Being Invisible

by Thomas Berger

  She had remained standing. “Know what?” she asked. “I’ve got some Heimat.”

  “What?”

  “Just the most famous chocolate cake in the world,” Sandra crooned. “No matter how bad things looked for Miles, a piece of Heimat would make him feel better.”

  “That’s awfully nice of you, but...” Wagner said uselessly, for on concluding her speech she proceeded inexorably to the kitchen and soon returned with a wedge of flat dark cake.

  Wagner was at least relieved not to have to grapple with a towering hunk of many layers, for though having had nothing to eat since the lukewarm pizza of the wee hours, he was not in the least hungry.

  He took a bit on the end of the fork. It proved to be the quintessence of chocolate, so intense as almost to sting his tongue.

  “This really is good,” he told Sandra.

  She moued, an expression of some magnitude given the bright lipstick. “That was Miles’s trouble. He had perfect taste in everything. But the only way he could indulge it was to steal the necessary funds.”

  Wagner took more of the cake, which was really like candy. A small portion once in contact with the palate seemed like a mouthful. When he spoke it was in a voice altered by the sweetness. “Everything with me is in transition at the moment, and—”

  “There’s a bureauful of cashmere sweaters in the bedroom,” Sandra said. “He was huskier than you, but I bet some of the things would fit. And the sports jackets with the double vents, and there’s a beautiful one in fawn suede—they might be altered to fit you. I’d hate to see them just go to charity.”

  Wagner lowered his plate to the coffee table. Sandra was still hovering over him.

  “Come on,” said she. “I want do something about his stuff. I didn’t have the nerve during those weeks all by myself.”

  That being the kind of plea one could not in decency reject out of hand, Wagner followed her, but when they reached the bedroom he said, “I really can’t stay long. I’ve got a lot of serious problems, and I have to attend to them.”

  Sandra put her hands to his shoulder and stared first into one of his eyes and then into the other. “We’ll meet them together, darling. You are not alone any more.”

  How difficult this was! He despaired that anything nonviolent could be done to get her attention.

  She now hurled open the door of a closet full of hangered male garments. “Look at this collection. It could do credit to a movie star! Select anything you like.”

  Wagner soon found himself enveloped in what there could be no denying was an exquisite piece of buttery suede. However, the mirror told him that the garment would have to be ripped apart and reconstructed before it could come anywhere near to fitting his figure. You had to try on the man’s clothes to appreciate what a splendid physical specimen Miles had been, whatever his moral failings. It was chagrining to Wagner that though only his fingertips were visible below the jacket’s sleeves and he could have put another of himself into the chest and shoulders, the waist was not all that voluminous, even given his current underweight.

  The jacket still reeked of an intensely scented aftershave lotion.

  Wagner took off the beautiful piece of hide. “Thanks anyway,” he said to Sandra. “Too bad.” He was prepared for her resistance, but was surprised when she sighed and nodded in agreement.

  “Look at it like this, Freddo,” said she. “You’ve got it all over him in other ways. You’re steady, you’re reliable, you earn an honest buck, and you’re proud of it. You don’t bite off more than you can chew.”

  The more she said, the more Wagner resented her sense of him. “Well,” said he, “I’m not all that steady.”

  Sandra patted him with an owner’s hand, then rehung the suede jacket on the shaped wooden hanger. “I told you I am willing to overlook your antics of last night. I don’t ride herd on a man. So you had a few too many and helplessly went home with the trash from the next bar stool.” She winked at him and suddenly punched him lightly in the belt buckle. “Just never do it again or I’ll murder you.”

  That she could so easily rise above such a coarse act amazed him even more than that she had accused him of committing it—because the brief synopsis, if the rude characterization was omitted, did cruelly approximate his experience with Mary Alice, with the condition that she had not really begun to manifest tramplike symptoms until they had come to the apartment in the morning at hand: who could have anticipated her voracious appetite?

