This Time Might Be Different

by Elaine Ford

  After her meal she washed the few dishes in the sink, looked at the newspaper, turned the pages of an Ondaatje novel without absorbing a word. The wind groaned, flinging freezing rain against the window glass. She felt restless, excited by the knowledge of the cold front moving in, bringing with it a dangerously low wind chill—enough to congeal your blood, stop your heart.

  Just before eleven, when she was preparing for bed, her cell rang, startling her. She went down the hall into the kitchen and, without turning on the light, picked it up from the counter.

  “Sorry to call so late,” Terry said.

  She pictured him in his stingily heated basement apartment, missing her. She never should have had coffee with him, never mind confided in him. Absolutely she could not let him back into her life.

  “I was out,” he said, “but I wanted to be sure to reach you tonight.”

  Out? Where would he have gone, in weather like this?

  “Remember what we talked about in the Blue Moon yesterday?” He paused, and she saw his plump hand moist on the receiver. “Anne, I was your intruder.”

  She almost didn’t believe him.

  “The first time,” he went on, “was a spur-of-the-moment type of thing. I happened to be near your place—I was picking up my laptop from the computer repair place on Hammond—and I remembered I still had your key. I missed you. I wanted to be close to you. Without giving it any more thought, I pulled into your parking lot and ran up the stairs and turned the key in the lock.”

  So that’s the way it was, she thought.

  “Once I was there, in your apartment, I had this urge to leave something behind for you,” he said, his voice earnest and a little breathless in confession. “Some little treasure. I searched through my pockets and found a button that I’d picked up from the sidewalk or somewhere. I left it on your red rug, where you’d be sure to notice it.”

  She’d noticed, all right.

  “Button made me think of needle,” Terry continued, “so the next time, I took a needle out of my emergency sewing kit. Remember the one I keep in my glove compartment? I think it was a prize in a cereal box.”

  The puncture in her finger, how painful for such a small wound.

  “With needle goes thread. Old Mother Twitchett had but one eye, and a long tail which she let fly . . . ”

  “What?”

  “The third time, I unwound the black thread from the card in the kit and left that on your table. I kept expecting you to call me up and yell at me. To be honest, I hoped you would call me up and yell at me.”

  Phone in hand, Anne walked to the window. Outside, a loose cable slapped insistently against metal siding. The panes in their old frames rattled with the wind.

  “But you didn’t,” Terry was saying, “and anyhow, since then things have changed.” He coughed meaningfully. “For the better.”

  She understood at once. Sincere, college-educated, gainfully employed WSM wishes to meet . . . Of course someone would bite. She might have bitten herself.

  “Yesterday, when I realized how upset you were, I felt kind of sheepish, and like a coward I kept my mouth shut.”

  After a long moment she asked, “Out of curiosity, what prompts you to unburden yourself now?”

  The question seemed to surprise him. “Guilt. I didn’t want you worrying for nothing.”

  For nothing. Anne pulled the cord to close the blind and moved away from the window. Steam had begun to burble and spit into the tall iron radiator. She told Terry it wasn’t important, forget it. Without saying goodbye she hung up and plugged her cell back into the charger.

  How, she asked herself, could she have been such an imbecile? How could she have supposed that Derek Millet, or any of them, for that matter, would give her a single thought after departing her class—let alone turn her, a fortyish old-maid lecturer in English, into the object of passionate obsession? “Get a grip,” Derek would say. “Get a life.”

  The wind died down during the night, and the Volvo started right up in the morning.

  FIRE ESCAPE

  Wally is at the kitchen table eating his evening meal, reheated veal stew that he cooked on Sunday, watching a cat squeeze through a partly opened window in the building across the alley. Wally has never noticed this cat before. It’s shorthaired and dirty white. Seated outside on the window ledge, the cat gives its coat a few casual licks. Suddenly, without bothering to consider the consequences, the animal springs from the ledge and lands on a step of the building’s fire escape. Wally stops chewing. What if the cat had misjudged the distance and tumbled down three stories? He winces, almost feeling his own spine twist to right itself, his feet sting as they hit the concrete, his bones shudder with the impact. Oblivious to Wally’s concern, the cat settles down to take a nap.

