If a Stranger Approaches You: Stories Read online

  Somebody’s Mistress, Somebody’s Wife

  Often she unplugged the answering machine and let the phone ring sixteen, seventeen, times before she answered it. It was always him. He was the only one who would let the phone ring that long. He was the only one who called her in the morning while she was getting ready for work.

  “Babe,” he’d say, as if he were out of breath, but not as if she’d surprised him by answering.

  “What do you want?” she’d ask.

  To this, he’d say nothing. She pictured him in his little white sports car with the roof down, his silver hair gleaming in the sunlight, his red tie lapping the wind over his shoulder, his cell phone held to an ear, maybe one elbow resting on the car door, arm extended, driving with his knee as he sometimes liked to do.

  Even in the winter she pictured this, although he lived even farther north than she did, and the winter was a bad one.

  “Don’t call me again, Conrad,” she’d say. But then she’d hold the phone to her ear a long time, listening to him breathe, waiting for him to say something he never got around to saying.

  When Karen was a child she’d been told a cautionary urban legend by her grandmother about a man who’d rested his elbow on the open window of his car, and it had been lopped off by a passing station wagon—torn right off at the shoulder. The man had driven ten more miles without realizing his arm was gone, until he was pulled over by a policeman who’d noticed the blood pouring out of the man’s car, painting a red stripe down the middle of the road.

  Karen sometimes imagined Conrad driving down the freeway with one arm ripped from the socket, his gray suit in bloody tatters at the shoulder as he held the phone to his ear with his free hand.

  Sometimes she pictured herself in the passenger seat beside him, lifting a hand to wave to a passing child on a bicycle, and suddenly realizing that her own arm was just a gushing, empty sleeve of blood.

  Usually, he was the first one to hang up.

  It had been a year since Karen broke things off with Conrad. It was hard to believe she’d once been that woman standing in a hotel parking lot while the rain poured down on her in a Hollywood-like deluge—nearly drowning in her own hair, which was running with water and plastered to her face. She was screaming up at the window of their room. Every time she inhaled, her mouth filled with water and hair. It was the middle of the night. She always suspected that Conrad was, himself, the one who called the cops, but all she knew was that she was guided into the back of the patrol car and told to hush up by a weary-looking uniformed officer, who said, “Jesus. People are trying to sleep in there lady. What is this, some kind of love trouble?”

  She didn’t bother to explain.

  The cop said, “Look, just get out of here, okay. If I have to come back here, it’s going to be Disturbing the Peace, okay. Trust me, you don’t want to spend the night in jail.”

  The officer came around the side of the car then and opened it for her like a gentleman—a gentleman who was opening the door for her because there were no handles in the back of his patrol car for her to open it herself, ushering her out into the parking lot into a driving rainstorm.

  Karen had no illusions that night. She knew she looked like a drowned rat, as her grandmother used to say. She knew that if this police officer felt anything other than contempt for her, it was pity.

  Soon after, she moved eighty miles south, and got a good, new job. She bought a bungalow in a funky little neighborhood full of bungalows. If he didn’t call her in the mornings, maybe she would have forgotten Conrad entirely by now.

  Conrad and his wife of twenty-two years.

  Conrad and his mansion on the lake.

  Conrad and his missing toes, which had fallen off on Mount Everest, and the way her own toes felt as she slid her foot across the bed and ran them over his toes, those little bubblish stumps. Conrad always pretended to be ashamed of his toeless foot, but he never missed a chance to point it out to her, or make a big show of stuffing wadded gauze into his shoe before he put it on.

  “Morning,” Jim Porter said when she reached the entrance to her office building. He was reading the paper with his legs spread wide apart on the bench outside the office. He didn’t look up when he greeted her.

  Karen had found out a few months before, through interoffice rumors, that Jim’s sister, when he was a little boy and the sister was thirteen, had stolen their father’s car and driven it off a bridge into a river. She was considered a Missing Person for four months before the car rose to the surface of the river with Jim’s sister still at the wheel.

