Strangers

by Mort Castle

  “I just stood there. I guess I was in shock.

  Michael looked up at me. ‘She fell. I saw her. She was right at the top of the stairs. Then she went down.’ That’s what he said.”

  Beth put the heels of her hands to her temples. Her mind was exploding. She pressed hard, holding her head together. The towel around her became untied, slid down her body. She felt the humiliating vulnerability of nakedness and there was her mother—deadeadead—and there was Michael and she was caught in a debauched surrealistic painting. Death and Michael and Nude on a Staircase and then she screamed.

  “‘What did you do to her? What did you do?’

  I kept yelling that at him and then the next thing I can clearly remember, I was dressed and we were at the hospital and Mother was DOA—I heard someone say that at the emergency room—and then a doctor, maybe a nurse, gave me something, and everything started to blur together…”

  “I see,” Jan Pretre said. “Tell me, Beth, have you had feelings of, let’s call it ‘mistrust’ about your husband in the past?”

  “I…I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “Aren’t you?”

  “Maybe I do know,” Beth said slowly. “Okay, I’ve sometimes had this idea that Michael isn’t at all what he appears to be, that he’s, well, a different man entirely. It’s hard to put into words.”

  “You’re doing fine,” Jan Pretre assured her.

  She went on, telling him what she could in the best way she could. It sounded insane, she realized, but… Hey, he’s a headshrinker and you’re supposed to tell a shrink your insane thoughts!

  “All right,” he said. “Let’s talk about your father.”

  “What? I thought we were talking about my feelings about my husband.”

  “But now it’s time to talk about something else,” Jan Pretre said. “We’re on an investigation, Beth, looking for clues to help us determine why you think what you do about Michael. You’ve labeled those thoughts ‘crazy,’ and certainly they seem irrational. We have to hunt for the roots of your fantasy so that we can deal with the cause of the problem and not merely this symptom.”

  “You’re the doctor,” Beth said weakly.

  “Yes, I am,” Jan Pretre said, “and it’s important you remember that, Beth. I ask questions, offer suggestions, and sometimes flat-out tell you what to do and how to do it because I have reasons. You’ve come to me for help—and if I’m to provide that, you’ll have to have confidence in me.”

  Beth said nothing.

  “Is that hard to do, Beth?” Jan Pretre said, “Is it difficult to trust me because I’m a man, a man just like Michael? Maybe you don’t trust men at all, Beth.”

  “That’s not true!” She bristled.

  “Strong reaction, Beth. Why are you so angry?”

  “I feel like you’re attacking me!”

  “I’m attacking you?” Jan Pretre said, “And Michael attacked your mother? Are you frightened that that is what men do—attack women? Do all men want to hurt you, Beth?”

  “You’re… You’re confusing me!” Beth gulped. There was a dry, hard lump in her throat; she kept swallowing but it would not go away.

  “If you’re going to cry, there are tissues on the desk.” From the comer of her eye, she saw that he was pointing.

  “No,” she said. She hadn’t cried since her mother’s funeral. Her tears then had been endless, but afterwards, she was empty. She felt as though her very guts had been scooped out, leaving her hollow.

  “Then tell me about your father, Beth. That’s what I asked you in the first place and that’s what you’ve been avoiding dealing with. Your father—did you love him?”

  “Yes!”

  “Very much?”

  “Yes!”

  “Were you Daddy’s little girl?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Did he give you all the attention you wanted?”

  Beth turned in her chair. She glared at Jan Pretre. Slowly, she said, “Why are you doing this to me?”

  “Beth,” he said, “don’t you see? I’m trying to help you.” His warm, rumbling voice and his compassionate blue-black eyes reassured her. He cared about people; she knew he did. She had to trust him. She needed him.

  “Can we continue?” he asked.

  She nodded and they went on: Was her father an affectionate man? To her? To her mother? Was she jealous of her mother? Oh, she didn’t think so? Really? What about late at night that wicked time when wicked children prayed their wicked prayers, did she ever wish that mother were out of the way so she could have Daddy all to herself?

