by David Ely
“One thing, excuse me. How often—how many times have you been, um, not lonely?”
“I don’t think I quite understand you,” she said, coldly.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to imply—”
“Look. If you’d rather not have the coffee, you needn’t.”
“It’s not that. I—I just remembered I have a plane connection to make. It must have been the brandy. Completely slipped my mind.”
“All right.”
He opened the door for her and bowed.
“I’m sorry.”
“Never mind,” she said. She gazed at him for a moment. “You don’t know what it means, being alone,” she said in a soft, angry voice. “Not really.”
“Oh, yes I do. Really.”
But she had turned away and was swiftly walking across the broad pavement toward the glass doors of the apartment building.
Wilson climbed back into the cab.
Chapter 5
IT WAS raining in New York; a slow, enveloping rain that seemed to adhere to the sidewalks and streets like a coating of grease. The tops of the buildings faded into mist, but no one looked up. People were hurrying along with their heads lowered beneath hats and swaying umbrellas, dodging puddles and each other, and plunging fatalistically into the paths of buses and taxis.
Wilson stood under the awning of the mid-town hotel where he had registered. Across the street, massive office buildings drew in and expelled their portions of the hastening crowd through mechanically revolving doors; he reflected that inside these buildings, the elevators also were in full operation . . . little steel boxes rushing up and down to eject loads of figures at various levels, and to suck in others.
He shivered, involuntarily, and glanced behind him. He had been followed, surely; even now, he supposed, he was under observation. That athletic-looking gentleman who stood just inside the lobby peering out as if waiting for a break in the rain—he could be one of them . . . or the tall man in a trench coat with a rolled-up newspaper stuck under one arm like a swagger stick who had come out of the hotel and was standing nearby, but who had declined the doorman’s offer to hail a taxi. Indeed, both men might be members of the brotherhood—and others could be advancing, too, to surround him, to take him gently away so that he would be prevented from indulging in any further acts of foolishness.
The tall man turned tentatively toward him, apparently about to speak. Wilson stepped to the edge of the awning, letting the street crowd bump around him; but he went no farther, for it occurred to him, perhaps illogically, that if he went into the street and across, he might be pulled into the mechanically revolving doors of the opposite buildings and be lost inside forever. One of those doors—any one—might be the entrance to the company’s headquarters, and from the rain-slick windows far above the patient clerks in their tan jackets might be staring sadly down. The hotel behind him—for all he knew it could be the one where the cadaver facsimile of himself had been discovered on a summer evening nine months ago . . . He felt uncomfortably close to unpleasant discoveries.
The tall man touched his sleeve. “Excuse me—”
“Sorry.” Wilson turned to one side and hastened off with the moving crowd. He was not ready for them yet. He needed time to think. The rain annoyed him; he ducked his head angrily and tipped his hatbrim down. Let the tall man follow him. Let them all follow him. A hundred of them could not keep him from doing what he had to do to salve his sense of injustice. It was not the company’s fault, of course. The company had nothing to do with it. It was his own private, personal affair, and the company would simply have to be patient with him until he had concluded it to his satisfaction.
He turned into a drugstore, and stood breathing harshly for a moment among stacks of plastic toys and gadgets that all but obscured the soda fountain counter and the telephone booth at its far end. A row of balloons with painted grinning faces confronted him. Behind them, ping-pong balls trembled in the air, supported by invisible fingers of air, and little mechanical men shuffled jerkily to and fro on a magnetic board.
He reached the telephone booth with the tall man at his heels.
“You’re Wilson, aren’t you?”
Wilson turned and answered bitterly: “I’m not really sure.” But the tall man seemed so inoffensively troubled and uncertain, that his anger dwindled. “Look here,” he added, “I know you mean well, but this isn’t exactly your affair. It’s mine.” He stepped into the booth and pulled out a handful of change.
The tall man eyed him ruefully. “Don’t do it, Wilson,” he said.
“Do what?”
