The Horned Man (14 page)

‘Listen, I –' I blustered, ‘I haven't had a chance to – to read your thing yet …'

‘Oh no problem.' Her voice was remote but soothing, like a phrase of otherworldly music drifting by on a breeze. She turned back to the photocopier.

There was a note in my mailbox. It was unsigned, and the words were in Latin:

Atrocissimum est Monoceros
.

I didn't know what it meant, but its obvious hostility (a tauntingly opaque follow-up, I assumed, to last night's more crudely visceral assault) broke on me like a whiplash out from the dark, and I felt almost physically stung. I looked over at Amber; I wanted to say something, to whinny out an aggrieved protest and hear the reassurance of another human
being's sympathetic outrage. On reflection, however, I realised Amber would hardly be an appropriate recipient for such an appeal. I stood there in silence, dazed, regretting for a moment (even as I acknowledged its importance) this unremitting obligation to hold oneself in check. I was gazing at her back: the obverse of the gold coin of herself. Wings of fine down caught the light at her long neck. Her shoulders were trim and straight in the soft blue sheathing of her top, crisscrossed by the ocher halter of her brushed cotton dungarees. Her willowy figure barely curved at the hips, almost as expressive as her face of things yet to awaken into the full articulation of themselves.

She turned around, catching my eye before I could look away. I felt sharply annoyed with myself – not for failing to take evasive action fast enough, but for ogling her like that in the first place. I was about to leave the room when I heard her say softly:

‘So you did know Barbara.'

‘I'm sorry?'

‘You did know Barbara Hellermann.'

‘No …'

‘But you were in Portland with her.'

Amber's blue-sleeved arm pointed languidly over to a poster on the notice-board. Distantly alarmed, I strolled across the room, as nonchalantly as I could.

The poster was for a week-long, interdisciplinary graduate seminar on Gender Studies, at Portland State. Among the fifteen or so guest lecturers listed were myself and Barbara Hellermann. Looking at it, I felt a distinct but as yet unlocatable feeling of danger, that I see in retrospect was my first intimation of the large antagonisms I had unwittingly aroused.

‘What's this doing up here?' I said. ‘It's three years out of date.'

‘I have no idea.'

‘How strange. Well perhaps I did meet her. I don't remember.'

‘She was my teacher here in my junior year.'

‘Oh.'

I was about to tear the poster down, when I thought that might strike Amber as odd. Instead I merely shrugged my shoulders and left the room.

Later, when nobody was there, I went back and discreetly removed the poster. Taking it into my office, I examined it closely. It looked genuine enough, not that I would have been able to tell if someone had forged it.

Perhaps, I thought, it had been left up there on the notice-board all this time, and Amber pointing it out to me today, the very day after I had learned of Barbara Hellermann's murder, was merely a chance event; the kind that occurs when you learn a word you've never come across in your life, only to hear it repeated in an unrelated context almost immediately after. And perhaps, in that case, Barbara Hellermann really had been in Portland when I was there, and I simply hadn't taken note of her. There had been an organised dinner, I remembered, and a muddy walk through a forest of wild salmonberries and Douglas fir to a spectacular waterfall above the Willamet. I had given my paper – part of a mini-symposium entitled ‘Engineering the New Male'. Other than that we'd been left to our own devices. I wasn't very sociable – I spent most of my free time on the phone to Carol (who only wasn't with me because she was so afraid of flying she never went anywhere she didn't absolutely have to go), and wishing I was back in New York with her. So it was possible
that Barbara had been there, and that we simply hadn't registered each other. Possible then, that the poster was genuine, and that it had been up on the notice-board for three years without my taking it in. Possible.

Nevertheless, I brought the poster home with me and threw it into the incinerator.

After that I took my old prep school Latin dictionary down from its shelf in the living room and translated the note. At once I found my investigation (as it had unequivocally become by now) of Trumilcik lurching in an altogether unexpected direction.

Watery, blinking eyes set in puffy tissue – too raw-looking and vulnerable to gaze at for long without discomfort. Thin, curving nose with scimitar-shaped nostrils. Mouth tight with old habits of suppression – frustration, disappointment, physical pain …

Ill-at-ease in his life, one had to surmise; my father.

