Being Invisible

by Thomas Berger

  Pascal’s heavy eyebrows rose. “I’m afraid I don’t get the reference at all.”

  “You’re slime,” said Wagner. “You’ve been uncovered: might as well come clean. I’m going to punish you anyway.”

  Pascal said calmly, “I assume you mean our very own Morton Wilton. I have never been in any direct communication with him whatever. I haven’t even ever said hello to the guy. I’ve only seen him at distance. I doubt he even knows I work here. Why would I write him a letter?”

  “Why?” cried Wagner. “Why? You told him I was regularly meeting some queer in the stalls of the men’s room. I ought to kill you for that!” He threw a flurry of blows, but Pascal quickly stepped out of their range.

  “Now, you listen to me, Fred. I did not write such a letter. I have always been your friend. At least I have always intended to be, whatever your feelings towards me. I certainly haven’t ever denounced you anonymously or otherwise, and—”

  Wagner rushed him, but Pascal parried his punches and then, when he would not desist, struck him lightly in the midsection and, as he bent, somewhat more forcefully in the upper chest. Wagner was hurled off balance, and he sat down hard on his behind. After a moment, seeking to rise, he took Pascal’s proffered grasp in a thoughtless reflex, then of course despised himself for it once he was on his feet.

  “Now, Fred,” Pascal said levelly, “just let it go at that. I boxed a lot in college, and it’s obvious you did not.”

  “All right, you’re a boxer and I’m not. What does that prove? I’m leaving this place with no regrets. I have nothing but contempt for all of you. I’m going to do something glorious.”

  He glared at Pascal, but the other man nodded calmly and said, “I’ll bet you will, Fred. I’ve always thought you had it in you.”

  Wagner hastened down the stairs, lest he burst into tears: he had singlehandedly given Pascal the opportunity, after all these years, to humiliate him absolutely.

  Someone above was calling his name. For a moment he supposed it was Pascal, who had become so vile as to assume a falsetto, but when he heard the subsequent sound of hard heels on the flight of steps just over his head, he paused. Could it be that Jackie was pursuing him, determined to get in one more thrust of the knife?

  But on the instant Mary Alice Phillips came around into view at the turn of stair just above him.

  “Fred, wait up!”

  It was a relief to recognize her—Wagner was exhausted by the various phases of his strife—but what he ached for at this moment was to be alone.

  “I’m really in a hurry.”

  “No, Fred,” said she, arriving at his side. “You just slow down. I’m not going to let you just wander off into the wilderness.”

  He realized he would probably miss her ingenuousness. “I’ll probably get another job in town somewhere. I’m not thinking of moving to the Gobi Desert.” He even tried to smile.

  “Fred,” said Mary Alice, “should we sit down right here and talk, or should we slip out to a quiet bar or tavern?”

  “I’ve got to get going,” said Wagner. “I’ve had enough talking for the day.”

  “It’s been the wrong kind, if you ask me,” Mary Alice said, suddenly taking him by the arm.

  He saw this action as having to do with power and not affection. Now that he had hit bottom, even a former inferior could get familiar. Yet neither was he in a state to resist. So she conducted him down the stairs and through the lobby and into the street, where she walked shivering against him. He had never taken off the topcoat in which he had left the doctor’s office, but Mary Alice was wearing only a figured dress in some thin fabric.

  He asserted himself. “You shouldn’t be out here, dressed like that. It’s chilly, and this breeze!”

  “It’s only two steps,” Mary Alice said, her hair going wild in a burst of wind. And then she pulled him into the doorway of a bar.

  In all his years of working just next door, he had never before penetrated this establishment. Indeed, he had hardly noticed it. Swan’s, the office hangout, was in the next block. Wagner was even ignorant of the name of this place though he had passed it several thousand times in six years. Its interior had no visible character whatever, consisting of a routine back-mirrored bar tended by a nondescript man in an open-necked shirt, and a sequence of murky booths all of which were now deserted. Three persons, each exclusively self-concerned at the moment, sat on bar stools widely separated each from each.

