I seldom act without thought but I did this time, and even while I was making the offer I knew I'd live to regret it: you just don't do something like this and expect a good outcome.
I was in a coffeeshop, I seldom go into coffeeshops but I needed a pick-me-up. Two young women were at the next table, one was telling the other that she had to move out of her place — the landlord had fallen ill and she hadn't been able to find anywhere else to go. She said she was absolutely screwed; she sounded like it; she was near tears. "There are two months left in the term, what the fuck am I going to do?"
It's times like this that you reflect on what you have. I'm wealthy, a widower living in a big house; I could afford to be generous. Without thinking, I leaned towards their table and said, "Excuse me, I couldn't help but overhear what you were saying. I live alone in a big house. You can have one of my rooms for the rest of the term if you want."
She was a little wisp of a thing; she obviously wasn't but she looked like she could have been 12 — I just wasn't thinking. Her eyes grew large. "Really?"
"I'll give you some references, you'll have to check me out first but, ya, if you really need a place for a couple of months, I have the room — I'm not too far from the university; you can bike it on the Riverwalk in ten minutes."
I pulled back and left her to consider the offer but she needed less time to accept it than I did to make it. After the briefest hesitation she jumped over to a chair at my table and stuck out her hand, "I'm Clair Cambolt, I'm going to be a grade school teacher; this is my last year of school — at least on this side of the desk," she snickered. "I accept your offer. Thanks. I can move in today ... I can move in right now."
Earnest, that's the way you might describe her but why wouldn't she be, she was, as she so articulately described, screwed. She also looked too vulnerable, too skinny, too pouty and too much in need of help. It didn't feel right. I took out my wallet, insisted her friend write down all the data on my driver's licence which she did then I shook Clair's hand, told her my name is John Halstrad, repeated my address and asked her when I should meet her there, to let her in ... to give her a key — that's when I had the second thoughts I should have had at the beginning. But it was too late now.
She wasn't there at the agreed upon time, she showed up more than an hour later. I was fuming. "I own a business; this is a work day; I have time commitments. You will never keep me waiting again, do you understand that?"
She might have heard me but I doubt it. She was struggling with two bags — not a lot even for a lowly student. She pushed passed me into the house, dropped the bags and looked around. "Fuuuuuck me, this is unbelievable. I've never even seen pictures of anything like this."
I picked up the larger of the two bags and headed for the stairs. "I'll show you your room."
She followed, but only sort of, she was still looking, inspecting, marvelling so I had to stand in the hallway in front of her room waiting. Eventually, we went in together; I put the bag on the bed.
OK, I get it, it's a nice place — it's a big room in a big house; she got lucky. But is it worth all the "I can't fucking believe this" nonsense that streamed from her foul mouth non-stop?
I tried to stay calm. "My wife ... I'm a widower, she had an office downstairs. You can use that for your studies. I'll show it to you and the kitchen."
"This room has it's own fucking bathroom!" She was standing in the doorway staring into it in utter disbelief.
"This way," I said, heading out of the room. But I knew without looking back that she wasn't following, and I realized in that instant that she was always going to do whatever the fuck she wanted to do and when she wanted to do it. I waited.
"I had to try it," she said, grinning, "well, I didn't actually have to but I wanted to: my own fucking toilet." She has a nice laugh, openly joyful; it touches you; it kind of rubs off on you — makes you forget you're pissed off.
I got out of the house in another 20 minutes and thought of the younger generation as I drove back to work. I didn't know them, any of them. My wife and I had twins, a boy and a girl; they would have been about her age. They were killed in a car crash when they were three. Their mother survived but with haunting, debilitating guilt for another 20 years until she killed herself two years ago.
I am a product of routine, which I often must break, but every time I do I feel an unfailing frustration, with myself and with others because I insist on the same order and efficiency from everyone as I do from myself. I make these observations because from the moment she moved in, my order and efficiency were under attack, no, it was more fierce than that, my order and efficiency were being assaulted as if she knew how much they meant to me and she just didn't want me to have them.
She made a big house seem small. Her stuff was everywhere, anywhere she dropped it; plates and glasses stayed where she put them; kitchen towels were on counters and tables; food was rearranged in the fridge with no reasoning; lights were never turned off. If you can call a veritable stick figure, not weighing 100 pounds, a slob, she is a slob.
But it wasn't just that. It started about three days after she moved in — the way I was beginning to calculate it, 57 days before she'd move out: she started bumping into me whenever she got a chance, in the kitchen mainly, just glancing brushes but when they started they happened every chance she got and she created a lot of them. Fine, confusing but no big deal ... until she started to do it overtly — she'd just come up to me and stand so close we touched. Was it just an odd bit of behaviour, an invasion of space or was it flirtatious? I soon found out.
I like to watch hockey games on TV when I get a chance. I sit back with an iPad and share my time between it and the game, concentrating on neither. One time early on she pulled up a straight back chair beside me, and, I'm not kidding, reached over and held my hand. Or tried to. I pushed it away but as she asked me questions about the game she knew nothing about ... and I didn't doubt, cared nothing about, she would sneak her hand down my arm to my wrist and then to my fingers. I had to shake her away. Weird, and I told her so.
Friendly, she said, what's the big deal?
By the fifth day together any time we were in remote proximity she was rubbing herself against me, deliberately, she was making no effort to pretend otherwise. Why?
"I like touching you, so? What's the big deal?" As if that was a serious answer.
"Wear a bra," I told her when I pushed her away from me ... from yet another too close encounter. She hadn't been wearing one for a few days, I could see the bumps which were often quite pronounced; now I could even see through the thin fabric the outline of nipple.
"I don't need one."
"You need something. Wear it."
I knew she wouldn't; I knew she was entirely indifferent to anything and everything I said. Turn the lights out? As if. Clean the kitchen? A cup, maybe, maybe a plate but the kitchen? Not a chance. Pick up your stuff! I didn't even bother. With her around I was gaining a whole new insight into parenting and that was encouraging a whole lot of sympathy for a whole lot of people.
I was reading when she walked into my bedroom, lifted the covers and got in beside me. "This house is too big. It scares me ... hope you don't mind."
This was so unexpected I lay there senseless ... I had no way of relating to it. "Of course I fucking mind! Get out of here!"
"I can't sleep out there. Ignore me ... I take up next to no space. And don't snore. I hate that."
I pushed at her shoulder. "Get out of here."
