If a Stranger Approaches You: Stories

  Now, Tony could hear girls shrieking on the other side of the door. Then, he saw the knob turn, slowly, counterclockwise, and then a purplish darkness cracked open between the doorjamb and the weatherstripping—which he’d nailed up there last winter (a really cold winter, the heating bills soaring so high he knew he had to do something, and this narrow strip of green felt was all he could think of to do) and which made the door so difficult to close that you really had to put some shoulder into it.

  However, opening the door had never been a problem.

  It opened.

  And, behind the glass storm door (another source of conflict, because Melody had wanted screens, to which Tony had said why bother since as soon as it got warm they’d be turning on the central air-conditioning anyway) stood Melody, with one hand on her hip (her hip!) and the other still on the doorknob. She opened the door then, and stood in front of him, as if to block his entrance or to keep him from seeing something that was going on behind her, although she said, “Come in.”

  “You’re in my way or I would,” Tony said, and she gave her head a little snap that sent her earrings swinging in slow arcs between her earlobes and her shoulders. The pit and the pendulum. He couldn’t help but stare. They were gold strands with little pearls at the ends.

  “Can you give me a hand here?” he said, nodding toward the boxes in his arms.

  He knew it had sounded accusatory by the way she narrowed her eyes and snatched a package from him, and turned her back.

  But, Jesus God she was gorgeous. Even her back was gorgeous. Was there any thirty-eight-year-old woman on the planet who looked as good as this? She’d done it to spite him. Lost some weight. Done up her hair (that deep red, she knew it was exactly how he liked it) and worn these tight jeans and some kind of exotic looking blouse. An armful of bracelets. Tony did not recall before in their years together ever once seeing his wife wearing more than one bracelet at a time—but there they were, a magnificent gathering of chains and bangles slipping around from her wrist to her elbow. She turned to see if he was following her and, it seemed to him, to show him that her skin was flawless. Radiant. Maybe she’d actually gone to the trouble of getting some kind of facial or makeover to torment him.

  And the neck. It was a cliché, Tony knew it, but his wife’s neck was exactly like a fucking swan’s, and Tony knew precisely what it would smell like if he buried his face in the corner between her ear and her shoulder, there where the little pendulums were swinging as she inhaled. He stepped over the threshold, and she glanced down at the shoe.

  She was, of course, thinking about the shoe.

  The wrong shoe. The business shoe worn to a child’s birthday party.

  To show her he could care less what she thought of his shoes, Tony butted the door (storm door!) open the rest of the way with his elbow, and then let it slam behind him. And then, fully inside the house, he was hit by a blast of air so cold he thought it might knock him right over, while his wife disappeared around the corner of their living room so quickly he considered chasing her, tackling her in the hallway, pressing her wrist (the one without the bracelets) against the ugly rug her mother had hooked for their anniversary years before, while the little girls screamed and his daughter shrieked, “Daddy. No. Daddy!”—anything to make her slow down, stop her from walking off into the house as if she had somewhere to go inside it without him, as if it didn’t make the slightest bit of difference to her that he was there (a guest, a guest in his own house!) and that, trying to find his way to the family room, he might become hopelessly lost.

  “Daddy!”

  Tony Harmon’s daughter tossed herself in his direction with such force it made him stumble backward, slipping dangerously for a moment on the ugly mother-in-law rug (an accident waiting to happen, he’d always said. the floors were too slick for a rug without a pad under it, someone was going to break his goddamned neck) before his back was to the wall.

  His daughter flung her arms around his waist, kissing his belly showily, making loud pretend-kissing sounds while the other girls watched from the family room. One child in particular—a dark-haired thing with olive skin—caught and held his eye. It seemed to Tony that she wore a disapproving look on her small, triangular face.

  “Honey,” he said to his daughter, trying to smile, patting her hair with his palm, inching away at the same time while she continued to fake the kissing noises loudly, now in the direction of his face. Was it the light in the hallway, or was she wearing makeup? There was something strangely new and flamboyant about her eyes, batting up at him, a cartoon character.

