Boundaries (23 page)

He stopped his car a couple of feet behind the Toyota. He could see the back of the driver’s head—a crown of dark hair sticking not far above the headrest. He thought he remembered seeing this driver, too, once or twice at the Sylvan Beach Grocery. She was the only woman in the area who had such a crown of black hair.

Why was she stopped here? he wondered. Perhaps her car wouldn’t start. Perhaps she had just braked for an animal—the area was a popular crossing for all kind of animals; feral cats, dogs, deer, woodchucks, opossums—and the road, in summer, was often littered with their dead bodies. Perhaps she had actually hit something and was in shock behind the wheel of her Toyota.

The elderly man was in a quandary as to what to do. There wasn’t a lot of room to maneuver around the Toyota, and he didn’t want to honk his horn for fear of seeming rude. If someone came up behind him, he’d explain the situation and hope that they would be as patient as he was. But it was unlikely that anyone would come along. The road was not much used this time of year because most of the cottages on the lake were seasonal. The summer people weren’t due to show up for a couple of months.

He waited for a minute, two minutes, five minutes. It was not an inordinately long amount of time for him to wait. He often relinquished his place in various lines (at theaters and grocery stores and the motor vehicle department) to people who looked as if they were in a much bigger hurry than he was—or told him they were—and had waited sometimes fifteen minutes or a half hour longer than he otherwise would have. So, five minutes was nothing. But, still, this woman sitting so quietly in her car was something of a puzzle. She might be hurt. She might have had some kind of attack. Maybe she was simply daydreaming and would get moving soon enough.

~ * ~

The thin man opened the front door to his apartment house and held it so David could go in.

But David did not go in. He wasn’t sure he trusted this man, or that he trusted anything, here. This place was simply too real. It should have been illusory, it should have been more like a dream; the streets he walked here should have been malleable beneath—brick or asphalt or stone, these streets should have felt like sand or water beneath his feet; but they were solid and unyielding; and the buildings were hard-edged and well delineated against the ever-changing sky. They, like the sky, should have changed, however subtly, with each passing second. This was, after all—as he had always believed—only a land of dreams, no more than a place where fantasies were allowed to come true, where childhoods were relived and relived again, where the best and happiest moments of a billion different completed lives were replayed endlessly.

This was a place of reward, a place of rest and peace and harmony. It existed only because its inhabitants
allowed
it to exist.

"Go in," invited the thin man, gesturing with his hand toward the inside of the apartment building. "It may not be heaven, but it’s home."

David shook his head. "I can’t. I’m afraid."

The man shook his head. David saw only the darkness framing it move. "I don’t understand what
afraid
is. I want to, certainly."

David did not answer him. Christian, he realized at once, had been right. His first visit here, five years ago, when he had nearly drowned, had really shown him almost nothing. He had seen so very little of this place, and his fantasies had filled in what he had not seen. He had devised a clever, enticing fiction, a heaven of his own making, a heaven, an afterlife—whatever you wanted to call it—that would have pleased
him
. And it apparently had nothing to do with reality.

This
was reality.

This squat brick apartment building, this thin man who talked almost ceaselessly and whose face was covered in darkness, these hard streets, this always-changing sky, this strange little city whose houses seemed to have been built from memories that were incomplete.

Here,
he
was the ghost,
he
was the one who was unreal,
he
was the fantasy.

"Go in," the man said again. "And don’t be afraid. There are no ghosts." A brief pause. "There I go again.
Ghosts
. Who knows what ghosts are? It’s like
forever
, isn’t it? And . . . and
microwave
,
Reddenbacher
, World War One
, all little snippets of nothing, motes of dust—"

Beyond the front door, there were dark stairs and a darker hallway.

"Are we going up?" David asked, interrupting the thin man’s monologue.

"We’re going to have some tea," said the man. "Our walk has made me very thirsty."

~ * ~

A dog ran loose on the rocky beach of Oneida Lake, near the Sylvan Beach Road. The dog was lost. The night before, she had chased a rabbit into the fields near her home and then, because her sense of smell was not what a dog’s sense of smell should be, she had not been able to find her way back.

The dog was small, white, skittish. Her owners called her "
Tootie
." Every few moments, she glanced over her shoulder. She was looking for two things—her owners, and other dogs that roamed freely in the area. Two of those dogs had chased her until her lungs were close to bursting.

K
aren read:

Dearest Anne,

Do you know what I give to the world when I’m writing? I give it myself. It’s that simple. I go inside myself and I pull out all the creatures that exist there, all the passions, all the desperation to be real, all the good and evil, and I make people out of them to populate the books that I write.

And so, dear Anne, I have come to realize the necessity of self-knowledge, and the real danger in self-ignorance, the enormous treachery of keeping our inner and outer selves separate.

We cannot for long safely allow our demon inner selves expression only in our dreams.

