by James Lasdun
I was reluctant to proceed from there to the next logical step: that I had been observed from within the room. Aside from everything else, it seemed a practical impossibility that a second person could have been in the room all the time I was there; unheard, unseen, unsuspected even, by me. For form’s sake, more than out of any conviction that Trumilcik could have been hiding in there, I opened the little storage closet where I had seen the air conditioner and Barbara Hellermann’s clothes. The space showed no obvious sign of intrusion, and I saw that even if someone had been in there with the door ajar, they would have seen nothing but a thin strip of wall with the owl-face of a light switch and the piece of paper with the quotation from Louisa May Alcott. Anyway, if there really was someone frequenting the room on a clandestine basis, they would surely have had to come up with a less obvious way of concealing themselves – should the need to do so arise – than a closet.
But the fact remained that the document, which had been in the computer less than twelve hours before, was no longer there, and that even if I had not been observed reading it, someone had been in the room between my leaving it last night and returning this morning.
Uncertain what to make of any of this, I left to teach my class. We were reading The Bacchae, with a view to seeing whether Pentheus, the ‘chilly’ opponent (and victim) of Dionysus, might be reclaimable as a prototype for a new kind of male hero. An interesting discussion arose on the death-walk sequence in the last act, where Pentheus, apparently mad, puts on women’s clothing and sets off for what turns out to be his own violent destruction. I remember that several of us discerned an undertow of something dignified, almost majestic in his behavior, counteracting the framing tone of mockery and humiliation cast by the triumphantly scornful Dionysus, as though, at the point of delivering on its hackneyed message about not offending the gods, the play had inadvertently stumbled on some larger, deeper truth about the tyranny of the supposedly ‘natural’ laws of gender, and was surreptitiously offering Pentheus as a martyr figure in the struggle against this tyranny. At any rate, it was a good class, lively and stimulating, and I left it feeling mildly elated.
From there I went to have lunch. I was carrying my tray to one of the small tables by the window (I usually sat by myself in the faculty dining room), when I caught sight of a woman looking up at me from a table in the corner of the room. It took me a moment to realise that it was Elaine Jordan, the school attorney. She had had her hair set in a new way, and in contrast to her usual self-effacing outfits of shapeless acrylic, she was wearing a tailored jacket and skirt with a frilled silk blouse.
I was about to nod and continue on, when I noticed something tentatively solicitous about her look, as though she was hoping I would eat at her table. I moved in her direction, and saw that this was in fact the case. Her expression grew more openly welcoming as I approached, and when I asked if I could join her, she replied with a wordless, intent smile. I smiled back at her, feeling vaguely under an obligation to match her intensity.
‘So,’ she said after a moment, ‘here you are.’
‘Yes.’
Another exchange of smiles followed. I busied myself for a moment arranging my lunch on the table. I hadn’t eaten with Elaine before; had had almost no contact with her in fact, other than at the weekly meetings of our committee. She wasn’t the kind of person who makes much of an impression on you – nothing obviously striking about her personality or looks to stall your thoughts or draw them back to her after she was out of your immediate orbit. As with Dr Schrever, I wouldn’t have been able to say how old she was, what color her eyes were, what shade of brown her hair was, without looking at her. I didn’t have an opinion of her, I suppose, because at some level I didn’t consider her a person of whom I needed to form an opinion. I wondered now if perhaps she had perceived this indifference (it amounted to that), and in the gently insistent way of certain meek but not after all entirely self-abnegating spirits, had summoned me over to her table in order, ever so gently, to reprove me for this: to make me acknowledge her as a human being, not merely a part of the administrative machinery.
I felt immediately chastened by this thought, as though I had been guilty of downright disrespect, and I was eager to show my willingness to make amends. I presumed this would take the form of having her talk to me at length about herself.
‘How’s your work going?’ I asked, attempting to get the ball rolling right away.
‘Good. And yours?’
‘Fine. But what are you – what have you been doing?’
‘Oh – not much. Surviving! How about you?’
There was an odd intensity, still, in her look, that made me wonder whether I had in fact appraised the situation correctly. She seemed nervous but at the same time oddly exuberant – triumphant almost. She patted her hair nervously; adjusted the collar of her tailored jacket – charcoal, with thin turquoise stripes – wafting a billow of surprisingly sweet perfume in my direction.
‘Not a lot,’ I said; ‘waiting for winter to end.’
We both chuckled loudly, as if there were something hilarious about that. Then there was another drawn-out silence. Elaine looked down at the table. She was smiling oddly to herself, perhaps debating whether or not to say something that was on her mind. Then, flashing her eyes candidly up at me, she said softly:
‘I’m glad you came, Lawrence.’
I was a little startled by that. I didn’t want to believe what my instincts were beginning to tell me, but in case they were correct I felt I should do something to neutralise the situation as quickly as possible. To buy time, I filled my mouth with food, and began thinking furiously of something to say, but my mind was an absolute blank.
By luck, Roger Freeman, the head of our committee, appeared at our table just then.
‘Greetings,’ he said.
