The Interloper (6 page)

I was working on Lily’s response a few evenings later when I heard shuffling outside my home office door. At first, I thought it was one of the cats, wanting to come in. The cats always acted crazy after the sun went down. I rose from my desk and opened the door. Patty looked like she had been about to knock.

“Come in,” I said. I slid a pile of books off the daybed. “Have a seat.”

She entered but did not sit. “Are you going to be working much longer?”

I shook my head. “Almost done.” A letter I would later throw away—one of many throw-away drafts, not meant for Raven’s eyes, but rather to form a subtext for Lily—sat waiting in the typewriter. My plan for the rest of the night’s work consisted of feeding it to the wastebasket.

“Then I’ll get the movie,” she said. “Will you be done by the time I get back?”

“Sure.” I had forgotten that it was Wednesday. Patty didn’t have to go to work.

She seemed almost ready to leave the room but moved toward my desk. It was covered with stacks of paper, printouts of software manual pages, random notes, pens and pencils, along
with the computer, and to one side, the Olivetti typewriter with the letter in it. Patty scanned these at a reasonable distance, close enough to indicate her curiosity, far enough away to acknowledge my privacy.

“You’re using the typewriter?”

“I like to make noise while I’m working.”

She moved toward the typewriter.

“Hey Patty,” I said. “If you want me to show you what I’m working on, I will.”

She stepped back immediately. “No, no, no. I’m sorry I even came in here.”

“Some exciting stuff here about using spreadsheets.”

“I’m sorry. What movie should I get?”

“I don’t know. Something funny.”

“New or old?”

“Old. You’re just getting one?”

“Probably a few.” She closed the door on her way out.

No good-bye kiss, no sense that she wanted to spend her evening curled up in my arms without the blue glow of a television in front of us. A few movies. She was going to stay up all night again. Sleep all day.

How I wanted to be able to show Patty something then, to let her know what I was doing for her! I wanted to be like the cat who drops a bird on the doorstep. I couldn’t wait to show her my little bird—my big bird, my Raven—and what I had done to him. She would finally understand the depth of my devotion to her, and to what she did not seem capable of: restoring her to her former self.

The next morning, I was back at it.

I couldn’t send that to Raven—it was practically a thesis statement. I had to draw him in, to make him want to seduce my Lily, to plant a seed in his head. Unfortunately, a planted seed gives no confirmation of its planting until much later. In the meanwhile, the essence of the thing was to keep up the illusion, to maintain the dream of Lily Hazelton as seamlessly as possible.

I tried to be an actor for a while, in high school. Not because I was a particularly good student of human behavior, or a great lover of the theater, but because I wanted everyone to admire me, to recognize me for what I had done on the stage. Luckily, I figured out early that I was not an actor, and so did not have to deal with later failure and re-evaluation of my life’s goal, as several of my fellow drama club members had to do. But in high school, before I had come to that realization, I auditioned for every play. Our director, while hardly blind to which kids were talented and which were not, would on occasion reward those who had done good work on the technical crews a decent part in one of the upcoming plays.

The bone thrown me was Lysander in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
. Late one night we were rehearsing out-of-doors in our
Little Epidaurus by the Sea. Someone—I can’t remember who—was supposed to walk up behind Lysander and surprise him. Time after time, with the director trying strategy after strategy, I failed to register any semblance of the human reaction known as surprise. I tried to “feel” surprised—it didn’t work. I tried to “feel” unaware, so that I would then “be” surprised—didn’t work either. Finally, recognizing that I would not be able to spur a subconscious reaction via these conscious means, I did my best to “mimic” surprise, and the result was so ham-fisted, it earned a restrained chuckle from the audience every night, a result which I considered better than nothing. My career as an actor began as ham-fisted mimicry and became, as I took myself more seriously, constipatedly minimalist. I excised everything that did not seem natural and ended up with nothing at all.

The same thing was happening as I drafted my letters to Raven. By the time I had cut out everything artificial, everything ham-fisted and suspect, I ended up with a page of crossed-out sentences. I would have to move beyond mimicry if I wanted any chance of success.

After Patty slept the day away, she and I went to dinner at her friends’ house, rich friends, about whose source of wealth we knew little. They had bought an enormous mansion in the hills. Their primary occupation seemed to be throwing dinner parties. For some reason along the way they had adopted Patty (and, by extension, me) into their circle and we would get invited occasionally to their table, at which sat an assortment of individuals and couples, specially selected to socialize well together, always with some new blood thrown in. Later, I discovered that our hostess kept a book in the kitchen in which she inscribed, for every dinner, the guests at the table, the food served, and who should be re-invited with whom and whether any glaring incompatibilities showed up.

We arrived early and therefore had to tolerate the most awkward stage of the evening, waiting for the other couples to arrive. Showing up late was Patty’s preference—you could join in conversations that had already started, you could survey all the
social dynamics in one swift appraising glance. But I could not stand being late. “You’d rather catch our hostess in curlers,” Patty used to say, “than risk being the last to arrive.”

