Look at Me

by Jennifer Egan

  I did the things I’d always done, but with a new excitement. A fever that reminded me of childhood. Adulthood as children imagine it.

  Dinner at ten with a man visiting from Europe. I’d known him for years. Added my bit of color to parties at his villa in Antibes. At lunchtime, an old English servant would wheel a cart to the water’s edge. Starched tablecloths thrown over yellow rocks. Grilled fish, white wine. The Mediterranean went purple in the afternoons. Twice I was burned by a stingray.

  This man was married now. A father. But still eager to see old friends, as he put it. While the others laughed around us, his hand drifted to my leg. “When are you going to get married?” he asked.

  “Never,” I said.

  The hand wandered, inquisitive. “Then what? This, on and on?”

  “Of course not.”

  Something else was going to happen. I was right up against it.

  37

  Z and I pretended we were strangers. No one knew. That secrecy was the hidden pulse. The buried engine.

  We were at our best with a room full of people between us, linked by a glittering strand of mutual awareness. His presence made the air sing. Made me loopy. Buoyed me up on a reckless swell of freedom I hadn’t felt in many years. I threw my arms around people and shouted into their ears. I jumped onto tables and danced. I expanded, trying to fill my exaggerated outline.

  He watched me. I was showing him something, but I didn’t know what it was. I was leading him someplace.

  He came to my apartment a few more times. Alone in a room, he was hard to take. Too goddamn serious.

  I was getting impatient. To begin! To play my part, whatever that was! I imagined drugs, crime. Spy missions. Weapons trading. But only in the most sketchy, cinematic terms. None of it really made sense. I think I didn’t want to know. Even as I boiled with frustration.

  I’d never liked mysteries. Except on television.

  He felt the frustration, too. Once, in the middle of fucking, he slapped my face. I hit him back, socked him right in the head. I heard my knuckles on the bone.

  And then we kissed. It was a relief.

  My name was printed in small block letters on the cover of Irene’s six-by-nine steno book. Looking at it gave me a tiny flick of pride, but each time I opened the cover, I felt dread.

  Dread of what? I didn’t know. Maybe it was as simple, as childish, as the fear that she’d written nasty things about me.

  On the day of our next appointment, I brought the notebook with me to Gristede’s and then to the river, where I sat on my usual bench. I opened the notebook. Irene’s writing was cryptic, streaky, illegible at first. Upside down it looked the same as right side up. I flipped among the pages, half relieved that I couldn’t read them. Then I deciphered Saved $, followed by (the words seemed to tumble toward me) Bought apt. 198—v. proud, esp. sect. couch. This was true, I thought; I was proud of my couch (it was an excellent couch), but reading it in someone else’s hand made that pride seem ludicrous. I made a mental note not to refer to the couch again in Irene’s presence.

  And then, by degrees, other words yielded themselves to me, painstakingly at first and then in a kind of rush, as if I were pushing through a wall: tough pose dev. early. Why? Hurt? Later I found sms completely isolated. Exile. Self punish? Ask abt religion. And I remembered Irene questioning me about religion, describing the Lutheran church where I’d gone each Sunday with my parents, blah blah blah. It was unsettling, now, to read the original question. All of it was unsettling, like hearing the other side of a conversation I only dimly recalled my end of. There were doodles: a sailing ship, a woman lying in bed covered with a blanket, her stomach bulging in pregnancy. Several long lashed eyes. Trees. Chess pieces. I found lists. Laundry, scrawled in one margin, and beneath it, buy: Windex, pap. towels, plant food, cereal, ravioli, shoelaces. Another list, Re: Mark 1. Invite J. M. to dinner. 2. Ask L. abt. commission 3. Apple composer prog—how much $$$?? 4. Mark—shrink?

  Poor Mark. I knew the feeling.