  “All right, that’ll do it for this session.” Jan Pretre was looking at his watch.

  Beth felt physically weary, like she’d spent hours moving the furniture to shampoo the living room carpet. She didn’t mind. Weariness was far preferable to the numbness that had invaded her body.

  “Do you think we’re…we’re making progress?” she asked as they both rose.

  “Yes, Beth,” Jan Pretre said. “For the first session, we’ve accomplished a great deal. And Beth?”

  “Yes, Dr. Pretre?”

  “Don’t expect miracles, all right? Your problem didn’t develop overnight. It will take time for us to discover solutions to it, and it’s often going to be a painful process, but believe me, you’ll be a stronger person for it.” He held out his hand. “Trust me?”

  She was touched. She shook his hand. “Completely,” she said.

  “Good,” he said. “That’s just fine. Let’s see you again next week, same time.”

  In his office, Michael answered the telephone.

  “She left here ten minutes ago, Michael,” Jan Pretre said. “She’s on to you. She knows.”

  “What?” Michael sat forward in the black leather desk chair. It was impossible, he thought. Tell him you could fly if you flapped your arms hard enough; he’d believe that before he would Beth’s knowing.

  “Fortunately,” Jan Pretre continued calmly, “she doesn’t know that she knows. She’s one very screwed-up woman, Michael. What she told me today is a classic example of an obsessive paranoid delusion. That’s what any shrink would call it and that’s exactly what Beth thinks it is.”

  “Right,” Michael said. “Beth isn’t going to realize the truth. She doesn’t have the sense.”

  “Don’t underestimate her, Michael,” Jan Pretre said. “She’s no fool. And she has a remarkable adaptive strength. If she didn’t, she’d have had a breakdown by now. Take this as a warning, Michael. She could give you problems.”

  Michael leaned back. A car wreck? The standard suburban housewife suicide—a bottle of pills and alcohol? “Yes, I knew she was depressed—in fact, she’s been seeing a psychiatrist—but I never thought for a moment that she…” He’d choke then, call up gallons of tears, the bereaved husband surrendering to his grief, while his secret self laughed like a manic hyena. There were ways to guarantee Wonderful Wife didn’t give him any trouble.

  But Goddamnit! He had waited so long, and he had promised himself that they—Beth and Marcy and Kim—would be the reward for his patience. The Call. The Time of the Strangers. Exult in the shock of their terrified eyes, laugh at their agonized screeching, and kill them, their destruction his farewell to the nothing, normal, mindless life he had been forced to endure, as he strode from that house of death and loosed his bloodlust on the world: Michael, Stranger.

  “Are you still there, Michael?”

  “I was just thinking.”

  “All right, then,” Jan Pretre said. “I put Beth through a real psychological inquisition today. I’ll keep running the same type of play on her. By next week, she’ll wonder if she really wished her mother dead and then, unable to accept such a terrible thought, projected it onto you. There are 1,001 tricks shrinkers have and I’ve got a couple of my own. Beth will get so wrapped up in a self-examination that she won’t have much time to ponder the man she married.”

  “Good,” Michael said. “Thanks.”


  “All right,” Jan Pretre said. “And Michael?”

  “Yes?”

  “Take care of yourself.”

  They were both parked in the same section of the lot. Walking together, they left the building a few minutes after nine. Yes, she was in the mood for a drink. She wanted to tell him about her session with Jan Pretre.

  The night was clear, moon and stars radiating a lifeless cold. The parking lot’s orange yellow lights gave a false promise of warmth. As they walked past the “Authorized Parking Only, Section D” sign, she watched their stretched shadows. There were two distinct heads but their shadow bodies were merged.

  But was there an invisible shadow that followed their shadow?

  Suddenly, she was stricken with fear.

  “I’m over this way,” Kevin said, pointing.

  “No,” she said. The sound of her own voice scared her. It was the helpless, desperate bleat of an abandoned child.

  She stood stock still. You’re all right, you’re in control of yourself, now stay calm, she told herself, a relentless panic squeezing her chest. Her heart hammered. She couldn’t breathe. She sucked in air that stabbed like knives.

