Being Invisible

by Thomas Berger

  “Miles Elg,” said Wagner, who was eating with a better appetite than he had had even at A Guy from Calabria. If he dined away from home often enough, he might begin to recover the weight he had lost since Babe left. Funny: he recognized what he was chewing as none other than the Down Home Meat Loaf that had been a regular feature on the weekly menu since his bachelorhood and through the time of Babe, but nowadays he could hardly swallow two forkfuls of that which he thawed for himself. “Interesting name.” He felt an obligation to say something favorable about the late Elg, whom he had known only as Sandra’s companion on a handful of chance meetings in hallways or lobby, during the less than two years in which the Elgs had been fellow residents of his.

  “The real one was Milton Alger,” Sandra now told him, blinking her eyes as if to relieve the burden of the heavy makeup on the lids. Her scent had been used too lavishly, as well, and apparently not only on her person but sprayed throughout the living-dining room, obliterating any aroma that might have emanated from the food. Wagner was not displeased: the smell made the place seem homey—not with respect to the apartment he had shared with Babe, who eschewed the use of perfume for the reason that it gave her a headache, but with memories of his childhood home, for his mother, a feckless cook who often burned dinner, was wont lavishly to distribute sweet-smelling sprays throughout the house.

  “Miles,” Sandra went on, “couldn’t leave anything as it was. Maybe he could have, had anything he was associated with been a genuine success, but that never happened.”

  She paused for a swallow, not a sip, of the red wine Wagner had brought. He himself had never honored the Down Home Meat Loaf with wine, but he realized he had been wrong: there was a nice wedding of tastes here, something his hostess had yet to experience, at least at this meal, for while she was on her second glass—after probably three vodka-rocks, anyway, the last in accompaniment of the first course, that shrimp cocktail that comes, already ketchup-sauced, in its own thick flutelike glass—she had not put a fork in the plate before her.

  “He was trying to enhance his life,” Wagner said, making something between a statement and a question.

  “That’s putting the best face on it,” said Sandra, whose décolletage was not now as immodest as it had been while her spouse was alive. “He could just simply be called a goddamn phony.”

  Her basic emotion might be bitterness and not simply self-pity, and it caused Wagner to reflect on his own emotional response to Babe. No, he would have to stick with feeling sorry for himself: he could not selfishly disparage her motives to succeed professionally in the absence of the detrimental effect he had had on her self-determination even though (as she had admitted) wishing her well.

  Sandra put her glass down for a change and, with extra feeling, looked across the table at him. “I don’t enjoy talking ill of the deceased, Fred, but a lot of these things I never knew earlier, and the things I did know about I seldom mentioned just so as to keep the peace. So if I kept silent now, I wouldn’t ever be able to have my say. It’s just not fair.”

  “You’ve got the right, Sandra,” said Wagner. “You say anything you want.”

  She took more wine. As yet she had shown no effect from the alcohol. “People think Miles died in a car crash. He didn’t. He was in a hotbed hotel with a whore, and there was a toilet just over the room they were in, which some drunk put too much paper into, and it overflowed when he flushed it. This had happened once too often, and the ceiling collapsed, coming down on Miles. He was on top at the time, so cushioned her from the worst of it, but she got a broken leg and some bruises. And you know what? She got a shyster lawyer who’s filed a suit against the hotel and also the estate of Miles Elg—which means me, in effect.”

  Wagner now sipped some of his own wine. He had had but a quarter-glass thus far, and not even half a vodka martini. The warmth he felt could hardly be from booze. Unexpectedly he was enjoying himself, in spite of Sandra’s woe: but wasn’t life like that?

  “I seriously doubt,” said he, “that the case will actually get into court. The law is often foolish, but there’s a limit.”

  Sandra went on after taking more wine. “That’s the least of my worries. The laugh’s on the bitch: Miles doesn’t have an estate. All he left was unpaid bills.”

