In fact, as I remember it, the conversation was nothing but a long monologue. After a couple of hours, I was convinced that he might just go on talking even after we left.
During the evening, the phone, which he kept in the hall, rang a number of times and he answered it, apologizing to us and quickly ending the conversations. At one point, however, he had a long talk, speaking in a low voice so that he wouldn’t be overheard from the living room. I couldn’t make out what he was saying, but his voice betrayed annoyance.
He came back looking upset.
“These guys are out of their minds,” he told Laura angrily. “How can you ask a scientist like me to do something like that? You give them an inch and they take a mile. It was the dumbest thing I ever did in my life, getting mixed up with these morons.”
Laura made no reply and vanished somewhere in the house. I wondered who was he talking about, but he left the room and brought another bottle of wine. After we finished it, he seemed to forget about the unpleasant call and jokingly stated that real men drank whiskey. He went off again and brought back a bottle of Lagavulin and a bowl of ice. The bottle was already half empty when he changed his mind. He said that vodka was the best booze for celebrating the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
I realized how drunk I was when I got up to go to the bathroom—I’d been heroically holding myself up until then. My legs wouldn’t obey me, and I almost fell headlong onto the floor. I wasn’t a teetotaler, but I’d never had so much to drink. Wieder watched me closely, as if I were an amusing puppy.
In the bathroom, I looked in the mirror above the sink and saw two familiar faces staring back at me, which caused me to burst out laughing. In the hall, I remembered that I hadn’t washed my hands, so I went back. The water was too hot, and I scalded myself.
Laura came back, gave us a long hard stare, and then made us both a cup of coffee. I tried to figure out whether the professor was also drunk, but he looked sober to me, as if I’d been drinking on my own. I felt like I was the victim of some practical joke, realizing that I was having trouble articulating words. I’d had too many cigarettes, too, and my chest ached. Gray clouds of smoke wafted through the room like ghosts, even though both windows were wide open.
We continued to chew the fat for another hour or so, without drinking anything except coffee and water; then Laura signaled to me that it was time to leave. Wieder walked with us to the car, bid us farewell, and told me again that he sincerely hoped I’d come again.
As Laura drove down Colonial Avenue, which was almost deserted at that hour, I said to her, “Nice guy, isn’t he? I’ve never met a man who could hold his booze so well. Jeez! Do you have any idea how much we drank?”
“Maybe he took something beforehand. I mean a pill or something. He doesn’t usually drink that much. And you’re not a psychologist, so you didn’t realize that he was pumping you for information about yourself, without giving anything away about himself.”
“He told me lots of stuff about himself,” I said, contradicting her and trying to figure out whether we should stop the car so that I could throw up behind some tree at the side of the road. My head was spinning, and I must have smelled like I’d just taken a bath in booze.
“He didn’t tell you anything,” she said curtly, “apart from stuff that’s common knowledge, which you could have found out from the dust jackets of any of his books. But you, on the other hand, told him that you’re afraid of snakes, and that at the age of four and a half you almost got raped by a crazy neighbor, whom your dad then almost beat to death. Those are significant things to say about yourself.”
“Told him that? I can’t remember—”
“His favorite game is to rummage around in other people’s minds, like he’d explore a house. With him, it’s more than just a professional habit. It’s almost a pathological curiosity, one he rarely manages to keep in check. That’s why he agreed to supervise that program, the one that—”
She stopped in mid-sentence, as if realizing all of a sudden that she was about to say too much.
I didn’t ask her what she’d meant. I opened the window and felt my head starting to clear. A pale half-moon was hanging in the sky.
That night we became lovers.
It happened in a simple way, without prior, hypocritical discussions of the “I don’t want to ruin our friendship” variety. After she parked the car in the garage, we stood for a few minutes in the backyard, which was bathed in the yellowish glow of the streetlight, and we shared a cigarette, saying nothing. We went inside, and when I tried to turn the light on in the den, she stopped me, took me by the hand, and led me to her bedroom.
The next day was a Sunday. We stayed in the house all day, making love and discovering each other. I remember that we barely spoke. In the late afternoon we went to the Peacock Inn where we ate something; then we walked in Community Park North for a while, until it got dark. I’d told her about my intention to find a job, and when I brought it up again, she asked me straightaway whether I’d be interested in working with Wieder. He was looking for somebody to organize the books in the library he’d mentioned, but hadn’t got around to showing me, the night before. I was surprised.
“Do you think he’ll agree?”
“I’ve already talked to him about it. That’s why he wanted to meet you. But like typical men, you didn’t get around to discussing it. I think he liked you, so there won’t be any difficulty.”
I asked myself whether I liked him.
“In that case, it’s fine by me.”
She leaned toward me and kissed me. Beneath her left clavicle, above her breast, she had a brown mole the size of a quarter. I studied her in detail that day, as if I wanted to be sure that I’d never forget any part of her body. Her ankles were unusually slender, and her toes very long—she called them her “basketball team.” I discovered each mark and blemish on her skin, which still showed traces of her summer tan.
