A Stranger in This World (3 page)

Even if she finds her owner, she’ll be back. And there are other futures: delivery trucks and dogcatchers, kids with .22s down in the wash, shooting rusty appliances, anything that moves. But still. The dogs in the cages behind you bark furiously, angry and begging, wanting only the chance that Ginger got: to be released into the wide and loveless world to find their owners. Let’s say you retreat into the chain-link pens, where tomorrow’s dead dogs race and whimper, frantic for love, barking and barking. And you have the keys to every lock, the means to open the cages, open the doors and send them racing. You’ll be a hero, king of the dogs. Strangers will know your name in the world of dogs.

But in the world of men, the dogs will continue to be killed. You can be replaced, easily. You can be replaced. The morning traffic has started, the morning cars on their way to work, the big machine awakening, moving forward, spitting out junk, broken parts, dead dogs, junk. The nonstop barking
drives the last thought from your mind. Quite suddenly you hate the dogs, all of them. You put the keys back in your pocket. Their barking is injuring you. You stand in the sunlight, feeling the yellow warmth of morning on your useless body.

JUDY
’
S WINDOW WAS NEAR THE TOP OF THE HOUSE
,
NEXT TO THE
supple tip of a tall, straight juniper tree, she’d lean out and call to the schoolchildren as they passed by, in the morning and again in the afternoon, especially the boys. A white house with
green shutters in a lake of brilliant lawn, a tulip tree spreading over the grass and flowers and hedges, the pair of candle-shaped junipers guarding the chimney all the way up to the third story, all rambling, graceful, not too perfect. Her mother, Mrs. MacGregor, coached her at the beginning of every school year, so that by October Judy knew nearly everyone’s name. October mornings, the rain splattering out of the leaves of the trees that lined the streets, their limbs meeting overhead, a tunnel of green turning gold, and Judy’s high clear voice drifting down: Hi Jerry! Hi Mary! Hi Paul!

But school was out, this was June, another rainy month, but more optimistic. Paul was coming back alone from the high school courts, where he’d hit a yellow tennis ball against the backstop for forty-five minutes. He said to himself, I am solitary, I am not lonely. My mother is a pediatrician, my father is an architect, I am going to college. Still, it was sweet to hear the high, piping voice float down from her window: Hi Paul! Hi Paul!

Hi Judy!

Come say hi to me!

OK! he said, and walked up onto the lawn. Hi Judy!

You couldn’t tell what was wrong with Judy by looking at her face, except that she would forget sometimes to close her mouth, and easy questions would worry her. Everything she felt was on her face, now round as a cartoon sun, pleased, elbows on the sill, staring down at him. The neighborhood said she was nineteen, or even twenty-one, but really she was a kid, kid T-shirts, lollipop colors, big and pink, glossy blond hair cropped blunt at her neck. All day, in the summer emptiness, the familiar streets and sidewalks had felt strange to Paul; he
was fifteen, growing out of his boy’s body into something else; he had passed her house a thousand times and still knew nothing about her. What was it like in Judy’s room?

In the driveway was a greasy spot where Judy’s mother’s station wagon was not.

Can I come in?

Come in, yes! Come say hi to me!

Curiosity wasn’t all of it. He crept around to the kitchen door like a thief, though this was the proper door—in this neighborhood the front door was for company, the side or back for familiars. He prayed this was not the day for the cleaning woman. The neighborhood boys told rumors about Judy, and Paul did not want to be misunderstood, or understood at all; he wanted to be alone, weightless, he wanted this to be happening in his imagination. The halls of the MacGregors’ house were mournful, serious, other people’s dead peering down at him from smoky paintings. The stairs were light maple, like a bowling alley, but the banister was some dark wood, deep red, like dried, polished blood. He was still holding his tennis racket, a ticket of membership. Red carpets with dark patterns, baskets of dried grasses and leaves, neat and tidy, scented with wax and lemons. Their other children were away at college. Paul guessed wrong on the third floor, opened the wrong door—to the attic, bare wood and piles of old
New Yorker
s and clothes—and again he felt that his life and everything in it was just a sham, something put up quickly for the sake of a picture, the thickness of a photograph.

——

Paul, she said, Pauletta Paulotta Paulola Pauleeleelu.

