If You Could See Me Now

by Peter Straub

  “I’ll bite. Why today, especially?”

  “What do you think of Pastor Bertilsson?”

  “I’ll spare you. Why?”

  Duane was crossing and uncrossing his legs, looking very uncomfortable. On his feet were heavy black brogues, immaculately polished. “You never exactly liked him, did you? I know. He maybe did go a little out of line when you and Joan got married. I don’t think he was right to bring up all that old stuff, even though he did it for your own good. When I got married, he didn’t talk about any of my old mistakes.”

  I hoped that his daughter would forget all about my reference to the Dream House—it had been a serious betrayal. While I was trying to think how I could tell him that I had let his secret slip out to his daughter without actually telling her anything about it, Duane got over his own nervousness and finally got to the point.

  “Anyhow, like I was saying, he said a few words about you today. In his sermon.”

  “About me?” I yelped. My guilt disappeared like flash powder.

  “Wait, Miles, he didn’t actually name you. But we all knew who he was talking about. After all, you made yourself known around here, years ago. So I guess most everybody knew who he was talking about.”

  “You mean I’m actually having sermons preached about me? I guess I really am a success.”

  “Well, it would have been better if you’d been there. See, in a community this size—well, a small community like this sort of draws together if any trouble happens. What happened to those two girls was a terrible thing, Miles. I think a man that can do something like that ought to be slaughtered like a pig. The thing is, we know none of us could have done it. Maybe some over in Arden, but none of us here.” He shifted in his chair. “While I’m talking on this I ought to say something else. Look. It might be better if you didn’t go around trying to see Paul Kant. That’s all I want to say about that.”

  “What are you saying, Duane?”

  “Just what I said. Paul might have been okay when he was a kid, but even then you didn’t know him all that well. You were only here in the summers.”

  “To hell with that,” I said. “Suppose you tell me what was the point of this sermon of Bertilsson’s.”

  “Well, I guess he was just saying how some people—”

  “Meaning me.”

  “—some people put themselves outside normal standards. He said that’s dangerous, when everybody’s got to pull together, times of trouble, like now.”

  “He’s guiltier of that than I am. Now I wish you’d tell me what crime Paul Kant is supposed to have committed.”

  To my surprise, Duane flushed. He turned his eyes toward the pot bubbling on the stove. “Well, it’s not a crime, exactly, not that you could say a crime, exactly. He’s just not like the rest of us.”

  “He puts himself outside normal standards. Good. That makes two of us. I’ll make a point of seeing him.”

  We stared at one another for a moment or two, Duane fidgeting, looking out of his depths. He appeared to be afflicted with moral uncertainty. In a dubious cause he had acted dubiously. He obviously wished that he had never brought up the questions of Bertilsson and Paul Kant. I remembered the idea I’d had in Freebo’s Bar—an idea brought up by my tactless mention of the Dream House. “Shall we change the subject?”

  “Hell, yes.” Duane looked relieved. “Do you feel like having one of those beers?”

  “Not now. Duane, what did you do with the rest of the stuff from Gramma’s house? The old pictures, and all the furniture?”

  “Well, let me think. I put the furniture down in the root cellar. It didn’t seem right to sell it or throw it away. Some of that stuff might be valuable someday, too. Most of those old pictures I took down I put in a trunk in the old bedroom.” That was the bedroom on the ground floor, where my grandparents had slept during my grandfather’s life.

  “All right, Duane,” I said. “Don’t be surprised by anything you hear.”

  PORTION OF STATEMENT BY DUANE UPDAHL:

  July 17

  So that was what he said just before the really strange business began. Don’t be surprised, something like that. Don’t be surprised by anything. Then he went off toward the old house like a rocket was in his pants. He was all sort of excited—he was drunk some too, Sunday morning or no Sunday morning. I could smell the booze on his breath. Later I found out from my kid that he’d been over to Freebo’s, down on Main. You know? He was just sittin’ there with Zack, suckin’ up drinks like it was Saturday night. Kind of funny, considering what he tried to do to Zack later. Maybe he was sort of trying him out, you know? Testing him? That’s what I think, anyhow. I think maybe he was keeping his mind on Paul Kant too, to see if he could use him like he tried to use Zack. What a choice, huh? But I don’t know. I don’t understand that whole Paul Kant business. I guess none of us will ever know what happened there.

