The Reflection

by Hugo Wilcken

  A few blocks later, I grabbed a couple of hot dogs from a street vendor and wolfed them down as I walked along, unsure of where I was going or what I was doing. I picked up a copy of the Times, then found myself drifting down into the subway on Fifty-Seventh, boarding a train heading downtown. It, too, was full of Saturday shoppers, but I managed to find a seat and leafed through the newspaper. The front page was given over to Truman’s announcement that the Russians had detonated an atom bomb. Inside, a morbid opinion piece said that lower Manhattan, with its tall buildings crammed into such a small area, was now a perfect target. I turned to the back of the paper, and scanned down the list of names in the obituary column. Seeing her name in black and white might have changed things, but there was no mention of Abby.

  I’d had a half-formed plan to go down to the Village, but when I finally looked up from the paper, I realized I’d missed the stop. Eventually I got off at East Broadway. Not a neighborhood I knew, but as soon as I emerged onto the street, I realized why I’d ended up there. It was near where I’d been last night. God knows why I was retracing my steps, but that was what I seemed to be doing.

  I walked down to Manhattan Bridge to orient myself. Then after an hour or so of wandering about, I found Esterhazy’s street. At first, I wasn’t sure I had the right place. It was bustling and animated, filled with stalls and street peddlers, whereas last night it had been deserted, sinister—another feeling altogether. It puzzled me, but finding Esterhazy’s building settled the question. The broken stair on the stoop: I’d almost fallen over it the night before. And there it was again.

  I hung about opposite, smoking a cigarette, at a loss as to what I was doing there. I was watching Esterhazy’s building, but I was thinking about Abby. Just as at home, in the apartment I’d briefly shared with Abby, I’d been thinking about Esterhazy. What shook me was the thought that in all these years, I could have simply picked up the phone and asked her to meet me for a drink. She’d have said yes, I was sure of it. I could imagine it so easily now. The initial surprise in her voice when she picks up my call. The coolness. Then finally a cautious agreement to meet me for an hour, no more, somewhere on the Upper West Side where she lived. We meet. It’s awkward. But once she understands that I’m calm, that I don’t want anything from her, we both relax a bit. Talk about our lives. She shows some interest in my work. Says she’ll send me tickets to her current show. I shake my head, say: “It’s nice of you to offer, but …” and then before I know it, the hour is up. After the first few difficult minutes, it had gone by so quickly. “I have to go now,” she says. We get out of our booth. Outside the bar, we stand looking at each other for a long moment. Finally I say, “I’m glad you came. Give my regards to Jeff.” She nods, says: “I’m glad I came too.” I say: “I’ll always want the best for you.” She nods, kisses me on the cheek, and that’s that. I won’t see her again, not ever again, unless by accident. But I’ll be able to go on. I’ll no longer be stuck in this state of suspension.

  I stood there on the street corner, lost in my fantasy, almost in tears. Missed opportunities: they were so peculiarly desolating. Even if I’d phoned her and she’d rebuffed me, I could have written her a note. Saying that I wanted nothing from her, only the best for her. And even if she hadn’t responded to that, I could have been secure in the knowledge that at least she’d read it. Instead, our last contacts dated back to the months after her departure, when I’d behaved abominably. Pestering her, stalking her, calling her up at ridiculous hours of the night … the thought was too much to bear. Then there was Speelman. Yesterday I’d felt grateful toward him. Now I felt angry. Why had he waited until it was too late? Why hadn’t he given me an opportunity to make my peace with her?

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a couple of men come out of Esterhazy’s building. One of them well groomed, elegantly dressed, quite out of place given the surroundings. The other was the square-jawed man from last night, I was almost certain, the one who’d sat at the table smoking. I noticed that he was still in his dark suit of the night before, and that settled it in my mind. The two of them turned north, walking at a fair pace in the direction of Chinatown. Without thinking, I tossed my cigarette into the gutter and set off after them. They were in deep conversation, and the smooth-looking one was wagging his finger at the square-jawed one, but whether he was doing it aggressively or simply to illustrate a point, I couldn’t tell. Within seconds of seeing them, I was inventing little scenarios as to what they were up to, what the relationship between the two might be. The adrenaline flushed through my body as they rounded a corner, and I quickened my pace.