In those days, fast love had already become as common as fast food, and I was no exception to the rule. I’d lost my virginity at fifteen, in a bed above which hung a big Michael Jackson poster. The bed belonged to a girl named Joelle, who was two years older than me and lived on Fulton Street. In the years that followed, I’d had many partners, and two or three times I’d even thought I was in love.
But that evening I knew that I’d been mistaken. Maybe in some cases what I’d felt had been an attraction, passion, or attachment. But with Laura it was completely different, all those things and something more: the strong desire to be with her every minute and every second. Perhaps I dimly sensed that our period together was to be short-lived, so I was in a hurry to gather enough memories of her to see me through the rest of my life.
THREE
I started working on Wieder’s library the very next weekend, visiting him on my own, taking the bus from Trinity Station. He and I drank a beer together on a bench by the lake, and he explained how he wanted his few thousand books to be organized.
The professor had bought a new computer, which he’d set up in a room upstairs. The chamber had no windows, and the walls were covered with long wooden shelves. He wanted me to put together a codified record, so that a search engine would be able to indicate the location of each book. That meant typing in the data—titles, authors, publishers, Library of Congress numbers, and so on—and arranging the books by categories. We both made a rough calculation and reached the conclusion that the whole business would take up my every weekend for the next six months, unless I was able to spend a couple of additional days working on it each week. I’d started writing up my final research thesis, but I still hoped that I could find an odd afternoon during the week to allow me to finish the library record Wieder had hired me for.
He proposed to pay me weekly. The sum was more than generous, and he gave me a check for the first three weeks in advance. I noticed that when Laura wasn’t there, he was less voluble and spoke more to the point.
He told me he was going to work out in th
e basement, where he had a small gym, and he left me to my own devices in the library.
I spent two or three hours familiarizing myself with the computer and the software, during which time Wieder didn’t return. When I finally left the library, I found him in the kitchen, making sandwiches. We ate together, talking about politics. Somewhat surprisingly for me, he was very conservative in his opinions and regarded “liberals” as being as dangerous as commies. He thought that Reagan was doing the best thing by shaking his fist in Moscow’s face, whereas his predecessor, Jimmy Carter, had done nothing but kiss the Russians’ butts.
We were smoking in the living room, with the coffee machine grumbling in the kitchen, when he asked me, “Are you and Laura just pals?”
His question took me by surprise, and I found formulating an answer very awkward. I was on the verge of telling him that the relationship between Laura and me was none of his business. But I knew that Laura valued her friendship with him a great deal, so I tried to stay cool.
“Just buddies,” I lied. “She happened to move into the same house as me and we became friends, although we don’t have much in common.”
“Do you have a girlfriend?”
“It just so happens that I’m single at the moment.”
“Well, then? She’s beautiful, intelligent, and attractive in every way. You spend a lot of time together, from what she’s told me.”
“I don’t know what to say—sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesn’t.”
He fetched two cups of coffee and handed me one, then lit another cigarette and gazed at me in a grave, searching sort of way.
“Has she told you anything about me?”
I felt that the conversation was becoming more and more uncomfortable.
“She holds you in great esteem, and she’s happy around you. I gather that you’re both working on a special project, one that will profoundly change the way we understand the human mind, something connected with memory. That’s all.”
“Did she tell you any details about what exactly the project is about?” he asked quickly.
“No. Unfortunately, I’m in a completely different field, and Laura has given up trying to initiate me into the mysteries of psychology,” I said, making an effort to seem relaxed. “The idea of combing people’s minds doesn’t turn me on. No offense.”
“But you want to be a writer, don’t you?” he said, annoyed. “How are you going to develop your characters if you haven’t got a clue about the way people think?”
“That’s like saying you have to be a geologist to enjoy rock climbing,” I said. “Joe, I think you’ve got me wrong.” He had insisted that I call him by his first name, although I found it awkward to do so. “Sometimes I sit in a café just so I can watch people, study their gestures and expressions. Sometimes I try to imagine what’s going on behind those gestures and expressions. But that’s what they want to reveal, whether consciously or not, and—”
He didn’t let me finish my sentence.
“So you think I’m some kind of voyeur, peeping through a keyhole? Not a bit. People often need to be helped to understand themselves better, so you have to know how to give them that helping hand, without which their personalities would start to disintegrate. In any event, the aim is completely different. You realize that such a research subject—or maybe you don’t realize, but you’ll have to take my word for it—needs to be approached with the greatest discretion, up until the moment when I make the results public. I’ve already signed a contract with a publisher, but not our university press, so there’ve been rumblings on the board. I don’t think I need to tell you about envy in the academic world. You’ve been a student long enough to see how it works. And there’s also another reason why a lot of discretion is required for the time being, but I can’t reveal it to you. How are things going in the library?”
It was in keeping with his style to change the subject abruptly, as if he were always trying to catch the other person out. I told him that I’d familiarized myself with the computer and the software, and that everything seemed to be all right.
