My Father More or Less

7

He thought it odd that Isabelle hadn’t answered the phone, tried to imagine where she might have gone, was angry at her defection. A taxi went by, was gone before he could call to it, before he could step from the booth and make himself known. Through the glass of the phone box, the street, the one he had come to through the small park, gave off glints of familiarity. He had visited it before, perhaps earlier that day. The peeling facade of a yellowish frame house directly across from where he stood had been a point on some trip he had once taken or dreamed.

He had the idea that Isabelle, worried about his prolonged absence, had gone out to search for him, had taken a bus or taxi to his son’s apartment with certain disastrous consequences.

He also had the idea (one didn’t cancel out the other) that Max Kirstner had arrived at his house and finding Isabelle alone, had persuaded her to go off with him to his flat in South Kensington. It was no less possible that she was in the shower or had gone to work.

In five minutes, or ten (or twenty-five), he was at his car, was in the driver’s seat, his head against the steering wheel. He didn’t have to raise his head to notice that there were three men across the street, staring at him, one of them the devious Pakistani that had dogged his steps.

Terman started up the car, considering only briefly what options remained to him if it didn’t start. All the while, a mist of rain coming through the half-opened window, he sweated from some private heat. He imagined himself taking a hot bath, a recuperative bath, soaking his swollen ankle, washing the sweat from his face. It was better than any real bath might have been, this imagination of bath, calmed his terrors.

He drove home, sat in the car for no time at all after he parked, felt incapable of letting himself out, of crossing the street, of unlocking the door to his house.

A furious woman, unimaginably familiar, was tapping at the window with a key.

“Didn’t you see me?” she was asking. “I was standing at the entrance to the park when you drove by and I was calling you, wasn’t I, and waving my arms.”

Isabelle came around and got in the other side of the car, though neither of them was going anywhere. “Tell my about it,” she said. “Did it go all right?”

He misjudged her sympathy and tried to kiss her on the neck, the collar of her blouse obstructing his intent. She pushed him away, using all her strength, drove him into the handle of his own door.

Later, after he had taken his hot bath and gone to bed, she tiptoed into the room and apologized for having been so upset with him. Terman feigned sleep, feigned dreams, feigned dying.

She cuddled his head against her chest or he dreamed her doing it.

He imagined or dreamed, imagined he dreamed or dreamed he imagined, the following conversation.

“I never got to see him.”

“That’s odd, isn’t it? You were gone such a long time I thought surely you were with him.”

“I ran into difficulty, a series of difficulties. I was going to call you and tell you about it but I couldn’t find a public phone and when I did and called you there was no answer.”

She was holding his hand to her mouth (or so he imagined) when the phone interrupted. “Why don’t we let it pass,” he dreamed himself saying.

Isabelle left to answer the phone while Terman imagined that he was the one that had gotten out of bed to confront the unknown. Isabelle said Hallo. Max was on the line to announce he was flying to Los Angeles in the morning. Isabelle said Hallo, the sound returning like an echo from a distant place.

She shouted something unintelligible, her voice unusually shrill, then hung up the phone.

Isabelle waited for him to ask what happened before committing her story to him. As it was, he had no intention of asking. Her experience with the silent phone went unshared.

A second phone call seemed to wake him several hours later and he picked up the receiver to hear Max do his well-worn imitation of English fatuity.

“BBC here,” he said. “Not disturbing anything, old boy, am I? We’re all wild over here about televiewing the story of your life if you could condense it into five or six absolutely smashing words.”

“I think you have the wrong number,” Terman said.

“This isn’t the brilliant, Dr. T? I’d know that voice anywhere, luv.”

“Dr. T done gone away,” he said.

“When you see the scoundrel, old boy, might you tell him that Max Kirstner will be in California for the next half week, some business to transact. The international director will be appearing on the show, Let’s Make a Deal.”

“Don’t expect ever to see that man, boss.”

“If you do run into the old boy, tell him that Max liked what he read of his latest rewrites, liked but not loved, though he is willing to compromise on matters of the heart. To keep up the good work and all that. Ciao, bambino.”

Terman called to Isabelle and got no answer, merely the return of her name, the echo of her absence.

When he found himself fully awake it was about midnight, he guessed, though it could have been any time. Days might have passed, whole lifetimes. A woman was asleep next to him, one of her legs curling about his like a vine.

He woke hungry and went downstairs in the dark to fix himself something to eat, the sore ankle still somewhat tender, though vastly improved for its rest.

The sleep had refreshed him — he was maneuvering down the stairs in the dark — and he considered that he was having, or had had, a condition known as breakdown.

He felt remarkably good at this moment of reckoning, felt like whistling or making love or watching an old American movie on television, preferably a western or mystery.

The house was absolutely dark, was dark the way a religious mystery is dark; it was illumined by dark.

The chairs in the large parlor were occupied by shadows. He saluted them as he passed, raising two fingers to his forehead, a gesture out of some other time or place. The shadows ignored his passage or took it for granted.

He was in the kitchen, had found his way there without turning on a single light, and was standing in front of the refrigerator.

He was on the steps coming down, his ankle paining him, holding on to the bannister as he made his way.

He poured himself a congnac, sat down on the maroon velvet couch in the large parlor and adjusted his eyes to the nuances of blackness.

He took a slice of baked ham from the refrigerator and made an open sandwich with it on a thick slice of stale black bread. He took a bite out of it then decided it wasn’t what he wanted and returned to the large parlor without it. His son Tom was waiting there for him.

He came down the stairs with both hands on the bannister, each step a plunge into the unimaginable. They had the following conversation.

“Is that you, Dad?” one of the shadows asked him. “I understand you’ve been looking for me.”

“I may have been. I don’t remember.”

“You don’t remember that you drove down from Ramsgate or Kent or whatever to say something to me that couldn’t wait?”

“It’s true that Isabelle and I drove down from Ramsgate through the night.”

“In the morning you got into your car — I don’t know if it’s yours or if it’s a rented job — and went looking for me.”

“The fact remains, and I think we ought to stay close to the facts, the fact remains that I didn’t find you.”

“Let me get this straight, Dad, okay? You’re denying that you were looking for me at all. It was coincidental that you were flashing around in my neighborhood and lost your way.”

“No. What I’m saying is this. The outcome of an act more or less defines its intention. I may have been looking for you or thought that that’s what I was about, but there’s no evidence that I actually wanted to find you.”

“It’s about time you admitted it,” Tom said.

An uneasy quiet followed, in which Terman got up and walked about.

“Is there something you want to say to me, Tom?” he asked.

Tom shook his head or so it appeared in the dark room. The abrupt movement of a shadow, dark against dark, darker against darker.

“Do you have the pistol with you?” Terman asked.

“With me?”

“I’d like to have it back if you don’t mind.”

“It’s in the pocket of my jacket. I take it with me everywhere.”

“I appreciate that,” Terman said under his breath. “Still, if you don’t mind, I’d like to have it back.”

“Do you need it right away, Dad? If you don’t, I’d like to, you know, hold onto it a while longer.”

Terman held out his hand, which was invisible in the dark room. “It’s out of the question,” he said. “What did you want it for in the first place?”

“I had nothing, you know, in mind. I just liked having it, just liked the idea of having it with me. Do you know what I mean? It was there for me.”

The same question kept returning. “There to do what with?”

“To do whatever. I mean, what use did you have for it?”

“The hero of the movie I was writing carried one and I acquired the gun as a form of research.”

“Yeah,” Tom said. “Right. If our reasons weren’t exactly the same, they weren’t so different either. Did you ever get to shoot it?”

The shadow leaned forward to ask the last question, the question pulling him forward.

“I went to a shooting range once,” Terman said. “It was a place for members only but Max knew the people in charge and so got us access. They had silhouettes of people and if you hit one in a vital part it would keel over.”

Tom laughed nervously. “Did you get off on it, Dad?”

“It was like eating forbidden fruit, had that fascination. Still, we were only playing.”

