Terman didn’t ask him what he thought of it and Tom offered no response beyond an enthusiastic shaking of his head. “Yeah,” he said, an acknowledgement that they had watched this inexplicable movie together, that it was beyond them now, a part of the mutually experienced past. After the movie, he took Tom and Astrid to dinner at an overpriced seafood restaurant in Soho, then drove them both to Astrid’s house. Disappointment that he wasn’t invited in — he had been in top form throughout dinner and thought he rated more than thank you and goodnight — Terman went home alone. He didn’t go right home but stopped off at Isabelle’s apartment, parking just down the street. He sat in the car a few minutes, thinking of climbing out, entering the building, ringing the doorbell to her apartment, thinking of saying when she answered the door that he missed her terribly and wondered if they couldn’t get together again (her answer, as he imagined it, was a mute refusal), then drove away, stripped of false hope. Each moment he seemed to get closer to himself.
The little man in the thick glasses is tied up, bound and gagged, and propped up in sitting position in one of the pay toilet booths. As Henry Berger leaves the Men’s Room, he is passed by a middleaged Japanese man in a panama suit, the man glancing at him with more than casual interest. Walking briskly to another terminal, Berger boards a Pan Am flight to New York, the last passenger but one. Two attendants are getting ready to disconnect the ramp. “You’re a lucky chap, aren’t you?” one of them says to him. Someone else is coming. A moment later, the dark-haired woman he is travelling with also boards.
My father was in his study when I came in — it was like 2 AM — manuscript pages (I think that’s what they were) spread out across the floor, his gun on his desk. I stuck my head in to say I was back, and that I thought I’d stay up the night and conk out, if I could, on the flight home.
“If you really want to do it, I’ll stay up with you,” he said.
He looked burnt out and his movements seemed barely coordinated. All the desk drawers were open, loose papers in five separate piles on the floor, his waste basket flowing over. There was a stack of eight manuscript boxes alongside the desk. I watched for awhile without saying anything, trying to figure out what was going on.
“Do you think you’ll ever see her again?” he asked.
I thought he was talking about my mother at first so I didn’t understand what he meant, but he was referring to Astrid (or talking about himself and Isabelle). “You never know,” I said.
“Did you make any arrangements with her?”
“Well, we exchanged addresses if that’s what you mean. What are the boxes for, Dad?”
“Just cleaning up,” he said. “I’ll be through in a few minutes.”
There was a tapping at the outside door, which my father ignored or seemed not to notice. It refused to go away, got louder, more persistent. I won’t deny that it scared me.
“It sounds like he changed the keyboard of his typewriter,” my father said, amused by the idea. “I like this tune better than the other.”
When he heard the knocking on the door, Terman assumed the presumptuous fat man upstairs had gone out for an airing and had misplaced his key. “Don’t answer it,” Tom said. Terman was thinking the same thing, though after a few minutes he made his way to the door, not wanting to miss the opportunity for some new experience. The knocking, if that’s what it was, had stopped. Terman saw a face in the window which startled him, yet renewed his faith in the possibilities for surprise in this life. He had the impression that the face belonged to Isabelle and he unlatched the door for her in a state of painful joy. “I’m glad you’ve come back,” he said. The face belonged to Astrid, who had come to see Tom. She stood in the shadows, her manner a confusion of anger and abasement, waiting to be asked in. “Come on it,” Terman said. He held out his hand.
Tom came down — he had been standing on the stairs while his father opened the door — and he and the girl talked in the parlor in soft halting voices. “I’m sorry if I woke anyone up?” Astrid said.
Terman was in his study sitting inertly in a chair, memorizing the recent past, the door closed against other voices. Nothing would ever escape him again, he decided. He resisted sleep so was taken by it unawares, was stolen from consciousness.
At some point Tom and the girl tiptoed up the stairs to the room on the second floor Tom had recently appropriated as his own. They were holding hands, as he and Isabelle had on occasion, or so Terman imagined them. It may have been they had their arms around each other and stopped on every second or third step to kiss.
Terman was thinking, as he slept or didn’t, that someone ought to remind Tom to set the alarm on his clock.
In a hurry — he had to do it before he fell asleep — he walked in stocking feet down the long corridor to Tom’s room. He slipped into the room, set the alarm for six thirty (Tom’s flight left Heathrow at 8:20), barely glancing at the entangled couple. He imagined himself closing the door behind him as he left the room.
After his plane lands at JFK, after he and his companion (who may or may not be his wife) clear customs, Henry Berger goes into a public phone booth and dials a long distance number from memory. “I’m coming in,” he says without identifying himself. “Henry,” says the other, “where are you, boy? We’ve been expecting you posthaste.”
“I’ll be there before you know it,” Berger says. “Leave a light burning in the window for me, will you?”
“Do you want us to bring you in from the airport? Might be the most effective procedure.”
“I’d prefer making an unannounced entrance,” Berger says. “And I want the President in the room when we talk.”
“He understands that.”
After Henry Berger leaves the phone booth, he takes his companion to a taxi, a gentlemanly excess perhaps not in his best interests. “See you in a couple of days,” he says through the two inch opening in the window. He takes a cab himself to LaGuardia Airport and catches the Washington shuttle, which is already boarding as he arrives.
The story moves abruptly toward its conclusion, though I confuse in the telling beginnings and ends.
I couldn’t seem to get out of the house, kept leaving things behind or losing them. After all the false starts, we drove to the airport in a white heat, my father silent for the duration of the ride, his manner like a reprimand. I asked him if something was wrong and he said if he thought about it long enough he would probably find something. We queued up to check the larger of my two bags, getting at first on the wrong line, investing at least ten minutes in misplaced expectation. After some frantic rushing about, we were told that the departure time of my flight had been delayed forty-five minutes, and we stopped at an overcrowded cafeteria for some breakfast. We had just gotten our food to an unoccupied table when the loudspeaker announced that TWA Flight 144, which was mine, was boarding at some unintelligible gate and we were up again, rushing to no purpose. I bought some chewing gum, an International Herald Tribune, and a copy of E. M. Forster’s The Longest Journey, my father choosing the book and paying the bill. A flashbulb went off. Someone took our picture or the picture of some people standing directly behind us, the lights blinding me momentarily. There was a point beyond which only passengers were allowed and we said goodbye and then embraced. “Keep in touch, Tom,” he said. I said I would do my best. There didn’t seem time for anything else.