Being Invisible (16 page)

Sandra moved her chair back and rose. “Oh, affection,” she said contemptuously. “I’m talking about passion.” She went, in a not altogether straight line, to the secretary desk, the bookshelves of which served her as liquor cabinet. She opened the mullioned glass doors and considered the several bottles therein. In Wagner’s boyhood home, such a repository held the twenty-five volumes of an encyclopedia his mother had purchased inexpensively, one book per week, at a supermarket; this reference work was never opened by anybody, for he trusted only the encyclopedias at school.

Sandra turned and spoke over her substantial right breast. “What is your pleasure?”

“Nothing, thanks. I’ve got enough wine to get to the end of the meal.”

“I’m not much of a wine drinker. Not enough pizzazz, you know?” She reapplied herself to the cabinet, selected a bottle, and returned to the table. She half-filled her wine glass with an amber fluid. A whiff of the unpleasant odor, even without looking at the label, told Wagner it was Scotch.

She indicated the bottle. “Sure?”

“I’m no drinker,” he said. He had cleaned his plate. He now saluted her with his glass and swallowed the remaining spoonful of wine.

He expected Sandra to gulp the whiskey, but he was wrong. She took only a modest sip. Holding the glass, she fixed him with a flushed eye. “No doubt you’re aware I’m somewhat...” She fluttered her hand. “No.” She waved off his ritualistic protest. “No, I
am.
That doesn’t mean I talk through my hat, though. It does give me the nerve to say you may be too nice a guy for that woman you were married to.”

“
Are
,” said Wagner.

“Are married to, OK. I see you still have hope of patching it up. But frankly that’s never going to happen unless you change drastically.” Sandra took another gingerly sip of the Scotch. Wagner disliked the smell, which seemed to him to be akin to the odor emitted by the transformer of an electric train, remembered over the years.

She gently shook the glass at him: the whiskey was un-iced. “I know I’m talking out of turn, but what good is booze if it doesn’t come to that?” It sounded as though it might have been a bon mot of the late Miles. She grinned brilliantly. Perhaps her teeth were capped; entertainers after all had to meet a certain public standard. “She’s a little cold-blooded snob. OK, so she’s educated. Does that make her better than you? You’re quite cultivated yourself, for gosh sake. That girl’s just got a lot of bitch in her, Fred, and you’ve got to—”

“I can’t listen to this,” said Wagner, rising, catching the paper napkin before it slid to the carpet. “Thanks for dinner, Sandra. I really enjoyed it.”

“Now, come on...”

“I’m sure you mean well, but I can’t listen to such abuse. You wouldn’t want me to attack your late husband.”

Sandra smiled with an open mouth. “There’s nothing you could say that would be too bad about that son of a bitch.”

“You don’t mean that. You loved him.”

“What’s that got to do with it? That doesn’t alter the fact he was a shit.”

“Well, Babe’s not,” said Wagner. “She has a right to live as she wishes. I have nothing to criticize her for.”

“C’mon and sit down,” said Sandra. “I’ll give you some dessert in a minute, and coffee.” She raised her right hand. “I won’t say anything more on the subject. Promise.”

He had nowhere else to go except home, where it would still be early enough to feel guilty about not getting out his manuscript and rereading it hopelessly. Therefore he sat down, and, as good as her word, in a moment his hostess had gone back to the kitchen and returned with a wedge of pecan pie.

“Water’s on,” said she. Then, having poured herself more Scotch, “OK, she had her reasons. You can tell me, Fred, you know that: were you having troubles?”

He shook his head, chewing a forkful of pecan pie; it had been frozen and even now was only partially thawed. Finally he said, “I’m not that crazy about my job, which is writing, but not the kind of writing I really want to do. I guess I talk about that a lot, but I just can’t seem to sit down and write when I’m home. I’m always too exhausted, and the ideas that come to me easily at other times vanish completely when I actually have to put them down on paper.”

Sandra made a glittering, dismissive gesture with her free hand, which was even more beringed than the right. “Forget about that. What I meant was sex. Did you have trouble giving satisfaction?”

