Mr. Apology Page 23

  “Hi,hi,hi,” she said. “If you’re listening, and you don’t want to speak, kindly replace the receiver. G’night.”

  She hung up. She paced the room again. Since she’d gotten a regular by-line, she’d wanted an unlisted number, but she’d just never gotten around to it. Jamey wandered back to the window again and watched the stream of traffic below the window, the lights carving through dark like little slits of cheap costume jewelry. She’d rather get silent breathers, she thought, than the kinds of calls Apology received. How the hell did Harry manage to put up with them? How did he manage to carry all those separate little burdens? Jesus Christ, some days it’s hard enough to face your own damn problems without taking on hundreds of others, the sorrows of strangers. The telephone was ringing again.

  She picked it up and said, “Hello?”

  “Jamey. Walt.”

  “Did you call a minute ago?”

  “No. Why?”

  “It’s nothing. So what’s happening?”

  “We’re about to approach the negotiating stage with Sharon’s agent, I guess. I just slipped out for a moment.”

  “Why the hell does our magazine want to serialize the memoirs of a simpleminded country-western singer? I can’t quite see that, given this sophisticated metropolis we call home.”

  “They’re juicy and scandalous and we’ve got great libel lawyers,” he answered.

  “What’s she like?”

  “Beneath the wig and the makeup, it’s hard to tell.”

  “Did she come barefoot?”

  “I guess she only sings barefoot,” Walt said. “Anyhow, I thought I’d give you a quick call. I’d better get back. You can expect me around nine-thirty.”

  “Which means eleven to midnight,” Jamey said. “You want anything to eat?”

  “A leading question,” Walt said.

  “You’ve got a vile mind, Walter. A vile mind.”

  “I like it that way. See you later.”

  When she’d hung up, Jamey went inside the kitchen. She lit a cigarette and flipped a switch for the coffeemaker to come on. She sat down at the table and gazed at the tiled walls, the hanging woks, the stainless-steel attachments of the room. Finicky Walt—his kitchen had to be just so. She longed to whip up some eggs, make a scrambled mess that stuck to his Teflon saucepan, spill slimy whites on the floor, then get the spatula lodged in the garbage disposal. She contented herself with flicking ash that only just missed the clay ashtray. Now, she thought, exactly how would a person feel turning into a millionaire overnight?

  Elation.

  Bewilderment.

  Anxiety.

  She sucked the end of her thumb a moment.

  Why can’t I pin this sucker down? What is it that’s escaping me anyhow? Why am I distracted?

  She got up, walked around the table, poured herself a cup of black coffee—Kona, she drank only that—and carried it to the kitchen window. She stood there, one hand in the pocket of her skirt. She wondered if Joe Slattery felt any anxieties. No way, he was too dumb. Some slight guilt, then? She doubted it. She smiled, imagining old Joe creeping around in the middle of the night to call Mr. Apology. Hey, I just won the state lottery and do I feel bad!

  She paused in the kitchen doorway, looking across the expanse of living room to the bedroom. The door there was open, the unmade bed visible. The apartment, which contained so many of Walt’s touches, Walt’s possessions, could be large and lonely without his presence. She moved across the living room, stepped into the bedroom, stared at her own reflection in the mirrors attached to the near wall. This was a blood-red room done in Chinese silks, dragon patterns, wall hangings of bamboo painted with serpents, delicate birds, pagodas. One time, she’d accused Walt of wanting to live in a Shanghai brothel. She sat on the bed, sipped her coffee, turned her face away from her image in the mirrors. Too many pastries lately, Jamey. Too many danishes. They didn’t agree with the figure.

  Lonesome. Why did mirror images always increase your sense of loneliness?

