Mr. Apology

by Campbell Armstrong

  “Did I ever stop to thank you?” he said.

  “Thank me?”

  “For your help with this project. Your support.”

  “Harry,” she said. “It comes easily.”

  “Easily? I lay some off-the-wall idea on you and you don’t have any doubts?”

  She turned over on her side, facing him. “I didn’t say I didn’t have any doubts exactly.” She paused a moment. “I have times of what you might call quiet misgivings. Little butterflies.”

  “Like what?”

  “Oh, I’m not sure. Maybe it’s the way I was raised, Harry. Something to do with the commandment thou shalt not eavesdrop.”

  “You don’t really think about it that way, do you? I mean, it’s more than just some kinky intrigue about other people’s deep secrets—”

  She touched the side of his face. Her hand was warm against his skin. “I know it is. I know it is. And I know you care about what you’re doing here.…”

  He rose from the bed. He’d forgotten to take off his wet overcoat. Now he slipped it over the back of a chair, then went to the stereo that was beneath the window and put a record on the turntable. Harry closed his eyes a moment, waiting for the music to touch him. Unashamedly romantic, a Schumann piano quintet. He liked the structure of the piece, the organization, even the lingering sentimentality. Once, he’d thought about playing this music behind the sound of his recorded greeting on the answering machine.

  HELLO, THIS IS MR. APOLOGY. APOLOGY IS NOT ASSOCIATED WITH THE POLICE OR WITH ANY OTHER ORGANIZATION. RATHER, IT’S A WAY TO TELL PEOPLE WHAT YOU’VE DONE WRONG AND HOW YOU FEEL ABOUT IT. ALL STATEMENTS RECEIVED BY APOLOGY MAY BE PLAYED BACK TO THE PUBLIC, SO DO NOT IDENTIFY YOURSELF. TALK FOR AS LONG AS YOU WANT. THANK YOU.

  In the end he’d decided against the music: If you had just held up a liquor store and shot the proprietor by accident, if you’d just had sex with your own daughter or whatever, did you really need to hear, the music of Schumann or anybody else for that matter?

  He went back across the room to the machine, pressed the PLAYBACK button, sat down on the bed again. There was another voice, a monotone rumbling out of the electronic circuits of the device. A wheezy, asthmatic rattle.

  SOMETIMES I GET THIS URGE TO GO INSIDE ONE OF THEM BARS WHERE NIGGERS SIT AROUND … AND I WANNA TAKE OUT A MOTHERFUCKIN’ GRENADE, AND I WANNA TOSS IT RIGHT IN THE CENTER OF THIS BAR AND JUST WATCH … WATCH THEM BIG FUCKIN’ BLACK FACES GO UP IN SMOKE … HA HA HA.… I’LL DO IT ONE DAY, FOR SURE. I’LL REALLY DO IT … AND I AIN’T GONNA APOLOGIZE FOR IT NEITHER.

  The message ended. Harry pressed the STOP button and looked at Madeleine. “Heavy,” he said.

  “Somebody in need of treatment, Harry,” Madeleine said. “Somebody in need of a cushioned room.”

  “Your average bigot.” He shrugged.

  “You don’t think that guy might be capable of doing what he says he wants to do?”

  “If he wanted to do it, would he tell me about it?”

  “On the principle that the guy who intends to commit suicide doesn’t sit around calling his pals to tell them about it?”

  “The same thing, sure.”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Something in that voice gave me the creeps, Harry. The wheeze. The way the guy seemed to be sucking air. Like he was extremely angry—”

  “Or extremely emphysematic.”

  Madeleine sat up, her back against the wall. She stared at her fingernails a moment. “There’s a flaw in Apology. Right there. You never have any way of knowing if somebody’s lying to you.”

  “I don’t think it matters. The imagined act of violence is just as interesting as the realized. I don’t really see any difference—”

  “I do. It’s the difference between a bunch of black guys sitting around peacefully drinking their beer and that same bunch lying around with broken heads.”

