You Are Not A Stranger Here (9 page)

Looking over it now, he wondered at the neutrality of the grass and the trees and the houses beyond, how in their stillness they neither judged nor forgave. He stared across the playing field a moment longer. And then, calmly, he crossed to the wardrobe and took down the box.

S I T T I N G I N T H E front room, Hillary heard her brother's footsteps overhead and then the sound of his door closing. Her tears had dried and she felt a stony kind of calm, gazing into the wing chair opposite--an old piece of their parents' furniture. Threads showed at the armrests, and along the front edge the ticking had come loose. At first they'd meant to get rid of so many things, the faded rugs, the heavy felt curtains, but their parents' possessions had settled in the house, and then there seemed no point.

In the supermarket checkout line, she sometimes glanced at the cover of a decor magazine, a sunny room with blond wood floors, bright solid colors, a white sheet on a white bed. The longing for it usually lasted only a moment. She knew she'd be a foreigner in such a room.

She sipped the last of her wine and put the glass down on the coffee table. Darkness had fallen now and in the window she saw the reflection of the lamp and the mantel and the bookcase.

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"Funny, isn't it? How it happens." That's all her friend Miriam Franks would ever say if the conversation turned onto the topic of why neither of them had married. Hillary would nod and recall one of the evenings she'd spent with Ben up at the cottage, sitting in the garden, talking of Owen, thinking to herself she could only ever be with someone who understood her brother as well as Ben did.

She switched off the light in the front room and walked to the kitchen. Owen had wiped down the counters, set everything back in its place. For a moment, she thought she might cry again. Her brother had led such a cramped life, losing his friends, scared of what people might know. She'd loved him so fiercely all these years, the fears and hindrances had felt like her own. What good, then, had her love been? she wondered as she pulled the French doors shut. Upstairs, Owen's light was still on, but she didn't knock or say good night as she usually did. Across the hall in her own room, she closed the door behind her. The little stack of letters lay on her bed. Years ago she had read them, after rummaging for a box at Christmastime. Ben was married by then, as she'd found out when she called. Her anger had lasted a season or two but she had held her tongue, remembering the chances Owen had to leave her and how he never had.

Standing over the bed now, looking down at the pale blue envelopes, she was glad her brother had let go of them at last. Tomorrow they would have supper in the kitchen. He would offer to leave this house, and she would tell him that was the last thing she wanted.

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Putting the letters aside, she undressed. When she'd climbed into bed, she reached up and turned the switch of her bedside lamp. For an instant, lying in the sudden darkness, she felt herself there again in the woods, covering her brother's eyes as she gazed up into the giant oak. 88

W A R ' S E N D

2

H E H A S S E E N these cliffs before, in picture books. He has seen the wide beaches and the ruined cathedral. Ellen, his wife, she has shown him. In the taxi from the station, Paul looks over the golf course, and there is Saint Andrews: the bell tower, rows of huddled stone houses, the town set out on a promontory, out over the blue-black sea. Farther, in the distance, a low bank of rain cloud stretches over the water; 89

waves emerge from the mist. He follows them into shore, watching them swell and crest, churning against the rocks. Ellen reaches across the back seat and takes his hand. They have come here for her to use a library at the university. They have paid for their trip with the last of her grant money and a credit card. Paul's latest psychiatrist, the one they can't really afford, has said a change of scenery might help, a break in the routine of empty days. He's been gone from work a year now, low as he's ever been and tired. In their apartment, in a college town in Pennsylvania, he has lain in bed in the early morning hours as Ellen slept beside him, and known that her life would be easier if he were gone. He's been too fatigued to plan.

Until now.

Staring at the dark face of the cliffs, his mind quickens enough to see how it might happen, and for a moment, sitting there in the taxi, holding his wife's hand, he feels relief.

A F T E R C H E C K I N G I N T O

the hotel and unpacking their

things, they go looking for a restaurant. The main street is cobbled, lined with two-story stone buildings, dirty beige or gray. A drizzle has begun to fall, dotting the plate glass windows of the shops closed for the night. The pubs have stopped serving food. They wander further and come to a restaurant on the town square, a mock American diner lit with traffic signals, the walls hung with road signs for San Diego and Gary, Indiana.

