The Horned Man

by James Lasdun

  Elaine’s hand flashed across the bar of light, sweeping over her skirt-tightened thigh and into her lap. The still-visible wrist it was attached to began moving, working busily from side to side. The knee crossed over its twin with a light fall of drapery that exposed a thin, iridescent slip under the skirt. After a while she stood up, going once more to my desk.

  I heard some squirting sounds I couldn’t decipher. A moment later she reappeared by the door and left, closing it behind her.

  I waited several minutes before I dared move. When I did, I found I was soaked through with sweat. I also appeared to have been clutching the metal bar all this time – so tightly the muscles in my hand had all but frozen themselves on to it.

  As I stepped out into the room, I realised what the squirting sounds had been: Elaine had sprayed the place with her lemony-sugary perfume. I saw too what she had been doing in the swivel chair: writing a note. It lay on my desk, folded over with my name on the outside in large, round letters. I picked it up and unfolded it: Why oh why, it read, did Roger have to show up like that? We do seem to be star-crossed! Anyway, this little note is to tell you I’m sorry it didn’t go as planned, but we do have all the time in the world after all, and I’m in your room at least, my gentle friend, drinking in the sight of your things (so you, those cups, so funny and original!). And that beautiful quotation on the wall: it made me feel almost as good about what I did last night as I do about you showing up at lunch like that in your shirt. Anyway I’ve got to run now, so if I don’t catch you later I’ll call you tonight. Till then …?? Darling?? Elaine.

  This seemed to indicate a new depth of strangeness. What lunacy could have possessed such a sensible-seeming woman to behave like this? The thing that made it peculiarly disturbing was the way she appeared to have hallucinated my acquiescence in her fantastical scenario.

  I went home; confused and distantly alarmed.

  My apartment felt oppressively empty. When Carol left, she took with her every shred of evidence connecting us, from the furniture and the kitchen stuff she’d brought with her, to our wedding photo from City Hall.

  Bereft of her, the place had languished. Piles of dusty papers and clothes grew over the floor and furniture. As soon as I cleared one up, another would appear somewhere else: apparently I was intent on creating disorder behind my own back. Sometimes, though, the rooms seemed to fill with a ghostly memory of her. The staleness would go from the air. The bookshelves would seem crowded again with her books on medieval art and thought. I would have the distinct sense that if I were to open the bedroom closet in such a way as to catch it unawares, her side of it would be filled again with her clothes; the neatly folded piles cool and soft, scented with the fragrance that was not so much the residue of a soap or perfume, as the emanation of a fine and pure spirit.

  I went into the kitchen; thought of cooking a meal, then decided not to. I wandered back into the living room; picked up a sweater from a stack of things on a recessed ledge beside the sofa … Under it lay some printed pages. A phrase caught my eye: Elaine’s pale breasts and thighs … Amazed, I picked up the pages. They were the typescript of the story I had tried to write a few months ago – S for Salmon. I’d forgotten I had used the name Elaine.

  The story was about a man having an affair. Returning to his office after a lunchtime assignation with his mistress, he finds a message from his wife asking him to bring home a wild salmon from the nearby fishmonger. He goes there right away to be sure of getting one before they run out. It’s a hot day; the office fridge turns out to be too small to accommodate the big fish; so he takes it down to the storage room, the only cool place in the building. Seeing a glue-trap covered in cockroaches, he puts the fish in a metal filing cabinet, selecting the S-Z drawer. Later, he leaves the office, hurrying to get the train his wife’s expecting him on. Only as he pulls out of the station does he realise he has left the fish behind in the filing cabinet. It’s a Friday; the office is locked all weekend. The story ends with him on the train, guiltily picturing the fish – a beautiful, rainbow-mailed creature with dark pink flesh in its slit belly – dulling and decomposing in its metal tomb, while insects swarm over the cabinet, trying to get inside.

  The line that had caught my eye came from the assignation at the beginning, where the man and his mistress are making love in a hotel room. Apparently I had named the mistress Elaine.

