If You Could See Me Now

by Peter Straub

  “This is what Auntie Rinn is afraid of,” she whispered, her mouth publishing warmth over his. She kissed him again, and he became a pinpoint of sensation.

  “You sort of make me feel like a boy,” she said. “I like it.”

  When she withdrew, she glanced down at his lap. He looked dazedly into her face. He would have given her anything, he would have died for her on the spot.

  “Did you ever go swimming at night?” she asked.

  He shook his head.

  “We’ll have so much fun,” she said, and started the car again. With a flourish, she pulled out into the road.

  He turned his head to look again out of the rear window, and saw the high headlights of another vehicle swing out thirty yards behind them. “I think Duane is following us.”

  She hastily looked into the rearview mirror. “I don’t see him.”

  He looked back. The headlights had disappeared. “But he was there before.”

  “He wouldn’t dare. Don’t worry about old Du-ane. Imagine having a name like that anyhow.”

  As he laughed, relieved, he was stopped short by an appalling realization. “We didn’t bring our suits! We’ll have to go back.”

  Alison glanced at him oddly. “Don’t you wear underwear?”

  Again, relief made him laugh.

  When they reached the rutted dirt road leading up the hill to the quarry, the boy quickly checked for the following headlights, but saw nothing except the lights of a farmhouse far down the road. Alison flicked on the radio, and “Yakety Yak” blared out at them. She sang the words as they sped up the hill. “Don’t talk back.”

  A thick screen of bushes separated the irregular steps to the quarry from the grassy, rock-strewn flat space where she stopped the car. “Oh, this is going to be good,” she said; on an afterthought, she snapped the radio back on. “—and for Johnny and Jeep and all the A.H.S. gang at Reuter’s Drive In, Les Brown and His Band of Renown playing ‘Lover Come Back To Me,’ ” came the announcer’s low oily voice. “And for Reba and LaVonne in the Arden Epworth League. Les Brown and ‘Lover Come Back To Me.’ ”

  From the flat space where workmen’s sheds had once stood, a beaten trail of dust and grass led through an opening in the screen of bushes to the rocky steps down to the lip of the quarry. When he had followed Alison down the steps, they stood on the slablike platform, two feet above the black water. As with all quarries, it was said that this one was bottomless, and the boy could believe that—the black skin of water seemed inviolate. If you broke through it, you would never cease to fall, you would go down forever.

  No such reflections troubled Alison. She was already out of her blouse and shoes, and was now removing her skirt. He realized that he was staring at her body, and that she knew he was staring, but did not mind.

  “Get out of those clothes,” she said. “You’re awfully slow, cousin. If you don’t hurry up I’ll have to help you.”

  He quickly pulled his shirt over his head. In bra and pants Alison stood and watched him. Shoes, socks, and then his trousers. The night air drifted coolly down onto his shoulders and chest. She was looking at him with approval, grinning.

  “Do you want to do what we do in California?”

  “Uh, sure.”

  “So let’s skinny-dip.”

  “What’s skinny-dip?” Though he thought he knew.

  “Watch me.” Smiling, she pushed her pants down over her hips and stepped out of them. Then she reached up and unhooked her bra. The car radio sent them Ray Anthony playing a languid torchy song. “You too,” she said, smiling. “You won’t believe how good it feels.”

  A sound from above them, from near the rocks, made him jump. “Was that someone coughing?”

  “Do birds cough? Come on.”

  “Yeah.” He removed his underpants, and when he looked up at her, she was just diving into the water. Her body gleamed whitely beneath the dark surface of the water, gliding for a long time out toward the center of the quarry. Then her head broke the water and she flipped back her hair, a movement full of competent womanly life.

  He had to be near her. He went to the lip of rock and made a flat dive into the water: the shock of the cold seemed to flash through his nervous system and burn his skin, but the simple womanly efficiency of her gesture had been a greater shock. More than her talk of greasers and art teachers, it made her a foreign creature.