  “A vodka and tonic,” said Mary Alice. “I don’t want to smell.”

  She proceeded to the remotest booth while Wagner stepped up to fetch the drinks.

  “I do serve tables,” said the bartender. “But I won’t knock ya if ya do my work.”

  Mary Alice had left Wagner the seat that faced the door. This was contrary to Babe’s practice with him—but not with Zirko.

  “Now, Fred,” Mary Alice said, leaning so that her breasts met the tabletop. “It’s an awful mess, isn’t it?”

  Wagner did not wish to discuss his troubles with her. Sandra would really be helpful at this point. He now welcomed the date she had set up without consulting him; suddenly he saw it as almost maternal generosity and not as obtrusive arrogance, and was pleased that he had not been able to reach her to cancel.

  “It’s the result of a misunderstanding,” he told Mary Alice.

  She was intense. “It can be straightened out!”

  He did not intend to establish just what it was she knew. “I think we’d do better to let it go.”

  She took a drink, staring at him over the rim of the glass with enlarged brown irises. “I know Jackie will want you back.”

  “No,” said Wagner, “she couldn’t. And I wouldn’t.”

  “She’ll have to,” said Mary Alice, “when I explain.”

  “You don’t understand, Mary Alice.” Wagner took a drink from his own glass. “It’s a thing of authority. You know, I trained her as I’ve been training you.”

  “Oh, God.”

  “It was nothing dramatic. It’s just that the shift of power is always a fascinating process, especially when the different sexes are involved.”

  Mary Alice spoke with intensity. “I’m sure you’ll always be an authority to me, Fred.”

  He knew a slight discomfort. “Let’s not make too much of it. You’re by now almost ready to train someone of your own.” This was scarcely true; perhaps it would never be. But he really found her gratitude embarrassing, and he wanted to limit it.

  “You’ve been a lot more than a friend,” said she, staring at him in exaggerated approval.

  He put up a hand. “Please.”

  The bartender misinterpreted the gesture, no doubt through greed, and in a moment brought them two more drinks. Mary Alice was still working on the first half of her original glassful.

  “You’re just feeling blue right now,” said she. “But there’s also someone else who’s fond of you: Roy Pascal.”

  Wagner struck the table with his glass. “He’s a skunk!”

  “I don’t like to disagree with you, Fred, but to be fair—”

  “He called you a lesbian,” Wagner said brutally. “Then right afterwards jumped on the elevator to feel you up.”

  But Mary Alice’s reaction was an almost saintly smile. “It wasn’t him, I mean he, on the elevator, Fred. It was that guy from the art department, that short fellow with the red hair and bad skin. As for the lesbian so-called accusation, well, we have to consider the source, don’t we?”

  The bartender arrived with still another round. As he paid him, Wagner realized that the man had considered the banging down of the glass as a reorder.

  He squinted at him. “All right this time, but don’t come again until I definitely ask you to in clear English.”

  The bartender clucked merrily and said, “I hear you talkin’.”

  All this while Wagner had been thinking about the last sentence in Mary Alice’s latest speech.

  “Are you implying that Pascal may be hom
osexual?”

  “Well, that’s no secret, is it?” She maintained her smile. “I don’t condemn him for saying what he did about me. I realize it was just jealousy. In practice he’s been as sweet as he could be. He’s even spoken well of me to Jackie: she told me as much.”

  Wagner was draining the glasses before him.

  Mary Alice continued to smile. “He’s very fond of you, Fred.”

  Wagner grimaced and said, “I suppose you won’t believe it if I say he’s never made a move towards me, uh, of that nature. Never. He’s hung around, but there was never that.”

  “I know that now. Yes, I do.”

  “Does that mean you didn’t always?”

  She took an outsized swallow of her drink. “I know,” said she, “it was pretty silly, but then you guys seemed inseparable, and then I heard your marriage was on the rocks. ... I’m really sorry, Fred, and will do whatever I can to make it up to you.”