  And her hair.

  There was no doubt about it now. It was getting darker. His daughter was going to be a dishwater blond like his sister. All that flaxen angel-hair of babyhood was gone. It had gone straighter, too. Not ringlets any longer. Not even, really, curls. Some kind of fineness that had frayed. Years before, when Tony had first realized that his daughter might not have golden ringlets all her life, it had occurred to him—horribly, unforgivably!—that he might stop loving her if she grew ugly, if she became a square-shouldered adolescent with bad skin and his sister’s mouse-gray hair. He’d been watching her on the beach, and in his mind had projected his little girl into the future—trying to picture her as a young woman already at the edge of that vastness, tossing a tiny stone into the water, a little speck of gravity which had vanished—and suddenly he realized that the grown woman she would be did not have, could not have, the flaxen hair of his little girl.

  Would he love her, then, without that, as much as he loved her with it?

  Well, of course he would! He’d loved her bloody and squirming with a head shaped like a banana screaming her lungs out, jaundiced and hairless and toothless, just delivered like some kind of terrifying package sloppily addressed to him and Melody when she was born. Loved her completely. Monstrously. An annihilation of utter love. How could ever he stop?

  “Daddy, daddy, daddy,” she said now in her phony little-girl voice.

  “Hi there, silly,” he said. “Happy birthday.”

  “Hi, Mr. Harmon,” the girl with the triangular face said, and it surprised him, his name on the lips of this tiny stranger. For one thing, almost none of his daughter’s friends actually called him Mr. Anything—not even Mr. H, which had been what his friends (the most familiar ones, the ones who hung out at his house every day for years) had dared to call his father so informally. His daughter’s friends had called him Tony from the start. He’d never encouraged that, feeling that children ought to at least sound respectful of the adults they addressed, but these girls seemed to have been born on a first-name basis with the world.

  “Hello there,” he said, wishing he could remember the girl’s name. He knew she’d spent the night in his house more than once, and had a vague memory of his daughter lying on the floor beside this girl, the two of them propped up on pillows watching The Wizard of Oz, and Tony suspected that this girl’s mother was one of those two women who’d been standing in his driveway when he walked up. But that was all. After that, he drew a blank.

  “Time for lunch!” Melody called from the dining room, out of which the smell of something flowery and chemical drifted—something canned, sprayed around, feminine. Cake. His daughter let go of him and called for her friends to follow. An elbow, a shoulder, a sharp small skeletal something bumped into him as they hurried past and disappeared, after which Tony stood for a few minutes in the entrance to the family room and looked.

  Not a thing had been changed, and not a thing was the same. The wedding photos were gone, but they’d been gone a long time. Gone since that first bad fight. What had she done with them after that night? Tossed them in the garbage? Burned them? Crushed them under the heel of her boot? Tony had never asked. He’d just come home after work that evening and noted without surprise that they were gone.

  The videos had slid out of the neat tower he’d forever been struggling to build with them, and they sprawled between the TV and the bookcase, an ava
lanche of Pooh and Sesame Street and Kid Songs USA. Not one of those movies had his daughter actually watched, to his knowledge, in over two years, but she and her mother had refused to let him toss them out, building a firewall together around them whenever he mentioned the unnecessary mess. Shaking their heads.

  The curtains that opened onto the sliding glass doors to the backyard were open, and the sun streamed in and lit up a fine scrim of dust between him and the world out there. A chewed-up cat toy lay in one corner of the couch, but Tony didn’t see the cat anywhere. No surprise there. The cat had always run when she smelled him coming.

  Why? he’d wanted to know. What had he ever done to the cat? Tony actually liked the cat. Melody was constantly letting its water dish run dry and those pebbles it ate run out, and he had always been perfectly happy to resupply the cat. Never once had he sworn at, hissed at, spoken harshly to that fucking cat. So why did it sleep at the foot of his daughter’s bed, rub the ankles of his wife, and then hide under the couch when he came home? It was a false accusation that Tony had never been able to defend himself against. “Why does the cat hate me?” he’d asked Melody.

