If a Stranger Approaches You: Stories (5 page)

The curtains that opened onto the sliding glass doors to the backyard were open, and the sun streamed in and lit up a fine scrim of dust between him and the world out there. A chewed-up cat toy lay in one corner of the couch, but Tony didn’t see the cat anywhere. No surprise there. The cat had always run when she smelled him coming.

Why?
he’d wanted to know. What had he ever done to the cat? Tony actually
liked
the cat. Melody was constantly letting its water dish run dry and those pebbles it ate run out, and he had always been perfectly happy to resupply the cat. Never once had he sworn at, hissed at, spoken harshly to that fucking cat. So why did it sleep at the foot of his daughter’s bed, rub the ankles of his wife, and then hide under the couch when he came home? It was a false accusation that Tony had never been able to defend himself against. “Why does the cat hate me?” he’d asked Melody.

“I don’t know,” she’d said dismissively. “Maybe you’re too noisy.” But that was Melody, not the cat. Melody still blamed him for the other cat, the one that had gotten out, and gotten lost, the first summer they lived together. It hadn’t even been their cat, really. It had been the neighbor’s cat, but it had preferred their apartment downstairs in the old Victorian to its owner’s upstairs. The cat had never been outside, had no claws and no clue, and had never shown any interest in the great outdoors. Then one day Tony left the front door open after hauling in a chair he’d found at the side of the
street, near a garbage can. A chair with wings, and wooden feet—paisley, and a bit worn, but the kind of thing he was sure Melody would love.

But what she noticed when she got home from her class that night was not the chair around which he’d rearranged their little living room, but that the door was open and the cat was gone.

“We have to search the neighborhood!” she’d said.

Back then, she wore her hair long and frizzy, and it was always hanging in two sexy ropes over her breasts.

“The cat’ll come back,” he’d said, trying to take her in his arms. “Cats can smell their ways home. It’s not even our cat.”

“I’ll go down McKinley Street. You go up Liberty, and then we’ll meet back here,” she said, pulling away.

Tony was going to object again, but Melody was already gone.

So, he did what she told him to do, wandered for a while up Liberty, occasionally calling out the cat’s name. Trixie. It was a night of fireflies and crickets. Someone was playing “Crimson and Clover” in an upstairs room of an old apartment house. Tony could smell pot in the air, and rotting fruit in a garbage can. When he met Melody back at the house, she was crying. No cat.

Had he really believed, even for a second, that the cat could
smell
its way back?

No. That was his guilt and selfishness talking—and she’d hammer that selfishness thing home over the years, that’s for sure—and mostly his desire to make love to Melody on their futon instead of walking around the neighborhood and then grieving the cat all night. It was his desire to get her excited approval of his paisley chair, and his need not to look at the awful truth of it. That the cat, which had slept between them every night since they’d moved into this apartment, and which had trusted them even more than the girl upstairs with whom it had lived for a year, had slipped out into the darkness because of him, and was now lost forever.

“It wasn’t even our cat, Mel,” Tony said again, knowing how cold and defensive it sounded. She looked away from him. In the morning he agreed to help make posters and staple them to the telephone
poles in the neighborhood. He’d gone to the drugstore for staples. He put the posters on the telephone poles, but it was useless. The world was enormous. Billions of years old. It was full of holes and caves. There were swamps, forests, oceans, not to mention all the things man-made:

Mines, wells, warehouses, malls. Hotels, motels, restaurants, amusement parks, bars.

And then there was space, which had no boundaries at all, just an expanding emptiness embracing the earth loosely and without laws.

And, if that weren’t enough, there was the
mind
. Its ten million memories. Its lists and hunches. Its illusions and facts. A man could wander around in his own
mind
until he died, finding nothing. How could anyone know where it would end, that searching, or if it ever would?

The flyers blew down almost as soon as he stapled them up, and Tony didn’t bother to go back, already knowing the thing Melody would never truly believe—that once you begin to look beyond the rooms of your own home for what you’ve lost, even the emptiness, the one last thing you could call your own, would be snatched by the world from your hands.

He continued to stare into his family room, as if he were a detective in search of some clue, when, from the dining room he heard Melody asking the girls what they wanted on their hotdogs, and the shouted answers. A grating chorus. Nonsensical. Devilish.
Ketchmustnothingup.
He closed his eyes as if that might block the sound, and when he opened them again, he saw it on the bookshelf. A new spine among the more familiar spines—
Best One-Dish Meals, The Herbal Doctor, Your Child’s Health, Dictionary of Quotations, Guitar Basics, The Amicable Divorce. …

The Amicable Divorce.

The Amicable.

Fucking.

Divorce.

Tony strode over to it, smirking as if it were a person he was about to get the better of, took it off the bookshelf, and walked straight to the door and out of the house with it.

Outside, the streetlights were no longer blazing, but the telephone lines were still humming, and there was no breeze at all, the leaves of the trees were motionless, hanging limply from the branches. He walked back the way he’d come, with that book tucked under his arm, following his own ridiculous shadow (longer than seven men set end to end, but emerging from his feet as if it were an organic part of him) around the block.

The cracks in the sidewalk were full of dry grass. He felt weakly victorious, marching over those. They wouldn’t trip him now. If the neighbors saw him headed back to his car already, so be it. Now, he was on a mission, although he had no idea what mission it was. But he had this book. A kind of trophy. Proof that he wouldn’t be anybody’s dupe. A man who grabbed such a book off his own bookshelf and walked straight out of his daughter’s birthday party with it was not a man to be messed with. He wished someone
would
come out of a house and ask him what the hell he was doing. He would tell that person where to go. He was
breathing
now. No spittle on the sidewalk this time around.

