The Horned Man (3 page)

Elaine, who had recovered her composure now, gave him a level stare. ‘All I'm trying to do', she said, ‘is I'm trying to alert you to the possible consequences of certain acts. I'm not here to tell you how to teach your classes. That's a judgment call only you can make.'

‘I'll take that as a veto on masturbation in Jane Austen then,' Bruno had said with a smirk. He'd looked around the room, as though expecting complicit smiles. I avoided his eye, and as far as I could tell, not one of us, male or female, had given him the slightest hint of encouragement.

After the meeting I had gone up to compliment Elaine on her handling of the situation. She thanked me profusely. We talked for a while – about what, I forget, though I do remember thinking that she was a more vulnerable and emotional person than her somewhat bland exterior had suggested.

Looking back at Bruno's behavior, I see that it wouldn't have been difficult to predict the trouble that was now looming over him.

Roger Freeman, our chair, was a small, dapper man of about fifty, with sparkling blue eyes and a thick mane of white hair. He had a dry, fluent way of talking, as though his words had formed themselves long before he actually spoke them,
and he was merely reporting his side of a conversation that had already taken place.

‘Here's what I think we need to do,' he began. ‘Number one, we need to talk informally to this young man, give him a chance to explain what's going on here. Number two …'

It was my job, as the newest member of the committee, to keep the minutes at these meetings. I was an assiduous clerk, and in my efforts to write down everything that was said, I often didn't take any of it in until after the meeting was over. I didn't, for instance, register the name ‘Trumilcik' – a name that was to become increasingly important to me over the next weeks – until later, when I was checking the legibility of my minutes prior to giving them to the department secretary to type out.

What we need to avoid at all costs
, I saw that Roger had said,
is letting things get to the point where we find ourselves with another Trumilcik on our hands
.

‘Who's Trumilcik?' I asked Marsha, the department secretary.

‘Bogomil Trumilcik? Oh God! What do you want to know about him for?'

I smiled. ‘You'll see when you read this.' I handed her the minutes.

Marsha was a large woman with a resonant voice.

‘He was a visiting professor. Some kind of poet or novelist from Romania or Bulgaria or one of those places. He was an awful man. I mean just awful!'

‘What did he do?' This was Amber, looking up from her desk at the side of the room. Remembering my near-blush of the other day, I refrained from looking at her. But I was strongly conscious of her presence – her sleepy eyes, her short reddish-orange hair dividing in soft feathery wisps down the
fluted back of her neck, her skin freckled and unnaturally pale, almost silvery. Acknowledging to myself that this young woman had begun to have an effect on me, and preferring to confront such things rather than sweep them under the rug, I made a mental note to think about the precise nature of this effect, and to construct a suitable attitude in response.

‘What
didn't
he do!' Marsha was saying; ‘He made passes at practically every female he taught. Then when someone finally complained about him to the President, instead of being embarrassed, he went totally crazy. He made this terrible commotion right out there on campus. I mean the most truly awful scene you can imagine. Him yelling at the President, calling everyone the most horrible names, students yelling at him … Just awful! Finally he ran off down Mulberry Street, screaming and yelling like a madman.'

‘What happened to him?' I asked.

‘He never showed up again. They had to find another instructor to take over his classes.'

It wasn't until I got back to my office that the real significance of Marsha's story struck me. I was sitting down at my desk, when the bronze bowl on one of the black-stained shelves caught my eye, and I remembered the Bulgarian coin I had seen in it.

I went over to the bowl to look again at the coin. The pebbles were there as I had left them, as were the quartz, the fir-cone, the key-ring and the jay feather. But the coin was gone.

Given my recent spate of slips and lapses, my first inclination was to think I must have made another mistake. Either there'd been no coin in the first place, and I had somehow fabricated a memory of it, or else there had been a
coin, but for some reason I myself had spirited it away, behind my own back.

The first seemed inconceivable: I could remember with absolute clarity the physical appearance of the coin – the high-domed head of some dignitary on one side, the bunch of grapes on the other, the Cyrillic letters I had partially deciphered using the smattering of ancient Greek I still remembered from school. Also the feel of it in my hand – the almost total weightlessness of the silver-gray alloy it was cast in; more like plastic than metal. How could I have invented such a vivid and detailed memory? It simply wasn't possible. As to the latter, that I myself had got rid of the coin, although it seemed far-fetched, I had to admit that on the basis of my having moved the bookmark and misread the phone number – if those were indeed what had occurred in these cases – not to mention misidentified Dr Schrever on the street, which indubitably
had
occurred, this too was possible. But what reason could I have had for doing it – especially since I'd have had to have done it
before
I'd heard of Trumilcik, or at any rate learned that he may have been Bulgarian? I had no prior connection to Bulgaria, and I could think of no other earthly reason why I should want to conceal a coin from myself. It didn't make sense.

And yet I still couldn't give myself entirely to the belief that someone else had been in the room and taken it.

Mystified, I set off for the train station, a ten-minute walk.

Last week's snow had mostly melted, leaving just a few rags of soot-flecked white in the shadows of walls and hedges. The campus was landscaped to give the impression of a pastoral setting, though it was in the middle of a dreary town that was itself part of the uninterrupted sprawl running west and north from New York. It had been founded by a local sugar
merchant at the turn of the last century, as a memorial to a beloved nephew, Arthur Clay, who had died young, and after whom the college was named. Something of the flukey nature of its origins (if the boy hadn't died, the college presumably wouldn't be there) still clung to it despite its massive shade-trees and thick-walled gothic buildings. In winter especially, with the traffic and nearby housing projects unhidden by foliage, you felt the thinness of the romantic illusion of itself – something between a country estate and a medieval seat of learning – that it seemed intent on purveying; its closeness to non-existence.

In the car park I saw Amber, heading out on to Mulberry Street. She was drifting along at her usual sleepwalker's pace. I hadn't had a chance to think about her effect on me yet, and by default fell into the perhaps regrettable but, alas, necessary attitude of caution a man in my position needs to adopt in such situations. I felt that it would be unwise to be seen walking with her off the campus, but on the other hand I didn't wish to seem unfriendly by passing her by, so I slowed down to a dawdle, letting her get a couple of hundred yards ahead of me. As a result I missed my train, and had half an hour to wait till the next one.

Time to kill. I disliked having nothing to do. I walked to the end of the platform and back; looked at my watch: a minute and a half had passed. A familiar vague restlessness came into me. The blank oblong of time ahead of me seemed to thicken, forming a viscous, impenetrable emptiness. I didn't want to have to think about the things I inevitably thought about during these dead stretches. Up above the opposite platform five cold pigeons snuggled in a row on top of a rain-puckered billboard with a podiatrist's ad on it:
1–800 WHY HURT? 1–800 END PAIN
.

Trumilcik … the name stirred in my mind again … I thought of him running off down Mulberry Street,
screaming and yelling like a madman
. Where had he run to? The train station? Had he stood here like me, waiting for a train into Manhattan? And if so, then what? Packed his bags and booked the next flight back to Bulgaria?

I doubted that. I had met very few visiting workers in this country who had the slightest interest in returning to their native land unless they were forced to. The mind abhors a vacuum: into the total vacuum that represented my knowledge of Bulgaria, spread the one detail I had recently encountered, namely the coin – its sub-metallic substance, pallid color (as if leached of any purchasing power), the squat, handicapped-looking lettering, the blandly pompous face on one side of it, the bunch of implausibly circular grapes on the other … And it seemed to me distinctly unlikely that a man who had put all that behind him would choose to return to it if he could possibly avoid doing so.

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 …'