A Stranger Like You - Original PDF
نویسندگان: Elizabeth Brundage
خلاصه: He had been watching her for days. Methodically, he’d researched her background on the Internet. She’dbeen raised in New Jersey and had gone to Yale—according to Variety she was on the fast track andHarold Unger, her boss at Gladiator Films, was paying her six figures for it.Surprisingly, Hedda Chase was not attractive. A photograph revealed the calamity of her looks, a gangly,unsmiling woman in somber clothing, with a bent nose that should have been fixed and a distracting littlemole on her cheek that beckoned a dermatologist. It was a face you might have seen in a history book,chronicling some anonymous woman’s plight in the Dust Bowl, and Hugh could only assume that, in a townlike Hollywood, where most of the women insisted on being perfect, her indifference to her appearance wasdeliberate and may have accounted for the attitude she exuded, a kind of forlorn complacency. She lived ina bungalow in Los Feliz, on Lomita Avenue. It was a one-story Spanish-style cottage, circa 1920s, hiddenbehind tall hedges, with a single garage in the rear. A small toolshed supplied an ideal hiding place, and itwas from inside its sweltering quarters that he’d witnessed her for the first time. At half past six on aWednesday evening in late spring a vintage blue BMW pulled into the driveway and parked in the garage,its flanks buffed to a shine. Chase emerged from the dark garage into the golden haze of sunset, pulling hersunglasses onto her head. She was talking to someone on a cell phone, a stack of scripts under her arm.Just the sight of her made him sweat. In truth, Hugh was accustomed to feeling inferior around certainwomen, his wife being one of the few exceptions—it was something he’d been working on with histherapist. Even his boss at Equitable Life, a consummate barracuda, liked to remind him of his pitiablestatus on the corporate food chain. As Chase passed the shed, he caught a whiff of her perfume, ajackhammer jasmine, and felt the prickly little hairs on his neck go stiff. She paused in the driveway, listeningwith contempt to whoever was on the other end of the conversation. She was dressed in a droopyensemble, a scarf tied around her head in a failed attempt at bohemian flair. It was no outfit for a studioexecutive, he thought. A plane flew overhead, roaring over the orange rooftops. She shut the phone irritablyand went up the steps of the small porch, unlocked the door and disappeared inside. A light came on in thefoyer and then another in what he predicted was her bedroom.It was almost dark. Through the small window of the shed he could see the last of the sun sinking into thebrown horizon. The air began to cool. A car pulled into the adjacent garage and a moment later a manemerged, Chase’s neighbor, and disappeared inside the house next door. The air smelled good, someonegrilling a steak. Hugh slid out of the shed and walked down the concrete driveway. A shoulder-high cementwall ran along the edge of the property, over which Hugh could see the neighboring yards, the lights justcoming on in windows, a trio of children being called indoors for supper. It seemed like Hedda Chase liveda nearly ideal life, he thought idly, one that he would intentionally disrupt, just as she had disrupted his.He grabbed a metal green chair, the sort of chair his grandmother would put out on her porch insummertime, and brought it around to the side of the house where the lights from the kitchen windowstreamed out onto the driveway. He climbed up onto it, wobbly as a surfer, and looked inside. There shestood at the sink—they were facing each other, the thin glass of the window between them—opening a jar ofherring. Gingerly, as if involved in a scientific experiment, she forked the fish onto a cracker, hors d’oeuvresstyle, and ate it then took a glass from the cupboard and filled it with vodka. Sipping her drink, she turned onthe radio. The phone rang and she answered it, frowning. He heard her say: “No, Mother! I’ve told youbefore, I can’t do that. I can’t and I won’t.