  “He’s never gotten over it,” Melissa whispered.

  Indeed, it seemed like the kind of thing one would never get over, a dark detail, a kind of grainy shadow that would trail Jim everywhere—but in truth Karen saw no signs that he hadn’t gotten over it. He made a lot of crude jokes around the coffee pot. He spent a lot of time on the Internet, looking for antique letter openers for sale on eBay. Karen tried to imagine, if it had been her own sister, would she have gotten over it?

  Probably.

  Her own sister had been a kind of Missing Person for the last two decades of Karen’s life, ever since their mother had died and Marybeth had accused Karen of usurping her affections at the deathbed. (“It was like I wasn’t even there!” Marybeth screamed in the hospital parking lot. “Like she was looking at you the whole time she was dying, like I wasn’t even in the fucking room!”)

  It was easy enough to imagine her sister at thirteen, swimming trapped in a stolen car, maybe trying lethargically to unbuckle her seat belt and get out, hoping for a while, and then dreaming, the way those whose brains are being deprived of oxygen must dream—dim light and echoes and empty corridors—until what Marybeth had been to Karen collapsed in on itself until it was smaller than a pencil eraser, and then the head of a pin, and then less than a pin-prick where once a very bitter older sister had been.

  It was perfect summer weather. The clouds looked artistically arranged in the sky. That weekend Karen had planted impatiens in a circle around the trees in her front yard. They looked like Christmas lights burning there in the middle of the day, electrically red and white.

  The bungalow next to hers had been for sale for months, and finally someone had bought it and was moving in. Karen had to admit to herself a bit of disappointment when she saw who it was—another woman in her thirties, also single—although she would not have admitted to herself that she was hoping for a single man. Or even a married man.

  “Hey!” the new neighbor had called over from an open window after her moving van pulled away. “I like your house!”

  It was a joke everyone on the block made, since all the bungalows on the block were the same.

  “Ha! Ha!” Karen said, trying to make it sound like laughter.

  It turned out that the new woman next door was freshly divorced. She’d lost everything in the divorce, including custody of her nine-year-old daughter. When Karen stopped in on Sunday to bring her a plate of brownies, it seemed that all this new neighbor had brought with her to unpack were about a hundred framed photographs of the daughter.

  Her daughter’s name was Beth. The new neighbor’s name was Elizabeth.

  Elizabeth made some instant iced tea, and she and Karen sat together on the couch, which was the only piece of furniture in the bungalow. Elizabeth wound her limbs around her as if she were made of rubber. Outside, there was the sound of an ice-cream truck playing tinny children’s music. Elizabeth put her face in her hands and began to weep.

  “Oh, God,” Karen said, and patted the woman’s shoulder. “I’m so sorry. Would you like me to go?”

  Elizabeth shook her head no no. Her hair was a mass of dark curls. She’d told Karen that she was from Russia, although there was no trace of an accent in her heavily Midwestern-sounding English.

  “It’s why they took my daughter,” she said. “Because I’m not American. I have no rights in this country. They can do whatever they want to me. My ex-husband
is a powerful man. He runs the government.”

  Karen couldn’t imagine what the woman meant. Was she trying to say that her ex-husband was the President? That seemed unlikely. But by some horrible coincidence then the ice-cream truck pulled up at the curb right outside the new neighbor’s house and kept the music—“I’m a Little Teapot”—blaring as children yelped and cried out, surrounding the truck.

  Elizabeth wept harder—longer, rasping, ragged inhalations followed by shuddering gulps. “I can’t help it, but I have to,” Elizabeth said. “Everything will always remind me of her. I’ll never get over this.”

  “Can’t your daughter visit?” Karen asked. “Can’t you visit your daughter?

  Elizabeth shook her head vehemently. “He’s guaranteed that I’ll never see her again.”

