A Perfect Stranger

by Roxana Robinson

  When Martha slowed the car to cross the reservoir, Kingsley understood that he was meant to admire the view. It was bleak. The woods were still winter brown and gray, the sky and water without hue. Two evil-tempered swans hung about the spillway.

  “Ah,” he said, after they scuttled perilously across a rocketing stream of traffic and onto another unpaved track, “another dirt lane.”

  “Yes,” Martha said happily. “We’re very proud of these. The town tried to pave them, years ago, but some local women came out and lay down in front of the bulldozers, and they had to stop.”

  Kingsley pictured the confrontation: courageous women in corduroy trousers and silver-buttoned loden jackets, neat curled hair, stretched bravely out in the mud. Had they closed their eyes, he wondered, as the bulldozers thundered above them? Sung hymns?

  It was strange the way Americans felt about unpaved lanes. In his own Suffolk village everything was paved except the farm tracks. The narrowest country lanes, set deep between ancient, towering hedgerows, were paved. The point of paving was that it improved roads, made them traversable. This American notion of keeping them muddy and rutted was wholly eccentric.

  He wondered about his lecture. He had several talks on Tosca, at various levels of sophistication. The Music Festival here was well-known, so the audience ought to be reasonably knowledgeable. Still, he must ask his hostess what she thought. It was terrible to put people visibly to sleep, which he had done.

  He hoped she wouldn’t try to seize his suitcase again; it was disheartening. Did he look so decrepit as not to be able to carry his own luggage? He couldn’t remember how he looked, actually, his face now so familiar, so much a part of his surroundings that he could hardly see it. It was like looking at his own kitchen shelves, trying to assess them. There was the mottled, balding dome, rising higher each year from the graying thicket that surrounded it; there were the deep creases to the corners of the wide thin mouth, the flat swags of skin below his eyes, the wild luxuriant eyebrows. The vitality that used to pulse elsewhere through his body seemed to have been diverted into other channels; it now animated his hair. Not the hair on top of his head, which was lank and spiritless and mostly gone, but the odd patches of ancillary hair, once meek and inconspicuous. Now these sprouted fiercely: his eyebrows, the insides of his ears, his nostrils—all were coarse and bushy gray tangles. Did he look old? Presumably, but how old? Did he look feeble? He was still quite tall, surely that counted for something?

  The house was pleasant, and old by American standards. Odd that so many American houses were made of wood, though of course, America was a vast young country. A hundred years ago, when this house had been built, the great forests here had still been standing. In England the great forests had been cut down five hundred years earlier, and the wooden houses from those days had long ago burned down. In his part of Suffolk, houses had been made from rose-colored brick for the last three centuries.

  Two dogs came out of the house to greet them, tails swaying gently: Labradors, of course. All Americans seemed to have black Labradors or golden retrievers. Perhaps there was an embargo on other breeds; perhaps they had a longer quarantine. Or did Americans not have a dog quarantine? He could not remember. There were so many things the English shared with Americans, so many things here that felt familiar, and then these inexplicable lacunae appeared—the reckless allowance of rabid animals to drift in and out of the country, for example.

  “Good dog, good dog,” Martha crooned, shooing their noses away from his crotch. “That’s Artemis, and that’s Apollo.” She pointed. “Say hello,” she told the dogs. The dogs wagged indiscriminately.

  Kingsley’s father had kept pointers, for shooting; lightlimbed, excitable dogs, with pale-rimmed eyes. Kingsley himself hadn’t had a dog since his wife died, eight years ago; her ancient dog had only briefly survived her. It had been a Norfolk terrier called Jackal, a bright-eyed irritable creature who slept on the bed between them and bit Kingsley periodically on the leg. Kingsley used to call the dog a Norfolk terrorist, long after, his wife told him, it was amusing.

  “Lovely,” Kingsley murmured now at the aimless dogs. He wondered which floor he would be staying on; the house was tall.

  “You’re on the third floor,” Martha said apologetically. They had come in through the kitchen, and she showed him up the back stairs. “Let me take your suitcase.”

