In Case We're Separated

by Alice Mattison

  “And you claim to resist city life!” said Richard. “No. The restaurant isn’t near a station.”

  Josh—whom I’d met once or twice—was recognizably my relative: short, with curly hair and a brainy, Jewish look. He gave me directions from the passenger seat, while Jo, his tall girlfriend, asked self-assured questions behind me. She had long black hair and features I thought were Korean. Richard had told them about my books. “They sound intriguing,” Jo said. “The little town in the Midwest—is that the latest one?”

  “It’s not out yet.”

  When I asked what she did, Jo said she worked in a day-care center. “I plan to quit just before I start wringing the necks of three-year-olds,” she said. Then she said, “Maybe my book group will read your new book. We read and knit.”

  “My mother knitted,” I said. Jo might be a tough critic, something like Richard’s mother, my aunt Sylvia, who read my books and sent me long candid letters.

  Richard waited—arms flung wide when he saw us—in one of his finds, an Italian restaurant in back of a deli. He squashed Josh in a hug, kissed me, and shook hands enthusiastically with Jo. “They have ostrich here. Order ostrich.”

  I ordered escarole-and-bean soup to start. As I tasted the soup, my mind was made to pay such close attention to my mouth (as escarole of just the right degree of doneness crossed my tongue) that everything became, with utter clarity, itself—as the soup was so precisely itself. My problem, I understood, wasn’t Warren or Wanda or even my book, but solitude, because Warren—dear Warren—was all I had. We’d had friends in Wanda—good-hearted liberals who welcomed a gay couple—but I’d quickly forgotten them. The people I’d interviewed were make-believe friends.

  When I paid attention again, Richard was quizzing Josh and Jo about Somerville. They’d just discussed movie houses and he was thoughtfully hearing their opinions of movies. Richard had been unhappy, I suspected, since he was drafted and sent to Vietnam, losing the chance for a life in music. He’d never loved anyone as he’d loved James, though he’d had a long line of young, self-absorbed boyfriends. But he could make any gathering festive, and discovered wonders of achievement and personality in those he met over dinner. I knew he delighted in treating his nephew, that he’d insist on paying for all of us—all of us kids. “So it’s safe here at night? People walk around?” he asked now.

  “Oh, sure,” said Josh. “We walk everywhere.”

  I spoke of the SUV and the boy, the casual tolerance for mischance that I’d sensed, and Josh said, “Well, I didn’t mean safe for pedestrians.”

  Then Jo said—and she sounded a little snippy, suddenly: “That’s not what Brad meant.”

  “It’s not?” said Josh.

  “No. He meant people expect trouble here. Josh, you know it’s not really safe.”

  “Oh,” said Josh. “That.”

  “Yes. That.”

  “I didn’t think you’d want to talk about it,” he said.

  “What?” Richard was saying. “Tell us the story. Is it gruesome?”

  Jo looked around the table. I almost said, “Never mind.” She drew a breath and said rapidly, “I was the last person at the day-care center one evening in March. While I was straightening up, a man came in and made me take off my clothes at knifepoint.”

  “Oh, my God,” I said. Richard was silent.

  Jo seemed to grow taller as she sat, twirling spaghetti on a fork. “He didn’t touch me.”

  “That’s supposed to make it all right?” I said.

  “Well, some people say, ‘Did he rape you?’ and when I say no, they tell me about a friend somewhere who was raped.”

  “They didn’t catch him?” said Richard.

  Josh said, “I’m not sure the police took it seriously. They said they did.”

  “You mean they think something like that is normal here, nothing to get upset about?” I said.

  “I don’t know,” said Josh. “All they’ve got is a description—just a nice-looking, middle-aged white guy.”

  “Maybe it was me,” I said.

  “Precisely,” said Josh. “The thing is, something similar happened a couple more times, to different women.”

  “It was in the paper?” I said.

  “Not that I know of,” said Josh.