Standing plainly in the middle of the carpet, as if she wasn’t sure what to do with her body, too big to hide.

How are you, Judy?

I was watching, she said. I always am.

Mournful deep green plaids on the cushions in the window seat, the rocking chair, the flounced bed; Paul had been expecting dolls, primary yellows. And she was big. She always surprised everyone at picnics or at the annual yard sale, Paul’s height at least, and imposing. Not fat but big, with tiny feet—how could her feet support her? She was a familiar face, but apart from her face he knew nothing about her. He had never been alone with her before, nor in her room, and he did not know what he was doing there; he was nervous, waiting to leave, wanting to stay. He did not know where to stand. Windows open, a rainy trickle of air filtering through the trees. Paul looked down at the sidewalk, an empty place, waiting.

A car, Judy said. There’s one. Make it go.

Go where?

I was playing with the cars, she said. I think that if I think, I can make them go faster or slow down or go the same, or maybe I don’t. I don’t know.

I’ll make it go left, he said, and they both watched. The car went straight, tires swishing on the wet pavement. It had started to rain again. What was he supposed to say? Something. Beyond her familiar shape she was so unknown. A slight voltage of alarm.

That’s nice, he said.

Judy looked at him, frowned. He was making her unhappy. Someday the perfect playmate, but it wouldn’t be him. He could think of nothing that would make her better. They knelt together on the window-seat cushion, touching at the shoulder and the hip, a shared rainy sadness, neither of them was right. Gradually Paul became aware of her body, her warmth and weight. What would she allow him? A red Volvo passed under the window, a black sedan. His hand reached out, he watched it like a movie, and touched her bare forearm below the sleeve of her sweatshirt. Paul himself didn’t touch her, only his hand.

Oh, Judy said.

Paul felt his heart start in his chest like a big rough motor, wondered what he had done. The sound of her voice, her little cry, was like nothing he had heard from a human voice, pure pleasure, he thought, she must have very sensitive skin. He touched her bare neck and saw her head wave blindly back and forth, eyes closed, like a dreamer seeing a beautiful city in the distance.

Oh, she said again, and Oh! as he touched her breast through the layers of fabric, sweatshirt and brassiere, remembering that the world could see them through her window, tugging her down to the carpeted floor, out of sight. She followed him obediently, it seemed to Paul that she was blind to anything but touch, drunk with it. He lifted her sweatshirt and then put his hand on the hard lace of her brassiere, no resistance,
only her soft, lost voice, he rolled her onto her side, reached behind her and fumbled with the little hooks until by some miracle her bra came unsprung and her big soft breasts tumbled against him. Paul felt drunk himself, with excitement and with panic. He had fumbled in playrooms before, in cars and in the rough grass of the neighborhood parks, girls from the neighborhood who would negotiate a touch, or on some lucky Saturday allow his blind hand to wander in the darkness of their jeans, but this, this plain revelation, was new to him. She wouldn’t stop him, wouldn’t stop him from anything, her hunger for every new touch was so direct. He knew what he was risking, the air itself was lit with danger, knew that if either of them was going to stop this, it would not be her, but she was so close, so open to him.

Paul had one last lucid moment, sitting away to undo his belt, her sweatpants lying beside her and her shirt hiked around her shoulders, the defenseless bulk of Judy. “Oh,” she said again and again, as if this moment’s absence of his hands were more than she could bear; and Paul saw what he was doing, knew that it was wrong, he meant to apologize and to leave, yet there she was, he could not stop looking. He didn’t, he remembered later, bother to fasten his belt again, but there wasn’t any Judy anymore, only this: a pink, mewling thing, cries that started back in her throat, as if he were hurting her, the last trace of language gone. Her little hands were callused, hard as a carpenter’s. Later he would think of her in animal terms: she mewled like a kitten, bawled and bucked like a hungry calf, and still later—years after—he would decide that this was because there was so little human veneer to her; that sex and awareness were natural enemies, a battle every time
between modesty, a sense of order and of embarrassment, and the little kindling flame of desire. But Judy’s desire was pure, reservations, questions burnt away, an animal thing, he told himself, an animal thing, but he met her in it and matched her, lost in guilt, engulfed, unwilling to stop, to breathe. He couldn’t seem to stop, he came as soon as he was inside her.