He sat down, unloading his tray with the ease of a man who feels welcome wherever he goes. Glancing at Elaine, he evidently took in the change in her appearance. For a moment he seemed to be considering the propriety of commenting on it. I assumed he would suppress the impulse, as I had, but to my surprise he spread a cheerful smile across his face.
‘That’s a new hairstyle. It suits you.’ He turned to me: ‘Don’t you agree, Lawrence?’
‘Yes, it’s very nice.’
Elaine thanked us with a little ironic swipe at her hair, and we all laughed.
As we conversed, it struck me that there had been something deliberate and self-conscious about Roger’s remark. Almost as if by saying something that in another man might have sounded questionable, he was demonstrating his consummate probity; showing that he possessed, in himself, some purifying quality that could render any wrong word or gesture innocent merely by virtue of the fact that he was its instrument of expression. I felt how much of a piece with this probity all his other qualities were – his dapperness, his cheerful, sparkling eye, the healthy flush of his wrinkled face. The fanciful idea came to me that anything he did would so thoroughly partake of this wholesomeness, that even if he were to do something on the face of it utterly crass or gross, such as sliding his hand up Elaine’s skirt, the action would become instantly so blameless that nobody would bat an eyelid.
‘Anyway,’ he continued, lowering his voice, ‘on a more pressing note; we need to meet again A.S.A.P. I’ve told the others. There’s been a formal complaint about – about the person we were discussing last time. I’ll give you the details when we meet. Any chance you could make it on Monday afternoon, Lawrence? Is that one of your days?’
It would mean canceling Dr Schrever – a hundred bucks down the drain unless she could reschedule, which she usually couldn’t.
‘It’s rather urgent,’ Roger prompted me.
‘That’s fine,’ I said, ‘no problem.’
‘Good.’
In the pause that followed, Elaine glanced at me, lightly curving the corners of her lips in what seemed to be a look of secret solidarity.
‘Roger, who is this Trumilcik
guy?’ I heard myself ask. ‘You mentioned him at the last meeting.’
‘Trumilcik! Oh boy …’
After repeating what I had already learned from Marsha, he embarked on one of his concise, précis-like appraisals of the case. Though I was naturally interested, I was somewhat distracted by the continuing oddness of Elaine’s demeanor, and I remember little about what Roger said other than that it left me feeling not much the wiser as far as Trumilcik was concerned.
‘Part of it undoubtedly was that he came from a different culture’, Roger concluded, ‘with a different set of values, and we worked hard to make allowances for that, didn’t we Elaine?’
‘Did we ever!’ Elaine assented, dutifully rolling her eyes, though I could tell she wasn’t remotely interested in the discussion. Her gaze returned to me; rather wistfully now, I thought.
‘What happened to him after he left?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know. He had a wife, if you can believe it, someone he met over here, though I think she’d already thrown him out by the time this all erupted. How come you’re interested?’
‘Just curious.’
I had noticed him glancing over at the clock as he spoke. Not wanting to risk being left alone with Elaine again, I hurried down my lunch and made my excuses.
In my building, as I headed back to my room, I heard my name called. I turned to see Amber, the graduate intern, standing in the corridor behind me.
‘Hi,’ I said, keeping my distance.
‘I was wondering if I could ask you a big favor …’
As always, her presence, somnolent-eyed yet keenly projected into the space about her, unnerved me.
‘Of course.’
‘Would you mind reading something I’ve written? It’s sort of in your field …’
In the fluorescent light of the corridor her shorn orange hair and gold-freckled, bluish-white skin had an unnatural, pallid luminosity. Her awkwardness seemed genuine enough, but it didn’t diminish the impression of fundamental poise and confidence underlying it. She seemed to proffer the chalice of herself with a strange, innocent blatancy. As a male in a position of power, one had to be vigilant over the inclination of one’s eye to stray at these moments, or the tendency of one’s voice to convey impulses unconnected to the ostensible matter in hand. And as a member of the Sexual Harassment Committee, I was doubly aware of the need for this vigilance. Out of the mass of mental events that occurred during exchanges such as this, only a very few were admissible into the field of acknowledged reality. The rest constituted a kind of vast, unauthorised apocrypha.
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Just put it in my box.’
She thanked me, and I continued on my way, reflexively checking over what I had said for any unintended innuendo, and concluding that I had nothing to worry about.
Back in my office I found myself once again puzzling about the disappearance of Trumilcik’s document. As I looked at the computer on its cumbrous desk, I was struck for the first time by the arrangement of furniture in that part of the room. The two oversized desks had been pushed together in such a way as to contain, I realised now, an enclosed space at their center. How large it might be I couldn’t tell from the outside, but I was suddenly curious.
I went over and pulled at one of the desks. Nothing budged at first, and it wasn’t until I heaved at it with all my strength, bracing my foot against a raised rib on the side of the other desk, that I was able to slide it a few inches. I peered in through the gap: there did seem to be a sizable space in there. I prised the desks far enough apart to squeeze inside.
