Wake Up With a Stranger

by Flora, Fletcher

  He was there, sitting alone at the very same table she had sat at yesterday, and she was shaken by the strong feeling she had upon seeing him. It was as if his presence were something she had planned, and it amounted, therefore, to a conquest.

  He was slouched in his chair with his legs extended under the table, and when she sat down across from him, she accidentally kicked one of his feet. He drew the foot away and looked up at her from his book with that oddly fierce expression she had noticed before.

  “Excuse me,” she said.

  He grunted and lowered his eyes, but she continued to stare across at him as she opened the chemistry text she intended to study, and after a while he looked up again to meet her gaze.

  “I wish you wouldn’t stare at me,” he said.

  “Why? Do you feel guilty?”

  “Guilty? Why the devil should I feel guilty?”

  “Because you have such bad manners.”

  “What do you know about my manners? You know nothing about them at all.”

  “I know that you stick your legs out in all directions, which is rude, and I know that you haven’t even the courtesy to acknowledge an apology.”

  “All right. Now you have told me off, and you can quit staring at me.”

  “I am just wondering why you never comb your hair.”

  “So now we are being rude to each other! It’s a pleasure to tell you that my hair, and what I do or don’t do to it, is none of your damn business.”

  “Perhaps not. But it’s rather fascinating just the same. Rather like Raggedy Andy’s. Like a string mop. I’m also wondering why you let your clothes get to looking as if you slept in them. Is it a kind of pose or something?”

  “Suppose it is. You’re something of a poseur yourself, aren’t you? Why do you wear glasses shaped like that, for instance, and why do you fix your face and your hair to make you look like a college girl at least, when you’re obviously only in high school?”

  “Do my looks offend you?”

  “Not at all. I don’t care what you try to look like.”

  They had started talking in whispers, but their voices had risen in the exchange, and suddenly a female librarian appeared from around a tier of shelves and hissed at them sharply. The boy turned his head indolently in her direction and hissed back at her deliberately.

  “Old crow,” he said.

  The librarian flushed and wagged an admonishing finger and retreated.

  “My God,” Donna whispered, “there’s no end to your bad manners, is there?”

  “I don’t like being hissed at,” he said.

  “Well, neither do I, so we had better stop talking.”

  “Must we? Now that you’ve started it, I’m not sure that I want to stop.”

  “Don’t I have anything to say about it?”

  “Oh, I suppose I’d eventually get tired and quit talking if you simply refused to listen or make any reply.”

  “Yes, but before that happened, you might get thrown out of here.”

  “That’s true. And you might get thrown out also, since you’re involved. Would you feel humiliated if you were?”

  “I think I’d manage to survive.”

  “I’m sure you would. But it seems silly to invite trouble. There are lots of places we could talk all we wanted to.”

  “What places?”

  “I don’t know. Lots of them.”

  “Are you asking me to leave with you?”

  “Not yet. I’ll ask you, though, if you promise to agree. I don’t like being rejected.”

  “That’s two things you don’t like. Being hissed at and being rejected.”

  “There are others. Many others. Do you agree to go?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I ask you to leave with me.”

  They closed their books and stood up and went out past the desk of the angry librarian, and outside they stood on the sidewalk that was wet from an earlier rain and wondered where they should go together in the soft mid-May afternoon that was almost evening.

  “If we are going some place together,” she said, “we should at least know each other’s name. Mine’s Donna Buchanan.”

  “Mine’s Enos Simon. Where would you like to go?”

  “I don’t know. Why don’t you just choose one of the lots of places you know about?”

  “Do you like beer?”

  “I’ve never drunk any.”

  “I knew that look of yours was phony.”

  “What look?”

  “You try to make people think you’re a lot more experienced than you really are.”

  “Oh, hell. The truth is, you talk pretty silly sometimes, do you know that? I was eighteen this month, as a matter of fact, and that’s as old as I care to be or look at present. Besides, what has not drinking beer got to do with anything? Do you measure experience by such silliness?”

  “Never mind. It’s not important, and I don’t want to argue about it. I suggest that we walk down to Sully’s and have a sandwich and a cup of coffee. Are you hungry?”

  “Yes. I think I’d like a sandwich.”

  “All right. Have you been to Sully’s?”

  “No.”

  “It’s not much.”

  He took her books, and they walked the six blocks on the wet sidewalk to Sully’s. As Enos had said, it wasn’t much of a place. The booths ran down one wall, and the counter ran down the other, and between the booths and the counter were a few tables. At the rear of the room was a jukebox with colored bubbles rising and descending soundlessly in lighted tubes. They sat and listened to the music until the man had returned with their order and gone again and the box was silent.

