Friends and Strangers

by J. Courtney Sullivan

  The interviewer mentioned a family up the road. They were from Toronto, and only in the country two more months for the father’s job. They had eighteen-month-old twin boys. The mother was about to give birth again any day, and their nanny had just quit with no warning.

  “The mum is a bit…difficult,” the interviewer said.

  She had frizzy hair, the color of an eggplant, and was eating a little bag of prawn-flavored potato chips, which Sam found revolting.

  “Let me rephrase that. The mum is overwhelmed. Would you be free to meet them tomorrow?”

  Sam said she would.

  * * *

  —

  The twins hid behind their mother’s legs when she answered the door the next morning.

  “Allison,” the woman said, extending her hand.

  Sam shook it and, as she did so, noticed the carpets. She wondered how Allison managed to keep them so white.

  They went into a living room full of white furniture.

  Within minutes, Sam was down on the floor with both boys, playing blocks. Allison sat in an armchair, watching. Her belly was so perfectly round and she was otherwise so slim that it looked like she might reach under her shirt at any moment and pull out a basketball.

  “Back in Canada, I led a department of fifty people,” she said. “Yet I find it impossible to manage these two on my own.”

  Sam gave her a sympathetic look and wondered why she had chosen to have a third. “It’s a difficult age,” she said. She had noticed that mothers said this about every age.

  “Thank you for saying that,” Allison said. “Sometimes I feel like I’m losing my mind. I’m not naturally a kid person. Like what you’re doing—making a tower of those blocks. It would never occur to me. Anyway. Your role would be primarily to watch the twins. I’ll keep the new baby with me most of the time. I don’t let them have sugar, other than some fruit. I prefer they not get dirty outside, because—”

  “Because everything here is white,” Sam said, as if she thought this was perfectly sensible.

  “Exactly,” Allison said. She sounded relieved.

  Sam was pondering whether she even wanted the position when Allison said, “As for pay,” and named an hourly rate that was almost twice what she had made temping the previous summer.

  The job provided a rhythm to her days. It made Sam feel like she actually lived in London, as opposed to just visiting. She turned her key in the front door each morning and saw the twins in the kitchen down the hall, in their high chairs, awaiting breakfast. They always ate the same thing: a slice of toast with cheddar cheese, and a slice of toast with jam, cut into squares and split evenly between them.

  * * *

  —

  When Clive’s roommate, Ian, came home at the end of July, it occurred to Sam that she and Clive had never spent time together in the company of others.

  The apartment looked different to her with Ian in it. He kept an ashtray, half full of cigarette butts, on the coffee table. He liked to bring in stray cats.

  “Not only cats, mind you,” Clive said. “He brought a fox in here once.”

  “A baby fox,” Ian said, as if that made all the difference.

  The place smelled like cigarettes and men. The carpet throughout was orange shag. The kitchen was cramped, the sink full of dishes. Clive and Ian had a routine in which each of them played a record for the other, choosing the next song based on a word or theme in the one that came before. They could keep at it all night, Sam sitting there with a tight smile, wishing Ian would go to bed, feeling like a killjoy.

  When Clive’s friends came over, she grew bashful. Some of them were married; a few had even had time to get divorced. They had careers in advertising or publicity or IT. One guy was a pharmacist. Sam suspected them all of seeing her as a twit, and to her great annoyance, she sort of acted like one in their presence, staying mute most of the time.

  She loved Clive’s brother Miles and his wife, Nicola, and their two kids. Nicola was the kind of woman who liked other women instinctively. She told Sam, “I’m so happy to have another girl around!” She emailed links to sales happening in London, with messages saying Wish I could come!

  But they lived way out in the country. Sam and Clive didn’t see them much.

  Clive’s mother terrified her. She was nearly an old lady. Her hands were wrinkled, her hair pure white. The way she stared at Sam made her flush with guilt, like perhaps she had a camera hooked up in Clive’s bedroom and knew everything they had done in there.