  In the light of what had happened today, I had to wonder if there was any significance in this. Bearing in mind what I had learned in my sessions with Dr Schrever, I tried to think what the name had meant to me when I chose it. Had I been thinking of Elaine Jordan? If so, was that because I had placed her, unconsciously, in the category of plausible sexual partner? And if that were the case, had I perhaps all this time been emitting signals of sexual interest in her, without knowing it – signals that had become transformed, in her inflamed imagination, into the sense of an actual, ongoing liaison between us? And if all this were so, did that mean that under the complete indifference I believed I felt toward her, I did in fact harbor feelings of desire?

  As I was turning this over in my mind, Mr Kurwen’s first TV came on. A moment later I heard the second, even louder than the first. There was a new level of assault in the volume; a suggestion of deliberate affront. I decided to go up and complain.

  This time Mr Kurwen’s glass eye was out. The white-lashed pucker of the eyelid over the empty socket struck me nearly dumb. Flakes of dried food fluttered at his mouth, impaled on his white stubble. A fetid stench reared up out of the hallway behind him. He scanned me aggressively with his good eye, then, to my surprise, gave me a rueful smile.

  ‘Better late than never. C’mon in.’ C’mawn … He had the old-time New York accent; a rarity in Manhattan these days. The lapdogs yapped at his heels.

  As he ushered me in, I felt his hand tousling my hair. I looked back, astonished.

  ‘Go on, go on,’ he said gruffly, waving me on into the living room. There was a gold carpet; thick floral curtains. The smell – canine, human, with a tinge of something absolutely unearthly too – was so intense I felt myself gagging. The heat was overpowering too. And the TV, dueling with its partner in the adjoining bedroom, filled the place with an earsplitting din.

  ‘Fix yourself a drink.’ He pointed at a cabinet where an assortment of ancient bottles presided over some dusty cut-glass tumblers.

  I shook my head. ‘The TVs,’ I said. ‘Do you think you could turn them down?’

  He cupped a hand to his ear.

  ‘The TVs!’ I bellowed.

  He gave a guilty, impish grin, fumbling for the volume knob and turning it down.

  ‘I turn ‘em up loud just to keep the little prick downstairs on his toes,’ he said, going off to turn down the one in the bedroom.

  A pang of hurt went through me at that. Not that I had any reason to care what this old man thought of me. But the only real news you ever get of yourself is what comes inadvertently from other people.

  I was curious who he thought I was, if not the ‘prick downstairs’.

  ‘Anyways,’ he said, returning, ‘I think it’s in the kitchen somewhere.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘My eye. That’s where I last had it. I was boiling it in the pan. I must’ve put it somewheres by accident.’

  I got the idea that whoever I was, I was expected to go in the kitchen and look for the missing eye. I went in there, leaving the other eye staring at a laxative commercial on the TV.

  The kitchen floor was sticky with grime; I felt like a fly walking on flypaper. I saw the eye right away, staring up at me from under an old cupboard on which the green paint had broken down into a mosaic of tiny hard blobs. The eye was the size of a golf ball. I picked it up, meaning to give it to Mr Kurwen, when I decided to pocket it instead. I was vaguely thinking it might come in useful later on, as leverage over the TVs.

  ‘What is it with the guy downstairs?’ I called out.

  ‘He’s a prick.’

&nbs
p; ‘But in what way?’ I went back into the living room, looking squarely at Mr Kurwen.

  ‘Whaddaya mean in what way? He’s a prick! Mimi talked to the wife the day she moved out on him. She told me the guy had to’ve been a total prick.’

  ‘What exactly did she say about him – the wife?’

  ‘What is this, a Q and A? How the fuck would I know what she said?’

  ‘I thought –’

  But all of a sudden I felt tired of the deception. I had an overwhelming desire to reveal myself to the old man; to come out, as it were, from under my desk.

  ‘Listen,’ I told him, ‘I’m not who you think I am.’

  He peered at me, not understanding at first, then disbelieving, then angry, with a pale flame of old man’s fear wavering over the anger.

