We Others (4 page)

DARING
. Just as we thought we had come to grips with the attack in the bank parking lot, the incident on Woods End Road shook us to the core. We had accepted, uneasily, the leap from the station parking lot at dusk to the bank parking lot in full daylight, and we had begun to absorb the change from upper-income commuter to two-job worker. Now the rules had changed again: the new victim was female, the scene of the attack a quiet residential street. The stranger, we felt, was widening his range, deliberately and with a kind of artfulness. For wasn’t he announcing, by this latest move, that no one was safe anymore? Of course we condemned the attack on Sharon Hands as an act of cowardice, we were outraged by its unfairness. Still, some of us sensed in it something darker: an element of insolent daring. It was daring because it took place closer to our homes, as if the attacker were moving toward our doors and windows, and it was daring above all because the victim was no match for him in strength. It was as if he wanted us to know that he was no longer limiting himself to those who might be expected to defend themselves.

ANNA LASHER
. As she tossed the salad in the cherrywood bowl on the kitchen counter, Anna Lasher realized that she was not looking forward to hearing her husband pull up in the drive. They’d had difficult patches before, but this silence, this refusal to let her know what was worrying him—well, Walter wasn’t the most forthcoming of men at the best of times. Under his public manner there had always been a secretiveness. None of that was new. What was new was the averted eyes, the moody staring off, the office anecdote told coldly, without a flicker of pleasure. After dinner he cleared the table, put the dishes in the dishwasher, and retired to his study. She wondered whether this was it, the famous midlife meltdown: the craving for adventure, the affair with the blond secretary in the spike-heeled boots. She remembered a cartoon he had shown her a few months ago: he’d been tickled by the punch line, but she had noticed the violently jutting breasts of the dumb blonde sitting in the boss’s lap. She carried the bowl of salad into the dining room. On the wall was a painting of Walter’s mother, with two rows of pearls around her neck. Who had a painting like that in their dining room? She wondered suddenly whether she herself had brought all this on—she’d been tired lately, moody, a little short-tempered. As Anna walked into the kitchen she heard the car pull into the drive. She could feel muscles tightening all over her body, as if she were sensing danger.

HELPLESS
. In an interview with a reporter from the
Daily Observer
, Sharon Hands spoke of her feeling of helplessness during the attack. “I felt like there was nothing I could do,” she said. “I was completely at his mercy.” She went on to say that she now knew what it must be like to be abused by a man, and that her heart went out to women everywhere. She said the stranger was a menace to society and urged everyone to cooperate fully with the police. She invited us to check out her brand-new blog; she looked forward to reading our comments. Beside the article appeared a color photograph of Sharon Hands: a pretty girl with straight blond hair, large brown eyes, and an easy smile. On her cheek was a ruddy glow that made us think of the slap. We were upset for many reasons by the attack on Sharon Hands, and we understood her feeling of terrible helplessness. At the same time we had the sense that the interview revealed a young woman who was confident, self-possessed, and not at all unhappy to have our attention.

ANALYSIS OF A SLAP
. Those of us who were inclined to distance ourselves from the drama of particular instances, and to think about the slap as a phenomenon in itself, tended to see in it two opposite qualities. In one sense, it seemed to us, a slap is a form of withholding, of refusal: it presents itself as the deliberate absence of a more damaging blow. Its aim isn’t to break a bone or to draw blood, but to fall short of both. The physical evidence of the slap—a redness in the cheek—conveys its meaning perfectly: it is the sign of blood, without the blood. In the same way, the pain of a slap is a sign of the greater pain not inflicted. But looked at another way, the slap doesn’t merely withhold: the slap imparts. What it imparts is precisely the knowledge of greater power withheld. In that knowledge lies the genius of the slap, the deep humiliation it imposes. It invites the victim to accept a punishment that might have been worse—that will in fact be worse if the slap isn’t accepted. The slap requires in the victim an unwavering submission, an utter abnegation. The victim bends in spirit before a lord. In this sense the slap is internal. It is closer to a word than to a blow. The sting passes, the redness fades, but the wound lingers, invisible. Therein lies the deepest meaning of the slap: its real work takes place secretly, out of sight, on the inside.

