Wake Up With a Stranger (18 page)

“No, you are not being too blunt, but I can’t understand why you should consider it adolescent to be interested in a woman.”

“The quality of my interest was adolescent, and still is. If it were not, I could try to seduce you and be done with it. It involves the most exquisite misery and a kind of masochistic passion for bondage. I am much too old to feel so young — so I have waited for the passing of an emotional condition I had thought and hoped I would never feel again, and thought, when it came, that I could never sustain. But it hasn’t passed. It hasn’t even diminished. Consequently, if I must feel like a schoolboy, I have decided that I can at least react to the feeling like an adult. So I called you, and so we are here drinking sidecars, and how do you feel about it?”

“I feel relaxed and quite flattered, and the sidecars are excellent.”

“That strikes me as being an evasion.”

“If it is, it is only temporary, to give me time to understand what you are saying. Are you asking me to have an affair with you?”

“Not yet.” He smiled and shook his head. “I am only asking you if you would consider giving us an opportunity to decide sensibly, after a while, whether an affair for us would be mutually acceptable.”

“Merely to see you and go out with you? Is that what you mean?”

“Yes. In the beginning, no more than a friendly relationship without commitments on either side, so that we can decide later what we want to do.”

“It sounds rather bloodless.”

“Believe me, I don’t feel bloodless. Quite the contrary. I only want, as a regressed adult feeling strangely uncertain in his regression, to be reasonably sure that neither of us makes a mess of things for himself or the other.”

“What about your wife? I have a feeling that she wouldn’t appreciate such an arrangement, even in the early stage before anything is decided.”

He smiled thinly, looking down into the shallow bulb of his glass, which was now empty. She thought that his mouth, after the thin smile left, was distorted briefly by a twist of bitterness, but she couldn’t be sure because his face was obscured by the inclination of his head.

“That needn’t concern either you or me,” he said. “Since I have proposed such an arrangement to you, however, I am rather obligated to assure you that Harriet and I made our own decision and established our own arrangement quite a long, long time ago. It has worked, in a way, and neither of us is likely to disturb it.”

As it was with Aaron,
she thought.
Probably it develops from different conditions, but in the end it comes to the same default. Is it going to be my part indefinitely to serve as compensation for inadequate wives?

“All right,” she said. “I don’t ask you to tell me anything that won’t concern me. There is something else, though, that concerns me a great deal, and I am wondering about it.”

“What’s that?”

“The loan. Does it depend upon my response to your proposal?”

“In other words, am I trying to bribe you? No. I’m not overly scrupulous, but I’m sure that I’m not doing that. Let’s put it this way. If we were later to decide to go ahead with this, I’d certainly establish you in the shop. That’s assured. If either one or both of us did not decide to go ahead, I might or might not make the loan, or invest in the shop myself. It would depend upon other factors entirely.”

“Well, that is clear enough, and it is also fair.”

“I’ve tried to be both, and I’m glad that you think I’ve succeeded. Do you want some time to consider your answer?”

“No. I have already decided. I won’t pretend that I’m offended by your proposal, for the truth is that I feel flattered. I can’t see that I have anything to lose from an arrangement that demands no commitments, at least in the beginning, and from which I can withdraw if I choose.”

“I see that you have an analytical mind. I’m beginning to be convinced that I would make no mistake, regardless of our personal relationship, in supporting you as a business woman.”

“I’m a good designer and a good business woman, and if it comes to it, I’ll be a good mistress.”

He laughed with genuine pleasure and lifted his empty glass.

“You have ended our discussion perfectly, and anything else would be a detraction. I suggest that we have another sidecar, and go to dinner afterward.”

“I agree to the sidecar, but I am not dressed for dinner.”

“You are dressed well enough for the place I’ll take you. I warn you at the beginning that I patronize only plain places. I drink in this plain place, where the drinks are good, and I eat in a plain place, where the food is good, and I drive a plain Chevrolet car which gets me from one place to another as well as a Cadillac would. By others, these preferences are considered affectations, and I dare say they are.”

