In Case We're Separated

by Alice Mattison

  “I like this place. Good choice,” he said. He had a cup of coffee in front of him, and I soon returned with my own. Before long we were jumping from topic to topic. We knew people who’d worked with each other’s agents or editors, we’d published in the same magazines. He told me about his divorce, and his new wife and small daughter.

  “You have kids?” he asked, and I shook my head, then explained what I was doing in the Boston area and with whom. “So how d’you feel,” he said, “plucked out of your life like that?”

  “Oh, this might be a better life. I don’t know many writers in Wisconsin.”

  “Still,” he said.

  I resisted a little longer. “It made sense for my partner.”

  “But you didn’t bring your books, did you?”

  “No,” I admitted. “Sometimes I read the phone book. That’s how I found you.” I told him about Wanda, about Warren’s parents, about Bags of Wisconsin—and even something about my earlier life in New York. I heard myself talk too long, and swallowed the last of my coffee. “I should go.”

  “I have your phone number,” he said, rising, “and you have mine.” I didn’t think I’d call him again. I liked him too much. I don’t mean I was attracted, not at all, but it made me uncomfortable, after all, to think of him as a possible friend, when I’d heard of him in such a strange way. I couldn’t call Francesca, whose last name I didn’t know, but I badly wanted to tell her, “It’s not the same man.” Yet I knew that even if I could reach her I couldn’t say it, because I didn’t know it. As we stepped from the coffee shop, I turned to Randy to shake hands again. The snow had stopped and sunlight gleamed through clouds. I saw in the light that his hair was flecked with gray.

  In the next weeks I finished one editing job and was occupied with another, more lucrative one that bored me. I minded the cold weather more than I did in Wisconsin, for some reason, and often didn’t go outside. In January Warren had begun new courses, and now he worked late, often in our living room, on a negotiation project with three other students, who pretended to be bureaucrats in the fictional town of Dalrymple, which was being choked by pollution coming from Dunbar, upriver and upwind of them. Dunbar was a working-class town with a paper mill, Dalrymple an affluent suburb.

  Sometimes I’d go in and argue—a scarf around my neck because the apartment was poorly insulated—taking the side of Dunbar. I imagined factory workers and lumbermen struggling against these Harvard intellectuals, though of course the Dunbar team was played by four other students. After the rest of his team left, I’d rouse myself to fight with Warren. Whatever he said, I’d oppose it. When I wasn’t siding with Dunbar against Dalrymple, I was siding with the three others on his team against him. I watched myself make foolish arguments, just to upset him. I wanted him to seize me and hurt me or make love to me—make love to me violently—but when we did make love, now and then, it was perfunctory, a reasonable accommodation to our physical needs.

  One day Josh phoned. “I’m taking advantage of your good nature and your status as my first cousin once removed,” he said. He wanted to buy a bookcase and wondered if I’d help him carry it home in my car. The following Saturday it had snowed again, but I dug the car out and drove Josh to a furniture store in Central Square, needing only a little help finding my way. He chose an unpainted pine bookcase.

  “How’s Jo?” I said as we waited for the clerk to ring it up.

  “Fine,” he said. “I finally told her about that meeting.”

  “Was she mad?”

  “I think she was mad that I didn’t include her, but she couldn’t say that, it would be so inconsistent. I’ve lost interest, anyway. It’s almost a year. I guess he wasn’t a serial killer.”

  We lifted the bookcase over the packed snow and eased it into the backseat of my car, then found a hardware store so Josh could buy sandpaper, brushes, and red paint. I offered to help him get started, and we went to his apartment.

  Jo was out, and by the time she arrived, Josh and I had finished sanding the bookcase. She looked amused at our project (“Red?” she said). She left the room, then returned. I was telling Josh about Warren and the negotiating team, and he was telling me he wanted to apply to graduate school someday, if he only knew in what, and only had the money.

  “I hear you participated in Josh’s tea party with crime victims, Brad,” Jo said, behind me. She spoke with cool irony, like a much older woman.

  “Do I owe you an apology?” I said.

