Never Cleaner

NEVER CLEANER

 
John was a man who liked to groom alone. Phoebe, his wife, was a secret Democrat. He and Phoebe had always had their own bathrooms and the private satisfactions they took behind curtains, the shower curtain and the drawn curtain on the voting booth. They shared a fastidiousness for bodily cleanliness but she also felt clean, clean and singular as a perfect, unbroken beach shell, when she cast her votes. In ‘72 she swore to herself she would share a bathroom if John would vote for McGovern. Multiple bathrooms were a sign of their prosperity. But now that he is dead, she sees it was more than that; He liked to keep himself apart.
 

Phoebe looks into John’s bathroom, as she does daily, and sees there are still footprints in the plush of the bath mat, the scar of toothpaste and shave cream dried in the sink. One used towel is still coiled on the floor. Then she notices something odd: a leopard print blanket is sprawled on top of the radiator like some sultan’s robe. The radiator is a low one crouching beside the toilet. The sight of the blanket, so garishly masculine, stirs some reserved pot of anger. She had never seen it before. How did such a thing get into their house?
 
Meticulously shaved, John would exit the bathroom smooth and clean as a seal, his thick gray hair slicked back, his face pink and occasionally dotted with tissue and blood. Then, the wake of his efforts tumbled in the steamy bathroom behind him, he’d call his wife, Phoebe, yelling “Sugar?” as if wanting to find her while he was this fresh. This was during the moon of his retirement. A time she had been waiting for.
 
Phoebe dares to finger the edge of the blanket. She wraps her robe tighter around her, suddenly cold. She looks at the large craters his feet made and whispers Sugar? (She began calling him Sugar, back. But sometimes she had called him Sir and then he called her Sir, too.) As Sugar stands amid the stillness and tumult of the medicine blue bathroom, she senses someone behind her. It’s Ivan, his yellow bucket of cleaning supplies clacking beside him. “You scared me, Ivan. You mustn’t creep up on me like that.” His dark lips curl into a fast smile. This is what she had ended up with: an attractive stranger in her house. John had arranged the fattest life policy. With it, their daughter Linda had hired Ivan and Yelena.
 
“Sorry, I went to Cross County and found not the right cleanser, so I use this,” he holds a stiff scrub brush up in the air. Linda has said that Ivan doesn’t understand personal space, and she notices that he does stand too close for conversation. She can smell something sharp and lemony coming off his wrists and neck. A triangular patch of chest hair sprouts over the top of his white shirt. It’s like the shirt of a peasant in a Russian novel.
 
“That is fine, Ivan,” she says with a wave of one hand. Phoebe has had housekeepers before, single girls who came and went as their immigration status wavered or anonymous people from cleaning services who moved fast as dervishes, too fast, she had comforted herself, to notice the intimacies of the house. Since John died, she has felt somehow too shy for a housekeeper. Yet she hadn’t cleaned the house herself. No wonder it was dirty. A mixture of chandeliers and dust, of signs of wealth and signs of neglect, Linda said it almost looked like they were old money. Even though they wouldn’t know the difference, the couple from the Ukraine makes her self-conscious. Ivan and Yelena live with her, live in her house!
 
It has been a month and Phoebe has learned that Yelena is the smarter of the two, but Ivan is healthier than his wife, more robust. Yelena is clever but not fit. Phoebe has seen her curse when the she was vacuuming and there was a short circuit. Exhaustion or impatience? Ivan has neither. He would do anything for her, as her daughter has promised.
 
“I clean now, the bathroom?” Phoebe sighs. He asks her about John’s bathroom everyday.
 
“No, not this bathroom, Ivan, only the other one, only mine.”
 
“And you want I dust all?” In a way she envies him. She imagines the simplicity of a squirt of cleanser, the smooth clearing away with paper towel. The fact that these walls, these rooms mean nothing to him, have no memory. She sees the outline of the dark center of a breast through his shirt and a small waterfall crashes in her spine. Huffily, she pulls her pink robe tighter around her.
“Yes, dust, Ivan but not in here.” She stands in the doorway of John’s bathroom and, reaching behind her, pulls the door shut. She acts furtive, as if there is stolen cash stacked in the bathtub. There is the leopard-print blanket after all. Maybe it is Ivan and Yelena’s-perhaps they had gone in there against her wishes. But why would they bring a blanket there? Ivan must never go in there and she tells him this sternly, pointing her index finger. The empty room makes her jittery and proprietary. Not Yelena and not you. Ivan shrugs. Luckily he’s not very curious.
 
Phoebe can’t help watching Ivan as he walks away, his looming shoulders–the shoulders of a man– headed toward her room, her bed! He turns to go into her bathroom and she sees the muscle man pose of MR CLEAN peeking at her from over the lip of the bucket.
 
