Authors: Steven Millhauser
Harter was awakened by a soft, persistent rapping on his door, such as someone might make who knew that it was early in the morning—not yet seven o’clock—and who wished to apologize for disturbing him even while insisting that he must be disturbed. Harter threw on an old robe and raked his fingers through his hair. He had not slept well. When he opened the kitchen door he was surprised to see two men in formal overcoats who stood with their hats in their hands. “May we come in?” asked the older and taller
man, whose thick gray hair was brushed carefully back above his ears, and when Harter hesitated the other said, “We’re here about—that business of last night. He asked us to speak to you.” He lowered his eyes. “We can come back another time.”
“No, it’s all right, I’m—it’s not even seven. Come in.” Harter gave a little flourish with his hand, which at once he regretted for its air of frivolity, and stopping the gesture abruptly he thrust the hand into the slightly torn pocket of his robe.
The men took two steps into the small kitchen and stopped, gripping their homburgs. Harter began to pull a chair out from the table, noticing with distaste the coffee cup with its sticky brown sediment, the plate with its stale half-doughnut, the crusted spoon in the flowered sugar bowl. The men did not move toward the table and Harter, uncertain, stood with a hand resting on the chairback.
“Mr. Harter,” said the older man, “we regret the inconvenience and can only stay a few minutes ourselves. Our friend was particularly anxious for us to see you. Needless to say he’s upset—very upset. He would like to meet with you as soon as possible.”
Harter imagined the meeting with revulsion, and wondered whether there was some way he could get out of it. But the thought of avoiding the little man made him uncomfortable, as if he would be running away.
“I’ll meet with him, why not, if he wants to. But what does he want?”
The second man said, “Mr. Harter, you don’t have to meet with him if you don’t want to. You have the right to refuse.”
“Although I wouldn’t,” the older man said, “if I were you.”
“Is that a threat?” Harter said angrily; and a little burst of fear rippled across his stomach.
The older man looked at him in surprise. “Hardly. I regret the
misunderstanding. I meant only that if you refuse to see him now, you’ll have to see him later. He’s very stubborn, our friend. And so it seems advisable not to draw things out, causing even more trouble and grief. But you do what you want to, of course.”
“Right,” said Harter. “And I said I’d see him. Whenever.”
“Well, good. That makes our job that much easier. Would tomorrow suit you? In the morning: early. We both work.”
Harter hesitated. “I’m not really at my best, early in the morning.”
The older man glanced down at his hat and raised his eyes. “Mr. Harter, may I say something? You have been the cause, for reasons of your own, of great pain and suffering. Do you seriously mean that for the sake of a few hours’ sleep you would refuse to meet with the injured party at a time convenient for him?”
Harter felt a motion of anger and tightened his grip on the chair. He ought to throw the old bastard out on his ear. But the man’s tone had not been insolent, and his face revealed only a mild surprise.
Harter shrugged. “Whenever. Where does he—”
“Oh, don’t worry,” said the other, “we’ll be getting back to you.”
“But why?” Harter began, and decided to drop it.
“Fine,” said the older man, putting his hat on his head. “Then it’s agreed. We can go now.”
The other man stepped forward. “If you should change your mind—”
“We needn’t consider that,” said the man wearing the hat, who had already stepped over to the door and stood with his hand on the fluted glass knob.
“I told you I’d meet with him,” Harter said, in a voice that struck him as a little too loud, even shrill, and he made an effort to master himself. “Listen, I hardly slept at all last night.”
The two men exchanged glances and said nothing.
“Until later, then,” said the man in the hat, moving through the doorway onto the landing. The second man followed, holding his hat in one hand and closing the door quietly with the other. Through the brass window grille, half covered by frilly white curtains, Harter could see the backs of their heads, moving away.
