Men in Black

by Scott Spencer

  She moved with great confidence and a lovely grace. Her hair was short, in a sort of Louise Brooks-ish fashion. She wore a brown suede jacket, a yellow skirt, boots. She seemed fuller breasted than I remembered her. There was a glow of good health in her skin, beaming out of her like a flashlight under a silk scarf.

  I threw the magazine aside and started to get up, but somehow remained seated. I watched as she made her way toward me; if she had looked up she would have seen me, but she did not look up. She stopped to talk to a young, overweight kid crouched in front of an open drawer filled with photos, and when she was finished with him she stopped to say something to an elderly guy in a maroon beret who was inspecting a photograph, holding it in a quivering spoke of sunlight and peering at it through a magnifying glass.

  The last time I had come to this office was to make love to Nadia, and somehow the drastic change of circumstance hadn’t yet reached the Iron Age hinterlands of my nervous system, and I sat there with sexual excitement spreading through me, like roses blooming in a battlefield.

  And now she was standing before me. I stood up, offered her my hand.

  She took it, briefly, coolly.

  “Where are we going?” she asked.

  “There’s that coffee shop next door.”

  She shook her head no. I wasn’t sure why, and I was in no position to ask. Somehow, despite her horrible behavior, she was still the injured party.

  “Any place you’d like to go?” I asked, managing to omit the word “special” at the last moment.

  “How about a bar so we can get totally drunk?” I must have looked confused, because she laughed, happy for the moment. “I’m not serious, Sam.” She pressed the call button for the elevator and the doors immediately opened.

  The elevator descended. We stood close to each other. I felt sick with nervousness, and simply became John Retcliffe for the ride. I thought of interviews coming up, questions to anticipate, things I might say. I did not think of the nights I had spent in Nadia’s arms, the slightly yeasty taste of her sleepy kisses. I did not think of Olivia, and I did not think of my son.

  When we were in the lobby I said, “Now where?” and Nadia said she was hungry for lunch and there was a new Japanese restaurant around the corner.

  It had a Grand Opening sign in the window and little plastic pennants flapping in the breeze, as if what they were offering were used cars rather than tempura. Inside, the place was so ordinary it looked as if it had been taken out of a box, ready-made: little Formica tables, carnations stuck in saki decanters, posters of Mount Fuji.

  The waitress was dressed in a kimono, but that was as traditional as she went. She had a Queens accent, and when she unceremoniously placed our tea on the table the sleeve of her kimono rode up, revealing an antismoking patch on her forearm.

  I could somehow tell by the way Nadia ordered her meal that I was in trouble. Her tone was harsh, authoritative; she ordered more than she could possibly eat. When our little lacquer bowls of miso came, we ate in silence, until I tried to break, or at least bend, the silence.

  “You’re looking well,” I said.

  “Oh, fuck you.”

  I rolled my eyes, as if I were used to this sort of verbal abuse, as if it barely fazed me.

  “Can I ask you a question?” I said.

  “No!” She took another spoonful of miso and then changed her mind. “What?”

  “Why do you want to make all this trouble? You’ve been talking to my publisher—I mean, I don’t get it. I’ve never had a book sell in—”

  “Don’t talk to me about that book, Sam. I mean it.”

  “What are you talking about? That’s why we’re here, to talk about the book.”

  “Maybe that’s why you’re here, Sam. But not me.”

  “What do you want, Nadia?”

  “I want you to face what you did to me. Okay? I want you to squirm. I want you to come to my office and pick me up for lunch.”

  “Well, then you should be very happy, all of your dreams have come true.”

  “To me, you look very comfortable.”

  “I do? Well, that’s just amazing. Because I’m not. In fact, things could hardly be worse.” Hearing I was feeling bad made me feel worse. The stone fell into the well of self-pity, raising a wave of the stuff. I dropped my mock- ivory spoon into the miso and covered my eyes with my hand.

  “I called your wife, Sam, the precious Olivia.”

  “You did? When?”

