The Angel on the Roof

by Russell Banks

  “Hi.”

  He turned, saw her, and instantly regained the moment he had lost when, two nights ago, once outside the bar and on his way home, he had forgotten about the ugliest woman he had ever seen. She seemed even more grotesque to him now than before, which made the moment all the more precious to him, and so, once again, he held the moment as if in his hands and began to speak with her, to ask questions, to offer his opinions and solicit hers.

  I said earlier that I am the man in this story and my friend Sarah Cole, now dead, is the woman. I think back to that night, the second time I had seen Sarah, and I tremble, not with fear, but in shame. My concern then, when I was first becoming involved with Sarah, was merely with the moment, holding on to it, grasping it wholly, as if its beginning did not grow out of some other prior moment in her life and my life separately, and at the same time did not lead into future moments in our separate lives. She talked more easily than she had the night before, and I listened as eagerly and carefully as I had before, again with the same motives, to keep her in front of me, to draw her forward from the context of her life and place her, as if she were an object, into the context of mine. I did not know how cruel this was. When you have never done a thing before and that thing is not simply and clearly right or wrong, you frequently do not know if it is a cruel thing, you just go ahead and do it. Maybe later you’ll be able to determine whether you acted cruelly. Too late, of course, but at least you’ll know.

  While we drank, Sarah told me that she hated her ex-husband because of the way he treated the children. “It’s not so much the money,” she said, nervously wagging her booted feet from her perch on the high barstool. “I mean, I get by, barely, but I get them fed and clothed on my own okay. It’s because he won’t even write them a letter or anything. He won’t call them on the phone, all he calls for is to bitch at me because I’m trying to get the state to take him to court so I can get some of the money he’s s’posed to be paying for child support. And he won’t even think to talk to the kids when he calls. Won’t even ask about them.”

  “He sounds like a sonofabitch.”

  “He is, he is!” she said. “I don’t know why I married him. Or stayed married. Fourteen years, for Christ’s sake. He put a spell over me or something. I don’t know,” she said, with a note of wistfulness in her voice. “He wasn’t what you’d call good-looking.”

  After her second drink, she decided she had to leave. Her children were at home, it was Friday night, and she liked to make sure she ate supper with them and knew where they were going and who they were with when they went out on their dates. “No dates on school nights,” she said to me. “I mean, you gotta have rules, you know.”

  I agreed, and we left together, everyone in the place following us with his or her gaze. I was aware of that, I knew what they were thinking, and I didn’t care, because I was simply walking her to her car.

  It was a cool evening, dusk settling onto the lot like a gray blanket. Her car, a huge, dark green Buick sedan at least ten years old, was battered almost beyond use. She reached for the door handle on the driver’s side and yanked. Nothing. The door wouldn’t open. She tried again. Then I tried. Still nothing.

  Then I saw it, a V-shaped dent in the left front fender, binding the metal of the door against the metal of the fender in a large crimp that held the door fast. “Someone must’ve backed into you while you were inside,” I said to her.

  She came forward and studied the crimp for a few seconds, and when she looked back at me, she was weeping. “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus!” she wailed, her large, frog-like mouth wide open and wet with spit, her tongue flopping loosely over gapped teeth. “I can’t pay for this! I can’t!” Her face was red, and even in the dusky light I could see it puff out with weeping, her tiny eyes seeming almost to disappear behind wet cheeks. Her shoulders slumped, and her hands fell limply to her sides.

  Placing my briefcase on the ground, I reached out to her and put my arms around her body and held her close to me, while she cried wetly into my shoulder. After a few seconds, she started pulling herself back together, and her weeping got reduced to snuffling. Her cowboy hat had been pushed back and now clung to her head at a precarious, absurdly jaunty angle. She took a step away from me and said, “I’ll get in the other side.”

  “Okay,” I said, almost in a whisper. “That’s fine.”

