My Father More or Less

5

When Marjorie Kirstner came into the workroom she was wearing a gray silk blouse over her topless bikini. Only a moment ago (in sensed time), he had spied her from the window sunbathing in the back garden and her sudden presence — those large pointed breasts stretching the silk — had the quality of an illusionist’s trick. “Would a cold beer interest you?” she asked him. He had been lying on the couch, pages of manuscript strewn across his lap, working and sleeping, the two at once. Marjorie repeated the question, modified it. She was standing over him, legs apart, hands on hips, sucking on the fruit of her impatience.

Terman raised himself into a sitting position, felt put upon by her intrusion.

“Why are you the only one required to work?” she asked, leaving without his answer, angry at something. He stood up to meet her when she returned with two cans of Heinekens on a small tray.

“Where’s your young lady friend?” she asked, giving him a beer he hadn’t asked for.

“I’m not her keeper,” he said.

“I’d have been most surprised if you were,” she said. “She seems a very independent young person from what I can tell. I thought your young friend might like to join us in the garden.”

Terman said he didn’t think his young friend was on the grounds, though he could see that Marjorie was indifferent to the news, had been making idle conversation. She hung on and, wanting her gone, he invited her to take a seat.

“I have no intention of standing in the way of progress,” she said. “As soon as I finish my beer, I’m returning to the garden.” She looked out the window, studied the view with pointed amusement. “This room comes equipped with picture window, does it? I hope you enjoyed the view.”

He pretended not to know what she meant.

She straddled a chair for a moment or two and then suggested, as if the suggestion made itself, that they take a walk around the grounds. “There’s a body of water I’d like you to see.”

“Is there?”

“It’s a particularly lovely spot, very bucolic, very unspoiled, very relaxing.”

“Is it a long walk?”

“I promise I won’t tire you out,” she said, “though of course I have no way of knowing what your capacities are, do I?”

He felt uneasy walking in the fields with her, suspicious and uncertain of what she wanted, wary of missing the point.

Her chatter was compulsive and he tended to listen intermittently, feeding on the odd and interesting word.

“How would you make me out in a novel?” she asked, the question addressed to herself more than to him. “You wouldn’t, would you?” she answered for him. “Not bloody likely…Terman, don’t you think it’s smashing here?” They could see the stream now through the arch of trees.

“I never draw characters from life,” he said, “unless at wit’s end.”

“You don’t? I never heard a real writer confess that before. What you’re really saying, isn’t it, is that I’m not interesting enough to be in one of your precious books. Not enough one way or another, I suppose.”

“Too much both ways,” he said.

“Yes? What does that mean exactly? Do you think I have an undeservedly low opinion of myself. It might be, after all, that I have a low opinion of what American writers find grist for their mill.”

“It could be that,” he said.

She took his arm and gave it back, nothing bought ever worth the price. “I talk too much out of school. You’ll forgive me if I overstated my case.”

“Isn’t it better to be a character of your own creation,” he said, “than some shadow of yourself falsely and insufficiently imagined?”

“I’ll take everything I can get, thank you,” said Marjorie. “And I’ll not forgive you for finding me insufficiently imaginable.”

Her self-deprecation tired him and he walked along with her without further comment. She too was silent briefly, complainingly silent.

“With a view like this,” Terman said, “I’m surprised you ever stay indoors.”

“Max hates nature,” she whispered. “He’s supposed to be so visual and all that but I don’t believe he ever actuallly looks outside himself.”

“That’s my story too,” he said. “The only things I ever look at are inside my head.”

“I don’t believe a word of it,” she said. “I think you’ll say anything to make an effect if you don’t mind my saying so. Are you uncomfortable being alone with me? You’ve been unnaturally quiet, haven’t you?” She had an abrupt tentative walk as if not all the parts of her body were agreed on the same destination.

“I’m looking at the sights,” he said, avoiding her eyes. “I try not to disappoint.”

“The sights, is that it?” She laughed loudly, too loudly. He could feel her unacknowledged complaint rising to the surface, making ready to join them in the open air, could feel it in the edginess she generated, could feel it in the novelistic view of her his imagination allowed.

He was not a man to dissuade confidences even when he had no patience to listen to them or knew in advance, as he thought he did now, exactly what secrets awaited him.

Marjorie informed him, in a voice that belied itself with irony, of being neglected by her husband, of the lonliness and humiliation attendant on such neglect. She talked of herself as if she were the orphaned heroine of a novel of unremitting banality. Her story, though in itself heart-rending, refused sympathy and so moved him by its reticence, touched him by failing to touch him.

He kept his distance, was not about to make love to his employer’s wife, a rawedged, tight-nerved woman who publicly modelled her dissatisfaction.

“It sounds as if you’ve been treated badly,” he said.

“Like most people, I got what I bargained for, don’t you think?”

The question requested denial and he said that he thought most people got worse than they deserved. He said he wondered why she had trusted him, a man she barely knew, with such personal news.

She was telling him, she said, because there was no one else to tell and he had a sympathetic face — those blue eyes — and he was a writer whose work she admired. She had once read a novel of his that spoke to her.

“What novel was it?” he asked, opening his attention to her.

It was his first, she said, withholding the title, or the first that was published in the United Kingdom. It was she, in fact, on the basis of that book, who had brought him to Max’s attention and so had been midwife to what had turned into an extended collaboration.

“Then he does respect your opinion,” Terman pointed out. “You can’t have it both ways.”

“Max used to listen to me quite a bit,” she said, turning to look at something, some flash of movement, real or imagined, at the other side of the stream. “He’s not the same person he was. You’ve seen it yourself, haven’t you?”

“What I hear you saying, Marjorie, is that you think Max has got someone else.” Terman had the momentary notion that his son was watching him from the deep brush on the other side of the stream. The notion was unsustaining, fled like shadows from a light.

“It’s obvious, isn’t it?” she was saying. “When you confront him with the news he denies everything, treats you like an escaped loony. He denies everything.”

Her bitterness tortured her face. He wanted to ask her what had moved her in his book, though waited for a more appropriate time for his question. He had difficulty separating his own interests from the disinterest of listener.

“Every woman who’s ever entered our house he’s managed to bed down one way or another,” she said.

“You’re exaggerating, I think.”

