Prowler

Prowler

Nino Ricci

Anna came home from work to find that her front door had been jimmied open.

From the entrance to her building she saw the small gap of light into her apartment and her mind did a double take, straining to make allowances for it, quick dreamlike explanations that later she would not quite be able to recall. But in the next instant she admitted the obvious. A wave of outrage went through her. Her impulse was to enter the apartment at once, as if the thing might still be forestalled in some way, but reason restrained her.

She went to her neighbour’s door.

‘I think my place has been broken into.’

When the police came—hours later, it seemed, though less than twenty minutes had elapsed—they searched the apartment then came for her at the neighbour’s, where she had waited. They had sent a man and woman.

‘Everything looks fine,’ the woman said, but not in a reassuring way.

The neighbour, Susan, hadn’t seen anything. Hers was the only other apartment on the ground floor of the building, a large converted Victorian.

‘I had the music on,’ she’d told Anna, seeming glad of the excuse. While they’d been waiting for the police she had offered Anna nothing, no sympathy, not so much as a glass of water, as if closing Anna out would somehow protect her from what had happened.

When Anna finally entered her apartment she had the momentary sensation that she had mistakenly stepped into the home of a stranger. The furnishings—the white sofa and armchair, the prints on the walls, the little knick knacks arranged on her bookcase—looked suddenly alien, not things that she herself had chosen and set out. But nothing seemed to be out of place, the only sign of the break-in the bit of splintered wood at the door. The police asked Anna to check if anything was missing, but even her camera had not been taken, though it sat in full view on the work table in her bedroom.

‘Check your personal things,’ the policewoman said. ‘Diaries, photographs, that sort of thing. Clothing.’

‘Oh,’ Anna said, beginning to understand.

There was a small buzz in her head now. She did a cursory inspection but couldn’t quite focus any more. She checked for the journal she kept in the drawer of her night table and was relieved to find it untouched.

‘There’s two possibilities here,’ the man said. Anna didn’t like the air of authority he’d put on, as if he wanted to show that he’d let the woman run things till now but he was the one in command. ‘First, the guy was in here but something scared him and he ran off before he could take anything. We found the back door unlocked so that’s probably how he got out. Second, he was looking for something else. Could be a stalker, who knows. I don’t mean to scare you, miss, but it’s a possibility.’

Anna spent the night with her friend Katie on the other side of town, the only person in the city she knew well enough to impose on. Katie was the one who had talked her into moving here from Montreal.

‘I warned you about that neighbourhood,’ she said. ‘There are break-ins all the time over there.’

But Anna said there were break-ins everywhere, it was just luck of the draw. She didn’t tell Katie the theory of the stalker—it would just make her overprotective. Katie had known her only since university but sometimes she acted as if Anna’s life were her own property, to be arranged as she wished. She didn’t realize that there were lots of things that Anna never told her.

‘You stay as long as you like,’ Katie said. But after two days Anna had already grown tired of trekking across town to retrieve clothing and things, of giving Katie a full account of her day. By then the super at her building had had her door repaired. She went by the apartment after work and in the afternoon light it seemed welcoming and warm, purged of any residue from the break-in. The idea that someone was out for her seemed far-fetched suddenly.

She called Katie.

‘It feels fine here,’ she told her. ‘It’ll probably be worse if I wait.’

‘I can stay over with you if you want,’ Katie said.

‘It’s fine.’ The truth was she wouldn’t have minded the company but two days with Katie was enough. ‘I’ll be fine.’

She had had the locks changed as well, front and back—an unnecessary precaution, really, but she had kept a spare set of keys in a kitchen drawer and though they hadn’t been taken it had flashed through her mind that whoever had broken in had found them and made an impression of them, like in some spy movie or thriller. It wasn’t usual for her to give in to these sorts of irrational fears; but it made her feel safer to know the place was newly battened down like that. The new locks had special keys that couldn’t be duplicated. She’d had chain locks installed on both doors as well, which didn’t seem unreasonable, and had asked that a metal plate be put into the front door frame so it would be harder to force the door open.