The moment I was in there, I had the sense of having entered a human habitation. It was perhaps five feet square, not more than three feet high. Balled up on one side was something soft that, as I held it out in the light, turned out to be a sheet. It was stained, stiffened in parts by paint and God knows what other substances. As I shook it open it gave off a staleness that seemed to me unmistakably male. Something else fell out of it; hard and heavy: a metal rod about fifteen inches long, with a thread at one end, as though perhaps it had formed part of the construction of the desk; some sort of ferrule or reinforcing rod.
I sat there, hunched and strangely excited, my heart beating hard in my chest. Was it possible that Trumilcik had been sitting here, silent and immobile all the time I was here last night? Against the improbability of that conjecture was the distinct, palpable human atmosphere of the place – something acrid, masculine, faintly derelict.
To get a better sense of how he would have felt if he had been there, I grasped an inner strut on the desk I had shifted and, with a mighty effort, managed to close myself in.
It was dark, but not quite pitch black: ahead of me at eye level was a slit of light, about three feet long and a third of an inch wide, where someone had apparently forced open a gap in the joint between the side wall of the desk and its overhanging surface. Through it I could see a thin cross-section of the room, that included part of a bookshelf and most of the wall with the door. I couldn’t see the printer, but I could see a strip of the cabinet it was sitting on, so that I would have seen the middle six inches of my body had I been sitting there spying on myself last night, and would certainly have guessed that I was doing something with the printer.
I could see in its entirety the bowl full of bits and pieces where I had found the Bulgarian coin, and the disturbing thought struck me that it was perhaps not just last night that Trumilcik had sat there in secret observing me, but on other occasions too; numerous perhaps, but even if not, requiring a reappraisal of my entire sense of my occupancy of this office: an acknowledgment that at any given moment as I went about my business, imagining I was alone there, I might in fact have been under close, and – I sensed – not especially friendly, scrutiny.
I thought of the things Trumilcik might have seen or heard me do, and tried to observe myself doing them from his point of view. Two hours a week were set aside for conferences with individual students. Since I made these occasions as public and impersonal as possible, keeping the door open in accordance with Elaine’s recommendations, I doubted whether Trumilcik would have seen anything to interest him. More disturbing was the thought of him overhearing some of the things I might have said aloud in private, particularly during the phonecalls I had made at the beginning of term, before I broke myself of the habit. These were calls to my own machine at home; silent hangups initially, made simply so that I wouldn’t have to return to a non-flashing machine (I would delete all messages without listening, as I still did), but then for a period consisting of little friendly messages to myself, first from me, but then, as the sense of the need to inhibit myself in what I took to be an entirely private act diminished, from Carol – my imitation of her crisp phrasing and intonation, if not her actual voice – telling me she loved me, begging me to return her calls, until I realised this was not a particularly healthy thing to be doing, and I stopped. What would Trumilcik have made of those calls, I wondered uneasily, if he had heard them?
As I squatted there in the near-darkness of his hiding place, I heard a knock at the door.
I didn’t want whoever it was to hear me call out ‘Come in’ in a mysteriously muffled voice, only to find me emerging from under the desk as they opened the door. Nor did I want my invitation to come in to be preceded by a hurried shifting of furniture, so I said nothing at all and waited for the person to go away. But instead of retreating footsteps, I heard another knock. Again I said nothing. The strip of door I could see through my slit contained the handle, and to my dismay I now saw the handle turn and the door begin to open.
A figure slipped in, leaving the door behind it ajar. All I could see was a section of waist and hip, but they were covered in a material of gray wool with turquoise pinstripes that I recognised immediately as Elaine’s. What on earth was she doing? I sat frozen at the slit, my eyes wide open, my heart pounding. She started moving about the room; looking at things, I supposed, checking out the books, objects, pictures, the way you do in so
meone else’s office. All the while she was humming to herself – a tuneless but jaunty drone, as if she were feeling on top of the world. I saw her hips cross back from the shelves to the side of the door, where she paused and after a moment stopped humming too. She must have been reading the quotation from Louisa May Alcott. She gave a long, pleased-sounding hmmm. Then, smoothing her skirt over her behind, she moved on, disappearing from view.
For the first time now I noticed a number of small, unobtrusive mirrors, placed here and there in my field of vision. I couldn’t see much in them, but they had evidently been positioned to pick up movement in any corner of the room, so that although I could no longer see Elaine, I could tell that she had crossed to my own desk and was now standing still – presumably examining its surface. After a moment she crossed back and sat down in the swivel chair I kept for students, turning around in it, so that her thighs and knees suddenly swung directly into my line of vision, about four feet from my face.
What a stupendously odd situation to find myself in! I felt what it must be like to wear a chador, a yashmak; to go about the world revealing nothing of yourself, and seeing only the equivalent of this truncated strip of Elaine’s midriff. And, continuing the line of thought I had been pursuing just a few minutes earlier, I was struck by the notion that this state of affairs wasn’t after all so different from the normal manner in which men like myself were getting accustomed to conducting our relations with other people; either totally concealing ourselves, or else revealing only what we ourselves hadn’t yet deemed inadmissible in civilised discourse; an aperture no less narrow than the one I was presently peeping through, and getting thinner by the day, so that all one ever really acknowledged of another person was the equivalent of what I was looking at now.