  Wagner all of a sudden recognized that he was drunk, a state he had seldom experienced throughout his life. He also had to go to the toilet.

  When he returned Mary Alice was tracing designs in a drop of tabletop liquid with a forefinger whose ragged nail gave evidence of nibbling.

  She smiled up wryly at him. “You must think I’m the dumbest person alive. Can you forgive me? Ever?” Again she said she’d try to make it up to him.

  He plunged to a seat in the booth.

  Mary Alice said, “I’m not that drunk. I can certainly feel it, though. One’s usually my limit.” She was leering at him.

  Wagner considered becoming invisible, but before he could make a decision Mary Alice was clutching both his hands.

  She was speaking in a low, hurried voice. The beginning of her speech was inaudible to him. He picked it up at “... nerve, but I know it’s right.” She gave his hands one more squeeze and then was somehow out of the booth while still holding on. Under these conditions he had to come along too or exert sufficient force to break her grip, which might even require violence, so powerful were her fingers.

  The bartender uttered some final ironic sentiment as they left, but Wagner could not decipher it. Indeed he was in a general quandary and devoid of will.

  In no time at all the girl and he were in the expectedly shabby but surprisingly clean room of a little hotel that he had probably passed thousands of times obliviously. To be sure, by the time he had recorded this fact they were in bed. He seemed to be thoroughly naked, but Mary Alice retained her brassiere, no doubt because she was shy. After all, she was very young.

  She was safe enough under his protection. For example, he was so drunk he could hardly molest her. ... He actually was still saying that to himself while the act was under way, perhaps because there was a savage, and incredible, feature to this hallucination: before he had penetrated her, Mary Alice had been a virgin.

  9

  WHEN WAGNER WOKE HE felt as though he had been mauled by a large animal; its feral, musky odor stayed behind. There was bright sunlight behind a pull-shade with a gaping tear just below the roller. This could not be his own bedroom.

  Nor had he been sleeping with Babe. An unrecognizable head of hair lay on the adjoining pillow, face averted. He had been drugged and dumped into bed with a corpse, whose murder would be easy to pin on him: a hackneyed plot.

  Of course when forced he could remember the late afternoon and evening of the day before. He simply rejected it. He had hardly known Mary Alice Phillips. Therefore it was unlikely that it would be he who had made her a woman. He was not a lascivious man, was in fact notorious for his moderation in all things, just ask his estranged wife.

  Then too: if Mary Alice was so modest as to wear a brassiere while in bed with a naked man, how could it be that she had willingly surrendered her virginity, if not downright imposed it upon him?

  He could recall a sharp image of the desk clerk who wore a blue shirt with the button missing from one point of the collar, which therefore was lifted as if in greeting. Later on, someone had gone out for pizza and Coke: he could remember the event, and the protagonist had probably been himself, but he could not yet certify this as a fact. By that time he should have been sobering up rather than becoming less aware, but the deflowering had been a shocker—far more to him than to the person uniquely immediate to it. Except for a certain gingerliness at the outset, and a brief loss of color at the mouth, Mary Alice had proceeded so wholeheartedly as to distract him from the moral implications of the deed until it had been accomplished, and in fact compounded. Her one reference to the most critical phase of their conjunction—“So that’s what it is”—was scarcely in the idiom of shame. But whether or not the experience had been a mere novelty to her, Wagner was hard hit after the fact. If the physical particulars of the encounter had been less troublesome than he would have anticipated, the strain on his spirit was heavy. What seeds of degeneracy might he not have planted in this young person hitherto respectably fallow? Would that she were weeping! Was it natural to display so much smugness?

  He remembered now: surely it had been he who had gone for pizza. He was not at all hungry but had needed a breather. He did not relish being seen by the desk clerk, who might well suppose that if the john was finished the whore’d better come down soon or get the old heave-ho. But when he reached the cage and saw the man with the wayward collar-point staring vacantly out into the very area through which he was passing, he realized that he was invisible again, this time as the result of no volition whatever.