VALERIE KOZLOWSKI
. Two days later, at 9:05 in the evening, Valerie Kozlowski sat at her kitchen table, drinking a cup of mint tea and finishing the daily crossword puzzle she had begun at breakfast. She liked coming home at 7:00 to the mail and the partly filled-in crossword; clues that had seemed vague and elusive at breakfast sometimes became transparent after a nine-hour day at the store and an hour of closing up. She put in six days a week at Now You See It, the consignment shop she co-owned with her sister; in addition, there was the sideline of estate appraisals, which sometimes had her scurrying out at night or on Sundays. They needed to hire a girl to help out, but sales were flat and her sister wanted to wait. Her sister always wanted to wait. What they really needed was a major reorganization. The vintage dresses were crowded against the back wall, pedestal tables and vanities were covered with sugar bowls and snakeskin purses and ivory netsuke warriors and fishermen, the highboy in the corner was half concealed by a rack of furs, and the sale tables along the side walls were cluttered with china teapots, antique butter dishes, and lamps with scenic shades. Items needed to be displayed clearly, without crowding, though how you did that in the cramped space of the store was another question. It was a matter of making hard choices. The Shaker rocker and the set of four nesting tables up front could be moved to the back, making room for a rack of top-of-the-line coats and jackets, but try telling that to her sister. That was why she liked coming home to her puzzle. She could sink into it and distract herself before bed, while making use of the mental energy she always brought back with her, no matter how tired she was. And she was tired at the end of the day, bone-tired, no doubt about it, especially when her sister fell into that bossy tone. She hated that tone, as though Sophia were always thirteen to Valerie’s eleven. They were both pushing forty, and Sophia looked it. You could see the lines carved into her skin from her nose down to both sides of her mouth. Valerie’s own skin was smooth as a girl’s. Not that it did her any good. Valerie had come home in a bad mood. She’d eaten a dinner of warmed-up leftovers, gone through the mail, all worthless except for a ten-dollar coupon from a new kitchen supply store she’d been meaning to have a look at, and talked on the phone for god knows how long with her father, who complained that no one ever called even though she called every single night no matter how tired she was. Now she sat sipping her mint tea and working on her puzzle. At 9:15 she put the cup in the sink, picked up the folded newspaper, and pushed open the swinging door that led into the living room. That was where she liked to finish her puzzle, seated in the armchair with her feet up on the hassock. As she stepped into the room a figure came toward her and raised his hand, and in the instant before terror came rushing in she thought, very distinctly: It’s not fair, I’m a good person, it should have been her.

THE GOOD SISTER
. It was all over town the next day: the attack on Valerie Kozlowski, the invasion of her home, the crossing of some final line. We imagined him staking out the house, waiting for nightfall, making his way along the side yard, climbing the back-porch steps. The police report indicated that he had slipped in through an unlocked window. We all knew what it meant: he was coming closer. All this was upsetting enough in itself. What made it worse was that many of us knew Valerie Kozlowski, had spent time in her store. She was the one known as the Good Sister, the one you felt easy speaking to when you asked about a Chinese vase or an old record player from the 1950s. She had a good heart, you could see that. Why would anyone want to hurt her? But as soon as we began asking ourselves such questions, we understood that until this moment we had held out a kind of secret hope. With the others, there might have been some excuse, something we didn’t know, which might have explained the attacks. Maybe each one of them, even Sharon Hands, had done something that deserved punishment. But the attack on the Good Sister was a simple outrage that couldn’t be explained away. It was as if we’d been living with an illusion, and the attack on the Good Sister had been directed not at her but at us, at our illusion. We’d been hoping for an explanation, an easy way out—but wasn’t he warning us against sentimentality? If so, it had worked. We hated him. We wanted him dead.

ANOTHER VIEW OF THE COAT
. Valerie Kozlowski’s description of the attacker made it clear that he was the same man, wearing the same coat. In fact it was so clear that we began to wonder why he never tried to change his appearance. Was it that he wanted us to recognize him as the one who slapped us? If, at first, he had chosen a trench coat in order to blend in with the commuters at the train station, by now the coat served the opposite purpose: it was the very symbol of danger, the sign that leaped out at us so vividly that trench coats had virtually disappeared from our town. It was, we thought, part of his daring. He was eluding the police, he was entering our homes, adorned in the very costume that allowed him the least chance of escaping detection. Out of this thought a question arose: Why this sign, rather than another? He might have chosen a windbreaker and ski mask, he might have chosen anything. The trench coat was a sign of the suburban commuter. By extension it was the sign of our town. Was he trying to say that he was one of us? Or was he not one of us, but someone who had adopted the coat contemptuously, in a spirit of parody?