  “I don’t know,” she’d said dismissively. “Maybe you’re too noisy.” But that was Melody, not the cat. Melody still blamed him for the other cat, the one that had gotten out, and gotten lost, the first summer they lived together. It hadn’t even been their cat, really. It had been the neighbor’s cat, but it had preferred their apartment downstairs in the old Victorian to its owner’s upstairs. The cat had never been outside, had no claws and no clue, and had never shown any interest in the great outdoors. Then one day Tony left the front door open after hauling in a chair he’d found at the side of the street, near a garbage can. A chair with wings, and wooden feet—paisley, and a bit worn, but the kind of thing he was sure Melody would love.

  But what she noticed when she got home from her class that night was not the chair around which he’d rearranged their little living room, but that the door was open and the cat was gone.

  “We have to search the neighborhood!” she’d said.

  Back then, she wore her hair long and frizzy, and it was always hanging in two sexy ropes over her breasts.

  “The cat’ll come back,” he’d said, trying to take her in his arms. “Cats can smell their ways home. It’s not even our cat.”

  “I’ll go down McKinley Street. You go up Liberty, and then we’ll meet back here,” she said, pulling away.

  Tony was going to object again, but Melody was already gone.

  So, he did what she told him to do, wandered for a while up Liberty, occasionally calling out the cat’s name. Trixie. It was a night of fireflies and crickets. Someone was playing “Crimson and Clover” in an upstairs room of an old apartment house. Tony could smell pot in the air, and rotting fruit in a garbage can. When he met Melody back at the house, she was crying. No cat.

  Had he really believed, even for a second, that the cat could smell its way back?

  No. That was his guilt and selfishness talking—and she’d hammer that selfishness thing home over the years, that’s for sure—and mostly his desire to make love to Melody on their futon instead of walking around the neighborhood and then grieving the cat all night. It was his desire to get her excited approval of his paisley chair, and his need not to look at the awful truth of it. That the cat, which had slept between them every night since they’d moved into this apartment, and which had trusted them even more than the girl upstairs with whom it had lived for a year, had slipped out into the darkness because of him, and was now lost forever.

  “It wasn’t even our cat, Mel,” Tony said again, knowing how cold and defensive it sounded. She looked away from him. In the morning he agreed to help make posters and staple them to the telephone poles in the neighborhood. He’d gone to the drugstore for staples. He put the posters on the telephone poles, but it was useless. The world was enormous. Billions of years old. It was full of holes and caves. There were swamps, forests, oceans, not to mention all the things man-made:

  Mines, wells, warehouses, malls. Hotels, motels, restaurants, amusement parks, bars.

  And then there was space, which had no boundaries at all, just an expanding emptiness embracing the earth loosely and without laws.

  And, if that weren’t enough, there was the mind. Its ten million memories. Its lists and hunches. Its illusions and facts. A man could wander around in his own mind until he died, finding nothing. How could anyone know where it would end, that searching, or if it ever would?

  The flyers blew down almost as soon as he stapled them up, and Tony didn’t bother to go back, already knowing the thing Melody would never truly believe—that once you begin to look beyond the rooms of your own home for what you’ve lost, even the emptiness, the one last thing you could call your own, would be snatched by the world from your hands.

  He continued to stare into his family room, as if he were a detective in search of some clue, when, from the dining room he heard Melody asking the girls what they wanted on their hotdogs, and the shouted answers. A grating chorus. Nonsensical. Devilish. Ketchmustnothingup. He closed his eyes as if that might block the sound, and when he opened them again, he saw it on the bookshelf. A new spine among the more familiar spines—Best One-Dish Meals, The Herbal Doctor, Your Child’s Health, Dictionary of Quotations, Guitar Basics, The Amicable Divorce. …

  The Amicable Divorce.

  The Amicable.

  Fucking.

  Divorce.

  Tony strode over to it, smirking as if it were a person he was about to get the better of, took it off the bookshelf, and walked straight to the door and out of the house with it.