  By the time he got to the surface, his body had adjusted to the temperature of the water. Alison was already knifing away from him, moving smoothly through the water. He realized with chagrin that she was a better swimmer than he, who was proud of his swimming. And she was a stronger swimmer too, for when he set out after her, she effortlessly increased the pulse of her strokes and widened the distance between them. At the far end of the quarry she flipped under the water in a racing turn and came up gracefully and powerfully, her shoulders and arms gleaming in the darkness. The rest of her body gleamed too, mysterious and warped by the water. He began to tread water, waiting for her.

  Then he heard, muffled by the drifting snatches of dance music from the car, another sound from above them, and he looked up sharply. Something white ran flitting behind the sparsest of the bushes. For a moment he thought it was a white shirt, and then it stopped and was too motionless for it to have moved at all—moonlight on a rock. From the other side of the quarry’s top, up above and behind him, came a short calling whistling sound. He looked up over his shoulder but saw nothing.

  Alison was now near him, making her beautiful strong strokes which barely disturbed the surface of the water. She bent at the waist, her bottom flashed for a moment, and she was gone. He felt her hands braceleting his calves and he managed to hold his breath before he went under.

  In dark water, Alison was clasping him now at the waist, grinning. He touched her cold smooth hands. Then, bravely, dared to touch her spreading hair and round skull. She gripped his middle more firmly and, using her shoulder muscles, levered him down and slid her body along his until her arms were clasping his chest. Her mouth nipped at his neck. Their legs lay parallel, twin forks, touching. Trouble started in his mind.

  When what she had caused to come to life brushed her stomach, she released him and went smoothly up to the surface. Holding the final seconds of his air, he saw her body dangling headlessly down, an unbelievable bounty of almost mystical perfection. Her small breasts bobbed in the water, her legs bent to a heartbreaking curve of calf. Her hands and feet were white stars, flashing. The trouble spread thickly through his mind, canceling all else. He glided up beside her, bruising all that foreign heartland and wilderness of skin.

  For a second he was unable to see, and Alison’s arm clamped about his neck: when his eyes cleared, he was looking into a sleek wet fall of hair. Her hard cheekbones pressed his jaw. Using all his strength, he broke the hold of her arms and turned her into him. His head went under water, forced to the hollow of her neck, and he heard her yell of laughter. His legs kicked around hers. They were back under, thrashing, and the trouble in his mind forced them to roll deeper into the cold water. His ears boomed as she struck them.

  Booming was everywhere. The water blanketed him, her slippery perfection fought him. They reached the surface again and gulped air a second before the water exploded with trouble. Her laughter ceased and she gripped his head, crushing his ears forward painfully and then there seemed to be more than two of them, fighting the trouble, fighting the water and fighting for air and fighting for trouble. The water boomed and whenever all their bodies, their one body, broke the surface, geysers of spray were booming too.

  ONE

  No story exists without its past, and the past of a story is what enables us to understand it (perhaps that I believe this is the reason I teach novels and not poems, where the internal history may be only a half dozen slewfoot lines), but because—precisely because—I am so aware of the past pressing in on my story, I wish to allow it to leak in when it must, and not butter it over the beginning. I k
now, and here speaks the lecturer in literature, the sort-of professor of contemporary fiction, that each story, however freighted with history, is a speaking present unit, a speaking knot, a gem. We may appreciate a diamond more if we know its history of association with bloody feuds and failed dynastic marriages, but we do not understand it better. The same point could be made of love, or of lovers—the history of indifferent wives or loafing husbands, even the paraphernalia of personality, is strewn about there on the floor, waiting to be put on with their clothing. So I begin this story, so far along in this maladroit paragraph, with myself driving my car, a decade-old Volkswagen, from New York to Wisconsin in the last breathless weeks of June. I was in that limbo between youth and middle age when change is most necessary, when new possibilities must replace the old dying visions, and I had been divorced a year. Divorced spiritually, not legally: because my wife had died six months after she had left me, I would never need the formal decree. (Impossible to conceal the bitterness, even after Joan’s death.)