  “It’s not you who owes me an apology,” Jo said, “but I’ve more or less had it. I might have liked to be there—if I could have been invisible.”

  I said, “We could have arranged to have you typing on a laptop behind us. You could have taken notes.”

  “I hope you didn’t speak loudly enough to be heard,” Jo said severely, flinging her long hair over her shoulder.

  “I wish I’d told you,” said Josh. “It would have made you feel better, just to talk to those women.”

  “Yeah, but I was the only one stupid enough to actually disrobe. That would make me feel great,” Jo said. “That would have made me feel stunningly perverted.”

  There was silence as Josh applied paint to the underside of a shelf.

  Then I said, “Jo, if you knew who the man was, would you press charges?”

  “No,” she said quickly. “I just couldn’t. And I don’t need some lawyer trying to make me feel like a whore.”

  Josh looked up at her from his knees, his hair spattered with red paint. “You mean that?” he said. “Don’t you think this guy needs to be stopped?”

  “Yes,” Jo said, looking down at him. “But not by me. And anyway, I don’t want him locked up for twenty years followed by having to register as a sexual predator everywhere he goes—I just want him to quit it.”

  “Does that jibe with your deepest principles?” pursued Josh. He was holding the paintbrush at an angle, and it was dripping on the floor, just beyond the newspaper.

  “No,” said Jo steadily. “In this instance, I am not capable of living according to my principles. I mean”—and for a moment she sounded less grown-up, even childish—“if it came up—if you found the nice-looking middle-aged man with the black-handled hunting knife—I wouldn’t be.”

  A few weeks later, it was lighter in the late afternoons, though no warmer. Warren had begun to talk about looking for a job in Boston. I watched myself, waiting to see if I was going to fight him, leave him and return to Wanda alone, or look for a teaching job myself. Then one afternoon, Randy Strout called me. “I came across something I want to give you,” he said. “May I stop by with it? Where do you live?”

  His friendliness was irresistible. I’d had a difficult day: errands in the cold and pointless Web surfing, instead of exercise and work. A few days earlier, I’d mentioned the idea of a book on Somerville to my editor, who dismissed it with disconcerting promptness. “Too local,” she said.

  “What could be more local than Wanda, Wisconsin?”

  “Wanda, Wisconsin, is so local it’s universal.”

  That book would be out soon. She was vague about promotion.

  Now I said to Randy, “Give me twenty minutes,” told him where I lived—with only an instant’s hesitation—and straightened up a little. I was pleased to have any visitor.

  A little while later the doorbell rang, and I could see Randy’s genial face above his blue parka through the small dirty window in our front door. He was holding something. I hurried to let him in while Glory barked. Randy stepped back warily, but I took her firmly by the collar. “She won’t bother you.” Before taking off his jacket, he waved a magazine at me. “I bet you haven’t seen this.” Wouldn’t you know, the man subscribed to Publishers Weekly. He’d been the first to spot the review of my book about Wanda. The magazine was open to the page, and he thrust it under my chin. “Oh, my God,” I said. I took it and read it. It was good.

  “I bought something to celebrate,” he said. He had a small bakery box, the kind I
remembered from boyhood, tied with string. I led him into our tiny kitchen, with Glory following, her tail swinging. I made coffee. He took off his parka and arranged it on the back of his chair. Again we were full of talk. The man liked me. He liked me and—rather than annoying me, this pleased me—he wanted to be friends with the sort of writer he believed me to be, the lucky, sought-after sort. His transparent pleasure was innocent.

  I poured coffee, offered milk and sugar, and sat down with him at our small kitchen table, then opened the box. He’d bought one big brownie. “They were so huge, I thought half would be plenty,” he said.

  “Definitely.” I started to rise, to get a knife, but he waved me down in his courteous way.

  “I always carry this,” he said. “It was my father’s.” It was a black-handled knife in a leather sheath, small, the kind a hunter might use—far sharper than we needed, of course. He cut the brownie and set the knife on the table as he reached for his half. I delayed taking mine.