  “This morning. Before you called. Before I even knew I was going to see you.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  She shrugged, and a surge of wild energy went through me. It felt like madness. The world, its conventions, propriety, a sense of consequence—all of it began to fade. I felt as if I might literally die of anger.

  “That was a terrible thing to do, Nadia.”

  “I can call whoever I want,” she said. She placed her spoon in the bowl and nodded agreeably at the waitress as she cleared the table.

  “No, you cannot do whatever you want,” I said. “There are people involved here, Nadia.”

  “That’s a good one, coming from you.”

  I gestured my lack of comprehension.

  “Since when did you become a big carer about people?” she asked, and then she folded her hands in her lap and smiled happily as a new waitress appeared with our lunches—we both ordered chicken teriyaki, if it matters.

  “That psycho letter you sent to me?” I said, while the waitress served us. “In which you so delicately said I used your cunt as a toilet?”

  Nadia gestured toward the waitress and then made a shushing sound.

  “Well, Michael got his hands on it.”

  “Oh.”

  “And you know what else? He was so fucked up by it, he disappeared.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Disappeared. He’s so bent out of shape by what you said, he can’t face me and he can’t face his mother, either, knowing as he does a great deal more about what a shit heel her husband is than she does. Or—I don’t know, I usually think about this at night, when I’m alone—maybe he ran away because he wanted to create some emergency that would bring me and Olivia together.”

  “Are you and Olivia apart? Or is this just more of your song and dance?”

  I stared at her. I had no idea what I might do next. The line that tethered me to civilized behavior was gone; I felt only the ghostly pressure of where it had once secured me to the shore.

  “Are Olivia and I apart? Why are you asking that?”

  It wasn’t as if I was trying to make my voice sound violent; it was only the lack of effort to make it sound reasonable. Nadia visibly drew back from me; I could sense her struggle to maintain a certain impassivity in her stare.

  “I seem to recall your saying something about a divorce.”

  “That is completely untrue. That was happening in your own mind, and in fact it’s probably something you made up afterwards. It was never fucking mentioned.”

  “Look, Sam, I didn’t come here to be verbally abused. And do you think you could manage to keep your voice down? You’re terrifying the waitresses.”

  “I am not terrifying the waitresses. I’m looking right at one of them and she couldn’t care less. Now listen, Nadia. I don’t want you calling my house.”

  “I’m sure there are a great many things you don’t want me to do.”

  “There are. And I think we’d better discuss all of them.”

  “Sam.”

  She was trying to alter the chaotic mood of the moment by merely modulating her voice, by putting a little burr of appeal in it. And it worked.

  “What?”

  “When you told me you loved me…when we had sex and you held me and you were so patient with me…when you fell asleep with your hand on my breast and your leg thrown over mine…what, if anything, did that mean to you?”

  “It meant a great deal to me.”

  “Did it?”

  “Y
es, of course it did. I was crazy about you.”

  “You were crazy about me. But did you love me?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact I did.” Did I? In fact, I couldn’t remember with any great accuracy. I recalled the heavy perfume of her, the sludginess of the sheets on the hotel bed. I remembered the meals we ate, I remembered the passion, I remembered the sudden vast openness of her, I remembered walking the back acres at the Leyden house whispering “Nadia, Nadia” to myself, enlarged, engorged by the secret of her. But did I love her; had I ever? Yes. No. Suddenly, I could not recall. I could remember the urge toward her, the rationalizations I constructed to excuse my behavior; but the soul of the matter was beyond my reach, its truth sailed off in the moments in which it existed, carried out on the vessel of time as it made its way into the darkness.

  “Then what happened?”

  “Look, Nadia, did you really call Olivia? Or are you just trying to drive me crazy? Because if you are, if that’s what you’re doing, I think you should know that this isn’t a very good time—”

  I stopped myself. Nadia looked as if I’d just slapped her across the face. In fact, I had been vaguely considering doing just that, though I’d never raised my hand against a woman.