That night she had supper out with a few university friends—not from her Katie group, as she called it, her conservative Westmount set, but from the more bohemian group she’d fallen in with working at the student paper, several of whom had also ending up moving here. The two groups were like parallel worlds for Anna, hardly aware of each other. When she was with one she always felt a small betrayal of the other; but she seemed to need the balance the groups provided, as if they were differents sides of her own head.

They ate at a hole-in-the-wall in Chinatown that Anna found a bit dirty and overloud, though she didn’t say anything. One of the group, Sacha, had brought his friend Arvinder Singh along. Anna had met him several times and had even gone out with him once, just a couple of weeks before. It hadn’t been a date; they’d had plans to see a play with Sacha and Sacha had had to cancel at the last minute, leaving her and Arvinder on their own. They’d had a fairly good time—a bit of a surprise, really, since there was a kind of forced geniality in Arvinder’s manner that Anna found offputting, as if he was trying too hard—and had even discovered that they had a quite a bit in common. Both had only recently moved to the city, he from Calgary; both liked theatre and dance; both had had plans to go into journalism, though Anna had ended up in advertising and Arvinder as a marketing manager for a small community newspaper. But there was no suggestion that the thing would go further with them. That was one of the qualities Anna liked about this group, that unlike Katie and her set they weren’t always forcing things into categories: she and Arvinder could go out alone like that and no one would think twice about it.

At supper Arvinder sat next to her. It was the first time she had seen him since the play, though he lived not far from her, in the market. She found herself telling him about the break-in—strangely, she was more open with him than she had been with Katie, perhaps because he was more distant from her.

Arvinder appeared genuinely concerned, for a moment dropping the façade he always had of gentlemanly bonhomie.

‘Aren’t you afraid of being alone like that, with this stalker thing?’

‘It’ll be fine. I think the guy just got scared, that’s all.’

‘Well if you want someone to stay with you for the night. I’m serious.’

He did in fact seem serious. Anna felt more touched by the offer than she would have thought. It seemed the first bit of real sympathy anyone had shown her since the break-in.

‘I’ll be fine. But thanks.’

But when she got home she felt a panic go through her as she unlocked her apartment door. It took an effort of will to go inside, and then she at once went through the entire apartment opening doors and putting on every light. What had seemed true in the daytime didn’t seem true now: she still felt the palpable sense of a presence, as if someone had been there only moments before.

The light for the small patio the back door gave on to wasn’t working. She peered out through the back blinds into the patio’s darkness but could barely make out anything beyond her own reflection. The panic went through her again. Someone could be out there looking in at her at that very moment, and she wouldn’t see him. She tried to remember if the light had been working before the break-in—perhaps someone had intentionally unscrewed it.

She had Arvinder’s number scrawled on a notepad from when they’d had to make plans for the play. He picked up on the first ring.

‘I’m really sorry to bug you,’ she said.

He was there inside of ten minutes, complete with sleeping bag and a light bulb.

‘It’s probably nothing,’ she said. ‘I guess I’m a little more freaked out by this whole thing than I thought.’

‘It’s perfectly understandable. You’re too hard on yourself.’

Arvinder checked the bulb out back: it was dead.

‘See,’ he said. ‘Nothing to worry about.’

‘I’m really sorry. If you want to go home—’

‘I won’t hear of it.’

She set him up on the sofa. He had put on his cheery disposition again but she didn’t mind it so much, under the circumstances.

‘It’s lucky you had an extra light bulb around,’ Anna said.

‘I just took the one from my kitchen.’

He had neglected to bring a toothbrush. Anna dug up an unused one still in its wrapper that she’d got at her last check-up.

‘My reward,’ he said, brandishing it like a trophy, and the gesture, the corniness of it, seemed to pinpoint for Anna what it was about him that she hadn’t liked. But now it merely made him seem boyish and vulnerable.

