Authors: Thomas Berger
The move succeeded perfectly, but he soon knew his own dismay, for a grope of the inside breast pocket reminded him that his wallet had been left behind in the middle drawer of his office desk, the one that could be, and was, locked. He wasn’t known in this place. He would have had not only to return to Pascal but also, by asking for a loan, to affiliate himself with a man who would exploit any association, however slight.
He would have had to do just that, had he not, while pretending to fumble within an overloaded coatrack, disappeared.
He left without paying the check. This was his first piece of dishonesty as an invisible personage. However, he intended the delinquency to be only temporary. He would drop by with the money after work, or at the latest, next noontime. Invisibility was still, except perhaps for the incident with Zirko, a device to avoid inconvenience or embarrassment, not a means for the shirking of responsibility.
He reached the lobby of the building at which he worked (still invisible, for he believed it not impossible that Pascal might bolt the rice pudding and launch a hot pursuit) and was heading for the door to the stairs, back of which he could materialize, when who should come in from the street but Mary Alice Phillips. More hastily than he would have moved could he have been seen, he followed her into an empty car. He believed it unfortunate that two other persons boarded before the door slid shut, yet the car was of generous proportions, and so long as Mary Alice moved no farther towards the corner, where he was as it were espaliered, his purpose was not defeated.
Mary Alice was a good deal more attractive than he had formerly believed and profited by a close-quarters assessment. What might seem like sallowness at a polite distance was, in tight focus, a delicate tint. Her nose was all but poreless. That part of her right ear that could be seen beneath her hair was exquisite, tightly whorled and the color of the inside of a baby’s nostril. Again it occurred to him that her hair would profit by a rearrangement of some sort, or perhaps merely a fluffing: at the moment it was lank to a fault. And the preponderance of breast (which the likes of Pascal might find exhilarating, but Wagner saw as slightly disproportionate according to the classic rules of female architectonics) might be corrected by better posture, a stiffer spine, a lifted chin. Mary Alice when in repose tended to droop—rather like Wagner himself on that occasion, which had now proved historic, when he inspected himself in the bedroom mirror just prior to becoming invisible for the first time. A girl so young and so comely should have a heartier morale. He was tempted to whisper something encouraging into the ear that was so close to him, but the chances that she would believe not that the voice was that of a divine adviser but rather a symptom of madness were too great. Mary Alice did not suggest self-possession. She might well panic at an unexpected occurrence. She was hardly cut from Babe’s fabric. (Once while Wagner searched ineptly for a weapon, Babe got out of bed and boldly went unarmed to investigate the odd sounds coming from the living room. An unscreened window had been left open on that balmy night, and a starling had got in.)
A strange thing happened now. The other passengers deboarded on a lower floor, and Wagner and Mary Alice rode alone for a while, yet the girl did not avail herself of the space newly at her disposal. She remained just before his corner, keeping him a cozy prisoner. Perhaps the explanation was to be found in her natural stolidity. Despite his ability to make himself invisible, Wagner placed little credence in things like extrasensory perception, auras, psychic emanations, and other related intangibles.
On reaching their floor, he let Mary Alice go to her cubicle without escort. He decided to proceed directly to his own before materializing, rather than go by way of the men’s room. Seated at his desk he had sufficient privacy in which to resume visibility, which along with the dematerialization, recent experiences had proved, had been getting nearer to the instantaneous. In this as in life’s more humdrum exercises, practice did make a difference.
He had assumed Delphine Root would still be absent from her desk, she being the kind who took 110 percent of a lunch hour—as it was typical of Mary Alice to take as little as 85—but even before he was opposite her niche he saw the smoke rising, like that signal which announced, on the horizon of a western movie, imminent Indian troubles. On closer approach she proved to be not only smoking: simultaneously she was eating at a sandwich of which the bread was exceedingly limp and the filling of some substance the self-cohesion of which was not reliable, like egg-, chicken-, or ham-salad, concoctions scrupulously avoided by Wagner, who had a horror of finding small hard dark foreign objects within. A dollop of this stuff separated itself from the edge of the mass and fell as he watched, just clipping the rim of the desktop, so that a cluster of yellow (it was egg) adhered there, though most of the nasty little bomb plopped on the floor and would have exploded had it not been stickily restricted by the constituent mayonnaise.
Delphine herself was ignorant of this event, for she was not only eating; she was reading as well and, for God’s sake, smoking.
Wagner was suddenly furious, and when she anchored the open volume with an elbow, so as to bring the burning cigarette to her mouth from the nearby ashtray, her other hand occupied with the collapsing sandwich, he leaned in and snatched the butt from her.
In her reaction she dropped the entire sandwich on the floor; indeed, half of it fell onto his foot and thereby was invisible until he jiggled it free. The cigarette too was invisible but still burning. He stepped to the water cooler and extinguished it. Delphine might have heard this but owing to her immediate catastrophe was distracted.
She shouted,
“
Kee
-ryst
!”
Wagner went into his cubicle and discarded the wet cigarette butt in his wastecan. He was regretting his impulsive act. He hadn’t expected to ruin Delphine’s lunch.
She cried, “Oh, shit.”
Wagner guiltily materialized and went around to her. She was stooping to her fallen sandwich.
“Drop something?”
“I must be going nuts,” said she, grunting in the cleanup effort. She brought her face up. It was of a higher color than usual. Wagner hoped he hadn’t brought on a heart attack. “For no reason at all, I dropped my lunch,” she said, grinning in a vulnerable way that was, at least with him, unprecedented. “I’m losing my grip.”
But she made no mention whatever of her cigarette, so he asked, looking around, “Anything else?”
“Naw.” She pointed. “Tea’s OK.” A light-gray mug, tagged string hanging over one side, stood just beyond her book, which of course had sprung shut as soon as she had taken her weight off it. He had never before seen Delphine with any reading material. This was no doubt a romance. Surprising as it might seem, he had read that confirmed spinsters were among the habitual readers of such.
“Sorry about your sandwich,” Wagner said. “There’s time: I’ll run out and get you a replacement.”
Delphine peered at him in what seemed to be astonishment. “It’s hardly your fault,” said she. “No thanks, but aren’t you nice.” The strong lines of her face softened. “Thanks, Fred. You really are awfully nice.” Of all things, she now winked. “Unless you’re just after my money.”
Wagner felt himself blush. To get away from the moment he made the banal observation, “You stayed in today.”
“I do most of the time. You don’t notice because you go out.”
“You like to read?”
She nodded at the book. “This is an assignment.”
“You’re taking a course?” Asking these wooden questions had not, however, yet relieved his embarrassment.
“Intermediate Spanish.” She wiped her hand on a paper napkin and picked up the book.
“La Pata de Zorro,
by Hugo Wast, if that means anything to you.”
“Funny name for a Hispanic personage,” he said, intentionally being parody-pompous.
“I believe it’s supposed to be a pseudonym.”
“You must be good: you don’t even have a dictionary.”
“Not really. I just forgot it today. But this is a textbook edition, with a vocabulary in back.” She smiled at him. This could be called the only conversation they had had in five and a half years of working in neighboring stalls. “I went to Mexico a couple of years ago.” He had not even been aware of that. “I swore I wouldn’t go again till I learned some of the language. Why not? I’ve certainly got the time.”
Wagner shrugged. “I made the same resolution as far back as when my high-school senior class went on a trip to Quebec. I took a lot of French in college, but by now I’d be lucky to be able to ask the time of day.” He saw a smear of egg salad on his shoe and said hastily, “Let me get you a wet Kleenex.”
“Let
me
,” said Delphine, pulling out the bottom drawer of her desk, exposing a box of tissues. “Gee, that sandwich flew everyplace.” She pointed at his shoe. Luckily she was not so careful an observer as to ask how the
top
of the shoe had been befouled by walking to her cubicle after the accident.