Harter spent the next hour failing to fall asleep, and after a long shower and two cups of coffee he drove out of town into the country. The sugar maples had started to turn; on the far hills they looked like colored gumdrops. A small white sign pointed him onto a familiar dirt road overhung with branches, and he soon came to an old red barn filled with books. The bulb-lit dark aisles smelled of damp wood. Harter liked to read about the Revolutionary War—from time to time he thought of writing a longish essay on the effects of the muzzle-loading musket on campaign strategy, but nothing had ever come of it—and he was looking through a monograph on the Danbury campaign when out of the corner of his eye he saw Martha in her blue coat at the end of the aisle. Even as he drew in his breath sharply he realized his mistake: she was older than Martha, heavier, hardly like her at all. He had sucked in his breath—an unmistakable gasp. Harter thrust the booklet back on the shelf and strode through the bulb-lit barn into the bright day.
The barn was red, the sky was blue. Along one side of the building was a row of bookstalls stuffed with paperbacks and sliced into sun and shade. A girl of about eighteen stood bent over a shady stall, and as she moved partway into brilliant sunlight, something
flashed for an instant: a tiny earring? She had very short straw-colored hair parted on one side, and she wore crisp-looking dark blue jeans with the cuffs rolled up above the calf and a long-sleeved white shirt that came down over her buttocks. The flash reminded Harter of something, it was on the tip of his mind, but at the sound of his footsteps on the gravel the girl glanced up and let her gaze linger for a moment before she returned to browsing. And Harter was seized by the certainty that she was approachable, that he could strike up a conversation with her, maybe even drive off with her to a country inn for a cup of coffee: she had let her gaze linger that extra moment. He would tell her everything. She would be moved by his unhappiness, she would reach across the table and place her hand on the back of his hand—and as Harter turned back to his car, for it was all impossible and absurd, he imagined that in the space of that arrested glance she had seen, in the grave face of a stranger, a secret grief.
At home Harter lay down heavily on his bed, but even as he closed his eyes he could feel his heart beating with disturbing swiftness. He could almost feel the blood surging through his veins as it rushed to reach the farthest limits of his body: his toes, his fingertips, his tingling scalp. The little man had stopped suddenly, as if struck in the face. And Martha asprawl in her lavender nightie, blowing her nose into a pink tissue—he’d forgotten the pink tissue. The room had been nearly dark. Martha disliked the lamp on the night table, with its bright, revealing bulb, and on the first night she had insisted on dragging out some sort of glass lantern with thick red-and-blue panes. It was there on all his visits, to cast its dim, romantic light over the room and permit her to overcome, a little, the exteme modesty that at first he’d found so touching but that
had come to irritate him more and more. The little man had entered quietly—Harter couldn’t remember hearing the doorknob turn—and had taken a full step into the room before suddenly coming to a halt. He hadn’t said anything but had stood rigidly there while Harter fumbled with his exasperating buttons. And now he remembered how Martha, with wisps of hair sticking to her wet cheeks, had pulled her nightie over her breasts, as if she were suddenly shy—a big, bewildered girl. For a few moments she stopped crying and stared at the man in the doorway, who did not move. Harter wished he had paid more attention to the few things she’d ever said about him, but the truth was, he hadn’t wanted to think about the husband at all. He had made it abundantly clear to Martha that he wished to be spared the details of her married life. Although Martha had an annoying habit of refusing to speak unkindly of people, she had once called her husband “stubborn”; Harter hadn’t invited her to give instances. Another time she had called him “old-fashioned,” which somehow made Harter imagine that he wore well-polished shoes with little holes in the toes and liked his socks to be rolled into balls. He had never asked a single question about the man, whose photograph he had seen only once on the bureau before Martha had made a habit of concealing it. His last name was odd: Razumian. He traveled a lot. A salesman, was he? A stubborn and old-fashioned little man. He wanted to meet with Harter. But why? Maybe he needed assurances. Harter was in no mood to rehash the sorry affair, but he supposed he’d have to go through with it. Your wife loves you. She’s lonely, that’s all. We just happened to meet—just one of those things. It’s over. Nothing serious. He had hissed out some words.
Harter opened his eyes and saw by the yellow light coming
through the window that it was late afternoon. He had fallen asleep for nearly two hours. His night’s sleep was now in jeopardy—and the men were coming back early in the morning. How could he possibly have allowed himself to be manipulated into such a foolish promise? His head felt tight, as if at any second it would burst into the full flower of headache, and suddenly a ripple of nervousness passed across his stomach. Harter sat up angrily. He had nothing to fear from the rigid little man and his peculiar friends. They would meet, and have it out, and that would be that. One meeting—no more. Harter swung his legs decisively over the side of the bed, and as his feet struck the floor he remembered the girl stepping from shade partway into brilliant sunlight. Something flashed for an instant: a tiny earring? It had reminded him of something else, and he had it now, he had it: it was the clasp of the slender black briefcase, gleaming in the light of the living room lamp.