  This was it. She was coming undone. She quivered, felt herself fragmenting—All the king’s horses—cobweb cracks running through the fabric of her self—all the king’s men—jagged edged tear-lines ripping her apart—cannot put her back together again—rending her—back together again—destroying her…

  “Hold me!” She tried to scream it but it was a whimpered whisper. A faraway voice as she dissolved into splinters and shards and…

  “It’s all right, it’s all right.” Kevin wrapped his arms around her.

  Through her coat and his quilted jacket, she felt his beating heart. She pressed against him, against that warm solidity. “It’s all right, Beth.”

  He was holding her, holding her together, keeping her all in one piece.

  He said, “I love you.” He kissed her.

  He was strong. She was safe with him. She was sobbing, kissing him, his mustache cold—wet with her tears tickling her, his lips demanding and loving.

  He pulled away from her. From the corner of her eye, she saw their shadow on the concrete, an empty distance separating them.

  “Beth, I…I’m sorry,” he said. His face, Beth thought, the way he was scraping the toe of his shoe on the pavement, made him look like a third grader who had to apologize for disrupting class. He was wonderful—beautiful. “I forgot myself for a second. It won’t…”

  “Be quiet,” she said, laughing and crying. “I don’t want you to say anything that neither one of us wants to hear. Just take me with you, Kevin. Now.”

  “Are you… Do you realize what you’re saying, Beth?”

  In answer, she held out her hand.

  In his Dodge Aspen, they drove to his apartment, five miles away from the college. She sat so close to him on the front seat she felt the heat radiating from his body. He smelled of soap and lime-scented deodorant. She watched his hands on the steering wheel, saw the bony bumps of his knuckles under the delicately taut flesh, the veins invisibly carrying his life’s blood, the workings of tendons.

  She studied his profile, the, profusion of curly hair, his sloping, intellectual brow, the over-sized nose. She had to be sure. She couldn’t afford to mistakenly cast him in the role of Knight in Shining Armor, Prince Charming, or Personal Saviour. No, she was convinced. Kevin Bollender was who he was. There was no lie beneath his skin. When he talked to her, he, Kevin and no one else, talked to her and when he kissed her, he—KevinKevinKevin! kissed her and when he’d said he loved her, God! She felt loved!

  In the bedroom of his small apartment, she insisted on leaving on the lights. She wanted to keep on seeing him.

  When they were naked and in bed, she felt as though all of her world were bordered and defined by him. Her arms were full of him, his sides, his ribs, his shoulders, her thighs held his hips, her heels rubbing his calves, the backs of his knees, and her innerness absorbed him, gripped him and played with him and stroked him and loved him.

  When it happened, it was so intense that she left her body. It was the delicate, singular instant of death and it was the explosive, peak moment of life. She was consumed by it and she writhed and moaned and cried at its exquisiteness.

  He hit his release. She tightly held him, wanting to cling to him in those shattering seconds when his strength vanished and he was a slave to his pleasure, a pleasure that she’d brought him. Then he was smiling down at her, guileless and content.

  Afterward, he said, “We ought to talk…talk about what happened.”

  “No,” she said. “Not now. Maybe not ever.”

  “Beth…”

  “I’m afraid talking would ruin it and I couldn’t bear that.” She was lying curled in his arms, her hand on his chest. His skin was warm and damp.

  “But Beth, I…I have to know. Are you all right? Will you be all right?”

  She laughed quietly. “Yes, I am all right.

  And I don’t know if I’ll be all right, but maybe nobody does.”

  He took her back to Lincoln Junior College. She got in the Chevette Scooter and drove home.

  “Beth, it’s past midnight! I was getting worried!” Michael said.

  She looked at him and said, “Were you?”

  “And what’s that supposed to mean?”

  She did not answer. She went upstairs, undressed, slipped on a nightgown, and got in bed. She could still smell Kevin, still feel the touch—memory of him.

  She had been loved. No matter what happened, that was real, and she would sleep easy knowing that.