  A straggly little black dog came running out of the bedroom then, skidding and slipping across the wooden floors on its toenails before leaping into Elizabeth’s lap. She buried her face in its greasy-looking fur, and said, “I’ll visit you tomorrow, Kathy. I need to be alone now.”

  She was going to remind her that her name was Karen, not Kathy, but thought better of it.

  The people at Karen’s office were chatty, and immature. Very little was accomplished on any given day, but often just before a presentation or a meeting there would be a surge of frantic energy that resulted in screaming fights, and tearful reconciliations. Karen tried to steer clear of most of her coworkers, and just do her job, but Melissa was always trying to drag her into office politics and gossip. Melissa hated everyone they worked with, but she was always urging Karen to join them for lunches or for drinks after work.

  One mind-numbingly dull afternoon, Karen confided in Melissa about Conrad and immediately wished she hadn’t.

  “God,” Melissa said. “What an asshole.”

  “I don’t know,” Karen said, feeling oddly defensive of Conrad. “There were never any promises made. I knew what I was getting into. I knew he was married. I just didn’t know how deeply in love I would fall.”

  “I don’t mean about you. I was thinking of his wife. Did she ever suspect?”

  “I don’t know,” Karen said, bristling. She did not want to think about Conrad’s wife. What did she care about Conrad’s wife. It seemed rude of Melissa to ask. “I never met his wife.”

  “Well,” Melissa said. “I knew someone once whose aunt suspected that her husband was having an affair, and this aunt worked in a factory, and she had access to radioactive materials, and she started mailing it to the woman her husband was having an affair with—just a bit here and there in envelopes that looked like, you know, coupons and such. And the mistress had no idea what was happening, but her hair started falling out, and her fingernails were peeling off, and then one night she woke up to go to the bathroom and saw herself in the dark in the medicine chest mirror, and she was glowing.”

  Karen went to the trash can and threw her styrofoam up into it. “I need to get back to work,” she said.

  “But do you think, you know, his wife would ever—?”

  “Conrad’s wife doesn’t work in a factory,” Karen said. “Conrad is one of the richest men in this state.”

  Melissa shrugged.

  The new neighbor’s dog was named Buttons. It never barked, but it would run out the neighbor’s back door every time she opened it, and come panting into Karen’s yard, where it would head straight for the impatiens, and, after pissing on them, begin digging them up. Karen would come out on her front stoop with her arms crossed, and watch. Elizabeth would just stand there, too, smiling sadly across the narrow stretch of grass and dandelions between them. If she understood that her dog was digging up something Karen had planted, and wanted, she didn’t register any problem with that.

  One Saturday morning while Buttons pissed on the impatiens, a beautiful emerald and blue butterfly rose out of the shrubbery under Karen’s bedroom window and began to make its way shakily on the breeze across her yard. It glowed as if it were bearing some sort of radioactive material on its wings, shimmering and powdery and dazzling. When Buttons saw it, he put down his leg, and tore after it, leaping into the air, snapping it off the breeze in one bite.

  Karen looked over at Elizabeth, who was dragging on a cigarette now, looking, if anything, pleased with her pet.

  “Buttons belonged to my daughter. My ex-husband hates animals. He made me take Buttons with me when I left, said he’d skin him in front of our daughter if I didn’t,” she told Karen, who was careful not to press the issue—any of the issues. “Kathy,” she said. “You have no idea what I’ve been through.”

  Conrad had always brought her unusual presents when they had their trysts. A pomegranate. A branch of apple blossoms. A praying mantis. He was a very rich man. He could have given her diamonds, he said. But diamonds were dull. Diamonds were what any rich man would have thought to give his mistress. Conrad was not just a businessman. He was creative.

  In truth, Karen wouldn’t have minded diamonds. She wasn’t rich. The praying mantis refused to fly away when she opened her bedroom window and let it go free. It sat on her windowsill praying, creepy little heart-shaped head bowed, for days before it fell off, drifting the ten stories down to the street where Karen hoped it got run over. The only jewelry he ever gave her was a hemp bracelet he had braided himself. At the center of it he’d tied a toenail, one of his own, on which he’d painstakingly painted the silhouette of the summit of Mount Everest against a light blue sky.

