A Stranger Like You

  Many of the women were beautiful. They were like rare and unusual birds. They were not available to him, he knew. And yet, he was happy just to be near them. Unlike the sourpuss women from work who smirked at him with the superior knowledge of some inexcusable personal embarrassment that he had yet to discover, the women at the party simply smiled. It occurred to him that he was not the sort of person who usually encountered a smile. Rather, expressions of dismay or distrust seemed to be the norm. At work, especially, crammed inside the elevator with an assortment of familiar strangers, many of whose expressions at half past eight in the morning seemed terribly, terribly complicated, the nonnegotiable smile was a complete anomaly.

  He found the bar and fixed himself a drink and one for his new friend: Ida. Turning back into the living room, he saw Hedda Chase walking off with the host, hopping as she took off her heels while hanging onto his shoulder in what he imagined was an uncharacteristically delicate gesture, because Hugh was absolutely fucking certain that a woman like her, a woman in her position, had very few delicate qualities. He watched her narrow heels as the two of them descended the stairs like a pair of teenagers in search of recreational oblivion. Hugh brought the drinks back into the living room and handed Ida her martini while she completely ignored him. Of course he understood, in the way all subordinates understand these things, that Ida was talking to Someone Important, her face over-bright and buzzing like an almost-dead lightbulb. He excused himself and walked in the direction of the stairs. She wasn’t really his type and, anyway, he’d lost track of his subject. The house was interesting, all cartoon angles and Starburst colors. People were dancing. Most of them had taken off their shoes. Watching them, it occurred to Hugh that they were like some jiggling religious cult—they all knew the steps by heart; the nonbelievers watched forlornly from the sidelines. Downstairs, the air smelled like those candles they gave you when your pet died, tinged with cherry and cinnamon. It was not a good smell. He found himself in a dim hallway and overheard Chase and their host talking in a nearby room. Gently, he pushed open the door and the motion seemed to startle them. Abruptly, the room went silent. They stood there looking at him without expectation, blank-faced. In the moments that transpired a story not without scandal erupted among all three of them, and then their faces changed subtly as if to affirm the possibility, the speculation. Hugh said nothing and then Bruno cleared his throat with purpose and said, “Down the hall on the left.”

  Driving back to his motel, he thought about his conversation with the other writer, Ida. As he was leaving the party, she’d pushed a piece of paper into his hand and mouthed over the noise call me. She’d said she’d gotten screwed. It was something that happened to writers, he thought, it had happened to him. He’d been back in Montclair, waiting for his check, when the phone call had come. His agent’s whiney-voiced secretary had explained that his producer, Cory Rogers, the veritable founder of Gladiator Films—who’d begun his career making B movies on shoestring budgets and was proud of it—had dropped dead of a heart attack—a sudden and unfortunate turn of events—“he was in his seventies, you know,” the secretary offered sympathetically, “his late seventies, actually.” Now this other person—this wench—had stepped in and dumped his movie. “It’s not unusual for projects to go into turnaround,” was how the secretary had put it. “Especially in situations like these.” Hugh pictured his script turning through a meat grinder—and now the project, which had been slated for production in late September, was a heap of shredded papers in the trash. Exactly why it had gotten trashed was unclear to him. After a bit of coaxing, Beck’s secretary admitted that Ms. Chase had hated the script. “She didn’t like the premise.”

  “No?” He tried to recollect what the word premise actually meant.

  “I’ll fax you her letter if you want.”

  In his tiny office at Equitable Life, where he’d unwittingly entrenched himself as an underwriter—something to hold him over, he’d explain to people, until his real career kicked in—he’d watched the white page emerge from the squealing grin of the fax machine. Hedda Chase had written it herself, on studio letterhead, in the inflated syntax of an Ivy League brat: an idiotic premise, inane characterizations, a thoroughly implausible ending! Frankly, she’d said, the experience of reading the script was akin to passing a kidney stone. And let’s not forget the misogynistic overtones!