  —

  I found the trunk immediately. In fact, I had known where it was the moment Duane had said that it was in the old bedroom; it was an ancient Norwegian sea chest, not truly a trunk, a small brassbound wooden case brought to America by Einar Updahl’s father. It had carried everything he owned in a space just about large enough to hold four electric typewriters. It was a beautiful old thing—the wood was handcarved, filigreed with scrolls and leaves.

  But the beautiful old thing was also padlocked, and I was too impatient to go back and ask Duane where he’d misplaced the key. I slammed out of the house onto the porch and went down its length to the far door. In surprising heat, I tugged open the old sliding doors of the garage and went inside. It smelled like a grave. Damp earth smells, a general odor of mold and beetles. Old tools hung on the walls, just as I had remembered. Rusted saws from the log-clearing days, three ten-gallon gas cans, hatchets and hammers, all on nails driven into the walls. I took a crowbar off its nail and went back into the house.

  The lip of the crowbar fit neatly into the gap between the lid and the body of the chest; I pressed hard on the bar, and felt wood yielding. The second time I pressed on the bar I heard a splintering sound; I put all my weight on the bar, and the wood above the lock popped away from the lid. I fell to my knees, the wound on my palm throbbing where I had unknowingly, unfeelingly been gripping it against the crowbar. With my right hand I banged open the lid of the chest. The inside was a disorder of framed and unframed photographs. After a second of pawing through them ineffectually and seeing several versions of Duane’s square face and my vanished cowlick and many pictures of orthodontia at work on the toothy Updahl smile, I impatiently turned the entire chest over and sent the sheets and frames across the hooked bedroom rug.

  It stared up at me from four feet away, self-isolated from the other photographs; someone had removed it from its frame, and it was curling slightly at either end. But there it was, and there we were, seen by Uncle Gilbert as we must have been seen by all, our spirits flowing toward each other, more one than two drops of blood in one bloodstream, no longer children but trapped in the beautiful amber chrysalis of the teens, our hands clasped and our faces smiling out in the summer of 1955.

  If I had not already been kneeling, it would have brought me to my knees—the force of that face next to mine squeezed all the breath from me. It was like being punched in the stomach with the handle of a rake. For if we were both beautiful, stuck there in ignorance and love in June of 1955, she was incomparably more so. She burned my intelligent young thief’s face right off the paper, she canceled me, she was on another plane altogether, where spirit is incandescent in flesh, she was at the height of being, body and soul together. This live trumpet blast of spirit, this illumination, put me altogether in shadow. I seemed almost to be levitating, carried by the currents of magic and complication of spirit in that face which was her face. Levitating on my knees, my knees already rubbed sore by the hooked rug!

  That face which was her face. By telepathy, we had been in communication all our lives—all my life I had been in touch with her.
<
br />   Then I knew that all my life since our last meeting had been the project of finding her again. Her mother had retreated in shock back to San Francisco; after I had stolen a car and wrecked it in a spectacular crash not forty feet from the spot where the painted thermometer overlooked an Italian distance, my parents had clapped me in a prisonlike boarding school in Miami. She was in another state; she was in another condition. We were apart but (I knew) not finally apart.

  —

  After an incalculable number of minutes I rolled over onto my back. Moisture dripped into the hair at my temples. The back of my head was embedded in crushed photographs and long splinters of Norwegian wood. I knew I would see her, that she would return. That was why I was there, in my grandmother’s house—the book had been an evasion. Wood dug into the back of my head. I had never intended to finish the dissertation. Spirit would not permit it. From now until she came, I would prepare for her coming. Even the blank letter was part of the preparation, part of the necessary trial of spirit.

