A calm overtook my body that evening. The headache sat firmly in my skull, but I felt less nauseated and the vibrations in my limbs had vanished. I ate every bite of my bad dinner and fell asleep very early. They had to wake me for my pill, and I never heard them tie down Mrs. O. I slept like a person in a coma and woke with difficulty the next morning. I remember that I had to push myself toward consciousness and that I had a sense of moving my arms in water and propelling myself to the surface. I was too drowsy to focus properly and at first I didn’t notice that she was gone, but when I finally roused myself, I saw that Mrs. O. was not in her bed. The bed was freshly made, her belongings had disappeared, and the curtain was pulled neatly to one side.
“Where is she?” I asked Mrs. M.
“Beats me,” she said. “She’s not here. That’s all I know, and the nurses aren’t saying beans. I got the same line every time I asked—‘It’s none of your business.’ ” Mrs. M. lent her voice a nasal, officious tone. “And when I think of all I’ve done for those tight-assed cows and what I’ve had to put up with. No offense, but between you and Houdini, it’s been a circus. I’ll tell you what I think. Old Houdini had the last laugh. She did her disappearing act. Poof!” Mrs. M. snapped her fingers. “She vanished into thin air.”
I looked at the empty bed. Since then I’ve often puzzled over Mrs. O.’s disappearance. Perhaps Mrs. M. lied to me. She may have seen them move the old lady while I slept. Mrs. O. could have had a stroke or seizure in the middle of the night. She could have died and been taken to the morgue. But I didn’t consider these possibilities at the time. I was simply amazed by her absence. Had I not been so sure that my memories were real, I might have thought that she was my invention, a character I had blown to life for my own purposes. As I reflected, I felt a tiny spasm in my arm—the first sign of the crisis. It came fast, a brief but violent nerve storm, a quake in my system so powerful that even while it was happening, a part of me regarded it with awe. My arm moved again; it actually jumped on the sheet. I felt a surge of nausea and dizziness. I dragged myself from the bed and lurched past Mrs. M. to the bathroom. I vomited. My intestines cramped horribly, and then my bowels fell out of me. The paroxysm seemed to send all my internal organs into the toilet. I steadied myself on the sink and looked at my hideous face in the mirror. “You’re a ridiculous person, Iris,” I said, “a ridiculous person.” I saw my head move in the glass. It felt smaller, lighter.
“Are you okay in there?” It was Mrs. M. “Should I get the nurse?”
“No,” I said. “I’m all right.”
I used my shoulder to push open the heavy bathroom door and then walked slowly across the room, clutching the back of my gown so that it wouldn’t fly open. I sat down on the edge of the bed and remained sitting there for a long time. The light seemed unusually dim to me, and I looked out the window toward the stone-gray wall of another building. It was dark outside, and large snowflakes were falling steadily.
“It’s snowing,” I said.
“Of course it is,” said Mrs. M. “It’s been snowing for days.”
FOUR
It all started with a handshake. I waited forty-five minutes to see him that day, standing outside his office with a crowd of other students who also wanted an interview. When it was finally my turn, I walked through the door and closed it behind me. “Professor Rose,” I said. “My name is Iris Vegan.” I reached across the desk and offered him my hand. He looked at me, and I saw nothing in his face. I might have been a stone. Then he lowered his eyelids. He didn’t move. His forearms were hidden in his lap. My hand hung in midair, and I noticed that my fingers were trembling, but I didn’t take it back. I won’t, I thought. It can hang here forever. I stared at him and he continued to gaze at me. This went on for maybe half a minute. Then the corner of his mouth moved. It wasn’t a smile but a tiny nervous quiver. He laid his hand in mine very limply. I squeezed it hard and sat down. I don’t remember what he asked me or what I said, but I do recall his gray hair and green eyes, and that in this early memory he looks different from the way I would remember him later. The interview ended abruptly. “Thank you, Miss Vegan,” he said. “I will expect you in class on Tuesday.”
