Steven Millhauser - We Others - New and Selected Stories

The next day it rained. It was one of those violent autumn rains that hurl themselves against roofs and attic windows, while through the water-sheeted glass there’s nothing to see but the bleak dark sky and the branches bending in the wind. The attic was dusky-dark. A good day for solitude! That was the thought that presented itself to my mind as I made my way down the attic stairs in search of — something else. Through the storm I had heard Maureen’s car backing out of the drive. I was struck by the gloom of the upper hall, as if the storm clouds had penetrated the house itself. Then I saw that the shade had been drawn on the window at the end of the hall and the two ruffled curtains pulled together. For some reason I thought: They have left me here, they have all gone away. When I reached the bottom of the carpeted stairs I saw that all the shades had been drawn and the curtains closed. A sullen day-darkness hung in the house. Andrea was sitting on the couch, in her bathrobe, erect but with half-closed eyes.

She raised an arm and swept her hand vaguely sideways before letting it drop to the couch cushion. It rose and came to rest in her lap. “I wanted you to feel — welcome,” she said, without turning to look at me.

I walked past the couch in silence and settled into my armchair. The word “welcome” had irritated me, and I looked at her without pleasure. I wanted to shout: We never feel welcome! — but I sat there, listening to the windows rattling behind the closed curtains. I stared at her large hands resting awkwardly in her big lap.

She said, “Auntie Maur told me you like to — I don’t know, sit with her at night, and I thought maybe if we — I like rain, rainy days.” She paused. “It’s all right if you don’t feel like talking. We can just sit here.”

After a while she said, “I’m going to make some tea now. I think a cup of tea would be nice. I’ll be right back.”

I watched her go slowly past my chair into the kitchen. There was strain in her face, and her stride was slightly wrong in some way, as if she were practicing a walk in front of a mirror. As I listened to her moving about in the kitchen, the thought occurred to me that now would be a good time to rise from my chair and pass out the door into the storm, never to return. I sat there thinking this thought and hearing the sound of the rain against the house, and of the teapot as she set it down on the stove.

All that dark morning she passed back and forth between the kitchen and the living room, carrying cups of tea, plates of crackers, glasses of juice. In the living room she would sit for a while over her tea, then stand up and go to a window. There she pushed aside a curtain and looked out at the rain. Moments later she would go over to the bookcase, take out a book, and bring it to the couch, where she opened it up and immediately put it aside. Sometimes she went into the kitchen, washed a cup, and set it in the dish rack to dry. Even when she sat still she was always in motion, stretching out her arms and interlocking her hands, or raking her fingers through her tangled hair. She rarely looked in my direction, but from time to time would utter a few words intended for me, such as “These rainy days are really something” or “I can see you better now.” Even as she moved restlessly about, I was sharply aware of her awareness of me. I noticed that she was very careful to keep a good distance between us at all times; but it was when she was farthest from me, across the room or hidden away in the kitchen, that I most had the feeling she had somehow wrapped an arm around me and brought me with her.

At lunchtime she carried her plate with its sandwich and her saucer with its cup of tea into the living room, where she placed them on the coffee table. She ate bending over awkwardly, while repeatedly wiping her mouth with a napkin.

After lunch she brought her dishes back to the kitchen and returned to sit on the couch. She leaned back and closed her eyes. Slowly her mouth began to open; she covered it with a hand. “Days like this,” she said, “make me sleepy.” She shifted on the couch. Then she stood up, pushed a hand through her hair, and began walking toward the stairway. There she stopped, glanced in my direction, and began climbing the stairs.

I listened to her clumping up the stairs in her fuzzy pink slippers. In the dusky light of the living room a restlessness came over me, and as I rose from the armchair I had the odd sense that she was watching me from the landing, even though she was no longer in view.

When I reached the top of the stairs, no one was there. I could hear the rain against the curtained window at the end of the hall. I made my way past the closed door of the attic to a door that stood partway open, and with a feeling of anxiety I entered Maureen’s room.

The curtain had been drawn. Andrea lay on one side of the bed with an arm over her eyes. I sat down on the other side of the bed and then lay down. I have already mentioned the sensation of danger that flares in us when the distance between us and you grows too close. That sensation was leaping in me as I lay on the bed beside this young woman with the fuzzy pink slippers who lay on her back with an arm flung over her face. But I was aware of a second sensation as well. This might be described as a sensation of disobedience, a rebellion against the very warning that sounded in me like a cry. It’s the feeling of a child who reaches toward the fire and, despite the heat scorching his hand, reaches farther. Was it perhaps only a desire to know? I forced myself closer to the flame, which in this case was also an icy wind. As I crossed the boundary I felt an unraveling, a fierce dissolution. Flesh stops at flesh — but we others, we mingle entirely, we invade and penetrate like rays of light, like dark smoke. I felt myself spreading through her like wind in a room. Who knows how long it lasted? At some point I found myself separate from her. I lay there unmoving. Tears of terror or tenderness lay on her cheek. Danger leaped along my side.

So I lay there listening to the rain against the draped windows. I became aware of pictures drifting before me: the book with the black dagger and the blood-red rose, Maureen raising her eyeglasses to the lamp, my father opening his black bag on the rug, Andrea standing at the end of the hall, her shoulders stooped and her head bent. Each picture seemed to contain a secret that eluded me. If I could grasp that secret, I would understand the universe. Then I became aware of my silence, as I lay there examining the pictures in my mind, and I recalled where I was, in the middle of an otherwise ordinary afternoon. I had the sensation that I was being looked at, and when I turned my head I saw a pair of dark tired eyes, much larger than I had remembered, looking at me with an air of expectation, as if it were my turn to say something in a conversation we had been having. Gradually her eyes changed, a dullness came over them, and she turned her head away. I was wondering what I ought to do to attract her attention when I became aware of a sound that was not the sound of the rain. It was at this moment that the door opened and Maureen entered the room.

She was stepping toward the bed and had begun to open her mouth, as if to address Andrea, for it must have seemed strange to her that the curtains were drawn in the living room and at the end of the hall, in the middle of the day, and in fact I detected in her face an expression of concern, as she looked at her niece lying in bed, in a darkened room. Her mouth was still opening when she saw me there. Her body stopped abruptly — she was leaning a little forward — and for a moment it looked as though every particle of her flesh had been replaced by a mineral deposit, as if she’d become a petrified tree, destined to remain there, leaning a little forward, with her mouth partly open, till the end of time. But gradually she came back to life, and straightening up, and raising a hand toward her cheek, without touching her face, she said, “No …” Then she began shaking her head slowly back and forth, like someone trying to get rid of a crick in her neck. Her “no,” although spoken quietly, must have been heard by Andrea, who removed her arm from her face and half raised herself on one elbow as she stared at her aunt with large, nervous eyes. “No,” Maureen said again, still shaking her head, and she began stepping backward toward the door. “Auntie Maur!” said Andrea. “It’s all right, I was just lying here.” But at this Maureen drew herself up and said in a loud voice, “I trusted you,” and raising a hand she pointed a finger at her niece. Now it was Andrea who began shaking her head, while she ran a hand through her hair and started to open her mouth, which she closed at once as if she’d thought better of what she was about to say, before she lowered her eyes beneath her aunt’s fierce stare. But now Maureen, like someone who had exhausted herself in a prolonged outburst, dropped her hand to her side, and with a distracted glance that swept across Andrea’s half-lifted torso and the lower part of my face, she took a final step backward out of the room and closed the door. As the door shut, Andrea reached out her arm, as if to pull the door back open, and kept her arm suspended there, as if she’d forgotten it.