"Charming," Ellen says, opening the front door. 90

Paul hangs back, stilled by a dread of the immediate future, the dispiriting imitations he sees through the windows, a fear of what it will feel like to be in there, a sense that commitment to it could be a mistake, that perhaps they should keep going. Though he doesn't want that either, having already sensed an abandoned quality to this town: the students gone for their Easter break, the pubs nearly empty, the dirty right angle where the sidewalk meets the foundation stones of a darkened bank, the crumpled flyer that lies there, all of it gaining on him now, this scene, these objects, their malignancy. He tries to recall the relief of just an hour ago: that soon this will end, the accusatory glare of the inanimate world. But there on the pavement in halogen streetlight is a scattering of sand that appears to him as if in the tight focus of a camera's lens, sharper than his eyes can bear. He takes a steadying breath, as the doctor told him to when the world of objects becomes so lucid he feels he is being crushed by their presence.

"You sure about this?" he asks.

"It's late--we might as well," Ellen says. "We can find something better tomorrow."

He could stop her, try to explain, but as she looks back at him from the doorway he can see her nascent concern in the slight tilt of her head. She will be looking for signs of improvement in him, indications the trip was a good idea. He will want time alone in the days ahead. If she worries too much now, she may hesitate to go by herself to the library. It's the first time in months he's been capable of an instrumental thought, a weighing of needs.

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"All right," he says, and follows her through the door. At their table, the coffee stains and salt crystals on the redand-white checkered oilcloth press him back in his chair; escaping them, he looks across the room to see a broad-faced old woman, her skin the color of a whitish moon. She sits at a table by the kitchen sipping a mug of tea. Their eyes meet for a moment, neither of them looking away. They stare straight at each other, expressionless, oddly intimate, like spies acknowledging each other's presence in a room of strangers. She nods, smiles weakly, turns away.

When the waitress arrives, Ellen orders her food. Then there is silence. Paul reads the description of the chicken sandwich again. From the speakers, he hears the smooth, crooning voices of the Doobie Brothers.

Time barely moves.

"Paul, you know what you want?"

He looks into Ellen's face, the slight rise of her eyebrow, a sign of apprehension, so familiar from the days she first saw him depressed, a year before they married, when for no apparent reason his basic faith in the world, the faith that there is a purpose in working or eating, dissolved, and she came to his apartment day after day with her books, conversation, news--patient and loving. Many times he's wondered why, after seeing him that way, she still married him. She was wrong to do it, he knows now, seeing her strained eyes and pursed lips, the way the old sympathy must fight against frustration. He is the chain and the weight. No matter how she struggles, he will pull her under eventually. Getting out of the 92

house, out of the solipsism of blank days, coming to this foreign place, he can see it all more clearly. The waitress stares.

"Honey? What are you going to have?" Ellen asks, trying after a long day's journey not to sound impatient. Silence stretches on.

"He'll have a chicken sandwich," Ellen says at last. I N T H E B AT H R O O M at the hotel, he stands before the mirror trying to recall his reason for being there. Electric light shines evenly on the sink's white porcelain. Cool air slides from the windowsill across the floor onto his bare feet. Water swells on the lip of the faucet.

From the bedroom he hears Ellen's voice. She seems to be talking about a friend of hers, a woman at the college who like Ellen has no permanent position, and was apparently just let go. There is something about courses not filled. She asks a question he doesn't follow. He tries to piece together what he's heard but it's no good.

"You all right in there?"

He opens his fist and sees the pill he is supposed to take flaking in the sweat of his palm.