“You were doing research, right?”

“Are you being ironic with me?”

“If I am, it wasn’t intentional,” said the disingenuous shadow. “Do you think I was being ironic, Dad?”

The smarmy sincerity was more offensive to him than the irony, though he choked back his disapproval.

“I’m really sorry if it sounded that way,” Tom said. “Forget it, okay?”

“Perhaps I’m being over-sensitive or projecting my own view of myself on to you.”

“Let it go,” Tom whispered.

“I accept your version of it,” Terman said in a voice that engendered irony in his own ear.

“You may have been right about my tone,” confided the shadow. “I have a hard time — other people have told me this — letting people be the way they are. My mother says I disapprove of everything.”

“Does she?”

“Hey, who’s being ironic now?” He laughed goodnaturedly. “Anyway she didn’t really say that. I like to attribute my own perceptions to others. It gives them the voice of authority.”

Again Terman held his hand out in ambiguous demand. “I think it would be a good idea, Tom, if you gave me back the gun.”

“You don’t have to keep after me about it,” said the shadow. “Anyway, there are a few things I want to get off my chest first.’”

“Do you want to tell me for the hundredth time that I’m a disappointment to you?” The subject was sore to him, a perpetually reopened wound, and he regretted advancing it. What was this conversation about anyway?

“You could at least hear me out,” the shadow said harshly, “before you tell me I’ve nothing to say to you.”

“It’s no pleasure to me to be told once again that I’ve disappointed you. If you have something else to say, something that adds to the store of knowledge between us, I’ll listen to that.”

The shadow laughed, then lapsed into silence. He stammered something.

“What?”

“It wasn’t your pleasure I was thinking of,” he said. “It’s my recollection, okay? that I never told you what was really getting to me. I never told you because I was afraid to. Even now in the dark where we can’t even see each other’s face, I can’t get a fucking word out.” The news Terman awaited was like a delayed time bomb. His only escape was to run from the house and keep running.

Tom seemed on the verge of speaking, but nothing was said.

“Would it satisfy you if I apologized in advance?” Terman asked. “I’m terribly sorry I’ve failed you.” He stood up as if the couch had suddenly released him. “What the hell do you want from me?” Tom said nothing. Terman said he was sorry he had shouted and sat down.

“I hear you want me to go back to New York,” Tom said after a prolonged silence.

Terman resisted inquiring into the source of Tom’s information, though couldn’t imagine how the news had come to him indirectly. “That was one of the things I wanted to say to you,” he said. “The reason is self-evident.”

“Yeah,” he said, the word barely leaving his mouth. “I remember a time in California when I was supposed to stay with you for three weeks and, for some reason never explained to me, I was sent home in disgrace after five days. I remembered that for a long time.”

“I don’t remember it at all,” Terman said. “This happened in California? Are you sure it was California?”

The recollection came supported by a wealth of corroborating detail. The color and texture of a couch in the living room of a rented cottage. The insufficient room in the back where he was made to stay, a place with grease-stained yellow walls and infested spider webs, the floor made of dirt. Lizards darted across the ceiling at night like dismembered fingers. A blond girl in braids named Alma who liked to sunbathe nude on the terrace stayed with them.

“What did I do that you had to send me away?” Tom asked.

“I never lived with a woman named Alma,” Terman said.

“I remember the two of you talking about me one night after I was supposed to be asleep,” Tom said. “You were both complaining at how I made things difficult for you, was always underfoot or something. ‘Snooping’ was the word Alma used. The kid is always snooping around, she said, and you did nothing to dissuade her of the notion that I was this mutt you had taken in off the street that had shat on the rug without permission.”

“You’re making that up,” Terman said, smiling in the dark despite the tightening in his chest the conversation had caused him.

“I stayed awake the whole night,” said the shadow, “unable to get out of my head the creepy picture of myself the two of you had given me. I remember, though I was totally depressed, that I didn’t cry. I realized, you know, that I didn’t need to cry, that I used to do it to attract sympathy and I was beyond that. I didn’t want to trivialize my pain by making a public demonstration of it. A couple of days after that you told me I was flying back the next morning, that you had called my mother and that she would be at the airport to pick me up.”

False memories, like happy marriages, are all alike, he was tempted to say. Instead, he offered an alternative version of the event as a gesture of melioration. “What I think may have happened,” he said, “is that, feeling rejected, you asked to go home and then when I acquiesced to your wishes, you made it out that I was the one sending you away.”

“I don’t think so, I really don’t, but it comes to the same thing. Why did I feel I had done something wrong?”

The period in California seemed more like a movie he had slept through and reinvented than something real in his life. A small time producer named Godowitz had flown him out to do a screenplay of his second novel, Out of Itself, and he stayed on in the sun, chasing elusive gold for almost two years, one aborted project leading to another. He made some money and lost some time, picked up a screen credit for what turned out to be a single surviving line of dialogue. Tom and Kate’s visits during this period were as shadowy to him as the rest of the experience. The odd thing was, the oddest thing, was that he had no recollection of ever having lived with a woman named Alma. “Are you positive the woman’s name was Alma?” he asked. His memory never used to be so poor.

“I have the idea she was astoundingly young,” said Tom. “Like sixteen. And she never wore shoes. She had this pair of orange sneakers that she wore around her neck with the laces tied together.”

“Not possible,” he said. If there was someone like that, some barefooted sixteen year old hippie who in some moment of distraction he had allowed to move in with him, her name at least was something else. He closed his eyes, worked at recovering the forgotten name of a woman he couldn’t believe he had ever known.

“When the fog lifted which was like once a week,” the shadow said, “you could see the water from the window of my room. Each time it appeared it was like some kind of miracle. Alma used to come in, I remember this very clearly, and stare at the ocean from my window. She said she was a water sign which meant looking into the water was like looking into herself.”

“There never was an Alma in my life,” Terman said.

The shadow across from him let out its breath in a staccato of disappointments.

“I didn’t mean to upset you,” Terman said. “It may be that your memory of that period is more accurate than mine. I concede that much.”

“Do you?” he asked. “What if there were a gun to your head, what would you say?”

“Whose gun are you thinking of putting to my head?”

“It was just a figure of speech, for God’s sake. You don’t have to be so literal about it.”

“It’s only a figure of speech when you don’t have a gun in your possession. I’ll ask you to give it back to me one last time.”

“Or what?”

“Is that the way you want it?” Terman asked.

“It’s the way you want it.” The voice childish, pained.

He thought to ask again for the return of the gun, but decided that further reiteration would only weaken the impact of his request. He was on the verge of saying something unforgivable. “I’ll never forgive you for this,” he said. Abruptly it came to him, the recollection interrupting the flow of his anger. “The girl’s name was Opal, the one with the braids around her head. She was very odd, had been living in an abandoned car on the beach before moving in with me. She was beautiful and profoundly remote. I took her vagueness for some kind of mystery.”

“I still remember her as Alma,” said the other. “She had the thinnest lips of anyone I’d ever seen.”

At some point the conversation began to repeat itself.

“I had no expectations in regard to this visit,” Tom said. “My mother said she thought it would be an educational experience for me.”

“She thought that visiting you father would be an educational experience?”

“That visiting London would be. You make a gesture and then you never follow through on it. It’s okay. I mean, it no longer comes as a surprise to me. I don’t expect anything from you any more so you can’t disappoint me.”

“I think it would be best it you went home in a few days,” Terman said.

“If that’s what you want. You once told me, though I doubt you’d remember, that any place you were living was also my home.”

“I remember.”

“It doesn’t hold any more, right? Or you never meant it in the first place?”

At some point the conversation among shadows came full circle. Terman came down the steps in the dark with both hands on the bannister, each step a plunge into the unimaginable.

“I understand you’ve been looking for me,” a disembodied voice announced.

“I may have been. I don’t remember.”

