Being Invisible: A Novel

by Thomas Berger

  He could expect no admiration from Babe for the process or the resulting state, even though, so far as he knew, it was, except in make-believe, unprecedented, many would have said impossible. No, he must use invisibility to achieve something more than merely bringing mischief. But that was a problem, for how being unseen would help to write a line of his novel, let alone complete it, was beyond his powers of projection at the moment, and until he worked out a strategy towards positive achievement, he would do better to bring some grief to his enemy than to sit home brooding. To that end he decided now to visit Babe’s place of business, the Guillaume Gallery, with its current show of Zirko’s sculpture. And of course the only state in which this could be done without Babe’s displeasure at seeing him—for he had agreed never to go there—was to make the visit invisibly.

  While he was formulating this as yet simple plan—tonight the gallery would be open till eight o’clock, and until that time Babe wouldn’t be dining anywhere, with or without Zirko—he heard footfalls on the metal stairway a floor above him, sharp step-sounds of the kind made only by high heels. For an instant, not wishing to be bothered to react to the astonishment and probably the fright of a woman encountering a man in such a confined and relatively remote place, he thought he would vanish.

  But as it happened he waited a second too long. In his distraction she had moved closer than he expected and now came around the landing just above and saw him, and not with the least surprise or apprehension.

  “Oh, hi, Fred,” said Mary Alice Phillips. “I thought I recognized you, looking down, and that’s why I put on speed. Do you do this often?”

  The exertion had produced a desirable color in her cheeks. She wore a tight-belted trench coat, which certainly gave her a kind of dash, but she would have done better to brush her hair.

  “You mean take the stairs? Only when I want privacy to think in.” Her face fell. “No,” he said quickly, “it’s OK now. I’ve done enough pondering at the moment. What about you: do you often walk down?” Last evening she had rather mysteriously not reached the lobby in the car he had seen her board.

  “Sometimes,” said she. “When I think there are too many people on the elevator.”

  They had resumed the descent. “Oh,” Wagner said, “I don’t really think there’s any danger. There are several safety features on the modern elevator. I understand that when it’s really overloaded, a device locks the car where it is and won’t let the motor start.”

  “I don’t mean that. What I don’t like is someone pressing up against me.”

  Did she mean a frotteur? Or was she confessing to a mix of generalized misanthropy with claustrophobia? It was probably more tasteful not to ask. Hardly had he made his decision when she told him.

  “Men.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  As they were rounding the next landing, Mary Alice glanced at him. “I hope I haven’t offended you.”

  “Since I don’t do that sort of thing, you haven’t.”

  Her brown eyes were dismayed. “Oh, I didn’t—”

  “I know you didn’t,” Wagner said, with a quick sober sort of smile.

  “I don’t have a very good sense of humor, I guess.”

  Wagner frowned. “I don’t think that’s got much to do with not liking a stranger to take liberties with you.”

  “They’re not always strangers.” Mary Alice’s tone was plaintive.

  Of course, Pascal! “I understand how you might not want to create a public disturbance,” he told her now. “But you really ought to get him aside and tell him privately, in no uncertain terms, it’s got to stop, or else.”

  “Or what?”

  “You’ll take measures.”

  “What measures?”

  Mary Alice was beginning to show her irritating way of asking foolish questions: she did that quite a lot with regard to catalogue copy. How could he know what she should do next? Women were expected, somewhere along the line but at a much younger age than Mary Alice’s, to acquire a technique to repel at least this kind of man, who after all was not a rapist.

  But Wagner found himself constitutionally unable to appear to her as less than an authority on any matter at hand.

  “Tell him next time you will make a public disturbance.”

  “You mean scream and yell? I couldn’t do that.”

  “But the idea is to make him think you would,” Wagner said. They were moving smartly, and had only one more floor to go, according to the number stenciled alongside the latest fire door. “You could have him arrested.”

  “My God, I couldn’t do that.”

  “Well, once again it would be the threat that would probably do the trick.”

