Memoirs Of An Invisible Man (44 page)

But to say that I was sexually attracted — or even aroused, excited, tantalized, tortured — would be to grotesquely understate matters. I was in love; I would have married her, followed her anywhere, done anything for this woman who inexplicably seemed so extraordinarily appealing and sensible and sensitive and understanding. Which may seem ridiculous, but whoever wired up the hearts and souls of humankind played a cruel and vulgar trick on us all.

There were three short knocks at the front door, and she ambled out naked to open it. I moved back into the corner. She reappeared immediately, followed by a boy also nineteen or twenty. He was blond and slender and wore rumpled khaki slacks and a polo shirt.

“How long have you been here?” he asked.

“Just a little while.”

“Any trouble with the doorman?”

“Uh-uh. This place gives me the creeps. Do these people have a cat?”

“I don’t know.”

He laid his clothes over a chair as he removed them, and when he was naked he turned and embraced the girl. Despite his youth and slenderness, he had a belly, and the flesh on his limbs seemed slightly flaccid. They rolled over onto the bed and grappled at each other for a moment, and then her legs spread open and he pushed into her.

It occurred to me that this was the first time I had ever seen other people performing the act. I understand that people actually pay to see it in some places — although I should think not more than once. To my surprise, I found the whole thing as unpleasant as it was compelling. The two young people were probably attractive — I can’t be sure — but there was something distasteful in the sight of all that flesh flapping about. Or perhaps it was rather my standing there, gaping furtively, that made it all seem somehow sordid.

The boy heaved up and down on top of her, panting. Each time he came down, the girl, her blank gaze on the ceiling, would expel a little puff of air from her mouth. I stayed watching to the end, which did not turn out to be much of a wait. The boy began to pump faster, the girl’s feet seemed to twitch several times, and they both abruptly relaxed in a motionless heap.

A few moments later the boy rolled off her, already asleep. Her eyes still open, the girl gathered up the edge of the bedclothes in her hand and wiped herself. In that posture, the wadded sheet pressed to her privates, she too fell asleep and began to snore lightly.

Dispirited, I slipped out the front door and dressed myself in the hall.

A
fter that I would always sleep in whatever bed seemed least likely to be used by a returning tenant or a houseguest arriving in the middle of the night — usually in a maid’s room or a child’s room — and I rose early in the morning, because you never know when a cleaning woman or a crew of painters is going to arrive and go through everything. I made a point of getting keys back down to where I had found them as soon as I got an apartment open, because if Jenkins was looking for me in these buildings, missing keys would be the plainest possible way for me to signal my presence. Often I could find a spare set of keys inside an apartment and hide them in a fire stair or basement. Or I would leave a door— preferably a service door — locked on the latch, so that I could get back whenever I wanted to merely by slipping one of my otherwise useless credit cards between the latch bolt and the jamb.

But no matter how careful you are, people notice that you have been there, and I made a point of never staying in any one place more than a night or two. There was no sign that Jenkins knew how I was living, but even if he didn’t he surely would soon, and I could not afford to sit still and let him close in on me. I was spending half my time now searching out empty apartments, and as I became more adept at it, I gradually built up a list of safe places that I could go back to. But if anything at all went wrong — if a doorman or elevator man heard something, if a neighbor rang at an apartment door or a maid noticed something out of place, if I returned to find a door rebolted or a hidden key missing — I would leave at once and never return. You have to keep moving.

But as careful as I was and as much as I kept on the move, I knew that I was barely staying even and that in the end I could not stay ahead of Jenkins like this. He would figure it out if he hadn’t already. And when cold weather came, things would become more difficult. There would be fewer vacant apartments. Building doors would be kept closed. When it snowed, I would be trapped in whatever building I happened to be in. And once I stopped moving, he would have me.