  Wagner wondered whether she would eventually get around to putting the bite on him for a loan. The fact was he had more funds at this time than he had ever before possessed. Babe was self-sustaining, indeed she had refused his offers of money: had her inheritance and then the salary paid her by Guillaume. She assertedly lived in a modest apartment at an address she kept secret from him. He had the phone number, and he forwarded to the gallery any mail that came for her. He had no urge to follow her home from work: she claimed to live alone; he did not want to catch her in a lie.

  “Uh,” he said now, “I’m not rich, but if you could use a little something to tide you over...”

  “Well, aren’t you nice,” said Sandra, “but you see, I’m no worse off now than when Miles was alive. In fact, I’m financially better off. I supported the fucker! Forgive me for using the vernacular, but I’m not just being foulmouthed for its own sake. That’s the only word I can use for him, because that’s all he could honestly do, but he was a genius at it. I’ll grant him that. It was natural for him to die in the saddle.”

  Wagner was not disconcerted by this information. He certainly felt no rivalry with the late Miles Elg, perhaps because Babe had thought the man so vulgar, everything she detested: i.e., tall, tanned out of season, conspicuously fit. She liked ugly bad-skinned runts like Siv Zirko—this bitter reflection appeared from nowhere.

  “Isn’t it odd then that he would have gone to a prostitute?”

  Sandra snorted. “I just call her whore. She’s somebody’s wife. Miles never paid for sex. He didn’t have to, for God’s sake. Everybody was after that schlong of his. I wouldn’t have put it past him to have asked for pay from some.” She breathed deeply and looked down at her plate, but still did not touch its contents. When she raised her head she was in another mood. “But I’ve been doing all the talking, Fred. Don’t you want to tell me your troubles?”

  “I’ve been trying to keep them secret around here,” said Wagner. “Would you mind telling me who told you?”

  “I ran into your ex,” Sandra said. She wore large gold circlet earrings that bounced when she spoke on an ascending note. Wagner had never been a good judge of whether red hair was genuine or dyed. He was trying to divert his attention from Sandra’s encounter with Babe. “She came in for tea where I work.”

  “A restaurant?”

  “The Tally Ho English Lounge of the Hotel Pierce,” said Sandra. “They serve sandwiches and drinks except from three to five daily, P.M., when we have our teatime, which is famous around town, with an assortment of little canopies and petty fours. The waitresses dress up like Elizabethan barmaids.”

  Wagner was just trying to picture Sandra in such a costume when she elucidated. “I play harp there.”

  He was impressed. “Golly. I’ll have to drop in, but you say it closes at five?”

  “Just teatime. I continue on till eight, throughout cocktails. Today’s one of my days off, because I work weekends.”

  “You’re a harpist.”

  “That’s right. I keep the instrument at the Lounge. It’s too bulky to bring back and forth. Else I’d give you a private recital.”

  He had postponed the question as long as he could. “I suppose Babe was not alone.”

  “Babe? Oh, your wife?”

  “Sorry,” said he. “Carla.”

  “That’s all right,” Sandra said. “I was Kiddo. But that wasn’t really a nickname of my own. Everybody was Kiddo to Miles, male or female, or for that matter, a dog or cat.” Her eyes quickly filled with tears. “Excuse me,” she said, dabbing at her face with the paper napkin. “Worthless though he was, he was an awful lot of fun to be with, sometimes, and I miss the hell out of him.”

  Wagner
’s feelings of well-being were now in question. He did not belong here, at an end-of-table that was the rightful place of another man. He could never be a substitute for Miles Elg—not that he would necessarily want to be, though it was true enough that he found Elg’s amorality not unattractive: it was not rare for such characters to have a concomitant verve of the kind to which Sandra had just referred. Whereas people with his own sense of responsibility tended to be sentimental, which in practice often meant melancholic. Were the situation reversed, with a living Elg’s having usurped his own place at table, one could be sure that the charming scoundrel would not feel inadequate though Babe despised him. Wagner even had the advantage: he was liked by Sandra.

  “Forgive me, Fred,” she asked, lifting both hands with all their rings, the crumpled napkin in the left. “No more, I promise. It’s not fair to you. Please go on. I’m interested, believe me.”