“Everyone,” she insisted, aware of the implication for Terman, a mad thin smile invading her stoic’s mouth. “I have evidence,” she added mysteriously. “What do you think Sylvie and I were talking about when you watched us from the window?”

Her assertion evoked a passionate denial. “Marjorie, why should I watch you from the window?”

She laughed, a temporary distraction from abiding discontent. “I was joking,” she said. “Didn’t you look even a little? I was hoping you’d look.”

He said he regretted the missed opportunity, feeling the regret as he announced it. It was odd how language sometimes created a reality in its wake.

“I forced a confession out of Sylvie,” Marjorie said. “She denied it at first absolutely and categorically and I simply said, Sylvie you don’t have to lie to me, I’m fully aware of what’s going on. She kept to her story until she saw that I wasn’t buying a word of it, then she admitted that she’d been sleeping with my husband on and off for three years. I was horrified. You’re a friend of mine, I said to her, how could you possibly do something like that? Max wouldn’t let me alone, she said. Then she cried and asked me to forgive her.”

They came to a stile. “This is where our property ends,” she said.

“How do you know there were others?” Terman asked.

“You’ll find out about it soon enough,” she said. “When Max wants something — I know this from having lived with him for fourteen years — he’ll stop at literally nothing to get what he wants.”

Her discontent seemed contagious.

“He can’t help himself,” she said in his defense. “He’s addicted to having absolutely everything he wants.”

“If what you say is true, why do you stay with him?” It struck him, listening to himself, that his question couldn’t have been more predictable and banal had she written his lines for him.

“I really don’t see how I can continue living with him,” she said in a world-weary voice. “Yet of course one goes on, one must.”

“We ought to be getting back,” he said. (He didn’t say that; it was what, not quite listening to the next stage of her confidence, he had wanted to say.) It was before or after she had turned her ankle by stepping on a rock or distended root and found herself unable to walk. She sat on the grass forlornly, alternatly squeezing and stroking the injured ankle to assuage the pain. Terman offered his hand, suggested she walk lightly on the ankle rather that let it stiffen up.

“Don’t you see,” she said with sudden vehemence, “that this film your working on will never get made.”

He was leaning over her, offering his hand, a crazed sky overhead. “I don’t believe you,” he said, though it was not disbelief he was talking about, not that so much as his disinclination to share her pain.

“It’s gone on too long,” she said. “You know what I’m talking about.”

When he withdrew his hand, she asked if he was planning to leave her there.

“Why don’t you try to get up?”

“Why don’t you go and get some help? I’m not going to be able to walk.”

“You want me to go or you don’t?”

“I’m putting myself in your hands,” she said.

Terman squatted next to her, the posture precarious. “Let me look at the ankle,” he said. It was swollen slightly and would swell more. He didn’t know what he was looking for, what significances, and was aggrieved at the ankle for being in complicity with its owner. “You can lean your weight on me,” he said. “We can get back to the house that way.” It was beginning to rain delicately.

“I think I’m too big for you,” she said. “Do you know how much I weigh?”

“It’s a matter of public record,” he said.

Marjorie, who was almost his height, got to her feet with his help, balancing herself on her good ankle. For some reason, they found themselves in an embrace.

She moaned twice for each step they took, asked again and again if she were too heavy for him until the weight of the question were almost as heavy a burden as the woman herself. He was surprised at how leaden she felt, at the deadness of her weight.

The rain was a fine mist, a veil of grief. Walking with her in the drizzle, holding her up, her arm clamped around his neck, he sensed that someone was watching them through the sights of a gun.

Just on the other side of the stile, at the place where the pond reentered view, he lost his balance. She dug her nails into his chest as they fell.

She apologized for her weight.

“It wasn’t your fault,” he said. “The grass was slick and my feet gave out.”

“You’re not attracted to me,” she said, “are you?” She disentangled herself, her teeth clenched against impending pain. “There’s no pleasure in our contact, is there?”

In pain himself, Terman had difficulty focusing on Marjorie’s complaint. “You’re an attractive woman, Marjorie,” he said.

“That ought to hold the old bitch a while,” she said. “Who the hell do you think you are?” She squeezed the neck of her ankle, punished and encouraged it.

His hip hurt but he was able to stand up without difficulty. He stretched the muscles of his legs, first the right then the left, then the right again. When he stretched the right leg, and only at a certain point, he could feel the stinging pains in his hip.

“Well,” she said, “what now?”

He studied the landscape to see if there was anyone in the near distance he might hail; the area was oddly desolate.

“It’ll have to be on the left side this time,” he said, holding out his hand.

“Have you hurt yourself?” she asked. “I can’t say how sorry I am.”

He saw no point in denying it — he had long since stopped perceiving himself as a hero — though he was embarrassed at the extent of her apparent concern, the exaggeration of real feeling.

“Sit down and rest a few minutes,” she said, sliding back a few feet so that the leaves of a large oak screened some of the rain.

“We ought to get some care for that ankle,” he said.

“If I don’t mind, why should you? It’s very beautiful here, isn’t it, very still and very beautiful.

The view, what he could see of it from where they sat, did not strike him as beautiful. It merely satisfied expectation. Nature, it was true, never seemed to him as beautiful or surprising as art. One had the difficulty of course of only being able to see patches of it at one time, fragments of some presumably larger design. He mentioned this heresy to her and got a blank look in return, an almost shocked stare. He resisted apology.

When they got back to the cottage Max and the others still hadn’t returned. There was a message for an L. Turpin on the desk in the workroom that someone had called, though the name of the caller was not given (the note was barely legible), nor was there a return number. He asked Sylvie, who was in the living room reading a copy of Vogue, if she had taken the phone call for him. Her manner was vague though earnest. She could tell from studying the handwriting that the note to him was not her work. Not only hadn’t she answered the phone, she said, she had no recollection of having heard it ring. Who else was in the house? he asked.

Marjorie sat in the workroom with her injured leg propped up on a stool, holding an unlit cigar in her long fingers as a prop.

Terman was trying to figure out Tom’s next move and thought it possible, or not impossible, that his son was somewhere on the grounds of the Kirstner estate.

“You are distracted, aren’t you?” she said. “Tuppence for them.”

He said he was thinking of food and Marjorie said she thought there was some fruit in a cut glass bowl in the dining room, granny smiths, bananas, and dark grapes.

Terman went into the dining room and returned empty-handed, something else impelling him, something he couldn’t remember or had never quite known.

