerate. And you have brightened so many lives,” he continued. His voice sounded odd. “How can you say those things?”

But he knew how she could. Guillaudeu sat on the edge of the makeshift bed. The skin had wrinkled terribly on each of her fingers, and Guillaudeu wondered if the nausea he felt while he clasped them was simply a reaction — or could it be the first sign of his own demise? But he remained well. It was a fact that added its own kind of delirium to those days: What kind of order did this world contain if he tended to a sick and contagious person, yet remained well? Randomness was not something Guillaudeu was built to appreciate.

The tap on the door surprised them both; the doctor was not scheduled to arrive for several hours yet. Guillaudeu went to answer it in his socks.

The caved-in appearance of the man at the threshold revealed that he, too, had been struck. He clutched at the door frame, peering beyond Guillaudeu with distracted, half-sunk eyes. The man’s dark beard was matted with spittle or worse. He was tall but he bent forward with one arm clutching his abdomen.

“I must see her,” the man whispered.

“You’ve come to the wrong place, sir.” Guillaudeu glanced out into the corridor behind the man. “I’m sorry. You should get to a hospital. Do you need a carriage?”

“Joseph?” Her hoarse voice reached the men with surprising force.

“Celia!” The man swung his head frantically. “Emile. Please.”

Guillaudeu took a step back, confused. The man lurched past, leaving Guillaudeu in his malodorous wake.

It was not until he followed the man into the parlor and discovered the stranger’s head resting on his wife’s bosom and her shriveled arms clasping him about the neck that he understood that this was her lover. He observed that had she not been dehydrated of all her body’s liquids, his wife would now be crying the first tears of her illness.

Guillaudeu leaned on the sideboard. Her disease had forced everything from his brain, even as it let his body live; all past and present disintegrated, disappearing like his wife’s flesh with only the thinnest membrane holding together the tatters. He had become an automaton, and now he felt only the dimmest flicker of feeling. So this was the lover.

He imagined her walking arm in arm with this man just as she now appeared: emaciated, her skin pulled too tightly around her skull, hanging loosely from her chin. Wearing the rags of the grave. Of course it would not have been that way. But he could see nothing but their skeletal hands entwined.

He could not conjure the outrage that might have been appropriate in any other circumstance. He had known this man existed, after all, that he was somewhere in the city. It was strange to finally see his face, although certainly this ravaged caricature was a poor impression of the original. He felt a peculiar satisfaction, even now, in being able to clarify and catalog what had for so long been obscure. He did not feel anything that approached sadness. He was puzzled, horrified, relieved, and tired. His only certainty was that they would die, and that his own life was in a precarious flux.

The best he could do was to give Joseph a cup of bitters. He offered to help the man off with his jacket. He gently wrapped his wife’s lover in a quilt. The man would not meet his eyes.

When the doctor arrived, Guillaudeu simply said: Now there are two. The exhausted physician required no further explanation.

For another full night and day Guillaudeu tended to them as best he could, propping Joseph up as he had done with Celia. He wiped away sputum and vomit and emptied their pots. While the invalids slept, he crept into the room and watched them lying side by side like a monstrous pair of stillborn twins whose gray skin met with the light only to illuminate death. Each time he left the room he was drawn back almost immediately by the force of his curiosity: How many glimpses of the world were left to them, how many breaths? Halfway through the second night she died. Guillaudeu moved her carefully to her bedroom and then tended to her lover for eleven more hours. When Joseph, too, finally shuddered out of the world, Guillaudeu rushed from the apartment down two flights of stairs and burst into a cold, bright morning. He felt as if he were the ghost, emerging from one life and hovering at the threshold of the next.