  Suddenly he began to wonder whether Sandra, though having embarrassingly little in common with him, might not save him from Mary Alice. He had no idea of how, but she was surely forceful and probably ingenious as well, and if she so generously forgave him for the hypothetical episode with a stranger, how tolerant she would be when a professional colleague was the female who had ensnared him. ... Perhaps she’d be willing to impersonate Babe, whom Mary Alice had never seen, and pretend to have returned to him. But then who could be found to pry him loose from Sandra?

  “Anyway,” Sandra was saying, “we’ve got more important matters to straighten out. Keeping both these apartments makes no sense. I want you to think about that. My lease doesn’t run out till the end of next month, so we’ve got a little time to plan. What about yours?”

  “Oh,” said Wagner, who, weary from the activities of night and morning, lowered himself to the edge of the pink bed. “Another year, I think. I’d have to look it up.”

  “They’re about the same size, I guess, so at least some of somebody’s possessions would have to go.” She sat down alongside him. “As you can see, my things are quite expensive: Miles insisted on that.”

  It took a while in his exhausted state for the implication to take effect. She was the second woman within an hour or so to threaten to share his domicile, and of course Mary Alice had apparently carried out the threat.

  He rose abruptly. “Thanks for offering the clothes. Also thanks for the cake. I have to get going. I just stopped off to explain about last night.” Which he had not done, but it sounded credible.

  Sandra extended her fleshy lower lip. After a moment he understood that she was pouting. “I’ve got a big problem,” she said, making the enlarged eyes of reproach. “I’ve been neglected.”

  Wagner had no patience with this style, of which however he had never had experience except as witness of movie scenes, where he had always seen it as tiresome.

  “Well then, Sandra,” he said, as if she were not doing this, “I’ll be on my way. Oh, about tonight: I’m sorry to say that once again I can’t make dinner. It’s, uh, family business. You couldn’t believe how many prob—”

  Sandra had lain back on the bed and, with a scream of zipper, opened the entire length of her housecoat. The last thing he wanted at the moment was more sex, but he simply couldn’t walk away when she said fervently, “Oh, honey, I really need some loving.”

  Given his exertions of the previous night and those only within the last hour, Wagner at the outset doubted whether he might once again rise to the occasion, but he must have so done, for Sandra was profuse in her display of satisfaction. To be seen as a stallion was new in his career, and though he was capable of male pride, exhausted as he was he hardly felt like whinnying in triumph. His big problem, how to earn a living now that he was unemployed, remained—unless he were to open a one-man agency for the depucelation of mature maidens and the servicing of lonely widows.

  After he had performed the task at hand he expected Sandra to permit him to leave, but she was no Mary Alice. Quenching her sexual thirst freed her to exert her considerable energy in other areas. She sprang up and beat Wagner to the shower, then in a damp robe, hair cocooned in a towel, shouted, en route to the kitchen, “Waffles and sausage patties!”

  Wagner was worried about what Mary Alice might do if she awakened and he was not at hand, but on stepping into the tub he decided to take a sit-down bath so as to put moist heat on those parts for which months of inaction had been replaced by frenetic demand, an
d hardly had the level of the affectionate warm water reached the bottom of his rib cage when he fell asleep.

  When he awoke, Sandra was kneeling on the bathmat, a loaded plate in her left hand, a laden fork in the right.

  “Open,” said she, nodding at his mouth, and he obeyed the command and shortly was chewing on a forkful of waffle, butter, and syrup followed hard after by one of sausage patty. Actually, while he could have taken or left the chocolate cake, he found himself genuinely hungry for this traditional breakfast provender once it was between his lips. Sandra proceeded to feed the entire plateful to him, alternating the solid food with a mug of coffee which between trips rested on the tile floor.

  When he finished the last morsel, the final sip, Sandra took away the crockery but returned immediately to scrub his back with a textured washcloth and a creamy soap.

