by Abby Frucht
Next morning, drinking coffee in the high-ceilinged dining room, she notices a man, a young man wearing a brown suit, alone at a table. He’s got his eyes shut tight and his hands clasped under his chin. Is he praying? All around him the waiters are hurrying and people are chattering. The sight of him fills her with pity and hope, as if she’s come upon a person waltzing alone in a ballroom. There’s a plate with a roll and a pot of jam, and the neat white tablecloth, and the pot of coffee. Nancy studies his lips as they move. She can’t make herself stop staring. She presses forward in her chair and strains to hear his thanks being lifted away from him.
Trees at Night
“But I wouldn’t call them rapes,” Mandy is saying. “I mean he didn’t really do it. Or maybe they just managed to fight him off before he got to it. They said he hid behind a tree. He was emaciated! A shrimp! But a lot of them start out that way, low key, and then they become more…”
“Aggressive,” David says.
“Violent.” Mandy’s face screws up when she says this, and David sees that she really is frightened. A moment comes and goes, familiarly, when he sees himself reaching out to touch her, but as usual the inclination is not specific enough to be acted upon; he cannot see just what his hand might do when it reaches her, what part of her he might touch, and how, and for how long. He would like to touch her cheekbones. In fact he would like to touch her entire face the way a blind person would, with the tips of his fingers, but because they aren’t lovers there seems no way of going about it. She really is striking, in an emotional sort of way, so that what she feels is mirrored in her face as if by an artist, and David imagines that by touching her he might better understand her. He once told her this.
“What’s there to understand?” she asked. “I’m all here, I’m not deep, I’m not hiding anything. I don’t think I have any secrets. I’m not that kind of person, am I? It’s all dramatics, really.” She made a face at him, sticking her tongue out.
At ten-thirty Mandy stands up to rinse her wine glass in the sink, carelessly as usual, so the glass strikes the porcelain with a ringing sound.
“Oh, did I break it? No.” She holds it up and twirls it so he can see. David is relieved; the glass is one of four he bought a short time ago at Woolworth’s, a cheap set, with seams in their stems like the seams in hosiery, but he likes them—they’re not fancy, they suit him. Mandy dries hers on the curtain and wipes her hands on her blue jeans.
“You should get a dish towel.”
“Bachelors don’t buy dish towels.”
“I once slept with a man who didn’t have toilet paper. I had to use a wash cloth and rinse it out.” Mandy laughs and makes a joke about how David is to watch her through the window to be sure she gets home safely. She lives next door. She never follows the sidewalk but cuts across the lawn, through the tall, ill-cut grass, high-stepping in her awkward sandals. “Why do women wear sandals like that?” says David to the window pane.
Several minutes later, Mandy’s boyfriend Eric bicycles up the driveway, jumps off the seat, unclips his pants cuff, and follows Mandy inside with the light still clipped to his arm, the white beam dancing alongside of him.
Soon David goes out for his dog walk, around the reservoir barefoot. It’s his private joke, that he walks an invisible dog on these chilly excursions, a dog that follows him the way dogs always do, by walking ahead of him. In springtime, the high school kids aren’t out there screwing yet, and the night has a presence all its own that floats above the ripples in the water, without seeming to touch it. David enjoys the brief, quiet circle he makes on the dirt path, never stopping to sit. He is somewhat overweight, and he can see himself sitting on the slatted bench, a fat man staring into black water.
Mandy and her boyfriend aren’t having an easy time. They’re not fighting, simply moving past one another. “Near misses” is the term Mandy favors, with a slight, quick raising of her eyebrows. Sometimes she experiments with paying Eric some attention, beginning by asking some inappropriate question about a graphic he’s been working on, on a subject requiring such technical expertise that she’ll need to ask him to rephrase his answer even though they both know she’s not really interested.
“The same thing happens the other way around,” she says to David.
