Wake Up With a Stranger (3 page)

She reached the drugstore and went to the telephone booth and dialed the number of a taxi company. When she started to give the address, she could not for a moment think of what it was, and she felt an odd, exorbitant panic out of all proportion to its cause, but then she remembered and provided with an equally disproportionate sense of relief the names of the two streets intersecting outside. Leaving the booth, she went up to the front entrance of the store to wait; and the taxi must have been cruising quite near when it received the radio message, for it was sounding its horn at the curb within four minutes. She went out and got in and gave the driver the address of the shop downtown.

Because of the heavily falling snow and the increasingly hazardous condition of the streets, it took an unusually long time to get there. Now that she was in the taxi, however, she lost much of her earlier sense of urgency and was acquiring in its place a feeling of apathy and a collateral inability to think of anything whatever constructively. Besides, she was becoming sleepy. She leaned back in the seat and closed her eyes and longed and longed to go to sleep.

When the taxi eventually stopped, she paid the fare and went directly through the shop to her workroom in the rear. Removing her coat and shoes and stockings, she rubbed her feet with a towel from the lavatory until warmth was restored to them, and then she removed the crimson sheath and put on dry stockings and the shoes and dress she had worn to work the day before. This done, she began to think in spite of herself in a way that she did not wish to think. Here in the shop that had been Aaron’s, she was acutely susceptible to the sense of his presence, as if he were actually sitting and watching her with the bitter-sad light of his desire in his eyes; and her conviction of guilt and cowardice was intense and no longer evadable. She had come here and found first a friend and then a lover, if not complete love, and most of all she had found support in doing what she wanted most to do. Now the man who had received her and accepted her, the friend and lover, was lying dead beyond possible help, and she had run away from him when she might have stayed, had denied him when she might have given recognition and dignity to his body in death. Oh, she was a coward, she could not deny it, and perhaps she was even committing some crime, but still it was better, it was surely much better — if she could only achieve this conviction — to have done what she had done and would certainly continue doing.

She always came back to this. That it was better this way for him and for her. For herself, there was too much in precarious balance, too much to lose that had been gained, for there was no way of predicting the ramifications and effects of adultery and death in collusion. For him, there was little left to lose, but he would surely be grateful, if he could ever again be anything, that she had prevented the scandal. She knew that all this might be rationalization, but it worked to the point of leavening her guilt, and pretty soon she began to think about going home.

She did not want to go. She would have much preferred going to her own apartment, but it was necessary now to go home instead, not only because she felt committed to her mother for a part of each Sunday, but also because she needed her parents’ help. She wanted them to be prepared to swear she had been home last night in case it was necessary or desirable for some reason she could not foresee.

She always thought of it as home, though it had never been that to her in any significant sense of the word; she had hated it while she was there, and had left it with relief. She dreaded going back even for a visit to the ugly, narrow two-story house cramped darkly between houses as high and ugly and narrow on either side.

She dreaded also seeing her mother and father. For her mother, she felt pity and some respect and a nagging sense of responsibility. For her father, a querulous ineffectual person who persisted ridiculously in trying to exercise the prerogatives of his position, without ever having assumed adequately the obligations, she felt contempt only. She wished she had never known him, would have liked never to see him again, and would surely never have gone near him or permitted him to come near her if it had not been for her mother.

When she was given a place in Aaron’s shop, she began to plan immediately to move into an apartment, and she executed the plan a few days after the night Aaron took her in the back room. She still contributed money, however, to supplement her father’s irregular income, always handing it directly to her mother, for whom she intended it and without whom she would not have given it. She visited the narrow, ugly house almost every Sunday, again for the sake of her mother only. Now she had to leave the shop and visit it again, this time, though, for her own sake too. It would be well, she thought, to go at once.

She did not call a taxi by telephone. She went through the shop to the front door and pulled the blind away from the glass a few inches and stood peering up the street until a taxi came into view. Then she went out quickly to the curb and stopped it and got in.

