Steven Millhauser - We Others - New and Selected Stories

I began to come down nightly, during her television time. I wanted to observe her, I wanted to be near her, I wanted — oh, who knows what we want, as we stand there watching you and trying to make up our minds! There she sat, intently watching a crime drama or an office comedy while she sipped cup after cup of herb tea and nibbled on salted almonds in a dish. At first I was careful to stay at the bottom of the stairway and peer into the darkened room. Against the wall directly on my left stood a CD player on a table. Then came a shadowy bookcase. The couch sat with its back to the bookcase, leaving a passageway.

After the first few nights I began to think about that passageway. Beyond the bookcase, in a dark corner near the half-open kitchen door, stood a lamp table and an armchair. It seemed to me that someone who was cautious but also deeply curious by nature could walk behind the couch in the direction of that armchair without attracting the attention of a person absorbed in a thrilling courtroom battle involving a beautiful defense lawyer and a corrupt judge. One night it happened. I walked along the passageway and sat down in the dark armchair. It was as simple as that. I was now closer to her and able to observe more of her: the other side of her head with its exposed ear, a moccasin sitting on a far cushion, her big pale knees. Had she turned her head, she might have seen him there — the stranger in the dark, waiting like a killer in a B movie. Did I want her to see me? Yes and no. After all, our condition is desperate. Ours is a savage loneliness of which you can know nothing. At the same time we are proud, haughty, unwilling to be known. For the moment it was enough to be in her presence.

Meanwhile I was getting to know quite a bit about her. Her name was Maureen, as I learned from the voice of someone on the phone. She taught second grade at the Collins Street Elementary School. She arrived home each weekday in the mid- or late afternoon, sometimes carrying small packages of groceries, as I could see from the attic window. She immediately climbed the carpeted stairs to her room on the second floor, where she changed out of her teaching clothes (scrape of hangers, bang of drawers) into her house clothes, which at night I saw to be either loose smocks printed with flowers, or oversized button-down shirts that hung down over baggy corduroys. Each night, at exactly eight by the mantelpiece clock — a white porcelain kitten — she called her mother and spoke to her while watching TV with the sound off. During these conversations she became tense and would rub her knuckles across her forehead or scratch her palm again and again with the curled fingers of the same hand. When she was through talking she would stride into the kitchen and return with a dish of malted-milk balls, which she devoured swiftly, as if angrily. The skin of her hands and face was very smooth, her nails short and polished. She fiddled a great deal with her eyeglasses, often removing them, holding them up toward the light from the kitchen, and returning them to her face.

It is not pleasant to observe someone secretly. For me at least there was in it no sense of exhilarating power, of mental or sensual freedom, as there might have been if I were a man of perverted appetites feeding on the sight of a seductive woman observed without her knowledge. What was it that I wanted, in that dark living room, in that lonely house, at the far end of town? To call it a desire for companionship would be to confuse it with more respectable realms of feeling. Our desire is infused with a darker, more ferocious longing: the desire for all that we have ceased to be.

I can’t say when exactly Maureen became aware of my presence. At first there were small signs — a sudden tension in her neck, an abrupt slight shifting of her head, a pause in the movement of her hand, as if she were listening. I should explain that she was somewhat nervous in temperament, and it wasn’t always easy to distinguish the new signs from her usual habits. Every evening she would get up to check the chain on the front door; she was always turning her head at the sound of a passing car. Sometimes she went to the kitchen, raised the shade, and peered out at the backyard. Once she called the police to report that someone was out there, behind the sugar maple — she’d seen something, she was sure of it. Every once in a while she sat up abruptly, rummaged wildly through her purse, and pulled out her cell phone, which was not ringing.

Now, it is my belief that these nervous natures, perpetually distracted by small disturbances in the outside world, are precisely the ones who prove unusually receptive to our kind. I began to sense a new alertness in her as I entered the room. Her body would become very still, her head would tilt slightly, her fingers stiffen, as if someone had crept up behind her and placed a hand gently on her shoulder. Once settled in my chair, beside the always unlit lamp, I would see her look around, very slowly. Sometimes she would stretch her arm across the back of the couch, place her chin on her forearm, and survey the part of the room behind her: the CD player, the bookcase, the lamp table and armchair in the dark corner.

One evening as I stepped from the bottom of the carpeted stairs and turned to enter the living room, I saw that something had changed. She was sitting on the couch, as always, but the television wasn’t on. The remote lay on the coffee table beside the cup of tea. The room was dark, except for the light that entered through the half-open kitchen door. I sensed immediately that she was waiting — waiting for whatever it was that had begun to visit her. She sat motionless and alert, before the dead TV. I hesitated. Wouldn’t it be better to return to the attic, where I had made a home of sorts among the outcast objects of a life? Why risk the dangers of an unpredictable encounter? But we are curious, we others; we are driven by irresistible urges of a kind we ourselves can barely understand.

So for a long time I stood on that threshold, feeling both sides of an argument blowing through me like bitter winds, before I stepped into the room.

As I entered I reminded myself that she had become aware of something, over the last few days. Exactly what she’d become aware of I had yet to find out. At the very least she was aware that something wasn’t right in her house, and she had taken steps to meet it head on. It was a show of courage that I acknowledged with a certain gratitude. My sense of her was that she was a lonely woman, a woman who might welcome companionship — even such companionship as mine. I was less sure of my own reasons for crossing the threshold. I suppose I craved simply to be in her presence, as someone shivering with cold might wish to be in the presence of a fire. But it was more than that. I could feel in myself a stranger desire: the desire to be seen. It struck me that I hadn’t been looked at by anyone since the flight from my house, under the smoky-quartz sky, a trillion years ago.

The couch, as I’ve mentioned, stood in the middle of the room, where it faced the television. Beyond the couch, in the far corner, my armchair sat beside the lamp table with the unlit lamp. But there was a second armchair, a more sociable armchair, situated between the couch and the television, and facing neither. It was toward this chair that I now made my way, passing behind the couch and keeping my distance from the back of a head that suddenly struck me as a child’s prank — at any moment I’d see the mop handle standing straight up between the couch cushions, the mop head peeping over the couch-back. At the end of the couch I swung around and made my way over to the chair. There I stood stiffly, facing her profile, with one hand resting on the back of the chair, like a bank president in a portrait.