  Wagner swallowed the rest of the contents of his glass. Sandra immediately refilled it and topped off her own.

  “The facts are simple enough,” said he.

  “By the way,” Sandra said, “she came into the Lounge with a woman, not a man. Their table was nearest the harp; they had cinnamon tea and toast. I stopped by on my break, and she told me she didn’t live here any more.”

  “Carla left supposedly so she could be on her own, whatever that means.” Using her proper name transformed Babe into a stranger, whatever he meant by saying “whatever that means,” for obviously her intent was clear enough: to escape from him. “She works at an art gallery. She knows a good deal about the subject, majored in art history. I guess she’s always wanted a gallery of her own. Recently she inherited some money. Not a fortune, but apparently enough in her view to make a start. She’s still at the old place, but is preparing the ground for the new enterprise. After all, she’s got to find the right space. But most importantly, a gallery can’t get going without artworks. Any artist already established naturally has a gallery. She needs a few people of that sort, so she can afford to launch the unknowns.” Considered in this light, nothing could have been more reasonable than her eating dinner with Zirko. Wagner realized his explanation was meant more for himself than for Sandra, who in fact, with wandering eyes that were still retaining tears, gave evidence that his remarks had failed to distract her from her memories.

  He decided to be dramatic, forgetting briefly that the account of his own role could hardly be literal. “Still, it was quite a shock to run across her having dinner in a restaurant with some guy I had never seen before. He turned out to be a famous artist, though, so it was not personal.”

  He had now caught Sandra’s interest. She smiled. “Probably a fag.”

  Wagner was jealous of what he saw as his own peculiar right to speak ill of Zirko and therefore now defended his enemy. “Oh, no. He’s world-famous.”

  “All the more reason, then,” Sandra said smugly. “That’s the normal thing, not the exception.” She divided between their glasses what was left in the wine bottle.

  “Not true in this case! In fact, this man, who’s named Siv Zirko, is quite a, uh”—he at last found an inadequate term—“ladies’ man.”

  “If that’s so, then why weren’t you more worried?” The question was affectionately derisive; she was gently baiting him.

  He opened his hand. “All right. I was worried. I tell you I wasn’t sorry when they had a fight and Babe left the restaurant in the middle of the meal.”

  “You were sitting there watching all of this?”

  “I was quietly eating my own dinner. Am I to go away hungry just because my estranged wife comes to the same restaurant?”

  “Know what Miles would have done?” Sandra asked.

  Wagner said resentfully, “Oh, sure: beat up the other guy.”

  Sandra smirked, her earrings dancing. “Are you kidding? He was as yellow as they come. He backed down from guys half his size. Naw. He would have gotten hold of me later on in private and slapped me silly.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “I told you he was a bastard. Not that I condone that, but it did serve to get it out of his system.”

  Obviously he and she were in different traditions. “Uh-huh. Well, that’s not my style.”

  “Maybe it should have been? At least it shows you care.”

  “I’d like to think there are”—he had been about to say “better ways,” but that would not have been considerate if Sandra, in her bereavement, missed the loving punches of yore—“there are other ways to show affection.”

  Sandra moved her chair back and rose. “Oh, affection,” she said contemptuously. “I’m talking about passion.” She went, in a not altogether straight line, to the secretary desk, the bookshelves of which served her as liquor cabinet. She opened the mullioned glass doors and considered the several bottles therein. In Wagner’s boyhood home, such a repository held the twenty-five volumes of an encyclopedia his mother had purchased inexpensively, one book per week, at a supermarket; this reference work was never opened by anybody, for he trusted only the encyclopedias at school.

  Sandra turned and spoke over her substantial right breast. “What is your pleasure?”

  “Nothing, thanks. I’ve got enough wine to get to the end of the meal.”

  “I’m not much of a wine drinker. Not enough pizzazz, you know?” She reapplied herself to the cabinet, selected a bottle, and returned to the table. She half-filled her wine glass with an amber fluid. A whiff of the unpleasant odor, even without looking at the label, told Wagner it was Scotch.

  She indicated the bottle. “Sure?”