  I had been driving for a day and a half, going as fast as my Volkswagen and the highway patrol would permit, and I had spent the intervening night in an Ohio motel of shabby aspect—a motel so characterless that I forgot its name and the town on the heel of which it squatted the moment I rejoined the freeway. Having had a particularly disturbing nightmare, I was gasping for freedom, for new air. Every cell and nerve of my body was choked with malignancy, the residue of gasoline fumes and repressed outrage; I needed dull green peace, fresh days in which to finish (actually, to write most of) the dissertation which would enable me to keep my job.

  For as I have said, I am not a professor: not even, to be truthful, a “sort-of” professor. I am an instructor. An instructor of the last gasp.

  Automobiles, especially my own, make me irritable and prone to accidents of temperament. Each man sits alone in his six-foot metal coffin, and traffic jams are like noisy graveyards. (I may be mechanically incompetent, but I can reduce death to a metaphor—the day after dreaming of it!) I am likely to “see” things, whereas normally all my hallucinations enter through another organ—I mean my nose. (Some people see things, I smell ’em.) In Massachusetts once, during a time when I was teaching Tom Jones, I was driving late at night on a country road well out of Boston. The familiar roadsign picked out by my headlights indicated a sharp curve. Entering it, I saw the road begin to ascend steeply, and pushed the accelerator down hard to the floor. I like to go up hills as fast as possible. When I had swung fully into the curve and had begun to ascend—little Schnauzer engine barking furiously—I heard a terrific clatter from the brow of the hill. A second later, my blood thinned: just beginning to careen down the hill was a stagecoach, obviously out of control. I could see the four horses racing in the straps, the carriage lamps flickering, the driver hauling uselessly on his reins. His face was taut with panic. The high wooden box of the coach jounced down at me, veering crazily across the road. It seemed like my last moment on earth. I fumbled in fear at the controls of my car, not knowing whether to change gears, shut off the engine, or risk my luck on speeding past the plunging carriage. At the last moment my mind began to work and I turned sharply to the right. The coach sped past me, missing the car by four or five inches. I could smell the sweat of the horses and hear the creaking of leather.

  When I had calmed down, I continued up the hill. It must have been a fraternity or club prank, I thought, college madmen from Harvard or B.U. But after I had gone on no more than a quarter mile, I realized that it was very late for that sort of prank—past three in the morning—and that you don’t race stagecoaches downhill. They crash. And I could not be sure that I had seen it at all. So I turned around and went back. I followed the road five miles the way I had come—long enough to catch up, more than enough to find the wreck. The road was empty. I went home and forgot about it. A year later, idly listening in my bath to a phone-in program about the supernatural, I heard a woman say that while she had been driving on a country road well out of Boston, she had turned up a hill late at night and seen a careering stagecoach racing toward her. My asthmatic heart nearly folded in half with shock. Driving, I still remember this. When the other world comes up and slaps me in the face, it will happen when I am in a car.

  Teagarden’s the name, pomposity’s the game.

  I was sweating and in bad temper. I was perhaps thirty miles from Arden, and my engine was rattling, and on the back seat noisily shook a carton of books and papers. I had to do that book or the Advancement and Promotions Committee—seven well-padded scholars on Long Island—would fire me. I was hoping that my cousin Duane, who lives in the newer farmhouse on what used to be my grandparents’ farm, would have got my telegram and had the older wooden house cleaned up for my arrival. Duane being himself, this seemed unlikely. When I reached a town I knew called Plainview, I stopped at a lunchroom for chili, though I was not hungry. Eating is affirmation, greed is life, food is antidote. When Joan died, I stood up beside the refrigerator and gobbled an entire Sara Lee cream cake.