  “Now that we’re here and free to talk without being hissed at,” Donna said, “what shall we talk about?”

  “You can start by telling me why you kicked me in the library and then picked a quarrel with me.”

  “I kicked you quite by accident, and I did not pick a quarrel with you. You were rude, and I told you so, that’s all. Please don’t be so vain as to think I kicked you on purpose just to get your attention.”

  “Well, didn’t you?”

  “Of course not. You were sprawled all over the place.”

  “Oh, all right. I’ll be more honest than you and admit that I’ve noticed you in the library before. I was trying to think of a way to meet you when it happened.”

  “You certainly didn’t sound as if you wanted to meet me.”

  “That’s just my way. The truth is, I’m shy and get all tensed up in such circumstances. Did you say you go to high school?”

  “You said it, not I. But it’s true. I’m a senior. I’ll graduate next month.”

  “Are you going to college in the fall?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I don’t want to. There’s something else I’d rather do.”

  “Get married?”

  “God, no! I want to be a designer. A fashion designer. I’m taking a correspondence course in design now, but I don’t think it’s much help. The main thing is, I seem to have a natural talent for it.”

  “Did you design the dress you’re wearing?”

  “Yes. I designed it and made it.”

  “I agree that you have a talent. Can you get very far with something like fashion designing in St. Louis? I should think you’d have to go somewhere like New York.”

  “If you had an exclusive shop to work through, you could go a long way right here. That’s what I’m going to try to do when I get good enough. I’m going to try to start a line of originals in a shop right here.”

  “You’re very ambitious, aren’t you?”

  “I guess so. Aren’t you?”

  “No. I can’t even make up my mind what I want to do.”

  “What do you mean, you can’t make up your mind? Don’t you do anything now?”

  “No. I graduated from high school a year ago, and I haven’t done anything since.”

  “Really? Nothing at all?”
>
  “Not a damn thing. I’ve been thinking about it, but I can’t seem to get started. I’m going to the state university this fall, but it’s more because my old man thinks I ought to than because I really want to.”

  “Isn’t there anything at all you think you’d like to do?”

  “Well, I think I’d like to be a writer, but I’m sure I could never be anything but a poor one, so I guess I won’t even try. Maybe I’ll end up teaching.”

  “What would you teach?”

  “Oh, literature. Something like that.”

  “Do you like to read?”

  “I read a lot. Always have. It’s the only thing I do much of.”

  She nodded at the book he had carried with hers from the library.

  “What are you reading now?”

  “The Grand Testament.”

  “The Bible, you mean?”

  “Lord, no! Villon’s Grand Testament.”

  “Who’s Villon?”

  “Seriously? Don’t you actually know? How can you be so ignorant?”

  “Well, you needn’t start being insulting and rude again. If you do, I’ll leave. I guess there are a few things I know that you don’t, as far as that goes.”

  “That’s true. I have a nasty way of thinking the only things worth knowing are the things I happen to know myself.”

  “That’s better. You can be very nice when you want to be. Will you tell me who this Villon is? Is he French? His name sounds French.”

  “You’re right except for your tense. Was, not is. He was born in Paris in 1431 and disappeared in 1463. No one knows what happened to him after that, but probably he was hanged.”

  “Why on earth do you think he was probably hanged?”

  “Because he had almost been hanged two or three times before, and it doesn’t seem likely that he could go on escaping by the skin of his teeth forever. He was a murderer and a thief and a whoremonger and a syphilitic and almost anything bad you could mention, but he also happened to have a master’s degree from the Sorbonne and to be the greatest poet of the Middle Ages, and one of the greatest poets of any age. Don’t you think that’s very amusing?”

  “I admit that I don’t see anything amusing about it at all.”

  “Don’t you? I do. A common criminal who worshiped beauty and wrote some of the most beautiful poetry in the world in cheap taverns and whorehouses and prisons and all sorts of low places. He was a coward, too. He was afraid of physical pain, and he was especially afraid of dying, because he had lived such a sinful life that the mere thought of dying filled him with terror. A criminal and a coward who wrote all this beautiful poetry that’s still read after more than five hundred years. Beauty and evil co-existing in such extremity in one ugly and diseased little man. Don’t you see why I consider it amusing? It’s so ironical and paradoxical, and it’s so contrary to what all the good little mediocre people try to teach you about evil not begetting beauty, and all that kind of crap. Would you like to hear something he wrote?”

  “I guess so.”

  “All right. Listen to this.”

  He began to recite Ballad of Dead Ladies, the Rossetti translation, and each time he repeated the sad refrain with which each stanza ended, his voice assumed an intensity that was very compelling, as if he were himself acutely aware of the brevity of life and was urging in her an equal awareness.