A middle-aged man in a dressing gown is looking at his face in the wall mirror of an oversized bathroom. He rubs the back of his hand across his cheek, decides he needs a shave, is putting lather on his face when the phone rings. He considers not answering but after several rings picks up the phone which is on a marble table next to the toilet and says, “Monsieur Lange ici.”

“This is Henry Berger,” the voice says. “A mutual friend gave me your number.”

“Pardon.”

“I understand that you spoke English.”

“Not so good I’m afraid. What may I do for you, Mr. Barber?” He takes the receiver with him to the mirror and continues lathering his face.

“Is there anyone in the house with you?”

“Pardon, monsieur. I fail to understand.”

“Monsieur Lange, I’ll say this as plainly as I can. I have a strong reason to believe that your life may be in immediate danger.” Monsieur Lange looks at the razor in his band, then puts it down as if distrustful even of himself. “And how do you know such things if it is not youself who is the assassin?”

We cut to Henry Berger, who is calling from a phone booth in front of a service station. “It is possible,” he says, “that the assasssin is someone you know, someone you may even trust.”

Monsieur Lange resumes shaving. “Quite alarming,” he says with some irony. “Have you notified the police, Monsieur Becker? Do you not think the police ought to be informed of so serious a matter?”

“I can understand your skepticism. A man you don’t know calls you m the middle of the night to tell you your life is in danger. Why should you believe him? Still, there’s no harm in taking precautions, is there? One of the precautions I would have you take is not to stand near a window, at least not so your silhouette is revealed to someone watching outside. And another is not to inform the local police.”

Lange turns the light out in the bathroom. “You are either mad, my friend, or have been given misinformation. There’s nobody who wishes me evil. Now I think it is time to say goodnight.”

“Your name was found in a certain notebook among other names,” Berger says quickly. “You know what I’m talking about. The men whose names were on the list above yours, all except two, have died under what the police call suspicious circumstances.”

M. Lange lights a cigarette and sits down on the commode. “So it follows that I’m to be rubbed out next. Yes? I promise to be wary of every suspicious sound, Monsieur Barber. Now if you’ll excuse me.” M. Lange hangs up the phone abruptly. After putting out the cigarette and turning on the light, he returns to the mirror to shave the left side of his face. While he is shaving he hears footsteps outside or perhaps from another part of the house. He puts down the razor and goes to the phone, checking first to see that the bathroom door is locked from the inside.

M. Lange phones the Chief of Police, mentions the call from Henry Berger. As they talk, we cut to Henry Berger driving through the woods presumably toward M. Lange’s estate.

Standing in the dark, M. Lange listens for footsteps and hears none. He puts the light on and continues shaving. He studies his aristocratic face in the mirror, admiring his profile, distressed by the blemishes, the inevitable demarcations of age. He salutes himself, one formidable figure to another. At that moment, he hears a crash as if something, a vase perhaps, had been knocked off a table. “Merde,” he whispers. The faint footsteps resume and he concentrates on them, trying to determine if they arc from within the house or outside. He looks at bis watch. Perhaps it is someone he knows, his son returned or one of the servants.

“C’est toi, Jacques?” he calls.

There is no answer. He looks at his watch again. The footsteps have stopped and he waits for them to renew, then goes to the phone and calls the Chief of Police a second time. “My men should be there at any moment,” the Inspector says. Abruptly the doorbell rings. “I’m not going to hang up,” Lange says. “Hold on until I get back.” Lange puts on a shirt, brushes his hair, then lets himself out of the bathroom. He goes warily down a long corridor toward the frontdoor, announcing himself in aloud voice. There is another corridor, then a small foyer to pass through. “Un moment,” he calls, dismayed that the police haven’t rung a second time.

When Lange gets to the front door he has some difficulty unlatching it, pressured by panic. He is again in control of himself, all icy dignity, as he opens the door to confront a figure in a ski mask, holding a gun. Two shots are fired point blank before M. Lange can protest and he stumbles back into the cavernous house. He plunges into a sitting room, trailed by his own blood. He collapses, then revives and pulls himself laboriously toward a phone, knocking over a Chinese vase m bis path.

“Je suis assassiné,” he says into the phone, dragging it off the table as he falls.

Sunlight was in his eyes when Terman got up from the couch, unaware of the date or time of day. The kitchen cupboard was even barer than he anticipated, as if rats or thieves had been there first. There was nothing to satisfy his hunger in this borrowed house, the refrigerator and cupboards seeming to empty of themselves.

He remembered putting certain things away, remembered carrying a box of groceries in his arms, a pint of milk, box of tea, six croissants, half dozen brown eggs, bottle of claret, package of McVittie’s digestives, jar of Wilkinson’s raspberry conserves. He tended to shop as need demanded, rarely bringing in provisions with anything but the forthcoming meal in mind. Still, nothing, nothing at all, had survived the night.

“You’ve been behaving like a mad person,” Isabelle said, “do you know?”

“The madness is unintentional,” he said, meaning it as an apology. He was looking in a parlor closet for a walking stick he was postive he had seen in there, riffling among boots and umbrellas.

“Terman, I’m very unhappy with you,” she said. “I’m going into work in a few minutes and I wanted to say that.”

“Why isn’t anything where it was?” he asked. He held out his hand to her.

“Am I invisible?” she asked him. “Once in a while you fix on me and then you pay me some attention, but I could be an inanimate object for all that.” Her hand in his was like a trapped mouse. “That’s all I have to say.”

“I don’t dispute it,’ he said.

She looked up at his face, wary of unheard irony, angry at him beyond respite. He stood with his head down, took his scolding like a child. “I have to go now,” she said, kissing the side of his head. She extracted her hand. “I don’t know that I’ll be back this evening. Do you want me to ring up if I change my mind?”

“I can understand that you might want to be alone,” he said, meaning to be polite or generous.

She didn’t say anything to that. The unspoken comment was sufficient, she thought.

He nodded his assent, though his agreement had not been requested. It was not that she was invisible to him as she said, but that the whole physical world was vanishing by degrees before his eyes.

There was something she felt she had to tell him before she left, she said, trying to underplay the melodrama of such a statement. She had an actress’s ability to maintain her self-possession while undergoing storms of distress or anxiety. It was when her manner was most glacial that those who could read her knew she was most deeply upset. Terman, it might be said, saw nothing, not even the contemptuous manner she wore like a mask. His distraction was complete.

The confession came and went, untempered by regret. She had gone off with Max Kirstner that afternoon he had stayed behind to work on the screenplay. It was a gesture, she supposed, more self-defeating than spiteful, though for which she had no intention of apologizing. “It’s out of character for me to behave that way,” she said, “so I tend to blame you for it. I feel, isn’t it odd, that you were the one that betrayed me.”

Her accusation seemed neither to hit the mark nor miss it altogether and he accepted it as he had the report of her liaison with Max.

“Get the hell out of here,” he said suddenly angry. He opened the door and pushed her out.

The conversation continued briefly after she had gone, completed itself. “Perhaps I’ll be back the day after,” she said.

“Perhaps you will,” he said.

A few minutes later he was on the telephone in a response to a ringing that went on beyond its course.

“Hello,” he said, leaning jauntily on an umbrella as if he thought he might be Fred Astaire.

There was a click on the other end. He knew who it was, had gotten the message.

He couldn’t remember if he had gone shopping or had only thought about going, had lived through the anticipation of it, and so checked the refrigerator and cupboards again.

When he returned from the store with a box of groceries — the weight of his arms presented itself as evidence — the phone was ringing again.

“Marjorie Kirstner here,” the voice said.

He had expected the click again, the knife edge of disconnection, or indeed something worse. “Where are you calling from?” he asked.

“I’m in London,” she said. “I’m staying with some friends.” He heard symphonic music in the background and a counterpoint of voices: someone was laughing or crying. “If you’re not too busy, perhaps we could meet for tea this afternoon.”

It was as if his memory were getting shorter and shorter so that as soon as a moment had passed it was already lost to him. “Who is this?” he asked.

She laughed, took the question — how else might it be taken? — as as uninspired joke. “It’s Marjorie, darling,” she said. “You haven’t forgotten already, I hope.”

