The Stranger Game. Peter Gadol
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house to a taco stand on the boulevard. My order was ready right at the same time as the one put in by a young woman, and I took a step back and pretended to inspect the contents of the bag I had been handed, although what I was doing was staring at her, unable to avert my gaze. She was wearing a plaid jacket, a striped skirt of an entirely different palette, and leggings printed with an animal pattern. What a mess. And, oh, her hair; her hair was a feathery fuchsia that reminded me of one of those trolls you hoped you didn’t get when you inserted a coin in a boardwalk vending machine—
Stop it, I told myself (hearing my ex-girlfriend in my mind). Why did I need to be so dismissive? The woman had style, or a style, and maybe (no, definitely) it didn’t appeal to me, yet she probably liked the way she looked or she wouldn’t be parading around in this outfit, drawing the gaze, I noticed as she walked away, of both a man walking a spaniel and the spaniel.
I followed her.
She had perfect posture, a dancer’s line. Her feet were turned out while she waited for a light to change. Where did she get the self-confidence to put herself together like this?
Even though she was holding the bag with her tacos in it, the woman turned into a vintage dress store. I stood on the sidewalk but watched her inside examining a long beaded frock (quite a different look than what she had on). I pretended to be looking at my phone when she exited the store and continued down the block. I followed her past a vegan café, past another boutique. She went into a store that sold barware and pricey liquor. This time I went in, too, and pretended to sort through an ice bucket full of novelty stirrers. The woman headed straight for the bourbon in the back. She asked a clerk for help—her voice was a round alto, and she had an accent: Could you by chance recommend a good earthy bourbon?
Then she finally glanced over at me ever so briefly, long enough for me to notice her eyes, pure sapphire, and I thought if you’re born with eyes that vivid, you will probably be attracted to bold color your whole life. I wanted to keep following her, but what if she saw that I was also carrying a bag from the taco stand? I did not want her to feel like I was stalking her even if that was exactly what I was doing.
I thought about her all afternoon. Had she come to this country alone? Did she have someone in her life with whom she could share tacos? Carnitas for you, pollo for me. What color was his hair? How did he dress? I decided she had done some modeling because she was tall and her look probably held marketable appeal. But the modeling career, it was a sideline, a way to earn money while she pursued her greater ambition—which was what? I could make up something: she wanted to front an all-girl band, she wanted to get a psychology degree and work with at-risk teens—but the truth was I didn’t have enough information to get a sense of who she was in the world. At first I’d wanted to write her off because she looked clownish, but now I yearned to connect to her, however tentatively, even at a distance.
Let’s mark this as the moment when I recognized that a transformation in my life was not only possible, but also, remarkably, within my reach.
The day after following the fuchsia-haired woman, Craig walked down the hill to the taco stand at approximately the same time, although he knew the chances were slim that he’d find her again. Instead someone else caught his attention, two people, an elderly couple across the street. The man was quite bundled up given the warm weather, a sweater pulled high around his neck, and he moved stiffly around a small cherry of a car to where the woman was standing. It seemed reasonable to assume they were married. The woman appeared both serene and distant. She was wearing a knit cap. She didn’t look the man in the eye when he opened the passenger-side door for her and eased her into the seat. Craig noted the tenderness with which the man, still moving very slowly, reached across the woman to buckle her safety belt. Then the man took half an eternity to walk around the car and slip in behind the wheel. Eventually he sped off, and not at a pace commensurate with his mobility; he drove fast, dangerously fast, as if with the potential speed of the car, the man were compensating for his diminished agility. This sporty coupe, impractically low to the ground, devilishly bright, was affirmatively alive with horsepower.
At home that night, I found myself thinking only about the fuchsia-haired woman and the sports car couple, and I experienced the pleasant erasure of time that I always imagined writers must enjoy when they submerged themselves in their characters. But eventually my own solitude returned. How faint and spectral I looked to myself reflected in the window. I didn’t want to become a ghost. I knew I needed to get out and wander. This was how I came up with my scheme, rules and all.
I imagine that given what A. Craig subsequently started doing, no matter the boundaries he set and no matter his intent in posting this so-called travelogue, he knew most readers would consider him little more than a sketchy voyeur; thus the pseudonym. His first real follow (his term) involved driving across the city and slipping into a table at a boardwalk café, the ocean loud on the other side of the wide white beach.
It was sunny out, and there were volleyball games in progress, skaters in slalom around tourists, sunbathers, and most important a crowd ample enough for me to become one more nobody. I ordered a sandwich and coffee and watched a group form around a gray-haired older woman wearing a red bikini and performing what might be described as an exotic dance; a muscular, significantly younger man with a boom box hoisted up on his shoulder moved in a circle around her. I focused on one woman in a purple dress standing at the edge of the group and taking in the spectacle. That I picked out this person at random and stuck with her was part of my plan.
When she began continuing her walk south down the boardwalk, I left cash on the table and followed her, moving quickly out of the touristy commercial stretch into a neighborhood of beach houses and walk streets. The crowd had thinned, and so I had a better view of her, but I also became more conspicuous, especially when she abruptly came to a halt and I had to stop, too, with nothing to duck behind.
The woman had spotted a cat basking in the sun. The cat was round, cared for, orange, on its back. And docile: it neither righted itself nor skittered off when the woman bent down to pet it. After a few good strokes, the woman pulled something from a tote bag, which caused the cat to flip around onto all fours and sit back on its haunches. The cat dug his snout into the woman’s open palm and devoured what must have been a treat. When the woman stood, she waited while the cat rubbed up against her legs.
I maintained an even distance as the woman turned into a block of bungalows. A few houses in, she saw a gray cat lying out on a broad porch, and she walked right up the front path to pet this one, too, a cat who also did not run away, who also eagerly accepted the woman’s caresses and eventual treat. Among these cats, she apparently enjoyed renown. Around the corner, yet another one appeared to be guarding a local election sign planted in the lawn; he received the same treatment. Two blocks east, the woman ministered her affections to a fat black Persian. Having slipped behind an easement eucalyptus, I was close enough to hear her friendly lilt, but not close enough to hear what exactly she said.
I hadn’t been in this part of town in a while and didn’t know it well, and the farther from the beach the woman strolled, the tighter the plot of streets became. When she turned a corner, I lost her. Maybe she went inside. I’d decided that my random follow needed to be conducted without the benefit of technology, but ultimately I did take out my phone to pull up a map. I’d had no contact with the woman, and I was pretty sure I had eluded detection (and therefore not caused alarm), so for the greater part I’d obeyed my own rules.
This had been interesting. Here was a cat lady who had a routine, a neighborhood; she belonged somewhere, but I didn’t know anything else about her, like if she herself had cats. Maybe she couldn’t because she lived her life with someone allergic to them, so she distributed her affections elsewhere. Or maybe she did live with cats and had extra love and treats to spare. I had no sense of how she’d spend her afternoon. Would her evening be as solitary as mine? Like me, did she have too much time to think? I accepted I’d never know. The final rule I’d made for myself was in many ways the most important, which was that if I tried to follow the same person twice, I might be perceived of as a threat.
I wanted to be extra sure I went unseen, so the next day I started following strangers by car. Maybe it wasn’t true, but I thought I’d be less noticeable driving and able to get