The Stranger Game

by Peter Gadol

  “Or you can impress someone by playing the hero.”

  “Like I said, I’ve never seen it, but it sure sounds like you did,” Carey said and switched off the lamp, returning us to darkness.

  “None of this resembles what Craig originally wrote about,” I said. “I wonder if he’s out there, if he knows what kind of madness he inspired.”

  “He must, don’t you think?”

  “I’m not sure. Wouldn’t he have spoken out by now and made some sort of comment?”

  “We don’t know very much about him,” Carey said. “Or I don’t anyway. I shouldn’t admit this, but I never read the article. Should I?”

  “Don’t bother now.”

  I was relieved Carey wasn’t upset at me for not being forthright, but I also wondered why he wasn’t more bothered. During the weeks he was following me, he must have witnessed me playing the game—did he realize that now? I didn’t ask. I didn’t want to revisit the topic ever again. However, I’d brought up the stranger game—I was the one who reintroduced it into our lives.

  The next day we went to the grocery store. Carey wanted to celebrate the new season by making pasta primavera, and while he was gathering asparagus and string beans and peas, et cetera, I found myself watching a woman hovering over the bin of avocados, squeezing every one several times. I understood she wanted avocados that were ripe (or not yet ripe), but once she found a few she approved of, why couldn’t she move on?

  “Check her out,” I whispered to Carey.

  “Finicky,” Carey said.

  After the woman selected an avocado and pushed her cart out of produce and into dairy, I followed her—or I should say we followed her, since Carey led the way. Standing in front of a refrigerator case, the woman proceeded to pick up and sniff every quart-sized carton of nonfat milk.

  “You can’t tell if it’s good by smelling a closed carton, can you?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Carey said. “I hope she doesn’t do this now with the—”

  Before he could finish his sentence, the woman was opening every carton of large brown eggs. She wasn’t going to stop at a carton with no broken ones; she had to survey every egg.

  “I sort of get it,” Carey said.

  “You do?”

  “She has a need for order. I do, too. She’s hypercautious.”

  I thought about the way he liked to make sure his fork was parallel to his knife before he began eating. He liked towels to hang evenly on a bathroom rack. He was a bit compulsive.

  “But with her,” he said, “this is all because of some childhood accident involving—what?”

  “Kayaks,” I said. “At summer camp.”

  “Oh, I see. All of the boats looked the same, the dozen lined up for the kids to take out on the lake.”

  “Right. Actually it wasn’t a lake, it was the ocean.”

  “Rough weather that day?”

  “Yes. She had her hand on one bright yellow kayak, but some bossy girl pushed in front of her,” I said, “and took it for herself, leaving the woman—the woman as a girl, I mean—an ugly, brown, banged-up kayak instead.”

  We had followed the woman from the dairy section down an aisle of canned vegetables and meats. She was examining tins of imported sardines.

  “But then the scariest thing happened,” Carey said.

  We’d come too close to the woman and had to pretend to discuss which brand of whole tomatoes we preferred.

  “The bright yellow kayak turned out not to be seaworthy,” I said. “There was a leak.”

  “It took on water fast.”

  “The girl in the bright yellow kayak was waving her oar around, panicking, sinking—and she hadn’t fastened her life vest tightly enough, it was coming undone, bobbing up around her chin—”

  “She was screaming,” Carey said. “No one helping her.”

  “She didn’t drown.”

  “Counselors saved her?”

  “Yes, thankfully. But ever since then...” I nodded in the direction of the woman who was bent over a display of whole-bean coffee at the end of the aisle.

  “It could have been her. She almost took the bright yellow kayak for herself simply because it was the prettiest.”

  “The prettiest isn’t always the safest though.”

  “Best to inspect everything twice. Know what you’ve got,” Carey said.

  We grinned at each other, satisfied with ourselves, and finished our shopping. We lost track of the woman in the store, but then we saw her in front of us as we were exiting the parking lot. I was driving. When the woman slipped into the left turn lane, I did as well, which meant heading the opposite direction from my house. I didn’t have to look over at Carey to know he approved.

  The woman made a right; I stayed with her. She made another quick right and headed up a steep incline into the hills overlooking the reservoir.

  “You’re good at this,” Carey said.

  “Better than you?”

  He didn’t answer me. Instead he said, “She’d like to be in a relationship, but she can’t. She won’t compromise, or she doesn’t know how to.”

  “She needs the pots and pans arranged just so?”

  “More that she has systems. If you finish two sticks of butter in a box of four, you’re supposed to write down you need more on the grocery list.”

  “You can’t wait until you run out and then put it on the list?”

  “Certainly not,” Carey said. “No one understands how important this is to her.”

  Following someone around the narrow bends of a hill road was tricky. In order not to get too close, I had to let the woman pursue an entire curve and trust she’d still be there when we drove the curve, too. It would seem she lived at the crest.

  “She did fall in love once,” Carey said.

  “Only once? What happened?”