“Do you want to come here?” he asked. “Is that why you called?”

She was silent for a moment and he thought he heard a click, terrible and decisive, within the silence. The voice returned, altered by the expedition. “Do you really mean that?” it asked. “I can’t think that it would be appropriate.”

He tapped the umbrella on the floor to the tune of an American song called “Nature Boy,” which he hadn’t heard or even thought of hearing for twenty-five years.

“Is there someone there with you?” she asked.

“Where with me?”

“At your house, Terman. Isn’t that what we’re talking about, luv?”

“We’re talking about love,” he said. “Isn’t that what we’re talking about?”

“Are you being nasty with me,” she asked, “or has there been a genuine misunderstanding?”

He said he couldn’t remember which, his memory failing, which made her laugh her odd tinkling laugh.

“What’s your pleasure, luv?” she said. “Should I come chez tu or would you rather meet on the town?”

Some time later in the day, when it was getting to be four o’clock in the afternoon, the doorbell sounded. Terman had been in the study when interrupted, holding conversations with the detective Henry Berger.

When he opened the massive door — he thought of the house sometimes as an enormous vault — standing there was a woman about his own age and an elegant young man who seemed not much older than his son.

“You’ve met Emile, I believe,” Marjorie said.

Marjorie sent the aging young man on a tour of the house — she herself had been in all its corners when her husband had used it as a location for his film, “Ceremony of Night”—and went with Terman into the kitchen for some private conversation.

“Where is your adorable friend?” she asked in a confidential voice, taking his arm. “Are you two no longer a thing, as they say in America?”

He could think of no answer to make, felt at once bereft and unencumbered.

“I expect our situations have quelque chose in common,” she whispered, inclining her head toward him.

“How’s that?” he roused himself to ask.

It was the right question, but she indicated with a rolling of her eyes that she had no intention of answering. “Max has gone to California for a few days,” she said, “and I’m rather at loose ends. We were in the middle of a fight that had to be postponed indefinitely.”

He was thinking that Max had all but given up on the Henry Berger film and that Marjorie had come, in Max’s absence, to break the news to him.

“It’s still in consideration,” she said. “Don’t think it isn’t, luv. I don’t remember what I may have said but I suspect I was being a bit bitchy whatever it was. You’ll forgive me, won’t you?”

Henry Berger was almost always a step or two behind the conspiracy, finding corpses wherever he went, pursuing ominous implications.

“Truth to tell, I came to ask your advice,” she said. “I am in grave need of a bit of wisdom if you don’t mind.”

Terman laughed until his sides hurt, until tears broke from his eyes. “What wisdom can I give you?”

Emile floated into the kitchen and sat down at the head of the table, had the air of studying his own reflection in an imaginary mirror.

Marjorie said something to him in French and the aging child pouted in parody of grievance and turned his chair around. She winked at Terman. Her life with Max was a melodrama of betrayal and abuse, she confided in the presence of Emile’s impassive back. What should she do? What would he do it he were in a similar bind?

“You will never leave him,” Emile said with barely the trace of an accent.

“I will. I will,” she said with exaggerated passion. Her manner included an awareness of self-parody.

They had their tea — Marjorie had brought cream cakes from Fortnum and Mason — in the large gloomy kitchen. There was a scene like it in the movie, “Ceremony of Night”—two men and a woman having tea in that very kitchen, one the woman’s stepfather, the other her lover.

Henry Berger is aware as he enters the Florentine villa that he has been set up by his own people, has been marked for assassination. What he doesn’t know is that a friend and former colleague is the intended assassin.

At some point Emile departed the kitchen on some unannounced mission. Marjorie took the occasion to ask Terman if he didn’t think the actor was beautiful.

“I suppose so,” Terman said, “though it’s not my line.”

“Isn’t that just the kind of thing a man would say,” she said. “I have no difficulty appreciating female beauty — your little friend, Isabelle, for example — without it being quite in my line you know.”

He admired her largeness of spirit, he said.

“He’s tres jeune, but in important ways mature beyond his years.”

“He’s been around a long time,” Terman said. “I only wondered why you brought him along.”

“I’m flaunting him,” she said. “Is that what you think? Flaunting or flouting — I’m never quite sure which is the right word.” Her leg brushed his or his hers, an accident in which no one admitted being hurt. She said with the cup of tea at her lips, “I’ll send him away if you like.”

A woman comes into the parlor and offers Henry Berger a cup of tea, which he declines. Beyond the offer of tea, she makes no comment and might have been a servant or the lady of the house with equal plausibility.

When Emile returned she escorted him into another room and Terman, if he made the effort, could hear the murmur of their conversation. It was as though two or three bees had gathered at a closed window to conspire.

Henry Berger sits with his hat in his lap — it is a hat one has rarely seen him wear, a gray stetson from another time. He is waiting for his host to appear.

Emile, who had aged in the intervening minutes, returned to the kitchen to announce the necessity of his departure, some tiresome business with a producer that had slipped his mind. “My pleasure,” he said, offering Terman his hand as though it were meant to be kissed. “We will meet again it is my hope.”

Terman had seen him in a film at the NFT about three weeks ago — it struck him when the actor said “it is my hope”—an Italian western in which Emile had played one of the two principal villains. He had a breathtaking death scene, somersaulting in air from a blast of gunfire.

The door opens behind him and Henry Berger stands up, turning in no particular hurry to see his friend, Adriano, stride in with outstretched hand, greeting him with an old ¡oke they had once shared. A shadow passes over Henry Berger’s face, a mingling of disappointment and disbelief. Perhaps the information he had been given is incorrect or imcomplete and this friend, this partner of his early days, is not the one assigned to terminate his career.

Emile was gone. Marjorie indicated Emile’s absence with a wave of her purple scarf as if, by some feat of prestidigitation, she had caused the actor to vanish into air. “The great thing about him,” she confided, “is that he is not in the least way possessive.”

Emile’s disappearance, that well-managed trick, put Terman under a certain obligation to Marjorie, an obligation he had no intention of making known. Each was walking on a cane and Terman thought of them as a matched pair, a remark he heard himself make to his companion, one that pleased him more in consideration than in echo.

They sit facing each other on opposing brown velvet sofas, an octagonal marble table between them. “Is this splendid place yours?” Henry Berger asks him. “Adriano looks around him, assessing his apparent domain. “Would you like a guided tour, old friend? There are more rooms than I ever learned to count.” “I’m stunned with admiration,” says Henry Berger. “I’ve had a little luck,” says Adriano, motioning to Berger to follow him. “As you probably heard, I retired from the profession a little over three years ago.”

“I feel as if I’ve given up,” Terman said, “only there’s no one appropriate around to whom I might surrender.”

“You poor man,” Marjorie said. “If you want to surrender your sword to me, I’ll find some use for it.”

He took her hand, a transient possession he had no recollection of having acquired, and brought it to his lips. She blushed at the gesture, touched to confusion.

Terman was prey to unobjectified sexual hungers that surged and receded like the tides. An aspect of his fragmentation, he found himself susceptible to Marjorie, whose charms up until the present moment had the weightlessness of myth.

“I find this conversation odd in the extreme,” she said.

There is an army of people in the house all pretending not to be there, faces at the windows like faded posters. Henry Berger pretends not to notice the things he sees, follows his old friend through a maze of extraordinary rooms. If the international detective feels his life in some danger, his manner gives no indication of it. More disturbing even than the danger is the apparent treachery of his old friend, who is so ingratiating as he shows him about. Where will he make his move? he wonders. He knows the friend well enough to know that he will not leave the business to a henchman. Adriano leads him out onto a elegant terrace, invites the detective to admire the panoramic view, the mountain stream below, the gray gnarled cliffs which frame the villa on three sides like outer walls. “The vista is most admirable from the south-east,” says the friend, leading Henry Berger to a corner of the terrace, stepping back as if to offer him the spectacular vista as a gift. This is where he intends to do it, thinks Berger.