  “Josh played detective,” Jo said. “He’s an idiot.” We smiled, Richard and I, and she said, “It’s not funny.”

  “She wants to be done with it,” Josh said. “I respect that.”

  Our plates were cleared, and Richard looked at his watch. He’d come from the airport by taxi and now I’d drive everyone to Symphony Hall. While we waited for the check, Josh said he’d posted a notice on a few bulletin boards, giving an e-mail address. He wrote, “Recently my girlfriend was assaulted at her workplace by a white man of about fifty carrying a small black-handled knife. Has anyone had a similar experience?” He’d received two replies. A secretary in a law firm in Medford, also the last person at closing time, had been ordered to undress by a “nice-looking” man in a baseball jacket, who fled when footsteps approached, just as she was starting to obey. And a graduate student had been drawn into conversation by a pleasant man who then led her at knifepoint into Powderhouse Park, but when he demanded that she undress she dropped what she was carrying and ran, and he didn’t follow. She called the police, and someone went with her to collect her things, which were as she’d left them. Of course the man was nowhere around.

  Richard insisted on paying, but the evening felt less festive, even tense, as we waited for him to receive his change. An old quarrel between Josh and Jo seemed to have been renewed, and it felt as if we’d violated Jo’s privacy again just by hearing the story. I wanted to give her something in exchange, and so I contrived to tell my own story, which might seem as naked in its way as hers. “Richard, let me tell you what’s been going on with me,” I began, but then I turned toward Jo, explaining how we’d lived in Wanda, how Warren had made us move, and how—again, I suddenly understood something—we might never go back. I talked about our quarrels, even about the time I broke his glasses. I somehow worked in James, leaving Richard out of that story, of course. Meanwhile we left the restaurant and set out for Symphony Hall, and as I kept talking, I had a third realization. Now I explained as I drove, while Josh again directed me, that Wanda, for me, was the place where lovers did not die, where grief was cheated. Josh and Jo listened with, I sensed, nervous interest. They weren’t used to stories about quarreling gay lovers, however firm their enlightened convictions might be. Quarreling gay lovers who were all but their uncles.

  Richard was always right about music and I loved the concert with the dazzling pianist. At intermission Jo and Richard excused themselves and Josh and I were left in the old, grand auditorium, standing in the aisle near our seats. “Jo doesn’t know this,” Josh said, “but I’m meeting the two other women.”

  “Man, you’re crazy,” I said. “She’s mad enough as things are.”

  “I have to.”

  “How did you arrange this?”

  “I just told them who I was and set up a time and place. Maybe they won’t come.”

  “What if Jo finds out?”

  “She’ll have to forgive me.”

  “All right,” I said then, making up my mind to something—some act that would connect me to others. “I’m interested. Can I come along?”

  He looked surprised. “Sure,” he said. “I guess so.” Jo was coming down the aisle. “I’ll call you.”

  “Well, I’d like to,” I said quietly.

  That night I had more to tell Warren than he had to tell me, though I didn’t tell him about the assault. I was feeling sheepish toward Warren, having had an inkling—several inklings—of why I’d resisted the move. I didn’t want to tell him another, worse story about violence. It wasn’t fair to claim that this was a menacing place. That driver had not expected to run down children on his way to work. The man with the knife was a troubled soul who might turn up in any town—in Wanda
.

  As I spoke, the small round glasses on Warren’s broad face flashed briefly in my direction. We sat in our living room—he in the single upholstered chair we’d brought, I in the oak armchair, with my fingers tracing the familiar grain of the wood—and Warren stared tiredly past me at one of our few pieces of art, a poster announcing a show of Chinese painting. It depicted a scene from a scroll on which small people trekked over detailed stretches of mountain. Sometimes in my working day I looked at it, and it made me sad to think of the trip they still had ahead of them, which I could see though they couldn’t. Warren began to talk about one of his classes. A woman had made a presentation about decisions she’d made when running a small family business.

