The shop prospered, though his marriage did not. He planned it himself from the beginning, specifying his choice of colors and fabrics and carpeting, and he had a genius for devising combinations of qualities that gave the effect of luxury without losing the aesthetic values of simplicity. His sense of what women would like, or ought to like and could be persuaded to like, was uncannily delicate and accurate. He displayed nothing but fine gowns, and he built quite rapidly a reputation which enticed the patronage of women who could afford to pay for both the gowns and his judgment in selecting them. But what he wanted more than anything else, and what he could not for a long time find the means of securing, was a selection of originals, originals in his own shop, which would compare favorably with the originals of New York and Paris. With these he could seduce and retain the patronage of women like Harriet Tyler who now selected most of their more expensive gowns in the shops of New York, at least, if not Paris.
While he was thinking of this and wondering how he could accomplish it, at the age of forty-five, he had his first heart attack. He was in the shop, fortunately in the back room supervising personally an alteration by the seamstress; and all of a sudden, without the slightest recognizable warning, he was overcome by the most terrible pain that he had ever known. A doctor was called by Gussie Ingram, his chief saleslady, and an ambulance was called by the doctor. The ambulance came into the alley behind the shop, and Aaron was carried out the rear exit on a stretcher. Mrs. Alton Sturdevant, who was at the time buying a hundred-and-fifty dollar cocktail gown in front, was never aware that anything had happened; and Aaron did not return for nearly two months.
This occurred in January, a month which Aaron’s wife had begun to spend in Florida, and he did not find it necessary to inform her precisely what he had suffered. On her part, she did not find it any more necessary to return to find out. As a matter of fact, she was inclined to consider illness her special privilege, and she rather resented him as a trespasser. Not that he cared at all. He no longer wished to kill her, or even that she would die, for it would have been impossible for her to have been, really, any more dead to him than she already was.
He learned two things from his brush with death. The first was that his life to that point, in spite of the shop, had hardly been worth living. The second was that, nevertheless, he would rather go on living than die. For several months he exercised the excessive caution characteristic of heart-conscious persons; but as time passed and he suffered no new attack or any signs of one, he relaxed and lived more naturally, and began to think again about the originals. He even thought of trying to design them himself, but his talent was in judgment, not creation, and he knew that he would not be successful. Soon afterward, almost a year from the time of his attack, Donna Buchanan came to see him.
The first thing he noticed about her was that she was frightened and had adopted an air of excessive sophistication to disguise her fright. He noted this only briefly, however, because the second thing he noticed was that she was unusually attractive and had learned well the tricks of making herself look even more attractive than she naturally was. Her hair was black, but her skin was fair — and her lips were done boldly in vivid color. She was wearing a pair of harlequin glasses that increased the piquancy of her thin face. When she removed her heavy coat in response to his invitation, he saw that her body was fine and slim and good to look at; and he would have viewed it imaginatively in a number of his own gowns if he had not been so struck by the one she was wearing. It was a navy faille with the effective simplicity of fine design and the unmistakable clean lines of expensive tailoring.
“Excuse me,” he said. “Where did you get that dress?”
“I made it,” she said.
“Where did you get the pattern?”
“I designed it myself.”
“Where did you learn to design?”
“I took a correspondence course, which helped, but mostly I’ve just worked at developing what I knew instinctively.”
This was an answer that pleased him, for he had a great belief in feeling as the primary element of excellence in design, a kind of natural awareness of what was right and not right.
“Why have you come to see me?” he asked.
“To ask if you might have a place for me in your shop.”
“As a designer?”
“I’d be willing to sell too, but I’d want to work part of the time on designing.”
He nodded at the portfolio she had brought in with her.
“Are those some of your designs?”
“Yes.”
“Show them to me.”
She did, and his excitement increased. He knew at once that he was going to give her a place in his shop — there was no question about that from the very first — but he examined all the sketches without comment, visualizing their execution in this or that fabric, brocades and velvets and Jacquarded silks. Afterward he closed the portfolio and began to talk with her about conditions and terms as if it were quite simply understood by both of them that it was no more than a matter of clarifying the details of an arrangement that was inevitable.