  The fire escape, the cat’s perch, is made of perforated segments of rusty iron attached to one another at forty-five- or ninety-degree angles and bolted onto painted brick about the same color as the cat. The building was once a private home, Wally has learned, a mansion built in the early nineteenth century by a man who made a pile of money in the lumber trade. Later on, in leaner times, at least a half dozen apartments were crammed into its spaces, a rabbit’s warren electrified with hazardous improvisation within and around the old walls. The apartments would have been divided by partitions made of some flimsy material like particleboard. Possibly some of them still retain their original fireplaces, from which drafts seep into the rooms, any warmth doomed to depart.

  By contrast, Wally’s own building is plain but efficient: three floors of nearly identical one- or two-bedroom apartments, each opening off a carpeted central corridor. Often he blesses his luck that his is at the far end of the top floor, on the south side. He doesn’t have to listen to the elevator whine up and down in the shaft, or the footsteps of other tenants passing his door, or anyone stomping about above his head, or car doors slamming in the parking lot.

  Wally wonders whether he should cut himself a slice of the rhubarb pie he bought on sale at the Mini-mart. Or instead save it for later, when he watches his video.

  A week or so later, a face appears in the same window out of which the cat climbed. Wally pauses, his fork halfway to his mouth. He’s never seen this woman before, either. Although her light hair is pulled back from her forehead, perhaps into a braid, he gets the idea that the hair is fuzzy rather than smooth. Her face is oval, her lips full. She stares in his direction, her head level with his. Then she brings the window down and draws a curtain across the opening. The material hangs limply—cheap fabric, by the look of it, hastily hemmed and strung up on a wire, more to keep out prying eyes than to decorate the room. Wally finishes his meal and washes the dishes, feeling oddly disturbed. He’s not sure whether it’s the woman’s abrupt invasion of his solitude that troubles him or the dismissive gesture that followed it.

  Although occasionally he sees the cat coiled on the fire escape, he doesn’t lay eyes on its owner again for quite some time. By now it’s late October, and dead leaves stick to his shoes as he starts down the hill from his apartment building. A drizzle is falling. The air feels raw. First he sees an open umbrella heading toward him, an ugly streaked and faded shrimp color, and then he realizes it’s the woman from across the alley who grips the handle.

  Not really wishing to become involved with any of his neighbors, he intends to pass her without speaking. However, she stops him. Rain drips from her umbrella spokes. He’s close enough to see that freckles lightly fleck her sallow, shiny cheekbones, close enough to smell smoke on her breath. There’s an unusual cast to her features that he can’t identify, perhaps the result of a mixture of races somewhere in her ancestry. The word octoroon comes to him.

  For a moment her fingertips touch the back of his hand. They feel warm and slightly oily. “I wonder if you might have seen a gray knapsack,” she says. “In the parking lot.” The lot is a paved area beh
ind their apartment houses, which the tenants of both buildings share. Yesterday, she tells him, she was unloading things from her car and somehow the knapsack hadn’t made it inside with the rest of her belongings.

  He denies any knowledge of the knapsack but for the sake of politeness asks, “What was in it?”

  “Oh,” she says in a slow, low-pitched voice, “nothing of much value to anyone else . . . Some books . . . Those guys must have taken it.”

  “What guys?”

  “You know . . . The guys that hang out back there, by the Dumpster.”

  Wally hasn’t observed any loiterers in the parking lot, but since he can walk to work and doesn’t own a car, he has no reason to linger there. Damp is seeping through the soles of his shoes. She’s not properly dressed for the weather, either—over her loose cotton dress she wears only a cardigan that is missing a button or two. But both of them seem stuck here on the sidewalk, the missing knapsack hanging between them like a dull gray cloud.

  He begins to be aware of a peculiar sensation of guilt. It’s as though he himself snatched the knapsack when she wasn’t looking, removed the books and spirited them to the secondhand bookseller on Central Street, stowed the knapsack in the back of his closet and blocked it from his memory until her question brought back his crime with a rush.

