Being Invisible (17 page)

It was not a baseless question, and it found its mark in Wagner. Therefore he could survive only by compounding the falsehood.

“Goddammit, Nancy, I had intended to keep this a surprise for a while, but you’re really forcing me to lose patience.
My book has been accepted by Burbage.
”

His sister was silent for a long moment, and then she said, “That means nothing to me, Freddy. Who or what is that silly name?”

With a derisive stage laugh, Wagner said, “Only the most distinguished publishing firm in the country. Their authors include Theodore Wulsin, who’s widely considered a living classic.”

“Uh-huh,” grunted Nan, who had never, so far as he knew, read a book whose primary purpose was not didactic. “Does he make a living?”

“For God’s sake, of course! He’s won all the prizes, visits the White House, and so on. You know, Nan, someone at your well-to-do level of society really should be more conversant with the serious culture of our time.”

He wasn’t getting far. She responded to his gibe by groaning, “So says the voice from the cheap seats! Tell me this, Freddy: why were you keeping this so-called news as a surprise? On what occasion did you intend to reveal it?”

“As soon as the movie deal was finalized,” said he, so desperate he was able to use, without a tremor, that word he had always thought an abomination. But perhaps it was the very term that evoked Nan’s credence now: “finalized” of course was one of the basics of the jargon of her milieu. And when he added another—“hopefully”—he had begun to hold his ground.

For the first time a note of other than self-righteous certainty could be detected in her voice. “You’re kidding now, Freddy, aren’t you?”

“Would I joke when I finally have a good answer to the vicious attacks you’ve been making on me for years?”

“You have sold this story to the movies?”

“I’m being cautious,” said Wagner. “I haven’t signed the contract yet.” He hastily added,
“They
have, though, so the deal is up to me to accept, but there are some clauses I want to think about awhile.”

Nan cried, “You rush a copy to Steve before you sign a thing, you hear? Make use of this wonderful legal expertise at your disposal!”

Wagner sighed audibly. “Don’t you think I have my own movie lawyer? These contracts are very special, require an expert.” What a good time he was having now!

His sister’s tone was softening as she spoke. “I suppose a thing like this can be profitable, Freddy?”

“Very,” said Wagner. He then coolly specified an outlandish figure.

Nan obviously heard this, but had an emotional need not to acknowledge it directly, saying instead, “Malcolm’s the one with the writing talent: the other day he produced his own newspaper with those letter-stamps and a stamp pad. It was all about the life of the family, including Spunky naturally.”

Wagner could not remember whether Malcolm was the youngest or the middle child. Spunky was probably a dog or cat.

“Of course,” he said, “the share of the box-office receipts could be a lot larger than that, providing the picture is a commercial blockbuster. Sid thinks it can be, but who knows?”

“Sid?”

“Sidney Gunman,” he said. “The studio head.”

“I’m sure I’ve heard of
him,”
said Nan, who was now even prepared to swallow this invented personage.

Having done so well thus far, Wagner went further. “And Bill Fontina loves the script. He’s dying to do it, if Sid will meet his terms, which are just about the stiffest in the Industry.”

“Who?” Nan’s question was respectful. She did not keep current with the cinema.

“William Z. Fontina. He won the Oscar last year.”

Her breath could be heard. “Well,” said she, “this is certainly good news. Tell me, Freddy, this book of yours: it’s make-believe?”

“In a sense,” Wagner said easily. “It’s fiction, after all.”

“What I mean is...” Nan paused for a moment, and then she blurted, “Freddy, might I ask if your story has anything to do with our family?”

Wagner was briefly silent: his ad hoc fantasy had as yet made no provision for plot or theme, for he had not been thinking of the fragment of novel he had called his own for some years and had apparently (for he had no memory of so doing) mentioned to most of his co-workers. That project could in this new light be dismissed. There should be no limitations on an imaginary narrative.

“There are certainly families in it,” said he. “But lots of other things as well. It’s a broad canvas. I suppose it’s really about life, lives, in our time.”

“Because,” said his sister, still occupied with the matter of her question, “real people could be hurt, even if you weren’t being malicious on purpose.” She cleared her throat. “Dad’s gone now, of course, but it would be too bad to hurt his reputation even so, and it certainly would be embarrassing to us out here.”