  I postponed that, and I postponed over and over something else I thought I might do. It would have been better if he hadn’t come bearing gifts and good news. It would have been better if I’d thought the police were wise and clearheaded, and the laws about sexual crimes sensible and just, better if those laws hadn’t been invoked, too often, against my kind, just for being what we were. Randy might have cleaned the knife and replaced it in its sheath, but he didn’t, eating his brownie and drinking his coffee, talking about his current difficult book. At last I had waited as long as I could. I picked up the knife, its blade still smeared with chocolate. Then I pointed it at Randy. “Take off your clothes,” I said.

  He didn’t say “What?” He looked hard at me, and his geniality began to disappear, his cheeks sinking into his face as his smile narrowed and trembled. We were completely silent. Then Randy stood. He took off his pullover sweater and put it on his chair. At one point I was afraid I might laugh, but it wasn’t because I was amused. What he did, in our chilly apartment, was what he must have seen women doing: it was flustered but functional, not erotic, like the disrobing of a patient who fears what the doctor will discover. He opened his cuff buttons, then, with his cuffs flopping, opened the buttons of his shirt from the top down, pulled it out of his pants without opening his belt, and took it off. His body was pale and a little fat, and even it looked frightened. I didn’t know how far I’d go with this. I put the knife down, but I continued to keep my hand on it, and after a pause Randy opened his belt buckle.

  When he’d dropped his trousers and his briefs, he sat down on top of his clothes to work on his shoes. I wondered if he expected that I’d rape him. He untied his shoelaces. “All right, stop,” I said. My hand was still on the knife. “Get dressed.” Then I said, “I know what you’ve done.”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” he said quietly.

  He stood and pulled up his briefs and his pants. Then he put his shirt on. I washed the knife at the sink and dried it with a paper towel. When I turned back, he was dressed, his shoes still untied. I gave him back Publishers Weekly and showed him to the door, then handed him the knife when he was already outside. I closed the door quickly. Through the window, I saw him pocket the knife unsheathed, then stoop to tie his shoelaces before starting down our porch steps. I watched until he was gone. I was cold. I returned to the kitchen. Randy’s leather sheath, dark with age, was on the table. I put it into my pocket. My half of the brownie was still in the box. I threw it away and washed the cups. Then I called Richard at his office in New York, and told him what I’d done. He listened without comment, except for a long exhalation of breath. Then came an extended pause. “Did you tell him to get help, to see someone?”

  “No.”

  “Did you keep the knife?”

  “No.”

  Another pause, and he began to talk about a second concert he thought he might come to in Boston. “I’ll be in touch.” Then he said, “Who else are you going to tell?”

  “I have to tell Jo,” I said. “Jo and Josh. Warren.”

  I got off the phone and went searching for Jo and Josh’s phone number, looking in my agitation in all the wrong places. I looked again. I still couldn’t find it. I sat down in Warren’s oak chair and held on to the arms. Anger, I saw—this time the discovery counted—had waited for me all my life.

  Pastries at the Bus Stop

  As I told my sister later, any reasonable person would have made the same remark. I was standing at a bus stop on Madison Avenue when a woman came out of a bakery carrying a little wooden table. She put it down near the curb and went back inside. Then she brought out a tray of French pastries: the chocolate was dark and glossy, the glazed strawberries fat, the crusts flaky. Whipped cream swirled and swooped. The woman set the tray on the table, right in front of me. She opened the rear doors of a van that was illegally parked in the bus stop, slowly slid the tray inside, shut the doors, and carried the table back into the store. I looked around, and saw nobody but an old man walking a brown dog. I said to him, “Did you see that tray? Makes you want to rush to a hotel and go to bed, doesn’t it?”

  “You didn’t,” said Ruth, when I told her about it.

  “I did.”

  “You went to a hotel?”

