The door to the room with the mirrors was closed, a Do Not Disturb notice, the kind used in certain hotels, on the knob of the door, an irrelevancy which nevertheless caused Terman some hesitation. “Is something wrong, luv?” Marjorie asked. He put his ear to the door, listened to heart beat and pulse, the breathing of moths. “Who’s in there?” she whispered, leaning over him, the point of a breast pressed to his back like a knife. “What are we supposed to be listening for?” she asked. “This is all terribly amusing.”
When he had pushed the door open he was surprised by the fierce unshaven figure coming at him in the mirror. When he turned away for respite the same unenviable figure approached him from another side, and still another.
After she had removed her blouse, mocked on all sides by ghostly imitators, Marjorie said, “It’s the kind of bizarre joke my husband would play on one, isn’t it? Was that what you had in mind?”
“In this room one gets overwhelmed by self,” he said.
Marjorie told a story of how Max had invited some people to a dinner party at their old flat in Knightsbridge and had absented himself before the guests arrived. He had hidden himself somewhere in the diminutive five room flat and the object of the evening was to discover his hiding place. After searching in vain for four or five hours, the guests decided that they were being hoaxed. Marjore had them step out into the hall for five minutes and when she ushered them back Max was waiting for them in the living room. Not only had he been able to avoid discovery, he had also managed to film the search from wherever he was hidden.
“Did they ever get any dinner?” Terman asked.
“You know I don’t remember if they did or not,” Marjorie said, “though I can’t imagine we’d let them go home without any food.”
“Perhaps they ate and searched at the same time,” he said.
A sudden wind caused the door to the room, which had been ajar, to slam shut.
“I nearly jumped out of my skin,” said Marjorie, who had already divested herself of her clothes.
Terman recalled that the door to this room tended to stick, which was one of the reasons the room was rarely used. He could almost remember Max warning him about the door sticking at some inappropriate time in the legendary past.
Marjorie’s anecdote had conjured Max’s presence.
“It’s a bit dazzling, isn’t it,” she was saying, “seeing yourself like that. One is never absolutely sure if it’s oneself or someone else.”
Terman kept his eyes closed, spooked by the repetition of images around him, the redundancy of forms. He could imagine the scene being filmed, image within image within image, the camera image no more than a reflection of itself. He wondered if their reflections could fuck while they remained spectators to the event.
“We don’t have to do this if you don’t want to,” Marjorie said. “We could just sit here and talk if you prefer.”
Unless the mirrors lied, he was already lodged between her legs. “You’re very sexy,” he said to her.
“I get off on seeing myself,” she whispered. She was articulate to a fault, a scholar of variation, almost every gesture perfectly phrased.
He had a sudden longing to return home, to return to America, that unsceptered continent, to be among people again that spoke the same language.
He had been feigning madness, he thought, or was the pretence itself also madness? Hamlet faced the same dilemma.
Their reflections, he noticed — eyes open for the moment — betrayed more passion, more erotic pleasure, than the supposed originals.
“They expect me to kill you and for that reason I won’t,” Adriano says. “I won’t do their housecleaning for them this time.”
‘“Who’s they?” Henry Berger asks.
“I want you to promise me you won’t let them hurt Claudia,” he says, coughing spasmodically, a trickle of blood at the side of his lips.
“Who gives you your orders, Adriano?”
The dying man’s lips quiver at the effort of speech, flutter like boneless fingers. “I promise I’ll see to Claudia,” Berger says.
Terman lay in bed like a corpse, hands folded across his chest, while Marjorie watched her reflection dress wherever she turned, all sides of her given credence. “You might say something kind,” she said.
He wrote himself two lines of dialogue. “You insist on people acting according to some scheme that exists solely in your head. We’re all characters in your novel, Marjorie.”
“I expect I want to hear that you’ve had a lovely time,” she said.
A third line of dialogue offered itself. “If I said that at your prompting, Marjorie, how could you possible believe it?”
“Trust me, luv.”
He perceived himself reaching across the bed to offer some gesture of affection, but in fact he made no such move, made no move at all.
She studied him in the mirror, in the various mirrors, then sat down on the edge of the bed with her back to him. “I think someone must have broken your heart,” she said icily.
He roused himself from his torpor. “If Max were a really smart man, he would never leave home,” he said.
“It’s a start,” she said. “Small and incomplete, though not entirely loathsome.”
His sleeping prick arose and lifted the covers like the spine of a tent. There was nothing to do for it, no will to accompany its purpose. In a moment or two (perhaps an hour had passed — the man in bed had no sense of time), Marjorie was at the door, negotiating the handle to no effect. He watched her in the opposing mirror.
She cursed the door, kicked at it, promised it the full burden of her wrath.
He planned to get up and help her — there was a trick to the door, you had to push it in to get it out — imagined himself lifting the covers and stepping out of the bed.
She pulled at the handle, turned it both ways, stopped then started again abruptly as if she might deceive the door into releasing her. Terman perceived her as a character in a comic film.
“Bloody bitch of door,” she yelled, laughing at herself. She joined him at the bed, the reflections from the four walls of mirrors multiplying her. “Please help me, luv,” she said. “The door won’t let me out.”
Having forgotten their initial combat and its attendant disappointments, he invited her under the covers for a rematch, heard himself speak the words, witnessed the movement of his mouth in one of the mirrors.
“Haven’t you had enough of that?” she asked. “Besides, I have to go, I really do. Is that bloody awful of me, darling?”
“Whatever you say,” he said.
“It will have to be a quicky-wicky,” she said. She removed her off-white pants with the wide cuffs and folded them over the back of a chair, posed for him in the box of mirrors.
When she stripped him of the blanket he shivered from the draft, from a sense of irremediable cold.