A Perfect Stranger

by Roxana Robinson

  I thought of their comfortably solid French bodies (as I imagined them), packed and firm from years of wine and cheese and pâté and olive oil and children and the pleasures of life. I felt safe and peaceful there, as if the comfort and steadiness of their lives (as I imagined them) would seep into mine as I lay in their bed.

  As soon as I closed my eyes I began to drift. It’s a moment that I love, the one before sleep when you feel yourself starting to give way, surrendering to that heavy irresistible sensation of exhaustion. It had become unusual for me, because sleep had become a rarity for me over the last few months. But now, being so sleep-deprived, so deliciously worn-out and now, this moment, feeling so deliciously safe in this low comforting bed, with my husband about to join me, I began to fall drowningly into miles and miles of deep sleep, as though I’d been drugged, and I gave myself up without a struggle.

  When I woke up the light coming in through the shutters was deep gold, and the air crepuscular. Steven was lying on his back, his face toward me. His mouth was very slightly open, and his eyes deeply shut. I could hear the faint slow sigh of his breath.

  When Steven and I were first together, when we first began sleeping together, in both senses of that phrase, we used to fall into unconsciousness lying face-to-face. We couldn’t bear to turn away from each other. We lay with our legs tangled, our arms wrapped around each other, our faces touching. Steven’s breath was sweet, like that of a horse, fresh as field grass, and smelling it was like breathing in a meadow. And in those days, as we lay together, close, touching everywhere, I used to listen to Steven breathing and then I’d hold my breath for a moment, timing the rise of my chest against the fall of his, so that I would breathe in as Steven was breathing out, and I could fill my lungs with that sweet sweet air. I couldn’t get enough of him.

  I would never dare do that now, set my face close against his, breathe in his breath without permission.

  When you learn that the sight of you is no longer what your husband wants, you find that the world has gone dark without warning. It’s like an eclipse: a vast racing shadow has suddenly overcome the sky, the landscape is drained of color and the light has gone. You don’t understand how it happened, or if it will come back. You don’t know how to find out. You are blind and clumsy, fearful. Since the sight of you is not what he looks for, you hesitate to stand before him. Since the sound of your voice is not what he listens for, you hesitate to speak.

  When I first found out about Alison, I shouted at Steven. I thought I had a right to shout.

  “How can you do this?” I demanded. My voice was loud and angry. “A research associate? Some twenty-eight-year-old kid?”

  Steven said nothing, his eyes black, his brows knitted. He leaned back in the kitchen chair, his arms crossed on his chest. He was still in his suit and tie, sweaty and wrinkled from his day in the office. He looked at me, silent and obdurate.

  “You can’t do this,” I told him, outraged. “You have a sixteen-year-old son. You have a nineteen-year-old marriage. You have a wife.” I slammed my spoon down so hard on the table that I broke my glass. I was glad I’d broken the glass.

  Steven said nothing, his gaze deep and hostile.

  That night we spent arguing, and finally I went to sleep in Jeffrey’s room. I shut the door and pushed a chair under the handle. I was crying. Later I got angry again, and shouted things out to Steven through the door. Then I cried again. I waited for him to come to the door in the dark, and planned what I would do when he did. Sometimes I thought I would let him in, sometimes I thought I would not. I slept a little, I woke and dozed and cried and dozed again. When I finally heard Steven getting up, moving around in our room, I lay in bed, clenched and angry again, waiting for him. I thought of what I’d say to him, the accusations I’d hurl. I was thinking of whether or not I’d forgive him, the conditions I would set. Now at least he understood what he was risking, after this night spent alone and in disgrace. I heard him going downstairs: he’d be making coffee, and he’d bring it up as a peace offering, before we began to talk.

  When I heard the car I sat up in bed, rigid. I heard it back into the driveway, and I threw myself out of bed and across the room. I had to wrestle the chair away from the doorknob and drag the door open before I could run down the stairs in my nightgown. By the time I got outside, the car was already at the bottom of the driveway, turning out onto the road, and then it was gone. Steven had slipped into the great stream of movement surging back into the city, headed toward a world that did not hold me. I stood on the driveway, barefoot. The gravel was hard and sharp against my feet, and my arms were cold. The sky was just turning light over the roof of the garage, behind the mulberry trees. The windows in our house were dark. I was alone. That was when I understood that I had no right to shout. I had no right to do anything. He could leave.