  She patted her stomach, stood up, moved towards the doorway. She stared across the living room. The keys of her electric typewriter gleamed beneath the desk lamp. Keys at times had the capacity to make you feel guilt. They were like eyes that stared at you—the tiny eyes of judges, interrogators, accusers. Come back to work, Jamey. Come back and write. She leaned against the door-jamb. There was a slight draft from somewhere, a column of sudden cold air that swept around her body, stirring the lightweight material of her shirt. She shivered. Where the hell was that coming from? She went across the living room. The window was shut tight. So was the one in the kitchen. This place with its high ceilings and awful insulation—the wind could slide through almost anywhere. She moved to her desk, sat down, gazed at the paper in the typewriter; as she did so she was conscious of her aloneness in the apartment. She was also conscious of sweat in the spaces between her fingers.

  What the fuck is this, Jamey?

  She peered past the light, through the murky shadows of the living room. She rubbed her hands together.

  A virus?

  Some kind of twenty-four-hour shot of a mysterious flu?

  You need that like a cavity, kid.

  She looked at the sheet of paper in the machine. She read about Joe Slattery but the words didn’t carry any real conviction. She tore the piece out, crumpled it, threw the ball of paper aside. Inspiration. Come to me, muse.

  She stood up. As she did so, she was aware of another movement in the room, a small secondary shiver of something, as if she might have set in motion an echo of herself. Two diazepam and a couple of caps of vitamin C and two Excedrin tablets—then off to bed with a glass of hot milk, she thought. By morning you’ll be a new woman.

  She looked in the direction of the kitchen.

  This is ridiculous, she told herself.

  I am here alone.

  There’s nobody inside this place except me.

  Nobody.

  Why am I shaking so?

  She slumped down in the chair behind the desk, then fed a clean sheet of paper into the typewriter.

  There. Again. This weird sense of something moving just beyond the range of her vision. She turned her face around, saw nothing, nobody.

  Call Walt, she thought.

  Tell him I’m sick, get his ass out of that stupid meeting, and come home as fast as he can.

  You’re being preposterous. What happened to Jamey Hausermann, metropolitan reporter with nerves like the walls of an igloo? What happened to that broad?

  Ticktickticktick—

  The creaking of a floorboard, pressure on wood that sounded like the quick crazy movements of a surreal clock marking mad time away.

  Ticktickticktick

  Floorboards do not move by themselves. They tend to lie pretty still. Unless some human agent stands on one, then maybe they yield a little, maybe they creak—

  tickticktickticktick

  She gazed through the dark, rising as she did so, moving behind her chair as if for protection.

  There’s somebody else in this apartment.

  Somebody other than me, somebody with no right to be here at all.

  She fumbled across the desk, moving her fingers in the search for something heavy. A paperweight. Something like that. You don’t have a goddamn paperweight, Jamey.

  She blinked, edged the desk lamp forward to throw a more penetrating light across the room, watched the white swath of electricity cut a narrow path over the floorboards and the Chinese scatter rugs.

  Walt?

  The drapes at the window shivered, gold-threaded peacocks and parrots danced slightly in the weave of cloth. She moved around the desk, the lamp held high in her hand, and went towards the front door. Then she couldn’t take the lamp any further, because the electric cord snapped tight and because all at once she was aware of somebody moving just behind her, somebody who breathed heavily and wore a peculiar kind of cologne, somebody whose hand was hard and clammy as it slammed over her lips, whose body was
taut and stiff against her own. She felt her neck being twisted back, fingers rough beneath her jaw, nails cutting into her lips and bringing a slight smear of blood to the surface.

  She shut her eyes and struggled but whoever was holding her was strong, forever drawing her head back to the point where she thought the neckbone would just snap like the dried-out leftovers of a chicken carcass. And the pain, the searing pain, the roughness of it, the hard pressure of a knee thrust into the small of her back. I can’t die like this, I can’t die and not see the face of my killer.

  She tried to twist away but the grip was too strong. She might have been held in place by clamps of ancient iron. She felt herself being drawn backwards, her heels scraping over the floorboards.

  Die, don’t think of dying, Jamey, any moment you’ll come out of this hallucination and maybe you can sit down behind the typewriter and put it into understandable words.

  There was the whir of some electric gadget suddenly. A familiar menacing whir, then she felt something hot blowing between her legs from behind.

  a hairdryer

  what does he need with

  “Tell me,” he said. “Tell me. Tell me what you know.”

