The Affairs of Others: A Novel

by Amy Grace Loyd Narrated by Kathe Mazur

Overview

A MESMERIZING DEBUT NOVEL ABOUT A YOUNG WOMAN, HAUNTED BY LOSS, WHO REDISCOVERS PASSION AND POSSIBILITY WHEN SHE'S DRAWN INTO THE TANGLED LIVES OF HER NEIGHBORS

Five years after her young husband's death, Celia Cassill has moved from one Brooklyn neighborhood to another, but she has not moved on. The owner of a small apartment building, she has chosen her tenants for their ability to respect one another's privacy. Celia believes in boundaries, solitude, that she has a right to her ghosts. She is determined to live a life at a remove from the chaos and competition of modern life. Everything changes with the arrival of a new tenant, Hope, a dazzling woman of a certain age on the run from her husband's recent betrayal. When Hope begins a torrid and noisy affair, and another tenant mysteriously disappears, the carefully constructed walls of Celia's world are tested and the sanctity of her building is shattered-through violence and sex, in turns tender and dark. Ultimately, Celia and her tenants are forced to abandon their separate spaces for a far more intimate one, leading to a surprising conclusion and the promise of genuine joy.

Amy Grace Loyd investigates interior spaces of the body and the New York warrens in which her characters live, offering a startling emotional honesty about the traffic between men and women. The Affairs of Others is a story about the irrepressibility of life and desire, no matter the sorrows or obstacles.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

The former literary editor of Playboy makes her fiction debut with an intimate portrayal of the walls erected by a woman after her husband’s death, and how impulsive encounters with others break them down. Widowed five years earlier, Celia Cassill now clings to her isolation, allowing herself happiness only in memories of her marriage—books read, movies watched, bodies shared. She chose the tenants in her Brooklyn brownstone for their discretion and respect for “separateness.” When one of them moves to France, she reluctantly allows him to sublet his apartment to Hope, a beautiful, newly divorced, middle-aged woman recovering from her husband’s infidelity. Not long after Hope moves in, another of Celia’s tenants—a retired ferryboat captain—disappears, and his daughter holds Celia responsible. That messiness, as well as Hope’s spinning-out-of-control life, prove intolerable to Celia, who wanders the city in search of her missing tenant, listening in on the tawdry goings-on in Hope’s apartment, and recounting some of her actions during and after the death of her husband. Celia witnesses and participates in small acts of violence and sexual exploration, and her past and Hope’s present force down Celia’s walls. Lloyd’s character study is narrow in scope but long on intensity and emotion. Agent: Warren Frazier, John Hawkins and Associates. (Sept.)

From the Publisher

A wonderful novel, beautifully written and sensuous, rich with emotion and psychological truth.” —Jess Walter, author of Beautiful Ruins

“[A] mesmerizing debut...beautifully, even feverishly described. As Celia discovers, the magnetic pull of other people's everyday experiences proves impossible to resist.” —Entertainment Weekly

“Loyd succeeds at the most difficult task for such a circumscribed setting—making the granular details of her characters' travails feel as though they added up to more than the sum of their parts.” —The New Yorker

“From start to finish, Loyd's prose flows exquisitely through the story, as she limns the depths of the protagonist's mind, the complexity of human intimacy, and the idiosyncrasies of each new character with the grace of a seasoned novelist.” —Vanity Fair

“Celia's journey is beautifully charted in this debut, with prose that mirrors her existence in her barely furnished apartment—confined, spare, but swirling with fierce emotion and insights.” —People

“An intimate portrayal of the walls erected by a woman after her husband's death, and how impulsive encounters with others break them down….Loyd's character study is narrow in scope but long on intensity and emotion.” —Publishers Weekly

“Debut novels don't come any more sure-handed and deftly written than The Affairs of Others. But it's the damaged, brokenhearted Celia—Amy Grace Loyd's brave, all-in protagonist—who latches on to us and refuses to loosen her grip.” —Richard Russo, author of Empire Falls

“Amy Grace Loyd has written an uncommonly accomplished first novel. Beautifully written, suspenseful and often disturbing.” —Jennifer Haigh, author of Faith

“Hypnotic, beautiful, and dangerously erotic, this book trembles with feeling, every sentence a breath, every sentence a seismographic wonder of observation. Scuba-diving once, I watched minute sea grass oscillate with the motion of the sea, and this is how I think of the narrator of this magnificent novel—-she sways with every movement of the world, both interior and exterior, registering it all, and always you wonder, with an aching heart, what will become of her.” —Jonathan Ames, author of Wake Up, Sir!