“Wasn’t my fruit any good?” she asked.

He glanced at his watch. It was ten minutes to seven — another day irretrievably gone. “When are they coming back?” he asked, the question rhetorical.

She shook her head in a self-amused way, smiling charmingly at him. “I wonder if you could get me an aperitif,” she said.

Fixed on something else, he only partly heard her request, wary of her demands, thinking that no matter the language she was asking him to make love to her.

“I’d like something to warm me up,” she said.

They could hear Sylvie upstairs talking on the phone in French, complaining about something.

Marjorie put her finger over her lips, enjoining him to silence. When Sylvie’s conversation was completed, Marjorie said, “You are forgetful, you know. I’m worried about you.”

Sylvie came downstairs, stuck her head in the room then disappeared somewhere outside.

Terman poured a glass of Rafael for Marjorie and made himself a Scotch, not bothering to put in ice or water, wanting to feel the heat of the liquor in his chest. He tossed down the drink and poured himself a second, before delivering the aperitif to Marjorie.

She acknowledged his service with a wink. “Would you change the compress on my ankle, my friend?” she asked in her peremptory way. “You don’t really mind, do you?”

He was unwrapping the compress when he heard a car pull into the driveway and he momentarily observed himself, bent devotedly over her outstretched leg, from the viewpoint of someone coming in them. “The swelling is down,” he said. “It can’t be too serious.”

“My dear, everything is too serious,” she said with a wink. “It’s such a bore, isn’t it?” It was as if an understanding had been established between them, an unacknowledged intimacy.

After dinner Terman sought out Isabelle who was sitting some distance from him at the large table. “I’m going back to London,” he whispered. “There’s no more for me to do here.”

“I understand,” she said coldly.

“Would you like to go?”

“Are you asking me to come with you?”

He noticed that Marjorie, leaning on a cane by the kitchen door, was watching them.

“That’s what I’m asking,” he said. “I don’t understand what else you thought.”

“Are we having a fight?” she asked.

“Let’s go into another room and talk.”

“I don’t want to,” she said, brushing off his arm.

He walked away, then came back to her. “It would please me if you came along,” he said.

She followed him outside to the car, neither consenting nor refusing, smiling apologetically to whomever she passed. Marjorie was watching them from the kitchen.

“You look very sexy tonight,” he said. He was holding the passenger door open for her (or for anyone) when he had an intuition that someone was observing them from the woods just beyond the garden.

“I’ll go with you,” she said, “but I have to get my things first and say goodbye to the others, which will take a few minutes. Is that all right? I know how impatient you get, but it’s not my nature to accept people’s hospitality without thanking them.”

He sat in the car and watched her walk back toward the house, full of frail determination, glancing over her shoulder to make sure that he hadn’t gone off without her.

Max came out after several minutes, followed by Isabelle who turned around to say something in the doorway to someone else. He heard Marjorie’s authoritative voice, heard his name mentioned.

“Wish we could have had more time together,” Max was saying, his face at the window like a Halloween mask, “but as I’ve told you more than you want to hear I’m not my own man.” He let himself into the back seat of the car, lowered his voice to the sympathetic tone he used for playing the good guy, the one who if not pressured by forces outside his control would give Terman everything he wanted. Terman, seeking comfort, let himself be gulled. It was not what Max said that was so persuasive but the undiguised need to persuade that worked its charm.

“The women are watching us,” Max said. “Regard.”

Indeed, Marjorie and Isabelle — Marjorie leaning on her cane-were standing silently just inside the doorway, looking out at the car. “What did Marjorie say to you about me?” he asked.

“I don’t think your name ever came up,” Terman said.

“You did spend some time with her, did you? And she had nothing, either good or bad, to say about yours truly?”

The two women, Marjorie’s hand at the small of Isabelle’s back, approached them.

“A bit frightening, the two of them in tandem, don’t you think?”

Isabelle looked into the back seat where Max was sitting and said hello.

“We’re talking shop,” Max said.

“Are you?” said Marjorie, offering them a road show version of her unconvincingly merciless grande dame. “I had the impression that Terman and Isabelle were going to London and we had come to the car to say goodbye to them.”

“I’m sitting in the car,” Max said, “so if Terman and Isabelle drive off they’ll have to take me along as bloody hostage.”

“He doesn’t get drunk like other people,” Marjorie explained to Isabelle, “he merely behaves oddly.”

“Is it odd, I ask you, to have a conference with my conspirator? We’ll put the question to Isabelle whose biases are either unknown or non-existent.”

“When Terman makes up his mind to go somewhere, he wants to be at that place in the flash of an eye,” Isabelle said. “That’s the way he is, I’m afraid.”

“Are you in a hurry, son?” Max asked. “Is there time for a word or two between us?”

“It’s cold as a witch’s tit,” Marjorie said. “I’m going back to the cottage if no one minds.” She blew them a kiss then turned to go, though didn’t.

“I’ll help you back,” Isabelle said, taking her arm.

Marjorie pulled away, said she preferred making it on her own if that didn’t interfere with anyone else’s plans. She took four maybe five steps and fell heavily. Neither of the men got out of the car. Isabelle hurried to her and asked Marjorie, who was making an effort not to cry, if she hurt herself. “I feel like letting out an enormous scream,” Marjorie said.

“One of us ought to go out there,” Max said. “It would be a great favor to me, Terman, if you represented the partnership on this occasion. Just tell her that Max sent you, that you’ve come in place of Max.”

Marjorie was on her feet, moving unsteadily toward the house, Isabelle followed protectively a step behind. “No need,” Marjorie said over her shoulder.

Terman opened his window to call to either or both of the women, but could think of nothing he wanted to say.

He looked into the rearview mirror and noted that Max was slumped like a ragdoll against the back of the seat. “Are you all right, Max?” he asked. There was no answer for the longest time. “Max!”

The eyes opened with apparent reluctance, or offered that illusion in the dark. The voice boomed in the closed space. “Why don’t you wait until the morning, old son?” it said. “Nothing useful or enobling can be done at this time of blight. Am I not speaking truth?” He let himself out of the car, opened his fly and peed in a wide arc toward the house. “Serve them right if they get a whiff of that.”

