The cakes, glossy with icing, were set out on a plate and the teapot was standing ready; on the counter the electric kettle boiled. Christine headed for it, but the girl, till then sitting with her elbows on the kitchen table and watching her expressionlessly, made a dash and intercepted her. Christine waited until she had poured the water into the pot. Then, “I’II carry it out, Elvira,” she said. She had just decided she didn’t want the girl to see her visitor’s orange tie; already, she knew, her position in the girl’s eyes had suffered because no one had yet attempted to get her pregnant.
“What you think they pay me for, Miss Christine?” the girl said insolently. She swung towards the garden with the tray; Christine trailed her, feeling lumpish and awkward. The girl was at least as big as she was but in a different way.
“Thank you, Elvira,” Christine said when the tray was in place. The girl departed without a word, casting a disdainful backward glance at the frayed jacket sleeves, the stained fingers. Christine was now determined to be especially kind to him.
“You are very rich,” he said.
“No,” Christine protested, shaking her head, “we’re not.” She had never thought of her family as rich; it was one of her father’s sayings that nobody made any money with the Government.
“Yes,” he repeated, “you are very rich.” He sat back in his lawn chair, gazing about him as though dazed.
Christine set his cup of tea in front of him. She wasn’t in the habit of paying much attention to the house or the garden; they were nothing special, far from being the largest on the street; other people took care of them. But now she looked where he was looking, seeing it all as though from a different height: the long expanses, the border flowers blazing in the early-summer sunlight, the flagged patio and walks, the high walls and the silence.
He came back to her face, sighing a little. “My English is not good,” he said, “but I improve.”
“You do,” Christine said, nodding encouragement.
He took sips of his tea, quickly and tenderly, as though afraid of injuring the cup. “I like to stay here.”
Christine passed him the cakes. He took only one, making a slight face as he ate it; but he had several more cups of tea while she finished the cakes. She managed to find out from him that he had come over on a church fellowship – she could not decode the denomination – and was studying Philosophy or Theology, or possibly both. She was feeling well disposed towards him: he had behaved himself, he had caused her no inconvenience.
The teapot was at last empty. He sat up straight in his chair, as though alerted by a soundless gong. “You look this way, please,” he said. Christine saw that he had placed his miniature camera on the stone sundial her mother had shipped back from England two years before. He wanted to take her picture. She was flattered, and settled herself to pose, smiling evenly.
He took off his glasses and laid them beside his plate. For a moment she saw his myopic, unprotected eyes turned towards her, with something tremulous and confiding in them she wanted to close herself off from knowing about. Then he went over and did something to the camera, his back to her. The next instant he was crouched beside her, his arm around her waist as far as it could reach, his other hand covering her own hands which she had folded in her lap, his cheek jammed up against hers. She was too startled to move. The camera clicked.
He stood up at once and replaced his glasses, which glittered now with a sad triumph. “Thank you, miss,” he said to her. “I go now.” He slung the camera back over his shoulder, keeping his hand on it as though to hold the lid on and prevent escape. “I send to my family, they will like.”
He was out the gate and gone before Christine had recovered; then she laughed. She had been afraid he would attack her, she could admit it now, and he had; but not in the usual way. He had raped, rapeo, rapere, rapui, to seize and carry off, not herself but her celluloid image, and incidentally that of the silver tea service, which glinted mockingly at her as the girl bore it away, carrying it regally, the insignia, the official jewels.
Christine spent the summer as she had for the past three years: she was the sailing instructress at an expensive all-girls camp near Algonquin Park. She had been a camper there, everything was familiar to her; she sailed almost better than she played tennis.
The second week she got a letter from him, postmarked Montreal and forwarded from her home address. It was printed in block letters on a piece of the green paper, two or three sentences. It began, “I hope you are well,” then described the weather in monosyllables and ended, “I am fine.” It was signed, “Your friend.” Each week she got another of these letters, more or less identical. In one of them a colour print was enclosed: himself, slightly cross-eyed and grinning hilariously, even more spindly than she remembered him against her billowing draperies, flowers exploding around them like firecrackers, one of his hands an equivocal blur in her lap, the other out of sight; on her own face, astonishment and outrage, as though he was sticking her in the behind with his hidden thumb.
She answered the first letter, but after that the seniors were in training for the races. At the end of the summer, packing to go home, she threw all the letters away.
When she had been back for several weeks she received another of the green letters. This time there was a return address printed at the top which Christine noted with foreboding was in her own city. Every day she waited for the phone to ring; she was so certain his first attempt at contact would be a disembodied voice that when he came upon her abruptly in mid-campus she was unprepared.
“How are you?”
His smile was the same, but everything else about him had deteriorated. He was, if possible; thinner; his jacket sleeves had sprouted a lush new crop of threads, as though to conceal hands now so badly bitten they appeared to have been gnawed by rodents. His hair fell over his eyes, uncut, ungreased; his eyes in the hollowed face, a delicate triangle of skin stretched on bone, jumped behind his glasses like hooded fish. He had the end of a cigarette in the corner of his mouth, and as they walked he lit a new one from it.