A high street pharmacist's son with intellectual pretensions, who'd left university after one year to take a pharmacy diploma and run the family business when his own father died.

My mother was working behind the till: eighteen, with aspirations of her own.

She was pregnant with me by the time my father realised how much he disliked standing in a white coat filling out prescriptions for the wheezing, flatulent, swollen-footed, styeeyed, hemorrhoidal denizens of Shepherd's Bush. My mother urged him, so she claimed, to sell the business. ‘I wanted him to become a BOAC pilot,' she told me, ‘but instead he had to make himself ill with that idiotic book of his.'

Shortly after I was born, he had embarked on a History of Pharmacology, a
magnum opus
intended to spirit him out of the Goldhawk Road, that endless stretch of secondhand appliance shops and dismal pubs, into the fragrant cloisters of some venerable old university. Lacking what he called ‘formal
discipline' (a phrase my mother used to repeat with an inimitable mixture of piety and acid irony) he had quickly started floundering in the morass of his own research. But rather than give up, he had thrown himself into the task ever more obstinately, lashing himself into a daily foment of wasted effort. The picture my mother's words conveyed was one of Sisyphean tragedy undercut by baleful pathos – an ambitious, untutored mind hammering at its limitations as if at the wall of its own skull, in the effort to turn the columns of books and notes rising around him like so many stalagmites, into a polished monument of erudition, such as he imagined the academic publishers he had his eye on might be impressed by. ‘Instead all he produced was a headache,' my mother would conclude drily, ‘poor man.'

As a matter of fact, she wasn't entirely right. After his first bout with the brain tumor, he appeared to have made a strategic concession to mortality, turning some of his notes into self-contained articles and sending them out to learned journals. The mills of those organs grinding no doubt even more slowly than usual through his unaccredited submissions, he was dead by the time the editors of a couple of them informed him they would be pleased to carry his observations in future issues. But in this way his labors, which were no doubt all he would have cared to be remembered by, did at least come to fruition.

And it was through these, too – these posthumously published articles – that he unexpectedly acquitted himself as a father, procuring for the son he barely knew, a wife.

The first inkling I had of her existence was an envelope sent from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to the
Manchester Society of Apothecaries' Quarterly Journal
, forwarded from there to my mother's former home, and from there back across the
Atlantic to my apartment on Horatio Street. The letter inside was addressed to my father. Carol had read one of his articles in the course of her own researches at Harvard, and wondered if the volume-in-progress mentioned in the contributor's note had ever been completed.

She wrote by hand, in blue ink on cream-colored card. Her writing was neat and stylish, done with a thick italic nib, so that it looked a little like something from an illuminated manuscript; but lively too – the letters pennanted with so many jibs and serifs they seemed to be fluttering in their own private breeze.

I wrote back telling her that my father had died before completing the volume, and enclosing copies of his other published articles. She was welcome, I added, to come and look through his papers any time she happened to be in New York.

A few weeks later she phoned from Cambridge to take me up on my offer.

She came to my studio on a chilly afternoon in March, wrapped in a long, royal-blue, cape-like coat with a gold-lined hood. I showed her my father's papers and went out, telling her I would leave her in peace for a few hours. She thanked me, and sat at the desk by the big steel window that looked out over the West River.

The sun was low in the sky when I came back. Carol was in the same posture as I had left her in earlier, apparently rapt. ‘This is fascinating material,' she said; ‘your father had an original mind.'

I didn't want to admit that I had never actually looked at his papers, and I turned the conversation to her own work instead.

She was writing a doctoral thesis, she told me, on ideas of
purity and pollution in medieval and early Renaissance Europe. One avenue of her researches had led her into the subject of poisons and their antidotes, and it was here, delving into the medieval pharmacopoeia of bezoar stones, griffin claws,
terra sigillata
, oil of scorpions, powdered smaragdus and so on, that she had chanced on my father's articles.

What interested her were certain paradoxes at the heart of medieval thought, such as the equally held belief in the curative powers of both extremely pure and extremely impure substances, and an apparent ambivalence when it came to deciding which of the two categories any given substance belonged to.

