by Hugo Wilcken
I’d had this notion that the meeting would be in the room I’d occupied at the hospital, just like old times. I’d even felt a vague longing to be back there. But the moment I actually thought about it, I realized the absurdity of the idea. Now I stood by a door that was half open. I could see the doctor not directly, but in a mirror on the wall facing his desk. Opposite, in a position I could see neither directly nor indirectly, was another man, whose voice I recognized. My first doctor at the hospital: the one with the beard, the pince-nez, the patrician New England accent. “I don’t think it’s the right way to go about things, not at all,” I could hear him say, to which Dr. Peters replied, “I’m afraid it’s no longer up to you.” There was another testy exchange, then the squeak of a chair leg scraping across the linoleum. The man walked past me, without so much as casting a glance in my direction.
“Mr. Smith? Come in. Please, sit down.”
Dr. Peters had been taking notes, and continued to do so for a minute or so, ignoring me as I sat there silently—it was a technique I remembered using myself, as a means of inducing unease and weakening a patient’s resistance. Finally, he left off. He opened a dossier on his desk and glanced through it.
“So … a stevedore … Chelsea Piers … seems you’ve been absent from work quite a few days. Why is that?”
“I got sick. I’m back on the job now.”
“Well … I wouldn’t take any more time off if I were you.”
Another minute’s silence while Dr. Peters read through notes, ignoring me. I looked about the office, which seemed utterly ordinary. There was the desk photo of his wife, another of two young boys. Each perfectly posed, with just the right smiles. As if they were not real family portraits, but a studio demonstration of what a family portrait should look like.
“Tell me about Marie.”
“What about her?”
“You’ve been seeing her again, haven’t you?”
“That’s right.”
“Tell me about it.”
“We got back in touch, through a mutual acquaintance. A few weeks back. That’s all there is to it.”
“What do you do together?”
“We go to the movies. The usual stuff.”
“That’s it? Nothing in particular she likes to do?”
“Like what?”
“Anything. Anything that comes to mind.”
“Well … she likes to go back to places we’ve been to before.”
“How do you mean?”
“We went down to the Battery, for example. She told me about the time we went there when we were first seeing each other. She wanted to retrace our steps.”
“What do you make of that?”
“I don’t make anything of that.”
“I see. Where do you usually meet?”
“In coffee shops, bars. One in particular I guess. Albert’s Bar & Grill. I kind of know the guy who runs it.”
“What I meant was, where do you conduct your affair? At your hotel?”
“No. We tried that once. We were caught out. In fact, the manager’s given me notice.”
“What will you do?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, where have you and Marie been sleeping together?”
“She works for a family, not far from here. She has the run of the apartment when they’re not there, which is a lot of the time.”
“You sleep in the marital bed?”
“No. We sleep in a different room.”
“Have you made any plans together?”
“You mean like getting married?”
“Any sort of plans.”
“Not really … Marie talks about a place upstate. The people she works for have a vacation home up that way. On a lake. She says we should borrow the house in the spring. Get away from the city.”
“What do you think of that idea?”
“I don’t know.”
“How would you like a place of your own? Here in the city?”
“I’d like it pretty well. But there’s not much chance of that.”
The doctor opened a desk drawer and took out a typed sheet, read it through, signed it at the bottom, and sealed it into an envelope. He picked up the phone, dialed a number, murmured a few yeses and nos into the receiver. He turned to me: “Can you afford thirty dollars a month?”
“I think so.”
A few more murmurs and then he put down the receiver. He scribbled something on a piece of paper and handed it to me.
“This is the address of a rental agent. Here’s a letter for him. Go see him now. He’s waiting for you.”
The interview was over; it had lasted barely ten minutes. I was escorted back down the corridors and walked quickly out through the lobby. It was a surprise to so suddenly find myself on the sidewalk again, and it took me a moment to gather my thoughts. Crossing the street, I turned around briefly to look back at the hospital facade, but it had already been swallowed up into the streetscape.
