Wake Up With a Stranger

by Flora, Fletcher

  For it would be necessary, of course, to wait until morning. At least, if not necessary, it would be wise. It could be done naturally then, a normal gesture when he did not appear at the shop. Perhaps she could send someone from the shop, or go herself and discover him by looking into the hall through the glass of the front door, or call a neighbor or a friend or even the police to investigate his inexplicable absence. Yes, any one of these actions would seem natural, an expression of concern in which she would be supported by Gussie Ingram and everyone else at the shop, and no particular attention or suspicion could possibly attach to her because of it. It could make no difference to him if he lay untended in the hall for another night. It was only in her mind that it made a difference, and it was imperative that she stop thinking as if he were somehow alive and dead at the same time, somehow aware of his desertion and the loneliness and the cold.

  And then, all at once, she thought of the cleaning woman, and she could not understand how she had failed to think of her immediately, long ago at the very beginning, when she had found the body. That she had failed to do so was certainly an indication of the extent she had been incapacitated by shock without fully realizing it. Aaron himself had spoken of the cleaning woman more than once — a Mrs. Cassidy, or a similar Irish name — and had said she had a key and came in to clean two days a week, two of them. (It was always planned that Donna should not be there the mornings she came.) Thinking back and trying to identify the days, Donna was certain that they were Monday and Friday. Tomorrow was Monday. Therefore Mrs. Cassidy, or whatever her name was, would surely come in the morning and find the body, and it would be unnecessary, after all, for Donna to take any action whatever.

  This was a vast relief. It was so vast a relief, and left her so limp in the sudden release from pressure, that she became fully aware then, for the first time, how much she had been dreading the prospect of taking any action. Now she need only wait with patience and react appropriately to whatever developed.

  Getting out of the chair, she turned the stack of recordings over on the spindle and set the mechanism again and went into the bedroom. In bed, she lay and listened to the waltzes, trying to remember as little as possible and to anticipate nothing at all. She knew very little about music and had little knowledge about the Chopin she was listening to, but she did know that the music made everything else seem less important for the time that she listened to it. With their help, and that of the strong drink, she went into a dreamless sleep and awakened early the next morning.

  After dressing, she had coffee in the kitchen and went directly to the shop, arriving about an hour before the shop normally opened. She entered by the front door, locking it after her, and passed through the luxurious simplicity of the salon to her room at the rear. There, she began without delay to work on a half-completed sketch, and she worked, apparently with complete absorption, until she heard, after half an hour, Gussie Ingram at the rear door. She went out then and let Gussie in and returned to the room with Gussie following.

  “Snow!” Gussie said bitterly. “God, how I hate the filthy stuff! To think that there are places in the world, on this very continent, where the sun is warm and the days are long and there isn’t one snotty nose or congested chest or any of this Goddamn virus stuff that the doctor always says you’ve got when he doesn’t know. Honest to God, a person must be insane to live in a hellish place like this.”

  “Why do you live in it, then?”

  “Because I’m insane, darling. Hadn’t you guessed? We’re all insane. If we weren’t, we’d simply swallow a bellyful of sleeping pills, or use any one of the many other pleasant and painless methods of getting out of this filthy mess for good and all instead of hanging on and on for more of the same.”

  Filthy was one of her favorite words. She slumped into a chair and began to cough, covering her mouth with a pink tissue. After a while she stopped coughing and lit a cigarette and immediately began to cough again. Watching her, Donna thought that she looked tired and ill, even more tired and more ill than she usually looked. She was, in fact, quite an ugly woman, but it was a striking kind of ugliness that had its own kind of appeal. Her skin was sallow, stretched tightly over the frame of her face and emphasizing the size of a nose and mouth that were large yet lacked emphasis. The cords in her neck became prominent when she turned her head, and her body was thin to the point of emaciation, collar and hip bones threatening, it seemed, to tear through their thin coating of flesh. There was grace in her gauntness, though, an unorthodox smartness in the way she walked and gestured and wore her clothes. Donna often wondered how old she was, and was sure that she was neither young nor old nor any particular age at all, a woman arrested and fixed who would go on and on all her life without ever looking a day older, just closer to dying.