When Anna awoke in the morning Arvinder was already up and dressed, and had even managed to get a pot of coffee going.

‘I hope I didn’t wake you,’ he said.

In fact she hadn’t heard a thing. Now that she was up, he went about setting out cutlery and cups, already seeming to know his way around the place as if it were his own. Anna felt some of her old irritation toward him returning at this morning cheeriness and industry, and tried to suppress it.

‘I should be doing that,’ she said.

‘It’s not a problem.’

Over their coffee, out of the blue, Arvinder asked her if she was Jewish.

‘Why would you ask that?’ she said, more sharply than she would have liked.

‘Oh. It’s just I saw that photograph in the bathroom. The old man with the Star of David. I thought it was your grandfather or something.’

It was true, the photo was there for anyone to see, though most people wouldn’t have noticed the star, which was tiny and hidden amidst folds of grey beard. In fact the picture was of her great-great-grandfather, as far as anyone knew; her father had found it among various things bequeathed to him by his own father at his death.

‘There’s a bit of Jewish blood a few generations back,’ Anna said. But then, not wanting to seem evasive, she added, ‘We only found out a few years ago. We don’t know much about it.’

‘That’s very interesting. To find out something like that. A bit of a shock or something. ’

‘It’s not that uncommon,’ Anna said, closing the conversation.

She might have added that Jewish lineage was through the mother, not the father; but then Arvinder, in his way, would inevitably have started prowling around the subject of her own mother, who in fact had died when Anna was quite young. It wasn’t that the matter represented some great trauma for her; she just didn’t like bringing it up with people she hardly knew. People always made assumptions about you when they found out something like that, treating it as if it were the key to your whole personality.

There was a moment of awkwardness at the door as he was leaving when he sort of bent forward as if to kiss her cheek, probably thinking that all Montrealers did that. But Anna offered her hand instead and he quickly withdrew.

‘If you’d like me to stay again,’ he said.

‘No, really, thanks. I’m sure I’ll be fine.’

‘Oh, I almost forgot. I’m having a few of the gang for supper on Saturday, I’d like you to come.’

‘Sure,’ Anna said. She knew that she was the one who should be having him for supper, to thank him, but obscurely hoped that this might somehow cover her. ‘Sure. That would be great.’

And when he was gone she felt a tremendous relief to be free of him.

That night the only presence she felt in her apartment was the lingering one of Arvinder: she didn’t like to admit it but there was a sort of smell to him, maybe that was what put her off him. But she felt badly about how she had treated him that morning, particularly when she found a message from him on her machine when she got home from work—which, however, she didn’t respond to—repeating his offer to stay the night again. She decided it was the question of her Jewishness that had set her off; in fact she was more bothered by that buried history than she cared to say. Her father, who had come to Canada from England as a young man, had known nothing of it until the photograph had surfaced: he had been raised an Anglican, all trace of his Jewishness erased. How had that happened, she wondered, such a total obliteration? She thought of the conversos of Spain, on whom she’d seen a documentary once, who even on pain of death had managed to retain elements of their Judaism over a period of 500 years.

Anna had once asked her father to follow the thing up but after a few cursory enquiries he had basically shrugged it off. What could it matter, he said. It wasn’t as if she planned to convert.

Saturday morning, Anna had another call from Arvinder.

‘You okay? I was getting worried about you.’ He tried to put this casually but Anna detected a bit of an edge in his voice: he was peeved that she hadn’t returned his call.

‘I’m fine. Really.’

‘You haven’t forgotten about supper?’

The truth was it had completely slipped her mind.

‘Of course not. I’m looking forward to it.’

She had never been to his apartment before. She had imagined it rife with eastern influences and the smell of spices but it turned out to be quite barren and plain, everything almost obsessively ordered and neat. It was a tiny place, not much bigger than a dorm room; for supper they were all crammed around an old formica-topped kitchen table. Arvinder served up pasta, of all things, which he said was his specialty.

