A Stranger's House (20 page)

Snow was already halfway up the tires of cars in the parking lot, the sidewalks nonexistent, only drifts of snow, and here came Jim and Sandra, Jim ahead of her, running, Sandra behind him, stooped in the snow. She pulled up a handful, made a snowball, and threw it at him. She nailed him square in the back, and I could hear above the bubbling of the radiators their laughter.

The second time I met him—the only other time—had been in midsummer. Jack had given me a draft of a paper he and Sandra had written for
Brain Research,
asked me to take it up to Sandra's apartment in North Village, where she was home sick.

I walked, the trees bright green and new, the students all gone, the campus like some small city evacuated for whatever reason. It was beautiful, quiet.

North Village, one of the married-student housing centers for the university, was about a half-mile north of campus, and by the time I got to the place, I had worked up a good sweat, the air heavy with humidity.

The complex was made up of one-story duplexes. Big Wheels littered the place, in yards, on porches, on the street. Each unit had a small patch of ground before it, mostly bald dirt where kids had played. The duplexes themselves were covered with gray, wooden siding, the trim all gray, the roofs gray and flat. Huge blue dumpsters sat here and there around the complex, some overflowing with trash, others empty.

I found their apartment halfway back into the complex, in the G section. Their lawn seemed to have a little more grass than most of the others, and I figured it must have been because they had no children.

I knocked on the door, a cheap, hollow gray door, and heard Jim shout from inside, “It's not locked.”

I pushed too hard to get the door open, slamming it into the wall inside. I nearly fell into the room, but then I got my balance. I looked up.

Jim stood in the front room in red nylon running shorts and black running shoes. He was pulling on a T-shirt, his chest bare and hairless, his stomach flat. The shirt was covering his head, and when he pulled it down, he was looking at me from the corner of his eyes, his head turned a little away. His mouth was shut tight.

I didn't recognize him. He was hurrying to dress, I could see, as he straightened out the shirt, knelt to tie first one shoe and then the other. He didn't have the beard or mustache now, and his hair was short. He was thin, terribly thin, and he was shorter than me, too, something I hadn't noticed during the winter, and for a moment
I thought that I had busted in on something illicit: a stranger hurrying to dress, Sandra somewhere, perhaps dressing in the bedroom, me arriving here unannounced.

He started in on a couple of stretches, spread his legs and leaned first toward one foot, then the other.

I said, “I'm Claire Templeton. From the lab? Jack sent me over to give something to Sandra.” I was still leaning against the open door.

He didn't look up at me, but merely stopped one stretch and went into another, twisting from side to side, his hands on his hips. “She's in the bedroom,” he seemed to grunt out. “Says she's sick.”

He stopped and, still without looking at me, came toward the door and jogged out. When he got onto the grass he called, “Close the door. Air conditioner's on.”

“Claire?” I heard from farther back in the apartment. It was Sandra, her voice faint, weak.

I closed the door, saw in the wall the hole where the doorknob had hit probably a thousand times before. I went for the doorway at the far end of the room, looking at everything. An old brown couch sat against one wall, the cushions nearly flat and sunken into the frame. Above it hung a poster of El Capitan, thumbtacked into the wall. Beneath the front window, the window that looked out onto the lawn and parking lot, were brick and plywood bookshelves crammed with textbooks and Stephen King novels; atop that sat a small portable television. Various sports equipment had been tossed or stacked around in the room: two sleeping bags, two backpacks, a Coleman stove, a canoe paddle, baseball bats and gloves. For a coffee table they had a telephone wire spool, one of those huge, round wooden things. On it lay issues of
Consumer Reports, Mother Earth News, Outside,
a dog-eared copy of the
Whole Earth Catalog.

I made it to the doorway, to my right the kitchenette, only a recess far enough into the wall to allow a sink, stove, and small refrigerator, above them miniscule cabinets maybe eight inches deep.

“Claire?” Sandra called out again, and I went through the doorway.

The room was nearly dark, the curtains drawn, the shades down. The room, too, was ice-cold, the air conditioner in the window on full blast.

I sat on the edge of the bed, Sandra lying in the middle, just a sheet over her. More posters hung on the walls; in the dark I thought I could see an Ansel Adams and a Harvey Edwards. Still more sports stuff was in here, against the wall and below the air conditioner their two bicycles, in another corner a soccer ball and some tennis racquets.

“Sandra,” I said, “what's wrong?”

“A cold. That's all,” she whispered, her nose stuffed up, I could hear. “A goddamned cold is all. I thought I could whip it myself, but I couldn't. Here I am.”

I said, “What's with Jim?”

She let out a deep sigh. “Oh, Jesus. He thinks it's my fault. He's up there with Linus Pauling, holding that the cold can be prevented with Vitamin C. So now it's all my fault.”

I handed the manuscript to her. “Will's get-well gift. The
Brain Research
paper. Final revisions.”

“What a guy,” she whispered, and reached for the manuscript Our hands touched, and her fingers were hot.

I stood, leaned over her, and put my wrist on her forehead. She was burning up.

That was when I took her to the Health Center, where they'd had to put her on antibiotics to get rid of the sinusitis she'd contracted.

So that now, in the dark of the computer room, these were the images of Jim I had in me: a kid ready to play in the snow, and some bastard who held her personally responsible for getting a cold.

“So,” she said. “You tell me. You tell me what to do. My husband gets me pregnant. I want it. He doesn't. So you tell me.”

My hand was still on her neck. I said, “I know what I would do.” I paused. “But I'm not you.”

“Easy answer,” she said.

I waited a moment, and said, “Will he leave you if you have it?”