  “That’s a nasty cough,” Donna said. “Wouldn’t you like to go home and take care of it?”

  “No, thanks.” Gussie extended her legs and blew smoke at her feet. “Another day alone at home with my sweet thoughts is the last thing I want. I’ll gobble lozenges till quitting time and whisky till bedtime, and I’ll manage to survive for a while yet.”

  “Did you have a bad Sunday?” Donna asked.

  “Filthy. Utterly filthy. I thought the damn day would never end. Not you, I’ll bet. You must have gone on a real fancy kick.”

  “Why?”

  “Because of the peau de soie, I mean. It isn’t every day you can hang four hundred dollars’ worth of your own talent on someone like Queen Hattie Tyler. Not that the one sale in itself is so much. It’s what it means to your future, darling.”

  “Well, I didn’t really go on a very fancy kick. Aaron took me out to dinner and then out to Mother’s. I spent the night and practically all of yesterday there. Do you actually think the sale to Harriet Tyler will turn into something?”

  Gussie dragged on her cigarette and coughed the smoke out of her lungs. Her wide, ugly mouth stretched into a smile as she looked at Donna through the blue thinning cloud.

  “I’ll be damned surprised if it doesn’t. You know why? Because you’ve got it, darling. You’ve got the feel or the touch or whatever the hell you want to call it. That little thing that the rest of us haven’t got and would give our souls to have. The job you sold Hattie was a perfect conception and a flawless execution, and you can’t say any more than that for any gown. It’ll stand out in any crowd with any comparison, and Hattie will look just like her precious William Walter’s millions because she’s got something to give to the gown as well as to get from it. I hate the bitch, but I’ll have to admit she’s stacked properly, and every slob and scarecrow who sees her in the gown will get the idea they’d look the same in one like it. Oh, don’t worry, darling, they’ll follow Hattie, and Hattie will be back. You’ve got what it takes to get what you want, and now it’ll begin coming with Hattie and the rest, and I’m damn glad of it, because I like you. That makes you exclusive, darling, whether you know it or not, for the people I like are very few. I could count the people I like on the fingers of one hand.”

  “Thanks, Gussie. I like you, too. Better than anyone else, I think. You know that.”

  “Sure, I know it. There’s a kind of rare and holy bond between us that’s just too precious for words, so let’s forget it. For God’s sake, I couldn’t stand any sloppy scenes this morning. You say you spent Saturday night and Sunday at your mother’s?”

  “That’s right. Aaron drove me out after dinner.”

  “I commend your devotion, darling. To me, it seems a filthy dull way to waste a night that should have been celebrated.”

  “Aaron wasn’t feeling well, as a matter of fact. I think he wanted to get to bed early.”

  “His heart again?”

  “I don’t know. He didn’t say it was that.”

  “He never does. Just totes his little detonating pills around, in case. Probably one of these days he’ll pop off in an instant, and it’s a filthy shame because he’s a sweet guy. He’s a sweet, lonely, dam
ned little apostate, and he’s another one of the fingers on the hand I count my friends on.”

  The words invoked in Donna’s mind the image of Aaron as the words were spoken, Aaron alone and dead and damned, and she closed her eyes upon the image, trapping it behind her lids. Then, in succession, came the sound of the rear door opening and closing, the brisk swishing of galoshes outside, and the near, softer sound of Gussie’s long sighing.

  “That’ll be Serena,” Gussie said. “God bless her pretty little pointed head.”

  Serena was a saleslady and sometime model, Gussie’s subordinate. She was a pale blonde with a tall willowy body and almost perfect classical features that were, fortunately, only slightly blemished by vacuity.

  “Oh, come off it, Gussie,” Donna said. “You know very well you consider Serena a valuable employee.”