The address the doctor had scrawled was on the Lower East Side. I’d have to get the F train down to East Broadway, again. I went through the motions—climbing down the stairs, putting the nickel in the turnstile, finding my way onto the platform—but my mind was still occupied with Dr. Peters. There were things I’d wanted to ask him, but I’d been fazed by the meeting’s abrupt end. I could understand how he’d known about my absenteeism. Someone at the shipping company must be reportig back to the hospital. But Marie? How could he have known that I was seeing her? It threw up the possibility of something far more insidious. I eyed the two men opposite me on the train. One was wearing a suit and reading the Times; the other was more raggedly dressed, probably a vagrant. Neither was paying any attention to me; neither were likely candidates to be spies.
In my hands was Dr. Peters’s letter, sealed in an envelope, and I resisted the urge to tear it open. It was no doubt some sort of institutional guarantee on the rental of an apartment. Why should he offer me that? I had the impression of being toyed with. I was a laboratory rat that Dr. Peters had set free in the city, to see how I’d react. A paranoid reaction on my part, but then the interview had felt almost designed to induce paranoia. I remembered my own time as a psychiatrist, and how a patient’s paranoia would inevitably become fixated on the treatment itself, provoking the very symptoms it was designed to banish. Of course, I could easily get off the train now and throw away the address the doctor had given me. I could easily disappear into the city. But I was being offered a place to live just as I was about to lose my hotel room, during a bitter winter.
Now I was at the agent’s office, above a grocery store. The agent read the doctor’s letter carefully with what seemed to me some puzzlement. He spoke to someone on the phone, possibly Dr. Peters, then finally opened a cupboard and took out some keys. I followed him from the office, down to a dingy street of tenement buildings, fifteen minutes’ walk away. We made our way up the garbage-strewn stairway of a rundown building, to a door on the third floor. Beyond it, a smallish room with peeling walls, a table and two chairs, a sofa, a bad painting hanging opposite a tiny window. An opening in the far wall led to an identically sized room, with just a mattress on the floor. The agent sat down on one of the chairs and lit a cigarette without offering me one. He was a stocky, square-jawed man and he wore a plain dark suit.
“You want it?”
“I’ll take it.”
“Okay. You’re set ’til the end of the month. After that you gotta pay upfront.”
“All right.”
He put the key on the table.
“You come down and see me at the end of the month, okay?”
“Okay.”
I was alone again. I looked around the apartment. It wasn’t so different in its basic structure from the one I’d inhabited for so many years, farther uptown. It would need some fixing up to be presentable enough for Marie—a coat of paint at the very least. Nonetheless, I felt a surge of exhilaration. I opened the door that the agent had just closed, and
looked out onto the drab landing with its stained carpet. Somebody was scraping about in the apartment opposite. I crossed the landing and knocked, thinking I might introduce myself as the new tenant—there were one or two questions I could ask about the building as well. I could hear labored breathing from the other side of the door. I knocked again, but no one answered.
No bathroom was inside the apartment; it was probably in the hall. But a small sink nestled in the corner. I threw my head under some running water, then smoothed back my wet hair and looked into the mirror fixed to the wall. It was dirty and warped, and a distorted version of myself stared back. In some fundamental way, though, I hadn’t changed as much as I’d supposed. Beyond the scar, beyond the more recent signs of ageing and my now-graying hair, it was the same mask as always. You tilt your head and things look different—what had become unfamiliar is familiar once more. You realize that it’s the same face. That it’s been there all this time, no matter how far you stray, waiting patiently for you, there in the looking glass.
7
Marie was getting dressed. I was lying on the mattress, watching her. It was fiercely cold, and I wasn’t expecting to go out much today. I hadn’t officially quit my job, but I’d had a run-in with the foreman, and I wasn’t necessarily going to return. No matter. Work seemed relatively easy to come by at the moment, and the other day I’d had some luck in the subway as well, pickpocketing a fat businessman’s wallet stuffed with bills.
