A Perfect Stranger

by Roxana Robinson

  “Now, let me see, Cristina. This is your uncle’s name, Alfredo Pacheco?” Mrs. Winston, the housemother, held Cristina’s weekend form, which Cristina had duly filled out. Mrs. Winston was a pleasant woman, tall and lean and attractive, with black-rimmed glasses, perfectly curled-under gray hair, and a perfectly straight back.

  “That’s right, Mrs. Winston,” Cristina said. She smiled dazzlingly at the housemother. Cristina’s shoes and pocketbook matched, both dark brown. Her hair was glossy and full of bounce. She had a brown-and-orange silk scarf at her throat.

  “And he lives in Philadelphia, at this address?” Mrs. Winston looked down at the form.

  “That’s right,” said Cristina. “I put down his phone number. That’s where I’ll be.” She was going to Princeton for House Parties Weekend.

  “All right,” Mrs. Winston said, looking again at the form. “This looks fine.” The taxi drew up to the door, and Cristina picked up her suitcase. “Have a nice time,” Mrs. Winston called, and Cristina waved as she got into the car. She looked out at me and waved again, her smile to me slightly different. She never got caught, I never went to House Parties Weekend.

  But I loved Cristina. In New York, that day, when she grabbed me and hugged me, I was caught up again by her energetic intimacy, won by the charm of her presence.

  “Tell me everything,” Cristina said, sitting down again, “and let’s get something to drink. Or at least I hope you’ll have a drink? Everyone has stopped drinking. And smoking. Do you mind?” She looked at me solicitously, holding up a cigarette.

  “I don’t mind,” I said, “but the restaurant won’t let you.” We were in a small Italian place in the East Seventies, just off Madison. She couldn’t smoke there, or in any restaurant; it’s illegal now in New York City.

  Cristina waved her hand. “Oh, they don’t mind if I smoke,” she said. “I’ve already talked to the waiter.” There was an ashtray next to her, and she flipped open her lighter and lit up. I was surprised by this. I had never seen anyone smoke in a restaurant since the law was passed, and I looked nervously over at the waiter, but he passed right by our table with a bottle of wine, indifferent to our illicit behavior. I wondered if there were any rules at all that Cristina had to obey.

  “But what’s happened to everyone?” Cristina asked, drawing hard on her cigarette, sucking in her cheeks for a long disreputable pull. She exhaled, shaking her head and expelling a bluish mist. “I go away for a couple of years and all of a sudden the entire population of New York has turned into goodygoodies. What is it?” She grinned at me. “I bet you don’t smoke, do you,” she said, cocking her head.

  “No,” I admitted, “but I never really did.”

  “No, that’s right,” Cristina said, remembering. She leaned back in her chair and took another long luxurious drag on her cigarette. She grinned again. “You never did. You never broke any of the rules. You made me feel like such a bad girl! I felt like a felon!” She laughed and shook her head. “But now you’re a big success, eh? I hear you’re the head of your foundation! La Exigente!”

  That’s how Cristina talks, all exclamation points and big scarlet smiles. Anything is more fun when she tells it. And listening to her, and watching her smoke, I found myself being torn, as I always had been, between falling in love with her all over again and wishing grumpily that somehow she wouldn’t get away with everything.

  “You look wonderful,” I said, which was true.

  Cristina pulled in her chin and gave me a knowing look. “Please,” she said extravagantly, rolling her eyes. She put down her cigarette and turned sideways, thrusting her head forward and stretching out her neck. There was a tiny swag of skin that hung below it. Cristina patted the top of her hand against it. “What about this horror? But it’s going,” she announced. She turned back to face me and touched the line between her eyebrows. “And this.”

  I dropped my voice. “You’re having your face done?” I asked, impressed.

  Cristina shrugged elaborately. “I wouldn’t call it done, ” she said. “Only the chin, the eyes, the line in the forehead. A few little alterations, but hey! Nobody’s perfect.” She picked up her cigarette again and added, “Except this surgeon, I hope. He’s meant to be a genius. He’s in Brazil.” There was another pause, while she grinned, then she added, “I’ll probably come out looking like a monkey.”