Terman could hardly make out the numbers on his watch, studying its unillumined face in the dark car, refusing to turn on the light or open the door. He squalled Isabelle’s name through the partially opened window and thought he heard it echo back after a time lapse of several seconds. It was possible that he heard Tom crawling through the brush like a commando, gradually approaching the car, stopping every few minutes to disguise his progress. The gun was in his hand as he crawled, held just above the ground so as not to get fouled by dirt or twigs. In two more sequences, he would be close enough to open fire at the silhouette in the driver’s seat.

The assassin in the woods rested for a count of five — Terman counting the seconds to himself as he imagined the other doing — then crawled the final thirty feet to the garden’s edge.

A few seconds later, he heard footsteps and he threw himself across the seat, hands over his head, to avoid the gunshots he anticipated. There were a series of raps like machine gun fire at some great distance. Isabelle’s face was at the opposing window, slightly distorted by his perspective.

“You don’t mean to sleep in the car, darling, do you?” she was saying. She opened the door on the passenger side to make herself understood.

He lifted his head to give her space to sit down, unable to give up the idea that an assassin awaited him just outside the window of the car. When she was seated and had closed the door he put his head in her lap.

“If we’re not going to London,” she said, “we ought to go inside, don’t you think?”

He could smell her sea-scent beneath the wool of her pants — the wool rough agaist his face — mingling with her perfume and something else, something not quite defineable. The pants had a fly and he worked the zipper open with his teeth.

She slapped at the back of his head, half reprimand, half play. “Mind,” she said.

Her smell had depths like a well-aged wine, though seemed somewhat murky as if it hadn’t travelled well or had been shaken up in transport. She wore a bikini under the mannish pants, an odd conjunction, an aspect (he thought) of disguise.

Terman had not thought of Isabelle as overpoweringly sexy before, was never so taken with her as this moment in the car with his head like some rooting animal buried in her crotch.

Isabelle offered no encouragement, even held the back of his neck with her hand as if (though not seriously) to restrain him from going further. He found an arm cramped under him and he used it, despite the stiffness in his shoulder, the numbness of the tips of his fingers, to open her pants at the waist. She murmured something, neither assent nor complaint, some English cry or sigh he had never understood. He thought of it, if he thought of anything, as getting to the bottom of Isabelle.

Intoxicated by her scent, his nose, that surrogate pointer, forced its way between her legs. The scent had not even its usual pleasure for him — something murky and contravening in it — yet he pursued it with some urgency, tracked it to its source.

The taste was different too this time — she opened for him to taste, her first compliance in the cramped silence — like a great wine twenty years past its peak, not quite gone bad though beginning to turn.

At any moment a gunshot might come through the window and tear off the top of his head. He thought of that, or the thought touched the edge of consciousness, as he supped at her well. For that space of awareness, he sucked on terror, dying and reviving, frightened to death.

She wanted him on top of her, she whispered, and he was aware at least for that moment that she was there too.

He was, oddly, in no special hurry and she had to tug on his arm to bring him to her, to remind him of her request. And that too, the fucking itself, was as good as he could remember it. He said or meant to say it, his mouth at her ear, hearing gunshots in his dreams as he slept, his weight centered on her.

The bullet took a devious path, wound itself around his head before going in one ear and coming out the other.

It was almost four AM when she woke him, the time in his head corresponding to the clock in the car. She was buttoning his shirt, though that may only have been the last part of it, his pants already restored, fly closed, belt buckled.

When he was finally awake — who could say how long it took? — he felt lightened and refreshed. He started up the car without a word to Isabelle, without even the barest acknowledgement. She curled up in her seat and he covered her with his jacket, his tenderness lasting only for the duration of the gesture. He had woken angry, its object undefined.

The night yielded by degrees. He was more than halfway to London when the cause of his anger clarified, the message deciphering itself as he drove. Isabelle had slept with Max, said intuition, and intuition almost never deceived him. He felt disappointment, not much more than that, grieved privately at the insufficiency of his passion. I ought to break Max in half, he thought. And if not Max, who?

Isabelle was asleep when he arrived at the Holland Park house and he left her as she was — a light coming from the second floor study he wanted to investigate — to go inside. “Don’t leave me,” she called after him as he returned to the car in delayed response.

In sleep, she appeared childlike and fragile, an innocent, unprotected by the disguises of will.

He had difficulty waking her. When he whispered her name a shadow of pain scarred her face. Her eyes opened and closed like a doll’s eyes.

“What do you want?” she asked, mildly indignant.

“Do you want me to carry you in?” he asked.

“I should say not,” she said, sitting up stiffly, moving her hair out of her eyes. “I don’t know what’s the matter with me. I never fall asleep in cars.”

Isabelle hurried ahead of him into the house.

She would have said something to him, had something on her mind, but thought to go upstairs first to take a bath.

The delay frustrated him. He wanted the ritual of her confession (and his forgiveness) out of the way so that they could get on to something else.

They had barely exchanged a word since he had wakened her, the silence echoing. The unspoken secret rankled.

Terman was conscious of what he did only in the moment of its doing, taunted afterward by the consequences of unremembered actions. The cry of the kettle disconcerted him — he had no sense of having gone into the kitchen to put up water for tea — thought in his distraction that there was a child in the house or an aggrieved cat.

“Tea or coffee?” he called up the stairs. He knew the answer, but he wanted to hear the sound of a voice, something to confirm his presence in the world.

On the way upstairs, he forgot about the boiled water in the kitchen, the question of tea or coffee, the sound of Isabelle’s voice or anyone else’s, and directed himself to his study, the only room he felt at home in. It was not as if he didn’t know what he would find or not find when he pulled open the bottom drawer of the desk. It was merely that he had to see for himself again and again, had to hold illusion only to court disillusion. A quixotic belief in the infinite possibilities of restoration compelled him. Surprises were never a surprise. He found a toy pistol in the very place he had kept the real one, a mock redemption, a menacing joke. He studied the imitation disbelievingly, half-thought that the original gun had been false too — everything on close inspection was false — though he knew that wasn’t the case. It was at that moment he decided that he could not be at ease with himself until Tom returned home.

Close up of a railway timetable. A hand circles 2:07 with a fountain pen. Wipe to a railway clock at two minutes after two. A slow pan reveals a railway station somewhere in Eastern Europe. There are four people waiting without apparent urgency for the train, an old couple, a middleaged woman who looks like a madam, and a studious-looking young man carrying a briefcase.