“Not necessarily. Perhaps they are signs of humility.”

“Oh, nonsense. I’m a monstrous egoist, and they are certainly affectations. If I were poor and couldn’t afford it, I’d eat and drink in expensive places and drive a Cadillac at least.”

“Well, however that may be, I agree to eat with you in a plain place and go there with you in a plain Chevrolet.”

He laughed again, again with pleasure, and signaled the waiter, who brought the sidecars. They enjoyed the drinks and the company of each other, and moved on in time to the plain place with good food, where they enjoyed broiled lobster and still the company of each other, and the evening slipped away.

It was not until after eleven o’clock, when he was taking her home, that she remembered Enos Simon, that she was to have seen him that evening. It was by then, of course, far too late to do anything about it.

He waited and waited, but she did not come. He had no means of getting into her apartment, and because he could not loiter so long in the hall, he went back downstairs and across the street and waited there in the dark doorway of a tobacco shop. At first he was able to convince himself that she had only been delayed, that she would arrive soon to secure the equilibrium of his tiny personal world which now stood suddenly in precarious balance, but as time passed he was unable to sustain this conviction. Eventually he was as thoroughly convinced that she would not come as he had previously been that she would. It was then a matter of enormous importance to know why she would not come, whether it was the result of something unavoidable which she would regret as much as he, or whether it was deliberate and ominously significant, a brutal indication that she was sick and tired of him and wanted nothing more to do with him. He reasoned that this was surely not so, for there had been no warning of it, no sign or word or slightest withdrawal. It was not possible, surely it was not, for such a monstrous change to occur all at once with no warning whatever. Or had there, perhaps, been signs that he had missed? Thinking back, he began to fancy that such signs had actually been present in her behavior, a reluctance to which he had been blind simply because he chose to be, a general impression that she was making concessions she would have preferred not to make.

She did not come, and after a while he was absolutely converted to the belief in his rejection. He wondered how he had ever been such a fool as to think that it could have ended otherwise, or continued without ending in a life in which everything that was good ended and nothing ever ended that was not. He felt degraded, debased, absurdly threatened, and he felt for her then, standing in the dark doorway watching her dark windows, a virulent and exorbitant hatred because she obviously intended to destroy him. Or, rather, because she was by some kind of mysterious selective process the agent of the dark forces that had been trying to destroy him all his life. He was aware all at once of a repeated harsh sound in the doorway with him, and immediately afterward he was aware that the sounds were in his own throat and were his own involuntary sobs. Lunging out of the doorway, he turned to his right and moved down the sidewalk at a kind of awkward lope, as if he were pursuing something or fleeing from something, both of which were true enough.

He had no goal, or even conscious direction, but he kept in his flight, or pursuit, or both, to darker streets where fewer people walked. And he continued his awkward loping gait in the empirical knowledge, though it was not specifically recognized as such, that there was a balance of sorts to be held in motion that could not be held when motion ceased, that it would require, once he became static, an impossible exertion of will ever to move again. His body was soon wet with sweat, but he went on and on across intersections and around corners and down the dark streets until, after many miles and a long time, he slipped off the edge of a curb and fell on his knees in the gutter. He remained on his knees for almost a minute, and then he stood up slowly. He felt stunned, incredulous that he had done such an idiotic thing, falling in the gutter as if he were drunk, and he realized dully that he must have veered gradually toward the curb without knowing it. His right knee burned, and there was, he saw, a tear in his trousers. Moreover, now that he was not moving, his wet body began to chill. He was exhausted, and it was necessary to find a place to rest. Stepping back onto the sidewalk, he began to walk again, much slower than before, and a couple of blocks farther along the street he came to a bar and entered.

