Memoirs Of An Invisible Man (4 page)

I was motionless with confusion and mortification. I thought of bundling myself into my trousers and buttoning myself up right there before them, but that seemed somehow even more silly and humiliating than the existing state of affairs. I wondered if I would feel even more foolish and shamed during the coming moments as my lust collapsed into limp embarrassment. Perhaps I should immediately grab Anne by the hand and drag her to another seat on the other side of the car, where we could collect our wits and clothing. Anne, however, had a different response. With a smile so utterly and mischievously wicked that you would think only a little girl could have produced it, she licked her lips slowly, leaned forward in her seat, and delicately kissed me. The little O’s formed by the ladies’ mouths grew wider as they watched. Anne drew back an inch and licked her lips once more. She kissed me again. Then
she
deliberately formed
her
mouth into a little O and moved it over me.

Mercifully, there was a metallic clank and a violent lurch, and the train began to haul us out of sight of those three grim ladies. As we drifted out of each other’s lives, the one in the center fixed me with her furious gaze. She set her features in an ominous frown, expertly twisted around one finger a thread from her needlework, and snapped it fiercely off. I felt as if my doom had been decreed by stern, suburban fates. I have no idea what punishment they would have wished for me, but if they could have foreseen the rest of my day, they would surely have been satisfied. I remember wondering if it was possible that one of them knew me. Or perhaps, several weeks or months later, I would turn and find one of them seated next to me at a dinner. I felt a bit sick. Somehow, unwittingly, incredibly, I had become part of a live sex act performed before a hostile, disapproving audience. I felt exposed, anxious, and ashamed.

But I also felt Anne’s mouth and hands all over my body, her lips and tongue caressing me, and a new swell of bliss mingled easily with my anxiety and shame. I leaned over her again, pushing her back into the seat. I ran my hands over her body, from her hips up over her breasts. I kissed her and as I pushed my tongue into her mouth, I pushed my thumb into her. She writhed on the seat and seized me with her hand.

This time the interruption was the door at the end of the car sliding open with a crash and flooding us with the metallic noise of wheels and rails. I raised myself and peered over the back of the seat. The conductor, a ponderous 250-pound man in a vast black uniform, was working his way down the aisle in a dignified ambling gait. This was even more unsettling than the last interruption: for one thing there was no pane of glass to make us seem like an official exhibit in a terrarium; for another, we had some warning, some time to hide. Frantically we pulled ourselves together as best we could. No time to fasten our clothing, but we pulled it as much as possible across the naked limbs and members and mounds of flesh. Then I pulled the
New York Times
up and spread it out over our bodies from our knees to our shoulders, like a gigantic child’s bib. I reached over, retrieved my pad of paper from the floor, and balanced it on my lap. As the conductor arrived, I resumed my lecture on supply and demand.

“When you superimpose the two curves, the intersection defines the point at which the market clears.”

The conductor looked down at us. Then he reached up and removed two ticket stubs from a slot in the luggage rack above us.

“That is,” I said uneasily, “supply and demand are in equilibrium.”

The conductor lowered his gaze again and stared at us. He seemed to feel that something was not quite right.

“Movements in price will tend toward that point…” Anne pinched me underneath the newspaper. I must have made some inarticulate grunt, since the conductor gave me a suspicious look. “Although a given short-term movement may not—”

The conductor, leaning over us, proclaimed as loudly as if to a car full of passengers, “Princeton Junction!”

Both Anne and I started. The conductor continued to stare at us. We silently and intently studied our pad of paper with its intersecting curves.

Evidently unable to think of anything more to say or do, the conductor finally turned ponderously and shuffled back toward the end of the car.

The newspaper slid from our laps. The train was already beginning to slow again to a halt. Anne was laughing. I gave her a last, rather violent caress. We both frantically pulled clothing together, fastened buttons, shoved papers into briefcases. Agonizing, aching frustration. We were still tucking in clothing and smoothing hair back into place with our hands as we stumbled awkwardly down the carriage steps onto the platform.

“Damn!” said Anne, laughing.