  — | — | —

  SEVENTEEN

  AT TEN o’clock on Friday morning, Michael stepped into Vern Engelking’s office. “You wanted to see…”

  “I did, Michael,” Jan Pretre said. He stood at the floor to ceiling window, hands behind him, his back to Michael.

  Seated at his desk, toying with a round glass paperweight, Vern said, “Jan has some news for you.”

  At last! Michael thought. His public life had been borne and his secret one lived for this, Jan’s proclamation!

  Jan turned around. Behind him, the early November sun was a blinding wash of light, silhouetting him, blurring the outline of his form. Looking at him, unable to discern his features, Michael remembered their first meeting, long ago, the first stirring of the sense he’d had that Jan Pretre was like him—and was something even more as well.

  “You know Beth had her second appointment with me yesterday,” Jan said.

  Michael nodded.

  “Beth thinks, of course, that you can say anything at all to your therapist in strictest confidence. A shrink’s office is as sacred as a confessional. She told me something interesting, Michael.”

  “Okay,” Michael said, “what did Beth tell you that you think I ought to know?”

  “She’s alienated from you,” Jan Pretre said. “I think you realize that. She refuses to believe what she thinks are her paranoid fantasies about you, but she’s emotionally cut herself off from you. Right now, at best, she views you as a casual acquaintance with whom she lives. Nothing more.”

  Michael shrugged and then he grinned. “W’al shucks, I guess I jes’ ain’t been workin’ hard enough at keepin’ that I’ll ole gal o’mine happy and content.”

  “You haven’t,” Jan Pretre said. He walked closer to Michael. “Someone else has.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Beth’s having an affair,” Jan Pretre said. “She has a lover.”

  Michael tugged at his earlobe. He said, “Bullshit.”

  “No, Michael. Fact.”

  “Beth screwing someone else? For Chrissake, she was a virgin, I mean complete with cherry in place, until two months before I married her. She wouldn’t. She’s not the type.”

  Vern chuckled. “It appears the cuckholded husband cannot accept the truth of his mate’s philandering.”

  Michael snapped a
quick look at Engelking. Vern’s face was a grinning puzzle. Something was wrong here, out of balance. Jan and Vern were his allies, yet they seemed to be united against him in a way he did not at all comprehend.

  Jan pointed an accusing finger. “Michael, You transformed her into the type.”

  “No,” Michael protested. “I’ve always acted like the super-supportive husband.”

  “Yes, Michael,” Jan said quietly, “but she saw through the act.”

  A lover! Beth was fucking someone! Only now was the full impact of Jan Pretre’s revelation hitting him. He should have known, godddamnit, should have realized she had a private game going. For just about a week now, she’d been out of her hang-dog depression but acting icily civil to him. From time to time he’d seen an expression on her face—a look he should have interpreted as an almost childish gloating, “I know something you don’t know, naa-naa-naa…”

  Goddamn her! There was a surging heat within him. He tried to determine just what he was feeling and then he had it: Outrage! The bitch had deceived him! He had spent half a lifetime fooling her and now she’d made a fool of him.

  He was suddenly tired. He sat in the chair alongside Vern’s desk.

  “Last week Beth suffered a major anxiety attack,” Jan Pretre said. “With all that she’s gone through, she was overdue for something of the sort. She desperately needed somebody, there was somebody there, and they wound up in bed.”

  Michael quietly said, “And this weekend last Saturday, she was with him, too, wasn’t she?”

  “That’s right,” Jan answered.

  The clues were there and he’d missed them. The long time in the bathroom, the perfume and make-up and clothing. Then she was off. She knew he didn’t have anything scheduled for the afternoon; he could watch the kids. Well sure, fine, no problem, and he reached for his wallet because she would need money to go shopping. No, she didn’t want money, and who said she was going shopping? Well, say, where was she going?

  She hadn’t told him but now he knew. The bitch! She was going to go spread her legs!

  “All right,” Michael sighed, “and I suppose that in a week or so, after she’s had her itch scratched, Beth will come to me with the guilty weeps, confessing her sins and asking to be forgiven.”