  3.

  Bryant Berger walked across the living room floor, looking at the chrome and smoked-glass lamps that were lit on either side of a brown velvet sofa. On the coffee table were a couple of magazines stacked tidily; Berger glanced at them, at the clean ashtrays, the vase of dried flowers. He moved around the sofa: There was a print on the wall ahead of him—a gift he’d given George once, a print of Goya’s dark work The Witches’ Sabbath. The faces intrigued and horrified him. They were looking at the silhouetted figure of the devil, a horned creature who appeared to have just manifested itself. What did you see on those faces? Fear and awe and surprise. The kind of surprise that comes from the sudden realization that the occult actually works, that you can really invoke a demon. My own demons, he thought, are just as astonishing. My own private devils beat their vast wings darkly. They teach me to miss trains I’ve sworn to catch. They tell me to skate the thin edges of frozen ponds. They congregate and they whisper. Lock up the gallery. Go see George. Don’t listen to Angela. Make an unholy mess of everything, Bryant. You went home to Bedford Hills last night, old man; tonight you owe one to George. Stay, make love.

  Make love, he thought.

  Mercifully, Angela had drunk too much last night at dinner to want to make love to him; with great relief, he’d helped her upstairs, undressed her, tucked her in bed. But there would be other nights when she wouldn’t be inebriated, when she’d want him to perform for her.

  Dear God. How do I get through that predicament?

  He stood under the print and looked in the direction of the bedroom door. It was halfway open: He could see a part of George’s large bed, the lavender sheets thrown back, the matching pillows piled up as if in the shape of some squat lavender bonfire. He swayed a little. After leaving the gallery he’d gone to a small bar that had been crowded with office types; he had found some kind of security, a safety, in the density of people. He had drunk too much so that the questions he wanted to ask himself dissolved into nothing. She might have waited at the station, he thought, then when I did not step off the appropriate train she drove home. She drove home and now she sits there fuming, planning my exit from her life. George, George, George—why did you inflict such pain, such anxiety? And where are you now, my love?

  Bryant pushed the bedroom door open with his foot. He had the strange clammy feeling that he was stuck inside an apartment with a corpse, a body he expected to stumble over at any moment. But the bedroom was obviously empty. He sat down on the edge of the bed. Where is he? he wondered. Where is George at this very moment? Even if he were here, what do you plan to say to him? What kind of action do you mean to take? Strip off your clothes and get into bed with him even as you suspect he’s come to you straight from another lover, a casual lay?

  It was eerie somehow to be alone in this place. It was a spooky feeling. The silence was pressing, tangible, a solid weight. He realized he was sweating—maybe it was the drinks he had consumed, distilled alcohol coming out of his pores. And he realized too that he didn’t know what he might say to George, whether he wanted to scold him with words or go ahead and just murder him. Murder him. What kind of thought is that? You do not have murder in your heart, Bryant. You have always been a cowardly pacifist, a shirker, someone who prefers flight to confrontation.

  He stood up from the bed and strolled to the window. The white-walled room had the warmth of a clinical cell. But in this room, Bryant, you have experienced great highs, gone beyond all the boundaries of your expectations. In this room you have lived. He stared out into the darkness—far below he could see the lights of traffic crawling sluggishly along. He pressed the palms of his hands together. He felt sick suddenly, the alcohol in his blood seeming to race, his stomach turning over. He just couldn’t think clearly. He moved towards the bathroom. The shower curtain was drawn back and the tub was starkly white and empty. The whole tiled room was empty. He stepped in front of the mirror. His face had no color. The black hat he wore was absurd, so he took it off.

  He moved away from the mirror.

  What do you do, Bryant, old man?

  Go live the bleak life of the well-married art dealer?

  Or tuck yourself away in some faggot underground with your golden boy?

  He looked at a glass shelf beneath the mirror. George’s lotions, aftershaves, colognes, sprays, toothpaste—so many aids to hygiene and smelling good that the boy might have had a well-defined mania about cleanliness. He absently flushed the toilet, watched water being sucked out of the bowl. Blue-dyed water that smelled of a hospital.

