Being Invisible: A Novel

by Thomas Berger

Suddenly Gordon flushed. He spoke in a high-pressured undertone. “You’re saying this because I’m a poet? Shit on you, Fred.” He spun on his toes and went swiftly away.

  What did that signify? Was it a red-herring reflex, or had he really wounded Gordon? Anything could be called poetry, after all, and apparently everything was called sculpture. Wagner decided not to worry about Gordon’s snit, he who had just returned two thousand two hundred dollars so as to save the job of a little teller whom he did not even know. That’s the kind of man he was.

  What he had to do at this point was design a means that would bring him a lot of money without hurting anybody. He did not understand how it was possible for him to become invisible, but he was convinced he should not let his gift be used for ignoble purposes.

  6

  WAGNER ARRIVED HOME INVISIBLY. Though this meant he had to wait for another arrival on whose heels he could enter the building, it was worth the trouble to evade the evening doorman, an effusive type who the night before had commented quizzically on Wagner’s return alone and after the dinner hour.

  “Mrs. under the weather?”

  The provocative question forced Wagner to produce an ungrammatical answer, something he detested doing, but he felt he had to respond quickly and decisively, and therefore could not afford to be impeccable with a man who habitually said “they was” and “he don’t.”

  “We each have our own independent career.” His shrug was false, but the internal shudder was genuine.

  “Yeah,” said Max the doorman, who seemed too young for what was most of the time a passive job, “but you always eat together.” By means of such particular observations he hoped to ingratiate the tenants, with an eye to holiday tips, and perhaps it was not the worst strategy—except of course in the case of someone with something to hide.

  This was another menace against which invisibility was marvelously efficacious. But he should probably remember to show himself periodically. Tonight he slipped into the lobby unseen, just behind an elderly woman who was leashed to a small woolly white dog. The animal of course was aware of him, but luckily was so spoiled as to be aloof and, after a quick twitching of nostrils, dismissed him from further consideration.

  Swinging back the door, Max asked, “Sugar’s bowels get settled down?”

  “Just as I think so, he’ll let go, wherever he is,” said the old lady. Sugar led her around the corner to the northern wing. Funny, while Babe was with him, Wagner would have liked to own a pet, but had no such urge now he was alone and could be expected to want company: his old idea of having a dog or cat was related to his concept of family.

  He stopped off at the alcove in which the mailboxes were mounted, prepared to wait or go away if it was occupied. But nobody was there, and he slipped in and quickly unlocked and unloaded his box. One practice he had changed since Babe’s departure: he had abandoned his old habit of discarding junk mail without opening the envelopes. Nowadays reading this stuff gave him something to do on entering the apartment.

  The precedent, however, was to be broken this evening: the genuine first-class letters for once outnumbered the commercial importunities—which of course he could see only after he reached the apartment and became visible. (Using the elevator would have been too risky; anyway it was good exercise to climb the four flights of stairs.) Indeed, the only impersonal communication consisted of a pitch for a new dishwashing detergent, along with a discount coupon to be presented on the purchase of a box. Wagner opened this envelope first, prolonging the suspense evoked by a pink oblong unmarked except for his name, and postponing the displeasure he knew awaited him inside the letter bearing his sister’s return address. It was too soon for Nan, across the country, to have received the communication he had sent but a day earlier—even though in some ways it seemed long, long ago, for he had first become publicly invisible on the occasion of that mailing, and had done so many things since in consequence.

  To read a message from a Nan who would naturally assume that her sister-in-law was still in residence had to be a painful experience, for though his sibling always addressed him exclusively, her only acknowledgment of his existence was so to speak reflected off his wife: tell me about Carla. He could not remember when Nan had last inquired as to his own state of being.

  Finally, on the simulated elevation of a deep breath, he opened her envelope. For the first nine handwritten pages, in a small but almost painfully clear script, the letter proved to be not so bad as he had anticipated, consisting of but a dogged list of the recent activities of each member of her five-person family, over which his eyes could soar without ever coming in for a landing. Then suddenly, there it was, on the last quarter-page: “Please pass along my love to Carla. How she can put up with you, I can’t imagine. Must be charity, don’t you think?”

  In some families, no doubt such sentiments would be affectionate chaff, but not here. Nan candidly disapproved of her brother; she still clung stubbornly to her conviction that he should have entered a profession, preferably law, but even university-level teaching would have met her minimal requirements. The trouble was that being six years his senior and of a much more assertive temperament than their male parent, Nan had taken over when their mother went into the lengthy illness from which she eventually died. It had to be admitted that Nan did everything well. At seventeen she was an excellent cook and a much more efficient housekeeper than Mother had ever been, and despite her new burden of work, remained the same honor student as before.

  Though offered scholarships to glamorous campuses, she went on to attend the local university, so she could live at home and maintain care of her otherwise helpless menfolk, then in the interests of the same responsibility endured an overlong engagement to a successful young corporation lawyer. She married only after their father died and Wagner obtained his BA. She assured her brother she would have stayed on had he gone to graduate school. But he told her that such was his principal reason for not doing so. The one reward Nan could never earn from him was not gratitude, which he could allow, but rather forgiveness. The constant emotion he evoked in her appeared to be resentment. They rarely spoke together on the telephone, and had never met since she and the lawyer moved to the other coast and produced three children, in addition to which Nan sold real estate and was involved in the many other activities enumerated in the quarterly newsletters, which Wagner not even in palmier days did more than scan. As to the admired Babe, his wife had had no more interest in Nan than he had.