I had been admitted to the coveted seminar: Hegel, Marx, and the Nineteenth-Century Novel. Professor Rose couldn’t have been much over fifty, but he had the mannerisms of an aging academic star, obviously beset by the affliction common to men in his place: contempt for students. At the same time, I found it hard to dismiss him, and I don’t think it was only the rumors of his remarkable intelligence. Seeing him left an oddly sensual impression on me. It must have been his voice. He was wooden in his body, but when he spoke, the tone of his voice was highly changeable and sensitive, and it stayed with me—a sonorous trace in my ear.
The twelve of us—eight men and four women—seldom spoke in the seminar. Professor Rose would interrupt his monologue only to bark out a question. These inquiries were rarely open-ended. Usually they were factual, involving dates and names, but on occasion he would ask for an interpretation. That was worse, because we knew that the professor had a specific response in mind. Still, our intimidation made us unusually rigorous. And Professor Rose worked hard, intent on elucidating the miasma of Hegel. He read passages aloud and then took them apart, proceeding word by word, always referring to the German, and under the pressure of his examination there were moments of startling clarity. We read novels, too, and these books served as an escape from the tortuous road of philosophy. One afternoon in October, we were discussing The Possessed. It was raining outside, and the windows in Dodge Hall were clouded by water so dense it seemed to fall in sheets. Professor Rose was talking about the Russian Nihilists, his voice growing louder for emphasis and then dropping almost to a whisper. For a few seconds my mind strayed, and I gazed at the blurred red leaves of a tree in the distance and then examined the face of a young man with bad skin who was growing a beard. Maybe to hide his pimples, I thought. I heard my name and was torn from the reverie. “The bite, Miss Vegan,” Professor Rose was saying. I turned toward him and looked at his face. His mouth was still moving with the words “Stavrogin’s bite,” and I noticed his teeth when he spoke the character’s name. “Yes,” I said, straightening in my chair, trying to focus on the incident. “He bites Telyatnikov.” My voice was small. “We know that,” he said loudly. My face burned. “What does it mean?” “Nothing,” I said. Professor Rose made a face and turned his head, looking for a more suitable reply, but I went on. “It comes from nowhere, out of the blue, and that’s why it’s so terrifying. It embodies nihilism for Dostoyevsky, because it’s totally ungrounded and meaningless.” I had been speaking at the top of my voice. He looked back at me, making his eyes small and sharp. The other students looked at me too. All at once I felt dizzy and clutched the table to prepare myself for the oncoming faint. It didn’t happen often, but every once in a while, I would lose consciousness, just like that, for reasons I couldn’t understand. But this time I didn’t and recovered quickly. The professor continued speaking. I took notes and pretended to be absorbed in every word. When class ended, I hurried to leave, stuffing my books and papers into my bag. Then I saw Professor Rose standing beside me.
“Are you unwell, Miss Vegan?” he said. He put his right hand on the table.
“Oh no,” I said, “I’m fine, thank you.” I looked at him. He seemed to want to say something, but instead he stared out the window.
I pulled on my raincoat. The collar was stuck, and then I noticed that my book bag was caught underneath, making a bulge at my side. I yanked at the sleeve, painfully aware of my clumsiness.
Professor Rose smiled at me. “I’ll leave you then,” he said, “to your habiliments.”
He took his umbrella and left the room.
I waited to leave until I heard his footsteps on the stairway. He had spoken to me kindly. I was certain of it, and with a rush of happiness, I understood that he liked me. This small encounter had a disproportionately large effect
on me. I saw myself in relief, separate and distinct from the others in the class, and even though he didn’t speak to me in that way for a long time, I began to regard Professor Rose as a secret ally. This transformation took place gradually, and I can’t say whether it existed solely in my mind or whether he was responsible for it. I know that I started to look forward to seeing him on Tuesdays, that his face was pleasing, his severity undercut by humor, and that I read the assigned books with new zeal.
