We Others (21 page)

From this bright and happy world I retreated into the black night of the closet. Two long skirts hung beside a fleece bathrobe. Wooden and wire hangers stretched away. A pair of fuzzy pink slippers sat on the floor.

A fine picture!—the stalker in the closet, waiting for the unsuspecting young woman to enter her bedroom. But that isn’t at all what it struck me as being, at the time. At the time I felt curious, dissatisfied—I wanted to know more about her. That was all. For us, hiddenness holds no pleasure. It’s nearness we crave—nearness and revelation.

I heard everything: the car pulling up, the footsteps leading to the back porch, the slamming of the screen door. Voices, a sneeze. A thump on a table. On the carpeted stairs her footsteps were heavy and slow. The sharp turn of the knob came a moment before I’d expected it. She was—as if suddenly—in the room. The bed creaked. I was puzzled by the next sounds, followed by a familiar thunk that explained things in reverse: she had untied a shoe and dropped it on the floor. People in rooms move around more than one might think. They pick things up, they put things down, they stride up and down like madmen, they look out of windows, they glance into mirrors, they push on. They never stop. A drawer slid open, changed its mind, slid back. A knock—a scrape—a creak of the bed. Many creaks of the bed. Had she picked up a book? Her breathing grew slow. I heard no turning of a page. I waited a little longer before I emerged from the closet.

The sunlight—the horrible sunlight—how can I explain? It was like a fistful of sand flung in my face. Even as I struggled against the glare I realized that it was softer than before—she had turned up the slats of the two blinds. Gradually I made out her form on the bed. I had expected to find her fast asleep, but she lay on her back with her eyes open. A book lay facedown on her stomach; it rose and fell slowly. She wore a long black skirt and a dark brown blouse. Her large bare pale feet were crossed at the ankles. I could see her broad face clearly: the somewhat petulant mouth, the heavy-lidded eyes, the large space between the bottom lip and the jaw. She wasn’t what anyone would call an attractive woman. I cared nothing about that. I took her in gratefully, hungrily. We are greedy, we others. We can never have enough.

I’d been observing her eagerly, in a kind of daze of concentration, when I was startled into alertness. Andrea had sat up. She had sat up swiftly, violently, with a hand clutching the V of her blouse. She looked around the room in a series of quick sharp motions of her head, with startled pauses between. Even I looked about for a moment, in search of an intruder. She swung her legs over the side of the bed and sat suddenly motionless. She was leaning forward a little, as if preparing for a leap. Her immobility unnerved me more than her fierce movements. She turned her head—another abrupt motion. She sat there. She listened. She sprang up and was at the door. With her hand on the knob she looked back into the room—at the closet, at the window—and vanished.

I laughed: the short, bitter laugh that gives no relief. Then, without thinking, I stepped over to the bed, bent over, and inhaled deeply. Some claim that we have no sense of smell, we others, but I can tell you that I was penetrated by the odors curling up from that bed: the laundered, lemony smell of the white-and-blue quilt itself, the darker aroma of her clothes, the sting of a hand lotion, and the fresh-acrid scent of her body, which made me think of rye-bread toast and salted boiling water.

Behold the creature of bitter laughter!—bent over the bed in a posture of abasement. I glanced over my shoulder, as if to catch someone spying on me. But wasn’t the whole point that she hadn’t seen me at all?

I returned to the attic, where I roamed among cast-off things—my comrades, my companions in exile. Impatiently I awaited the sound of her footsteps on the carpeted stairs. That day she remained below. I waited through dinner, listened for the move into the living room. What did the two of them have to talk about? Hadn’t they talked enough for one day? For a whole lifetime? I restrained myself, I crushed down my impulse to be a secret witness. Her footsteps climbed the stairs. She entered the room. After a suitable time, I went down to Maureen.

She was standing in the dark, smoking a cigarette. I had never seen her smoke before. “She suspects something,” she said, in a conspiratorial whisper, and began to walk melodramatically up and down before the couch. As she paced, she held one forearm pressed across her stomach, with the hand cupping the elbow of the upright arm. She whirled and looked at me. “She knows.”

