A Perfect Stranger

by Roxana Robinson

  One day Steven came home from the marketing humming and cheerful. I went into the kitchen to help put things away, and Nina and John appeared in bathing suits, on their way to the pool.

  “What’s the news?” John asked. Steven often brought us village gossip: the two feuding bakeries, the funeral procession down the main street, the drunk who lay on the sidewalk and refused to get up even when the big-bellied mayor himself stood over him and ordered him to move.

  “I have a report,” Steven said. He took from his basket a baguette and a small plastic container of olives.

  “Tell us,” said Nina, picking up the olives. “ Love these,” she added parenthetically.

  “I want you all to know,” Steven said and paused solemnly for effect, “that I am now a man known to the locals.” His chin was lifted with pride.

  “Oh, well, now,” Nina said, sounding impressed. She fished out an olive and put it in her mouth. “Tell us about it.”

  “Today, as I was leaving the vegetable shop, I said, ‘Merci, madame,’ as I do every day, and the woman at the counter said, ‘Merci, monsieur,’ as she always does, and then she added, ‘à demain.’” Steven looked at us all. “‘Until tomorrow’! She expects me!”

  “Now that is a real accomplishment,” Nina said generously. She held out the olives that he’d just brought, like an award. “Have one of these. They’re delicious.”

  “Thank you,” Steven said. He gave a little bow and took one.

  “We’re clearly in the right place,” Nina said, turning to John, “with the right people.” She shook her head. “We’ll just have to stay.”

  It was a small thing, but it made Steven happy, and it was a measure of his content that such a small thing would make a difference. Happiness was seeping into him like the cool water into the dry fields. That afternoon when we went upstairs for our siesta I could feel him watching me while I undressed. I didn’t meet his eyes, I didn’t dare, but I could feel him watching, and when I got into bed, lying with my back to him, he slid at once over to me, stretching his whole body against mine from behind, and I felt his hands slide smoothly, and so slowly and deliberately up, along my ribs and onto my breasts, and I closed my eyes, with gratitude and delight.

  It was a lovely month, and it seemed that everything I’d hoped for had come true. On the last night we went out for a fancy farewell dinner at our favorite restaurant, in Fontvieille, a few miles away. The village was even smaller than ours, just one main street lined with old stone houses. We parked and walked to the restaurant: it was entirely silent around us. In those small Provençal villages there is no sound after dark, and there all the houses were shuttered against the night. No one was on the sidewalk, there were no passing cars. The sound of each footstep rang against the stone walls. The evening air was sweet and soft, and we walked through it full of anticipation. We were dressed up, the men in white pants and crisp shirts, Nina and I in dresses and heels.

  The owner-chef came out to greet us. He was tall, with blue eyes and smooth pink cheeks, in a very clean white chef’s uniform and toque. He nodded at everything we said; he seemed to approve of all our decisions.

  Would we like a table in the garden?

  “S’il vous plaît,” Steven said enthusiastically, and the chef bowed his head politely and led us out. The garden was walled, and there were low fruit trees in it, and flowers everywhere: tumbling from big urns, on climbing vines, in vases on the tables. Around us were the old stone walls of the village houses; their shuttered windows overlooked us. There were flickering candles on the tables, though there was then still enough twilight in which to see. The sky above us was a deepening blue; the first faint points of stars were beginning to appear. We ordered a bottle of the local rosé wine, which is light and sweet and makes you happy.

  The pink-cheeked chef took our orders, bowed with courtesy, like a friend, and left us.

  “You know, the French are really so polite,” Steven said. “They have a reputation for being rude, but they’re really incredibly polite. Much more polite than Americans.”

  “Well, to be fair, they can be incredibly rude,” John said.

  “They aren’t really, it’s just that they don’t smile. That’s why Americans think they’re rude. We think smiling is being polite, but for them, it’s what you say, not how you look. They say good morning and good-bye to everyone. They always say please and thank you when we don’t bother. All they don’t do is smile.”

