The Horned Man

by James Lasdun

  At the Port Authority I had gone without thinking into the Men’s Room to pee. A man in a suit, still fastening his fly as he turned from the urinal, had looked at me, startled. Catching sight of myself in the mirror, I realised he was looking at a woman in a maroon beret who was apparently about to approach the porcelain stalls, and I beat a hasty retreat to the Women’s Room; mortified, and again strangely humiliated. Here, as I washed my hands at the sink, a white-haired old lady had tut-tutted sympathetically at me in the mirror. ‘Boyfriend?’ she’d murmured, gesturing at my bruises. I hesitated a moment, then nodded. She shook her head with a sigh.

  I’d felt even worse after that. Aside from abusing the woman’s sympathy, this little misappropriation of female suffering seemed to deepen the reality of what I was doing. To my general despondency, a new, sharply particular kind of demoralisation was added: I had just stepped into character, I realised. I was a battered woman.

  Over the bridge and all along the Palisades the rain kept the traffic at the same funereal adagio. We lumbered off on to the Thruway. Mountains appeared; nothing on them but the endless rolling smoke of winter trees, barely distinguishable from the clouds above them or the gray explosions of rain in between.

  The vastness of America, the great volumes of space in which one’s existence has no meaning to anyone or anything, is overpowering at times like this. If you’re alone, you feel your aloneness as an almost physical encumbrance. An acute homesickness seizes you; unballasted, in my case, by any sense of where home might be. To be traveling through the rain, dressed as a woman, with a broken face, from a place where I had almost no human connections left, to one where I had none at all, seemed suddenly pitiful. There was a certain margin of tolerance, I felt; an elastic limit stretching only so far from the warm centers of human society. Step beyond it, and you couldn’t count on being gathered back in. And it wouldn’t necessarily be society that kept you out, but something in yourself; some unassimilable new singularity making you unfit, by your own judgment, for the company of your fellow creatures.

  At a rest stop on Route 9 – a senses-jangling temple of commerce set down by what appeared to be primeval forest – I sat with a cup of bile-colored coffee, staring through the rain-streaming glass, thinking I could disappear out of my life without a ripple; could just get up and walk out there into those dripping oaks and pines, and vanish … There was something appealing about the idea; soothing almost. I pictured myself hiding out there somewhere, huddled in a damp cave or pine-bough shelter over a smoking heap of dead leaves …

  The reverie must have connected with some deep wish or fantasy. I was so lost in it that it took several attempts for the voice I was hearing beside me to get through.

  ‘Ma’am, we’re ready to leave now. Ma’am?’

  I turned and saw that the voice belonged to the bus driver, and that she was addressing me.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I murmured.

  ‘Oh no problem.’ She smiled at me, her eye lingering a moment on my hurt cheek.

  I followed her back to the bus, checking the hang of my skirt as I crossed the forecourt through the rain.

  Two hours later we came to a small city on a plain under jagged hills. A water-tower in the form of a giant, inverted tear-drop bore the legend ‘CORINTH’.

  At the bus station, a short, overweight man with a mustache paused by my seat as I reached for my suitcase.

  ‘Want help there, lady?’

  I thought I would make myself less conspicuous by accepting than refusing.

  ‘Oh … Thank you.’

  He lifted the suitcase down and insisted on carrying it out of the bus for me.

  ‘Where’re you headed?’

  I opened my umbrella, wondering if there was some special way women did this.

  ‘To my girlfriend’s house,’ I said.

  ‘What part of town? I’ll give you a ride.’

  ‘That’s all right, thanks.’

  ‘Really – it’d be no trouble.’

  ‘That’s all right, thank you. I’ll get a cab.’ I turned from him.

  ‘Hey, wait –’

  He was wagging his finger at me, his small eyes twinkling roguishly. I thought he must have seen through my disguise, and that I was now going to have to publicly prove I was a woman.

  But ‘You’re British, right?’ was all he said.

  Relieved, I confessed that I was.

