My Father More or Less Page 14

  False memories, like happy marriages, are all alike, he was tempted to say. Instead, he offered an alternative version of the event as a gesture of melioration. “What I think may have happened,” he said, “is that, feeling rejected, you asked to go home and then when I acquiesced to your wishes, you made it out that I was the one sending you away.”

  “I don’t think so, I really don’t, but it comes to the same thing. Why did I feel I had done something wrong?”

  The period in California seemed more like a movie he had slept through and reinvented than something real in his life. A small time producer named Godowitz had flown him out to do a screenplay of his second novel, Out of Itself, and he stayed on in the sun, chasing elusive gold for almost two years, one aborted project leading to another. He made some money and lost some time, picked up a screen credit for what turned out to be a single surviving line of dialogue. Tom and Kate’s visits during this period were as shadowy to him as the rest of the experience. The odd thing was, the oddest thing, was that he had no recollection of ever having lived with a woman named Alma. “Are you positive the woman’s name was Alma?” he asked. His memory never used to be so poor.

  “I have the idea she was astoundingly young,” said Tom. “Like sixteen. And she never wore shoes. She had this pair of orange sneakers that she wore around her neck with the laces tied together.”

  “Not possible,” he said. If there was someone like that, some barefooted sixteen year old hippie who in some moment of distraction he had allowed to move in with him, her name at least was something else. He closed his eyes, worked at recovering the forgotten name of a woman he couldn’t believe he had ever known.

  “When the fog lifted which was like once a week,” the shadow said, “you could see the water from the window of my room. Each time it appeared it was like some kind of miracle. Alma used to come in, I remember this very clearly, and stare at the ocean from my window. She said she was a water sign which meant looking into the water was like looking into herself.”

  “There never was an Alma in my life,” Terman said.

  The shadow across from him let out its breath in a staccato of disappointments.

  “I didn’t mean to upset you,” Terman said. “It may be that your memory of that period is more accurate than mine. I concede that much.”

  “Do you?” he asked. “What if there were a gun to your head, what would you say?”

  “Whose gun are you thinking of putting to my head?”

  “It was just a figure of speech, for God’s sake. You don’t have to be so literal about it.”

  “It’s only a figure of speech when you don’t have a gun in your possession. I’ll ask you to give it back to me one last time.”

  “Or what?”

  “Is that the way you want it?” Terman asked.

  “It’s the way you want it.” The voice childish, pained.

  He thought to ask again for the return of the gun, but decided that further reiteration would only weaken the impact of his request. He was on the verge of saying something unforgivable. “I’ll never forgive you for this,” he said. Abruptly it came to him, the recollection interrupting the flow of his anger. “The girl’s name was Opal, the one with the braids around her head. She was very odd, had been living in an abandoned car on the beach before moving in with me. She was beautiful and profoundly remote. I took her vagueness for some kind of mystery.”

  “I still remember her as Alma,” said the other. “She had the thinnest lips of anyone I’d ever seen.”

  At some point the conversation began to repeat itself.

  “I had no expectations in regard to this visit,” Tom said. “My mother said she thought it would be an educational experience for me.”

  “She thought that visiting you father would be an educational experience?”

  “That visiting London would be. You make a gesture and then you never follow through on it. It’s okay. I mean, it no longer comes as a surprise to me. I don’t expect anything from you any more so you can’t disappoint me.”

  “I think it would be best it you went home in a few days,” Terman said.

  “If that’s what you want. You once told me, though I doubt you’d remember, that any place you were living was also my home.”

  “I remember.”

  “It doesn’t hold any more, right? Or you never meant it in the first place?”

  At some point the conversation among shadows came full circle. Terman came down the steps in the dark with both hands on the bannister, each step a plunge into the unimaginable.

  “I understand you’ve been looking for me,” a disembodied voice announced.

  “I may have been. I don’t remember.”

  A middle-aged man in a dressing gown is looking at his face in the wall mirror of an oversized bathroom. He rubs the back of his hand across his cheek, decides he needs a shave, is putting lather on his face when the phone rings. He considers not answering but after several rings picks up the phone which is on a marble table next to the toilet and says, “Monsieur Lange ici.”

  “This is Henry Berger,” the voice says. “A mutual friend gave me your number.”

  “Pardon.”

  “I understand that you spoke English.”

  “Not so good I’m afraid. What may I do for you, Mr. Barber?” He takes the receiver with him to the mirror and continues lathering his face.

  “Is there anyone in the house with you?”

  “Pardon, monsieur. I fail to understand.”

  “Monsieur Lange, I’ll say this as plainly as I can. I have a strong reason to believe that your life may be in immediate danger.” Monsieur Lange looks at the razor in his band, then puts it down as if distrustful even of himself. “And how do you know such things if it is not youself who is the assassin?”

  We cut to Henry Berger, who is calling from a phone booth in front of a service station. “It is possible,” he says, “that the assasssin is someone you know, someone you may even trust.”

  Monsieur Lange resumes shaving. “Quite alarming,” he says with some irony. “Have you notified the police, Monsieur Becker? Do you not think the police ought to be informed of so serious a matter?”