  In fact, the letter went on to complain that the script’s entire premise was anti-female. The violence he’d so precisely conveyed was, in her opinion, over the top. His agent, Miles Beck, had told Hugh not to take Chase’s letter too seriously, things like this happened all the time in the business, he’d said. “You just have to suck it up and move on.” Beck assured Waters that he’d try to set it up somewhere else—but after several months of “trying” nobody else wanted it and the agent admitted that Chase had a big mouth. “These are uncertain times,” he’d muttered, sheepishly. “Word spreads pretty fast in this town. For some godawful reason, people trust her opinion.”

  Hugh couldn’t help thinking that Beck did too; he’d discerned a twang of pity in the agent’s tone as he’d rushed Hugh off the phone.

  Hugh knew he shouldn’t take it personally, but he couldn’t seem to help it. The disappointment festered in his mind.

  “I guess we won’t be moving to Hollywood after all,” Marion had said, almost gratefully.

  It had taken Hugh five years to finish the screenplay, squeezing in an hour or two at the computer after work. Unlike some of his writer friends, he hadn’t gone to film school, but had taken night courses at the local community college. Hugh had fond memories of the cement block building with its submarinelike corridors, the fast-food-bright room where the class met around a Formica table that pretended to be wood. His classmates were an assortment of misanthropes: the disenchanted housewife; the fledgling private investigator; the bored tax attorney; the cancer survivor; the bitter widower—and him. When they had gone around the table at their first meeting, he had described himself—with pride—as being an underwriter with untapped ambitions. And it was true, wasn’t it? The instructor, a balding ex-hippie with sideburns that looked like Band-Aids, had a disarming stutter that made him speak very slowly. As a result, his words had surprising weight and meaning and at the end of each class Hugh experienced small and powerful revelations, as if he had just been to church. He would walk to his car, heady with optimism.

  At home, he’d watch movies late into the night in his basement, long after his wife had gone to bed, sucking hits from a bong he’d had since college. He had an extensive collection of film classics. There was Dersu Uzala; The Passenger; Visconti’s The Leopard. He had watched The Passenger numerous times; it was his favorite film. He could watch it again and again, marveling at the elegant pans of the African desert, the swells of emptiness, the persistent wind. He knew the dialogue by heart; the actor’s gestures. He could almost taste their cigarettes, their gin. Watching Jack Nicholson in that stifling hotel room—Hugh would give anything to be there now—he could almost feel the sweat rolling down his back. The bleach-white walls disrupted only by the occasional spider—it was how Hugh felt about life—that the real dangers were the slippery interlopers that went unnoticed, the subtle influences that were like termites of the soul, before you knew it there was nothing left. And then later, with Maria Schneider, her understated hips, her breasts, her almost boyish swagger. What are you running away from?—and Nicholson’s answer—turn your back to the front seat. She turns, watching the road spill away—letting the past go—letting freedom overtake her—the seduction of the unknown—as the camera rises up into the shimmering trees. Always at the end of the movie, Hugh felt a sense of loss. As he climbed the two flights up from the basement, he’d question his existence. Lying awake beside his sleeping wife, he’d study the web of shadows on the ceiling of their suburban bedroom, as though trying to crack some obscure, divine code.

  He knew plenty about film, he studied carefully, but no one wou
ld ever guess. At work, his colleagues baited him, “How’s that screenplay of yours coming? Any calls from Hollyweird yet?” Or, derisively, at a cocktail party, “So, tell me, Waters, are you still writing that script?” Hugh was the first to admit that finishing it had been nothing short of a miracle. With discreet pride, he’d presented the script to his screenwriting instructor, offering the stack of pages like the white sheet cake his wife had baked on his fortieth birthday. His instructor liked the script and offered to give it to his agent, Miles Beck, who, remarkably, succeeded in selling it. Cory Rogers, Hedda Chase’s unfortunate predecessor, had paid him an enormous sum, which had helped Hugh and his wife immeasurably after years of sacrifice—they’d moved out of their cramped apartment in the city and bought a house in Montclair; his wife had bought a Subaru. That had been the last Hugh had heard, and then Beck’s secretary had called to give him the news. Hugh had tried to call Chase, but she was always out at meetings. “I’ll leave word,” the male assistant assured Hugh in a bored, irritable voice, but Hugh doubted she ever got the messages because she never called him back.