  If your husband doesn’t want you, there is nothing you can do. You can’t argue. You can’t persuade him that he is wrong. Reminding him that he once promised to love you, and that he once did, is useless. Showing your feelings, revealing your vulnerabilities, once so useful and necessary in marital exchanges, is now forbidden. Weeping, your most frequent and involuntary response, is also the worst, and least useful. It makes your husband angry at you; it turns him into your enemy.

  I tried not to weep in front of Steven after that, though sometimes I couldn’t help it. When it threatened, I tried to think of something else to distract myself, to keep it from happening, the way Steven used to do during sex, to keep from coming too soon. Once he told me that he thought of baseball for this, and for years, whenever someone mentioned baseball, we’d catch each other’s eyes. Now, of course, if I’d heard someone mention baseball, I’d have avoided his eye. It would have made him angry to see me looking at him then, just as it made him angry when I cried.

  The friends who were sharing the house with us were John and Nina Stanton. John and Steven had been roommates in college, and they were each other’s closest friends. I didn’t know if Steven had told John about Alison; I hoped he hadn’t. It was horrible enough for me to know; knowing that other people knew would make me feel flayed, as though the skin had been stripped from me, as though I was walking naked and skinless through the streets: the woman whose husband no longer wanted the sight of her.

  I had seen Alison once, before I knew who she was. I went to Steven’s office to pick something up, and a young woman came out of it as I was going in. She was wearing a tight short-skirted black suit, black tights, and high black heels. She had a glossy cap of thick dark hair, and that red red mouth. She didn’t look to me like a research associate, but then I didn’t know what one would look like. We passed each other in the doorway, and I could feel her gaze, powerful and alarming, like a dangerous ray. It was so powerful that I turned and looked back at her after I passed. She was still looking at me. She held my eye boldly for a moment, then turned and went on, composed and somehow triumphant. Crisp white collar and cuffs, like a French schoolgirl.

  It was over now, Steven had told me.

  “I’m not seeing her anymore.” He said that at the end of a long night. It was five o’clock in the morning, and we were lying in bed, not touching. We’d been up all night, arguing, and the sheets felt gray and heavy, rumpled, twisted like ropes. There was no air left in the room.

  “It’s over,” he said, his voice flat and cold.

  There was a long pause. I couldn’t really believe it.

  I said, “Are you sure, Steven?” He didn’t answer, and I said, “Please don’t say this unless you mean it.”

  Steven was looking straight ahead. “I’m sure,” he said. He sounded dead. He didn’t look at me.

  I didn’t ask any more. I didn’t ask when it had been decided, or why, if it were true, he hadn’t told me until five o’clock in the morning. I didn’t ask whose idea it had been; I didn’t want to know that. What he said should have made me happy; it should have made both of us happy. It should have been the moment for him to take me in
his arms and look at me, but instead we lay side by side, on our backs, without speaking. He didn’t touch me, and I didn’t dare touch him. I listened to his breathing.

  I didn’t know what to say: should I thank him, as though he’d done me a favor? Should I say I was sorry, since he was so clearly unhappy? Should I say I was glad, though he was not?

  He said nothing more, and it seemed safer for me to say nothing, his silence was so dense and so unfriendly.

  It was after this that Steven started talking about France. I could see that it would be a way for us to start out again. We’d be in a place where we could be kind to each other, a place we’d never argued, in rooms where we’d never run out of oxygen. It would be a place where I’d never been alone while he was with Alison, a place where he had never come back to me after being with her. It would be a place where we’d only have been together.

  The morning after we arrived we drove into the village to buy groceries. Saint-Emilion was very small, really only two intersecting streets of shops, and then a few quiet blocks behind of houses. The two main streets were wide, lined by great sycamore trees with mottled trunks. The trees made a high green canopy of shade, and filtered sunlight fell in shifting patterns onto the pavement. It was hot, and the women had bare shoulders. They wore dresses in bright Provençal prints, deep reds, bold blues, bright ochers. They carried wide straw shopping baskets and wore flat slippers, which slapped against the sidewalks as they walked.