  Despite these proofs that Irene’s mind had strayed to other topics during our conversations, I experienced relief. There was nothing really bad. At one point, she had even written Less bitch than 1st seems. That was toward the beginning—the second page. I returned to it, and now a few other formerly indecipherable lines tipped open to me: Doesn’t want to talk. Needs $$. (Why me?) and then, a few lines down, Jackpot, followed by lying before, did know Z. In the margin she’d written a phone number that looked familiar. I flipped ahead, then returned uneasily to that page. What did she mean by lying before—when was before? My eyes drifted again to that number. I opened my cell phone and dialed it.

  “Mr. Halliday’s office,” his receptionist answered.

  I hung up confounded, my brain straining to conjure a scenario whereby a connection between Irene and Halliday made sense: they’d met recently, by chance; she’d hired him for some reason. I myself had written his phone number in the margin of her notebook and forgotten. It had to be recent, because weeks ago I had mentioned Halliday to Irene, and she’d denied knowing him; I remembered that distinctly. And when I’d impersonated Irene in Halliday’s presence, he had betrayed no recognition of her name. My mind gyred harriedly, eagerly among these possibilities, but in the end I found myself staring at that word Jackpot, an ominous sensation lazing through me like a stench.

  Pluto was back, hovering to my left with an air of frenetic insistence. I hardly saw him through the blur of my distraction; I had to finish this. I pressed redial, and this time Halliday picked up.

  “How do you know Irene Maitlock?” I asked, not bothering to identify myself. “The Post reporter?”

  There was a long pause, a completely different sort of pause from the ones that took place during our nocturnal conversations. This pause was filled with the creak of Anthony’s thoughts. “She interviewed me,” he said, “about three months ago.”

  Pluto was standing directly in front of me. I ignored him.

  “I sent her to you,” Halliday said quietly.

  “Why?”

  “I could tell you,” he said. “And I will, if you want. But I’d rather give Irene a chance to do it her way.”

  I felt strange, tingly. Sick. My new life was so small; together, Anthony and Irene made up the major portion of it. And they knew each other—had from the beginning, but kept it a secret. Foreboding fastened leathery wings around me.

  But when I thought of Irene, the foreboding eased. She wasn’t capable of deception; she was too transparent. Too honest. It simply wasn’t possible.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll talk to Irene.”

  “Will you call me, Charlotte? After you’re done?”

  “What an excellent question.”

  I closed my phone and sat numbly, staring at the water. Pluto could contain himself no longer. “You find yourself in the coveted position,” he declaimed, dancing beside me, “of having a human being owe you his blessed life. Fill my ears with what that feels like.”

  “No one owes me their life,” I said.

  “Oh, yes,” he said. “Oh, yes, Pluto owes you his.” He pulled from his immaculate pocket a check I recognized, a check for $1,000. From Extra/Ordinary.com.

  “Randall Joseph Smith,” I read.

  “That’s the name I had back when I got named.”

  “Wow. So they signed you up.” I did my best to sound enthusiastic, despite my seismic uneasiness.

  “All these years of waiting, and something finally happens,” Pluto said. “Because of you.”

  “Stop saying that.” He was starting to make me angry.

  “I love America. I love this crazy damn country. Where else does such beautiful insanity enter the realm of the possible?”

  “He’s doing it for himself,” I said, “not you.”

  “That’s the only reason I’ve got any modicum of faith whatsoever!” Pluto retorted. “If he’s doing it for me, he won’t do it. He’s doing it for himself, there’s some possibility it’ll a
ctually get done.”

  “Just don’t trust him.”

  “Trust,” Pluto scoffed. “You’re telling a homeless guy that’s been kicked around by every man woman and child got legs to kick with not to trust? I read every word of that contract before I set my John Hancock to it. Brought my specs and read it right there in his damn office. Took me over an hour.”

  Having not read a word of my own contract, I could only be impressed. “He paid me a lot more than he paid you,” I said.

  That stopped Pluto for a moment. Watching him hesitate, I felt a grinding cruelty whose single goal was to take this pleasure away from him. Because it was false; all of it was phony and false, and he shouldn’t believe it. “More than seven times as much,” I added.

