Adam Haslett - You Are Not a Stranger Here

“Yeah,” the girl sitting next to James said, appearing not to have heard the question. Trisha was an ethereal-looking character with a mass of hair as light as the skin of her face.

Her eyes were large and protruding, as though she were forever alarmed. James thought them an unlikely couple.

“Are you in business too, then?” she asked in a soft voice, beneath the rising chatter of another round of drinks. She was speaking to James alone, removing Clive from the conversation with the quietness of her tone. Clive turned to his food and was soon caught up in discussion with a man sitting across the table.

“Well,” James began, “at the moment I don’t do much of anything.”

“Do you enjoy that?” she asked, apparently uninterested in the whys and wherefores.

“I can’t say I do.”

“Me neither.” She looked down the table, sizing up the young woman in pearls, whose shiny brown hair hung in a gentle curl to her shoulders. Over the cacophony of deeper, male voices, this woman’s nasal inflection rose. The accent was well-to-do, the repartee with her male companions conducted with nonchalance, perhaps a little disdain. Trisha looked down again, inspecting her hand of painted nails, pressing back strands of frayed cuticle with the edge of her thumbnail.

“I take it you’re not working at the moment,” James said. She laughed. Pushing her plate away untouched, she fiddled with a pack of cigarettes. Her smile stiffened, came to pieces, and appeared again, as though attached to strings pulled by other hands. Then she leaned in closer to James and said even more quietly than before, “This isn’t as it appears. I’m here in what you might call a professional capacity. Your friend Clive wanted a little company while he’s in town. I think he’s an asshole. But if he stays conscious I guess we’ll be sleeping together in a few hours.” She sat up again in her chair and smiled vaguely at Clive, whose bloated face had grown redder with drink.

“You can laugh at me now,” she said nervously, out of the corner of her mouth. Then she turned to James again, pulled in by the intensity of her thought. “You can go ahead and tell me what a worthless life this is.” Her whole expression reached forward in anticipation, as if she saw a blow to the head coming and was determined not to flinch.

James felt as if he had been yanked from a stupor, pulled into the tight space of this woman’s fury, and to his surprise he didn’t feel like turning away.

“No,” he said, “I don’t want to say that. Honestly.”

She leaned her elbow on the table, resting her head on her hand. She looked disappointed. Around the table people were calling and laughing, conversation having given way to anecdotes shouted over the din.

“So are you rich or something?” she asked beneath the noise. “Is that why you’ve got time on your hands?” Gathering her plate back, she picked at a piece of bread.

“No,” James replied, feeling a sudden tenderness for this stranger. “To tell you the truth, I’m dying.”

The girl froze for an instant, torn from her own form of complacency. His words seemed to filter through her mind, her expression passing from confusion to incredulity to a kind of somber calm.

“I’m sorry,” she said, and James thought it genuine. “Do you have long?”

He looked into her large black eyes, then down at his hands.

“Difficult to say. Probably not.”

She was the first person he’d told. A year and a half the medications had worked, and then suddenly they were no good. A resistant strain, the doctors said. For a moment, he felt again the devouring shame that he’d let this disease he’d been so warned of into his body, let it in because he wanted pleasure and somewhere along the way believed people he shouldn’t have. But he’d learned early in life there were things it was best not to think about. The shame passed and he didn’t let his mind pursue it.

Suddenly, Clive was leaning over them, putting his arms around their shoulders, his bulbous face inserted between them.

“What are you two going on about?” he said, louder than necessary. “Just here a week, Finn, want to see my girl.” He cupped Trisha’s head in his hand and kissed her roughly on the lips. “Go on then, push over.” James moved down a seat.

Over Clive’s shoulder, the girl looked at him and for a moment he felt his tenderness reflected in the concern of her gaze. Clive began to caress her cheek. She managed to smile at him before closing her eyes.

Later, standing in the restaurant’s foyer as the group prepared to leave, Clive insisted James join them all the next evening at a pub on the King’s Road. Laughton, another classmate, would be along. James muttered an excuse—a project at work, long hours.

As she leaned against Clive by the cigarette machine, the girl came no higher than his shoulder.

“It was good to meet you,” James said but a waiter glided between them and when he’d passed, the girl had looked away; repetition would seem overbearing, he thought. He waved good-bye, and ahead of the others, made his way out of the restaurant.

On the curb in front of him a bus pulled alongside the shelter, and a small group of passengers stepped off the rear platform, disbanding as they gained the pavement. He headed east, behind the quickly disappearing figures.

THE BENCH BY the wall of the common was empty, the streetlamp already on. He should go home, he told himself.

But then there was a rustling of feet by the beech hedge, the sound of shallow breath. He kept walking. At the copse, he saw an unshaven man in a tank top picking his way carefully around the glimmer of the ground’s muddy patches. James moved farther toward the shed and waited just in from the path. Men, young and old, wandered among the trees, stopping now and again to pierce the shadow, a white piece of clothing or the whites of their determined eyes catching a speck of lamplight and floating for an instant in the darkness.

He let them pass by, trying still to convince himself, as he always tried, that he would thank himself for turning away.

Soon a man with thinning black hair, wearing a suit and polished shoes, approached and hung beside him. James remained still, reminding himself to breathe. There were muffled greetings, a hand placed flat on his beating chest.

He reached out to loosen the man’s tie, and then their lips met. James closed his eyes and the pent welter of longing rushed into his limbs. He ran his hands down the man’s back, pressed his shoulders, grabbed at the back of his head. In the now perfect darkness, he had the oddest sensation it was the girl from the restaurant he was embracing, her slender frame, her plight. He moved more gently, holding her like he would hold an old person, or someone who has lost their strength, trying to forgive by the way he touched. Then he felt the scratch of stubble along his neck, ran his hand past the dangling tie, and it was no longer the girl he was pressed against in this dance of apparitions, but his father. The hands at the fly, the condom, the warm mouth, they all came as a disappointment.

ONE MORNING A month later, a man from British Telecom knocked on the door. For weeks, James had thrown his post in the garbage unopened and the habit seemed to be attracting unsolicited visits. They had sent warnings, the man said, they had tried to contact him by phone, but his service had now been disconnected. Was there a problem? He told James there were installment plans for people with financial difficulties.

“It’s not the money,” James said. “I don’t want a phone.”

The man looked confused, as though perhaps James were a disturbed character and the service under discussion that of a halfway home. He peered through the front window, presumably looking for the person in charge. The previous Tuesday, the cable service had gone out, and soon thereafter, James had noticed that the newspaper no longer appeared on the doorstep each morning. Stepping into a taxi on the way to a cinema one afternoon, he had seen two men in sunglasses knocking at his door, and recognized them as employees of the collection agency Shipley’s used for its rental properties. They must do a sideline in credit cards, he’d thought, for while he ignored his mail, he had been careful to pay his rent.