The Reflection (18 page)

“You want it?”

“I’ll take it.”

“Okay. You’re set ’til the end of the month. After that you gotta pay upfront.”

“All right.”

He put the key on the table.

“You come down and see me at the end of the month, okay?”

“Okay.”

I was alone again. I looked around the apartment. It wasn’t so different in its basic structure from the one I’d inhabited for so many years, farther uptown. It would need some fixing up to be presentable enough for Marie—a coat of paint at the very least. Nonetheless, I felt a surge of exhilaration. I opened the door that the agent had just closed, and looked out onto the drab landing with its stained carpet. Somebody was scraping about in the apartment opposite. I crossed the landing and knocked, thinking I might introduce myself as the new tenant—there were one or two questions I could ask about the building as well. I could hear labored breathing from the other side of the door. I knocked again, but no one answered.

No bathroom was inside the apartment; it was probably in the hall. But a small sink nestled in the corner. I threw my head under some running water, then smoothed back my wet hair and looked into the mirror fixed to the wall. It was dirty and warped, and a distorted version of myself stared back. In some fundamental way, though, I hadn’t changed as much as I’d supposed. Beyond the scar, beyond the more recent signs of ageing and my now-graying hair, it was the same mask as always. You tilt your head and things look different—what had become unfamiliar is familiar once more. You realize that it’s the same face. That it’s been there all this time, no matter how far you stray, waiting patiently for you, there in the looking glass.

Marie was getting dressed. I was lying on the mattress, watching her. It was fiercely cold, and I wasn’t expecting to go out much today. I hadn’t officially quit my job, but I’d had a run-in with the foreman, and I wasn’t necessarily going to return. No matter. Work seemed relatively easy to come by at the moment, and the other day I’d had some luck in the subway as well, pickpocketing a fat businessman’s wallet stuffed with bills.

“Where are you going?”

“College.”

A professor at Columbia was helping Marie with her studies. It was someone I vaguely remembered from my own time there. People she was meeting knew Manne, and although the name was unlikely ever to come up in conversation, the connection still felt strange. Marie was now bent over, applying lipstick in the small, cracked mirror.

“You’re not going to the other apartment?”

“No.”

“You’re not looking after Anatole today?”

“No.”

I knew she didn’t like me using the name Anatole—the boy’s real name was Anthony. It was like an accusation, intruding on her intimacy with the boy and his father. I was silent as she put the finishing touches to her makeup. A few minutes later she was gone, the click of the door echoing in the emptiness. The apartment was peculiarly silent for its downtown location, and those first few moments of solitude were always slightly eerie. I hadn’t made the place a home, as I’d planned to. It hadn’t come alive. The walls were still bare, excepting the mirror and the clumsy painting of a seaside scene. I’d cleaned the place up, I’d painted the walls, I’d bought curtains and sheets. But that was as far as it had gone.

At first I’d insisted Marie move in with me. She’d stayed a week or so—even then I’d noticed that she hadn’t brought all her things with her—but it wasn’t long before she was back spending half of her nights with her employer. I could see well enough that the two apartments were escapes from each other, and I didn’t say anything. Sometimes I felt in love with Marie; other times, there was a cold distance. I was beginning to understand Smith’s vanishing act, although nothing like that would be necessary this time around. I could already see how things would pan out. A traumatized refugee had fallen for me, but now she was remaking herself. One day, she’d wear a white coat. She’d be a doctor with a foreign accent. Perhaps she’d land an internship at Bellevue, as I had. In years to come, she might even end up with an office on Park Avenue. Long before that, our worlds would have separated. She’d drop by less and less frequently. We’d have less to say to each other. The sex would become perfunctory, even clinical. Then one day, she simply wouldn’t show up when she’d said she would, and that would be that. Just visualizing the sequence
of events in my head seemed to make it a done deal. And as much as Marie had been important to me, I wouldn’t have much trouble finding another woman. I’d had offers enough, in the bars I’d frequented.

