Being Invisible: A Novel

by Thomas Berger

  Wagner tore the paper from the typewriter, which produced that near-scream of a platen spun too rapidly.

  “Jesus,” said Pascal, “there go the cogs. But maybe that’s the only way to get new equipment. Come on, Ferdinand, let’s get that cuppa Joe.” He also used such terms as “head” for “toilet,” and “glad to have you aboard” when greeting newcomers, though it was not he but rather his father who had served in the Navy. This was but one of his many affectations.

  “I’ve had all the coffee I can swallow for one day,” Wagner said.

  Pascal agreed. “Me too. We’ll get Cokes.”

  “No,” said Wagner. “I’ve got to break the back of this copy. I just haven’t been able to concentrate.” He had continued to stare at his empty typewriter. Pascal was the only person in the office who would engage in nonbusiness talk to one’s back. No doubt he would have preferred Wagner to turn in the chair but would settle for this. He seemed immune to feelings of rejection.

  Wagner doggedly returned the paper to the typewriter. He would have liked to crumple it and bounce its ball against the partition, but management had been very strict about wastage in recent months, going so far as to ask that for original drafts the backs of used sheets be employed. Such measures had been instituted not long after Wilton’s joining the firm. Perhaps that is what he did when not being dry-masturbated in the elevator by Wagner’s immediate superior: dreamed up new economies to be imposed on the serfs.

  “It’s four thirty-five,” Pascal, still there, said behind him. Wagner had assumed the bastard was gone! “It’s too late now to find the words.”

  This was surely an accidental echoing of the very statement Babe had made on leaving—with reference to his novel—but it was no less cruel for that, and he was unmanned all over again, to the degree that he actually left his cubicle and accompanied Pascal to the soda-dispensing machine in the corridor on the route to the restrooms.

  Over their cans of what proved to be grape soda—this late in the day everything else was gone—Pascal tried to gossip, but as he never had the real goods on anybody, he spoke in fantasy.

  “I tell you Mary Alice is a lez if ever I saw one. Anybody looks like that and never dates.” He was referring to their youngest colleague, a deep-breasted sallow-skinned brunette newly out of college. Wagner was helping her to learn to write catalogue copy but had identified in Mary Alice very little potential for this sort of work. Some of her efforts were memorably inept. He had started her on certain novelty items whose appeal would be only to a limited market so far as buyers went, but which might well amuse those who scanned catalogues, inducing them to linger here and there throughout the pages and maybe eventually come across a gadget they would wish to order.

  There was a breast-pocket handkerchief for the jacket of a business suit, which when removed and shaken out of its folds appeared to be rather a pair of lace-trimmed underpants. There was a miniature version of a loving cup, inscribed with a mildly insulting title, e.g., “World’s Champion Bullshooter.” There was one of the classics in this tradition, the nutcrackers in the shape of a woman’s legs. Mary Alice actually seemed not to get the feeble jokes of these infantile amusements. In her copy the fake panties were simply an “elegant lace-trimmed handkerchief” and the little loving cup was a “thoughtful award for prowess in some area which might ordinarily go unrecognized.” The nutcracker was called simply that, and the text pointed out that it was also functional with lobster- and crab-shells.

  Mary Alice Phillips had off-white skin and small dark eyes. She was not the type of female to whom Wagner was erotically attracted, despite her prominent breasts or perhaps because of them as well as her tender age. He was never altogether at ease with unseasoned women. Mary Alice still lived with her parents. He doubted that Pascal had any evidence she was lesbian. The man was usually wrong.

