Paul Theroux - Mr. Bones - Twenty Stories

Shelby said, “There’s someone here.”

“I’ll check — don’t worry,” he said, and braced himself for Ellie.

She was on the porch swing, facing away. He saw the woman’s back, her cold purply hands — it was November — on the suspended chains that held the seat, the kerchief tightened over her head. She turned and the swing squeaked again.

“You.” The snarled word made her face ugly, as though with pain.

He had no idea who the woman was, and before he could speak, Shelby came up behind him and said, “What are you doing here?”

“Visiting my old friend Ray Testa,” the woman said.

“Are you Ellie?”

The woman frowned at the name. She said, “No. Ask him who I am. Go on, Ray, tell her.”

But he didn’t know. Even so, he started to gabble in fear.

“Think,” she said. “You used to visit me and my husband in New Hampshire. He was a photographer. You pretended you were interested in his pictures. You were very chatty. And then, when he was away, you visited me. You couldn’t keep your hands off me. Always sneaking around, sniff-sniff.” To Shelby she said, “This man drove two hundred miles to touch me.”

And the effort seemed preposterous, because the woman was gray, with papery skin and sad eyes and reddened gums showing in her downturned mouth. He hated himself for seeing only her fragility and her age, but because of her defiance it was all that mattered.

He said, “Joyce.”

“See? He knows who I am.”

“What do you want?”

“Just to pay a friendly visit.”

“Please go.”

The woman said, “Isn’t it funny? You drove all that way to see me — took half a day to get to my house, and all the probing, to make sure Richard was away. And now you can’t wait to get rid of me.”

With that, she stamped on the porch floorboards and hoisted herself from the swing. She stood leaning sideways, and she came at him, maintaining the same crooked posture, with a slight limp, a suggestion that she was about to fall down.

“This is how he’ll treat you one day, sweetheart,” she said to Shelby.

Ray let Joyce pass, then followed her to the driveway and kept watching her — where was her car? How had she gotten here? — but, still watching her, he saw her vanish before she got to the road.

Shelby was in tears, her face in her hands, miserable on the sofa. She recoiled when he reached for her.

“You know them,” Shelby said. “All of them.”

She refused to allow him to console her. She was disgusted, she said. She didn’t eat that night. She slept in the spare room thereafter. He regretted their sleeping apart, until one night soon after Joyce’s visit, he woke in his bed and became aware not of breathing but of a swelling shadow, someone holding her breath in the room.

He said, “Shelby?”

The soft laugh he heard was not Shelby’s.

“You probably think you had a hard time,” the woman said, becoming more substantial, emerging from the darkness as she spoke. “In those days, an abortion was a criminal offense. A doctor could lose his license for performing one. And it was painful and bloody and humiliating. It had another effect — I was never able to bear another child. I got married. My husband left me when he realized we’d never have children. I became a teacher, because I loved kids. I recently retired. I live on a pension. You destroyed my life.”

Just as he thought she was going to hit him, she disappeared.

In the morning Shelby said she’d heard him. “Who was it?”

“Talking in my sleep. I was dreaming.”

Certain that he was lying, Shelby said she could not bear to hear another word from him, and when he attempted to explain, she said in her unanswerable, dead-certain voice, “You keep saying how old and feeble they are, and how repugnant. But don’t you realize who they look like?”

He gaped at her, feeling futile.

“They all look like you. I sometimes think they are you. Each person in our past is an aspect of us. You need to know that.”

Ray called his ex-wife, but got her voice mail. “Angie,” he pleaded, “I don’t know how you’re doing it, but please stop. I’ll agree to anything if you stop them showing up.”

For several weeks no women from his past intruded, and Ray believed that Angie had gotten the message. He even called again and left a thank-you on her voice mail.

Shelby demanded that they see a marriage counselor. Ray agreed, but on the condition that the counselor be in Boston, far from their home, so that their anonymity was assured. “I want it to be a woman,” Shelby said, and found a Dr. Pat Devlin, whose office was near Massachusetts General Hospital.

On their first visit, after they filled out the insurance forms, they were shown into the doctor’s office.

“Please take a seat,” Dr. Devlin said. “Make yourselves comfortable.”

She read the insurance forms, running her finger down the answers to the questions on the back of the page. She was heavy, jowly, almost regal, wearing a white smock, her hair cut short, tapping her thick finger as she read, and her chair emitted complaint-like squeaks as she shifted in it, her movements provoked by what seemed her restless thoughts.

“I’m afraid I can’t take you on,” she said, sighing, removing her glasses, and facing Ray, who smiled helplessly. “Did you do this deliberately, to make me feel even worse?”

Ray said, “The appointment was Shelby’s idea.”

Looking hard at Ray, the doctor said, “I thought I’d seen the last of you and heard the last of your excuses. Maybe it’s unprofessional of me to say this — but it’s outrageous that you should come here out of the blue after the way you treated me.” She gripped the armrests of her chair as though restraining herself, and holding herself this way, her head back, she seemed like an emperor. “Now I must ask you to leave.”

Shelby was silent in the elevator, because of the other passengers, but in the street she said, “Tell me who she is, and don’t lie to me.”

“We were at BU together,” he said. “Premed.”

“You’re stalling,” Shelby said.

He was. But he had been thrown by “Dr. Devlin.” Her name was Pat Dorian — Armenian, a chemistry major. She was beautiful, with a sultry central-Asian cast to her face, full lips, and thick jet-black hair. He’d taken her to a fraternity party and they’d gotten drunk, and she’d said, “I feel sick. I have to lie down,” and she’d fallen asleep in his room, in his own bed, only to wake in the morning half-naked but fully alert, saying, “Did you touch me? What did you do to me? Tell me!”

He’d said, truthfully, that he could not remember; but he was half-naked too. And that was the beginning of a back-and-forth of recrimination that ended with Pat changing her major to psychology, so that she would not have to face Ray again in the chem lab.

“I knew her long ago,” Ray said.

“Don’t tell me any more,” Shelby said. She turned her gray eyes on him and said, “She looks like you too.”

Shelby became humorless and doubting, and she was like a much older woman, slow in the way she moved, as though fearing she might trip, quieter and more reflective, seeming rueful when Ray passed the bedroom and saw her lying alone — her bedroom. He slept in the spare room now.

He wanted to tell her that most people have a flawed past, and act unthinkingly, and that we move on from them. New experiences take their place, new memories, better ones, and all the old selves remain interred in a forgetfulness that was itself merciful. This was the process of aging, each new decade burying the previous one, and the long-ago self was a stranger. But for these women, all they had was the past. They dragged him back to listen to them, to take part in this ritual of unfulfillment, the reunion of endless visitations, old women, old loves, old objects of desire with faces like bruised fruit.