The Horned Man

CHAPTER 6

It was getting dark. Treetops made shatter-line patterns against the glassy strip of horizon. I was in a state of deliberate suspension: suspended judgment, suspended feeling. I was following a plan of my own devising, but passively, in a state of deliberately suspended will.

In a women’s clothing store on Mulberry Street, I saw a V-neck sweater of gray wool with flower-embroidered cuffs. It was exactly the kind of thing Carol wore: austere, with an impishly begrudged femininity. I’d have bought it for her without hesitating if we’d still been living together. I did things like that, and she seemed to appreciate them. I was beginning to move reluctantly away, when I decided to buy the sweater anyway. It was expensive, but just having it in my possession seemed to bring me a step closer to some hypothetical moment in the future when I would have the opportunity to give it to her.

Strange, at the station, to move off in the opposite direction from usual. Out in the twilight a row of shacks went by. Zigzagging white Christmas lights – a new type that had taken over the country like an invasive weed – fringed the plastic-roofed decks. Beyond them was an old assembly plant with a row of truck cabins – just the cabins – moldering in front of it like gigantic skulls in some dinosaur graveyard. Then after that, stranger still in the dregs of the daylight, a ghostly fairground, abandoned decades ago by the look of it; the blown husks and bracts of some bygone era’s little flowering of fun. A radial of horseless spokes was all that survived of the merry-go-round. Over a small wooden booth I made out the capital H and M of two otherwise illegible words in faded circus lettering. Whatever came next the scrub had knitted a snarl of creepers over, obliterating all but a few dark forms that looked like ruins in a jungle.

Elaine’s station was a lonely strip of platform in a near-empty parking lot. As I got in a taxi, I discovered I had left the scrap of paper with her directions on it behind, presumably in my office. Oddly enough, given my recent forgetfulness, I remembered the address without difficulty, even though I had only looked at it once, as she wrote it down. I took this to be a good omen.

The town was just a series of new residential developments; twenty or thirty identical houses in each, with identical blobs of shrubbery out front and big signs offering units for sale. I had seen these kinds of places on summer days. The people you saw drifting around them wore pajama-like clothes, as though their conception of leisure was inextricably bound up with the idea of sleep. Lincoln Court, where Elaine lived, was still partly under construction. Plywood-covered frames stuck up out of the raw dirt, and between some of the houses there were still patches of old, scrubby farmland, not yet reprocessed into manicured lawns. The cold air smelled of pressure-treated lumber. I paid the taxi and went up the short path to Elaine’s door.

Perfume billowed up at me as she opened it. There she was, a look of ardent joy spilling from her eyes. She wore a lemon-colored chemise, and a brown, calf-length, hip-hugging skirt.

Before arriving, I had made up my mind that I would greet her with a light kiss on the lips. For a moment now I baulked: there was something softly overpowering about her; her indefinite features rendered somehow daunting by the formalised glamor of her outfit. I braced myself however, plunged my head into the cloud of scent, and brushed my lips against hers. She seemed surprised by the gesture, but not displeased. She led me into a gray-carpeted room with prints of semiabstract flowers on the wall. At the back was a tile-floored dining area with a glass table set for two.

The place felt brand-new: unpenetrated, yet, by its human inhabitant.

I sat on a denim-covered couch, oatmeal in color, while Elaine poured me a drink. It crossed my mind that I should have brought something – flowers, or at least a bottle of wine.

Handing me my drink, Elaine looked hesitantly at the space next to me on the couch. I patted it, and she lowered the sweetened weight of herself into the cushion beside me. I took her hand and gave it a squeeze.

‘I’m so glad you could come,’ she said.

I had given up trying to figure out what it was I could have said or done to bring this situation into being. I accepted it in all its strangeness: looked on it as a premise rather than a result. The question in my mind was where to go from here.

I hadn’t slept with a woman for some time – long enough that my thoughts and dreams had started decomposing into erotic fantasies with a frequency I hadn’t experienced in years. Theoretically the idea of leveraging my apparently substantial credit with Elaine into some kind of fling had a certain appeal; or would have, if I had felt the slightest physical attraction to her, which so far I had not.