  “And the incredibly supercilious manner?” John said.

  “You just don’t speak French well enough to know when they’re being polite,” Steven said, waving his hand, grinning.

  “That must be it,” John said, nodding.

  “But you are getting really good in French,” Nina said to Steven, swirling her drink. She was wearing glittery earrings, the color of her eyes, and a low-cut dress; her sumptuous tanned breasts were on display. “Aren’t you?”

  “Better, anyway,” Steven said modestly. “I’m still actually terrible.”

  “No, you’re not,” I said. “Steven can say anything.”

  “Oh, really very little,” Steven said, but he was pleased.

  “The big challenges in a foreign language,” said John, “are telling jokes, a dinner party, and calling from a pay phone.”

  “Phone calls are easy,” Steven said, waving his hand.

  “They are?” Nina asked.

  “Pièce de gâteau,” Steven said.

  “You know how to use the French pay phones?” I said, surprised, impressed. “How do you know things like that?”

  “I know lots of things,” Steven said and smiled at me.

  The evening drew out. The candles grew brighter, illuminating our faces as the nighttime darkened around us. It grew later and later. The German couple at the next table paid their bill and went home, and so did the American family behind us. The silent Parisian couple sat over their coffee without talking, but we grew merrier and merrier. Everything seemed funny, that night. Steven was across from me, and I could see his happiness, his good humor, glowing from him.

  When John leaned back in his chair and lifted his hand for the waiter, Steven lifted his hand too.

  “I’ll do this, Stanton,” Steven said, pretending to be surly.

  “I can take care of it,” John said, pretending to bristle.

  “I told you I’ll do it,” Steven said, and the two of them leaned back in their chairs, their arms raised high, jostling, easy.

  “You two look like kids up in the bleachers,” Nina said, “trying to catch the baseball. What is it, a pop fly? What is a pop fly?”

  When she said the word baseball, I glanced at Steven. I hadn’t meant to, but I did, and he was looking at me, and he smiled. I thought, We’ve done it.

  The waiter came with the bill, but when we’d paid we didn’t stand up to leave. We sat there, still talking and laughing, unwilling to let go of what we had.

  The village around us was completely quiet by then, so we could easily hear the first scrape of metal against wood. It was a small sound, somewhere above us. I looked up, and Steven did too, and we watched each other, listening. Up on one of the houses overlooking our garden, shutters were being swung open. Then we heard the swift turning of metal, as the long windows were parted. There was a brief pause, and then we heard a man’s deep voice, someone leaning out into the air above us. He spoke one word: “Assez!”

  Enough: that was all.

  Silence. We looked at each other, laughing and sheepish. The man was so precise, so perfectly assured, so courteous, and so inarguably right. It was really late. We looked around: the other tables all were empty. Everyone else had gone home. The waiter stood respectfully near the door, his hands crossed. He was waiting for us to leave, the whole village was waiting for us to leave. We’d had enough: the beautiful meal, the wine, the garden, the warm scented air, the black star-filled sky. And so we went out, and down the black silent street to our cars, walking slowly, arm in arm, giddy wit
h the pleasure of that night.

  When I look back at that evening, it still makes me happy. I like the memory of that invisible Frenchman, declaring his single word into the dark air like a charm. We all heard it, and caught each other’s gazes, and we knew that he was right, that our night was over, that we had had enough.

  You can’t keep things as they are, but you can hold things fixed in your memory, and so I still have that evening, although everything was lost, after that.

  Steven had never stopped seeing Alison. That month in France he called her every morning when he went to the market. It would have been the middle of the night in New York; she would have answered when she was still asleep, dozy and warm. Steven must have stood in the phone booth in our little village, next to the tabac, his head held down in order to hear her voice, pressing the phone against his ear, imagining the sight of her on the other end of the line. I suppose he was happier as the month went on because each day he was closer to seeing her again.

