Something Is Out There

This morning, while Josephine Stanislowski is tearfully packing winter clothes into a big box for the attic, her friend and neighbor Ruthie calls about the surprise party she’s having for her husband, Andrew, celebrating his graduation from college. It’s a party Josephine helped enthusiastically, several weeks ago, to plan. “Oh, God, it’s Friday, isn’t it,” Josephine says before she can catch herself. “That’s right.”

“You didn’t forget.”

“I lost track of the days, Ruthie. Sorry.”

“You all right? You sound like you’ve been crying.”

“I had a pepper and egg sandwich,” Josephine says, and is dejected about the lie. “It made my nose run.”

“You sound awful.”

Excitable, garrulous Ruthie knows only the outlines of Josephine’s situation—Monday, after a big blowup, John Stanislowski moved into the little efficiency downtown, his old studio overlooking the river; he says he’s through. Josephine has told Ruthie the change is temporary, so he can work on his new music.

“The cake isn’t ready,” Ruthie goes on. “And the idiot just called to say he’s getting off an hour early.”

Josephine manages the automatic response. “Uh-oh.”

“I won’t be able to get everything laid out and the time’s all messed up now and I can’t get in touch with everybody,” says Ruthie. “But he’ll come right by you. Do you think you could delay him for me?”

It’s a fifteen-minute walk from the university. They both know he’ll stop and buy a quart of beer at the little Korean one-stop, as he does every day. So, twenty minutes.

“I’ll—I’ll pretend I need help with something,” Josephine gets out. “Should we have a signal when you’re ready for him?”

“Let’s say the signal will be that I’ll call you. And don’t let him get suspicious. Make it something good.”

“I will,” Josephine tells her. “I have a big heavy box of clothes that has to go in the attic.”

“You’re packing his clothes away?”

“Winter clothes. Mine, too. I do it every year.”

“I guess he’s not coming to the party.”

“Actually, he said he might.”

“It would mean a lot to me.”

After a brief pause, Josephine says, “Call when you’re ready.”

They talk a little about how Ruthie wants things to go, and Josephine hears herself pretending she still has any interest in it. Somewhere she finds the strength to say, “It’s gonna be perfect, Ruthie.”

“You always make me feel better,” Ruthie tells her. Then: “Oh, I’ll kill them if that cake’s not ready. I’ve gotta go, honey. Bye.”

“Bye,” Josephine says. But the connection is broken.

She puts the receiver back in its cradle, and walks into the living room of her now empty-feeling house to sit with a guitar on her lap and cry. She plays a few desultory chords, trying to
get control of herself. Major chords. What John Stanislowski to his students used to call happy chords, being ironical. Then, without explaining or introducing it, he would play a Bulgarian song in G minor and make them want to dance, and when it was done he would reveal the fact. Nothing inherently cheerful or sad about the major and minor keys, he would say. She can hear his voice. The guitar smells of cedar. It’s a new one, bought only last month. The odor is familiar and something she has always loved, but just now it’s a little suffocating, so she sets it in its stand on the other side of the room. She has spent most of the morning folding the clothes. It’s a task she has performed every spring for the past four years—packing the heavy flannels, the sweaters, and the corduroy slacks. It’s important to keep to routines as much as possible. She goes back to work, stuffing the big box, sniffling into the busy silence and searching her mind for excuses she might use to escape having to attend Ruthie’s party. She mulls over possible lies to tell, different scenarios of feigned illness and emergency. Nothing seems right; it all sounds like evasion. And there’s the business of delaying Andrew.

When the box is packed at last, its lid forced closed and fastened, she gets down on her knees for leverage and pushes it out into the hallway. Reaching up, she opens the attic stairs, but then lacks the heart to do more. A tide of anxiety washes over her. She moves from room to room, looking at the pictures on the walls and the books in the bookcases, the musical instruments—guitars, banjos, mandolins, a piano, even a harp—trying to be brave, trying to concentrate on it all as home, her home. But her stomach hurts, and it’s hard to breathe right.

“Oh,” she says aloud. “You are so wrong about me.” It’s as if Stanislowski’s standing right there.

•  •  •

This predawn she had a dream about turtles, and remembered her childhood fascination with them, her mother talking about how they carry their homes on their backs. The dream felt occult, as if meant to impart something to her about her childhood and her mother, or take her back to a version of herself then. She didn’t get another minute’s sleep. The night wore on like silence during a bad argument.

Now she dusts the surfaces, and straightens things, puts last night’s saucer and cup and cheese plate away. She wanders into the bathroom and blows her nose with toilet paper, washes her face, and puts on some makeup, exactly as if she’s someone to whom appearances matter. Then she goes into the kitchen and makes herself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. She can’t finish it. She lies down on the sofa and thinks about staying awake for fear of bad dreams.