  A minute or so later, it was all over. By the time I’d turned the corner, they were nowhere to be seen. I sprinted ahead, scanning the sidewalks. Had they seen me? Gone into another building? Gotten into a car? I was flummoxed, furious with myself. I couldn’t believe how quickly I’d managed to lose them. I hung about feeling stupid, then slowly made my way back to Esterhazy’s road—my heart still hammering against my ribcage, my thoughts racing. I replayed in my mind the scene of the two men leaving Esterhazy’s building. Had one of them hesitated over the broken step? I thought he had, but perhaps even this early on, only minutes after the event, I was already elaborating on my memories.

  I thought about Esterhazy’s wife. Would she be alone in the apartment now? If I wanted to see her, I just about had a legitimate excuse. After all, even if her husband was now under some other doctor’s charge, he was ultimately my responsibility, since I’d signed his papers. It didn’t make much sense, but I crossed the street anyway, then strode up the three flights of stairs.

  No answer. I knocked again. Not a sound. I’d guessed there’d be no one there, but that didn’t stop me from feeling deflated. After a minute or so, I bent down, stared through the keyhole. The same bare room I’d been in last night. A table with nothing on it. Two chairs. A bland picture on the wall. If anything, it looked even emptier in the daylight, so much so that I couldn’t imagine anyone really living there. But what about my own apartment? It was hardly more furnished. I stood up, cocked my head toward the stairwell. Once again, this suspicion that I was being followed. Ridiculous. I’d heard a noise, but obviously it was somebody scraping about behind the door on the other side of the landing. I crossed over, knocked on the other door. I could hear labored breathing coming from the other side, but still no answer until I knocked again, harder.

  “What d’you want?”

  “I’m looking for Mrs. Esterhazy, from across the landing.”

  “Don’t know nobody from across the landing.”

  “Mr. and Mrs. Esterhazy. They live on this floor.”

  “You mean the door opposite?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ain’t nobody lives there. Not permanent anyway. People come and go.”

  “What do you mean? Could you open the door so we can talk?”

  “I mean ain’t nobody lives there. Ain’t opening the door to you or anyone else. Good day to you, mister.”

  At some point I had lunch at an automat, and then the afternoon was lost to another restless meander across Manhattan. Without my usual routine, I felt unmoored, drifting through the mass of anonymous bodies, wanting to be alone, yet lonely at the same time. As I turned a corner, a newspaper hawker was yelling out the headline: “Russians have the bomb!” I remembered that piece I’d read on the subway, about Manhattan’s vulnerability to attack. Everything surrounding me—buildings, cars, people—could apparently now be vaporized in seconds. That simple fact seemed to steal some of the city’s reality.

  I rarely spent daytime hours in my apartment over the weekend—it was too claustrophobic—but sometimes I’d drop by my office to do paperwork. I considered doing that now, but could come up with no good reason for it. My mood kept jolting from numb sadness when thinking about Abby, to an excited unease when thinking about the Esterhazy case. Later, wandering around the Village, I passed by City Psychiatric, its neogothic gargoyles looming above me on Eleven
th. How many people had I signed in to that hospital? How many had never left? I thought back to various occasions when the police had called me in for an opinion. Sometimes a single glance confirmed that a person was disturbed and dangerous. Other times, it was more borderline. Would I have had Esterhazy committed if I hadn’t been so tired? If I hadn’t felt some obscure pressure?

  I’d finally realized something about Mrs. Esterhazy. Physically, she was very like one of my first patients, Miss Fregoli. The same bland good looks, young yet somehow ageless. And the same accent from nowhere. Miss Fregoli had suffered from a long-term melancholic illness, but after three months of therapy, I’d felt she’d made progress. The last time I’d seen her, she’d gone to a good deal of trouble over her appearance: new clothes, hairstyle, makeup. We’d discussed whether she should take a break from treatment. She’d seemed keen, and we’d agreed to suspend our twice-weekly appointments for a month. She’d been the last patient of my day and—unusually for me—I’d stopped for a drink on the way home, at a bar on Columbus Circle. It had been a private celebration of my success with Miss Fregoli, coming at a time when my self-esteem was low on account of Abby’s recent departure. But a few days later, Miss Fregoli’s mother had phoned me. Her daughter had hanged herself.