Wearily Harter dragged himself into the kitchen to begin the long night.
Harter was walking along the narrow aisle of a library, following a girl who ran her fingers along the book spines. As he drew close to her she turned around, and he saw that she was a little girl in a short nightgown, with one bare shoulder and a Band-Aid on her knee. She wore bright red lipstick and smiled up at him, and as Harter bent over to kiss her shoulder she began to frown and suddenly seized his upper arm and squeezed painfully, saying, “Get up! Get! Up get!” Harter opened his eyes. A voice in the dark said,
“Get up.” He sat up violently, sick with fear, but already he understood, he knew exactly what was happening.
“How did you get in here?” he said, making a fist. “There are laws, I can call the police.”
“The police!” said the voice of the older man. “But there’s no need to do that, now is there, Mr. Harter? We told you we’d be back. And you ought to take a minute to consider whether you really want anyone to know why we’re here. Of course, we regret waking you like this, at such an early hour. But you were so fast asleep! I’m afraid you left us no choice. You have my word we knocked.”
“Yes, we knocked, you can rest easy on that. We each knocked twice.”
“And the door was unlocked, Mr. Harter, as if you’d left if that way on purpose. ‘He must have left it like that on purpose,’ my friend said. ‘For us.’ But you’ve got to get up now, there’s no time to waste.”
“It’s the middle of the night,” Harter said, but even as he spoke he bent toward his clock and saw that it was nearly five. “Not that I can sleep anyway. A terrible night.” And flinging the covers off he swung his legs so forcefully over the side of the bed that one of the men leaped back.
“But you agreed to meet,” said the older man, who had remained near the bed. “That was understood. We thought everything had been arranged.”
“All this is wrong,” Harter said, stepping out of bed toward the chair, where he had laid his shirt and pants.
“I think we can all agree that it’s
wrong
, Mr. Harter. The question is, how to bring about a satisfactory resolution to the problem.
As to the early hour, certainly we apologize, though in all fairness you have to admit that we too are up very early, on business that doesn’t directly concern us. We’d be very grateful if you hurried, we have to go to work ourselves—a full day’s work, after only five hours of sleep. Do you have any idea what it’s like to work a full day after only five hours of sleep? But this isn’t an ordinary day, as I’m sure you’ll agree.”
“Not an ordinary day at all,” said the other. “At least, not in the ordinary sense.”
“But why are we talking so much?” Harter said, snatching up his clothes and turning toward the bathroom. “I’d like to get this over with as much as he does.” In the bathroom he rubbed water on his face and fumbled into his clothes—he felt as if he were wearing gloves, he could barely thrust the slippery buttons through the tiny shirt holes—and as he ran a comb through his hair in the dimness of the night-light it struck him that all this was absurd, he ought to throw them out and go back to sleep and deal with it all in the clear light of morning. It seemed to him that at the slightest show of resistance they would back down and leave him alone, he even wondered whether they were secretly hoping for him to let them off the hook—after all, hadn’t one of the men hinted from the very beginning that they found the whole business as distasteful as he did? But he was impatient himself to get it over with. If the little man was itching to see him, then he for one wasn’t going to be difficult; and as he reached out to wipe his fingers on a towel, he jerked his hands away as a dark moth burst silently from the folds.
With a finger raised to his lips he began to lead them down the shadowy stairway, lit at each landing by a twenty-five-watt bulb in a yellow oilpaper shade with brown scorch marks.
On the dark front porch he could see the plumes of his breath. The sight of his feathery frail-looking breath made him feel cold, and a little strange, as if someone his size ought to have breath more solid than that. The sky was blackish gray, tinged at the horizon with a sulfurous glow. No stars: only that glow staining the sky from neon signs and sodium-vapor lamps. The tops of gabled two-family houses showed black against the sky.