  But when they were alone, it was magic.

  Clive showed her London, the parts tourists never got to see. They hiked through the Epping Forest. It was a short journey from the chicken takeaways and frozen-food shops and discarded mattresses in their neighborhood, and yet it felt like escaping to a dreamland.

  They walked hand in hand along the canals of Little Venice, Clive pointing out the white stucco mansions where Annie Lennox and Paul McCartney and Sigmund Freud had once lived. He took her picture in front of a houseboat owned by Richard Branson. On another boat, a floating café, they stopped for tea and scones.

  He took her to Lisbon and Dubrovnik and Berlin. Cities where they could get a cheap hotel room, or stay in spare bedrooms, with friends of his, or friends of friends. Sam sometimes suggested more traditional destinations—Paris, Rome. But as Clive explained it, those places were overpriced and tired.

  “You’ll see the Eiffel Tower up close and it will look just like it did in the five thousand pictures you’ve seen,” he said.

  Every day, Sam paused to consider the astonishing state of her life.

  Clive loved her paintings, hung them all over the apartment.

  He brought her to all the galleries. Her favorite was Matilda Grey in Mayfair, a space dedicated to the work of women.

  “This is my happy place,” Sam told him. They returned again and again.

  Once, while Clive was at work, and Sam was talking to Isabella over Skype, Isabella said, “Isn’t there anything wrong with him? Usually we do a good amount of bitching about the guys we date, but Clive doesn’t seem to do anything wrong ever.”

  “He doesn’t,” Sam said.

  She thought then of what she’d found, but it didn’t seem worth mentioning. And really, it was her own fault for snooping. This had been Sam’s bad habit ever since she was seven and read Harriet the Spy. As a kid, she got in trouble multiple times for reading her sister Molly’s diary. In the extremely rare event that she was left home alone, Sam would go through her mother’s dresser drawers. There, she had found an old black-and-white copy of The Joy of Sex, complete with ten pages of photographs of naked men and women in various poses. She smuggled the book into school, to the horror and delight of her friends.

  One evening, when he didn’t know she was looking, Sam watched Clive sort through the mail, scowl at a large brown envelope, and then shove it on the top shelf of his closet. She didn’t say anything, but instead went to look at it later while he was out at the store. He hadn’t opened it yet. The return address said Clerk of Courts. Maybe he owed money—she’d heard him complain to Ian about how broke he was. She recalled a time when his nephew, Freddy, said, “Daddy says Uncle Clive made a whopper of a mistake when he—” only to have Nicola clap a hand over his mouth.

  Sam couldn’t stop thinking about what the envelope contained. Each time she checked, Clive still hadn’t opened it. By the time she resolved to steam it open, like in an old movie, the envelope was gone.

  Soon after, she looked at Clive’s emails for clues. She didn’t find much. She was reminded that he signed every message with the words Stay Gold, which for some reason made her uneasy. He’d long ago started signing emails to her with Love, and so she had blocked this out.

  There was a folder titled “Laura,” but it contained no messages. Sam was up late pondering this.


  She had asked Clive about previous relationships. He told her he had never been involved in anything serious.

  “What about you?” he said.

  Sam told him about Sanjeev, how they were together for three years, how she got along with his sisters and parents and sometimes missed them.

  “But that wasn’t serious,” Clive said. “You were in high school.”

  He said it like it was a hundred years ago, when, really, it was three.

  First thing the next morning after coming across the “Laura” folder, Sam said, while they were still in bed, “Laura is a nice name. I always thought I’d maybe name a daughter that one day. Laura. It’s pretty, right? Like Laura Linney.”

  She thought he might say, I used to have a girlfriend by that name. Or that his expression would give something away.

  But Clive only said, “I have no idea who Laura Linney is, but sure,” before wrapping her in a hug and kissing her all over her face as she screamed in delight.

