The Horned Man (6 page)

The train doors had opened, and since the two of them were now locked in a kiss, and making no move to get aboard, I had no choice but to come out of my hiding place in
full view of Bruno; evidently not a man to kiss with his eyes closed. He saw me, of course, as I passed by, and I felt myself flinch as if it were I, not he, who had been caught doing something questionable. I don't know whether they boarded that train or stayed there smooching till the next one came along.

As I rattled for the fourth time that day along the dirty creek, my mind drifted in an abstract, speculative way over Trumilcik's document.

I found myself thinking of the woman ahead of him on the photograph line – the yellow-shawled woman he had described as ‘coquettish'. Catching up with her as he left the INS building with his Employment Authorisation card, he had fallen into conversation with her. As was often the case with him, the conversation had continued over the course of several nights at her apartment, which was up on Central Park West, a block north of the Dakota Building. The thought of their encounter seemed to be offering some strange elegance of symmetry or reciprocity for my enjoyment, but before my exhausted mind could grasp what it was, I found myself suddenly remembering where I had seen Blumfeld before.

Just before Carol left me, a colleague of hers had come to dinner, bringing her new girlfriend with her, an actress. After dinner, the actress had suggested we all go to a club on Eleventh Avenue, the Plymouth Rock, where sexual games of various kinds were played. I had declined politely, explaining that I needed to be up early the next morning for my Employment Authorisation interview, the penultimate phase in my Green Card application procedure. I assumed that my wife, a medieval scholar not given to caprices of a sexual or any other nature, would likewise decline. To my astonishment, however, she had accepted, and insisted on going even
when I discreetly suggested she might have drunk more than she realised. She left me at home with the dishes, and the strange sense of being a spoilsport, something I had never before suspected her of thinking.

The actress was Blumfeld. He was a woman! Hence those hairless white hands; hence that secretive, mischievous look in her eyes …

I arrived home still absorbed in this discovery – so much so that I forgot to avoid looking at the answering machine on my way through the living room, and found myself stalled by the unexpected pulsation of a red light.

I allowed myself a moment of joy as I watched it flashing. Then, as I always did on the rare occasions when the machine held a message for me, I deleted it without listening to it, so as not to risk the disappointment of it not being from Carol.

The next morning I took the train back to work with a fresh sheaf of Laser Printer paper in my briefcase. I wanted to print out Trumilcik's manuscript and reread it; that was all.

That
was
all, though I should say that although I had never had any literary ambitions of my own, I had recently read several articles about the colossal advances being paid to novelists, and as a result had briefly included novel-writing among the various alternative-career fantasies I drifted into whenever I found myself worrying about money. I had even gone so far as to embark on a little story – it was called
S for Salmon
– to see if I had any talent for invention. I hadn't been pleased with the results, and that particular daydream had faded from the roster.

I mention this purely to play devil's advocate against myself; to make the case that if Trumilcik had been able to see inside my head and piece together the frailest remains of buried wishes, he might indeed have been justified in regarding me as a would-be plagiarist, though even then he would have been wrong. As it is, I can only attribute his subsequent actions to an innate suspiciousness bordering on paranoia.

My office was as I had left it. I closed the door behind me and took the fat sheaf of paper from my bag, tearing off its wrapper and loading the pristine white block into the printer.
Removing the cover from the computer, I pressed the power button, watched the screen flicker on, heard the tinny synthetic fanfare, gave the list-files command, and saw with the kind of pang you feel when a blissful encounter evaporates as you wake and realise you were merely dreaming it, that the document was no longer there.

After repeating the operation, checking the Recycle Bin, and trying out every other exploring and resuscitating technique I knew, I had no choice but to acknowledge the fact that I had been observed last night, presumably by Trumilcik himself.

