Being Invisible (25 page)

“Don’t answer that,” said Mary Alice. “That pimp was amusing the first time, but I think maybe I ought to be insulted now.”

“That won’t be Glen,” said Wagner. “He just barges in. I’d better open it. Why don’t you go into the bedroom?” He extinguished the TV.

“In fact I’ll get in bed,” said Mary Alice, with a conspicuously suggestive smirk.

Wagner opened the door to see a small middle-aged man, with a sandy mustache and eyes genially crowsfooted, who carried a leather-trimmed canvas golf-club bag though his attire, a brown suit and green tie, seemed not designed for sport.

“Sir,” said this man, “would you be Frederick Wagner?”

“Yes,” said Wagner. “That’s exactly who I am.”

The small man pushed into the apartment, kicking the door shut behind him as he went. He then removed a long-barreled gun from the golf bag.

“I’m Alwyn Phillips, father of Mary Alice, the young maiden you have abducted. I am trying to control myself, but I am quite capable of using this weapon.”

Phillips brought the muzzle of the gun to bear on Wagner’s chest. Wagner was not conscious of feeling fear as such, yet he could not force his voice to become audible. He could however point vigorously into the corner beyond Phillips’ left shoulder.

Mary Alice’s father whirled and stared there. When he turned back, Wagner was invisible.

Phillips dashed down the little hall and into the bedroom, Wagner following. The armed man opened the closet and poked amongst the hangered clothing with the barrel of his weapon, then knelt and peeped under the bed. Both he and Wagner, at much the same time, next took note of the closed door of the bathroom across the hall. Phillips went out there and threatened loudly to blast away the lock.

The door opened and Mary Alice emerged. She was fully dressed in her street clothing.

She said prissily, “Dad, you’re making a fool of yourself.”

“Where is he, Maywee?” asked her father. “Is he in there, hiding behind your skirts?”

“He’s not in here,” said Mary Alice. “He hasn’t mistreated me, either, as I assured you on the phone. Why don’t you believe me?”

“Because you’re too indulgent of human frailties,” said Phillips in the intense way that contrasted with his appearance as a reasonable person. “I demand that you step aside and let me search the bathroom.”

“Go home, Dad!” Mary Alice wailed. “I’m twenty-three years of age. I’m legally responsible for myself.”

“Maywee,” Phillips said sternly, “this isn’t easy for me to ask, but I must: are you still
intacta
?”

“Is that any of your business?”

“Then you’re not, pure and simple. And I know you. Such a venture could never be your own enterprise.”

As always when an unannounced kibitzer on the private moments of others, Wagner felt some shame now—until he remembered that both father and daughter assumed he was listening from a place of concealment, and then he began to develop an indignation against them both. Mary Alice could easily cancel this emergency by simply answering the question in the affirmative. Why must she continue to compound the trouble that she indeed had begun the day before?

“Dad, you’ll just have to accept the fact that I can’t stay a little girl till I’m old and gray. Now put down the thirty-aught-six and go home.”

“Not before I put a round or two into him,” Phillips said in a dispassionate voice.

“How come you didn’t bring the nine millimeter?” asked his daughter.

“Why, you ought to be able to figure that out. The permit’s premises-only. It would be a violation.”

“But, Dad, my God, isn’t it also against the law to shoot somebody?”

Both of these people seemed to know the specialized jargon of firearms enthusiasts. Listening to them, Wagner felt even more out of his element than when in the company of Sandra. Any prolonged connection with Mary Alice was out of the question. No doubt her father would be overjoyed to hear such sentiments, but how to get the message to him without being shot first?

Alwyn Phillips answered his daughter now with a contemptuous laugh that sounded like the bark of a miniature dog. “No danger at the moment, it seems,” said he. “Your admirer has fled the premises. Went out a window and down the fire escape, I suppose. It seems he is a poltroon.” He lowered the weapon, banging the butt on the bare wood of the hallway floor. Babe had taken away the little rug, handwoven by peasants in the mountains somewhere. Wagner would rather have had that back than get the TV set: when one was barefoot it had been a welcome island in the straits between bedroom and bath.

