If a Stranger Approaches You: Stories Page 4

  Anything, really, but preferably a dangerous animal, something it would have aided the world to have him kill. He would have willed one—hyena, jaguar, pit bull—if he could have, to come bounding across the barrier between the scuzzy neighborhood over there and the shoulder of the freeway where he stood: something growling and slobbering and lunging for his major arteries just so he could beat it to death with the jack, chase it into the garbage-filled ditch down there and lay that solid metal into its skull. More than one homicide had been committed with nothing less than a jack, Tony felt sure. It would make a satisfying weapon. Primitive and blunt. He could imagine it perfectly. The heft and pulp of it. The strength it would require on his part. Without him, it would just be a tire jack, but with the full force of his anger it would be stunning. He was sure he could do it, that he’d been born to do it, at that moment, although he had never killed anything other than an insect on purpose. Never gone deer hunting. Never even trapped a mouse under the kitchen sink. Never even once nudged the goddamned cat out of the way with the toe of his bare foot. There’d been small furry things that ran in front of his car, but they didn’t count.

  Certainly, he’d never committed a murder! He wasn’t violent. Even Melody knew he wasn’t violent. He’d always agreed with her and all the other women he knew that conflicts could be resolved with words. He’d invented nonviolence. Even when what he wanted was to beat the living shit out of some grocery store clerk or the kid who’d lived next door for a while and wouldn’t turn down his fucking stereo in the middle of the night when his daughter had just been a baby and so much as a stifled sneeze in the next room could wake her up screaming. When that had gone on long enough (that stereo night after night, phone calls to the boy, to his parents, late night treks to their front door, which they never answered), Tony had finally written them a long, polite, and somewhat threatening letter, and the day after he delivered it personally to their empty mailbox, the stereo was never played loudly enough for them to hear it from next door again, and within a year the family had moved. He’d won.

  “My weapon of choice,” Tony Harmon had said more than once, brandishing a black felt-tipped pen.

  “You’re the writer!” Melody would say when she was trying to think of a way to describe someone she’d seen or something that had happened to her. “Help me out here, how would you describe…?”

  And Tony would always come up with the words for her, the ones she seemed to have been searching for all her life.

  “Exactly!” she’d say.

  When he was in college, Tony had begun to write a novel. To write, he always used the same brand and color of pen, and he bought his notebooks (black-covered) from a stationary store on campus. He filled notebook after notebook with outlines and character sketches and plans. It was an experimental novel. A narrative that moved backward in time. An old man would rise from the gurney on which he’d just died in a hospital emergency room, be taken home in the ambulance that had brought him to the hospital, have the heart attack that killed him, and then make breakfast, wake in his bed, and then dream, and then fall asleep after reading late into the night, and then have dinner. The novel would end with the old man’s birth in the backseat of a taxi-cab in Paris.

  Although Tony had written only paragraphs and chapter outlines, he knew exactly what the cover would look like, what the weight of that book would feel like in the hands. He knew the tone and sweep and sense of it, and its overall affect on the reader, and the soundtrack that would accompany the film. When he was writing in one of his notebooks Melody was always very careful not to interupt him. It was sacred, the novel he was going to write.

  Sacred, like a cow. A cow. Meat, and gravity. Or, like his dead sister in his parents’ home: implicit in everything. The dust on the windowpanes. The carpet pile. The food they consumed and the water that fell like a hot shawl around their shoulders in the shower

  Melody always told her friends and family, “Tony’s working on his novel,” and then one day, many years after he’d graduated from college, she’d given him a clipping from the New York Times Book Review, something her mother, she said, had sent to her for him—a review of a novel that went backward in time, beginning with an old man rising from a gurney in the hospital where he has just died, and following him backward to his birth.

  “Did you tell her what my novel was about?” Tony asked Melody, and he knew it sounded like an accusation.

  “You never told me not to,” Melody said. “Besides,” she said, “you haven’t been working on that novel for years.”