I heard a door opening and closing across the landing. I jumped up to open my own door, but not fast enough. I’d only caught glimpses of the person who lived opposite me, and all I could say with any confidence was that she was a woman, either middle aged or old. She never answered when I knocked, and her shadowy presence played into my paranoia. In my weaker moments, even Marie could provoke suspicion. She was studying medicine. Did she have some connection with Dr. Peters? Other things about her didn’t feel quite right. How had she learned to speak English so well, so quickly?

I thought I’d go out, after all. There was nothing to eat or drink in the apartment, and in any case a whole day inside would only result in cabin fever. I dressed and went down the stairs into a blast of freezing air, hugging myself tight. The extreme cold made you withdraw ever deeper into your core—just as the heat did the opposite, a relentless sun exploding one’s sense of self. I went into an Italian place and ordered some coffee. Lying on the counter was a photo magazine,
Look
or something like that. I idly flicked my way through it, wondering what I might do for the rest of the day. I’d take a subway uptown. It was the kind of weather where I could spend the entire day in a theater, watching movie after movie until they spilled over into each other and then into my dreams.

The magazine pictures paraded past me in a blur of smiling faces. I froze, then turned back a few pages to a full-page ad. The bland, good-looking features of the woman in it were hard to place, and it took me a few seconds to work out who she was. Mrs. Esterhazy. I recalled thinking, the one time we’d
met, that there was something flat and generic about her, as if she’d walked out of an ad for washing powder. And now here she was. Neither young nor old, part of an all-American scene, a husband returning from work and the young son playing with his train set on the living room floor. It didn’t really matter what the advertisement was for. I slipped the magazine into my coat pocket and drank up my coffee.

A frozen mist hung over the city. It was late morning, but the light barely penetrated down to street level. Despite this gauziness, on Park Avenue South I felt I was suddenly able to see for miles and miles, intersection after intersection, past my old office, to Harlem River and beyond. Perhaps there was some sort of corridor through the fog at that precise point, or more probably it was my imagination. New York seemed like a vast machine. A city-sized puppet show, the wires almost visible, flickering in the periphery of my vision. People streamed down the avenue into the subway, as if part of a mass ritual. It was hard to get a sense of anyone as an individual, within that indiscriminate multitude. I focused on a woman with a small child, pregnant with another. I marveled at the optimism of giving birth to something that you knew would die one day. I pondered the significance of Mrs. Esterhazy’s photo. Somehow, it meant that Manne was still there, in the shadows. And his story was still alive, despite my best efforts.

I climbed the stoop of my building, skipping the broken stair that had tripped me up the day before. I was back in my apartment now, and everything was exactly how I’d left it, naturally, even though it felt changed by what I’d found. The stillness and silence didn’t induce calm, but a sort of anxiety of anticipation, a feeling that something would happen, must happen. I tore the photo out of the magazine and pinned it to the wall, then lay back down on the mattress, hands behind my head, examining it at leisure. On the one hand, it was
a rigorously conventional piece of advertising, no different from hundreds of pictures you could find in any number of publications. On the other hand, the more I looked at it, the more the image seemed a world unto itself.

The setting was a split-level sitting room, traditional and yet modern, probably in one of New York’s tonier suburbs, although the garish colors of the decor suggested California as well—I had half of a feeling that I’d seen this same room in other ads. A man has just come through the door, he’s waving to his wife and kid. His brown check suit and trilby aren’t sober enough for him to be a lawyer or a banker, but he’s clearly on a decent salary. Perhaps he’s an ad man—after all, directors make movies about Hollywood, novelists have novel-writing protagonists, and maybe ad men create ads about ad men. Each of the protagonists—the man, the woman, the child—is caught in a pose of absolute expression, like in a nineteenth-century academic painting. There’s unalloyed joy in the man’s face as he greets his family: it’s as if he’s been away weeks, rather than hours. But his expression seems forced, off-key. Which is not exactly surprising, given that this is an advertisement, not a stolen photo of an actual homecoming. The man in the picture is not a doting husband and father, after all. He is a model, a bad actor.

