The Invisibles (15 page)

He looked at his left hand and its naked ring finger. He wondered if he had lost it, sold it, left it someplace.

“Your wife left,” she said, under her breath, as if she both feared and hoped the words would sting.

“Shortest marriage in history. Most painless, too.” He did not feel like laughing. They were in a coffeehouse in the lobby of a building near her job, crowded into a tiny circular table beside the cold window. Around them strangers sat typing at laptops, reading newspapers, eating, talking, stealing looks at each other. Outside a bum in a soiled-looking green coat held out a cardboard sign for bundled-up pedestrians to read. He was sure he usually avoided places like this. “I feel exposed here,” he said quietly. “Like there's no privacy. Like that's kind of the idea of these places.”

“That's what you always say,” she said. “I can never get you to come here with me.”

He saw, among other things, she did not fully believe him. This news must be difficult to hear from someone you know, he reflected, especially if, as she said, it had been weeks. “Does that mean you and I were together? Is that why my wife left?”

She rested her chin on her hand, looking toward the brightly lighted glass counter filled with Danishes and bagels. “No. Not yet. We were being careful. Your wife left for some other reason. You never said. You didn't like to talk about it.” She turned to him, narrowing her eyes with something new: the fatigue that sets in after sadness runs out. “You were always a mess.”

His face burned with embarrassment. He saw how he must look, either like someone mentally ill or like a total creep, depending on whether or not she believed him. “Look, I'm sorry.”

“No, it's fine,” she said, with a swift, learned politeness.

“I guess I should go, try to figure out more stuff.”

“I have to get to the office.”

“Where do I work?” he said. “I have a job, right?” He was aware a girl at the next table had stopped reading her novel to eavesdrop. “I feel like the kind of person who would have a job.”

She had stopped buttoning her coat halfway. Her face was soft with pity. She reached across the table and he could see she thought he was out of his mind — it occurred to him he was, in a manner of speaking. She petted his hand as if it were a wounded bird. “You need to see someone, Marcus.”

He half stood, and his chair scraped noisily across the tiles. He had disrupted the moderate coffee bar noisiness, and customers were staring. “Seriously. Can you tell me?”

“You worked at Saint Anthony's College. You taught classical literature and theater there. But you lost your job. Don't ask me why. You never gave me a straight answer.” She turned and headed
for the door, holding her pastel blue purse so low it hovered over the dirty pools on the orange tiles.

He went out after her into the bitterly cold morning. Buildings of stone and steel and glass loomed up massively, their upper stories lost in vapors, echoing the slishing, honking cars. A bank of granite-colored clouds threatened more snow, and out across the drifts and avenues flurries danced. The air was blue and gray. He walked beside her, neither of them speaking, to the corner, separation imminent.

“Don't ask me to introduce myself to you again,” she said sharply.

“I won't. Look, I'm not making this up. You shouldn't be offended.” He sensed the words contradicted something that had passed between them. His face was getting cold, his ears stinging, his nose hairs stiffening into little birds' nests. Winds came up constantly now, and the right side of his coat flapped open.

She lifted her purse and hung it on her shoulder. “You used to tell me about what your mother was like right before she died,” she said. “How terrible it was that she never knew you anymore. You talked about how hard it was that you didn't have any other relatives, how you were standing with her knowing she didn't remember the only person she had left. It sounded so lonely.”

“She had Alzheimer's,” he ventured.

She nodded. “It got really advanced, until she was just an old lady with the mind of a girl. That's what you said.”

“Do you think that's what's happening to me?” he said.

“I think you're too young. But I don't know.” She sighed. “I don't know, Marcus. I don't know.” She took a tortoiseshell card wallet from her purse and gave him a rose-colored business card.
Laura
. “Call me when you find something out. Or if you need something.”

“Great color,” he said.

She nodded her head quickly. “I know.”