  —

  I was in the final stages of the transformation (I thought) which had begun when I had torn open my hand on the VW’s engine cover and felt the freedom which was her freedom invading and sluicing through me. Reality was not a single thing, it broke through the apparently real like a fist. It was this knowledge which had always trembled in her face. Reality is merely an arrangement of molecules held together by tension, a veneer. In her face was there not the face she’d had at six? Also the face of herself at fifty? As I lay sprawled on the hooked rug in a confusion of paper and splintered wood, the white ceiling above me seemed to dissolve into white sky. I thought fleetingly of Zack, and smiled. Harmless. Harmless clueless nut. When I lost normal consciousness, I dreamed not of being suspended adrift in a far blue horror, but of Alison swimming toward me.

  This image rang through my suspended mind. Everything was a part of this surge of feeling, my ripped hand, the unimportant discomfort in my neck, even Zack’s prattle about reality being thinnest in the Midwest, even my theft and destruction of Maccabee’s terrible book. The proof would occur on the twenty-first of July. There were no impossibilities. I slept. (I passed out.)

  —

  And woke full of purpose. When I had said to Duane, don’t be surprised by anything you hear, I’d had a plan which I now saw to be absolutely necessary. I had to begin the preparations. I had to be ready for the day. I had about three weeks. It was more than enough time.

  I began by tearing a photograph out of the nearest frame that looked the right size and sliding the picture of Alison and myself inside it. Idly, I tore the other photograph in half, and doubled the pieces and tore it again. Dropping the torn bits of glossy paper and letting them flutter to the littered floor, I took the photograph into the living room and hung it where the first photograph of Alison had been.

  Then I looked around at the room. Most of it was going to have to go. I was going to make an Alison-environment: I was going to re-create, as nearly as possible and with a few added embellishments, the room of twenty years before. Duane’s office furniture could go down into the root cellar where my grandmother’s old furniture now sat. I wasn’t sure that I could single-handedly manage some of the heavier pieces down the rough steps of the root cellar, but there was no other choice. It was what I was going to do.

  The doors to the root cellar were set into the ground at a slightly elevated angle just at the end of the porch. You swung them up and let them drop open to the sides—it was the most old-fashioned and rural of arrangements, and I suspected that Duane’s dark cellar, though modernized by the introduction of a staircase leading down from the body of the house, was originally of similar construction. With some effort I pulled one of the doors up and open, nearly straining my back; time had cemented the two doors together.

  The earthen stairs looked treacherous, half-crumbled away and very steep. Some of the damage was old, but Duane had shredded some of the steps when he had taken the old furniture down. I put one foot on the first of the stairs and tested my weight. The earth was reassuringly resilient and firm. After trying a few more steps I became careless and put my foot down without looking, and the earth gave way beneath it, sending me sliding three or four feet down across a terrace of crumbling dirt. When I was steady again I put my feet solidly on a thick step and braced my shoulder under the other door and pushed with my body and legs. The door strained and flew open on complaining hinges. Now light entered nearly the whole of the root cellar. That wonderful old furniture lay in heaps and piles like stew bones. Like the garage, the cellar smelled like a grave. I began to pull my grandmother’s furniture out of the dark hole of the root cellar and up into the sunlight.

  —

  I worked at this task of reclamation until my shoulders and legs ached and my clothes were covered with dirt. There was more furniture in the cellar than I had thought, all of it essential. I needed every footstool and end table, every lamp and bookcase. Too exhausted to continue, I went inside and made sandwiches from Saturday’s groceries. When I had pushed down the food, I went back out with a pail of soapy warm water and washed off what was on the lawn; that completed, I went back down the crumbled steps and began to wrestle out more things. I could remember where every stick of it had been placed, I could see the room as it had been twenty years before and would be again. She had touched every bit of this furniture.