  They had sex every day, at least once. It seemed to smooth over any tensions, any doubts in her mind.

  * * *

  —

  Sam and Clive ate dinner in the park most evenings. They might pack salad and cheese sandwiches and a bottle of cheap white wine, but still it seemed romantic to sit on a blanket in the grass, side by side.

  She tried not to think about leaving. The idea of it seemed impossible. That she should return to her life at school without him there beside her in bed each night; without waking up in the morning to the sound of him whistling in the shower. The smell of Clive’s skin was enough to make her want to cry if she imagined herself no longer knowing it. When Sam talked to her friends about plans for next year, she could tell that none of them expected her and Clive to continue together. It made her want to hold on even tighter. She thought of her mother’s warning that she would never return. Part of her wanted to stay.

  One night toward the end of the summer, watching Clive make a funny face as he bit into a baguette, Sam began to cry.

  “I don’t know what I’m going to do without you,” she said.

  “Then marry me,” he said. “And you won’t have to find out.”

  Sam laughed through her tears. “My mother would kill me if I didn’t go back and finish school.”

  “That’s nine months,” he said. “You’ll go and you’ll finish, we’ll visit each other, and then you’ll come back here, and we’ll get married. What do you say?”

  All this time, her life had been going in a certain direction. But she saw now that it didn’t have to stay that way. Things could change. Things ought to change.

  “Okay,” she said, feeling elated, and a bit ill.

  He kissed her, and rolled her onto the blanket.

  The following Saturday, Clive told Sam he was taking her ring shopping. She pictured the two of them in a jewelry shop, everyone wondering what they were doing together. She pictured Clive wincing at the price tags, as he did sometimes when he read a dinner menu in a restaurant.

  “Flying back and forth to see one another for a year is going to be expensive,” she said. “Maybe we should hold off on a ring and save our money. I don’t even care about a ring, to be honest.”

  Clive smiled. “So practical,” he said. “All right. But there will be a ring one day. I promise you that.”

  Sam felt relieved that there would be no ring for now. She chose not to spend too much time wondering why.

  From then on, whenever Clive introduced her to anyone, it was as his fiancée. She told her friends that they were kind of engaged. She didn’t dare tell her parents, which seemed like a bad sign. But Sam never voiced her doubts to Clive. She left London with the understanding that the separation was temporary.

  They had made promises, but back at home, her real life had resumed, poking holes in the fantasy. The problem was Clive had been in his real life all along. Sam loved him. She did. But sometimes she could project herself into the future, see herself married to someone more appropriate. Or was that her fear? Other people’s voices in her head? Everyone said to go with your gut, but when Sam tunneled down and listened, she couldn’t hear anything one way or the other.

  6

  BY THE TIME CLIVE TEXTED to say his plane had landed, Sam was at the international arrivals gate feeling like she might throw up.

  When she saw him, she was nervous, unable to think of how to stand, or what to say.

  “Babe!” he yelled, coming over and kissing her right away, which was appropriate, and yet Sam felt shy and awkward, like this was the first meeting of two strangers entering into an arranged marriage.

  “How was the flight?” she said stiffly, willing herself to act normal.

  “Fine,” he said. He gave her a curious look. “You all right?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “I’m so glad you’re here.”

  When they reached the van it was somehow understood that they should climb into the last row and have sex, right there in the crowded parking garage. His bare butt and pale legs on the blue vinyl seat, pants at his ankles. Sam straddled him in her summer dress, with a full view through the rear window of travelers coming and going.

  After that, she felt better. They lay down together for a bit, and she told him about the party, about Isabella’s meltdown over a guy whose name she had forgotten.

  On the drive back, he pointed out everything that was different from the UK, just as she had done when she first went there.

  Clive told her about the book he’d started on the plane, a history of the Labour Party. Sam tried to follow along, but she didn’t know any of the backstory or who the players were. He was so smart. He liked nature documentaries and never went anywhere without a book in his hand. Clive made her wonder about the American education system. He was better read than any college graduate she knew.