  There being no convenient means by which to get a cooked pie while invisible, Wagner materialized at the counter of the branch of the Pizza on Earth chain just around the corner from the hotel and also the office. He might have been recognized here by members of the daytime staff, but that was out of the question now: the wall clock, in the form of a pizza, with imitation-pepperoni-cylinder hands, informed him that the time was 1:12.

  On the round trip he was accosted by two streetwalkers and saw three more. One, leading a wiry little bowlegged client, entered the hotel just ahead of him on his return. He had never before been in the neighborhood of his office this late in the day. Apparently it was a sort of Tenderloin after business hours. The desolate bar in which he and Mary Alice had got into the condition to visit the nearby hotel was now turning raucous. Laughter and clinking could be heard from within. Coming back, he encountered a truculent drunk who staggered out the door in a rush of noise and beer fumes.

  “Gimme that pizza pie,” this man demanded, clawing towards Wagner’s flat box. Wagner found it politic to vanish until he returned to the room.

  “Well,” said Mary Alice when he had folded back the lid of the pizza box, “you’ve already succeeded in making me unhappy. I distinctly said all cheese, and yet what do I see on the top? Mushrooms!”

  Having, with all his worries, forgotten her instructions, he had produced an invented explanation to the effect that the mushroom was ready to go, whereas had he waited for “plain” he would have been kept away from her for more painful minutes. But there was nothing coy about Mary Alice, and at this point she no longer sought reassurance. Her annoyance proved to be genuine. She turned over, buried her face in the pillows, and went immediately into a resentful but sound sleep.

  Now he had awakened and was staring at her tangled back of head. Though he was sober and the day had just begun, he was lacking altogether in a spark of enterprise. While none of his recent misfortunes had been properly the result of his own errors—the malice of chance had simultaneously been operative everywhere—his amour propre had never been feebler. It was absurd that a man who could become invisible at will was not able quickly to take dominion over his existence but instead must go from one predicament to another. Invisibility might seem an overwhelming advantage to have on other mortals. If what you wanted to do was make an ass of your fellow man, tormenting him from an impenetrable hiding place, then you could not do better. And of course it was incomparable for snooping on the most private of events. An unseen personage
could be privy to all manner of shame. For criminal activity, from espionage to the snatching of purses, it would be the ultimate technique. One invisible assassin, for example, might single-handedly bring down a nation. A Wagner without conscience could have sold his services to any one of a host of international brigands and been instantly rich. A heroic Wagner might save common decency from its many enemies domestic and foreign.

  Instead he lay here, head supported on a fist (for Mary Alice had appropriated his pillow the night before), staring at the stained ceiling, remembering how one such had allegedly fallen on Miles Elg. All his current problems were associated with women: to the list of Babe, Nan, Sandra, and Jackie must now be added the name of Mary Alice. What a reckless thing for him to have done; he should have resisted her; he had no character at all.

  He touched her shoulder. “Mary Alice.”

  “I’m awake.” And, judging from the clarity and strength of her voice, had been for some time.

  “We’d better get up.”

  “Why? I’m sure I don’t have a job to go to now.”

  “I’m the one who was fired,” Wagner said.

  Mary Alice rolled over. Not being one for much makeup when wearing office attire, she provided no morning disillusionment. “I just stepped out for a word with you on the fire stairs,” said she. “I haven’t returned yet.”

  “I see,” Wagner said. “But I’m sure it can be explained to Jackie: you suddenly took sick or something.”

  She made a resentful chin. “And it was me who was going to explain to her about you.”

  “That was a generous offer, Mary Alice, but what Jackie has against me is not something that another person’s intervention could help, I’m afraid. I made a mistake. With the best will in the world, but still a mistake.” His body was embarrassing him: the proximity of a naked woman was arousing his appropriate part. This seemed to be an isolated phenomenon: at first he had not taken mental notice of it, and now, trying consciously to ignore and then to resist the burgeoning assertion, he was being defied.