Memoirs Of An Invisible Man (43 page)

There was a loud clanking from the end of the lobby, and the ripple halted abruptly several feet from the end. An elevator door opened, and a woman in her twenties strode out and across the lobby, passing within inches of me. The doorman rose, opened one door, then the other, and followed her out to hail a cab. Seizing the opportunity, I spun the keys along the floor the rest of the way to the end of the lobby and then, running after them, kicked them around the corner and out of sight.

The rest would be easy. I picked up the keys and hiked up the fire stairs to the fourth floor. The carpeting in the corridor was laid wall to wall, but I got down on all fours again and slid the keys quickly along the edge, ready to force them under the carpet if anyone came out of an apartment or an elevator. At the door of 4C, I had to pick up the keys and take my chances. It took what seemed like an interminable time to get both locks released and the door opened, but moments later I was stepping into the apartment, pulling the keys free, and pushing the door shut behind me.

I could not remember ever having felt so secure. A physical warmth spread through my body, and I was suddenly free of the grinding anxiety I had lived with continuously for months. I was safely locked inside this splendid little apartment where no one would ever find me.

Switching on a light, I made my way into the kitchen and pulled open the refrigerator door. Ketchup, maple syrup, strawberry jam, five cans of beer, and a bottle of champagne. They had cleared out the refrigerator before leaving. No matter. I snatched a spoon from the drying rack and greedily cleaned out the jam jar. I got the champagne bottle, worked out the cork, and poured myself a large glass. Very special occasion. To my new life. Good champagne. I have experimentally determined that in every refrigerator between Eighth Street and Ninety-sixth Street there is at all times a bottle of champagne.

I turned my attention to the cupboards and found cans of tuna fish and sardines and boxes of spaghetti. That is another thing: there is always tuna fish in the cupboard and usually sardines. There will always be pasta, usually number 9 spaghetti and egg noodles. You can also pretty much count on some cans of Campbell’s soup and some boxes of crackers sealed in cellophane — and with luck some canned spaghetti sauce.

I went to work on a sardine can, managing to twist the key just far enough with my trembling fingers so that I could get at the contents with a fork and shovel them into myself. More champagne. To a long and happy life. Safe and sound.

I put some water on the stove to cook spaghetti and made a tour of the premises. It was a standard postwar apartment: two bedrooms and a large living room with a dining alcove. Not enough closet space and the ceiling too low. But it seemed quite wonderful to me. It appeared to be inhabited by a couple with one child of four or five. Mr. and Mrs. Matthew B. Logan. Matthew and Mary and little Jamie. Scattered throughout the apartment were travel brochures for Italy. Another glass of champagne.
Buon viaggio alla famiglia
Logan. I hoped they were enjoying a wonderful and lengthy holiday. How lengthy exactly would it be? I stacked
The Marriage of Figaro
onto the turntable and loaded several bottles of white wine into the refrigerator for the days ahead. Perhaps they were taking the entire summer off.

As I ate my spaghetti I considered my good fortune with satisfaction. I should have figured this out long ago. It was all quite simple. I could forget about Jenkins now. There were hundreds of thousands of apartments all within a short walk, and at any given time there must be thousands of them sitting empty. At this time of year tens of thousands. And there would be no more reason for Jenkins to look for me in this particular apartment than in any of the others. No wonder he had tried to trick me into leaving New York. This must be exactly what he had been afraid of.

I ran myself a hot bath and lay luxuriating in it for an hour with the music playing in the next room. Afterwards I lay in the Logans’ vast bed, so comfortable and serene that it seemed a shame to go to sleep.

I slept till midday and then showered and shaved, feeling wonderfully refreshed. On a cork bulletin board in the kitchen was a list of telephone numbers for various emergencies. I dialed the one described as “oficina de Mr. Logan” and was told that Mr. Logan was out of the country and would not be back in the office until a week from Monday. I had another ten days. Nine at the very least. They would surely not return any earlier than Saturday. I would be absolutely safe until the end of next week, and by then I would have established myself in another apartment. One night this weekend I would have to look at the other empty apartments in the building. No reason, really, to look any farther afield.