  He now took Nan’s pages to the bathroom, where he tore them into bits which he flushed down the toilet. Only by such means could he hope to withstand the impulse to reply spitefully and thus nullify the effect he had hoped to create with the almost serene message of his previous letter, in which with all his literary talent he had contrived to make Babe’s departure seem to be the product of their collaborative and amicable best judgment and not really a separation so much as the establishing of alternative residences which they might well, according to the prevailing winds and their respective professional responsibilities, occupy together or severally. The point was not to let the world define the limits or for that matter the expanse of their association. That he knew before the fact that not only would such a picture immediately be seen by Nan as a false one, but also the style in which it was painted would infuriate her, went without saying. Whenever Wagner wrote to his sister, his real statement was a rejection of her values.

  Now for the matter of the pink envelope, unstamped and still warped from having been folded into a form slender enough to be inserted into the slit of the mailbox. Wagner knew it was technically illegal to place anything that did not bear a stamp into any receptacle for which the Postal Service was responsible, even these personal boxes in the lobby of a private apartment building. In practice he had never even heard of an attempt to enforce this law, so it stayed a mere curiosity.

  “Dear F. Wagner,” began the pink note he took from the envelope,

  I have just learned, quite by acci
dent I assure you, that like me tho for a quite different reason, you too are living alone and lonely at the present time. I’ve just got a bright idea: why don’t we combine forces for dinner tonite? At my place. I’m buying, but I wouldn’t be offended by a bottle of wine. It’s now 4:10. I’ll wait till 8 for your reply, phone or in person preferably.

  Your neighbor,

  SANDRA BARROWS (formerly Elg)

  Wagner wondered whether it might not be bad taste for her so quickly to replace her husband’s name with, presumably, that by which she had been known as a maiden. He thought about that so as to avoid reacting to the surprise of the invitation. He never liked being taken socially unawares; he usually tried to contrive a nonchalance on such occasions. For example, he had first seen Babe in a supermarket. He had been attracted by the sheen of her hair. But then when he saw the ivory ovoid of her face he was put off slightly, not by her features but rather her expression as she pondered on the oranges. However, having at last rejected this fruit in favor of Anjou pears—to Wagner a somewhat incongruous alternative, since the replacement was not in the citrus family—she rounded off her chin and retracted the nose which had been slightly extended, and Wagner’s judgment too was altered. She was not pretty, but she might be beautiful. She was certainly beautiful to him: when he was so convinced, he cared little for the tastes of the world if they were at variance with his own, and he did not know that they were. But having made this assessment, he had selected his own three tangerines and moved on. It was three aisles later on, at the frozen-dinner case, that he was spoken to by someone who turned out to be the young woman he had noticed in the fruit department.

  “Are those really nourishing?” The question referred to the cold, hard package he was at the moment extracting from a stack of same on the freezer shelves.

  He was much taken with her voice. In those days Babe was in the habit of giving arbitrary, soprano emphasis to certain words. Formal analysis might deny any special meaning to the results of such a practice: for example, he should not have said his selecting the Down Home Meat Loaf implied that he was authenticating the product as to its nutritive content. But the musical liquidity with which she pronounced “really” was irresistible.

  “I never have thought about that,” he answered. “I just buy it because it tastes better than the other dinners. And the little compartmentful of cherry pie isn’t bad.”

  “I don’t know,” said she. “I really hate to let some company choose the entire menu for the dinner I’m going to eat alone.”

  “Oh,” said Wagner, “but now you’re no longer speaking about nourishment.”

  “I don’t care,” said she, presenting him with her full face, her candid brown eyes just below the forehead-fringe of precisely cut bangs. “I just wanted to say something.”

  This confession startled Wagner to the degree that, though it seemed as if it might well lead to the realization of the stillborn fantasy he had undergone at the fruit bins, he was now disconcerted.

  “I’m glad you did then,” said he. “It’s nice to do something one wants to do and not be punished for it.” It was a statement that had no intentional purpose: it represented mere nervous gaucherie; he had of course not been at all prepared to be spoken to by anybody on this occasion, let alone by her.

  Yet her assessment of it was honorific. “Then I was right,” she said, with a movement of mouth that he learned in time was her version of a grin. “You have a sense of humor.”

  Nevertheless he still had no self-command. “Thank you.” He produced a niggardly smile. He closed the case, but then immediately opened it in courtesy, offering the door to her.

  He was actually moving away when she asked, holding the freezer door open, “What about the Sauerbraten with Red Cabbage and Potato Pancake?”

  He turned back. “That comes with the apple strudel, which stays awfully soggy if you don’t heat it longer than their directions say. If you do, the meat gets dried out.”

  “You never thought of taking the strudel out and heating it on its own?”