  “How’s Carla?” Pascal now asked, with an intimate intonation, as if he were a close friend of the family. He had encountered Babe but once, two years before, and that was certainly an accident. In those days the Wagners were on the town once or twice a week, prowling to obscure restaurants not yet assessed by food critics, then on to postprandial entertainments: penny arcades (Babe was good at machine games; Wagner excelled at the electronic-eye gun which if aimed accurately would reverse the little moving bear) or the movies: Babe liked narratives of contemporary life, the give and take between persons of opposing sexes, whereas Wagner’s favorites were the cinematic nightmares in which the routine is hideously transformed, owing usually to excessive radiation: Uncle Ralph suddenly becomes an eater of human flesh or a common mosquito grows to the size of a dirigible. As ill luck would have it, on the evening in question they were emerging from a restaurant when who should be the only passerby but Pascal. For the instant before taking note of Wagner, he wore quite a different expression from that of the office. There, his nervous eyes were quick to focus on whatever they were directed towards. Among his tiresome traits was an insistence on noticing all petty phenomena in his vicinity—“there goes Irene for more coffee,” “that pigeon almost landed on the sill but thought better of it, went to the steeple over there,” “are you getting a pimple on your ear? ...sorry, it was the way the light was falling”—but as encountered here, Wagner’s colleague walked with a lowered head, and when he raised it his eyes were heavy-lidded and lusterless.

  In the next instant, recognizing Wagner, he altered his state dramatically.

  “Fred!” he cried, failing to say “Ferd” or some variant no doubt because they were not alone. Wagner would not have credited him with such delicacy. “What are you doing in another part of the forest?”

  Wagner’s response was a lugubrious “Hi.” He might have had the nerve to proceed onward without introducing his wife had Babe not claimed the initiative.

  “I’m Carla,” said she, going so far as to extend her hand to a person who had no greater recommendation than that he knew her husband’s given name. (Wagner chided her later: “He could have been a criminal.” “Oh, come on, is that likely?”)

  Of course Pascal was thrilled for once to have acceptance thrust upon him. “I’ve certainly heard a lot about you,” he eagerly lied, shaking her hand too long.

  No doubt Babe would have stayed and talked to the man had her husband not insisted they were late for the movie, a misrepresentation that was exposed when they reached the theater, twenty-five minutes early.

  If Pascal had seen Babe only once and by chance, he had certainly not been apprised of her flying the coop.

  “She’s fine,” Wagner said now, through his teeth. He brandished the soda can. “This is awful!” He disposed of it in the nearby container, baffled as to why he had drunk so much of it as he had.

  “Ferdie old boy, we need stronger stuff. Close up your desk and I’ll meet you at the elevators and we’ll stop off at Swan’s.” Pascal referred to the nearest watering place, or anyway the closest that was acceptable to the office gang. He quickly walked away, before Wagner could say no. Which meant he would stand guard at the elevator and be all that much tougher to reject.

  Wagner had never been one of Swan’s crowd. Now that Babe was gone, he returned home as promptly as ever, so that he would not be asked embarrassing questions if found lingering.

  Despite the vow he had made after the unsatisfactory experience at noon, he now returned to his desk, which was so situated that no one routinely could see all of it on passing, pressed himself into the least conspicuous corner, and became invisible. It seemed to him that the process took less time than it had in any of the trials or in the post office. In any event he could not be seen only a few moments later when Mary Alice Phillips’ quizzical expression appeared at the entrance to the cubicle.

  A moment afterwards he heard her ask Delphine Root, the woman whose space was separated from his by their respective fiberglass partitions and a water cooler, “Fred’s still here, isn’t he?”

  “Darned if I know,” said Delphine, no doubt amidst e
scaping smoke, for a lighted cigarette was her constant companion.

  Invisibly and quietly, Wagner covered his typewriter and dropped the papers into the deepest drawer, wincing in revulsion at the thought of the flashlight-pen. Hardly was this completed when back came Mary Alice, who peeped in again, almost impaling the unseen Wagner on a nose sharp with chagrin.

  Again she stopped at Delphine’s lair. She complained, “He must have walked right past me. His stuff’s all put away for the day.”

  “He’ll be back tomorrow,” Delphine said indifferently. She added, “Death and taxes.” She was beginning to sound malicious, though he had never quarreled with her.

  “Well, it is closing time,” said Mary Alice. “I came around too late.”

  “Sticking up for him, I see,” Delphine said drily.

  Mary Alice’s voice was soft. “He’s just been nice to me, is all.”