“You know.” The tall man made a despairing gesture with his hands. “We’ve all been through the mill, Wilson. Believe me. It won’t do any good.” Wilson jiggled the door handle impatiently. “I mean,” the man went on, “haven’t you had enough of it already?”
“That’s my business. It doesn’t affect the company.”
“No, I mean for you. It’s wrong for you, Wilson.”
“I’m afraid I’ll have to be the judge of that.”
“Wilson, you’ll be sorry—”
Wilson slid the door shut. The tall man hovered nearby for a moment and then, as he saw Wilson push a coin into the box, he backed off reproachfully and became lost to sight among the balloons.
The sound of Emily’s voice so startled Wilson that he almost forgot to wrap the mouthpiece with his handkerchief, to disguise his own.
“Ah, Mrs.—um . . .” He could not bring himself to pronounce the name. And it might no longer be the one she used. The booth was stifling. He coughed.
“Yes?”
“Excuse me. My name is Tony Wilson. You don’t know me, I’m afraid, but I was a fairly good friend of your late husband’s, and—well, he often told me whenever I was East I ought to call him up, and, ah . . .”
“Yes?”
“Of course that was last year, before he, ahem.” Wilson laughed, inappropriately. “But I didn’t want to let the occasion pass without conveying my deepest personal. My sympathies. Those of us who.” He coughed again and glanced out guiltily. A woman was waiting for him to finish. Behind her he noticed the tall man’s hat seemingly perched atop one of the grinning balloons.
“Yes, it was a great loss,” Emily said formally. “It’s very thoughtful of you to call.”
“Well, I was anxious to extend my—that is, I wonder if it would be possible for me to. I’d like very much,” said Wilson, wiping his brow with the free end of his handkerchief, “to pay a call, if it’s convenient.”
“Yes, I see. Well—”
“Your late husband was a man of many facets,” he went on quickly, aware of her hesitation. “He was . . . well, it’s impossible to talk about it over the phone, but of course naturally I have no intention, no wish of stirring up your, um, grief. I’m here just today and tonight before I go back West, and if it’s not convenient, then of course, naturally—”
“Not at all.” She made the little clucking sound that meant she was thinking. He shut his eyes. He could well imagine her blinking her lids rapidly, pouting out her cheeks, poised there by the telephone stand in the foyer, considering what to do. “It’s terribly kind of you, Mr. Wilson. I’m having a few people in for cocktails at five o’clock, as it happens, but if you’d care to drop in then . . .”
“You’re sure it would be all right?”
“Oh, positively.”
“I’d only stay for a few minutes,” he went on, anxious to soothe away her obvious reluctance. Emily’s parties were always so precisely planned. He realized how dismayed she might be at the prospect of having a stranger appear to upset the social balance. He fumbled for a further justification. “I’m a painter, Mrs.—um. An artist. Actually, I always admired your late husband’s watercolors.”
“Really?”
“Not that he was a professional. But he did have . . . something. And, well, I wondered if maybe as a kind of token I might pick out one of his pictures from the walnut cupboa
rd in the garage.” He coughed once more, hoping to cover what would appear to be a strange familiarity with the furnishing of a garage which he would not have had the opportunity of seeing.
“Oh. Well, as a matter of fact, the garage has been cleaned out.”
“You threw them away?”
“Not exactly. But anyway,” she said quickly, “if you’ll come at five, I’m sure I can find something as a remembrance. Do you have the address?”
“Yes . . .”
He replaced the receiver. Of course she would have chucked out his watercolors. Why not?
He wandered out again to the street. The tall man was waiting there in the rain, humbly allowing himself to be buffeted by the crowd.
Wilson went up to him. An umbrella bobbed between them and passed on, its silver tip glistening.
“What do you want me to do?”
The tall man looked silently down at him for a moment. He seemed ill at ease; the rain was slanting into his face, but he made no attempt to shield himself from it.
“Go back to California,” he said, finally.
“I will, tomorrow.”
“You ought to go now, Wilson. Let me go with you—out to the airport.”
Wilson shook his head. “I’m sorry.”