She turned out to be not only a fine designer but also a subtle and effective saleslady; and even these assets, important as they were to the shop and its increasing distinction, were of minor significance as compared with her total effect in the life that Aaron had been living, less because he really wanted to live it than because he did not want to explore the consequences of dying. He soon loved her and wanted to possess her. This he confessed to himself, because he was painfully honest in the presence of his id, but he confessed it to no one else, certainly not to her, because he was considerate and shy and had no faith in his capacity to incite in her a reciprocal desire.
After a while she had her own key to the shop and often returned at night to work at her sketches, and sometimes, at the beginning, he was there himself when she came. Afterward he made a point of being there every time instead of only sometimes. For quite a long while he made a pretense of having his own late business in the shop, but then, abruptly, he abandoned the pretense entirely and spent all his time in the room where she worked. It gave him genuine pleasure merely to sit and watch her, and to talk with her when she wanted to talk, and even to feel within himself the aching carnal appetite that was now specifically dedicated for the first time in much too long. Because it was dedicated, because it was a part of love, it was therefore purified and no disturbance to his tender conscience.
One night when she was finished working, she turned and met his bitter-sad eyes and held them levelly with hers for the length of three long breaths.
“Are you in love with me?” she said.
Rather strangely, or perhaps not, he wasn’t in the least disturbed by the question, and he answered that he was. “Would you like to have me?” she said. “Yes.”
“Well, I think I would like to have you too, so why don’t we try it and see how it works out?”
“Here? Now?”
“Do you object to here and now?”
“Oh, no. No.”
“Well, then.”
He was a little awkward the first time, and excessively gentle, but it worked out pleasantly for her, and wonderfully for him, and was repeated frequently afterward. She left home (she had been living with her mother and father) and rented an apartment, and he stayed with her there several nights a month. Or when his wife was out of town, they went to his house. He discontinued his trips to the south side. His life was suddenly warm and exciting, something it had never been before, and then, cataclysmically, in the midst of the warmth and excitement, about eight months after he took her the first time in the shop, he had his second heart attack.
He spent two months in the hospital and six weeks at home and was considered fortunate, by his doctor, to be alive. The shop in his absence was in Donna’s charge. She visited him in the hospital and reported how things were going, and they went well. While he was convalescing at home, she did not see him at all, altho
ugh she talked to him daily over the telephone, because she did not wish to meet the wife of the man with whom she had committed adultery and with whom she expected to commit it again. This was a reticence he could understand and approve of, but the six weeks at home were the longest of his life. He eventually escaped to the shop, and Donna, with vast relief, but always afterward he carried, or was supposed to carry, a supply of nitroglycerine tablets in his pocket.
Everything was resumed. Business and Donna and life. And the warmth and excitement were still there, the strong desire to live and do and be. It was never in him in greater force than it was the morning he awakened early, arose quietly, and looked down at her nakedness with love, and then descended the stairs of his house to drop dead in the hall in an instant.
3.
Before she had walked from the house to the street, her feet were wet and very cold. She turned left at the street and walked directly down it for several blocks, looking right and left at each intersection for a drugstore or café or any establishment at all that might be open on a Sunday and have a telephone. At last she saw to her left, at an intersection, the unlighted neon identification of a drugstore.
While she felt for Aaron a genuine grief, it was not unmixed grief, and she felt also for herself a concern which had been expressed first in flight and would from this time on be expressed in a calculated effort to avoid implication. There was no real harm in this, of course — it was better for him as it was for her — but it entailed problems; and the most imperative of the problems was arranging that his body be found soon. This was a problem which could surely be solved simply, however, once she was in a position to think about it clearly, and, meanwhile, she wondered if anyone had seen her leave the house fifteen or twenty minutes ago. She doubted it, but even so, there were her footprints in the snow. She hoped the heavy snow would continue, and obliterate the prints.
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?”
Wake Up With a Stranger Page 2
