Эд Макбейн - Strangers When We Meet

Facing his aloneness, her own solitude seemed overwhelming. She was suddenly frightened. The world seemed like a gigantic place to her all at once, a strange and forbidding place where she wandered alone and unwanted. There was danger in this place, hidden behind every tortured outcropping of rock, every twisted tree. In the wilderness, she wandered alone, her eyes wide with terror in a world alive with menace. In all this lonely wilderness, there was no one to whom she could turn — no firm hand or smiling face — only a forest of clutching trees and tearing brambles.

Whom can I trust? she thought. To whom can I go? Who wants me? Who loves me? What shall I do! How will I live, how will I survive, what can I do, where shall I turn, whom shall I love, what does one do alone, why am I alone, why am I afraid, I don’t want to be alone, I need someone, I’m scared, I can’t alone, I’m scared, I can’t, I don’t know, I want, alone, no, I can’t, yes trust please, love please, me please, take, take, please, I can’t, I’m afraid, I’m afraid, please, I’m afraid, please, please, please, PLEASE.

And the tears burst from her eyes like explosions of her soul.

She had cried before. She had certainly cried before. But this time the tears were tears of utter bewilderment, of sorrow wrenched from the depths of her being, sorrow that rose in her throat and burned there, scaldingly hot, to erupt in great wracking sobs, claiming her completely because she did not know why she was crying and so the crying became a final act in itself, with no reason for being and no reason for ceasing.

Larry turned to her, alarmed. “Eve, what is it?” he asked. His eyes darted from her face to the passers-by, and then back to her face again.

“I don’t know,” she said. She moaned the words. The words were the tortured cry of a wounded animal hiding in the darkness. “I DON’T KNOW!”

He seized her shoulders and shook her, and she stopped for a moment, gasping for breath. And then the crying came again in a series of short machine-gun bursts, her breath uh-uh-uhing as she tried to hold back the giant sobs. Her entire body trembled with the effort to hold back the sobs. The tears ran, but her sorrow did not need tears, needed only the twisted, tortured face, the wildly moving fingers in her lap, the gasps for breath as if she were suffocating, desperately trying to suck air into her lungs.

He shook her violently. “Stop it!” he said. “Eve, stop it !”

She nodded, but she could not stop crying. Foolishly, all she could say was “The people, the people...”

“The hell with the people!” He put his arm around her and tried to pull her to him, but she would not move. Her chest and shoulders heaving she sat like a stone and would not respond to his touch. “What is it?” he asked desperately.

“Are you happy?” she asked. Her voice was very small. It barely escaped her lips, thinly wedged itself between the sobs.

“No,” he said.

She nodded her head, and then she shook her head. The crying was beginning to taper off. Nodding, she said, “I want you to be happy.”

“All right, but stop crying, Eve. Please...”

“Can’t you be happy?”

“Yes. Yes, I can. It’s...”

“Is it me?”

“Eve, please, try to stop crying. Please don’t cry like this.”

“I can’t help it. Is it me?”

“No.”

“Is it? Am I making you unhappy?”

“No.”

“Because if it’s me...” A new wave of anguish tore through her. She turned her head from him, sobbing, gasping for breath.

“Eve, Eve...”

“If it’s me, say so. Tell me, Larry, and I’ll let you go.”

“Eve, this isn’t the time to...”

“When? When you come back? Will you come back, Larry? Will Larry come back, the person I used to know? Where are we, Larry? Who are we? Larry, don’t you know how much I need you?” she said, hurling the words on a sob, and then turning on the seat to fling herself into his arms. “Please don’t cut me off, please don’t kill me. I have to know I’m yours. Please, Larry, please!”

He held her close, and he comforted her and soothed her. The passers-by looked at them strangely, and then glanced skyward again, anticipating the arrival of Felicia.

In a little while it began raining.

He hailed a cab and took her back to the apartment.

Maggie did not begin dressing until nine o’clock that night.

The rain that had swept the development that afternoon seemed to have abated suddenly, leaving an anticlimactic stillness. The forecasters warned that this was the eye of the storm, the lull preceding the real onslaught of Felicia, but it seemed to Maggie the storm was over, it seemed to her it had passed. Larry had called again that afternoon to say he’d be leaving the city at nine that night, giving himself plenty of time in case the traveling was bad. She was grateful for the lull. He would be starting just about now, and she did not want him to be driving in the rain.

She was in her slip when Don came into the bedroom

“Where’s Patrick?” she asked.

“Downstairs. Watching television.” Don sat on the edge of the canopied bed, his hands behind him. “You really going, Margaret?” he asked.

“Yes, Don.”

“In spite of the storm?”

“The storm is over.”

“That’s not what they said on television.”

“Well, I’m going anyway.”

He watched her silently for a while. Then he said, “You’ve got wide hips, you know?”

“Mmm.”

“Real childbirth hips.”

“Thank you.”

“I wasn’t trying to be nasty,” he said apologetically. “I meant it as a...” He stopped and shrugged, and then fell silent again. At last he said, “You’re really looking forward to this trip, aren’t you?”

“I’m anxious to get away,” she said. “The house can get a person down.”

“Oh, sure, I know. Don’t misunderstand me, Margaret. I don’t mind.”

She felt a spark of anger in his words. She rose suddenly as if to hurl a retort, walked swiftly to the closet instead, and took a dress from one of the hangers. She pulled it over her head and smoothed it over her hips and all the while her hands worked she thought angrily, Why doesn’t he mind? She went to him and said, “Would you zip me up please?”

Don pulled up the zipper at the back of her dress, and then put his hands behind him on the bed again.

“You don’t seem very concerned about my going,” she said, a sharp edge to her voice.

“I just wish you’d wait for the storm to be over, that’s all.”

“I didn’t mean that.”

“What did you mean?”

“My going. Not the storm. Just my going.” With each word he spoke, she was becoming increasingly more angry. She could not understand the anger, but she knew it was spreading through her unchecked. As she walked to the dressing table, she could feel a frown claiming her face.

“Why should I be worried?” Don shrugged. “Everybody deserves a rest every now and then.”

“Not many men let their wives go alone,” she said. She sat and picked up her lipstick tube. In tense short movements, she jabbed at it with her brush.

Don shrugged again. “Who cares what other men do? You’re my wife, not theirs.”

“A lot of men would feel—”

“I can’t see anything wrong with your going away for a little rest.”

“ Most men,” she said, “wouldn’t trust their wives that far.”

“Well, I trust you, Margaret.”

“Well, maybe you shouldn’t,” she said, amazed when the words sprang from her mouth.

“What do you mean?”

“Just that!” she said, and she begged herself to stop, knowing the conversation had come too far already, and yet perversely and doggedly continuing as her anger mounted. “I might be running off to meet another man, for all you know.”