  Finally she says, “Well thanks, anyway,” and walks past him. From one of her umbrella spokes rain water trickles onto the sleeve of his topcoat.

  The following morning, on his way to work, Wally carries down to the Dumpster his weekly accumulation of garbage. Because he is a recycler, his contribution to the Dumpster generally amounts to no more than a pound of detritus in the bottom of a sack from the Mini-mart. Before he deposits the knotted bag, he peers into the Dumpster in case the knapsack might be there, tossed away by a thief. A frustrated thief, angry that his haul turned out to be worthless to him. All Wally sees are the legs and spines of broken furniture, and huge black trash bags, foul-smelling, some of them pecked or ripped open by foraging animals.

  In November, Wally is offered a promotion at his job. If he accepts, it will mean transferring from Bangor south to the Portland area, becoming assistant manager of a newer and busier store. The small chain he works for sells business supplies at discount, office furniture, computers in the low-to-moderate price range. He thinks it’s probably time for a move. Since his girlfriend broke up with him, two years ago, he hasn’t had much of a social life. Everyone he and Roberta knew in common drifted into her camp after the split. That’s the way it usually goes, Wally has observed—the woman in question is accorded most of the sympathy, never mind whose fault the parting. Back in the summer, when Wally ran into the Burketts on the street and invited them up for a drink, Peggy giggled nervously and Ron mumbled an obvious lie about an engagement they were already late for. Wally refuses to feel bitter. Resentment gets you nowhere.

  It’s true that things here seem stale, repetitious, the dreary season dragging him down. Somehow, though, he can’t make up his mind about the transfer. More pay, of course, but more hassle, too. He’d have to find a new apartment. It’s more expensive to live in Portland than in Bangor. If he couldn’t walk to work he’d have to acquire a car and renew his driver’s license, which has lapsed, and probably pay to park the car in some garage.

  The next week, without giving Wally sufficient opportunity to consider fully all the implications of the transfer, the district manager offers the job to one of Wally’s coworkers, who is off to Portland like a shot.

  The first snowfall comes, and the cat has long since given up sunning itself on the fire escape. Sometimes Wally observes it resting behind the closed window, on the sill. As if sensing Wally’s attention, the cat raises its head and meets his glance with squinty eyes. Wally finds himself thinking about the young woman who lives behind the dirty-white brick wall. Octoroon. A musical word, like ocarina or Cameroon. He invents names for her, foreign names, appropriate to her vaguely exotic appearance. Thibedi. Stazi. Aïsa.

  He speculates on where she’s gone during those times when no light glows in her apartment. She must have a job, he decides, but nothing very much, not with that shabby, unkempt air about her. One day during his lunch hour he wanders into an import shop on the sudden hunch that she works in this place. For some reason he wants to see her behind the counter, taking people’s money, flattening the bills between her oily palms before tucking them into the cash register drawer. Maybe she pierces people’s ears and fits their lobes with those tiny gold wires. The shop, which is jammed full of colorful merchandise, reeks of incense. Wally looks at a rack of hand-sewn blouses and at strings of beads. He examines stone boxes carved in Africa and decides on impulse to buy one. Not that he is much for table ornaments and there’s no one to whom he owes a gift. Although he takes his time over the purchase, weighing the merits of black versus red and deliberating over which of the etched designs is the most attractive, she does not appear. If she does work here, she must be on her lunch hour, too.

  Now, instead of packing a sandwich, he eats his noontime meal in one or another of the little cafés that dot the downtown area. Sooner or later she’ll come in and sit at one of the round tables and order thick lentil soup, or flatbread filled with sprouting bean seeds and that garlicky substance that looks like damp putty. Neither will presume on the acquaintance—she values privacy, just as he does. She’ll sit at one of the round metal tables and take a book out of her new knapsack and read while she eats.

  Although Wally spends more time at his kitchen table in the winter months, paging through the newspaper or listening to a news program on public radio while his dinner bakes in the oven, he rarely sees her face. Just a hand moving the frayed curtain along the wire, or a distant shape passing between him and the light in the depths of her apartment, momentarily blotting it out.