  ‘I have a cousin in Dorsetshire.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Do you know that area?’

  ‘A little.’

  ‘He’s a mechanic, Russell Thorpe. Russ Thorpe?’

  ‘I don’t … I haven’t met him.’

  ‘Too bad, I think you’d like him. Listen, you want a drink? Just, you know, go to a bar, have a couple cocktails?’

  He was friendly enough, even quite jolly, with his fat man’s awareness of his own slightly comical ungainliness. But the mere fact of his presumption that he could talk to me, make suggestions bearing on the disposition of my own person, was startlingly hard to take.

  ‘Oh … No … I have to get to my friend’s house.’

  I smiled appeasingly at him and hurried away.

  ‘What’s the matter, I’m too skinny for you?’ I heard him call with a chuckle as I went off in search of a taxi.

  The shelter was on a quiet street of rundown old mansions. It was in better repair than most of them, with a new-looking red roof and warm, mustard-colored clapboard walls. A tall fence jutted from either side of it, enclosing a back yard from which I could hear the voices of children playing in the drizzle. There was nothing to tell you the place was a shelter until you climbed the porch steps to the front door and saw a security camera in a steel cage, staring down at you.

  I pressed the buzzer, showing my face to the camera. The heavy door clicked open and I carried my suitcase into a warm, light-filled vestibule that smelled of clean laundry and floor polish.

  Strollers and outdoor boots were lined neatly against the walls, and over the stairway was a children’s collage of a rainbow with the word welcome dangling from it in foil letters.

  A woman was smiling at me from the top of the stairs.

  ‘Marlene?’

  I nodded. I had given my name as Marlene Winters in the brief conversation I had had with the woman who’d returned my call the previous day.

  ‘C’mon up. We’ve been expecting you. I’m Josephine.’

  I climbed the stairs and Josephine gave me a light hug, looking over my bruises with a brief sympathetic wince that dissolved back into a smile.

  ‘You need something for that, honey? A ice pack maybe? You sure? Be no trouble to fix you one …’

  She led me into an office where I filled out a form with false information and signed an agreement not to disclose the address of the shelter to anyone I knew.

  ‘We have all kind of counseling and legal services for you when you’re good and ready,’ Josephine said, ‘but I’m guessing right now you probably could use a good rest more than anything else. Am I right?’

  I nodded. Though I had practiced using a higher-pitched voice than normal, I had thought it would be wise to minimise speaking altogether.

  ‘I’ll show you your room.’

  She led me through a communal area where half a dozen bruised and battered faces raised themselves toward my own. My courage almost failed me then. The reasoning behind my coming here seemed threatened with obliteration by the engulfing reality of the place itself. I kept my head down, shrinking inward, as if I could make myself invisible.

  We went up another flight of stairs and along a corridor.

  ‘This is where the residents without children sleep. We call it the peace zone. The other place we call the combat zone. Just so you know what people are sayin’ when you hear that!’

  She opened the door on to a small room with a narrow bed and a window looking on to the back yard where I could see the children I’d heard before, playing on a swing-set.

  ‘It ain
’t much, but …’

  ‘It’s perfect,’ I said.

  ‘Sister Cathy will be here later on. She’s the director. Tonight’s Group Night. We all have a meal together, then after … Well you’ll see. It’s special.’

  She showed me the bathroom I was to share with the other childless women.

  ‘Don’t be afraid to holler if there’s anything else you need,’ she said, leaving with a kindly smile. She was fifty, perhaps; a motherly woman with an air of having made a conscious decision to ply her way through life under the flag of absolute trust and faith. I could have turned up here with a thick beard and hair billowing out of my ears and nostrils, I felt, and still been welcomed by her with the same unsuspecting warmth.

  Alone, I realised I was exhausted. I lay down on the bed and closed my eyes, but at once my heart started racing and I knew I would be unable to sleep.

