Wake Up With a Stranger

by Flora, Fletcher

  But she was thinking again of the day that had happened instead of the day that was happening; this accomplished nothing and was likely, besides, to become depressing. So she turned off the shower and toweled herself vigorously and returned to the bedroom. Retrieving her glasses from the bedside table where she had laid them last night, she put them on, the first act of dressing, then she stood for a minute before her mirror and smiled at herself and received a smile back. There was in this a kind of renewal, as if she had been bored and had met unexpectedly someone she had known and found stimulating and had almost forgotten; and with the renewal of pleasure there was also a renewal of the old resolve, that nothing should be wasted or lost before it was used, not talent or training or time or the fortunate arrangement and quality of flesh and bones. Now, however, that other morning kept intruding upon this morning, actually seemed to keep repeating itself in small parts removed from the whole. She was, for an instant before she moved, looking at herself in another mirror in another house three months ago, and everything that had occurred since would have to be repeated just as her image was now repeated in glass. Moving away from the glass and out of the glass, she dressed and fixed her face and went back to the kitchen where the coffee was ready.

  Sitting at the tiny kitchen table with the coffee hot and black in its cup before her, she began for the first time to plan the day precisely around the things that were already established. There were two appointments, one in the morning and the other in the afternoon, with two women who wanted gowns designed for specific occasions. It would be necessary to listen to their ideas and then modify them, or transform them completely to conform with her own which were already definite and partially on paper, and this was a delicate process requiring time and tact but which would mean at least a thousand dollars between the two of them and possibly even more. It would also be necessary to talk with Earl Joslin regarding the business, since it was still owned by Shirley Burns for whom Joslin acted, but this would be, because everything was going so well at the shop, no more than a routine conference. It would be, besides, a pleasure to talk with Joslin, who had been kind and helpful from the beginning, and still was. In the beginning, as a matter of fact, she had thought that he was possibly motivated by something more than kindness and a genuine respect for her ability and had expected him to make eventually some kind of overt bid for concession. She had wondered how she would respond if he did, but he had never made it and now quite palpably never would. She was thankful for this, especially since things had developed as they had with Tyler, and it was with Tyler, now that she had reached him in her mind, that the day she was planning would end, in this apartment in whatever development of their relationship he determined or succumbed to. But between now and then there were all these other things to do, and it was certainly time that she started to do them.

  She finished her coffee and started. It was the day that ended what the other day had begun, which was, in its simplest terms, her struggle for the shop but was really far more complex, and it was — until long after dark after she had returned to her apartment — a good day that went well.

  2.

  There were some boys down on the slope beneath the pines. From his position in the headmaster’s office, by looking over the headmaster’s left shoulder and through the bright glass pane of the window behind him, Enos could see them quite clearly. They didn’t seem to be doing much of anything in particular, just moving around rather slowly and aimlessly, in and out of light and shadow as they were cast in pattern by the pines and the sun. There was no special order or purpose in their movements, that was certain, and chances were that they had merely walked down the slope to loiter under the pines because it was a good place to go and be on a fine, bright day. The odd thing about them was that they no longer seemed to be the intolerable monsters of a monstrous world, and there was about them, in fact, a kind of halcyon air, motion and grace without the slightest sound. One of the boys had very pale hair; when he moved into the sun the hair changed instantly into white fire, and when he moved back into shade the fire went out as instantly as it had begun. This was very fascinating to see, and seemed for a moment to have some kind of significance that never became clear. The sight of the boys was not at all upsetting to Enos, and this was something different, a change that was part of his new peace. This was because the boys were now in a different world from his; they belonged to a world which he had left for the last time and to which he would never return, but into which he could still look over the left shoulder of the headmaster through a pane of bright glass.

  “Do you understand what I have been saying?” the headmaster said.

  “Yes,” Enos said. “Yes, I understand.”

  What he understood was that the headmaster was trying to be kind and firm at the same time, which is standard procedure for headmasters in dealing with both students and young masters. This was something for which Enos should have been thankful, but he was not. The truth was, the firm kindness was more than a little patronizing, or at least it seemed so to Enos, and he was offended by it, because he was now, after a long time, superior and invulnerable and in no need of kindness or patronage or anything at all from anyone on earth. This feeling of detached invulnerability was so strong in him that he thought it must surely be apparent to any sentient person, and he could not understand why the headmaster was not aware of it and persisted in his foolish attitude, as if it were he who were the stronger of the two. But then, of course, when you stopped to consider it, that was because the headmaster was really a dull and inadequate little man who was aware of practically nothing and was more to be tolerated than resented. He was a frail man, with a tracery of fine blue veins visible under his skin; and his hair was white and soft and rather sparse and seemed to float in a kind of detached thin cloud around the contour of his skull. His lower lip sometimes began to tremble, which gave him the appearance of being on the verge of tears, but actually this was only a sort of tic; when it happened he would pinch the lip between the thumb and index finger of his right hand, and after a bit the trembling would stop.

