James Lasdun
The Horned Man
© 2002
CHAPTER 1
One afternoon earlier this winter, in a moment of idle curiosity, I took a book from the shelf in my office, and began reading it where it fell open on a piece of compressed tissue that had evidently been used as a bookmark. I only had time to read a few sentences when I was interrupted by a knock on the door. Reluctantly – the sentences had looked interesting – I closed the book on its marker and returned it to the shelf.
The next morning I took it down again, intending to continue reading where I had left off, only to find that the marker was no longer at the page it had been on the day before. Leafing through the book, I found my sentences thirty pages earlier. Either I had moved the marker inadvertently myself, or else some night-visitor had been reading the book in my absence. I settled on the first as the more likely explanation, though it seemed odd that I could have moved a bookmark thirty pages forward without noticing it.
I mentioned it that afternoon to Dr Schrever as I lay on the crimson couch of her small consulting room on West Eighty-sixth Street. After telling her the story, which she received in her customary silence, I asked her if it might have been a case of parapraxis – Freud’s term for the lapses of memory, slips of the tongue, and other minor suppressions of consciousness that occur in everyday life.
‘Maybe I moved it myself, without being aware of it.’
‘Is that what you think happened?’ Dr Schrever asked.
‘I don’t know. I suppose if it is, the next question is why would I have done it?’
Dr Schrever said nothing.
‘You think I deliberately hid the words from myself because they disturbed me in some way?’
‘Is that what you think?’
‘I suppose it’s possible…’
We continued like this for a little while, but the topic didn’t seem to be leading anywhere, and we moved on to other, unrelated, matters.
And by the time I next went into my office, the mystery of the moving bookmark had ceased to interest me.
A few days later I received my office phone bill through the internal mail. Glancing over the list of calls, almost all of which were to my own number in New York, I happened to notice an unfamiliar area code. I was wondering who I could have been calling at that number when I saw that the call had been made at two in the morning; not an hour at which I had ever been in the office.
I was a little perturbed by the idea of a stranger having access to my office and coming there in the middle of the night to make phone calls. I didn’t have anything to hide, but the intrusion made the bland carpeted space with its metal desks and cabinets feel momentarily strange, as though it was concealing something from me.
Until then, it hadn’t crossed my mind to wonder whose books these were on the shelves, whose files were stored in the cabinet, even whose computer it was that sat shrouded in plastic on the surface of the cumbrous desks arranged on one side of the room. There were always the same things lying around these offices when you were assigned them – books, files, letters, invitations to talks, dog-eared old New Yorker cartoons, often a pair of gloves, an umbrella… the residue of former occupants, leached by time and dust of anything suggestive of a living human being.
But as I looked at the phone bill on my desk, it crossed my mind that my visitor, who must have had a key to the room (I always locked it when I left), might have been one of these former occupants.
On the other hand, perhaps I really was sharing the room, legitimately and officially, with a colleague who worked on different days from me. Perhaps it was simply that nobody had thought to inform me of this arrangement.
On my way to lunch I asked Amber, the intern, as casually as I could, whether anyone besides me was using Room 106.
‘No.’
She looked at me as if expecting an explanation of the question. Ignoring this, I asked if she knew who had had my office before I moved in there.
‘Yes. That was Barbara.’
‘Barbara?’
‘Barbara Hellermann. Why?’
‘I – I think she may have left some things behind.’ I was reluctant to get into a conversation about the bookmark and the phone number.
Amber gave me a strange look. ‘Well – maybe. I mean… You know about her, right?’
‘No?’
‘She’s dead.’
‘Oh!’
I was about to ask more when I felt the warning signs of an ailment that had been afflicting me since I had begun this job in the falclass="underline" an unpredictable and embarrassing tendency to blush. Like insomnia, the affliction had become a self-perpetuating problem. The fear of blushing had me in a state of permanent blush-readiness in which the slightest errancy of thought, conscious or unconscious, could open the blood-gates. A moment before it started, I would experience a faint lurch inside me, and with a helpless lucidity I would know that a burning crimson tide was about to start rising from my neck over my chin and cheeks, all the way up to my forehead. I would have grown a beard by now if the hair on my face were not so fair and scant.
I thanked Amber curtly, and hurried away. Outside her force-field, the blush command withdrew itself, and I continued pallidly down the corridor that led out of our building.
It was snowing as I walked up Central Park West from the subway station. The large flakes were few enough in number that I was aware of each individually as it drifted by, though the sky had a lurid, bruise-colored tone, as if it were getting ready to unleash something more serious.
Lights came on in windows as I passed the Dakota Building and reached the area I had once heard described as the Therapy District. Already the snow was thickening. The trees on Dr Schrever’s street had started to catch puffy snowflakes on the tips of their purple twigs – a ghostly blossom, almost luminous in the darkening air. Through the proliferating whiteness I saw a figure moving toward me: a woman, in a thick jacket, powder-blue scarf and black skirt – leather, from the way it gleamed.
As she approached, I found myself absent-mindedly eyeing her figure, a crude reflex I had been struggling to correct, but still sometimes caught myself succumbing to. Her legs were slim and shapely; her hips moved in their gleaming sheath with a sinuous, swaying motion. As she drew close, I peered through the veils of snow to check out her face and saw, to my astonishment, that it was Dr Schrever.
I was early for my appointment, so I suppose there was no reason for her not to be out on the street. But the sight of her there (I had never seen her outside the context of the consulting room) was disconcerting. She smiled at me; we said hello, and continued on our separate ways. At the end of the street I looked back and saw that she had crossed the avenue and was heading into Central Park.
I had half an hour to kill, so I stopped for a coffee at a diner on Amsterdam Avenue. As I sat in my booth I found myself thinking about the encounter. Had Dr Schrever noticed me eyeing her up? I wondered. The thought that she might have, troubled me. She had asked me more than once whether I ever experienced sexual feelings for her, and I had told her emphatically that I hadn’t. As a matter of fact, although I had spent the first few sessions sitting on a chair opposite her (rather than the couch I now lay on), I had never formed a very definite sense of her physical reality at all. She had shortish dark hair, dark eyes, smooth skin. Beyond that, her appearance always melted into vagueness whenever I tried to summon it. Age-wise, for all I knew, she might have been a seasoned thirty or a well-preserved fifty. I never noticed her clothes, though I suppose I wouldn’t have suspected a taste for leather skirts.
It became clear to me now that, in her capacity as my therapist, I had placed her off-limits sexually, but that, reduced to the anonymity of a female human being, she was in fact quite capable of arousing desire in me after all.