“Dad? What are you talking about, Nan?”

“You know, that thing at church, when he was treasurer. After all, he returned most of the money, and it was hushed up at the time. Why reveal it after all these years?”

This was news to Wagner. After a moment, he said, “I agree, and I haven’t referred to it.”

“Good,” said Nan. “You’re a decent man, Freddy. I’m sure I don’t have to ask if you have used the unpleasant incident involving, uh, you know George Monrovey.”

Wagner vaguely recognized the name as being that of a high-school teacher of long ago, but he had no other associations for the name, Monrovey having gone before he himself had reached high school.

However, some instinct now restrained him from assenting too readily to whatever Nan was pleading. “Well, not quite. Maybe I’ve used certain elements in, uh, a montage, a rearrangement of course—”

“Oh no, you can’t,” Nan all but wailed, though in a voice with lowered volume, indeed almost a whisper. “He’s an old man now, if he’s alive at all. Look, he lost his job and his wife of twenty years. Isn’t that punishment enough? Let it stay under the rug, I beg you, Freddy. It would sound so sordid at this late date, but it wasn’t that ugly at the time. George was a sensitive man.” Her voice had become tender.

Wagner had never suspected that his sister could have been sexually attractive to anyone at any age: without consciously thinking about it, he somehow assumed that Steve had been interested in her organizational abilities and had fathered her children as the performance of his role in a rite.

At length, having enjoyed the suspense, he said, “OK. But I wouldn’t do it for anyone else but you, Nan.” For the first time in his life he now found it possible to say, “I owe you a lot. I haven’t forgotten how you stayed behind till I grew up. Thanks, sis.”

Nancy was sobbing: another thing he had not suspected she had in her was tears.

After an assurance by Wagner that the family must certainly assemble for the premiere of the movie, the conversation reached its end, and when it had so done, Wagner’s heart made a breathtaking descent. Alone in a bedroom that without a partner seemed vast as an empty gymnasium, he was left with only the truth, in which there was no place for anything he had said in the foregoing remarks except perhaps the expression of gratitude to his sister, but denied the pretext for such expression,
viz.,
a personal success, he could not even maintain that feeling for long. Indeed, within an instant his resentment towards Nan had compounded and returned: his outlandish lies were all her doing.

He spent a sleepless night, in the course of which he at one point rose, went to the little desk in the corner of the room, found his so-called manuscript in the bottom of the lowest drawer, under the rubber-banded bundles of canceled checks preserved for years should he be challenged to confirm routine payments made long ago, and taking what existed of his “novel” to the bathroom, tore it page by page into strips and sent it into the maelstrom of a flushed toilet.

When the last fragment had been devoured by the gulping water closet he knew a moment of liberation—this was a beginning; the new could not have got under way so long as the route was blocked by the old. As the Orientals know, creation and destruction are symbiotic, if not synonymous... but the moment was left behind as he stepped over the threshold of the bathroom, as if across an abyss, and he returned to bed with haste, so that he would not be tempted to go back to where his cutthroat razor was housed.

Sleepless and still dyspeptic at the time he would ordinarily have begun to prepare to leave for work, he decided to stay home. The company was intolerant of employees not sufficiently ill to enter a hospital: migraines, lower-back aches, flus with temperatures under 100, nonbandaged un-slung limbs however bruised or strained, these were officially assumed to be but symptoms of the proscribed disease of malingering. He was well aware that if he phoned in to Jackie Grinzing he would be challenged to defend himself, and the fact was that he would not be staying away from the office had he not felt peculiarly defenseless this morning.

Therefore when the time came, about a quarter after nine, allowing Delphine to get through half the first cup of coffee and to light a second cigarette, he placed a call to his nearest office neighbor.

After an extra ring, the extension was answered by a voice that said, “Delphine Root’s phone.”

“She’s not there?”

“She went to the toilet, I guess. Any message?” asked the person Wagner had now identified as Mary Alice Phillips.

“Mary Alice, Fred Wagner.”

“That’s a coincidence. I was just over here looking for you, Fred.”

“Well, yes, I’m ill, Mary Alice, much too ill to get in there today: headache, fever, and so on—”

“Vomiting, diarrhea?” asked Mary Alice.