  Wagner had stepped out of his niche and come forward as far as the water cooler. He wanted to observe Mary Alice’s expression at close hand. She was scarcely the glamour girl of Pascal’s fantasies, but she was comely enough. Her skin though slightly sallow was finely textured. Her eyes could easily be enlarged with cosmetics.

  He could see Delphine as well, or much of her. She extended her naturally apelike upper lip and took such a deep draft of her cigarette that the glowing ash traveled a third of the length of the paper tube.

  She winked at Mary Alice and said, significantly, “OK.”

  The girl reddened and went back to her own desk. Wagner followed, lurked nearby until she put her things in order for leaving and donned a trench coat in which, when it was belted, she cut another and more lively figure than that afforded by the dun cardigan worn in the office.

  At the elevators, he and she, she not knowing of him of course, came upon the wretched Pascal, waiting for Wagner, who in fact had forgotten about him.

  “Hi there,” Pascal said to Mary Alice. “Say.” This word had no immediate successors. It was Pascal’s means of holding on to someone encountered by chance until he could think of a reason for such detention.

  It failed to ensnare Mary Alice. While she completed her nod a car arrived. She boarded it briskly. Pascal would have been on her heels, but Wagner caught the back of his topcoat and, using both hands, restrained him for a moment. Meanwhile, a number of other people stepped into the car, solipsistically preoccupied, and thus no one seemed to notice the man’s preposterous struggle against his own coat, which was stretched tautly from his shoulders to a point in sheer air.

  Wagner thought he had done enough once Mary Alice was insulated by a double layer of people, and he permitted Pascal to pull away. He was even a bit too quick to open his fingers, and the suddenly liberated Pascal plunged recklessly, clawing, into the front rank of those on board, which earned him abuse from at least one small woman.

  Wagner realized he could not himself board a crowded car without probably bringing about some consternation that would serve no one’s purpose: invisibility would be ineffective when tactile matters were uppermost. Some people, himself included, knew desperation when enclosed in a crowd: suppose they were pressed against a body they could not see, and the unreasonable were added to the existing claustral stresses?

  Nevertheless, Wagner wanted to continue to follow Mary Alice Phillips and thus he dashed to the heavy metal door at the end of the corridor, hurled it open (regardless of consequences, and there were some: two young women from the art department, en route to the elevators, raised their eyebrows and pursed their lips, and one said, “Ghosts”), and plunged down the stairs. If the car stopped at other floors, and it always did, his ETA at the lobby might be competitive, and so it proved, though he fell once, luckily sustaining only a bruised knee, and avoided doing so subsequently by not looking at where his feet were or should have been.

  He burst out onto the ground floor (again providing some spectators with the mystery of a door, in this case a stainless-steel one, that opened violently as if of its own volition (but such phenomena are soon dismissed amidst the distractions of the city), just as the elevator car arrived.

  Naturally, for he had been nearer the front, it was Pascal who was seen first—but a truth soon became apparent to Wagner as the car rapidly was emptied of its passengers. Mary Alice was not amongst them. How could that be possible? Wagner demanded of himself, as if it were an absolutely unanswerable question, whereas the explanation could scarcely be exotic: there were eight whole floors between where he stood now and where he had seen her last. She had stopped off on one of them: yes, even though it had obviously been necessary for half the car to deboard so as to permit her own exit. That Wagner wouldn’t have had the nerve to ask this for himself, had no necessary bearing on what Mary Alice was capable of.

  Did she really have the special interest in him that was suggested by the interchange between her and Delphine Root? This matter had intrigued him when he eavesdropped, but it would have been degrading now to search half the building for her, or boring to wait till she reached the lobby, perhaps with a companion, and then be forced to judge whether that companion was indeed in some sexual association with her.

  Pascal lingered just beyond the bank of elevators. It would have been simple for Wagner to evade the man, but had he done so he would have acquired the obligation to explain next day in a credible fashion how their trails had failed to cross despite a surveillance that would have done credit to an undercover police officer. It was easier to clear the air, and the deck, forthwith.

