Bruno!
It was Bruno Jackson’s coat!
He should have liv’d, Angelo says after reneging on his promise to spare Claudio’s life in return for a night with Isabella; He should have liv’d, save that his riotous youth, with dangerous sense, might in the times to come have ta’en revenge…
Like the guests on Desert Island Discs, I have my Shakespeare and my Bible: Barbara Hellermann’s Shakespeare; Trumilcik’s Bible, which, as you would expect, is no conventional Bible. Between these books I have been trying to make sense of the events of these past weeks. And it seems to me that far from overestimating the scale and complexity of the campaign launched against me (as an obdurately skeptical part of me suspected I was, even to the end), I had been fatally underestimating these things.
That I was confronting not one, but two antagonists, allied against me in the implementation of a kind of vast pincer movement – motivated, on Bruno’s part at least, by revenge (I have yet to understand Trumilcik’s motive) – was still far from clear to me as I stumbled down the stairs of Melody’s building, and out on to the street.
Instead of curing me, Melody’s one-handed touch seemed to have made my head even worse. And added to the physical pain was that sight – an image to pierce the soul – of Bruno Jackson’s coat embracing Carol’s. It was about all I could do to examine the memory then of what I had had no doubt a deep vested interest in forgetting: that Bruno and Carol had met, had spent time together under the same roof as Fellows at the Getty Institute in California three years earlier. This fact had come to light last fall, when Bruno and I had first met, and were sounding each other out over coffee in the Faculty Dining Room, cautiously trading selections of our life histories. ‘The Getty Institute?’ I remembered saying, ‘my wife was there a couple of years ago. Carol Vindler.’
‘Carol Vindler’s your wife?’
As I dragged myself through the streets of the West Village, I tried to burrow back in time to that moment. Had there been any particular glint in Bruno’s eye, any suggestion in his voice or demeanor of sensitive information in his possession; of a split-second’s decision to withhold it? I couldn’t be sure, and yet the possibility itself was enough to set my mind reeling. Bruno and my wife? No! I wanted to shout out the word; blast its veto indelibly on to the past, the present and the future. Certain turns of event are simply incompatible with the continuation of one’s life…
I controlled myself as best I could, tried to come to a cooler, more rational appraisal of things. They had met; that was for sure. Perhaps she had found him attractive, as women seemed to. But even if she had, I doubted whether anything would have happened. The whole light-filled edifice of Carol’s personality, her emotions as precise, as diamond-bright as her intelligence, was built on honesty. Deception would have been as little tolerable in there as a spitball in a Swiss watch. But now – now that she was a free agent again… Might she not have resumed contact? Even the most contented spouses keep a few names and faces at the back of their minds for a rainy day – former lovers, someone they might have slept with if circumstances had been different, chance acquaintances their stray gaze held a second longer than a purely social contact required, leading them both somewhere they stepped back from but never forgot… And when the moment comes, the rainy day, the partner gone, how easy it is all of a sudden, how natural it feels, to pick up the phone… But on reflection even that I couldn’t quite see Carol doing. Even that had something base about it; an admission of latent duplicity during the time we were together, which her pride in her own integrity, if nothing else, would find offensive.
No, the move must have come from Bruno. He must have heard about our separation – not hard in a villagey city like New York. And he would have found a way of insinuating himself into her new orbit. Perhaps he knew Melody; knew her through… through Trumilcik! (That, right there, was my first intimation of the possibility of their being in league together: Bruno and Trumilcik; Bruno’s cunning, his malcontent’s sly machination; Trumilcik’s crude and bestial brutality: Bruno pinning up that Portland poster, maybe even faking it, sticking the note in my mailbox, forging the letter to Elaine; Trumilcik crapping on my desk, attacking me in the synagogue…) And through Melody had got to Carol. Ah! My insides seemed to melt. I felt as I imagined a parent would feel at the thought of their child being abducted by a stranger: an immediate, foaming panic I had to beat down, once again, to pursue the question of why he would do it. Simple opportunism? The assiduous womaniser simply obeying the law of his own instincts? Possibly. But was there not also – in the outcome at least – something tauntingly pointed, aimed deliberately at me, calculated to send me lurching into whichever circle of hell it is that the victims of sexual jealousy suffer their torments in? Something, in other words, that might have had less to do with desire for Carol than with revenge against me? He should have liv’d – I read the words again – save that his riotous youth, with dangerous sense, might in the times to come have ta’en revenge… Too bad, I find myself thinking ruefully, that the powers of the Sexual Harassment Committee didn’t extend to the issuing of a death warrant!
CHAPTER 14
I spent that night in my office at Arthur Clay. It seemed to me I could reasonably count on a night of grace before anyone thought of looking for me there. Since my encounter with Trumilcik, I had formed the assumption that he favored the synagogue basement over this office for his nocturnal quarters, and I didn’t think there was much likelihood of his appearing here tonight. But if he did, I was ready for him. At any rate, I thought I was.
I tried to go to sleep in my desk chair, but between the glare of the campus lamps outside, and the unceasing ache in my head, I soon realised that this position offered little prospect of oblivion. The heat must have been lowered too, as the room was distinctly chilly. I wanted to lie down, I wanted darkness, and I wanted something to wrap myself in.
With a distinct reluctance, though realising there was nowhere else to go (the closet was too short to lie down in), I opened Trumilcik’s hiding place and crept in, closing the desks behind me. Wrapping myself in his stinking sheet, I shut my eyes and fell into a fitful sleep, full of uneasy dreams.
I was unaware of any nocturnal visitation, human or otherwise, but when I emerged at dawn, bleary and unclean, I realised even before I caught sight of myself in one of Trumilcik’s strategically placed mirrors, that something truly catastrophic had come to pass.
Forcing myself to stand still and confront my reflected head, I had the sensation of fainting rapidly through successive layers of consciousness, but without the luxury of passing out.
A thick, white, horn-like protrusion had grown out of my forehead.
I knew, of course, that this could not be so: that I was either still asleep and dreaming it, or that the mounting pressure of these past few days had made me suggestible to the point of hallucination. But this knowledge didn’t remotely lessen the terror I felt as I stared at my image in the mirror. Gingerly, I raised my hand to the protrusion, praying that the sense of touch – less given to hysteria, perhaps, than that of sight – would prove the monstrosity an apparition and make it vanish. Unfortunately it had the opposite effect: the thing felt appallingly reaclass="underline" hard, rock-smooth, and icy cold.