Read Wake Up With a Stranger Online
Authors: Fletcher Flora
Wake Up With a Stranger
With
A Stranger
FLETCHER FLORA
a division of F+W Media, Inc.
We have this young woman, this Donna Buchanan, who awakened one morning in a room in a house in Midland City, a certain kind of person with a certain kind of day ahead of her.
At first, immediately after opening her eyes, she had a feeling that it was very late and that she would have to get up at once and go down to the shop in which she worked. Then, with increasing awareness of which day it was, she remembered that it was Sunday and that it would not be necessary to get up until she chose, or to go anywhere at all. With this established — the day and the limits of its claims upon her — she was prepared to establish also in her mind the significant sequence of events which had determined that she should awaken here and now instead of somewhere else at another time.
To start with,
she thought,
there was the sale of the original peau de soie with the bouffant skirt. I designed it myself and made it myself and sold it myself to no one but Mrs. William Walter Tyler, Queen Harriet herself, the snotty bitch, but I’ll have to hand it to her that she’s got the body to wear it and get away with it, not all points and edges like some of them. It was the sheerest bit of good luck that the gown was available when she stopped in the shop, just finished and hanging on the rack in the back room as if it were made for her and meant for her from the beginning. But even so, even with such a beautiful chance to show it for the first time, I almost didn’t do it because I was afraid. I was afraid she wouldn’t like it — and if she hadn’t, if she’d rejected it, I’d have hated her guts, I swear to God I’d have scratched her eyes out. But I needn’t have been afraid at all as it turned out, because she liked it and bought it, and this is much more important than might at first be apparent. Quite apart from the price, which was four hundred dollars and therefore of considerable importance in itself, there is the matter of having the continuing patronage of Mrs. William Walter Tyler, Queen Harriet, beautiful Hattie, and the additional patronage of all the points and edges who try to look like Hattie and act like Hattie in all that Hattie does for public observation. What Hattie does that is not for public observation is no business or concern of mine, but just the same, in passing, I wonder who the hell she thinks she’s fooling with her sly caresses under the guise of feeling the material, and I wonder what the hell kind of life Mr. William Walter Tyler has in bed at home.
Let’s see, now. What happened next in the day that was yesterday and had everything to do with the day that is today? After Queen Hattie had gone, it was quite late, almost time to close the shop, and I went into the back room again, and the sewing machine was running, and because of the sale of the peau de soie, which was the best thing I have ever done and actually worth more than the four hundred dollars it brought, the sound of the sewing machine was like a song, a serenade, a singing in the blood. Gussie was waiting for me there, and I could tell from her excitement that she had been spying through the curtains and had followed the sale right from Queen Hattie in mink to her panties and back, and she asked me if I’d really sold it, the peau de soie, and I told her I had, casually, as if it were nothing unusual at all to have one of my little creations covering the velveteen tail of Mrs. William Walter Tyler, and just about then Aaron came back from wherever he’d been, and I told him about it.
He was happy. He was happy for me, and there’s that about Aaron. There was profit in it for him, because it’s his shop, but he was basically glad because it was my design and my gown and might be for me the beginning of acceptance and recognition and something truly big at last. He was happier for me than for himself, and there’s that about him.
“It’s marvelous, Donna,” he said. “I am so happy for you.”
“Maybe it won’t mean anything,” I said. “Maybe it’s a four-hundred-dollar sale and nothing more.”
“Oh, no,” he said. “It’s a beautiful gown, and it will make Mrs. Tyler look beautiful, and everyone will tell her so, and she’ll surely be back for more Donna Buchanan originals. Make no mistake about that.”
“Well, I hope you’re right,” I said, and he said, “It’s absolutely true, and you’ll see, and we should do something to celebrate it.”