  She keeps the window shut tight—to hoard the heat, he supposes, atavistically craving warmth. He watches vapor steam the inside of the glass. She must have plug-in heaters to supplement the building’s ancient radiators. In that temperature, fruit put out in a bowl to ripen would rot before she could eat it all.

  Outside, snow layers the iron steps of the fire escape.

  Early in the new year Wally begins to have troubling dreams. He awakens at two or three in the morning with his heart banging explosively in his chest. Scraps of memory remain with him: his teeth coming loose and falling out of his gums, his feet mired in an underground passageway flowing with sewage. Couldn’t the physical effects of dreams like those kill you? When you don’t show up for work for a week, they call the police who break in and discover you in bed with a burst aorta.

  At his memorial service his former friends are shamed and overcome with grief. Deaf to their laments, Wally is now nothing but ashes in his black African box with an ibex etched on the lid.

  Late one afternoon, as Wally is returning from work, he comes upon two young men leaning against a graffiti-covered fence within a block of his apartment building. One of the men is scrawny, eyes small and bright as a weasel’s. The other has hair so short Wally can see scrapes and lumps on his skull. “Hey, man, got a light?” the weasel-eyed one says. He’s amused by some joke Wally isn’t in on. Wally shakes his head and goes on by, holding his apartment keys in his pocket.

  It occurs to him that they might be the men she mentioned, the ones she saw lounging by the Dumpster. They certainly looked up to no good. In his kitchen, he stares across the alley at her window. He wonders what she’d do if she encountered them by the fence. Would she pause when they spoke to her, grope in her bag for a matchbook, offer it to them when she found it?

  Just before going to bed, he realizes that his bathroom sink has begun to drain sluggishly. He digs into the hole first with a pair of tweezers, then with a long-handled fork, then with a coat hanger he unbends and bends again so that it has a hook on the end. The quantity of metallic-smelling, gelatinous black sludge h
e is able to extract both repels and fascinates him. With a wad of tissues he wipes out the sink bowl, flushes the mess away down the toilet. But water still dribbles only reluctantly down the drain.

  It must be the soap he’s been using, he decides, that created the blockage. He remembers that Roberta gave him half a dozen bars of the stuff one Christmas. Oatmeal soap, densely medicinal, uncompromisingly good for you. Prized for its natural exfoliating qualities, according to the promotional material on the box.

  Roberta is behind him as he wipes his hands on a towel. If he turned quickly, she’d be close enough to bump into. “Why can’t you ever tell me what you’re thinking?” she demands. “Am I your enemy, or what? Why does everything have to be such a big secret?” If only just once it had occurred to Roberta to have a secret or to keep one.

  He decides to eat a piece of coconut cream pie before turning in. In the kitchen, setting out a fork for himself, he sees a ghost of a light burning behind the curtain across the alley.

  One morning on his way to work he notices the shrimp-colored umbrella ahead of him on the sidewalk. It’s February, giant clots of wet snow dropping from the sky.

  He takes pleasure in watching the octoroon negotiate the steep downhill pavement on Middle Street, umbrella lifted high above her head. The hem of her dress skims the slush. Stumbling behind her in bald rubbers, he realizes that as she has neared the bottom of the hill she has begun to walk more rapidly. She’s serenely confident of her ability to stay on her feet. She rounds the corner onto Main Street, and he follows. As far as the Army-Navy store he is able to keep sight of the umbrella floating over the heads of pedestrians.

  Then, without warning, she steps off the curb and moves into the street, cutting through traffic as if she’s indifferent to the possibility of being run down and killed. Wally sucks in his breath. Apparently she’s heading for the entrance to the building that occupies the whole of the opposite block. But that building, once Freese’s department store, has been vacant for years. A bus trundles by, obscuring Wally’s view. When he manages to make it across the street himself, she has vanished. A rusty chain, padlocked, is looped through the department store’s door handles. Where in the world can she have gone? No sign of the umbrella anywhere up and down the sidewalk.