She came to a halt at Menzer’s shoulder, looking at me with an empty expression.
Without her pearls, without the glamorous atmosphere of Gloria’s party, without the sting of Harold Gedney’s snub still reverberating inside me, she seemed a less imposing figure than my memory had made her. Even so, I felt stunned, caught badly off my guard. And as though she had just thrown her glass of wine at me again I felt a burning sensation spreading down across my face and chest.
‘This is Lilian,’ Menzer said, ‘she’s studying design at Parsons. She has to go to class now. Right, honey?’
‘Right.’
‘See you later. Be good.’
He squeezed her hand and she left, smiling as she passed me by.
A silence ensued after she closed the door. Menzer seemed to be lost in a reverie of private delight at his little coup de théâtre, while for my own part I was so shaken I didn’t trust myself to speak. I wonder now how I could have failed to see beforehand that my drenching at Gloria’s party was connected to Menzer’s reappearance out of the blue by more than just the vague fatefulness to which I had attributed both things. Not that it makes much difference what form or combination of forms one’s designated Furies assume when they awaken. All that matters is that one recognise them, and even I was capable of that.
It was Menzer who finally broke the silence.
‘I thought you’d appreciate the allusion,’ he said, smiling, ‘as a fellow poet.’
I managed to muster a more or less dignified terseness:
‘I missed it.’
‘Ascalaphus. The dead man splashed by Proserpine for informing on her. You a Sinn und Form poet too!’
‘How did you know I’d be at that party?’
‘At the museum? Lilian’s old roommate told us. She’s a friend of Gloria Danilov’s social secretary. She -’
But I suddenly didn’t care:
‘What do you want?’
He feigned bafflement at the question. I rephrased it:
‘How much money do you want?’
‘Oh, you mean for my movie?’
‘Whatever.’
‘Well, let’s see, I was thinking of offering individual shares to potential investors at five thousand dollars apiece. How does that sound?’
I absorbed this, struck by the realisation that what I was encountering here was one of the abiding motifs of my existence: that act of predation I had been thinking about earlier; the actual naked plundering motion in which a human being becomes for a moment demon-like. I looked at Menzer; peered into his face, into the light-dashed lenses over his eyes, half expecting, hoping even, to catch some outward sign of transfiguration, if only to see how I myself had appeared when I had put the demon mask over my own face.
There was no visible change, of course.
‘It’s sort of fascinatingly expensive, isn’t it, New York?’ he was saying, evidently immensely pleased with the way things had gone. ‘I have this fantasy -’
‘How about fifteen thousand?’ I interrupted him again. An idea had come to me. It had just seemed to spring up fully formed out of that fast-moving, dubiously inventive region of my mind, my sprinter’s imagination – absurd, outrageous, unconscionable, and yet in its very preposterousness, irresistible.
Menzer looked as if he were trying very hard not to show surprise.
‘Five thousand when I get home,’ I said, ‘then another ten if you do something for me.’
A mirthful gleam came into his eye, as though the thought that I should have things in my humble life of such apparent momentousness entertained him greatly.
‘Do what?’ he asked.
I told him. He listened in silence, and made no comment when I had finished.
‘Take it or leave it,’ I said, and got up to go. He remained seated, grey and gaunt in the surreptitious light of the chrome lamp.
‘Let me think about it,’ he said as I opened the door.
‘I’ll call in a few days,’ I told him as I let myself out.
‘Inge has a lover,’ he called out suddenly. ‘Is that what we’re talking about here?’
I turned to him, struck by the inadvertant poignancy of this.
‘Yes, as a matter of fact it is.’
CHAPTER 16
It’s two o’clock, a clear day with particles of ice glinting in the air all the way across the valley. I’m sitting on the stone bench at the quarry in a grey wool coat and fawn-coloured hat with the flaps down over my ears. Lena is in the house; I didn’t want her with me. On my lap is a new notebook. The ones I have already filled are in an envelope on the kitchen table with Inge’s name on it. At five thirty Inge will come home from her shift at the health food store. If she starts reading right away, she should finish around seven. By that time it will be dark.
The trees are mostly bare now. Everywhere a greyness and a puffiness. Woolly spoor-heads of coltsfoot. Dead goldenrod, the yellow burrs dusty and whitish, stalks black-spotted, mildewy.
Am I afraid? Yes: but in a narrow, purely physical way; the fear concentrated in the back of my neck, from which gossamer-like feelers seem to have stretched all the way up to the clifftop behind me, sending little shock waves back down at every rustle or breath of wind.
I remember when we first came here. Lowenthal’s film had ended in fiasco. Shooting had been delayed twice, and by the time it finally started, Inge’s brief moment of unalloyed happiness in our exile had passed. Already she had embarked on her melancholy rebellion against our new life, and this, alas, included the film.
From the start she was ill at ease on the set: distracted, withdrawn, her performance erratic. She seemed under a strange compulsion to fail, spectacularly and in public; almost as if to turn herself into a living reproach against the whole enterprise. It didn’t help that this period coincided with the time of her ‘mercy missions’ around the city. Aside from making her frequently late, these expeditions left her too shattered to reimmerse herself in her role with any conviction. Having been dressed in her house-cleaning outfit and made up and brought onto the set, she would stand with her mop or vacuum cleaner in front of the rolling camera looking utterly lost, as if she really were some hapless Polish cleaning lady who had wandered accidentally onto a film set, then turn apologetically to Lowenthal, who, patient to a fault, would cut, give her time to collect herself and call for another take, only for the same thing to happen again, and then again… To watch someone sabotage herself is painful under any circumstances; in the concentrated glare and scrutiny of a film set it was unbearable.
I wanted to help, naturally. At Lowenthal’s request I came every day to the location. He stationed me beside him at the black and white video monitor, and between shots he would ask me in private what I thought was going on in Inge’s mind. I was mesmerised by the grainy, dream-like images of my wife on the little screen, though what I saw in them had little to do with her acting. Like Dr Serkin’s X-rays, they seemed to illuminate a state of affairs I had so far managed to conceal from myself. The depth of uncomprehending anguish in them caught me off my guard. It seemed to me my own marriage, and the actions that had brought it about, were being revealed to me with a stark, accusing brilliance. And like those slender trees I used to gaze at in the derelict garden near our apartment in Berlin, they brought back all my old feelings of longing and exclusion: that sense of another universe, bordering intimately on my own, yet impenetrable, and all the more painfully so for the fact that it was now officially in my possession.