A Perfect Stranger

by Roxana Robinson

  Martha had finally reached a real voice, and he heard her asking for directions. She wrote down route numbers.

  “And how long do you think that will take us? We’re near Cross River,” she said. She looked again at the clock. “Thirtyfive minutes. That will be all right. You’re open until five?”

  The person on the other end said something Martha did not want to hear. Her voice rose.

  “But the recording said you’re open till five.”

  More unwelcome information.

  “Thank you,” Martha said and hung up. She stared for a moment at the telephone.

  “Something wrong?” Kingsley asked.

  “It’s too late,” Martha said. “I’m so sorry.” She sounded desolate.

  “Oh, that’s perfectly all right,” Kingsley said, unsure of how to remedy this. What had upset her so?

  “It will take longer than I thought to get there, and they’re open until five, but they don’t let anyone in after four-thirty. We can’t get there before then.” She sat still for a moment. She was determined to pull the day out of its downward spiral toward failure.

  “I know what we can do,” she announced, looking up decisively. “We can go to the local historical society. It’s right nearby. It’s not as good as Lyndhurst, but it will give you some idea of American houses. We’ll go over there.”

  The Historical Hall was two miles south, a rambling, gloomy old house with an odd assortment of furniture. Martha stood up, remembering, for some reason, the day the town had tried to pave the road. Lying on her back, on the smooth hard-packed dirt, looking straight up, into the green canopy of trees overhead. The suffocating stench of hot tar, the sense of exultation.

  “Lovely,” said Kingsley. He did not want to go to the historical society. He would have been happy to read in the sunny drawing room until his train, but it seemed that Martha was determined to go through with the project. She seemed caught in the grip of something.

  Martha walked briskly to the garage and backed Jeffrey’s car out. She would take Kingsley to the hall and then to the train, and then she would come home and face Jeffrey.

  Kingsley waited for her in the driveway. He liked Martha, her small round face, her cheerful air. He liked her resoluteness, the way she made her way quietly around obstacles, like a deer moving through a wood. Whatever lay between her and Geoffrey was opaque to him, a mystery; he knew better than to try to puzzle out someone else’s marriage. It would be impossible for him to know which was more characteristic—the first easy partnership or the later silent conflict. Kingsley suspected that they rubbed along all right, that they loved each other.

  Fights meant nothing, really. He remembered his own rages toward Evvie, whom he had loved dearly. Once, years ago, at Christmas, he had locked her out of the house. She had walked, furious, from window to window in the dark, knocking loudly on the panes. He had feared they would shatter. It shamed him now to remember it; he hoped no one else had ever known. No outsider should look too closely into someone else’s marriage, you could never know enough to understand those vivid glaring scenes, someone else’s anguish.

  Martha pushed open the car door for Kingsley, who climbed creakily in. She turned the car around and headed down the drive again. She thought of Jeffrey throwing his shirt into the hamper, slamming down the lid, and felt a brief surge of heat, exasperation.

  Once, during a fight, she’d driven off in the middle of the night. She’d been in a fury when she left the house, boiling, her cheeks hot with rage. She drove across the county, speeding over the dark highways, tunneling through the night. Three A.M.: she’d decided to drive straight through to Chicago. Rage was uplifting, somehow: she’d been in a state of exaltation. On the wide empty curves, her car drifted easily to the outside. She felt she could go on forever.

  Now Kingsley said diffidently, as they started off again, “Are we quite sure that this place will be open?”

  “It doesn’t matter if it’s not,” Martha said, confident. “I’m on the board. I know where the key is.”

  At the bottom of the driveway she turned onto the dirt road, moving slowly on the loose gravelly surface.

  She remembered starting off down this road that night, fueled by anger. Surging along the smooth deserted highways, swinging off one, sliding down the ramp onto another. The highway at night, empty and singing: you wanted to press your foot down on the accelerator until it met the floor below.

  But forty minutes later, just before the Tappan Zee Bridge, she’d pulled over on the side of the highway and stopped. Her headlights bored into the mist over the Hudson. She turned off the engine and sat in silence, watching the light over the dark water. The river was wide there, the far shore invisible.

  By then, for some reason, everything had changed. During the drive, the long curves, the silence, the silence, amid the black emptiness of the night, her rage had ebbed. It had evaporated somehow. Why would she want to drive to Chicago?

  By the time she parked on the shoulder, what she was thinking about was something else: after the last miscarriage, when Jeffrey had wrapped himself around her and held her all night. Even in his sleep, his muscles tightened around her each time she moved. She was held in his close embrace until morning. And she remembered the time in Asolo, walking in the narrow street, the cobblestones damp and slippery after the rain, when he had said, so quietly, and without looking at her, “You make me very happy.”

  When she pulled out onto the highway again, it was too late to get off before the bridge, and she had had to drive all the way across the river and pay the toll before she could turn around. By then she was longing to get back; the toll seemed like a penance, something she owed for her rage.