  Wagner slipped back behind the door to the stairway and made himself visible, then boldly strode out and confronted his colleague.

  “Why in the world would you have come down by stairway?” he was asked. “Claustrophobia?”

  “You know my secret.”

  Pascal grimaced, an expression that briefly improved the appearance of his weak chin. “I’m sorry. I was kidding.”

  “So was I,” said Wagner. “Look, uh, Roy, I really don’t have time for a drink.”

  To his surprise, the other gave him no argument, instead said, “Sure, Ferdie, I understand. I’d rush home too if I had someone like Carla waiting for me.” His right eye looked as if he wished he had the nerve to wink.

  This was one of those times when Wagner, fundamentally a peaceable sort, felt on the point of smashing Pascal in the face. Instead he nodded abruptly.

  “See you tomorrow.”

  “Or maybe in front of the Mexican Standoff.”

  “What?”

  Pascal said, “Remember last year when I ran into you two lovebirds coming out of the restaurant?”

  “That wasn’t Mexican,” Wagner explained with asperity. “That was A Guy from Calabria.” And taking advantage of Pascal’s deflation, he grunted a farewell and vanished—not literally this time but so rapidly and deftly that it would have required a greater effort to pursue him than even Pascal could exert while retaining any pride whatever.

  After a block he slowed down, being in no hurry to reach the apartment, to which he intended to walk all the way instead of taking either of the two buses required to reach home on wheels. The fact was that he had to do something about food, having had none for lunch. He had lost some pounds since Babe left, he who even in good times verged on the underweight and thus was envied by his wife as he had been by so many of his associates his life long.

  The restaurant he had been forced to identify for Pascal had been a favorite of his and Babe’s. The Guy’s name was Jimmy and though he himself had not come from Calabria he was descended from several persons who had and whose recipes were presumably on the menu, which, thank God so far as Wagner was concerned, offered no surprises, he being an old-school man who ate spaghetti sluiced down with the harsh house red that came in the thick glass decanter. Naturally, since Babe’s departure he had dined anyplace but there. Indeed, he had not eaten out at all except for workday lunches. At home he had hardly eaten, period. Dinner for six days in a row, until the carton was exhausted, might wel
l be scrambled eggs.

  But now, having been forced boldly to pronounce the name of A Guy from Calabria, he felt as though the taboo had been lifted thereby. All at once he was hungry for the first time in weeks: that thick, acidulous tomato sauce in which all of Jimmy’s dishes were inundated might be just the balm he sought. He turned west. The fall evening, with its new darkness, the clock having only lately been changed, was clement and just cool enough, when taken at a measured pace, for his raincoat without its zippered lining.

  For the briefest moment, as he passed from the tiny vestibule through the inner door and was flooded by the heated air of the restaurant, so aromatic as at first to be overwhelming to nostrils still pinched from the atmosphere of the sidewalk, Wagner felt a twinge of horror, but in the next instant, being gripped by Jimmy at his hand and then elbow and shouldercap, he knew nothing but kind emotions.

  “Mr. Wagner,” Jimmy was saying, working his entire arm, “my gosh I thought maybe you got sick or something, or mad at me, it’s been so long. So tell me—” He was interrupted here by the man who tended the short bar.

  “Jimmy, phone. Want to take it here?” He brandished the instrument.

  “Hey,” said Jimmy, and went to lean over the bar. His office was in back, between kitchen and the restrooms.

  Though a habitué, with, whenever convenient, his own table (which by the way was empty now; it was earlier than most cityites dined, unless they were as unrepresentative as Wagner now found himself, and he was the only customer except for a middle-aged couple on the far right), he never seated himself but rather waited quietly to be led, another of his habits Babe saw as passive. But to him it seemed no more than good taste, and it made sense, as he had always heard, to keep on the good side of restaurateurs and maîtres d’hôtels, who had both privileges and punishments at their disposal, could seat you in the preferred section or in front of a toilet door, could steer you to rareties unlisted on the menu or stanchly reject legitimate complaints about corked wine or gristly meat.