“I’m fine,” Christine said. She was thinking, I’m not going to get involved again, enough is enough, I’ve done my bit for internationalism. “How are you?”
“I live here now,” he said. “Maybe I study Economics.”
“That’s nice.” He didn’t sound as though he was enrolled anywhere.
“I come to see you.”
Christine didn’t know whether he meant he had left Montreal in order to be near her or just wanted to visit her at her house as he had done in the spring; either way she refused to be implicated. They were outside the Political Science Building. “I have a class here,” she said. “Goodbye.” She was being callous, she realized that, but a quick chop was more merciful in the long run, that was what her beautiful sisters used to say.
Afterwards she decided it had been stupid of her to let him find out where her class was. Though a timetable was posted in each of the colleges; all he had to do was look her up and record her every probable movement in block letters on his green notepad. After that day he never left her alone.
Initially he waited outside the lecture rooms for her to come out. She said hello to him curtly at first and kept on going, but this didn’t work; he followed her at a distance, smiling his changeless smile. Then she stopped speaking altogether and pretended to ignore him, but it made no difference, he followed her anyway. The fact that she was in some way afraid of him – or was it just embarrassment? – seemed only to encourage him. Her friends started to notice, asking her who he was and why he was tagging along behind her; she could hardly answer because she hardly knew.
As the weekdays passed and he showed no signs of letting up, she began to jog-trot between classes, finally to run. He was tireless, and had an amazing wind for one who smoked so heavily: he would speed along behind her, keeping the distance between them the same, as though he were a pull-toy attached to her by a string. She was aware of the ridiculous spectacle
they must make, galloping across campus, something out of a cartoon short, a lumbering elephant stampeded by a smiling, emaciated mouse, both of them locked in the classic pattern of comic pursuit and flight; but she found that to race made her less nervous than to walk sedately, the skin on the back of her neck crawling with the feel of his eyes on it. At least she could use her muscles. She worked out routines, escapes: she would dash in the front door of the Ladies’ Room in the coffee shop and out the backdoor, and he would lose the trail, until he discovered the other entrance. She would try to shake him by detours through baffling archways and corridors, but he seemed as familiar with the architectural mazes as she was herself. As a last refuge she could head for the women’s dormitory and watch from safety as he was skidded to a halt by the receptionist’s austere voice: men were not allowed past the entrance.
Lunch became difficult. She would be sitting, usually with other members of the Debating Society, just digging nicely into a sandwich, when he would appear suddenly as though he’d come up through an unseen manhole. She then had the choice of barging out through the crowded cafeteria, sandwich half-eaten, or finishing her lunch with him standing behind her chair, everyone at the table acutely aware of him, the conversation stilting and dwindling. Her friends learned to spot him from a distance; they posted lookouts. “Here he comes,” they would whisper, helping her collect her belongings for the sprint they knew would follow.
Several times she got tired of running and turned to confront him. “What do you want?” she would ask, glowering belligerently down at him, almost clenching her fists; she felt like shaking him, hitting him.
“I wish to talk with you.”
“Well, here I am,” she would say. “What do you want to talk about?”
But he would say nothing; he would stand in front of her, shifting his feet, smiling perhaps apologetically (though she could never pinpoint the exact tone of that smile, chewed lips stretched apart over the nicotine-yellowed teeth, rising at the corners, flesh held stiffly in place for an invisible photographer), his eyes jerking from one part of her face to another as though he saw her in fragments.
Annoying and tedious though it was, his pursuit of her had an odd result: mysterious in itself, it rendered her equally mysterious. No one had ever found Christine mysterious before. To her parents she was a beefy heavyweight, a plodder, lacking in flair, ordinary as bread. To her sisters she was the plain one, treated with an indulgence they did not give to each other: they did not fear her as a rival. To her male friends she was the one who could be relied on. She was helpful and a hard worker, always good for a game of tennis with the athletes among them. They invited her along to drink beer with them so they could get into the cleaner, more desirable Ladies and Escorts side of the beer parlour, taking it for granted she would buy her share of the rounds. In moments of stress they confided to her their problems with women. There was nothing devious about her and nothing interesting.
Christine had always agreed with these estimates of herself. In childhood she had identified with the false bride or the ugly sister, whenever a story had begun, “Once there was a maiden as beautiful as she was good,” she had known it wasn’t her. That was just how it was, but it wasn’t so bad. Her parents never expected her to be a brilliant social success and weren’t overly disappointed when she wasn’t. She was spared the manoeuvring and anxiety she witnessed among others her age, and she even had a kind of special position among men: she was an exception, she fitted none of the categories they commonly used when talking about girls; she wasn’t a cock-teaser, a cold fish, an easy lay or a snarky bitch; she was an honorary person. She had grown to share their contempt for most women.
