by Peter Gadol
“So do you come here often?” I asked.
He chuckled. “I do indeed. What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?”
“No idea,” I said. “What’s your sign?”
“My sign is yield,” he said. “And yours?”
I should have said it was stop.
“Want to drive me home?” I asked. I’d called a car to get to the restaurant so I could drink and not worry about driving.
Carey signaled the bartender for the check, and when he looked back at me, I was even more smitten because he was rosy cheeked, boyish, like he very much wanted not to mess this up.
As I was handing him his jacket and putting on my own, he said, “By the way, I like your sweater.”
He said this with his head cocked, one eyebrow arced, waiting for me to respond. I was wearing a lavender cashmere V-neck, and it looked fine on me but wasn’t tight, not the sort of sweater to show off anything, the opposite. I wasn’t sure how I should respond—with counterinnuendo, was that how this worked? I wanted what I wanted that night, I will freely admit it, but didn’t know if I would be bold enough at the critical moment.
All I said was “Thanks, it’s new.”
Of course it was stupid to get in a car with him, both of us intoxicated. Thankfully we didn’t have to drive far, and he parked in front of my house and came in. I gave him a tour, switching on lights as we went. He noticed the patches of sample paints and pointed at a color he liked.
“The lighter green would be better for resale,” he said.
“I’m not thinking about selling.”
“One should always be thinking about selling. Especially given that we’re moving to the lake house.”
“Good point. But at certain times of day, the lighter green seems anemic to me. You need to see it in the morning,” I said.
Yes, that was an invitation, and I knew what I was doing, showing him the main room, the kitchen first, saving the bedroom for last. I turned on two lamps. He turned off one. Was he modest? He had to bend down a little bit to kiss me. I discovered he was freckled everywhere when I unbuttoned his shirt and pulled it free from his trousers. Then we were on the bed and things picked up. I was too much in my head and tried to let go. He slipped off everything. He was even better looking naked. I was still mostly clothed, wearing my admired sweater, though he’d unzipped my pants. They were tight. And as he stood and tried to pull them off, they turned inside out and got caught on my ankles. He was too aggressive, dragging me down toward the foot of the bed, and my sweater bunched up around my chin. My butt was at the edge of the mattress; I almost fell off.
And in that moment, a turn. Carey managed to tug one pant leg off, but left the other inside out and cuffed around my ankle. There was nothing lovely about this, and when I pulled my sweater down so I could see him better, he looked neither soulful nor sexy. He swayed a bit. We’d had too much to drink, and I thought maybe we ought not to go any further, but he was moving forward now, eager, superhard, not the man I’d bantered with earlier—a wave of panic rose up from my stomach to my throat.
Farce seemed the quickest way out: I deliberately slipped off the bed onto the rug, oops. Carey remained standing, frowning, neither helping me up nor kneeling to be with me on the floor. He simply stood there. I watched his erection all but vanish. I wanted to cover myself up.
“Game over,” he said. “You win. Or maybe I win. Does anyone actually win?”
I’d managed to get the pant leg over my foot and pulled my sweater down over my hips, and I was sitting on the bed again, pushing myself back. Now Carey was the one who sat down on the floor, naked, exposed.
“What do you mean does anyone actually win?” I asked.
“Your sweater,” he said.
“What about it?”
“You didn’t see me? You never saw me? Maybe then I do win.”
I started shivering because suddenly I knew what he would tell me next.
“I was there when you bought it,” he said.
I’d picked out this lavender V-neck that same day I’d followed the woman who tried on men’s sweaters. I’d walked back across the department store to continue shopping for myself. This was a month ago.
“And you really never saw me?” he asked. “All this time, never?”
“Get out,” I said.
Carey held up both hands, surrendering. “Like I said, game over—”
“You’ve been stalking me this whole time—”
“I wasn’t stalking you,” Carey said. He was standing again, stepping into his briefs. “I was playing—”
“Then why would you talk to me tonight? Those aren’t the rules! How is this even the stranger game?”
“But that is how it’s played,” Carey said matter-of-factly.
I didn’t know what he was talking about. “Get out,” I said again.
“I’m sorry,” he tried, but I was having none of it. I wanted him gone. “I really am,” he said. “I screwed up.”
“Get. Out.”
He didn’t explain himself or try to stay, and he also didn’t look back at me when he let himself out, although he did apologize one last time. I jumped up the moment the door was shut and bolted it. I waited a good ten minutes after his car drove off to make sure he didn’t return. I wanted to call the police, but to say what, to report what, the end of civilization? I thought about contacting Detective Martinez, but again, to what end? So she could admonish me for being so reckless?
I thought about all of the places I’d been in the last weeks and wondered when Carey had been watching me. The irony was acidic: I thought I was so expertly stealthy when I followed strangers, but most of that time, I’d been a subject, too. Although he couldn’t have been trailing me the entire time because I certainly didn’t spot anyone that rainy night when I got lost north of the city. He probably had learned enough about my routines to know where to find me whenever he wanted. He knew where my studio was and my yoga class and where I liked to hike and get takeout. It was likely that before coming home with me he already knew where I lived.