She sat with her legs tucked under her, holding a cigarette she only on rare occasion brought to her lips. Terman came back from the kitchen with a bottle of Muscadet and two champagne glasses. “I like that idea,” she said. She rose to her knees, put her arms around his neck and kissed him, the cigarette held behind his head.

The phone was ringing and she called his attention to it but he merely shook his head. “Mightn’t it be important?” she asked.

His hand was shaking. “I’d quite like to go into the room with all the mirrors,” she said. “That doesn’t offend you, I hope. I’ve always adored that room, though I can see that it might be pall after a while once you’ve had the initial frisson.”

The phone had stopped ringing, but after a few minutes interval began again. “I wish to hell you’d answer it,” she said. He took her cigarette from between her fingers and tossed it into the fireplace. “Don’t do that,” she whispered. “I don’t like things taken out of my hands.” The phone was still ringing as they went up the stairs, could be heard now from one of the rooms on the second floor in muffled counterpoint to the ringing downstairs. “Do you know who it is?” she asked him, poking him with her cane. They dueled briefly on the steps, each holding on with one hand to the bannister behind. He knocked her cane from her hand, sent it sprawling over the bannister to the floor below. She gave out a small cry of pain, more shock than pain. The phone stopped then started again. “The room I’m talking about is on the third floor, isn’t it?” she said.

This is where he intends to do it, thinks Berger. The old friend is standing a step behind and to the left, has not yet revealed his intention, speaks of the capacity of the landscape to change in different light. “We all change in different light.” says the detective. The dark young woman who offered him tea on his entrance, steps out onto the terrace carrying a bowl of olives. Two cars drive up to the other side of the house. “The note I received said you had some information for me,” says the detective. “You’ve been stepping on too many toes,” says Adriano. “There are some people in high places that might wish you out of the way.” They are facing each other, the hat in Henry Berger’s hand held out in front of him. The old friend points to something in the distance while moving his other hand into the pocket of his coat. Henry Berger fires first, his gun under his hat. The impact of the shot sends the friend careening into the side of the villa, his mouth a broken line, eyes frozen open in astonishment. The woman drops the bowl of olives, covers her mouth with her hand. Berger’s hat sails over the railing into the ravine below. The detective stands over the fallen Adriano, his gun still drawn. Adriano beckons him with a finger and Berger leans toward him, “One always pays for weakness in the end,” Adriano whispers, a gun in his hand pointing at Berger.

The door to the room with the mirrors was closed, a Do Not Disturb notice, the kind used in certain hotels, on the knob of the door, an irrelevancy which nevertheless caused Terman some hesitation. “Is something wrong, luv?” Marjorie asked. He put his ear to the door, listened to heart beat and pulse, the breathing of moths. “Who’s in there?” she whispered, leaning over him, the point of a breast pressed to his back like a knife. “What are we supposed to be listening for?” she asked. “This is all terribly amusing.”

When he had pushed the door open he was surprised by the fierce unshaven figure coming at him in the mirror. When he turned away for respite the same unenviable figure approached him from another side, and still another.

After she had removed her blouse, mocked on all sides by ghostly imitators, Marjorie said, “It’s the kind of bizarre joke my husband would play on one, isn’t it? Was that what you had in mind?”

“In this room one gets overwhelmed by self,” he said.

Marjorie told a story of how Max had invited some people to a dinner party at their old flat in Knightsbridge and had absented himself before the guests arrived. He had hidden himself somewhere in the diminutive five room flat and the object of the evening was to discover his hiding place. After searching in vain for four or five hours, the guests decided that they were being hoaxed. Marjore had them step out into the hall for five minutes and when she ushered them back Max was waiting for them in the living room. Not only had he been able to avoid discovery, he had also managed to film the search from wherever he was hidden.

“Did they ever get any dinner?” Terman asked.

“You know I don’t remember if they did or not,” Marjorie said, “though I can’t imagine we’d let them go home without any food.”

“Perhaps they ate and searched at the same time,” he said.

A sudden wind caused the door to the room, which had been ajar, to slam shut.

“I nearly jumped out of my skin,” said Marjorie, who had already divested herself of her clothes.

Terman recalled that the door to this room tended to stick, which was one of the reasons the room was rarely used. He could almost remember Max warning him about the door sticking at some inappropriate time in the legendary past.

Marjorie’s anecdote had conjured Max’s presence.

“It’s a bit dazzling, isn’t it,” she was saying, “seeing yourself like that. One is never absolutely sure if it’s oneself or someone else.”

Terman kept his eyes closed, spooked by the repetition of images around him, the redundancy of forms. He could imagine the scene being filmed, image within image within image, the camera image no more than a reflection of itself. He wondered if their reflections could fuck while they remained spectators to the event.

“We don’t have to do this if you don’t want to,” Marjorie said. “We could just sit here and talk if you prefer.”

Unless the mirrors lied, he was already lodged between her legs. “You’re very sexy,” he said to her.

“I get off on seeing myself,” she whispered. She was articulate to a fault, a scholar of variation, almost every gesture perfectly phrased.

He had a sudden longing to return home, to return to America, that unsceptered continent, to be among people again that spoke the same language.

He had been feigning madness, he thought, or was the pretence itself also madness? Hamlet faced the same dilemma.

Their reflections, he noticed — eyes open for the moment — betrayed more passion, more erotic pleasure, than the supposed originals.

“They expect me to kill you and for that reason I won’t,” Adriano says. “I won’t do their housecleaning for them this time.”

‘“Who’s they?” Henry Berger asks.

“I want you to promise me you won’t let them hurt Claudia,” he says, coughing spasmodically, a trickle of blood at the side of his lips.

“Who gives you your orders, Adriano?”

The dying man’s lips quiver at the effort of speech, flutter like boneless fingers. “I promise I’ll see to Claudia,” Berger says.

Terman lay in bed like a corpse, hands folded across his chest, while Marjorie watched her reflection dress wherever she turned, all sides of her given credence. “You might say something kind,” she said.

He wrote himself two lines of dialogue. “You insist on people acting according to some scheme that exists solely in your head. We’re all characters in your novel, Marjorie.”

“I expect I want to hear that you’ve had a lovely time,” she said.

A third line of dialogue offered itself. “If I said that at your prompting, Marjorie, how could you possible believe it?”

“Trust me, luv.”

He perceived himself reaching across the bed to offer some gesture of affection, but in fact he made no such move, made no move at all.

She studied him in the mirror, in the various mirrors, then sat down on the edge of the bed with her back to him. “I think someone must have broken your heart,” she said icily.

He roused himself from his torpor. “If Max were a really smart man, he would never leave home,” he said.

“It’s a start,” she said. “Small and incomplete, though not entirely loathsome.”

His sleeping prick arose and lifted the covers like the spine of a tent. There was nothing to do for it, no will to accompany its purpose. In a moment or two (perhaps an hour had passed — the man in bed had no sense of time), Marjorie was at the door, negotiating the handle to no effect. He watched her in the opposing mirror.

She cursed the door, kicked at it, promised it the full burden of her wrath.

He planned to get up and help her — there was a trick to the door, you had to push it in to get it out — imagined himself lifting the covers and stepping out of the bed.

She pulled at the handle, turned it both ways, stopped then started again abruptly as if she might deceive the door into releasing her. Terman perceived her as a character in a comic film.

“Bloody bitch of door,” she yelled, laughing at herself. She joined him at the bed, the reflections from the four walls of mirrors multiplying her. “Please help me, luv,” she said. “The door won’t let me out.”

Having forgotten their initial combat and its attendant disappointments, he invited her under the covers for a rematch, heard himself speak the words, witnessed the movement of his mouth in one of the mirrors.

“Haven’t you had enough of that?” she asked. “Besides, I have to go, I really do. Is that bloody awful of me, darling?”

“Whatever you say,” he said.

“It will have to be a quicky-wicky,” she said. She removed her off-white pants with the wide cuffs and folded them over the back of a chair, posed for him in the box of mirrors.

