A Perfect Stranger

by Roxana Robinson

  “She was so-and-so years old,” the woman said.

  My numbers are not so good in French, and I often get them wrong. I knew this was a large number, but I hadn’t caught what had come after quatre-vingt, so I wasn’t sure if she’d been in her eighties or her nineties. But I knew it was an impressive age, and I nodded respectfully.

  “Not bad,” said the blond woman, looking down at the photograph.

  “Wonderful,” I said, in my best French. “Une merveille.”

  But my husband and I were late for the lecture.

  “I’ll come back tomorrow,” I promised. “I’m so glad to have found you.”

  The woman gave me an enchanting smile and a little nod. “We will be waiting for you, madame.”

  The next afternoon I made my way back through the cobble-stone streets to the intersection, wondering if the shop had been an illusion, a place you can find only when you are late and can’t stop.

  But no. There it was, and inside was the slim blond woman, elegantly erect, arms smoothly folded on her chest.

  “Bonjour, madame,” she greeted me. She knew me. I was now a person known at Madeleine Castaing, and my posture improved with the responsibility. I began looking around again, trying to drink in the objects. My new friend stood politely near me, and we talked some more. I mentioned my friend the decorator. Had she known him? But of course.

  “Il avait du goût, le pauvre,” she said.

  I agreed, proud. I was now the friend of a man with taste. We were getting along very well.

  “You know the shop has been sold,” she said.

  “This place? No,” I breathed. My favorite shop in Paris, sold? It was sacrilege.

  “Yes,” she said. “We will only be here for two more months.”

  “This is terrible,” I said.

  “C’est dommage,” she agreed. “We are moving nearby. It is pleasant enough, but it is not the same.”

  “But the shop will not close,” I said, partly mollified.

  “No, no,” she said. “We will be nearby. Would you like to see the new place? There are things there as well.”

  Of course I would. She went back to the tiny spiral staircase and spoke down into it. I hadn’t noticed yesterday, but it curled downward as well as upward. From somewhere below us a tiny black man appeared, round-faced, graying, with a gap between his two front teeth.

  “Auguste, would you show Madame the new shop?” my friend asked. He nodded solemnly, and we set out. The sidewalk was not wide enough for us to walk side by side, and he preceded me. He wore a long green loden coat, with a high back pleat that opened at each step. At the far end of the block he unlocked the door, and we stepped inside. Here again the walls were pale green, with painted friezes, but the ceilings were higher, and the feeling grander and colder. Again I tried to memorize the furniture; again I could not. There was a pair of painted bookcases, with much of the decoration rubbed off. A metal clip-on lamp was clipped carelessly onto one of them, rubbing off more paint. I found everything enchanting. I looked around and around, turning in distracted circles. The tiny black man in his loden coat politely did not watch me.

  “Merci,” I said finally. He nodded, and we paraded back down the sidewalk to the first shop, the true source of Madeleine Castaing, which would be irrevocably lost in two months. By now I was determined to buy something from it, a single object, no matter how small.

  In the shop again I began hunting.

  What I was actually, vaguely, looking for was a pair of big carved wooden candlesticks. I had never seen these in reality, and had no clear picture of them, but I was confident that I would one day find them. Or something like them: anyway I wanted a pair of objects for the mantelpiece. There was nothing like them here; heavy carved objects were not Madeleine Castaing’s style, and looking at these arcane and deeply sophisticated things, I became embarrassed at even having considered something so gauche as heavy carved wooden candlesticks. How could I have? I would have to educate my eye. I looked from object to object. My new blond friend stood quietly nearby, smiling.

  In the window was a pair of small black vases.

  “Could I see those?” I asked.

  But of course. My friend took them out and held them up for me. They were black ceramic, neoclassical. The handles were swans, sleek and supple, the long slim beaks just touching the rims. I held one. It was smooth, a bit battered; small chips showed a reddish glaze under the black.

  “Could you tell me the price?” I asked.

  She could.

  I did the conversion from francs: somewhere between three and four hundred dollars, a bit closer to four.

  “What can you tell me about them?” I asked Madame, turning one upside down.