  When he had finished, he was silent for a moment, looking at her intently across the table, and she didn’t know what to say. Up to then, she had honestly considered him rather ridiculous, although interesting, but now she saw he had sensibilities she had not imagined, and she no longer considered him at all ridiculous. The truth was, he disturbed her a little, more than she was prepared to admit, and she began to think that it was time to go home.

  “You’re right,” she said. “It is beautiful.”

  “Do you think so? It’s probably the most famous thing he did. It’s called Ballad of Dead Ladies.”

  She had by this time finished her sandwich and coffee, and she slipped sidewise, on the red leather seat and stood up abruptly, impatient with herself for permitting him to affect her so strongly.

  “I think I’d better go now,” she said.

  “All right.” He also slipped out of the booth and stood up, lifting their books from the table. “Do you live far from here?”

  “Not so far. It’s about a mile, I think.”

  “Will you let me go with you? I haven’t got any place to go, except home, and I would much rather walk along with you.”

  She was ashamed of the house and neighborhood in which she lived, but she was also proud and defiant, so she said he could. After that, they met several times a week in the branch library and went out together from there, and a little later they began seeing each other in the evenings. But they didn’t go many places or do many things because there didn’t seem to be anything Enos really cared about, quite apart from the fact that he was in bad at home for his indolence and was given little money to spend. The first significant thing about him that Donna learned was that it was impossible ever to anticipate his mood. Sometimes he was gay and really clever, other times he was sullen and difficult to get along with, and still at other times, in what seemed to be a kind of intermediate mood between the two extremes, he was quietly considerate, almost tender, and seemed to be making a kind of plea that was never quite clarified.

  On the whole, he was much too disturbing in proportion to his appeal, and she thought more than once she would tell him she didn’t care to see him again, but she never did. Their relationship continued past her graduation and into the summer nearing the time when he would have to go away to the university. Several times, at some propitious moment, it wavered briefly on the verge of demand and eager submission, but nothing was gained or lost. Then he came the evening before he was to leave. He had managed to get the use of his father’s car, and they drove out of the city along the river and parked in a narrow road. There at last, at the last moment before the long summer, they crossed the boundary at which they had always stopped before. In the experience for her there was some sadness and a little pain and, most of all, an oddly exciting sense of charity, as if she had, at some sacrifice, been kind to a child who needed her.

  He went away the next day to the university, and a little later he wrote to her, and she replied. He wrote again, telling her that he was already looking forward to Christmas, when he would come home and see her, and she replied again and told him that she was also looking forward to it. Then in November she got a letter saying that his parents had moved away from St. Louis to a small town across state and that he wouldn’t be able to see her at Christmas after all. At first, for a while, after the intimacy by the river and his going away, she had felt desolate and alone in a drained and distorted world, and she had thought then that she truly loved him and would die without him. But in time the color returned surely to the world around her, her perspective returned, and she was able to admit to herself what she had known all along, that he was an oversensitive and unstable boy who would never on earth do one thing of consequence. When the last letter came, she did not answer it.

  CHAPTER III

  Late that Sunday afternoon the snow stopped falling, and Donna returned from the narrow, oppressive house to her apartment. It was dark when she got there, and she stood a few moments in the unlighted living room, wondering how she could survive the long night. She could not remember ever having been so tired before, and she felt in her stomach a dull and gnawing pain that reminded her that she had not eaten since the dinner the night before that she and Aaron had eaten together in celebration of the sale of the peau de soie. The dinner seemed a long time ago and scarcely credible as something that had actually happened. By a kind of strange reversal of chronology in her mind, perhaps because the present was a threat she needed for a while to evade, recent events were indistinct, and the clearest were those which were furthest away.

  Crossing the dark living room, she went into the bedroo
m and turned on a light and undressed. After a hot shower, her second of the day, she put on pajamas and went into the kitchen. She did not want to eat, for even the thought of food was slightly sickening to her, but she knew from the gnawing pain in her stomach that she had better eat something. She heated a can of soup on the range, and sat down at the small breakfast table in a corner of the room to eat it with crackers. After she finished the soup she felt a little sustained, and the night ahead of her seemed a little less impossible.

  She washed the pan and bowl and spoon she had used and returned to the living room. At a cabinet, she mixed a very strong drink, half bourbon and half seltzer, and then setting the drink on a small table beside a large brocaded chair, she went to a console phonograph, selected an album of Chopin waltzes, and put the recordings on the spindle. The first platter dropped softly to the spinning, felt-covered turntable, and the ineffably precise and delicate music came alive in the room. She sat down and drank from her glass and began to go over in her mind how she could arrange the finding of Aaron in the morning.