The tall man sighed. He appeared on the verge of repeating his request, but then apparently thought better of it, and merely waved his hands clumsily in a gesture of resignation.
“What difference does it make—today or tomorrow?” Wilson asked. “Look, I’m not going to do anything stupid, you know. I just want—well, I want to check up on a few matters. You people didn’t really give me time to make the proper preparation when I was processed. I had no idea I would be required to drop everything all at once. That’s hardly a businesslike way of handling one’s affairs,” he went on determinedly. “I thought surely I’d have a day or two to complete my arrangements.”
“Like what?” The tall man spoke softly, as if the question was of no consequence.
“Well, I don’t think the details are important. It’s a matter of principle.” A sagging awning loosed a spout of water onto his hat. He dodged aside, too late. “Frankly,” he continued, tilting his head to let the water drain from the crown, “I’m not too well pleased with the way the company has dealt with my case. They’ve made a few mistakes, which they’ve as much as admitted, and now when all I’m trying to do is smooth out some of the rough edges, they have me followed all over the country like some criminal . . . Are you a company staff man, by the way, or are you—like me?”
“Does it matter?”
“I happen to think it does.”
The tall man stared intently at Wilson. He shook his head slowly. “Has it ever mattered? I don’t mean with me or you now, but . . . well, ever. In your experience. With your father, maybe, but what I’m trying to say . . .” He waved his hands again, hopelessly. “Just go back . . . to California. I can’t explain it.”
“What’s my father got to do with it?” Wilson asked, but the tall man simply made one final flapping movement with his hands, turned, and walked awkwardly away in the rain, without saying goodbye. Wilson pursued him, ducking away from umbrellas and the ends of awnings.
“Look here. Wait a minute.” He tugged at the man’s sleeve. “I don’t get what you said about my father.”
“Oh, I don’t really mean your father. I mean, in your father’s time, or maybe earlier than that even.”
“But that still doesn’t make sense.”
“I told you I couldn’t explain it.” The tall man screwed up his features painfully, as if trying to muster the right words. “I mean, what difference does it make to people like you and me? If a man stays on the surface of things all his life, then it’s the surface that counts, isn’t it? There isn’t really anything important but the surface. That’s what I’m trying to say. And—well, here’s my surface.” He grinned in a forced way and drew one hand down slowly across his face, then thoughtfully examined his fingers. “See? That’s all there is—because that’s all there ever . . .” He shrugged his shoulders and began walking again.
Wilson kept pace with him. “I think I see what you’re driving at,” he said soothingly, for he was anxious to prolong the conversation and find out more about the tall man. “But it seems to me you’re taking a pretty grim view of things. Take the inner life, for example.” He stepped aside to avoid being bumped by a careless trucker’s dolly. “Everybody’s got an inner life,” Wilson persisted, hastening to catch up again. “And things like love and happiness. You can’t simply dismiss all of that, my friend.”
The tall man did not look at him. “I don’t dismiss them.”
“Well, dammit. These things don’t show. They don’t appear on that surface of yours. They’re down underneath, inside. That’s where they are.”
“Why?”
“They’ve got to be, that’s all.”
“But if they are, then why did you do what you did?” The man still would not look at him. They stood at a crossing, waiting for the light to change.
“Well, nobody’s situation is ideal, and a man has a right to try for improvement,” said Wilson, realizing that he was in the ironical position of justifying the company’s point of view to someone who had obviously been dispatched on behalf of the company. “Believe me, I have no regrets. No substantial regrets,” he amended, but as he spoke the tall man darted out through the traffic with surprising agility, and climbed into a taxicab which had just discharged a fare. “Look here!” Wilson cried out after him, but in vain. The cab pulled away, turned the corner, and was gone.