  No one had even noticed he’d been gone. The party was going on just as it had—the little girls having been transported by the force of some frenetic birthday propellant into another helium-filled place. One or two were twirling around in the hallway, screeching, and a few were still at the dining room table continuing to work on their hot dogs. It was as if no time had passed at all since he’d left with the book and returned, and also as if he’d slipped through some crack in the space-time continuum and come back to the party as a completely immaterial being. Not even as a fly on the wall. As the idea of a fly on the wall. Melody was oblivious to him, leaning over the shoulder of some sullen-looking little girl, cutting the girl’s hotdog in half. As she did so, Tony Harmon couldn’t help but notice the shining wealth of his wife’s breasts surging inside the black sweater he was sure she’d worn for his sake. Look, asshole, my body still turns you on, and you’ll quite possibly never touch it again. …

  He had no idea what to do with his hands now, how to stand there, useless. No little girl was going to ask the awkward father who didn’t live there anymore to spoon relish onto her bun. So, except to hulk in the doorway glancing at and away from his wife’s breasts, Tony had nothing whatsoever to do.

  It was impossible not to notice her breasts, not to think about how, the first time he’d touched them, he’d had to fight his way through two layers of clothes and a padded bra to do so. Melody, her back against the wall beside his bed. Her perfect dentist-daughter’s teeth gleaming absurdly purple in the weird fever-glow of his blacklight.

  She hadn’t been his first choice. He could admit that now: At that long table in the basement of Pizza Bob’s he’d noticed another girl (woman?—remember the way they’d insisted in those years, only eighteen or nineteen years old, on being referred to as women?)—a history major with what appeared to be a permanently world-weary expression that made her look as if she’d already figured out that everybody within her line of sight was doomed. Tony had tried to talk to that girl, but she wouldn’t look him in the eyes, and then she left. Later, she turned up in more than a few of his classes, but Tony never had a personal conversation with her, although she’d stuck somehow in his mind all these years as the alternative life he might have chosen, except that it had never been a choice.

  He’d gone for Melody instead, who was like a simpler, happier version of the history major. Granola girl. Bit of a hippy (although this was 1981 and hippies had utterly faded from the scene by then). That night at Pizza Bob’s, as Tony had watched Melody sip what appeared to be a chocolate shake from a straw, he’d thought that she was not nearly as sexy as the other girl, and that it was too bad because she seemed to like him. He thought how the other girl’s broody lips and the way she kept sweeping the same bangs out of her face over and over just for them to fall in her face again was a lot more interesting than Melody’s bandana-wrapped ponytail. He thought it would be a bit of a letdown to wind up with that ponytail instead of the swooping bangs.

  But, God, how he’d fallen for Melody once he had her to himself. The ponytail and the giggle and the bright incisors and the positive attitude and all. That semester he dropped a course and used the extra time to memorize half a dozen love poems to recite to her. Spent all the money he made from his job at the library on Joni Mitchell albums to play while they made love.

  Couldn’t get enough.

  Could have dived straight into her at some soft point between h
er ribs, and lived there.

  The first three times they’d slept together, that’s all they’d done—slept. Melody, curled into his chest, his arm clasped around her stomach, her hair in his face. The smell of it—as if sleep had been made into hair. Or mincemeat. That was it. Melody’s tawny brown hair smelled like his mother’s mincemeat pie. Some kind of hippy shampoo, he supposed. Her neck, like milk. Melody was like milk and mincemeat struck by lightning, sprung to life in the form of a girl.

  It was a warm winter, that one, and strange to wake every morning and find the sun shining in on them through his dormitory window. He was a Resident Advisor. It was free room and board, and a good deal, but it meant that he couldn’t live off campus and that sometimes in the middle of the night he had to wrench himself out of bed and tell the guys on his hall to turn the fucking Led Zeppelin down or to order somebody to clean up his puke in the bathroom or to stuff a towel under the door if he was going to smoke dope in his room so they wouldn’t all get busted.