  On a shelf by the bed were a number of pamphlets. I picked them up and looked through them. There was information on how to get a Personal Protection Order, a PPO. There was a Domestic Abuse Handbook with a ‘Violence Wheel’ on it, showing eight stages in the escalation from emotional abuse to physical violence. There was a Police Department questionnaire: Does your partner embarrass you in front of other people? belittle your accomplishments? constantly contradict himself to confuse you? use money as a way of controlling you? hold you to keep you from leaving after an argument? physically force you to do what you don’t want to do? There was a booklet entitled You Are Not Alone, with case histories of domestic abuse survivors. Melinda was beaten unconscious when her husband found dirty dishes in the sink. Janice was kicked in the stomach after an old boyfriend came by for a visit. Meekah’s arm was broken when her fiance´ disagreed with her about their wedding plans.

  I put the pamphlets back on the table. I felt sickened: aware, suddenly, of the scale of my trespass in coming here. My plan, which had seemed to me entirely reasonable, now struck me as a piece of insane folly. Among other things, it was dawning on me that even finding out which of the women here was the one Trumilcik had called from my office, let alone inveigling myself sufficiently into her confidence to find out anything about him, was going to involve considerably more than the few cunning, casually dropped remarks I had blithely allowed myself to imagine it would take.

  I began to wonder whether this trip, far from demonstrating my ability to take the initiative against Trumilcik, wasn’t after all evidence that I had fallen entirely under his control. If nothing else, that would account for the odd sense I had had since setting out, of being under duress; of submitting to a kind of strange ritual humiliation.

  I sat up on the bed, looking out of the window at the kids playing in the yard, bundled up in their little faded anoraks and gloves. Two boys swung strenuously back and forth on the swings while a toddler ran from one to the other waving a plastic shovel and whimpering for a turn. A small girl slid down the slide, then ran back to the steps to climb up and slide down again. She did this again and then again, with a grim intentness; running off from the bottom of the slide back to the steps without a smile or a moment’s pause to savor the pleasure of the descent. A woman in a suede coat stood watching her, puffing on a cigarette with the same intent, joyless hunger. The toddler, exasperated, hit one of the boys on the swings with his plastic shovel. The boy casually kicked him in the face, sending him sprawling in the mud, where he sat looking dazed.

  I lay back down on the bed, staring at the ceiling and listening to the pipes clank in the wall until Josephine knocked on the door and led me down to dinner.

  We ate at two large tables, mothers, children and singles all mixed together. The meal was simple and wholesome, and for several minutes the conversation consisted solely of appreciative remarks addressed to the two women who’d prepared it. When one of them began trying to avert the praise, saying her pasta dish had come out too dry, Sister Cathy, the shelter director, gently reproved her:

  ‘Chantal, do you think it really is too dry?’

  The woman looked at her uncertainly a moment, then broke into a grin.

  ‘No – you right Sister Cathy. It’s perfect and I’m proud of it. So now would you all shut up and eat!’

  Everyone laughed, and the room filled with the voices of women and small children. I sat quietly, smiling and nodding, eating my food with what I hoped was a plausibly feminine grace. My neighbors were friendly without being overbearing or inquisitive; the rule seemed to be that if you wanted to talk, you would volunteer something about yourself, but not ask questions or get into exchanges beyond the response of an affirming murmur or nod.

  Sister Cathy sat at the head of my table, the other end from me. She was a broad-shouldered woman in her thirties, wearing a flowing crimson dress. Though not immediately or conventionally attractive, her appearance was of a kind that drew your gaze powerfully in her direction. Her eyes were blue and piercing. Her dark hair shone in thick burnished waves under the electric light. Her mouth was firm but not tight; full-lipped in a way that suggested a developed, disciplined sensuality. I was careful to stop myself glancing at her more often than would have seemed natural.

  After dinner Josephine led the children upstairs while the rest of us went into the living room and sat on the sofas and chairs with mugs of herbal tea. Sister Cathy closed the shades and lit candles and incense sticks. I watched her circle the room, spreading the warm yellow light from candle to candle. There was more than a hint of fleshiness about her shoulders and waist, but she had a dignified, almost regal carriage, and gave the impression that it suited some queenly purpose of her own to carry a certain superfluous bulk through the world.