Wagner could not believe the question was as he heard it. Chewing, especially on some substance like the cold nuts of the pie, could alter sounds considerably. His response was therefore limited to a trace of a smile.

“Because,” Sandra went on, after so short a pause that he would not anyway have had time to answer, “it wouldn’t necessarily be your fault. I don’t automatically blame the man, like some girls I’ve known.”

Wagner made a movement with his head. Once warmed by the mouth’s natural heat, the pie was intensely sweet and impeded him from speaking, which was no doubt just as well.

An anguished shriek was heard from the kitchen.

“That’s the water,” Sandra said and got up. As she passed her guest she touched his shoulder, whether in friendship or merely to catch her balance, he could not have said.

When she returned with the cup of coffee and the cream-and-sugar tray and saw that he had finished the pie, she took away the dish and the Scotch bottle, then asked him to move slightly back. Reaching under the top of the table, she did something that made its legs slowly collapse and seize rigidly again only when it had reached the height of a coffee table.

“It’s convertible,” Sandra said. “You’ve got to have things like that to eke out the room in such a tiny apartment. Else you’d have to eat at the kitchen counter.”

“Yes,” said Wagner, “that’s what we’ve always done.” He had thought it nice and cozy, but he realized that if he confessed as much to Sandra she might think him soft.

“We can sit here now,” said Sandra, indicating the adjacent sofa.

Wagner would have preferred to keep his chair, which was still in reach of the now stunted table, but he did not wish to offend. He sat down on the sofa.

Sandra retrieved the Scotch bottle from the floor, leaving behind the plate from which he had eaten the pie. “Won’t you join me now?”

“No thanks,” Wagner said. “I never drink much. I have a low tolerance for alcohol.”

“So have I,” said Sandra, pouring whiskey into her glass. “That’s why I drink.” Apparently this was not intended to be a joke, for she turned to him, glass in hand, and said soberly, “You might have medical problems.”

“I just can’t drink much without feeling it more than I like to.”

“I don’t mean that,” said Sandra. “I meant the sex thing.”

Wagner actually asked, “
What
sex thing?”

She gestured airily with her left hand while drinking from the right.

After an instant it occurred to him that she was referring to impotence, and he said heatedly, “There’s nothing wrong with me!”

She smiled benignly. “Except the woman.” She stood up and stepped before him, bent, and took his hand.

Sandra led him into a fancy bedroom, a place of satin coverlets and skirts on the vanity, and alternately undressed him and herself. Wagner had no taste for this enterprise, but it was now too late to become invisible without causing more trouble than he was having. Given the situation, he would have liked to be impotent at this moment, but Sandra simply would not permit it. Though having subordinated herself to her husband, she had become, perhaps in overcompensation, almost tyrannically assertive. In any event, she had her way with Wagner and, inconveniently for him, she found the result so satisfactory that even while he was still engulfed, she enthusiastically anticipated their ever more intimate association.

It was obvious that from now on he would do well never to be visible in the public areas of the building.

S
ANDRA WAS MOST RELUCTANT TO
let him escape. It appeared that her original invitation to dinner had tacitly comprised plans for breakfast as well, for which she had provisioned her larder with crumb cake and sticky caramel rolls. But though Wagner had been docilely led to bed, his panic on learning of her assumption that he would spend the night there, wearing the late Miles’s striped pajamas, as well as the golden terrycloth robe and heelless calfskin slippers—these garments were handily laid out on the nearby chair, demonstrating a shameless premeditation—gave him the strength to be very firm in insisting he must return to his own apartment and remain there till morning. You see, he expected a late phone call from his sister, who was in transit someplace, unreachable. His situation must be known and fixed, since hers could not be. There could be no argument against him at this point, and as to his returning to Sandra after the call, Nancy was an inconsiderate nightowl: she might phone anytime at all, and he had to go to work next day.

An extraordinary thing happened: what had been said as a polite and somewhat elaborate lie became truth: Nan did indeed telephone him, and furthermore at 2:15
A.M.

It had been ever so long since he had spoken with his sister, and her voice was now contorted with rage, but he knew no other female who would have called him in the wee hours and therefore recognized her immediately despite her failure to provide identification or, for that matter, greeting.