  ‘What is this?’

  ‘I’m the guy downstairs. The prick downstairs. I just came up to complain about the noise of your TVs. You must have been expecting someone else, right?’

  ‘You’re not Corven?’

  ‘No, I’m not Corven.’

  He looked at me mistrustfully. ‘I don’t see so good no more,’ he muttered.

  ‘I’m sorry about that.’

  ‘Diabetes.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘On top of my wife dying I have to become a fucking diabetic.’

  ‘That’s rough. I’m sorry.’

  He stood there in the doorway, the light glinting round the stubbly perimeter of his face, while I made my way through the hallway, where the airless, lightless space squeezed the stench and heat to a suffocating intensity.

  ‘So would you mind keeping the volume down?’ I asked, turning back to him from the front door.

  He grimaced. His swaggerer’s courage had returned to him now that he saw I was going to leave without beating him to a pulp.

  ‘I’ll think about it,’ he said nastily, but then took a frightened step back.

  ‘It would make a huge difference to me, Mr Kurwen, really.’

  His face went abruptly slack. He turned and hobbled away, an old man, saying nothing.

  I left, depressed by him, but glad of the plaindealing way in which I had acquitted myself. It gave me a pleasant feeling of large-spiritedness.

  Back downstairs I read the phrase that had caught my eye again: Elaine’s pale breasts and thighs … I realised I had pictured my protagonist’s mistress in the most stereotypical terms; as a torso without occupation, personality or history: just an embodiment of the idea of lustful infidelity. What if I were to model her on the real Elaine, I wondered; would that bring this stillborn effort to life? But how would I convey the real Elaine – the transcendent ordinariness she projected, even in the midst of her bizarre behavior today? And if I succeeded, how then would I account for the man’s attraction to her? He didn’t have much personality either, come to think of it. He didn’t even have a name. In the terse style I had opted for, I referred to him merely as ‘he’. I decided there and then to name him. I picked up a pen, crossed out the first ‘he’ and, with a feeling of amusement, replaced it with the word ‘Kadmilos’.

  At once something seemed to stir in the sheaf of pages; a little quiver of life … With Kadmilos/Trumilcik in play, the figure of Elaine suddenly seemed capable of making the transition from erotic projection to flesh and blood. Furthermore, conceived as the real Elaine, but looked at through the eyes of Kadmilos, her very ordinariness acquired a sudden allure.

  I thought of the three of us – myself, Trumilcik and Elaine – each present there via our more or less phantasmagorical versions of each other, our recondite emblems of ourselves. And for a moment I felt I was at the point of grasping what it was that made the full unfolding of another human being into one’s consciousness so painfully dazzling that one spent one’s life contriving ways of filtering them, blocking them out, setting up labyrinthine passageways between oneself and them, kidnapping their images for various exploitative purposes of one’s own, and generally doing all one could to fend off their problematic, objective reality.

  The phone rang.

  I let the machine pick up. Elaine’s voice came into the room.

  ‘Hi there, me again. Guess I missed you. I hope you got my note. Well …’ She sounded a bit forlorn, but then went on in a firmer tone: ‘Call me would you, Lawrence, when you get in? Doesn’t matter how late.’ She left her number and hung up.

  It was only now that I thought of the message I had erased the previous night without listening to it. I realised that it had probably been from Elaine. I tried to surmise what she could have said, and how I could have unwittingly responded to it in such a way as to unleash the delusionary behavior that followed.

  At once I remembered the phrase in her note about me turning up at lunch like that in your shirt. An idea began taking shape in my mind. It was absurd, I realised, as its outlines clarified themselves, and yet there was a certain mad logic about it that didn’t seem out of keeping with the side of her personality Elaine had displayed this afternoon.

  She had made some kind of wild declaration of love, I conjectured, followed by a proposal that if I reciprocated her feelings, I should indicate the fact by joining her for lunch dressed in a particular shirt – presumably the very one I happened to be wearing.

