The Stranger Behind You

by Carol Goodman

  “Cass told me that Joan Lurie was fired from her internship at the Globe. Why isn’t anyone talking about that?” I asked Wally.

  “Well,” Wally said, spreading a tablespoon of pâté on a slice of baguette, “that would look a teensy bit petty right now. But just you wait. The tide will turn on this. You and Cass just have to ride it out. Have some pâté, darlin’, you’re nothing but skin and bones.”

  Sometimes I thought Wally was trying to stuff me like a French goose. She and Greg both seemed invested in keeping me well fed—and quiet. The dutiful wife standing by her man.

  Even if no one else was standing by Cass. The Society of Professional Journalists canceled his membership. Brown revoked his invitation to speak at next year’s graduation—Whit’s graduation! A couple of weeks after the Disaster, Pat Shanahan made a public statement saying he was returning Cass’s campaign contributions. “Good,” I told Cass. “The money will help with our legal fees.”

  Cass didn’t seem to think that was funny. “This is the thanks I get for all the money I’ve shelled out for you?” I heard him yelling at Pat on the phone. I would have reminded him that he’d made those contributions to thank Wally for her support during Whit’s crisis, but he clearly wasn’t in the mood to be reasoned with.

  A little later Greg drove up with Wally in the black SUV. “Like a hit man,” Cass said, peering out the sidelight. Wally got out in a long black raincoat and a wide-brimmed hat as if she were afraid of being recognized in our garage. When she suggested we sit out on the terrace, though, I understood; she didn’t want to risk being recognized if we were photographed by a drone.

  “I hear on the grapevine that Joan Lurie’s book is getting seven-figure offers,” she told me, filling my glass.

  I nearly choked on my wine. “Seven figures? For a packet of lies? What could she possibly fill a book with that’s worth that much money?”

  “That’s what everybody is wondering,” Wally said, leaning forward. “The rumor is that she has more material that didn’t make it into the Manahatta story. Is there anything . . . well . . .” Wally gave me that pained smile women get on their faces when they’re about to say something really hurtful but are pretending it’s for your own good. “Anything Cass has mentioned to you that’s worse than what came out in the story?”

  I stared at her for a moment, unable to process what she was asking me. The sheers were fluttering in from the living room and the light from the pool was making curvy lines on Wally’s face. It made me feel dizzy. “The story alleges that he had sex with half a dozen interns and assistants over the years, that he’d coerced women into giving him blowjobs in his office, and fired women who didn’t comply,” I said, my words coming out slurred. My mouth felt numb. “What could be worse?”

  “Well,” Wally said, looking embarrassed, “if any of the women were underage, for instance—”

  “Cass would never,” I hissed, stumbling as I stood up from the lounge chair. Wally got up to steady me.

  “Maybe Cass didn’t know the girl was underage,” she said, leading me back into the living room. “Some of these teenage girls do their hair and makeup to look much older. Cass might have met one at a party, for instance, and thought she was older. Did he mention anything like that to you? Anything that happened at a party?”

  “Of coursch not . . .” I slurred. Greg came into the living room and took the bottle of Veuve Clicquot from Wally, making some joke about what it meant in French, and then Greg was helping me up the stairs. Where had Wally gone? I could hear her voice downstairs talking to someone on her phone in a low, urgent tone. I caught my own name. It sounded like she was saying, Don’t worry about Melissa. When we got to my bedroom I told Greg I could take it from here, but his hands lingered on my waist . . . and then drifted down to my ass. I pushed him away and raised my hand to slap him but he caught it. “See what it feels like, Mel? Now you know how those girls felt when your husband assaulted them.”

  I opened my mouth but nothing came out. Like I really was nothing but a puppet and couldn’t talk for myself anymore. He turned and left. Maybe I’d heard him wrong. There was a humming in my ears and everything was blurry. I dropped into bed without taking my clothes off and fell into a deep, dreamless sleep as if I’d taken an Ambien, but I hadn’t . . . or at least I didn’t think I had. Sometimes I forgot when I took them . . . I should tell Wally I didn’t want any more. . . .