I had been preoccupied with my response to Raven all day, and I had to make a conscious effort to reintegrate into the social world. Patty had not looked so elegant in a long time. She wore black, of course, but something about this outfit made her look as though she had decided to cast off the mourner’s uniform for the night. With the right makeup and a good mood, her big eyes and natural sneer made her look like royalty. I had accepted, but never fully gotten used to, the way Patty could transform herself, depending on whether she was going to work, dinner, or a party—each place requiring a specific kind of performance—and I found myself looking forward to this evening, to observing her in her element. I felt lucky and proud that she was mine.

Patty and our hostess talked about each other’s outfits while the host and I exchanged grumbling greetings, both of us acknowledging thereby that the evening belonged to the women, so to speak. The house was big and hollow and new, and while you could spot our hostess’s attempts to make it cozy and homey—blankets thrown over the couches, flowers in the alcoves—the effect was one of attempted hominess rather than the genuine feeling anyone lived there.

Several more people arrived; we stood in the kitchen, sipping wine, making introductions. The room was broken up into several one-on-one or one-on-two conversations. I stood alone, occupying myself with the opening and pouring of wine, and sampled bits and pieces of what people were saying. One can
learn a great deal by zipping the mouth and opening the ears. I watched the women, the way they handled the men. I am a quick study.

A current event absorbed, amoeba-like, all the other topics, and the small conversations became a big group conversation. There had been another suicide bombing in the Middle East. It had been all over the news that day. Dozens of people, many of them children, dead. The talk went round and round, with expressions of sympathy for the victims, shaking heads of halfway-around-the-world impotence, a few words about the news media, early symptoms of compassion-fatigue and its cousin, compassion-fatigue-fatigue. There is no group duller than one’s peers.

“I cannot understand how someone would think it’s a good idea to blow themselves up,” said our host.

“And kill children,” added our hostess. Various gestures of agreement.

“It’s incomprehensible.” This from a short and bearded Professor of Something. “They’re maniacs.”

I hadn’t said anything. I had been trying to cut the foil from a bottle of white wine with the sharp tip of the opener’s corkscrew. I had not yet learned that most foil tops can be pulled right off, sleeve-like. You have to keep your eye on that sharp metal tip if you don’t want to spear your finger and give yourself tetanus. I sliced the foil and removed it successfully.

“What I can’t understand,” I offered, “is why we think we’re any different.” I twisted the corkscrew into the cork. I had only
meant to throw in my two cents, but now I had everyone’s attention. “I mean, who’s to say any one of us wouldn’t do the same thing if placed in that situation?”

“I, for one, would not.” The professor again.

“You don’t know that for sure,” I said.

“I think I do.”

“Even if you were placed in the same environment—war, poverty, martyrdom the only heroism, no knowledge of another kind of life, no other options to make your mark?”

“In that case, friend, we’re not talking about me anymore.”

But others are like us.

Others are us.

They feel what we feel.

I was constructing my reply when Patty took the bottle from my hand. People stepped forward with their glasses. I watched her fill them. The prior conversations resumed in dyads and triads. And the professor? He was now engaged in golf-talk with our host.

Our hostess cleared her throat. “I hope everyone is hungry.”

We were ten total around the table. The subject, once we were seated, shifted toward what we all did for a living, and in some cases, what we all wanted to be doing for a living. I might have preferred a discussion about what we were reading, but—as I had learned at an earlier dinner—not everyone reads for pleasure, and those who don’t are ashamed of that fact, so discussions about books should occur only in the confines of a “book club”—to which I have never belonged.

The table was crowded with flowers, candles, napkins, plates, glasses (two each), and silverware. On each of our plates sat tiny sterling-silver pigs, into whose pigtails were tucked cards with our names laser-printed on them. The hostess had divided the couples, so that I found myself sitting across the table from Patty and two seats over. I tried to catch her eye now and then, give her a wink, which she indulged and admonished with a half-smile. She wanted me to act like an adult. I spoke with our hostess, mainly, about how good the food was, and listened to the other conversations around the table. A swirling conversational sinkhole. I was in a sour mood, I admit. Were I placed in that room today I might consider it paradise. But I am obliged to reproduce my attitude then, however lazy and cynical it seems to me now.

I must have been staring at my food too long because Patty called my name. “Owen, dear, I was just telling Attila here about your work and he’s interested in hearing more about it.”

Attila stared at me from across the table.

“It’s not so exciting. We do the manuals for a large software company.”

“Do you do all the layout as well, like the diagrams?”

“One of my colleagues does that. I’m mainly a text guy.”

Attila waited for more. Patty joined another conversation. She had handed me off. Perhaps it was my mood, but the promise of the early part of the evening—the simple pleasure of watching my wife interact with others, even as I interacted with her—seemed all but crushed in this brief swerve of her attention away from me.

Letters started but never sent: