Being Invisible (30 page)

“I’m in love with you,” Wagner said. “Forgive me for interrupting, but I wanted to say that before he comes back.”

“He won’t be back,” she said. “Not tonight.”

“Doesn’t he live here?”

“No, he doesn’t. He’ll call back and want to talk it over. I hurt his pride by disagreeing, you see. He won’t return till we’ve got that straightened out.”

“Don’t straighten it out, Catherine,” Wagner said impulsively. “Be mine.”

She smiled inscrutably into her wine glass.

“I wasn’t lying when I said I was a writer,” he went on. “Actually I am, but not really the kind you might think. I have always wanted to be that kind, but now I suspect I won’t ever be. At the moment I don’t even have a job. You might think I’ve got my nerve in speaking to you this way at all.”

She looked at him. “No, I don’t, Fred.”

“You’re being hospitable,” said Wagner. “Yet, if I do say so myself, I am more than meets the eye—by being, so to speak, less. You may not believe this, but I can become invisible at will.”

Catherine nodded. “Of course I believe you.”

“It’s my only real talent when all is said and done. It’s the only reason why I could subdue Flippens.”

“It must be a marvelous gift,” Catherine said. “I sensed there was something very special about you from the first.”

“You’re not dubious?”

“You saved my life.”

“I don’t intend to trade on that episode forever,” Wagner said. “I think I might well be able to find just the right use for my talent as a career, or perhaps more than one, but I’ll need help.”

The telephone rang. Catherine said, “That will be Alan.” She found an instrument on a table near the doorway, lifted it, and listened for a moment, then said, “I think you are wrong.”

She returned to the dinner table. “There have always been a lot of his ideas that I haven’t liked. I rarely have had the nerve to tell him.”

“Well,” said Wagner, “will you be mine?”

“It’s awfully soon.”

“It’s just that I’m impatient right now,” said Wagner. “I’ve wasted so much time. Things have only begun to clear up since I got here to your home. But you don’t have to take my word for what I can do. I’ll give you a demonstration.” He became invisible where he sat.

Catherine sighed in admiration and addressed the chair. “That’s wonderful, Fred.”

Silently he had got to his feet and crossed the room to the sideboard. “I’m over here now.”

“It works perfectly,” said Catherine. “It’s really a wonder.”

Wagner realized he could slip around back of her chair and embrace her from behind, but he was no Flippens.

“You’re not frightened?”

She smiled into empty space. “With you looking after me?”

“Oh, good,” said Wagner. “I love you, Catherine.”

“This whole thing has come about so suddenly for me,” she said. “You understand, I’m very fond of Alan, whom I’ve known for years. And then we have music in common.”

Wagner had unthinkingly returned to his chair. Catherine was still looking where he had been. “I’m back here,” he said, materializing.

Catherine turned with her usual serenity. “Gosh, isn’t that something!”

“Life is going by as we speak,” Wagner said. “Great things are waiting to be done, and I sense that you and I could do them. We’ll start by getting Flippens put away securely. And if you reflect, only you and I are capable of doing that at this time. But though necessary, that’s essentially a negative act. It will just clear the stage for some positive, creative accomplishments. You’ve seen my potential. What I need is someone who believes in me. I think you’re that person. I want you to know it’s a lot more than mere sexual attraction: it’s important to me that you yourself are a performing artist.”

Catherine smiled in the candlelight. She put her exquisite pianist’s fingers on the back of the hand he had slid halfway between them. “I’m worried about Alan. Fred, I’m afraid I must ask you to leave, because he’ll be watching the doorway from the phone booth on the corner and otherwise won’t go away.”

Wagner lost emotional momentum. “Then he’ll come back up here?”

“No,” said Catherine. “He won’t do that. He’ll still be too sulky.”

They moved to the apartment door, where Catherine continued to disappoint him by offering only the most perfunctory handshake. He realized he was still going it alone insofar as a real friendship between them was concerned. No doubt realism was called for here, as in so many other cases, but why must truth always be so banal?

“You will at least think about what I’m proposing?”

“I could hardly help doing that,” she said, unhelpfully. “Now, be sure to let Alan see you leaving. Walk in the direction of the phone booth, please, and not the other way.”

“That’s easily accomplished,” said a dejected Wagner. “I just hope you’ll let me see you again.”

Catherine’s smile seemed unusually remote. “Once you’re around the corner, come on back.”

He experienced an instant of vertigo. “Just a moment,” he said, detaining her opening of the door. “Do you mean tonight?”

Catherine said levelly, “I think you can do more or less anything you want. To stop you they’d have to see you.”

Wagner regarded this as the first genuine evidence he had ever obtained that being invisible was not, underneath it all, only a self-serving delusion.

Thomas Louis Berger (b. 1924) is an American novelist best known for his picaresque classic,
Little Big Man
(1964). His other works include
Arthur Rex
(1978),
Neighbors
(1980), and
The Feud
(1983), which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

Berger was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, the son of Thomas Charles, a public school business manager, and Mildred (née Bubbe) Berger. Berger grew up in the town of Lockland, Ohio, and one of his first jobs was working at a branch of the public library while in high school. After a brief period in college, Berger enlisted in the army in 1943 and served in Europe during World War II. His experiences with a medical unit in the American occupation zone of postwar Berlin inspired his first novel,
Crazy in Berlin
(1958). This novel introduced protagonist Carlo Reinhart, who would appear in several more novels.

In 1946, Berger reentered college at the University of Cincinnati, earning a bachelor’s degree two years later. In 1948, he moved to New York City and was hired as librarian of the Rand School of Social Science. While enrolled in a writer's workshop at the nearby New School for Social Research, Berger met artist Jeanne Redpath; they married in 1950. He subsequently entered Columbia University as a graduate student in English literature, but left the program after a year and a half without taking a degree. He next worked at the
New York Times Index
; at
Popular Science Monthly
as an associate editor; and, for a decade, as a freelance copy editor for book publishers.

Following the success of Rinehart in Love (1962), Berger was named a Dial Fellow. In 1965, he received the Western Heritage Award and the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Award of the National Institute of Arts and Letters for
Little Big Man
(1964), the success of which allowed him to write full time. In 1970,
Little Big Man
was made into an acclaimed film, directed by Arthur Penn and starring Dustin Hoffman and Faye Dunaway.

Following his job as
Esquire
’s film critic from 1972 to 1973, Berger became a writer in residence at the University of Kansas in 1974. One year later, he became a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Southampton College, and went on to lecture at Yale University and the University of California, Davis.

Berger’s work continued to appear on the big screen. His novel
Neighbors
(1980) was adapted for a 1981 film starring John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd. In 1984, his novel
The Feud
(1983) was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize; in 1988, it too was made into a movie. His thriller
Meeting Evil
(1992) was adapted as a 2012 film starring Samuel L. Jackson and Luke Wilson.

In 1999, Berger published
The Return of Little Big Man
, a sequel to his literary classic. His most recent novel,
Adventures of the Artificial Woman
, was published in 2004.

Berger lives ten feet from the Hudson River in Rockland County, New York.

In 1966, two years after he wrote
Little Big Man
, Berger stands at Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument, the site of Custer’s last stand in 1876. This was Berger’s first visit to the famous battlefield.

This black-and-white image became the readers’ vision of Berger: dark and esoteric. (Photo courtesy of Gerry Bauer.)

A snapshot of Berger with his friend Zulkifar Ghose, taken in midtown Manhattan in the summer of 1974. (Photo courtesy of Betty Sue Flowers.)

This marked-up manuscript page comes from a story called “Gibberish,” from Berger’s original short story collection
Abnormal Occurrences.

In this 1984 letter to his agent, Don Congdon, Berger tells Congdon that he was mentioned on
The David Susskind Show
, a television talk show.