13

What she actually knew was less clear than that she didn’t want to know too much. Andrea had apparently told her aunt that she’d sensed something—something in the hall, something in her room—and had thought at first it might be an intruder before she’d realized that her mind was playing tricks on her. So much at least I gathered through the sharp bursts of cigarette smoke that erupted from Maureen like hisses of steam. At one point she turned to me and said in a fierce whisper: “We’ve got to be careful. She knows, she knows. Oh, she doesn’t know she knows, but she knows. Hssst!” Here she held up a hand, turned her head sharply, listened. She shrugged. “I thought—” She listened again. “Do you think she’s listening?” She waved at the smoke with swift short strokes of her hand, as if someone might be hiding in there.

Later, on my way to the attic, I lingered in the upstairs hall. Maureen had a habit of going to the refrigerator for a drink of bottled water and a bite of whatever lay at hand before she climbed the stairs to get ready for bed. In the unlit hall I stood before Andrea’s door. A line of light showed under it. I could hear the turning of a page, the creak of bedsprings. My desire to enter the room was so powerful that I could feel it penetrating the door and coming out on the other side. But already I could hear Maureen’s footstep on the carpeted stairs. Back in the attic I listened to her enter her room, across from Andrea’s.

Please understand: it had been scarcely five weeks since I’d fled from my house through the dark dawn. I knew some things, but not many, about the conditions of my new existence. Even so, I recognized that my behavior had taken a turn toward the—well, toward the bizarre. I had always been a quiet man; a man of regular habits; a conventional man, if I may put it that way without the sneer that usually accompanies such a description. My relations with Maureen, peculiar though they might seem to an outsider, made entire sense to me. What didn’t make sense was my behavior toward Andrea. I was no bender and sniffer, no lurker in ladies’ closets. What had come over me?

Let me speak for a moment about the nature of our desire. We do not understand it, we others. Our relation to the world in which we find ourselves is murky at best. We possess the faculty of sight, though we see best in the dark. We hear, but the sound of our own voices is always disturbing to us. We are entirely without the sense of taste. Some of us are without the sense of smell, though I am not one of them. Many of us claim that we are without the sense of touch, though it’s well known that we can adapt our shapes to the shapes of the world—we can sit on couches, stand on floors, climb steps. I would argue that we have a memory of touch, a shadow-touch that permits us to conform to your world. What then of desire? Our desire resembles yours in certain respects, with this difference: it expects nothing, it believes in nothing. Above all, it does not believe in itself. Why should it? We know who we are, we others. We are not-you. We have nothing to do with you. Which is to say, we have only to do with you—for without you, we are even less than ourselves, we are less than absences. Is this clear? Nothing is clear. A murky business, as I’ve said.

As for Andrea, I knew only that I craved to be near her—to be as near her as possible. I did not crave to see her naked body. Such desires have nothing to do with us. But the desire to be near, to be as near as possible, to be nearer than is possible, to mingle, to merge, to lose ourselves in the substance of a living creature—that is what we desire, when we desire.

After Maureen was safely in her room, I found myself in the upstairs hall before Andrea’s door. I say “found myself” because I became aware of standing there without any memory of having descended the attic stairs. A moment later I was inside the room. It was entirely dark—she had closed and lowered the blinds and drawn the curtains—and it was only now, in that room, that I realized how very well I was able to see in the dark. She lay on her back with her head turned to one side and one arm lying across her stomach. The sleeve of her pajama top had been pulled back to the middle of her large forearm. I sat down on the end of the bed, next to the place where her feet pushed up under the covers. I felt gratified to be near her. I felt more than gratified, I felt soothed, as if my existence were a bleeding sore for which she—but this is a horrible metaphor. I leave it here as evidence of my agitation.

Andrea was a restless sleeper—I had known this before. What I hadn’t known was how much, in sleep, she remained in motion. She moved each of her shoulders; her hands shifted position; her head turned until she was facing straight up. Then her whole body began to roll over. I had the impression that her body was a train traveling through the night, while she lay fast asleep on a berth somewhere inside. Now she lay on her outstretched arm. Now she turned again, onto her stomach. She took a deep breath, and was still—then rolled onto her back. She said, very distinctly, the syllable “nong.” She sighed. She opened her eyes.