  “Oh, no, he probably didn’t even hear me. But I did say it. I—”

  My sister yelled, but my point was that I had changed. My reason for speaking, and for telling Ruth about it, was not to bring humiliation and pain on my head, as it would have been not so many years earlier. I said it—and I described saying it—to celebrate the sexiness of French pastries at the bus stop. Ruth and I were meeting at Bloomingdale’s to pick out a dress for her to be married in, and the wedding was five days off. I wouldn’t have gone to a hotel with the man walking the dog, even if he’d been attractive, had wanted to, and wasn’t accompanied by his dog, because Ruth urgently needed a wedding dress. Also, I had an appointment later with the man I loved.

  The bus arrived as the woman came rushing out of the store again, waving car keys apologetically. And then life became a little complicated, because as I got on the bus my cell phone rang. I was the director of an organization with the innocent name of Neighborhood Helpers, and the caller was my assistant, Georgiana, who was still at our office downtown, where she’d received a phone call from a client’s daughter. We were a nonprofit agency—so nonprofit we were always about to go out of business for lack of money to buy a new ink cartridge for the printer. We placed ex-crazies, ex-junkies, and reformed alcoholics—sometimes known as psychiatric survivors and recovering substance abusers—in part-time jobs assisting old people, and then we kept track of everybody while the old people’s lightbulbs were changed, their library books returned, or their bathrooms cleaned. Our goal was to stay out of the papers except for one schmaltzy story every year. That wasn’t too hard: we picked our employees carefully, and I could give you pages of statistics on the rarity of violence among former drinkers, drug users, and mental patients. The greatest risk, ordinarily, was that a recovering addict would bore an old lady to death explaining the more obscure steps of a twelve-step program. A typical newspaper story showed a tall, shy depressive taking a box of cornflakes off the top shelf in the supermarket for a smiling old woman leaning on a walker, but now and then people’s peculiarities coincided in some unpredictable way and an obsessive-compulsive who spent her days washing her hands was paired with an early-stage Alzheimer’s victim who couldn’t remember whether he’d washed his hands that week. So I worried because Georgiana, when she called me, sounded worried. The client was Mrs. Cohen, a diabetic who injected herself with insulin. Mrs. Cohen’s daughter had said her mother was now too confused to do this properly, and our worker had provided more help than the daughter considered acceptable.

  “Who’s the worker?” I asked Georgiana.

  “Bernadette.” Bernadette was an ex-junkie who maybe knew too much about needles.

  “I’ll talk to Bernie tomorrow,” I said. I got off the bus and walked o
ver to Bloomingdale’s. “Wedding-dress time!” I greeted Ruth.

  “Please let’s not call it a wedding dress,” she said. “That’s what Mom keeps saying—wedding dress. Mom’s being impossible.” Ruth was almost sixty and it was a second marriage for both her and the man, whose name was Bob and who had a number of rough little places in his personality upon which Ruthie seemed to thrive. They chewed on each other like people who grab the crustiest part of the turkey skin at Thanksgiving dinner. “And let’s get coffee first,” Ruth said.

  “Okay,” I said. “Coffee. But then we’re buying a dress. Not a wedding dress, all right, but a nice dress.” While Ruth and I had coffee I told her about the pastries at the bus stop and she yelled. Ruth’s usual take on me was that despite marked improvements (no suicide attempts in many years, useful employment, a cat who was up to date with all his shots) I was still self-destructive and the main way to tell was that the man I loved was married. Then I told her about the woman who’d called about Bernie, and Ruth objected some more. “You’re asking for trouble, sending these people into apartments unsupervised.”

  “When we started,” I said, “the employee and the client met at the senior center and went shopping, but the old people started sneaking them home.”

  “And now your worker’s sticking needles into somebody. Needles!”

  “I’m sure it’s fine,” I said. I said that Bernie had been clean for three years, was taking community college courses, and had all but managed to get her kids out of foster care.

  “I’m in a funny mood,” said Ruth, putting down her cup.

  We picked out a blue silk calf-length dress with long sleeves. “I’m not telling you to become respectable,” she said in the dressing room, slithering into it. Ruthie had long tangled gray hair and she was shedding on the new dress, even before she had it on. “I hate ‘respectable.’ ” She spoke while it was bunched over her head and I had trouble making out what she was saying.