Флетчер Флора - Wake Up With a Stranger

She turned out to be not only a fine designer but also a subtle and effective saleslady; and even these assets, important as they were to the shop and its increasing distinction, were of minor significance as compared with her total effect in the life that Aaron had been living, less because he really wanted to live it than because he did not want to explore the consequences of dying. He soon loved her and wanted to possess her. This he confessed to himself, because he was painfully honest in the presence of his id, but he confessed it to no one else, certainly not to her, because he was considerate and shy and had no faith in his capacity to incite in her a reciprocal desire.

After a while she had her own key to the shop and often returned at night to work at her sketches, and sometimes, at the beginning, he was there himself when she came. Afterward he made a point of being there every time instead of only sometimes. For quite a long while he made a pretense of having his own late business in the shop, but then, abruptly, he abandoned the pretense entirely and spent all his time in the room where she worked. It gave him genuine pleasure merely to sit and watch her, and to talk with her when she wanted to talk, and even to feel within himself the aching carnal appetite that was now specifically dedicated for the first time in much too long. Because it was dedicated, because it was a part of love, it was therefore purified and no disturbance to his tender conscience.

One night when she was finished working, she turned and met his bitter-sad eyes and held them levelly with hers for the length of three long breaths.

“Are you in love with me?” she said.

Rather strangely, or perhaps not, he wasn’t in the least disturbed by the question, and he answered that he was. “Would you like to have me?” she said. “Yes.”

“Well, I think I would like to have you too, so why don’t we try it and see how it works out?”

“Here? Now?”

“Do you object to here and now?”

“Oh, no. No.”

“Well, then.”

He was a little awkward the first time, and excessively gentle, but it worked out pleasantly for her, and wonderfully for him, and was repeated frequently afterward. She left home (she had been living with her mother and father) and rented an apartment, and he stayed with her there several nights a month. Or when his wife was out of town, they went to his house. He discontinued his trips to the south side. His life was suddenly warm and exciting, something it had never been before, and then, cataclysmically, in the midst of the warmth and excitement, about eight months after he took her the first time in the shop, he had his second heart attack.

He spent two months in the hospital and six weeks at home and was considered fortunate, by his doctor, to be alive. The shop in his absence was in Donna’s charge. She visited him in the hospital and reported how things were going, and they went well. While he was convalescing at home, she did not see him at all, although she talked to him daily over the telephone, because she did not wish to meet the wife of the man with whom she had committed adultery and with whom she expected to commit it again. This was a reticence he could understand and approve of, but the six weeks at home were the longest of his life. He eventually escaped to the shop, and Donna, with vast relief, but always afterward he carried, or was supposed to carry, a supply of nitroglycerine tablets in his pocket.

Everything was resumed. Business and Donna and life. And the warmth and excitement were still there, the strong desire to live and do and be. It was never in him in greater force than it was the morning he awakened early, arose quietly, and looked down at her nakedness with love, and then descended the stairs of his house to drop dead in the hall in an instant.

Before she had walked from the house to the street, her feet were wet and very cold. She turned left at the street and walked directly down it for several blocks, looking right and left at each intersection for a drugstore or café or any establishment at all that might be open on a Sunday and have a telephone. At last she saw to her left, at an intersection, the unlighted neon identification of a drugstore.

While she felt for Aaron a genuine grief, it was not unmixed grief, and she felt also for herself a concern which had been expressed first in flight and would from this time on be expressed in a calculated effort to avoid implication. There was no real harm in this, of course — it was better for him as it was for her — but it entailed problems; and the most imperative of the problems was arranging that his body be found soon. This was a problem which could surely be solved simply, however, once she was in a position to think about it clearly, and, meanwhile, she wondered if anyone had seen her leave the house fifteen or twenty minutes ago. She doubted it, but even so, there were her footprints in the snow. She hoped the heavy snow would continue, and obliterate the prints.

She reached the drugstore and went to the telephone booth and dialed the number of a taxi company. When she started to give the address, she could not for a moment think of what it was, and she felt an odd, exorbitant panic out of all proportion to its cause, but then she remembered and provided with an equally disproportionate sense of relief the names of the two streets intersecting outside. Leaving the booth, she went up to the front entrance of the store to wait; and the taxi must have been cruising quite near when it received the radio message, for it was sounding its horn at the curb within four minutes. She went out and got in and gave the driver the address of the shop downtown.

Because of the heavily falling snow and the increasingly hazardous condition of the streets, it took an unusually long time to get there. Now that she was in the taxi, however, she lost much of her earlier sense of urgency and was acquiring in its place a feeling of apathy and a collateral inability to think of anything whatever constructively. Besides, she was becoming sleepy. She leaned back in the seat and closed her eyes and longed and longed to go to sleep.

When the taxi eventually stopped, she paid the fare and went directly through the shop to her workroom in the rear. Removing her coat and shoes and stockings, she rubbed her feet with a towel from the lavatory until warmth was restored to them, and then she removed the crimson sheath and put on dry stockings and the shoes and dress she had worn to work the day before. This done, she began to think in spite of herself in a way that she did not wish to think. Here in the shop that had been Aaron’s, she was acutely susceptible to the sense of his presence, as if he were actually sitting and watching her with the bitter-sad light of his desire in his eyes; and her conviction of guilt and cowardice was intense and no longer evadable. She had come here and found first a friend and then a lover, if not complete love, and most of all she had found support in doing what she wanted most to do. Now the man who had received her and accepted her, the friend and lover, was lying dead beyond possible help, and she had run away from him when she might have stayed, had denied him when she might have given recognition and dignity to his body in death. Oh, she was a coward, she could not deny it, and perhaps she was even committing some crime, but still it was better, it was surely much better — if she could only achieve this conviction — to have done what she had done and would certainly continue doing.

She always came back to this. That it was better this way for him and for her. For herself, there was too much in precarious balance, too much to lose that had been gained, for there was no way of predicting the ramifications and effects of adultery and death in collusion. For him, there was little left to lose, but he would surely be grateful, if he could ever again be anything, that she had prevented the scandal. She knew that all this might be rationalization, but it worked to the point of leavening her guilt, and pretty soon she began to think about going home.