Adam Haslett - You Are Not a Stranger Here

“Where have you been?” Ellen cries as he enters the lobby.

“Where in the world have you been?”

He looks at her with what he imagines is a pleading expression.

“Paul,” she says, her voice quavering. She puts her arms around him, holds his head against her shoulder.

“Why didn’t you wake me? What’s going on?”

He’s used all the words he has to describe his state to her.

He could only repeat them now. A selfish repetition. How many times will he ask for a reassurance he will never believe? This should have ended by now.

He holds on to her, grabbing her more tightly because he can think of nothing to say.

THEY SPEND THE rest of that morning in the room.

Paul sits in a chair by the window, while Ellen reads the paper. She has called the library to let the curator know she will be starting a day later.

Her way of coping with him has changed over the years.

She’s read books and articles about depression and its symptoms, spoken to the psychiatrists he sees, tackled the problem like the researcher she is. She knows the clinical details, reminding him always it is a chemical problem, a treatable disease: eventually a doctor will find the right formula. From the window, he sees a man across the street depositing a letter in a mailbox and he wonders what the inside of the man’s leather glove would smell of. He runs a hand under his nose, sniffing his palm.

“Do you want to call Dr. Gormley?” Ellen asks.

His glance drops, freezing on the wool ticking of the armchair; strands of dust settle on the blue fibers. He shakes his head.

THAT NIGHT, WHEN he cannot sleep he goes into the bathroom and pees. He splashes urine on the edge of the bowl, then gets on his hands and knees to sniff the rim. He smells the cracks in the tile, the damp bath mat, his wife’s underwear, the hair and skin in the drain of the tub. He runs his finger along the back of the medicine cabinet’s shelf and tastes the gray-white dust. None of it comes close to the stench in that house.

ALL THE NEXT morning it rains, as the old woman said it would. They eat lunch in the nearly empty dining room of the hotel. Across the way, a German couple argues quietly over a map. Ellen suggests that Paul come back to the library with her, he could read the British papers there. She only needs a day or two, she says, then they can take the train back to Edinburgh, see more of the city.

There is a fragment of tea leaf on the rim of her cup; a sheen to the softening butter; a black fly brushing its feelers on the white cloth of the table. He pictures the library and at once fears some constriction he imagines he will experience there. It is the familiar fear of being anywhere at all, of committing to the decision to stay in one place.

“I think I’ll take a walk,” he says.

“Did you take the pill this morning?” she asks. There is no impatience in her voice. She has trained herself over the years to control that, which only reminds him of how he’s weighed on her, whittled her down to this cautious caring. He nods, though once again he’s disposed of the tablet in the bathroom, knowing she will count them.

After she leaves for the library, Paul sets out across the square, past the tables of books and china, heading into the narrow lanes. As he comes to the house and reaches out to knock on the low door, it opens and the old woman steps aside to let him enter.

“Good afternoon,” she says. “We never made our introductions yesterday. I’m Mrs. McLaggan.”

“Paul Lewis,” he says.

“Right. Mr. Lewis. I’m glad you’ve come.” They walk down the hall into the kitchen. “I’ll just be a minute,” she says, heading into the other room. It’s then he sniffs the air, finding it as thick and rank as the day before. A light comes on in the next room, the old woman calls to him, and Paul walks through the doorway.

Running along the far side of the room, completely obscuring the windows, is a wall of clear plastic gal on buckets filled with what appears to be petroleum jelly. They’ve been arranged in a single row and stacked from floor to ceiling.

Along the adjacent wall stands a metal clothes rack on wheels holding twenty or more identical blue track suits. A sideboard across from this is laid with dishes of lamb, potatoes, and string beans. Mrs. McLaggan stands in the middle of the room under another naked lightbulb. At the center is a table set for two.

The low ceiling, the electric light, the pale brown walls, the strange provisions all give the room the feel of a way station on some forgotten trade route, or a bunker yet to hear news of the war’s end.

“Now, dear, I hope you’ll just help yourself to everything,” Mrs. McLaggan says, standing by her chair. He is not hungry but fills a plate anyway and sits.

“Mrs. Lewis is getting on well at the university, then, is she?” she says, once she’s served herself and taken a seat.

“Yes.”

For a minute or two, they eat in silence.

“I was thinking perhaps you might meet Albert today,” she says. “I’ve told him about you. Difficult to know sometimes, but I think he’s keen to see you.”

“Do you do this often?”

“What’s that, dear?”

“Having guests you don’t know—strangers.”

Mrs. McLaggan looks down at her plate and smiles.

“You’re not a stranger here,” she says. “In the restaurant the other night… How should I say it?… I recognized you somehow, not like I’d met you or such, but nonetheless. And then yesterday morning…” Her voice trails off.

“Would you like a glass of wine?” she asks. For years he’s had no alcohol because of medication—the warnings and the caveats.

“Sure,” he says.

She pours them each a glass. “My grandson’s not well, you see.” After saying this, she pauses, her eyes wandering left, then right, as if deciding how to proceed.

“Glenda, my daughter—she was awfully young when she had him. Father was some fellow I never saw. Course the old codgers round here never tire of saying, ‘Wasn’t so back in our day, was it then?’ I don’t know, though. Seems to me the world’s always had plenty of trouble to spare a bit for the girls… I suppose what’s different is she went off, left Albert with me. Would’ve been harder when I was young, that would—a woman going out into the world like that. But there we are. Manchester she went to first. Then London for a spell.”

She sips her wine.

“You try not to judge… Course when Albert got sick I rang.

To tell her he’d gone into hospital. Tried the last number I had for her. No answer though, line disconnected. Been three years he’s been ill now.”

She looks up at Paul and smiles, wanly. “Here I am nattering on about my troubles.”

“It’s all right,” he says. He’s finished half a glass of wine. With the scent of it, the smell of the house has risen into his head again, but he fights it less now.

“You seem like a very sympathetic man,” she says. When the meal is finished, they return to the kitchen and Mrs.

McLaggan puts a kettle on the stove. “Shall we go up, then, and see Albert?”

“All right.”

She makes the tea and sets it out on a tray. Paul follows her up the stairs. They pass along a narrow hallway. The smell is stronger here. They stop at a door and she gestures for him to open it.

“It’s difficult at first,” she says.

The air in the room is so heavy with stench he feels like he’s being pressed to a man’s body and made to breathe through the filter of his skin—a familiar scent raised to a sickening power. It’s a small space with one eaved window, open at the top. In the corner, a boy of ten or twelve lies on a bed. He wears a blue track suit marked with greasy spots.