  Now, driving Kingsley toward the hall, Martha stopped at the bottom of their dirt road before turning out onto the faster paved one. She waited for a small parade of cars to pass and thought of that night parked on the edge of the bridge, and of the ebbing of one feeling, the rise of the other. How strange the shift had been that night, how complete.

  These things came in waves, she thought. She pulled decorously out onto the paved road, following the line of cars. She thought of Jeffrey being charming to Kingsley, throwing himself into the conversations. And in fact, she thought suddenly, it was true that she never had consulted Jeffrey about having a guest. It was an imposition, he was right. In his own house.

  These things came in waves, she thought again. Something set them off: a visitor, the suspension and suppression of normal life, rising tensions. When this happened, she and Jeffrey became foreign to each other, contentious strangers. Each of them willful and self-absorbed.

  Later it would pass, and they would meet again, as themselves. They would recognize each other, with relief. That night when she had driven off, when she returned from the Tappan Zee, Jeffrey was standing in the driveway, waiting. He was in his blue striped bathrobe, barefoot.

  In fact, this was the path that emotion carved between the two of them. This was the way their marriage worked: it was not opera, not so heroic or grand. It was simpler, more domestic: a ballad, a folk song. Something more evenhanded. They were in this, whatever it was, together, both of them struggling with the waves of emotion, both carrying burdens of anger and love. You’re everything I want, he’d said afterward. What more could she ask?

  Kingsley could see now, as they rattled once again down the dirt road, how things would go. He could picture the white-painted door of the historical society, locked solid and unyielding, dazzling in the late afternoon sun, and the key not, as it was meant to be, beneath the heavy iron bucket under the window. He could see Martha, silent and frustrated, looking beneath every object in the yard of the Historical Hall. Geoffrey standing stoically alone in the parking lot, ten miles away, waiting for some mysterious arrival. Jordan driving slowly home, his strange, nearly naked head bobbing up and down to unlistenable sounds. He could see himself, Kingsley, back at the house after the failed attempt on the Historical Hall, standing in Martha�
�s kitchen, dolefully reading the train schedule to discover that today, because of a seasonal change, the last train to New York was not running at all.

  But Kingsley would be somehow gone from this, magically removed from the complicated tangle of these predicaments, the impenetrable mystery of the car—what had happened to it?— abandoned in the parking lot, by the next day. All these questions would be behind him, unimaginably resolved. By then he would be in another country, another world: he would be back in Suffolk by tomorrow evening.

  He would set the key into the stiff lock at the back door, pushing the door open into the silent kitchen. He would step inside, onto the cold slate floor. He would see the long battered silvery sink, the row of old apothecary jars above it, the table piled untidily with mail. The air would be quiet, stale, familiar, his. He would move about those cool unused rooms at will, without thinking; he would feel himself expanding freely into the space, without the constraints of other people, their gazes, their awareness. He would walk about as he chose, no longer troubling to conceal his limp. There would be the wintry smell of dampness.

  What had shamed him, that Christmas, was his cowardliness. His own act, so cruel and outrageous in its intent, had been physically so civil, so discreet. He had merely turned the key quietly in the lock—and with that gesture he had forced Evvie into the role of the crazed outsider, someone near hysteria, violence. Bearing the burden of his emotion. He’d never apologized for that, he hadn’t been able to. He was too ashamed to mention it, though he’d said he was sorry for other, lesser, things. Regret was one of the things you faced, after death. That was his burden now, knowing, too late, the part love had played in his life.

  Inside the room Kingsley would take off his raincoat and drape it over the back of a wooden chair, he would bend over the mail on the table, and he would be once again inside the deep intimate space of his own familiar, mysterious, darkening life.

  A Perfect Stranger

  ROXANA ROBINSON

  A Reader’s Guide

  In this May 2005 essay written for the M. J. Rose’s prestigious literary web log, Backstory (http://mjroseblog.typepad.com/backstory), Roxana Robinson wrote about the differences between the short story and the novel.

  Where They Come From

  There’s a certain convention that holds in this country, concerning fiction writers. By its terms, they’re more or less expected to write short stories while they’re learning their craft, and then, later, they’re expected to write novels when they’ve become accomplished. Underlying this convention is the premise that the short story is the easier form of the two, and one suitable only for beginners.

  In fact, I’d argue that the short story form is the much more demanding of the two. The novel is forgiving, it’s as loose and capacious as a pair of baggy trousers: it will hold anything. It can easily absorb an entire chapter on the whiteness of the whale, something that could only, in a fiction workshop, be called digressive. The short story, by contrast, only has room for the essentials—the crucial words, descriptions, characters, actions—there’s no room for anything extra in a short story. It should have the shape of a perfect arc, like the smooth uninterrupted curve of a fish.

  For me, the two forms behave very differently.