We see the hand of the clock move to 2:08. We hear a train coming into the station, hear it before we see it. The train slows down as it approaches the station but then as it appears about to stop, picks up speed again. The old man knocks at the side with his walking stick, calling to it to stop. “What’s the meaning of this?” he says to the others. “I demand to know the meaning of this.” “Shhh,” his wife says. The train flashes by leaving a cloud of dust in the air. When the train is gone, we are made aware of a shadowy form on the tracks. The stationmaster comes out after a moment to have a look. In the wake of the train, we discover the body of a young woman lying on the tracks. The four people on the platform pretend not to sec what surely each has glimpsed at some point.

We cut away to the dashboard clock of Henry Berger’s car. It reads 2:04, then 2:05. Henry Berger and Yanna are travelling at high speed along a winding road. A black limousine seems to be following them, though perhaps it is only going in the same direction.

“Are we almost there?” the woman asks with a kind of private irony.

“We are always almost there,” says Berger. “There’s the station up ahead, an idyllic setting isn’t it? Don’t get out of the car until I tell you it’s all right.”

We cut to two stationworkers lifting the body, covered with a blanket, off the tracks. The stationmaster stands behind them waving a red flag. The railway station clock reads 2:07.

We see Berger through the window of the station talking to the station-master. The studious young man, looking in the window, appears to be interested in their conversation.

We see the limousine that had been behind them on the road pull into the station lot in the row just behind Berger’s car. Yanna rolls up the window, locks the door, watches the other car in her rear-view mirror. The oddly dressed woman from the station gets into the other car.

Berger returns to the parking lot on the run, gets into his car. “We have to go to the next station,” he says. “The train was five minutes early and didn’t stop.”

From an overview we see three cars in close proximity — Berger’s in the lead — speeding along a narrow road. The red sportscar shoots past Berger in a dangerous maneuver. As soon as it gets ahead, it slows up, forcing Berger and the black limousine behind him to decrease their pace.

The limousine moves out alongside Berger’s car and we see into it for the first time. There are two heavyset men in front, both wearing dark glasses, and the heavily made-up woman from the station in the back. When the young woman removes her wig — we catch a glimpse of her as the limousine goes by — her appearance is significantly altered. The two cars speed ahead of Berger, concerned for the moment only with each other. At some point the second car moves abreast of the first, neither making an effort to pass or fall back. We perceive them from Berger’s vantage point, losing them momentarily each time the road turns. Yanna hunkers down in her seat, covers her eyes with her hands. The two cars bump one another, each trying to force the other off the road. At some point the driver of the sports car throws something through the window at the other car. There is an explosion, the limousine crashing into a telephone poll. The sports car speeds on. A man in woman’s clothing, his clothes in flames, pulls himself out of the wrecked car. He staggers a few moments, then collapses. Berger and Yanna stop a few yards behind the wreck, get out of their car. The transvestite dies before they can get to him/her. (We recognize the figure as Pietro D’Agostino.) They return to their car and sit at the side of the road, Berger’s arm around Yanna, who is shivering. She kisses him.

Yanna: When I’m frightened I always want to make love.

Berger starts up the car and they move on. Through the rear-view mirror we see the scattered fragments of the wreck, streams of flame illuminating the countryside.

Terman returned to the kitchen and made two cups of Indian tea, using one tea bag for both cups, an uncharacterisic economy. He drank half a cup diluted with milk and poured the rest down the drain. Isabelle’s would be cold when she finished whatever she was doing and he called to her in a tentative voice, tea’s ready, not insisting on it, wanting above all to avoid a fight.

When she came down in jeans and a cashmere sweater, her hair in curlers covered by a red scarf, he asked her if she wanted to go back to sleep. She said, thank you no. A formality had come between them, a delicate caution.

One word, he felt, a wrong word or one readily misconstrued, might precipitate a fight. He was determined to prevent conflict if possible and was all smiles and kindness for a moment or two. “You’re not acting like yourself,” she told him.

Something else was on his mind and though he had resolved not to mention it to Isabelle, obsession overrode constraint.

“I’m thinking of sending Tom back to the states,” he announced.

She got up to make herself a fresh pot of tea. “Are you?” she asked.

He would be able to breathe again, he said, once his son was off his chest. Isabelle said nothing. He repeated his remark.

“You’ve got twenty-four hours to get out of town, pardner,” she said, her eyes mysteriously wet.

“You do that very well,” he said.

Isabelle wore her impatient look. “You can’t make him leave if he doesn’t want to go, Terman, can you?”

He put his hand on her hand, reaching awkwardly across the table. “He’ll go, I think.”

“Why should he, for God’s sake. Why the hell should he? If you were in his place, would you go?” She suffered his touch, her will clenched against him.

He withdrew his hand, said he didn’t understand her bitterness, that it was Tom he was talking about, not her.

“Oh cut it out,” she screamed at him.

Afterward, when they had agreed on the terms of a truce and Isabelle had gone up to their room for no clear reason, a dull pain moved into his chest, frightening him. He staggered up from the table, dislodging the cup of cold tea in front of him, and fled into the nearer of the two sitting rooms, a hand on his chest pressing back the invisible ache. He willed calm, sat with his eyes closed, setting up the itinerary of mundane tasks that would occupy him for the next three or four hours. Hot bath…brush teeth…shave…shop at Europa for beer…read last two chapters of Dom Casmura… take Isabelle to lunch….

The pain receded or moved on, exorcised by the litany of his plans and he went upstairs to put up water for his bath. He was taking off his shirt when he heard a crash from somewhere in the house. He stuck his head out the door and called Isabelle’s name and got nothing but a squeak of wind against window in return. When he looked into the bedroom she raised her head and asked if something was the matter. “Do you want to make love?” he asked, not knowing what else to say. “When I wake up,” she said and he returned to the bathroom and closed himself in. The ache in his chest recalled itself like an echo.

Terman looked crumpled in the mirror, more so without his clothes than with, catching his reflection out of the side of his eye as he stepped into the tub.

The water in the bath was too hot on the surface and not warm enough once he was seated in it, an underlay of coldish water like a draft at the bottom. Had he locked the door? It worried him that he hadn’t, made aware of the vulnerabilty of his position. He stood up and sat down again, would take the risk.