Don’t stop, she said.

Paul’s mouth had filled with sand, the whore, the horror. Pants around his knees, he slid shamefully from inside her and leaned against the window seat, a sickness quickly filling him that he would not be able to vomit out. Thoughts of escape.

Don’t stop, she said again, turned her head toward Paul and briefly focused her eyes on him, then let them go blank again, turned her face to the wall, dropped her hand between her legs and quickly brought herself off again, cat-cries that the whole world could hear, listening from the window. Then said something he didn’t catch.

What’s that? he asked, dragging the words from somewhere inside.

Pretty Judy, she whispered to the wall.

Then he knew what she was asking for, and for a moment he thought that he would just leave, disappear. But some reserve of courage found him, and he reached out a reluctant hand and whispered, That’s right. Pretty Judy.

Pretty Judy, she said.

He stroked the soft curve of her hip, her fascination hadn’t left him, even in his shame. Pretty Judy, he said.

The slam of a car door jolted him upright, he went to the window and peered carefully through but it wasn’t Mrs. MacGregor, not yet. The neighbors. But still.

She turned her face from the wall, like a dreamer, still half in sleep. You better go, she said. I don’t want my mom to get mad.

Paul heard this like a reprieve. He gathered his clothes back into order, looked back from the doorway, but she didn’t seem to expect a kiss, still lying pink, inert, half-naked. And he didn’t want to kiss her then. Had he at all? Yes, he remembered her busy, surprising tongue in his mouth. Demons of shame whipped him down the stairs, out into the clean, rain-washed streets and down the sidewalk, as if all this had happened in a sidewalk crack, an excursion out of time, a moment of imagination.

Hi Paul!

He tensed, heart in his throat, as if the trees and air had announced him guilty for all the neighborhood to hear. Looked up, saw her waving, back in her sweatshirt. Paul waved un-surely, turned his back on her, walked away, felt her eyes on his neck until he reached the cover of the sheltering trees. Walking away, betrayal. Closing his eyes, feeling her heavy breasts against him, he nearly tripped over one of the Morganfield kids rounding the driveway on a Big Wheel.

Hey, fuck you, the kid said.

Paul grinned. Fuck you, too, he said. A kid again for a moment, biggest kid on the block, he could get his way, but then he tripped over the word fuck, and remembered. He walked on toward his house and he knew, stood convicted: he was like her, they were equal. Not then, but in that green bedroom, two bodies, neither better than the other. This was
the worst thing to know about himself: he was just like her, they were equal. He saw her busy hand between her legs, blank eyes, and thought of all the times in the shower or in his room.

This awful equality frightened him, worse than the guilt. He was just like her, and he tried to defend himself as he walked toward his house: her fault, but it wasn’t, he knew it; only curiosity, but he knew the rumors before he went, he couldn’t deny it. He could have stopped, anytime, he’d known. It seemed like somebody else, in memory, it had never happened.

It had never happened, as long as it was a secret, who would Judy talk to, who would Judy tell? He imagined her mouth rounding around the words I fucked Paul, and her mother’s straight mouth and iron hair, a tidy, self-sacrificing fifty. Plaid skirts, church on Sunday. If she found out she would put him in jail, and that would be easy; better than this, this black, corrosive secret, cancer of the mind. But Judy would never tell, and Paul would never tell. He dragged his secret, like the body of a dead dog, up the back steps to his kitchen, where his mother, the pediatrician, was making tuna salad in the skylit brightness.

Hi sweetie, she said. Where’s your tennis racket?

Paul lit like a man on a hot wire. He didn’t have an answer for this, and his mother looked at him curiously, seeing right through his pants and his shorts to his wet, guilty dick. I loaned it to Colin, he finally said.

I thought he was in Denver.

Denmark, Paul said. He’s coming home tomorrow.

Both of them took a moment to realize this made no sense. Paul added, I put it in his garage, as if this would make anything clear. He felt his hands grow until they were enormous bald red things, guilty secrets that would not be concealed, then realized he’d have to go on the offensive if he was going to escape.

He said, I don’t know, I guess I’m having sort of a hard time.