He misjudged her sympathy and tried to kiss her on the neck, the collar of her blouse obstructing his intent. She pushed him away, using all her strength, drove him into the handle of his own door.
Later, after he had taken his hot bath and gone to bed, she tiptoed into the room and apologized for having been so upset with him. Terman feigned sleep, feigned dreams, feigned dying.
She cuddled his head against her chest or he dreamed her doing it.
He imagined or dreamed, imagined he dreamed or dreamed he imagined, the following conversation.
“I never got to see him.”
“That’s odd, isn’t it? You were gone such a long time I thought surely you were with him.”
“I ran into difficulty, a series of difficulties. I was going to call you and tell you about it but I couldn’t find a public phone and when I did and called you there was no answer.”
She was holding his hand to her mouth (or so he imagined) when the phone interrupted. “Why don’t we let it pass,” he dreamed himself saying.
Isabelle left to answer the phone while Terman imagined that he was the one that had gotten out of bed to confront the unknown. Isabelle said Hallo. Max was on the line to announce he was flying to Los Angeles in the morning. Isabelle said Hallo, the sound returning like an echo from a distant place.
She shouted something unintelligible, her voice unusually shrill, then hung up the phone.
Isabelle waited for him to ask what happened before committing her story to him. As it was, he had no intention of asking. Her experience with the silent phone went unshared.
A second phone call seemed to wake him several hours later and he picked up the receiver to hear Max do his well-worn imitation of English fatuity.
“BBC here,” he said. “Not disturbing anything, old boy, am I? We’re all wild over here about televiewing the story of your life if you could condense it into five or six absolutely smashing words.”
“I think you have the wrong number,” Terman said.
“This isn’t the brilliant, Dr. T? I’d know that voice anywhere, luv.”
“Dr. T done gone away,” he said.
“When you see the scoundrel, old boy, might you tell him that Max Kirstner will be in California for the next half week, some business to transact. The international director will be appearing on the show, Let’s Make a Deal.”
“Don’t expect ever to see that man, boss.”
“If you do run into the old boy, tell him that Max liked what he read of his latest rewrites, liked but not loved, though he is willing to compromise on matters of the heart. To keep up the good work and all that. Ciao, bambino.”
Terman called to Isabelle and got no answer, merely the return of her name, the echo of her absence.
When he found himself fully awake it was about midnight, he guessed, though it could have been any time. Days might have passed, whole lifetimes. A woman was asleep next to him, one of her legs curling about his like a vine.
He woke hungry and went downstairs in the dark to fix himself something to eat, the sore ankle still somewhat tender, though vastly improved for its rest.
The sleep had refreshed him — he was maneuvering down the stairs in the dark — and he considered that he was having, or had had, a condition known as breakdown.
He felt remarkably good at this moment of reckoning, felt like whistling or making love or watching an old American movie on television, preferably a western or mystery.
The house was absolutely dark, was dark the way a religious mystery is dark; it was illumined by dark.
The chairs in the large parlor were occupied by shadows. He saluted them as he passed, raising two fingers to his forehead, a gesture out of some other time or place. The shadows ignored his passage or took it for granted.
He was in the kitchen, had found his way there without turning on a single light, and was standing in front of the refrigerator.
He was on the steps coming down, his ankle paining him, holding on to the bannister as he made his way.
He poured himself a congnac, sat down on the maroon velvet couch in the large parlor and adjusted his eyes to the nuances of blackness.
He took a slice of baked ham from the refrigerator and made an open sandwich with it on a thick slice of stale black bread. He took a bite out of it then decided it wasn’t what he wanted and returned to the large parlor without it. His son Tom was waiting there for him.
He came down the stairs with both hands on the bannister, each step a plunge into the unimaginable. They had the following conversation.
“Is that you, Dad?” one of the shadows asked him. “I understand you’ve been looking for me.”
“I may have been. I don’t remember.”
“You don’t remember that you drove down from Ramsgate or Kent or whatever to say something to me that couldn’t wait?”
“It’s true that Isabelle and I drove down from Ramsgate through the night.”
“In the morning you got into your car — I don’t know if it’s yours or if it’s a rented job — and went looking for me.”
“The fact remains, and I think we ought to stay close to the facts, the fact remains that I didn’t find you.”
“Let me get this straight, Dad, okay? You’re denying that you were looking for me at all. It was coincidental that you were flashing around in my neighborhood and lost your way.”
“No. What I’m saying is this. The outcome of an act more or less defines its intention. I may have been looking for you or thought that that’s what I was about, but there’s no evidence that I actually wanted to find you.”
“It’s about time you admitted it,” Tom said.
An uneasy quiet followed, in which Terman got up and walked about.
“Is there something you want to say to me, Tom?” he asked.
Tom shook his head or so it appeared in the dark room. The abrupt movement of a shadow, dark against dark, darker against darker.
“Do you have the pistol with you?” Terman asked.
“With me?”
“I’d like to have it back if you don’t mind.”
“It’s in the pocket of my jacket. I take it with me everywhere.”
“I appreciate that,” Terman said under his breath. “Still, if you don’t mind, I’d like to have it back.”
“Do you need it right away, Dad? If you don’t, I’d like to, you know, hold onto it a while longer.”
Terman held out his hand, which was invisible in the dark room. “It’s out of the question,” he said. “What did you want it for in the first place?”
“I had nothing, you know, in mind. I just liked having it, just liked the idea of having it with me. Do you know what I mean? It was there for me.”
The same question kept returning. “There to do what with?”
“To do whatever. I mean, what use did you have for it?”
“The hero of the movie I was writing carried one and I acquired the gun as a form of research.”
“Yeah,” Tom said. “Right. If our reasons weren’t exactly the same, they weren’t so different either. Did you ever get to shoot it?”
The shadow leaned forward to ask the last question, the question pulling him forward.
“I went to a shooting range once,” Terman said. “It was a place for members only but Max knew the people in charge and so got us access. They had silhouettes of people and if you hit one in a vital part it would keel over.”
Tom laughed nervously. “Did you get off on it, Dad?”
“It was like eating forbidden fruit, had that fascination. Still, we were only playing.”
“You were doing research, right?”
“Are you being ironic with me?”
“If I am, it wasn’t intentional,” said the disingenuous shadow. “Do you think I was being ironic, Dad?”
The smarmy sincerity was more offensive to him than the irony, though he choked back his disapproval.