  What an elaborate rigmarole! And yet I found I could imagine her doing all this. Suppose she had been attracted to me for some time, I thought; suppose I had unconsciously been giving her encouraging signals; suppose then that her feelings had grown to such passionate proportions that she simply had to confront me with them so as to break the deadlock of what, from her point of view, might have seemed an agonisingly slow-burning flirtation that was in danger of missing its moment if one of us didn’t act soon. With the enormous courage it must have taken for a woman who presumably wasn’t excessively confident of her own attractive-ness, she had crossed the Rubicon of natural inhibition and blurted out her feelings on to my answering machine, risking the pain of a rebuff, from which she had touchingly tried to protect both of us by asking me to give my answer in a manner that would allow the misunderstanding, if that was what it turned out to be, to sink into the oblivion of history without any echoing residue of words to keep its memory alive. I was just to show up wearing a certain shirt.

  I thought of how she must have felt sitting there in the faculty dining room, anxiously waiting, unsure perhaps of her choice of outfit, her new hairdo; a little dazed, still, by what she had done, yet elated by it, carried forward by the momentum of her liberated passion, looking at her watch, thinking that at the very worst she would have a story to tell her grandchildren if she were lucky enough – blessed enough – to have any, and then looking up to see, as if in a vision, me, walking uncertainly toward her in my black-buttoned blue shirt, a blue wave of love, rippling through her with the miraculous force of an answered prayer …

  Such are the phantoms we create out of each other. And although as phantoms went it was an improvement on the ‘prick downstairs’, the idea of it left me with the same sense of depleted reality, as though I had been improperly replicated, and grown correspondingly lighter and flimsier in myself. No wonder, I thought, that so many people end up feeling like the human equivalent of a Bulgarian coin.

  CHAPTER 4

  ‘Before we start, I’d like you to take a look at something.’

  I felt a stirring in the air behind me, then a disturbance in my field of vision as Dr Schrever’s hand crossed over my prone head, holding a small piece of paper. My heart gave an unaccountable little thump.

  The piece of paper was a check. I had signed and mailed it to her the day before.

  ‘Do you notice something strange about it?’ she asked.

  Had I signed someone else’s name? No; the signature looked all right, unless I was truly going out of my mind. The amount was the same as I always made out the checks for. And the date looked right too.

  ‘What’s wrong with it?’ I asked.

  ‘You can’t see?’

&nbs
p; ‘No.’

  ‘Look who it’s made out to.’

  I saw then that I had made the check out to a Dr Schroeder instead of Dr Schrever. The error made me laugh out loud.

  ‘Why did I do that?’

  ‘Why do you think you did it?’

  ‘I have absolutely no idea!’

  ‘Do you know somebody called Schroeder?’

  ‘Not that I can think of.’

  ‘A student of yours, perhaps?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Someone from England?’

  I couldn’t think of anyone by that name.

  ‘I wonder why it made you laugh when you saw it?’

  ‘I suppose there’s something inherently comical about these little slips.’

  ‘I’m wondering if you laughed because you recognised some hostility you felt toward me, that embarrasses you to have to acknowledge?’

  I told her I didn’t think this was so; she didn’t pursue the point. I corrected the check and returned it to her.

  I had come in thinking I was going to talk about Elaine, but something had snagged on the current of my thoughts, drawing them in another direction. After a moment I realised what it was.

  ‘When you moved your hand over my head just now, I felt myself flinching. I must have thought for a moment that you were going to tousle my hair. My stepfather used to do that. It was his one sign of affection …’

  While I was talking I remembered how Mr Kurwen had tousled my hair last night as I went past him into his living room, and I realised that at the back of my mind I had been thinking about my childhood ever since then.

  Instead of going on to talk about that, though, I interrupted myself to tell Dr Schrever about my encounter with Mr Kurwen; how he had mistaken me for someone he’d asked to come and help find his glass eye, how in my dislike of confrontation I had half gone along with this error, but how I had then come clean to him instead, telling him he’d made a mistake, and asking him, in my capacity as the ‘prick downstairs’, to keep his TV down.