  Steven and I went up and down the two blocks, in and out of the shops, finding bread and olive oil and cheese. When we were done, we each had a heavy bag, and when we reached the car Steven came around to my side and opened my door. He set his bag on the back seat and took mine from my arms. He set it inside, then opened the front door for me.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “You’re very welcome,” he said, punctilious.

  A year ago, would he have taken the trouble to do that? Would I have thanked him so formally? Would we have been so aware of our obligations to each other? I couldn’t remember. I couldn’t be sure, now, how we had acted toward each other before, when love was common, everywhere, the element we breathed. When had we stopped? When had Steven stopped breathing me in, needing me to fill his lungs? I didn’t want to know.

  Of course I did want to know. I wanted to know what day he first looked up at Alison, as she leaned over his desk and as he smiled up into her face. I wanted to know what he first said to her, intimately, that changed everything—How do you know things like that?—and what she answered—I know lots of things. I wanted to know what midtown hotel he first took her to at lunchtime, and what room they were in, the room where they left the sheets hot and rank, torn off the bed, blankets and pillows thrown onto the floor, and then afterward, for the rest of the day he smelled her on his hands, his stupendous delicious secret, borne in on him every time he raised the phone to his face. I was dying to know all that, dying to know it, but I didn’t ask any of those questions. I knew it was too dangerous. I could feel the black swelling urge beneath those questions, that knowledge. It was bad enough just imagining these things to myself: it would have killed me to hear the answers, to know how those things actually happened.

  I wanted to kill him just knowing they had happened, and I knew I had to quell those thoughts if we were going to go on together. I had to quell that rage when it rose up in me, because we were trying to love each other. I had to stop these long swings into hatred and vituperation, I had to work my way back into loving him. Because I did love Steven, that was why I wanted to kill him. And I wanted him to love me, and I knew he was trying to quell certain thoughts and feelings of his own, he was trying to return himself to me, and to our marriage.

  We were attached to each other, we were like climbers on a mountain, out of sight of each other, but with the long rope between us. We were struggling, each of us alone, chipping with hammers at the implacable stone, setting our feet into narrow crevices, but held together, each one knowing the other was at the end of the cord. That knowledge was holding us onto the face of the mountain, keeping us moving upward.

  Of course, if your partner really falls off the mountain—a dead weight plummeting toward the earth—you cannot save him. In fact, the reverse: his velocity, the absolute plumb-line insistence of gravity, will pull you down too. But you can save each other from minor things, an ill-considered handhold, a crumbling rock, a loosened piton. Slips, not plummeting falls. If you’re both careful, the major fall won’t happen. You might make it to the top, still linked, and there you’ll be, the sky spreading out around you in transparent splendor, the whole earth stretching out at your feet.

  The Stantons arrived two days after we did, on the same flight. We heard them arrive, and came down to see them appear in the front hall with their bags and suitcases.

  Nina was wearing a wrinkled tan suit and gold earrings, and sunglasses on top of her head. Her eyes were bright blue— turquoise, really—and her straight hair was streaky blond and thick, with straight chopped-off bangs. Her tanned limbs were smooth and rounded, slightly heavy, voluptuous; her breasts were generous. She had long narrow fingers and polished nails, and an air of splendor, sumptuousness. Her teeth were straight and white, but there was a narrow gap between the front two. The gap distracted you from her beauty, and made her look slightly hoydenish. And in fact Nina was slightly hoydenish, opinionated and unpredictable. She would say anything.

  “Sweetheart!” Nina said, her voice rich and joyful. She threw her arms around me as though we had been separated for decades. “This is so exciting!”

  Steven and John gave each other manly shoulder grabs.

  “Hey there,” Steven said, grinning, and John said, “Yo.” Then John and I hugged, rather gingerly, as we do, and Nina called Steven “Sweetheart,” and she embraced him, lavishly and full-frontedly, as she does.