  He shielded it from her determinedly and labored up the two flights behind her. He could hear his panting breaths in the narrow stairwell and coughed, to disguise them.

  “Only one more flight,” Martha said, anxious.

  Martha heard him now not only panting but coughing, and she hoped he wouldn’t fall right there on the stairs. What did you actually do in CPR? Besides leaning heavily on the chest of, and placing your open mouth on, that of a perfect stranger. She had once taken a course: there was an acronym about how to begin. FISH, perhaps, but what did it mean? Was it about airways? She did not want to think of what Jeffrey would say—not to mention the Lectures Committee at the Music Festival—if Kingsley were to have a heart attack right there in their house.

  “Well, here we are,” she said, looking around. The guest room, long and narrow, high up under the eaves, which she thought of as airy and charming, seemed suddenly dark and small. The white curtains had yellowed, she saw now, and hung limply. The space was nearly filled by Kingsley’s craggy height.

  “What a nice room,” he said happily.

  It was totally private, with its own bath. Americans were good about private baths, and their plumbing invariably worked. The room itself was pleasant and cottagey, simply furnished, slightly shabby, comfortable.

  “Would you like some tea?” Martha asked. “Or a nap? What would you like?”

  Alone, Kingsley unpacked. He took out his lecture suit, but there were no free coat hangers for it. The closet seemed to be full of Martha’s clothes from the nineteen seventies, and possibly her wedding dress: something long and white and satin, in a plastic garment bag. Kingsley hung his jacket over a magentaflowered silk blouse and jammed his trousers into a press with a lime green miniskirt. He wondered again about the audience, and if he had brought another pair of socks. Inevitably, when traveling, he forgot something crucial, though when he was laying things out beforehand it seemed as if his entire wardrobe were traveling with him.

  His ankle still hurt, giving off a subtle interior throb with each step. It had been like this for some time; he could not remember exactly when it had begun. There were so many murmurs of distress from his body now, a quiet and continual susurration, that it was hard to remember when one voice rose slowly above the others, when it fell, or vanished altogether. He thought the ankle had been hurting for several days; he could remember no knock against it, no collision with chair or wall. Back at home he would go and see the new doctor, the woman. Women doctors were such a good idea, so much nicer than the men. The old doctor, Toland, had asked him suggestive questions which were always veiled rebukes. If Kingsley came in with a cough, Toland would inquire, “Been walking about without your coat?” Then his lips would rise slowly over his yellowed teeth in an unfriendly grin. This new woman—calm and plump, with short graying hair—was just as good as Toland, and comforting. After seeing her Kingsley always felt better; after seeing Toland he had felt guilty and doomed.

  Kingsley limped to the bed and lay down. It was only his ankle, far away from the important things. The brain knows where it lives. An ankle was remote, negligible. The entire leg could be jettisoned, if necessary, if the worst had happened, cancer. At his age everything suggested cancer; the droop of an eyelid, the first stirrings of nausea in the early dawn, discolored skin along the back of a hand. Kingsley stretched out on his back and gazed up at the ceiling. It was wallpapered with small blue sprigs on white and reminded him of home.

  Dinner that night was just the three of them. When Kingsley came slowly down the narrow back stairs, careful of his ankle, he found Martha’s husband in the kitch
en, standing by the stove, near his wife. Geoffrey was a tall man, bulky, with a long jaw and shaggy graying hair. He wore thick glasses that magnified his eyes, making them alarmingly large and fluid. He stepped forward at once to greet Kingsley, his hand held out hospitably.

  “I’m Jeffrey Truesdale,” he said. “It’s so nice to have you here.”

  “Very kind of you to have me,” Kingsley said, smiling, “a perfect stranger.”

  “Not at all,” Jeffrey assured him, shaking his head. “Our pleasure.”

  They ate in the kitchen, which pleased Kingsley, at a small square table by the window. The Labs lay sprawled beside them on dusty green dog beds. Martha served the plates at the stove and brought them over. It turned out that Geoffrey was a reader, too, and deep in the middle of a Faulkner biography.

