The Reflection (17 page)

She was gazing through to another room that I couldn’t see at first. I thought she was looking at someone, even signaling to him, but when I walked over to her, there was no one. Only an empty space, save for two narrow beds. We hurriedly pushed them together. Marie reached down to unbutton my pants. She whispered something, too softly for me to catch it. My hand was on her breast, her hand on mine, my head full of the smell of her skin. Inside the moment she seemed barely recognizable, her flesh almost liquid to touch. But behind the distorting excitement I was aware of something else, an almost comfortable intimacy. As if this were something we’d done a hundred times before.

“When’s he back?”

“This afternoon.”

“I’d better leave, then.”

“Don’t go just yet. He’ll call first.”

Marie had propped herself on her elbow. She was looking up at me, and her face had a radiance that startled me. I put my hand to her neck, and traced the faint white line that ran from below her ear down to her shoulder blade.

“What’s this?”

“From an operation.”

“What for?”

“I had a tumor. Years ago. But you knew that.”

She turned about so I could no longer see the scar. Perhaps the fact of having one herself had softened her toward my own. She’d worn her scarf high up on her neck, just as I tended to push my fedora down over my face.

It felt like the greatest luxury to watch Marie as she dressed without hurry. She disappeared into the bathroom. I put the beds back to how they’d been, then wandered out into the small corridor, at the end of which was another bedroom, its door half open. The man’s room. Perhaps Marie’s as well. Without thinking, I walked in. Double bed, a chest of drawers, a small writing table, a wardrobe—just by looking around I felt I already knew him. What kind of man would call his maid to say he was on his way home, I wondered. No kind of man, evidently. I opened the wardrobe: a dozen or so white shirts hung neatly off a railing, seemingly all the same. Had Marie ironed them? I took one off the hanger and put it on; it fit me perfectly. I’d torn my own shirt in my haste to get undressed. Some ten-dollar bills, maybe a dozen of them, sat on the bedside table. For what purpose? I picked up a couple but then put them down again. I didn’t want to get Marie into trouble.

I turned around to see her watching me from the sitting room. She was no longer wearing the summer dress, but a more seasonal woolen skirt and cardigan. Her hair was smoothed down, makeup applied. She was different again, her face more serious, and in her difference, our sexual encounter of only minutes before seemed inconceivable. As if to reassure myself that it had happened, I walked up to her and put my hands around her waist. I started to unbutton her cardigan.

“There’s no time.”

“Will we see each other again?”

“I don’t know.”

“If you don’t know, why did you go to bed with me?”

She turned away and sat down in the one armchair in the room. Beside it was a small table on which lay some medical books.

“You disappear completely. Suddenly you’re back again. I’m angry with you. Very angry. But not quite finished with you. Remember the time we met outside Radio City?

“Yes.”

“You knew a way to get into the show without paying. We couldn’t afford to eat out, but you had flowers for me. Later you told me you’d spent an hour picking them in Central Park.”

“I remember.”

She nodded to herself. It all made strange sense to me. Manne had been cold, austere, driven by routine; Smith was different: gregarious, impulsive—even romantic, it seemed. As Marie excavated the details of our affair, it came alive for me as well, the scenes playing in my head like a movie reel. I tried to imagine what it must have been like for her, a refugee, arriving in New York, knowing no one, utterly alone. But then someone eventually takes pity on you. He makes an effort to help you. It almost doesn’t matter who he is, or that he barely shares a common language with you. In fact, the greater the distance between the two of you, the better it is. After all, passion is not a meeting of minds, it’s an entanglement of fantasies. Only later, as the unknown is gradually, dismally translated into the known, does the disappointment come.

The ringing phone cut through my thoughts. Marie hurried over to the sideboard and picked it up.

“Yes … yes … Anatole … yes.” She put down the receiver and turned to me. “You’ve got to go now.”

“That was Stevenson?”

“Yes. He’s at Grand Central.”

“Anatole … you’re on first name terms with him?”

“That’s his son’s name.”

“He has a French name?”

“No. It’s just my own name for him. A kind of joke.”

“What sort of joke?”