It was a stunningly clear summer day, and I decided to go out for a walk. After surveying the empty corridor through the peephole, I slipped out the door, leaving it on the latch, and walked over to Carl Schurz Park. The sky was brilliant blue, and even Long Island City looked splendid. Boats moved up and down the East River, and runners toiled along the promenade. When you know you are secure, you can begin to take pleasure in these things again. There were people out on the little fenced-in patches of grass sunbathing, women in bathing suits, almost naked, and I went as close as I could to them and stared at their breasts where the tops of their bathing suits were half peeled away, and at the open thighs. Better not to think about it. Never.

To clear my mind I ran for a mile along the promenade, and it occurred to me how extraordinarily confident I had become about moving around among other people. It would be a melancholy existence, but I began to feel a certain pleasure at the thought of living my entirely separate, secret life in the midst of all these people.

Back in the apartment I showered again and for the first time in weeks washed my clothes. Although it was still afternoon, I made myself a small meal by heating up some clam chowder and toasting a frozen English muffin. It was wonderful to be able to eat more than one meal a day. All evening I watched movies on television and ate and drank whenever I felt like it. It was extraordinary how pleasant my life had suddenly become, when only thirty-six hours before it had been a nightmare from which there seemed to be no escape.

For those two days I imagined I was safe.

On the third morning I was awakened from deep sleep by the insistent, repetitive ringing of the doorbell. I sat straight up in the bed and dully asked myself where I was. Logan. 4C. The bell had stopped ringing and the lock was turning. I looked down at my intestines and saw that they were clear.

“I know there’s been someone in there for at least two nights now, and the Logans don’t get back for another week.”

Two people stood in the open doorway. One was a middle-aged woman in a linen suit and the other was a large man in grey work clothes with the address of the building stitched onto the shirt. Probably the superintendent.

“I can hear whoever it is playing classical music in the middle of the night, and you can see the light under the door. You see? The bed’s not made.”

I sat there looking at them stupidly. Don’t come any closer, please.

“They could of left it like that,” said the man. They turned and went into the living room.

“I heard the shower running last night. It’s right next to my bathroom. And look in here. The Logans didn’t leave out all these dirty dishes. I told Benny yesterday when I went out, but he obviously didn’t even tell you…”

They were in the kitchen now. I scrambled out of bed and grabbed the bundle of clothes that I always kept beside me when I slept.

“Look at all this fresh garbage.”

“It could be friends of theirs staying in the apartment,” the man insisted.

“Well, they didn’t tell me, and Benny and Oliver both say
they
haven’t let anyone up to the Logans’ apartment. Look at the empty bottles all over. Benny says the keys are gone from the—”

Still naked, and carrying my clothes under my arm, I slipped out the front door and down the fire stairs to the street. I had completely misjudged my situation. I had been stupid. Careless. In New York your neighbors may not know you, but they know when you are running the water, when you have a phone call, when you are flushing the toilet. They are always peering out through their little peepholes and peering in through your windows. This would be far more difficult than I had thought. I had not solved anything yet.

O
ver the course of the Summer I learned a great deal about new York apartment buildings. Each one is different, and I began to accumulate lore of a sort that would be valueless to anyone else. I learned which buildings had elevator men, which had fire stairs that exited out of sight of the lobby. I learned where the mail was sorted and by whom, where the apartment keys were kept in the lobby, and better yet, where the superintendent kept his much more extensive set of keys. I got to know which buildings had inattentive doormen and which had a lot of turnover in their staff.

In the beginning I concentrated on large postwar buildings, where there are so many tenants moving in and out and changing their roommates and lovers and families that even the doormen cannot keep track of who is there, much less who ought to be. In these buildings security is often haphazard, and it is usually easy to get at the apartment entrances. But the apartments themselves are small, and the walls paper-thin, so that the neighbors can tell when you are using the toaster, and often there are a hundred people in the building across the street staring right in the window.