“Oh, maybe you had to take the step eventually,” Phillips was saying, “but why with this dog-eared example of the opposite sex? Why not with a fine lad of your own age, Maywee, and not this poor specimen of manhood?”

Making every allowance for Phillips’ emotional state, Wagner was annoyed by the slurs, especially when made by such a runt.

Mary Alice spoke. “Don’t judge by exterior impressions. Fred cares nothing about his appearance. So his posture is awful, he’s skinny, his clothes are rumpled, his shoes scuffed, et cetera, et cetera. He’ll even wear socks of different colors. So? But he has quite a mind.”

“Oh, yeah?” her father asked defiantly. “And what has he invented for the betterment of humanity?”

Though of course he was flattered by her tribute to his other gifts, Wagner had not realized that Mary Alice so despised his person. He was tempted to point out, from thin air, that it was not his mind that she had been overusing during the last twenty hours.

Phillips added, “That’s my definition of brilliance: does it contribute to the welfare of humankind. I can scarcely find anything to admire in some cheap cleverness that has no purpose but to delude the naïve into buying that which they do not really want.”

“My gosh, Dad, you can’t expect everybody to be another Archimedes. Fred’s not the only person never to have discovered a principle as far-reaching in its consequences as the lever.”

Mary Alice continued to reveal new facets of herself, but none thus far that Wagner found especially fetching. Of course, one is always otherwise with members of one’s own family than with even the closest of friends: indeed, just thinking about his sister could make Wagner feel like a ninny.

“The important point,” said Mary Alice, “is that when it comes to words, he hasn’t met his master.” This was too outlandish an overstatement to be at all pleasing, unless of course it was confined to the preposterously literal: no, he had never sailed with Capt. Joe Conrad or gambled with Dusty at Roulettenburg or met Chuck Baudelaire at Mallarmé’s
mardis.

“If that were the case,” said her father, his weedy mustache quivering in derision, “then how can it be we are not reading his byline on dispatches from the tinderkegs and flashpoints across the globe, or seeing his Burberry outside some chancellery on the cathode-ray tube? Answer: he’s nobody, Maywee. He’s simply used his seniority at the office to win your favor.”

“You’re wrong, Dad. He’s publishing a book with Burbage.”

The statement had an uncomfortably familiar resonance, but Wagner had no memory of ever making it to Mary Alice. Apparently he could not be trusted when it came to the matter of his unwritten novel.

Phillips looked as if he were impressed by what embarrassed Wagner to hear. “Can it be true?”

“Sure it is,” said Mary Alice. “Same publisher as your favorite, Theodore Wulsin.”

Phillips peeped at the ceiling, hand at chin. “You certainly know how to fetch me up short,” said he, under the finger that was across his lips. “Mightn’t you have imparted this information at the outset?” He lowered one eyelid. “But look here, he’s married, isn’t he?”

“That’s a technicality,” said Mary Alice.

Her father plunged a finger into his collar. “Well, you know you can count on me to apologize if I’m wrong,” said he. “I won’t be deterred by a narrow concern for amour propre.” He glanced up and down the hall with an air of drama. “But if he’s a man of probity, where
is
he? He disappeared without an argument.”

“He’s shy,” said Mary Alice. “Not to mention you came in muzzle first.”

“Indeed a slippery customer,” her father said, not unkindly. He and Mary Alice drifted along the hall to the living room, where Alwyn found his golf bag and returned the firearm to it. Now, thought Wagner, would be the moment to jump him, but it was too base an impulse to survive. Caring about the fate of one’s offspring was not a contemptible emotion: this was a lot more than Wagner’s own father would have done, and though it might not have been his mother’s fault as such, she
had
died when he was yet a boy. Suddenly he felt an unprecedented access of affection for his sister. After all, she was kin. But in the next moment he remembered that in his latest conversation with her he had made the outlandish claim that apparently he repeated later on during some sexual transport with Mary Alice, and he found himself resenting both women for believing him.

However, if he could only get rid of Mary Alice and then somehow elude Sandra except for carefully scheduled meetings, there was now no procedural reason why he could not sit down and write that novel. He had no job to deter him. And why did he need Gordon’s permission to use the poet’s name to make contact with someone in power at the Burbage Press? Things often seem impossible only because one has not tried them. Invisibility was a case in point.

