“Terman, I’m very unhappy with you,” she said. “I’m going into work in a few minutes and I wanted to say that.”
“Why isn’t anything where it was?” he asked. He held out his hand to her.
“Am I invisible?” she asked him. “Once in a while you fix on me and then you pay me some attention, but I could be an inanimate object for all that.” Her hand in his was like a trapped mouse. “That’s all I have to say.”
“I don’t dispute it,’ he said.
She looked up at his face, wary of unheard irony, angry at him beyond respite. He stood with his head down, took his scolding like a child. “I have to go now,” she said, kissing the side of his head. She extracted her hand. “I don’t know that I’ll be back this evening. Do you want me to ring up if I change my mind?”
“I can understand that you might want to be alone,” he said, meaning to be polite or generous.
She didn’t say anything to that. The unspoken comment was sufficient, she thought.
He nodded his assent, though his agreement had not been requested. It was not that she was invisible to him as she said, but that the whole physical world was vanishing by degrees before his eyes.
There was something she felt she had to tell him before she left, she said, trying to underplay the melodrama of such a statement. She had an actress’s ability to maintain her self-possession while undergoing storms of distress or anxiety. It was when her manner was most glacial that those who could read her knew she was most deeply upset. Terman, it might be said, saw nothing, not even the contemptuous manner she wore like a mask. His distraction was complete.
The confession came and went, untempered by regret. She had gone off with Max Kirstner that afternoon he had stayed behind to work on the screenplay. It was a gesture, she supposed, more self-defeating than spiteful, though for which she had no intention of apologizing. “It’s out of character for me to behave that way,” she said, “so I tend to blame you for it. I feel, isn’t it odd, that you were the one that betrayed me.”
Her accusation seemed neither to hit the mark nor miss it altogether and he accepted it as he had the report of her liaison with Max.
“Get the hell out of here,” he said suddenly angry. He opened the door and pushed her out.
The conversation continued briefly after she had gone, completed itself. “Perhaps I’ll be back the day after,” she said.
“Perhaps you will,” he said.
A few minutes later he was on the telephone in a response to a ringing that went on beyond its course.
“Hello,” he said, leaning jauntily on an umbrella as if he thought he might be Fred Astaire.
There was a click on the other end. He knew who it was, had gotten the message.
He couldn’t remember if he had gone shopping or had only thought about going, had lived through the anticipation of it, and so checked the refrigerator and cupboards again.
When he returned from the store with a box of groceries — the weight of his arms presented itself as evidence — the phone was ringing again.
“Marjorie Kirstner here,” the voice said.
He had expected the click again, the knife edge of disconnection, or indeed something worse. “Where are you calling from?” he asked.
“I’m in London,” she said. “I’m staying with some friends.” He heard symphonic music in the background and a counterpoint of voices: someone was laughing or crying. “If you’re not too busy, perhaps we could meet for tea this afternoon.”
It was as if his memory were getting shorter and shorter so that as soon as a moment had passed it was already lost to him. “Who is this?” he asked.
She laughed, took the question — how else might it be taken? — as as uninspired joke. “It’s Marjorie, darling,” she said. “You haven’t forgotten already, I hope.”
“Do you want to come here?” he asked. “Is that why you called?”
She was silent for a moment and he thought he heard a click, terrible and decisive, within the silence. The voice returned, altered by the expedition. “Do you really mean that?” it asked. “I can’t think that it would be appropriate.”
He tapped the umbrella on the floor to the tune of an American song called “Nature Boy,” which he hadn’t heard or even thought of hearing for twenty-five years.
“Is there someone there with you?” she asked.
“Where with me?”
“At your house, Terman. Isn’t that what we’re talking about, luv?”
“We’re talking about love,” he said. “Isn’t that what we’re talking about?”
“Are you being nasty with me,” she asked, “or has there been a genuine misunderstanding?”
He said he couldn’t remember which, his memory failing, which made her laugh her odd tinkling laugh.
“What’s your pleasure, luv?” she said. “Should I come chez tu or would you rather meet on the town?”
Some time later in the day, when it was getting to be four o’clock in the afternoon, the doorbell sounded. Terman had been in the study when interrupted, holding conversations with the detective Henry Berger.
When he opened the massive door — he thought of the house sometimes as an enormous vault — standing there was a woman about his own age and an elegant young man who seemed not much older than his son.
“You’ve met Emile, I believe,” Marjorie said.
Marjorie sent the aging young man on a tour of the house — she herself had been in all its corners when her husband had used it as a location for his film, “Ceremony of Night”—and went with Terman into the kitchen for some private conversation.
“Where is your adorable friend?” she asked in a confidential voice, taking his arm. “Are you two no longer a thing, as they say in America?”
He could think of no answer to make, felt at once bereft and unencumbered.
“I expect our situations have quelque chose in common,” she whispered, inclining her head toward him.
“How’s that?” he roused himself to ask.
It was the right question, but she indicated with a rolling of her eyes that she had no intention of answering. “Max has gone to California for a few days,” she said, “and I’m rather at loose ends. We were in the middle of a fight that had to be postponed indefinitely.”
He was thinking that Max had all but given up on the Henry Berger film and that Marjorie had come, in Max’s absence, to break the news to him.
“It’s still in consideration,” she said. “Don’t think it isn’t, luv. I don’t remember what I may have said but I suspect I was being a bit bitchy whatever it was. You’ll forgive me, won’t you?”
Henry Berger was almost always a step or two behind the conspiracy, finding corpses wherever he went, pursuing ominous implications.
“Truth to tell, I came to ask your advice,” she said. “I am in grave need of a bit of wisdom if you don’t mind.”
Terman laughed until his sides hurt, until tears broke from his eyes. “What wisdom can I give you?”
Emile floated into the kitchen and sat down at the head of the table, had the air of studying his own reflection in an imaginary mirror.
Marjorie said something to him in French and the aging child pouted in parody of grievance and turned his chair around. She winked at Terman. Her life with Max was a melodrama of betrayal and abuse, she confided in the presence of Emile’s impassive back. What should she do? What would he do it he were in a similar bind?
“You will never leave him,” Emile said with barely the trace of an accent.
“I will. I will,” she said with exaggerated passion. Her manner included an awareness of self-parody.
They had their tea — Marjorie had brought cream cakes from Fortnum and Mason — in the large gloomy kitchen. There was a scene like it in the movie, “Ceremony of Night”—two men and a woman having tea in that very kitchen, one the woman’s stepfather, the other her lover.