by James Lasdun
Was that why I had come here tonight? Partly. But I was aware of something else too: something obscurely, soothingly expiatory in deferring to another person’s version of reality. As if there were something significant to be gained by giving myself to this woman out of nothing more than sheer self-sacrificing agreeableness.
I turned to her. She looked at me expectantly. I felt her vulnerability; her strange humility too, and under it the throb of a real passion: incomprehensible to me, but undeniable.
‘I brought you something,’ I heard myself say, standing up.
With a vague feeling of annoyance, I realised I was going to take the bag with Carol’s sweater in it from my briefcase and give it to Elaine. I did this.
She unwrapped it. ‘You got me a sweater!’ she said, beaming. ‘Thank you Lawrence. Thanks so much!’
She held it up against her chest.
‘That’s just so gorgeous! I’m so flattered you would think to do a thing like that!’
‘Why don’t you try it on?’
‘I will. But not over this. Wait right there.’
She went out of the room. I heard her go upstairs. A moment later, I wandered up myself.
‘Can I see up here?’ I called out.
‘Help yourself.’
There was a spare room with a single bed on a gray fitted carpet; bare walls. The bathroom next to it was green tile and chrome; spotless, with fluffy green towels neatly folded over the rack. I knocked on the bedroom door.
‘Oh … Come in.’
This also was strangely featureless, like a hotel room; the bed immaculately flat and smooth under its gold-brown bedspread; the bedside table with its brass reading lamp, china tissue dispenser, red-digit radio-alarm. A black TV faced it from the dresser opposite. There was an infant’s wooden rocker with a rag-doll asprawl in it, but even that seemed like something that might have been supplied along with the rest of the fixtures. The only noticeably personal touch was a small, hand-painted wooden box on the dressing table. Otherwise the aspiration here seemed to be toward total anonymity.
Elaine stepped out from behind the opened closet door, smoothing the sweater down over her front.
‘What do you think?’
It was tight on her: she must have been a couple of sizes larger than Carol. But the sight of her in it had an immediate effect on me. I saw there were possibilities in this situation that I hadn’t considered. It wasn’t that she resembled my wife, but she put me in mind of her, and the very lack of any powerful singularity about herself or her home, allowed the thought to grow more vivid.
‘You look spectacular,’ I told her.
She coughed and reddened, patting her chest.
‘Thank you!’
I was struck again by the curious dominion her version of me seemed to possess over her. In deferring to her sense of what existed between us, I appeared to have put myself in a position of paradoxical power.
I took her hands in mine and drew her close, smiling at her. She smiled back. Then with a playful laugh she freed one of her hands and placed it on the little painted box.
‘Guess what I keep in here.’
‘What?’
‘Guess!’
‘Your husband?’
She gave a peal of laughter. ‘You are so funny!’
‘What then?’
‘What would be the most precious thing I could have in my possession, other than yourself?’
‘I can’t imagine.’
‘Oh Lawrence! Your letter, of course!’
I had never written her a letter. I must have looked disconcerted.
‘Did I say something wrong?’ she asked.
I felt instinctively that I should try to conceal my puzzlement, at least until I had figured out what was going on.
‘Not at all,’ I managed, ‘I’m – I guess I’m just – moved.’
A look of joy blazed from her eyes.
‘Let’s eat.’
As if the mystery of this letter were not enough to keep me thoroughly distracted for the rest of the evening, something even more disturbing arose soon after. As I passed my open briefcase on my way into the dining room, I happened to glimpse Barbara Hellermann’s volume of Shakespeare, which I had brought to read on the train home.
‘Incidentally,’ I said, ‘did you know Barbara Hellermann?’
She looked blank for a moment.
‘Oh Lord – you mean the woman who got killed?’
‘She was killed?’
‘You didn’t know?’
‘No.’ With an obscure apprehensiveness, I asked what had happened.
‘Some crazy guy in the subway attacked her. She went into a coma, then died just a few days later. I knew her to say hello, but –’
‘– Did they catch the guy?’
‘I don’t believe they did.’
‘How did he – how did he kill her?’