  Harrison put his arm around her shoulder. He tried to imagine the face of the last caller, tried to visualize some brutal face inside a phone booth, shoulders hunched, skin pale, the mouth slack, the eyes mindless. He could see the dim light of a phone booth at the end of some drab street shining grimly in the rain. Maybe a guy like that only flirted around the edges of violence; maybe Apology provided him with an outlet, a source of release, something necessary that prevented him from following through on his threat. He could talk his violence away; he could go home and fall asleep, perhaps pleased he’d managed to tell somebody—even a recording device—about the hatred he felt. True or false? Harry still wasn’t sure if it mattered whether the caller was on the level or otherwise; from the very outset he’d been aware of the fact that he was going to get a high percentage of liars, bluffers, big talkers on the tapes. Maybe it was enough just to hear the inherent violence in the voice. He lay back alongside Madeleine, closing his eyes. He was tired now; he felt cold. He was aware of Madeleine shifting around and he opened his eyes a little way to look at her. She was touching the answering machine, pressing the PLAYBACK button.

  “Let’s just check and see if there are any more,” she said.

  She’s into this, he thought. She’s getting into this project the way I am. He closed his eyes again, listened to the hum of the tape, waited. He was aware of the Schumann filling the small room. Rising, falling, the hammering of fingers on the keys of a piano. An intricate, lyrical moment: It seemed to reach out and ensnare him. A strange juxtaposition to the threat of violence.

  APOLOGY … I’M A COP.… YOU THINK IT’S STRANGE. A COP CALLING YOU LIKE THIS? I DON’T HAVE A WHOLE LOT ON MY MIND EXCEPT FOR THE FACT THAT I’VE BEEN TAKING MONEY FOR THE LAST FEW MONTHS FROM THESE GUYS THAT OPERATE A NUMBERS GAME.… IT’S THE SAME OLD STORY, I GUESS. I GOT DEBTS. I GOT VARIOUS THINGS I NEED. I CAN’T MAKE THE ENDS MEET.… THIS JUST SEEMED LIKE AN EASY WAY TO MAKE SOME EXTRA BREAD … ONLY I DON’T SLEEP NIGHTS, APOLOGY.… I JUST WANTED TO TELL SOMEBODY.… NOW I FEEL GODDAMN EMBARRASSED.…

  The line went dead. Madeleine stopped the tape.

  “It figures,” she said.

  “What does?”

  “Cops.”

  Harrison smiled. “You don’t like cops, do you?”

  “I can’t put them high on my list of favorite civil servants. They always spend too much time dealing out traffic tickets and not enough time doing the real things. Like catching muggers. Rapists. Killers. I always get the impression that they’re writing tickets with one hand and hauling in crumpled bills with the other.”

  A cop, he thought. He opened his eyes. “You know what pleases me, Maddy? It’s got nothing to do with the last message in itself. What pleases me is the whole response so far. The Apology thing is really touching people. People are reading the handbills. They’re reacting to them. And I think we’re going to get a broad spectrum of callers before we’re through.” He felt suddenly elated. He slapped the palms of his hands against his knees. It was going to be a success, it was going to work, it was going to work better than he’d ever imagined—the next step was to convince the people on the grants committee that this was a project worth funding. His elation dissolved a little when he thought of going to the interview and selling Apology to a committee of hardassed professors. He’d never exactly been at ease with academic types. It always seemed to him that they occupied a different world, breathed a distilled kind of oxygen.

  He said, “The day after tomorrow.”

  “What about it?”

  “Professor Hutchinson and his gang.”

  “I haven’t uncrossed my fingers in days, Harry.”

  He looked at her. “I don’t know what I feel about it. Somewhere between optimism and pessimism.”

  “You’ll get lucky. You just go in there thinking positive.”

  “Pass me my Dale Carnegie.”

  “Seriously.” She nudged his shoulder. “Positive thinking is the answer to a bunch of things. Just go in there and pretend you’re not really begging, just tell yourself that you’re doing them a favor by asking for their money.”r />
  “I’ll try. I promise I’ll try.”

  “Smile a lot. Look them straight in the eye. Works wonders.”

  “Yes, coach. Sure, coach.”