  Hoping for some respite from my own mind, I ducked into a movie theater. When the mood struck, I could sit in the dark for hours on end, as one feature melded into the next, in a loop of endless narrative. The more generic the movie, the more absurd, the more removed from anything realistic or artistic, the more I liked it. I bought my ticket and settled down to watch a romantic picture with an even more ridiculous plot than usual: a showgirl falls in love with a returned war veteran suffering from amnesia. Characters flickered by in ghostly fashion—thoughts still circled me, just beyond my grasp, as if they were emanating from somewhere else. After an hour or so, well before the end of the movie, I stood up and wandered out into twilit streets.

  I was thinking of Miss Fregoli again as I ordered my hamburger and coffee in a near-empty drugstore. In my mind’s eye, her face had now merged with Mrs. Esterhazy’s until they’d become indistinguishable. Miss Fregoli’s death had been a huge blow. But it had also triggered my sporadic writing career, as she’d been the subject of my first paper. For months after her suicide, I’d tormented myself with the fact that she’d killed herself just when I’d thought she was improving. Then walking home from my office one evening, I’d had an idea. In the depths of depression, people cannot summon up the energy or courage for suicide. It’s only when they get better that they can do it. The danger period is not when the depression is at its worst, I realized, but when the patient is pulling out of it. Throughout the night, I’d feverishly written up the case history and my conclusions. Journal after journal had turned the paper down, always finding it “interesting,” but lacking the necessary “clinical rigor.” Eventually, a small journal published by some Midwestern university had accepted the piece.

  It was getting late when I finally returned home, but I wasn’t tired. I felt dizzily on the verge of something, but I didn’t know what. An odor of cigarettes was in the sitting room, although I rarely smoked at home, and hadn’t for weeks. I picked up a coin from the table, flicked it into the air, caught it, then put it down again. Heads or tails? Abby and I had often played this game to decide what to what to do with our evenings. For the second night running, I poured myself a large whiskey, downed it, then poured myself another. By nature, I was an abstemious type—I’d drunk more in the past couple of days than I normally would in a month.

  I eyed the gramophone in the corner of the room. Beside it, the dozen or so records I owned. All Beethoven. All piano sonatas and string quartets. It was this music, more than anything else, which filled the emotional space that had long ago opened up within me. I took a record out of its sleeve, dropped the needle onto it. The grooves were worn down through overplaying now, although to my ears the accentuated crackles only added further meaning, overlaying the music with intimations of its own obsolescence. It sometimes felt as though the whole of a life had been lived within those tolling tones of the slow movement of the “Appassionata.” Other music imposed a mood, but this soaked up one’s own mood, reached to the essence of it, and ultimately to the end of it.

  4

  Again I lay in bed longer than usual. Feeling at a loose end, I flicked through my address book. D’Angelo’s home number was there, although I couldn’t recall his giving it to me. Even as I was dialing it I was wondering why—as though I were observing myself from a distance, with no access to my own motives. But once his wife had handed him the phone, I bluntly cut through the first few awkward exchanges.

  “Something I didn’t tell you the other day. If I seemed in a peculiar mood, it was because I’d had a bit of a shock. Remember my ex-wife?”

  “Yeah. Abby, is it?”

  “She died a few days ago. Cancer. I’d only just found out that afternoon.”

  “Ah. I’m sorry to hear that.”

  I could hear the slight hesitation. She wasn’t my wife any more, after all, and it wasn’t immediately clear whether condolences were due.

  “It threw me, that’s all. I’d had a few drinks. I’m concerned because I really shouldn’t have gone to see Esterhazy. Wasn’t in a fit state to give an opinion.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “I mean it, George.”

