Being Invisible

by Thomas Berger

  “Oh, come on, Fred,” Mary Alice said irritably, “it was because of that anonymous letter.” She shook her head. Another woman might long since have arisen and combed her hair. “I’m sorry, but I got tired of waiting.” She grimaced at him. “So look at the pickle I landed up in.”

  “Oh, you haven’t lost your job,” Wagner said. He found her statements cryptic but was not impatient to have them deciphered. “I’ll blame your absence all on myself. What do I have to lose? I’m out anyway.”

  Mary Alice propped herself up on an elbow and looked down into his face. “Fred, you still aren’t getting it. I wrote the letter that got you fired.” She made this confession angrily, as though he were the culprit.

  Perhaps he was. “I don’t know where you got that funny idea,” said he. “It was the letter I wrote to Jackie that did it. I never heard of any other... unless you mean—” No, that was impossible: how could Mary Alice speak of what went on in the men’s restroom?

  “Of course, that’s exactly what I mean,” said she, glaring down at him. “You hadn’t made a move toward me in all those weeks, and I happen to know your wife walked out on you, and you and Roy were always together, you have to admit that.”

  Wagner at first felt more curiosity than anger. “Then you didn’t actually know there was some depraved activity going on in there?”

  She wrinkled her blunt little nose at him. “You’re not saying you’re bisexual?”

  “Certainly not.” He told her about “Artie.” However, by now he was experiencing the onset of resentment. “It’s decent of you to admit your error,” he said, “but it was an awfully reckless accusation, and it could have—”

  “Now, don’t you dare attack me,” cried Mary Alice, “when I’m admitting a lack of judgment, not to mention that I’m offering to go to Jackie and make a clean breast of it.”

  Which was more than she had done with him, Wagner reflected in a moment of perverse humor: she had yet to reveal the contents of her brassiere. But what he said was, “I guess it doesn’t matter now.”

  “It certainly does!” Mary Alice said with urgency. “She might fire me, but I don’t want her to go on thinking my lover is queer.”

  For a moment Wagner despaired of setting her right. She had not listened to him at all. Furthermore, he was now incongruously at full, imperious distension. It would seem to be the moment for a dramatic move.

  Suddenly he rolled over on top of her.

  She cried, “Hey!” and suggested resistance, but when his hand swooped behind her back and unhooked the brassiere she went limp.

  Her bare breasts were undersized. The cups of the garment were stuffed with material that though inorganic must have felt natural enough the night before.

  It was too late to hook her up again. He didn’t mind small breasts at all, and after a moment of mental adjustment these seemed more appropriate to her slender body than had the twin melons, but how to convey that to her without offending? His way with words would seem peculiar to the written language. And he sensed that by penetrating her the night before he had lost the authority and respect that had been his as the veteran who had trained her in their profession.

  “So now you know,” said she.

  “You have a beautiful body.” He had an unexpected inspiration: “You’re like a silver fish.”

  “That’s one way to say I’m flat-chested,” Mary Alice said. “Listen, you’re not exactly well-built.”

  Funny, he would never have said he was, but she was being gratuitously insulting. Nevertheless, it had been he whose action had humiliated her.

  So he said, “Don’t argue. You have an exquisite body.” He caressed her delicately.

  “I wish you wouldn’t poke at me like a pork chop,” she complained, sliding out of bed onto her feet. Now that she had nothing more to conceal she displayed not even that routine modesty that had seemed natural to every woman with whom Wagner had ever been intimate: perhaps not that extensive a roster, but presumably enough to make the point. A few had on occasion proudly paraded in the nude, but none had ever simply forgotten she was naked, as Mary Alice gave evidence of doing now as she trudged in an almost slatternly stride to the window, to pluck back a piece of the shade and peer down at the street.

  “All the creeps are going to work,” she said, making a face as she turned away. “Well, I never did like that stupid job. Good riddance.”

  Could the act of love have so altered her character? Nobody at the office had been more eager to please than Mary Alice. Her application to the task and her complaisance had done much to compensate for her lack of ability.

