The Horned Man (16 page)

I was on the point of asking where she was, when I thought better of it. An instinct for caution was beginning to censor even the most innocent-seeming remarks at this time. There was also the fact that with the left side of my face looking like a slice of raw ox liver, I had no wish to draw any unnecessary attention to myself.

My question was asked for me, however, by the fifth member of our committee, a mild-mannered biologist named Tony Ardito.

‘You didn't hear?' Roger answered him. ‘Her brother called in for her last week. She went to visit him in Iowa and got in a car crash in Sioux City. She's in the hospital with head injuries.'

‘Oh my gosh!'

‘Yep. She's on indefinite leave.'

‘Boy!'

There was a pause in which it seemed to be tacitly agreed among us that further discussion of our missing member would be inappropriate, and Roger began to address the matter in hand.

For the second time in a week I found myself in a situation where I was increasingly unable to concentrate on what was going on. The news of this accident, not to mention Elaine's
trip to Iowa, was a shock, but I was aware that under my simple response of surprise was a more restless, agitated feeling, as though there was something about the information that made me unable to secure it inside me in a stable position. I felt like a child trying very hard to believe something that won't quite settle within the limits of her or his credulousness.

Earlier that week I had done something I would never have imagined doing in the days before the name Trumilcik entered my consciousness: I had looked up private investigators in the
Yellow Pages
, with a view to finding an address for the number he had called from my office. Just glancing down the list of names; the Sentinels and Warriors, the Bureaus, Corporations, Networks and Associates, with their bulleted services –
Digital Lie Detection
,
Male and Female Armed Agents
,
Matrimonial Evidence
,
Nanny Surveillance
– had made me feel as though I'd been waylaid into some realm of existence as absurdly, shabbily gothic as the buildings I worked in. For a moment it seemed to me that I would do better, after all, to ignore Trumilcik and all his maneuvers; his notes and gifts, his pettily vindictive intrusions; just go on living my life as if he didn't exist. Nothing excites a bully more than signs of submission in his victim, and it was surely submissive of me to allow my actions to be dictated to me by Trumilcik's. I was about to put the phone book away, when I'd caught sight of my bruised face in the mirror, and at once all the latent violence clinging like a dark fog around each of his manifestations seemed to gather into a single louring cloud of evil intent, and I realised after all that I would be well advised at this point to take whatever initiative I could.

The man who answered the phone at Crane, Coleman Associates – a name I picked out for its relative untheatricality – had sounded reassuringly businesslike. It wasn't hard, he
said, to reverse-access an address from a listed number, and he quoted a reasonable-sounding price for doing so.

I gave him the number and my credit card details. A little later he called back to tell me that the number was
un
listed, and that this was going to make the job more expensive. He gave me a price more than four times the original. Uneasy, wondering if I was being taken for a ride, I told him to go ahead. The next morning he called to say he'd traced the address. There was an odd, unctuous quality in his voice that hadn't been there before. In view of the nature of this address, Lawrence, he had said, he was going to have to add a surcharge of two hundred dollars to his original quote.

I told him I didn't understand.

‘Let's say you're paying for the risk we're taking here with our license, Lawrence, and, uh, you're guaranteeing a level of confidentiality for yourself.'

‘I still don't understand.'

‘It's a shelter, Mr Miller,' he said, ‘for victims of domestic abuse. They're very protective about their addresses, those places.'

It took me a moment to understand that I was being blackmailed. A cry of indignant rage almost burst out of me, but again, like an invisible muzzle, my new-found instinct for caution had kept my mouth shut. I could make my complaint later; write to whatever governing body licenced these outfits, when all this unpleasantness was over and no unhelpful ambiguities could attach themselves to my interest in the address of such a shelter.

‘All right,' I snapped, ‘I'll pay the surcharge.'

He gave me the address. I looked at a map and saw that the town it was in – a place called Corinth – was upstate a hundred and fifty miles or so. But having gone to the trouble
and expense of finding this out, I'd fallen into an odd state of inertia, as if I'd prematurely exhausted my interest in self-preservation, and I had done nothing to follow up on the information.