“Rich and fresh...The writing is just so wonderfully good: What other authors labor over, Loyd seems to just toss off. Throughout there are sentences to linger over, or for me to grin at with envy. Loyd has written a Rear Window story of a confined society described with Hitchcockian, voyeuristic detail.” —Ron Hansen, author of Mariette in Ecstasy

Kirkus Reviews

A sensitive but too understated portrayal of widowhood as experienced by a "young or youngish woman"--and, in a way, the building she inhabits. Celia is in her late 30s and, as former Playboy literary editor Loyd writes, not quite sure of herself in the world. Fortunately, her late husband prepared her for a time without him and, more important, left her with sufficient funds that she could buy a modest apartment building in Brooklyn and rent out three spaces. Being a property owner and landlord offers Celia an opportunity to channel her energies into bringing a badly mistreated building back to life, godlike: "What I could not restore, I replicated; what I could not replicate, I left simple but clean." Life, of course, is not so easily controlled, nor are the titular "affairs of others." Woven into the story are other deaths, as well as the brooding fact of 9/11 and the "varieties and degrees of trauma felt...even in the sidewalks." Yet this is no Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, nothing eccentric or, sad to say, particularly memorable. Like a neat apartment, Loyd's story hasn't an element out of place; she writes expertly, without wasted words. Yet the affect is curiously flat: Celia is matter-of-fact and, it seems, scarcely involved in the heart of her own story; only the supporting players seem to feel much of anything, including, in a nicely written turn, anguish over the plight of the polar bears. As a result, the feel of the book overall is more memoir than novel and even then, a memoir that is merely reporting the facts. More emotional investment would have given this story, competent though it is, more life.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169457032
Publisher:	Macmillan Audio
Publication date:	08/27/2013
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

HOPE

 

 

THE BODY OF A WOMAN aging. It’s a landscape that, even as it vanishes, asks a lot of the eyes. Or it should. No two landscapes the same. They never were the same, no matter their age, but then how time brings details to the body.

Of course every woman’s body ages. What’s disorienting is how friendly it all starts out, with words like smooth and tight and firm, high and pink and wet—words that are given to women’s bodies and that they wear around, as comfortably as cotton. And why not? These are gifts they did little to earn. Life does this so rarely—offer unearned or unasked-for rewards. But inevitably the words fall away, one by one: There goes tight, there goes smooth, god, even wet. And the words that replace them, that are provisioned, are not nearly so welcome or easy to carry. Some women carry these new ways of addressing their bodies with pride. They’ll explain that the knots in their flesh tell a good story. Others celebrate the change of vernacular, the end of a certain kind of surveillance. Or they continue to pursue the first set of words—high, tight, smooth. It’s not wrong or it’s not for me to say. Who am I to say? I am a young or youngish woman. I am in my late middle thirties, though I could be twenty-five or fifty. I believe I have no age anymore. I am not unattractive but neither am I beautiful. I married a man I first met in college and then again later, a few years after graduation. My husband died a difficult death. I went with him, or a lot of me did. I cannot apologize for this nor do I wish to challenge that I am changed.

Being a widow was a respected thing once. Understood as a destination. Now, we are asked to let go, move on, become someone or something else, marry, divorce, marry again. American life asks us to engage in an act of triumphant recovery at all times or get out of the way. I have been happy to get out of the way.

My husband left me comfortably provided. With the money given me, I bought a small apartment building in which I live and rent three one-bedroom apartments. Behind my building in downtown Brooklyn there is a garden of three hundred square feet with an old lilac bush that blooms a deep ancient-looking purple, a tall female ginkgo, a scrawny sycamore, and then a strange assortment of plantings to which the previous owners and I have made a halfhearted commitment. In my case I queried will this herb or flower grow, and if the answer was yes, I let it make its bid for survival and maybe even return on its own the following year. I am often surprised by what greets me in the spring. Weeds of course but also a determined patchwork of grass that reminds me of the head of a disheveled balding man. My tenants have asked to contribute to the garden, but as I am not here to make a family of them, to know them too well, I’ve not encouraged this and so their relationship to the garden is as tentative as it is to me. I have only been a landlord for four years.