  “Please,” said Wagner, having drawn up the bedclothes to cover his groin. “Mark my words, you can walk right back in there this morning and nobody will oppose you.”

  She went, slumped, to look at her peevish expression in the mirror over the washstand. Wagner studied her buttocks, which were on the spare side, with proprietary smugness. In one limited but essential way, she was his product. But that was surely another truth he could not effectively have expressed to her, at least not while she was in this mood. Yesterday he could not have imagined a querulous Mary Alice, but neither could he have supposed that he would have shattered her hymen by nightfall.

  “Christ,” she said now, at last having looked down, “I’m a mess. Couldn’t you at least have gotten a room with a bath?”

  Again this was unfair. It had been she who pulled him towards the hotel, but again he was placating. “I was so drunk yesterday I can’t even remember registering here.”

  “Thanks a lot!”

  He showed a smile that was intended to be endearing. “I haven’t forgotten you.”

  Despite her youth Mary Alice could look aged and downright ugly by means of one scowl. “I bet my parents haven’t forgotten me, either.”

  Wagner raised his eyebrows at her.

  “Well,” said she, “when would I have had the time to call them? You were screwing me all night.”

  “That’s not fair.” He found the language as offensive as the charge.

  “Then who was it?” she shouted. “An unidentified rapist? Dragged me into this fleabag and brutally forced me to do his bidding?”

  “Oh, I see. You mean, that’s going to be the story you tell?”

  “Who would believe shit like that?” cried Mary Alice.

  “We can invent something better.” Wagner’s own voice was now raised. “Haven’t you got a girl friend with whom you might have spent the night?”

  “You idiot,” she barked in her new coarse voice, “in that event why wouldn’t I have phoned home?”

  “I wish you wouldn’t take it out on me,” said Wagner, making the effort to lower his own volume. “I’m your friend, and I’m in this with you.”

  “Some friend,” Mary Alice said bitterly. “You just used me for your own pleasure. How often do you come across a fresh young girl in that old folks’ home?”

  Wagner now believed he could recognize it was anxiety that worked the extraordinary alteration in her. She was like the callow male youth in the war movies who panics in battle. Perhaps she needed the slap of a grizzled sergeant.

  “Get hold of yourself, Mary Alice, and get washed and put on your clothes.”

  “You just hate my body.”

  He welcomed her return to the self-deprecating. “Don’t say that.” He got up and went to embrace her.

  But she dashed to put the bed between them. “Don’t touch me!” She bent over crossed hands. “Don’t put that thing in me again!”

  He raised his arms as though he were being held up at gunpoint. “All right, all right. I don’t know what to say when you’re in this mood. But I tell you your fears are exaggerated. You’ll still have your job and I’ll dream up a good story to tell your parents.”

  “Just you take care of me,” said Mary Alice. “Just you promise.”

  “I just told you I was going to get you out of what you call a pickle, but I don’t think the situation is that
grave.”

  “You’re going to have to do a lot more than that, if you expect to get any more of this.” She made a very coarse gesture.

  Wagner felt a chill, though not on the skin. Surprisingly, the room was well heated by an old iron radiator in the corner. “Let’s get out of here first before we formulate our plans,” said he, now speaking towards the mirror. He leaned forward, his genitals sliding into the washbowl, where he washed them and his hands with a sliver of tan-colored soap that had no doubt been used by a succession of harlots and their clients. There was but one towel, thin as a handkerchief.

  Mary Alice was sitting on the far edge of the bed, bent forward, with her spine all bumps. He had an awful suspicion she might be weeping, but in an instant she had risen, gone to the dresser, and begun to chew at a limp triangle of the cold pizza found there.

  Wagner decided to limit his conversation to the minimum until he could get away. It was difficult for him to think coherently in Mary Alice’s presence.

  She finally got perfunctorily washed and quickly dressed. When she again looked as she had before he had possessed her, he found it easy to believe she still was full-chested and untouched by man. But if he therefore assumed her old manner would return as well, he was in error.