Wagner cleaned the smear from his upper and again was claimed by an access of guilt as he watched Delphine squat and swab the floor. But this feeling was soon canceled by her returning to the chair and, without even looking for the one he had confiscated, lighting up another cigarette. He had however been impressed with her ambitious and commendable effort to learn another language. She was not simply a hard-smoking old maid who wrote mail-order-catalogue copy. Ever striving, she would be more tomorrow than she was today.
Nowadays he had plenty of time at his disposal in which to study French, not to mention work on his novel. Babe’s departure could be seen, in the long run, as precisely what brought about his personal renaissance. He admitted there were great gaps in his culture, and there they had remained year after year. He had always told himself that writing catalogue copy was beneath him, but was it? Perhaps he had found his place. The incident with Delphine had had this unfortunate effect on his morale. Even judged by its positive results, snatching away her cigarette had been an utter failure if she only lighted another in the next moment. If invisibility was to be used for policing other people, it was obvious he’d have to become much more deft in its employment, else it would resemble those efforts which with the best will in the world exacerbate the very problems they were created to solve.
That morning he had finally finished the copy for the flashlight-pen. The text was much like the one it replaced, though he did invent a few more uses for the device: following and making notes on a musical score in a darkened concert hall; recording the figures from a utilities meter in a dark corner of a basement; scribbling reminders in a parked car at night. While he was away at lunch the copy had vanished from his Out box, presumably the work of the office boy, who in this firm was called officially a messenger, and that was more reasonable a name, for the young man who held the job was at least twenty-five years of age, and he gave the position even more substance by always wearing a full suit, sometimes even three-piece. In between his rounds he was permitted rather than encouraged to try his own hand at writing copy, and was much better at it than Mary Alice Phillips. In time he would probably be promoted, if he persisted and if someone left or died.
This fellow, whose name was Gordon, appeared now, just as Wagner was about to start on the copy for salt and pepper shakers with magnetic strips on their backs, enabling them to be stuck to the front of the doors of refrigerators and stoves and cabinets made of metal. Once again, like the flashlight-pen combo, these could be said to be somewhere between utility and novelty. They would certainly not be appropriate to the catalogues of highbrow
batterie de cuisine.
On the other hand, the condiment shakers were in a different category from the outsized towel, made of inferior-grade terrycloth, imprinted:
I DON’T SWIM IN YOUR TOILET / PLEASE DON’T PEE IN MY POOL
.
“Fred,” Gordon said, for first names were the approved idiom in this office, even
de bas en haute,
“Jackie wants to see you.”
“Oh sure,” said Wagner, happy to be relieved from coming to immediate terms with the magnetic shakers, for which he had no examples but rather a sheet of specifications and two colored photographs, one of which would be chosen, by the art department, to accompany the printed text. “How’s it going, Gordon?”
“You mean personally?” Gordon was a clean-featured young man, perhaps even handsome, with his fine thin nose, and therefore looked as if he might breeze through life, but apparently he was more careful, for the question was typical. He added, “Or professionally?”
“Neither,” said Wagner. “Under the aspect of eternity.”
Gordon was not humorless. He made a smile, in which expression his features were not as regular, for some reason, as when his face was in repose. Wagner recorded such phenomena from time to time for use in his novel.
“I’m trying not to offend the Holy Ghost,” said Gordon.
“What does that mean?”
“To despair,” Gordon explained. “In the Augustinian sense.”
“I didn’t realize you were that religious,” said Wagner.
“I’m not.”
Gordon was getting pretentious. Wagner still didn’t really understand the comment, but if Gordon said it, it could scarcely be too abstruse. This place attracted would-be writers and intellectuals. He would not have believed that Delphine was one of them, but there she was, studying Spanish. It occurred to him that perhaps Gordon was a seminary dropout.
Jackie Grinzing never displayed intellectual pretensions. No doubt that was why she was head of the department, with an office that had real walls that went all the way to the ceiling.
She was wearing her outsized eyeglasses as he entered. When he had first seen the spectacles he had assumed they were a joke item from one of the catalogues, but apparently the lenses were prescription. Jackie wore them when reading, but now she was staring at the building across the street: either they were bifocals or she wasn’t actually looking at anything.