Steven Millhauser - We Others - New and Selected Stories

Besides, darkness is our natural element, as Maureen herself had cleverly come to understand. Light harms us, like a shout in the ear. Instinctively we avoid the glare over the kitchen sink, the clock radio with its violent green numerals, the ominous night-light howling in its socket. We prefer the quiet place where the rafters slope down to the floorboards. In earlier times, before the fanatical multiplication of light, we were no doubt more present in the darkness of the world, more visible, more familiar, more woven into the fabric of things. I was pursuing this line of thought when I was startled by a flare of light that immediately went out.

She had opened the door to the attic — what I’d seen was the light from the hall — and immediately closed it. She was climbing the stairs in the dark. Maureen never entered the attic. That she had done so, and in the dark, was alarming and revelatory: she must have come in search of me. I was fortunately far away from the head of the stairs, well hidden behind a wicker hamper beside an old couch on which sat an enormous bear. Any movement might reveal me. At the top of the stairs she stopped. She stood there a long while — I could hear her breathing as if she’d run around the block. She took a step forward and stopped again. She stood motionless for a full five minutes before turning and descending the stairs.

I understood that I was in some sense to blame for having provoked this attic journey — that she was bound to search the house for a presence she felt had taken up residence. I understood another thing as well: it was in my interest to confront her on her own ground.

I listened for her footsteps in the living room before making my way down. She was sitting in the dark like a queen of the netherworld. This time I entered decisively, and as I did so I thought how rarely I had acted with decision since the moment I had entered this house. We are not decisive, we others. Or rather, our decisiveness is intermittent and erratic, with intervals of paralysis, so that what it most resembles is its opposite. Then I recalled that other life, where I hurled myself through obstacles with energy and certainty. But already I had crossed the room in front of her and was sitting down in the armchair that faced neither the couch nor the television.

I could sense the change in her, though she remained as motionless as the cushion she sat on. It was a sudden tension of alertness — a tightening that was also a readiness. All her senses had sprung open. I could see her face in the darkness, looking more or less at me but not precisely. Her eyes moved, as if trying to find someone there.

“What do you want?” she then asked.

I hadn’t expected her to speak. In her voice I heard coldness, and anger — the anger of a woman whose privacy has been violated. I heard also a touch of curiosity. And there was something else I heard, something that seemed to me a kind of wary and distrustful hope. It was the hope of someone whose desperately dull life has at last taken a turn toward the unexpected — toward the unknown.

We do not like to speak, we others. We inhabit silence as we inhabit darkness — naturally. Even among ourselves, what takes place is a species of silent speech — but more of that later. At the moment I felt a dreary need to answer her.

“What I want,” I said, and stopped. It was the first time I’d heard myself speak. I heard what sounded like a voice at a great distance — a faint, thin, rippling voice, a voice blown by a wind.

“What I want,” I said again. “What I want—” The sound of those wavering words rang out in me like a cry. I felt a violence of wanting, a rage of bitter longing. The force of it frightened me, as if I had leaped out at myself in the dark.

“It’s all right,” she then said. “Everything’s going to be all right.” And I was grateful to her for those words, for she had felt my trouble; and I was angry at her for those words, for nothing was ever going to be all right.

She allowed me to sit there in silence — it seemed enough for her that I’d come at all. Nor did she object when I rose not long after to take my leave, though the look she threw at me seemed to say that I would find her there tomorrow, at exactly the same time. And so I visited her the next night, and the night after; it quickly became a habit. She would prepare carefully for these encounters. After dinner she changed clothes a second time — clash of hangers, thud of drawers — and sometimes there were long pauses, in which I imagined her studying herself before a mirror, or combing her hair with scrunched-up eyes. Back in the living room she would close the venetian blinds and take up her position on the couch, with her cup of tea and a book. Sometimes I heard a faint whirring or grinding sound: she was sharpening a pencil in the electric sharpener as she prepared a lesson plan or corrected a set of second-grade exercises. At eight o’clock she called her mother. After that came the malted-milk balls. I would hear low sounds from the television, and sometimes I could make out the clicks of turned-off lamps. Later in the evening I might hear a faint rattling sound: salted almonds spilling into a dish. At some point I heard her moving about the living room, drawing the long curtains across the windows. In the kitchen she turned off the overhead light, leaving only the fluorescent light above the kitchen sink. Only then was she ready for me. In the not-quite-dark darkness she would take up her position on the couch, drawing her legs under her, smoothing down her dress or fiddling with the knees of her pants, turning off the TV with the remote, and subsiding into stillness.

It was about this time that I would come down, for I too had been waiting. I would make my way over to the armchair and our evening would begin.

Maureen understood that I preferred not to speak, but she herself had a good deal to say. She spoke of her childhood in a small town in northern Vermont — she had read a lot, worn eyeglasses, and felt that her older, prettier, thinner sister was the one her mother really cared about. No boy ever gave her the time of day until senior year of high school, when Ron Olsen invited her to a party and left with another girl. She went to college at the University of Vermont and after graduation began teaching in elementary school in her hometown. At her school she fell in love with an older man, married him, and divorced him a year later when she learned he was carrying on with another teacher. She moved first to upstate New York, where she felt out of place, and then to Connecticut, where she’d been teaching for over twenty years. It was difficult for a single woman, the social life here was closed, her mother was always hounding her. She saw her sister once a year, at Thanksgiving, though she was close to Andrea, the older of her two nieces. Andrea was like a daughter to her, and visited her more than she visited her own mother — not that that came as a big surprise.

I listened with wavering attention to these revelations, wondering precisely what it was that I was doing there. It was true enough that I liked being spoken to — it hardly mattered what was said. Sometimes she would seize my attention by a sudden swerve in my direction. “I can’t always see you,” she might say, “but I always know you’re here.” Evidently we moved in and out of visibility, in accordance with laws that we ourselves have never understood. “Do you see me now?” I once said, in that quavering voice — for I sometimes broke into speech. “Oh yes,” she replied. “I can see you real well. You’ve got your hair parted on one side — eyeglasses — strong chin — a distinguished-looking man. You’re wearing a sport jacket — herringbone, I think — open — no tie. Your fingers are long.” At other times she could make out my eyeglasses and my general form but without any detail. These are the things that obsess our kind. We cannot be told enough about ourselves.