“You’ve really done it now, haven’t you?”

“Hi, Nan,” said Wagner. “How are you and Steve and all?” He could never remember all the names of her children and had to look up this information at Xmastime, when he sent each a piece of paper money enclosed in one of those cards made for the purpose, with an oval cutout through which the engraving of the appropriate President can be seen: in the case of those sent to extremely young people, he included in the holiday wishes a suggestion that the money might be banked for later use.

She now ignored his attempt to be civilized and more or less repeated, “You’ve gone and done it, haven’t you?”

“You received my letter?” She had not awakened him, for as yet he had been unable to get to sleep, what with the amount of food in his stomach, not to mention the session in bed with Sandra.

It was typical of Nan to say nothing of his letter and not so much as acknowledge any of the argument within.

“Apparently she finally had it up to here, is that it?” she was asking, and because it was hardly a sincere question, went immediately on. “It might interest you to know, and if it doesn’t, I’m going to tell you anyway: I saw this coming from the first. Carla was obviously too good for you, Freddy. I’m not being cruel: you know me too well for that. I wouldn’t be saying this if I thought you lacked the ability to make something of yourself, but you don’t, or anyway you didn’t in college. You were an honors student, if you can remember that far back. We had reason to expect a great deal from you. Frankly, never till now had I given up all hope.”

“I wish you’d actually read what I wrote,” said he, “instead of, a continent away, arriving at a conclusion of your own. I told you she and I remain close. Only last night, for example, we went to dinner at a favorite restaurant of ours. Today I visited her at the gallery. Don’t talk as if we’re divorced. I explained the whole thing carefully, but of course you dismiss it, as usual.”

“I’ve had your number for many years, Freddy. For example, I know it was you, and not Carla, who if she were permitted to be herself would be quite maternal, it was you who didn’t want children. Carla’s Italian: God, she’s a natural mother, yet you—”

“Babe’s not Italian,” Wagner said in exasperation. “Where did you get that idea?”

But Nan, talking on through what was therefore not his interruption, continued. “And don’t tell me her heart wasn’t broken when you turned down that magnificent offer Steve got for you, at some cost to himself.”

The reference here was to the editorship of the house organ for the corporation of which his brother-in-law was legal counsel. A four-page monthly, printed on a shiny stock from which they took the courage to call it a magazine, it consisted of photographs of the employees’ bowling team, which had once again whipped all competitors from factories of a similar size and had all but held its own against the county championship squad from the sheriff’s department. Aside from the relevant captions identifying the persons by department, and a headline, “Go, Hewco Keglers!” the only text in the specimen copy furnished to Wagner had been an encomium on a vice-president of marketing. Notwithstanding the breezy tone—“Ken’s golf might not be quite up to the National Open, but he sure has fun at it”—this was a composition informed by little but rank obsequiousness. The fact was that Wagner’s existing job did require the exercise of a gift for verbal expression; one had to write with precision. He might have been joking irreverently when he referred to Flaubert in his remarks to Mary Alice Phillips, but he had to believe that the great master, more than most, would have appreciated what was at stake in any use of language however humble the end to which it was directed.

“You know very well,” he told Nan now, “that all of our professional connections are here. I won’t go into that again.”

“Ha!” jeered his sister. “And just what are
your
professional connections? When Grammuh Wilkie was a girl they had an outdoor privy where mail-order catalogues were used as toilet paper.”

The reference was to their maternal grandmother. Wagner always winced at Nan’s affected pronunciation of “Grandma,” which she had assumed only since marrying into Steve’s family, who were or pretended to be regionally genteel.

“All right, Nan,” Wagner said, “once again you’ve proven unworthy of being sent any serious information. In future I’ll confine my messages to those synthetic printed comments on commercial greeting cards. ... For God’s sake, I’m a writer. Why can’t you
ever
just read what I’ve written?”

“You’ve been making that claim for years, and yet I have never seen a word of yours in print—I don’t count that kitchen-appliance catalogue you sent me once! I’m afraid you’re a phony, Freddy, and now Carla has confirmed that fact by walking out on you. How long can you keep telling yourself the same old lie?”