But most of the picture windows he passed had their curtains drawn. Only here and there, a flat blackness. Here and there, beyond that blackness, where a curtain was left open, Tony could see the back of a couch, or a doorway between what must have been the den and the kitchen offering some intriguing hint at the mystery of the people who lived there. A little promise.
We exist.
He kept walking, but there was less forward momentum in it, as if his legs had their own agenda, or were questioning his. He realized he probably would have looked, to anyone watching, like a potential peeper. In truth he’d stopped marching, was actually, now, strolling, and what he wanted to do was to stand and stare. He wanted to go up to the window, press his face to it, see whatever there was to see. Anything. Everything. At that moment Tony Harmon would have
given anything
to be able to walk into one of those houses and ask a few questions of anyone he could find. What’s your life like? What are your regrets? Have you ever spanked your child? How much cash do you have in the bank? Annual income? Greatest fear? How often do you have sex with your wife? Do you feel like a failure? Are you the man (or woman) you thought you’d be?

What an incredible relief it would be to know the answers to those questions from just a handful of strangers—a handful of answers to a handful of questions put to the residents of these tidy houses.

It all looked so perfect. So made of hope and exclusion come to fruition. Only here and there, Tony spied a problem—an eavestrough that had fallen and no one had bothered to hammer back up, a mailbox stuffed full of junk no one had bothered to bring in—a hint that something was not entirely right, that something different was going on behind that front door than was going on behind the others.

But, really, you couldn’t tell a thing about most people. All you could do was walk by and assume they knew something, had something, understood something you simply did not.

Maybe they didn’t, of course, but you would die without ever knowing if it had been the same for them as it had been for you. This confusion, it was what you were born with and what you took with you when you left.

But as soon as Tony Harmon got to his car and saw the silver tonnage of it gleaming at the side of the street, he realized he had to go back, that he couldn’t just drive away from his daughter’s birthday party. That she would finish her hot dog soon, would be waiting for the cake, would be sitting at the head of the table. “Where’s Daddy?” she’d say. How impossible to imagine that she might search the rooms of the house for him. That she might go into the backyard. That she might check the garage. That she might turn back to the circle of girls around her cake with tears in her eyes and proclaim to them that her father was gone.

Melody would cross her arms, mutter, “That bastard,” under her breath. She’d probably never even notice that the book was gone.
She’d think she left it in the locker room at the pool. Everything would be for nothing.

He opened his trunk and tossed the book into it—
The Amicabl
e
Divorce
right beside the tire jack, which had been thudding clumsily around back there as he made left turns for days now, since he’d had the flat on the interstate, as he’d yet to tuck it under the piece of carpet where it usually stayed. What a fuck story that had been. He’d already been late, of course, and then found himself kneeling at his left rear tire while the trucks soared by him, his knees in the gravel, his face choked in clouds of diesel fumes, only nine o’clock in the morning and already so hot he’d soaked straight through his shirt before he’d even gotten the jack out from under that piece of carpet. When he’d first stepped out of his car and had seen the tire, deflated down to the rim, he’d looked up at the sky—burning and purple with impending heat—and been seized with the desire to kill something.

Anything, really, but preferably a dangerous animal, something it would have aided the world to have him kill. He would have willed one—hyena, jaguar, pit bull—if he could have, to come bounding across the barrier between the scuzzy neighborhood over there and the shoulder of the freeway where he stood: something growling and slobbering and lunging for his major arteries just so he could beat it to death with the jack, chase it into the garbage-filled ditch down there and lay that solid metal into its skull. More than one homicide had been committed with nothing less than a jack, Tony felt sure. It would make a satisfying weapon. Primitive and blunt. He could imagine it perfectly. The heft and pulp of it. The strength it would require on his part. Without him, it would just be a tire jack, but with the full force of his anger it would be stunning. He was sure he could do it, that he’d been born to do it, at that moment, although he had never killed anything other than an insect on purpose. Never gone deer hunting. Never even trapped a mouse under the kitchen sink. Never even once nudged the goddamned cat out of the way with the toe of his bare foot. There’d been small furry things that ran in front of his car, but they didn’t count.

Certainly, he’d never committed a murder! He wasn’t violent. Even Melody knew he wasn’t violent. He’d always agreed with her and all the other women he knew that conflicts could be resolved with words. He’d
invented
nonviolence. Even when what he wanted was to beat the living shit out of some grocery store clerk or the kid who’d lived next door for a while and wouldn’t turn down his fucking stereo in the middle of the night when his daughter had just been a baby and so much as a stifled sneeze in the next room could wake her up screaming. When that had gone on long enough (that stereo night after night, phone calls to the boy, to his parents, late night treks to their front door, which they never answered), Tony had finally written them a long, polite, and somewhat threatening letter, and the day after he delivered it personally to their empty mailbox, the stereo was never played loudly enough for them to hear it from next door again, and within a year the family had moved. He’d won.

“My weapon of choice,” Tony Harmon had said more than once, brandishing a black felt-tipped pen.

“You’re the writer!” Melody would say when she was trying to think of a way to describe someone she’d seen or something that had happened to her. “Help me out here, how would you describe…?”

And Tony would always come up with the words for her, the ones she seemed to have been searching for all her life.

“Exactly!” she’d say.