  “Well of course he did,” Pluto said, regaining his composure. “You’re worth more at this particular point in time. We’ll see in the end; I’ve got every intention of being their number-one guy.” He cocked his head at me. “I know what you’re up to, prettygirl, but you can’t hurt me. Don’t you see? I’m impervious—it’s just not within your power, powerful though you may be.” He went to retrieve his laundry bag from his tent.

  “The irony of it is,” he said, returning, “all this silly money in my hand and I can’t even rent a room. I’ve got to stay homeless until I’m filthy rich. Then I’m gonna buy me a palace with tiles in the shower like you’ve got. Portuguese tiles, that’s what I’m thinking, with little paintings on them. Each tile, I want a different historic scene, the Greeks and the Babylonians, the African kings. I want to stand in my shower and look at the whole mad fantastical evolution of the human race. I want to ruminate over mankind all at one time, with hot water splashing down my back.”

  “You’ve never seen my shower,” I reminded him, but he had already walked away from me, grinning.

  Irene arrived punctually at the appointed hour; I’d left the door open as usual and she locked it behind her. She wore a plaid dress that contained the color orange and smelled of mothballs. I liked it on sight.

  I held up the notebook.

  “Oh, I’m so relieved!” she cried. “I called Thomas, I called the restaurant, I’ve been … where did you find it?”

  “In your bag.”

  She’d been on her way toward me; now she stopped. “You took it from my bag?”

  “In a sense.”

  “What do you mean, in a—? You either—”

  “Yes.”

  “Charlotte, why?”

  “I wanted to read it.”

  “What kind of fucked-up thing was that to do?” she said, in the first volley of profanity I’d ever heard from Irene. It jarred me. “All you had to do was ask. I would have shown it to you gladly. Why sneak around like that?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know why a person sneaks around, but I’m looking forward to finding out.” And then I told her: The phone number. Halliday. Jackpot.

  She looked away, exhaled and sat down heavily on the piece of furniture I had determined not to mention in her presence.

  “He said you would explain,” I said.

  Irene didn’t answer. For a long while she seemed to be thinking. “Okay,” she finally said. “I’m going to start with the worst part, right up front. I’ll just say it, okay?” Still, she hesitated. Since entering my apartment, she had actually gone pale. “I’m not a reporter.”

  She blurted this out, then seemed to wait for what devastation might follow.

  “Huh,” I said, careful not to react. But I was shocked. More than shocked, I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t imagine her as anything else.

  “I’m an academic,” she went on, “a professor of comparative literature. An adjunct,” she added quickly, as if saying the first without the second amounted to further duplicity. “My area is cultural studies. Specifically, the way literary and cinematic genres affect certain kinds of experience.” I sensed her straining to put this in language I would understand. “For example, the Mafia. How do cultural notions of the so-called wiseguy affect the way people like John Gotti dress and move and speak? How does that extra layer of self-consciousness impact experience? The same for cops; they watch cop shows, too. And how does their experience of those shows affect their experience as cops?”

  “Detectives,” I said, addressing the cigarette in my hand.

  “Exactly. Detective stories. The genre is almost as old as the profession, the two have been intertwined practically from the beginning.”

  “Detectives write books,” I said ruefully.

  “That’s right,” she said. “A surprising number try to write detective novels, as if writing books were a corollary of the experience of being a detective. So … well, you know where this is going.”

  She had interviewed Halliday for a paper she was writing on detectives, then asked if she could spend a couple of weeks observing his work. He’d called her a few days later, spur-of-the-moment, and offered her an opportunity to experience his work from the inside: to interview a reluctant witness in a missing-persons case. So she’d invented the phony story about being a reporter who was looking for a model with a brand-new face. She’d phoned around until she found my agency and pitched the story to Oscar, who, desperate on my behalf, had lunged unthinkingly into the trap. Then she’d fabricated a business card on one of those selfservice machines and shown up on my doorstep.