Now though, here at the meeting, with the news of Elaine's disappearance bobbing and shifting in my mind, I felt again the folly of not pursuing any hint that might shed light on Trumilcik. For reasons I couldn't yet fully articulate, the two discoveries – Elaine's crash (her
alleged
crash, I was already calling it) and Trumilcik's connection to a shelter for victims of domestic abuse – converged in my mind on a point of obscure but urgently galvanising dread. It seemed to me that it would be a good idea to pay a visit to this shelter. How to get inside it, and what to do there even if I could, was less clear.

The meeting – in effect a dismissal proceeding – passed like a muffled dream under these preoccupations. No doubt the minutes I took were as assiduous as ever, but I was barely conscious of what I was writing. Of the actual confrontation with Bruno, I recall little other than a general sense of his disdainful refusal to defend himself against Candida Johanssen's accusations, and his apparent indifference to the impending termination of his career (something self-consciously British about his laconic posture, I remember dimly feeling, as though in his mind he was Raleigh in the Tower, or Sir Thomas More on the scaffold, unflappably tying his own blindfold:
see me safe up, and for my coming down let me shift for myself
…).

I do, however, retain a vivid impression of his physical presence in the room. He was wearing his thick black coat, the one with the slit at the back, and he declined to remove it. His long legs – hind legs, I find myself tempted to call them – were sheathed in skin-tight black drainpipes, tight as an Elizabethan's doublet and hose. All he lacked was a codpiece.
It struck me, I remember, that there was even something indecent about his face. Handsome as it was, its very handsomeness was of a kind that made you want to avert your eye, as though, having been drawn to it by an apparent fineness, you suddenly realised you were looking at a body part that should have been covered. I thought of the previous meeting; how I had sat there taking notes with one hand, while my other gently kneaded Elaine's thigh under the table, and I felt the irony of a situation that had positioned me on one side of this table, obliged by convention to conceal a perfectly legitimate consensual act, while setting Bruno on the other, free to flaunt that naked knot of sense organs that devolved, when you regarded it for more than a moment, into the embodiment of an obscene proposition.

Thinking of him now, I feel more than ever the rightness of the great repudiation of masculinity that so many of us in academe consider the supreme contribution of the humanities in our time. Masculinity in its old, feral, malevolent guise, that is; unadapted masculinity worthy of nothing more than its own inevitable extinction. I can almost see a furry tail waving between the split skirts of Bruno's coat as he walks out of the room …

He turned to me from the door:

‘Where'd you get the black eye from, Lawrence? Did someone put up a fight?'

‘I slipped on ice,' I muttered in reply to the first part of his question. The second part I didn't understand.

As it happened, Bruno's words proved unexpectedly helpful. By reminding me of my appearance while I was in the midst of all my other preoccupations, they gave me an idea I might not otherwise have had.

Returning to my office after the meeting, I locked the door behind me and opened the closet. There, hanging on the peg, were Barbara Hellermann's maroon beret and her dry cleaning.

I took down the beret and put it on my head.

Modest as this gesture was, it filled me with a strange excitement, as though a minor adjustment to some telescopic instrument had abruptly swung a whole new galaxy of possibilities into view.

The hat was a good fit. It felt warm and very comfortable. In the mirror it sat softly on my lank blond hair, looking only a little strange. With my high cheekbones and smooth chin, I reminded myself of some film actress from the forties, the bruise and black eye not altogether ruining the effect. I could pass for a female member of the French Resistance, I thought, heroically holding out after being beaten by her captors.

Or I could pass for a more modern kind of heroine: a battered woman, for instance, summoning up the courage to escape from her abuser.

I went back to the closet for the dry cleaning. Under the wrapper I could see a fawn-colored jerkin-style jacket with a quilted lining, and a brown skirt of heavy, woven yarn.

A powerful, almost gleeful sense of purpose came into me as I folded these into my briefcase along with the maroon beret. I felt that I was finally on the attack.

At home I dialed the shelter. The machine picked up as usual.

