For the first time now I noticed a number of small, unobtrusive mirrors, placed here and there in my field of vision. I couldn’t see much in them, but they had evidently been positioned to pick up movement in any corner of the room, so that although I could no longer see Elaine, I could tell that she had crossed to my own desk and was now standing still – presumably examining its surface. After a moment she crossed back and sat down in the swivel chair I kept for students, turning around in it, so that her thighs and knees suddenly swung directly into my line of vision, about four feet from my face.
What a stupendously odd situation to find myself in! I felt what it must be like to wear a chador, a yashmak; to go about the world revealing nothing of yourself, and seeing only the equivalent of this truncated strip of Elaine’s midriff. And, continuing the line of thought I had been pursuing just a few minutes earlier, I was struck by the notion that this state of affairs wasn’t after all so different from the normal manner in which men like myself were getting accustomed to conducting our relations with other people; either totally concealing ourselves, or else revealing only what we ourselves hadn’t yet deemed inadmissible in civilised discourse; an aperture no less narrow than the one I was presently peeping through, and getting thinner by the day, so that all one ever really acknowledged of another person was the equivalent of what I was looking at now.
Elaine’s hand flashed across the bar of light, sweeping over her skirt-tightened thigh and into her lap. The still-visible wrist it was attached to began moving, working busily from side to side. The knee crossed over its twin with a light fall of drapery that exposed a thin, iridescent slip under the skirt. After a while she stood up, going once more to my desk.
I heard some squirting sounds I couldn’t decipher. A moment later she reappeared by the door and left, closing it behind her.
I waited several minutes before I dared move. When I did, I found I was soaked through with sweat. I also appeared to have been clutching the metal bar all this time – so tightly the muscles in my hand had all but frozen themselves on to it.
As I stepped out into the room, I realised what the squirting sounds had been: Elaine had sprayed the place with her lemony-sugary perfume. I saw too what she had been doing in the swivel chair: writing a note. It lay on my desk, folded over with my name on the outside in large, round letters. I picked it up and unfolded it: Why oh why, it read, did Roger have to show up like that? We do seem to be star-crossed! Anyway, this little note is to tell you I’m sorry it didn’t go as planned, but we do have all the time in the world after all, and I’m in your room at least, my gentle friend, drinking in the sight of your things (so you, those cups, so funny and original!). And that beautiful quotation on the walclass="underline" it made me feel almost as good about what I did last night as I do about you showing up at lunch like that in your shirt. Anyway I’ve got to run now, so if I don’t catch you later I’ll call you tonight. Till then…?? Darling?? Elaine.
This seemed to indicate a new depth of strangeness. What lunacy could have possessed such a sensible-seeming woman to behave like this? The thing that made it peculiarly disturbing was the way she appeared to have hallucinated my acquiescence in her fantastical scenario.
I went home; confused and distantly alarmed.
My apartment felt oppressively empty. When Carol left, she took with her every shred of evidence connecting us, from the furniture and the kitchen stuff she’d brought with her, to our wedding photo from City Hall.
Bereft of her, the place had languished. Piles of dusty papers and clothes grew over the floor and furniture. As soon as I cleared one up, another would appear somewhere else: apparently I was intent on creating disorder behind my own back. Sometimes, though, the rooms seemed to fill with a ghostly memory of her. The staleness would go from the air. The bookshelves would seem crowded again with her books on medieval art and thought. I would have the distinct sense that if I were to open the bedroom closet in such a way as to catch it unawares, her side of it would be filled again with her clothes; the neatly folded piles cool and soft, scented with the fragrance that was not so much the residue of a soap or perfume, as the emanation of a fine and pure spirit.
I went into the kitchen; thought of cooking a meal, then decided not to. I wandered back into the living room; picked up a sweater from a stack of things on a recessed ledge beside the sofa… Under it lay some printed pages. A phrase caught my eye: Elaine’s pale breasts and thighs… Amazed, I picked up the pages. They were the typescript of the story I had tried to write a few months ago – S for Salmon. I’d forgotten I had used the name Elaine.
The story was about a man having an affair. Returning to his office after a lunchtime assignation with his mistress, he finds a message from his wife asking him to bring home a wild salmon from the nearby fishmonger. He goes there right away to be sure of getting one before they run out. It’s a hot day; the office fridge turns out to be too small to accommodate the big fish; so he takes it down to the storage room, the only cool place in the building. Seeing a glue-trap covered in cockroaches, he puts the fish in a metal filing cabinet, selecting the S-Z drawer. Later, he leaves the office, hurrying to get the train his wife’s expecting him on. Only as he pulls out of the station does he realise he has left the fish behind in the filing cabinet. It’s a Friday; the office is locked all weekend. The story ends with him on the train, guiltily picturing the fish – a beautiful, rainbow-mailed creature with dark pink flesh in its slit belly – dulling and decomposing in its metal tomb, while insects swarm over the cabinet, trying to get inside.
The line that had caught my eye came from the assignation at the beginning, where the man and his mistress are making love in a hotel room. Apparently I had named the mistress Elaine.
In the light of what had happened today, I had to wonder if there was any significance in this. Bearing in mind what I had learned in my sessions with Dr Schrever, I tried to think what the name had meant to me when I chose it. Had I been thinking of Elaine Jordan? If so, was that because I had placed her, unconsciously, in the category of plausible sexual partner? And if that were the case, had I perhaps all this time been emitting signals of sexual interest in her, without knowing it – signals that had become transformed, in her inflamed imagination, into the sense of an actual, ongoing liaison between us? And if all this were so, did that mean that under the complete indifference I believed I felt toward her, I did in fact harbor feelings of desire?
As I was turning this over in my mind, Mr Kurwen’s first TV came on. A moment later I heard the second, even louder than the first. There was a new level of assault in the volume; a suggestion of deliberate affront. I decided to go up and complain.
This time Mr Kurwen’s glass eye was out. The white-lashed pucker of the eyelid over the empty socket struck me nearly dumb. Flakes of dried food fluttered at his mouth, impaled on his white stubble. A fetid stench reared up out of the hallway behind him. He scanned me aggressively with his good eye, then, to my surprise, gave me a rueful smile.