  “I regret the necessity for this action very much,” he said.

  “It’s all right,” Enos said. “It’s perfectly all right.”

  “If it were only that your instruction was weak, your techniques, or something of that sort, we could undoubtedly work it out. It is not only that, however, as I have tried to make clear. It is that you have lost control of the boys, which means, to be blunt, that you have lost their respect. This is a much more serious matter. Irremediable, I should say. Once you have lost control, nothing is left but to try to start again in another position. I realize, of course, that you have a contract for the remainder of the year, and the contract will be honored, that is, you will continue to receive your salary. However, for the good of the school, as well as for your own, we must remove you from the classroom.”

  “I don’t care about the contract,” Enos said. “You can forget it.”

  “Nothing of the sort.” The headmaster shook his head and frowned slightly, as if his word and honor had somehow been questioned. “The contract is binding.”

  The headmaster was silent, staring at Enos across the desk. His lower lip began to tremble, and he took it gently between the thumb and index finger and pinched, gradually increasing the pressure until it became quite painful. Enos looked over the headmaster’s shoulder and through the pane of glass at the group of boys on the slope beneath the pines. The boy with pale hair crossed a path of light, from shade to shade. The white fire flared briefly and instantly died.

  A shadow of irritation drifted into the pastel blue eyes of the headmaster as he began to understand finally that the situation was really quite abnormal. It was surely only appropriate that a young master facing failure and dismissal should betray some signs of distress, perhaps even plead for another chance, which the headmaster would have been willing to grant, but Enos seemed quite withdrawn and untouched. And as a matter of fact there seemed to
be in him a feeling of deep and quiet relief, a profound thankfulness that circumstances had reached their present point of development. What the headmaster resented more than anything else, though he did not concede it even to himself, was the uneasy feeling that he had himself been maneuvered, through a distortion of normal values that he had not followed and could not understand, into a position of subordination. This was intolerable, forcing him to feel the distress that Enos should in all decency have been feeling, and he was forced to exercise careful control of his voice to prevent his resentment from becoming apparent.

  “I have an impression that you are, perhaps, not well,” he said. “Have you consulted a doctor?”

  “No, I haven’t seen a doctor.”

  Enos continued to look through the glass into the remote bright world of the boys under the pines, and he thought of the other pines and of the doctor who had been in the place where the pines were. But now the remembrance did not distress him, for he knew that he would not be compelled to see that doctor again, or any other doctor, and that he was finally through with all such things, with doctors and boys and pines and schools and all distressing things. There were some words that expressed it very well, the words of a poem he had once read, words about one balm for many fevers, but he couldn’t remember them exactly. Anyhow, it did not matter, and it was, under the circumstances, clearly a ridiculous waste of time to sit here any longer in this room with this inadequate little man who was obviously quite determined to make a great deal out of what was, after all, very little.

  He stood up abruptly and said, “I’m quite well, there’s no need at all to see a doctor. If you have said all to me that you want to say, I’d like very much to go.”

  The headmaster’s lower lip began to tremble again, and he pinched it severely. He did not trust himself to speak and was actually so weakened by a sense of shock that he did not, for the moment, trust himself to rise from his chair. He merely nodded his head and continued to pinch his lip. He remained sitting in the same position for quite a long time after Enos was gone, resenting with unusual bitterness the young master’s pre-emptory attitude. Always afterward, thinking back, he remembered his resentment and was ashamed of it.

  Outside, Enos walked down the slope. He walked across the grass and under the trees into the remote and halcyon world at which he had been looking a few minutes earlier, and it was as if the glass were still there, bright and shining and wonderfully protective between him and the world in which he walked and of which he was no part in any real sense. When he came to the boys beneath the pines, several of them looked at him and quickly away, but one of them spoke and said “Good afternoon, Mr. Simon.” He nodded and said “Good afternoon” in a perfectly normal voice, and he knew that they were watching him from behind and were certainly sorry for the part they had played in what had happened to him. But this did not matter to him at all, not in the least, except that he was truly a little amused that they presumed to pity him. He felt very good, remarkably light in a way that could almost be called effervescent, and as he walked in this remarkably light way, hardly bending the grass beneath his feet, he thought of a pleasant little tune and began to whistle it softly. And he kept whistling it over and over until he came to the house at the foot of the slope in which he lived.

