The Day Sleeper

When a good friend told me the story of the man who once came to her house looking for a place to nap, this story germinated in my head. Don't we all, now and then, need a place to rest?

In the days before Amazon deliveries, doorbells didn’t often ring in the mid-afternoon, so when Eva’s did—and she happened to be home with a head cold—she rushed to see who was buzzing.

Rushed, but halted mid-foyer. Crime was on the rise in their neighborhood, with several cases of break-ins. It could be a burglar out there, she fretted, or worse, a junkie with a gun. But then she berated herself for thinking that any thief or murderer would be so moronic to knock before bursting in, much less ring the bell.

Her next thoughts were far more practical. She was still in her bathrobe and pajamas, makeup-less, and her hair—now there was a crime scene. What if it were Mrs. McFarlan from next door in need of an egg or vanilla extract? Or Evelyn from work with a pot of her mother’s cure-any-virus-that-walks chicken soup? Already she heard herself apologizing, clutching her terry cloth lapels and croaking through a crack in the door. Her bug was highly contagious.

Ever efficient, Eva managed to pack all these thoughts into the moment after the first chime, but in the second, her mind went blank. She watched her hand reach for the doorknob, turn it, and pull. A whiff of September air, overcooked by summer but autumn-trimmed, brushed her cheeks together with another odor—dark and enigmatic. A rare book smell.

It emanated from an old man who barely reached her thorax. Shabbily but not dirtily dressed in a drab, out-of-date suit and a floral tie last seen in the Sixties, his hair mopish and gray-scored. His beard was midway between bush and goatee.

“Good afternoon, Madam,” he began softly. Meaty fingers worked the rim of the rumpled Stetson hiding his mid-section. “Forgive me for disturbing you on this fine fall day.”

Apart from conveying some street-borne bacteria, he seemed to present no physical threat. Perhaps it was his eyes, thickly browed and drooping, moist and importune. Thanks to those eyes, instead of the curt, “We don’t want any,” and shutting the door, Eva opened it wider and heard herself rasp, “Can I help you?”

“I have a small request.” His hat brim was in danger of detaching. “A very small one.”

Idiot, Eva thought. You asked for it. What could she possibly give him? Food? Money? What would Jason say if he knew…

“You see, Madam, I like to walk,” the man began matter-of-factly. “I like parks. Yours, especially.” His wispy chin motioned over one shabby shoulder at the splotch of green down the street. The laughter of children swinging from its simple wooden beams wafted out of it, followed by a parent’s occasional bark. “I like sitting there, watching the kids, the birds, the leaves. But sometimes I get tired.”

Then why not find a bench? Eva thought to suggest, but didn’t.

“Why not a bench?” he nevertheless asked. “The answer is simple.”

He paused a moment as if to reveal some esoteric secret. Eva crushed her lapels.

“People like old men strolling. It’s part of the charm—like a pond or an ice cream seller. But an old man on a bench?”

He smiled at her and, Eva could have sworn, winked. “That’s not charm, that’s a bum.”

Eva nodded numbly, all the while trying to place the man’s accent. Not local nor, for that matter, national, but different.. Antique. “And so?” she asked.

“And so, if you don’t mind. If I would not be imposing too much…”

She wanted to shut the door in his face just then, before it was too late. But instead leaned halfway through the frame.

“Yes?”

“Could I come in and lie down for a while? Now and then. An old couch or armchair would do. I wouldn’t disturb you in the least.”

“Come in…lie down,” Eva repeated, all the while thinking, how do I get out of this? How can I tell him nicely—for she was anything but crude—fuck off?

“Thirty minutes would do.”

What was it, she later strove to recall, the Spaniel eyes, the hat brim rubbed shiny, the accent that was not an accent and the look that made her imagine that this man, so foreign yet familiar, could have been her great-grandfather. Whatever it was, it drew words from her mouth that her ears could barely register.

“Very well, just for thirty minutes.” Eva gulped. “An hour, if you need it.”

“That’s most generous.” Bowing slightly, the man wiped his clunky shoes on the welcome mat and made his way past her into the foyer.

“There’s a bed made up in the guest room. Follow me,” Eva said and wondered if maybe those new-fangled cold pills were doing the talking, not her. “Mr.?”

The old man followed her up the stairs, one plodding step at a time. “Oh, my name is far too long. Too complicated. I wouldn’t burden you.”