I didn’t normally allow subletters, but George brought her, a candidate, to meet me on a day where, though it was only the beginning of March, I could smell the soil in the damp air and had noticed the daylight was lengthening. George had always been a good tenant. He lived above me on the second floor and was careful of the noise his feet made over my head, and once when I was ill with a bacterial bronchitis, he had gone to pick up my antibiotics at the drugstore for me. He taught English at St. Ann’s, a private school on Pierrepont Street that turns its students into sophisticates long before they can vote, and he had published poems in journals meant to impress the literate. He was gay and had had a roommate initially, a lover of many years who left him after only a few months of living in my building. At night, during that time, when I couldn’t sleep, I heard George walking the floorboards, the same length, back and forth and back and forth, as if he were schooling himself in precision. If I focused on his regular steps, the predictable shifts his weight made, I would fall back to sleep, his vigil excusing me from my own. Once I heard him cry out—it sounded like someone had startled him. I immediately thought of a ghost, perhaps of himself, when he loved and was loved.

I had seen the woman to whom George wanted to let his place on the streets of Brooklyn Heights and Cobble Hill alone or sometimes in the company of people I took to be her family. She had broad shoulders for a woman and long legs, though she was not overly tall, only a little above average in height. I could have mistaken her for French—her clothing, her unapologetic femininity, the dark lipstick and the way she swept her hair up on her head and into a twist—but the accent, the volume and pace of her voice, and the openness of her face didn’t fit. It would be fair to say she was beautiful. Last fall, I was sure I had seen her with a young man on Hicks Street, on a deserted residential block. I had felt I was intruding and crossed to the other side of the street. I took him to be her son because he resembled her—same color hair, same body type. She grabbed him abruptly and hugged him with all of her, as if she were trying to steady him against a mean wind or force something out of him. That day, I remember I thought sorrow, she’s trying to hug his sorrow away and there was no time to lose apparently. When she let him go, she looped her arm in his, and they walked away vividly in step, in league, heads high, not embarrassed or worried about who might have seen them, but full of vitality and purpose. I believe I am remembering that right or that is how I want to remember it.

She had left an impression or several, and it was a pleasant enough association.

George wanted to go to France for a time to see an ailing friend. He wanted to get away, to write. He talked very briefly about the sensuality of time and of landscape, the sort that can’t be had in America, in New York City, and then he talked about Marseille, the city, and Rimbaud—did I know Rimbaud? He talked more quickly than he might usually, which was all to say he wanted out, urgently, but eventually he wanted to come home to Brooklyn, to his apartment. He’d arranged a leave for the rest of the school year and then he had the summer off anyway—the great boon of teaching, he said, summers. There was simply the matter of the apartment, of rent, of me. He could not afford to go if I did not let his dear friend Hope stay for a while. He didn’t slow down or acknowledge how a body might respond to the words “let Hope stay.” He kept talking, launching his hope at me with her there beside him nodding brightly at intervals, and it was my duty to demonstrate some resistance. I had some but not much. My tenants think me cold. They know that I am young or youngish, but some part of them does not believe it.

I began by explaining how small the building is, how careful I am in selecting my tenants, that there is a certain consonance of character I look for and mean to maintain.

George offered, “Of course, I would not suggest anyone who I didn’t think suitable.”

Then I brought up precedent, my desire for consistency; at this Hope craned toward me and spoke to me as if English were my second language.

“But I am a friend of George’s and the neighborhood’s, was it Ms. Cassill?”

Her lipstick looked expensive and her brows were dark and high in their natural arch. She knew the impact her face could have, even now in her mid- to late forties. She’d known it for years.

“It’s Mrs., and I don’t doubt that you are—”

“I’m sure the other tenants could be made to see—”

“With that, it’s tricky—”

“Is it really? Huh.” She changed course, biting down on her lip to contain her enthusiasm. “Did George ever tell you that I’m a great cook?”

“Are you?”

“George would probably eat better in his own kitchen with me running it than in France.”

“Well, that’s something—”

“Why don’t you let me cook for you?” She was trying to flirt with me.

“Very kind but not at all necessary.”

She was the sort who created intimacies where there were none.