All evening he seemed to hover around Anna without however quite making contact with her. Anna was afraid he would bring up the matter of her Jewishness, but he seemed to have understood it was off-limits; he also made no allusion to having spent the night at her apartment. She was glad about that; it spared her all the obvious jokes.

Then when she was using the bathroom after supper, she noticed that the only toothbrush in the holder above the sink was the one she had given him. She felt a chill go through her. Wasn’t there something strange in that? Didn’t he have his own toothbrush?

She went back out to the others but somehow she couldn’t get the sight of her toothbrush in his bathroom out of her mind.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said finally, ‘I’m really beat. I should get going.’

At the door, Arvinder looked a little desperate at her early departure.

‘I’ll call you,’ he said, but then, because her puzzlement at that must have shown, added, ‘I mean, we didn’t really get a chance to talk.’

‘Sure.’

She was over-reacting, she knew; it was just a toothbrush. Maybe his own had been old and he’d simply thrown it away. But when she got back to her place she felt creeped out suddenly that Arvinder had spent the night there, had the same feeling of contamination as after the break-in, the sense of something alien in the place. To make matters worse, Arvinder phoned her not long after she got home.

‘I just wanted to make sure you got in all right.’

It was strange that she couldn’t hear the sound of the others in the background. It made it seem as if he’d chased them away the instant she’d gone, or as if they were sitting there hushed while he phoned.

‘I’m fine,’ she said, as neutrally as she could manage.

‘Also, say, I was wondering. There’s a pay-what-you-can tomorrow for that play we were talking about. I thought maybe we could catch it.’

This was getting a bit too weird for her.

‘Oh. Yeah. Look. I’d love to, but I’ve already got plans for tomorrow.’

She didn’t know any more what to make of him. In the morning, to calm herself, she called Sacha to ask about him; but she couldn’t find the right way to put the thing.

‘There’s nothing weird about him, is there?’ she said.

But Sacha misunderstood, thinking she was interested in him.

‘He’s the most normal guy you’ll ever meet. Maybe the two of you should get together.’

She might have just dropped the matter if she hadn’t noticed that day, while making herself a bit of lunch, that the spare key for the new lock on her back door was missing. She had put the new spares in the same drawer that the old ones had been in, as if to convince herself that her original fear had been unfounded; but now she was able to turn up only one of them. For an instant she felt sick with fear; and then she began, very methodically, to search for the lost key, pulling out the drawers one by one, searching the bottom of their cabinet in case the key had somehow fallen through, then going through the entire apartment, her purse, all her pockets. When the search failed to yield up the key, she called the locksmith who had put in her new locks and waited a tense half hour for him to return her page, then a half hour more for him to appear at her apartment to replace the lock again.

‘You’re just lucky you noticed the thing was missing,’ he said. ‘You might want to call the police again.’

‘I’m sure I just lost it. Anyway there’s no way anyone could have got in to take it.’

But by then the idea had already taken full shape in her: Arvinder had gone through those drawers, when he’d made breakfast.

She wasn’t sure what to do. Katie would be no help—the only thing she would be able to see about Arvinder, though she’d never admit this, was that he was Indian. There was no telling, of course, whether she would simply quietly convict him because of this, or, just as likely, impute her own racism to Anna and put that at the base of Anna’s suspicion. The fact was that Anna herself was afraid there might be some truth to this: why else had she taken an almost immediate dislike to him?

What she ended up doing was nothing—the lock was changed, after all, and she had only a theory, nothing more. But she couldn’t get out of her head the image of Arvinder lurking around her apartment while she was out. Perhaps he had come that day after he’d stayed the night, looking at God knew what. How it made her skin crawl now, to think he had been there in the next room while she lay in her bed.