I scrubbed myself in the shower. I remade my bed with fresh linens. I refused to let this get to me, but I couldn’t sleep and got dressed, went out to my car, backed out onto the street and made sure, extra sure no one was following me. It was three in the morning when I let myself into Ezra’s cold apartment and crawled into his bed. He’d been gone four months, but his pillows smelled like him, like cinnamon. I cried. This was a very bad idea. I’d let the night defeat me, although I did eventually fall asleep.
FIFTEEN WAS EZRA’S FAVORITE NUMBER. IF HE RETIED HIS LEFT SNEAKER, he had to retie his right, too. He wanted to put tomatoes in everything, but he didn’t care for tomato soup. The cello was his favorite instrument. His favorite color was green, but brown greens, not blue greens, and definitely not yellow greens. He was left-handed and couldn’t use a fountain pen because he’d smear the ink when he tried to write anything with it.
The novel he was writing was set in Paris, though the longest he’d lived there was for three months one summer during college before I knew him well. He had been to France two or three times before that. However, he said writing the novel kind of killed the place for him, and one reason he might never finish this book was because he’d fallen out of love with its setting. If anyone asked him what the novel was about, he’d say it was about people who had no desire to live where they were living but couldn’t figure out how to leave. The working title was Landlocked.
Ezra got cold easily, and when we were together, rather than have a duvet on our bed, we’d come up with a system of layers of blankets so I could throw off some when I became too warm. I loved the parts of his body where he was ticklish, like the side of his chest; he was lean and I liked to run my fingers along the grooves between his ribs, and he’d learned to tolerate this, if not enjoy it a little.
He knew that my favorite number was forty-five, three times his favorite number (he always noted), and a long while ago he’d promised we’d go on a fantastic trip when I turned forty-five (not forty, not fifty). He knew I was fond of men’s watches, and he bought me several over the years, calling himself my royal timekeeper. He knew I loved anything with mushrooms, and it was no accident he was ever perfecting his mushroom risotto, that this was what he was making when I saw him the last time. The guitar was my favorite instrument, and he tried (but failed) to learn it for me; I appreciated the effort. My favorite color was technically not a color, black, and this was a source of amusement for him; when we shopped together (which wasn’t often), he pulled red and orange outfits off the rack for me as a challenge. I was right-handed and loved fountain pens, which he’d buy for me if ever he saw one that was onyx with gold trim—he spent too much money on fountain pens for me—and he’d buy me journals, too, although I was never a diarist.
Long ago when I was trying to be a painter, I was keen on portraiture, and even though Ezra thought no novel should come with a cover that had people on it because it was the reader’s job to picture the characters an author invented, he said one of my portraits would be on his dust jacket. He said the book would be judged by its cover and therefore do well.
Because I was always warm and he ran cold, and even though we lived in a warm climate, during the winter when we went out, I’d wind a scarf around my neck, only to give it to Ezra, who sometimes was already wearing a scarf, and he’d walk around wearing both scarves like it was the height of fashion; I think he wanted to look a tad ridiculous to amuse me. I loved it when he kissed my neck, his always cool lips, the soft brush of his beard. I loved it when he stood behind me, simply stood there and held me, his arms a tight sash.
I never imagined I could know so much about another person and his body, nor he remember everything about me and mine. This sustained intimacy was what I missed most, our evolving lexicon, our constant conspiracy, his protection, the way I forever felt saved from what would have been a lonelier life. When I thought about meeting someone new, I was overwhelmed by how very long it would take to achieve the same closeness I’d known with Ezra, which was maybe why I hadn’t really tried to meet anyone.
But then again there was apparently so much I didn’t know about Ezra, and how could that be? Was there anything he didn’t in turn know about me? No, nothing, or that’s what it felt like, and I needed to dwell on this imbalance: it was significant.
When I woke up at Ezra’s place, disoriented, then sadly remembering where I was and why, this was what I tried to focus on, Ezra the secret keeper, the man who could disappear without a trace. I was mad at myself. One horrible night with a creep had driven me back to Ezra, who was conveniently easy to fall in love with when he wasn’t around.
And yet: Where was he?
I KEPT THE CURTAINS DRAWN IN THE FRONT OF THE HOUSE. Whenever I left, I scanned the street before I got in my car. At my morning yoga class, I unrolled my mat in the back corner, not to watch everyone else but so I could remain mostly unobserved. I cooked at home or ordered in. The only time I didn’t move through the world extra-alert about who might be spying on me was when I went for a run around the reservoir because I needed to concentrate on my pace and not tripping, and even then I had to sprint to elude my paranoia, so fast sometimes that I couldn’t make it through my usual five miles. This was why I wasn’t able to ascend the final slope one morning and instead was breathing hard and walking past the dog park. I didn’t recognize Detective Martinez out of uniform, a leash in each hand. Her two big wooly dogs didn’t want her to stop to say hello to me. They were half her size and trying to tug her in opposite directions.
“Are you okay, Rebecca?”
