Wake Up With a Stranger (2 page)

The Jewish population of the town was quite small, but it supported one synagogue. Aaron went there to worship, and when he was old enough he started attending public school. It was then that his personality began to develop in a certain way and to acquire a particular quality, and the quality that it began to acquire was bitterness. This was not overt and offensive, as it might have been in a boy less naturally gentle; and instead of becoming the basis of aggression it showed in his eyes and attitude more as a kind of inexplicable sadness than anything else. This quality was not the result of persecution, for there was none, but of exclusion. To be sure, he had fully the acceptance of his own people, and even up to a point the acceptance of the non-Jews, but this was for him too narrow on the one hand and too qualified on the other, and on neither hand was it enough.

He was a bright boy and did well in school, and when he was seventeen he went away to the state university. His academic status there Was exceptionally good, but his social status was essentially the same as it had been at home, and while this was comfortable, it was not sufficient. He finished two years and began a third, and then one morning, without any warning, he quietly packed his things and went home. His father did not question the decision nor ever ask afterward why it had been made. He did not feel compelled or qualified to do the one, and it was unnecessary to do the other. He was certain that he knew without asking.

Aaron went to work in the haberdashery and did as well in the business as he had done in school. He worked there for five years, and in the third year his mother died, and at the end of the fifth his father died also. His father’s assets were far greater than Aaron had dreamed, and he inherited everything. After the will was probated, he never opened the haberdashery again. He liquidated the assets and moved north to St. Louis. After a while he opened an exclusive shop for women in an area of exclusive shops, but before doing this he married a woman three years his senior, a Methodist from a good family. And always thereafter, for as long as he lived, the apostate felt like a traitor and carried within himself an unrelieved burden of guilt and a quiet conviction of his irrevocable damnation.

The marriage was not successful. He bought a fine house in a restricted residential area where every property had enough ground to insure reasonable privacy, and he tried very hard in every way that he could; but in spite of all his efforts the marriage went sour, and the truth was that it had no chance from the beginning. It was honestly not his fault, but his wife’s.

A neurotic, she accumulated over a period of years an incredible number of psychosomatic ills; and it was not long before she decided that the state of her health made it imperative for her to deny her husband access to her body. She moved into a separate bedroom, and since she had never achieved a climax in her life, she was not aware of any personal loss in the discontinuance of a rather untidy function that she had always considered a disagreeable duty.

This was not true, however, with Aaron. His needs were normal and demanded satisfaction. He was a reasonably attractive man with more money than most men ever get; he could have had affairs, of course, or taken a permanent mistress, but he did not wish to risk emotional involvment or the possible development of an unfortunate situation. As an inadequate compromise, he went twice a month to a fashionable whorehouse on the south side of the city.

There was quite a bit of the moralist in him, and the biweekly trips to the south side disturbed his conscience some, adding to the burden of guilt that he already carried for other reasons. Because he was forced into them by his wife’s abstinence, he came to look upon her as a source of corruption as well as a kind of parasite, and he hated her covertly and quietly. There was a short time when he considered rather academically the possibility of killing her and getting away with it, but of course his considerations came to nothing because he was really far too gentle to resort to violence and far too tender to the probings of his conscience to survive indefinitely as a murderer even if he could evade the retribution prescribed by law. Compensation for the deficiency of his marriage he found to a degree in his shop, and eventually to a greater degree in the young woman who came to work in the shop.

The shop prospered, though his marriage did not. He planned it himself from the beginning, specifying his choice of colors and fabrics and carpeting, and he had a genius for devising combinations of qualities that gave the effect of luxury without losing the aesthetic values of simplicity. His sense of what women would like, or ought to like and could be persuaded to like, was uncannily delicate and accurate. He displayed nothing but fine gowns, and he built quite rapidly a reputation which enticed the patronage of women who could afford to pay for both the gowns and his judgment in selecting them. But what he wanted more than anything else, and what he could not for a long time find the means of securing, was a selection of originals, originals in his own shop, which would compare favorably with the originals of New York and Paris. With these he could seduce and retain the patronage of women like Harriet Tyler who now selected most of their more expensive gowns in the shops of New York, at least, if not Paris.

While he was thinking of this and wondering how he could accomplish it, at the age of forty-five, he had his first heart attack. He was in the shop, fortunately in the back room supervising personally an alteration by the seamstress; and all of a sudden, without the slightest recognizable warning, he was overcome by the most terrible pain that he had ever known. A doctor was called by Gussie Ingram, his chief saleslady, and an ambulance was called by the doctor. The ambulance came into the alley behind the shop, and Aaron was carried out the rear exit on a stretcher. Mrs. Alton Sturdevant, who was at the time buying a hundred-and-fifty dollar cocktail gown in front, was never aware that anything had happened; and Aaron did not return for nearly two months.

This occurred in January, a month which Aaron’s wife had begun to spend in Florida, and he did not find it necessary to inform her precisely what he had suffered. On her part, she did not find it any more necessary to return to find out. As a matter of fact, she was inclined to consider illness her special privilege, and she rather resented him as a trespasser. Not that he cared at all. He no longer wished to kill her, or even that she would die, for it would have been impossible for her to have been, really, any more dead to him than she already was.

He learned two things from his brush with death. The first was that his life to that point, in spite of the shop, had hardly been worth living. The second was that, nevertheless, he would rather go on living than die. For several months he exercised the excessive caution characteristic of heart-conscious persons; but as time passed and he suffered no new attack or any signs of one, he relaxed and lived more naturally, and began to think again about the originals. He even thought of trying to design them himself, but his talent was in judgment, not creation, and he knew that he would not be successful. Soon afterward, almost a year from the time of his attack, Donna Buchanan came to see him.