  “How is it?” Kingsley asked.

  “It’s interesting,” Jeffrey said, “because Faulkner is interesting. But the writing is dull and academic, and it’s too long. Much too long.”

  Kingsley himself preferred long books. He liked something with heft and stamina, a place where he could establish himself, where he could linger and return.

  “I’ve read your Faulkner,” he said, nodding, remembering. “Rather wonderful, I thought. So intense. Your American novelists enter into the interior world, don’t they, in a way that ours don’t.”

  “Oh, but Virginia Woolf does,” Martha said politely.

  “Well, yes, she does, it’s true,” Kingsley said, politely back. He couldn’t bear Virginia Woolf, her novels so prissy and tedious, the essays so full of feminist nonsense. But Americans, he knew, loved her.

  “I think the trouble is computers,” Jeffrey declared. “They’ve made writing too easy. If writers still had to write on typewriters, or better yet by hand, it would take more effort, and books would be shorter and better.” He offered Kingsley the salad bowl.

  “Thank you,” said Kingsley. He poked discreetly through the salad, trying to find sweet broad leaves of lettuce among the bitter spiky greens Americans seemed to like. He thought of long great books. “What do you think of Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire?” he asked. “Bleak House. War and Peace. Written by hand, pretty long, and pretty good, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Exactly,” Geoffrey said, pleased. “Those writers were geniuses. They’re the ones who should write long books. Those writers were driven by passion, they wrote masterpieces. But nowadays any nitwit can write a long book, and some other nitwit will publish it.” Geoffrey beamed at him, his eyes huge and glowing.

  “Well, yes, I see what you mean,” Kingsley said, not sure that he did. Why weren’t unwieldy books the fault of writers and editors, not of computers? It seemed like muddled thinking to him, but tonight his own thinking seemed muddled. He could feel jet lag and exhaustion invading his mind, slowing him down.

  Passing the bowl to Martha, Kingsley changed the subject. “Now, there are two things I should very much like to do while I’m here.”

  “Tell me what they are,” Martha said, smiling.

  She hoped that the two things would be possible to arrange. She also hoped that Jeffrey would not make any more literary denunciations. She had heard this theory before (actually more than once), and was afraid that Kingsley found it dull. Why else had he changed the subject?

  “Number one,” Kingsley said, “I’d like to take you both to lunch somewhere agreeable, on Sunday. And then I’d like to see a historic house near here. Is it called Lindmere? A friend from our National Trust told me about it.”

  “Lyndhurst,” Martha said with enthusiasm. She tried to remember where it was: on the Hudson somewhere? “What a good idea. I’ve never actually been there. And how extremely kind of you, about lunch.” “Extremely kind”: was she slipping into Anglicisms? She saw Jeffrey give her a look. She was.

  Later, in their bedroom, Jeffrey lay under the covers, reading, his long legs stretched out, the ponderous book resting on his chest.

  Martha held on to the closet door for balance and kicked off her shoes. “Now, that wasn’t so bad, was it?”

  “It’s only Friday night,” Jeffrey said, not looking up from his book.

  Martha pulled her sweater up over her head. “Come on,” she said, her voice muffled. “He’s very pleasant.” She freed her head and looked at him. “Admit it.”

  “He’s perfectly pleasant,” Jeffrey said, still not looking up. “But he’s here.”

  “Well, he had to stay with someone,” Martha said. She slid her arms from the sleeves.

  “But why with us?”

  “I’ve told you why,” Martha said, exasperated. “I thought Kay Bowditch knew him, and that he’d stay with her. I only volunteered as a gesture. Then it turned out Kay didn’t know him, and no one else did either, and there I was, having made the offer, and Jean Singer staring at me over her glasses.”

  “He could have stayed in a hotel.” Jeffrey raised his head.

  “I told you this too,” said Martha. “The committee always puts him up in someone’s house, it saves money. But the point is that Michael Kingsley is not only a very nice man but a very distinguished scholar of Italian opera. You’re acting as though he’s some verminous undesirable who couldn’t get through immigration.”