‘He hit her with a steel bar.’
Over the cauliflower quiche I tried to maintain the appearance of a besotted admirer, asking Elaine about her life and nodding interestedly as she told me about it, but my mind was elsewhere. I was preoccupied with the question of how soon I could decently leave, and whether there would be time to stop off at my office before the last train home. The result was that I took in only snatches of what she was saying to me, my growing consternation blocking out most of her words, just as the desks the other day had blocked out most of her body. Our relationship seemed to be developing a peculiar truncated quality.
‘I’m a rebel, is what I am,’ I heard her say at one point, ‘people just don’t realise it.’
I nodded, narrowing my eyes as if in appreciation of a subtly astute analysis, though I had no idea what had prompted her remark.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I can see that.’
‘Does it bother you?’
‘No.’
‘So I wasn’t wrong, then, to do it?’
I racked my brains for an echo, a trace imprint of what she had just been talking about, but all I could think of were the words she had uttered a few minutes earlier; he hit her with a steel bar, that had sent me into this distracted state in the first place. A steel bar … I was trying to deny to myself the likelihood of a connection between this and the rod I had found under the desks in my office, but against this effort came wave upon wave of strange, surging apprehensiveness.
‘Not at all,’ I hazarded in answer to Elaine’s question, ‘I think you were absolutely right to do it.’
She nodded: glad, apparently, of my approval for whatever it was she had done, but seemingly placed by it in some difficult new quandary:
‘So what should I tell them?’
‘Well … What do you want to tell them?’
‘I’m not sure. Sometimes I almost feel like telling them to go take a running jump!’
‘Then that’s what you should do!’
So it continued: Elaine supplying the talk, me tuning out despite my best efforts to follow. At one point I realised from the way she was looking at me, and from a dim, lingering sense of a rising intonation at the end of the last phrase that had drifted by (no more intelligibly than the hum of the refrigerator), that she had just asked me another question.
‘Well?’ she said, after a longish pause.
It occurred to me that in my capacity as projected apparition, I was perhaps above having to observe the petty conventions of rational or continuous discourse. I could say or do whatever I felt like, and Elaine would adapt pliably to my whim.
I put my hand under her chin and drew her head toward mine. She seemed startled, but as I’d predicted, she acquiesced in the gesture. I kissed her lips, then probed into her mouth with my tongue. We were seated on her black-stained dining room chairs, a little too far apart to embrace, our conjoined heads forming an apex over the tile-floored space between us. A multitude of things tumbled about in my mind as we kissed. I tried to focus on the sweater-clad torso beside me and think of Carol. For a moment I felt almost present in
the physical reality of what I was doing, but then the distractions impinged again: the letter I had never written; the steel rod I had mistaken for an innocent component of my office furniture … Meanwhile the kiss continued. Sooner or later, I supposed, I would catch up with it – find out what it meant to me, what it had accomplished, if anything. Right now it existed only for Elaine. Judging by the frantic vigor of her response, she was enjoying it.
‘That’s your answer,’ I said, pulling away. I stood up. ‘And now I have to get going.’
She blinked at me, baffled but unprotesting.
While we waited for my taxi she became rapidly subdued. No doubt my erratic behavior had finally got to her. She had a large capacity for pain, I sensed, if also for the endurance of pain. There was something softly monumental about her, living out here by herself like a pioneer woman out on the plains. Though in all but body I was already halfway up Mulberry Street to the dark campus, my hand gripping the key to Room 106, my nerves preparing themselves for the shock of a possible encounter with a startled Trumilcik, I had enough regard for her to attempt a gracious exit.
‘I’d like to see you again,’ I said.
‘Would you?’
I put my arms around her.
‘Let’s go away somewhere, shall we? For a weekend?’
She nodded.
‘I’ll organise it,’ I said.
I kissed her again. This time I felt a wave of desire; unexpectedly powerful. I don’t know why; perhaps the feelings of guilt and pity she’d succeeded in arousing in me had supplied the component missing before. With a familiar swarming sensation, my center of gravity shifted downward from my head. My mouth and hands, answerable to a new set of priorities, acquired a new boldness. I felt them slide over her breasts and down across her skirt to her groin.
