Mystery Girl: A Novel (8 page)

“Yes, sir,” I said and inched another pawn. At least this meant I wasn’t fired.

“Now,” he said, shifting a bishop. “As to your marital woes. I am sorry to see things are not improving.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“Kornberg, I said ‘see’ not ‘hear.’ You have some basic intelligence and you follow direction well but you need to develop your perspicacity. When you entered I saw immediately that one of your sideburns is considerably longer than the other, again something a loving wife or even a concerned roommate would point out. You are living alone. Also there’s peanut butter on your cuff.”

I quelched the urge to touch my sideburns. “It’s true,” I admitted, sliding my queen out to buy a moment. “She’s out of town. But it’s just a business trip. Nothing to do with our marriage.”

Lonsky nodded. “So you agree with me then. Sadly, things are not improving.”

“No.” I looked him in the eye. Now he was bugging me. “That’s not what I said.”

“You said, and I quote, ‘It’s true.’ Then you paused. Full stop.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“It’s what you said and I believe it is actually what you meant, though it may not be what you intended. Then you broke eye contact and moved your queen. To say the queen represents a woman is obvious, but in your case, it is safe to say that your wife also rules.”

“It’s a coincidence. I moved a random piece, for fuck’s sake.”

“Nothing human is random. There are no such beasts as coincidences. I take your anger as confirmation that I struck the truth. In fact you could have moved any piece. You could have crossed the bishop over to protect your queen. But you moved her away from you. You sent her on a trip. A business trip, perhaps. Though you yourself don’t believe it is.”

“Now you’re going too far.” I was almost gratified to have stumped him. “That I can honestly say I haven’t even thought of.”

“Not consciously, no. You can’t yet bring yourself to think it. But it’s there. Why did you imagine seeing her if you knew she was gone? Why did you assume the car was hers instead of assuming it was not? There must be many like it in this city. Because one part of your mind, the unconscious, but also unclouded part, disbelieves her. Again, recall precisely what you said: it’s just a business trip. You used the word ‘just,’ and felt the need to explain what sort of trip it was, although no one, at least not I, had challenged it. Whose doubts were you assuaging then? Your own.”

I sat back in silence. Then I pushed my king over. “Checkmate,” I said. “In two.”

“Ha!” He was one of those people who really laugh like that, head
back and mouth open wide as a well. His booming laugh echoed from the depths of the great belly. “Ha! Ha! Very good.”

“But if you’re so smart,” I asked, “how come I’m the one walking out of here, and you’re the one in slippers?”

He laughed even harder, holding his gut in place as it bounced and juggled. “Ha! Ha! Yes! Capital!” He wiped his eyes. “I admire your spirit, Kornberg, if not your intellect. Draw.” He knocked his own king over. “Yes, it’s quite true. My own emotional life is damaged, to say the least. Quite hopelessly so. And all of my intellectual or intuitive powers have granted me no insight into my own case whatsoever. They rarely do. Even the brightest mirror is dark to itself.” He seemed to smile with satisfaction at this thought and continued:

“That is my point, precisely: people unconsciously reveal to the perceptive observer precisely what they wish to hide, even from themselves. Freud said, ‘There is almost no such thing as a lie, for the man who has eyes to see.’ But most people don’t even look. Most signals go unread, including the most essential, those sent from one unconscious mind to another, messages passed in total darkness as it were, where not a soul is watching, except perhaps for a few detectives, like you and me.”

17

AS INSTRUCTED, I RETURNED
to Ramona Doon’s cottage the next day and parked outside. Subject still nowhere in sight. But there was action in number five: a woman I’d never seen before, in sweats and plastic yellow gloves, was carrying a big bag of garbage out the door. What the hell, I decided. Time to play detective for real. I got out and strolled on over.

“Excuse me, Ma’am,” I said, as if tipping an invisible hat. “Is Ramona Doon available?”

She looked me up and down. “Who’s asking?”

I decided to win her over, like Bogey and the bookstore girl in
The Big Sleep.
Of course he is Bogey, and like all bookstore girls, when she lets down her up-do and takes off her glasses, she is a knockout and he offers her a drink from the bottle of rye in his glove box. My costar had a gray crew cut and bifocals on a beaded chain around her neck, so I just tried to stand like him and said, “Well, to be honest, I have some important papers for her to sign. They say it’s urgent.”