  They were descending the last flight of stairs. “Listen, I’ve got it,” said Wagner. “Here’s something you can do.” He suppressed the impulse to say even you. “Tell him privately, quietly, that unless he doesn’t quit, you’ll spread it around the office. Now that should do it, and without any commotion. Nobody could stand that kind of embarrassment.”

  She said nothing for the few steps remaining, but stopped before the door to the lobby. “Thanks, Fred.” She put out her hand. After a moment he gave her his, and she shook it. Hers was larger and stronger than he expected. “As usual,” said she, “you’re the one with the answers.”

  Ordinarily he would have uttered some self-effacing sentiment, but he sensed that here it might be taken as a failure of responsibility. “I’m pleased to have been able to help, Mary Alice. I’m sure it will work. Let me know.” He was still shaking the hand with which she held him. He had never before touched her in any way, not even in the slight contact of brushing by at close quarters. He was not the kind of fellow who was given to that practice, and if he had been, she would not have been the kind of woman to whom he would have done it. That Pascal was rubbing his groin against her behind—which was undoubtedly what she meant—was peculiarly outrageous, but it was probably no worse than searching the personal drawer of a colleague. Wagner regretted only not having kicked him more savagely.

  Finally he got his hand free and opened the door, ushering her out. The roar of the lobby at rush hour, after the quiet of the stairs, was startling. He had intended to escape from Mary Alice at this point, but he now knew a need to be protective. Actually, as a team they posed a certain menace to others, for they both walked quickly and collided with slowpokes several times before reaching the sidewalk.

  As a result of this shared experience, which became richer by their stepping amongst the even more alien throng on the pavement, people who didn’t even work in the same building—competitors, even potential enemies abound in the city—Wagner again acquired an interest in Mary Alice. It was however too slight to affect his immediate behavior.

  Therefore at the corner, where they were detained by both a red light and the heavy traffic, he said, “I’m taking a left turn here. I’ll see you tomorrow, Mary Alice. Have a good evening.”

  A strain in her eye suggested she might insist on accompanying him anyway, but she did not. Instead she shook hands again, and thereby delayed him long enough for the light to turn red in the direction in which he was heading, notwithstanding which he dashed across the street, only just managing to elude the surge of front bumpers. From the other side he looked back, so as to make a kind of shrug to let Mary Alice know his escape had not been intentionally that desperate, but already she could not be seen.

  As usual, the most likely way to proceed where he was going was to walk, even though the Guillaume Gallery was quite a hike. As he passed the lunch counter from which he had slunk invisibly without paying the check at noontime, he remembered his earlier intention to drop off the money at the next opportunity, but did not so much as slow his pace at this moment. It would have been a different matter had he been on conversational terms with the owner or even one of the countermen. Then he could have stepped inside and made a joke of it. As things stood it would have been too embarrassing. Anyway, their food, which was often stale
and always overcooked, was outlandishly overpriced as well, and the service was at best indifferent. Wagner had been present once when the owner, a stout swarthy man with an unkempt mustache, had actually threatened bodily to throw out a customer who had begun by complaining about the tepid coffee and gone on justifiably to several other delinquencies, such as fork tines webbed with dried food and the sweaty T-shirt on the short-order cook.

  A block before reaching the gallery, Wagner took the precaution of stepping into an unlighted areaway full of garbage cans and becoming invisible. He wanted Babe to remain ignorant of his visit from start to finish, and for all he knew she might be out in the neighborhood someplace, fetching coffee for Cleve Guillaume, for she did that sort of flunky work from time to time, and Guillaume was too “fastidious,” her word, to keep a coffee-making device of any kind in the office of the gallery: after all, that’s where he took clients to write out checks. Babe was supposedly working as his assistant only until she learned enough about the profession to open a gallery of her own. She believed she had sufficient capital to get started, having got a bequest when her father died, which was the immediate pretext for leaving Wagner. She had actually tried to make him see his advantage in the new arrangement: he would not need to contribute a penny to her support. It was this sort of thing that made him suspect that in four years of marriage he had never penetrated to the core of Babe’s being.