You understand that too well because you are the person you

The letter ended there. It was written in black fountain pen; many of the upstrokes and
downstrokes
were obscured by flares of ink.

I shouldn’t have been snooping
, Karen thought, and tucked the unfinished letter back into the copy of Christian’s first novel,
Greed
, where she had found it.

She closed her eyes, felt tears starting. My God, he’d never mentioned having had a relationship with Anne Case. Not once. Her name had hardly passed his lips except in conversation with David.

The implications of what she was thinking astounded her. Frightened her.

She looked again at the copy of Christian’s first novel which had been the letter’s hiding place. She withdrew it again slowly from the bookcase, flipped the pages. There were no other errant pieces of paper, no other letters.

She put the book back where she’d found it.

Perhaps the "Anne" that the letter referred to wasn’t Anne Case at all. Perhaps the letter was simply a piece of fiction, part of a new manuscript. Perhaps the Anne referred to was another Anne. There had been no date on the letter, so it was impossible to tell how old it was. And it was unsigned, too, so it was impossible to say definitely that Christian had even written it.

She shook her head miserably. Of course he’d written it. The handwriting had been his, the style of writing had been his—intense and circuitous; of course he’d written it.

There was another copy of
Greed
standing next to the one she had looked through. She pulled it from the bookcase, hesitated, flipped through it.

The pages opened at once to several folded pieces of paper stuck between pages 102 and 103. She lifted the sheets out. She unfolded them. They were written in a small, meticulous hand—not Christian’s bold strokes.

She read:

He’s a chameleon. Many people are. But he’s especially good at it. His whole countenance changes, not just his skin. And, unlike a chameleon, he changes it at will, at the necessity of the moment, and of the conquest to be made.

He professed to know me and understand me. Perhaps he did. I
believed
that he did, and it made me feel . . . hopeful. But even if he did, or didn’t, there is the fact of himself, the fact that he is a monster, the fact that I have slept with a monster. Thank God I cannot bear children.

"No more," I told him. He professed to understand. He said that I had misinterpreted him and though that was an injustice, he would overlook it, that he understood me, and understood why I had misinterpreted him. He would forgive me immediately, he said.

"For all the tomorrows we will have," he said, "I will forgive you now for this injustice you have committed against me." He said this smilingly, and his eyes were a little moist as if he were overcome by the emotion of the moment. It was an act, of course. One of his chameleon changes.

"No, I don’t believe you," I told him. "I believed you before. Too many times. I don’t believe you now. This is over." And I wanted to add, "I’m sorry." But I didn’t, because I was glad it was over. Our two weeks together were history and I was ecstatic. And troubled, too. Because I could see that he would not let go. Perhaps he
could not
let go. I had disarmed him, seen him for himself, exposed him. I was his enemy. I had to be bested, and he was going to do it.

"You think you know me," he said. "Perhaps you do. Perhaps you know as much as anyone . . .
more
than anyone. But you don’t know enough, my love." I cringed when he called me that. It wasn’t always so, but it was then. The phrase "my love" was, from his lips, something malodorous. I wondered, suddenly, how much anyone knew him, how significantly he had fooled everyone else in his life. Or was I somehow more vulnerable, and naïve?

But I am not naïve, and I am not vulnerable. My illness has shown me that I am more than flesh and blood. My soul dances around me, bold and ashamed at the same time, quivering and bold and frightened all at the same time. I am spirit, mostly, and spirit cannot be bested.

It is something I dearly want to believe. That my spirit—that part of me that is not bone and muscle—cannot be bested.

I told him, "You want to hurt me."

He said, "I don’t want to hurt you. I want to show you myself. What’s wrong with that? It’s only natural and good that I want to show my true self to the woman that I love."

"You have," I said. "You’ve shown me yourself. I hate what you’ve shown me. It’s awful. It’s monstrous."

His smile went away for a moment. He didn’t like me telling him he was a monster, and that was clear.

He said, "Monster mean’s anti-nature, it means perversion, it means something abhorrent, something unintended by God—"

I told him to leave. He refused. I told him that I would call the police if he didn’t leave. He still refused. I picked up the phone, pretended to dial. He laughed. He knew I was pretending. He’s a very smart man. I put the phone down.

He was besting me already, and I knew it. So did he.

I said to him, "Someday you’re going to hurt me. How can I allow that?"And I picked up the phone again. And in his full view I dialed the number for the police.

He came over immediately and grabbed my wrist very hard. He let go of it almost at once, as if the act had shocked him. Indeed, he
looked
shocked for a moment. Then he smiled again. The same sort of smile. His eyes moist.

He let go of my wrist and looked silently at me for a very long time. He smiled as he looked. The same smile. Same moist eyes. The eyes of a monster.

And at last he said, "
I
am a whole person, my love." Then he left the house.

For a long while, Karen stared silently, disbelievingly at the sheets of paper in her hand.