As he approached the red brick classics building, two youngish women on the front stoop stubbed out cigarettes in the cement ashtray and disappeared through the heavy cream-painted wooden doors. He had seen their faces when they saw him coming and was sure they were avoiding him. He walked up the salted steps and, standing before the great brass doorknobs, took a last look at the small snowbound campus, a haven in the middle of the city. Pines and naked beeches and maples grew tall over Georgian-style buildings and sidewalks dark with melted snow. It looked like an ideal place to teach, quiet and rich, a shelter for student theatrics.

Save for a few sparsely attended classes, the building seemed empty. A white-bearded man speaking in Hebrew to a class of five students looked up from his desk, saw him, and paused to stare for a moment, then resumed his lecture.

He found the main office on the second floor. The student secretary, a short girl with pink hair and blue- and green-winged angels tattooed on her chunky arms, looked up from the computer where she was reading messages on a web page featuring a picture of her dancing at a concert. She smiled kindly at him. “Hey, Dr. Schwartz. I didn't know you were still around.”

He looked around the suite at the closed doors with dark windows. The white names stenciled on their black placards were uncannily familiar. “Not many people around.”

“Friday.” She shrugged and glanced at her computer screen, smiled at something there, looked back at him. “Are you still moving out of your office?”

He nodded and started toward the hallway beyond her, when
she rolled her chair back and pointed in the other direction, toward a narrow half-lighted room behind him. The wall was a hive of rectangular wooden mail slots.

“Your box is full. Let me know when you've decided on an address for forwarding, and I'll take care of that for you.”

“Thanks.” He slipped into the narrow space, scanning the last names, one beneath each mailbox. It was a confusing system, alphabetized horizontally, and several of the slots were full enough to meet the secretary's description. He glanced over and saw her frowning as she watched. “Um,” he said.

“Down two,” she instructed.

“Aha.” The opening was stuffed with letters and two bulging envelopes he guessed contained journals or books. He pulled them out in a thick stack and hurried past the girl into the tight corridor of faculty offices. He read the name signs on the doors as he went, looking for the one assigned him — Marcus Schwartz. He stepped over cardboard boxes full of dropped-off and graded student papers, glanced at articles and cartoons taped up as semi-public statements. Passing an open doorway he saw he had interrupted two presumable faculty members: a man wearing a T-shirt and jeans, his salt and pepper hair held up with hair glue, sprawled out in a chair before the desk of a woman with striking hazel eyes and curly gray hair to her shoulders. They had been talking in low voices, and when he passed they turned to look, the man with raised eyebrows and the woman with an astonished smile.

“Hi, Marcus,” she called.

“Hey,” muttered the man, turning his head to look elsewhere.

He lifted a hand in greeting and hurried on, terrified by the prospect of academic banter, with its mazes of connotations and pauses, and nearly missed the name he was looking for. He got out the keys, intending to lock himself in, and tried four before one fit the knob.

If he was this person, Marcus Schwartz, he had kept a messy office by his own standards, though he immediately liked the large map of the ancient world taped to the wall: its land was condensed into a honey-colored croissant resting on a swirled blue plate called
Ocean
. Books lay scattered across the desk, overturned or propped open with coffee mugs and other books. A brick of student papers slumped on the front left corner; bookshelves bulged. Aside from the map and wrappers and empty to-go coffee cups, there were no personal effects. He sat in his chair and switched on his computer screen. The desktop and e-mail account had been left open. Letters and memos lay around like fallen leaves.

He opened the paper mail, most of it garbage, memos and ads and newsletters, and found a letter addressing Dr. Schwartz. It was from a publishing house called Triton, and it told of a decision to pulp the remaining copies of a book of Ovid's
Metamorphoses
Marcus Schwartz had translated.

Strange, he knew Latin, he found, old and new, as various quotations floated to the surface of his mind. He knew several languages. He ran his eyes over the titles on the shelf, their words blurring together. Even if the translation did not tell him who he was — or what had happened to him, if he was Marcus Schwartz — he felt sure it contained a clue. The publisher's letter said no more than,
Given the overwhelming evidence of willful falsification in this matter, Triton Press sees no alternative but to proceed with the recall and destruction of this edition, and with the severance of all ties to its author
. He read through the e-mails. Most were student questions about grades. He deleted them, presuming they were the department's concern now. He read the more personal correspondence, condolences from Schwartz's former students, colleagues, and friends. Many mentioned the insignificance — one, the mischief — of Schwartz's act, but none said what he had done.

