Wake Up With a Stranger

by Flora, Fletcher

  “No, I’m still working,” Donna said. “I’ll be here for at least another hour.”

  “Have you had a good day?”

  “Yes. Everything has gone well. I’m looking forward to seeing you tonight, of course.”

  “Well, that’s what I’m calling about. Something has developed to prevent my coming. It’s a nuisance, I know, but I simply can’t avoid it.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  He was silent for a moment, and she could hear faintly in the background the lilting sound of music — strings and brass and reeds forming the light and perishable pattern of a popular tune. She listened to the tune and liked it and was able to name it. Lisbon Antigua. A jukebox. She wondered if he was calling from the small bar to which she had first gone to meet him and where she still frequently met him. She was sure that he was there, and she could suddenly see and feel the place as truly as if she were there, and she wished that she were. Without forewarning, with the faint and perishable tune on the wire between them, it was quite abruptly an instant of crisis, a point from which her life would move inexorably one way or another, and she felt in the instant a surge of panic. He was calling to put an end to things. Already, she was certain, he had simply gone away, leaving the wire open to the inconsequential tune as a kind of commentary on the inconsequential affair he had initiated and tolerated and was now ending, for his own reasons, in this contemptuous manner.

  “Are you there?” she said.

  “Yes,” he said, “I’m here.”

  “Are you at our bar?”

  “Yes. How did you know?”

  “I can hear music. Lisbon Antigua.”

  “Oh. I see. There’s a fellow here who seems to like it. He insists on playing it over and over. Would you like me to explain why I can’t come tonight?”

  “If you want to.”

  “It would be easier if you were here. Can you come for a drink, or does that work have to be done immediately?”

  “It can wait.”

  “Shall I have a drink ready for you?”

  “A Martini, please.”

  “All right. I’ll be expecting you.”

  She hung up and went out into the salon. Gussie was standing at the rear alone, a cigarette hanging loosely from her lips and leaking smoke in a thin ascending wisp. She spoke without removing the cigarette, squinting through the smoke.

  “Leaving, darling?” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “Tyler again?”

  “Yes. I’m meeting him for a drink.”

  “How are things going?”

  “About the loan?”

  “Yes, of course, darling. Did you think I was being inquisitive about your sex life?”

  “I think it may work out all right, Gussie.”

  “Well, it seems to me that it’s taking a hell of a long time. Why don’t you simply tell him to crap or get off the pot?”

  Donna laughed. She loved Gussie and was never offended by what she said, and she knew quite well that Gussie’s vulgarities were a kind of derision directed toward her own sentimentality.

  “I’m afraid he might get off,” she said.

  “Sure. I can see where that would leave us, all right. Right up that well-known creek without a paddle. Do you think this joint is really worth the trouble?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “I guess it is, at that. For you, anyhow.”

  “It takes time, Gussie. We have to be patient.”

  “I know, I know. I’m just a sour bitch, and you mustn’t pay the least attention to me. I think I need a hobby or something. You know. Something to take my mind off things after hours. Isn’t that a hell of a confession for a woman to make? Time was I had an entertaining hobby that just came naturally, but I’m getting too old for it. But then, no one wants what I haven’t got any longer, so it comes out even in the end. Maybe I’ll buy myself a motorcycle.”

  “You’d better buy yourself a drink.”

  “That’s a superfluous suggestion, darling. Buying myself a drink is something that still comes naturally, and something for which, apparently, one does not become too old. However, thank you for reminding me. Run along, darling, and have fun. I’ll finish up here and get out myself in a few minutes.”

  “All right, Gussie. Goodby, now.”

  She went out and caught a taxi and went to the bar between the books and the flowers, and Tyler was waiting for her, and so, as he’d promised, was the Martini. The man who liked Lisbon Antigua was still playing it — probably it had associations for him. He stood leaning against the jukebox and listened to the music and thought about the associations, whatever they were. At the small table with Tyler, Donna lifted her glass and drank from it and set it down again, and Tyler took and held her hand. And her recent panic and sense of crisis, the irrational reaction on the telephone, was instantly and properly reduced to absurdity.

  “I’m glad you could come,” he said.

  “You only had to ask,” she said.

  “I want to explain why I must break our date.”

  “It isn’t necessary to explain.”

  “Anyhow, I would like to. It’s nothing much, really. Merely that I must drive my wife to the airport.”

  “Oh? Is she going away?”

  “Yes. For quite a long time. The truth is, she is going to Europe.”

  “Did she decide so suddenly to go so far?”

  He shook his head. “No. It has been planned for some time, of course. Originally, she intended to leave next week, but she decided all at once to leave earlier in order to have an extra week in New York before sailing.”

  “Is she going alone?”