This time I left a message.

It had snowed in the night, but now it was raining. The traffic, solid from the Port Authority, sizzled through the slush along the West River, which was all but choked with its own traffic of car-sized, mud-colored chunks of ice.

I was on a Trailways bus bound for Corinth.

I was wearing Barbara's clothes, along with a polo-neck sweater, and some women's shoes and wool tights I'd bought to complete the outfit. In my initial excitement at this plan, I had assumed it would be something that I, of all people, should have been able to execute without psychic cost; with even a certain professional enthusiasm. I had told myself that a journey in women's clothing would be a learning – an
empowering
– experience; something I might even ask my male students to try as an exercise. I remembered reading that Siberian shamans would sometimes undergo a symbolic transformation into women as a part of their journey into the spirit realm. Perhaps I would come back like them with healing or prophetic visions, or, like Tiresias, with a completed knowledge of what it was to be human.

What I hadn't counted on was the tremendous resistance of one's mass of unconscious prejudices – one's gender-soul, if I can call it that – to this kind of disturbance. Stepping out on to the street in these clothes, I had felt an abrupt, cascading sense
of inward collapse; almost a feeling of shame, as if I were wearing this long brown skirt, these chrome-buckled pumps, under duress; as a punishment for some crime I'd committed without knowing it.

As I'd turned on to Avenue A, I had seen Mr Kurwen walking toward me with a black patch over his missing eye. All my remaining strength seemed to go out of me as we approached each other. I wanted very badly not to be recognised by him. Despite my own knowledge that what I was doing was both rational and necessary, I felt unequal to the savage hilarity I knew my transformation would arouse in such a man. His good eye stared hard at me as we came close. I don't know if he recognised me, but for a moment I felt cornered and utterly defenseless.

At the Port Authority I had gone without thinking into the Men's Room to pee. A man in a suit, still fastening his fly as he turned from the urinal, had looked at me, startled. Catching sight of myself in the mirror, I realised he was looking at a woman in a maroon beret who was apparently about to approach the porcelain stalls, and I beat a hasty retreat to the Women's Room; mortified, and again strangely humiliated. Here, as I washed my hands at the sink, a white-haired old lady had tut-tutted sympathetically at me in the mirror. ‘Boyfriend?' she'd murmured, gesturing at my bruises. I hesitated a moment, then nodded. She shook her head with a sigh.

I'd felt even worse after that. Aside from abusing the woman's sympathy, this little misappropriation of female suffering seemed to deepen the reality of what I was doing. To my general despondency, a new, sharply particular kind of demoralisation was added: I had just stepped into character, I realised. I was a battered woman.

Over the bridge and all along the Palisades the rain kept the traffic at the same funereal adagio. We lumbered off on to the Thruway. Mountains appeared; nothing on them but the endless rolling smoke of winter trees, barely distinguishable from the clouds above them or the gray explosions of rain in between.

The vastness of America, the great volumes of space in which one's existence has no meaning to anyone or anything, is overpowering at times like this. If you're alone, you feel your aloneness as an almost physical encumbrance. An acute homesickness seizes you; unballasted, in my case, by any sense of where home might be. To be traveling through the rain, dressed as a woman, with a broken face, from a place where I had almost no human connections left, to one where I had none at all, seemed suddenly pitiful. There was a certain margin of tolerance, I felt; an elastic limit stretching only so far from the warm centers of human society. Step beyond it, and you couldn't count on being gathered back in. And it wouldn't necessarily be society that kept you out, but something in yourself; some unassimilable new singularity making you unfit,
by your own judgment
, for the company of your fellow creatures.

At a rest stop on Route 9 – a senses-jangling temple of commerce set down by what appeared to be primeval forest – I sat with a cup of bile-colored coffee, staring through the rain-streaming glass, thinking I could disappear out of my life without a ripple; could just get up and walk out there into those dripping oaks and pines, and vanish … There was something appealing about the idea; soothing almost. I pictured myself hiding out there somewhere, huddled in a damp cave or pine-bough shelter over a smoking heap of dead leaves …