  Sam sometimes lied to make Clive sound better. His résumé did not reflect him.

  When they reached the dorm, she heard the party raging in the dining hall and hurried Clive upstairs.

  The platform hallway was empty, strewn with red plastic cups and paper plates. Sam felt relieved. They wouldn’t be bombarded by a wall of nosy drunk girls, like she’d feared. Not tonight, at least.

  The recycling bin lay on its side. A thin trickle of sangria had made its way to the outer edge, and onto the green carpet.

  Sam opened the door to her room. Isabella was gone, her bed neatly made.

  “I recognize this place,” Clive said.

  Sam was confused, but then she remembered their video chats.

  “I’ve never seen this half of the room before,” he said.

  She had imagined them going for a walk, though there wasn’t much to see. Clive said he was exhausted. They lay down in bed and he held her. He fell asleep right away.

  Sam stayed in his arms, breathing in his familiar soapy scent, amazed that he was actually here.

  Usually at this hour, she’d be wondering what he was doing. Sleeping, most likely. If it was a Saturday, Clive would be out at a club, dancing with friends. When they lived together, Sam had never joined in these outings. He often came home at four or five in the morning. Once she had asked his roommate, Ian, how they managed to stay up so late. Ecstasy, my darling, Ian said. Then, seeing the look on her face, he added, Sorry. I forget what an innocent you are.

  Sometimes Sam looked at online reviews for the walking-tour company and searched for mentions of Clive, though afterward she always regretted it.

  My girlfriends and I have done the Haunted London tour three times, mostly because of the hottie guide, one woman had written.

  Another wrote: We did the Highgate Village walk on Sunday. Small group size. Interesting look at an area I knew nothing about. My husband said the sexy tour guide played it fast and loose with the facts, but I think he’s just jealous.

  Sam got u
p and went to her desk. She switched on the lamp and started reading her art history assignment. This was nice, she told herself. This was what she wanted. Clive was here, and she was living her regular life, with him in it.

  She tried to focus on the book. They were to read three hundred fifty dense pages over the weekend, which seemed impossible, but Sam knew that, somehow, she would get it done.

  Before college, she had attended public school. Teachers usually liked her because she was well behaved and required nothing of them. She was a good student, without having to try. And she was known for her paintings, which always won a blue ribbon at the school art fair.

  In ninth grade, her best friend, Maddie, had entered one of Sam’s paintings—a picture of sailboats at a marina on Cape Cod—into a competition for young artists, sponsored by the New England Arts League. Sam won. She got to go to the governor’s mansion. She received a check for three hundred dollars. She loved Maddie so much in that moment. Sam never would have entered on her own. From then on, she took painting seriously.

  Once, she had dreamed of actually being a painter someday. But she knew now that she wasn’t good enough, because of the way her professors and peers regarded her work.

  “Competent but not strikingly original” was how one instructor described her final project sophomore year. During a critique, a classmate said of one of Sam’s paintings, “There’s something a little, I don’t know—hotel room—about it.”

  Sam liked to paint landscapes and portraits and bowls of fruit. There was nothing edgy about her work, which somehow felt embarrassing. But then, there was nothing edgy about her.

  Academics too were a struggle when she first got to college. She hadn’t anticipated that. After Sam received the first and only C of her life, she realized she would have to work harder if she wanted to keep up with girls who had attended New England prep schools and spent their summer vacations touring Europe.

  She found that, with some effort, she enjoyed academic work and was good at it. Since arriving here, she had never missed a class. Her first year, she calculated what she would eventually owe in student loans and divided the amount by the number of credits needed to graduate, and then divided that by the number of times each class met. When she wanted to skip History of European Decorative Arts, 1400–1800 or The Making of Modern Visual Culture, Sam reminded herself that this would be fifty-seven dollars thrown down a deep dark hole.