“Papers? Where’s your briefcase then?”

“Oh.” That was a good question. “In the car?”

“Debt collector or process server?” She shook her head and I thought I’d lost her. “Figures. Though she seemed more like the rich girl type. Anyway, she’s gone.”

“Gone?”

“Moved out last night. Called up and told me to keep the deposit. After only one month too.” She shrugged. Through the open door behind her I could see the same furniture.

“But what about all her stuff?”

“That’s my stuff. I rent the place furnished short term. Her personals are in this bag. Just papers and crap. Anyways. Good luck. I guess sometimes those rich kids are the worst at paying bills.”

She shouldered her trash bag and swayed off. I considered sneaking in, but she didn’t seem the type to trifle with, and besides, the “personals” were in the goody bag, so I walked back toward my car in slow motion and then, when I saw she was gone, I circled around to the trash Dumpster and went fishing. The landlady hadn’t been lying. It was indeed crap: used coffee filters caked with brown grime, banana peels and eggshells. Old magazines and empty toilet paper tubes. A torn dirty pink sock that I could have added to the panties, but I decided I wasn’t ready to move up to that level of detection quite yet.

I called Lonsky and reported in. He felt my garbage picking showed initiative, although I left out any mention of the sock, fearing
he might send me back to scrounge it up like a truffle. Then he got deep on me.

“A detective finds clues,” he boomed at me over the fuzzy cell connection as I bounced along Franklin Boulevard, swimming in the gray wake of a gardening truck, a rattling wooden wagon piled stories high with branches, dead grass, and leaves, and with several grinning Mexicans riding on top and no exhaust pipe. I tried not to breathe. “Sometimes those clues are around us, in the street, in the garbage. Sometimes within. Look within, Kornberg.”

I thought,
Thanks, Obi-Wan,
but audibly agreed to do a top-to-bottom search within. Then, with no real job, no real wife, and no real life to distract me, I went home and wrote a novel.

18

IT WAS IN MY TEENS
and twenties that I first absorbed the great works of experimental or avant-garde or whatever, advanced, modern fiction:
Ulysses
of course, which I read twice, back to back, as if unable to quite believe what had just happened; the mad Austrians,
The Man Without Qualities, The Sleepwalkers, The Demons,
and their German cousin,
Berlin Alexanderplatz;
Biely and Bulgakov, Russian time travelers from a lost future that never arrived; those witchy vitchs, Gombrowicz and Witkiewicz—mind-bending Warsaw weirdos—and Bruno Schulz, the Jewish point to the Polish Holy Trinity, his pure, clear light snuffed out by the Nazis, ungentlest of gentiles. I remember my amazement when, picking up a stained one-dollar paperback of Schulz’s
Street of Crocodiles
in a sidewalk stall one chill fall day, I found all the terror and wonder of my own middle-class Jersey childhood somehow reanimated in this tiny book by a little-known small town Pole whose prose blazed out like embers under my breath as I stood and read. I remember the scene in Biely’s
St. Petersburg
where the Bronze Horseman, the statue of Peter the Great,
takes off into the air, and the moment in Bulgakov’s
The Master and Margarita
when the devil, wandering 1930s Moscow, sits beside a bureaucrat and whispers in his ear of Pontius Pilate, transporting us, in the turn of a page, to ancient Jerusalem. I remember exactly where I was when I finished
Molloy,
in a hammock, on vacation with my family. Head deep in the postwar European wasteland while they frolicked in the sun nearby, I felt the walls in my mind collapsing as, in its final sentences, Beckett’s novel of negation negates itself, disappearing up its own arse, as the Irish genius might say. Then there was Pynchon. My copy of
Gravity’s Rainbow
has blood on it, nonfiguratively, from when I couldn’t stop reading long enough to make a sandwich and ended up trying to decipher terminal brainfucker prose while slicing cheese. Gaddis! I summited
The Recognitions
in winter, as if on a foolish dare, but had a deeper, summery love for
JR:
800 pages of unattributed screwball dialogue about a drippy-nosed kid who becomes a millionaire stock baron. To me, a man who would do such an absurdly noble thing with his life was mythic, half Groucho Marx, half Hercules: like flying to the moon just to plant the pirate flag for the rare voyager who might sail by and salute. As for Kafka, what can I say? He commanded that his papers be burned after his death. He was disobeyed and now his work is the eternal flame, the bonfire into which all other writers should toss their own failed efforts. I will restrain myself here to reminding the reader of the moment toward the end of
The Trial
when, just before his execution, Josef K puts up his arms and says: I have something to say!