He was very sweet with his gray curly hair and soft smiling mouth, and I agreed that it was something that should be celebrated, and after Gussie and the seamstress were gone we talked about what would be a proper celebration and finally decided to go to dinner as a beginning, which we did. I didn’t want to go to my apartment even long enough to change clothes, so I changed into my dress shoes and borrowed from the racks the crimson sheath that fitted my mood, and changed in one of the dressing rooms, and we went out and had dinner and later went dancing and got a little drunk on too many brandies, and I could tell that he wanted me, and after a while I began to want him also, though not so much as he wanted me, and eventually we came here to his home, his wife having gone to Florida, and we undressed and went to bed, and so here I am, in bed still, but he is not, for some reason or other, and I wonder why everything is so exceptionally quiet.
Having thus reviewed her way to bed, she lay and listened to oppressive silence, and all at once, for no reason that she could isolate, she was uneasy and a little depressed and no longer so pleased by remembrance of the sale of the peau de soie. Lying quite still, hardly breathing so that her breath would not disturb the air, she listened intently for the sound of Aaron in the bathroom, but she heard no sound at all, and she began to wonder where he could possibly have gone to. It was certainly not reasonable that he would simply get up and go away under the circumstances, leaving her asleep and naked in bed with no word whatever. Unless, of course, he had been called away quite early and planned to return quickly, in which case he would surely have left a note explaining things.
Thinking that this was what he had done, she sat up suddenly and snapped on the small lamp on the table beside the bed. But there was no note on the table or pinned to his pillow, and neither, she learned by leaning to the side and peering over the edge of the bed, had it accidentally fallen to the floor. It was certainly peculiar, and she couldn’t understand it at all, and she began to feel a little angry, as well as lonely and depressed, and she would give Aaron hell for it when he returned, you could depend on that, and what made his absence even worse and absolutely inexcusable was that she was becoming increasingly conscious of her own body and wanted him to return for more reasons than one.
Then it occurred to her that he had probably gone downstairs to the kitchen to prepare them some breakfast. This was a perfectly rational and acceptable explanation, because it was just the kind of considerate thing he would do, and she lay and listened intently again, trying to detect the sounds of movement on the lower floor, but she still heard nothing and had really expected to hear nothing, for in so large a house the kitchen was much too far away for sounds to carry. Moving abruptly, she swung her legs over the edge of the bed and reached for her glasses on the bedside table and put them on.
She did not do this because she needed them to see well, but because they had become to her the symbol of something she had never quite isolated and identified, and they gave her a feeling of strength and security and of being the kind of person she wanted to be. They were harlequin-shaped horn rims with plain glass lenses. The optometrist had reported she did not need glasses, but she had insisted so vehemently upon having them that he had finally shrugged and put the plain glass in the frames of her choice. She had thought then, and still thought, that the frames accentuated the natural slant of her eyes and the piquancy of her thin face, and what she thought was true. She was pretty enough without them, but with them she was much more than pretty, and it would have been difficult to determine precisely the substance of the difference.
Wearing the glasses and no more, she walked across the room to a bank of windows and pulled the heavy gray drapes a little apart and stood looking down across a side yard at an angle to the street. It was snowing thickly, great wet flakes, and that explained, in part, the oppressive silence. Houses always went silent, it seemed, in a snow, and even if there were talking and laughing and music, the silence was still there on the inside if the snow was outside.
She crossed to the bathroom and went through it and into the bedroom beyond, the room of Aaron’s wife. It gave her a feeling of aggressive pride to be there, a kind of arrogant and insolent sense of triumph to walk naked through the room — a woman wanted, and had, and essential, among the possessions of a woman unwanted and no longer worth having and essential to no one on earth. She sat on the bed, lay back and rolled over on it, got up and went over to the dressing table, and examined the articles on it. If the cosmetics were the right shade, she thought, she might use them to repair the composition of her own face, but they were, of course, much too pastel for her vividness, and she replaced them with an abrupt little gesture of contempt, as if there were necessarily something deficient in a woman who used pastel shades.