  WHEN I WOKE up the sun was in my face and someone was screaming. One of those reporters, I thought, had finally broken into the house.

  I stumbled down the stairs into the living room. The gliders were open, the sheers moving in the breeze like an army of naked women. All those women who had accused Cass had marched on the house to take their revenge. They were screaming outside for his blood—for my blood, my children’s blood. I hurried to the doors, tripping over something on the floor. A shoe. One of Cass’s handmade Italian loafers. I picked it up and pushed through the filmy drapes. It felt like pushing through flesh, like being in a steam room surrounded by fat, damp bodies pressing up against my chest . . .

  See what it feels like, Mel?

  The screaming made it impossible to think. It was louder when I got outside. Mist was rising from the pool’s surface. A woman was standing on the edge, a cowl over her head, her hands covering her face. She was like a statue on a grave. Only louder.

  It was Marta, her hands over her mouth as if she were trying to silence the sounds coming from inside of her. There must be an animal drowned in the pool—

  “What is it?” I demanded, grabbing her hands and pulling them away from her face. She snatched them out of my grip as if my hands were on fire—as if I were trying to hurt her—and pointed to the pool.

  He was floating in the deep end, facedown, white shirt riffling in the current from the circulation pump, arms spread as if he had tried to embrace the water. As if all his women had come for him and he’d opened his arms wide to welcome them and they’d rushed into his embrace. They finally had him now.

  Chapter Five

  Joan

  CASPAR OSGOOD TWEETED his suicide note—an apology to the women he had hurt—but Melissa Osgood issued a statement that she believed her husband had been hounded to his grave by a witch-hunt.

  “She has to say that,” Simon told me. “To protect herself against a civil suit. She’ll probably sue us as well.”

  “Should I make a statement?” I asked.

  “No. Better to continue laying low. In fact, I suggest you extend your leave for six months so you can work on your book; that’s what you should be focusing on now. Remember, you wrote a good, honest story, Joan. It can stand on its own merits.”

  All the favorable responses to my story seemed to have evaporated, at least as far as I could tell from my cursory review of the news via Siri; I still couldn’t look at a screen for more than fifteen minutes. I didn’t tweet back at the pundits saying I had hounded Osgood to his grave or comment on the Atlantic Monthly article questioning whether the #MeToo movement had gone too far.

  Instead, in the week following Cass’s suicide, I forced myself into an Uber and took the drive uptown to look at an apartment at the Refuge. I knew as soon as I saw those windows looking out on open space with no one looking back that I would feel safe. I was afraid that the co-op board wouldn’t approve my application, but Sylvia knew someone on the board who eased my way, and my new literary agency sent me the first part of my advance money in time for the down payment. After Cass’s death, the publisher seemed, if anything, more excited about the book.

  My new editor, Etinosa Okoro, was only a few years older than me but a powerhouse. The first thing she told me when we spoke on the phone was that the Manahatta story had made her weep for her sister, who had been sexually assaulted when she was a teenager in Lagos. We outlined a plan for my first draft, but she told me that I should feel free to follow where the story took me.

  “I trust your instincts,” she told me, which almost made me wee
p; since the night of the attack I hadn’t felt like I could trust anything about myself.

  We agreed that I would send her a progress report in three months. Then she told me that she wanted me to write about my reaction to the suicide. I had no idea how I was going to do that. Since the night I woke up and saw Caspar Osgood’s bloated ghost on my fire escape I’ve tried not to think about him at all.

  As if purging myself of my possessions could rid me of the memory, I donate my fold-out couch and rickety IKEA furniture to Salvation Army and order new from Pottery Barn and West Elm. I donate bags of my clothes, keeping only the good pieces I have picked up at the sample sales that Sylvia has directed me to over the last three years—Italian woolens from obscure centuries-old mills, the leather shoes handmade in an English village, the Chanel bag I wore the night of the party, which somehow escaped the attention of my thief—that felt like good-luck tokens of another life. I pack up the notebooks and folders I’ve amassed over three years, stuffing them indiscriminately into boxes because I can’t read my own handwritten labels. They fill two boxes, which I take, along with a few boxes of books and two suitcases, in an Uber up the West Side Highway on a rainy day in the first week of August.