  She laughed at him. She lay with her face across his chest, her hands pressed to his sides. He tried to dismiss the idea of the grants committee; you could lose yourself quite easily in Madeleine, he thought, in making love to her. You could slide down into that cool uncomplicated world where you didn’t have to worry about voices on a tape or professors holding pursestrings or teaching high school to make the rent payments on a loft or entertain concerns about where, from the viewpoint of thirty-five, your future was headed. He shut his eyes and buried his face in her hair, placed his hands against the base of her spine, feeling for that strange spot in her back where a single touch upon some sensitive grouping of nerves and muscles made her shiver and laugh. He found it and she moaned, trying at the same time to twist away from him. I can’t explain it, Harry. It’s something like a ticklish feeling and something like a huge turn-on, she’d told him once. The mysterious quality of her body. The delicate smoothness of her skin. The moisture that lay faintly on her lips. She kissed him, then drew her face away. There was a light in her eyes; it was like a certain light he’d seen once underwater when a spike of sun had pierced the surface and illuminated the tiles of the pool in the manner of a revelation. He touched her breasts, moving his fingers slowly between the buttons of her blouse, undoing them, trying not to be clumsy. The breasts were warm, small, tight. He moved the palm of his hand gently against a nipple. And then he could feel her hand move across his stomach; he could hear the faint rattle of his belt buckle as she worked it open. The room was silent now; the music had stopped. She made a strange sound as he entered her—a sound both detached and intimate, as if she had come to exist in a world where opposites might dissolve. Detached, intimate. He moved inside her, knowing he couldn’t hold on, knowing that her excitement was carrying him along, feeling the sensation of orgasm begin somewhere at the base of his spine and flow like a hot tributary to his groin. She held him tightly against her, arching her back upwards in one sudden thrust. He shut his eyes very tight. It wasn’t between his legs now; it hadn’t anything to do with his body—the sensation was rooted in the dark center of his brain, a burning, fiery, tantalizing feeling that rose the way a firework might. And then he was silent, his face pressed to the side of her neck. This silence, this mutual quiet—as if a tent had been erected over them, a soundproofed cocoon—always filled him with a sense of wonder. Was this love? He wasn’t altogether certain how you defined love. What it was you were supposed to feel. Sometimes it seemed to him that love was a boundary you crossed, a frontier you negotiated, then you were lost in strange, imposing vistas. Sometimes, too, it seemed love was learned behavior, a fact of your life you grew to accept as soon as you understood it.

  He had gone through his thirty-five years without a special commitment to any one woman. There had been several, of course, but they had come and gone, each one playing a mournful second fiddle to his work. Each of these women had shared one common attribute: He had been able to forget them when it came time to doing his work; he had been able to relegate them from his mind to the point where it always surprised him to find that they still lingered in the loft. He looked at Madeleine now and wondered if this one might turn out to be different: Was she going to slip into his life to the point of necessity? He also wondered why he didn’t find this question laughable. She had qualities he liked—she was truthful, loyal, and yet at the same time she could be critical. She enjoyed being involved in his work—unlike some of the past entries who had obviously resented what he did.

  He rolled away from her, one leg still stretched across her body. He ran his index finger down her side, the nail lightly touching her skin. Then he turned over on his back and gazed at the ceiling. There was the sudden sound of the telephone ringing. Once, twice—then the answering machine kicked in. He could hear his own recorded message, then the beep, after which there was a period of quiet.

  “The Apology line never closes,” Madeleine said.

  I SAW YOUR POSTER DOWN AT THE PORT AUTHORITY BUS TERMINAL, YOU KNOW? WELL, I DON’T KNOW WHY I’M CALLING.… REALLY I SHOULD BE CALLING MY PARENTS.… I JUST RAN AWAY FROM HOME.… HELLO HELLO HELLO. IS ANYBODY THERE?… I JUST WISH MY PARENTS HAD LOVED ME A BIT BETTER.… GOODBYE.

  A young girl’s voice. Hard to guess the age. Thirteen, fourteen maybe. Something in the sound of the voice touched Harrison—the desolation, the loneliness. I just wish my parents had loved me a bit better.

  “I feel sorry for her,” he said.

  “Me too. The poor kid. It makes you wish you could’ve just picked up the telephone and talked to her, doesn’t it?”

  “Then it wouldn’t be the Apology line,” Harrison said.

  “I guess.” Madeleine took his hand, pressing it between her own. Then she lay back and pulled a sheet up over her body. Harrison took off the rest of his clothes and settled down beside her. Fatigue was a monster. Something black circling his brain. He covered a yawn with his hand.