  “He’s a complete stranger,” Jeffrey complained. “I’m acting as though you’ve imposed a complete stranger on me for the weekend.”

  “Well, there’s nothing I can do about it now,” said Martha crossly. “Don’t take it out on me.”

  “Who should I take it out on?” asked Jeffrey.

  Martha did not answer, walking into the bathroom and firmly closing the door. She was pleased by verminous and turned the water on full blast. It was unfair of Jeffrey to complain now, when it was too late to change anything, but she was determined to rise above it. She met her eyes in the mirror, her gaze full of resolution.

  Though she had to admit, in the steamy privacy of her bathroom, the mirror slightly flecked with toothpaste, that she was slightly intimidated by Kingsley: by his looming height, his alienating accent, his grand English manner. And she worried that what she was offering—the stuffy guest room with its limp curtains, the meek suburban countryside—was somehow wanting.

  “I’m sure it’s no fun for him either,” Jeffrey said loudly to the closed door and lowered his eyes again to his book.

  He opposed houseguests on principle, and he felt ill-used. Martha hadn’t consulted him about this, she had simply announced it as a fait accompli. All week long, Jeffrey’s days were spent in noise and motion; on the weekends he wanted silence and stillness. He wanted to sit undisturbed in the fat faded brown armchair next to the fireplace, turning the pages of a book without interruption. He wanted no conversation, no schedule, no scrutiny. He wanted no looming stranger’s face, no unknown footsteps creaking about overhead, no third presence at the table, no questions throughout the meal. He felt ill-used, and also rather noble, for rising so well to the occasion. Feeling noble fed his sense of aggrievement. He had said all along it was a poor idea, and his wife had ignored him.

  When Martha came out of the bathroom he did not look at her, and when he had finished reading he closed his book without speaking. He turned off his light, put on his black eye mask, and settled himself on his back. He lay like a Crusader on his tomb, his arms straight at his sides, his nose in the air, closing himself off to the world.

  Upstairs, Kingsley turned out his light at once, ready to sink into sleep. At his age, jet lag was like a deliciously potent medication: sleep had become increasingly fugitive. At home, sometimes he lay awake until one or two o’clock; sometimes he slept at once, earlier, but then woke for the day at three. Sometimes he turned on the light to read, sometimes he simply lay still in the dim room, drifting in and out of the currents of the night, listening to the small sounds of the house as it moved through the long dark hours.

  Kingsley wondered again about the audience. He must ask Martha. He thought of the intent look on her face as she ha
d listened to Geoffrey talk: it was a pleasure to be with a couple so visibly happy with each other. He wondered where the dogs slept, and if they would remember him if he went downstairs early, or if they would view him as an intruder and let loose a pandemonium of barks. He could see them now, the two of them standing by the table in the kitchen, wagging their tails and barking; confusingly, they were barking out the Anvil Chorus from Trovatore. The room, high up among the tops of the willow trees, with its slanting ceilings and faded flower-sprigged wallpaper, was closing around him, the dogs became distant and silent, Kingsley floated gratefully into the dark current and was gone.

  In the morning, Martha had already left their bedroom when Jeffrey awoke; he found her down in the kitchen with Kingsley.

  “Good morning,” Jeffrey said to Kingsley, bowing his head courteously. “Good morning,” he said to Martha, bowing again, more courteously. Martha bowed in response, but she understood his courtesy toward her as ironic and did not answer.

  After breakfast, Martha asked Kingsley if he would like to have some time to go over his notes, and he spent a peaceful time alone in the sunny sitting room. Martha worked at her desk; Jeffrey read upstairs.

  In the late afternoon they all drove over to the Music Festival. This was held in a faux-Gothic castle built by a rich industrialist in the nineteen twenties. It was a meandering complex of half-timbered buildings, the rooms high-ceilinged and gloomily opulent, full of dim tapestries and elaborate chandeliers. Kingsley’s talk was in the huge Music Room, which was Venetian, with gilt stars painted on the deep blue ceiling. It was nearly full.