  Invisibly he now approached the big show window. When he was near enough to see what was on display therein, he recoiled. Siv Zirko, in the flesh, was sitting on a high stool, just behind the glass, staring, even glaring in his direction. Since Wagner could not be seen, this meant that Zirko’s expression was intended for anybody who looked at him. At the moment, despite the plentiful pedestrians abroad, he had no visible audience. It interested Wagner for a time to witness how long the egomaniacal artist could maintain his features in the same fix, without so much as the faintest tremor of eye.

  It was ever so long before he first began to suspect that the figure under his surveillance was not the living Zirko but rather an extraordinarily accurate replica of the man. His certainty was still not absolute on leaving the window to use the door; he would not have been startled had the figure at last stopped holding its breath.

  No one could be seen inside the gallery as he entered, but opening the door sounded an alarm somewhere, and from a room at the left emerged Cleve Guillaume, whom Wagner had met that time he attended an opening. It was difficult to think of Guillaume as sexually deviant when he was silent, for he was a thickset young man who would not have been questioned if seen in the uniform of a contact sport. And even when he spoke, he was not noticeably effeminate.

  But now he was piqued, and petulance gave his voice a girlish rhythm.

  “Will you look at that? Either the wind managed to open that door, or, more likely, someone had concealed himself and then, when the coast was cleared, seized one of the pieces and ran out.” He was silent for a moment before lifting his thick chin to the ceiling and shouting, “Carla! Where are you!”

  Babe came through a door in the rear, a door that was almost concealed, flush-fitting as it was and of the same off-white as the walls.

  She was wearing a dirty blue smock. “What’s the trouble?”

  “I could wish you would stay on the qui vive,” said Guillaume. “If you don’t mind.”

  “I was just crating the—”

  “I know very well what you were doing,” Guillaume said. “But all the same I wish you had been keeping an eye on who comes and goes out here. Now somebody has gotten in and swiped something.”

  She was dismayed. “My God, what?”

  Guillaume turned away, his chin still held high. “How do I know? Take inventory. Let’s hope it was just the wind.”

  “What wind?”

  “Honestly, Carla.” Guillaume turned back with a reproachful lower lip. “You don’t listen to anything I say. The buzzer sounded, I came out, and no one was here. Ergo, it was either the wind or a sneak thief, wouldn’t you say?”

  Babe glanced around the exhibition space, which consisted at this moment of one large room, though by means of movable partitions it was sometimes made into two or even three enclosures.

  “Must have been the wind then,” said Babe. “I don’t see anything’s missing.”

  Guillaume’s hands rose to his hips, a gesture that given his build did not suggest the maidenly: he might have reacted that way to a penalty call at the ten yardline. “That’s your idea of an inventory?”

  Babe sighed, groaned, and then said heavily, “All right, Cleve,” and in a dramatic plod went methodically around past each of the exhibits, which in most cases were mounted atop white, shoulder-high columns and seemed to be human organs molded from the same material, wax or plastic and amazingly lifelike, of which the show-window Zirko had been fashioned. The nearest to where Wagner stood consisted of a familiar complex of five fingers joined to a palm. This had such verisimilitude as to cause him queasily to look for the bloody stump: it was as though the hand had been cleanly severed at the wrist and mounted upright on the column. The label below read: ARTIST’S LEFT HAND. Wagner had to admit it was a remarkable piece of work: in addition to the lines which palmists trace there was a scar of a healing cut at the base of the thumb, and on the reverse were prominent blue veins and even two dirty fingernails.

  A more disquieting piece was just beyond. At the ends of thin vertical rods were two little spheres. The accompanying card read: ARTIST’S EYES. They were brown-irised and bloodshot. Detached as they were, they could have been anybody’s, but on a pillar just beyond was a nose that, deeply pitted above each flange and with sprouts of hair from each nostril, really was a dead ringer for Zirko’s. Next was a right foot, with what looked very like an incipient ingrown nail on the big toe.