  “I can understand your skepticism. A man you don’t know calls you m the middle of the night to tell you your life is in danger. Why should you believe him? Still, there’s no harm in taking precautions, is there? One of the precautions I would have you take is not to stand near a window, at least not so your silhouette is revealed to someone watching outside. And another is not to inform the local police.”

  Lange turns the light out in the bathroom. “You are either mad, my friend, or have been given misinformation. There’s nobody who wishes me evil. Now I think it is time to say goodnight.”

  “Your name was found in a certain notebook among other names,” Berger says quickly. “You know what I’m talking about. The men whose names were on the list above yours, all except two, have died under what the police call suspicious circumstances.”

  M. Lange lights a cigarette and sits down on the commode. “So it follows that I’m to be rubbed out next. Yes? I promise to be wary of every suspicious sound, Monsieur Barber. Now if you’ll excuse me.” M. Lange hangs up the phone abruptly. After putting out the cigarette and turning on the light, he returns to the mirror to shave the left side of his face. While he is shaving he hears footsteps outside or perhaps from another part of the house. He puts down the razor and goes to the phone, checking first to see that the bathroom door is locked from the inside.

  M. Lange phones the Chief of Police, mentions the call from Henry Berger. As they talk, we cut to Henry Berger driving through the woods presumably toward M. Lange’s estate.

  Standing in the dark, M. Lange listens for footsteps and hears none. He puts the light on and continues shaving. He studies his aristocratic face in the mirror, admiring his profile, distressed by the blemishes, the inevitable demarcations of age. He salutes himself, one formidable figure to another. At
that moment, he hears a crash as if something, a vase perhaps, had been knocked off a table. “Merde,” he whispers. The faint footsteps resume and he concentrates on them, trying to determine if they arc from within the house or outside. He looks at bis watch. Perhaps it is someone he knows, his son returned or one of the servants.

  “C’est toi, Jacques?” he calls.

  There is no answer. He looks at his watch again. The footsteps have stopped and he waits for them to renew, then goes to the phone and calls the Chief of Police a second time. “My men should be there at any moment,” the Inspector says. Abruptly the doorbell rings. “I’m not going to hang up,” Lange says. “Hold on until I get back.” Lange puts on a shirt, brushes his hair, then lets himself out of the bathroom. He goes warily down a long corridor toward the frontdoor, announcing himself in aloud voice. There is another corridor, then a small foyer to pass through. “Un moment,” he calls, dismayed that the police haven’t rung a second time.

  When Lange gets to the front door he has some difficulty unlatching it, pressured by panic. He is again in control of himself, all icy dignity, as he opens the door to confront a figure in a ski mask, holding a gun. Two shots are fired point blank before M. Lange can protest and he stumbles back into the cavernous house. He plunges into a sitting room, trailed by his own blood. He collapses, then revives and pulls himself laboriously toward a phone, knocking over a Chinese vase m bis path.

  “Je suis assassiné,” he says into the phone, dragging it off the table as he falls.

  Sunlight was in his eyes when Terman got up from the couch, unaware of the date or time of day. The kitchen cupboard was even barer than he anticipated, as if rats or thieves had been there first. There was nothing to satisfy his hunger in this borrowed house, the refrigerator and cupboards seeming to empty of themselves.

  He remembered putting certain things away, remembered carrying a box of groceries in his arms, a pint of milk, box of tea, six croissants, half dozen brown eggs, bottle of claret, package of McVittie’s digestives, jar of Wilkinson’s raspberry conserves. He tended to shop as need demanded, rarely bringing in provisions with anything but the forthcoming meal in mind. Still, nothing, nothing at all, had survived the night.

  “You’ve been behaving like a mad person,” Isabelle said, “do you know?”

  “The madness is unintentional,” he said, meaning it as an apology. He was looking in a parlor closet for a walking stick he was postive he had seen in there, riffling among boots and umbrellas.

  “Terman, I’m very unhappy with you,” she said. “I’m going into work in a few minutes and I wanted to say that.”

  “Why isn’t anything where it was?” he asked. He held out his hand to her.

  “Am I invisible?” she asked him. “Once in a while you fix on me and then you pay me some attention, but I could be an inanimate object for all that.” Her hand in his was like a trapped mouse. “That’s all I have to say.”

  “I don’t dispute it,’ he said.

  She looked up at his face, wary of unheard irony, angry at him beyond respite. He stood with his head down, took his scolding like a child. “I have to go now,” she said, kissing the side of his head. She extracted her hand. “I don’t know that I’ll be back this evening. Do you want me to ring up if I change my mind?”

  “I can understand that you might want to be alone,” he said, meaning to be polite or generous.

  She didn’t say anything to that. The unspoken comment was sufficient, she thought.

  He nodded his assent, though his agreement had not been requested. It was not that she was invisible to him as she said, but that the whole physical world was vanishing by degrees before his eyes.