The idea of a bath was to give oneself to it unequivocally, to ripen in the hot water like noodles or potatoes. It had to be searing for that, almost too hot to bear. He slid forward so that only his head and the top of his knees weren’t submerged. He was thinking of the best way of breaking the news to Tom, rehearsing variant possibilities in his imagination, nothing right. Tom, I want you to go home: I’m sending you home. His anger trampled his prose. You come all the way from America to visit and then you don’t even live with me, though invade my life, steal from my desk, leave threatening messages. I won’t stand for it any longer. Empty bluster. He had begun to sound like his own father. Perhaps he ought to take some of the responsibility on himself. I can’t even handle my own life, how can I handle yours?

Someone was knocking on the door to the bathroom. “I’m in the bath,” he said. After a moment, assuming she hadn’t heard him, he raised his voice, said he hadn’t fallen asleep in the tub. She made no comment or none that he could hear. “I’ll be out in a few minutes,” he said.

He felt no compelling urgency to leave the bath but it was time and he emerged dutifully, moving quickly to circumvent the shock of air, throwing a bath towel over his shoulders.

He shaved and dressed, held brief consultation with his reflection in the steamy mirror (“I worry that you’ll do something desparate,” he said to his son) and came down the stairs like a visiting dignitary. Isabelle was asleep on the couch, dead asleep as she had been in the car, a french fashion magazine called Marie Clare clutched to her chin. Terman tried to remove the magazine without disturbing her sleep, but she held on with the ferocity of a child. He went away, then came back with his trench coat from the closet and covered her legs. After kissing the top of her head, he tried again to remove the magazine but Isabelle held fast.

There was a week’s mail, mostly bills and circulars (what else was there ever?) stacked neatly in two piles on the dining room table. Leafing through, he remembered he had a letter from Magda in his jacket pocket that he had been carrying around for two days. It had been posted nine days ago from New York so was likely to be old news. His right hand trembling like something in a wind, he tore the letter open, wanting to get the distasteful out of the way so he could get on to something else.

Typed on thin yellow paper, the letter was written in capitals like a ransom note.

Terman went up to his study, put an air letter in his Lettera 32 and typed off an answer in white heat, resisting the impulse to do the text in lower case.

Dear Magda,

I am writing to acknowledge your letter which didn’t reach me until…

Terman addressed the airletter, assembled it and put it in the inside pocket of his jacket. He thought if he viewed his own behavior from the vantage of an outsider, he might well despise himself. His watch, which was going again, indicated that it was almost 9 o’clock, that the real day had begun.

He unlocked the door of his hermetic space and stepped out into the hall, wary of the least shadow. The house was quiet, unnaturally silent. He restrained an impulse to shout, walked stealthily, lit his way in the muted morning light from room to room.

Isabelle was asleep in the master bedroom, had changed location (had sleep-walked?) while he was writing the letter to Magda. The other rooms, including both bathrooms, were empty.

He mounted the stairs to the third floor with the same stealth, though the creaky stair boards contrived to betray his step.

Even before he reached the top of the steps he called his son’s name. He heard his own name in response but it came from below.

“Terman?”

In a moment there were footsteps on the stairs coming up, a delayed echo.

“What time is it?” Isabelle asked him. “I feel as if I’ve been out of it for hours.”

He opened each of the five rooms on the third floor, pushing the doors open with his foot and stepping back. He tried the closets (once started it was difficult to give up the quest), looked under the beds, uncovered nothing. “Could I talk to you, Terman?” Isabelle asked.

In one of the rooms, the one with the full length wall mirrors, there was a chair by the window overlooking the street that he could have sworn had not been in that position before. It was the only obvious sign that someone might have been there.

“In my dream,” Isabelle was saying, “you were having a fight with my mother and I was trying to meliorate. You kept insisting — we both thought you were bonkers — that though you were younger than she, you were actually her father.”

“I was speaking metaphorically,” Terman said.

“My mother kept repeating — it was something she used to say to me when I was a child — “You make me want to tear my hair, luv.”

When they were downstairs he asked Isabelle if she had knocked on the bathroom door when he was in the bath.

“Why would I do that?”

“You didn’t, did you?”

“Of course I didn’t.” She lit a filter-tipped cigar, stared unhappily into the smoke.

He prowled the house, opening and reopening the same doors. Since when had she been smoking cigars, he wondered.

“Once you start something,” she said, “you never give it up, do you?” She put an arm around his waist, though removed it almost immediately.

“Don’t you give me a hard time too,” he said.

“Who’s giving whom a hard time, I’d like to know.”

If Tom were gone, he thought, everything else would fall into place. Isabelle left him to make a phone call from the kitchen with the door closed.

He shouted Tom’s name so that it reverberated through the seemingly untenanted house.

Isabelle returned as if he had conjured her from out of the walls. “If I were your son,” she said, “I’d probably hide from you too.” She winked at him to soften the remark.

He was in no mood to be propitiated, was up to the worst she had to offer. “If I were me, I’d hide from me too,” he said. “You don’t think he’s still in the house, do you?”

“I don’t see how he could be,” she said, “do you?”

At first he couldn’t find his corduroy jacket, and was willing to blame his son for that loss too, but then it turned up on the back of a chair in the kitchen. “I’m going out to find Tom,” he said. “We can go out for lunch at a wine pub when I get back if you like.”

Isabelle shrugged. “I find this all so unpleasant and painful, do you know? I tend to identify with Tom and wish to God you just let us be…I’m sorry, sweetheart.” She came over and leaned her head on his cheek. “Why don’t you at least call first and see if he’s there?” She kissed his face.

“Don’t comfort me,” he said.

“That wasn’t what I had in mind,” she said. “Would you like to have a go?” She winked at him in parody of brazenness.

It disturbed him when she wasn’t herself, made him feel he didn’t know her, that the person he knew no longer existed. He wanted to tell her that he loved her, but found the words embarrassing to speak. “I can’t concentrate on anything,” he said.

“I’ve never known you to turn it down before.”

“Think of it as a postponement,” he said. “One can’t always do what one wants to do.”

“I know all too well how that is,” she said, holding the outside door open for him. “Sorry I asked.”

He almost expected the boy to spring out at him as he stepped into the air.

“I have to go to work at two,” she called after him. “I forgot to tell you.”