  “Useful for when we get back to Wanda,” I said. “What kind of business?”

  “It failed. Something to do with software,” he said. “If we get back to Wanda.”

  I was as shocked as if I hadn’t had my string of epiphanies that evening. “Betty can’t run that business forever,” I said.

  “I could sell it,” said Warren.

  I was silent, and as I sat looking at my own spot on the opposite wall—which was bare—Glory gave off a weary German shepherd noise, then stretched and walked toward the back door, her claws clicking on the bare wood floor. I followed her, reaching for my coat.

  Josh had told the graduate student and the secretary he’d carry a green backpack and wear a red watch cap, and they both came to the coffeehouse he’d specified. It was a cold day, and shrugging off coats, everyone seemed pleased to be indoors. The student had brought her roommate, and the secretary—who talked with a Boston accent—had brought her brother, a man bursting out of his clothes, who I thought might be a plainclothes cop. He wouldn’t have coffee, just water. “A glass of water,” he said pointedly. “Not water you pay for, in a bottle.” He said “bawdle.” Josh bought coffee for the women and himself and asked for a glass of water. I bought my own coffee, then helped him carry everything. He was fluttery.

  Immediately the women told each other their stories. They were instantly comfortable, though one, who I thought had never been in this coffee shop, was probably from an Italian family that was gradually being priced out of Somerville by the arrival of people like the other, who might have come often to sit in a dim corner with a laptop.

  “I should have walked faster and gotten away,” said the student, “but he seemed harmless. I wasn’t positive I didn’t know him.”

  “You thought you knew him?” said Josh.

  “You know how it is when somebody speaks to you, and you’re not sure if he’s a stranger, or someone you’ve met before?”

  “Same here,” said the secretary. “I was embarrassed that I didn’t recognize him. I thought he was a lawyer.”

  Josh had put the green backpack on the table and as he listened he played with the cinch cord that closed the main compartment, pressing and releasing the toggle, then twisting the black elastic around his fingers and letting it untwist. Bags of Wisconsin offered sturdier backpacks, and our cinch cords didn’t get as stretched and frayed as Josh’s was. “We could talk about what the guy looked like,” he said rapidly. “My girlfriend couldn’t come, but I know what she remembers. And we could chart the places where this happened.”

  He took a notebook from his pack, tore out a sheet of lined paper, and began drawing a map, just indicating main streets. It was difficult, and he turned the paper over and tried again, while everyone watched patiently. The angles were surely wrong in the second map as well—Somerville has few right angles—but the map made clear what we already knew: the man had operated in an area about a mile wide. As Josh worked, Marie, the secretary, said, “His hair was beginning to get gray, little flecks all over his head.”

  “I didn’t see any gray,” said Sarah, the grad student.

  “My girlfriend said light brown hair,” Josh said.

  “Maybe it’s not the same man,” I put in.

  “You think there are two?” said the brother. It was the first time he’d spoken since he asked for the water, which he had drunk in a few gulps, squashing the tall paper cup when he was done.

  “I guess not,” I said.

  When Josh suggested that we three men stand, the women agreed that the man was taller than Josh or me, and possibly a little taller than Marie’s brother. “I’m five-nine,” said the brother. There was something touching about all this. It felt like being in a boys’ book, but the boys would solve the crime and we wouldn’t.

  At this point Sarah’s roommate, who’d said her name was Francesca, spoke to me. “Could you tell me your interest in all this? Why are you here?”

  “He’s my cousin,” said Josh.

  “I asked to come,” I said. “I just moved here.”

  “How come? Work?” Francesca continued.

  “My partner’s in grad school.”

  “And what do you do?”

  “I’m a writer,” I said reluctantly.

  “For a magazine?” she said. “I sort of thought you might be. And if you’re thinking of writing a story about all this, well, I don’t know—” She looked at Sarah.

  So I told them what I wrote. “I suppose I could write about Somerville next,” I said, “but it’s probably been done.”