The first thing he noticed about her was that she was frightened and had adopted an air of excessive sophistication to disguise her fright. He noted this only briefly, however, because the second thing he noticed was that she was unusually attractive and had learned well the tricks of making herself look even more attractive than she naturally was. Her hair was black, but her skin was fair — and her lips were done boldly in vivid color. She was wearing a pair of harlequin glasses that increased the piquancy of her thin face. When she removed her heavy coat in response to his invitation, he saw that her body was fine and slim and good to look at; and he would have viewed it imaginatively in a number of his own gowns if he had not been so struck by the one she was wearing. It was a navy faille with the effective simplicity of fine design and the unmistakable clean lines of expensive tailoring.

“Excuse me,” he said. “Where did you get that dress?”

“I made it,” she said.

“Where did you get the pattern?”

“I designed it myself.”

“Where did you learn to design?”

“I took a correspondence course, which helped, but mostly I’ve just worked at developing what I knew instinctively.”

This was an answer that pleased him, for he had a great belief in feeling as the primary element of excellence in design, a kind of natural awareness of what was right and not right.

“Why have you come to see me?” he asked.

“To ask if you might have a place for me in your shop.”

“As a designer?”

“I’d be willing to sell too, but I’d want to work part of the time on designing.”

He nodded at the portfolio she had brought in with her.

“Are those some of your designs?”

“Yes.”

“Show them to me.”

She did, and his excitement increased. He knew at once that he was going to give her a place in his shop — there was no question about that from the very first — but he examined all the sketches without comment, visualizing their execution in this or that fabric, brocades and velvets and Jacquarded silks. Afterward he closed the portfolio and began to talk with her about conditions and terms as if it were quite simply understood by both of them that it was no more than a matter of clarifying the details of an arrangement that was inevitable.

She turned out to be not only a fine designer but also a subtle and effective saleslady; and even these assets, important as they were to the shop and its increasing distinction, were of minor significance as compared with her total effect in the life that Aaron had been living, less because he really wanted to live it than because he did not want to explore the consequences of dying. He soon loved her and wanted to possess her. This he confessed to himself, because he was painfully honest in the presence of his id, but he confessed it to no one else, certainly not to her, because he was considerate and shy and had no faith in his capacity to incite in her a reciprocal desire.

After a while she had her own key to the shop and often returned at night to work at her sketches, and sometimes, at the beginning, he was there himself when she came. Afterward he made a point of being there every time instead of only sometimes. For quite a long while he made a pretense of having his own late business in the shop, but then, abruptly, he abandoned the pretense entirely and spent all his time in the room where she worked. It gave him genuine pleasure merely to sit and watch her, and to talk with her when she wanted to talk, and even to feel within himself the aching carnal appetite that was now specifically dedicated for the first time in much too long. Because it was dedicated, because it was a part of love, it was therefore purified and no disturbance to his tender conscience.

One night when she was finished working, she turned and met his bitter-sad eyes and held them levelly with hers for the length of three long breaths.

“Are you in love with me?” she said.

Rather strangely, or perhaps not, he wasn’t in the least disturbed by the question, and he answered that he was. “Would you like to have me?” she said. “Yes.”

“Well, I think I would like to have you too, so why don’t we try it and see how it works out?”

“Here? Now?”

“Do you object to here and now?”

“Oh, no. No.”

“Well, then.”

He was a little awkward the first time, and excessively gentle, but it worked out pleasantly for her, and wonderfully for him, and was repeated frequently afterward. She left home (she had been living with her mother and father) and rented an apartment, and he stayed with her there several nights a month. Or when his wife was out of town, they went to his house. He discontinued his trips to the south side. His life was suddenly warm and exciting, something it had never been before, and then, cataclysmically, in the midst of the warmth and excitement, about eight months after he took her the first time in the shop, he had his second heart attack.

He spent two months in the hospital and six weeks at home and was considered fortunate, by his doctor, to be alive. The shop in his absence was in Donna’s charge. She visited him in the hospital and reported how things were going, and they went well. While he was convalescing at home, she did not see him at all, although she talked to him daily over the telephone, because she did not wish to meet the wife of the man with whom she had committed adultery and with whom she expected to commit it again. This was a reticence he could understand and approve of, but the six weeks at home were the longest of his life. He eventually escaped to the shop, and Donna, with vast relief, but always afterward he carried, or was supposed to carry, a supply of nitroglycerine tablets in his pocket.

Everything was resumed. Business and Donna and life. And the warmth and excitement were still there, the strong desire to live and do and be. It was never in him in greater force than it was the morning he awakened early, arose quietly, and looked down at her nakedness with love, and then descended the stairs of his house to drop dead in the hall in an instant.

Before she had walked from the house to the street, her feet were wet and very cold. She turned left at the street and walked directly down it for several blocks, looking right and left at each intersection for a drugstore or café or any establishment at all that might be open on a Sunday and have a telephone. At last she saw to her left, at an intersection, the unlighted neon identification of a drugstore.

While she felt for Aaron a genuine grief, it was not unmixed grief, and she felt also for herself a concern which had been expressed first in flight and would from this time on be expressed in a calculated effort to avoid implication. There was no real harm in this, of course — it was better for him as it was for her — but it entailed problems; and the most imperative of the problems was arranging that his body be found soon. This was a problem which could surely be solved simply, however, once she was in a position to think about it clearly, and, meanwhile, she wondered if anyone had seen her leave the house fifteen or twenty minutes ago. She doubted it, but even so, there were her footprints in the snow. She hoped the heavy snow would continue, and obliterate the prints.