• • •
Ruth Slubovsky sat across from me in the seminar. She had a small face and long red hair. Ruth loved novels, and although she was abreast of all the latest literary theories, she had a gossipy interest in the fate of characters and liked to think of herself as a latter-day Emma Bovary. I never understood the appeal of imagining oneself as Madame Bovary, and I asked Ruth about this early in our friendship. In response she took from her notebook a reproduction of an eighteenth-century painting called “The Novel Reader.” It showed a fleshy, naked woman reclining on a sofa with her eyes lowered and her legs slightly opened. In her right hand was a small, thick volume. “Does this answer your question?” she said, and laughed. I laughed too, but as became clear later, the joke was an aperture not only to Ruth’s dreams but to mine, and the image of the masturbatory reader, intended no doubt as a warning to the parents of young ladies, has resonance for me now. It was Ruth, after all, who introduced me to Paris, the strange young man who popped in and out of my life with the suddenness of a genie, and she became the unlikely yoke between what will always be for me two sides of a single obscenity: the image of the nude woman with her fat book and Paris leaning toward me with vigilant eyes and painted mouth.
On Halloween night Ruth took me to a party somewhere below Canal Street. I had been in New York City for only two months and didn’t know my way around. Manhattan was a puzzle of isolated landmarks that I hadn’t yet put together, but Ruth was a native and knew it by heart. She led, I followed. Because we had no money for costumes, Ruth borrowed clothes from her brother and we went as men. The suit she brought for me was right for my tall, thin body, and when I turned to the long mirror in my apartment, I was startled by the change in my appearance. It wasn’t so much that I looked like a man but that the clothes created an image of sexual doubt. With no makeup and my hair hidden beneath a fedora, I seemed to be either a masculine woman or an effeminate man, and as I walked through the streets with Ruth, I lengthened my stride in imitation of a man’s step and pushed my hands deep into the trouser pockets. Our journey ended outside a warehouse building. Ruth took me up five flights of stairs, through an open door and into a vast, crowded room. The light was dim and smoke blurred the faces of the guests who milled about with plastic wineglasses. From the first, I was struck by the almost lunatic pleasure the partygoers had taken in their costumes—both gruesome and ridiculous. Until then I had always thought of Halloween as a child’s holiday, but gaping at the monsters, animals, transvestites, movie stars, and myriad others, I saw that the night of the dead looked more like an adult’s fever dream—brilliant, chaotic, lascivious.
Only minutes later, Ruth spotted Paris.
“You see that little guy over there in the white suit?” she said. I looked in the direction of her nod and saw a tiny man of no identifiable age talking to a pretty young woman dressed as Alice in Wonderland.
“That’s Paris,” she said.
“Who’s he supposed to be?”
“Nobody,” she said. “He always looks like that.”
“He’s wearing makeup.”
“As usual.”
I stared at him.
“He’s an art critic,” Ruth continued, “known for his nastiness in print. They say a painter committed suicide after reading a review of his work by Paris in the Village Voice.”
“He must have been unstable to begin with,” I said. “Lots of people get bad reviews.”
“I guess it was more complicated than that. You see, Paris knew him. They were friends, maybe more than friends, and Paris had always promoted his work. There was some girl, too, I think, involved with both of them. My brother told me that Paris knew this guy was on the edge. He took pills . . .”
“How awful. He sounds horrible.”
“Actually,” said Ruth, “he’s charming in a way, and you can’t believe everything you hear. Maybe there’s another side to the story. Anyway, Paris is everyone’s uninvited guest, if you know what I mean. He’s everywhere. Someone told me once that he hires a double to go to parties for him so he can be in two places at once. Look, he’s coming over here,” she said, leaning close to my ear.
The object of our conversation stood in front of me. I looked down at him thinking it would be difficult to find a double for such a person. He was too short and odd. I examined his small head, with its protruding ears and the cowlick at the top of his forehead that made his hair stand on end. I noticed then that the hairs had been forced into that position by a hair cream or gel. They were hard and shiny. He reminded me of an elf.