When she stripped him of the blanket he shivered from the draft, from a sense of irremediable cold.

The thought struck her, interrupted a separate intention. “It would be just like dear old Max to lock us in,” she said. “He has a sense of fun that would make the Marquis de Sade envious.”

Max came and went, entered the room and exited without the opening of a door.

Marjorie, surveying the landscape, considered the choices before them. “It’ll have to be quick as a wink,” she said, reminding them both. She sucked him with lady-like dispatch, a woman of passionate constraints, restored his tower the moment it began to lean. Then she sat on him, facing away, encouraging him to push forward as if he meant to dislodge her. “I always think of it as riding a horse,” she said.

She made quick work of him as promised; he was gone before he had so much as arrived. He dreamed someone was in the house, was walking deliberately up the steps, gun in hand. He would have gone to sleep, how easy that was, how right-seeming, but she pulled on his arm until he climbed out of bed. Of course, the door needed opening, required his touch.

“This is the way you do it,” he said. He pushed the door in, leaned his shoulder against the frame, then turned the handle down and pulled sharply toward him in one precise infallible gesture.

“It didn’t open,” she said, laughing nervously. “Is it panic time?”

He tried again without measurable success, embarrassed at his failure. Marjorie walked back and forth from bed to door, generating energy.

“Is someone downstairs?” Marjorie asked, hearing the echo of her own steps.

“It could be Isabelle,” he said.

“Will she make a fuss, do you think? I’ll say you were showing me the house and the door got stuck.” Marjorie threw his clothes at him, worked at straightening the bed. “Don’t just stand there,” she shouted in a mock-whisper, “Oh, God, I broke a fingernail.” Holding the finger to her mouth, sucking on it. A single tear escaped her eye and made its way down her cheek.

Adriano is trying to say something, is marshalling his strength for one last effort. “Trust no one,” he mutters. There are footsteps at the door to the terrace and Berger points his gun at the narrow passageway. A gun comes through the terrace door followed by an arm, followed by the figure of a uniformed police officer. “No trouble,” says Henry Berger. The old friend in his arms is unconscious, and he puts him down, never for a moment letting the armed policeman out of his sight.

Terman sat at the edge of the bed, picking at a knot in one of his shoelaces, while Marjorie had her ear to the door. From the vantage of the ceiling mirror, they presented a study in angles. “Whoever it is, walks like a cat burglar,” she said.

He heard something or thought he did, the exaggerated breathing of someone who had run too fast or was in a state of severe anxiety.

“Will you please get yourself together,” she said.

Terman had one shoe on and hefted the other, thought of throwing it at Marjorie.

She caught his eye in the wall mirror and winked. “Whoever it is, I don’t believe it’s Max,” she whispered. “Max has a distinctive step as I should imagine you’ve noticed.”

“I’ve felt it on my neck,” he said.

“Have you?” she said. “I shouldn’t be at all surprised. Mon ami, I really have to be on my way.”

The shoelace knot opened in his fingers like a flower. Not all frustrations were without remedy.

“It’s not as if I had a choice,” she said. “I really have to be somewhere. It’s an irreversible commitment.”

“I understand that you have to be somewhere,” he said.

Terman stood behind her at the door, listening to the news on the other side. The intruder had found his way to the staircase and was coming up the steps.

“Do you have any idea who it is?” she asked. “It’s not a housebreaker, is it?”

Imagining that it was his son, Terman declined comment, indicated with a shrug an unlimited set of possibilities.

“Hallo,” Marjorie called. “We’re locked in a room on the third floor. Could you let us out?”

There was no apparent response and she repeated her request, emboldened to raise her voice so that it seemed to echo through the large house, returning to them like a muted scream. “Please please please,” she added.

A door opened and closed below them, a gesture of indifference or contempt. “You say something,” Marjorie said to him.

“Who’s there?” he yelled in an unused voice. A sudden rage took him. “Damn you,” he yelled.

“I hope to god you haven’t frightened the person,” Marjorie said, banging on the door with her fists. “It’s queer, isn’t it, that he or she hasn’t answered. It wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if Max had sent someone here to murder us both. I should never have mentioned to him that I was coming to your house for tea.”

“You mentioned to Max that you were coming here?”

“I wanted to give him back a little of his own,” Marjorie said. “I can see now that it was an error of judgment.” She tried the door again. “I think I’m getting it, luv. If we both pulled at the same time, don’t you think it might make all the difference?”

“We’ve rounded them all up,” says Colonel Lindstrom, putting the gun in his coat pocket as he might a pair of gloves. “All of them except the woman and Adriano.” He comes over to check on Adriano’s condition, puts his ear to the dead man’s chest. “He made you do it, I suppose,” he says to Berger.

“I suppose,” says Berger.

“Whatever you want to say about his character,” Lindstrom says, “he was a man that lived and died by the rules. I suppose he said a few thinks, did he? before he went.”

“Only that he regretted dying.”

Lindstrom is looking over the ratling, his hand in his gun pocket. “Quite a view I should say. What?”

Another man in a uniform comes on to the terrace. “No signs of the woman, sir,” he says. “We’ve taken the place apart with nothing to show for it.”

“Keep at it, lad,” says Lindstrom. “That attractive young lady is a veritable nest of scorpions. Let’s go inside, Berger, before the late afternoon chill gets into the bones.”

We cut to the woman, as she’s called, letting herself into a crawl space under the lip of the roof.

Marjorie was working on the door, pulling and pushing, making imperceptible progress. “Come over, why don’t you, and give us a hand.”

Terman went to the window and looked out, saw someone that might have been his son go into the park across the street.

An hour passed and Marjorie wondered out loud whether they oughtn’t to break down the door. If they both threw their shoulders into it, she thought, it might do the trick.

“The door is too thick,” he said.

“Won’t you try even once?” she asked. “You just might be stronger than you think.”

To set an example, Marjorie rushed her shoulder into the door and came away in pain. She was looking at the reflection of her martyrdom when she said, “My time spent with you has been the occasion of crippling injuries.” For the next few minutes she appeared inconsolable.

Terman thought he heard the outside door open and he mentioned it to her, which eased the pain in her bruised shoulder if only for that moment of illusion.

Henry Berger doesn’t like the present business, likes it less and less as it ramifies before him.

“What’s your opinion, Henry?” Lindstrom asks him, while his men disassemble the villa. “Are we going about this the wrong way?”

“Why do you want her?” he asks.

“It’s the old story, Henry. We want her because she is there.”

Berger and Colonel Lindstrom and one of the Colonel’s aides, a Chinese sumo wrestler named Yin, go up the stairs to the entrance to the roof, Berger in the advance. Lindstrom says his men have already checked the roof but if Berger wants to take a second look he has no objection. Yin follows him up the ladder to the roof while the Colonel and Sergeant Clark wait below, their guns drawn. Who can tell what Henry Berger is thinking as he walks across the tiled roof, moving methodically from one side to the other, concentrating on the sounds his steps make? “You were right,” he shouts down to Lindstrom, stopping at the hollow place where the woman is hiding. “She must have gotten away while you were rounding up the others.”

There were moments when Marjorie didn’t think about being imprisoned but they had only limited duration. Mostly, she struggled for self-possession. If one didn’t panic and went with the flow, she told herself, eventually a way out would present itself. “A situation like this makes one reevaluate one’s entire life,” she said. “Or do you think that’s taking it a bit far?”

Terman looked out the window to avoid being mimicked by his own image, his sense of himself undermined by overstatement. At the last extreme, he could always get the attention of a passerby and ask whoever to notify the police of their entrapment. It hadn’t yet reached that moment of urgency. Oddly, in the extended period he had spent at the window, no one had come by on his side of the street.

The urge to account for himself overwhelmed him. “I’ve been treading water for too long,” he said over his shoulder. “Everytime I reevaluate my life, it seems to have fallen off from the year before. I age without getting wiser, tend to forget more than I learn. My relationships with people are as tentative and incomplete as they ever were. More so than ever.”