  “I trust you’re good for a taxi, anyway,” said she when they had reached the lobby, where the cockeyed man now on duty in the cage contemptuously disregarded their departure.

  Wagner just wondered whether he had enough cash with him to pay for her ride home, wherever that might be, perhaps in an outlying district or suburb. He had taken the young lady’s maidenhead without even knowing where she lived: such lack of care was unprecedented in his history. Perhaps he was on the threshold of a new existence, where precedents would not be all that important. Yet he had felt vulnerable as they passed the desk clerk—even though such a room was paid for on entrance and had no telephone or room service for which extra charges could be assessed.

  The taxi hailed by Mary Alice from curbside was already occupied, but she seemed prescient, for as if in answer to her summons it pulled to a stop directly in front of her.

  The door was flung open, and Jackie Grinzing stepped out of the vehicle. She ignored Mary Alice to smile sardonically at Wagner.

  “At least I had the decency to find another hotel than the nearest one to the office,” said she.

  Mary Alice had caught the door of the taxi. “Go fuck yourself, Jackie. Come on, darling.” She climbed in.

  Had Wagner had his wits about him, he might have done something before it got this far, but obviously there was nothing left to preserve now. He climbed into the cab after Mary Alice.

  He shrugged at her. “I guess it’s pretty certain now that you’ve lost your job.”

  “I told you it was a foregone conclusion.” She leaned forward to give the driver Wagner’s home address.

  Wagner was both flattered and worried. “How do you happen to know where I live?”

  Mary Alice settled back in the seat. “I made you my hobby, Fred. You really succeeded in fascinating me. You’re brilliant, but there’s no getting away from the fact that you’re getting older and life has not brought you the rewards your talent deserves. That could be either your fault or life’s, and guess which one always has the upper hand?”

  This was still another phase: Mary Alice as girl-philosopher.

  “I’m not that old,” he said.

  “I don’t call six years at that dumb place getting anywhere. And anyway except for Roy everybody else is a woman.”

  She had forgotten Gordon, but then he was soon to leave. Wagner tried to change the subject. “I’ve been thinking about what to tell your parents, Mary Alice,” he lied. “Your friend’s phone was out of order; you assumed it was a temporary condition, and by the time you realized it couldn’t be repaired till morning, it was too late to go into the street to a public phone. Anyway, by then they’d have been asleep.”

  “Fred,” Mary Alice said, patting his wrist, “you’ve been letting your potential go to seed. It’s ridiculous that a person with your command of the English language should be in harness to some second-rate catalogue-writing business for the best years of his life.” She glanced over his shoulder. “But here we are. Pay the man.” She was already out the door.

  Wagner could not believe that in such a short time they had made the trip for which the record by bus could be no less than thirty minutes, but he saw the correct house number over the double entrance doors and below it the dour morning doorman.

  The taxi driver, a toothy, long-jawed man of about Wagner’s age, accepted the fare with a wink. “Boy,” said he, “they can sure bitch you up sometimes. My old lady —”

  Wagner was on the sidewalk. He realized only now, when he saw Andy the doorman sizing up Mary Alice, that she clearly showed the night’s wear and tear. He was embarrassed, he who had hitherto been seen only in the company of the well-groomed Babe. Mary Alice looked for all the world like a girl who had been filled with liquor, screwed all night, and now was still with her user only because no convenient moment had yet appeared in which she could be dumped.

  He made the best of a bad job, and introduced her to Andy as “Miss Phillips. We work together.”

  This did not erase the scowl from Andy’s face. What did, however, was Mary Alice’s contribution. “We just both got fired!” She clamped a proprietor’s grip on Wagner’s arm. Wagner had never before seen Andy’s grin, which proved vulpine.

  Just as they arrived at the elevator, its doors opened and Debbie Fong and Ellen Mackintosh, the roommates and co-workers, stepped into the lobby. By contrast with these sleek young ladies, Mary Alice might have been his charwoman.