She pulled back a little, registering the change.
‘What are you doing?’
‘This,’ I said with a smile, tumbling us both into the oatmeal denim couch. It was always amazing to me, the changes of consciousness that came over one at these moments. I felt abruptly free of inhibitions.
She gazed up at me with a look of helpless bewilderment.
‘It’s all right,’ I said.
‘Is it?’
‘We’ve been wanting this for a long time, haven’t we?’
Even my voice sounded different; its timbre suddenly playful and brazen, as though I had entered a state of irrepressible good spirits; one that couldn’t but be irresistibly infectious to anyone near me.
‘I don’t mean just this,’ I said, ‘but this too …’
She looked at me, saying nothing.
I kissed her very gently on her lips and throat. She lay unresponsive, then turned her face from under mine.
‘No?’ I asked, grinning. ‘No?’
‘No!’ she said, with sudden firmness.
I kissed her again.
Frowning at me, she pushed me off her, and stood up abruptly from the sofa. She looked extremely upset.
A little later I was striding up Mulberry Street, key prematurely in hand as I had envisaged, my mind plunging forward into the question of what exactly I should do with Trumilcik’s rod when I retrieved it from under the desks.
Naturally my first thought was to take it to the police, and tell them what I knew about Trumilcik. But as I imagined how my list of Trumilcik’s manifestations might sound to a New York police detective, I began to have doubts. Someone who hadn’t seen the bookmark, the phone bill, the coin, or the computer file in the first place, might not find the disappearance of these things all that compelling. The hideout under the desks might look to them like nothing more than empty space. And to a person without the sophistication to connect a certain kind of womanising with a capacity for homicidal misogyny, the presence of a steel rod there might seem less than significant. All in all, I realised I might be in danger of being politely dismissed as a lunatic.
For this reason I decided I would keep the rod myself; find a safe place to hide it until I had something more tangible to present alongside it.
In a sense what I discovered on entering my room was precisely that. Unfortunately its tangibility was of a nature so violently unpleasant I couldn’t even consider becoming the means of disclosing it to another human being. If ever there was a message vile enough to warrant the execution of its messenger, this was it. It lay on the desk where I had left my offering for Trumilcik, surrounded by smeared, torn up pieces of paper. The money was gone: in its place, as if by some nightmarish reverse alchemy, a brown, pyramidal mound; raw and reeking, the nastiest gift one person can give another, so smolderingly dense in its physical reality it seemed to give the objects about it – books, papers, telephone, stapler – a quality of tentative abstraction.
Appalled; leaving the light off and the door open, I approached the coiled pile, which glistened horribly in the faint radiance of the campus lights.
It was on the blotter at least, this dollop of anti-matter; moveable without the need for direct contact. The soiled bits of paper scrunched around it like netherworld origami were Amber’s pages; what remained of them. I picked the blotter up; carried it steadily as I could so as not to be so much as fluttered against by the unclean crumpled scraps. To my left, the closed-together desks registered themselves on me with a dull pressure as I crossed back to the door and passed on into the corridor. If it is true that certain actions performed in the secular world have their true meaning elsewhere, in the world of the spirit, then this was surely one. I moved toward the men’s room, trying hard to induce a state of imperviousness to what I was doing. It seemed a matter of some urgency not to let this event secure a place for itself in my psyche. It was night; I was alone; in a moment all evidence of its having occurred at all would be literally flushed away. As good, I told myself, as if it hadn’t occurred at all. In the sepulchral dimness of the corridor, lit only by low-wattage nightlights at distant intervals, I could almost believe I wasn’t really here; was elsewhere, dreaming this, as I did sometimes dream of such things.
In the men’s room, between the rubber garbage bin and the toilet, I was able to dispose of everything, blotter included. I went back to my office. By now a heavy weariness had replaced my horror. I felt torn, demoralised. If Trumilcik was in there somewhere, then so be it. I turned on the light, opened the window to let out the lingering odor. Then I went to the desks, gave them a warning thump, and pulled them apart. He wasn’t there.