  I confess that I felt a tiny surge of moral triumph when I heard about this, having a face-lift. Because I thought that scarlet nails were one thing, but a face-lift was something else. A face-lift, I thought, was wretched excess, and I thought that now she’d gone too far. It seemed to me there was a fundamental difference between makeup and surgery, and self-respect should prevent us all from the latter. There was a line to be drawn, and it had to do with integrity and honesty and probity. Face-lifts were definitely on the other side, the far side, of that line. It was clear to me that women debased themselves, trying to fight the biological fact of ageing. It seemed that women who struggle are acting foolish, and women who don’t struggle are acting dignified and self-confident. So when she told me what she was going to do I felt a thrill, as though, at last, I had finally bettered Cristina at something. I felt a jolt of self-righteous pleasure.

  “I’m going to do it soon,” said Cristina. She took another long pull. “I want to do it before I go back to San Salvador. You know we’re moving back, everyone’s moving back there.”

  “Is it safe?” I asked.

  “Well. There are armed holdups, hijackings and murders, but no rapes. Which is to say it’s safer than New York City.” She smiled dazzlingly at me again and then shrugged her shoulders. “It’s home. It’s where I grew up. The revolution is over. Everyone is going back.”

  Cristina’s troubles were through. She was going back, after the revolution, with all three children and her handsome husband, and she was still rich. And in another few weeks she’d look twenty-eight again, instead of forty-two. And I found myself wondering if she would go on forever getting away with things. But I knew this was mean-spirited, and I dislike that side of myself. So what I said to her was that I was glad she could go home now. And I meant what I said: I do love Cristina, and I don’t like my uncharitable side.

  I told her it was wonderful that the danger was over.

  “Well,” Cristina said and paused again. “It’s not really over. It’s never really over, right?” She stubbed out her cigarette and gave me her big flashy smile. “And who cares?”

  That day in San Salvador, Cristina told the driver to pull over to the side of the street, behind the car that was already parked there. The driver, for some reason, was taking a long time to pull in behind the other car, which was where he had to go to be right next to the street door, so that Elvira and Consuela could step across the sidewalk and go right into Elvira’s house.

  “Ándale, ándale, ándale,” Cristina said rapidly, leaning forward to the driver. He started to say something to her, but her mother did at the same time, and Cristina turned back to her mother. Their car pulled in behind the other and stopped. Consuela, Elvira’s friend, opened her door, but without getting out; she was waiting for Elvira, who was asking Cristina about a piece of silver she was going to return.

  “Okay, okay, okay,” Cristina was saying, very rapidly, “okay, Mama, you’re right. Claro que sí. I’ll do it tomorrow. I don’t know why I didn’t do it before. You’re right, the sooner the better. Okay,” she said again, and right then all three women realized that something was happening.

  The door that Consuela was holding nearly shut was pulled suddenly open, and Consuela herself, gray-haired, in her sleek gray dress and holding a black bag, was yanked out by her arm, and she fell, frightened, onto the grass strip along the sidewalk. The man in the doorway was leaning into the car, holding a gun that was bigger than his face, and he grabbed at Elvira, pulling her out as well. All the time he was talking fast, fast, fast.

  Get out, he was saying, get out or I’ll kill you, get out, he s
aid to the driver, I’ll kill you all, get out, get out, get out. He kicked Elvira as he pulled her out. She staggered a bit and then sat down unintentionally on the grass next to Consuela, who was leaning over, holding her knee. There was no one on the street, the sidewalks were empty. All the houses were hidden behind the high walls, the closed electronic gates.

  Get out, get out, get out, the man said, pointing the gun at the driver. The driver turned his face away at once, as though that made him safer, and he ducked down and climbed out of the front door on his knees. All these things happened so quickly, the two older women sitting heavily on the grass, the driver in his dark uniform crawling on his knees along the hard concrete road.