My first thought was that he must have been on his way into the office, perhaps to continue working on this very document, when he had noticed the light on and had crept up to the window, watching me through the latticed panes as I devoured his story. If this were the case, he would have had to be standing close to the window itself, somewhere in the patch of ground defined by the flying buttresses that protruded from either side of the casement, and a line of thick, eight-foot-high hemlocks running parallel with the wall. The room wouldn't have been clearly visible from beyond this small oblong. Not being a walkway, the area had held its patch of old snow more or less intact, and had anyway been completely covered with new snow from the flurries that had fallen before I arrived last night. Anyone standing there watching me would have left footprints, but there were no footprints.

I was reluctant to proceed from there to the next logical step: that I had been observed from within the room. Aside from everything else, it seemed a practical impossibility that a second person could have been in the room all the time I was there; unheard, unseen, unsuspected even, by me. For form's sake, more than out of any conviction that Trumilcik could
have been hiding in there, I opened the little storage closet where I had seen the air conditioner and Barbara Hellermann's clothes. The space showed no obvious sign of intrusion, and I saw that even if someone had been in there with the door ajar, they would have seen nothing but a thin strip of wall with the owl-face of a light switch and the piece of paper with the quotation from Louisa May Alcott. Anyway, if there really was someone frequenting the room on a clandestine basis, they would surely have had to come up with a less obvious way of concealing themselves – should the need to do so arise – than a closet.

But the fact remained that the document, which had been in the computer less than twelve hours before, was no longer there, and that even if I had
not
been observed reading it, someone had been in the room between my leaving it last night and returning this morning.

Uncertain what to make of any of this, I left to teach my class. We were reading
The Bacchae
, with a view to seeing whether Pentheus, the ‘chilly' opponent (and victim) of Dionysus, might be reclaimable as a prototype for a new kind of male hero. An interesting discussion arose on the death-walk sequence in the last act, where Pentheus, apparently mad, puts on women's clothing and sets off for what turns out to be his own violent destruction. I remember that several of us discerned an undertow of something dignified, almost majestic in his behavior, counteracting the framing tone of mockery and humiliation cast by the triumphantly scornful Dionysus, as though, at the point of delivering on its hackneyed message about not offending the gods, the play had inadvertently stumbled on some larger, deeper truth about the tyranny of the supposedly ‘natural' laws of gender, and was surreptitiously offering Pentheus as a martyr figure in the struggle against this
tyranny. At any rate, it was a good class, lively and stimulating, and I left it feeling mildly elated.

From there I went to have lunch. I was carrying my tray to one of the small tables by the window (I usually sat by myself in the faculty dining room), when I caught sight of a woman looking up at me from a table in the corner of the room. It took me a moment to realise that it was Elaine Jordan, the school attorney. She had had her hair set in a new way, and in contrast to her usual self-effacing outfits of shapeless acrylic, she was wearing a tailored jacket and skirt with a frilled silk blouse.

I was about to nod and continue on, when I noticed something tentatively solicitous about her look, as though she was hoping I would eat at her table. I moved in her direction, and saw that this was in fact the case. Her expression grew more openly welcoming as I approached, and when I asked if I could join her, she replied with a wordless, intent smile. I smiled back at her, feeling vaguely under an obligation to match her intensity.

‘So,' she said after a moment, ‘here you are.'

‘Yes.'

Another exchange of smiles followed. I busied myself for a moment arranging my lunch on the table. I hadn't eaten with Elaine before; had had almost no contact with her in fact, other than at the weekly meetings of our committee. She wasn't the kind of person who makes much of an impression on you – nothing obviously striking about her personality or looks to stall your thoughts or draw them back to her after she was out of your immediate orbit. As with Dr Schrever, I wouldn't have been able to say how old she was, what color her eyes were, what shade of brown her hair was, without looking at her. I didn't have an opinion of her, I suppose,
because at some level I didn't consider her a person of whom I needed to form an opinion. I wondered now if perhaps she had perceived this indifference (it amounted to that), and in the gently insistent way of certain meek but not after all entirely self-abnegating spirits, had summoned me over to her table in order, ever so gently, to reprove me for this: to make me acknowledge her as a human being, not merely a part of the administrative machinery.