  As she sat down, we all linked hands and sat in silence for a moment.

  I was on a sofa next to a young woman in a seventies-style denim coat with wide, fleece lapels. She had a choker tattooed around her neck. She gave me an ingratiating smile and whispered that her name was Trixie. In the chair on the other side of me a large, weary-looking woman was nursing a somber little baby. Above the hand she extended to me was a splint running the length of her forearm. I squeezed the hand as gently as I could.

  I remember the hyperalert state I found myself in when I realised the women were going to be telling stories about themselves: I felt suddenly that I was being offered an unexpected opportunity here, and that I needed to be especially attentive. I remember the magnetic, statuesque presence of Sister Cathy on her wooden chair, her dress hanging in crescents over her knees, her broad face golden-looking in the trembling candleflames. And I remember the women. There couldn’t have been more than a dozen of them, yet in recollection the incense-filled room seems to swell and overflow, as though it had been populated by the wounded souls of half of womankind. They spoke in turn; some tearfully, some in dry-eyed detachment, some offering up only brief moments of their lives, others giving detailed accounts of entire relationships. There were poems, stories, anecdotes, abstract musings. After each woman spoke, there was an interval for discussion, comment, or in many cases merely sympathetic hugs.

  Difficult as it was not to become overwhelmed by the sheer pain circulating around the room, I tried to stay focused; to reserve my attention only for things that might constitute clues relating to my particular quarry.

  I caught a scent of him with the very first speaker, a thin woman with a cane, who offered a wryly told story involving an ex-husband not paying child support, a Green Card marriage proposal from a would-be immigrant, a financial arrangement that had ‘blurred at the edges’, an attempt to ‘back away’, an eruption of insanely possessive jealousy, violent assaults, and a final dramatic escape through the window of a Brooklyn apartment when the man came crashing through the door. Trumilcik, I had thought, picturing the maniacal figure I had glimpsed in the basement theater, bursting through this woman’s apartment door. But a little later an equally plausible version of my antagonist, this time in his philanderer’s guise, seemed conjured before me by a woman who read a comic doggerel ballad about a
‘cheat ’n’ beat’ husband whose idea of marriage was to send his wife out to work cleaning houses, while he blew her wages picking up women in clubs and bars.

  One time the crazy bitch complains

  And gets her nose broke for her pains …

  ‘That’s a powerful way to take possession of our anger, isn’t it?’ Sister Cathy said, ‘turning it into laughter?’

  But no sooner had I made up my mind to get into conversation with this woman after the meeting was over, than another resident, frail-looking, with wide, watery blue eyes, stood up and delivered an incantation entitled ‘Naming the Weapons’ where, in a tremulous monotone, she cataloged the occasions of her boyfriend’s outbursts of violence, and the weapon used in each attack. Morning, October, began one of the entries, after I telephone to my sister Jean in Poughkeepsie, the one he knows she wants me to leave him. Weapon of choice: metal bar. And immediately I seemed to glimpse my quarry again …

  Too many clues … The last thing I had expected! It was more bewildering than having none at all. I began to feel as though the various aspects comprising my picture of Trumilcik had been distributed piecemeal about that room. A familiar redolence of dereliction wafted up from the fitfully coherent reminiscence of a scarlet-faced woman, formerly homeless, who had been stalked by a homeless man she’d met at a mixed shelter in Rockland County … Then an educated, timid-voiced Asian woman spoke of her misbegotten alliance with a man who had seemed the soul of gentleness and civility, a college professor no less, until he lost his job, started drinking, and took to kicking and punching her of an evening, until she was hospitalised with three broken ribs and a fractured pelvis, and once again I found myself thinking, Trumilcik …

  ‘What about you, Marlene?’ Sister Cathy asked me, as my own turn came around. ‘Is there something you’d like to share with us?’