  In his dorm room, he and Melody slept in his twin bed with the window wide open because the radiator was right next to his pillow, and an endless stream of dry dust was sent up from the slatted, hellish box of it into their faces. But, with the window open onto that first and only humid winter they’d ever had, the moisture of hot and cool was just right. The union of institutional swelter with the off-kilter nature of that year’s winter was exactly like falling in love in college. Three quarters of your life ahead of you and nothing but the moment to worry about. A botanical garden. A glass box full of jungle vines and butterlies. The climate of the heart and the mind at the same time. No one, it seemed, had ever experienced anything quite like this before.

  Apparently after hotdogs there had to be games before cake. So Tony found himself following his wife and the girls into the backyard, where he stood just as stiffly as he had in the dining room until Melody turned and handed him a paper donkey’s tail. “Here,” she said, “I’ll blindfold one of the girls and you spin her around and hand her this tail.”

  He held the paper tail and stared at her. Was she joking?

  She was not joking.

  “Me first!” his daughter screamed, grabbing at the tail, which Tony instinctively snapped out of her reach.

  “No,” Melody said to her. “Let one of the guests go first.”

  At this their daughter stamped her feet and scrunched up her features into a parody of childish rage. Tony thought of Rumplestiltskin stomping straight through the floor and tearing himself in half. Had she always been such a brat?

  Tony looked away from her, afraid the expression on his face might betray the disgust he felt toward his daughter, the truly ugly face she was making, and that Melody would call him on it right then and there as he guarded the ass-tail she’d given him.

  The backyard was neatly mown.

  Had Melody done it herself? He had to admit that if she’d done it herself, she’d done a pretty good job. Tended, the yard looked pleasant. When he was younger he’d imagined himself with an ocean view, or a Manhattan penthouse, but in reality this little yard was not so bad. It looked green and even. He was glad she wasn’t letting it go to hell without him here.

  But, of course, that wouldn’t be like Melody.

  And was it really any better that here was this proof that the one thing he’d felt sure she’d need him for—starting the goddamned lawn mower—was another thing she did not need him for? He thought about all the Sundays he’d been out here shirtless, sweating, bending over their shitty lawn mower, yanking and yanking as it sputtered and died, and how, infuriatingly, Melody would sometimes come out and ask him if he needed any help.

  He had not needed any fucking help.

  And, apparently, neither had she.

  Beside him, his daughter stood stiffly now, fuming, her hands in small balled fists at her sides as Melody blindfolded someone else’s daughter—a girl both more delicate and polite than his own—and started to spin her around. The girl groped the air in Tony’s direction for the donkey’s tail, which he pressed into her hand. Then he stepped back to watch as she walked in the opposite direction of the tree, where the donkey itself was tacked up and waiting.

  Like a drunk, the little girl took tentative stumbling steps while the others laughed at her, and he thought what kind of stupid and sadistic game is this. Why was the world full of games like this? Soccer, hockey, Jeopardy: Match your wits and strength, and fail. Publicly. He remembered a game they’d played in gym class in elementary school when he was a kid. In his memory, they’d played it every day. Scramble. A line was drawn in the middle of the gym floor—half the class on one side, half the class on the other, half a dozen basketballs tossed around randomly—and the children on one side of the line were instructed to throw the balls at the children on the other side of the line. When you were hit, you were out. You went to sit on the bench.

  As a child, Tony had been strong and quick, but not the strongest and quickest. Although he was often one of the last left standing at the end of that game, it just made him an easier target for Scott Alguire or David Haviland—brutes, with unbelievable physical strength. They’d aim for Tony’s head, and he’d hear the hard ball zinging toward him (like those phone lines, somehow shiny and more terrifying than a scream) before it took him out, sent him sprawling onto the waxed floor while other children cheered.