And then the oddest thing happened. Driving in the general area of his son’s rented room, he couldn’t find the street, was failed by his usually faultless sense of direction. He could neither find the right street nor remember its name. It was not even that the neighborhood was foreign to him, not that excuse, nor that there were no recognizable landmarks. He came on a rather grim playground he had once played tennis in and a church in the process of being torn down that he had passed on foot a number of times, but his son’s street, which ran parallel or perpendicular to it, eluded him. If only he could recall its unappealing name, he could stop someone and ask directions. Chepstow kept coming to mind, though that was the name of the proprietress, the street something else. He knew the number was 44, which was his age on his birthday before last. After a point, on something called Barlby — it was as if a syllable had been swallowed — he pulled over to the curb and stopped the car. He poked into the glove compartment to check out the ratty London street guide he kept there, though, like his memory, that too was gone.

He emptied his pockets, found a number of fragmentary messages on torn-off pieces of envelope, much of it at this point in unbreakable code. Tom’s address was not among the debris.

With no clear intent he got out of the car, thought on foot he might find his son’s rooming house or some familiar street name that would lead him to it. Perhaps he thought nothing of the kind, wanting merely to be out of the car, to be free of that burden.

The streets seemed to wind back on each other, but he walked energetically in a direction he had chosen arbitrarily, guided if at all by a trust in instinct. The buildings he passed were in states of disrepair, many uninhabited, some boarded up. He persisted in the sense that he was going in the right direction, took long strides — the faster he walked the less his bruised hip bothered him — anticipating that the next street (or the one after that) would be the one he sought. Never for a moment did he consider that he might be lost, or that a house with a Bed and Breakfast sign in the window might not after a certain point appear before him. It was one of those London days in which, though it appears not to be raining, almost everything is moist — the rain seeming to come up from the ground rather than down from the sky. He had the illusion from time to time that there were footseps behind him, but instead of looking to see who it was he quickened his pace.

Three Arabs standing in front of a pub, stared at him as he passed. One called something to him in a nearly incomprehensible dialect. The others laughed unpleasantly.

Did he know the man who spoke to him? He didn’t think so, though turned, despite his sense of urgency, to look. Something, a stone perhaps, hit him just above the right eye. He let out a scream, the sound like nothing he had heard himself utter before, his hand to his eye. The Arabs scattered, each taking a separate direction. The scream continued, despite his intent to stop, sustained itself like an electronic alarm that had to run its course. An older man, also dark-skinned (Indian or Pakistani, he thought) came over and said something unintelligble, the persisting scream overriding other voices.

His hand came away from his eye, unglued itself from the wound. He had not, as feared, lost sight in the eye, though his vision, perhaps from the pressure of his hand, was somewhat blurred. There was a little blood from the wound, not much, insufficient to his response, the palm of his hand the wound’s mirror.

Terman had embarrassed himself enough for one morning, refused the offer of the man’s arm, thanked him as an afterthought, and hurried off in the direction he had come.

The man followed briefly, offering a hospital or something that sounded like hospital as if he had one in his possession. He said repeatedly that he was okay, that no real damage had been done.

And then, he had difficulty retracing his steps, the street names not what they were. The walk back seemed to age him. After a half dozen blocks, he was too tired to go any further and he sat down on a bench in front of an abandoned church, took out a handkerchief and wiped the rain from his face. In a moment or so he would get up and locate a public telephone (that consideration sustaining him), and report to Isabelle his painful misadventure. Sweetheart, she would say, I’m so sorry.

Her pity, in his imagination of it, was more than he could bear. Why, if she were as devoted to him as she pretended, had she gone off with Max?

Oh Terman, she would say — or was it Luke? — you are a misery, luv, aren’t you?

He continued to sit, clasping himself against the damp air. People passed occasionally, glancing at him with indifference. He imagined himself getting up, locating a Newsagent on the next street or the next, buying a Guardian to get some change — mostly he avoided the English papers — locating a phone box, closing himself in, dialing his number. All he really had to do was get back to his car on Barlby Street and drive himself home.

When he looked up he saw the Pakistani and another swarthy man coming down the street toward him. Their impending presence moved him to cross the street, his gesture making it clear, he hoped, that he didn’t want to be interfered with again. The Pakistani called something to him and he shouted back, “Nothing to worry about, thank you.”

What the hell did they want with him? He turned right at the next corner, though he couldn’t remember if he had come that way or not. It was the shock of it that caused him to lose his poise. On the next corner, standing with his back to him, was the Arab that had thrown the stone at him. (Had he thrown the stone because he recognized Terman as a Jew?) Stupidly — he knew it was a mistake to call attention to himself even as he gave vent to the impulse — he broke into a run. Not looking back, he took a left turn at the next corner, a narrow winding street called Vashti Lane, which connected with a series of other winding streets. His sense of direction betrayed him. He hurried from one tortuous street to the next only to discover himself returned to the very street from which he had taken precipitous leave.

He stood awhile against the wall at the intersection of Calgary Road and Vashti Lane before daring to look around the corner. His adversaries were standing across the street in front of a red and white stucco house, their backs to him, heads close together like conspirators. It was at moments like this that he was most aware of being in a foreign country, of having nowhere in particular to turn in a crisis. Panic governed him. He returned up the series of winding streets, running at first, then walking quickly, atempting a new set of choices. Whatever he did, his choices blind, he found himself back on Calgary Road, his original point of departure. A third time (or was it the fourth?) he reversed himself, varying his route, taking two successive lefts then a right then another half right and another, until he found himself in a cul de sac, a medium-high fence backing on a small unkempt field. In all of the maze of streets he had come, there had not been one open shop or a single working public telephone.

There was no entrance to the field at his end. Nothing to do, he thought, but climb the fence, no matter the difficulties, and trust there was an open gate on the other side. The fence seemed slightly lower on the left, round-shouldered from erosion, though the far right side offered the advantage of a cement pedestal of about two feet high that might bear his weight. If he raised himself on his toes while standing on the pedestal, he could grip the fence sufficiently to pull himself over.

An old woman, banging on the sill with a shoe, called to him from the window to go away.

He waved to her, asked if there was an exit on the other side of the field.

“If you don’t scoot this instant, young man, I’ll have the bobbies on you,” she said. She had a face that looked as if it could turn you into stone.