  He went inside and upstairs into his room, and when he was there he went directly across to the window that looked out upon the slope which he had just descended. He stood looking out the window and up the slope at the boys, who were still there beneath the pines, and he began to whistle again the little tune that had got into his head and was very pleasant to listen to. After a while he began to get tired — there was quite an ache in his legs from standing so long without moving — so he got an easy chair and pushed it up to the window and sat down. During all this he continued to whistle the little tune. Eventually he stopped whistling for a few minutes, but he missed it so much, there was such an emptiness without it, that he picked it up again and went on with it. The shade got deeper and deeper on the slope outside, which was the east side of the hill, and the boys walked up the slope and over the crest and were gone.

  Pretty soon after that, with the shade getting deeper and the boys gone, he began to think of Donna, of the things they had done together and would never do again, and it was not painful, as it had been before, to think of her. This was also part of the new peace that had come with the acceptance of a very simple solution to everything. As a matter of fact, far from being painful, it was now quite pleasant to think of her; it gave him something to do while he sat in the chair and looked up at the darkening slope. He conceded that she had been very kind, and he was grateful for the kindness and wished that he had not struck her — a very bad thing to have done. If it were possible, he would certainly go back and tell her that he was sorry, but it was clearly not possible. What he had better do instead was to write her a note and tell her how sorry and grateful he was, and that everything would be all right from now on. Thinking about writing the note, he became so absorbed in the problem, whether to do it or not, that he forgot to continue whistling and this time did not even miss it.

  In time he came to the conclusion that the note should surely be written, that it was no more than the simplest courtesy which was also an obligation. He got up to write it, but it was too dark; this necessitated turning on a light which he was reluctant to do. It was, altogether, another problem which had to be considered, and he stood in the darkness with his back to the window and thought about it. Because he felt he could not shirk the obligation, he eventually walked across the room and turned on a light and sat down at his desk and began to think about what he should write.

  It was necessary and very difficult, he thought, to achieve the right tone. He did not want to be tedious, but neither did he want to be excessively curt, which might be interpreted as a sign of anger or accusation. It seemed best on the whole to write merely what he had been thinking, that he was sorry for what he had done and grateful for what she had given, and so he wrote this as simply as he could on a sheet of paper. Then he folded the paper and put it into an envelope and wrote Donna’s name on the outside of the envelope. Leaving the envelope on the desk, he turned off the light and went back to the chair at the window and sat down and looked out at the pines on the slope. But now, after the writing of the note, he was beset by impatience that developed from a feeling that he had reached a point of completion, that there was nothing more of consequence to do or see or think, and that he was only wasting time inexcusably. The house around him seemed very quiet, and even as he sat and listened to the silence, it was broken by the sound of footsteps in the hall and a sudden knocking on his door. He turned his head and looked over his shoulder toward the door, but otherwise he did not move, and in a few seconds the knocking was repeated, and he still did not move or speak. He knew very well that the knocker was the other master who lived in the house, a fellow named Calkins. It was dinner time, and Calkins was starting up the hill to the dining room, and he wanted to know if Enos cared to go with him — and Enos didn’t. After the second knocking, the footsteps receded in the hall and died on the stairs, and shortly thereafter, looking out the window again, Enos could see the figure of the master ascending the darkening slope. It was then, indeed, time to end delay.

  Getting up, he removed his coat and tie and rolled the sleeves of his white shirt above his elbows. He did this in a leisurely way, folding up the sleeves neatly, as if there were some sort of pleasure in the simple act. Afterward, he walked across the room, which was now quite dark, to the dresser. From the top drawer of the dresser he took his safety razor, a small gold instrument which had been given to him as a gift, at Christmas or a birthday or some time, by someone he could not exactly remember, his father or mother, a cousin or someone. Carrying the razor, he went out into the hall and down to the bathroom and inside. He locked the door behind him and snapped on the light and laid the razor on the lavatory and turned on the water in the tub and sat quietly o
n the commode until the tub was almost full. Then he turned off the water and removed the bright double-edged blade from the razor and stood for several minutes looking at the tub and thinking.

  He was not concerned about pain, for he remembered from the first time, the abortive time, that there was very little. Primarily, he wondered about the best position to assume, and he wished that there were a low stool available so that he could sit comfortably. A kneeling position seemed to be the only one that would serve, and so he got down on his knees beside the tub. At the same time, without being aware that he was doing it, he began to whistle the pleasant little tune again. Kneeling and whistling, he submerged both forearms in the water with the palm of his left hand turned up and the palm of his right hand turned down. With the small blade in his right hand, he opened the artery in his left wrist. And as he remembered it from the time before, there was only the slightest burning sensation.

  A thin red ribbon rose in the water from his wrist and diffused and darkened the water around, and the water grew slowly darker and darker, and the darkness spread from the water over everything, and he died kneeling in the darkness.

  3.

  At five-thirty, Tyler called.

  “I’m relieved to find you still there,” he said. “I was afraid you might have gone.”