  In college, when he’d told Melody about this game, about Scramble, she’d nodded knowingly. She, too, apparently, had played it in her own elementary school on the opposite side of the state from his. She said, “I just always tried to be the first one out. I’d stand right at the line and let another girl toss the ball at my shoulder and then I’d go sit on the side.”

  This had amazed him—the idea that someone (even a girl!) would so willfully and cannily buck the system by choosing failure over injury. Tony had longed to go backward in time and see if he could do it, if he could just stand there and be eliminated by a soft toss rather than fighting it out until the inevitable and painful end. And what would it mean to him if he could have? If they’d yelled Sissy at him, could he have stood it? Or would they not have yelled Sissy? Would his classmates, perhaps, have seen it as the bold move of a very brave boy, a boy much smarter and more capable than they had ever even imagined being? Might his boldness, perhaps, have brought the whole charade of Scramble to a screeching halt? Would the gym teacher have found something genuinely amusing for them to play instead? Something that didn’t require pain, and losers?

  But of course Tony could never have done it. Tony was nothing like Melody. And, back in those early days of their relationship, that had been the whole point of such pillow talk, to discover over and over again how alien a creature she was. A better, smarter creature. A creature completely lacking in irony and anger and malice, and better off for it. On the surface, they had things in common. Their English majors, for instance. But Melody was the kind of English major completely devoted to reading books and talking about them, with no ulterior motives and no future plans—as if there would be some kind of future in that, as if you could get a license and go off into the world explaining your feelings about books to other people and get paid for it. And she was a genius at it. Her analyses of books were often more interesting than the books themselves, even if she only liked the ones with happy endings.

  Tony was, however, an English major because he’d claimed nothing else and time was running out and he was a junior who’d taken nothing but literature courses for no real reason other than that they met, often, in the evenings or late afternoons, and he liked to sleep in.

  Also, he had a knack for faking his way through lit classes with all A’s, intuiting early on that ninety percent of one’s success or failure in a literature course (not to mention the mood of the instructor) depended on whether or not the student participated in class discussion:

  “In ‘The Yellow Wallpaper,’ does the wife have a choice other than to go mad?”

  Tony really had no a
nswer for that, so he would, instead, be the student who asked the question. It was a way of participating, generating participation—avoiding and initiating controversial discussions at the same time. The professor, or lecturer, or teaching assistant (it didn’t matter which one, they were all equally touched and grateful and singled him out as an English major and an A student right away) would heave a sigh of relief and lean back in his or her chair. The other students seemed to admire him, and only that woman (girl?) with the black hair—the history major from the basement of Pizza Bob’s—seemed ever to notice what he was up to.

  Like him, she seemed to have wandered into more than her share of literature classes with just as little interest in literature, and when he asked his questions, she always made a funny little pursing kiss with her lips and looked at him longer than was necessary.

  Well, maybe he couldn’t fool her, but Tony could fake it for the instructors, so homework never interfered with his relationship with Melody. Neither did work. She would come to the library where he worked part-time while he stamped books, sometimes sitting on his lap.

  He’d had, by this time, a few girlfriends, but Melody was the first one with whom he’d slept in the same bed night after night after night. He learned how to slip out of bed to go to the john without waking her up. He learned how to match his breathing to another person’s as sleep came on. And from Melody he learned about biology—the female side of things. Together they paged through a borrowed copy of Our Bodies, Our Selves, looking for a better method of contraception than the one they were using, which was coitus interruptus. With her, he studied the line-illustration of the internal organs of the female with care. The cervix seemed particularly mysterious, being neither flesh, actually, nor an organ. A sea animal sort of thing. There was nothing in the male anatomy to compare it to, as far as he could tell. Tony read about the incredible sensitivity of the clitoris, and felt jealous. He read of the many diseases of the female reproductive organs, and felt relieved. He studied the symptoms of the diseases—mostly pain and itching—and the way men passed on the diseases, as lovers, and then ignored them as doctors and actively encouraged them as politicians and oppressors. He was aghast when he saw the photographs of naked pregnant women, although he pretended not to be.