If a Stranger Approaches You: Stories (7 page)

Tony was, however, an English major because he’d claimed nothing else and time was running out and he was a junior who’d taken
nothing but literature courses for no real reason other than that they met, often, in the evenings or late afternoons, and he liked to sleep in.

Also, he had a knack for faking his way through lit classes with all A’s, intuiting early on that ninety percent of one’s success or failure in a literature course (not to mention the mood of the instructor) depended on whether or not the student participated in class discussion:

“In ‘The Yellow Wallpaper,’ does the wife have a choice other than to go mad?”

Tony really had no answer for that, so he would, instead, be the student who asked the question. It was a way of participating, generating participation—avoiding and initiating controversial discussions at the same time. The professor, or lecturer, or teaching assistant (it didn’t matter which one, they were all equally touched and grateful and singled him out as an English major and an A student right away) would heave a sigh of relief and lean back in his or her chair. The other students seemed to admire him, and only that woman (girl?) with the black hair—the history major from the basement of Pizza Bob’s—seemed ever to notice what he was up to.

Like him, she seemed to have wandered into more than her share of literature classes with just as little interest in literature, and when he asked his questions, she always made a funny little pursing kiss with her lips and looked at him longer than was necessary.

Well, maybe he couldn’t fool her, but Tony could fake it for the instructors, so homework never interfered with his relationship with Melody. Neither did work. She would come to the library where he worked part-time while he stamped books, sometimes sitting on his lap.

He’d had, by this time, a few girlfriends, but Melody was the first one with whom he’d slept in the same bed night after night after night. He learned how to slip out of bed to go to the john without waking her up. He learned how to match his breathing to another person’s as sleep came on. And from Melody he learned about biology—the female side of things. Together they paged through a
borrowed copy of
Our Bodies, Our Selves
, looking for a better method of contraception than the one they were using, which was coitus interruptus. With her, he studied the line-illustration of the internal organs of the female with care. The cervix seemed particularly mysterious, being neither flesh, actually, nor an organ. A sea animal sort of thing. There was nothing in the male anatomy to compare it to, as far as he could tell. Tony read about the incredible sensitivity of the clitoris, and felt jealous. He read of the many diseases of the female reproductive organs, and felt relieved. He studied the symptoms of the diseases—mostly pain and itching—and the way men passed on the diseases, as lovers, and then ignored them as doctors and actively encouraged them as politicians and oppressors. He was aghast when he saw the photographs of naked pregnant women, although he pretended not to be.

“Isn’t that beautiful?” Melody had said.

“Hell, yes,” he agreed.

But something blocked his throat—mucus, phlegm?—and Melody seemed to notice.

“Don’t you think that’s beautiful?” she asked again.

“Yeah,” he said, “Definitely. Yes.” But she looked at him longer than she usually did.

Soon after that, Melody stopped shaving her armpits or her legs. “Do you mind?” she asked, holding up her arm, under which a little nest had grown. “It’s just so unnatural, shaving.”

No. It didn’t matter to him in the least. He liked it. The muskier she was the more she seemed like another human being—not like his other girlfriends who smelled like Pine Sol and looked like pictures. They had sex straight through her periods. Cunnilingus even! Blood on everything. Yes! On his face, in his hair, on the dormitory walls. They had sex straight through the winter until it was spring, and the lawn of the college commons was hopping around with pregnant birds. On his way to class one morning, Tony crushed a pale blue egg under his shoe by accident, and gagged, scraping it off with a leaf.
Everything
was having sex.

This was, of course, the common life, but
his
common life was animated by an extraordinary love. No one had ever loved this way
before. Technicolor! Tony was charmed! He’d been chosen! This was your Average Joe pumped full of light and oxygen and set afloat.

After the semester ended, Tony and Melody moved out of the dorm into a sublet together. He would walk down the street on his way to his job at the library, and suddenly be transported by the realization that, back at the studio apartment, his girlfriend was rinsing out his cereal bowl! It was incredible, waking every morning next to Melody, or waking to hear her puttering around in their kitchen (only a few feet from their bed on the other side of a plywood partition) making a pot of coffee for them. It was incredible, finding her beaded earrings on the bathroom sink. Her toothbrush leaning casually next to his in the toothbrush holder! It was only for the month of May and half of June, but in that span of time they became an elderly couple, complete with routine and cat (until it got out.) Simple chores became an adventure in adulthood, in manhood. Tying up the garbage bag to take it to the trash can. (“Sweetheart, I’m taking out the garbage now!” “Okay, hon. Thanks!”) It was as if, when he did these chores, he became his own father, and also an entirely new man. The first man. When Tony found Melody at the kitchen sink rinsing out their coffee cups, he felt such a rush of pleasure and satisfaction he had to wonder if this was normal. Had his father felt this way watching his mother fold the laundry? Had any man
ever
felt this way?

But he’d also known what was coming. After their nearly two months of bliss, their two-month separation. Still, he hadn’t known that he would be sick with anxiety (literally sick—feverish, nauseated) when Melody went off to Camp Wishy-Washy to be a summer counselor. (“Tony, don’t make fun of it!”)

A moat of time. A penal institution of time. Threatening everything. Undermining every crystalline detail of his ecstatic existence.

It would be the end of this perfect world, he knew. And he’d been right. They were still together after those two months were over, but nothing was ever the same.

The second girl pinned her donkey’s tail exactly at the spot where the poster-donkey lacked a tail. Obviously, she’d been peeking out from beneath her blindfold, but this girl was a born actress, had
even pretended to walk completely in the wrong direction for six or seven paces, pretended to grope the air in the right direction, before, bingo!, she pinned the tail on the donkey.

Tony’s daughter wasn’t fooled, either, and shouted, “You were peeking!”