  There was something she felt she had to tell him before she left, she said, trying to underplay the melodrama of such a statement. She had an actress’s ability to maintain her self-possession while undergoing storms of distress or anxiety. It was when her manner was most glacial that those who could read her knew she was most deeply upset. Terman, it might be said, saw nothing, not even the contemptuous manner she wore like a mask. His distraction was complete.

  The confession came and went, untempered by regret. She had gone off with Max Kirstner that afternoon he had stayed behind to work on the screenplay. It was a gesture, she supposed, more self-defeating than spiteful, though for which she had no intention of apologizing. “It’s out of character for me to behave that way,” she said, “so I tend to blame you for it. I feel, isn’t it odd, that you were the one that betrayed me.”

  Her accusation seemed neither to hit the mark nor miss it altogether and he accepted it as he had the report of her liaison with Max.

  “Get the hell out of here,” he said suddenly angry. He opened the door and pushed her out.

  The conversation continued briefly after she had gone, completed itself. “Perhaps I’ll be back the day after,” she said.

  “Perhaps you will,” he said.

  A few minutes later he was on the telephone in a response to a ringing that went on beyond its course.

  “Hello,” he said, leaning jauntily on an umbrella as if he thought he might be Fred Astaire.

  There was a click on the other end. He knew who it was, had gotten the message.

  He couldn’t remember if he had gone shopping or had only thought about going, had lived through the anticipation of it, and so checked the refrigerator and cupboards again.

  When he returned from the store with a box of groceries—the weight of his arms presented itself as evidence—the phone was ringing again.

  “Marjorie Kirstner here,” the voice said.

  He had expected the click again, the knife edge of disconnection, or indeed something worse. “Where are you calling from?” he asked.

  “I’m in London,” she said. “I’m staying with some friends.” He heard symphonic music in the background and a counterpoint of voices: someone was laughing or crying. “If you’re not too busy, perhaps we could meet for tea this afternoon.”

  It was as if his memory were getting shorter and shorter so that as soon as a moment had passed it was already lost to him. “Who is this?” he asked.

  She laughed, took the question—how else might it be taken?—as as uninspired joke. “It’s Marjorie, darling,” she said. “You haven’t forgotten already, I hope.”

  “Do you want to come here?” he asked. “Is that why you called?”

  She was silent for a moment and he thought he heard a click, terrible and decisive, within the silence. The voice returned, altered by the expedition. “Do you really mean that?” it asked. “I can’t think that it would be appropriate.”

  He tapped the umbrella on the floor to the tune of an American song called “Nature Boy,” which he hadn’t heard or even thought of hearing for twenty-five years.

  “Is there someone there with you?” she asked.

  “Where with me?”

  “At your house, Terman. Isn’t that what we’re talking about, luv?”

  “We’re talking about love,” he said. “Isn’t that what we’re talking about?”

  “Are you being nasty with me,” she asked, “or has there been a genuine misunderstanding?”

  He said he couldn’t remember which, his memory failing, which made her laugh her odd tinkling laugh.

  “What’s your pleasure, luv?” she said. “Should I come chez tu or would you rather meet on the town?”

  Some time later in the day, when it was getting to be four o’clock in the afternoon, the doorbell sounded. Terman had been in the study when interrupted, holding conversations with the detective Henry Berger.

  When he opened the massive door—he thought of the house sometimes as an enormous vault—standing there was a woman about his own age and an elegant young man who seemed not much older than his son.

  “You’ve met Emile, I believe,” Marjorie said.

  Marjorie sent the aging young man on a tour of the house—she herself had been in all its corners when her husband had used it as
a location for his film, “Ceremony of Night”—and went with Terman into the kitchen for some private conversation.

  “Where is your adorable friend?” she asked in a confidential voice, taking his arm. “Are you two no longer a thing, as they say in America?”

  He could think of no answer to make, felt at once bereft and unencumbered.

  “I expect our situations have quelque chose in common,” she whispered, inclining her head toward him.

  “How’s that?” he roused himself to ask.

  It was the right question, but she indicated with a rolling of her eyes that she had no intention of answering. “Max has gone to California for a few days,” she said, “and I’m rather at loose ends. We were in the middle of a fight that had to be postponed indefinitely.”

  He was thinking that Max had all but given up on the Henry Berger film and that Marjorie had come, in Max’s absence, to break the news to him.

  “It’s still in consideration,” she said. “Don’t think it isn’t, luv. I don’t remember what I may have said but I suspect I was being a bit bitchy whatever it was. You’ll forgive me, won’t you?”

  Henry Berger was almost always a step or two behind the conspiracy, finding corpses wherever he went, pursuing ominous implications.

  “Truth to tell, I came to ask your advice,” she said. “I am in grave need of a bit of wisdom if you don’t mind.”

  Terman laughed until his sides hurt, until tears broke from his eyes. “What wisdom can I give you?”

  Emile floated into the kitchen and sat down at the head of the table, had the air of studying his own reflection in an imaginary mirror.

  Marjorie said something to him in French and the aging child pouted in parody of grievance and turned his chair around. She winked at Terman. Her life with Max was a melodrama of betrayal and abuse, she confided in the presence of Emile’s impassive back. What should she do? What would he do it he were in a similar bind?