Adam Haslett - You Are Not a Stranger Here

For an instant, he’s poised between drive and revulsion. He licks her breast. She presses his face harder against her skin. He wants it now, his whole body wants it. With his elbows, he presses against the inside of her knees, spreading her legs.

“Put it on,” she whispers. He leans back to grab from his jeans the condom he bought that morning. He’s never used one before but he’s seen pictures; he rolls it on as fast as he can. Then he crawls forward and she takes his penis in her hand. There are long, hideously awkward seconds as she squiggles farther down on the bed and he tries to push. His eyes are clenched shut. He hopes hers are too. Lauren takes a sudden, sharp breath, shouts, “Ow!” He holds himself above her.

“It’s okay,” he says. “I can stop.”

“No,” she says, her voice so deep and determined he doesn’t recognize it. She puts her hand on his butt and pulls.

He can feel her trembling. Her breath is short and tight as he uses the muscles in the backs of his legs to move in and then almost out of her. It feels involuntary. Beastlike. Good.

He begins to shiver and then with no warning comes in a rush, collapsing down onto her, burying his sighs in the pillow over her shoulder.

For a few seconds he lies across her, then rises, slipping out of her, leaning back onto his ankles. She covers herself with a pillow. He feels a wave of misery and defeat.

“Are you okay?” he whispers.

Her expression is blank, a little stunned. As though she has arrived somewhere only to discover it is no different than the place she has come from.

He leans to kiss her, but she turns her head. A bit of the lipstick he gave her is smeared across her cheek. He wonders why she ever decided to wear it. They remain there on the bed, neither of them moving. Hot air streams from a vent somewhere on the floor. His lips are dry and cracked.

From beneath the pillow, he notices a dark red stain seeping along the sheet. Looking down he sees his crotch is dark and wet. Lauren moves quickly off the mattress, wrapping herself in a towel, hurriedly moving to the bathroom. She closes the door behind her. He’s kneeling there, on this enormous bed, staring into a circle of blood.

THREE TIMES SHE presses the bell, but there is neither sound nor answer. The downstairs lights are on, the shades up, snow visible as it drops through the squares of brightness into the bushes. She is cold and would like to be inside. Trying the latch, she finds it unlocked.

“Hello?” she calls, standing in the huge front hall, beneath a sparkling chandelier. “Ted?” The only reply is a click followed by the soft rumble of the furnace.

The walk has tired her. She passes into the dining room looking for a place to rest. The table needs painting, though it looks like a fine, sturdy old piece of furniture. She sits at the near end, taking off her hat, opening her coat. They have gone for a walk, she decides, young lovers in the snow, walking this ground she used to play on. She feels herself kneeling on the veranda, her arms around Peck, the shaggy mutt, holding him as he barks at a bird in the yard, feeling the bark’s reverberations in her chest, her brother yelling at a friend up in the copper beech, the drone of the mower in the back field, air scented with grass; and she wrestles on the lawn with her father, trying to pry a coin from his fist. Her fingers run over the dent in his thumbnail; her mother says, Watch it, you two, leaning down to kiss her father. On the floor of the upstairs landing is a grate just above where her grandmother sits at her desk, and with her ear against it, crouched on the floorboards, Elizabeth hears the steel nib of her grandmother’s ink pen scratching the thick card stock she writes her thank-you notes on. She is playing by herself upstairs. The bedspreads have patterns of tufted cotton. The posts of her grandparents’ bed are of dark red cherry wood, tops carved in the shape of pineapples. Standing on the corner of the mattress, grasping the bedpost, her heels sink lower than the balls of her feet, stretching the joints of her ankles. The knife she uses to stab at the wood is the knife her grandfather uses to carve roast chicken on Sundays. Beneath the quick jabs of the silver tip spots of lighter red blossom in the dark varnish. Her heart beats so fast she can hardly breathe. Her mother shuts her in the guest room and in the evening her father spanks her over the edge of the couch, though she tells him she didn’t want to do it. The marks are still on the posts of the bed there in the candlelight, as the snow falls, and she lies grasping her mother’s hand, wishing the doctor would come to make her baby safe.

She wonders what other people’s lives are like. Ted halts at the entrance to the dining room, slack jawed. Mrs. Maynard sits in her fur coat at the far end of the table, staring out the window, a bleary, ruined look on her face.

“Mrs. Maynard?”

Elizabeth turns to see Ted standing in the door to the living room. He’s not wearing a shirt, only jeans. His hair is as messy as she’s ever seen it.

“Mrs. Maynard, what are you doing here? How did you get here? What’s going on?”

“I thought you’d gone for a walk,” she says. “It’s snowing, you know. I thought you and Lauren were on a walk.” She looks about the room as if searching for something. “I used to play on the ground this house is built on. Did you know that? Some say this place is an offense—ugly—that most all of what we’ve done since the beginning is ugly. But you’re not, Ted. I told you. You’re beautiful. The dead don’t remember you. It’s better that way. Will you come here and sit?”

Ted watches Mrs. Maynard lean forward and pull a dining room chair up beside her. She’s had some kind of break, he thinks. The woman must be with her. He crosses to the chair and sits.

From her coat pocket, Elizabeth takes the folded piece of notepaper on which she’s kept her list of questions. She pauses, then reading from the page, asks in a quiet voice,

“Did you ever think you meant more to your mother than her own life?”

It’s some nonsense she’s written down, Ted says to himself.

He still can’t figure out how she got here. He’ll have to drive her back.

“I’ll just read them, Ted, and then you can… What is your mother’s name?”

The roads will be bad by now; he doesn’t have snow tires. It will take time.

“Mrs. Maynard—”

“Do you exist as a judgment of her? What does it feel like to be in her arms?”

Ted would like her to be quiet now. There is so much to think about. For ten minutes he stood by the bathroom door, calling softly, “Are you all right?” but Lauren said nothing, and all he could think of was her disappointment.

“Can you see your mother’s face, or is it so familiar you don’t see it? Do you feel that you know her?”

Elizabeth looks up and sees tears running from Ted’s impassive eyes. She puts aside her list and lifts her hands to his cheeks. At her touch, his mouth trembles and he starts to sob.

You and all the inheritors of wealth who think life is a matter of perfected sentiment. You are wrong.

Elizabeth is exhausted. She does not argue. The lights in the room stream into her eyes like refulgent dawn. At last, she feels the warmth of her son’s tears in the palms of her hands.

FOR THEIR SUPPORT during the writing of this book, I would like to thank the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, the Michener/Copernicus Society of America, and the MacDowel Colony. I would also like to thank my editor Nan Talese, my agent Ira Silverberg, Frank Conroy, Marilynne Robinson, and Connie Brothers at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Sandy McClatchy at The Yale Review, and Adrienne Brodeur and Samantha Schnee at Zoetrope for their encouragement. For helping to improve various stories in this book, I owe thanks to Al an Gurganus, Nick Sywak, Minna Proctor, Justin Tussing, and Jacob Molyneaux. Finally, for making sure I left the apartment now and again, my thanks to Adam Hickey and David Grewal.