W
e stood on the platform in a momentary daze and watched the train pull away. The sky was completely dark now; it seemed about to rain. Sudden contact with the cool, moist, threatening air made me feel as if I were just now being awakened after a night of insufficient sleep. The handful of other passengers who had descended here hurried off across the platform to the parking lot or to the little train that would shuttle them to Princeton. I announced to Anne that I was going to find a taxi. We had plenty of time — not that I would have cared if we were late — and I meant to go into Princeton and rent a car so that I could escape with Anne from MicroMagnetics at the earliest possible moment.

I was disappointed when my companion replied that she had arranged to have us met. At first I imagined that the
Times
in its magnificence provided its employees with drivers wherever the quest for truth took them. In fact, I was informed, we were being met by a representative of Students for a Fair World.

“Why Students for a Fair World? Princeton Yellow Cabs has better drivers,” I protested. Maybe the
Times
really did have training camps in Ethiopia. “Besides,” I asked, “why do the Students for a Fair World want to go to all this trouble for us? I know we’ve all got to pitch in and help each other in the struggle for a better world and everything, but I really feel this isn’t the best use of their talents, providing drivers for us. Really, we’re doing a disservice to the revolution.”

“Shut up,” she said affably. “This is probably him now.”

Indeed, a member of the revolutionary vanguard had appeared farther down the platform. He was really quite striking — handsome with the small, fine features of a model, longish blond hair swept straight back, and dressed entirely in overlaundered, faded denim. He was young enough so that he might still have been an undergraduate.

“Yes, indeed,” I said. “From the autumn line of revolutionaries by Ralph Lauren.” He was observing us uncertainly. We were evidently not what he was expecting, but we were the only people left at the station.

“How about letting me do my job?” she said to me and then strode down the platform with a greeting smile. As she approached, he swept one hand through his hair and extended the other in greeting. My heart full of sullenness, I followed as slowly as I could manage to where they stood. If nearly grown men want to put on costumes and play cowboys and Indians or make-believe revolution, it is fine with me; but I didn’t want them intruding on my morning. As I came up to them, Anne was thanking him for meeting us.

“Not at all. If you hadn’t called and told us this was taking place, we’d have missed it completely. None of us had ever even heard of Micro-Magnetics, and this is just the kind of opportunity we’re always looking for. Nuclear poisoning of the environment is an issue with a really broad appeal. And once you get people—”

He stopped as I joined them, and they both looked up at me with slightly startled expressions, as if my arrival had been somehow unanticipated, or inappropriate. I felt a childish but considerable annoyance — annoyance that my day was taking a different turn than I had planned, annoyance at the young person’s make-believe work clothes, at his good looks, and at his way of staring at me as if I were an unusual and somewhat suspect form of life.

“Nick Halloway, Robert Carillon,” Anne said rather quickly, indicating first one of us and then the other with perfunctory waves of the hand. She didn’t seem to want to linger over the introduction. She turned back to Carillon, leaving me with a view of the back of her head, and started to speak to him. But he spoke first.

“Are you with the
Times
too, Nick?” He was studying me with an expression of deliberate and skeptical appraisal.

“Gosh, no.” I spoke with the most boyishly ingenuous air I could contrive. “Unfortunately. I mean, I wish I were. Great paper. Tremendous challenge, working there — lot of fun too, I’ll bet. And a tremendous responsibility.” I cast a glance at Anne, who had been looking at me in amazement and who now turned away again, stonily. “Actually, I’m with Shipway & Whitman. Great firm. Nice people.” I grinned a large, friendly, foolish grin.

Carillon seemed uncertain whether I was serious or not, but I suppose he found me offensive either way. As I spoke, he studied my necktie as if he had never seen one before and found the idea vaguely amusing. He moved his head and squinted slightly to make it clear that he was examining first the initials monogrammed on my shirt front and then my suspenders. His eyes traveled up and down my suit, which was grey with pinstripes, as it happened, and came to rest on my shoes, which seemed to be particularly troubling to him. They were very good English shoes made to fit my particular feet, and as things would turn out it was good luck that I wore them that day.

“Who are you with?” I asked enthusiastically.