I had to find someplace secure, a place of my own, where I could stay put and arrange a reasonable life for myself. But I could hardly go out and rent an apartment. I could not even buy a sack of groceries. Whatever I did I would have to do over the telephone. In principle you can do almost anything over the telephone nowadays, and when there
is
something that has to be done in person, you can hire someone over the telephone to act as your agent. The trouble was, Nicholas Halloway couldn’t do any more over the telephone than he could do in person. Because of Jenkins. Nicholas Halloway, as a legal person, was defunct.

I would have to start over again. I would have to create a new identity with a checking account and credit cards. Then I should be able to provide myself with whatever I needed. But to open a bank account or get a credit card, you need a credit rating — some sort of financial history — and to get that, you need bank accounts and credit cards. You also need a little something to put into the bank accounts, and it is just about impossible to accumulate any wealth without having an account in the first place. I could, of course, steal any amount of cash and could conceivably even mail it to myself somewhere. But what then? Cash is largely useless in the modern world. It is difficult to pay for anything more than a meal with it. Financial assets exist almost exclusively as bookkeeping entries. If you sent an envelope full of cash to a bank and asked them kindly to open an account, they would probably report you to the police. You need a check to open a bank account, and you need a bank account to write a check.

But that might not be true of every sort of account. A brokerage account, for example. Unlike a banker, a broker might be willing to open an account without meeting you or even having a very solid reference, because the decision would be made by a particular broker with something to gain. The commissions. If there were some promise of real commissions, corners could be cut. And furthermore, you could open a brokerage account without putting any funds in it for a while. You could even get the broker to make a trade if you had him convinced that a check would arrive by the settlement date five days later. He would not be in any trouble until then. It would require a broker who was ready to overlook a few of the niceties for the sake of some commissions, but all my past experience of brokers tended to make me confident that I would find my man.

But what would not be so easy was finding a name with a matching social security number that I could safely use, and I would absolutely need that to open any sort of account. And worse yet, I would need an address and a phone number where I could receive phone calls and statements under that name.

But as it turned out, I got the address almost right away. I had spent a tedious morning looking for apartments in a building on Fifth Avenue and managed to learn only that “the people in 7C are away.” Whether for a few days or a few years I could not determine. But there was a set of keys right there in the lobby, and I had no better prospect at the moment, so that night I returned, extracted the keys, and unlocked the apartment. Once I had got the keys safely back where they belonged, I began a thorough search of 7C.

It was a large, comfortable apartment with splendid views out over the park, and it looked from the first as if no one was living there. I found the mail piled up on a table in the foyer, which meant that the doorman or elevator man was probably leaving it there each day, but I was disappointed to discover that it had been accumulating for only about a week. They would be away on vacation, then. Perhaps in the morning I would be able to figure out for how long. I slept in a maid’s room that looked as if it had not been inhabited for years.

In the morning, as I was going through the drawers of the table in the foyer, I was unpleasantly startled by the sound of a key turning in the front door. As I hurriedly pushed the drawers shut, an unsmiling woman in her sixties entered and immediately gathered up the mail from the table, as if that were her only interest here. I followed her into a little study off the living room, where there was a small desk. Without ever pausing, she expertly sorted through the mail, making a stack of periodicals, a stack of advertisements and catalogues, a stack of bills, and a stack of personal correspondence. The periodicals she laid out neatly on a table in the living room. The advertisements and catalogues she threw into a wastepaper basket. The personal mail she put into a large manila envelope, which she had already addressed to Mr. and Mrs. John R. Crosby. Somewhere in Switzerland. Then she began opening the bills one at a time and paying them from a checkbook which she withdrew from one of the desk drawers.

I moved a step closer so that I could read the exact address on the manila envelope. The Crosbys seemed to live in their own villa somewhere in Vaud. It all looked very promising indeed. The woman worked for a little more than an hour and then abruptly stood up, returning the checkbook to the desk and inserting copies of the paid bills in a file drawer. She walked briskly through the apartment once, looking in each room to make sure that everything was in order; then she gathered up the paid bills and the personal mail to be forwarded, and left, locking the front door behind her.