Terman walked away as though he had accepted her warning, not looking back until he judged himself beyond her range. The head was hanging out like a flag, peering blindly in his direction. He waited until it had withdrawn, and then a minute or so beyond that. If he could clear the fence at one jump, the unstatued pedestal his springboard, he might get by without the old lady’s notice. He got a running start, had one foot over, was awkwardly split at the top, when the head thrust itself out the window and squalled at him to get away.

Her shouting harried him like a vicious dog at his heels. The second leg cleared awkwardly, ankle scraping the top. Unable to brace himself for the fall, he took all his weight on his left leg and pitched forward, his other leg folded under him like an afterthought. The pain came in flashes and seemed bearable except in moments of expectation. He was in a vacated lot, once perhaps a cricket pitch or a small park. There was the skeleton of a structure in one corner, the beginnings of an apartment complex that had either been temporarily or permanently abandoned.

He couldn’t get up, reconciled himself to the arrival of the police, the inevitable nastiness and misunderstanding.

It was possible that his leg was broken, one or the other (one banged up, the other severely twisted), though he was inclined to think not. When the pain receded — the left ankle its main source — he rolled onto his side. He rested a few minutes from his exertion. Using his right arm for leverage, he gradually pulled himself upright, the preponderance of his weight on his right leg. How odd to be standing. How unnatural the position seemed. He walked a few cautious steps, putting one foot in front of the other, right first then left, then right, the process not quite as he remembered it. His body refused the upright position, longed to fall. He stopped his stuttering walk, stood with his legs apart, half-squatting, to purchase his balance. The ragged park, deserted except for an urchin kicking a soccer ball at the far end, extended itself before him. There was no sign of the police, but he could believe that the old lady would follow through on her threat. What else was there in her life? He forced himself to walk, pulling one foot, dragging the other, the space magnified by his urgency. He had to instruct his feet to get himself moving, each step ordered to specification. The far end of the park — he could make out an open gate where the boy was kicking the ball — approached him by degrees. Nausea came and went, settled in for a prolonged visit. His right foot must place itself ahead of his left and then his left must outdo, if only by several inches, if only by its own size, the presumptions of his right. The boy looked up at him, stared for a moment, then went about his business, which included a controversy with an imaginary adversary.

The closer he got to the exit — he was more than halfway there, he thought — the greater his sense of urgency. He might actually escape his pursuers, avoid confrontation with the police, find a taxi and return to the safety (the relative safety) of his own house. He didn’t want to believe it, resisted hope, committed to no larger possibility than fulfilling the demands of the next step.

Only for moments did he think of the target he offered, limping slowly across the open field. It would not require a particularly good marksman to bring him down.

He was struck by the recollection of an airless Polish film he had seen in Cleveland Ohio the night of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. In the movie a group of men attempt to escape the Nazis by moving through the city’s sewer system, a network of underground tunnels. The maze of entrapment had never seemed more claustrophobic. One man gets through at the end. When he rises from the sewer, after having miraculously endured in that underground hell, Terman had anticipated that enemy soldiers would be waiting for him. That they weren’t did not undo for him the expectation that they were there, and had chosen not to reveal themselves. The survivor redescends at the end to search for his comrades or perhaps merely because he is no longer able to bear the idea of freedom.

The right ankle becoming increasingly tender, he gradually shifted the burden of his weight from the right foot to the left. Even the present limiting circumstances yielded choices. He had to decide whether to veer from his path to pick up an old broomstick that might, if it weren’t rotted out, be used as a cane.

He cut down the space between himself and the stick in short order, wanting the digression concluded and the real trip resumed. He refused to regret his choice, but a rueful feeling persisted, a sense of unredeemable error.

He squatted to acquire the warped broomstick, heard someone coming and raised his head to look, tilting backwards, restoring his balance as a trick of will. Two other boys, slightly larger than the first, had joined the urchin in his makeshift game. They were shouting at some unseen audience in mock bravado.

Terman claimed the splintery stick and rose like Lazarus to his feet.

“Hey, that’s me private club,” one of the newcomers yelled at him. There was some self-conscious laughter from the others.

He ignored them as a matter of choice, walked conscientiously, using the stick as a third leg, toward the open gate.

He would have liked to avoid crossing paths with the ragged soccer players, but to go out of his way was to call attention to his fear (was he even really afraid of them?), might invite some form of interference. If they decided to mug him — it could come to that without premeditation — there was little he could do to prevent it. (Where were the police the old lady had threatened to call?) He noticed another possible exit, an iron gate on the far right that was closed and possibly locked. He decided — the decision made instinctively — to continue in the direction he was going. Involved in their game, the boys might be willing to overlook his trespass.

The largest one called out to no one in particular. “That gent has got me big stick between his legs.”

He thought to joke back, show them he was one of the boys himself, though held, instinct again predominating, to his decision to ignore them. The cane preceded him, step by step, had become an integral part of his act.

He passed through, had got beyond the arena of the game, without incident.

In the next moment, the ball rode by him, barely missing his leg, buckling the cane. The boys pursued the ball, were rushing helter skelter in his direction, bumping each other as they ran. The implication of the ball being kicked in his direction was hard to avoid.

They brushed him slightly as they went by (did he imagine the contact?), did him no notable damage. It might have been the wind that stroked his elbow. Was that all the harm they meant to do?

One of them, he noticed with a sideglance, was moving the ball toward him with his foot. Terman sidestepped cautiously, a delicate maneuver. The ball skipped by him.

“Goal Rangers,” the boy who had been kicking it called.

They were behind him now, their movements unobservable, their loud chatter announcing the progress of the game. They played to him, their voices too loud for themselves alone, dogged his heels.

The ball again skittered past him, bounded headlong toward the open gate.

“Penalty kick,” one of them called out.

He readied himself for trouble, held the cane in both hands.

In a moment they were past him, scrambling after the ball, calling to it to stop its flight. They disappeared through the open gate, pushing each other for position as they left his view, their cries of complaint hanging in the air, surviving their departure.

He felt a loss of energy like the sudden dying of a wind. Each step required more effort than its achievement seemed to warrant. He inched toward the gate, which was almost directly in front of him, his pace so slow it seemed like virtual immobility. It was curious that the soccer players hadn’t returned. Terman strained to locate their voices but they were silent or had gone away. The more immediate danger became the less it frightened him.

Just as he stepped through the gate — the boys for all he knew were waiting for him on the other side — he thought of Tom hating him.