“I could cook a meal for the whole building if you’d like and serve it out there in that lovely garden. Pâté and bouillabaisse and good bread and wine, a great mess of a meal—”

“We don’t really have…” I threw a look at George. Flattened my tone. “No, that’s not at all—necessary. I wouldn’t dream of asking that of you or my tenants. We are very respectful of each other’s—what? Separateness here…”

Her face, which had been full of expectancy, fell slightly, and I saw her age there, a feathering over the upper lip; two sharp lines that had dug in and stayed between her brows, but on a face with good bones and wide planes and eyes so light, an almost yellow blue, these lines gave her a helpful gravity, an authority. She’d run out of the energy it takes to be playful quickly, more quickly than I’d have guessed. She shook her head at George and then opened her arms and shrugged. “Not a good year so far, darling.”

He placed an arm on her shoulder. Placed it because he was gentle with her, wanted to show her gentleness. “It’s been a hard go,” he said.

Looking at me with some impatience now, and taking in a big breath, he was about to launch another appeal when Hope, straightening her neck and leveling her shoulders, making the best of her height, preempted him: “I’ll pay for the whole thing up front, security included. Cash. Does that interest you?”

“Money’s not really the issue here. Is it Miss or Mrs.?”

She smoothed her light brown hair on one side above her ear and looked down to inspect her sweater. It was sage-colored and looked handmade, with a silk-cotton thread. It flattered her. “I left my husband, you see. I need a safe place. A quiet place. I thought this was it. George and I thought … well”—she put her hand on George’s forearm—“we’re like children, I suppose. We thought it would all fall together. That something could.” Tears bloomed through those strange eyes, and she laughed a little. “George and I both need new scenery, but there are other options, aren’t there, George? We needn’t trouble you anymore.” With a stiff hand, she patted at my upper arm, letting go of me and the conversation utterly. I was no one to her. I had been an obstacle to overcome and that’s all. “C’mon, George. Let’s go find a drink.”

“Celie, really,” he said to me. He had never called me “Celie,” only “Celia,” my name in fact and what I prefer to be called. “I can’t afford to cover the rent while I’m gone. And I have to go away. I really have to. Do you really want to go to the trouble of getting a new tenant, of evicting me?”

I took a moment. I pretended this was something I hadn’t considered. I had always planned on saying yes, but he had to know, as she had to know, that this was my home first, theirs only by concession, and with some formality; a place here had to be earned. I was responsible for the roof, the boiler, the cast-iron plumbing. I had refinished all the floors, had sanded and painted the walls, and re-hung all the doors. This building in all its particulars, even securing the building permits from an unhelpful urban bureaucracy for the renovation of the entrance and windows, readying the old cable elevator for inspection, had given me purpose when I was newly widowed. I’d claimed it with intentions I didn’t even fully understand. Yes, a safe place. Order. For me and others on the other side of walls, of floors, tenants I would and would not know. A city arrangement on my terms for as long as I stayed in the city.

I had hired help of course, but I worked alongside Anton and his wife, Marina, and his brother, sometimes their son, Ukrainians all. They were hardworking and did not complain, at least to me, about my insisting to participate in the work. My muscles remembered every effort still, and I could see my contributions everywhere around me. My mistakes, too, though these weren’t appreciable. I’d been careful, and I believed the building and I had an agreement. We would keep each other well.

I’d extend myself for my tenants but only so far.

I called to Hope, who had moved to the door, her long back to me. “Can you take care of plants? George has so many. You even have an orchid or two, don’t you, George? They’re temperamental.”

George nodded.

“I’ve taken care of George’s watering here and there when he’s gone on shorter trips,” I said.

“She has,” he said. I could see the pleasure welling in him. He was a neat medium-sized man with a broad face that always reminded me of actor James Mason’s; it was soft and hard, gentlemanly but acute, and it colored easily. He was forming a paunch and had begun to belt his pants higher.

“I’ve not killed anything.” Hope gave us her profile first. “Or anyone,” then she turned and smiled with her whole body, “yet.” She laughed low to high, arriving at something like a giggle, and then threw her arms around George. When she released him, she looked at me full in the eyes. She went to touch me but thought better of it this time, out of respect, I suppose, and steadied a look on me so grateful and unshy with relief that I barely heard her “thank you” or listened to the details of her arrival. I’ve only known one person who could focus on a body so completely, with such sincerity, and he was gone.

As they opened the door to go, she ran back to me and grabbed my hand. “Not to worry. I will try to behave myself.” I smelled her then. She wore a perfume or deodorant that was floral and spicy. Rose and rosemary or smells like these, at odds and in sympathy, that bring to mind a versatile garden, and spring. It was light but present, and her hand covering mine was soft and hot. “You have made us so happy.”

 

Copyright © 2013 by Amy Grace Loyd

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