‘Your husband?’
She gave a peal of laughter. ‘You are so funny!’
‘What then?’
‘What would be the most precious thing I could have in my possession, other than yourself?’
‘I can’t imagine.’
‘Oh Lawrence! Your letter, of course!’
I had never written her a letter. I must have looked disconcerted.
‘Did I say something wrong?’ she asked.
I felt instinctively that I should try to conceal my puzzlement, at least until I had figured out what was going on.
‘Not at all,’ I managed, ‘I’m – I guess I’m just – moved.’
A look of joy blazed from her eyes.
‘Let’s eat.’
As if the mystery of this letter were not enough to keep me thoroughly distracted for the rest of the evening, something even more disturbing arose soon after. As I passed my open briefcase on my way into the dining room, I happened to glimpse Barbara Hellermann’s volume of Shakespeare, which I had brought to read on the train home.
‘Incidentally,’ I said, ‘did you know Barbara Hellermann?’
She looked blank for a moment.
‘Oh Lord – you mean the woman who got killed?’
‘She was killed?’
‘You didn’t know?’
‘No.’ With an obscure apprehensiveness, I asked what had happened.
‘Some crazy guy in the subway attacked her. She went into a coma, then died just a few days later. I knew her to say hello, but -’
‘- Did they catch the guy?’
‘I don’t believe they did.’
‘How did he – how did he kill her?’
‘He hit her with a steel bar.’
Over the cauliflower quiche I tried to maintain the appearance of a besotted admirer, asking Elaine about her life and nodding interestedly as she told me about it, but my mind was elsewhere. I was preoccupied with the question of how soon I could decently leave, and whether there would be time to stop off at my office before the last train home. The result was that I took in only snatches of what she was saying to me, my growing consternation blocking out most of her words, just as the desks the other day had blocked out most of her body. Our relationship seemed to be developing a peculiar truncated quality.
‘I’m a rebel, is what I am,’ I heard her say at one point, ‘people just don’t realise it.’
I nodded, narrowing my eyes as if in appreciation of a subtly astute analysis, though I had no idea what had prompted her remark.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I can see that.’
‘Does it bother you?’
‘No.’
‘So I wasn’t wrong, then, to do it?’
I racked my brains for an echo, a trace imprint of what she had just been talking about, but all I could think of were the words she had uttered a few minutes earlier; he hit her with a steel bar, that had sent me into this distracted state in the first place. A steel bar… I was trying to deny to myself the likelihood of a connection between this and the rod I had found under the desks in my office, but against this effort came wave upon wave of strange, surging apprehensiveness.
‘Not at all,’ I hazarded in answer to Elaine’s question, ‘I think you were absolutely right to do it.’
She nodded: glad, apparently, of my approval for whatever it was she had done, but seemingly placed by it in some difficult new quandary:
‘So what should I tell them?’
‘Well… What do you want to tell them?’
‘I’m not sure. Sometimes I almost feel like telling them to go take a running jump!’
‘Then that’s what you should do!’
So it continued: Elaine supplying the talk, me tuning out despite my best efforts to follow. At one point I realised from the way she was looking at me, and from a dim, lingering sense of a rising intonation at the end of the last phrase that had drifted by (no more intelligibly than the hum of the refrigerator), that she had just asked me another question.
‘Well?’ she said, after a longish pause.
It occurred to me that in my capacity as projected apparition, I was perhaps above having to observe the petty conventions of rational or continuous discourse. I could say or do whatever I felt like, and Elaine would adapt pliably to my whim.
I put my hand under her chin and drew her head toward mine. She seemed startled, but as I’d predicted, she acquiesced in the gesture. I kissed her lips, then probed into her mouth with my tongue. We were seated on her black-stained dining room chairs, a little too far apart to embrace, our conjoined heads forming an apex over the tile-floored space between us. A multitude of things tumbled about in my mind as we kissed. I tried to focus on the sweater-clad torso beside me and think of Carol. For a moment I felt almost present in the physical reality of what I was doing, but then the distractions impinged again: the letter I had never written; the steel rod I had mistaken for an innocent component of my office furniture… Meanwhile the kiss continued. Sooner or later, I supposed, I would catch up with it – find out what it meant to me, what it had accomplished, if anything. Right now it existed only for Elaine. Judging by the frantic vigor of her response, she was enjoying it.
‘That’s your answer,’ I said, pulling away. I stood up. ‘And now I have to get going.’
She blinked at me, baffled but unprotesting.
While we waited for my taxi she became rapidly subdued. No doubt my erratic behavior had finally got to her. She had a large capacity for pain, I sensed, if also for the endurance of pain. There was something softly monumental about her, living out here by herself like a pioneer woman out on the plains. Though in all but body I was already halfway up Mulberry Street to the dark campus, my hand gripping the key to Room 106, my nerves preparing themselves for the shock of a possible encounter with a startled Trumilcik, I had enough regard for her to attempt a gracious exit.
‘I’d like to see you again,’ I said.
‘Would you?’
I put my arms around her.
‘Let’s go away somewhere, shall we? For a weekend?’
She nodded.
‘I’ll organise it,’ I said.
I kissed her again. This time I felt a wave of desire; unexpectedly powerful. I don’t know why; perhaps the feelings of guilt and pity she’d succeeded in arousing in me had supplied the component missing before. With a familiar swarming sensation, my center of gravity shifted downward from my head. My mouth and hands, answerable to a new set of priorities, acquired a new boldness. I felt them slide over her breasts and down across her skirt to her groin.
She pulled back a little, registering the change.
‘What are you doing?’
‘This,’ I said with a smile, tumbling us both into the oatmeal denim couch. It was always amazing to me, the changes of consciousness that came over one at these moments. I felt abruptly free of inhibitions.
She gazed up at me with a look of helpless bewilderment.
‘It’s all right,’ I said.
‘Is it?’
‘We’ve been wanting this for a long time, haven’t we?’
Even my voice sounded different; its timbre suddenly playful and brazen, as though I had entered a state of irrepressible good spirits; one that couldn’t but be irresistibly infectious to anyone near me.
‘I don’t mean just this,’ I said, ‘but this too…’
She looked at me, saying nothing.
I kissed her very gently on her lips and throat. She lay unresponsive, then turned her face from under mine.
‘No?’ I asked, grinning. ‘No?’
‘No!’ she said, with sudden firmness.
I kissed her again.
Frowning at me, she pushed me off her, and stood up abruptly from the sofa. She looked extremely upset.
A little later I was striding up Mulberry Street, key prematurely in hand as I had envisaged, my mind plunging forward into the question of what exactly I should do with Trumilcik’s rod when I retrieved it from under the desks.
Naturally my first thought was to take it to the police, and tell them what I knew about Trumilcik. But as I imagined how my list of Trumilcik’s manifestations might sound to a New York police detective, I began to have doubts. Someone who hadn’t seen the bookmark, the phone bill, the coin, or the computer file in the first place, might not find the disappearance of these things all that compelling. The hideout under the desks might look to them like nothing more than empty space. And to a person without the sophistication to connect a certain kind of womanising with a capacity for homicidal misogyny, the presence of a steel rod there might seem less than significant. All in all, I realised I might be in danger of being politely dismissed as a lunatic.