  Francesca seemed satisfied, and what I’d said seemed to make it possible for others to change the subject or leave. Sarah said she had a class, and Josh looked at his watch and hurried away, too. Nothing tangible had come of the meeting. Marie and her brother had a car parked nearby, so that left Francesca and me, and we stepped out together into the wind. We were going in different directions, but we crossed two streets in Davis Square before separating, and as we walked, Francesca said, “Frankly, I want this thing to get all the publicity possible, if only Sarah’s name isn’t in it. She was sure the police thought she made it up, and sometimes she thinks she imagined it, but of course she didn’t.”

  “Of course not.”

  “I’m going to tell you something,” Francesca said. “You can do what you want with it. The man’s name is probably Randall Strout. He’s also a writer. Maybe you’ve come across him.”

  Of course I was astonished. She was turning away. “But you have to tell me how you know,” I said. “And why you aren’t telling.”

  “I know because Sarah did recognize him, but she doubts herself. She’d met him at a party a few weeks earlier. She was pretty sure it was the same man when he talked to her that night—that’s why she was friendly. Later she began to wonder. And she doesn’t want to accuse anybody if he isn’t—oh, you get the picture.”

  “But you’re sure?” I said.

  “Sarah doesn’t hallucinate,” Francesca said. “I’m freezing. I have to go.”

  A few days later, I looked up Randall Strout on the Internet, feeling uncomfortable as I did it. Francesca believed Sarah but I thought Sarah probably distrusted herself with good reason, and what I was doing seemed like spreading a false rumor, even if I told nobody why I typed the name I did into my search engine. I probably did it not because I was so interested in Josh’s pursuit of the criminal but because I was looking for something to do. I’d had a few freelance editing projects, but my main task right now, with my book in production, was to find the subject of my next book. I was happy on the days I wandered around Boston, learning random facts in the hope that one of them would start a succession of thoughts, but the cold deterred me, and too often I stayed in the apartment with Glory. We had brought so few books that I couldn’t even waste a day reading. Talking to local writers, or reading them, might be a plausible way to begin, but this was a funny way to find local writers. Randall Strout, it turned out, had written two books, both out of print. The more recent one was about the politics behind the redevelopment of the Boston North End and the construction of the Faneuil Hall market and Lewis Wharf; the other, written long ago, was a memoir called Boy in Winter. He taught at a college in a Boston suburb. He was I, in other words—a slightly less lucky vers
ion of me, since one of my old books was still in print. Still feeling odd, I let myself look in used bookstores for works by Randall Strout, and my heart pounded when I found the one about politics. I bought it, then read a chapter or two. It wasn’t bad, and wasn’t completely different from a book I might write, except that it looked less at individuals and more at the workings of government. I left it around and Warren picked it up. “You’re starting to think of local topics,” he said. “I told you.”

  One day I found myself reading the phone book, one of the few books we had. Then it occurred to me to look up Randall Strout—and yes, he lived not far away, and yes, after doing something else for an hour, I called him. If he had answered, I might have hung up, but when I got a message (“Randy and Ann are out, but—”) I left a message on his answering machine, identifying myself, saying I’d come across his book, that I had written comparable books and was new in town, that I wondered if we might meet. I had no trouble telling the partial truths I told. When I hung up I no longer felt strange. It seemed simply absurd—a fantasy of the young—to think this writer with a friendly voice and a wife named Ann was a criminal, an example of a deplorable person in a book he or I might write. I was annoyed with Francesca on Randall Strout’s behalf and on mine.

  Randall Strout phoned me, and I walked through light snow to meet him at a coffee shop—a different one. His photograph on the book jacket was blurry and out-of-date, but I recognized him. He was my age or older, with a friendly, open face. His hair looked evenly brown, with no gray.

  “Randy Strout,” he said, rising, extending his hand, when I approached.

  “Brad Kaplowitz.” I took off my gloves to shake his hand.