***
 
The next day something terrible happens. Shuffling through the house opening and closing doors as if doing a mental inventory, Phoebe opens the guestroom and finds Ivan naked. Well, with his shirt off, his jeans on, faded white creases fanning out around his crotch. The skin on his chest is smooth and hairless. Yelena stands next to him fully clothed wearing an undone apron, the loose strings dangling at her hips.
 
“Mrs.?” Yelena said, as her sallow face blushed.
 
“Oh!” was all Phoebe said.
 
But as Phoebe stood there, her lost body seemed to prickle and ignite, as if brought back to alertness. Her thighs grew warm and liquid-y and she imagined the sides of the pink robe flapped out like wings or fire. She was burning, flying.
 
She slowly closed the door. First it had been a nursery, then a guestroom. It had never been a sex room! Rage burned in her cheeks. Ivan’s naked chest produced in her first the flying and the burning, then a mild feeling of neglect, a stunned separateness. She felt awkward and exposed as she walked back to her room as if someone had walked in on her. She had to tell herself that neither one of them had seen the flowering of her robe, the way its lapels seemed to undulate and flutter, its pink, slit flanks opening slowly like stage curtains revealing the length of her leg and then dancing, soaring like flames.
 
She suddenly wanted a glass of grapefruit juice. She walked back to the landing and smoothed down the folds of her robe as if tamping down the embers. She was still. Ash. She looked down the flight of steps and felt the dryness of her mouth, the mechanical creaking of pins in her hip, a settling of oil around her creased throat. She wasn’t thinking of them but that she was unkempt and was suddenly ashamed of her appearance and the possibility of odor. She tapped her fuzzy hair into place and stood alone looking down the stairs. But the stairs had become too risky after her broken hip. Her thirst became overpowering, the staircase too steep.
 
*
 
Phoebe’s bathroom is white and frilly. During the clear days of John’s retirement, she had bathed daily while John had whistled and shaved and did whatever things he did, in his blue bathroom. Maybe he wore or caressed the leopard blanket. Now she would never know. She had liked the symmetry and the comfortable distance between them, and the expectant preparation for the day and the night they’d spend together.
 

They had both been meticulous groomers.
 
The last bath she took was on a Tuesday morning. It was an ordinary bath in the middle of the week, not the more charged variety of a Saturday night bath. Afterward, she went to find John. She had chosen her pink robe.
 
“Sir?”
 
“Yes Sir,” he said emerging from his steamy bathroom, a man walking through a cloud. The heavy mist rolled out into the hallway. The two of them were so clean and new: They were not old anymore. Each privately washed, they came toward each other, toward what would have been their restrained but insinuating last kiss, when John stopped. His eyes looked bewildered. They grew round and wet.
How could it be that her consciousness continued, while his ended? She thought, for she knew this instantly.
 
She gasped when she saw his lost look. How unprecedented and unforeseen, this moment of intimacy unlike any they’d ever experienced. She had seen him when he had not meant to be seen, had intruded for perhaps the first time.
 
All these years of living together, yet his experience she saw, in the shift of his eyes, was solitary, a room that she could never enter.
 
“Sir?” she said.
 
But he didn’t answer. His eyes were open but he had already left her. This final removal was natural, but cut to the quick as if it were deliberate. He lurched forward as if, she hoped, to embrace her, but he fell instead.
 
***
 
Phoebe told her daughter on the phone, “I walked into the guest room and there they were, naked.”
 
“How embarrassing. But the guestroom is their bedroom now, Mother.”
 
“He had his shirt off and, at first his back to me but then he turned. And she! She was just standing there facing me, blushing in her apron.”
 
“Naked in an apron?”
 
“Well, no. I guess she was dressed but he was topless.”
 
The muscles of Ivan’s chest were small but defined, the color of his skin, a deep apricot.
 
“So you didn’t see anything, then.”
 
It was hard to explain: Yelena had not been blushing exactly but had a red splotch blooming on her neck and collarbone traveling up toward her face. Her parted lips were dark and bleary as if she had been kissing. Ivan looked guilty: his chin and eyes cast down, as if caught, his rough male mouth forming a surprised O.
 
“Well, I, I recognized them.”
 

“You shouldn’t have walked in, Mother. Really.”
 
“Well what were they doing in there in my house?”
 
“They were doing whatever they want, mother,” Linda said, annoyed, “it is their room now.” Phoebe felt the spent energy she’d had when she had fought to remain in the house. There had been a nice communal living arrangement nearby, they said. She’d said no. There would be married couples there, flaunting their exclusive link with signals: a wink, a code word, a certain whistle used for public places. On the phone the wasted feeling of that fight returned to her. She had won the argument but now was sure she was somehow losing. No one was listening to her.
 
“I should have knocked? But we used to go to the movies.”
 
“What does that have to do with anything?”
 