A quarter of an hour later, just as I was about to leave, he stopped me at the front door and told me there was something else we needed to talk about.
“After you visited me last week, did anybody approach you and try to get you to tell them about what I’m working on? A colleague, a friend? Maybe even a stranger?”
“No, especially given that I haven’t told anybody but Laura that I came here.”
“That’s great, then. Don’t tell anybody in the future, either. The business with the library is just between us. By the way, why didn’t Laura come today?”
“She’s in New York, with a friend of hers. She promised to go to a show with her, and they’re staying with the friend’s parents overnight. They’re coming back tomorrow morning.”
He stared at me for a few long moments.
“Excellent. I’ll be curious to hear what she thinks of the show. What’s her friend’s name?”
“Dharma, if I’m not mistaken.”
“Names like Daisy and Nancy just didn’t cut it for those hippies twenty years ago, did they? Bye now, Richard. I’ll see you after Thanksgiving. I’d have invited you here to celebrate with me, but I’m going to Chicago tomorrow, and I won’t be back until Friday. Laura has a spare set of keys you can use. You know what you have to do, and if you have time you can come while I’m away. Take care.”
Instead of heading directly for the bus stop, I wandered the streets around his house, smoking and thinking about our conversation.
So, Laura had a spare set of keys to Wieder’s house. That seemed strange to me, because I hadn’t realized up until then that they were that close. If I understood correctly, Wieder had insinuated that Laura had lied to me when she’d said she was going to the theater with her friend. And he’d been very circumspect when it came to questioning me about the nature of the relationship between the two of us.
I arrived back home in a bad mood, and I put the check in a drawer of the wardrobe in my room with the unpleasant feeling that it was payment for some fishy transaction that I didn’t understand. For the first time since I’d met Laura, I was going to be spending Saturday evening on my own, and the house seemed dark and hostile.
I took a shower, ordered a pizza, and watched an episode of Married with Children, finding nothing amusing about the exploits of the Bundy family. I could sense Laura’s smell, as if she were sitting next to me on the couch. It’d been only a few weeks since I’d first met her, but I had the impression that we’d known each other for years—she was already part of my life.
I listened to a B. B. King cassette, leafed through a Norman Mailer novel, and thought about her and Professor Wieder.
He’d treated me nicely and offered me a job, for which I ought to be grateful. He was a leading figure in the academic world, so I was lucky he’d taken any notice of me at all, even if it’d been at the suggestion of his protégée. Yet despite appearances, I sensed something dark and strange in his behavior, something I couldn’t yet put a name to, but it was there, lurking hidden beneath his amiability and near-constant stream of words.
And worst of all, I’d already begun to wonder whether Laura was telling me the truth. I dreamed up all kinds of scenarios by which I might check the veracity of what she’d told me, but by then it was too late to take the train to New York. And besides, I’d have felt ridiculous spying on her from afar, like in a bad B movie.
With these thoughts popping up in my mind, I fell asleep on the couch, then woke up in the middle of the night and went to bed upstairs. I dreamed I was beside a huge lake, its shore covered in reeds. I looked into the dark water, and all of a sudden I had a strong feeling of danger. I glimpsed the scaly, muddy form of a huge gator that was stalking me through the vegetation. But when the reptile opened its eyes and stared at me, I saw that they were the same watery blue as Professor Wieder’s.
Laura came back the next evening. I’d spent the enti
re day wandering around campus with two acquaintances, and at lunch I’d gone over to their house, on Nassau Street, to eat pizza and listen to music. When I heard her car pull up, I was making myself a cup of coffee.
She looked tired and had dark circles under her eyes. She kissed me in a way that seemed quite reserved, then shot off upstairs to her room to change and take a shower. While I waited for her, I poured two cups and stretched out on the couch. When she came downstairs, she thanked me for the coffee, grabbed the remote control, and started channel-surfing. She didn’t look like she was in the mood to talk, so I left her alone. At one point, she suggested we go outside for a smoke.
“The show was stupid,” she told me, taking a hungry drag on her cigarette. “Dharma’s parents nagged us the whole evening. And there was an accident up ahead in the tunnel on my way back, so I had to wait, stuck in traffic for half an hour. That crappy car of mine has started making a weird noise. I think I ought to get somebody to look at it.”
It was drizzling outside, and the droplets of water in her hair glinted like diamonds.
“What was the name of the show?” I asked. “If anybody asks me, I’ll help them save thirty bucks.”
“Starlight Express,” she answered quickly. “It’s had good reviews, but I just wasn’t in the right mood.”
She knew I’d gone to meet Wieder, so she asked me how it had gone and whether we’d come to an agreement about the library. I told her that he’d given me a check, which I was going to use to pay the rent, and that I’d already put in a few hours’ work.
After we went back inside and sat down on the couch, she said, “Something’s wrong, Richard. Do you want to talk about it?”
The Book of Mirrors Page 3