  “At that point you weren’t real to me, Charlotte,” she said. “It was all just a goofy experiment, a slice-of-life kind of thing.”

  During our “interview,” she’d felt cushioned at first by the several layers of disingenuousness that separated us, but with time those had seemed to burn away, leaving her exposed and at my mercy. And then a queasy sense of impropriety had made itself known within her. “I don’t know if you remember this,” she said, “but you said something like, Can you look me in the eye and swear on your husband’s life that everything you’re saying is absolutely true? I was like, Oh my God, get me out of here.”

  Afterwards, she’d felt crummy about the whole thing—so crummy that although she did write the paper on detectives, she’d found a different one to observe rather than work with Halliday. “He was very sweet about it,” she said. “He felt badly that I felt bad.”

  “So there was no article?” I asked, still not fully able to grasp it.

  “Well, there was an article. But not about models. And not for the Post, that’s for sure. I don’t even read it!”

  “And the business card wasn’t real?”

  “It was all fake, Charlotte. That’s what I’m telling you.”

  “But how did you think up those questions?”

  Irene looked at me with concern. “I just made them up. I was trying to get you to talk about Z. I mean, granted, I wasn’t very good at it—I had no idea what I was doing.”

  “I see,” I said. But I didn’t. Irene Maitlock the reporter I trusted implicitly; this new woman I was having trouble believing.

  And then, she said, I had called her out of nowhere, wanting to meet again. She’d tried to wriggle out of it, but when I announced that I was on my way to her “office” armed with her phony business card (a card she was fairly certain she had made illegally, with her real phone number on it), she’d dashed to my apartment to stave me off. And once she was here, practically the first words out of my mouth were about the very person Halliday had been looking for.

  “I listened,” she said, “I was curious, obviously, I remembered that this was the guy who’d disappeared. But afterwards, when I got home, the whole thing seemed too neat. And I wondered if Anthony was somehow behind it—if the two of you were in cahoots, trying to mess with my head.”

  I knew the feeling. Because now, at last, I saw it all, like the final, critical moves in a game of solitaire. Halliday wanted information on Z. He’d sent Irene to get it. And, in the course of two short months, I’d told her everything.

  “So you called him,” I said pleasantly.

  “I did.”
r />   “You told him what I’d said.”

  “About the wire. Yes.”

  “And?”

  “And I could tell by his reaction that he hadn’t set it up.”

  “He was excited. He finally had some information.”

  “He was … interested. But I told him he was on his own from there on in. That was the last time we spoke.”

  “And there’s a bridge in Brooklyn you’d like to sell me, if I’d be interested.”

  Irene sighed. “It’s the truth,” she said. “You can believe it or not believe it.”

  “You little bitch!” I cried, jumping to my feet.

  She looked frightened, just as the other Irene—the reporter—would have looked. But I wasn’t fooled anymore.

  “Charlotte, I wanted to tell you,” she said. “I felt shitty about having lied. But the longer I waited, the harder it seemed, the weirder it got, and finally I thought, Look, what does it even matter? This thing we’re doing is about you—what does it matter exactly what I do for a living?”

  “Oh, it matters,” I said. Already she seemed different to me; bolder, less restrained. I wondered if what I’d mistaken for reticence, reserve—for honesty—had merely been the fact that she’d been hiding something.

  “I would even tell myself sometimes that you, of all people, would understand,” she said. “If you knew.”

  “I do understand,” I said. “I understand that you’re exactly like everybody else. You lie, you say whatever you need to say, you’re one more calculating bitch in a world that’s full of them.”

  “Like you?”

  “Yeah, like me. The difference is, I don’t pretend to be anything else.”

  “Neither do I!”

  “You did! You do! Look at you, with your odd hair and your ripped hem and your genius husband who obviously can’t earn a dime. You come off like someone who could never tell a lie; the last Honest John left on earth.”

  “You invented that person,” she said angrily. “That was never me.”