You Are Not a Stranger Here - Adam Haslett [31]
The waitress stares.
“Honey? What are you going to have?” Ellen asks, trying after a long day’s journey not to sound impatient.
Silence stretches on.
“He’ll have a chicken sandwich,” Ellen says at last.
IN THE BATHROOM at the hotel, he stands before the mirror trying to recall his reason for being there. Electric light shines evenly on the sink’s white porcelain. Cool air slides from the windowsill across the floor onto his bare feet. Water swells on the lip of the faucet.
From the bedroom he hears Ellen’s voice. She seems to be talking about a friend of hers, a woman at the college who like Ellen has no permanent position, and was apparently just let go. There is something about courses not filled. She asks a question he doesn’t follow. He tries to piece together what he’s heard but it’s no good.
“You all right in there?”
He opens his fist and sees the pill he is supposed to take flaking in the sweat of his palm.
Ten times, maybe even twenty, he has sat on a doctor’s couch and answered the same battery of questions about his sleep and interest in sex, his appetite and sense of despair; and he’s said, yes, there was an uncle and a grandmother who, looking back, seemed unhappy in more than the usual ways; and yes, there were his parents, who divorced, his mother who always had a few drinks after dinner; and no, he doesn’t hear voices or believe there is a plot to undo him. At the end of each of the hours, he’s listened to the doctor’s brief talk about the new combination they’d like to try, how at first it might make him nauseous or tired or anxious. For years he’s done as he was told, and for stretches of time he’s felt like a living person. Then the undertow returns. Ellen hears of a better doctor. Again he must answer the questions. He’s always doubted the purpose of the drugs. Despite all the explanations, he’s never been able to rid himself of the conviction that his experience has a meaning. That the crushing pulse of specificity he so often sees teeming in the physical world is no distortion. That it is there to be seen if one has the eyes. He’s been told this is a romantic notion, a dangerous thing to cling to, bad advice for the mentally ill. Perhaps it is. Though the opposite has always seemed more frightening to him, lonelier—the idea that so much of him was a pure and blinded waste.
“I’m fine,” he says softly, rinsing the damp powder into the drain.
In bed, Ellen leans her head on his chest, laying a hand flat on his stomach. There is nothing sexual about her touch. There has been none of that for a long time. She is thirty-four and would like to have a child. He begins, as he has so often, to think of all the things he does not provide her, but knowing the list is endless, he stops.
“You feel nice and warm,” she says.
He runs his hand through her hair. She has never worn perfume or makeup, which for him has always added to her beauty, the lack of facade.
“You all set for the library tomorrow?”
“Yeah,” she says, nodding her head against his chest.
She’s come to read correspondence from the Second World War, part of her research on the lives of women on the home front. Her real interests are in the political history of the time, but her adviser has told her there is a glut of scholarship on the topic and it isn’t the best idea if she wants to find a faculty position. She’s thought about ignoring his advice, but when Paul stopped working, she decided it was best to be practical.
He remembers their meeting for the first time, at a friend’s house, where they sat in a bay window overlooking a garden. No matter what she spoke of, she seemed so optimistic: her work, their friends at the party, the cut of his jacket—it was all good. Those first months he would come to her apartment in the afternoons when he’d finished his teaching at the high