  The man was wearing a dark shirt and pants, no jacket. He had dark skin and black hair and his face was pockmarked and his black eyes were enraged, as if hatred and wildness were the only things inside him. He pulled Cristina out of the back seat last, and he held on to her arm so she stood next to him on the grass. He held her tightly as he pulled open the front passenger door. He was watching Elvira and Consuela then, and he pointed his gun on them. I’ll kill you, I’ll kill you, he promised, over and over and over, and his voice was filled with such wildness, such heat, such fury that no one doubted him. He slid into the front seat, pulling Cristina in after him, still keeping his gun pointed at the two older women. Don’t move or I’ll kill you, he chanted.

  Then it was like a movie, everything happening without you being able to stop it, him moving into the car, the chauffeur crawling further and further away along the street, Cristina’s eyes brilliant as the man held his elbow around her neck in the front seat, and just as in a movie everyone could see how things were going to unfold, that this was how it happened, how one became desaparecida. Cristina could see there was no help for it, she saw herself part of this scene, getting into the car with this man and his gun, leaving her mother and her children and Carlos, as the man was muttering in a steady violent stream that he would kill them all.

  And then something else happened. Elvira, who was now struggling to stand up, realized that Cristina had been pulled back into the car with the gunman, and she turned and ran the few steps across the grass to the car and threw herself over its hood, her gold earrings glinting against the hard shine of the black paint.

  “Don’t take her!” screamed Elvira. “Don’t take her, she’s a mother! Es una madre! Tiene tres niños! Take me!” Elvira screamed, throwing her thin old woman’s arms against the hood, banging on it in a horrible, unsettling, embarrassing way. “Take me!” she screamed, her voice high and demanding. “Take me!” she insisted. “Don’t take her! She has three children! Take me!” And she clambered, sprawling, like a heavy sack, in her beautiful gray wool dress, over the hood, beating at it with her bony old fragile fists, her gold bracelets jangling in an excruciating way on the metal, and her wild screaming face looming into the windshield.

  The gunman was trying to organize himself, holding on to Cristina with his arm hooked around her throat, trying to hold the gun cocked in the air and pull the driver’s door shut and find the key and turn it in the ignition and ignore the horrible screaming of the old crone who was flailing her arms on the hood in front of him.

  He leaned out the window to shout at her. “We don’t want an old woman,” he yelled contemptuously. “We want the young one.”

  When he said that, Cristina said, it was as though everything stopped for her, just for one moment. Everything went slowly and perfectly into crystal in her mind. She heard the gunman call out what he wanted, and she could see what would happen next, she could see the car driving off, with her mother weeping and flinging her hands up in the air. She could see herself being driven off to where the gunman’s friends waited, she knew the pain that was waiting for her there among them. She could see that she would die, that they would kill her. Whatever they wanted, she meant nothing to them, and once her body was still they would throw it from the car. It would be found by the side of some road, and later it would be taken, bruised and discolored, to her family. Then her mother would weep in earnest. It was that thought, the thought of her mother when they found her body, and her children sinking down afterward, moment by moment, into the profound darkness of grief, that changed everything for Cristina.

  As the gunman was holding her close to his body, his mind distracted, leaning out of the driver’s window to shout at her mother, who was screaming in at him through the windshield, Cristina raised her arm up and brought it down as hard as she could, the point of her elbow driving down as hard as she had ever imagined doing anything, deep into the soft place where the gunman’s legs met his body. What she did was smooth and exact, as in a dream, as though she had practiced that one stroke all her life, in preparation for this moment.

  The gunman’s face dropped like a stone toward the place where her elbow hit him. His whole body seemed to turn in on itself, as if it had now some secret business, rolling tightly and deeply into itself with a grunt. And even before the gunman’s head started going down, almost before she felt him start to crumple, Cristina found herself moving, sliding across the front seat, opening the door and spilling herself out onto the grass.

  Out on the grass things had changed: Elvira was pulling herself off the hood, Consuela had managed to stagger to her feet, and from the corner of her eye Cristina could see the houseman, alerted by all the commotion, by her mother’s furious pounding and her demands, standing in the open doorway of the house.