I felt immediately chastened by this thought, as though I had been guilty of downright disrespect, and I was eager to show my willingness to make amends. I presumed this would take the form of having her talk to me at length about herself.

‘How's your work going?' I asked, attempting to get the ball rolling right away.

‘Good. And yours?'

‘Fine. But what are you – what have you been doing?'

‘Oh – not much. Surviving! How about you?'

There was an odd intensity, still, in her look, that made me wonder whether I had in fact appraised the situation correctly. She seemed nervous but at the same time oddly exuberant – triumphant almost. She patted her hair nervously; adjusted the collar of her tailored jacket – charcoal, with thin turquoise stripes – wafting a billow of surprisingly sweet perfume in my direction.

‘Not a lot,' I said; ‘waiting for winter to end.'

We both chuckled loudly, as if there were something hilarious about that. Then there was another drawn-out silence. Elaine looked down at the table. She was smiling oddly to herself, perhaps debating whether or not to say something that was on her mind. Then, flashing her eyes candidly up at me, she said softly:

‘I'm glad you came, Lawrence.'

I was a little startled by that. I didn't want to believe what my instincts were beginning to tell me, but in case they were correct I felt I should do something to neutralise the situation as quickly as possible. To buy time, I filled my mouth with food, and began thinking furiously of something to say, but my mind was an absolute blank.

By luck, Roger Freeman, the head of our committee, appeared at our table just then.

‘Greetings,' he said.

He sat down, unloading his tray with the ease of a man who feels welcome wherever he goes. Glancing at Elaine, he evidently took in the change in her appearance. For a moment he seemed to be considering the propriety of commenting on it. I assumed he would suppress the impulse, as I had, but to my surprise he spread a cheerful smile across his face.

‘That's a new hairstyle. It suits you.' He turned to me: ‘Don't you agree, Lawrence?'

‘Yes, it's very nice.'

Elaine thanked us with a little ironic swipe at her hair, and we all laughed.

As we conversed, it struck me that there had been something deliberate and self-conscious about Roger's remark. Almost as if by saying something that in another man might have sounded questionable, he was demonstrating his consummate probity; showing that he possessed,
in himself
, some purifying quality that could render any wrong word or gesture innocent merely by virtue of the fact that
he
was its instrument of expression. I felt how much of a piece with this probity all his other qualities were – his dapperness, his cheerful, sparkling eye, the healthy flush of his wrinkled face. The fanciful idea came to me that
anything
he did would so thoroughly partake of this wholesomeness, that even if he
were to do something on the face of it utterly crass or gross, such as sliding his hand up Elaine's skirt, the action would become instantly so blameless that nobody would bat an eyelid.

‘Anyway,' he continued, lowering his voice, ‘on a more pressing note; we need to meet again A.S.A.P. I've told the others. There's been a formal complaint about – about the person we were discussing last time. I'll give you the details when we meet. Any chance you could make it on Monday afternoon, Lawrence? Is that one of your days?'

It would mean canceling Dr Schrever – a hundred bucks down the drain unless she could reschedule, which she usually couldn't.

‘It's rather urgent,' Roger prompted me.

‘That's fine,' I said, ‘no problem.'

‘Good.'

In the pause that followed, Elaine glanced at me, lightly curving the corners of her lips in what seemed to be a look of secret solidarity.

‘Roger, who is this Trumilcik guy?' I heard myself ask. ‘You mentioned him at the last meeting.'

‘Trumilcik! Oh boy …'

After repeating what I had already learned from Marsha, he embarked on one of his concise,
précis
-like appraisals of the case. Though I was naturally interested, I was somewhat distracted by the continuing oddness of Elaine's demeanor, and I remember little about what Roger said other than that it left me feeling not much the wiser as far as Trumilcik was concerned.