Steven Millhauser - Dangerous Laughter

It may have been a little different; one evening she may have become aware of what was happening to her, she may, in a profound movement of her being, have embraced her fate and joined forces with the powers of dissolution.

She is not alone. On street corners at dusk, in the corridors of dark movie theaters, behind the windows of cars in parking lots at melancholy shopping centers illuminated by pale orange lamps, you sometimes see them, the Elaine Colemans of this world. They lower their eyes, they turn away, they vanish into shadowy places. Sometimes I seem to see, through their nearly transparent skin, a light or a building behind them. I try to catch their eyes, to penetrate them with my attention, but it’s always too late, already they are fading, fixed as they are in the long habit of not being noticed. And perhaps the police, who suspected foul play, were not in the end mistaken. For we are no longer innocent, we who do not see and do not remember, we incurious ones, we conspirators in disappearance. I too murdered Elaine Coleman. Let this account be entered in the record.

I

WAKERS AND DREAMERS

I FIRST SAW WOLFin March of junior year. This isn’t his story, but I suppose I ought to begin with him. I had slung myself into my seat with the careful nonchalance of which I was a master, and had opened my ancient brownish-red copy of The Mayor of Casterbridge, which held nothing of interest for me except the little threads of unraveling cloth along the bottom of the front cover, when I became aware of someone in the row on my right, two seats up. It was as if he’d sprung into existence a moment before. I was struck by his light gray suit — no one in our school wore a suit — and by the top of a paperback that I saw tugging down his left jacket pocket. I felt a brief pity for him, the new kid in the wrong clothes, along with a certain contempt for his suit and a curiosity about his book. He seemed to be studying the back of his left hand, though for a moment I saw him look toward the row of tall windows along the side of the room. One of them stood open, on this mild morning in 1959, held up by an upside-down flowerpot, and for some reason I imagined him striding across the room, pushing the window higher, and stepping through.

When everyone was seated, Mrs. Bassick asked the new boy to stand up. It was an act he performed with surprising grace — a tall young man, sure of himself, unsmiling but at ease in his light gray suit, his hair curving back above his ears and falling in strands over his forehead, his long hands hanging lightly at his sides, as if it were nothing at all to stand up in a roomful of strangers with all eyes on you, or as if he simply didn’t care: John Wolfson, who had moved to our town from somewhere else in Connecticut, welcome to William Harrison High. He sat down, not quickly or clumsily as I would have done, and leaned back in an attitude of polite attention as class began. Five minutes later I saw his left hand slip into his jacket pocket and remove the paperback. He held it open on his lap during the rest of class.

Later that day I passed him in the hall and saw that he had shed his jacket and tie. I imagined them hanging forlornly on a hook in his locker. The next day he appeared in a new set of clothes, which he wore with casual ease: chinos, scuffed black loafers with crushed-looking sides, and a light blue long-sleeved shirt with the cuffs rolled back twice over his forearms. I envied his ease with clothes; girls smiled at him; within a week we were calling him Wolf and feeling that he was part of things, as if he’d always been among us, this stranger with his amused gray eyes. Rumor had it that his father had been transferred suddenly from another part of Connecticut; rumor also had it that Wolf had flunked out of prep school or been thrown out for unknown reasons that seemed vaguely glamorous. He was slow-smiling, amiable, a little reserved. What struck me about him, aside from his untroubled way of fitting in, was the alien paperback I always saw among his schoolbooks. The book marked him. It was as if to say he’d gotten rid of the suit, but refused to go further. That, and the slight reserve you could feel in him, his air of self-sufficiency, the touch of mockery you sometimes felt in his smile — it all kept him from being simply popular. Sometimes it seemed to me that he had made an effort to look exactly like us, so that he could do what he liked without attracting attention.

We fell into an uneasy friendship. I too was a secret reader, though I kept my books at home, in my room with the wide bookcase and the old living-room armchair with a sagging cushion. But that wasn’t the main thing. I thought of myself, in those days, as someone in disguise — beneath the obedient son, beneath the straight-A student, the agreeable well-brought-up boy with his friends and his ping-pong and his semiofficial girlfriend, there was another being, restless, elusive, mocking, disruptive, imperious, and this shadowy underself had nothing to do with that other one who laughed with his friends and went to school dances and spent summer afternoons at the beach. In a murky sense I felt that my secret reading was a way of burrowing down to that underplace, where a truer or better version of myself lay waiting for me. But Wolf would have none of it. “A book,” he declared, “is a dream-machine.” He said this one day when we were sitting on the steps of the town library, leaning back against the pillars. “Its purpose,” he said, “is to take you out of the world.” He jerked his thumb toward the doors of the library, where I worked for two hours a day after school, three days a week. “Welcome to the dream-factory.” I protested that for me a book was something else, something to get me past whatever was standing in my way, though I didn’t know what it was that was in my way or what I wanted to get to on the other side. “What gets in your way,” Wolf said, as if he’d thought about it before, “is all this”—he waved vaguely at Main Street. “Stores, houses, classrooms, alarm clocks, dinner at six, a sound mind in a healthy body. The well-ordered life.” He shrugged and held up a book. “My ticket out of here.” He gave that slow lazy smile of his, which had, I thought, a touch of mockery in it.

He invited me to his house, one warm April day, when all the windows stood open and you could see out past the baseball field to the railroad tracks running behind it. We left together after school, I walking beside my bike as my books jumped in the dented wire basket, Wolf strolling beside me with a nylon jacket flung over one shoulder like a guy in a shirt ad and his books clutched at his hip. I lived in a newish neighborhood of ranch houses not far from the beach, but Wolf lived on the other side of town, out past the thruway, where the houses grew larger, the trees thicker and greener. We entered the shade of the thruway overpass, filled with the roar of eighteen-wheelers rumbling over our heads, then cut across a small park with slatted benches. After a while we found ourselves walking along a winding road, bordered by short brown posts with red reflectors. Here the houses were set far back from the street behind clusters of pine and oak and maple. At a driveway with a high wooden fence along one side and a high hedge on the other, we turned in and climbed a curving slope.

Around the bend, Wolf’s house appeared. Massive and shadowy, it seemed to stand too close to me as I bent my neck back to look up at the row of second-floor windows with their black shutters. The house was so dark that I was surprised to notice it was painted white; the sun struck through the high trees onto the clapboards in small bright bursts of white and burned on the black roof shingles.