  Babe meanwhile had made a brisk inspection tour. “Nothing’s gone,” she announced. “How could it be? Somebody making a quick grab would have to take the stand and all: Siv’s got everything tightly anchored.”

  Guillaume was still in place. “Hmmm.” His murmur was rich. He was jowlier than when Wagner had seen him last. Finally he said, “Frankly, I don’t understand this at all.” His voice had almost returned to normal. Suddenly he showed a radiant grin. “But then who does?” He did have a boyish charm. He returned to the office.

  Apart from the soiled smock, Babe was perfectly groomed as always. Indeed the smock was unprecedented to Wagner. It was also too large: the cuffs were rolled at the wrists. Surely it was a borrowed garment. Since he was invisible, Wagner could inspect her at close range and in a better light than on the sidewalk the evening before, and he moved to do so, but she now went, even more quickly, into the back room, the door to which she closed in his face.

  He was reluctant to open it immediately. Curiosity might be provoked by too many consecutive inexplicable events.

  Anyway, he had come here really to do something about Zirko, not Babe. On the wall near the door to the street was a plaque under the clear-plastic lamination of which was a dark-gray surface imprinted in white type. Wagner returned to it now.

  ALL OF SIV ZIRKO was the headline, below which appeared the following text.

  “Like most people,” Zirko says, “I never before actually ever looked at myself. I mean really looked. Or maybe I looked without seeing. And what is art anyway but a way of seeing? And if you think about it, where should an artist begin if not with himself? This is especially true with a sculptor, to which is added the truth that can be learned through tactility. So I have dissected myself. I have let you in on my secrets. Use them well. Touch me, stroke me, fondle me, caress me. Let’s exchange love!”

  This statement was followed by encomia from critics whose publications—major papers, newsweeklies, art journals—were eminent.

  Zirko has no peer as a plastic rhetorician. His is the language of conclusive conjecture.

  “Cruel,” “imperious,” “paranoid” are some of the terms tha
t have been applied to Zirko’s work, and perhaps justifiably so, but it has as appropriately been called “genial,” even “tender,” and so it certainly is as well. What all agree on is that it is unquestionably eloquent.

  Zirko is free-swinging, true enough: that much must be admitted, and as such he has been seen as irresponsible. Well, okay, but I maintain that thoughtful examination of any of the pieces in question cannot help but reveal that the irresponsibility is superficial. Significance is there, but it must be sought after. Zirko makes one demand: that the viewer become a criminal accomplice. This is not unprecedented, but for once it is serious.

  Wagner chewed on his invisible lower lip. Grammatical barbarism could be expected from Zirko, but for a national magazine to print a solecism like “not help but” was disgusting. The matter of these critical statements was another thing: they read as so much contemptible nonsense, but, as Babe had been wont to remind him, he had no true sympathy with art whose language was nonverbal.

  He was, however, as familiar with male anatomy as Zirko, having lived with his own for more than three decades, and what he now recognized, on one of the stands halfway along the western wall of the gallery, just beyond a red fire extinguisher in a glass-enclosed recess, was a set of masculine genitalia: hair-fringed phallus with dependent bag.

  Wagner approached this exhibit, but before he got there he encountered a work of another sort than the others, not a standing sculpture but rather a wall-fastened white panel from which five large glass or clear-plastic bubbles protruded. Each container displayed a substance, two of which were colorless. On the near side was posted a card of identification which dealt with the lot: ARTIST’S SHIT, PISS, SWEAT, SPIT, AND COME.

  At no point in his rage did Wagner consider molesting this frieze of filth and thus perhaps effecting the release of some vile material, should any of it be genuine. Instead he moved on to the genitals, which he now noticed had a companion piece of which the principal element loomed so massive he had assumed, from a distance, it was a forearm. These works were labeled, respectively, ARTIST’S LIMP COCK AND BALLS and ARTIST’S HARD-ON. The detailing of these imitation organs—swollen, tortuous purple veining, etc.—was extraordinarily precise. As to the erection, Zirko had been outlandishly generous to himself: if this were even half true he had made physiological history.