  Slowly, she walked around the front of the huge, ugly vehicle and opened the door on the passenger’s side and slid awkwardly across the seat until she had positioned herself behind the steering wheel. She started the motor, which came to life with a roar. The muffler was shot. Without saying another word to me or even waving, she dropped the car into reverse gear and backed it loudly out of the parking space and headed out of the lot to the street.

  I turned and started for my car, when I happened to glance toward the door of the bar, and there, staring after me, were the bartender, the two women who had come in with Sarah, and two of the men who had been sitting at the bar. They were lawyers, and I knew them slightly. They were grinning at me. I grinned back and got into my car and, without looking at them again, left the place and drove straight to my apartment.

  3

  One night several weeks later, Ron meets Sarah at Osgood’s, and after buying her three White Russians and drinking three Scotches himself, he takes her back to his apartment in his car—a Datsun fast-back coupe that she says she admires—for the sole purpose of making love to her.

  I’m still the man in the story, and Sarah is still the woman, but I’m telling it this way because what I have to tell you now confuses me, embarrasses me, and makes me sad, and consequently I’m likely to tell it falsely. I’m likely to cover the truth by making Sarah a better woman than she actually was, while making me appear worse than I actually was or am; or else I’ll do the opposite, make Sarah worse than she was and me better. The truth is, I was pretty, extremely so, and she was not, extremely so, and I knew it, and she knew it. She walked out the door of Osgood’s determined to make love to a man much prettier than any she had seen up close before, and I walked out determined to make love to a woman much homelier than any I had made love to before. We were, in a sense, equals.

  No, that’s not exactly true. I’m not at all sure she feels as Ron does. That is to say, perhaps she genuinely likes the man, in spite of his being the most physically attractive man she has ever known. Perhaps she is more aware of her homeliness than of his beauty, for Ron, despite what I may have implied, does not think of himself as especially beautiful. He merely knows that other people think of him that way. As I said before, he is a nice man.

  Ron unlocks the door to his apartment, walks in ahead of her, and flicks on the lamp beside the couch. It’s a small, single-bedroom, modern apartment, one of thirty identical apartments in a large brick building on the Heights just east of downtown Concord. Sarah stands nervously at the door, peering in.

  “Come in, come in,” Ron says.

  She steps timidly in and closes the door behind her. She removes her cowboy hat, then quickly puts it back on, crosses the living room, and plops down in a blond easy chair, seeming to shrink in its hug out of sight to safety. Behind her, Ron, at the entry to the kitchen, places one hand on her shoulder, and she stiffens. He removes his hand.

  “Would you like a drink?”

  “No… I guess not,” she says, staring straight ahead at the wall opposite, where a large, framed photograph of a bicyclist advertises in French the Tour de France. Around a corner, in an alcove off the living room, a silvery gray twenty-one-speed bicycle leans casually against the wall, glistening and poised, slender as a thoroughbred racehorse.

  “I don’t know,” she says. Ron is in the kitchen now, making himself a drink. “I don’t know… I don’t know.”

  “What? Change your mind? I can make a White Russian for you. Vodka, cream, Kahlúa, and ice, right?”

  Sarah tries to cross her legs, but she is sitting too low in the chair and her legs are too thick at the thi
ghs, so she ends, after a struggle, with one leg in the air and the other twisted on its side. She looks as if she has fallen from a great height.

  Ron steps out from the kitchen, peers over the back of the chair, and watches her untangle herself, then ducks back into the kitchen. After a few seconds, he returns. “Seriously. Want me to fix you a White Russian?”

  “No.”

  Again from behind and above her, Ron places one hand on Sarah’s shoulder, and this time she does not stiffen, though she does not exactly relax, either. She sits there, a block of wood, staring straight ahead.

  “Are you scared?” he asks gently. Then he adds, “I am.”

  “Well, no, I’m not scared.” She remains silent for a moment. “You’re scared? Of what?” She turns to face him, but avoids his blue eyes.

  “Well… I don’t do this all the time, you know. Bring home a woman I…,” he trails off.

  “Picked up in a bar.”

  “No. I mean, I like you, Sarah. I really do. And I didn’t just pick you up in a bar, you know that. We’ve gotten to be friends, you and me.”