  “Absolutely nothing,” she said with amused pride, shaking her head. “We know nothing about them at all.”

  Here was a challenge. There were no words to surround and bolster up the idea of the vases. There was no connection to a period, a studio, an artist, even a country. There was no date, no provenance, nothing to support the price but the look, the infallible eye of Madame Castaing. I turned the vase over and over, trying to come up with a logical base for a decision. They weren’t what I was looking for; I wasn’t even sure that they were big enough for the space. But they were objects from The Shop, the real one, before it moved. And then they were elegant in a deeply sophisticated way, they were chic, subtle, charming. These would be the Madeleine Castaing vases, triumphant evidence of the pilgrimage. “Oh, I bought those from the old shop,” I would say, “before it moved. It’s all different now.”

  There is no logic to this kind of decision. I could feel myself reeling closer and closer to the edge of the cliff, I could feel the siren call of the abyss. I ran my hand over the urn, as though this would somehow help me. The abyss sang to me; I understood that I could not resist; I felt myself stagger, beginning to fall.

  “I’ll take them,” I said to my friend, and as she heard the words she gave me a smile I had never before seen on a French face.

  “I will miss them,” she said in a dégagé way, “but I am glad you will be giving them a good home.” We were friends, now, for life: I was adopting her children.

  “I will,” I promised happily. I looked at the vases now with the fond tenderness of ownership.

  I began to wonder, belatedly, about customs, about brokers and shipping. “Would it be possible,” I asked timidly, “to have them wrapped up so that I could carry them home myself?”

  “Oui, oui, ma chérie, il sera possible,” my blond friend said, teasing and comforting. She ticked her way back to the tiny snail-shell staircase, where she thumped on the floor with a walking stick. “Auguste!” she called, and my tiny guide appeared again, rising up from the depths like Erda. “Could you wrap these vases up for Madame?”

  He disappeared again and reemerged with a translucent load of Bubble Wrap. I stood glowing, the vases on the desk before me, now mine. Auguste took out a sheet of wrap and began painstakingly to shroud the first vase. It disappeared into the opaque blanket, and he turned the bundle this way and that, sealing it carefully with tape.

  I watched him with anxious satisfaction, pleased, with the golden proprietary rush that ownership brings, but already worrying that I had made some profound mistake. A nervous buyer, I began to wonder now if my husband would like these. I wondered if I would have to pay duty on them. Suddenly I felt a cold grip in my insides: the numbers. I swallowed. The thought I had was too terrifying to consider, but too terrifying to ignore.

  “Attendez un instant, s’il vous plaît, monsieur,” I said to Auguste, who stopped moving like a clockwork toy, one hand raised in the air, holding up the sheet of bubble.

  “Madame,” I said, “I am worried about the arithmetic, if I perhaps have made an error. I wonder if you could find out the exact number of the conversion to dollars. Could you give me the exact figure? Do you have a machine?”

  Madame had a machine, but it did not work. A friend of hers
, glossy-haired and bored, had come in. She sat next to the desk, leafing through a densely illustrated magazine, paying no attention to us. Madame sat down at her desk, stabbing with her long nails at her tiny computer.

  “Ça ne marche pas,” she said with irritation to her friend. Her friend looked at the machine, pursed her lips, raised her eyebrows, and turned once more to the magazine.

  Madame said to me, “I’ll call the bank for the right rate.” She dialed a number. I waited nervously.

  I knew I had done the conversion right, multiplied by the right number; what worried me was the zeros. I was afraid I had left one off. It was a thought so terrifying that I could hardly admit it. My heart was thudding as I waited for Madame to reach the bank. My error was one of such profound stupidity that I could not reveal it to this new friend, who was so fond of me and who had, up to now, such a high opinion of my taste and intelligence.

  “Bonjour, monsieur,” Madame rattled pleasantly into the telephone. She delivered the price and explained her request. She waited; she listened. She thanked him at machine gun speed and hung up. She turned to me. “Oui, madame, it’s just what I told you before.” In French she repeated the number she had given me earlier. We had gotten nowhere.

  “But could you write down the number in dollars?” I asked pathetically.