But that indifference, related as it was to a similarly unqualified emotional indifference, was possibly not the end of the story. Whenever I had denied to Dr Schrever that I was attracted to her, or missed her between sessions, or had tried to hurt her by not showing up, she would suggest that I wasn’t necessarily able to experience the reality of my own feelings. I had always privately dismissed this as an example of the kind of cant her profession was prone to, but in view of some of the things that had been happening recently, I had begun to wonder if there mightn’t really be some kind of interference between the feelings I had, and my ability to register them.

Was it possible, I had wondered, that I was attracted to Elaine without knowing it? Such a thing seemed beyond the bounds of likelihood, but I found I couldn’t dismiss it out of hand. My unconscious choice of her name for the mistress in S for Salmon, was surely an indication of something. Perhaps if I placed myself in her presence for long enough, I had thought, my feelings might become sufficiently focused to make themselves known to me.

Was that why I had come here tonight? Partly. But I was aware of something else too: something obscurely, soothingly expiatory in deferring to another person’s version of reality. As if there were something significant to be gained by giving myself to this woman out of nothing more than sheer self-sacrificing agreeableness.

I turned to her. She looked at me expectantly. I felt her vulnerability; her strange humility too, and under it the throb of a real passion: incomprehensible to me, but undeniable.

‘I brought you something,’ I heard myself say, standing up.

With a vague feeling of annoyance, I realised I was going to take the bag with Carol’s sweater in it from my briefcase and give it to Elaine. I did this.

She unwrapped it. ‘You got me a sweater!’ she said, beaming. ‘Thank you Lawrence. Thanks so much!’

She held it up against her chest.

‘That’s just so gorgeous! I’m so flattered you would think to do a thing like that!’

‘Why don’t you try it on?’

‘I will. But not over this. Wait right there.’

She went out of the room. I heard her go upstairs. A moment later, I wandered up myself.

‘Can I see up here?’ I called out.

‘Help yourself.’

There was a spare room with a single bed on a gray fitted carpet; bare walls. The bathroom next to it was green tile and chrome; spotless, with fluffy green towels neatly folded over the rack. I knocked on the bedroom door.

‘Oh… Come in.’

This also was strangely featureless, like a hotel room; the bed immaculately flat and smooth under its gold-brown bedspread; the bedside table with its brass reading lamp, china tissue dispenser, red-digit radio-alarm. A black TV faced it from the dresser opposite. There was an infant’s wooden rocker with a rag-doll asprawl in it, but even that seemed like something that might have been supplied along with the rest of the fixtures. The only noticeably personal touch was a small, hand-painted wooden box on the dressing table. Otherwise the aspiration here seemed to be toward total anonymity.

Elaine stepped out from behind the opened closet door, smoothing the sweater down over her front.

‘What do you think?’

It was tight on her: she must have been a couple of sizes larger than Carol. But the sight of her in it had an immediate effect on me. I saw there were possibilities in this situation that I hadn’t considered. It wasn’t that she resembled my wife, but she put me in mind of her, and the very lack of any powerful singularity about herself or her home, allowed the thought to grow more vivid.

‘You look spectacular,’ I told her.

She coughed and reddened, patting her chest.

‘Thank you!’

I was struck again by the curious dominion her version of me seemed to possess over her. In deferring to her sense of what existed between us, I appeared to have put myself in a position of paradoxical power.

I took her hands in mine and drew her close, smiling at her. She smiled back. Then with a playful laugh she freed one of her hands and placed it on the little painted box.

‘Guess what I keep in here.’

‘What?’

‘Guess!’

‘Your husband?’

She gave a peal of laughter. ‘You are so funny!’

‘What then?’

‘What would be the most precious thing I could have in my possession, other than yourself?’

‘I can’t imagine.’

‘Oh Lawrence! Your letter, of course!’

I had never written her a letter. I must have looked disconcerted.

‘Did I say something wrong?’ she asked.

I felt instinctively that I should try to conceal my puzzlement, at least until I had figured out what was going on.

‘Not at all,’ I managed, ‘I’m – I guess I’m just – moved.’

A look of joy blazed from her eyes.

‘Let’s eat.’

As if the mystery of this letter were not enough to keep me thoroughly distracted for the rest of the evening, something even more disturbing arose soon after. As I passed my open briefcase on my way into the dining room, I happened to glimpse Barbara Hellermann’s volume of Shakespeare, which I had brought to read on the train home.

‘Incidentally,’ I said, ‘did you know Barbara Hellermann?’

