Peter Straub - If You Could See Me Now

At the box I pulled out a thick pad of folders and envelopes. One after the other I sailed into the ditch letters addressed to Occupant. The last of the letters came in the same envelope as the one addressed to me, and it was written over in the same flowing handwriting. For a moment I thought I read my name on it. Like the previous letter, it had been posted in Arden.

When I finally saw what the envelope said I glanced across the cornfields to the beginning of the woods. No figure stood there gazing with waiting aloof Olympian calm. My hands were trembling. I looked again at the envelope — I was not mistaken. It was addressed to Alison Greening. Care of (my name), RFD 2, Norway Valley, Arden. The sun seemed to penetrate behind my pupils and give me a searing touch. Clumsily, still trembling, I inserted a finger beneath the flap and tore it open. I knew what I would find. The single sheet unfolded itself in my hands. Of course. It was blank. Neither a heart pierced by an arrow nor a black spot nor anything but creamy paper.

Down the road, her handbag pumping at her side, Tula Sunderson toiled toward me. I waited, gasping with emotion, as long as I could and then ran toward her.

“Something come for you?”

“No, yes,” I said. “I don’t know. Mrs. Sunderson, you can’t clean the living room yet. I’m not through in there. You might as well go home. I have to go somewhere.” Remembering the phone call of the morning, I added, “If the phone rings, don’t answer it.” I pelted up the road toward my car.

Smashing the gears, making the VW howl in torment, I shot across the lawn, twisting the wheel at the last moment to avoid the walnut trees. I came rocketing out onto the valley road in the direction of Highway 93. Fat Tuta Sunderson still stood where I had left her; mouth open, she dully watched me zoom past.

But this was not how I wanted to meet Polar Bears, I could not be dragged manacled before him by a slack-faced Arden constable, and I slowed to forty descending the hill past the R-D-N motel. By the time I reached the flat near the high school, I was proceeding at an almost-legal thirty. People were visible on the sidewalks, a cat cleaned itself on a windowsill, other cars trolled before mine: Arden did not have the deserted, eerie look it had had on my earlier visit, but was a normal small town in a normal condition of sleepy bustle. I pulled into an empty spot before Zumgo’s and stopped as gently as a dove. I felt like a man poised on an eggshell. The folded envelope distended my pocket. I knew only one sure way to conquer that awful weightless expectant eggshell feeling. Hearing no wingbeats but the sound of voices, I crossed the pavement to enter Zumgo’s.

Happily, the store had a good crowd of women shoppers. Mostly overweight, dressed in obscene halters and skirts excessively short, they would be the audience for my autotherapy. From them rose a mass smell of compost and barren backyards, of dime taps of Leinenkugel beer and soggy pretzels. I began to drift, in an attitude of abstracted busy specific search, through the aisles and around the tables. The women, including the harridan of my previous visit, scarcely noticed me. I was some husband on some errand. I thought and felt myself into this role.

I am no kleptomaniac. I have a letter from an analyst setting that down in black and white, pica type. I took a ten-dollar bill from my wallet and folded it between the second and third fingers of my right hand.

Now it is time for two comments. The first is obvious. I thought that I knew the handwriting on that envelope. I thought that Alison Greening had sent it to me. This was crazy. But it was no crazier than that she would return on the twenty-first of July to keep her vow. Perhaps she was signaling to me, telling me to hold out until that day. The second comment has to do with stealing. I do not think of myself as a thief — except perhaps at a gritty subconscious level that pumps guilt up into my dreams. I hate stealing. Except for Maccabee’s book, I had not stolen anything for at least fifteen years. Thinking of the thefts of my boyhood, I once asked an analyst if he thought I was a kleptomaniac. He said, of course not. Put it in writing, I said. He told me it was my fifty minutes and typed it out on a piece of notepaper. Yet at moments of great unease, I know that I can put my mind right — if at all, if at cost of a wider displacement — by only one means. It is like eating — like stuffing food down your throat long after your hunger has died.

So what I intended doing was a repetition of my mime of thievery: I was going to surreptitiously pocket goods and then drop the ten dollars at the cash register on the way out. Temptation struck first in household novelties, where I saw a corkscrew on a table. Next to it lay a rank of clasp knives. I hovered over the table, ignoring a dozen opportunities for palming the corkscrew and one of the knives. The whole business suddenly seemed labored and stupid.

Revulsion for the charade made me turn away. I was too old for these tricks, I could not allow myself to be so foolishly self-indulgent. But still I suffered. I went upstairs where the books were kept.

Slowly I revolved the rack: you will not steal again, I said to myself, you will not even pretend to steal. Romantic novels with jacket pictures of girls running from castles predominated. I could see no more copies of The Enchanted Dream . Finding even one had been fantastic luck. With feigned idleness I scanned the spines side-view. Still nothing.

And then I saw a natural second choice. There, crammed in one of the bottom divisions, was a novel written by Lamont Withers, who had been the gabbiest, most annoying member of my Joyce seminar at Columbia and now taught at Bennington — A Vision of Fish , an experimental novel disguised by its jacket drawing of two embracing androgynies as a romance. I extracted the book and examined the back of the cover. “A sensitive tour de force… Cleveland Plain Dealer . Stunning, witty advance… Library Journal . Withers is the coming man… Saturday Review .” My facial muscles contracted; it was even worse than Maccabee. Temptation reared up, and I nearly tucked the book between arm and elbow. But I would not give in to this gluttony; I could not be ruled by the responses of twenty years past. I gripped the book in my hand. I went down the stairs. At the cash register, an orderly man, I paid for the book and accepted my change.

Breathing hard, flushed of face, at peace, I sat in my car. Not stealing was so much a better feeling than stealing, or mime-stealing. Not stealing, as I had in fact known for years, was the only way to shop. I felt like an alcoholic who has just turned down a drink. It was still too early to see Polar Bears, so I touched the folded letter in my pocket and decided to go — where else? — to Freebo’s, to celebrate. In the midst of death and breakdown, a successful mission.

As I walked across the street, a sharp atom neatly bisected my back between the shoulder blades. I heard a stone clatter on the surface of the road. Stupidly, I watched it roll and come to rest before I looked at the sidewall. People were there, still simulating that sleepy smalltown bustle, walking from Zumgo’s to the Coast To Coast Store, looking in the bread-filled windows of Myer’s bakery. They seemed to be avoiding looking at me, avoiding even looking in my direction. A second later I saw the men who had probably thrown the stone. Five or burly middle-aged men, two or three in dungarees and the others in shabby business suits, stood in front of the Angler’s Bar. These men were watching me, a general smile flickering between them. I could not stare them down — it was like the Plainview diner. I recognized none of them. When I turned away, a second stone flew past my head. Another struck my right leg.