  “How was the flight?” I asked Nina.

  At once Nina looked dark. “Oh, the flight was fine,” she began. “It was the woman from Texas I thought I’d have to strangle. She was sitting across the aisle from John, and she kept flirting with him. It was all right when she was sober, but then she got drunk and began to sing. Frank Sinatra,” said Nina and rolled her eyes.

  John watched her, with a small smile at the corners of his mouth. John was quiet, a bit reserved. He was a handsome man, barely taller than Nina, trim and muscular, with small hands and feet. His eyes were amused and heavy-lidded, and his voice was wonderfully deep. He was an art dealer, specializing in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European paintings, and he had a hushed and solemn gallery on East Seventy-eighth Street.

  “I kept trying to sleep,” Nina went on, “but every time I’d start to doze I’d hear Dooby dooby doo, in this terrible off-key whiskey voice. Dooby dooby doo,” Nina hummed, in her own voice, which was husky and delicious. “Waving her glass at John. Finally I leaned across him and I said to her, ‘Look, I don’t care if you run off with my husband when we get to Nice, but would you stop serenading him while we’re still on the plane? It’s one o’clock in the morning and I’d like to get some sleep, especially if I’m going to have to talk to a divorce lawyer later.’”

  John’s small smile deepened. He took great pleasure in Nina, and she in him, which made them a pleasure to be around. They produced their own current of tenderness and affection, and I hoped it would catch us up in it. I hoped that Steven would be drawn back into the place he’d once occupied. I hoped he’d remember what good friends we all were, and how it was to love your wife.

  Then Nina put her hands on her hips and looked around, shaking her head. “This is so great,” she said throatily. She walked to the end of the hall and looked outside to the terrace, and to the garden beyond, still and silent in the sun. “This is fabulous.” When Nina liked something, you felt she was going to lean forward and take a big bite out of it. She looked around at John. “Let’s just not go back. Let’s just stay. Why should we ever go back?”

  “Why
should we?” John repeated, smiling at her.

  That night in bed Steven and I talked about Nina and John as though we were allies, companions. Their arrival had changed things, altered the balance. We were no longer two people struggling perilously to become a couple; we were now part of a four-some, old friends. And Steven and I had given up the stage. We were no longer the center of everything, no longer the raging and weeping characters in our own wild drama. Now we had become the audience; a relief.

  “Nina has so much fun with everything,” I said. We were lying on our backs under the sheets, looking up into the dark.

  “Zest for life,” Steven agreed.

  “But I always wonder about her stories,” I went on. “Do you think there really was a woman on the plane? Or if there was, did Nina actually say anything to her?”

  “Who knows? It doesn’t matter,” Steven said cheerfully, and he yawned suddenly. “Nina’s wonderful.”

  I wondered for a moment if he were jealous of John, for having such a wonderful wife. It was something I could not ask him; I couldn’t raise those horrible issues—twisting and writhing—up from the depths. We had put those things away, and I turned myself from the thought.

  And I could hear from Steven’s voice that he was becoming happy, content. He put his hands behind his head and spread his legs out, under the sheets; the side of his leg moved against mine and stayed there, unflinching, solid, and I was so grateful, and so happy, to feel him back, next to me.

  All that month it was hot and clear. The sky was the deep intense blue of Provence, the air was dry and sweet-smelling, and the cigales sang their strange high song in the trees. Each morning Steven went early to the village and came back with food, the paper, local news. We had breakfast outside, at the stone table under the chestnut tree. Some days we all went on excursions, driving across the flat countryside to Nîmes, to Arles and Avignon. We felt the Roman presence from two thousand years earlier in the great monolithic geometry of the Pont du Gard, the vast stone amphitheaters at Arles and Orange, which still hold operas and bullfights. We drove up into the low sunbaked hillsides, covered with wild rosemary and thyme and rustling grasses, past olive orchards and wide cultivated fields. The long rows of pale crumbly earth were edged with narrow ditches; these were filled with cool dark water, seeping invisibly into the dry fields. Some days we went nowhere, and had lunch at home under high green shade; we swam, we lay beside the pool, we read, we took siestas and ate dinner late.