“No I wasn’t!” the other girl snapped back with what sounded like practiced defensiveness—a girl with a sister, probably older, was Tony’s guess, and his daughter seemed to sense this girl’s superiority when it came to such arguments, and dropped it.

“Next girl!” Melody chimed in. She was expert, as always, at keeping things moving. No matter what it was, Melody knew that if you rushed at it fast enough with a broom in your hand you could sweep it under the carpet before anyone noticed it was there.

Melody hadn’t been gone to Camp Wishy-Washy for two nights before Tony had started flipping out. Drank a lot of beer in front of the fuzzy black-and-white TV before he fell asleep, and then woke up in their sublet bed in the morning feeling as if he’d been punched hard right between his ribs.

“I miss you,” he said to her picture, held by a black magnet to the fridge.

“I miss you,” he said, leaning into his own reflection at the bathroom mirror, letting the pathos breathe its steam all over his face, smelling like beer.

But it was a lot worse than missing her. It was like grief. She was dead. He called in sick to his job at the library, and started drinking beer right after he finished his bowl of Grape Nuts in the morning. He lay on their bed. The ceiling was a swirling mess of plaster and paint, and beyond it were layers of shit he couldn’t even imagine. Insulation. Wires. Sawdust. When he closed his eyes he didn’t see Melody. He saw, instead, what he could only have described as an artist’s rendering of a guy named Bud.

Bud was the lifeguard Melody had slept with at Camp Wishy-Washy the year before. She hadn’t described Bud to him, so Tony Harmon had created a picture of Bud from the tics and features of guys he’d felt intimidated by in the past.

Bud had the piercing blue eyes of his sister’s last boyfriend, the one who’d called him Squirtlet. He had the shaggy blond hair of a guy he’d gone to high school with, a guy who’d played electric guitar in a band, who Tony always suspected his own girlfriend, Cindy Malofsky, had a crush on (although she denied it tearfully in his car and in the cafeteria and once on her knees at a playground while the mother of some toddler playing in the sand eyed them suspiciously). Tony couldn’t have told you where the mouth of Bud came from. Mark Spitz, maybe. Some godlike swimmer. The chipped front tooth of a frat boy who’d come to Behavior Modification every day, snow or shine, wearing a muscle shirt while the girls practically fell out of their desks to get a better look at his rippling and hairless flesh.

The pain of looking into Bud’s face was terrible—like seeing his own inadequacies under a microscope—but it was all Tony could do. Look. That artist’s rendering was tattooed on his eyelids. It didn’t matter how much beer he drank, it was still there.

And Melody’s first phone call from camp to him (from some cabin office, shouting over the background noise of a lot of rowdy teenagers) made things worse. He pictured her in her short-shorts, wearing love-beads and braids, with Bud standing in the doorway behind her feeling her up with his eyes. It didn’t matter that she’d sworn up and down that Bud wasn’t going to be there this summer, that Bud had gone up to Alaska this year to fish on the big boats (whatever the hell the “big boats” meant: Melody always said it as if it were common knowledge that the waters of Alaska were full of large and small boats, and we all knew which kind of boat Bud would be on) and, besides, she had no feelings for Bud anymore. “I’m with
you
.”

Tony shouted into the phone, hoping it was loud enough for Bud in the background to hear, “I love you!” and she whispered it hoarsely back. “I love you, too.”

It had lasted only four minutes, that call, but Tony lay with the phone in his hand for hours afterward, drunk on his back on their bed, playing it over and over in his mind.

Was it his imagination, or had she emphasized the word
too?

“I love you,
too.
”

(“‘I love you,
too,
’ the beautiful girl whispered, impatiently …” was the way he’d write it in a story.)

And when could she call him again, he’d demanded to know.
Please, Melody, when will you call again so I can be sure to be home?

But she just couldn’t be sure. Day after tomorrow if they had some free time to get up to the cabin where the only phone at Camp Wishy-Washy was. “They really discourage phone calls here,” she’d said. She might as well have said they were urging her to put a gun in his mouth and pull the trigger. “I have to go,” she’d said. “I’m so sorry. … Like ten people are waiting for this phone.”

Tony had said nothing. She kept saying good-bye apologetically until he’d forced her to hang up to his nothing. Then, for a long time he’d kept the phone to his ear as he listened to the dead air, almost hoping he’d hear something he could hold against her—maybe a click, and then the line to Wishy-Washy reconnected: “Hello? Hello? This is Bud, Bud the lifeguard. Who’s still hanging on to this connection?”

But the connection just hummed itself into dial-tone eventually, and then a recording came on politely asking him to hang up and try his call again, and then that turned into a high pitched screeching that was supposed to scare him into slamming down the receiver—but he still didn’t. He threw up, drank some coffee, went back to bed, where he stayed, and then in the middle of the night he got in his car and drove straight up to Camp Wishy-Washy—probably driving a hundred miles and hour, but he didn’t remember anything about the drive except stopping at a filling station. There was a hole in his gas tank, so Tony could only put a few gallons in it at a time, and when the gas started splashing onto the black-top, the kid who was pumping it said, “Hey, there’s a hole in your gas tank.”

“I don’t have a gas tank,” Tony said flatly, and the kid just stared at him.

A sign nailed to a post marking a rutted dirt road said, WELCOME TO CAMP MICHI-WAU-LU-K.

“Fuck you,” Tony said to it, and stopped, looking ahead. He knew
his old Honda would never make it down that road. The car only weighed about twenty pounds and the tires were smooth as glass, so Tony parked it under the sign and started to walk. This was really the woods. There were things flying and whining in his ears. He was that prince cutting his way through the vines to get at Sleeping Beauty. He walked for miles without hearing anything but those insects and the wind flapping around in the leaves.