“You need to break with Max,” she said, “and go back to your own writing.”

“The fact is, I like working with Max,” he said. “If I didn’t have a screenplay to write, I might sit around drinking beer and staring at the walls. I don’t even enjoy going to the movies any more.”

“It’s not an adult pleasure, is it?” she said. “The first step for you, Terman, is to get away from Max and on to something else.”

Marjorie tried the door for what must have been the tenth time, felt it yielding just a little, nothing the eye might acknowledge, but enough to let her entertain a whisper of hope.

Terman had been saying the word “father” to himself. “Father father father father father father father father father father father father father father…” At some point the word evolved from “father” to “farther.”

“I felt something,” Marjorie said.

He took an andiron from the fireplace and went to the door to see if he could help. The room echoed a sense of contrition.

Henry Berger is standing a few feet away from the downslope of the roof. “You can come out,” he says. “Lindstrom and his men have gone.”

After a moment or two, a voice comes from the crawl space under the eaves. “I have a gun trained on you,” it says. “Throw your gun across the roof and do it quickly. It would please me to kill you.”

“I promised your husband I’d keep you from being caught,” he says.

“I don’t trust you. Throw away your gun.”

“Wouldn’t I have given you away before if that’s what I wanted to do?” When she doesn’t answer he says, “I’m going to walk away. If you shoot me it will attract the attention of Lindstrom s men who are sitting in a parked car at the edge of the woods. I’m going now to walk to the ladder at the other side of the roof.” Henry Berger turns around and walks slowly toward the other side of the roof.

A trap door opens at the lip of the roof and the woman, not a little crumpled, emerges without attracting Berger’s notice. She holds an unusually small handgun and is pointing it at Berger’s back when he turns instinctively to face her.

“Will you take me with you?” she asks. “You’ll find me a resourceful companion.”

They go out the back door of the pensione and move through tall grass towards Berger’s car, which is obscured by two large trees. When they reach the car, when Berger unlocks the door to the passenger’s side, she presses her handgun to his hack. “Take off your jacket and trousers for me, please.”

“Are you serious?”

“If you test me,” she says, “you’ll never know how serious I was.”

He undresses without further protest, keeping one hand behind his head as instructed. The widow of his old friend puts his clothes on over her own, while Berger leans against the side of his car with hands behind his head.

“I ought to kill you,” she says, “but I don’t want to attract attention if I can help it. I want you to open the driver’s door with your left hand, keeping the other behind your head. Don’t make any moves you’ll regret.”

“You’ll be better off with me than without me,” he says. “I’m really quite good at avoiding the police”

“I’ve already got the better part of your identity,” she says. “Take your left hand from behind your head and open the door. When the door is opened, drop the key on the seat, then turn around, take three steps and throw yourself face down on the grass.”

“Adriano was lucky to have a woman like you,” he says.

“Not lucky enough. Are you opening the door or do I have to shoot you?”

Trying to unlock the car with his left hand, he drops the key to the ground.

“I hate the sight of you,” she says. “I despise the way you do things. I hate your preposterous self-satisfaction.”

Henry Berger bends down to retrieve the key. As he comes up he turns as if to hand it to her. We see the shadow of his arm moving through the air, followed by the sound of a shot. There is a second shot shortly after the first, then a third.

Dressed again, Berger carries the dying woman back toward the villa.

“I should have killed you the first time I saw you,” she says.

“You misjudged my intentions,” he says. “I would have helped you get away if you had let me.”

“You’ve done that; I’m away.” A thin stream of blood comes from the side of her mouth, keeps coming like a scarf in a magician’s trick. “The pain is gone,” she whispers. “It just went somewhere else.”

Berger puts her down on the grass and sits alongside her, holding her hand. Three cars drive up in short succession. He continues to hold the dead woman’s hand, staring into the distance as several men, including Colonel Lindstrom and Sergeant Clark, approach.

They had been trapped in the room for almost five hours and Terman had reached the point where the sight of his own face, no matter the angle of distortion, sickened him. He sat on the bed with his hands over his eyes, besieged by other selves at every turn.

Marjorie had talked non-stop for a time and then, as though her quota of words had run out, had fallen into a protracted silence. Although she heard something, the front door unlocking and someone (a man, she thought) stepping almost noiselessly into the front parlor, she withheld report of the news, superstitious about false alarms.

This time they both heard it, the almost noiseless entry, the hesitant steps in the living room, the uncertain movement of someone who didn’t know the house.

“Up here,” Terman called out, without turning his head.

“We’re locked in a room on the third floor,” Marjorie shouted into the door. “Would you let us out?”

“Is it your son?” she asked him.

There was nothing amusing in the situation for Terman, though he discovered a smile on the face of several of his reflections when he allowed himself to turn his head. He had a sense of the same scene playing itself out without resolution again and again. The unknown intruder comes in the house, awakens expectation, then disappears without heeding their cries for help. The incident varied a little on each occasion (the way memory tends to twist events into narrative pattern), though the basic scenario remained faithful to itself.

When she heard someone coming up the stairs Marjorie turned to Terman and winked. The wink recurred in the first two mirrors and then was gone. “In here,” Marjorie called. “We’re on the top floor.” She recovered her cane which was hanging over the back of a chair.

Between calls for help, Marjorie reported the movements of the intruder. After a brief respite on the second landing, he was coming up the stairs to the third floor.

He or she was on the third floor, coming down the long hallway toward them.

“Second door on the right,” Terman roused himself to say. He had the premonition that when the door opened, if it ever did, another distorted reflection of his own face would be waiting for him on the other side.

They watched the door handle turn, down and back, down and back, to no startling effect.

Terman took a hand, pulled on the handle as the other pushed against the door. The door remained adamant.

“Put your weight against it,” Marjorie advised. “Push with your shoulder.”

The mimic in the several reflections mocked all human endeavor.

“It’s coming,” Marjorie shouted.

The door opened suddenly, severed its restraints, and a man with his own face came into the room.

Terman opened his eyes the next morning with a burgeoning sense of self-contempt, regretted the light of day. He had no breakfst, had no need of food, could barely stand to cover himself with clothes. Something was the matter with him or something had been the matter and had cured itself, leaving him untenanted like some derelict building. The air around him, the air he breathed, smelled of neglect.

He dialed Isabelle’s number with no expectation of finding her in, so when she answered on the fifth or sixth ring it was almost a dissap-pointment.

“I didn’t expect to find you home,” he said.

“I hope that’s not why you called. As a matter of fact, I’m waiting for the studio to ring up to find out where I’m supposed to be.”

He stammered his request, the question begging refusal. “Why don’t we meet for a drink after you finish work?”

“I believe I already have an appointment,” she said. “Can’t you tell me over the phone what you want?”

He wanted nothing. An unbearable weight of shame oppressed him. “Isabelle, look I’m sorry.”

“Yes? That makes two of us, doesn’t it?”

“I’ve behaved unforgivably. I’ve no excuses.”

“I don’t want to hear it, Terman. Do you have anything else to say?”

“Isabelle, I’m sorry.”

“You don’t know what you’ve done. How can you possibly be sorry?”

“I’m terribly ashamed.” He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand, the gesture premature, the tears of shame unrecorded.

“I simply hate this,” she said. “If you continue to apologize, I’m going to hang up on you. Don’t you have any dignity at all?”

He could do no more than act on the feelings he supposed himself to have. “Could we have dinner tomorrow night?” he asked.

“I don’t want to see you,” she said in a constricted voice. “Haven’t I made that clear? I don’t want to see you, not now, not tomorrow, not next week, not next year.”

She hung up before he could apologize again, then called back moments later to say she had no business losing her temper at him. “You’ve done nothing to me I haven’t done to myself, have you? I apopogize for hanging up on you, Terman, and for letting you think you had done me some great injustice when you hadn’t at all.”

He resented her apology, felt it in competition with his own. “You didn’t have to call to tell me that,” he said.