  “Of course I do,” Gussie admitted, “but I am constantly amazed by the girl’s absolutely perfect stupidity. In its way, it’s every bit as perfect as her face.”

  “That’s all right. A girl with Serena’s looks doesn’t have to have brains.”

  “No, darling, you’re wrong there.” Gussie shook her head and leaned forward to crush her cigarette in a tray. “A girl with Serena’s looks needs brains more than most of us. In just her face and body, without anything in addition, she has the most useful tools that a woman can have on earth, but she has to have the brains to use them effectively. It staggers the imagination to consider what things she might accomplish for herself if she were only a little clever, and it’s horribly depressing to know what a monstrous waste Serena is bound to make of them. Do you know that she’s in love? It’s the truth, so help me God, and it’s simply the filthiest kind of a shame. She’s in love with a kid who’s a bookkeeper in a department store and will be a bookkeeper in a department store forever, and they’re only waiting until he gets a lousy ten-dollar raise or something so they can be married. She is simply too stupid to understand that she could just as easily go to bed with the goddamn owner if only she knew how to use what she’s got.” Gussie stood up abruptly and moved toward the door. “Oh, well, the hell with it! It’s no skin off my tail. I’d better go get things open up front. If Queen Hattie wore that gown during the weekend, we may have an early rush for Donna Buchanan originals.”

  Donna laughed, though she didn’t feel at all like laughing. The increasing pressure about Aaron and what could possibly be developing in connection with him was bad enough, and now Gussie’s chatter about Serena’s waste of her assets had made matters even worse and more depressing by reminding her of her mother, who had also wasted what she might have used.

  Gussie gone, she resumed work on her sketch, but she was unable to accomplish anything that pleased her. Her feeling of guilt was developing abnormally to include much more than her legitimate responsibility, not only her evasion of a clear obligation, if not actually a betrayal of trust, but also an irrational feeling of having been instrumental, somehow, in Aaron’s death. It would have been a relief to confide in Gussie, to call her back and tell her just what had happened and to achieve in the telling a measure of catharsis. She was not restrained by a lack of confidence in Gussie, for she knew very well that Gussie would collaborate in good faith. She truly did not know what restrained her, but only that she had better adhere to the policy of solitary deception, except for her mother, that she had set for herself.

  After she had worked with little effect for about an hour, she got up and went forward into the salon; it was then a few minutes after ten o’clock. Both Gussie and Serena were busy with customers, and she waited at the rear, smoking a cigarette, until Gussie was free and came back to her.

  “Has Aaron come in?” she said.

  “Not yet.” Gussie removed a thin brown lozenge from a box and put it on her tongue. “I’m satisfied these filthy things will destroy me in a little while, but in the meantime they keep me from coughing. Perhaps he’s still not feeling well and won’t come in at all.”

  “I don’t know. There is something I particularly want to speak with him about, and he assured me Saturday night that he would be here this morning.”

  “It’s only around ten, darling. Probably he’ll be here soon.”

  “His wife’s not at home, you know.”

  “Yes, I know. That hypochondriac bitch is gone off to Florida again, and don’t I hate her guts because she’s there instead of me.” Gussie stared at Donna intently. “But why mention his wife? What’s the significance?”

  “Nothing, I guess. I was just thinking that he’s all alone in the house. Do you suppose anything could have happened to him?”

  “Like another heart attack?”

  “Yes.”

  Gussie’s face expressed a kind of undirected anger at the filthiness of things in general.

  “Damn it, darling, let’s not start anticipating anything. If he’s not here in another hour, we can call his house or something.”