I hadn’t expected her to open her eyes. She saw me—I saw her see me. She sat up violently, holding the collar of her pajama top against her throat. The gesture reminded me of her aunt. She held up her forearm, as if to prevent a blow to the face. I heard myself speak—that distant, despairing sound—and with a cry she leaped from the bed and rushed to the door, where she fumbled at the knob before escaping into the hall.

I continued to sit there, paralyzed with shame, while outside I heard Andrea tear open the door of her aunt’s room and cry out “Oh god—oh god—” and as I rushed from that cry and hurled myself up the attic stairs, I could hear the women talking together, very fast.

14

In my high lair I paced and brooded. What else was there to do? I had seen the look of terror on Andrea’s face and I could imagine with dreadful ease the dark thoughts of Maureen. I kept out of sight all day Sunday and came out only when it was safe. Maureen was waiting for me in the darkened living room. As soon as I appeared she whispered, “You scared the life out of her! She’s practically—how could you?” She paced in a haze of smoke, waving her cigarette. “I told her it was all a dream. I think she—but she knows. She knows. I made her doubt her own eyes. I can’t believe that you—in her room, of all places. What were you doing in her room?” I stood there stiffly while she shouted in whispers. Smoke swirled around her like river mist. Light from the kitchen caught her barrettes, her eyes. She looked like a creature in a chamber in hell. Jealousy flared in her like fire. “I thought we had an agreement—an understanding—” She flung herself heavily onto the couch. Her head lay against the couch-back. A hand fell to her lap.

I breathed out an apology and made an awkward exit. I had no excuses, nothing to say. Outside, in the night, I threw myself from one refuge to another, in search of calm, but there was no calm. I had terrified one woman and mortified another—it was time for me to banish myself to the ends of the earth. But where does the earth end? The earth never ends. Besides, where could I go, really? It was also true that I wanted desperately to return and set things right—I who was wrong in my very existence.

Back in the attic I paced and paused, paced and paused, like someone with a memory disorder who is searching for something that keeps vanishing from his mind.

Have I spoken of the dawn? We do not like the dawn. We object to its youthful radiance. We dislike its suggestion of new beginnings, of the uplifted spirit. We are creatures of the downward-plunging spirit, where hope perishes in black laughter. Some claim that at dawn we cease to exist, that we dissolve in light. Blissful thought! But that is pure superstition—or careless observation. No, we’re there, always there, though in a weakened and faded way, like flowers that bloom only after sunset.

Dawn came. It was Monday morning: a school day. Maureen was soon stirring. When I heard her leave, I understood that I wasn’t going to remain locked up in the attic like an insane relative shut away from the healthy part of the house. It was absolutely necessary for me to know that Andrea was all right. I understood that I was behaving foolishly, even recklessly, and that my desire to assure myself of Andrea’s wellbeing was a mask for my imperious need to be in her presence.

I had known from days of listening that Andrea spent her time drifting about the house, but as I followed her—at a safe distance—I was impressed by the number and intricacy of her rituals of wasting time. In her long robe and big fuzzy slippers she sat at her late breakfast in front of an open newspaper that she folded carefully along the crease each time she turned the page. After this she folded the paper exactly in half and then in half again. Every few minutes she rose to go to the silverware drawer, or check the faucet in the sink, or look for something on the counter, or gaze out the kitchen window while she sipped her coffee. Later she brought her coffee and the newspaper into the living room, where she turned on the television and flipped through channels, never watching a program for more than three minutes at a time. She rummaged through her large pocketbook and removed a big comb that she pulled for a while through her hair. She went to the front door, opened it, and looked out. In the kitchen she rinsed one of her dishes and placed it in the dishwasher. In the living room she closed the blinds of each window and then partly opened them again. Once, in the kitchen, she looked around suddenly. I was standing closer to her than I had realized, but she saw nothing. She liked to rub the side of her nose, stretch out her arms, fling herself onto the couch. A moment later she would stand up and go into the kitchen, where she opened the refrigerator and peered inside with a studious frown.