Leaning forward, she switched on a light beside the long mirror and studied her body in the shining glass, the high breasts and flat belly and hips that were perhaps a trifle narrow but swelling sufficiently, nevertheless into long clean flanks. Pivoting, she twisted her head arid looked around over her shoulder into the mirror at her backside; and she laughed suddenly and softly and spontaneously at the sight, as if she couldn’t help it in the warm, possessive pleasure she felt in herself. But in this warm reaction there was also an element of sadness, the knowledge not specifically recognized that even self-love and self-possession were not inviolable securities, and that she would in time as surely lose herself — at least herself as she was in the glass — as she had lost and would lose others. This understanding, though not clearly verbalized or accepted, took much of the pleasure from her narcissm, and she turned off the light and went back into the bathroom.
Above the lavatory was a large mirrored door, and she opened it and regarded the articles on the shelves. Most of them were masculine — Aaron’s possessions, a razor, a can of lather, talcum and lotion and styptic. There was also a bottle of aspirin tablets, and this reminded her that she didn’t even have a headache, after having drunk really quite a lot last night, and she felt a little proud that this was the case, as if it were some superiority in herself that made it possible.
Beside the aspirin bottle was a smaller clear cylinder, with cotton under the cork and some very tiny tablets under the cotton. Taking it in her hands, she turned it around and read the word
NITROGLYCERIN
on the small label that had been turned toward the back of the cabinet. She replaced the cylinder and closed the mirrored door and decided that she would take a shower.
From a drawer of a built-in cabinet she took a towel, and from another she took a rubber cap to keep her hair dry. In the tub, she kept increasing the hot water until it was very hot indeed, and after it was so hot that she thought she could stand it no hotter, she turned it off entirely, leaving only the cold water running, and it was then, for the seconds she stood under it, an excruciatingly delightful torture, like a thousand thin needles piercing her flesh. Out of the tub, she rubbed herself dry and went back into Aaron’s bedroom to get her clothes.
She found them in a pile on the floor at the foot of the bed, and she separated them and examined them now to see if she had done them any real harm, the crimson sheath and the wisps of nylon, and she was relieved to see that she hadn’t. The crimson sheath was rather ridiculous now at mid-morning, but it wouldn’t matter in the house or under her coat when she left, and she would stop by the shop and change back into her own dress on the way home. A more serious problem were her shoes, hardly more than thin soles with narrow strategic straps. They were not at all suitable for snow, and she had no galoshes, but since Aaron would deliver her to the shop, it would only be a matter of a few steps in approaching and leaving the car.
Fully dressed, she found her purse and removed her lipstick and went back into the bathroom to do her lips before the mirror, leaning forward and carefully extending and perfecting their natural outline with the vivid color. In doing this, she noticed for the first time that she had neglected to put her glasses back on again after the shower. They were still lying on the edge of the lavatory, and she put them on and studied her face for a moment in the glass and then returned to the bedroom. Now, having run out of things to do, she was forced to consider again the absence of Aaron.
She could not understand it, she simply could not, and the more she thought about it, the more furious she became. Well, if he thought she was going to sit and sit and wait and wait until he got goddamn good and ready to return, he was crazy. What she was going to do, thin shoes or no shoes at all, was go down and get her coat where she had left it below in the hall, call a taxi, and go to the shop and home by herself — and Aaron, the bastard, could go to hell.
Determined to follow this course of action, she went into the hall and began to descend the stairs, and she was halfway down when she understood at last why it was that he had left, and where he had gone, and why he would not return, not today or tomorrow or ever.
He was lying on the floor of the hall below her. He was obviously and incredibly and terrifyingly dead.
Aaron Burns was born in a town downstate forty-eight years before he died in his home in St. Louis. His father was an old-fashioned orthodox Jew who operated a haberdashery and prospered at it. He was a stern man, adhering strictly to the tenets of his religion and the mores of his people, but he was also compassionate and just, with compassion tempering justice more often than otherwise. Aaron respected his father, and even loved him in a way, but he often could not understand him and later could not follow him.