“Hello, Ruthie,” he said, and then turned to me smiling. “My name’s Paris,” he said.
“Just Paris?” I said. “No last name?”
“No, that’s it,” he said. “It used to be something else, but I banished it.”
“Just like that?”
He took a step toward me, lifted his chin, and lowered his voice. “Went to court, had the judge toss out the old and bring in the new. Legal magic. Since then I’ve been Paris, just Paris.”
“What was your old name?”
“That’s a secret,” he said, eyeing Ruth for a moment. “My only real secret. I tell people everything, except that. Everybody needs one mystery, don’t you think?” He looked at me, grinned, and then did a little cha-cha on the floor. Ruth and I exchanged glances.
Paris spoke to Ruth. “You don’t mind if I steal her for a little while, do you? I’ll bring her back, or perhaps I should say bring him back. We wouldn’t want to dispel any illusions, now would we?”
Without waiting for Ruth to reply, he folded his arm in mine and led me across the floor. I waved to my friend and looked down at my little escort. He seemed innocuous enough. We walked to a far corner of the room and stopped. Paris released my arm and said, “Tell me about yourself.”
I gave him the brief, dull outline. I was the daughter of a linguistics professor and a Norwegian mother, born and bred in a small town, Webster, Minnesota. I had just come to New York for graduate school at Columbia University in literature.
He shook his head. “I didn’t mean that at all.”
“No?” I said, smiling at him.
“No. I meant something about yourself that would be revealing: an idiosyncrasy, a preference, a little story from your past. That sort of thing. It’s a hobby with me. I collect what might be called psychological minutiae. Unlike most of this riffraff,” he said, waving his arm to indicate the crowd, “who only enjoy talking about themselves. I’m genuinely interested in other people, in the state of their souls.”
“I see,” I said. “And you think that idiosyncrasies reveal people’s souls?”
“I do,” he said, drawing himself up to his full height of perhaps five feet. “For example, I’m asthmatic.” He took a deep breath, as if to reassure himself that he was quite all right at the moment. “I love crime novels, all kinds, good and bad—it doesn’t matter. I worship Giorgione, Pontormo, Egon Schiele, and Duchamp. And . . .” He raised a finger in the air and shook it. “I have a sensitive spot behind my knee, which I force my lovers to stroke. It drives me wild.”
“I’ve glimpsed your innermost self,” I said.
Paris smiled, then looked sober. “I like you,” he said. “Now it’s your turn.”
“Okay. Let me see. I have no chronic illnesses that I know of. My literary passions are wide-ranging. I love Dickens and George Eliot, Henry James and Kafka. And as for my sensual inclinations, I usually keep them to myself.”
Paris smiled without opening his mouth. He
looked very white all of a sudden, like a mime. “I see,” he said. “It’s interesting though, isn’t it, what’s public and private? I mean, your taste in literature is there for everyone to see, but your taste in men is hidden territory.”
“It makes sense to me.”
“But all attractions are alike,” he said. “They come from an emptiness inside.” He hammered on his chest with his index finger. “Something’s missing and you have to fill it. Books, paintings, people, they’re all the same . . .”
“A lot of people do without books and paintings.”
“True,” he said, “but that doesn’t affect the argument.” Paris turned his head to one side and chewed on his lip. “Of course, nothing ever does the trick. Nobody’s really satisfied for long.”
I smiled. “I suppose not.”
Paris lifted his chin and looked me straight in the eyes. His gaze was direct, ingenuous, like a small boy’s, and I warmed to him. “Do you enjoy dressing as a man?” he said to me.
I looked down at the suit. “My costume,” I said. “I know it’s not much. Ruth and I whipped these up at the last minute.”
“That wasn’t the question,” he said, holding his eyes on mine. “I asked you if you enjoyed dressing as a man.”
“I guess so,” I said, and hesitated.
His face was unchanged. “Does it give you a little kick?”
“Well,” I said, not sure why I was answering. “These clothes make me feel different—especially on the street. I felt a certain excitement, yes.”
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