You Are Not a Stranger Here - Adam Haslett [30]
Until now.
Staring at the dark face of the cliffs, his mind quickens enough to see how it might happen, and for a moment, sitting there in the taxi, holding his wife’s hand, he feels relief.
AFTER CHECKING INTO the hotel and unpacking their things, they go looking for a restaurant. The main street is cobbled, lined with two-story stone buildings, dirty beige or gray. A drizzle has begun to fall, dotting the plate glass windows of the shops closed for the night. The pubs have stopped serving food. They wander further and come to a restaurant on the town square, a mock American diner lit with traffic signals, the walls hung with road signs for San Diego and Gary, Indiana.
“Charming,” Ellen says, opening the front door.
Paul hangs back, stilled by a dread of the immediate future, the dispiriting imitations he sees through the windows, a fear of what it will feel like to be in there, a sense that commitment to it could be a mistake, that perhaps they should keep going. Though he doesn’t want that either, having already sensed an abandoned quality to this town: the students gone for their Easter break, the pubs nearly empty, the dirty right angle where the sidewalk meets the foundation stones of a darkened bank, the crumpled flyer that lies there, all of it gaining on him now, this scene, these objects, their malignancy. He tries to recall the relief of just an hour ago: that soon this will end, the accusatory glare of the inanimate world. But there on the pavement in halogen streetlight is a scattering of sand that appears to him as if in the tight focus of a camera’s lens, sharper than his eyes can bear.
He takes a steadying breath, as the doctor told him to when the world of objects becomes so lucid he feels he is being crushed by their presence.
“You sure about this?” he asks.
“It’s late—we might as well,” Ellen says. “We can find something better tomorrow.”
He could stop her, try to explain, but as she looks back at him from the doorway he can see her nascent concern in the slight tilt of her head. She will be looking for signs of improvement in him, indications the trip was a good idea. He will want time alone in the days ahead. If she worries too much now, she may hesitate to go by herself to the library. It’s the first time in months he’s been capable of an instrumental thought, a weighing of needs.
“All right,” he says, and follows her through the door.
At their table, the coffee stains and salt crystals on the red-and-white checkered oilcloth press him back in his chair; escaping them, he looks across the room to see a broad-faced old woman, her skin the color of a whitish moon. She sits at a table by the kitchen sipping a mug of tea. Their eyes meet for a moment, neither of them looking away. They stare straight at each other, expressionless, oddly intimate, like spies acknowledging each other’s presence in a room of strangers. She nods, smiles weakly, turns away.
When the waitress arrives, Ellen orders her food. Then there is silence. Paul reads the description of the chicken sandwich again. From the speakers, he hears the smooth, crooning voices of the Doobie Brothers.
Time barely moves.
“Paul, you know what you want?”
He looks into Ellen’s face, the slight rise of her eyebrow, a sign of apprehension, so familiar from the days she first saw him depressed, a year before they married, when for no apparent reason his basic faith in the world, the faith that there is a purpose in working or eating, dissolved, and she came to his apartment day after day with her books, conversation, news—patient and loving. Many times he’s wondered why, after seeing him that way, she still married him. She was wrong to do it, he knows now, seeing her strained eyes and pursed lips, the way the old