Stopping to say hi made my heart race, and I had to bend over a moment.
“How have you been?” she asked.
I gave her a thumbs-up.
“I wish I had something new to tell you,” she said.
“It’s okay, Detective Martinez. You’re off duty.”
“Lisa,” the detective said. “Hey, hey,” she said to her dogs, pulling them toward her. “Sit, sit.”
The dogs obeyed for all of ten seconds.
“They’re handsome,” I said.
“A handful, you mean. You want to hear something funny? They’re rescue dogs, right. I figure there’s some husky in there, some shepherd, a few other breeds. But I never really stopped to think what their parents looked like.”
“I took your advice,” I said.
“Oh?”
“I’ve been trying to move on.”
“That’s good to hear.”
The detective could tell I wasn’t happy about it. Even when she wasn’t on the job, she stared at me without blinking.
“Something happened,” I said, and right there on the sidewalk, me in my running kit and the detective trying to control her dogs, with other people jogging by and guiding their puppies into the dog park, I told her all about Carey and his revelation back at my house. Everything came out about the awful almost sex, how I ended up at Ezra’s and how I was convinced now that everyone was playing the stranger game: the guys on the basketball court down the bend and the people driving by and all of the dog walkers, even the damned dogs probably.
The detective didn’t respond at first. I waited to be scolded for bringing Carey home without knowing him, but instead she held both leashes with her right hand so she could squeeze my arm with her left.
“What a creep. That’s awful,” she said. “But listen, not everyone is like that. There are still people in the world you can trust.”
I admit I did like hearing this.
“You know what bothers me the most?” I asked. “That the guy wasn’t following the rules. I’m such a goody two-shoes. Of all things, that’s what I can’t let go of!”
“Oh, but that is the way people are playing now,” Detective Martinez said. “For the thrills. They pick out random strangers like before, but now they see how long they can follow them—days, weeks. The endgame is exactly what happened to you. Contact, seduction, worse.”
“Worse? Worse how?”
The detective did not elaborate. “At first, as you know, we were dealing with missing persons. Now it’s all about the stalking, persistent stalking, sometimes criminal.”
I rubbed my arms. I’d gotten cold. The detective couldn’t keep her dogs from pulling her down the hill.
“Please be careful, Rebecca,” she said. “And don’t try to figure any of this out.”
I DIDN’T LISTEN TO HER. I STARTED LEAVING WORK EARLY TO GO to the nearby mall, where I would ride the escalator to the top floor and stand at the railing of the atrium, peering down at the three floors of shops beneath, trying to identify anyone I thought might be a player. What was I looking for? Anyone loitering alone, standing off to the side, staring at people streaming by. Someone who might make a sudden move and dart off after a passerby. My plan was that if I spotted someone whom I suspected might be inaugurating a follow, I would sweep downstairs and follow the player as long as I could, although this never worked because by the time I reached the lower floor, I’d lost the player.
At the museum on long lunch breaks, I tried to do the same thing, deciding the man in the untucked black shirt and black jeans with tinted glasses wasn’t looking at the exhibit of color field paintings; he was in fact trailing the woman with the jacket tied around her waist and two sets of glasses, the ones on a lanyard that she put on briefly to read the wall text, and the ones she let slip off her forehead onto the bridge of her nose to look at the art. Then it looked to me like the woman with two pairs of glasses herself may not have been truly studying the art or reading the wall text, and that this was all a ruse because she was following two teenagers in love, a boy and girl with equally narrow bodies and their arms coiled around each other. At le
ast they couldn’t be players; they were too preoccupied with each other to follow anyone.
But where did this end? Because in the mall, in the museum, I began to think that anyone and everyone could be playing the stranger game, and every follower him- or herself could be a subject in an infinite regression of pursuit.
I was thinking a lot about the broken rules, and sure, I could see how the first rule might fall away easily enough: followers might want to track subjects who intrigued them rather than those who at any given moment happened to pass by. I understood how according to Detective Martinez ignoring the second rule had become the norm, but I suspected that making contact wasn’t merely an act of seduction; it was also the case that followers wanted to know if there was any truth in what they speculated about their subjects. However, breaking the third rule mystified me. What did it feel like to violate someone’s privacy not once but repeatedly? Was there no hesitation in this, no shame?
One morning the second week in February, I was having trouble concentrating while working on a proposal for a new charter school and decided to ride the metro, something I hadn’t done in a long while; riding trains always had a way of relaxing my mind. At one station, a man and a girl who could only be his daughter boarded and sat down across from me; they had the same pale complexion with faintly penciled-in eyes, the same small mouth and dot of a nose. He was wearing a suit; she was in a plaid school uniform. They sat very close to each other, didn’t speak to one another, and each stared straight at me. Not in my direction, but at me, making eye contact. At first I looked away, and then when I turned back, they were still staring. I focused on the girl and stared back; she blinked. And that was that, they each withdrew a tablet from a bag and started scrolling through whatever they were reading. The girl got off the train first, the father two stations later. To school, to work—nothing unusual.