Catherine smiled in the candlelight. She put her exquisite pianist’s fingers on the back of the hand he had slid halfway between them. “I’m worried about Alan. Fred, I’m afraid I must ask you to leave, because he’ll be watching the doorway from the phone booth on the corner and otherwise won’t go away.”
Wagner lost emotional momentum. “Then he’ll come back up here?”
“No,” said Catherine. “He won’t do that. He’ll still be too sulky.”
They moved to the apartment door, where Catherine continued to disappoint him by offering only the most perfunctory handshake. He realized he was still going it alone insofar as a real friendship between them was concerned. No doubt realism was called for here, as in so many other cases, but why must truth always be so banal?
“You will at least think about what I’m proposing?”
“I could hardly help doing that,” she said, unhelpfully. “Now, be sure to let Alan see you leaving. Walk in the direction of the phone booth, please, and not the other way.”
“That’s easily accomplished,” said a dejected Wagner. “I just hope you’ll let me see you again.”
Catherine’s smile seemed unusually remote. “Once you’re around the corner, come on back.”
He experienced an instant of vertigo. “Just a moment,” he said, detaining her opening of the door. “Do you mean tonight?”
Catherine said levelly, “I think you can do more or less anything you want. To stop you they’d have to see you.”
Wagner regarded this as the first genuine evidence he had ever obtained that being invisible was not, underneath it all, only a self-serving delusion.
A Biography of Thomas Berger
Thomas Louis Berger (b. 1924) is an American novelist best known for his picaresque classic, Little Big Man (1964). His other works include Arthur Rex (1978), Neighbors (1980), and The Feud (1983), which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.
Berger was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, the son of Thomas Charles, a public school business manager, and Mildred (née Bubbe) Berger. Berger grew up in the town of Lockland, Ohio, and one of his first jobs was working at a branch of the public library while in high school. After a brief period in college, Berger enlisted in the army in 1943 and served in Europe during World War II. His experiences with a medical unit in the American occupation zone of postwar Berlin inspired his first novel, Crazy in Berlin (1958). This novel introduced protagonist Carlo Reinhart, who would appear in several more novels.
In 1946, Berger reentered college at the University of Cincinnati, earning a bachelor’s degree two years later. In 1948, he moved to New York City and was hired as librarian of the Rand School of Social Science. While enrolled in a writer's workshop at the nearby New School for Social Research, Berger met artist Jeanne Redpath; they married in 1950. He subsequently entered Columbia University as a graduate student in English literature, but left the program after a year and a half without taking a degree. He next worked at the New York Times Index; at Popular Science Monthly as an associate editor; and, for a decade, as a freelance copy editor for book publishers.
Following the success of Rinehart in Love (1962), Berger was named a Dial Fellow. In 1965, he received the Western Heritage Award and the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Award of the National Institute of Arts and Letters for Little Big Man (1964), the success of which allowed him to write full time. In 1970, Little Big Man was made into an acclaimed film, directed by Arthur Penn and starring Dustin Hoffman and Faye Dunaway.
Following his job as Esquire’s film critic from 1972 to 1973, Berger became a writer in residence at the University of Kansas in 1974. One year later, he became a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Southampton College, and went on to lecture at Yale University and the University of California, Davis.
Berger’s work continued to appear on the big screen. His novel Neighbors (1980) was adapted for a 1981 film starring John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd. In 1984, his novel The Feud (1983) was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize; in 1988, it too was made into a movie. His thriller Meeting Evil (1992) was adapted as a 2012 film starring Samuel L. Jackson and Luke Wilson.
In 1999, Berger published The Return of Little Big Man, a sequel to his literary classic. His most recent novel, Adventures of the Artificial Woman, was published in 2004.
Berger lives ten feet from the Hudson River in Rockland County, New York.
In 1966, two years after he wrote Little Big Man, Berger stands at Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument, the site of Custer’s last stand in 1876. This was Berger’s first visit to the famous battlefield.
This black-and-white image became the readers’ vision of Berger: dark and esoteric. (Photo courtesy of Gerry Bauer.)
A snapshot of Berger with his friend Zulkifar Ghose, taken in midtown Manhattan in the summer of 1974. (Photo courtesy of Betty Sue Flowers.)
This marked-up manuscript page comes from a story called “Gibberish,” from Berger’s original short story collection Abnormal Occurrences.
In this 1984 letter to his agent, Don Congdon, Berger tells Congdon that he was mentioned on The David Susskind Show, a television talk show.
In this 1997 letter, Berger writes to Roger Donald, his editor at Little, Brown, about characters, props, and plot points in The Return of Little Big Man.
In 1997, Berger wrote to Congdon about communications from Michael Korda, editor in chief of the publisher Simon & Schuster, and Donald.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 1987 by Thomas Berger
cover design by Michel Vrana
978-1-4804-0094-8
This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media
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Being Invisible Page 24