  “No.” He looked down at her hand in his, and his voice went curiously flat. “She is going with a friend. Of hers, not ours. Perhaps it would be more accurate to call her a protégée. A young woman who is studying music at the local conservatory. A harpist, I believe. The primary purpose of the trip, I’m told, is to give her training and experience abroad. Harriet is very generous in such matters. Anyhow, it seems that I am expected to drive her to the airport, though I should think a servant would do as well. Perhaps it is merely something a husband is required to do when his wife goes to Europe.”

  “It’s all right, of course. There’s nothing else you can do.”

  “I’d much prefer keeping our date.”

  “Will it be too late after the plane leaves?”

  “It will be quite late. Midnight, I suspect, before I could get back to your apartment.”

  “That’s all right if you want to come.”

  “Would it be all right if I wanted to stay?”

  “You’re imposing a condition, and so I won’t answer. If you want to stay, you must ask me directly, and I’ll give you a direct answer.”

  “All right. So far as I’m concerned, the preliminary period we agreed upon is over. I want to stay, and I am asking you directly if I may.”

  “Are you sure it’s what you want? Do you remember what it commits you to?”

  “The shop, you mean?” He smiled and lifted her hand to his lips in an obviously warm and spontaneous gesture that elicited in her a response of tenderness that she had not felt for him before. “I had decided long ago that you should have your shop in any event. Did I neglect to tell you that?”

  “I’m afraid you did.”

  “Perhaps I should not be telling you now.”

  “Why?”

  “That should be apparent. I’m not the most astute man in the world, but neither am I naive. I am well aware that the shop has been from the beginning my principal negotiable asset. Perhaps my only one.”

  “No. In the beginning it may have been your only one, but now it is not.”

  “Nevertheless, since you know that you are going to get anyway what you set out to get, I may have weakened my position.”

  “You could always change your mind about the shop.”

  “No. Like most men with few virtues, I make great issue of the few. I don’t break
my promises, and I promise that you shall have your shop. Now will you give me the direct answer to my direct question?”

  “You may stay, of course.”

  “Because you’re grateful?”

  “Not only that.”

  “Good enough. I’m wise enough not to press it any further. And now it’s time I was leaving, and I wish it weren’t.” He lifted her hand to his lips in a repetition of the warm gesture. “Would you like me to take you some place?”

  “No, thank you. If you don’t mind, I think I’ll have one more drink before leaving.”

  “In that case, I’ll see you tonight.”

  He went away, and she watched him go, and she continued to feel for him the new tenderness that seemed to have nothing to do with his generosity. The man in the rear of the bar kept playing Lisbon Antigua; she ordered another Martini and sat drinking it, and she thought that it was really very strange how things eventually culminated so quietly, for better or for worse. She had schemed for the shop and had felt intensely that the shop was absolutely essential to all that she wanted to do and be, that failure to acquire it would somehow be a disaster from which she could never recover completely. Now that she was successful and had achieved all that she wanted through her own efforts and the exploitation of herself, she should have been filled with tremendous excitement and satisfaction, but instead she was only quiet and acceptant of things as they had turned out. She knew that she would have been the same way, exactly the same way, if they had turned out bad instead of good. But she also knew that this was something that would change, that she was now caught in a kind of recuperative lethargy in which she would gather again her emotional energy. Excitement would come in its own time, as despair would have come if she had failed.

  After finishing her second Martini, she left the bar and walked several blocks to the restaurant where she had gone previously with Tyler. She ate alone in the restaurant, and then she returned to her apartment, and it was almost eight o’clock when she arrived. She wondered what she could do until midnight, when Tyler would come, and she thought that perhaps she would sleep for two or three hours. She actually did set the alarm and lie down on the bed in the bedroom, but it was impossible to sleep after all. Lying there, she began to review in her mind all that had happened in the last hundred days or so since the death of Aaron, but this involved things about which she would rather not think. After half an hour she got up and went out into the living room and began to read a book called The Sleepless Moon, which she had bought only a few days earlier, about a man and a woman, married to each other, who shouldn’t have been. At first it was difficult to get into the book, and her own thoughts kept interfering with the symbols on the pages, but after a while the symbols became dominant. She continued to read without stopping until the buzzer sounded at the door.

  She looked at her watch and saw that it was ten o’clock, much too early for Tyler unless something had happened to change his plans, which wasn’t likely. And even if his plans had been changed, it wasn’t likely that he would simply come along early without calling first. Having considered and discarded the possibility of its being Tyler, she thought at once of Enos Simon, that it might be he at the door. If it was, which would be unfortunate to say the least, she had better see him and get rid of him quickly before Tyler came. While this was in her mind, she was aware also of a kind of subversive hope that he had indeed returned, was standing at that moment outside the door, and that she could somehow devise a way of salvaging him and making him compatible with the plan of her life, but this was impossible, as she knew very well, and was not to be seriously thought of.

  But it was not Enos. It was a slender man, almost slight, neatly dressed in a dark brown suit with brown shoes and a brown knit tie, and he held in his right hand a brown hat that had covered, before he removed it, a head of short-cut light brown hair. At first she could not place him, though he seemed familiar, and then she remembered who he was, but she still couldn’t remember his name, and this was possibly because it was a name she preferred not to remember.

