Open Season by Archer Mayor Page A

landlady, Miss Brooks, had never seen fit to raise it. Personally, I never much noticed the traffic.
    I did, however, notice the Plymouth again. As I put down the groceries to open my mailbox, it passed quietly down the street. The snow was falling harder now, and I couldn’t make out the plates.
    I’d never been tailed before, so I had to wonder if it wasn’t coincidence. Neither Hillcrest Terrace nor Oak Street are exactly off the beaten path, and it was early enough that a good many cars were still on the roads. Conceivably, it could even have been a different car.
    But I didn’t believe any of that. As I climbed the creaking, carpeted steps up to my door on the third floor, I knew in my bones someone was watching me.
    The apartment was, of course, quite empty. There was no reason it shouldn’t have been. I dumped the mail on the living room coffee table and the groceries in the kitchen and went into the bedroom to change into a pair of comfortable furry slippers.
    I then fixed dinner—diced, fried Spam stirred into scrambled eggs and peas, a glass of milk, and a half can of fruit cocktail for dessert—and settled down in a large, slightly bedraggled armchair to read the mail. I tend to do this every night and rather thoroughly at that. Catalogues, mailers, the free Town Crier, all of them get the same attention as the occasional letter and the morning Reformer. I even fill out the sweepstakes, idly wondering what I’ll say to Ed McMahon when he hands me my million-dollar check. Habits, now old, born of comfortable isolation. I hadn’t dropped by the Murphy’s after their dinner hour to avoid Martha’s cooking, which was indeed better than my own, but only because I wanted the evening to myself, as usual.
    My wife Ellen died of cancer about eighteen years ago. We’d been married eight years—she’d been a teller at the bank I use to this day. She couldn’t have children, and for some reason we never thought of adoption, so we paid a good deal of attention to each other, going to movies a lot, planning picnics and day hikes for the weekends, reading books aloud while she sewed or I built plastic airplanes for Murphy’s kids.
    We had our run-ins, of course. Days when all we did was get in each other’s way. I would long for the bachelor life then, sensing how within reach it was. A divorce for us, after all, would have been a simple parting of the ways—no children, little property, still young. But we never did; it never got that bad, and it never lasted long.
    The doctors said she died quickly. The whole thing took about four months from diagnosis to burial. But that was a long time for me, watching her die in slow motion, piece by piece. This was, after all, the woman I had undressed many times, scattering her clothes around the house. We’d made love with real enthusiasm, often on the spur of the moment. She’d been an extremely sensual woman.
    So her death had been a catharsis of sorts, her slow and steady deterioration had been draining something vital from my core until at last, mercifully, by dying she released us both. For a long time afterward, I was alone—I needed no more companionship, no more emotional ups and downs. I was free to work, to read, to go to the movies utterly alone. I had come to realize that my home life, even with someone as accommodating as Ellen, had begun to echo the complexities of my job. Day in and day out, each twenty-four-hour cycle was a constant struggle, swimming against dozens of competing currents in an effort merely to tread water. Perhaps I’m a man whose ambitions are too slight, or maybe I lack the basic toughness most have to deal with a crowded life without respite. I could be just selfish. Whatever it is, by the time I snapped out of mourning Ellen’s loss and renewed my interest in the opposite sex, I was a confirmed bachelor, devoted to keeping at least one small part of my soul entirely to myself.
    Which brings me back to my Realtor friend, Gail, the