“Up here,” Terman called out, without turning his head.
“We’re locked in a room on the third floor,” Marjorie shouted into the door. “Would you let us out?”
“Is it your son?” she asked him.
There was nothing amusing in the situation for Terman, though he discovered a smile on the face of several of his reflections when he allowed himself to turn his head. He had a sense of the same scene playing itself out without resolution again and again. The unknown intruder comes in the house, awakens expectation, then disappears without heeding their cries for help. The incident varied a little on each occasion (the way memory tends to twist events into narrative pattern), though the basic scenario remained faithful to itself.
When she heard someone coming up the stairs Marjorie turned to Terman and winked. The wink recurred in the first two mirrors and then was gone. “In here,” Marjorie called. “We’re on the top floor.” She recovered her cane which was hanging over the back of a chair.
Between calls for help, Marjorie reported the movements of the intruder. After a brief respite on the second landing, he was coming up the stairs to the third floor.
He or she was on the third floor, coming down the long hallway toward them.
“Second door on the right,” Terman roused himself to say. He had the premonition that when the door opened, if it ever did, another distorted reflection of his own face would be waiting for him on the other side.
They watched the door handle turn, down and back, down and back, to no startling effect.
Terman took a hand, pulled on the handle as the other pushed against the door. The door remained adamant.
“Put your weight against it,” Marjorie advised. “Push with your shoulder.”
The mimic in the several reflections mocked all human endeavor.
“It’s coming,” Marjorie shouted.
The door opened suddenly, severed its restraints, and a man with his own face came into the room.
Terman opened his eyes the next morning with a burgeoning sense of self-contempt, regretted the light of day. He had no breakfst, had no need of food, could barely stand to cover himself with clothes. Something was the matter with him or something had been the matter and had cured itself, leaving him untenanted like some derelict building. The air around him, the air he breathed, smelled of neglect.
He dialed Isabelle’s number with no expectation of finding her in, so when she answered on the fifth or sixth ring it was almost a dissap-pointment.
“I didn’t expect to find you home,” he said.
“I hope that’s not why you called. As a matter of fact, I’m waiting for the studio to ring up to find out where I’m supposed to be.”
He stammered his request, the question begging refusal. “Why don’t we meet for a drink after you finish work?”
“I believe I already have an appointment,” she said. “Can’t you tell me over the phone what you want?”
He wanted nothing. An unbearable weight of shame oppressed him. “Isabelle, look I’m sorry.”
“Yes? That makes two of us, doesn’t it?”
“I’ve behaved unforgivably. I’ve no excuses.”
“I don’t want to hear it, Terman. Do you have anything else to say?”
“Isabelle, I’m sorry.”
“You don’t know what you’ve done. How can you possibly be sorry?”
“I’m terribly ashamed.” He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand, the gesture premature, the tears of shame unrecorded.
“I simply hate this,” she said. “If you continue to apologize, I’m going to hang up on you. Don’t you have any dignity at all?”
He could do no more than act on the feelings he supposed himself to have. “Could we have dinner tomorrow night?” he asked.
“I don’t want to see you,” she said in a constricted voice. “Haven’t I made that clear? I don’t want to see you, not now, not tomorrow, not next week, not next year.”
She hung up before he could apologize again, then called back moments later to say she had no business losing her temper at him. “You’ve done nothing to me I haven’t done to myself, have you? I apopogize for hanging up on you, Terman, and for letting you think you had done me some great injustice when you hadn’t at all.”
He resented her apology, felt it in competition with his own. “You didn’t have to call to tell me that,” he said.
“I don’t know why I called back,” she said. “I thought you might come by until I had to leave for work, though I’m not sure that’s what I want either. I’m sorry to be so equivocal. It makes me unhappy when you make yourself an abject show and I don’t want to subject either of us to that again.”
“I can see your point,” he said.
“Can you? Terman, what do you want from me?”
“Nothing,” he said. He felt himself in a fever of desirelessness.
“Then leave me alone, Terman, will you? Stay away.”
“I’ll do whatever you want,” he said.
“You’re not mocking me, are you? Excuse me, someone’s at the door.” She hung up.
There were no transitional moments, no opening and closing of doors. Dressed in a baggy three-piece suit, he was walking south on Abbotsbury Road, the morning unusually warm, the white light of the sun everywhere. He turned left at Leicester Place, walking briskly and without descernible limp. If his ankle hurt him, he avoided the pain by thinking of something else. The white light scorched him. Each step he imagined as the last of its kind, the last he might allow himself within a certain frame of reference. Each gesture supplanted its predecessor, was complete and distinct, never to be recalled or repeated. He walked around the southern end of the park — something he had only done once before — and went along Fillmore Walk to Camden Hill Road. Two burnt-out teen-age girls, lounging in front of a boutique called Sex Sisters, were eyeing him furtively. He turned toward them, nodded, held out empty hands. They put their heads together and giggled. He was struck with the idea of ending his screenplay with Henry Berger walking along a street very much like the one he was on, while a sniper on a rooftop studied him in his sights. The last shot would be of Henry Berger framed (like the subject of a photgraph) in the sights of a telescopic lens. After the picture dissolved to black, The End in white on a black screen, we would hear the sound of a gun shot echoing.
Terman went up Camden Hill Road to Holland Street, thought to turn but couldn’t without going against himself, made his way to Peele Street where Isabelle had her two room flat. He passed Isabelle’s building, went on to the next street, then crossed over and doubled back. He was studying the windows of her aparment when a man working in a garden asked him if he knew the time. He wasn’t listening and offered the man a cigarette, which the other accepted with some reluctance. “Ta,” said the gardener. “And what’s the hour, mate?”
“Eleven o’clock,” Terman said without looking at his watch.
“Can’t be right,” said the other and turned his attention to a wheelbarrow filled with cement.
Giving the time away, Terman felt, was like losing it irretrievably. It was a perception he had had when he was five years old that he had never fully shaken off.
He shadowed her house for hours in his imagination, this shadow of her former lover, accumulating evidence of infidelity and betrayal.
Waiting for Isabelle to answer the door, he could think of nothing to say that would explain the presumption of his visit, trusted to crisis and native wit. He waited five or six minutes — his private clock accurate to a fault — perceiving her continuing absence as further evidence of her contempt. When he knocked the door was opened to him. “You didn’t say you were coming over,” Isabelle said. “How was I to know?” She was wearing a bathrobe over a slip and looked like she had just taken a bath or been in bed. He embraced her clumsily. “I didn’t realize how much I missed you,” he said. Her arms circled him without pressure. He was overwhelmed with affection for her, spoke her name with the care one gives a sacred object.