I immediately pulled out the checkbook and began examining the register. The woman had been there every Tuesday as far back as the register went. In a state of excitement I spent the next two days going through the apartment finding out everything I could about the Crosbys. I identified a spare key to the service entrance and hid it in the back stairs.

At nine-thirty on the next Tuesday morning I was in another apartment, dialing the Crosbys’ number. It rang seven times, and I was afraid she would not answer, but in the end few people can resist a ringing telephone.

“Crosby residence,” she answered curtly.

“I’d like to speak to Mr. Crosby, please. This is Fred Fmmmph,” I mumbled indistinctly.

“The Crosbys are not in New York.”

“Still off in Switzerland, are they? I was afraid of that. When do you expect them to be in New York?”

“I’m afraid I don’t know,” she said, as if not knowing gave her considerable pleasure. “If you would like to leave a message, I can forward it. If you could spell your name—”

“You must be Mrs. Dixon, aren’t you?”

“I am Mrs. Dixon,” she said as if it were an affront to be addressed by name.

“That’s wonderful. John and Mary talk about you all the time. It’s a real pleasure to meet you. You don’t have any idea whether they plan to be in New York during the next few months, do you?”

“I really don’t know their plans. If you want to leave—”

“Actually, I’ll tell you — it’s probably better if you don’t even mention that I called. The thing is, a bunch of us from Marley School wanted to get together… hold a dinner for John… kind of honor him for everything he’s done for the school and so forth… unveil a small statue we’ve had made of him.”

“Oh, I see—”

“And we were hoping he might be in New York sometime in the fall… September or October.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, Mr… um… that is, I’m sorry, but I’m afraid they won’t be here before Christmas. They generally come only at Christmas, to see the children.”

“That would be perfect. Perfect. Better not even to mention that I called, Mrs. Dixon. So as not to spoil the surprise.”

“Of course, Mr… uh—”

“Pleasure finally to meet you, Mrs. Dixon. Goodbye.”

I
learned from a telephone call to the Social Security Administration that I would have to “come in in person” for an interview, bringing “an original birth certificate and two means of identification.” The nearest office was on East Fifty-eighth Street. I went in — “in person” —although I had nothing to bring and knew I would do badly in an interview. It turned out to be on the twelfth floor, which for me meant trudging up eleven flights of stairs. The office itself was a single large room, one end of which had been more or less fenced off with a metal desk and several racks of pamphlets to serve as a waiting room. There were two rows of decrepit metal chairs, on which half a dozen people sat staring aimlessly into space. Waiting, probably, for their names to be called.

I went around behind the racks into the main office area, where there were fifteen or twenty drab grey metal desks, positioned at random on the linoleum floor. There were very few people applying for social security cards, and most of them were aliens or minors, so that it took me several hours to figure out the whole procedure for processing applications. The applicant would hand in his completed application together with his birth certificate and “evidence of identity” and wait to be called for an interview. After the interview, which seemed to serve no function at all in the process, the interviewer, having noted the documentation provided, would sign and stamp the application. The application form then made its very gradual way to one of two women seated in front of computer terminals, and the information was keyed in and transmitted directly to a central computer somewhere in Maryland. The application form itself was then placed in a folder where it was held for several weeks before being forwarded for permanent filing at yet another office in Pennsylvania. I spent most of the morning watching the women at the terminals, paying particular attention when they signed off for lunch and then signed on again afterward.

At five minutes after five, when the room was entirely empty, I switched on one of the terminals and logged on, typing in the same password and information I had seen one of the women use in the afternoon. I called up the format for entering a new name into the system and typed in “Jonathan B. Crosby.” That would be different enough from “John R. Crosby” that I would be able to pick out my mail, but not so different as to invite comment from the postman or building staff. I entered the Fifth Avenue address and gave myself a birth date that made me exactly twenty-one that day — old enough to allow me to establish accounts but young enough to make plausible my lack of a credit record.