She looked blank for a moment.

‘Oh Lord – you mean the woman who got killed?’

‘She was killed?’

‘You didn’t know?’

‘No.’ With an obscure apprehensiveness, I asked what had happened.

‘Some crazy guy in the subway attacked her. She went into a coma, then died just a few days later. I knew her to say hello, but -’

‘- Did they catch the guy?’

‘I don’t believe they did.’

‘How did he – how did he kill her?’

‘He hit her with a steel bar.’

Over the cauliflower quiche I tried to maintain the appearance of a besotted admirer, asking Elaine about her life and nodding interestedly as she told me about it, but my mind was elsewhere. I was preoccupied with the question of how soon I could decently leave, and whether there would be time to stop off at my office before the last train home. The result was that I took in only snatches of what she was saying to me, my growing consternation blocking out most of her words, just as the desks the other day had blocked out most of her body. Our relationship seemed to be developing a peculiar truncated quality.

‘I’m a rebel, is what I am,’ I heard her say at one point, ‘people just don’t realise it.’

I nodded, narrowing my eyes as if in appreciation of a subtly astute analysis, though I had no idea what had prompted her remark.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I can see that.’

‘Does it bother you?’

‘No.’

‘So I wasn’t wrong, then, to do it?’

I racked my brains for an echo, a trace imprint of what she had just been talking about, but all I could think of were the words she had uttered a few minutes earlier; he hit her with a steel bar, that had sent me into this distracted state in the first place. A steel bar… I was trying to deny to myself the likelihood of a connection between this and the rod I had found under the desks in my office, but against this effort came wave upon wave of strange, surging apprehensiveness.

‘Not at all,’ I hazarded in answer to Elaine’s question, ‘I think you were absolutely right to do it.’

She nodded: glad, apparently, of my approval for whatever it was she had done, but seemingly placed by it in some difficult new quandary:

‘So what should I tell them?’

‘Well… What do you want to tell them?’

‘I’m not sure. Sometimes I almost feel like telling them to go take a running jump!’

‘Then that’s what you should do!’

So it continued: Elaine supplying the talk, me tuning out despite my best efforts to follow. At one point I realised from the way she was looking at me, and from a dim, lingering sense of a rising intonation at the end of the last phrase that had drifted by (no more intelligibly than the hum of the refrigerator), that she had just asked me another question.

‘Well?’ she said, after a longish pause.

It occurred to me that in my capacity as projected apparition, I was perhaps above having to observe the petty conventions of rational or continuous discourse. I could say or do whatever I felt like, and Elaine would adapt pliably to my whim.

I put my hand under her chin and drew her head toward mine. She seemed startled, but as I’d predicted, she acquiesced in the gesture. I kissed her lips, then probed into her mouth with my tongue. We were seated on her black-stained dining room chairs, a little too far apart to embrace, our conjoined heads forming an apex over the tile-floored space between us. A multitude of things tumbled about in my mind as we kissed. I tried to focus on the sweater-clad torso beside me and think of Carol. For a moment I felt almost present in the physical reality of what I was doing, but then the distractions impinged again: the letter I had never written; the steel rod I had mistaken for an innocent component of my office furniture… Meanwhile the kiss continued. Sooner or later, I supposed, I would catch up with it – find out what it meant to me, what it had accomplished, if anything. Right now it existed only for Elaine. Judging by the frantic vigor of her response, she was enjoying it.

‘That’s your answer,’ I said, pulling away. I stood up. ‘And now I have to get going.’

She blinked at me, baffled but unprotesting.

While we waited for my taxi she became rapidly subdued. No doubt my erratic behavior had finally got to her. She had a large capacity for pain, I sensed, if also for the endurance of pain. There was something softly monumental about her, living out here by herself like a pioneer woman out on the plains. Though in all but body I was already halfway up Mulberry Street to the dark campus, my hand gripping the key to Room 106, my nerves preparing themselves for the shock of a possible encounter with a startled Trumilcik, I had enough regard for her to attempt a gracious exit.

‘I’d like to see you again,’ I said.

‘Would you?’

I put my arms around her.

‘Let’s go away somewhere, shall we? For a weekend?’

She nodded.

‘I’ll organise it,’ I said.