  He parked in the motel parking lot and wandered out to the street. It was nearly midnight and he was hungry. He didn’t like Los Angeles, really. It was a sprawling, complicated city, unlike New York, which seemed straightforward by comparison. It had been his wife’s idea to move out of the city, blaming it on his paltry salary when in fact she’d never liked the city and had wanted a house just like the one she’d grown up in, with a driveway and a garage and a front lawn and a bird feeder that attracted more squirrels than it did birds, and cheerful, suspicious neighbors. Mornings, he rode the train into Hoboken with all the other commuters. He didn’t mind it, really. He would look out the train window with interest at the row houses in East Orange, slim buildings adorned with cheesy facades or painted in hues of gelato—pistachio or peppermint stick or lemon—and he would think: What is it like to live there? Or the dilapidated motel in Newark where people seemed to be living, the large, movie-screen-sized windows, the pus-yellow water in the once lovely pool, someone’s skeletal dog tied to the fence. In truth, Hugh found the mystery of those rooms compelling, and he’d find himself daydreaming about the possibilities of life inside them. Eventually, the train pulled into Hoboken, a sluggish caterpillar crawling to its destination. He’d look out across the wide V of tracks and see the workers in their plaid coats at the breakfast wagon, hunched over paper cups of coffee, their cigarettes, then follow the parade of suits and overcoats down into the tubes and the subterranean journey across the river to the city, a jagged, squealing ride through flashes of darkness that always reminded him of death, after which, climbing unhurriedly out of the subway into the bright, powdered-sugar daylight that signified his arrival, he felt little relief. Somehow, in life, he felt misinterpreted. His colleagues at work, their greedy eyes in the boardroom, their handy disdain tersely dispensed like the slang of some foreign language he could not understand. Even his wife, when he’d look at her from time to time, seemed like a stranger to him and he sometimes wondered what he was doing there in that house on Rollins Avenue. Completing some ordinary and necessary task like taking out the trash, he would say to himself: What am I doing here? Sometimes, when he woke in their bed, he felt disoriented, the way he’d felt as a sickly child waking from a fever, the strangeness of staying home from school, his bedroom brimming with sunshine, the sense he’d had of being left out, kept apart. Separate. He felt it now, as an adult. He’d felt it all along.

  He came to an all-night coffee shop and went in and sat down at one of the tables. He didn’t know what he wanted. A girl was sitting alone in an adjacent booth having a hot fudge sundae. “I’ll take one of those,” he told the waitress. “And coffee.”

  “I’m making a fresh pot. It’ll be just a minute.”

  The girl in the booth looked over at him. She was maybe thirteen or fourteen, he didn’t know. Hugh and Marion didn’t have children. They had tried, of course—didn’t everyone? They’d been to specialists; they’d done all the tests. Finally they’d given up. The experience had changed his wife somehow. They did not discuss it. But there it was at the dinner table. There it was in the bowl of peas, the loaf of bread, the bottle of wine, the roasted chicken. There it was on the beige carpet as they climbed the stairs night after night. And there it was in the empty room beside their own, empty like an open mouth, screaming.

  The girl in the booth had a hard look. Her hair was blond, tied up in pig-tails. She had a pencil case on the table; it had a picture of a unicorn on it. There was something moving around in her pocket, a disconcerting jumble, and then he saw the flash of a thin white tail.

  “You’ve got something in your pocket,” he said to her.

  “I know.”

  “What is it?”

  Frowning, she put her finger over her lips as if to shush him.