Eva glanced behind her just long enough to catch him smiling, playfully and perhaps too knowingly.

“Call me whatever you like,” he continued with a sweep of his hat. “Mr. Whatever. The Day Sleeper.”

***

She didn’t tell Jason. That night when he came home from work and sat eating the lasagna she made him in spite of being sick, Eva didn’t tell him about the old man, the Day Sleeper, and her decision to let him rest or how, while he did, she lay in their room waiting for the thud of his footsteps on the stairs, the front door clacking behind him. She didn’t say a word, knowing that he’d only berate her for once again being gullible, the woman who’d put a dollar in a beggar’s tin cup even though that buck went only for booze. And now that beggar was in their own house! Telling him would have only worsened her cold.

Not that Jason told her much now, either. Twelve years married that felt like forty, for all their weariness. A relationship that began when both were in school, brimming with promise, bound by carnality, their futures intertwined fasces-like, unbreakable. Eva, no beauty perhaps, but busty and broad hipped—“the model for a Sumerian fertility goddess,” he flattered her—peachy-skinned with five-alarm fire hair. And Jason, so slight at times she feared breaking him in bed, with his poet’s face devoid of the slightest intrusive angle, worn smooth, she back then imagined, by purling streams. His hair was ash to her flame. But his eyes, above all, conquered her. Eyes that bore inside her and inspected her from within, ferreting out her secrets. Those same gunmetal eyes that now scrutinized her lasagna, as if for flaws in the sauce.

“Good day?” she asked and merely merited a shrug. Fact was, their days—hers at an upscale law firm and his in an office halfway up a corporate tower, were always good, but never exceptional. Never ripe with the partnership or promotion that would have launched their lives on a trajectory other than flat. Or the possibility of extending their kitchen table with a highchair and filling their silences with gurgles. But that hope had also withered, five miscarriages on, leaving them to chatter indifferently about the president’s latest sex scandal or their possible purchase of one of those new portable telephones, each the size of a shoe. Anything but feelings, much less intimacy, and for Eva, anything except the Day Sleeper.

***

A part of her hoped that it’d only been her imagination, cold pill fueled, or, if not, a one-off. But another part of her knew—the way a mariner spying the horizon knows that rain will fall or a farmer beholding a locust cloud that his crop is doomed—that the bell would eventually ring. And sure enough, at exactly the same hour and during a day much like the previous one, unseasonably sunny but crisp around the edges, it chimed. Then Eva, still in her terrycloth robe and nursing a cold that normally she’d ignore and haul into work but telling herself she was feverish, answered the door.

“Good day to you, Ma’am.”

“Good afternoon, Mr….” Eva smiled. Was she actually enjoying this? “Day Sleeper.”

He wore the same suit, coffee ground brown, and a tie inspired by the jungle. His hair and beard were tousled, his hat brim taut between stubby thumbs and forefingers, his smell, a vintage bookstore’s. “May I?” he asked and his dewy eyes dampened hers.

As if it were the world’s most natural thing, as if she were greeting a brother or an old college friend, Eva stood aside as her arm inscribed an arc that swept the outside—and the old man—in.

He needed no guidance but went straight to the second-floor guest room and left Eva to wonder just how old was old, really—fifty, seventy, one hundred!—and whether he was alone in the world. Her feelings careened between empathy and creepiness. Thoughts grappled, separated, then pounced on one another again until, finally, she heard his plodding footsteps on the stairs.

Cloistered in her bedroom, Eva didn’t emerge to say goodbye. She made no movement except to consult her watch. Unlike his first thirty-minute snooze, it told her, this one lasted over an hour.

So the snoozes grew, two hours the next day, almost three the day after that. Eva’s cold was clearly behind her, and the office was beginning to call, but she kept fabricating symptoms and excuses to remain homebound. To greet the Day Sleeper and perhaps figure a way out of the mess she so expertly—and typically—brewed. From her marriage to her career, Eva believed she had engineered her own paralysis. The current fix was no different.

How much longer could she afford to miss work, she wondered. How could she possibly tell Jason? And what, God help her, if he ever found out?

That was it. She had to inform the old man that, though he seemed like a truly good person, arrangement had to end. Surely, she’d advise him, there were other houses in the neighborhood, other, stay-at-home moms, open to hosting a Day Sleeper.

She was going to act the moment she heard his heavy steps descending the stairs and rushed to meet him at the bottom. But before she could, before a word escaped her quivering lips, the old man looked up at her with an expression at once innocent and impish.