  Steamy condensation fogs the windows, muting the city into a pearly, iridescent blur. Shadows still lurk in my peripheral vision, but as long as I don’t move my head too fast they float companionably alongside me like a school of curious fish, pushed along by the tide, past the elegant terraces of Riverside Park and the massive ramparts of Fort Tryon Park. The car exits at Dyckman Street and drives toward Inwood Park—a green and leafy enclave at the northern tip of Manhattan where Peter Minuit purchased the swampy island for a few bushels of shells under a tulip tree nearly four hundred years ago. The gray spires of the Refuge rise out of the trees like a medieval castle built to withstand a siege, the river serving as a moat around it. Inviolate.

  Safe.

  The doorman, who introduces himself as Enda, helps me up with my boxes, leaving the door to an older silver-haired doorman who I’m told is called Hector. “We always make sure to have an extra person on-site when someone’s moving in or needs help,” Enda explains as we ride up in the elevator. “If you let me know when to expect your moving truck, I’ll arrange to have extra help on call.”

  “This is it,” I tell him, a bit curtly. I recognize the not-so-subtle hint that I may have neglected something and notice the way he wrinkles his nose at my grimy luggage and tattered liquor-store boxes, as if I’m bringing in cases of vodka instead of books and papers. Or maybe it’s the books and papers he objects to. Who bothers with paper anything these days? Or perhaps it’s the shabby wingback chair my mother sent as a housewarming present that’s waiting for me in the apartment.

  I remember how you loved curling up and reading in it and thought it would warm up your new place, my mother said when she called last week. I could tell from her voice that she was hoping I’d invite her to see my new apartment, but I knew she would know something terrible had happened to me if she saw me in person, and I just can’t bear for her to know about the attack. She’s spent her whole life battling the anxiety that my grandmother passed down to her, and if she knows that one of her fears had come true she might begin to think all of them would.

  I see that she’s included one of the hideous afghans my grandmother had knitted as well. I had loved reading in that old chair, curled up under one of Grandma’s scratchy afghans, and I’m touched my mother spent the money to have it delivered. But it looks out of place in the apartment, especially with the white, green, and orange (my grandmother’s favorite color combination) afghan draped over it.

  The only other pieces of furniture are two velvet couches, marooned on a sea of parquet like the only surviving lifeboats from the Titanic, and a massive oak desk I’d splurged on from Stickley and that the deliverers have left along the wall next to the fireplace.

  “I told Stickley I wanted the desk in the bay window,” I say, the doorman’s snobbery turning me into a bitch lady. I feel as though I’m starting to sound like Sylvia.

  “Eejits,” he says. “I’ll move it for you.”

  I offer to help—he can’t possibly move the massive oak desk by himself—but he waves me away, strips off his shiny buttoned jacket, and grasps the long sides of the Stickley desk and lifts it up. Only the strain in his back muscles gives away how heavy it is as he carries it over to the windows and places it down gently beneath the center one. The bottom sill is a few inches below the top of the desk. The Feng Shui expert I interviewed last year would complain that I was blocking the energy flow, but I have always dreamed of having a desk with a view.

  Enda steps back and surveys it. “Looks a bit lonely . . . wait . . .” He moves the threadbare wingback chair to one side of the desk as if it were holding an invisible companion to watch over me when I write. “There,” he says, draping the afghan over the arm of the chair, “now you have a place to write and a place to read. You’re all set to write the great American novel.”

  “I don’t know about the great American novel,” I say, disarmed by the way the glow off the river lights up his face. “I’m just going to tell a few women’s stories—” I break off, ashamed at how corny that sounds. That blow to the head is making me soft. Sentimental.