  His ice cream sundae came. It looked exactly like the picture on the menu. For a while he just studied it. It occurred to him that he didn’t want it now. The girl had already finished hers and was clanking the spoon against the parfait glass.

  “Do you want this?” he said. “I haven’t touched it.”

  “You don’t want it?”

  He handed it to her. “I want you to have it.”

  The girl didn’t hesitate. He watched her eat, sucking the chocolate off the spoon. The waitress brought his coffee and the check. The coffee tasted bitter. It did not taste like a fresh pot. Outside, it had begun to rain. The bell on the glass door jingled as stragglers came in to wait it out. He put his money out on the table.

  The girl touched his arm. “Hey, mister? You got a car?”

  The question caught him off guard. “What?”

  “You’re not a pervert, are you?”

  He blurted a laugh. “No, I’m not a pervert.”

  “I’m staying on Argyle. It’s not far.”

  They ran through the rain to the motel parking lot where he’d left his car. The girl wore only a light jacket; he thought she must be cold. In the car he noticed that her eyes were glassy and her nose was running. He turned on the heat and she put her wet hands up to the vent. Her fingernails were green with dirt. She took a white rat out of her pocket, shifting it from hand to hand like a ball of dough. “This is my friend.”

  Hugh was not fond of rodents. The rat was alarmingly fat. He tried to concentrate on the road.

  “He keeps me company,” the girl said.

  “What’s his name?”

  “Snowball. Snowy for short. He looks like a snowball, doesn’t he?”

  “Yes, he does.” Hugh wondered where the girl had gotten it.

  “I’m not from around here,” she said, grimly.

  “No?”

  “South Dakota.”

  “Where do you live now?”

  She shrugged, playing with the rat. “Nowhere special.”

  Argyle Avenue wasn’t far and she pointed to a building on the corner that had a sign out front: Transients Welcome. The cement blocks of the building had been painted mint green. A single tube of florescent light hung over the door, attracting moths. A few people were hanging around out front, shielding their heads from the rain with newspapers.

  “What’s it like in there?” he asked her.

  “It stinks.” She sat there. She didn’t seem to want to get out.

  “Look, don’t take this the wrong way, but I’ve got a room you could stay in. It has two beds.”

  “You said you weren’t a pervert,” she said with a hint of provocation that seemed beyond her years. “Liar.”

  “It’s just an extra bed,” he explained. “It’s just a better place for you to stay.”

  She looked at him, sizing him up. “Okay, Mister Daddy. If you say so.”

  He drove back to the parking lot of the motel and returned his car to the same space they’d left only minutes before. His stomach ached slightly; he’d been foolish not to eat. They walked over to the motel, up the stairs, down the long c
orridor to the room. He took out the key and opened the door. The room smelled like insecticide. The rain made a gentle sound against the window. “Help yourself.”

  She went into the bathroom and put the shower on. He heard the plastic curtain sliding across the rod. He sat on the bed, waiting. She took her time. Then she came out dressed in her clothes again and got into one of the beds.

  “Where did you put your little friend?” he asked.

  “In my sock.” She held it up for him to see. The rat’s little pink nose was sticking out, its whiskers twitching. “Don’t worry, he won’t bother you.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Daisy.”

  “Like the flower.”

  She turned away from him. After a moment his cell phone rang. He knew it was his wife. He let the phone ring. He looked over at the girl and saw that she had fallen asleep. For a long while he sat on the edge of his bed, watching her. She made noises in her sleep, a wheezing sound rushing up her throat. It troubled him, and he worried that she might be sick. His stomach went tight as he watched her. She shouldn’t be living like this, he thought. It was wrong. It was an awful thing to see.

  He slept fitfully, and was awakened at dawn by the elephantine wail of a garbage truck. The girl was still in the bed, sleeping. She had turned on her side and was sucking her thumb. It alarmed him, seeing her like that, with her thumb in her mouth. It gave him a feeling inside. It made his eyes water.