  “Porfirio!” Cristina yelled to him at the top of her lungs. “Call the police! Kidnappers! Thieves! Call the police!” Now it was her turn, now she was yelling over and over, anger and wildness in her voice, and the gunman clambered out of the car and began running toward the other car, which was idling in front of him. Now the chauffeur thought he was being pursued, and so he lay down on the street without moving as if he were already dead so he wouldn’t be shot. The gunman pulled open the back door of the other car and jumped in, and before the door was even shut again the car fishtailed and skidded and roared, and gunned off down the street. It was a red sedan, an old beat-up American car. They never found it.

  Cristina told me all that while we were having lunch. The restaurant we were in was chic, and full of women with streaked blond hair, wearing tight snappy suits and gold earrings. The Italian waiters wore white aprons over black pants and white long-sleeved shirts, with the sleeves rolled up.

  Cristina told me the story the way she tells everything, with exclamation points and pauses, rolling her eyes. She told it as though it were both extravagant and hilarious, and as though those are the only things she chooses to register. As though the gunman, holding her desperate throat in the crook of his brutal arm, were funny; as though her three children, poised on the verge of endless grief, were funny; as though her mother, beating her frail old arms on the car’s hood and shouting crazily into the windshield, were funny; as though her own brilliant and daring and courageous escape were funny; as though the whole world were spread out before Cristina in a series of wild and uproarious adventures, which she chose to see as absurd, though she knew exactly how dangerous and serious they really were. She talked as though boldness and certainty and a fearless readiness to break any rules, any rules at all, were all normal traits, common, insignificant, negligible. She talked as though challenges were there for her amusement, as though they were simply things for her to rise astonishingly up to, like a swimmer lofting herself miraculously over the crests of great waves.

  And I forgave Cristina the vodka, the House Parties Weekends, the smoking, the face-lift, the children. I forgave her everything.

  Assistance

  Adele had not had a good night. She had gone finally to sleep around midnight but waked up again at two-fifteen. This was not a surprise: Adele always had trouble sleeping at her parents’ house.

  Adele was forty-eight years old and lived alone. She had been divorced for twelve years, and her son, Philip, was at college in California. She lived in the t
op floor of a brick house on West Fourth Street in Greenwich Village, overlooking other people’s gardens. Her apartment was small but sunny, and in the mornings she watched the neighborhood cats parade slowly along the walls dividing the gardens. Her life was quiet, and she worked at home: she translated novels from the French.

  Adele liked all of this. She liked her solitary life, with her view over the back gardens, and she liked the silence and rigor of translating. She liked the notion that she was effecting a linguistic transition, making something possible that was otherwise impossible, creating a calm and useful channel of understanding between two vast and powerful oceans.

  Adele had driven down to Chestertown, on the Eastern Shore, where her parents lived. Her father, Sam Bolton, had been a hand surgeon at Johns Hopkins for nearly forty years. He was now ninety, and her mother, Bess, was eighty-seven. They were both still mentally vigorous, but physically they were becoming rather frail. Sam had had his second hip replacement operation two months earlier, and Bess’s trouble with her knees was getting worse. Since Sam’s operation, Adele had been coming down every few weeks to help out.

  Beforehand, Adele envisioned each of these visits as orderly and productive. She saw herself as competent and sensible, helping to translate her parents’ old life into this new unlearned one that lay ahead. But this was not the way the visits turned out. Going back to her parents’ small house was like entering a foreign force field, where the normal rules of transaction—logic and reason and predictability—seemed suspended. It was a strange, disorienting, gravity-free realm where the air sang and jangled with dysfunction, where her own competence somehow evaporated, and giddy chaos threatened.

  From two-fifteen until four-thirty Adele lay awake, reading, in the blond-wood contemporary bed her uncle had given her mother when he got rid of all his Swedish modern in the nineteen seventies. The austere bed looked out of place: the room had lavender walls and white ruffled curtains, and was full of dark Victorian furniture from Adele’s grandparents. The mahogany sleigh bed had gone to Adele’s older sister in San Diego when the Swedish bed arrived. Adele’s mother draped a length of thin lavender cloth over the wooden headboard, in an effort to make the new bed blend with the room. It was unsuccessful. The angular blond-wood bed, with its loose lavender hood, looked merely bizarre, as though it had been set there among the ruffles and mahogany according to some alternate universe theory of decoration, inaccessible to us.