  I would have given anything to have made that not happen, to have kept him from ebbing away from me, but I could not. I did what I could, and it wasn’t enough. I couldn’t make a current strong enough to draw him to me; he left. He married Alison, with that red red mouth, and I don’t think about them now any more than I can help it.

  And Nina’s sumptuous breasts contained her death. First she had surgery, then toxic treatments, poison, deadly rays— oh, everything anyone could think of—and then finally, her immune system ravaged and gone, she died of a fever. She got a headache, and then the fever. Her temperature was one hundred and five when we got the last report from the hospital, and we were told by then that her brain had been destroyed, so we couldn’t even hope they could save her. And John—it’s so hard to believe it—died too. The last evening I had dinner with them, when Nina was wearing a brilliant scarf wrapped around her head to conceal the loss of her thick blond hair, John complained of dizziness. Oh, that’s nothing, I said, inner ear infection, they give you antibiotics. I was so glad to be able to identify it and dismiss it. But it wasn’t nothing, it was the other thing, the thing no one mentions until there is no other thing to say: brain tumor. Nina was sick for three years, but John was only sick for three months. He went into a coma and died two weeks before Nina’s headache, the one that turned into the rising unstoppable fever. She died in twenty-four hours, before most of us even knew she was in trouble.

  It’s so strange to think that all that is past, gone, that it’s over and can’t be reclaimed. But that night in the warm garden, with the dark aromatic countryside all around us, the black starry sky overhead, we were happy. What we had, without realizing it, was enough. It was all we were to have, whether we wanted more or not.

  Intersection

  I live on a narrow dirt road, about a hundred and fifty years old. Great standing sugar maples line this road, and in the summer it is a cool shadowy tunnel, though the high arching boughs allow a dappling of light to sift through. On one side of the road the Audubon preserve plunges down a steep ravine into dim woods. The interior is crowded with wild grape and maple saplings that struggle under the high dense canopy of the forest. On the other side of the road a wooded hill rises gently, its few houses hidden on its open upper slopes.

  At night, deer tap tentatively across the cool hard surface of the road. Possums and woodchucks and raccoons wind secretively along the stone walls that line it, and skunks parade down the middle of it, reeking fearlessly. And there is traffic in broad daylight as well: there are the harried squirrels who insist on living on one side of the road and working on the other. In the early mornings, joggers are rife, with dogs, black Labs and golden retrievers, that drift alongside the runners in erratic patterns. There are walkers, too, on the road. Every afternoon a woman strides by my house holding a tall stick in one hand and the leash to a saluki hound in the other: equal measures of order and chaos. And on weekends there are the young girls who trot past on horseback, their horses’ ears pricked forward at a critical angle of curiosity—intense, polite, limitless.

  One day last month I saw a woman walking along the road pushing a big baby carriage, the padded box joggling comfortably along on high springy wheels. It was an incongruous sight on the packed dirt road, under the hanging swags of grapevine and bittersweet, the high dim canopy of the woods in the background. The baby carriage looked so elegant and urban, the navy canvas sides were so darkly clean, the wide chrome wheels so bright. It was so obviously designed for smooth paved sidewalks, not the uneven surfaces of our dirt road. The young mother pushing it was looking straight ahead, and singing. I was driving past, but I could see from the tempo and the rhythm of her mouth that she was singing, not talking. She was half-smiling, her eyebrows lifted, looking ahead, up the road, thinking about the words she was singing, or about nothing in particular, in that dreamy, meditative, slightly exalted state brought on by song. She was wearing blue jeans and a sweater, and thick-soled running shoes, and she was pushing the carriage along with purpose and confidence, as though she were on a wide esplanade, or on her way to the Serpentine, in Kensington Gardens. I thought of the baby, lying in that swaying cot, watching overhead the slow unwinding of the reel of interwoven branches, the mysterious green canopy above. He was listening to his mother’s voice as he watched the forest ceiling move past him, hearing her liquid presence in this airy green world. Perhaps he couldn’t even see her face, perhaps he was so carefully lapped in fine pale blankets and coverlets that he could only see the trees and hear her voice, as he was carried along in that smoothly rocking cushioned ride.

