He pulled her back. Something – his slightly abnormal shortness, I suppose – made me suddenly think that, like many people who abuse their power over others, he had carried into adulthood some ancient sense of himself as a victim. I felt certain that he saw himself as the weaker party here; entitled – even obliged – to use any weapon he could: that he wasn’t so much trying to possess the girl, as conducting an ongoing act of defiance against the hand nature had dealt him as a physical specimen; a hand that appeared to have ruled beauty of the order this girl possessed forever out of reach. But although I sympathised with him for this, I held him entirely responsible for what he was doing. The girl’s lips parted for another half-kiss. Seeing this – practiced manipulator that he evidently was – Bruno said flatly, ‘OK, if that’s what you think…’ and let go of her hands. She stared at him, biting her lip, her eyes wide like a disappointed child’s. He looked back at her, surer than ever, I felt, of his ground; making his own eyes glint in what seemed to me a downright predatory manner. One could practically see the look travel down through the girl’s dilated pupils and spread out in a ramifying flush through the capillaries of her under-defended flesh.
The steel tracks gave a knife-grinding sound, and I could hear the distant roar of our approaching train.
‘Night-night then,’ Bruno said.
I was hoping they would move so I could come out without being seen, but they stayed there looking at each other, and as the train came hissing in, Bruno put a single finger under the girl’s chin and brought her face down toward his. She had her hands in her pockets now, and as she let herself be tipped toward him, the effect was like that of seeing a delicate statue about to topple over. I felt that she was using the small range of gestures available to her at that moment to signal acquiescence, but of the most passive kind: you’ve overpowered me, she might have been saying; I hereby inform you I no longer have any responsibility for my actions.
The train doors had opened, and since the two of them were now locked in a kiss, and making no move to get aboard, I had no choice but to come out of my hiding place in full view of Bruno; evidently not a man to kiss with his eyes closed. He saw me, of course, as I passed by, and I felt myself flinch as if it were I, not he, who had been caught doing something questionable. I don’t know whether they boarded that train or stayed there smooching till the next one came along.
As I rattled for the fourth time that day along the dirty creek, my mind drifted in an abstract, speculative way over Trumilcik’s document.
I found myself thinking of the woman ahead of him on the photograph line – the yellow-shawled woman he had described as ‘coquettish’. Catching up with her as he left the INS building with his Employment Authorisation card, he had fallen into conversation with her. As was often the case with him, the conversation had continued over the course of several nights at her apartment, which was up on Central Park West, a block north of the Dakota Building. The thought of their encounter seemed to be offering some strange elegance of symmetry or reciprocity for my enjoyment, but before my exhausted mind could grasp what it was, I found myself suddenly remembering where I had seen Blumfeld before.
Just before Carol left me, a colleague of hers had come to dinner, bringing her new girlfriend with her, an actress. After dinner, the actress had suggested we all go to a club on Eleventh Avenue, the Plymouth Rock, where sexual games of various kinds were played. I had declined politely, explaining that I needed to be up early the next morning for my Employment Authorisation interview, the penultimate phase in my Green Card application procedure. I assumed that my wife, a medieval scholar not given to caprices of a sexual or any other nature, would likewise decline. To my astonishment, however, she had accepted, and insisted on going even when I discreetly suggested she might have drunk more than she realised. She left me at home with the dishes, and the strange sense of being a spoilsport, something I had never before suspected her of thinking.
The actress was Blumfeld. He was a woman! Hence those hairless white hands; hence that secretive, mischievous look in her eyes…
I arrived home still absorbed in this discovery – so much so that I forgot to avoid looking at the answering machine on my way through the living room, and found myself stalled by the unexpected pulsation of a red light.
I allowed myself a moment of joy as I watched it flashing. Then, as I always did on the rare occasions when the machine held a message for me, I deleted it without listening to it, so as not to risk the disappointment of it not being from Carol.
CHAPTER 3
The next morning I took the train back to work with a fresh sheaf of Laser Printer paper in my briefcase. I wanted to print out Trumilcik’s manuscript and reread it; that was all.
That was all, though I should say that although I had never had any literary ambitions of my own, I had recently read several articles about the colossal advances being paid to novelists, and as a result had briefly included novel-writing among the various alternative-career fantasies I drifted into whenever I found myself worrying about money. I had even gone so far as to embark on a little story – it was called S for Salmon – to see if I had any talent for invention. I hadn’t been pleased with the results, and that particular daydream had faded from the roster.
I mention this purely to play devil’s advocate against myself; to make the case that if Trumilcik had been able to see inside my head and piece together the frailest remains of buried wishes, he might indeed have been justified in regarding me as a would-be plagiarist, though even then he would have been wrong. As it is, I can only attribute his subsequent actions to an innate suspiciousness bordering on paranoia.
My office was as I had left it. I closed the door behind me and took the fat sheaf of paper from my bag, tearing off its wrapper and loading the pristine white block into the printer. Removing the cover from the computer, I pressed the power button, watched the screen flicker on, heard the tinny synthetic fanfare, gave the list-files command, and saw with the kind of pang you feel when a blissful encounter evaporates as you wake and realise you were merely dreaming it, that the document was no longer there.
After repeating the operation, checking the Recycle Bin, and trying out every other exploring and resuscitating technique I knew, I had no choice but to acknowledge the fact that I had been observed last night, presumably by Trumilcik himself.
My first thought was that he must have been on his way into the office, perhaps to continue working on this very document, when he had noticed the light on and had crept up to the window, watching me through the latticed panes as I devoured his story. If this were the case, he would have had to be standing close to the window itself, somewhere in the patch of ground defined by the flying buttresses that protruded from either side of the casement, and a line of thick, eight-foot-high hemlocks running parallel with the wall. The room wouldn’t have been clearly visible from beyond this small oblong. Not being a walkway, the area had held its patch of old snow more or less intact, and had anyway been completely covered with new snow from the flurries that had fallen before I arrived last night. Anyone standing there watching me would have left footprints, but there were no footprints.
I was reluctant to proceed from there to the next logical step: that I had been observed from within the room. Aside from everything else, it seemed a practical impossibility that a second person could have been in the room all the time I was there; unheard, unseen, unsuspected even, by me. For form’s sake, more than out of any conviction that Trumilcik could have been hiding in there, I opened the little storage closet where I had seen the air conditioner and Barbara Hellermann’s clothes. The space showed no obvious sign of intrusion, and I saw that even if someone had been in there with the door ajar, they would have seen nothing but a thin strip of wall with the owl-face of a light switch and the piece of paper with the quotation from Louisa May Alcott. Anyway, if there really was someone frequenting the room on a clandestine basis, they would surely have had to come up with a less obvious way of concealing themselves – should the need to do so arise – than a closet.