“A silly thing. It’s not important.”

She put her arms around my neck again, and I could feel her breasts against me. She had a pet name for the boy, one that she shared with his father. Even in the unlikely event that she wasn’t sleeping with Stevenson, it demonstrated a certain domestic intimacy. I had an image of her here in the apartment playing with the boy, the man looking on indulgently, like an illustration for an ad.

“Will we see each other again?”

“Don’t worry. We’ll see each other again.”

It took me quite a while to find the hospital again, despite the midtown location. When I finally came upon it, practically by accident, its modest facade seemed to slot perfectly into a faceless New York. Through the doors I found myself in an atrium, with a reception desk at one end manned by a young man, no doubt a medical student earning a few extra bucks. I remembered little of the day of my discharge, only a couple of months before, although it felt like the distant past. Now I took the opportunity to look about and absorb the details. Fresh paint, shiny carpet, new chairs—and yet, in my mind, the hospital had been quite shabby. It must have been renovated in the months since I’d left. Nobody about, which was odd as well. As if to contradict that thought, a woman suddenly appeared from behind the receptionist’s desk and then walked out the front door. For a bizarre moment I thought she was Marie, although on second glance the resemblance was quite superficial.

I was in a waiting area just off the atrium. I’d had my
misgivings about coming back to the hospital for the appointment. I had this image of it as a sort of cocoon. A place of flickering ambiguity, into which a dying Manne had entered, and a reborn Smith had exited. It should have disappeared and crumbled away as soon as I no longer had any use for it. Now I wondered whether Dr. Peters might even get me committed again. I had a desire to melt back into the city, to become yet another of its anonymous faces. Instead, I’d kept my word. I didn’t really know why, except that it was to do with Manne, not Smith. I couldn’t entirely shake Manne off, not on my own.

“Dr. Peters will see you now.”

A nurse had appeared. She led me down a long corridor to an elevator. As we walked, I continued to look around, surprised at how perfect everything seemed. Even the nurse herself was immaculately groomed, as if she’d just stepped out of a makeup department. We rode the elevator, walked down another pristine corridor, and then the nurse said: “This is Dr. Peters’s office.”

I’d had this notion that the meeting would be in the room I’d occupied at the hospital, just like old times. I’d even felt a vague longing to be back there. But the moment I actually thought about it, I realized the absurdity of the idea. Now I stood by a door that was half open. I could see the doctor not directly, but in a mirror on the wall facing his desk. Opposite, in a position I could see neither directly nor indirectly, was another man, whose voice I recognized. My first doctor at the hospital: the one with the beard, the pince-nez, the patrician New England accent. “I don’t think it’s the right way to go about things, not at all,” I could hear him say, to which Dr. Peters replied, “I’m afraid it’s no longer up to you.” There was another testy exchange, then the squeak of a chair leg scraping across the linoleum. The man
walked past me, without so much as casting a glance in my direction.

“Mr. Smith? Come in. Please, sit down.”

Dr. Peters had been taking notes, and continued to do so for a minute or so, ignoring me as I sat there silently—it was a technique I remembered using myself, as a means of inducing unease and weakening a patient’s resistance. Finally, he left off. He opened a dossier on his desk and glanced through it.

“So … a stevedore … Chelsea Piers … seems you’ve been absent from work quite a few days. Why is that?”

“I got sick. I’m back on the job now.”

“Well … I wouldn’t take any more time off if I were you.”

Another minute’s silence while Dr. Peters read through notes, ignoring me. I looked about the office, which seemed utterly ordinary. There was the desk photo of his wife, another of two young boys. Each perfectly posed, with just the right smiles. As if they were not real family portraits, but a studio demonstration of what a family portrait should look like.

“Tell me about Marie.”

“What about her?”

“You’ve been seeing her again, haven’t you?”

“That’s right.”

“Tell me about it.”

“We got back in touch, through a mutual acquaintance. A few weeks back. That’s all there is to it.”

“What do you do together?”

“We go to the movies. The usual stuff.”

“That’s it? Nothing in particular she likes to do?”

“Like what?”

“Anything. Anything that comes to mind.”