  The woman had come to a stop in front of a rusty gate. It wasn’t automated or the remote was broken; she had to get out of the car and slide it open manually. We were down the grade a ways, and by the time we made it to the top, the woman had driven through and closed the gate behind her. We didn’t have a good view of her house. We could see the rain-stained metal fascia running around the eaves of what looked to be a modern box, but that was it. We could only imagine her view of the city on the other side, even more proprietary than mine.

  “He died,” Carey said. “Her one true love.”

  I winced at that. There was no one with whom she could share the best of all possible avocados. Carey sighed, too. We’d made ourselves sad, and that melancholy seemed to follow us home. We were unpacking our groceries in silence when Carey took the asparagus from my hand and set it on the counter. He pulled me into a hug, and we stood like that awhile, comforting each other with the tacit acknowledgment that at least we weren’t alone.

  Something was shifting. How to describe it? That night we embraced the way we usually did as we started to fall asleep, except we didn’t eventually migrate to our separate sides of the bed, and I was surprised when I awoke at three in the morning to find us still entwined. This was a new need—authentic, urgent—and I liked it; I wanted more.

  The next afternoon we were on the way to the movies when Carey, driving now, pointed out a minivan a few cars in front of us, the minivan packed with teenage girls in pink satin gowns. The driver was a guy in a tux, not much older.

  “Where are they headed? A wedding?” I asked.

  “A quinceañera,” Carey said, and he glanced over at me in the passenger seat: Should we?

  We followed the minivan to the park, to a fountain popular with event photographers. The teenagers filed out of the minivan and joined others already fanning out around the girl of the hour, all in white. We weren’t so much focused on them, however, as much as the driver, who didn’t get out from behind the wheel. He smoked two
cigarettes in a row.

  “What’s his deal?” Carey asked. “He’s the older brother chaperone?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “His mind is elsewhere.”

  The driver abruptly pulled out in Reverse and then drove away from the fountain and out of the park. I speculated that he probably had to collect another group of celebrants and bring them up here, but Carey disagreed. We followed him a mile or two down the road, and then he turned back into the park through a different entrance. This road wound past a onetime Western movie set turned into a playground, a miniature golf course, and then up into the hills. I thought Carey was getting too close to the minivan, so we dropped back, and when we found the driver again, he’d pulled into a small lot by a lookout point. There was the panoramic view, yes, but more immediately below, a clear shot of the fountain in the park where everyone was having photos taken with the birthday girl. The man sat on a bench and withdrew another cigarette from the breast pocket of his tux. He looked back at us sitting in Carey’s car with the motor running—our cover was blown—but the man didn’t seem to care and peered down again at the girls around the fountain.

  We couldn’t agree on what he was up to. I thought he was being creepy, spying on a young girl it would have been inappropriate to stare at close-up. Carey was convinced the man had recently lost someone—a sister—and he was simply too sad to stick around for the festivities. Twice now Carey’s narratives for the strangers we followed arrived at loss.

  We had missed our movie but didn’t go to another screening. Out of the park, we were heading west.

  Carey said, “Say when.”

  A pickup truck loaded with lawn mowers and rakes and coils of hoses drifted by. There were two women in the cab.

  “When,” I said.

  It was a Sunday, not when I would have expected to find gardeners working, and I was used to seeing men in these trucks, not women. The boulevard took us through a series of commercial strips and then a pricier part of town with old mansions set back from the road and newer ones occupying the entirety of smaller lots. Carey thought the gardeners would turn off into one of these estates, but they didn’t; they kept going, on through the next neighborhood. The road dropped down toward the ocean eventually, ten-plus miles from where we’d picked them up. They made a U-turn on the coast road to park on the beach side. The sun would set soon. There were no other cars parked nearby, and there wasn’t official access to the beach here, but that was where the two women headed, leaving the pickup with all its gear exposed to highway thieves. One woman wore a backpack.

  By the time we shot ahead several hundred yards and made a U-turn ourselves, the women had stepped over the guard rail and were climbing down the rocks toward the narrow stretch of sand.

  “They’re going to take a walk and watch the sun set?” I asked.

  Carey didn’t think so. “They’re here on a mission. What’s in the backpack?”

  We didn’t go down the rocks after them, but we could watch them from the road. When one looked back our way, we both ducked behind Carey’s car. She stared at the car for a long moment and said something to the other woman. They were the same height, had the same long hair—each wore a gold bracelet reflecting the dying sun. They must have decided we weren’t a threat, and they headed a little ways down the beach. They removed a box from the backpack.

  “There’s been a recent death,” Carey said. “A brother, a husband—”

  “Carey,” I said. “This is always where you go, to such a dark place...”

  But I had to be quiet because he was right: from the box, one woman removed a plastic bag, into which the other dug her hand and withdrew a fistful of cinders, which she flung into the approaching tide. They were spreading someone’s ashes. The second woman took a turn. The first woman again. And then the second dumped the rest of the cremains in the ocean foam. We decided to head off before they climbed back up the rocks.

  “I don’t know,” Carey said back at my place, on the couch, the lights off, the city flickering with extra life. “I feel like it’s everywhere you turn.”

