‘Nothing real man, all right?’
Nothing real… But the blood streaming down the appalled, familiar face I glimpsed through the fire door slamming behind me as I was hurled out not twenty minutes later, had looked real enough. And the riding crop one of my burly escorts slashed me with before tossing it after me in the apparent belief that it was mine, was real enough too. I knew where I had seen that: a plump man in leather trousers with their seat missing had been offering it to anyone who’d take it. I had kept well away from him, as I had – as far as was possible in those suffocatingly crowded rooms – from everyone else. Noli me tangere… In restrospect the place itself seems of purely zoological interest. I think of Rémy de Gourmont’s Natural Philosophy of Love, a book I have my students read for its inspired analysis of the biological underpinnings of sexual behavior. One chamber after another in the corridors off the dance floor seems like a living illustration of its pages – ant-hill orgies with the lovers falling in golden cascades, frogs foaming ecstatically in slime, spintrian gastropods forming hermaphroditic garlands…
Was he there? I wondered as Terri brought me my beer, which turned out to be served in a fantastical tankard with a lid you had to open each time you wanted to drink; had he seen me enter that first, dark, pounding space with its mass of pulsating bodies, scanning it hopelessly for Carol at each burst of blue lightning? Had he found – bought, borrowed – a stocking to pull over his head to impersonate me? Could he have begun his vendetta as far back as that: before I had even been moved into his room at Arthur Clay?
And if so, why?
Why?
CHAPTER 12
I took the first bus out of Corinth that morning and went to sleep as soon as I got home. Late that evening I was woken by Mr Kurwen’s TVs. I went groggily into the kitchen and looked for something to eat. There were some eggs in the fridge and the stale half of a loaf in the bread bin. I remembered a dish my mother used to cook for me as a child, a rudimentary French toast she called ‘eggy bread’, made by dipping slices of bread in beaten egg and frying them in butter. That would do, I thought; better than going out to some hip little East Village restaurant and sitting alone among the groups of young diners, trying to look like the guest of honor at an exclusive party of one.
I turned on the radio as I cooked. There was a news story about the Iraqis violating the no-fly zone. A Pentagon spokesperson said the US would respond when and how it chose. ‘We have no intention of letting this man set our agenda for us,’ he declared, and I remember feeling that this was exactly the right attitude to take. After that there was a brief report about the body of a woman found in Central Park. Other than the jolt of dismay one feels automatically on hearing this kind of thing, I didn’t pay it any particular attention. The eggy bread was ready, the mottled yellow and white glaze on each side just starting to brown. I put the two slices on a plate, poured a glass of water and sat down at the kitchen table. A little joke came into my head: if Carol and I got back together in time to go to her aunt’s house in Cape Cod this summer as we’d planned, I would refer to the screened porch where we ate our meals as the ‘no-fly zone’. That would tickle her – I was sure. Just thinking of saying it, I could see her clear-skinned face light up in a laugh. She would laugh her high, austerely musical laugh, and from there on everyone – her aunt and all the other guests – would refer to the screened porch as the no-fly zone, and I would bask in the pleasure of having made a contribution to the general merriment. I found myself wishing I hadn’t given Elaine the sweater I’d bought for Carol – wishing in a way that I hadn’t even gone to dinner with her in the first place; that I had preserved not just the sweater but my own emotions chaste and intact for the time when Carol and I were ready to put all this nonsense behind us and start again. By the time I had thought these thoughts, overcome the inevitable backwash of self-pity that followed, and cleared away my dinner, another news bulletin had begun on the radio. This time there were more details on the body in Central Park. It was that of an Ecuadorian woman named Rosa Vasquez, who had recently moved to New York. She had been murdered some time the previous night by a blow to the head. The reason for the attack was not known.
I turned off the radio: an irrational anxiety had come into me, and I had no wish to torment myself by purposelessly nourishing it. I read for a couple of hours, then graded papers until I was tired enough to go back to bed.
In the Times the next morning, there was a picture of the woman with the golden earrings. Not that you could see the earrings themselves in the blurry picture, but it was unmistakably her. The picture looked like a photo i.d., and might well, I surmised, have been a blow-up of the very picture Trumilcik had described being taken at the INS, the woman smilingly adjusting her hair to show off the earrings, only to be told to remove them by the surly photographer – Aretes! – producing the rather glum expression on the face staring up at me now above the words Woman beaten to death in Central Park. The story described her as a dealer in rainforest artefacts.
I seem to have a gift for at least temporarily staving off the encroachment of bad tidings. Just as I had suspended my true reaction to the sight of Carol’s Halcyon that time she flew in so insouciantly from Palo Alto (only to suffer the real impact a couple of weeks later with a fierceness perhaps exaggerated by the delay), so, now, I experienced a kind of inward feinting or evasion; a sense of having been confronted with something truly appalling, and of having dodged its blow.
I spent that morning in a mood of taut neutrality. I was able to finish grading my papers; even went on to prepare my seminar for the next day. That afternoon, however, as I set off for my appointment with Dr Schrever, I could already sense this sheeny calm beginning to discolor at its edges. Like some powerful corrosive substance, the implications of Trumilcik’s latest maneuver (I could only assume it was that) had started to spread in darkly across my mind. The shape of what was being perpetrated against me had begun to clarify, though how I had managed to lay myself open to an act of such preposterously elaborate vindictiveness, how or why such an intricate engine of destruction could ever have docked at my life, was still unfathomable.
I lay on Dr Schrever’s crimson couch in silence, unable to think of anything but Trumilcik. I hadn’t mentioned him to her in all this time, my instinct for discretion having grown in direct proportion to my sense of the danger he posed. Now, much as I would have liked to unburden myself, I felt more than ever the imprudence of adding this self-evidently deranged figure to the portrait of my psyche that Dr Schrever was compiling in her notebook.
‘Is there something you don’t want to talk about?’ she asked after several minutes had passed in total silence. I had forgotten the delicate humor she sometimes deployed.
I tried to think of something innocuous to fob her off with, but my mind stayed obstinately on Trumilcik.
‘You seem distracted today, Lawrence.’
‘Do I? I’m sorry.’
‘Is something the matter?’
‘You mean other than my wife leaving me?’ I’d meant this to sound light-heartedly sardonic, but it came out querulous and overemphatic. Its vehemence resonated harshly in the quiet room.