Wilson stood irresolutely at the curb for a moment, aware of the trickling of rain down the back of his coat collar, the heedless elbows of the crowd, and the grey sweep of traffic; all was in motion, except himself. The sidewalk he stood on trembled as a subway passed beneath it, the traffic signals clicked and whirred—even the massed buildings seemed busy with the noisy processes of mechanical life. Once more he was impressed by their power. It was all automatic—the revolving doors of the entryways, turning constantly at an even rate, and the elevators, which rose and descended without human operators. Some of the offices, too, he reflected, would be equipped with machines that opened doors, and that typed messages—and even perhaps some that responded to inquiries, and announced the quitting hour. He wondered idly what would happen if the machinery got out of hand and began to speed up. The revolving doors, say. If they started whirling, would those who happened to be caught in them be imprisoned and spun dizzily about, or would the centrifugal force fling them out and, by some terrific vacuum, pump in others from the street . . . possibly persons who had no intention of entering that particular building at all, but who would find themselves thrown inside, and then drawn irresistibly into an automatic elevator to be hurled up twenty stories and spat out into a strange office where a mechanical receptionist would seize their hats and coats in its steel claws—?
Someone bumped him hard from behind. He turned, but the transgressor had passed on. He tipped his hat humbly, nevertheless, and said, to no one in particular: “Sorry.”
He almost expected to find Emily at the station to meet his train. There were some wives parked in idling cars waiting for their husbands (not many, it was true, for this was an early train), but as Wilson strolled among the homebound commuters, he recalled that Emily would not have been there in any case, for in recent years he had used the grey sedan to get to the station.
He glanced involuntarily toward the parking lot. The car—it was still there, its identity proclaimed by the badge of rust on the right rear fender and the crumpled edge of the bumper where he had struck a telephone pole once, backing up. Emily had not come to meet him . . . but the sedan was waiting right where he had left it on that summer day, as if he had gone nowhere, as if nothing had happened . . . and perhaps if he went over to claim it, climbed in behind the wheel as usual, and drove on home—
“Pardon me.”
He lea
ped back, startled by the voice. A thin, elderly man reached past him for the door handle.
“I-I’m sorry. I—”
“Not at all.”
The man slipped inside, glanced at his watch, and jammed a key into the ignition.
Wilson stepped aside, confused, anxious to explain. “I didn’t mean to be—to be—”
“Be glad to give you a lift, except—” The man’s voice was overridden by the racket of the engine, and the clash of the gears as he shifted into reverse and backed out to swing around and head for the parking lot exit.
Wilson drew his hand from his pocket, where it had been fumbling for his old car keys; he pulled out, instead, his Denver hotel room-key, and at the same time he caught a blurred glimpse of Antiochus Wilson grinning in reflection from the window of the grey sedan as it passed by.
He set his shoulders and started back toward the station. She had sold it. One car was all she needed, to be sure. Even so, he was annoyed that he had not been given the opportunity to dispose of the car himself, for it had been, after all, not an item of family property but rather a personal belonging used only by him, like his cuff links.
He dropped the room-key into the mailbox and telephoned for a taxi.
Waiting for it, he became possessed by the idea that Emily would immediately recognize him—not so much by his voice or his eyes or gestures, the things which the company had been unable to alter, but by the indefinable and possibly even extra-sensory knowledge of his presence, which a wife was bound to have after a quarter-century of marriage. Intuition: the surgeons could not have protected him against that. With Sally there had been no real test, for daughters are accustomed to judge their fathers in terms of superficial external things, but a wife—! How embarrassed Emily will be, he thought. How flustered and confused. To see a stranger suddenly as her husband, the former source of all the binding intimacies of love, of money, of tolerance and coldness, breakfasts and garden planning . . . it would drive her mad. Well, not mad, exactly. Emily was not the kind of person to be driven mad, he reflected. She would consult not a psychiatrist but a lawyer, if indeed she decided that she required any assistance to deal with what she would instantly define as a Social Situation, the resolution of which must be deferred at least until her party was over. And then, he wondered, when they were alone together again, what would she do? Fall on her knees before him to beg him to come back, whatever his changed name and face might be . . . or wait, with suppressed consternation, for him to make the first move? Somehow, he could not quite imagine Emily on her knees, and as for his making the first move, or a move of any kind—