  “You want to sleep with me?” she asks, still not meeting his steady gaze.

  “Yes.” He seems to mean it. He does not take a gulp or even a sip from his drink. He just says, “Yes,” straight out, and cleanly, not too quickly, either, and not after a hesitant delay. A simple statement of a simple fact. The man wants to make love to the woman. She asked him, and he told her. What could be simpler?

  “Do you want to sleep with me?” he asks.

  She turns around in the chair, faces the wall again, and says in a low voice, “Sure, I do, but … it’s hard to explain.”

  “What? But what?” Placing his glass down on the table between the chair and the sofa, he puts both hands on her shoulders and lightly kneads them. He knows he can be discouraged from pursuing this, but he is not sure how easily. Having got this far without bumping against obstacles (except the ones he has placed in his way himself), he is not sure what it will take to turn him back. He does not know, therefore, how assertive or how seductive he should be with her. He suspects that he can be stopped very easily, so he is reluctant to give her a chance to try. He goes on kneading her doughy shoulders.

  “You and me, Ron … we’re real different.” She glances at the bicycle in the corner.

  “A man … and a woman,” he says.

  “No, not that. I mean, different. That’s all. Real different. More than you think. You’re nice, but you don’t know what I mean, and that’s one of the things that makes you so nice. But we’re different. Listen,” she says, “I gotta go. I gotta leave now.”

  The man removes his hands and retrieves his glass, takes a sip, and watches her over the rim of the glass, as, not without difficulty, the woman rises from the chair and moves swiftly toward the door. She stops at the door, squares her hat on her head, and glances back at him.

  “We can be friends, though, okay?”

  “Okay. Friends.”

  “I’ll see you again down at Osgood’s, right?”

  “Oh, yeah, sure.”

  “Good. See you,” she says, opening the door.

  The door closes. The man walks around the sofa, snaps on the television set, and sits down in front of it. He picks up a TV Guide from the coffee table and flips through it, stops, runs a finger down the listings, stops, puts down the magazine, and changes the channel. He does not once connect the magazine in his hand to the woman who has just left his apartment, even though he knows she spends her days packing TV Guides into cartons that get shipped to warehouses in distant parts of New England. He’ll think of the connection some other night, but by then the connection will be merely sentimental. It’ll be too late for him to understand what she meant by “different.”

  4

  But that’s not the point of my story. Certainly, it’s an aspect of the story, the political aspect, if you want, but it’s not the reason I’m trying to tell it in the first place. I’m trying to tell the story so that I can understand what happened between me and Sarah Cole that summer and early autumn ten years ago. To say we were lovers says very little about what happened; to say we were friends says even less. No, if I’m to understand the whole thing, I’ll have to say the whole thing, for, in the end, what I need to know is whether what happened between me and Sarah Cole was right or wrong. Character is fate, which suggests that if a man can know and then to some degree control his character, he can know and to that same degree control his fate.

  The next time Sarah and I were together we were at her apartment in the south end of Concord, a second-floor flat in a tenement building on Perley Street. I had stayed away from Osgood’s for several weeks, deliberately trying to avoid running into Sarah there, though I never quite put it that way to myself. I found excuses and generated interest in and reasons for going elsewhere after work. Yet I was obsessed with Sarah by then, obsessed with the idea of making love to her, which, because it was not an actual desire to make love to her, was an unusually complex obsession. Passion without desire, if it gets expressed, may in fact be a kind of rape, and perhaps I sensed the danger that lay behind my obsession and for that reason went out of my way to avoid meeting Sarah again.

