You Are Not a Stranger Here - Adam Haslett [43]
“It was good to meet you,” James said but a waiter glided between them and when he’d passed, the girl had looked away; repetition would seem overbearing, he thought. He waved good-bye, and ahead of the others, made his way out of the restaurant.
On the curb in front of him a bus pulled alongside the shelter, and a small group of passengers stepped off the rear platform, disbanding as they gained the pavement. He headed east, behind the quickly disappearing figures.
THE BENCH BY the wall of the common was empty, the streetlamp already on. He should go home, he told himself. But then there was a rustling of feet by the beech hedge, the sound of shallow breath. He kept walking. At the copse, he saw an unshaven man in a tank top picking his way carefully around the glimmer of the ground’s muddy patches. James moved farther toward the shed and waited just in from the path. Men, young and old, wandered among the trees, stopping now and again to pierce the shadow, a white piece of clothing or the whites of their determined eyes catching a speck of lamplight and floating for an instant in the darkness. He let them pass by, trying still to convince himself, as he always tried, that he would thank himself for turning away.
Soon a man with thinning black hair, wearing a suit and polished shoes, approached and hung beside him. James remained still, reminding himself to breathe. There were muffled greetings, a hand placed flat on his beating chest. He reached out to loosen the man’s tie, and then their lips met. James closed his eyes and the pent welter of longing rushed into his limbs. He ran his hands down the man’s back, pressed his shoulders, grabbed at the back of his head. In the now perfect darkness, he had the oddest sensation it was the girl from the restaurant he was embracing, her slender frame, her plight. He moved more gently, holding her like he would hold an old person, or someone who has lost their strength, trying to forgive by the way he touched. Then he felt the scratch of stubble along his neck, ran his hand past the dangling tie, and it was no longer the girl he was pressed against in this dance of apparitions, but his father. The hands at the fly, the condom, the warm mouth, they all came as a disappointment.
ONE MORNING A month later, a man from British Telecom knocked on the door. For weeks, James had thrown his post in the garbage unopened and the habit seemed to be attracting unsolicited visits. They had sent warnings, the man said, they had tried to contact him by phone, but his service had now been disconnected. Was there a problem? He told James there were installment plans for people with financial difficulties.
“It’s not the money,” James said. “I don’t want a phone.”
The man looked confused, as though perhaps James were a disturbed character and the service under discussion that of a halfway home. He peered through the front window, presumably looking for the person in charge.
The previous Tuesday, the cable service had gone out, and soon thereafter, James had noticed that the newspaper no longer appeared on the doorstep each morning. Stepping into a taxi on the way to a cinema one afternoon, he had seen two men in sunglasses knocking at his door, and recognized them as employees of the collection agency Shipley’s used for its rental properties. They must do a sideline in credit cards, he’d thought, for while he ignored his mail, he had been careful to pay his rent.
“Here,” James said to the man as he picked up the telephone, which he had wrapped up in its cords and placed at the foot of the stairs a week before, “I imagine you’ve come for this.”
THAT EVENING, AS the light faded over the common, he wrote:
Dear Father,
We are well past the summer solstice now and the days are getting shorter. I suppose it’s with this sort of observation a letter should begin, in the safety of neutral facts.
Since I’ve stopped working, time has slowed. I think a lot about the past, and the memories tend to make the present less real, like the memory of you standing at the back door in your blue