“You wouldn’t happen to have a little something to eat?” the Day Sleeper inquired. “A hardboiled egg, maybe? A piece of toast?”

***

Fortunately, Jason never came home during the day. But what if he did? What if, on a whim, he decided to leave his downtown office, pop out to his favorite suburban deli and smother his frustrations in pastrami? And then, entering his own Colonial Revival doorway, crossing the foyer, and mounting the stairs to the guest bedroom, he found not his wife in bed with another man but, immeasurably worse, a street person snoring. Or, wandering into the kitchen, hankering for that one slice of pecan pie, the sole memento of an otherwise forgettable dinner, he discovered a disheveled geezer with crumbs in his beard pouting, “Maybe, a glass of milk?”

But Jason didn’t come home and Eva nevertheless resolved to confess to him how she couldn’t find the guts to shoo the old man away but instead—oh, she could hear her husband roar—showed him where, among the hollyhocks, she kept the fake plastic rock with their key. All he had to do was make sure the house remained precisely as he’d found it and remember to lock up leaving. The refrigerator, meanwhile—eggs, milk, salami—was stocked.

A week passed, two. September became October and autumn, the fall, complete with the year’s first frost. Ensconced in her associate’s office, half-hidden behind ziggurats of briefs, Eva sometimes paused to question not only her own judgement but also her sanity, allowing a thorough stranger into their house. But then she consoled herself with the thought that she, who had never reached her potential professionally, had fallen short in her marriage and failed to bring new life into the world, was finally doing something laudable in life. Taking in the Day Sleeper was her last–if reckless—redemption.

She was languishing in those thoughts, absently thumbing through precedents, when Jason called. Irrationally, of course, but she swore she knew his ring: strident, irascible. And sure enough, his initial shout of “Eva!” propelled the receiver from her ear. But what followed astounded her.

“I got it!”

Shit, she feared, My cold, and almost apologized.

“I got the promotion! Finally! I made it!

"Oh, Jason,” she gasped.

***

“Oh, Jason,” she cried that night when he made love to her as he hadn’t since college, a hunter to her gatherer. Re-manned, delirious with his ascent to the tower top, Jason scarcely reacted when Eva let slip about the old man dozing in their guest bed during the day.

“The Day Sleeper,” he said, rolling onto his back and exhaling the words like cigarette smoke toward the ceiling. “An egg…”

“With milk sometimes. Sometimes a slice of bread.” Eva was whispering, she realized, her voice a registerable quake.

But Jason just whinnied, “Bring him caviar, for chrissakes, foie gras. Hell, give him mousse!”

“Ok, caviar,” Eva, relieve, sighed. “Foie gras,” she imparted to his heart, “Mousse.”

***

Which was how, well before November’s chill set in, the Day Sleeper came to lounge most of his day in their home. Eggs had expanded into sandwiches and milk into coffee, with two spoons of sugar and just a touch of cream. Soup was a favorite as well. He remained as polite as ever, thanking Eva demurely, hat in hand, ardently massaging its brim. And each afternoon, just before dark, he exited quietly to God knows where—she never asked. No dirty dishes, no mud prints on the floor, only a whiff of out-of-print texts.

Jason, consumed by his new job, rarely asked about the old man and his wife volunteered little. Nothing changed until the December day when, amid the disruption caused by the clerks decorating the office, the partners summoned Eva into the conference room. She feared some kind of reprimand—for what, she had no idea—and was totally unprepared for their gratulations. Fifteen minutes later, she strode out an utterly exalted woman.

She considered baking a cake to celebrate but then bought the bakery’s best, conceived of a special dinner but instead had it catered. Jason came home to a feast.

“What’s this about?” he asked and glanced expectantly at her belly.

Eva simpered, “No, sorry, but almost as good.” The champagne cork popped cannon-like as she told him about the partnership. Filling their flutes, she raised her own and toasted. “To us, the world’s most fortunate people.”

“To us!” he echoed, “The winners!”

Later, while ladling out peas, Eva questioned what they had done to deserve this. “It’s not that we’ve gone pious or anything.”

“Beats me.”

“Some act of kindness?” she ventured “A good deed?” But then, suddenly, she froze. Peas poured out of the ladle and rolled off their plates. “You don’t think?”

“Nah. Can’t be.”

“Couldn’t it?”

For once, her husband was speechless.