  When I write a novel, I start out with a group of characters and a conflict; the characters must work the issue out. I don’t have a plot, I don’t know what lies ahead. But when I write a short story, I start out with the ending—or at least I’m writing toward a particular, known moment that is, for me, very highly charged and powerful. It’s my task to create this same feeling for the reader. My novels can be entirely fictitious, but my stories always have some factual basis, something I’ve lived through or witnessed or heard about. This is the core of the story, and around it I weave my own layers of interpretation, description, action, characters and dialogue, like a dense cocoon. I’m trying to allow the story to emerge as something new, something larger, more beautiful, airborne.

  The Face-lift, for example, is based on an incident told to me by a South American friend, one day at lunch in New York. The incident that she told me about was amazingly cinematic, very dramatic and I thought, electrifying. It seems like a scene from a movie, and it’s one we all know well: here is the beautiful, terrified young woman in the expensive clothes, the limousine, the gunman, the violence, the dread intentions. So while I was listening to it, I was imagining how it would happen, how we’ve been taught by movies and newspapers that these things happen: they don’t end well. We know we’re going to see more terror, sickening pools of blood.

  But this story had a different ending, one that was unexpected, but equally dramatic, and, to me, equally powerful. Most movies, as it happens, are written by men, and it’s their expectations to which we’ve become accustomed. Movies that are about violence usually play themselves out in a particular way: a horrifically gory scene, pathetic victims, an avenging hero who comes in later to save the day—though sometimes he doesn’t save it, in which case it’s called “brutal realism.” (Regardless of any purported message, violent movies celebrate violence, as Anthony Swofford points out in Jarhead.) But this story was entirely different. It was a violent story with an ending written by women, and their actions had nothing to do with anyone’s expectations.

  So I was at once fascinated by this rewriting of a familiar scene. I thought it was gorgeous, the whole incident. I also wanted to give it another layer of context. The story is about the way women act with each other, under certain compelling circumstances. I also wanted it to be about women’s friendship, which I think is a very interesting and relatively unexplored landscape. Women’s friendships are often more demanding and complex than those of men, and because of that, perhaps, the friendships often become too demanding, and they explode. Envy figures more, I think, in women’s friendships than it does in men’s, and I think envy is an important element in those friendships. Envy and affection: they’re usually present between most women friends, and whichever element is ascendant will determine the kind of friendship that we have.

  So I wanted to write about all this, the way women act with each other under stress, and how they act toward and around each other every day. I wanted to write about how complicated this behavior is, how rich and rather wonderful it can be, despite the dangerous rifts that can occur.

  The Face-lift was published first in The Atlantic, something which is, sadly, now a historic event. Surprisingly, it was then chosen for Best American Mystery Stories, because of that one scene that was told to me over lunch, its drama and violence. Since the story isn’t a mystery, and since I don’t think of myself as a mystery writer, of course I was surprised. But I was pleased, too, of course, and I was proud to be chosen. It seemed to me that the choice meant that one of the layers in this story had been recognized, that one aspect of women’s lives—something about their own response to violence, their own dealings with risk, their own particular and admirable forms of courage—had been perceived and understood by a sympathetic eye.

  And what more does a writer want?

  Questions and Topics for Discussion

  In Family Christmas, how do Joanna’s family and Molly’s family relate to each other?

  What does The Face-lift suggest about the complexities of friendships between women?

  In At the Beach, do you feel more sympathy for the husband or the wife? Why? As you read the story, do your sympathies shift?

  Why does the father feel helpless in Blind Man? What are the things he cannot alter, and what are the things that he can?

  In The Treatment, do you think the protagonist feels betrayed? Is there something she should have done to prevent this betrayal?

  What changes does the narrator go through during the course of Assez? What part does Provence play—why is it set there, and not in Westchester?

  In Intersection, the narrator is caught in what struggle? Is this a universal feeling? Does everyone feel a sense of some dark destructive undercurr
ent?

  How is the narrator affected by the change of community in Shame? What part does the New Mexican landscape play in this story? What does shame mean to the narrator? Does everyone feel shame about certain aspects of his or her own life?

  In The Football Game, what is the narrator’s view of herself and her family? How does she see them interacting with the rest of the world? Is her anxiety common among adolescents? How does she feel about this problem at the end of the story?

  What are the misunderstandings that lie between the three main characters in A Perfect Stranger? How do these rise to a crescendo, and what interior shift takes place as a result?

  Alice Munro says that reading any of these stories will make you “seriously happy.” Do you agree with this? What does she mean by “seriously happy”?

  Do you have a favorite story? If so, what makes it your favorite?

  What are some recurring themes in these stories?

  Out of all of the characters in these stories, which character do you most identify with?

  Out of all of the characters in these stories, which character do you think is the most misunderstood?

  Why do you think this collection is called A Perfect Stranger?

  ROXANA ROBINSON is the author of three novels, Summer Light, Sweetwater, and This Is My Daughter; a biography of Georgia O’Keeffe; and two previous short-story collections, A Glimpse of Scarlet and Asking for Love. Four of her works have been named Notable Books of the Year by The New York Times. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the MacDowell Colony. Robinson’s fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Harper’s, Dædalus, and Vogue. She lives in New York City and Westchester County, New York.