  “Oh yeah,” he says, snapping his fingers. “You’re the one who brought down that sex pervert. Good on you. I wonder that you didn’t feel afraid going up against a big man like that.”

  Brought down? I don’t know if he’s referring to Osgood’s suicide or not, but there’s something about the way he says it—or the way he’s leaning too close to me in his shirtsleeves, which are still damp from the exertion of moving the desk—that makes my skin prickle. Like he’s telling me I should be afraid. “It’s the men who bully and intimidate women who should be afraid,” I say, digging in my purse for a tip.

  He smiles and holds up his hands, palms out, as if to counter what I’m saying, but then I realize he’s just turning down the tip. He picks up his jacket but drapes it over his shoulder rather than putting it back on. Big man. He’s letting me know he’s not smaller than me just because he’s paid to wait on me. It’s a harmless bit of bravado, but I suddenly want him out. I walk briskly to the front door and hold it open. He saunters, smiling all the way.

  “Buzz if you need me,” he says, pointing to the button next to the monitor. “I’m always here.”

  Again it sounds like a threat. I’m always here. I’m always watching you. I wonder which cameras he has access to. Maybe I’m just being paranoid.

  “Good to know,” I say as he takes his time exiting. I lose no time in closing the door after him and bolting all my state-of-the-art locks. Then I watch him walk down the hall on the camera screen. When he gets to the elevator he turns back and smiles right at the camera. As if he didn’t have a doubt in the world that I was watching him.

  I SPEND THE next few weeks settling into my new apartment. I can’t possibly begin work on my book, I explain to the boxes of notes, until I feel settled. First I need filing cabinets, which I order from Stickley to match my desk. Then I need new folders, which I order from an Italian stationery company I once did a story on. I order colorful dishes from Marimekko, and then add rugs and throw pillows to cheer up the place. I order crisp linen sheets from D. Porthault, hoping they will make me sleep better. Despite my new, secure apartment I still can’t sleep well and I feel groggy and unfocused during the day. So I order a fancy Breville coffee/espresso machine to wake myself up.

  All the boxes arrive as if by magic. I never see who delivers them—Enda or Hector—I just hear a chime from the monitor and there’s the box on my camera screen, sitting in the empty hallway. As if the doormen know I don’t want to open my door to another human being.

  One of those packages arrives with the latest voice-activated digital assistant. I unpack it warily as if it were a bomb—Should I ask Enda if he can run my packages through a metal detector?—and plug i
t in.

  “Hello,” a polite animatrix voice chirps, a soothing blue light pulsing from the top of the phallic-shaped unit. “Thank you for inviting me into your home. What’s your name?”

  I nearly pull out the plug. Sylvia wanted me to do a story on electronic assistants last year, but I declined because I would have had to sample a few in my home. I don’t need any more corporate spies in my life, I’d groused. Google already reads my mail, Amazon is keeping track of my taste in books and vitamins, and Facebook is mining my data for the Russians. I don’t want to bug my own home.

  But what choice do I have? While I can see well enough to read now, I still can’t focus on print for longer than fifteen minutes. Plus my memory is shot to hell. I can’t even remember my computer password, but luckily I’ve got it written down in the back of my address book.

  “Joan,” I tell the blinking light. Is it an accident that it reminds me of the eye in 2001: A Space Odyssey? “What’s yours?”

  I’m expecting one of the anodyne millennial names—Michaela, Alexa, Electra—popular with digital media, but the pulsing light replies, “You can call me whatever you like.”

  “Oh,” I say, disarmed. This already feels . . . intimate. Did some marketer decide I would bond with my device better if I named it?

  “You’re a robot,” I say, as if I need to establish boundaries.

  “Yes, that is correct,” it answers cheerfully. “A voice-activated personal assistant, to be precise.”

  “Hm, your acronym would be VAPA, but that doesn’t sound very nice.”

  “Vapa,” it repeats. “That sounds like vapid.”

  “I don’t like it,” I agree. “How about . . . Bot?”