“Everything! You wouldn’t know. There are no elegant pictures anymore with subtlety. The hint of an evening spent together signaled by a kiss. But not the evening itself. Now they show the evening! They show too much, everything.” Tears spring to her eyes. This is inexplicable. But a kiss was nothing that you had to explain. One look between Sugar and Sugar or Sir and Sir said everything. She knew by the spark of triumph, and evasion in his eyes, what her Republican husband had done in ‘92. She looked at him and sighed. On the quiet drive home from the schoolhouse where they voted, she was angry. Yet she comforted herself the way she always did: at least he had not succumbed to Goldwater back in’64. She had worried that the name itself was perfect for John, the rich executive with his privileged, steamy ablutions, his face and knuckles dried, almost abraded by soap. Yet no candidate had ever divided them. Linda didn’t understand. Those restrained kisses, the constant pull of attraction became a potent glue if permitted to live among such differences.
She hears her daughter’s weary sigh through the receiver: a dismissive breath. “I can come help you with his things on Saturday at two.“ Phoebe can feel her daughter’s eagerness to get away, the same outward squirm she’d felt when she’d held her at three, the twisting of her little body, her attention elsewhere.
 
“I can do it myself. Don’t come.”
 
“Don’t make me feel guilty, mother.”
 
But she does not want her to come. Theirs was a delicate connection. Sugar and Sugar retreated into themselves and back out in waves, sensing the unspoken in a gesture or expression, in magnetic air or air charged with tension. They had understood one another. Now their connection is reduced to the material, to conduits: a belt worn soft at the third notch, his smell, clean as marbles all over the tacky, troublesome blanket. But then, if this connection is sacred, she certainly should have knocked instead of walking in on Ivan and Yelena.
 
What had he done with that blanket anyway? It seems so unlike him, its fur so pilled. A conservative man, he would have no need for a blanket like that. She dreams of him donning it as a cape, dashing through an alleyway, and running naked, his genitals swaying. She runs after him, trying to catch up. But he keeps disappearing from view turning corners too quickly, moving away from her.
 
***
 
Phoebe wonders about Ivan’s memory. Ivan doesn’t seem to remember yesterday’s humiliating incident or that he persists in cleaning her bathroom everyday, although it remains unused. She watches him leaning his broad back over her bathtub. She used to drape a washcloth up over her breasts as she floated in the water, humming, speaking half phrases. She watched the sun dappling the ceiling and the pruning of her fingers. Things one only does when alone. She remembers such solitude but can’t feel it. Now layers of Comet cake and accumulate in the tub, the faucets gleam, cleaned until they might peel and disintegrate. After Ivan has finished cleaning Phoebe’s white bathroom, she is sitting on the edge of her dressing table breathing heavily, holding the blanket in one hand. “Are you all right, Mrs.?” He rushes to her side. He is solicitous isn’t he?
 
“Yes. Just a little tired. If you could just help me up, I’d probably be fine. By the way is this yours?”
 
She gestures with the blanket.
 
He shakes his head no as if the question is of no importance, and says, “Let me help you up” He cups her small elbow with his hand, a teacup resting in a paw. He smells sharp and sweet, the lemons again and ammonia. His faint beard makes him look gallant. It reminds her of John one Halloween. Dressed up as a pirate, he had stopped shaving for three days- a huge challenge for him. They stand in the middle of the room and she looks at his upper lip, the puffy, masculine section between nose and mouth. Where shall he take her? Where had she wanted to be?
 
“Now let me go. I’m all right now,” she scolds abruptly. The blanket must belong to the Russian couple. John could not have had secrets from her. Ivan holds on for a moment longer because she is so light and sways. She remembers dancing. “Get off, Ivan, let go!” He lets go of her very slowly, as if releasing a child learning to ride a bicycle. His warmth lingers on her elbow. Yelena is downstairs preparing lunch and when it is ready he will have to carry Phoebe down like a princess. She could not have let him lead her to her bed, or have waited on the bed while he cleaned the bathroom, even though she was tired. She didn’t want to look suggestive: Reading there in an embroidered satin bed jacket, her glasses sliding down her nose as she glanced up at him. What would she have said? Perhaps she’d have acted surprised. “Oh it’s you.” Or she might have yawned and stretched her arms over her head. “Ivan would you mind getting the bed side lamp for me? I’m so tired.” He would have come, his hip at the height of the table, his torso leaning over her, so close, as he clicked off the lamp.
 
Her bare toes clench the carpet for balance. Ivan’s lips on hers. No. That would be as blatant as a new movie that shows everything. At eighty-one, Phoebe can identify lust and sees it is not sacred.
 
But if he had come to her, to her old body–what a betrayal. The footprints are still fresh on the bathmat, like prints in sand, fossilized. If Ivan had come to her in his inappropriate, see-through shirt with Yelena just downstairs, if he had touched her shoulder and lingered there, touched the crepe of her neck, stroked her tingly scalp, kissed her, if that had happened to her, to her dirty body, now more than a month away from her last morning bath, she might experience everything unspeakable.
 
 

Other Voices, 2006