Флетчер Флора - Wake Up With a Stranger

“Will you let me go with you? I haven’t got any place to go, except home, and I would much rather walk along with you.”

She was ashamed of the house and neighborhood in which she lived, but she was also proud and defiant, so she said he could. After that, they met several times a week in the branch library and went out together from there, and a little later they began seeing each other in the evenings. But they didn’t go many places or do many things because there didn’t seem to be anything Enos really cared about, quite apart from the fact that he was in bad at home for his indolence and was given little money to spend. The first significant thing about him that Donna learned was that it was impossible ever to anticipate his mood. Sometimes he was gay and really clever, other times he was sullen and difficult to get along with, and still at other times, in what seemed to be a kind of intermediate mood between the two extremes, he was quietly considerate, almost tender, and seemed to be making a kind of plea that was never quite clarified.

On the whole, he was much too disturbing in proportion to his appeal, and she thought more than once she would tell him she didn’t care to see him again, but she never did. Their relationship continued past her graduation and into the summer nearing the time when he would have to go away to the university. Several times, at some propitious moment, it wavered briefly on the verge of demand and eager submission, but nothing was gained or lost. Then he came the evening before he was to leave. He had managed to get the use of his father’s car, and they drove out of the city along the river and parked in a narrow road. There at last, at the last moment before the long summer, they crossed the boundary at which they had always stopped before. In the experience for her there was some sadness and a little pain and, most of all, an oddly exciting sense of charity, as if she had, at some sacrifice, been kind to a child who needed her.

He went away the next day to the university, and a little later he wrote to her, and she replied. He wrote again, telling her that he was already looking forward to Christmas, when he would come home and see her, and she replied again and told him that she was also looking forward to it. Then in November she got a letter saying that his parents had moved away from St. Louis to a small town across state and that he wouldn’t be able to see her at Christmas after all. At first, for a while, after the intimacy by the river and his going away, she had felt desolate and alone in a drained and distorted world, and she had thought then that she truly loved him and would die without him. But in time the color returned surely to the world around her, her perspective returned, and she was able to admit to herself what she had known all along, that he was an oversensitive and unstable boy who would never on earth do one thing of consequence. When the last letter came, she did not answer it.

Late that Sunday afternoon the snow stopped falling, and Donna returned from the narrow, oppressive house to her apartment. It was dark when she got there, and she stood a few moments in the unlighted living room, wondering how she could survive the long night. She could not remember ever having been so tired before, and she felt in her stomach a dull and gnawing pain that reminded her that she had not eaten since the dinner the night before that she and Aaron had eaten together in celebration of the sale of the peau de soie. The dinner seemed a long time ago and scarcely credible as something that had actually happened. By a kind of strange reversal of chronology in her mind, perhaps because the present was a threat she needed for a while to evade, recent events were indistinct, and the clearest were those which were furthest away.

Crossing the dark living room, she went into the bedroom and turned on a light and undressed. After a hot shower, her second of the day, she put on pajamas and went into the kitchen. She did not want to eat, for even the thought of food was slightly sickening to her, but she knew from the gnawing pain in her stomach that she had better eat something. She heated a can of soup on the range, and sat down at the small breakfast table in a corner of the room to eat it with crackers. After she finished the soup she felt a little sustained, and the night ahead of her seemed a little less impossible.

She washed the pan and bowl and spoon she had used and returned to the living room. At a cabinet, she mixed a very strong drink, half bourbon and half seltzer, and then setting the drink on a small table beside a large brocaded chair, she went to a console phonograph, selected an album of Chopin waltzes, and put the recordings on the spindle. The first platter dropped softly to the spinning, felt-covered turntable, and the ineffably precise and delicate music came alive in the room. She sat down and drank from her glass and began to go over in her mind how she could arrange the finding of Aaron in the morning.

For it would be necessary, of course, to wait until morning. At least, if not necessary, it would be wise. It could be done naturally then, a normal gesture when he did not appear at the shop. Perhaps she could send someone from the shop, or go herself and discover him by looking into the hall through the glass of the front door, or call a neighbor or a friend or even the police to investigate his inexplicable absence. Yes, any one of these actions would seem natural, an expression of concern in which she would be supported by Gussie Ingram and everyone else at the shop, and no particular attention or suspicion could possibly attach to her because of it. It could make no difference to him if he lay untended in the hall for another night. It was only in her mind that it made a difference, and it was imperative that she stop thinking as if he were somehow alive and dead at the same time, somehow aware of his desertion and the loneliness and the cold.

And then, all at once, she thought of the cleaning woman, and she could not understand how she had failed to think of her immediately, long ago at the very beginning, when she had found the body. That she had failed to do so was certainly an indication of the extent she had been incapacitated by shock without fully realizing it. Aaron himself had spoken of the cleaning woman more than once — a Mrs. Cassidy, or a similar Irish name — and had said she had a key and came in to clean two days a week, two of them. (It was always planned that Donna should not be there the mornings she came.) Thinking back and trying to identify the days, Donna was certain that they were Monday and Friday. Tomorrow was Monday. Therefore Mrs. Cassidy, or whatever her name was, would surely come in the morning and find the body, and it would be unnecessary, after all, for Donna to take any action whatever.

This was a vast relief. It was so vast a relief, and left her so limp in the sudden release from pressure, that she became fully aware then, for the first time, how much she had been dreading the prospect of taking any action. Now she need only wait with patience and react appropriately to whatever developed.

Getting out of the chair, she turned the stack of recordings over on the spindle and set the mechanism again and went into the bedroom. In bed, she lay and listened to the waltzes, trying to remember as little as possible and to anticipate nothing at all. She knew very little about music and had little knowledge about the Chopin she was listening to, but she did know that the music made everything else seem less important for the time that she listened to it. With their help, and that of the strong drink, she went into a dreamless sleep and awakened early the next morning.

After dressing, she had coffee in the kitchen and went directly to the shop, arriving about an hour before the shop normally opened. She entered by the front door, locking it after her, and passed through the luxurious simplicity of the salon to her room at the rear. There, she began without delay to work on a half-completed sketch, and she worked, apparently with complete absorption, until she heard, after half an hour, Gussie Ingram at the rear door. She went out then and let Gussie in and returned to the room with Gussie following.