Adam Haslett - You Are Not a Stranger Here

In the car, his brother plays Rage Against the Machine loud enough to make the seats vibrate. He runs two stop signs and doesn’t speak the whole way to school. Finally, in the parking lot, Ted slips on his headset and a British rock star’s lilting voice sweeps everything from his mind: She walks in beauty like the night, ba ba ba ba ba da da, followed, as he climbs the front steps, by words he can never make out, Marilyn something, and then at last, as he turns into the corridor, the part he’s been waiting for, I’m aaaaching to see my heroine, I’m aaaaching to see my heroine, his head swooning to the rise of the vocal line, a line of bliss, followed by a tap on the shoulder—Mr. Ananian’s lips saying, “Turn that thing off.”

The stop button clicks in his ears.

“I’m not telling you again.”

Twenty-odd students slumped on their tan Formica desks, forty-five minutes of advanced algebra, not a hope of seeing Lauren Jencks. He feels ill.

“Oh my God,” he says, working a quizzical expression,

“I totally forgot my notebook—I’ll be right back,” and he turns into the hall, walking quickly away, the door slamming behind him.

“Way to go,” Stevie Piper says, giving him a thumbs-up as he darts out of a chemistry class. “You got to come tonight, man—Phoebe Davidson’s parents are outta town.”

“Sure,” Ted says, hurrying down the hall toward the art wing, where Lauren has life drawing. He’s nervous already about her spotting him at the door of the classroom, though he knows she knows he’s been looking at her for weeks, even months, ever since she arrived at school the beginning of term. Mrs. Theodopoulos has a photograph of a dog set on an easel at the front of the class and she’s using a pointer to direct her students’ attention to the dog’s ear. The kids, their backs to Ted, smudge charcoal on drawing paper, doing ears. Lauren’s in the second row: faded orange cardigan with the pockets stretched open, a bar of sunlight slanting across her back, a patch of her short brown hair shining above her ear, no earring. He loves the fact she doesn’t wear rings or necklaces or makeup and how large her eyes are and how she seems about ten years older than he is, as though she’s traveled the world five times over and for some mysterious reason, bad karma or whatever, is being made to repeat life in high school. In his room at night, when he demurely puts his image of her aside to jack off to the cruder images on the Net, he thinks she must want to tell someone how that’s been, to have to return from such distant places. If on certain rare occasions he does let himself undress her, she’s always on top, her back arched, her eyes closed, this look on her face as though she’s remembering another time, but then as he’s about to come she opens her eyes and leans down and they stare at each other before he rises up to kiss her, exploding. From where he’s standing, hard now thinking about her, he can’t see her dog’s ear. He leans his head in against the glass, trying to catch a glimpse of the side of her face, her hand, the drawing, leaving out of his field of vision the approaching juggernaut of Mrs. Theodopoulos storming the aisle, ballistic finger outstretched. She is halfway to the door when he sees her, the class turning now to watch, his heart thudding.

Giddy, he dodges and runs.

From the third floor walkway he can see across the courtyard, through the window, over Mrs. Theodopoulos’s shoulder, and into the first two rows of the art room. Since Lauren’s friends started laughing at the sight of him a few weeks back he’s known there is no point in playing it cool.

He stares at her without pretense. Bring it on, he thinks, bring on the ridicule, go ahead, call me pathetic and ugly and desperate, snicker at me, roll your eyes, say you’d never touch me in a mil ion years, that you’d all rather sleep with a monkey, go ahead, shout it.

No one seems to be watching him. They scrawl at their papers, minds still in bed, bodies drowsing through first period.

Then it happens. She looks up over her easel, and squinting, sees him. She smiles. He is sure of it. Lauren Jencks has identified him at thirty yards, and she’s smiling—at him or with him, he doesn’t dare to guess. He plays it cool, waves casually, starts walking away. It is decided then, he will take his tray to her table today, giggling friends be damned. He knows he must calm himself before they meet. In the bathroom stall he tries reading a page on the battle of Shiloh but gives up and hurriedly imagines four blond girls licking his naked body, chiding himself as he goes for his lack of originality, but relieved, when he is done, to breathe deeply for the first time that morning.

ELIZABETH WAKES TO colors more vivid: the Oriental carpet’s swirls of burgundy and gold; dawn kindling the sky an immaculate blue. She puts on her bathrobe and moves to her spot by the window. Planes of the rising sun sparkle in the courtyard’s frosted grass. It is the washed light of autumn that shone on the lawn of the hospital down on the Connecticut coast, the hospital where Elizabeth stayed a month the year before she and Will were married—this memory arriving now with unaccustomed ease.

He would come down from Cambridge on Sundays in his father’s old Lincoln Town Car. They’d take walks on the cliffs overlooking Long Island Sound. He was a bookish man, nervous. Like Elizabeth, he’d grown up in New England in a house of lapsed Episcopalians, raised like her on a liberal conscience, parents sighing resignedly over the New York Times, salvation—if there were such a thing—a promise of reform rather than redemption. Together she and Will managed hours of politeness with no mention of Elizabeth’s reasons for being in an institution—her little confusions, as her parents called them—the occasional trouble remembering where she was, the rarer sense she was being spoken to. Will was completing his doctorate in sociology at Harvard and they spoke of that. They’d met in his discussion section the semester before she’d taken a leave from Radcliffe, a school her parents still hoped back then she might return to.

Toward the end of her stay, Will had an appointment alone with her psychiatrist. Elizabeth behaved badly, listening at the door. “A mild imbalance,” the man said. She has never known if he was merely a sexist who thought her hysterical or a kind man who understood what Will meant to her, perhaps even a man who let his kindness supervene his judgment.

When Will asked him if they should still get married, the doctor asked if he loved his fiancée. Elizabeth never felt as safe as she did when she heard Will say, “Yes,” without stopping to consider. “Then you should marry her,” the doctor replied. After the wedding, they took her parents’ summer home in the town next to Plymouth, an old saltbox by the river, where her grandparents had lived all their lives. Just for a year, it was said, while Will finished his degree. No rent for them to pay, and he only needed to be in Cambridge twice a week. She can remember her dislike of the idea of living, however briefly, in that house, away from the city, in a place she’d spent months of her childhood, a house one branch or another of her family had lived in or owned for more than three centuries. The weight of the past felt so heavy there, it was hard to imagine a future. Will set his desk up in the parlor, next to the four-foot-high mahogany radio in whose bottom cabinets the old 78s of Beethoven and Mahler gathered their dust. Trying to read a book on the sofa in the afternoon, she had to work hard to forget the sight of her grandmother sitting in the chair opposite, napping through a summer rainstorm.

Before they were married they had talked about having children; they both wanted them. A bit of a strain, don’t you think? her mother said when she brought up the idea, their life together having just begun, no job for Will yet. But Will didn’t see any reason to wait. They were happy when she got pregnant. More than the wedding vows this meant permanence—a future they could predict.