“I don’t know why I called back,” she said. “I thought you might come by until I had to leave for work, though I’m not sure that’s what I want either. I’m sorry to be so equivocal. It makes me unhappy when you make yourself an abject show and I don’t want to subject either of us to that again.”

“I can see your point,” he said.

“Can you? Terman, what do you want from me?”

“Nothing,” he said. He felt himself in a fever of desirelessness.

“Then leave me alone, Terman, will you? Stay away.”

“I’ll do whatever you want,” he said.

“You’re not mocking me, are you? Excuse me, someone’s at the door.” She hung up.

There were no transitional moments, no opening and closing of doors. Dressed in a baggy three-piece suit, he was walking south on Abbotsbury Road, the morning unusually warm, the white light of the sun everywhere. He turned left at Leicester Place, walking briskly and without descernible limp. If his ankle hurt him, he avoided the pain by thinking of something else. The white light scorched him. Each step he imagined as the last of its kind, the last he might allow himself within a certain frame of reference. Each gesture supplanted its predecessor, was complete and distinct, never to be recalled or repeated. He walked around the southern end of the park — something he had only done once before — and went along Fillmore Walk to Camden Hill Road. Two burnt-out teen-age girls, lounging in front of a boutique called Sex Sisters, were eyeing him furtively. He turned toward them, nodded, held out empty hands. They put their heads together and giggled. He was struck with the idea of ending his screenplay with Henry Berger walking along a street very much like the one he was on, while a sniper on a rooftop studied him in his sights. The last shot would be of Henry Berger framed (like the subject of a photgraph) in the sights of a telescopic lens. After the picture dissolved to black, The End in white on a black screen, we would hear the sound of a gun shot echoing.

Terman went up Camden Hill Road to Holland Street, thought to turn but couldn’t without going against himself, made his way to Peele Street where Isabelle had her two room flat. He passed Isabelle’s building, went on to the next street, then crossed over and doubled back. He was studying the windows of her aparment when a man working in a garden asked him if he knew the time. He wasn’t listening and offered the man a cigarette, which the other accepted with some reluctance. “Ta,” said the gardener. “And what’s the hour, mate?”

“Eleven o’clock,” Terman said without looking at his watch.

“Can’t be right,” said the other and turned his attention to a wheelbarrow filled with cement.

Giving the time away, Terman felt, was like losing it irretrievably. It was a perception he had had when he was five years old that he had never fully shaken off.

He shadowed her house for hours in his imagination, this shadow of her former lover, accumulating evidence of infidelity and betrayal.

Waiting for Isabelle to answer the door, he could think of nothing to say that would explain the presumption of his visit, trusted to crisis and native wit. He waited five or six minutes — his private clock accurate to a fault — perceiving her continuing absence as further evidence of her contempt. When he knocked the door was opened to him. “You didn’t say you were coming over,” Isabelle said. “How was I to know?” She was wearing a bathrobe over a slip and looked like she had just taken a bath or been in bed. He embraced her clumsily. “I didn’t realize how much I missed you,” he said. Her arms circled him without pressure. He was overwhelmed with affection for her, spoke her name with the care one gives a sacred object.

“Did you want to come in?” she asked with a notable absence of conviction. “There’s someone else here.”

“Someone else and the corpse not yet buried?” He meant it to be amusing, but the words came out etched with bitterness.

“I didn’t mean it quite that way,” she said.

She preceded him in. The someone, a silver-haired man was sitting in the parlor on a yellow velvet love seat, aggressively smoking a cigar. The men nodded curtly to each other.

Max looked everywhere but at his former collaborator. “I was going to call you as soon as I got to the office,” he said. “The news of our project is not so bad, not at all despicable.”

Isabelle side-stepped her way into the small kitchen, vanished without explaining herself. “In a moment,” Terman said to Max, holding up a finger, and trailed Isabelle into the kitchen, his limp as he followed her insisting on its prerogatives.

“I thought I’d make a pot of coffee,” she said, “unless the two of you prefer to have tea.” Terman stood behind her and observed his knee brushing the back of her leg. “There’s not sufficient room for both of us,” she said.

“I want him out of here,” he said.

“Tell him that if you like.”

Her head bruised his mouth when he kissed her, was backing up as he was coming forward. It struck her as funny but then she apologized for laughing. Terman embraced her from behind, slipped by her, and returned to the sitting room. Max was writing something on the back of an envelope. “Tea about ready?” he asked.

Terman sat in a chair on the other side of the room, turned it so it faced away.

“Would you like a Cuban cigar?” Max asked him. “The real thing.”

Terman said, or thought of saying, that there wasn’t anything he wanted from Max.

“We’re still waiting,” Max said, “for the other shoe to fall. Actually there’s another project I want to sound you out on. Could you come by the office tomorrow first thing in the morning?”

“I don’t think so,” he said.

“Prior commitment, is it? Give me a ring at the office and we’ll arrange something else, cowboy.”

Isabelle returned and sat down at the apex of the imaginary triangle. She had a teapot, three spoons and a bowl of sugar cubes on a tray, but she had forgotten the cups and the pitcher of milk. “I can’t go back into the kitchen,” she said. “I really can’t.” She held the tray in her lap, the teapot balanced in the center. Tears overfilled her eyes. “I almost never cry,” she said.

“It’s true,” said Max from behind his cigar. “I’ve never seen her cry.” He rose abruptly from the loveseat as if propelled by this negative recollection. “This is something extremely rare we’re privileged to witness.”

Terman eased himself from his chair, crossed the room in two strides and, without prior indication of intent, knocked Max down. Max smiled, looked astonished. “I don’t understand what’s going on,” Isabelle said to no one.

Terman took the tray from Isabelle’s lap and put it down on an end table. “I’ll get cups from the kitchen for you,” he said. His thumb hurt and he studied it for signs of dislocation, held it to the light. Max was on his feet, pulling a sweater on over his head, when Terman, without thinking about it, knocked him into the couch.

“There’s no need for that,” Isabelle said, her head turned away like a partial secret.

Max sprawled on the couch with his fists in front of his face in mock defense. “He has a tendency to overstate,” he said. “The next time you hit me, I’ll cut your ears off with a razor.”

Isabelle came over and put her arms around him from behind. “Be a love,” she said, “and go home.”

“I haven’t finished,” he said.

A throw pillow, defining itself in flight, glanced off the side of Terman’s head.

Isabelle continued to hold on to him from behind. “I’ll come back tonight and stay with you,” she whispered, “if that’s what you want.”

He said yes and felt the death of desire, the small quenching of a still smaller passion. Only frustration was eased, necessity quieted. He struggled to feel love, to shake and burn with feeling.

His thumb ached. Disappointment arose unbidden, diminished him with its niggardly claim.

“You’re the love of my life,” he said to her at the door, her hand on his arm, steering him out.

Dismissed, he waited on the street for Max to follow, regretting that he had yielded his place for so small a price. Jealousy passed through him like a sweat of mild fever. In moments Max came through the door, scowling, hair askew from the first kiss of wind, and the former collaborators faced each other as adversaries.

Max pointed a finger at him. “You’re lucky I don’t bear grudges,” The director walked past him then came back, holding a rock the size of his hand. “I’d like to put your face through the other side of your head, you fucking degenerate,” Max said.

Terman grinned, though believed himself angry. He held up his walking stick in case the other meant business.

“I’m a civilized man,” Max said. “I abhor violence, though when a man abuses me the way you have I’ll go to any length to pay him back.”

Max backed off when Terman wagged his cane, feinted with the rock which he hefted behind his ear in throwing position.

Their confrontation embarrassed Terman — perhaps worried him too — and he looked for a way out. “An overdose of melodrama,” he said, a parody of one of Max’s remarks. “I’m sorry I punched you when you weren’t looking.”

“Apology unacceptable,” Max said, though his face relaxed into a self-mocking smile. “If you apologize for the second punch, perhaps we can come to terms.”