Waking with a start, she realizes that she has been asleep for more than an hour.

It’s become afternoon, somehow. She sits up and stretches and then stands up. The house feels so goddamned unpleasantly spacious.

She lies back down on the sofa and tries to read, but the words dissolve into worry. Finally she dozes still more, and wakes up from another dream, one that leaves only a sense of itself as disturbing. She supposes it might have been about the turtles again.

On the refrigerator are photographs of her and Stanislowski being happy together, playing music, standing in a crowded piazza in Rome, on the corner of Beale and Second with friends, entertaining guests out on the back lawn of this house.

The two of them have lived here for almost four years. He’s Stan to friends and family. Professor Emeritus of Music at Memphis School of the Arts. A fixture, a feature of the cultural landscape. Thirty years older than she is, he has lived in many houses; but this is her first—the first mortgage, and the first place she has occupied for more than a few months. Now she’s alone with two cats and the musical instruments. No matter how many lights she turns on, the rooms seem gloomy and forlorn, nobody else here except the cats, whose names are Cat One and Cat Two. They’re outside types; she lets them in at night.

Ruthie’s husband works the front desk in the physical education building at the university. On sunny, warm days he walks to and from work. He comes along in the late afternoons in summer with a quart of cold beer in a paper bag, sipping it as he goes. He’s been going to night school for the past five years seeking his degree in history, the first in his family to go to college. For the party, Ruthie has invited all his friends from school, along with a few neighbors, and his mother and father, who have flown in from Chicago. It’s a special day and Josephine helped plan it because Ruthie has what she calls S.O.D.—special occasion disorder. The condition, Ruthie says, manifests itself as anxiety and confusion and an inability to focus on the practical matters of preparation for any social gathering; it’s a kind of paralysis, really, and she’s not kidding when she talks about it. The only thing for it is an organized and concerned friend like Josephine, who designed some of the banners with which Ruthie will festoon the porch and the front hall, and wrapped the presents, and even mapped out the rearrangement of chairs in the front room. She also took care of the invitations, and this week she e-mailed one to Stanislowski
at his school address, to remind him. He called to ask what she could be thinking of; he never liked Andrew particularly. “Ruthie invited us both,” Josephine told him. “As you know. And of course she’d like you to come.”

“You tell her anything?”

“You need space and time to work on your new music.”

“That’s funny.”

“I’m telling you what I told her. And maybe you’ll write some new music.”

After a pause, he said, “I don’t know about this—party. I doubt I’ll be there.”

She kept silent, trying to control her breathing because he would hear it through the line.

“If I’m not there by the time it starts, I’m not coming.”

“Okay.”

“I wish it was last year,” he muttered.

“Come home,” she said, listening to him breathe into the phone, and then clear his throat. Was he crying?

Earlier this spring, at an outing with her painting class, she got separated from the others with someone named Bradford Smith, a classmate who had seemed only marginally interesting as a fellow student, much less a friend. They got lost in the woods. The two of them had a long afternoon, which became a surprisingly pleasurable interval of talk and telling stories and laughing about being lost. It began to feel like one of those movies where strangers are thrown together and learn mutual respect and affection, and then something causes them to take a turn toward each other in seriousness, with music. The afternoon ended in an embrace and a kiss, and resulted in a few meetings over the next month, for coffee, or a short walk—nothing more, finally, than a kind of flirtation (for Josephine, it
was strangely an accession to the wish to recover the dreamy zaniness of the first day), and it never went farther than that one kiss. Smith was closer to her age and there were elements of common experience and culture that they shared. It was a form of relaxation for her, talking to him—it was even, in a way, a little lazy. But then he got strange and moody, and started talking about love, and just as she was trying gently to remove herself, things went very badly awry. Saturday morning Bradford Smith, in an absurd misguided romantic fervor, approached Stanislowski at the entrance to the music building and expressed his belief that he had won Josephine’s heart. Stanislowski, having worried about her in that way from the beginning, knocked him down, and then came home and packed a bag.

“Nothing has changed,” she told Stanislowski over the phone. “I love you.”

“And Bradford Smith?”

“Oh, Stan—you have to please stop turning the knife in yourself.”

“It’s your knife, kid.”

“Will you please.” She sighed. “I never felt anything like love for Bradford Smith. I never felt anything at all for Bradford Smith. I keep saying it and saying it: I’m innocent of what you have imagined about me. I can’t help—I couldn’t help—what
he
felt.”