  “Tired?” she asked.

  “Pretty beat,” he said. Beat and satisfied; delighted by the fact that the handbills had already prompted a number of calls.

  “It’s damned hard to go to sleep when you know you’ve got to get up in a few hours to go to work,” Madeleine said. She looked at her wristwatch and then unstrapped it. “It’s almost time to get up now.”

  She put her arms around him. He watched her face; with her eyes shut there was something peaceful, something timeless, in her expression. He reached out and turned the volume control of the answering machine low. He was too tired now to listen to any more incoming calls. He would check the tape again when he woke.

  2.

  The man in the grey homburg hat and black overcoat passed under the sign carrying his name and stepped inside the gallery. The little bell that rang above the door had a somehow satisfying sound to it—it was like the discreet note of a muted cash register. As he undid the buttons of his coat he gazed at the midmorning traffic stuttering along 57th Street; it was a damp dog of a Manhattan morning, clouds so heavy and low they appeared to engulf the tops of skyscrapers. He rubbed his cold hands together and turned towards his small office at the rear of the gallery. Ah, the obstacle course—if he could make it back there without having to see any of the paintings that hung on the walls it would indeed be a small victory. They made him bilious; they churned his stomach. For a moment he didn’t even want to bring the socalled artist’s name to mind. Something Japanese. Each vast canvas echoed the last one, predicted the next. Each depicted a rainbow—not the kind of rainbow one might encounter in the natural world, but great arcs of somber colors, browns and blacks and purples, joyless things at the end of which you would expect to find a pot, not of gold, but lead. He stepped inside his office. The girl was already there, straightening papers on his desk. He hung his hat and coat on the hat rack and smiled at her. She reminded him of Ingres’s Comtesse d’Hausonville—the same slightly rounded face, the wide eyes, the hair center-parted and held back with a ribbon.

  “There were a couple of calls,” she said.

  He looked at the slips of paper she’d placed beside the telephone. He observed that his hand trembled a little. It was called “paying the piper,” he thought. It happened when too many last nights caught up with one. There had been a call from Feldman, Angela’s accountant. Damn, Feldman was always calling, always bitching about cash flow; he talked about this mysterious concept in such a way that he might have been marveling at some wonderful waterfall. Cash flow, Bryant. Cash flow. There was another call from a young lady who wanted to bring her portfolio around. She’d been advised to do so by Fotheringay, it seemed, who had a gallery up on East 74th Street. If the work was so commendable, why the hell didn’t Fotheringay want it for his own place? The waters were filled with sharks.

  He put the message slips down and looked at the
girl.

  “Tell me something uplifting,” he said. “Tell me we’ve already had interested customers this morning. Tell me we’ve had a dozen positive inquiries concerning Tahiko’s rainbows.”

  The girl smiled and shook her head. “We’ve had zero customers,” she said and leaned against the front of his desk. Pretty, he thought. She had a rather straightforward quality he enjoyed; she always looked you directly in the eyes.

  He said, “In times of recession, my dear, nobody wants to buy pictures, especially pictures of such a depressing kind. Can you honestly imagine hanging one in your living room? They rather remind me of the colors you might see behind your eyes when you’re suffering a morning hangover.”

  “Without the benefit of the night before.”

  “Exactly.” He stared past her and out into the gallery, looking at the huge rainbows. “For me, the last great art was done by the Dutch in the seventeenth century. I look at those wretched rainbows and I cannot help thinking of Frans Hals’s Regentesses of the Old Men’s Almhouse. Those hands, the worn skin, the way you imagine you want to reach out and touch them. Art pulls you into a picture. It draws you beneath the surface. It most certainly shouldn’t repel you.” He paused; it always excited him to think about the Dutch masters. “Or Vermeer’s Kitchen Maid … the high forehead of the girl, the wide hips, the appearance of the water pouring from her jug. Has anybody ever painted water that way?” He shook his head, turned his face away from the sight of Tahiko’s gloomy canvases. She probably thinks I sound quaint, old-fashioned, perhaps even somewhat didactic. He looked at her, but couldn’t tell from her expression what might be on her mind.