Now, however, there was something about her that could not be explained. A man was chasing her, a peculiar sort of man, granted, but still a man, and he was without doubt attracted to her, he couldn’t leave her alone. Other men examined her more closely than they ever had, appraising her, trying to find out what it was those twitching bespectacled eyes saw in her. They started to ask her out, though they returned from these excursions with their curiosity unsatisfied, the secret of her charm still intact. Her opaque dumpling face, her solid bearshaped body became for them parts of a riddle no one could solve. Christine sensed this. In the bathtub she no longer imagined she was a dolphin; instead she imagined she was an elusive water-nixie; or sometimes, in moments of audacity, Marilyn Monroe. The daily chase was becoming a habit; she even looked forward to it. In addition to its other benefits she was losing weight.
All these weeks he had never phoned her or turned up at the house. He must have decided however that his tactics were not having the desired result, or perhaps he sensed she was becoming bored. The phone began to ring in the early morning or late at night when he could be sure she would be there. Sometimes he would simply breathe (she could recognize, or thought she could, the quality of his breathing), in which case she would hang up. Occasionally he would say again that he wanted to talk to her, but even when she gave him lots of time nothing else would follow. Then he extended his range: she would see him on her streetcar, smiling at her silently from a seat never closer than three away; she could feel him tracking her down her own street, though when she would break her resolve to pay no attention and would glance back he would be invisible or in the act of hiding behind a tree or hedge.
Among crowds of people and in daylight she had not really been afraid of him; she was stronger than he was and he had made no recent attempt to touch her. But the days were growing shorter and colder, it was almost November. Often she was arriving home in twilight or a darkness broken only by the feeble orange streetlamps. She brooded over the possibility of razors, knives, guns; by acquiring a weapon he could quickly turn the odds against her. She avoided wearing scarves, remembering the newspaper stories about girls who had been strangled by men. Putting on her nylons in the morning gave her a funny feeling. Her body seemed to have diminished, to have become smaller than his.
Was he deranged, was he a sex maniac? He seemed so harmless, yet it was that kind who often went berserk in the end. She pictured those ragged fingers at her throat; tearing at her clothes, though she could not think of herself as screaming. Parked cars, the shrubberies near her house, the driveways on either side of it, changed as she passed them from unnoticed background to sinister shadowed foreground, every detail distinct and harsh: they were places a man might crouch, leap out from. Yet every time she saw him in the clear light of morning or afternoon (for he still continued his old methods of pursuit), his aging jacket and jittery eyes convinced her that it was she herself who was the tormentor, the persecutor. She was in some sense responsible; from the folds and crevices of the body she had treated for so long as a reliable machine was emanating, against her will, some potent invisible odour, like a dog’s in heat or a female moth’s, that made him unable to stop following her.
Her mother, who had been too preoccupied with the unavoidable fall entertaining to pay much attention to the number of phone calls Christine was getting or to the hired girl’s complaints of a man who hung up without speaking, announced that she was flying down to New York for the weekend; her father decided to go too; Christine panicked: she saw herself in the bathtub with her throat slit, the blood drooling out of her neck and running in a little spiral down the drain (for by this time she believed he could walk through walls, could be everywhere at once). The girl would do nothing to help; she might even stand in the bathroom door with her arms folded, watching. Christine arranged to spend the weekend at her married sister’s.
When she arrived back Sunday evening she found the girl close to hysterics. She said that on Saturday she had gone to pull the curtains across the French doors at dusk and had found a strangely contorted face, a man’s face, pressed against the glass, staring in at her from the garden. She claimed she had fainted and had almost had her baby a month too early right there on the living-room carpet. Then she had called the police. He was gone by the time they got there but she
had recognized him from the afternoon of the tea; she had informed them he was a friend of Christine’s.
They called Monday evening to investigate, two of them. They were very polite, they knew who Christine’s father was. Her father greeted them heartily; her mother hovered, in the background, fidgeting with her porcelain hands, letting them see how frail and worried she was. She didn’t like having them in the living room but they were necessary.
Christine had to admit he’d been following her around. She was relieved he’d been discovered, relieved also that she hadn’t been the one to tell, though if he’d been a citizen of the country she would have called the police a long time ago. She insisted he was not dangerous, he had never hurt her.
“That kind don’t hurt you,” one of the policemen said. “They just kill you. You’re lucky you aren’t dead.”
“Nut cases,” the other one said.
Her mother volunteered that the thing about people from another culture was that you could never tell whether they were insane or not because their ways were so different. The policemen agreed with her, deferential but also condescending, as though she was a royal halfwit who had to be humoured.
“You know where he lives?” the first policeman asked. Christine had long ago torn up the letter with his address on it; she shook her head.
“We’ll have to pick him up tomorrow then,” he said. “Think you can keep him talking outside your class if he’s waiting for you?”
After questioning her they held a murmured conversation with her father in the front hall. The girl, clearing away the coffee cups, said if they didn’t lock him up she was leaving, she wasn’t going to be scared half out of her skin like that again.
Next day when Christine came out of her Modem History lecture he was there, right on schedule. He seemed puzzled when she did not begin to run. She approached him, her heart thumping with treachery and the prospect of freedom. Her body was back to its usual size; she felt herself a giantess, self-controlled, invulnerable.
The Story: Love, Loss and the Lives of Women: 100 Great Short Stories Page 11