“But why should you be interested in each other’s jobs?” he says. “Day in and day out, it’s irrelevant. That seems to me to be something you would have worked out by now.”
“It’s not the jobs,” Mandy says. “I don’t even care if he cares about his job, much less about mine. What bothers me is I don’t know if I care about him anymore. Or if he cares about me.”
“But do you care if he cares about you,” David jokes. Mandy shrugs, not getting it. “It seems to me that you can go through stages like this and then grow out of them and start caring about one another in different ways,” he continues.
“This isn’t a stage, David. It’s not as if we had a crush on each other and now we have to get to know each other better.”
“Maybe you just don’t like each other anymore, then.”
“Thanks.”
“You talk to me like I don’t have any idea what you’re going through, and then you get pissed off when I don’t make it better,” says David.
“You don’t have any idea what I’m going through, but you do make it better.”
“I don’t see why it’s so important for two people to stay together,” says David gloomily.
“I know. Sometimes I think I should marry him, so he can divorce me. I keep thinking of this one Thanksgiving we had together, when things were really good between us. Not a long time ago. I made a turkey, and all the things that go with it. Stuffing, cranberries, potatoes…”
David nods. Mandy stops talking long enough to pour herself more wine. Her third glass, and still she focuses deliberately, gripping it, so her fingers clenched around the stem make David think a wine glass must be like an egg—no matter how hard you hold onto it, it won’t break.
“I spent all day cooking, or just hanging out in the kitchen, because it was so cozy in there. The windows steamed up, and it was snowing out. Eric was watching football. I didn’t even mind he was watching football, because it seemed so homey, him lying on his back on the bed while I cooked, just down the hallway. Have you ever stewed cranberries? They pop! When they heat up! It was such a great day. We made love a little, and then we sat down to eat, and it was over in fifteen minutes. We just ate it like any other dinner, because we couldn’t work up the mood, the whole Thanksgiving thing, after having eaten together every night for months in front of the news. I was so disappointed. I kept stuffing myself just so we could keep sitting there pretending.”
David says he solved the problem of Thanksgiving by ignoring it and cooking a hamburger unless he was seeing Julie at the time and they went out. They once went to a Chinese place that served American-style Thanksgiving food with fortune cookies at the end. Julie wouldn’t let him read her fortune, which at the time seemed important to him and triggered an “off” period that they later laughed about whenever they were “on.”
“What was it?” asks Mandy.
“She never told me.”
Mandy purses her lips and sips a little wine. Later, after Mandy has gone home, David phones Julie.
“What was that fortune?” he asks.
“None of your business.”
“Come on.”
“Something about how beautiful I was.” Julie is not beautiful. “I was embarrassed to show it to you.”
“Should I come up for the night?”
“Not really.”
“Someone’s there?”
“More or less.”
The ambiguity is Julie’s style, and he admires the way she makes it sound absolute.
“In a couple of days, maybe,” she says. “What’s new in your life?”
“Nothing. I’m still trying to figure out if I should try and make it with Mandy or not.”
That nigh
t there’s another attack, and again the woman, a student jogging, breaks free and sprints back to her dorm. She does not scream. The policeman, who comes to talk with David on the following morning, identifies the tree behind which the man hid as one in David’s front yard, one whose leaves can be seen from David’s gabled bedroom window.
“She said he was narrow,” the policeman snorts. David nods, looking at the sycamore, which is young, upright, but comparatively small. He is glad that the girl didn’t scream, because he heard nothing. How awful it would be if she screamed and no one came. However, it is not the girl he thinks of after the policeman drives off but the attacker himself, who stood waiting on David’s lawn as David lay inside reading, the glow of his bedside lamp visible among the branches of the tree. David can’t think of a lonelier thing.
But he can’t say that to Mandy. He tells her he was reading the book she loaned him, Katherine Mansfield’s letters. Love letters to John Middleton Murray. Pages and pages of “Darlings” and “Sweethearts,” the same frank, hungry language over and over.
