The Horned Man (7 page)

‘Part of it undoubtedly was that he came from a different culture', Roger concluded, ‘with a different set of values, and
we worked hard to make allowances for that, didn't we Elaine?'

‘Did we ever!' Elaine assented, dutifully rolling her eyes, though I could tell she wasn't remotely interested in the discussion. Her gaze returned to me; rather wistfully now, I thought.

‘What happened to him after he left?' I asked.

‘I don't know. He had a wife, if you can believe it, someone he met over here, though I think she'd already thrown him out by the time this all erupted. How come you're interested?'

‘Just curious.'

I had noticed him glancing over at the clock as he spoke. Not wanting to risk being left alone with Elaine again, I hurried down my lunch and made my excuses.

In my building, as I headed back to my room, I heard my name called. I turned to see Amber, the graduate intern, standing in the corridor behind me.

‘Hi,' I said, keeping my distance.

‘I was wondering if I could ask you a big favor …'

As always, her presence, somnolent-eyed yet keenly projected into the space about her, unnerved me.

‘Of course.'

‘Would you mind reading something I've written? It's sort of in your field …'

In the fluorescent light of the corridor her shorn orange hair and gold-freckled, bluish-white skin had an unnatural, pallid luminosity. Her awkwardness seemed genuine enough, but it didn't diminish the impression of fundamental poise and confidence underlying it. She seemed to proffer the chalice of herself with a strange, innocent blatancy. As a male in a position of power, one had to be vigilant over the inclination
of one's eye to stray at these moments, or the tendency of one's voice to convey impulses unconnected to the ostensible matter in hand. And as a member of the Sexual Harassment Committee, I was doubly aware of the need for this vigilance. Out of the mass of mental events that occurred during exchanges such as this, only a very few were admissible into the field of acknowledged reality. The rest constituted a kind of vast, unauthorised apocrypha.

‘Sure,' I said. ‘Just put it in my box.'

She thanked me, and I continued on my way, reflexively checking over what I had said for any unintended innuendo, and concluding that I had nothing to worry about.

Back in my office I found myself once again puzzling about the disappearance of Trumilcik's document. As I looked at the computer on its cumbrous desk, I was struck for the first time by the arrangement of furniture in that part of the room. The two oversized desks had been pushed together in such a way as to contain, I realised now, an enclosed space at their center. How large it might be I couldn't tell from the outside, but I was suddenly curious.

I went over and pulled at one of the desks. Nothing budged at first, and it wasn't until I heaved at it with all my strength, bracing my foot against a raised rib on the side of the other desk, that I was able to slide it a few inches. I peered in through the gap: there did seem to be a sizable space in there. I prised the desks far enough apart to squeeze inside.

The moment I was in there, I had the sense of having entered a human habitation. It was perhaps five feet square, not more than three feet high. Balled up on one side was something soft that, as I held it out in the light, turned out to be a sheet. It was stained, stiffened in parts by paint and God knows what other substances. As I shook it open it gave off a
staleness that seemed to me unmistakably male. Something else fell out of it; hard and heavy: a metal rod about fifteen inches long, with a thread at one end, as though perhaps it had formed part of the construction of the desk; some sort of ferrule or reinforcing rod.

I sat there, hunched and strangely excited, my heart beating hard in my chest. Was it possible that Trumilcik had been sitting here, silent and immobile all the time I was here last night? Against the improbability of that conjecture was the distinct, palpable human atmosphere of the place – something acrid, masculine, faintly derelict.

To get a better sense of how he would have felt if he
had
been there, I grasped an inner strut on the desk I had shifted and, with a mighty effort, managed to close myself in.

It was dark, but not quite pitch black: ahead of me at eye level was a slit of light, about three feet long and a third of an inch wide, where someone had apparently forced open a gap in the joint between the side wall of the desk and its overhanging surface. Through it I could see a thin cross-section of the room, that included part of a bookshelf and most of the wall with the door. I couldn't see the printer, but I could see a strip of the cabinet it was sitting on, so that I would have seen the middle six inches of my body had I been sitting there spying on myself last night, and would certainly have guessed that I was doing something with the printer.