  “I’m no drinker,” he said. He had cleaned his plate. He now saluted her with his glass and swallowed the remaining spoonful of wine.

  He expected Sandra to gulp the whiskey, but he was wrong. She took only a modest sip. Holding the glass, she fixed him with a flushed eye. “No doubt you’re aware I’m somewhat...” She fluttered her hand. “No.” She waved off his ritualistic protest. “No, I am. That doesn’t mean I talk through my hat, though. It does give me the nerve to say you may be too nice a guy for that woman you were married to.”

  “Are,” said Wagner.

  “Are married to, OK. I see you still have hope of patching it up. But frankly that’s never going to happen unless you change drastically.” Sandra took another gingerly sip of the Scotch. Wagner disliked the smell, which seemed to him to be akin to the odor emitted by the transformer of an electric train, remembered over the years.

  She gently shook the glass at him: the whiskey was un-iced. “I know I’m talking out of turn, but what good is booze if it doesn’t come to that?” It sounded as though it might have been a bon mot of the late Miles. She grinned brilliantly. Perhaps her teeth were capped; entertainers after all had to meet a certain public standard. “She’s a little cold-blooded snob. OK, so she’s educated. Does that make her better than you? You’re quite cultivated yourself, for gosh sake. That girl’s just got a lot of bitch in her, Fred, and you’ve got to—”

  “I can’t listen to this,” said Wagner, rising, catching the paper napkin before it slid to the carpet. “Thanks for dinner, Sandra. I really enjoyed it.”

  “Now, come on...”

  “I’m sure you mean well, but I can’t listen to such abuse. You wouldn’t want me to attack your late husband.”

  Sandra smiled with an open mouth. “There’s nothing you could say that would be too bad about that son of a bitch.”

  “You don’t mean that. You loved him.”

  “What’s that got to do with it? That doesn’t alter the fact he was a shit.”

  “Well, Babe’s not,” said Wagner. “She has a right to live as she wishes. I have nothing to criticize her for.”

  “C’mon and sit down,” said Sandra. “I’ll give you some dessert in a minute, and coffee.” She raised her right hand. “I won’t say anything more on the subject. Promise.”

  He had nowhere else to go except home, where it would still be early enough to feel g
uilty about not getting out his manuscript and rereading it hopelessly. Therefore he sat down, and, as good as her word, in a moment his hostess had gone back to the kitchen and returned with a wedge of pecan pie.

  “Water’s on,” said she. Then, having poured herself more Scotch, “OK, she had her reasons. You can tell me, Fred, you know that: were you having troubles?”

  He shook his head, chewing a forkful of pecan pie; it had been frozen and even now was only partially thawed. Finally he said, “I’m not that crazy about my job, which is writing, but not the kind of writing I really want to do. I guess I talk about that a lot, but I just can’t seem to sit down and write when I’m home. I’m always too exhausted, and the ideas that come to me easily at other times vanish completely when I actually have to put them down on paper.”

  Sandra made a glittering, dismissive gesture with her free hand, which was even more beringed than the right. “Forget about that. What I meant was sex. Did you have trouble giving satisfaction?”

  Wagner could not believe the question was as he heard it. Chewing, especially on some substance like the cold nuts of the pie, could alter sounds considerably. His response was therefore limited to a trace of a smile.

  “Because,” Sandra went on, after so short a pause that he would not anyway have had time to answer, “it wouldn’t necessarily be your fault. I don’t automatically blame the man, like some girls I’ve known.”

  Wagner made a movement with his head. Once warmed by the mouth’s natural heat, the pie was intensely sweet and impeded him from speaking, which was no doubt just as well.

  An anguished shriek was heard from the kitchen.

  “That’s the water,” Sandra said and got up. As she passed her guest she touched his shoulder, whether in friendship or merely to catch her balance, he could not have said.

  When she returned with the cup of coffee and the cream-and-sugar tray and saw that he had finished the pie, she took away the dish and the Scotch bottle, then asked him to move slightly back. Reaching under the top of the table, she did something that made its legs slowly collapse and seize rigidly again only when it had reached the height of a coffee table.