  Wagner muttered a hello. As if Mary Alice were a stranger, he made a gallant little bowing gesture the implication of which was that she should board the elevator before him. She did not comply. Instead she positively gawked at Debbie and Ellen.

  “Hi, Ed!” Ellen cried enthusiastically.

  Debbie poked an elbow at her. “It’s Fred. Hi, Fred. We’re going to a seminar.”

  “I see,” said Wagner. “Well, enjoy yourselves.”

  “That’s why we’re off today,” said Ellen. “Sorry I called you Ed. I knew it was Fred.” It looked as though she had subtly lightened her hair; Debbie of course retained the glossy black bangs of her heritage.

  Thus far it seemed as though he might be getting away with it, but now Mary Alice said, in a voice with an identifiable edge, “I’m Fred’s friend.”

  The roommates were affable as always when introducing themselves, but Wagner could not doubt that they would despise him now.

  Once he and Mary Alice were on the elevator, she asked, with an implied groan, “Who were those two characters?”

  Wagner had both keys ready, and as soon as the car reached his floor he dashed for the door of his apartment and opened it with dispatch. Mary Alice however took her time, staring up and down the hallway, apparently with interest, bleak though this prospect had always seemed to him.

  Standing inside the doorway, he motioned to her.

  “What’s the hurry?” she asked, grinning disdainfully. “Don’t you want to run into any more call girls?”

  He brought her inside and closed the door. “You’re joking. Debbie and Ellen both have junior-executive positions at a big downtown bank.”

  “Oh, sure they do,” said Mary Alice, glancing around the living room. “How long have you been living in this apartment, Fred?”

  “Three years. We—” He caught himself. It seemed wrong to allude to Babe in any way at this time, lest Mary Alice seem even more of an invader. “Three years, take or leave a little.”

  “Don’t you think it’s time then to get drapes that fit the windows?” she asked, turning abruptly away from the articles in question. “Oh, so there’s how you got so smart.” She nodded at the small bookcase in the corner, which in point of fact held few books, with its empty shelf-and-a-half forlornly awaiting Babe’s
return with her potted plants, and then some more of its space was occupied by horizontaled magazines and newspapers, all outdated. There was probably a total of no more than two dozen volumes on the lowest shelf of all, which sagged midways thereby, and it would have been fruitless to seek literature as such amongst the classified phone book, a no doubt useful but never used tome on the removal of stains, and a thick-spined Who’s Who in Private Country Clubs, in which his sister and brother-in-law had paid to have themselves listed (“but you have to be invited”).

  Along with the houseplants, Babe had taken away all the pictures, which of course were her property, and the only decoration on the walls at this time were rectangles of pale plaster outlined in the soot that must always be in the air but otherwise goes undetected: an unpleasant thought. Only now did it occur to Wagner that it must be a shabby-looking place: the irony was that the dusty-gold draperies were the most attractive item on hand, having been sewn to order by the appropriate department of an expensive store and installed only a year ago.

  In an officious stride Mary Alice went back to the kitchen, followed by Wagner, who asked, if only to remind her who was host, “Would you like some coffee?”

  “Oh,” said she, “I’m capable of that.” She seized the kettle from the stovetop and went to fill it at the sink.

  Wagner hastened to fetch the jar of powder from a cabinet which was otherwise empty except for a teabag without a string and a can of Petite Marmite Henry IV, imported from Portugal and given to Babe by Cleve Guillaume after breaking up with a boy who had cost him a fortune in exotic canned goods. The tin was slightly deformed from, probably, a fall; fearing botulism, the Wagners had never broached it. In any event, Wagner did not want a stranger to see how pitiful was his larder.

  Yes, despite their excruciatingly intimate association of the night before, Mary Alice now seemed, in the environment of his own home, the slightest of acquaintances.

  Deaf to direction, she quickly ransacked two drawers before she found the spoons. Then she sloppily shoveled too much instant coffee into each of the cups.

  “When I get some of this in me, I’ll use the phone,” she said, indicating the wall-hung instrument next to the refrigerator. “My father will have gone to work by then, and I can talk to my mom.”