  George, oh George, where are you now?

  Bryant Berger returned to the living room, where he sat down on the big velvet sofa and leaned back. Sleep suggested itself, but he couldn’t sleep; he had something to do here, something he wanted to get over. I’ve made up my mind, George. I can’t go on playing your games. I need peace, an end to guilt, freedom from the anxiety of lies.

  He heard the sound of the elevator rising inside the building, but it didn’t stop at this floor; it went on whining upwards. No George. Bryant tapped his fingers hurriedly. He opened his eyes and looked at an object on the coffee table, a thing half hidden by the magazines. He reached down and picked it up. It was George’s Swiss army knife. He pulled out a couple of blades, couldn’t decide what they were meant to do, pushed them back in again. What did George want with this weapon anyhow? He dropped it on the table, as if he were appalled by the thing. The fag’s protection, he imagined—if George patronized those lowlife gay bars where he might encounter any kind of trouble. Maybe the knife came in handy then.

  He got up from the sofa restlessly, paced the room, stopped under the Goya print. He thought: This has to be your last time here. Your very last time.

  The telephone was ringing. It rang several times, then stopped.

  He wondered who had been on the end of the line. But what was that kind of wondering except the old familiar twinge of jealousy? A touch of the old green-eyed god?

  He looked across the room.

  The door of the apartment was opening.

  George stood there. Why did the sight of George on his own fill one with such pleasure? The yellow wind-breaker, the straightleg blue jeans, the plaid scarf around the neck, the red hair, the mischievous grin. Look long enough and every resolution would just melt as if it had never existed in the first place.

  “Surprise, surprise,” George said, crossing the room, extending his arms.

  Berger let himself be embraced. But you have to look cold, act chilly; you have to become like Angela. George dropped his arms at his side. Berger wondered where he had been. Do you never stop that kind of aimless wondering?

  “You found me out, Bryant?”

  “I found you out.”

  “Oh, dear.” George flapped across the room and lay down
on the sofa, arms tucked underneath his head.

  “I think it was despicable, George. I don’t know why you did it. I can’t understand why you’d play such a miserable joke—”

  “It was harmless.”

  “It wasn’t harmless at all, George. It was mean. It was vindictive. It caused me …” Berger raised his arms in despair. Blood red anger—it flared in front of his eyes like a cloud, a swarm of molten locusts. He hated the encounter with that kind of rage. He tried to subdue it.

  “The point, dear one, is that I didn’t talk with your beloved Angela, did I? I only led you to think I did. So you see, it was harmless after all.”

  Berger shook his head back and forth. This childish quality in George distressed him; this inability to see the possibilities of wreckage, of ruin, filled him with dismay. He wanted to say something like grow up, George but he couldn’t stand the thought of George laughing in his face. He couldn’t bring himself to look at the young man now, so he turned and stared up at the Goya.

  “Angela is a cunt, Bryant. You don’t realize that. She’s all teeth and she wants you to be bloody. She wants to break you, Bryant. Face it. If she needs her kind of control, let her buy herself a puppy. Maybe you want to be her faithful little dog, my dear? Is that what you want?”

  “I want peace, for Christ’s sake,” Berger said. He stared at his hat, which he had left on the coffee table. It seemed like a stupid symbol somehow—the black color, the garb of the so-called businessman.

  “Peace peace peace,” George said. His face was flushed and his speech, Berger noticed, quick and abrupt—almost the way it had been the other day in the bar of the Warwick Hotel. The boy got up from the sofa, moving like a spring suddenly freed, and crossed the room. “You want me, Bryant. You don’t want your fucking wife in the fucking suburbs, do you? You want Georgie, your own Georgie.”

  Berger stared at the young man’s face. The eyes seemed glazed. Even the red hair appeared darker, more fiery, than ever before. He didn’t want the boy to be right. He could live out some kind of life with Angela, couldn’t he?