As time went on, I tried more and more to stay in prewar buildings. The trouble was that in those buildings it was far more difficult to locate empty apartments and get into them. When people are away, the building staff will put the mail in the apartment or keep it out of sight somewhere. There are far fewer people going in and out, and the main apartment entrances are often accessible only from the elevators. But the apartments themselves are large and comfortable, the walls are solid, and you can feel almost secure inside them.

But after that first apartment I understood that I was in just as much danger as ever, and I would have to think out every step I took. I could not go into an apartment whose entrance was visible from a neighbor’s peephole. (Every front door in New York has one of those unpleasant little spy holes, so that you must always assume that you are being watched.) I was careful not to disturb anything or leave any sign of my presence. I would flush as much garbage as possible down the toilet, and I would flush the toilet only during the day, when the neighboring apartments were more likely to be empty. As soon as I got into an apartment, I would search the closets for a sun lamp, so that I could get myself clear again as soon as possible after I had eaten. I never took showers now or played music, and I tried as much as possible to avoid even turning on a light. I crept about in the dark, always listening for the sound of movement in the next apartment or of someone at the entrance.

It was at every moment possible that someone would come through the door without warning: a maid, a repairman, a friend to water the plants. Even in the middle of the night a teen-aged child or a friend from out of town who had been told he could use the apartment might suddenly appear and I would be scrambling frantically into some corner to wait for a chance to get out.

I remember particularly the first time it happened. It must have been three in the morning, and I was sound asleep in an apartment that was supposed to be empty for the rest of the summer. I never heard the apartment door open. The first thing I was aware of was that I was in a room filled with bright light and that I had somehow rolled off the bed and was clutching in terror for my little bundle of clothing. A girl of not more than twenty was standing in the doorway staring at the bed. I had no idea whether she had noticed anything or not. Certainly the bed was untidy, although it did not seem to me that that should bother her particularly. She was short, almost chunky, with dark hair, a rucksack, and the plain, ill-fitting clothing that children in the better boarding schools and universities order through the mail from L. L. Bean, as if they were all on some extended camping trip. Which they more or less are, I suppose.

She walked across the room and around the bed to within a few feet of where I was cowering. She peered under the bed and then glanced about the room. Nothing to see. She must have noticed some movement in the bedclothes when she had switched on the lights, or heard me scrambling onto the floor. I watched her, motionless, afraid of betraying myself by some noise, but the thumping of my heart began to slow to normal, and I became almost calm. She did not know I was there. Nothing was going to happen to me now.

She stared at the bed again for a moment and then, apparently losing interest in the problem, turned and raised the blinds. There was a view of Manhattan rooftops and lights.

Turning back to the bed, she dropped, rather than lowered, the rucksack onto the floor. Then she unbuttoned her plaid cotton shirt, pulled it off, and dropped it to the floor. No brassiere. Full breasts.

My fear was forgotten now, and my mind was filled with the exquisitely agonizing sight of her body. Painful to watch. I knew well enough, insofar as I let myself think about the matter at all, that I would never touch a woman again. Never feel the nipple hardening under my hand, flesh sliding against flesh.

Although she was plump she had a pronounced waist. She was really quite attractive in her way. In fact, she seemed to me at that moment absolutely, excruciatingly beautiful. Probably she was attractive; I have no idea whatever if she was attractive. I had no idea about anything: my mind felt as if it were about to burst.

She pushed off one dirty tennis shoe with the toe of the other, then pushed the remaining shoe off with the bare toes. No socks. They never wear socks. She was pulling down her blue jeans, her breasts extending out as she bent over. Full legs, thin ankles. The blue jeans, half inside out, were left in a crumpled heap on the floor where they had come free. She was sliding down the underpants, stepping out of them, her legs scissoring apart. The tuft of fine, curled hair. The hips and thighs. The short full curves of flesh.