  Outside, the streetlights were no longer blazing, but the telephone lines were still humming, and there was no breeze at all, the leaves of the trees were motionless, hanging limply from the branches. He walked back the way he’d come, with that book tucked under his arm, following his own ridiculous shadow (longer than seven men set end to end, but emerging from his feet as if it were an organic part of him) around the block.

  The cracks in the sidewalk were full of dry grass. He felt weakly victorious, marching over those. They wouldn’t trip him now. If the neighbors saw him headed back to his car already, so be it. Now, he was on a mission, although he had no idea what mission it was. But he had this book. A kind of trophy. Proof that he wouldn’t be anybody’s dupe. A man who grabbed such a book off his own bookshelf and walked straight out of his daughter’s birthday party with it was not a man to be messed with. He wished someone would come out of a house and ask him what the hell he was doing. He would tell that person where to go. He was breathing now. No spittle on the sidewalk this time around.

  But most of the picture windows he passed had their curtains drawn. Only here and there, a flat blackness. Here and there, beyond that blackness, where a curtain was left open, Tony could see the back of a couch, or a doorway between what must have been the den and the kitchen offering some intriguing hint at the mystery of the people who lived there. A little promise. We exist. He kept walking, but there was less forward momentum in it, as if his legs had their own agenda, or were questioning his. He realized he probably would have looked, to anyone watching, like a potential peeper. In truth he’d stopped marching, was actually, now, strolling, and what he wanted to do was to stand and stare. He wanted to go up to the window, press his face to it, see whatever there was to see. Anything. Everything. At that moment Tony Harmon would have given anything to be able to walk into one of those houses and ask a few questions of anyone he could find. What’s your life like? What are your regrets? Have you ever spanked your child? How much cash do you have in the bank? Annual income? Greatest fear? How often do you have sex with your wife? Do you feel like a failure? Are you the man (or woman) you thought you’d be?

  What an incredible relief it would be to know the answers to those questions from just a handful of strangers—a handful of answers to a handful of questions put to the residents of these tidy h
ouses.

  It all looked so perfect. So made of hope and exclusion come to fruition. Only here and there, Tony spied a problem—an eavestrough that had fallen and no one had bothered to hammer back up, a mailbox stuffed full of junk no one had bothered to bring in—a hint that something was not entirely right, that something different was going on behind that front door than was going on behind the others.

  But, really, you couldn’t tell a thing about most people. All you could do was walk by and assume they knew something, had something, understood something you simply did not.

  Maybe they didn’t, of course, but you would die without ever knowing if it had been the same for them as it had been for you. This confusion, it was what you were born with and what you took with you when you left.

  But as soon as Tony Harmon got to his car and saw the silver tonnage of it gleaming at the side of the street, he realized he had to go back, that he couldn’t just drive away from his daughter’s birthday party. That she would finish her hot dog soon, would be waiting for the cake, would be sitting at the head of the table. “Where’s Daddy?” she’d say. How impossible to imagine that she might search the rooms of the house for him. That she might go into the backyard. That she might check the garage. That she might turn back to the circle of girls around her cake with tears in her eyes and proclaim to them that her father was gone.

  Melody would cross her arms, mutter, “That bastard,” under her breath. She’d probably never even notice that the book was gone. She’d think she left it in the locker room at the pool. Everything would be for nothing.

  He opened his trunk and tossed the book into it—The Amicable Divorce right beside the tire jack, which had been thudding clumsily around back there as he made left turns for days now, since he’d had the flat on the interstate, as he’d yet to tuck it under the piece of carpet where it usually stayed. What a fuck story that had been. He’d already been late, of course, and then found himself kneeling at his left rear tire while the trucks soared by him, his knees in the gravel, his face choked in clouds of diesel fumes, only nine o’clock in the morning and already so hot he’d soaked straight through his shirt before he’d even gotten the jack out from under that piece of carpet. When he’d first stepped out of his car and had seen the tire, deflated down to the rim, he’d looked up at the sky—burning and purple with impending heat—and been seized with the desire to kill something.