The room was long and narrow, dimly lighted, the bar stretching the length of one side. Tables and chairs were scattered without order or design over a bare floor that had begun to splinter, darkened and greasy from innumerable applications of sweeping compound. Some of the tables were occupied. A man and a woman sat drinking at the bar. Two other women sat drinking pale drinks at the bar alone, separated by an intervening empty stool. The two lone women were wearing cheap evening gowns, short-skirted, that clung to the upper slopes of their breasts, and they were obviously part of the place. Enos sat at the bar and ordered whisky and water. He drank the whisky at a gulp, gagging a little before he could lift the water and wash the taste from his mouth. His body was drying now, and not so chilled. The bartender refilled his glass, and he drank again, only part of the whisky this time, holding his breath after swallowing and washing the taste away at once with the water. The nearer of the two lone women moved down and sat beside him. She was wearing a thick and sickening scent, and he could see, looking sidewise and down from the corners of his eyes, a swell of flesh below the cleavage of her breasts. The gown was pale green and looked like rayon.

“Buy me a drink, honey?” she said.

He did not want to offend her, but neither did he want to buy her a drink or have anything at all to do with her. All he wanted, with an intensity of desire that was almost nauseous, was to be left alone by everyone on earth. Specifically, in his general withdrawal, he wanted the woman to go away, and he told her so with an exorbitantly precise articulation of syllables, as if he were afraid she would not clearly understand him and thereby force him to the monstrous effort of repeating himself. “Go away,” he said.

The woman understood him, all right, and for a moment she considered him with eyes reduced to slits of venom. Then she laughed with professional resiliency and laid a hand on his arm in a placating gesture.

“What’s the matter, honey? Something bothering you? Lost your best girl or something?”

Her persistence was an affront, her touch a violation, and her remark was unfortunate, to say the least. He reached across his own body and knocked her hand from his arm with a degree of violence that he did not actually intend.

“Go away,” he said. “I don’t want you here.”

The woman sucked in her breath with a hiss, and darkened lids slipped down again like purple bruises over gathering venom. She spat an epithet and slapped like a cat with her claws. He saw the attack from the corners of his eyes, as he had seen her breasts and swell of flesh, and he tried to avoid it, but he was not quick enough, and he felt on his cheek the burning mark of a nail. Down the bar, the woman sitting with the man had twisted on her stool to watch them, and beyond her her escort leaned far forward over the bar with his face turned toward them, split in cruel pleasure by a stained grin. Behind the bar, the bartender began to laugh, a windy expulsion without body. Quickly, neither speaking nor retaliating in any way, Enos got up and left. Laughter behind him grew and followed, and the woman, for good measure, added another epithet.

When he reached the sidewalk, he knew already what it was that he had to do next, but it was necessary to stop at the curb and think, for he did not know exactly where he was in relation to the place to which he wanted to go. It was imperative, he knew now, to return to Donna’s apartment. It was not that he hoped to salvage anything of what was surely lost, but only because there was a kind of negative security in establishing definitively that there was nothing to be salvaged, the kind of dark security he had felt in the end that had been no end before the remembered pines.

Moving abruptly, he walked to the corner and read on an iron post the names of the streets. He was able then to orient himself in relation to Donna’s apartment, which was an astonishingly long distance away, and he was dully incredulous that he had walked so far. He began to walk in the direction he needed to go, lunging forward again with the awkward, loping gait that carried him with remarkable swiftness over asphalt and concrete; and he reached the doorway in which he had stood before, just as a Chevrolet drove up from the opposite direction and stopped. He stood quietly and watched as Tyler got out and went around the car and opened the door for Donna. He felt within himself the silent, unbearable beat of pain that was somehow coordinated with the beat of his blood but was separate and stronger and not at all the same. In the brick wall of the apartment house light came up where darkness had been, from Donna’s windows. Time passed, and Tyler reappeared and drove away, and the time that had passed was no more than ten minutes, though it seemed longer than a night could be. After waiting yet a little longer in the distorted night where time, and all things, were deceptions, he crossed the street and went up to the floor on which Donna’s apartment was and pressed the button beside the door.