I could see in its entirety the bowl full of bits and pieces where I had found the Bulgarian coin, and the disturbing thought struck me that it was perhaps not just last night that Trumilcik had sat there in secret observing me, but on other occasions too; numerous perhaps, but even if not, requiring a reappraisal of my entire sense of my occupancy of this office: an acknowledgment that at any given moment as I went about
my business, imagining I was alone there, I might in fact have been under close, and – I sensed – not especially friendly, scrutiny.

I thought of the things Trumilcik might have seen or heard me do, and tried to observe myself doing them from his point of view. Two hours a week were set aside for conferences with individual students. Since I made these occasions as public and impersonal as possible, keeping the door open in accordance with Elaine's recommendations, I doubted whether Trumilcik would have seen anything to interest him. More disturbing was the thought of him overhearing some of the things I might have said aloud in private, particularly during the phonecalls I had made at the beginning of term, before I broke myself of the habit. These were calls to my own machine at home; silent hangups initially, made simply so that I wouldn't have to return to a non-flashing machine (I would delete all messages without listening, as I still did), but then for a period consisting of little friendly messages to myself, first from me, but then, as the sense of the need to inhibit myself in what I took to be an entirely private act diminished, from Carol – my imitation of her crisp phrasing and intonation, if not her actual voice – telling me she loved me, begging me to return her calls, until I realised this was not a particularly healthy thing to be doing, and I stopped. What would Trumilcik have made of those calls, I wondered uneasily, if he had heard them?

As I squatted there in the near-darkness of his hiding place, I heard a knock at the door.

I didn't want whoever it was to hear me call out ‘Come in' in a mysteriously muffled voice, only to find me emerging from under the desk as they opened the door. Nor did I want my invitation to come in to be preceded by a hurried shifting
of furniture, so I said nothing at all and waited for the person to go away. But instead of retreating footsteps, I heard another knock. Again I said nothing. The strip of door I could see through my slit contained the handle, and to my dismay I now saw the handle turn and the door begin to open.

A figure slipped in, leaving the door behind it ajar. All I could see was a section of waist and hip, but they were covered in a material of gray wool with turquoise pinstripes that I recognised immediately as Elaine's. What on earth was she doing? I sat frozen at the slit, my eyes wide open, my heart pounding. She started moving about the room; looking at things, I supposed, checking out the books, objects, pictures, the way you do in someone else's office. All the while she was humming to herself – a tuneless but jaunty drone, as if she were feeling on top of the world. I saw her hips cross back from the shelves to the side of the door, where she paused and after a moment stopped humming too. She must have been reading the quotation from Louisa May Alcott. She gave a long, pleased-sounding
hmmm
. Then, smoothing her skirt over her behind, she moved on, disappearing from view.

For the first time now I noticed a number of small, unobtrusive mirrors, placed here and there in my field of vision. I couldn't see much in them, but they had evidently been positioned to pick up movement in any corner of the room, so that although I could no longer see Elaine, I could tell that she had crossed to my own desk and was now standing still – presumably examining its surface. After a moment she crossed back and sat down in the swivel chair I kept for students, turning around in it, so that her thighs and knees suddenly swung directly into my line of vision, about four feet from my face.

What a stupendously odd situation to find myself in! I felt
what it must be like to wear a chador, a yashmak; to go about the world revealing nothing of yourself, and seeing only the equivalent of this truncated strip of Elaine's midriff. And, continuing the line of thought I had been pursuing just a few minutes earlier, I was struck by the notion that this state of affairs wasn't after all so different from the normal manner in which men like myself were getting accustomed to conducting our relations with other people; either totally concealing ourselves, or else revealing only what we ourselves hadn't yet deemed inadmissible in civilised discourse; an aperture no less narrow than the one I was presently peeping through, and getting thinner by the day, so that all one ever really acknowledged of another person was the equivalent of what I was looking at now.