There was an article on the Saint Anthony student paper website titled
Professor Resigns after Accusations of Academic Dishonesty
. It said Marcus Schwartz, a translator who taught classics and theater, had quit after being accused of adding an apocryphal story to Ovid's
Metamorphoses
, claiming to have discovered a new fragment. The article described how other scholars concluded no such fragment existed, speculating Schwartz himself wrote the tale. The counterfeit myth was not described.

He searched the office, taking the books one at a time from the shelf and then tossing them aside onto the floor. Soon he had made such a pile that he was put in mind of a bonfire ready for ignition, and he had moved on to ferreting out books concealed under papers when someone knocked at the door. He ignored the disturbance and gave the room a final scan. Odd he would not have a copy of his own book in his university office, where it seemed several should be lying around.

The knocking came again. “It's Catherine.”

Deciding her voice sounded more eager to talk than to listen, he opened the door and looked down at the woman whose conversation he had interrupted earlier. She smoothed down the front of her maroon sweater over the waist of her gray skirt.

“Hey, Catherine,” he said. “What's up?”

She looked down the corridor as if to ensure they were alone. “I didn't know if you would be back. Ever.”

“Look at this mess. Can't just leave this behind.”

“In all honesty,” she said, looking past him, “I thought you would just abandon it. Just leave it all. I guess I do that, imagine people are more impetuous than I am, to live vicariously. How long has it been?”

“A while, I guess. I haven't really kept track. In fact, I'm actually about to step out, and I can't say when I'll be back.”

“Listen, Marcus.” She crossed her arms firmly across her chest and looked up into his eyes. “I just want you to know that some of us are behind you. No matter what the dean says. I've talked to friends at other schools, and I don't think this thing will dog you. You'll be okay.”

His eyes moved past her earnestly trembling face to the office almost right across the hall. Through the open door he could see, beyond a desk covered in Faberge eggs and figurines, her shelves of hardcover books in shining dust jackets. “Thanks, Catherine, it means a lot. By the way, would you happen to have a copy of
Metamorphoses?
”

She tensed at the shoulders like a cornered animal. “Which one?”

“Mine.”

“Oh.” She pressed her lips together and breathed through her nose. “I'm sorry, Marcus. I sent mine back to Triton. I didn't want to, but mine was a gift edition, and Henry contacted me personally. They're so embarrassed, you know. And the bookstore here had already sent theirs back.” She glanced away. “I didn't want to send it back. You know what it's like in this field. There are only so many places to publish.”

Laura picked up on the third ring. “Hey,” she said in a depthless monotone. He gathered that her cell phone informed her that the office of Marcus Schwartz was calling. Machines recognized Marcus Schwartz, he reflected, and would continue doing so until someone else took over that information. “I'm at lunch. Can I call you back?”

“I just have a quick question. It shouldn't compromise you at all.”

“Sounds promising.”

“Do you know my address? My home address, I mean.”

She paused, breathing into the phone as she fiddled with something. “Yeah, hold on, it's in my purse. Are you ready?”

He wrote it down on a sticky yellow note and put it in his pocket. “Are you busy later?”

“I can't talk right now. Call me later.”

Back on the train, seated beside the doors, he read vandalized ads for night schools and free background checks and glanced at the faces of fellow passengers, all of them looking forward to being elsewhere. The car was warm, and the linoleum was covered with puddles of melted ice. Outside the smeared plastic window a moderate snow was falling on the city and the snow-covered river. At each stop, a new mob of strangers boarded blowing clouds of breath, rubbing their hands together as they sought out open seats. An old woman wearing a pink parka and a plastic babushka sat in the space beside him, using her sharp little elbow to prod him into the corner. In place, she looked straight ahead, her wrinkled nose and frowning mouth framed tightly by her steel-colored hair and her shawl.