  “It’s one of a kind,” he said. “There’s not another bracelet like this in the world.”

  She never asked him where the other four toenails had gone.

  Maybe she didn’t want to know.

  He told her about his wife, who had Irritable Bowel Syndrome and had been unwilling to make love to him for the last twenty-two years of their marriage. But also about his beautiful daughters. Blond, athletic, musical, academically-gifted girls. And also his one son, who caused Conrad so much grief he really didn’t want to get into it.

  When Karen made the ultimatum every mistress eventually makes, Conrad blamed his inability to leave his wife on the son. “He’s been diagnosed with clinical depression.”

  “So have I!” Karen said.

  “Karen, darling,” Conrad said, holding up his hands as if to prove that he had all his digits.

  “What is it?” Karen asked when she stepped into the office and saw them all there, standing around the coffee pot, staring into it as the black water dripped into it one scalding drop at a time.

  Melissa looked up.

  “It’s Jim,” she said.

  “What about Jim?”

  “You won’t believe it,” Melissa said.

  “Try me,” Karen said.

  “He went home to visit his parents for the weekend. He was driving back here on Sunday, along the river. A little girl on a bicycle rolled down her driveway into the street right in front of him. He swerved to miss her, and drove off the road, into the river, at the exact spot where his sister drove into the river fifteen years ago to the day.”

  “No way,” Karen said.

  Her other five office mates looked up, nodding their heads as if against unusually powerful gravity.

  “I have great news!” Elizabeth shouted across their yards as Buttons, crouching among the impatiens, strained irritably to have a bowel movement. “My husband is letting me see my daughter this weekend!”

  “Great!” Karen said.

  “Kathy, do you know how much this means to me?”

  Karen had never had any particular interest in having children, but she supposed she could imagine the excitement of seeing the daughter you’d thought you’d never see again if she tried. She was, however, distracted by Buttons, and Buttons’ business among her impatiens.

  “Can you do me a favor?”

  “I suppose,” Karen said. “What is it?”

  “Can you watch Buttons this weekend? While I visit with my daughter?”

  Conrad’s wife
found a number on her husband’s cell phone statement, a number he’d dialed every weekday morning of that month, a call lasting, each time, one or two minutes.

  Curious, Conrad’s wife dialed it herself.

  After seventeen rings, a woman answered.

  Conrad’s wife held the phone to her ear and listened to the very crisp space between them, frozen in her bare feet in the kitchen, staring out the French doors to the backyard where two squirrels were chasing each other around in manic circles. The woman on the other end of the line sounded to Conrad’s wife as if she were, perhaps, applying makeup, or tidying up a bedroom. Some sort of animal was making a muffled whiny noise in the background, it seemed. After a minute or two passed, the woman on the other end of the line said, “Don’t call me anymore, Conrad. It’s over between us.”

  Conrad’s wife called information after that, and was given the address of the house where the phone bill for the number she’d dialed was sent. She jotted it down on a piece of paper, but she was upset, distracted, a bit dyslexic, and reversed the last two digits of the house number when she did.

  What choice did Karen have but to keep the little dog after Elizabeth never returned from the weekend with her daughter? It was months before they found the poor woman’s body cut into small pieces and stuffed into the toilet tank and the crawl space of her bungalow—which was only inspected some months after the new couple moved in and complained to the realtor who’d sold it to them about the plumbing and the stench—and a huge, protracted courtroom drama full of shouting and paparazzi and Special Reports interrupting every television show Karen tried to watch for many months before Elizabeth’s ex-husband, who happened to be the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, was convicted of her murder.

  Buttons learned some tricks. Fetch. Sit. Beg. He slept for the first few weeks at the foot of Karen’s bed, but when she allowed it, he liked to make his way up to the pillow beside hers and curl against her face.