“Well … she likes to go back to places we’ve been to before.”

“How do you mean?”

“We went down to the Battery, for example. She told me about the time we went there when we were first seeing each other. She wanted to retrace our steps.”

“What do you make of that?”

“I don’t make anything of that.”

“I see. Where do you usually meet?”

“In coffee shops, bars. One in particular I guess. Albert’s Bar & Grill. I kind of know the guy who runs it.”

“What I meant was, where do you conduct your affair? At your hotel?”

“No. We tried that once. We were caught out. In fact, the manager’s given me notice.”

“What will you do?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, where have you and Marie been sleeping together?”

“She works for a family, not far from here. She has the run of the apartment when they’re not there, which is a lot of the time.”

“You sleep in the marital bed?”

“No. We sleep in a different room.”

“Have you made any plans together?”

“You mean like getting married?”

“Any sort of plans.”

“Not really … Marie talks about a place upstate. The people she works for have a vacation home up that way. On a lake. She says we should borrow the house in the spring. Get away from the city.”

“What do you think of that idea?”

“I don’t know.”

“How would you like a place of your own? Here in the city?”

“I’d like it pretty well. But there’s not much chance of that.”

The doctor opened a desk drawer and took out a typed
sheet, read it through, signed it at the bottom, and sealed it into an envelope. He picked up the phone, dialed a number, murmured a few yeses and nos into the receiver. He turned to me: “Can you afford thirty dollars a month?”

“I think so.”

A few more murmurs and then he put down the receiver. He scribbled something on a piece of paper and handed it to me.

“This is the address of a rental agent. Here’s a letter for him. Go see him now. He’s waiting for you.”

The interview was over; it had lasted barely ten minutes. I was escorted back down the corridors and walked quickly out through the lobby. It was a surprise to so suddenly find myself on the sidewalk again, and it took me a moment to gather my thoughts. Crossing the street, I turned around briefly to look back at the hospital facade, but it had already been swallowed up into the streetscape.

The address the doctor had scrawled was on the Lower East Side. I’d have to get the F train down to East Broadway, again. I went through the motions—climbing down the stairs, putting the nickel in the turnstile, finding my way onto the platform—but my mind was still occupied with Dr. Peters. There were things I’d wanted to ask him, but I’d been fazed by the meeting’s abrupt end. I could understand how he’d known about my absenteeism. Someone at the shipping company must be reportig back to the hospital. But Marie? How could he have known that I was seeing her? It threw up the possibility of something far more insidious. I eyed the two men opposite me on the train. One was wearing a suit and reading the
Times
; the other was more raggedly dressed, probably a vagrant. Neither was paying any attention to me; neither were likely candidates to be spies.

In my hands was Dr. Peters’s letter, sealed in an envelope,
and I resisted the urge to tear it open. It was no doubt some sort of institutional guarantee on the rental of an apartment. Why should he offer me that? I had the impression of being toyed with. I was a laboratory rat that Dr. Peters had set free in the city, to see how I’d react. A paranoid reaction on my part, but then the interview had felt almost designed to induce paranoia. I remembered my own time as a psychiatrist, and how a patient’s paranoia would inevitably become fixated on the treatment itself, provoking the very symptoms it was designed to banish. Of course, I could easily get off the train now and throw away the address the doctor had given me. I could easily disappear into the city. But I was being offered a place to live just as I was about to lose my hotel room, during a bitter winter.

Now I was at the agent’s office, above a grocery store. The agent read the doctor’s letter carefully with what seemed to me some puzzlement. He spoke to someone on the phone, possibly Dr. Peters, then finally opened a cupboard and took out some keys. I followed him from the office, down to a dingy street of tenement buildings, fifteen minutes’ walk away. We made our way up the garbage-strewn stairway of a rundown building, to a door on the third floor. Beyond it, a smallish room with peeling walls, a table and two chairs, a sofa, a bad painting hanging opposite a tiny window. An opening in the far wall led to an identically sized room, with just a mattress on the floor. The agent sat down on one of the chairs and lit a cigarette without offering me one. He was a stocky, square-jawed man and he wore a plain dark suit.