She began to wonder what would be the best way to get from her mother and father the consent to the lie that might never become necessary at all, but she could formulate no particular strategy, and probably would need none, for her mother was weak and her father was vulnerable. In the end they would simply do as she told them to. The taxi moved slowly through cloudy streets, and for a long while she sat erect in the back seat, looking through the taxi window at the changing character of the city as the buildings diminished and admitted the sky and became residential in allotments of blanketed lawn between shopping-center breaks. Then, when they moved at last into the mean streets of her earliest remembrance, she leaned back and closed her eyes and quit looking at anything at all except the tenacious image — of Aaron dead — behind her lids.

The taxi stopped in front of the narrow and ugly house. She opened her eyes, got out and overpaid the driver, and then went quickly up the stairs and across the high porch and into a dark hall. She paused in the hall to hang her coat on a rack fastened to the wall, and wondered with mounting depression why the smell never changed, never, never changed — the thin perennial and faintly sour smell which apparently had nothing to do with ventilation, or the lack of it, and was perhaps the breath of the house itself or the scent of sour lives. She turned away from the rack and started across to the entrance to the living room, and the voice of her mother came out to meet her. “Is that you, Donna?”

She answered that it was and went on into the room. Her mother was sitting in an overstuffed chair around which were scattered the several sections of a Sunday newspaper. She had been on the point of rising, but now she sank back and folded her hands in her lap and automatically tilted her head and turned her cheek for the swift kiss routinely accorded by this sleek and sometimes disturbing young woman who was (rather incredibly, she often thought) her daughter.

“Did you have trouble getting here?” she said.

“Because of the snow? No. None at all.”

“I was worried. I thought you might have trouble, or might not be able to come at all.”

“Well, I didn’t, but I imagine it would be wise if I started back early.”

“That’s too bad. I see you so seldom.”

“Once a week isn’t so seldom, Mother.”

“I wish you would live at home. It isn’t right for a girl to be living alone in an apartment when she has a home to live in.”

“Now, Mother, for Christ’s sake, let’s not start that all over again the moment I get here.”

“I just can’t help thinking I must have failed you some way. Why would a girl want to leave her home if she was happy in it?”

“I wasn’t happy in it. I was damn miserable in it, as you know very well, but I’ve told you and told you that it wasn’t your fault. If it hadn’t been for you, I’d have gone long before I did. We’ve been over and over this, Mother, and I absolutely won’t discuss it again, so let’s please drop it right now or I’ll leave.”

She looked at her mother’s face and quickly away, for she could never look at her long without ambivalence. It made her feel at once sad and contemptuous, and the reason was that her mother had been a beautiful woman and had not deserved to be. How in God’s name could a woman who had been beautiful and reasonably intelligent have made such a drab mess of her life? And the most depressing thing of all was that her mother was not actually aware of the mess. She had been beautiful and intelligent, and she had wasted all of what she had been on a ridiculous ineffective who should have been discarded ages ago, and this depressing and senseless waste had happened simply because she was totally incapable of facing the truth about anything, because she had no guts, and she damn well deserved the consequences of not having any.

“I wish you wouldn’t be so cross, dear,” her mother said. “And that reminds me. I’ve been wanting to speak to you about your father. I know he’s very irritating to you, but do you think you could just try a little harder to get along with him?”

“All Father has to do to get along with me is to mind his own damn business.”

“Well, that’s just what I mean. Don’t you see, dear, that Father considers that you
are
his business? He only tries to think of what is good for you.”

“Oh, hell. That kind of talk makes me sick. Whatever in my life has been done for my good has been done by you, or I have done it for myself. The truth is that Father has been a damn detriment to both of us, and you know it, and he has never done a thing that entitles him to any authority at all in my affairs. I tell you I don’t wish to talk about him any more, now or ever, and if you don’t stop dragging him up every time I’m here, I swear to God I’ll leave and never come back.”

“All right, dear, all right. I don’t want to make you angry.”

“Damn it to hell, I am not angry.”

“Do you have to swear so much?”