At one point she took her journal out from her bedside table. He would have found this and read through it; the idea of it sickened her. But then she thought that all she had to do was find some detail he could only know by having read it and somehow draw it out of him, and that would be her proof. Even as she formed the plan, though, it began to seem ludicrous to her. How would she go about doing that, exactly, pressing him for intimate details of her own life?

All the same she began to read through the journal. What struck her most about it, however, thinking of it as it might seem to someone else, was how little of her it revealed, after all, as if it had already been edited for someone else’s eyes. Just the barest, pettiest details of her life were recorded there, making it seem as if all of her interior life had been edited out, or, worse, as if she didn’t have one.

Almost unthinkingly she scrawled ‘Is this my life?’ at the bottom of the last entry, but then, feeling somehow exposed by that, crossed it out.

The days went by. Tuesday she had a message from Arvinder saying hi, which she ignored; Thursday she had another, with a small note of urgency, saying he needed to talk to her. Friday she called his place from the office thinking she’d get his machine, and intending to put him off in some way; but he picked up.

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Hi. It’s you. I was wondering how you were.’ He sounded like he had just got out of bed, though it was practically noon.

‘I’ve been pretty busy,’ Anna said.

‘I was just wondering if we could get together to talk.’

‘Sure.’ She couldn’t think of a way to deflect him. ‘I mean, I’m pretty busy. Maybe next week, I don’t know.’

‘Sure, sure. I’ll call you.’

The tactic got her through the weekend; but Monday evening he called again. She saw his number come up on her call display and so simply sat by the phone as the answering machine came on, as his voice came across the line. The message was disturbing: it started out normally enough but then got weird and nearly incoherent.

‘Now I don’t know if you want to see me at all,’ he said. She felt a shiver go through her, thinking of him sitting there in his tiny, strange apartment as she listened. ‘I don’t want you to think I’m some kind of freak, I just want to know where I stand.’

When he hung up she could hardly think straight. She phoned Sacha.

‘What’s going on with your friend Arvinder?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘He won’t stop phoning me. I’m getting a little freaked out here.’

It took a while before she could calm herself enough to talk sensibly. She had to remember that Arvinder was Sacha’s friend; she couldn’t simply start throwing accusations around.

‘Look,’ Sacha said finally. ‘I have a confession to make. We’ve been trying to set you guys up.’

‘What?’ Anna could hardly believe this. ‘What?’

‘That theatre thing, supper the other night, all that. We were just trying to figure out ways to get the two of you together. You seemed to have quite a bit in common.’

‘You were all in on this?’

‘You make it sound like a conspiracy.’

Anna was livid.

‘He’s kind of smitten with you,’ Sacha said. ‘It’s probably making him a little irrational.’

‘He doesn’t even know me!’

‘Yeah, well, he thinks you’re enigmatic. He likes that about you.’

‘How would he ever get the slightest idea I was interested in him?’

Now Sacha’s tone began to change: he was taking sides.

‘You did ask him to stay in your apartment.’

‘I’d been broken into!’

‘Look, I know the details. But try to see it from his side. The message he’d get from that.’

‘I don’t know what you guys were thinking but I just want you to call him off. The guy’s a freak!’

She was ranting.

‘Anna, you’re way over the top on this one.’ Sacha’s tone had hardened. ‘I’ve known Arvinder since I was a kid. I think the problem here might be with you.’

Anna knew what he was thinking, though he would never say it: she was reacting this way because he was Indian. They were all so bloody PC, that group, and Arvinder was their token person of colour. But the truth was Arvinder was no more Indian than she was Jewish.

She wanted to say, ‘He has my fucking toothbrush in his bathroom!’ but knew how ridiculous that would sound.

‘Look, just tell him I’m not interested,’ she said finally, also understanding in that instant how tenuous her connection to Sacha and his group was, and that it probably wouldn’t survive this.