  Donna returned to her room and sat down to the sketch, but she no longer tried to work. The promotion of deception, especially her easy accomplishment of it, filled her with self-disgust and actually made her physically ill. After a few minutes, she got up and went out and opened the door to Aaron’s office so that she could hear the phone in there if it began to ring. Then she returned and sat down again and stared at the sketch without seeing it, and waited and waited for the ringing to begin. Surely Mrs. Cassidy — was that her name? — had arrived long ago at the house to discover Aaron in the hall, and if she had discovered him, which she surely had, what had she done about it? What would one do naturally in such an event? It was quite likely that she had first called a doctor, even though Aaron was obviously dead and had been dead for a long time and had no need of a doctor, simply because calling a doctor was what one would instinctively think of and do. The doctor would come and would in turn call the police. The police would come, and all this would take time, of course, but surely there had been time enough. Surely they were there now, or had been there, and why in God’s name didn’t one of them call the shop, which would seem a reasonable thing to do.

  Sitting and waiting and visualizing the probable sequence of events, she felt her tension increasing to an intolerable degree. She wanted desperately to get up and do something to relieve it — to run or scream or destroy something with her hands, or best of all to call Aaron’s home number at once and get it over with — but she knew that it would not be wise to display an anxiety out of proportion to its cause. So she forced herself to sit and wait with apparent calm until most of another hour had passed. At ten minutes to eleven, Gussie came into the room, and it was she who assumed in the end the position of suggesting some kind of action.

  “Damn it, Donna,” she said, “you’ve started me worrying. I think I’ll call Aaron’s house. Not that it’ll do any good, so far as I can see. If he’s there alone, and something’s happened to him, he won’t be able to answer.”

  “A cleaning woman comes in some days. She might be there this morning.”

  “That’s right. I’d forgotten about her. Do you think I should call?”

  “No.” Donna stood up. “I’ll call, Gussie. I was just thinking about doing it when you came in.”

  She went out of the room and into Aaron’s office. Gussie followed and stood in the doorway, watching her as she dialed the number. At the other end of the line, the telephone rang in three long bursts, and at the completion of the third burst the receiver was picked up and a man’s voice came through.

  “Hello,” the voice said.

  “Hello.” There was a painful constriction in Donna’s throat, and she could not understand how her own voice slipped so easily through it. “Is this Aaron Burns’ residence?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is Mr. Burns there?”

  “He’s here, but he can’t come to the phone. Who’s calling, please?”

  “This is Donna Buchanan, Mr. Burns’ assistant.”

  “Assistant?”

  “At the
shop.”

  “Would you care to tell me what you want with Mr. Burns?”

  “I don’t think so. At least, not unless you would first care to tell me who you are.”

  “Sorry. My name’s Daniels. I’m a policeman.”

  “Policeman! What’s the matter? Has something happened to Mr. Burns?”

  “I’m afraid so. As a matter of fact, he’s dead.”

  “Dead? Mr. Burns is dead?”

  “Right, Miss Buchanan. He’s dead.”

  “Why are the police there?”

  “He was alone when he died, Miss Buchanan. The cleaning woman found him when she arrived for work this morning. It’s required that the police make a routine investigation of such matters.”

  “I see. Was it his heart?”

  “I wouldn’t know, Miss Buchanan. I’m a policeman, not a doctor. What makes you think it might have been his heart?”

  “Because he’s had heart attacks before. The cleaning woman should be able to tell you that.”

  “She has done so, as a matter of fact. To be perfectly frank with you, Mr. Burns’ doctor said it was his heart, and it probably was, but it isn’t official yet.”

  “Thank you for being frank.”

  “Have I offended you? If I have, I’m sorry. I realize that this must be quite a shock to you.”

  “Thank you for being sorry.”

  “Well, I don’t seem to be doing very well with you, Miss Buchanan. Perhaps I’d have better luck if I spoke with you in person. Would you agree to see me for a few minutes?”

  “You mean you want me to come out to the house?”

  “That won’t be necessary. I’d be happy to call at the shop.”

  “All right.”

  “Thank you, Miss Buchanan. Some time this afternoon. Probably about two o’clock.”

  Now that it was over, she felt drained and spent and suddenly chilled, and she put her head in her hands and began to shiver. Gussie moved over quickly from the door to put an arm around her shoulders, and the scent of Gussie was an odd and offensive mixture of perfume and smoke and medicated lozenges.