  By the time the light had begun to fail, I had it all out on the lawn and washed. The fabrics were worn, but the wood was clean and shining. Even on the lawn beside the white house in the fading light, it all looked magically appropriate—that is to say no more than that it had the rightness of all things made and used with care. That beautiful worn old stuff could make you weep. The past was enshrined in it. Just sitting out there on the lawn in the dusk, it evoked the entire history of my family in America. Like them, it was solid, it was right.

  Unlike Duane’s office furniture, which merely looked naked and stunned and stupid when dragged outside. There was less of it than there had seemed. It had a negative relation to spirit.

  I made the mistake of taking the lighter pieces, the dreadful pictures and lamps and chairs, down into the root cellar first. Under one of the lamps I found two neatly folded dollar bills. Under different circumstances, I might have admired the gesture, but it was proof of how badly I had acted. I finished with the light things in a disproportionately bad temper. That left me with the job of handling the heavy couches and the two heavier chairs when I was almost too tired to move them further, and in the dark. I had only the light from the porch and pale early moonlight, and the battered earthen steps, in many places now worn to a continuous pitted incline, were visible only at their top. The first chair went down easily; I carried it in my trembling arms and felt my way slowly along the ruined steps. But when I tried it with the second chair, I lost my footing on an incline of dirt and fell all the way to the bottom.

  To complete that Buster Keatonish stunt I should have landed on the dirt floor seated comfortably in the embrace of the chair; but I landed sprawled half over, half under it, with pain radiating out from all of my left leg, ankle to thigh. It did not feel broken, but one of the chair’s legs was, dangling from ripped fabric like a dead tooth. Cursing, I ripped it off and threw it into a corner. I disposed of the chair in much the same way.

  After that, I had no patience with the couches. I was not going to baby them down the slope. I shoved the first up to the lip of the cellar, nudged it over until it was set, and let go of the arm. It crashed down to the bottom. I grunted with satisfaction and was turning to the second when I became aware of a flashlight bobbing toward me.

  “Goddam you, Miles,” Duane said. The flashlight was held on my face. In a moment he had moved into the area of light from the porch.

  “You don’t need a flashlight to see it’s me.”

  “No, even on a dark night I’d know it was you.” He flicked off the flashlight and stepped closer to me. His face was savage. “Goddam yo
u. I wish you’d never come back here. What the hell were you thinking of anyhow? You fucking bastard.”

  “Look,” I said, “I know it looks funny, but—” I realized that as far as anger was concerned I was an amateur. Duane’s face seemed to be inflating.

  “Is that what you think? You think it looks funny? Now you look. If you had to go and talk about that goddam house, why did you have to talk about it with my daughter?”

  I was too stunned to reply.

  He glared at me for another long moment, and then whirled to the side and banged his hand against one of the porch supports.

  That was when I should have started to worry—when I was given special dispensation.

  “Don’t you have an answer? You shit, Miles. Everybody’s forgotten about that house by now. Alison was never going to find out. In a little while, the goddam thing was going to fall over anyhow. She’d never know. Then you come along and tell her it was my ‘dream house,’ huh? Then she can get one of the drunken bums in Arden to tell her all about it, can’t she? I suppose you wanted to get her to laugh at me, just the way you and your cousin used to do.”

  “It was a mistake, Duane. I’m sorry. I thought she knew already.”

  “Bullshit, Miles, bull shit. My dream house, isn’t that what you called it? You wanted to make her laugh at me. You wanted to humiliate me. I should pound you into the ground.”

  “Maybe you should,” I said. “But if you’re not going to, then listen to me. It was an accident. I thought it was something everybody knew.”

  “Yeah, that makes me feel real good. I should break you up.”

  “If you want a fight, give it a try. But I’m apologizing to you.”

  “You can’t apologize for that, Miles. I want you to stay away from my daughter, hear that? Stay away from her, Miles.”

  He might not ever have noticed the furniture around us if he hadn’t thumped his hand into the couch. Pure furious astonishment replaced the rage in his face.