  “Is that all you care about?” she asked. “Do you realize how much I’d have to be suffering to make a call like that?”

  “Did you actually make that call?”

  “Yes. God damn you. Yes. God, you are such an asshole.”

  “What did you say to her?”

  She stood up. She held the edge of the table as if to fight back a sudden pain. “I have to go to the bathroom,” she said.

  I considered insisting that she tell me what she said to Olivia before she went to the bathroom, but as unhinged and irrational as I felt, my own madness was modulated by some vague sense of fair play, and so I said nothing. I watched her make her way across the restaurant; she knew my eyes were on her. “You have to at least try the sushi, my pet,” an older gent was saying to his émigré companion—I figured her for a Ukrainian, partly because I had a couple of nights before read an article about the influx of Ukrainian women in New York, looking for husbands.

  One of the waitresses came to the table and refilled our cups with clear green tea. I kept my eyes averted; in the little respite of sanity occasioned by Nadia’s exit, I fully realized what a scene we had been making. Our angry, disappointed voices must have filled the place like pneumatic drills.

  I thought of Nadia calling Olivia and the terror of my life being altered beyond any recognition made me want to cry out. I found some quarters in my pocket and asked the sushi chef if there was a pay phone. His eyes were very dark beneath his white paper hat; he wore opaque white plastic gloves. He pointed his pudgy white finger at a phone in the back of the restaurant, near a couple of cool, unused hibachi tables.

  I dialed my number, dropped in a buck and a half, and then let the phone ring once and hung up. As I waited for the phone to return my coins, I wondered if I would have done better not to use the signal. If Nadia had spoken to Olivia, then my chances of getting through might have been improved by her not knowing it was me who was calling. Then, to make matters immeasurably worse—sometimes all it takes is a small thing to fuck up to drive you over the edge—the phone failed to return my quarters, and I had to go to the cash register, where a wizened old woman stared at me with fear and defiance, as if I might be Death Himself, and counted out change for a couple of dollars for me, while I popped an anise-flavored peppermint into my mouth. Then I called Olivia again, and either I let too much time pass between the signal and the second call, or she was out, or she was simply (!) not taking my calls, because between the second and third rings my slurring, uncertain voice came onto the answer machine.

  “Olivia? Are you there?” I said, just as Nadia was coming out of the bathroom.

  She took one look at me and disappeared behind the ballerina-embossed door once again.

  “Nadia!” I called, but she didn’t want to hear me. I stood there for a moment and then it seemed okay to just follow her in. Surely there would be no other women in there, no shouts, no eeks—and as to the staff of this place, well, they could hardly think worse of us than they already did.

  Walking into the women’s bathroom, I was struck by an old, buried memory: my mother taking me into the ladies’ room with her at Macy’s when we were shopping for a winter coat for me. She needed to use the toilet, and leaving me unattended in that vast store was out of the question. I was only five or six years old, and she told me to wait by the sinks while she went into a stall. “Hey, what’s he doing in here?” said a woman in a pillbox hat, a woman with orange lipstick, stout legs. “Oh, he’s just a little boy,” my mother said from her stall. “You’re getting carried away over nothing.” The woman looked startled, she didn’t know exactly where my mother’s voice was coming from; then she looked at me, shook her head, and turned away.

  “Nadia,” I called, though I was looking right at her. Unlike the one at Macy’s, this bathroom was apartment tiny: just one stall, a sink, an electric hot-air machine to dry your hands. Nadia was leaning over the sink, fanning water into her face.

  “What did you say to her, Nadia? I just called and there’s no one home.”

  She turned to me. Tusks of saliva hung from her mouth; her hair was plastered to her sweating forehead.

  “Let me alone,” she said, pleadingly. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.

  “You have to tell me what you said to her. Did you say we were lovers?”

  “I didn’t say anything. I asked her if you were home. I love you, Sam. I wouldn’t do anything to hurt you, or make you hate me. But…” She put her hand on her belly. Her eyes were desperate and I knew what she was going to say. “I’m pregnant.”

