You Are Not a Stranger Here - Adam Haslett [32]
“You’re too hard on yourself,” she said. “That school wears you out. You need more sleep.” Her voice had a kindly tone. If he hadn’t known before, he knew then she’d never experienced the kind of dread he was trying to describe. It didn’t matter, he told himself then. That she loved him, that was enough. It wasn’t realistic to expect acknowledgment would ever be complete.
“I’ll just get started at the library tomorrow, just a few hours in the morning,” she says, reaching up to kiss him good night. “Then we can take a walk around, see the beach.”
He touches his hand to her face.
“All right,” he says, switching off the bedside lamp.
EARLY MORNING, A pewter gray light hangs in the middle of the room, leaving the corners obscured, blurring the outlines of the sitting chair and bureau.
He dresses quietly; quietly he closes the door behind him. The air outside is cold, mist blanketing the streets. He makes his way up toward the castle, and from there onto the path leading alongside the wall of the cathedral grounds. Opposite is the cliff, grass running to its edge. He walks to the verge. He can hear the slosh and fizz of the sea below, the deep knock of a boulder being rocked in place by the waves. All of it invisible down there in the fog.
It is better this way, he thinks.
“’Scuse me, dear, could you give me a hand?” a voice behind him says.
He turns to see an old woman buttoned in a green wool coat. She stands no more than a yard away, holding a grocery bag. He can’t understand how she’s come this near without his notice. As he looks more closely, he sees it is the old woman from the restaurant, her brown eyes set in wrinkled skin.
“Didn’t mean to scare you, dear. Just that I’ve dropped a bit of the shopping. Shouldn’t have brought Polly down before stopping at the house.” She glances back along the cliff, where a white terrier emerges from the mist. A brown paper bag lies on the ground before her.
Mutely, he kneels to retrieve it.
“The chemist—always a new something or other,” she mutters. When she has the bag safely in hand, she says, “You’re American.”
Paul stares at her, as if at an apparition.
“Come for the course, have you? . . . Have you come over for the golf?”
He shakes his head.
“Air force? Over at Leuchars, are you?”
“No. My wife. She’s . . .”
“She’s what, dear? . . . At the university?”
He nods.
“Right. Lots of the foreigners over for that. Nothing like the golf, though. Last summer was dreadful. We had the British Open. You’d think Christ had risen on the eighteenth green. More telly people than putters as far as I could tell. Awful. You live in Texas?”
He shakes his head. “Pennsylvania.”
“Is that near Texas?”
“No.”
She leans down to pat the head of her terrier, who has scurried up to meet them. “Your wife’s in the books and you’ve got the day to yourself.”
Paul says nothing. She comes a step closer, barely two feet from him. “Not an easy place to entertain yourself,” she says, leaning her head forward. “Without the golf, I mean.” She searches his face, as though straining to read the fine print of a map. “Would you like to come for a cup of tea?”
HE DOES NOT know why he goes with her. She is here and has asked and so he goes.
They walk down past the clock tower. She moves slowly, stopping to look back for the dog, checking her bags and packages. She speaks of the university students, complains of the noise they make during term, says the tourists are generally polite but she doesn’t like all the coach buses.
They take a right turn, then a left down a narrow street of two-story houses. At the door of