“How can one person have written so many letters? I feel like a Peeping Tom, reading them. I think I’m falling in love with her.”
“And she wanted him to burn them,” says Mandy. “Think of it. You have a love affair now, no one will ever know, you do it on the telephone. No one writes letters. Think of listening in on her phone calls!”
“You liked reading them as much as I do.”
“I felt like a Peeping Tom too,” she admits.
“Peeping Mandy.”
“Yeah. Only from inside. It’s my new hobby. Don’t you just want to look and see if he’s out there?”
“Who?”
“Behind that tree again.”
“Oh.” He comes up from behind her and parts the curtains. She’s been standing there all along, twirling her wine glass, wanting to look out the window. He didn’t know. They stare out across the yard, above the spiky crowns of some shrubs, to the plane trees with their flaking, layered, silvery bark, the trunks like satin where the bark is stripped. A week has passed since the assault. Women, if they walk alone, follow the center of the road as if walking a tightrope. David has noticed that the ones who walk alone have about them an exaggerated energetic bravery, their shoulder bags swinging freely from their elbows, flat leather boots slap-slapping the pavement.
“I like them,” Mandy says. “I admire them. Only I couldn’t do it, I’m too scared. Eric says it shows, that I’m scared, and that that’s how they choose their victims. Evidently he’s saying if I get it, I asked for it.”
“No, he isn’t. He’s protecting you.”
“He says if I can’t sleep, I might try not drinking so much wine over here every night. Wine keeps me up. I fall asleep, and then I wake up a few hours later dehydrated. I think he resents you.”
“I didn’t know you weren’t sleeping,” says David, concerned. But then the telephone rings. It’s Julie, wanting to come down.
“Bring egg rolls,” David says into the receiver. He grins at Mandy, who puffs out her cheeks. Julie lives near a Chinese takeout, where the cashier calls her Dollie.
“Bye,” says Julie.
“Bye, Dollie,” says David.
“Who’s Dollie?” asks Mandy, looking amused.
“Julie. She’s coming over. How can Eric resent me?”
“Not you, I guess. He resents me for needing to come here. I guess I better go.”
“I’ll walk you home.”
“It’s not necessary.”
“Just scream, then.”
“Wonderful. I should practice walking to the corner and back. Naked. Carrying a tomahawk. A boa constrictor.”
“I once picked up a hitchhiker,” says David. “A girl. She gets in the car and takes an apple from her bag and starts peeling it, with this giant knife. The whole ride she’s peeling it, continuously, so the skin doesn’t tear, and then she cuts it into eighths, real methodically, and picks out the seeds with the tip of the blade. I was scared out of my wits.”
“You were scared!” Mandy puts on her sandals, and then she has to take them off again to put her socks on first. She wears lavender socks, turned down at the ankles, and pants to midcalf, a girl’s costume, David always thinks, except her legs are strong, unshaven, the hair a line, dark shadow. At once he is jealous, not of Eric himself but of the fact of Eric coming home through that kitchen door, where the vestibule is piled messily with socks and shoes, a tangle of male and female—sneakers, sandals, boots, slippers, the socks grass-stained, their toes threadbare. It’s not true what he told her, about the hitchhiker and the apple. Or maybe it happened, but to somebody else, somebody who passed it on. The thing is, when he told the story, he believed he was telling the truth, for in the few seconds that it took to tell, he could feel it happening. He felt the girl’s fear and his own emotion bouncing off it, like opposing poles of a single magnet, fear and longing, longing and fear.
“What I mean is,” says Mandy, squinting into his gaze, “do you think I want to love Eric but I don’t, or I don’t want to love him but I do?”
“I think you want to love him and you do love him. You come over here because you like all the free booze you get out of me.”