  “Listen. You sound like someone who could do with some company. It’s going to be a fine day. Me and Maureen, we’re going to set up the grill in the yard, cook some steak. Why don’t you come over? We’re in Howard Beach, not so far. Get the train from Penn Station. When you get in, call me and I’ll pick you up.”

  A couple of hours later I was in D’Angelo’s car. We were pulling into the drive of a neat, clapboard bungalow on a long, wide avenue of more-or-less identical clapboard bungalows. It had been so long since I’d been out of Manhattan that the quiet suburban streets felt like a foreign country. I hadn’t been angling for an invitation, not consciously anyway, but had nonetheless jumped at D’Angelo’s offer. After the past couple of days, I was surely in need of a perspective other than my own. And this felt like the kind of thing that people should be doing on a weekend. A family man invites an old friend over for a barbecue. What could be more normal than that? But on the train down, it started to seem less clear-cut. I wasn’t really a friend of D’Angelo’s, was I? Not since school, anyway. Why would he invite me over? It wasn’t as if he’d ever done it before.

  The weather had changed; the warm, hazy air felt more like August than late September. D’Angelo’s wife was setting a table in the backyard. Although we’d only met once, she greeted me warmly with a kiss on the cheek. It was the first physical contact I’d had with a woman in months, and it sent a tiny shock through me. D’Angelo got us beers; their six-year-old boy was driving a toy truck across the lawn. The setup seemed so conventional, almost too ordinary, like some magazine advertisement portraying suburban life. I took a long gulp of cold beer that went right to my head—I’d skipped breakfast and was drinking on an empty stomach, I realized.

  “Do you like comic books?”

  Excited at having a guest for lunch, the boy had come and sat beside me while his parents got the meal ready.

  “There weren’t too many of them around when I was a kid. Do you like them?”

  “Yes. My favorite character’s The Shapemaker. Do you know The Shapemaker?”

  “Afraid not.”

  “He’s this man, his real name’s Mike Brown, and one day he took some bad medicine, so now he can change shapes, and he has a friend who’s a police officer like Dad, and sometimes he calls The Shapemaker, and The Shapemaker changes into other people, and helps him catch criminals …”

  The boy’s eyes shone with enthusiasm. We talked more about comic books then suddenly he jumped up and shouted: “Try and catch me!” We ran around the garden for a while until I brought him down with a playful tackle.
Stimulated by the beer and physical exertion, I was invaded by a brief feeling of euphoria. Was this what it was like to have a wife, a child? I glanced at Maureen. She wasn’t wildly attractive, but she had a nice, gentle face. She’d put on weight since I’d first met her, and I could see that she’d end up plump, but right now she had a beautifully voluptuous figure. It felt good to be walking to the table, holding hands with the boy, looking over to his smiling mother. For a moment, I was living in a parallel world—this was my house, my son, my wife, and we were about to have lunch outside on a sunny fall afternoon.

  D’Angelo took me aside before we sat down. “There’s something inside I want to show you first.” We went through to a spotless living room. A photo album sat on a coffee table. D’Angelo picked it up, flicked through it, took out a photograph. “Here, I found this.” He handed it to me. A picnic scene: a young Abby staring straight out of the photo; me looking furtively to one side.

  “Wherever did this come from?”

  “Don’t you remember that time you invited me to a picnic? In Central Park? I found it this morning. I want you to have it.”

  I nodded, shoved the photo into my pocket, and walked back out to the garden.

  The steaks were good. An atmosphere of easy conviviality descended across the table as we chatted about everything and nothing. D’Angelo was in an expansive mood, talking about the boat he was going to buy for weekend outings. He put his hand on my back: “What the heck are you still doing in Manhattan? Why not get out? There’s space here, there’s air here. There’s water. We can go for a swim after lunch. I’ll lend you some trunks. Probably the last time this season.” I nodded—the woozy sense of euphoria still lingered. Why indeed was I still in Manhattan? Why did life have to be so difficult, anguished? Surely it was all here. As simple as having lunch in the garden. Or watching a boy lying on the grass, laughing.