I kissed her again. This time I felt a wave of desire; unexpectedly powerful. I don’t know why; perhaps the feelings of guilt and pity she’d succeeded in arousing in me had supplied the component missing before. With a familiar swarming sensation, my center of gravity shifted downward from my head. My mouth and hands, answerable to a new set of priorities, acquired a new boldness. I felt them slide over her breasts and down across her skirt to her groin.

She pulled back a little, registering the change.

‘What are you doing?’

‘This,’ I said with a smile, tumbling us both into the oatmeal denim couch. It was always amazing to me, the changes of consciousness that came over one at these moments. I felt abruptly free of inhibitions.

She gazed up at me with a look of helpless bewilderment.

‘It’s all right,’ I said.

‘Is it?’

‘We’ve been wanting this for a long time, haven’t we?’

Even my voice sounded different; its timbre suddenly playful and brazen, as though I had entered a state of irrepressible good spirits; one that couldn’t but be irresistibly infectious to anyone near me.

‘I don’t mean just this,’ I said, ‘but this too…’

She looked at me, saying nothing.

I kissed her very gently on her lips and throat. She lay unresponsive, then turned her face from under mine.

‘No?’ I asked, grinning. ‘No?’

‘No!’ she said, with sudden firmness.

I kissed her again.

Frowning at me, she pushed me off her, and stood up abruptly from the sofa. She looked extremely upset.

A little later I was striding up Mulberry Street, key prematurely in hand as I had envisaged, my mind plunging forward into the question of what exactly I should do with Trumilcik’s rod when I retrieved it from under the desks.

Naturally my first thought was to take it to the police, and tell them what I knew about Trumilcik. But as I imagined how my list of Trumilcik’s manifestations might sound to a New York police detective, I began to have doubts. Someone who hadn’t seen the bookmark, the phone bill, the coin, or the computer file in the first place, might not find the disappearance of these things all that compelling. The hideout under the desks might look to them like nothing more than empty space. And to a person without the sophistication to connect a certain kind of womanising with a capacity for homicidal misogyny, the presence of a steel rod there might seem less than significant. All in all, I realised I might be in danger of being politely dismissed as a lunatic.

For this reason I decided I would keep the rod myself; find a safe place to hide it until I had something more tangible to present alongside it.

In a sense what I discovered on entering my room was precisely that. Unfortunately its tangibility was of a nature so violently unpleasant I couldn’t even consider becoming the means of disclosing it to another human being. If ever there was a message vile enough to warrant the execution of its messenger, this was it. It lay on the desk where I had left my offering for Trumilcik, surrounded by smeared, torn up pieces of paper. The money was gone: in its place, as if by some nightmarish reverse alchemy, a brown, pyramidal mound; raw and reeking, the nastiest gift one person can give another, so smolderingly dense in its physical reality it seemed to give the objects about it – books, papers, telephone, stapler – a quality of tentative abstraction.

Appalled; leaving the light off and the door open, I approached the coiled pile, which glistened horribly in the faint radiance of the campus lights.

It was on the blotter at least, this dollop of anti-matter; moveable without the need for direct contact. The soiled bits of paper scrunched around it like netherworld origami were Amber’s pages; what remained of them. I picked the blotter up; carried it steadily as I could so as not to be so much as fluttered against by the unclean crumpled scraps. To my left, the closed-together desks registered themselves on me with a dull pressure as I crossed back to the door and passed on into the corridor. If it is true that certain actions performed in the secular world have their true meaning elsewhere, in the world of the spirit, then this was surely one. I moved toward the men’s room, trying hard to induce a state of imperviousness to what I was doing. It seemed a matter of some urgency not to let this event secure a place for itself in my psyche. It was night; I was alone; in a moment all evidence of its having occurred at all would be literally flushed away. As good, I told myself, as if it hadn’t occurred at all. In the sepulchral dimness of the corridor, lit only by low-wattage nightlights at distant intervals, I could almost believe I wasn’t really here; was elsewhere, dreaming this, as I did sometimes dream of such things.

In the men’s room, between the rubber garbage bin and the toilet, I was able to dispose of everything, blotter included. I went back to my office. By now a heavy weariness had replaced my horror. I felt torn, demoralised. If Trumilcik was in there somewhere, then so be it. I turned on the light, opened the window to let out the lingering odor. Then I went to the desks, gave them a warning thump, and pulled them apart. He wasn’t there.

Nor, however, was the steel rod.