She had had a stalker, this woman. The moment I read this, the reason for her reaction to me that afternoon in the park flashed on me with painful clarity. She too had thought I was Trumilcik! What gave it all its peculiar farcical desperateness was that, after seeing me throw something into the lake, she had notified the police, who had retrieved Mr Kurwen’s glass eye from the ice floe it had landed on, so that there now existed a possible connection between the woman’s assailant and this absurd, orbicular prosthesis. It was like a riddle: what do a glass eye and a motiveless killing have in common? The answer – not the true answer, but the only answer – could be triangulated, I realised, in Dr Schrever’s notebook. For all I knew, this had already been done. Hence the radical unapproachability of her office.
My apartment felt emptier and more silent than ever. I moved through it, trying to think clearly what I should do. Turn myself in to the police with a wild, still-unverifiable story about a plot to make me look like a serial murderer? Try to flush out Trumilcik from wherever he was hiding now? (But then what? Ask him politely to please stop this inconsiderate behavior?) Or go somewhere, escape, get on a train or plane till things, as they say, ‘quietened down’?
I was overwhelmed: stressed to the point where my mind simply froze like a stalled engine. In a vague, trance-like state, I gathered a few things together – warm clothes, passport and Green Card, various papers – and put them in my briefcase, not remotely knowing what I intended to do. Having done that, I immediately succumbed to a heavy, familiar inertia. I stared abstractedly out of the window without moving. So abstracted was I, in fact, that at first I thought the flickering silver light I could see out of the corner of my eye was just a reflection on the revolving ventilator fan across the courtyard. Even when I roused myself from my stupor and moved into the kitchen to throw out the few bits of fresh food I still had, it took me a moment to realise that the flickering spot had come into the kitchen with me and grown a little larger, and that this meant it had nothing to do with the ventilator fan, but was in fact an emissary from the world of pain, come to pay me another call in its familiar metallic livery.
As it grew, spreading across my field of vision like a great, sunlit shoal of mackerel, I felt a burst of childish self-pity. I found myself thinking of my mother, childishly yearning for the soothing way she had taken up the management of these migraines when I was a boy, entering so intimately into the interstices of my pain, it seemed she might be capable of assuming the burden of it herself, relieving me altogether. And then, when conventional medicine failed to help me, the way she had sought out that homeopath, the old Finn with his tiny, mysterious pills… I wondered again what they were, wished I could call my mother to find out, and as the silvery obstruction vanished and the first wave of pain came crashing into my head, I felt with a pang the sadness of the state of affairs that had arisen between myself and my mother. The truth was I had lost touch with her over the years, and no longer had an address or phone number for her. I had always been aware of something not quite natural about this, but now, for the first time, I seemed to come face to face with its full, appalling strangeness. What was almost worse was that I had no real idea how it had come about! It was as though some deep rift or faultline existed in the terrain of my psyche, some hidden oubliette of consciousness, into which events – even momentous events like this – could fall without a sound.
The ache pounded in my head, hammering at the inside of my skull. Hearing myself cry aloud with pain, I grabbed my coat and briefcase, and ran downstairs to the street. Now at least I had a specific goal to accomplish. I knew exactly where I was going: 156 Washington Avenue. I’d read the address enough times in the Manhattan Directory over the past week in my attempt to clarify the mystery of an apparent connection between Trumilcik and my wife, though that particular conundrum couldn’t have been further from my mind right now, fully occupied as it was by the immense discomfort of its own physical substance; that, and the frailly assuaging memory of a pair of white, cool hands pressing into my temples and forehead.
The building was an old brownstone with chipped black lions on its stoop. The name I was looking for was on a buzzer marked Apt 5. I pressed it. To my surprise the door was buzzed open without any preliminaries on the entryphone. I trudged up the uncarpeted wooden stairs to the fifth floor and saw that the apartment door was open, spilling out voices and soft music. Behind it was a small entranceway with a coat-stand draped in winter coats.
Almost immediately – several seconds before I became conscious of what I was looking at – I felt the same sense of being pushed away as I had felt outside Dr Schrever’s office earlier that afternoon and at Elaine’s house the day before: an invisible peristalsis of space, air, light, urging me – it had begun to seem – out of existence itself.
I was turning, still unaware of what it was I had laid eyes on, when a voice said hello.
I turned back, and there was Melody Schroeder, a glass of red wine in her hand. Her cheeks were pink and soft-looking. Her hair was short, almost shaven, though the effect was also one of softness, rather than toughness. She was looking at me with her odd, mischievous, secretively knowing smile. A delicious smell of cooking had wafted into the air.
‘I’m Lawrence Miller,’ I said. ‘You once -’
‘I know who you are.’
‘Well, I was wondering -’
‘Yes but I can’t help you.’
I paused, blinking. The slightest effort of thought seemed to intensify the ache in my head.
‘Oh, you mean – no, no, it isn’t about Carol. It’s – I have a -’ I touched my head.
Her eyes roved across my own with an aloof curiosity.
‘You do, don’t you?’
‘That was you, wasn’t it? Blumfeld?’
She smiled. Only now do I see the cruelty of that smile: the same indolent, foreknowing expression that I note in retrospect as I recall the moment at our table months earlier, when she had first suggested, her husky voice all antic innocence, that expedition to the Plymouth Rock.
‘Here,’ she said. She brought a hand to my forehead – just one hand, the other still holding her wineglass. She was wearing a thumb-ring: gold and very thick. My eye rested on it blurrily as she gripped the front of my head and pressed in her thumb. There was something disturbing about it, I caught myself feeling; something delicately, elusively gross…
‘There. Now I’m having a dinner party which I’m afraid I can’t -’
‘She’s here, isn’t she?’ I interrupted, conscious suddenly of at least a part of what it was that had caught my eye earlier: half-hidden by the other coats on the rack was the unmistakable royal blue of Carol’s cape-like winter coat.
‘Yes she is.’
I looked over Melody’s shoulder, but the corridor from this vestibule turned a corner, and the guests were not visible. From a flicker of shadow on the wall, I saw that they must be sitting in candlelight. That Carol was there, around that corner, where the voices and music and the smell of cooking were coming from, was a thought large enough to obliterate all sense of the pain in my head, and for a moment I thought Melody’s touch had worked another miracle. I tried to make out Carol’s voice in the drifting murmur of conversation. Just the sound of her voice would have been something to carry away with me. I could have lived on that and nothing else for days! Life itself – all I wanted of life – seemed just around that corner. A few steps and I could be a part of its candlelit, warm circle again.
‘You’d better go,’ Melody said.
I nodded. There seemed a deep, unintended judiciousness to her words, as if she were telling me, rightly, that that unseen, golden image required precisely my own absence from it as the condition for its continued existence. As I turned to leave, I saw that the coat all but covering Carol’s was also familiar, and I realised with a jolt that it was this: the sight of the two of them together – this black coat with its split tails joined at the stylised rectangle of raised fabric, lying over Carol’s blue coat – that had created the strange force-field I had felt propelling me away from here when I had first reached the doorway, and felt again now, like a great blast of cold wind ushering me back out into the night.