“I’m sorry. The truth is, something has happened that worries me.”

“Are you in trouble?”

“No. Not exactly. At least, I don’t think so. Where’s Father now?”

“Why, I was just going to tell you, dear. He’s not at home. Only last week he took this selling job that keeps him out of town part of the time.”

“You mean he wasn’t home last night?”

“No, dear. He’s been gone since last Thursday. He’ll be back tomorrow, I think, if you want to see him.”

“I don’t want to see him. I’m just glad he wasn’t here last night.”

“That’s a strange thing to say about your father, dear. Why are you glad?”

“Because I want you to promise to do something for me, and it will be better if he doesn’t know anything about it. If I ask you to do something for me that may seem rather strange, will you do it?”

“Of course, dear. If I can. You know I always try to do anything for you that I can.”

“I know, Mother. You’ve always been very good to me. It’s really not so much to ask, after all. I only want you to promise to say that I spent last night here if anyone should ask you.”

“To lie, dear? Why ever should you want me to do that?”

“Well, let’s not get heavy about the lying, Mother. Chances are you won’t have to say anything at all, but if you should, I want you to say that I was here. Will you do it?”

“I don’t know. I don’t like to tell lies unless it’s absolutely necessary. You will have to tell me why you want me to say you were here when you really weren’t.”

Donna lit a cigarette and sat looking at her mother through the thin smoke between them. She had thought that it might be possible to arrange things without a confession, but now she saw that it wouldn’t. Besides, she felt suddenly a rather perverse desire to be perfectly honest, not so much for the sake of honesty as for the sake of honesty’s capacity to shock and disturb.

“Aaron’s dead,” she said.

“Aaron? Mr. Burns? The Aaron Burns you work for?”

“That’s right. He died in his home last night, or perhaps early this morning, and that’s why I want you to say I was here. It might ruin me if I were to become involved, and at the very least it would be unpleasant.”

“Involved? I don’t understand what you mean by becoming involved. For God’s sake, you didn’t have anything to do with his death, did you?”

“Oh God, Mother, will you please stop being so tragic? I already have enough to bear without this in addition. I didn’t kill him, if that’s what you mean, and I didn’t contribute to his death indirectly, either. He had a heart condition. He simply died some time while I was asleep. Sometime in the night or early morning.”

“You spent the night with him?”

“Yes. I have spent many nights with him.”

“Oh, Donna, Donna! So your father was right after all! Sleeping with a married man, living like a — ”

“Stop it, Mother! Stop it immediately! And if you say anything against Aaron, one damn word, I’ll never speak to you again. Do you understand? He was kind and generous and gentle, which I am not and can never be, and we were good for each other. You needn’t expect me to be ashamed of anything I have done. Do you think I will feel like a criminal because I committed adultery? Well, there was something between us that was what we both needed, and whatever it was, it was good. And I will tell you that it was infinitely more moral, if you are concerned about my morals, than the sour cohabitation that you and Father have been engaged in for as long as I can remember.”

She had not intended to be so cruel, and she regretted at once that she had been. Sucking smoke into her lungs, she expelled it with a long exhalation and watched the slow crumbling and complete dissolution of the vestiges of beauty in her mother’s face.

“Don’t cry,” she said. “Damn it to hell, please don’t cry.”

Standing up abruptly, sickened by ambivalence, she walked out of the living room and through the dining room into the kitchen. On the range was an aluminum pot half full of cold coffee. Lighting the burner under the pot, she stood watching it while the coffee heated. As she stood and watched she began to think with clarity of her position and all that stood in the balance now that Aaron was dead. Here in the ugly house she loathed, in the smell and the shadow of the life she had escaped, she was morbidly aware of what she stood to lose, the shop and her job and all that they entailed and promised. It was not fair after she had schemed and worked so long and so hard, it was simply the rottenest piece of goddamn luck at just the time when everything was going so beautifully. Suddenly, to Aaron, wherever he was, her mind cried out a thin, irrational indictment of betrayal.