I stood by her as we talked – there was no furniture other than the futon, the desk, and the chair she was sitting in. I'd deliberately kept the place bare since moving in. I liked that ringing emptiness – the sense of promise not yet unfulfilled – you get from a new room you haven't yet colonised with your things. Against that bareness, Carol's presence was all the more vivid: a brand-new, gleaming-eyed human phenomenon to take account of. She wore no jewelry or makeup, I noticed. Her straight, almost black hair fell thick and smooth around her face, shiny as a helmet. Her mouth was small but full, with curving shadows at the corners of her lips that gave her expression of cool asperity a barely accountable mirthfulness. She didn't flirt but she didn't withhold herself either. When I looked at her she held my gaze candidly, even challengingly, as though curious to test my interest, or my nerve. Her unadorned wrists and hands were finely articulated – long-fingered, with concise, pliant joints that had their own look of high intelligence.

The sun slid down behind the Hoboken smokestacks. At that hour the river looks taut and self-contained, as if a
scooped handful wouldn't run, but wobble on your palm like mercury, burning coldly.

I was single then, and at a stage where I was no longer satisfied by the brief relationships and casual flings that my love life so far had consisted of. I had come to realise that I no longer wanted a ‘lover', or a ‘girlfriend'; that I wanted a
wife
. I wanted something durable about me – a fortress and a sanctuary. I wanted a woman whom I could love – as a character in a book I'd read put it –
sincerely, without irony, and without resignation
. I had been observing a self-imposed celibacy as I waited for the right woman to come along: partly so as not to be entangled when I met her, but also, more positively, in order to create in myself the state of receptiveness and high sensitisation I considered necessary for an auspicious first meeting. I believed that human relations were capable of partaking in a certain mystery; that under the right conditions something larger than the sum of what each individual brought with them, could transfuse itself into the encounter, elevating it and permanently shielding it from the grinding destructiveness of everyday life. And just such a mystery, such a baptism-in-love, was what I felt to be heavily and sweetly impending as I stood beside Carol in my room that afternoon. I knew almost nothing of her, and yet it seems to me I knew as much about her at that moment as I ever came to learn in the years that followed. The outward circumstances of her existence were immaterial to the intensity of what passed between us as we paused in our conversation there, high above the river. She could have been brought up in Timbuctoo rather than Palo Alto, could have had five brothers in show business rather than two sisters in medical school; she might have summered with an uncle in the Rockies rather than an aunt in Cape Cod, had a fear of spiders
instead of a fear of flying … These details, though charmed because they concerned
her
, added little to the essential, radiant mutual disclosure that occurred in that moment.

In silence we watched a barge glide seaward on the gold and mauve water, tumbling curled shavings of foam from its stern.

‘That's some view you have,' Carol remarked, turning to me with a smile.

As she looked at me, the firm, clear outline of her beautiful face was lit by the trapezoid of dark yellow light coming in through the window.

I had the sense of being inscribed on, etched into, by the sight.

The battered suitcase containing my father's papers was now back in the hall closet. Even though I had gone to the trouble of bringing it out here to the States, I had always felt an odd, almost narcotic weariness at the thought of going through its contents. But whatever obscure private taboo that weariness represented, it was overruled now by a sense of urgent practical necessity.

What first caught my eye when I opened the suitcase had nothing to do with my father: bristling all over the piles of manuscript were brightly colored little arrow-shaped clips that Carol had used to mark passages she wanted to return to.

She always studded whatever she was reading with these things: they were part of her permanent retinue of physical objects, like her tortoiseshell comb or her italic-nibbed silver pen. They were the first things of hers I had seen in months; the first physical evidence that she had once shared my life in this apartment, and the sight of them had a powerful effect on me. She had left something of herself behind after all! Red,
green, yellow, blue … they teemed under my eyes like shiny winged insects. I felt simultaneously the sharp anguish of her loss, and the passionate warmth that even a passing thought of her had always been capable of arousing in me. It would have been easy to spend the rest of the evening sitting there adrift on these bits of plastic, thinking about her, and I had to make a deliberate effort to turn my attention instead to the immense piles of yellowed manuscript into which they had been inserted.