Elaine's hand flashed across the bar of light, sweeping over her skirt-tightened thigh and into her lap. The still-visible wrist it was attached to began moving, working busily from side to side. The knee crossed over its twin with a light fall of drapery that exposed a thin, iridescent slip under the skirt. After a while she stood up, going once more to my desk.

I heard some squirting sounds I couldn't decipher. A moment later she reappeared by the door and left, closing it behind her.

I waited several minutes before I dared move. When I did, I found I was soaked through with sweat. I also appeared to have been clutching the metal bar all this time – so tightly the muscles in my hand had all but frozen themselves on to it.

As I stepped out into the room, I realised what the squirting sounds had been: Elaine had sprayed the place with her lemony-sugary perfume. I saw too what she had been doing in the swivel chair: writing a note. It lay on my desk, folded over with my name on the outside in large, round letters. I picked
it up and unfolded it:
Why oh why
, it read,
did Roger have to show up like that? We do seem to be star-crossed! Anyway, this little note is to tell you I'm sorry it didn't go as planned, but we do have all the time in the world after all, and I'm in your room at least, my gentle friend, drinking in the sight of your things (so
you,
those cups, so funny and original!). And that beautiful quotation on the wall: it made me feel almost as good about what I did last night as I do about you showing up at lunch like that in your shirt. Anyway I've got to run now, so if I don't catch you later I'll call you tonight. Till then …?? Darling?? Elaine
.

This seemed to indicate a new depth of strangeness. What lunacy could have possessed such a sensible-seeming woman to behave like this? The thing that made it peculiarly disturbing was the way she appeared to have hallucinated my acquiescence in her fantastical scenario.

I went home; confused and distantly alarmed.

My apartment felt oppressively empty. When Carol left, she took with her every shred of evidence connecting us, from the furniture and the kitchen stuff she'd brought with her, to our wedding photo from City Hall.

Bereft of her, the place had languished. Piles of dusty papers and clothes grew over the floor and furniture. As soon as I cleared one up, another would appear somewhere else: apparently I was intent on creating disorder behind my own back. Sometimes, though, the rooms seemed to fill with a ghostly memory of her. The staleness would go from the air. The bookshelves would seem crowded again with her books on medieval art and thought. I would have the distinct sense that if I were to open the bedroom closet in such a way as to catch it unawares, her side of it would be filled again with her clothes; the neatly folded piles cool and soft, scented with the
fragrance that was not so much the residue of a soap or perfume, as the emanation of a fine and pure spirit.

I went into the kitchen; thought of cooking a meal, then decided not to. I wandered back into the living room; picked up a sweater from a stack of things on a recessed ledge beside the sofa … Under it lay some printed pages. A phrase caught my eye:
Elaine's pale breasts and thighs
… Amazed, I picked up the pages. They were the typescript of the story I had tried to write a few months ago –
S for Salmon
. I'd forgotten I had used the name Elaine.

The story was about a man having an affair. Returning to his office after a lunchtime assignation with his mistress, he finds a message from his wife asking him to bring home a wild salmon from the nearby fishmonger. He goes there right away to be sure of getting one before they run out. It's a hot day; the office fridge turns out to be too small to accommodate the big fish; so he takes it down to the storage room, the only cool place in the building. Seeing a glue-trap covered in cockroaches, he puts the fish in a metal filing cabinet, selecting the S-Z drawer. Later, he leaves the office, hurrying to get the train his wife's expecting him on. Only as he pulls out of the station does he realise he has left the fish behind in the filing cabinet. It's a Friday; the office is locked all weekend. The story ends with him on the train, guiltily picturing the fish – a beautiful, rainbow-mailed creature with dark pink flesh in its slit belly – dulling and decomposing in its metal tomb, while insects swarm over the cabinet, trying to get inside.