She could always provoke a wince. “No, no, not that.” Even though his plea was designed to be forwarded to Jackie Grinzing, Wagner could not resort to ugliness. “Double vision, and my head is throbbing with each word I speak. Tell Jackie for me, will you please? Her phone was busy last time I tried. I can’t keep calling. I have to try to get out now and see my doctor.” He added the last note to forestall Jackie’s trying to reach him as soon as she received the news.

“Sure,” said Mary Alice. “I’m really sorry, Fred. I hope you feel better soon. I’d volunteer to write your copy today, but in fact I’m having a lot of trouble with my own and wanted
your
help—which is how I happened to be in your vicinity.” She would have talked more, and despite the banality of the subject, Wagner might have hung on awhile, for Mary Alice’s telephone voice was very gentle, even sweet, qualities that struck just the right note for him at the moment, but he could hardly stay on the line interminably and sustain the simulation of illness. He therefore produced a groaning thanks and hung up.

The call he expected from Jackie, however, was not quick in coming. Therefore he did not dare fall asleep, for if the telephone rang while he was unconscious he was likely, with his instinctive tendency to respond to the peremptory summons of a bell, to pick up the instrument. He could not have held his own with Jackie in the ensuing exchange. There was no precedent for his claiming to a sudden indisposition: in six years he had never before been sufficiently ill to stay home from work. To make a performance believable now he must be incommunicado all day. Then, on his return the following morning, he would have to bring along a supporting document from a doctor, say an illegible prescription for a placebo, which could be easily obtained from his physician, a hurried practitioner who was never offended by the simple disorders that could be treated by capsule.

However, he could not call Dr. Leprak’s office at a time when Jackie Grinzing might be trying to get through: a busy signal would nullify his alibi. There was nothing for it but to beg admittance at Leprak’s office after 1
P.M.
, if the doctor’s schedule remained the same as it had been during the previous year, when Babe had visited him several times with regard to a menstrual irregularity that proceeded to correct itself as soon as she proved to be nongravid. Wagner could not see what was so deplorable about having a child, though true enough he would not have been the one who bore it.

Until Jackie called, he had a morning to kill in another fashion than by sleeping. It would have been too easy to regret having destroyed the manuscript of his novel: good taste forbade him that bogus emotion. The story he had been trying to tell therein was essentially an autobiographical account of the period between the onset of the illness that kept his mother an invalid for many months and her death. What was wrong with this for purposes of fiction was that it had already taken place in time: to write about it was either to be a reporter or a liar, in either of which roles he would have felt as though he were corrupting private histories. Yet he had little gift for impersonal literary invention: he could not put himself inside supposititious skins, feel the heartbeats of fancy as if they represented the circulation of his own blood. ... Invisibility was his proper medium.

Wagner arrived at this conclusion while in a state of somnolence, not fully conscious but not asleep either. Indeed it was the same state in which, utilizing the flashlight-pen, he had scrawled out those incoherent dream-thoughts. But this one survived his full awakening, perhaps was what had awakened him.

He stayed awake when he heard the sounds of an incursion into the outer room of the apartment. It was someone bold and by no means stealthy, no doubt Glen the super or a professional admitted under his auspices: the roach-exterminator or perhaps a plumber in quest of the origin of the water that dripped mysteriously onto a lower floor. If such people appeared at times on Saturday, surely it was standard for them to work on weekdays: an apartment could never be considered one’s castle, especially with an attendant functionary like Glen.

Wagner was somewhat annoyed now—perhaps irresponsibly so, for his own well-being might not be immune to some general menace like escaping gas—but certainly not apprehensive about burglars, Babe having taken with her the few objects of value they had possessed, including the miniature TV with the postcard-sized screen, the little netsuke baboon brought back by her father after a sabbatical in Japan, and a pair of sterling asparagus tongs, for all these had been her own before marriage. However, Wagner did not relish being seen, even by a janitor or a man whose job took him elbow-deep into toilets, in the disreputable nightclothes he had been wearing probably ever since Babe’s departure, having no memory of recent alternatives: pale-blue sleeveless summer-pajama coat, stained with coffee and yolk of egg, worn above the jockey drawers of daytime service. The latter were changed occasionally and worn on a body that was often bathed, but in Wagner’s solitary existence the pajama top was one of those things to which he was blind except at such a moment as this.