Ten times, maybe even twenty, he has sat on a doctor's couch and answered the same battery of questions about his sleep and interest in sex, his appetite and sense of despair; and he's said, yes, there was an uncle and a grandmother who, looking back, seemed unhappy in more than the usual ways; 93

and yes, there were his parents, who divorced, his mother who always had a few drinks after dinner; and no, he doesn't hear voices or believe there is a plot to undo him. At the end of each of the hours, he's listened to the doctor's brief talk about the new combination they'd like to try, how at first it might make him nauseous or tired or anxious. For years he's done as he was told, and for stretches of time he's felt like a living person. Then the undertow returns. Ellen hears of a better doctor. Again he must answer the questions. He's always doubted the purpose of the drugs. Despite all the explanations, he's never been able to rid himself of the conviction that his experience has a meaning. That the crushing pulse of specificity he so often sees teeming in the physical world is no distortion. That it is there to be seen if one has the eyes. He's been told this is a romantic notion, a dangerous thing to cling to, bad advice for the mentally ill. Perhaps it is. Though the opposite has always seemed more frightening to him, lonelier--the idea that so much of him was a pure and blinded waste.

"I'm fine," he says softly, rinsing the damp powder into the drain.

In bed, Ellen leans her head on his chest, laying a hand flat on his stomach. There is nothing sexual about her touch. There has been none of that for a long time. She is thirty-four and would like to have a child. He begins, as he has so often, to think of all the things he does not provide her, but knowing the list is endless, he stops.

"You feel nice and warm," she says.

He runs his hand through her hair. She has never worn 94

perfume or makeup, which for him has always added to her beauty, the lack of facade.

"You all set for the library tomorrow?"

"Yeah," she says, nodding her head against his chest. She's come to read correspondence from the Second World War, part of her research on the lives of women on the home front. Her real interests are in the political history of the time, but her adviser has told her there is a glut of scholarship on the topic and it isn't the best idea if she wants to find a faculty position. She's thought about ignoring his advice, but when Paul stopped working, she decided it was best to be practical.

He remembers their meeting for the first time, at a friend's house, where they sat in a bay window overlooking a garden. No matter what she spoke of, she seemed so optimistic: her work, their friends at the party, the cut of his jacket--it was all good. Those first months he would come to her apartment in the afternoons when he'd finished his teaching at the high school. He'd do his correcting at the kitchen table while she worked at her desk in the bedroom. It was as if he'd been invited into a parallel world, a place where small pleasures--like knowing she was in the other room--could be a daily thing. She had a bemused look on her face when one evening he tried to explain he wasn't feeling well. They were sitting on the porch of her apartment after supper, a pop song, as he remembers it, coming from the window of her downstairs neighbor.

"You're too hard on yourself," she said. "That school 95

wears you out. You need more sleep." Her voice had a kindly tone. If he hadn't known before, he knew then she'd never experienced the kind of dread he was trying to describe. It didn't matter, he told himself then. That she loved him, that was enough. It wasn't realistic to expect acknowledgment would ever be complete.

"I'll just get started at the library tomorrow, just a few hours in the morning," she says, reaching up to kiss him good night. "Then we can take a walk around, see the beach."

He touches his hand to her face.

"All right," he says, switching off the bedside lamp. E A R LY M O R N I N G , A pewter gray light hangs in the middle of the room, leaving the corners obscured, blurring the outlines of the sitting chair and bureau.

He dresses quietly; quietly he closes the door behind him. The air outside is cold, mist blanketing the streets. He makes his way up toward the castle, and from there onto the path leading alongside the wall of the cathedral grounds. Opposite is the cliff, grass running to its edge. He walks to the verge. He can hear the slosh and fizz of the sea below, the deep knock of a boulder being rocked in place by the waves. All of it invisible down there in the fog. It is better this way, he thinks.

" 'Scuse me, dear, could you give me a hand?" a voice behind him says. He turns to see an old woman buttoned in a green wool coat. She stands no more than a yard away, holding a grocery 96

bag. He can't understand how she's come this near without his notice. As he looks more closely, he sees it is the old woman from the restaurant, her brown eyes set in wrinkled skin.

"Didn't mean to scare you, dear. Just that I've dropped a bit of the shopping. Shouldn't have brought Polly down before stopping at the house." She glances back along the cliff, where a white terrier emerges from the mist. A brown paper bag lies on the ground before her.