A Stranger Like You Read Online Free PDF Page B

temple and cocked it. “Are you sure?”
    “I don’t know what you want,” she said, her voice quavering. “I don’t understand what you want from me.”
    “Make me happy.” He smiled like a banker.
    She looked at him.
    “Take these.” He opened his hand. The pills sat in his palm like snowflakes. He handed her a glass of water. She just sat there. “Don’t make me shoot you,” he said, “because I will.”
    Maybe she saw something in his eyes, something that he didn’t know he had, some menacing affect, because her fingers crawled into his palm and grasped the pills and then she took them and drank all the water and put down the glass and glanced at him with contempt. That was all right; he didn’t care. “I’ll get you back for this,” she said. “Don’t think I won’t.”
    “We’ll see.”
    “You’re dead. You’ll never work in this town.”
    “All right. If you say so.”
    He sat back down in his chair and watched her. Now her face was pale, almost beautiful. If she tried harder she could be beautiful, he thought. He didn’t understand why some women who could be perfectly decent looking didn’t make more of their looks.
    At length he said, “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”
    Her eyes were glassy, vividly blue. “I’m not afraid of you.”
    “I’m glad.” He smiled. “I’m not a very scary person.” He laughed.
    “You realize this is a mistake.”
    “Perhaps.” He tilted his head and smiled, thinking of his therapist back in Montclair, the way they’d sit together on adjacent couches in her office while the tops of the birch trees swayed outside the second-story window. They were such solemn trees, he thought. Looking at them always made him melancholy. His therapist had a tender smile and yet she was the sort of woman who would smile even if you’d told her she’d just swallowed a cockroach. When all was said and done she gave him very little advice. Sometimes, when they sat there in the quiet room he’d try to smell her; he’d try very hard. But she had no scent. No scent at all, he thought it was strange. He’d wonder what she was thinking—whether or not she was actually listening to him, or whether she was reviewing a grocery list in her head or her schedule of errands after work. Once, he’d followed her home after their session, taking care to drive several cars behind. In her backyard, he’d stood in the bushes and spied on her through the window of her white Cape, eating supper out of a bowl in front of her Facebook page.
    “You think you know me,” Chase said bitterly. “You’ve made assumptions about me. You think I’m this horrible person, right? But you don’t know me. You don’t know anything about me.”
    He shrugged. “I know enough.” He looked at her. “I know that you’re very sad.” It was something his therapist had said to him.
    Her eyes flashed, but she said nothing. Then she said, “You writers are all the same. You come into my office, trying to butter me up. And you know what I’ve learned? Ideas? Everybody’s got one—they drop out of the sky like bird shit. The truth is, you can turn any idea—and I mean any idea—into a movie. You can work a screenplay like tailoring a suit. It’s not fucking brain surgery. We could have made your movie. And, yeah, somebody would have liked it. But after a week or two, it would have disappeared—collecting dust in some video store.” She looked at him hard. “To be perfectly honest, Mr. Waters, I’m tired of making films that make women look like idiots or Barbie warriors—I’ve tried some of those moves and they’re impossible, I couldn’t get out of bed for a week. Then one afternoon I’m sitting with my friend’s sons, they’re twins, fourteen, and it occurs to me that they’ve witnessed rape and murder in gruesome detail more times than I like to think about. I’m wondering how they process it. I used to be okay with it, but I’ve changed; I’m not that person anymore. You