  Plainview is where my family always stopped for lunch when we drove to the farm, and I had to make a longish detour to get there. In those days, it was a hamlet of one street lined with feed stores, a five-and-ten, a hotel, a Rexall pharmacy, a tavern, our diner. Now I saw that the town had grown, and the second feed store had been replaced by the Roxy cinema, which itself had bankrupted so that the marquee read C ARLTO HESTO IN HUR. Good work, Carlto! The diner was externally unchanged, but when I stepped inside I saw that the churchy wooden booths along the wall had yielded to new banquettes padded with that plastic luncheonette leather which is forever gummy. I sat at the far end of the counter. The waitress idled over, leaned on the counter staring at me and missed a few beats with her gum while I gave my order. I could smell baby oil and tooth decay, mostly the latter.

  Though she smelled of nothing of the kind. As I’ve said, I have olfactory hallucinations. I smell people even when I’m talking to them on the telephone. In a German novel I once read about this phenomenon, and there it seemed almost charming, pleasant, a sort of gift. But it is not charming or pleasant, it is disquieting and unsettling. Most of the odors I catch hook the nerves.

  She wandered away, scribbling on a pad, and rejoined a group of men attending to a radio at the other end of the counter. The men were huddled together, ignoring their plates of hash and steaming cups of coffee. I could see it was a matter of serious local interest, both by the men’s attitudes—anger in those hunched shoulders, anger and bafflement—and by the broken phrases which came to me from the radio. “No progress in the shocking…discovery of the twelve…a bare eight hours since…” Some of the men glanced sullenly at me, as if I hadn’t the right to hear even so much.

  When the waitress brought my bowl of chili I asked, “What the devil’s going on?”

  One of the men, a skinny clerk in rimless glasses and a shiny double-breasted suit, clapped his hat on his elongated pink head and left the diner, slamming the screen door.

  The waitress blankly watched him go and then looked down at her stained blue uniform. When she brought her gaze up to my face I saw that she was older than the high-school girl I had taken her for; her sprayed white bubble of hair and bright lipstick rode uneasily on her aging face. “You’re not from around here,” she said.

  “That’s right,” I said. “What happened?”

  “Where’re you from?”

  “New York,” I said. “Why does it matter?”

  “It matters, friend,” came a male voice from down the counter, and I swiveled to look at a burly young moonface with thinning blond hair and a high corrugated forehead. The others grouped behind him, pretending not to hear, but I could see their bicep muscles tensing in their short-sleeve shirts. My friend with the football forehead leaned forward on his stool, palms on knees so that his forearms bulged.

  I deliberately took a spoonful of chili. It was warm and bland. Greed is life. “Okay,” I said, “it matters. I’m from New York. If yo
u don’t want to tell me what’s happening you don’t have to. I can hear it on the radio for myself.”

  “Now apologize to Grace-Ellen.”

  I was dumbfounded. “For what?”

  “For swearing.”

  I looked at the waitress. She was leaning against the wall behind the counter. I thought she was trying to look offended.

  “If I swore at you, I apologize,” I said.

  The men sat staring at me. I could feel violence thickening about them, not sure which way to flow or whether to flow at all.

  “Get the shit out of here, wiseass,” the young man said. “Wait. Frank, get the number of big shot’s car.” He held up a massive palm in my direction while a small man in suspenders, a natural flunky, jumped up from his stool and ran out and stood in front of my car. Through the window I saw him pull a piece of paper from his shirt pocket and write on it.

  My friend lowered his meaty palm. “I’m taking that number to the police,” he said. “Now are you gonna sit and bullshit me some more or are you gonna leave?”

  I stood up. There were three of them, not counting no ’count Frank. Sweat glissed coldly down my sides. In Manhattan such an exchange might last fifteen minutes with all parties knowing that they will do nothing more violent at the end than walk away. But the muscular balding blond young man had no trace of New York relish in insult and feigned toughness, and I risked only one further remark.

  “I only asked a question.” I hated him, his distrust of strangers and his manner of the village bully. I knew I would hate myself for fleeing.