Is it (a) weird, or (b) sad, that I remember these Great Moments in Reading better than I remember my own life? That they ring out in the mind and tingle the spine with the power of the present, and of the real, while reality seems like the poor copy, badly printed and full of typos? Don’t answer. I bring up my early and perhaps deformative exposure to books here only to explain what happened next.

Much like experimental drug users, most troubled young experimental fiction readers pass through the gateway and, with late adolescence,
college graduation, and the need to get a life, outgrow the dangerous phase. But some poor fool always gets hooked, and so I found one day, that I had myself a habit. I hit the hard stuff, V. Woolf, G. Stein,
F. Wake,
but soon found that merely consuming these books wasn’t enough to feed my demon. I began to write them.

And now, a couple of decades later, while most men had careers, families, bank accounts, health insurance, and wives who didn’t openly despise them, I had these books no one in the whole world wanted to read weighing down the bottom drawer of my soul. My disasterpieces. My monsterworks. My wastebasket of a life.

19

HOW MUCH OF MY MARITAL
discord could, if I was honest, be laid on that pyre of pages? Let’s see: years of unrewarded labor, hundreds upon hundreds of rejections, all “free” time, all weekends, evenings, holidays, and vacations, devoted to a private obsession no other human could share, resenting the world that ignored my efforts while despising myself most of all, raging and ranting against literature as a bad joke and then slinking away, late at night while Lala slept, to indulge my wretched vice. These things might tend to make a person difficult to live with, like being married to a junkie, without the fun of getting high. It wasn’t any better when I finally left the house. In a party of any size (one or more), I was always the least successful man in the room, wincing when Lala told a friend I was a writer, changing the subject when anyone asked how it was going (or worse, telling the truth), finally denying it altogether, just saying I was a bookstore clerk or an office worker or even unemployed when someone scorched my soul by politely inquiring, What do you do?

Even my good points, I realized upon reflection, were nothing more than skills I’d developed to manage my literary disability. The
self-deprecating humor, the easy jokes about what a loser I was, the graceful playing of the jester’s role at table, the mildly eccentric intellectual sidekick, ready to spice the grown-ups’ talk with a silly anecdote about my kooky hobby or accept a small favor from my betters, a part-time job or a pair of pants that the successful had outgrown. The compliant pal (or husband) who knew he had no grounds for complaint. Realizing intuitively that the person I really was deep down was someone no one, including me, could stand, I became, well,
nice,
as if my life depended on it. Which it did. There was no other reason to feed me. So I quit whining. I quickly learned to have the good taste not to make others uncomfortable about my lowliness, like a disfigurement they were obliged not to notice. Rather, I set people at ease, encouraging them to take my misfortunes lightly, and even enjoy them. It’s fun to have a friend who is a total loser compared to you, as long as he doesn’t make you guilty about it. On the contrary, I was popular. Hanging out with me made all my friends feel better about themselves.

In other words, my whole personality was nothing more than an elaborate defense against despair. Without my failure I was nothing.

20

BUT THE CRAZY THING,
the punch line, the part I had a hard time admitting, even to myself, was that I myself could no longer stand to read these sorts of novels, the kind I couldn’t seem to stop writing. I don’t know what changed—the focus of my eyes, the span of my attention, the shape of the synapses in my brain—but my Age of Giants was over, and (except for Proust, whom I dithered and dreamed over like a rabbi snoring beard-deep in the Talmud) I now exclusively read crime novels (but never those that “transcended” the genre), newspapers (gossip and horoscope with my wake-up coffee), fashion magazines (which Lala left within reach of the toilet), comics, and
porn. Only what was funny, violent, dirty, and fast held my interest and even then not for very long. It seemed I had dedicated my life to a quest whose point even I had forgotten along the way.