  In spite of all this fragile and slow-paced traffic, cars still rocket along the road as though they were its only travelers. It’s dangerous to drive fast on a dirt surface. It’s hard to stop quickly; wheels find little purchase on the smooth clay, and what produces an easy, obedient lessening on the highway will cause a wild, sickening skid on dirt. Two days ago I saw a small red car nestled confidingly into the base of one of the maples, its nose tidily concave around the convex trunk.

  The cars hit our road fast. There’s no preparation for it, and people don’t slow down, turning onto it from the fast paved road at the bottom of the hill. This road has become busier and busier as big companies set up offices in the countryside, creating around them the suburbs they pretend to shun. People who drive that fast east-west road are rapid-transit types. They are in a hurry, on the way to the railroad station, or the mall, or the office complex. They hurtle, unseeing, past the scenery, which is spectacular. This road runs past one of the New York City reservoirs, a great shimmering untouched stretch of light and water, rimmed with silent woods. Deer swim out to the small wild islands in the middle of it, swans float nobly across it, and Canada geese come and stand on the spillway, dabbing at any small creature about to be swept over, in a bogus rescue attempt.

  The cars on that east-west road are heading for an intersection three miles away, with a big six-lane interstate. The flat calm of the reservoir states simply that you are there; the interstate reminds you of all the other places you might be instead. Great distances are suggested here, and the interstate leads toward anywhere else on the continent. The road widens as it approaches the intersection, and official green metal signs appear, bold and bossy. Big cities are announced, and the points of the compass. There are lots of other places you could be, and speed will get you to any one of them.

  Last summer a woman I knew was picked up out there, for speeding, by a state policeman. She wasn’t yet on the highway, she was still on the smaller road, and might have been heading right through the intersection, though that was never clear. It was very early in the morning, five or five-thirty, and the policeman had pulled his car into a graveled space at the side of the road. There would be nothing going on at that hour; it was too early even for the most fanatical commuters to the city, too late for the most determined drunks. The sun would have been coming up from the wooded hills above the reservoir, sliding across the cold wet grass on the
shoulder, which would be still soaked and white with dew. It was an in-between time for the policeman, the ragtag end of a shift that finished at six; nothing to do but wait for the numbers on his digital watch to change.

  When the woman appeared she was heading west toward the intersection, on a straight wide and empty road. The policeman said later that she was doing eighty, eighty-five when he first saw her. He turned on his circling blue light and went after her. She pulled over, with him behind her, just before the entrance to the highway going north, and I wonder if she hadn’t planned to turn up it. Canada? The wide blue of Hudson Bay? She could have had anything in mind, anywhere. At home she had left her husband asleep. Lunches for the children—sandwiches wrapped in aluminum foil, filled thermoses—were set out on the kitchen counter, ready for day camp.

  When she pulled over, the policeman did too. Usually, when people are stopped, they stay in their cars, meek and chastened, awaiting the appearance of the policeman in the car window. But the policeman was still in his cruiser, checking her license plate number in the computer, when the woman climbed urgently out of her car and ran across to him, barefoot in the wet grass. By now the sun would have started altering the landscape. Her face would have been lit up by that clean early light, though maybe not her bare legs, her feet, cold and soaked by dew. She was wearing only a bathrobe, an old blue terry-cloth one that fastened with a cord at the waist. She ran across the grass toward the policeman and halfway there collapsed. He opened his door, startled, and of course not knowing what she was doing. By the time he reached her she was unconscious, or at least past speech: she had put the blade of the big kitchen knife so precisely between her fifth and sixth ribs that she didn’t live to reach the hospital, though it was only twelve miles away on the interstate, and the policeman was going a hundred, maybe a hundred and ten, his siren on, the blue light flashing in circles, as though speed might save her now.