“Where are you going?”
“College.”
A professor at Columbia was helping Marie with her studies. It was someone I vaguely remembered from my own time there. People she was meeting knew Manne, and although the name was unlikely ever to come up in conversation, the connection still felt strange. Marie was now bent over, applying lipstick in the small, cracked mirror.
“You’re not going to the other apartment?”
“No.”
“You’re not looking after Anatole today?”
“No.”
I knew she didn’t like me using the name Anatole—the boy’s real name was Anthony. It was like an accusation, intruding on her intimacy with the boy and his father. I was silent as she put the finishing touches to her makeup. A few minutes later she was gone, the click of the door echoing in the emptiness. The apartment was peculiarly silent for its downtown location, and those first few moments of solitude were always slightly eerie. I hadn’t made the place a home, as I’d planned to. It hadn’t come alive. The walls were still bare, excepting the mirror and the clumsy painting of a seaside scene. I’d cleaned the place up, I’d painted the walls, I’d bought curtains and sheets. But that was as far as it had gone.
At first I’d insisted Marie move in with me. She’d stayed a week or so—even then I’d noticed that she hadn’t brought all her things with her—but it wasn’t long before she was back spending half of her nights with her employer. I could see well enough that the two apartments were escapes from each other, and I didn’t say anything. Sometimes I felt in love with Marie; other times, there was a cold distance. I was beginning to understand Smith’s vanishing act, although nothing like that would be necessary this time around. I could already see how things would pan out. A traumatized refugee had fallen for me, but now she was remaking herself. One day, she’d wear a white coat. She’d be a doctor with a foreign accent. Perhaps she’d land an internship at Bellevue, as I had. In years to come, she might even end up with an office on Park Avenue. Long before that, our worlds would have separated. She’d drop by less and less frequently. We’d have less to say to each other. The sex would become perfunctory, even clinical. Then one day, she simply wouldn’t show up when she’d said she would, and that would be that. Just visualizing the sequence of events in my head seemed to make it a done deal. And as much as Marie had been important to me, I wouldn’t have much trouble finding another woman. I’d had offers enough, in the bars I’d frequented.
I heard a door opening and closing across the landing. I jumped up to open my own door, but not fast enough. I’d only caught glimpses of the person who lived opposite me, and all I could say with any confidence was that she was a woman, either middle aged or old. She never answered when I knocked, and her shadowy presence played into my paranoia. In my weaker moments, even Marie could provoke suspicion. She was studying medicine. Did she have some connection with Dr. Peters? Other things about her didn’t feel quite right. How had she learned to speak English so well, so quickly?
I thought I’d go out, after all. There was nothing to eat or drink in the apartment, and in any case a whole day inside would only result in cabin fever. I dressed and went down the stairs into a blast of freezing air, hugging myself tight. The extreme cold made you withdraw ever deeper into your core—just as the heat did the opposite, a relentless sun exploding one’s sense of self. I went into an Italian place and ordered some coffee. Lying on the counter was a photo magazine, Look or something like that. I idly flicked my way through it, wondering what I might do for the rest of the day. I’d take a subway uptown. It was the kind of weather where I could spend the entire day in a theater, watching movie after movie until they spilled over into each other and then into my dreams.
The magazine pictures paraded past me in a blur of smiling faces. I froze, then turned back a few pages to a full-page ad. The bland, good-looking features of the woman in it were hard to place, and it took me a few seconds to work out who she was. Mrs. Esterhazy. I recalled thinking, the one time we’d met, that there was something flat and generic about her, as if she’d walked out of an ad for washing powder. And now here she was. Neither young nor old, part of an all-American scene, a husband returning from work and the young son playing with his train set on the living room floor. It didn’t really matter what the advertisement was for. I slipped the magazine into my coat pocket and drank up my coffee.
