Adam Haslett - You Are Not a Stranger Here

“You sure about this?” he asks.

“It’s late—we might as well,” Ellen says. “We can find something better tomorrow.”

He could stop her, try to explain, but as she looks back at him from the doorway he can see her nascent concern in the slight tilt of her head. She will be looking for signs of improvement in him, indications the trip was a good idea.

He will want time alone in the days ahead. If she worries too much now, she may hesitate to go by herself to the library.

It’s the first time in months he’s been capable of an instrumental thought, a weighing of needs.

“All right,” he says, and follows her through the door. At their table, the coffee stains and salt crystals on the red-and-white checkered oilcloth press him back in his chair; escaping them, he looks across the room to see a broad-faced old woman, her skin the color of a whitish moon. She sits at a table by the kitchen sipping a mug of tea. Their eyes meet for a moment, neither of them looking away. They stare straight at each other, expressionless, oddly intimate, like spies acknowledging each other’s presence in a room of strangers. She nods, smiles weakly, turns away.

When the waitress arrives, Ellen orders her food. Then there is silence. Paul reads the description of the chicken sandwich again. From the speakers, he hears the smooth, crooning voices of the Doobie Brothers.

Time barely moves.

“Paul, you know what you want?”

He looks into Ellen’s face, the slight rise of her eyebrow, a sign of apprehension, so familiar from the days she first saw him depressed, a year before they married, when for no apparent reason his basic faith in the world, the faith that there is a purpose in working or eating, dissolved, and she came to his apartment day after day with her books, conversation, news—patient and loving. Many times he’s wondered why, after seeing him that way, she still married him. She was wrong to do it, he knows now, seeing her strained eyes and pursed lips, the way the old sympathy must fight against frustration. He is the chain and the weight.

No matter how she struggles, he will pull her under eventually. Getting out of the house, out of the solipsism of blank days, coming to this foreign place, he can see it all more clearly. The waitress stares.

“Honey? What are you going to have?” Ellen asks, trying after a long day’s journey not to sound impatient. Silence stretches on.

“He’ll have a chicken sandwich,” Ellen says at last.

IN THE BATHROOM at the hotel, he stands before the mirror trying to recall his reason for being there. Electric light shines evenly on the sink’s white porcelain. Cool air slides from the windowsill across the floor onto his bare feet. Water swells on the lip of the faucet.

From the bedroom he hears Ellen’s voice. She seems to be talking about a friend of hers, a woman at the college who like Ellen has no permanent position, and was apparently just let go. There is something about courses not filled. She asks a question he doesn’t follow. He tries to piece together what he’s heard but it’s no good.

“You all right in there?”

He opens his fist and sees the pill he is supposed to take flaking in the sweat of his palm.

Ten times, maybe even twenty, he has sat on a doctor’s couch and answered the same battery of questions about his sleep and interest in sex, his appetite and sense of despair; and he’s said, yes, there was an uncle and a grandmother who, looking back, seemed unhappy in more than the usual ways; and yes, there were his parents, who divorced, his mother who always had a few drinks after dinner; and no, he doesn’t hear voices or believe there is a plot to undo him. At the end of each of the hours, he’s listened to the doctor’s brief talk about the new combination they’d like to try, how at first it might make him nauseous or tired or anxious. For years he’s done as he was told, and for stretches of time he’s felt like a living person. Then the undertow returns. Ellen hears of a better doctor. Again he must answer the questions. He’s always doubted the purpose of the drugs. Despite all the explanations, he’s never been able to rid himself of the conviction that his experience has a meaning. That the crushing pulse of specificity he so often sees teeming in the physical world is no distortion. That it is there to be seen if one has the eyes. He’s been told this is a romantic notion, a dangerous thing to cling to, bad advice for the mentally ill.

Perhaps it is. Though the opposite has always seemed more frightening to him, lonelier—the idea that so much of him was a pure and blinded waste.

“I’m fine,” he says softly, rinsing the damp powder into the drain.

In bed, Ellen leans her head on his chest, laying a hand flat on his stomach. There is nothing sexual about her touch.

There has been none of that for a long time. She is thirty-four and would like to have a child. He begins, as he has so often, to think of all the things he does not provide her, but knowing the list is endless, he stops.

“You feel nice and warm,” she says.

He runs his hand through her hair. She has never worn perfume or makeup, which for him has always added to her beauty, the lack of facade.

“You all set for the library tomorrow?”

“Yeah,” she says, nodding her head against his chest. She’s come to read correspondence from the Second World War, part of her research on the lives of women on the home front.

Her real interests are in the political history of the time, but her adviser has told her there is a glut of scholarship on the topic and it isn’t the best idea if she wants to find a faculty position. She’s thought about ignoring his advice, but when Paul stopped working, she decided it was best to be practical.

He remembers their meeting for the first time, at a friend’s house, where they sat in a bay window overlooking a garden. No matter what she spoke of, she seemed so optimistic: her work, their friends at the party, the cut of his jacket—it was all good. Those first months he would come to her apartment in the afternoons when he’d finished his teaching at the high school. He’d do his correcting at the kitchen table while she worked at her desk in the bedroom. It was as if he’d been invited into a parallel world, a place where small pleasures—like knowing she was in the other room—could be a daily thing. She had a bemused look on her face when one evening he tried to explain he wasn’t feeling well. They were sitting on the porch of her apartment after supper, a pop song, as he remembers it, coming from the window of her downstairs neighbor.

“You’re too hard on yourself,” she said. “That school wears you out. You need more sleep.” Her voice had a kindly tone. If he hadn’t known before, he knew then she’d never experienced the kind of dread he was trying to describe. It didn’t matter, he told himself then. That she loved him, that was enough. It wasn’t realistic to expect acknowledgment would ever be complete.

“I’ll just get started at the library tomorrow, just a few hours in the morning,” she says, reaching up to kiss him good night.

“Then we can take a walk around, see the beach.”

He touches his hand to her face.

“All right,” he says, switching off the bedside lamp.

EARLY MORNING, A pewter gray light hangs in the middle of the room, leaving the corners obscured, blurring the outlines of the sitting chair and bureau.

He dresses quietly; quietly he closes the door behind him.

The air outside is cold, mist blanketing the streets. He makes his way up toward the castle, and from there onto the path leading alongside the wall of the cathedral grounds.

Opposite is the cliff, grass running to its edge. He walks to the verge. He can hear the slosh and fizz of the sea below, the deep knock of a boulder being rocked in place by the waves. All of it invisible down there in the fog. It is better this way, he thinks.