Anna had no idea what to do next. Her life seemed to be unravelling before her eyes but she couldn’t say why, how this whole chain of events had been set in motion. Days went by and she didn’t phone anyone; and though it shouldn’t have surprised her neither did anyone phone her, not even Katie. She realized there was no one in this city she was actually close to, not Katie, who at bottom she didn’t even like very much, and not Sacha and his group, who she’d held on to, she understood now, only because they’d made her feel superior to her Westmount set.

In the midst of all this she had a call from her old employer in Montreal: they wanted her back. Her replacement had made a mess of things; they could offer her a raise and more responsibility. Anna gave the matter only a day’s thought before accepting. The idea of leaving this place, her apartment, her false friends, filled her with too much relief. She would simply tell people she hadn’t liked the city; that would fly well in Montreal. Anyway, it was true—she found the city fairly superficial and cold. In Montreal, at least, she had roots. Her father was there, and also several friends who went further back than her university days. It was true that she hadn’t had much to do with them in recent years, but that could change. It also occurred to her that she might take a trip to England before returning to work to look up some of her family, most of whom she hadn’t seen since she was a child.

She didn’t hear from Arvinder again. At first she couldn’t put him from her mind, was dogged by the constant apprehension whenever she was in her apartment that he would suddenly appear at her door. But then in a matter of weeks, as her departure from the city grew nearer, her preoccupation with him faded. As it did, so did her sense that there could have been any truth to her suspicions about him: now at a distance what she remembered was the boyish person who had brandished his toothbrush the night he’d stayed with her. In the market, once, she saw him from across the street going about his purchases and was almost tempted to speak to him, seeing how naked he looked caught in secret like that, a bit lonely and a bit sad as if some switch in him had been turned off. Yet somehow she couldn’t quite shake the residue of anger she felt toward him, the feeling that the whole fiasco had been his fault in some way.

Then, while she was packing, she discovered the spare key that had gone missing sitting in a bowl at the top of her kitchen cupboard. She felt mortified at the sight of it, remembering at once her having put it there, out of some logic that had been perfectly clear to her at the time but that now escaped her. How could she have forgotten she’d done that? All the chaos that she had slowly been tucking back into place over the past few weeks seemed to come tumbling out of her again. It was as if she had wilfully set Arvinder up, as if her mind had plotted out this strategic memory lapse as a way of punishing him, of locking him out of her life. She tried to piece together again how things had happened, when her suspicions had begun, what she’d based them on; but it was no use, the whole thing was a muddle now. She’d been distraught, obviously, about the break-in—that had to account for things. She thought of writing Arvinder a letter to explain all this to him, why she’d acted so oddly, but couldn’t think of a way of doing it without risking further insulting him.

One thing, however, was apparent to her: the whole Arvinder matter must have actually served as a sort of shield for her, because now that he’d been cleared of any suspicion she started thinking again about the break-in, more and more, though over two months had passed since it had occurred. She wondered again what the motive could have been; she began to look at her apartment with the same distant eye she’d had just after it, as if she were a stranger here. Though indeed, as she packed her things, it sometimes felt that she was: apart from a few photos and other mementos she found there was very little of what she owned that had any real meaning for her. It seemed an irony to her suddenly that the thief hadn’t taken anything, as if he had determined that there was nothing of value, after all, to be taken.

At one point, thinking about the key that she had placed at the top of her cupboard, she had a flash of what had gone through her mind then: a sense, almost, of casting a spell, as if the key were a talisman, something to keep her safe. It came back to her that as a small girl, alone with her father in the house, she used to hide things as well—little bits of things, she could hardly remember what, though she remembered the importance she used to attach to them, that they be placed just so, at the top of a window frame, at the back of a clock, and that they remain forever undiscovered there, forgotten even by herself. That was exactly the power of them, the way they held things safe behind her forgetting. What had become of them, she wondered now, all those things she’d hidden away, whose precise hidden nature the very world, back then, had seemed to hang by.

First published in Toronto Life, August 1999.

The image at the top of the story is from the Giorgio de Chirico painting Mystery and Melancholy of a Street (1914).