Free If You Could See Me Now by Peter Straub

distraction. Soon I had all my paraphernalia arranged on the desk—typewriter, paper, notes, the beginning of my draft and my outline. Typex, pens, pencils, paper clips. The novels I placed in several neat piles beside the chair. For a moment I felt that spirit lay in labor, in hard work, the more recondite and irrelevant the better. My dogged dissertation would be my linkage with Alison Greening; my work would summon her.
    —
    But that day I did no work. I sat at my desk and looked out of the window, watching my cousin’s daughter cross and recross the grass and the path as she went to the equipment shed or down to the barn, glancing curiously at my window, and then watching Duane ride up from the road on his giant tractor. He put it in the pole barn and then lumbered back across to his house, scratching himself on the bottom. I felt—I suppose I felt—lonely and elated, primed for an event and still flat and hollow at the same time, as though I were not what I was pretendingto be, but were merely an actor waiting for the role to begin. It is a feeling I often have.
    I sat there watching the sky darken over the barn as the path lost its definition and the tops of Duane’s house and the barn first stood out with greater clarity against a background of darkening blue and then were absorbed into the sky, as if bites were taken out of them. Lights appeared in Duane’s house in series, each window lighting up as though it were timed to go on a moment after its neighbor. I thought Alison might appear on the path, her T-shirt shining in moonlight as she sulkily walked toward me, the lank ends of her hair swinging in rhythm with her heavy thighs. After a time I fell asleep. I could have been out no more than an hour, but when I opened my eyes only one light was on in Duane’s house and the territory between our two dwellings seemed as dark and pathless as a jungle. Hungry, I groped my way downstairs and into the kitchen. The house was clammy and musty, and everything was cold to my touch. When I opened the refrigerator I found that either Duane or Mrs. Sunderson had stocked it with enough food for that night and the following morning—butter, bread, eggs, potatoes, two lamb chops, cheese. I fried the chops and wolfed them down with slices of bread and butter. A meal without wine is not a meal for a grown man. I gnawed at the block of cheddar for dessert. Then I dumped the dishes in the sink for the cleaning woman and went burping back upstairs to the bedroom. When I looked in at my workroom I saw a single light still on in Duane’s house, but at its far end. Alison’s bedroom, presumably. As I stood looking at it I heard the buzz of a motorcycle going up the road. It increased in volume until it came about level with my position and then it abruptly shut off. My desk looked malevolent, like the fat black center of a spider web.
    —
    My bedroom, of course, had been my grandmother’s. Yet I see that it is not of course, for she had moved to the chillier, smaller bedroom upstairs only after the death of my grandfather; for this reason it had a newer bed, and for that reason I chose it. It was as far as you could get from the old bedroom and still be in the house—on the opposite side and up the narrow stairs. My grandfather had died when I was a small child, so all my memories of my grandmother are of her as a widow, a wrinkled old woman who climbed the narrow stairs to go to bed. As some old women do, she swung in size between extremes of heaviness and thinness, alternating every three or four years, and finally settled on being thin, and died like that. Given that the narrow little room had this history, it is unsurprising that I had a dream about my grandmother; but I found the emotional violence of the dream shocking.
    I was in the sitting room, which was furnished not with Duane’s office contraptions but in the old way. My grandmother was seated on her wooden-backed sofa, nervously looking at her hands.—Why did