I found myself imagining Trumilcik surreptitiously entering my office late at night. I pictured him sitting at my desk, reading the book I had taken from the shelf, using the phone… I thought of him removing the coin from the bronze bowl. As I did so, something delicately uneasy passed through me, though as I tried to account for it, the sensation – too faint to withstand scrutiny – evaporated.
Six and a half minutes… A high-speed train bulleted through the station, pummeling the air. The pigeons shifted in unison, ruffling their feathers a little before settling back as they were, as if they thought it only polite to register such an event.
There was a payphone on the platform. I’d been resisting its winking glitter since I’d arrived, but I found myself starting to amble toward it. As I did, I saw myself dialing my wife’s number. I heard her voice say hello, then imagined asking her in a casual tone how she was doing; telling her I just happened to be thinking of her, waiting to see if she would suggest getting together for dinner, realising she wasn’t going to, and saying a friendly, brittle goodbye, with a reinvigorated sense of the emptiness of the evening that lay ahead of me.
Better not to call, I told myself as I approached the phone. Better to think she might for once have actually suggested the dinner if only I had called. That way when I ate I could legitimately imagine her right there across the table.
But I continued moving toward the phone.
I was within a few feet of it, resigning myself to my own weakness in the weary way one does at the point of giving in to a vice, when a colorful, chattering group of people arrived on the platform. All but one were students, sporting an array of clownish hats and the exaggeratedly baggy clothes that had briefly gone out of style, only to return with a vengeance.
The other figure, short and stocky in a black winter coat, was none other than Bruno Jackson.
Seeing me, he smiled warmly and strolled over, his young posse following loudly behind him.
I had had little contact with him this semester, but he was always friendly when we ran into each other. I felt that he hadn’t given up hope of recruiting me as an ally. The fact that we were both English seemed to mean something to him. Though he had been in the States several years longer than I had, and seemed in many ways thoroughly Americanised (his accent had warped into an ugly transatlantic hybrid that made me feel protective about the purity of my own), he retained an interest in British popular culture, which he seemed to assume I shared. I remember listening to him talk volubly about a new cable show featuring British darts tournaments, and trying politely to match his enthusiasm, while all I really felt was the familiar melancholy that most things English seemed to arouse in me ever since I’d first arrived in the States as an Abramowitz Fellow at Columbia University. Now of course there was a more serious difference between us. I don’t know if he realised I was on the Sexual Harassment Committee, but from my point of view the fact that I was made a friendship with him out of the question.
His cheery approach right now was particularly disconcerting. Given the discussion concerning him at the meeting I’d just attended, I felt that it would compromise me to be seen fraternising with him, especially with this entourage of students milling at close quarters all around him. I was also afraid that I would be setting myself up to look treacherous if I were friendly to him now, only to be sitting in judgment on him in a few weeks’ time.
‘Going into the city, Lawrence?’ he asked, helping himself to a cigarette from a packet that a girl – a sophomore I recognised from one of my own classes – had just taken from her embroidered backpack.
‘Yes.’
‘Us too.’
I smiled, saying nothing.
The students seemed to grow subdued in my presence. Naturally I was curious to know what they were doing traveling to New York with their instructor – an unusual if not actually illicit occurrence. But I was worried that if I asked, it might appear subsequently as though I had been looking for incriminating information.
‘Where in the city do you live?’ Bruno asked me.
When I told him the East Village, his tawny green eyes lit up.
‘That’s where we’re headed too.’
‘Oh.’ I noticed that the skirt of his long coat divided at the back in a strangely baroque fashion, with two long swallow-tails of thick black wool hanging from a raised lip of rectangular material.
‘We’re going to a play, Blumfeld, an Elderly Bachelor, an adaptation of a Kafka story we’re reading. Do you know it?’
‘No.’
‘Oh wow!’ one of the students said, a short, plump girl in a Peruvian wool cap. ‘You have to read it!’
Another student, a boy with a hatchet face and shifty, narrow eyes, began to tell me the story:
‘It’s about this lonely old guy who goes home to his apartment one night to find these two balls bouncing around the place all by themselves. It’s hilarious…’
The train came, and I felt compelled to sit with Bruno and his students. The Peruvian-hatted girl took out a camcorder and pointed it through the scratched window. An oily, ice-graveled creek ran along the tracks, full of half-swallowed car-wrecks and dumped appliances.
‘Hello Tomorrow…’ sang another girl – a blonde waif.
‘C’mon man, it’s beautiful!’ the shifty-eyed boy said.
They turned the camera on Bruno, who blew it a kiss, then on me. I gave a polite smile.
‘How’s Carol?’ Bruno asked. I’d forgotten his prior acquaintance with my wife – the two of them had met several years back, at the Getty Institute.
‘She’s fine.’ I wasn’t about to tell him we were separated.
‘Why don’t you come to the play? Bring her along.
’ I thanked him, but said we couldn’t.
He grinned back at the camcorder: ‘Professor Miller’s snubbing us.’
The students laughed.
Night had fallen by the time I reached my block down between B and C. It had been a crack block when Carol and I had moved there a few years ago – vials all over the sidewalk like mutant hailstones; stocky, stud-collared dealers in the doorways with canine versions of themselves grimacing on leather-and-chain leashes; a false bodega with an unchanging display of soap powders gathering dust in the window and a steady stream of human wreckage staggering in and out through the door… All gone now; swept clean by a mayor who seemed (so it occurs to me now) to have modeled himself on Angelo in Measure for Measure, cleaning up the stews of Vienna. I studied that play for O-level English and it has stuck in my mind like no other book has since. Our natures do pursue, like rats that ravin down their proper bane, a thirsty evil, and when we drink we die: Claudio waiting to have his head chopped off for getting a girl pregnant. The bodega was now a cybercafe´; the shooting gallery on the corner was a wheatgrass juicery, and the crackhouse opposite had been turned into a health and fitness center.
As I climbed the stairs to my apartment – a sixth-floor walk-up – I thought how unpleasant this utterly lonely life was becoming. The few friends I’d made in New York had all been scattered by the job centrifuge that rules over American lives, or else been driven out to the suburbs by the advent of children. A part of me regretted not having been able to accept Bruno’s invitation. It would have been out of the question, naturally, but I couldn’t help a faint wistful pang at the thought of them all sitting happily together, watching the play.
Having nothing better to do, I decided to read the story it was based on. Carefully avoiding looking at the answering machine on the window-ledge (as long as I didn’t know for sure that Carol hadn’t called, I could legitimately tell myself that she might have), I went to my bookshelf and took down my edition of Kafka’s Short Works, where I found the story.