“Couldn’t it…” Eva repeated, no longer a question. Peas formed an ellipsis on the floor.

***

By February, often the coldest month in their parts, the neighborhood park was nearly deserted. The few children who played there, thickly bundled, mittened, and scarfed, looked like miniature Michelin Men. Hardly the place, Eva and Jason, agreed for an old man in a threadbare suit and fair-weather hat, who seemed to own no winter clothing at all. “Forget the park,” they told him. “Spend the time with us. Your bed, our kitchen, is open.”

So the Day Sleeper became the All-Day Boarder, arriving early in the morning and departing before sunset, always without leaving a trace. He seemed to keep mostly to the guest room, so the happy couple assumed, each of them jumping home now and then to check if he was warm enough and fed.

“I’m perfectly content,” the Day Sleeper swore in his otherworldly lilt. “I want for nothing.” But then added, “Perhaps a bagel, maybe?” with his pout and soggy eyes. “Some lox?”

He never had to ask twice. Eva and Jason would have given him their cars, each recently upgraded, if he desired, or their newly minted membership in the club. For their promotions were only the first of their windfalls. Jason won an office lottery, not a jackpot exactly but enough to gift them a week in the Bahamas, and Eva prevailed in a case that the other partners deemed hopeless. Their luck seemed never to run out, not as long as the Day Sleep slept in.

Only one source of gladness eluded them. Try as they did, no longer monthly and perfunctory as in the past, but now twice weekly at least and savagely, but their deposits generated no interest. No highchair, no gurgles.

“Maybe we should invite him to move in with us,” Eva exasperatingly suggested, and Jason, no less frustrated agreed. “Shit, why don’t we just adopt him.”

Their frustration steadily deepened, burying much of their joy. Soon, they feared, they’d be taking it out on the Day Sleeper, as if he’d somehow betrayed them, lured them into believing that miracles happen only to bash them with fact.

***

Spring arrived, finally. Icicles wept, warblers returned to the park. Snowdrops and crocuses sprouted up and so, too, one early April morning, did Eva’s breakfast. She didn’t need a test to know. The life that was resurrecting all around her was blossoming inside her as well. Ecstatically she informed her husband and rapturously they embraced the Day Sleeper.

“You’ve made us the happiest people on earth,” they chanted. “How can we ever repay you?”

But the Day Sleeper merely replied with his wry, guileless smile and a glint like melting ice in his eyes. “A piece of Danish, maybe.”

The next three months were frantic with planning—baby showers, birth parties, names—and purchases of a princely crib and playpen. That the Day Sleeper would have to share the guest room with an infant didn’t bother them in the least—nor him. On the contrary, an old man who spent hours watching kids romping in the park would make the perfect afternoon sitter.

Summer beckoned, the trees in full bloom, and Eva more than beginning to show. Happiness reigned throughout the household, with Jason attending to her every need even more ardently than he did in college, while the Day Sleeper—when he wasn’t eating or napping—beneficently, wordlessly, watched. Intimate moments passed with Jason and their guest each placing a hand on her bulge and feeling for movement. None came, but the doctor told her not to worry. “Fetuses work according to their own timetables,” the doctor assured her. “Yours is just taking a break.”

The break, though, proved to be permanent. That was the goodbye note their baby left them, one night when she undressed, scribbled in heart-wrenching red. Eva screamed, Jason howled, and the house roiled with their pain. Only late the next morning when the Day Sleeper appeared, did the two of them suddenly grow silent. The only sound was those of the Colonial Revival door slamming shut and its locks bolting tight behind it. Echoes of birdsong faded in their foyer.

***

Often now, in her retirement, Eva wanders past the park. Children cackle on its candy-colored playground, molded from pure polyethylene for safety. Only the bench remains, a memorial to a world made of wood. But its slats are now filled with nannies gossiping with one another with scarcely a glance at the kids or chatting with their boyfriends on portable phones reduced to the size of playing cards.

She watches and wonders what it’d be like parading with a stroller in front of those brats and showing them how a caring mother—or grandmother—acts. She’d teach them what responsibility was, and gratitude. She’d remind them of the miracles a mere bed and a bagel could bring, a hardboiled egg and a piece of toast. And Eva would warn them, as only an old woman could, in her old-fashion clothes, wide-brimmed hat, and cloddy shoes, not to question life’s gifts and disappointments. Never ignore the front doorbell when it rings, she’d teach them, nor forfeit the hope of deliverance.