  She stared at me for a moment and then gave a disgusted click. “But I forgot to write it down,” she said and sat down to call the bank back. I looked at Auguste. His eyes were on Madame, his hand still raised, holding the sheet of frozen air.

  “Bonjour, monsieur,” my friend rattled off again. She listened again and this time carefully set down the numbers on a scrap of paper. “Merci, monsieur,” she said crisply. “Au revoir.”

  Smiling, she handed me the scrap of paper. My heart now thundering, I read the number. There it was: thirty-four hundred dollars for a pair of terra-cotta vases of unknown origin and unknown date, probably twentieth-century, chipped and scraped and battered. In fact, it wouldn’t have mattered if they’d been handmade by Marie Antoinette, I couldn’t afford them. I swallowed hard. My heart was by now making nearly too much noise for me to talk over it.

  “Madame,” I announced, “I have made a mistake. I made the conversion wrong.” I couldn’t admit to the missing zero. “I will have to discuss this with my husband.” While I spoke I kept my chin lifted and my back very straight, hoping that she would still see me as a person of substance, someone who might very well go off and discuss a pair of thirty-four-hundred-dollar vases with her husband and come back later and buy them.

  But my new friend was smarter than that, and besides, she was no longer my friend. As she heard me speak, her face froze. Warmth drained from the landscape as in a nature film. Winter appeared, spreading suddenly and completely across the countryside; the air chilled, and ice settled in for the season. Auguste silently lowered his hand. He began methodically unwrapping the vase.

  “Merci beaucoup, madame,” I said determinedly, my chin high. “Au revoir.”

  “Au revoir, madame,” the blond woman said, her back to me, already on her way to her desk where her friend waited, flipping through the pages of her magazine.

  Passing Auguste, who was pulling the long roll of wrapping off the vase, and who did not look up, I made my way in disgrace to the door. I looked at nothing in passing. I pushed open the door and stepped out onto the street. I hurried down the narrow sidewalk toward the hotel and the pleasant concierge, my pulse racing, my heart hammering, as though I had just barely escaped the whistling rush of the guillotine.

  Who knows how these things start? But when they’re over, they’re over.

  A Perfect Stranger

  Martha met Michael Kingsley at the station. She was standing on the platform and worrying about recognizing him as the train slid quietly alongside. She had met him only once, at a dinner in London a year ago, and now, when she tried to conjure up his face, she found nothing. A long nose, she thought. Tall, in his seventies, probably gray-haired. What else? Would there be more than one man like that on the train? Should she have told him she’d wear a red rose? Should she never have gotten herself into this in the first place—inviting a perfect stranger for the weekend? Jeffrey, who had opposed it from the start, would feel no sympathy for her now.

  It was midafternoon, well before the commuter rush—Jeffrey would not be home for hours—and the train was not full. Martha saw her guest in the lighted car before the train came to a halt. He was standing in the aisle, very erect, and tall, a head and a half above the man in front of him. His huge eagle’s beak was in profile. Of course, she thought, the nose. He was balding and graying, with a noble dome and regal posture. He wore a tan raincoat and was frowning deeply, his great bristly brows knitted. When he stepped off the train, Martha was before him.

  “Mister Kingsley,” she said, smiling, holding out her hand. She made the name sound like a joke; she wasn’t quite ready to call him Michael. Though as she said it she suddenly worried: was he actually Lord Kingsley? Or Sir Michael? There was a title somewhere in his family. She should have asked someone on the committee what to call him—had she just insulted him?

  His face cleared into a smile. “Oh, you’re Martha, aren’t you,” he said cordially and seized her hand. “You are kind, to come all the way out onto the platform.” A huge soft suitcase weighed him down on one side, and his tall thin body listed heavily to the left.

  Martha wondered about suitcase-carrying protocol: she was strong, and thirty years younger than he, but a woman. He was elderly, and quite rickety-looking, but a man. Should she offer to carry his suitcase? Would it offend him if she did? Would he have a heart attack if she didn’t?

  “Can I help you with your bag?” she asked tentatively.

  “Oh, no,” he replied, giving a short high whinny of amusement. She could hear him puffing as they walked along.