  “Death?”

  “Loss in general.”

  I had decided to ask as gently as I could if this pervasive grief he experienced had a source. Were there losses in his own life he hadn’t told me about?

  “Can I be completely candid?” he asked. “You already dealt with one lost soul when you were with Ezra. You don’t need another one with me.”

  I wasn’t expecting this. There was something sweetly considerate about his thinking, even if he was off. I didn’t think he was a perro perdido (nor was that necessarily how I would characterize Ezra). Although even as I told him this, I was asking myself if I was (why I was) possibly attracted to depressives.

  “Keep talking,” I said.

  Carey said he hated being a developer and also didn’t think he was very good at it; but he couldn’t stop. “I have debts. Loans to repay. It’s a lot. Don’t ask how much. I don’t really want to talk about it.”

  “Then don’t,” I said.

  “Maybe this is the moment when I tell you that you should break up with me now if you want to—”

  “I’m not breaking up with you.”

  “I’m opening the door for you. I’ll understand.”

  “You’re being dramatic is what you’re doing.”

  “Run away—”

  “Stop,” I said and took his hand. “We’ll get through it,” I said.

  He smiled at me: we.

  When we were intimate that night, we were silent. Whereas before we each might coo with pleasure, and our volume might increase as our sex gained momentum, now we’d moved beyond any such signaling—we didn’t need it—which made our lovemaking more intense, and which also made me feel more at risk. More was at stake; there was more to lose.

  We lapsed into a narcotic drift: instead of replacing the fence at the bottom of the property or weeding the herb garden or finding new furniture for the terrace, we went on drives, one of us behind the wheel, the other saying go. There was the gaggle of orthodox school girls all covered up in their uniforms jogging around the reservoir. There were the two leathery muscle men riding in a convertible with the top down, the men too big for the tuna can of a car. There was a bakery truck. An SUV with four bikes lashed upside down on its roof. We would follow someone awhile, then carom off to follow someone else. If this was the stranger game, it was our own version of it because we weren’t talking about the people we chased; we weren’t speculating about them or trying to achieve any empathic connection; we weren’t saying much of anything. Like the first time we played the game together, we always ended up in a melancholy state, yet as soon as we got home, we’d end up in bed.

  During the workweek, Carey would drop me off at the studio, where I had trouble focusing. I was supposed to be working through some concept drawings for a high-profile competition—some open land along the river was being transformed into parkland complete with recreation centers, and every firm who did what we did would be submitting a proposal—but I was making little headway, and I overheard my partners talking about how most tactfully to ask me to step aside from the project. At the end of the day, Carey picked me up, and while we had errands to run on the way home, instead we would follow a yellow bus packed with a middle school soccer team. We’d follow another bus: the field hockey players. We devised an iteration of the game wherein we picked up taxis and went wherever they went, fare to fare. We’d get home late. He’d start the shower. I’d get in with him. He’d pull me up against the slippery tile and we’d go at it with the water streaming down all around us. I couldn’t get enough of him, of this. We were on a binge, and I started to think something had to give, although we weren’t about to quit, were we, because the game only became more interesting to play.

  One lunch break, we met up at the museum and were wandering the grounds, ending up at the s
culpture garden. At the top of the steps (where I’d spied on Carey), we noticed a man and woman who were transfixed by two women standing down below in front of the steel dancing man. One of the women was quite tall, the other by contrast very short. The short woman dropped to one knee (making her even tinier compared to the tall woman); we could hear her (though barely) make a marriage proposal. She withdrew a velvet ring box from her pocket and a diamond band from the box. The tall woman gasped, allowed the ring to be slid up her long finger, and accepted by pulling the shorter woman to her feet and then hoisting her up so they were eye to eye and could kiss. All of us at the top of the steps clapped, and the now-engaged women blew us kisses. As Carey and I walked away, the man and woman who’d been standing next to us were locked in an embrace so intense I was fairly certain one of them would propose marriage, too. A happy story, the end—except it wasn’t the end.

  Two weeks later, all the way across town (and after many other random follows), Carey and I were walking along a pier at sunset and spotted a semicircle of people mesmerized by what we assumed would be a juggler or break-dancer. When we got closer, however, we could see the group was watching the very public display of affection between two women, one tall, one short—the very same two women we’d seen in the sculpture garden. The shorter woman was on one knee proposing to the other, apparently proposing again. One more time the taller woman happily lifted the shorter woman up in the air for a jubilant kiss.

  I whispered to Carey, “Do you think they’re—?”

  “Definitely,” he whispered back, and he nodded at another couple, embracing now as well—players, we decided, inspired to perform their own impromptu romantic show.

  There was applause, and as the onlookers as well as the two stagers dispersed, I noticed that the embracing man and woman hadn’t moved—indeed, the man was now kneeling (on both knees as if in prayer), offering his hand in marriage (or so it appeared, though without a ring). We walked away without knowing whether the woman said yes.

  “So you think the guy hired the two women to stage a proposal,” I said, “in order to sway his girlfriend so she’d say yes to him?”