  “It’s not worth that much to me,” said Wagner. “Fact is, I don’t even like strudel when it isn’t soggy.”

  Now the woman whom he eventually knew as Babe laughed outright. For a moment he worried about the kind of person who would even see that confession as humorous. But to his relief, she did not. Apparently she had laughed, the way people do, because she shared a particular prejudice.

  “I hate strudel,” she said with enthusiasm.

  “A meeting of minds,” Wagner lamely observed.

  Carla shrugged. Without warning she turned all but indifferent. She showed him a slight frown, took from the freezer case not the Sauerbraten but rather the worst of all available frozen dinners, the Filet of Fish: if heated sufficiently to crisp the breading, the fish would be much overcooked, not to mention that the garnishes did not inspire respect: so-called Spanish rice, flecked with pimiento and something green, and a paste made of yam surmounted by several miniature marshmallows: dessert was butterscotch pudding, not that different in color from the mashed yam and not quite as sweet.

  Wagner returned the shrug, though with her back towards him she would not have seen it. “Fair enough,” said he, turned, and began to push his cart away. But then he remembered a detail that stopped him.

  Carla had no cart nor even one of those hand-baskets. It looked as though all she was buying was the fish dinner. She carried nothing else.

  Wagner wheeled back to her. “Did you lose those pears I saw you take?” He had an impulse of panic: she wore a baggy coat, perhaps was shoplifting the fruit.

  “Had second thoughts,” she said. “I don’t like pears. I’m awfully cranky about food. I used to drive my mother crazy: wouldn’t eat most of what she put on the table.”

  “I usually ate it, or some anyway,” Wagner eagerly admitted. “But I rarely liked it.” This was not an appropriate place to say that the meals prepared by his sister had been an immense improvement.

  “On the other hand,” Carla said, “I can be a glutton if it’s something I like.”

  Wagner asked what would fall into that select category. He was cautious about listing his own favorites first, afraid that she would shoot them down, diminishing the affinity that seemed to be in the air.

  “They change from time to time,” was however all she would say, and the statement was certainly borne out through the subsequent four years spent in her proximity.

  ... Sandra formerly Elg was well-upholstered, upstairs and down, though bisected by a conspicuously small waistline. He was not quite sure what she wanted of him. If it was sex, he might have a mauvais quart d’heure. He could not envision having any desire for her, and a man was not expected to be able gracefully to extricate himself from the grasp of a lustful woman: it would seem to go against nature’s design. The only two possibilities were: professing to either inversion or intimate disease. Cal Cavanaugh, Wagner’s old college friend, had claimed as an undergraduate to have been sexually importuned by his own stepmother; when he pretended to be attracted exclusively to his own kind, she threatened to inform his father unless Cal submitted to her cure, so he had no choice. Wagner might have believed this story had Cavanaugh not been an established Munchausen, with a ready tall tale on any theme, and had not their current assignment in French been Phèdre. However, like so many of Cal’s imaginative constructions, it seemed sound in its approach to human character. It was Cavanaugh, with his sense of things that might even be called Balzacian, who should really have written novels. Yet Cal sold real estate, and insurance, in a little town too remote to be called suburban, and had a sizable family and no regrets. Unfortunately for Wagner’s purposes, Cal had long since become a bore who no longer even told tall stories.

  There was no lack of good reasons why Wagner should have refused the invitation of Sandra now Barrows, perhaps foremost amongst them his weariness owing to the taxing events of the day—becoming invisible certainly took some energy both physical and
psychic, added to which expenditure must be the demands made on the nerves by the two episodes in the bank, the second of which had been unusually stressful. Then he had had abrasive moments with both Jackie Grinzing and Gordon the glorified office boy, who however was a published poet—and now, that his reaction to Wagner’s remarks was examined in cold blood, pretty likely to be queer.

  No doubt Wagner found himself dining with Sandra because on this evening she was the only person extant who knew of his domestic plight and still approved of him to the degree that she would ask him to her home; that she might have selfish designs on him did not alter the foregoing truth. Mutual back-scratching is no perversity in this world of ours.

  It was understandable that Sandra began by talking about her own marriage, and what she said was instructive. Though hers had been terminated by chance, she revealed it to have been no more trouble-free than his own. As it turned out, her late husband had never been more than a fake, and to a degree not even she had suspected until he was dead. For example, he had never been a racing driver. Nor, despite a gaudy military decoration he had once shown her as that of an award for bravery under fire, had he ever been under arms. He had once been tried and found guilty in a court of law for his role in a confidence scheme and given a suspended sentence. This, with other depreciatory information, had been furnished Sandra by her spouse’s elder brother, and it seemed true enough, for not only was it in accord with what Sandra knew as facts, but her brother-in-law, a modest high-school teacher, had nothing to gain by unjustly disparaging his dead kin. Indeed, he had, in an offer that must be called saintly, vowed to do what he could to help the widow meet some of the many unpaid bills left behind by the fraudulent one.

  “Of course I refused,” Sandra said over the main course, which throughout her monologue she never touched. “The poor man obviously needs every cent from his little salary. Turns out he’s got three kids. You know Miles never mentioned a brother?”