  My heart beat wildly, my blood raced; yet still I lived, which seemed to imply that the drama and dignity of sudden death would be denied me. A kind of hyperawareness came over me. I looked away from Nadia’s hurt, dangerous face and glanced at the tiles on the walls, the sloppiness of the workmanship, the grouting between the white and the aqua squares. I could sense the movement of the earth, our orbit around the sun, the millstone grind of day into night. Of course, I was noticing too much, madness often being a matter of something stripping the threads off of the spigot that controls how much information gushes into you. I felt sensation soaking through the soles of my shoes, and a few heartbeats later I was up to my chin in it—the smells of raw fish and seaweed, the pungent corkscrew aroma of the wasabi, the beep of the chef’s Casio watch, the chop of his long knife, the rumble of the traffic outside, the flap of the fabric ribbons near the cool air vents, the slightly askew center part of Nadia’s hair, which looked like a zigzag of lightning, the subzero blue of her eyes, her teardrop-shaped nostrils, her small, square teeth….

  “Don’t look at me like that,” she said. She covered her abdomen with her hands, protecting the life within her from the corrosiveness of my stare. Yet then her gaze met mine, and even in my near-derangement I recognized in her eyes that mixture of stubbornness, sexuality, and a slightly depersonalized desire to be noticed and loved that had drawn me to her in the first place.

  “And, yes, it’s yours,” she said.

  “But I thought you were—”

  “Don’t you dare start questioning me about birth control, Sam, or I swear to God I’ll start screaming.”

  She was right; I was going to say she’d told me that she was taking birth control pills. (In fact, I had given her a little paternal talking-to on the subject, relating some of the dangers of the pill—the high blood pressure, the phlebitis fears.)

  “Are you going to have this baby?”

  “What do you think I should do?”

  “How should I know? I’m just now hearing about it. Do you want some off-the-cuff answer?”

  “Yes, I would. I think that would be a lot more honest than something you’ve thought about for a long time.”

/>   “Okay, then. No.”

  “You want me to kill our baby?”

  “I want? When was the last time my life was about what I wanted?”

  “You’ve changed, Sam.”

  “Look, Nadia,” I said, quickly shifting gears, though not so gracefully as I would have wanted, “fatherhood has never been a talent of mine. I haven’t done very well with my own children—”

  “What do you mean, your own children? Who do you think put this life inside me? One of your bullshit space visitors?”

  “I’m not disputing this, Nadia. Anyhow, there are scientific ways of determining—”

  “You are really incredible, Sam.”

  “What do you want me to do? Just accept everything you say? The reason I’m here in the first place is you’ve been threatening my publisher—”

  “Publishers should not feel threatened, not by the truth. And neither should writers.”

  “You’ve been practicing for this meeting, haven’t you? Everything I’ve said so far, you’ve run in through your head and have figured out what you would say in reply.”

  She shrugged. I didn’t know if she was conceding the point or deeming it irrelevant.

  “Why are you doing this to me?” I asked. But before she could answer—if, in fact, she ever intended to answer—I said, “No, forget it. I don’t care. Why would I want to know the fucking reason you’re calling my publisher and my wife?”

  “You’re doing bad things, Sam—someone has to stop you, you’re out of control.”

  “What did I do? I kissed you, I wrote a book to feed my family. What?”

  “You’re making people believe things that aren’t true.”

  Just then, the bathroom door flew open, and the young Ukrainian woman staggered in, her bejeweled hand over her mouth. Her eyes widened as she saw me, but she could do little more to register her shock over seeing a man in the ladies’ room. She shouldered her way into the toilet stall, closing the door behind her with her ample, tweedy hip. Soft Russian sounds of revulsion and distress preceded her retching, and for some reason I found myself staring in the mirror. How had my life led me to this spot? Where had I turned; what wind had blown me: what would the line look like connecting the place in time when I had decided to give my life to Art and this moment, here, now, in this chemically reodorized room, facing one woman who wanted to reveal my various forgeries while another regurgitated sushi?