And yet I couldn’t entirely see it that way. I couldn’t unsuspend my disbelief so easily. I had to create a narrative that accounted for all the details. For me, the man’s strange grin masked unease. It wasn’t hard to think up a conventional explanation: for example, he might have stopped off at his mistress’s apartment on the way home. But I had feeling that this unease was something altogether more fundamental. Perhaps the man has come back to his house, and as he opens the door, ready to greet his wife and son, he sees a woman and child he doesn’t recognize. The boy jumps up to give him a
hug; the woman kisses him, then whispers an endearment in his ear. In shock, he lets all this happen, passively. He plays the part that is patently expected of him. There’s a moment when he knows that he should confront the two, ask them who the hell they are, but that moment passes, and the man feels himself drawn into a story not his own. Perhaps some kind of joke is being played on him; perhaps he’s the victim of a malaise; perhaps there are other forces at work. In any case, playing the game seems to be the path of least resistance, until he understands what’s happening to him.

My gaze shifted from the man, to the furniture, to the boy, to his toy train in violent blue. Each detail of the scene would either be smoothly integrated into the narrative I’d created, or would shape it further. The one thing in the photograph that I seemed to be avoiding was Mrs. Esterhazy herself. Her face bore a similar theatrical expression of joy, although I failed to detect any undercurrent of unease. Her complexion was as smooth as polished stone. If it hid nothing, perhaps it was because there was nothing to hide. Mrs. Esterhazy was the empty space around which everything revolved, like water circling the drain.

To distract myself, I put on the radio set I’d bought the other day. Manne had had a liking for somber classical music, but Smith preferred jaunty jazz tunes, and I fiddled about to find a station that fit the bill. I’d looked away from the photo for only a minute or so, but that was all it took to break the spell. The image was no longer an instant of weird drama. It was just an ad again. I’d been so absorbed in my fantasy that I’d failed to observe the one thing that really mattered, the minuscule lettering along the left-hand side of the photo that said “Rigaut.”

There was a back entrance to Stevenson’s building. I knew that the door was sometimes left open for deliveries during the day, because I’d occasionally used it myself to avoid the doorman, back when Marie and I were still meeting at the apartment. It was locked now, but I managed to open it easily enough with a knife blade. I found myself in a steamy dark passageway, the walls wet as if sweating in the heat generated by the laundry, through an opening on the right. I could hear voices and the sound of machinery as I sneaked past, making my way up the stairs to the fifth floor. For a while I stood with my ear to Stevenson’s door, until I was perfectly satisfied that no one was home. I took the key from under the carpet on the stairs, as I’d seen Marie do on past occasions, and opened the door.

The noise of traffic below was reduced to a dull hum, dampened by the heavy curtains that remained drawn. I’d been here enough times before, but never by myself, and there was a certain thrill to wandering around someone else’s apartment without their knowledge. I was experiencing the space in a different way as well, seeing things I hadn’t noticed before. In the sitting room, for example, it was now clear that one part of the ceiling was marginally higher than the other, and that the borderline corresponded to a difference on the ground as well: the floorboards on one side of the room were of a slightly different color to those of the other side. A wall must have at one time run through the room, I hypothesized. Perhaps it had originally been two studio rooms, joined together to make the two-bedroom apartment that it was now.

I found the phone book on the sideboard. I flicked through the
R
pages until I found Rigaut. The only nonresidential entry was for “Rigaut Images.” Not an advertising firm, as I’d first supposed, but a photographic agency. It was located not far from where I was now, just beyond St. Patrick’s on Madison.
I made the call and then wandered into the bedroom. There again was the row of suits in the wardrobe—all seemingly the same or with only minor variations—and a drawerful of new white shirts. It occurred to me that I’d never seen this man, nor his son; there was not even a photo of either in the apartment. It was as if they existed on a different plane, which could never intersect with mine. I took out one of his shirts from the drawer and started to undress. Looking for cufflinks I cast my eyes over to the dresser. Propped up against the mirror was a note, in fastidious handwriting.