... It was ridiculous that he continued to be on the retreat long since perfecting the process of becoming invisible. In the latest exercise of his power, when Phillips pointed the gun at him, he had disappeared in a millisecond. His potential was unlimited: by invisibly manipulating orders at headquarters, he could exert his will on an army. He could saunter unseen into the White House and, monitoring the President at close hand, learn all the secrets of state. From the Bureau of Engraving and Printing he could in one visit take away enough high-denomination bills to make him immediately rich, then go again at any time for replenishment.

But his moral principles had not changed. He had no intention of being a spy or a traitor, and as to stealing money that was not yet current, if he did that those responsible for it would be placed in jeopardy. Surely the sheets of newly printed greenbacks were tallied at every phase of their production. He could not prosper by the ruination of the innocent.

Thus despite his extraordinary gift, Wagner was still as much at the mercy of events as he ever was. Perhaps he lacked the basic stuff to be a legendary invisible personage, one of the pioneering titans of the tradition, on whose shoulders all future unseen practitioners would stand. Perhaps he was a poetaster, not a poet, of invisibility, his experiences a mere doggerel of the ability to elude the eye.

He found himself standing between father and daughter now, near his own front door.

“I am big enough to reconsider, Maywee,” Alwyn Phillips was saying. “But I really would like the opportunity to converse with the gentleman.”

“Undoubtedly you shall have it anon,
moan pear
,” Mary Alice replied, continuing to manifest her father’s stylistic influence though perhaps with an edge of parody.

Wagner stepped aside so that they would not collide with him when they embraced, but in fact they shook hands, not even with much apparent warmth. Reflecting on Mary Alice’s newly awakened appetite for fleshly contact, Wagner once again felt an uneasy sense of responsibility.

Phillips and golf bag made their exit. Mary Alice stood before the closed door for a moment, then lifted her shoulders and sighed.

She lifted her chin, and shouted, “Where
are
you, Fred?”

Wagner went quickly to the sofa, lay down, and materialized. “Hi.”

“You were there all the while,” Mary Alice stated. “You were counting on Dad’s being distracted.” She gave him a look of brief vulnerability.

“It’s just that I didn’t want to be wounded,” said Wagner. “I suppose you’ll tell me now his shotgun didn’t have any bullets in it.”

This time she sighed in another fashion. “Finally found something I know and you don’t. All wrong. It’s a rifle, and it
was
loaded with cartridges. Dad had blood in his eye.”

“Then you saved my life,” said Wagner, but without a genuine feeling of gratitude.

Mary Alice screwed up the corner of her mouth. “Does that surprise you? Seems little enough.” She began to leer at him.

Wagner put out a finger. “Now, Mary Alice, I absolutely must go down to the office and get my check.”

Her underlip rose to cover the upper. Then she opened both to say, “You don’t care for me.”

Though he found this display exasperating, Wagner did acknowledge that he owed her an explanation. “But you see, Mary Alice”—he had to restrain himself from using “Maywee”—“I need money to buy paper to complete that book of mine you told your dad about.”

Her eyes displayed incredulity. “You mean you’ve really
got
such a book? I assumed you said that last night merely to get into my pants.” She grinned brilliantly. “And it worked!”

At this point the telephone rang. Wagner stepped into the kitchen and answered at the wall-hung instrument.

“Mr. Wagner, this is Miss Brink at Dr. Leprak’s office. Could you come to the office at your earliest opportunity?”

“Is something wrong?”

“How about this afternoon at one
P.M
. sharp?”

Wagner looked at his watch. “It’s already eleven-forty. I’ve got some errands to run.”

“Put them off,” said Miss Brink. “Get over here.”

“If it’s that important.”

“Please.”

“I’m not supposed to be dying or anything, am I?”

“It’s hardly my place to say,” said Miss Brink.

Wagner felt no sense of doom as such; it seemed simply as if he were in another state of being as he hung up.

When he emerged from the kitchen Mary Alice was watching TV again. Now he might have welcomed a sexual advance from her as being an affirmation of his healthy life force, but she had changed in just that short a time.

She looked away from the screen to say, “Tell
them
I’m doing all right.”