  This was all unique in his experience, and he could not deny it was pleasurable, but a certain uneasiness would not be dislodged: he was not the person Sandra took him for, and would never be. She was no more like Babe, his ideal, than he resembled the late Miles: a truth he alone seemed in possession of, for now once again she was trying to encapsulate him in the robe her husband had left behind: an almost furry terrycloth, of an old-gold background onto which were superimposed glossy black stripes, far from the traditional faded blue and threadbaring one Wagner had owned time out of mind. Not to mention that Miles’s robe exuded the same strong reek of aftershave that had been smelled on the suede jacket: inhaling with the nose buried in a lapel might well cause asphyxiation.

  Wagner found the will to oppose Sandra’s attempt to towel him dry, a process to him more intimate than back-scrubbing or, for that matter, coitus. Nor did he even like to do it while she stood by, so he asked for privacy by pretending to need to use the toilet.

  “Go ahead,” said she. “I always think it’s so homey.”

  So much for Miles’s perfect taste. Wagner hastily dried himself and went out and reclaimed his clothes.

  “Now, Sandra, I absolutely must go about my business. Thank you for a delicious breakfast and your other generosities. I—”

  “I wish you wouldn’t talk like I’m the Salvation Army,” said she. “I am your woman, after all.”

  This was the kind of talk that made him shudder, but he preserved his composure. “You’re a very kind person,” he said. “And I owe you a dinner, but I’m afraid I can’t—”

  She was gently pushing him towards the apartment door. “OK, then get going. The sooner you do, the sooner you’re back. Pick me up at seven. That should give you more’n enough time for your business. You know what would be nice? Have you got a tux? Let’s go formal! What does it matter? You can wear Miles’s, with the cuffs pinned up. After all, we’ve got a lot to celebrate.”

  Wagner was in the hallway before he would have had a chance to ask what, and anyway he dreaded hearing the kind of answer Sandra would have given.

  He had no idea of how long he had been gone. He just hoped that if Mary Alice had awakened she had not been induced by his absence to manifest extreme behavior. When he unlocked and opened the door to the apartment he was gratified to see her seated on the living-room sofa, staring at the illuminated screen of the TV set lately delivered by Babe.

  As it happened Mary Alice was attired in his old robe, which looked even more shabby than he had remembered it to be. She sat slumped on the small of her back, and her bare feet were propped on the plate-glass top of the coffee table.

  “Shit,” was her greeting to him, “they get the dumbest people in the world as contestants on those quiz shows. I’m sure it’s an intentional policy, else you might try to get selected. You could make a year’s income from one program. The questions are pathetic. Listen...”

  From the TV set came a voice that said, “Henry the Eighth?”

  “Sorry,” was the baritone answer. “I’m afraid it’s Kaiser Wilhelm.”

  “Shit,” squealed Mary Alice, lifting her feet and banging them down on the glass. “Can you believe it?”

  Wagner could see the screen only at an extreme angle. “Yes,” he said dolefully. “Too bad. ... Come on, Mary Alice, let’s go down to the office and get our checks.”

  “I told you I’m not going back to that fucking place.”

  He really hated her new idiom. He also despaired over how he was ever going to dislodge her from the apartment. He would have felt more hopeful had she asked him where he had been.

  It was almost to taunt her that he said, “I had to step out for a while.”

  After a pause in which she listened to the TV quizmaster, who was saying, “King Gustavus Adolphus,” Mary Alice gave Wagner a roguish glance. “If we really get hard up, we can make a nice living renting this place out by the hour.” She returned to the screen, from which issued an uncertain voice that said, “War of Eighteen-twelve?”

  Mary Alice grimaced. “Now, that’s actually a tough one.”

  “Thirty Years’ War,” Wagner said, only an instant before the same answer, preceded by the routine “I’m sorry,” was heard from the television set.

  “See,” said Mary Alice. “It’s just too bad you can’t make your vast knowledge pay such dividends.”

  “May I ask what you meant about renting out the apartment?”

  “Oh.” She crossed her ankles the other way. Plate glass was not made to bear the weight of human limbs. “That super showed up—Glen? He’s quite a case, isn’t he? He was looking for you. I didn’t know where you had gone, so I told him to tell me if it was important, because you and I are on confidential terms.”