  On the way home she took the narrow dirt road that crossed the reservoir, instead of the paved road parallel to it. Martha always took guests this way, which was cheating, really. It made their neighborhood look like wilderness: the wide untouched water, the woods coming right down to the edge. Everyone exclaimed over it.

  “Goodness, how pretty this is,” Kingsley said, as the car pulled out onto the causeway. “I had no idea we’d be so far out in the country here. I’d have thought an hour from New York would mean the thick of the suburbs.”

  “It is nice, isn’t it,” said Martha, pleased. She added snobbishly, “We don’t, actually, like that word.”

  “But why not? I think Americans do suburbs remarkably well,” said Kingsley. “I gave a talk on Turandot last year in Chicago and stayed in a place called, I think, Forest Lake? It had beautiful brick houses and enormous old trees. I thought it was perfectly lovely.”

  “Oh, yes,” murmured Martha, who thought those big, dressed-up manor houses on small lots were pretentious.

  “But I shouldn’t call these suburbs,” Kingsley went on, looking out the window. Near the dam was a pair of black-faced swans, motionless on the water, pale and mysterious in the gray light. “I should call this country,” he said generously.

  “We like to think of it that way,” Martha said, pleased again.

  Beyond the reservoir they had to cross the main road, a fast east-west thoroughfare full of kamikaze vehicles tailgating each other at high speed. Martha hoped Kingsley would not notice the intersection; beyond it they were back on another dirt road.

  She wanted the weekend to go well. She’d only recently begun volunteering for the Music Festival, and this was her maiden venture. She’d been put on the Lectures Committee but somehow had fallen afoul of its head, Jean Singer. Jean disliked her, and at meetings she frowned impatiently whenever Martha spoke, resisting all her suggestions. When Martha had offered to put Kingsley up for the weekend, Jean looked around the table. “Any other offers?” she asked and waited. When no one else answered, Jean turned to Martha, her mouth pursed. “It looks as though you’re our h
ostess,” she said and added rudely, smiling, “Are you equipped?”

  Martha was determined that the visit would be a success, despite Jeffrey’s reservations and Jean’s misgivings. In fact these spurred her on: she was determined that the weekend would be flawless, a pleasure for everyone.

  “What a nice house,” Kingsley said, as they came up the driveway. “This is what you call ‘clap-board,’ isn’t it.”

  The guest room was on the third floor, and Martha wondered again about carrying his suitcase. Wouldn’t it simply be polite? She was the hostess, after all.

  “Let me take that for you,” she said in a firmer voice as they got out of the car, but Kingsley refused to yield.

  “I have it,” he said.

  Going up the second flight of stairs, she could hear his breathing. Perhaps the nose acted as an amplifier; they were very long breaths.

  He had worried that he would not recognize her on the platform. It was one reason he had taken an early train, so there would be fewer strange women to choose among. Perhaps he should have asked her to wear a red rose, though he didn’t really know her well enough. Sense of humor was the last thing you understood about foreigners, and Americans were especially tricky. He hardly knew this woman; he had met her only once, at that dinner at the Ward-Jacksons’. He thought he remembered her as pleasant-looking, though perhaps with too small a nose? Silky straight colorless hair, like a child’s; he could not remember her face. He did remember they had talked about Nabokov. He had been pleased to discover she was a reader, though her ideas were peculiar. She smiled too much, as Americans do, but he didn’t mind that. He liked Americans: their energy, their profound and rather childish earnestness. He liked the things about America that Americans themselves seemed to despise: the huge shopping malls, like Oriental treasure troves; the car washes, fast and steamy and meticulous; the wonderful roads, wide, smooth, perfectly maintained. He liked the selfconfidence of Americans, their boundless belief in the possibilities of achievement, their intuitive grasp of technology, their generosity. He liked the glitter and swing of their cities, the brutal hardness of their sidewalks, the punishing speed of the walking pace in New York. The speed everywhere. And their easy openness: it was so kind of Martha and her husband—was it Geoffrey?—to invite him, a virtual stranger, to stay. He never knew, when he was invited to give an opera talk, whether he’d be put up in a hotel or in someone’s house. He generally preferred the house, he liked meeting new people.