Nor, however, was the steel rod.
CHAPTER 7
The next day I went into the department office at lunch time to get my mail. Amber was there, working the photocopier. She looked at me drowsily. Her eyelids seemed literally weighted down by their brush of thick, cornsilk-colored lashes. For a moment I thought we might not have to speak. But under the surface torpor of her expression, a keener attentiveness began shoaling up toward me, and I felt once again the familiar agitated sense of having to account for myself as I stood before her.
‘Listen, I –’ I blustered, ‘I haven’t had a chance to – to read your thing yet …’
‘Oh no problem.’ Her voice was remote but soothing, like a phrase of otherworldly music drifting by on a breeze. She turned back to the photocopier.
There was a note in my mailbox. It was unsigned, and the words were in Latin:
Atrocissimum est Monoceros.
I didn’t know what it meant, but its obvious hostility (a tauntingly opaque follow-up, I assumed, to last night’s more crudely visceral assault) broke on me like a whiplash out from the dark, and I felt almost physically stung. I looked over at Amber; I wanted to say something, to whinny out an aggrieved protest and hear the reassurance of another human being’s sympathetic outrage. On reflection, however, I realised Amber would hardly be an appropriate recipient for such an appeal. I stood there in silence, dazed, regretting for a moment (even as I acknowledged its importance) this unremitting obligation to hold oneself in check. I was gazing at her back: the obverse of the gol
d coin of herself. Wings of fine down caught the light at her long neck. Her shoulders were trim and straight in the soft blue sheathing of her top, crisscrossed by the ocher halter of her brushed cotton dungarees. Her willowy figure barely curved at the hips, almost as expressive as her face of things yet to awaken into the full articulation of themselves.
She turned around, catching my eye before I could look away. I felt sharply annoyed with myself – not for failing to take evasive action fast enough, but for ogling her like that in the first place. I was about to leave the room when I heard her say softly:
‘So you did know Barbara.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘You did know Barbara Hellermann.’
‘No …’
‘But you were in Portland with her.’
Amber’s blue-sleeved arm pointed languidly over to a poster on the notice-board. Distantly alarmed, I strolled across the room, as nonchalantly as I could.
The poster was for a week-long, interdisciplinary graduate seminar on Gender Studies, at Portland State. Among the fifteen or so guest lecturers listed were myself and Barbara Hellermann. Looking at it, I felt a distinct but as yet unlocatable feeling of danger, that I see in retrospect was my first intimation of the large antagonisms I had unwittingly aroused.
‘What’s this doing up here?’ I said. ‘It’s three years out of date.’
‘I have no idea.’
‘How strange. Well perhaps I did meet her. I don’t remember.’
‘She was my teacher here in my junior year.’
‘Oh.’
I was about to tear the poster down, when I thought that might strike Amber as odd. Instead I merely shrugged my shoulders and left the room.
Later, when nobody was there, I went back and discreetly removed the poster. Taking it into my office, I examined it closely. It looked genuine enough, not that I would have been able to tell if someone had forged it.
Perhaps, I thought, it had been left up there on the notice-board all this time, and Amber pointing it out to me today, the very day after I had learned of Barbara Hellermann’s murder, was merely a chance event; the kind that occurs when you learn a word you’ve never come across in your life, only to hear it repeated in an unrelated context almost immediately after. And perhaps, in that case, Barbara Hellermann really had been in Portland when I was there, and I simply hadn’t taken note of her. There had been an organised dinner, I remembered, and a muddy walk through a forest of wild salmonberries and Douglas fir to a spectacular waterfall above the Willamet. I had given my paper – part of a mini-symposium entitled ‘Engineering the New Male’. Other than that we’d been left to our own devices. I wasn’t very sociable – I spent most of my free time on the phone to Carol (who only wasn’t with me because she was so afraid of flying she never went anywhere she didn’t absolutely have to go), and wishing I was back in New York with her. So it was possible that Barbara had been there, and that we simply hadn’t registered each other. Possible then, that the poster was genuine, and that it had been up on the notice-board for three years without my taking it in. Possible.