“I’m with Students for a Fair World.”

“Oh, right. Of course you are. I’ve been hearing all about you. You’re the head of the whole shooting match, aren’t you?”

“I don’t think I’d call it a shooting match,” he said a little stiffly. “Shooting is exactly what we’re trying to put an end to. And we don’t have a ‘head.’ We organize ourselves by democratic principles with a collective consensus. You may be unfamiliar with the idea.”

“But you
are
the head man?”

“I am sometimes chosen to be a spokesperson,” he said demurely.

“Gee, that’s great. Probably like being president of a fraternity, or a secret society or whatever, in my day. Or an eating club — it
is
eating clubs you have down here, isn’t it? Your family must be proud as punch.”

He reddened and his eyes narrowed.

“I don’t think they see it quite the same way you do. And for once I’m in agreement with them. You’re here, I take it, to see whether someone can make a profit on some new variety of nuclear energy.”

“That’s it,” I said cheerfully. “Always looking for the highest rate of return, wherever it may be. That’s what makes the world go round, as the poet says. The invisible hand and all. The ruthlessly efficient market.”

“Well, I suppose it can only be as ruthless and efficient as the people who operate it,” he replied with a sardonic smile. “Perhaps that’s why it sometimes seems more the former than the latter.”

Really, we were hitting it off splendidly. Anne, who usually had an appetite for ideological conflict, seemed on this occasion irritated, however. She was probably embarrassed by me — a thought which added to my own annoyance. She moved to take control.

“This thing is scheduled for ten-thirty—” she began.

But a thought struck me, and I interrupted. “Say, you don’t have a brother or a cousin named Bradford Carillon, do you? Works at Morgan?”

“Half-brother,” he replied coldly.

“Great guy,” I said, totally inaccurately. “I’ll let him know I ran into you.”

“Do.”

“We’ve got to get along,” Anne said firmly. She had definitely had enough. “How far is it to MicroMagnetics, exactly?”

Carillon seemed to welcome the interruption. It was ten minutes to MicroMagnetics, but the two of them began a discussion, as if it were a complex and engrossing problem, of distances and driving times and alternative routes. They both carefully avoided looking at me or acknowledging my presence. I considered taking a taxi on my own but decided that would seem childishly petulant. Carillon was excusing himself to get the car.

“Why don’t we just come with you to the parking lot?” asked Anne.

“No, just wait here a moment, and I’ll get everything organized.”

The hero of the revolution hurried off up the platform, and as soon as he was out of earshot, Anne shared with me her view of my behavior.

“Jesus Christ. Can’t you be civil?”

“I thought I was being civil. I practically had to carry the whole conversation, although I’m not sure why we’re wasting our time talking to this guy. We should get into Princeton and rent a car for—”

“It’s my job to talk to him. I enjoy talking to him.”

“I was enjoying talking to him too.”

“Well, you’ve had enough enjoyment for today. Leave him alone.”

“Exactly what I’d like to do. But by the way, what in God’s name possessed you to call these people and put them up to harassing Micro-Magnetics?”

This question subdued her instantly; she was visibly uncomfortable with it.

“I didn’t put anyone up to anything. Because I take the trouble to follow what happens in the world I live in, I was aware of the active concern of Students for a Fair World with certain issues, and it was part of my job to find out whether they were planning any action in response to a highly publicized event organized by the nuclear industry. And also I wish you wouldn’t mention this to anyone else. Especially at the
Times.”

“Anne, my love, this is not a ‘highly publicized event.’ We shall probably be the only people who bother to come — and if the weather forecast hadn’t been completely inaccurate, even that turnout would have been cut at least in half. Furthermore, MicroMagnetics, whoever they may be, would surely be amazed and thrilled to know that someone had included them in ‘the nuclear industry.’ But I absolutely adore you, and I couldn’t care less if you want to organize an armed rebellion in central New Jersey while on salary at the
Times.
I won’t tell a soul. As a matter of fact, I’m making an effort to keep on your good side; I’m counting on you to put in a good word for me with these people, assure them that I was really a secret sympathizer all along — I mean in case the question should come up at some point after the revolution.”