  “Good evening, Miss Buchanan,” he said. “Do you remember me?”

  “I remember who you are,” she said, “but I don’t remember your name.”

  “It’s Daniels. The last time we met, which was also the first, I said that I would enjoy seeing you again, but we agreed that it would be impossible.”

  “Apparently we were wrong.”

  “Yes. Apparently. I hope you are not distressed about it.”

  “Why should I be? Are you here on police business?”

  “In a way I am. In a way I’m not. The fact is, I’m delivering mail.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that I have a letter for you. A note. May I come in for a few minutes?”

  “If it’s necessary.”

  “I regret that it is.”

  She stepped back and aside, still holding to the knob of the door. It was something of consequence, of course, that brought him here at this hour, and the chances were that it was unpleasant or possibly disastrous, though she couldn’t think what it might be. What surprised her even more than his presence was the quiet readiness with which she would surely accept whatever it was that brought him. She watched him come past her into the room, feeling in her readiness a certain pride.

  “Won’t you sit down?” she said.

  “Thank you.”

  He drifted across to the chair in which she had been sitting. Seeing her book, which was turned face down on the chair’s arm, he turned toward her with the thin smile that she remembered well, now that she saw it again.

  “I see that you are reading The Sleepless Moon,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “I haven’t read it yet myself, but I’ve read a review. In the Atlantic, I think.”

  “The Atlantic?”

  The question had an inflection of skepticism, and she regretted it as soon as it was spoken, not so much because it was a rudeness to him as because it suggested in her a naive snobbishness that discredited automatically the claim of a policeman to read anything superior to comic books. Sensitive to the inflection, he permitted his smile to return briefly.

  “Anyhow,” he said, “I’m sure you have no desire to discuss books with me at this hour of the night, or any hour at all. As I said, I have brought you a note, and here it is.”

  He took an envelope from his coat pocket and handed it to her, and she took it and looked at it, and there was nothing on the outside except her name. She had not seen Enos Simon’s handwriting for years, not since the letters from college, and she didn’t recognize it. But she knew just the same that the letter was from Enos and that he had written to her before dying and was by this time surely dead. This was knowledge that involved her awareness of the possibility, plus the presence of Daniels, and it was incontrovertible. Removing the note from the envelope, she read it quickly, the few lines, the simple statement of regret and gratitude.

  It is too bad, she thought, that he felt this way in the end. If only he had abused me or cursed me or made some kind of indictment, it would now be better and easier for me. He was weak or sick and in a very real sense a coward, though it was something he could in no way help, and if he has now killed himself, which he obviously has, it is because of these things and because he was simply not fit to live, and there is no good reason at all why I should hold myself responsible or be disturbed beyond the demands of compassion and natural sorrow, but I wish to God in all reverence that he had blamed me and cursed me and wished me dead instead of himself, for this would be something I could hold in contempt and soon forget, but I can never forget what he has written, not so long as I live, and he has done me after all the most harm that he could do.

  “So he has killed himself,” she said.

  “Yes. He cut his wrist with a razor blade and bled to death.”

  “I’m sorry, but I’m not particularly surprised.”

  “Aren’t you? Why not?”

  “Bec
ause he was a depressive. He went into the deepest despair over the slightest things, and he had absolutely no capacity for solving his problems.”

  “Well, some of us are like that, I understand. Did you know him long?”

  “I knew him for several months a good many years ago. When we were kids. We met again this year and became friends again, but I have not seen him for about three weeks.”

  “Why not?”

  “Primarily for the reasons I have indicated. He was not a person you could be casual with indefinitely. He became quite difficult.”

  “I see. Did you anticipate his suicide specifically?”

  “Not specifically, nor particularly as a consequence of our relationship, if that’s what you mean. It was merely something he might have done, for this reason or that, at one time or another.”

  “In fact, it was something he was almost bound to do. Is that right?”

  “I think so.”

  “All right. So he did. He has committed suicide, as palpably as Mr. Burns died earlier this year of a heart attack, and that seems to be the end of it. It is only coincidental, of course, that you have been concerned in both instances — and I also, in a lesser way.”

  “Yes. Of course.”

  He looked at her without saying anything, and she folded the sheet of paper and returned it to the envelope and held it out to him. He smiled his thin smile and executed a small gesture of rejection.

  “I thought you might like to keep it,” he said.

  “Don’t the police like to retain things of this sort?”

  “Only when they are evidence of something or other that concerns us. In this case, there doesn’t seem to be any indication of that.”

  “Will it be necessary to give it any publicity?”

  “The letter? Not adversely, at any rate. Certainly it can’t be published so long as it is in your possession.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Not at all. And now I have intruded long enough. Good night, Miss Buchanan.”

  “Good night,” she said.

  He walked past her to the door and turned without opening it, and it was the last time that she saw his thin smile.