  Yet I did meet her, inadvertently, of course. After picking up shirts at the cleaner’s on South Main and Perley Streets, I’d gone down Perley on my way to South State and the post office. It was a Saturday morning, and this trip on my bicycle was part of my regular Saturday routine. I did not remember that Sarah lived on Perley Street, although she had told me several times in a complaining way—it’s a rough neighborhood, packed-dirt yards, shabby apartment buildings, the carcasses of old, half-stripped cars on cinder blocks in the driveways, broken red-and-yellow plastic tricycles on the cracked sidewalks—but as soon as I saw her, I remembered. It was too late to avoid meeting her. I was riding my bike, wearing shorts and T-shirt, the package containing my folded and starched shirts hooked to the carrier behind me, and she was walking toward me along the sidewalk, lugging two large bags of groceries. She saw me, and I stopped. We talked, and I offered to carry her groceries for her. I took the bags while she led the bike, handling it carefully, as if she were afraid she might break it.

  At the stoop we came to a halt. The wooden steps were cluttered with half-opened garbage bags spilling eggshells, coffee grounds, and old food wrappers to the walkway. “I can’t get the people downstairs to take care of their garbage,” she explained. She leaned the bike against the banister and reached for her groceries.

  “I’ll carry them up for you,” I said. I directed her to loop the chain lock from the bike to the banister rail and snap it shut and told her to bring my shirts up with her.

  “Maybe you’d like a beer?” she said as she opened the door to the darkened hallway. Narrow stairs disappeared in front of me into heavy, damp darkness, and the air smelled like old newspapers.

  “Sure,” I said, and followed her up.

  “Sorry there’s no light. I can’t get them to fix it.”

  “No matter. I can follow along,” I said, and even in the dim light of the hall I could see the large, blue veins that cascaded thickly down the backs of her legs. She wore tight, white-duck Bermuda shorts, rubber shower sandals, and a pink, sleeveless sweater. I pictured her in the cashier’s line at the supermarket. I would have been behind her, a stranger, and on seeing her, I would have turned away and studied the covers of the magazines, TV Guide, People, the National Enquirer, for there was nothing of interest in her appearance that in the hard light of day would not have slightly embarrassed me. Yet here I was inviting myself into her home, eagerly staring at the backs of her ravaged legs, her sad, tasteless clothing, her poverty. I was not detached, however, was not staring at her with scientific curiosity and, because of my passion, did not feel or believe that what I was doing was perverse. I felt warmed by her presence and was flirtatious and bold, a little pushy, even.

  Picture this. The man, tanned, limber, fit, wearing red jo
gging shorts, Italian leather sandals, a clinging net T-shirt of Scandinavian design and manufacture, enters the apartment behind the woman, whose dough-colored skin, thick, short body, and homely, uncomfortable face all try, but fail, to hide themselves. She waves him toward the table in the kitchen, where he sets down the bags and looks good-naturedly around the room. “What about the beer you bribed me with?” he asks.

  The apartment is cluttered with old, oversized furniture, yard sale and secondhand stuff bought originally for a large house in the country or a spacious apartment on a boulevard forty or fifty years ago, passed down from antique dealer to used furniture store to yard sale to thrift shop, where it finally gets purchased by Sarah Cole and gets hauled over to Perley Street and shoved up the narrow stairs, she and her children grunting and sweating in the darkness of the hallway— overstuffed armchairs and couch, huge, ungainly dressers, upholstered rocking chairs, and, in the kitchen, an old flat-topped maple desk for a table, a half dozen heavy, oak dining room chairs, a high, glass-fronted cabinet, all peeling, stained, chipped, and squatting on a dark green linoleum floor.

  The place is neat and arranged in a more or less orderly way, however, and the man seems comfortable there. He strolls from the kitchen to the living room and peeks into the three small bedrooms that branch off a hallway behind the living room. “Nice place!” he calls to the woman. He studies the framed pictures of her three children arranged as if on an altar atop the buffet. “Nice-looking kids!” he calls out. They are. Blond, round-faced, clean, and utterly ordinary-looking, their pleasant faces glance, as instructed, slightly off camera and down to the right, as if they are trying to remember the name of the capital of Montana.

  When he returns to the kitchen, the woman is putting away her groceries, her back to him. “Where’s that beer you bribed me with?” he asks again. He takes a position against the doorframe, his weight on one hip, like a dancer resting. “You sure are quiet today, Sarah,” he says in a low voice. “Everything okay?”