A frozen mist hung over the city. It was late morning, but the light barely penetrated down to street level. Despite this gauziness, on Park Avenue South I felt I was suddenly able to see for miles and miles, intersection after intersection, past my old office, to Harlem River and beyond. Perhaps there was some sort of corridor through the fog at that precise point, or more probably it was my imagination. New York seemed like a vast machine. A city-sized puppet show, the wires almost visible, flickering in the periphery of my vision. People streamed down the avenue into the subway, as if part of a mass ritual. It was hard to get a sense of anyone as an individual, within that indiscriminate multitude. I focused on a woman with a small child, pregnant with another. I marveled at the optimism of giving birth to something that you knew would die one day. I pondered the significance of Mrs. Esterhazy’s photo. Somehow, it meant that Manne was still there, in the shadows. And his story was still alive, despite my best efforts.
I climbed the stoop of my building, skipping the broken stair that had tripped me up the day before. I was back in my apartment now, and everything was exactly how I’d left it, naturally, even though it felt changed by what I’d found. The stillness and silence didn’t induce calm, but a sort of anxiety of anticipation, a feeling that something would happen, must happen. I tore the photo out of the magazine and pinned it to the wall, then lay back down on the mattress, hands behind my head, examining it at leisure. On the one hand, it was a rigorously conventional piece of advertising, no different from hundreds of pictures you could find in any number of publications. On the other hand, the more I looked at it, the more the image seemed a world unto itself.
The setting was a split-level sitting room, traditional and yet modern, probably in one of New York’s tonier suburbs, although the garish colors of the decor suggested California as well—I had half of a feeling that I’d seen this same room in other ads. A man has just come through the door, he’s waving to his wife and kid. His brown check suit and trilby aren’t sober enough for him to be a lawyer or a banker, but he’s clearly on a decent salary. Perhaps he’s an ad man—after all, directors make movies about Hollywood, novelis
ts have novel-writing protagonists, and maybe ad men create ads about ad men. Each of the protagonists—the man, the woman, the child—is caught in a pose of absolute expression, like in a nineteenth-century academic painting. There’s unalloyed joy in the man’s face as he greets his family: it’s as if he’s been away weeks, rather than hours. But his expression seems forced, off-key. Which is not exactly surprising, given that this is an advertisement, not a stolen photo of an actual homecoming. The man in the picture is not a doting husband and father, after all. He is a model, a bad actor.
And yet I couldn’t entirely see it that way. I couldn’t unsuspend my disbelief so easily. I had to create a narrative that accounted for all the details. For me, the man’s strange grin masked unease. It wasn’t hard to think up a conventional explanation: for example, he might have stopped off at his mistress’s apartment on the way home. But I had feeling that this unease was something altogether more fundamental. Perhaps the man has come back to his house, and as he opens the door, ready to greet his wife and son, he sees a woman and child he doesn’t recognize. The boy jumps up to give him a hug; the woman kisses him, then whispers an endearment in his ear. In shock, he lets all this happen, passively. He plays the part that is patently expected of him. There’s a moment when he knows that he should confront the two, ask them who the hell they are, but that moment passes, and the man feels himself drawn into a story not his own. Perhaps some kind of joke is being played on him; perhaps he’s the victim of a malaise; perhaps there are other forces at work. In any case, playing the game seems to be the path of least resistance, until he understands what’s happening to him.
My gaze shifted from the man, to the furniture, to the boy, to his toy train in violent blue. Each detail of the scene would either be smoothly integrated into the narrative I’d created, or would shape it further. The one thing in the photograph that I seemed to be avoiding was Mrs. Esterhazy herself. Her face bore a similar theatrical expression of joy, although I failed to detect any undercurrent of unease. Her complexion was as smooth as polished stone. If it hid nothing, perhaps it was because there was nothing to hide. Mrs. Esterhazy was the empty space around which everything revolved, like water circling the drain.