WE WHO WERE NOT SLAPPED
. We of course felt sympathy for those who had been slapped. It was impossible not to imagine the moment: the stranger emerging from nowhere, the flare of danger, the hand raised to strike a blow. We wondered how they must have felt, those unlucky ones, as the sound rang out, as the stranger walked away. We wondered what we ourselves would have done, as he stepped up to us with his angry eyes. We understood that our compassion for the victims had in it a touch of superiority, of condescension, which the fortunate are bound to feel for the less fortunate, and we tried not to feel too great a pleasure in having escaped their fate. We understood one other thing. Even though we were pleased to have been spared, even though we were the ones to whom nothing ugly had happened, still we wondered, at times, whether they were more fortunate than we. After all, their ordeal was over, they had been tested, they had nothing more to fear, whereas we, the innocent ones, we, the unslapped, walked in a world crackling with danger. It was as if they knew something that we didn’t know. At times we even envied them a little.

WALTER LASHER AND THE FOOTSTEPS
. Walter Lasher walked along the station platform, carrying his laptop in one hand and a
New York Times
folded under the other arm. It was nearly dark; he had worked late. Once again he’d drifted off at his desk in the afternoon, not a nap thank god, but close to it, sitting there with half-closed eyes and drumming temples. There was still a good crowd at this hour, though he sensed a nervous watchfulness as they approached the stairs leading down to the lot. It was lit up now by those orange lights that made everything look like a stage set awaiting the actors. He himself had no anxiety, only a dull, heavy irritation as he entered the lot and began walking toward Section B. The police were hopeless, not a clue in all this time. The town was no longer what it used to be. When he’d first moved here from the city, it still had the feeling of a small old-fashioned place tucked away at the end of the commuter line. Now you had upscale retailers fighting for prime locations, the old drugstore gone, the news store gone, corporate headquarters springing up, teardowns replaced by monster houses built out to the property line. Asians moving into the newer neighborhoods, all professionals, all very classy, even a touch of India, that woman coming out of the wine shop in a rose-colored sari carrying herself like a foreign queen. The stranger in the coat was part of it somehow, as if he’d been swept in along with everything else. It was all nonsense, he wasn’t thinking straight. As Lasher walked toward his car, three rows away, he heard footsteps not far behind him. It wasn’t unusual, in the station parking lot, at this hour, to hear footsteps not far behind you, but these were not usual times. Lasher felt a tension rippling through his upper back. The footsteps drew closer. As if he were moving a heavy weight, he turned his head slowly. He saw a man in a long coat coming swiftly toward him. Lasher turned his body around. He stepped forward and swung his open hand violently against the man’s face. As his palm cracked against flesh, knocking the face to one side and throwing the body back against a car, he felt deeply soothed, as if he had sunk down into a warm bath after a long hard day. A moment later he saw that the coat was a double-breasted wool coat, dark, no belt, the face different, older. He understood that it was all part of a necessary pattern, and a tiredness came over him, even as he took a step forward and began talking very fast.

SILENCE
. When we read in the
Daily Observer
about the assault in the station parking lot, where both men were quickly arrested, when we learned that Walter Lasher had himself been slapped but had not come forward, we didn’t know whether we were more disturbed by his attack on Dr. Daniel Ettlinger, who was returning from a visit to his sister in Mamaroneck, or by the long concealment of information that might have been useful to the police. Had Walter Lasher gone immediately to the police, the man in the trench coat might have been apprehended, or at least prevented by police surveillance and public awareness from pursuing his series of attacks. It was true enough that Robert Sutliff’s swift response had not stopped the stranger in any way, and in fact, when we thought more carefully about it, we didn’t believe for one second that a report by Walter Lasher would have changed the course of events. Nevertheless, his silence troubled us, in a way we found difficult to define. Was it that, by his silence, he was acknowledging what many of us felt to be the dark truth of the attacks, namely, that they were a humiliation too deep to bear? We tried to imagine Walter Lasher carrying his secret with him, day after day, while police cars patrolled the streets of every neighborhood, and citizen watch committees reported the presence of any stranger, and daily editorials urged that more safety measures be taken by town authorities. We thought of Walter Lasher riding the train home from work, with his secret squatting in his chest. We imagined the secret as a small, hairy animal with sharp teeth. We wondered what it felt like, to be slapped in the face, hard, and to say nothing about it. We wondered what thoughts passed through Walter Lasher’s mind, night after night, as he lay in bed, feeling his secret biting inside him.