“That's the thing,” she said, and leaned her head forward again, let it rest on her knees. “He's just pissing around with his course work. He is. He's not interested in the Ag stuff anymore. He doesn't study. He's not attending classes. He's got his job with the Ag department, handling animals and cleaning sheep shit, and that's it. Otherwise he's out playing fast-pitch softball, or over at Boyden
playing basketball, or ice-climbing or running cross-country or God knows what else.” She sniffed, then whispered, “Stuff I used to do.” She was quiet. “But he hasn't said one way or the other. No ultimatum. Not yet.”

She started to cry again, her breaths almost silent, silver sounds in the dark. She cried, and said, “But here's the problem. The problem is that I love him. And what I keep wondering is, Why should that be the problem? Why should the fact that I love my husband be the problem?” She tried to come up from her sobbing, to take a deep breath, but nothing happened. She cried, saying, “And I look at you. And I hate you, because you have what I want. You love your husband, he loves you. And you want to get pregnant. And here I am, just the opposite. I don't have any idea whether or not he loves me, and here I am pregnant. He tells me to get rid of it, that it's in the way. He tells me to go get—”

“Stop,” I whispered. “Now stop.”

“Why?” she said, and her head was up again, her back stiff. Though I couldn't see her face in the dark, I knew she was looking at me. “Don't you want me to say the word?” She'd stopped crying, too. She sniffed again, took in a breath. “Don't you want to hear it? Here:
Abortion.
That's what he tells me to go do. To get an abortion.”

It was me who was crying now, whatever shapes I could see in the darkness disappearing as my eyes filled, as I bit my lip to hold in my breath.

“That's the word,” she went on, “that's what he told me. ‘Why don't you just go on in and get an abortion?' he says to me, him standing there in the living room in shorts and a T-shirt, holding a basketball. He's just back from the courts, where he and some buddies have had a good, refreshing, brisk workout. ‘Abortion,' he says. That's the word.”

I closed my eyes.

“So,” she said. “What to do?”

“Leave him,” I whispered.

“Not that easy,” she said. “That's Claire talking as Claire. That's not Claire trying to think what Sandra should do.”

“Why?” I cried finally, letting out my sob, my chest collapsing. “Why ask me? Why ask me if you know I can't help?”

“Because,” she said quickly. She paused, took a deep breath, again
on that air in the faint hiccups. “Because now I've told you. Now you know.”

I leaned into her, and cried, trying to whisper
I see,
but unable to form the words, any words, that might comfort her, and that might comfort me.

I said nothing.

 

I began to feel as if my life were happening in dark rooms, that that was where I lived, where I talked, where I slept and ate. Here we were now, too, in the office of Mr. Clark's lawyer, only two lights on: the green banker's lamp on his desk, and the ginger jar lamp at the end of the sofa. The rest of the room was dark oak paneling and books.

Mr. Blaisdell stood looking out the curtainless window of the office down onto Main Street, his office on the second floor of one of the older buildings. His back was to us, his hands jammed into his pockets, his suit coat flared out at either side.

He was an old man, what I figured was apropos: he and the as yet unseen Mr. Clark could see eye to eye, know what each other thought, regard people like us the same. They understood each other.

He was short and round, his thick, white hair in something of a pompadour, only enhancing the roundness of things. His arms were short, the fingers fat and stubby so that whenever I shook hands with him—this was the third time we had met—his fingers only came to about the middle of my palm.

He gave out a heavy sigh, let his shoulders drop, all with his back to us. He looked down, and his head disappeared, before us only the back of a round body clad in a brown pinstripe suit.

He turned from the window, came around the edge of his desk, and did the best he could to sit on the front corner. When he finally situated himself, he was blocking out the light from the banker's
lamp, and suddenly I wanted away from this flush-faced old lawyer gearing himself up to tell us something we didn't want to hear.

I wanted out. I wanted to be outside on the street, the street-lamps just coming on, the sun now down, the sky, what I could see of it from where I sat, deep violet, the first evening stars glimmering in. I wanted on that street.

But then I thought of something better: I wanted to be in Chesterfield right now. I wanted to be settled in front of the fireplace in the front room, wanted some hot food going on the ancient stove in the kitchen, wanted our furniture in.

And then too many things crowded in on me. First was Sandra; after we talked that afternoon, we sat there in the dark for an hour without saying anything. To hell with Will, I was thinking, and with the rabbits and brains and sutures and running. To hell with it all. But as if on cue we had both stood up, left the room, still without having spoken. She went to the left and down the hall to whatever project she had been working on, and I went to the right, and down to the basement and to the next rabbit.

And then those thoughts were shoved out, because I started thinking of Mr. Gadsen, of this part of me left undone by my holding against him that accident, because what she had said was true: I had avoided him. Only last week I had seen him in the hall, saw him facing the wall and leaning against it, his right arm from palm to elbow pressed against the cinderblock, his head down. He was hacking, coughing something up into an old, yellowed handkerchief there at his mouth. He'd glanced up, and I knew he saw me coming out of the staining room. I had meant to go down the hall and to the basement, a path that would have led me right to him, fifteen yards away, but instead I gave him a quick smile, looked away, and turned toward the women's room across the hall, pushing into that door. From the corner of my eye I had seen him turn toward me, seen him raise an arm as if to wave at me, saw him already moving toward me. Then, just as the door closed behind me, I heard him call out “Missy,” and I went to a stall, sat on the toilet seat, and waited until I heard his footsteps recede down the hallway.

The old lawyer put a fist to his mouth, cleared his throat into it “You know,” he started, his solemn lawyer's voice full and booming in the small room. “You know that there are always reasons why
someone sells a house. Reasons that, oftentimes, defy any sort of rational orientation.”