  And she had been wearing his robe over her naked body. Glen was a vigorous gossip: by nightfall her presence would have been made known throughout the building.

  Wagner tried to look on the bright side. “Good you were here. He takes advantage of the tenants’ absence to snoop around.”

  “He had a proposition for us,” Mary Alice said, smirking though keeping an eye on the TV proceedings. “In so many words, what he wanted was a place to bring whores.”

  “Next time I really will call the cops,” Wagner said, with inadvertent reference to the episode of the day before. “You’d think after his experience—” He stopped there. “How dare he speak that way to you?”

  “He didn’t actually. I had to draw him out. I got the idea, though. He definitely is a pimp of some kind.”

  “That swine,” Wagner said. “I’m going to make a formal complaint to the management.” This was sheer bluster, but he had to say something as he desperately searched his imagination for a means by which to get Mary Alice out of his home. “Well,” he said next, though he was surely not hungry, “it’s getting on to noon. We’ll have to get lunch someplace.”

  “Let’s call for takeout,” Mary Alice said. “I don’t want to put my clothes on again.” She winked at him. “In case I get another attack of the hornies.”

  Wagner couldn’t really understand this. “You don’t experience any discomfort?”

  “Not me! Who would have guessed?” She then cried at the screen, “The War of Jenkins’ Ear! ...I finally got one!”

  “That must have been the toughest question thus far,” said Wagner, who had not heard it. “I wouldn’t have known that one: it’s always been just a name to me.” Mary Alice had hitherto unsuspected resources—like everyone else at the office; perhaps she too was about to publish a book.

  His wonderment was superseded by a banging on the door.

  “Don’t answer that,” said Mary Alice. “That pimp was amusing the first time, but I think maybe I ought to be insulted now.”

  “That won’t be Glen,” said Wagner. “He just barges in. I’d better open it. Why don’t you go into the bedroom?” He extinguished the TV.

  “In fact I’ll get in bed,” said Mary Alice, with a conspicuously suggestive smirk.

  Wagner opened the door to see a small middle-aged man, with a sandy mustache and eyes genially crowsfooted, who carried a leather-trimmed canvas golf
-club bag though his attire, a brown suit and green tie, seemed not designed for sport.

  “Sir,” said this man, “would you be Frederick Wagner?”

  “Yes,” said Wagner. “That’s exactly who I am.”

  The small man pushed into the apartment, kicking the door shut behind him as he went. He then removed a long-barreled gun from the golf bag.

  “I’m Alwyn Phillips, father of Mary Alice, the young maiden you have abducted. I am trying to control myself, but I am quite capable of using this weapon.”

  Phillips brought the muzzle of the gun to bear on Wagner’s chest. Wagner was not conscious of feeling fear as such, yet he could not force his voice to become audible. He could however point vigorously into the corner beyond Phillips’ left shoulder.

  Mary Alice’s father whirled and stared there. When he turned back, Wagner was invisible.

  Phillips dashed down the little hall and into the bedroom, Wagner following. The armed man opened the closet and poked amongst the hangered clothing with the barrel of his weapon, then knelt and peeped under the bed. Both he and Wagner, at much the same time, next took note of the closed door of the bathroom across the hall. Phillips went out there and threatened loudly to blast away the lock.

  The door opened and Mary Alice emerged. She was fully dressed in her street clothing.

  She said prissily, “Dad, you’re making a fool of yourself.”

  “Where is he, Maywee?” asked her father. “Is he in there, hiding behind your skirts?”

  “He’s not in here,” said Mary Alice. “He hasn’t mistreated me, either, as I assured you on the phone. Why don’t you believe me?”

  “Because you’re too indulgent of human frailties,” said Phillips in the intense way that contrasted with his appearance as a reasonable person. “I demand that you step aside and let me search the bathroom.”

  “Go home, Dad!” Mary Alice wailed. “I’m twenty-three years of age. I’m legally responsible for myself.”

  “Maywee,” Phillips said sternly, “this isn’t easy for me to ask, but I must: are you still intacta?”