“You’re right,” Mandy laughs, and is gone, the door swinging open behind her. David cleans the kitchen and changes his clothes, into fresh black jeans and a black knit shirt with the full moon silk-screened on it. His loony shirt. When Julie arrives, the door is still open. For a second she stands on the step as if the door is a mystery, something to be wary of, but she’s invulnerable. Stepping inside she drops the shopping bag in David’s lap. He sticks his head in. Six egg rolls, four beers, a pack of shrimp chips, multicolored like confetti.
“The chips are for you,” says Julie. “And I’m only having two egg rolls. I swear. I’m dieting.”
“You have lost weight,” says David.
“Eighteen pounds. Twelve to go. It’s easy, you just drink one eight-ounce glass of water before every meal.”
“I don’t have any eight-ounce glasses.”
“Too bad.”
David pinches the full moon, clowning. They eat with the TV on, and play Chinese checkers, one game after another. Across the bright star shape of the checker board, they tell each other stories. Julie tells him about the time she got locked for an hour in a rest room at a gas station in Tennessee, and he tells her how, without meaning to, he had lied to Mandy about the hitchhiker. As usual, their separate entrapments seem complementary, and David wonders if all old friends feel like this or if the two of them are lucky. In bed he pulls Julie on top of him, to feel her diminished weight, and she plays up to it, enjoying herself, arching away from him, holding herself at arm’s length. She is like a balloon, floating above him and then touching down.
“I was hoping to meet this Mandy,” she says to him later.
“You can see her if you look out the window in the morning, when she goes to work.”
But in the morning, gulping her mugs of water, Julie explains that she is getting serious with Seth, really serious, and that he and she are moving to Vermont to buy a house and start a bed and breakfast place.
“He’s a great cook,” she says, “and I don’t mind cleaning up if I’m paid. We want to ski our lives away. You can stay there sometime.”
David is surprised. It is as if she is at once on the brink of a slope, the poles tapping the snowy crust, teasing, so that the skis inch forward just enough to send her flying.
“I didn’t know you skied,” he says.
“I’ll learn. But don’t think it’s so sudden—it’s not, we’ve been talking about it for a year already.”
“Has Seth stopped smoking yet?”
“When I lose thirty pounds.”
“Then what happens when you gain it back? I can’t picture you in a bed and breakfast, Julie.”
“Neither can I.” She kisses him, a long kiss, a good-bye kiss.
“There’s something tha
t’s been happening,” Mandy is saying, “that makes me think I might really be crazy.”
She takes a long, nervous sip of her wine, and for a moment her hair falls over her face. David has to nudge her before she’ll continue. Wine glasses in hand, they are skirting the reservoir, following the narrow path around its perimeter, detouring here and there because the high school kids are out, in clusters on the steep grassy edge, partying. A boy grunts in the bushes, and one girl wretches while two others stroke her back, all three of them laughing because its so new to them—drunken feelings, night air, freedom, space. In the morning, beer cans will float in the water, and cigarette butts, and someone’s sweater on the rocks like a puddle of wool.
“For instance I’ll be coming to a door, about to open it,” Mandy explains, “any door, like a broom closet, because I have to sweep, or even the medicine cabinet, when I’m getting aspirin out, and before I open it I get this flash, this image of myself screaming, a horror movie scream, because there’s something horrible on the other side of the door, it doesn’t matter what, but what matters is I’m screaming for that split second in my mind, and I can feel it welling up, like I really want to scream, like I need to do it.”
“Primal scream therapy, maybe.”
“No, because it’s private. It’s not the scream that’s important, it’s the need. There was a girl in college who used to do it. A messy girl. She’d be walking along and then all at once she’d stop, and stand up straight and just wail, like a siren. But I could never do that, in public.”
“That’s self-control. You’re sane, not crazy.”
“I know it. I’m too sane. If I wasn’t sane I wouldn’t be with Eric anymore, I’d be with you.”
“Anyone would have to be crazy to go out with me.”
“Cut it out. I mean, even when I hate him, objectively I know I still love him. I do. I want to marry him and get it over with. I’m telling him that, tonight.”