The Reflection

“David Manne?”

“Speaking.”

“Jeff Speelman here. I guess you may not remember me …”

“Why wouldn’t I? How’d you get my number?”

“Looked it up in the phone book.”

“What do you want?”

“It’s about Abby.”

“Jeff, I don’t know what you could possibly say that would interest me. I haven’t seen or spoken to her in … it must be a decade now.”

“I know that. You probably haven’t heard that she …”

“Wait a second. Slow down. This is pretty weird for me. You popping up out of nowhere like this. I told you I haven’t seen or spoken to Abby since before the war.”

“David, I’m sorry to call up out of the blue like this. Please hear me out. The reason I wanted to get in touch is, well, you may not have heard about Abby’s illness …”

“I don’t know anything about it.”

“She was finding it harder and harder to swallow. They diagnosed a tumor in her trachea. About three months ago. She had an operation to have it removed.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. I really am. But Abby and I lost touch a long, long time ago. The parting wasn’t exactly friendly. You, of all people, should know that.”

“I do, David. I thought you’d still want to be told, though. Things took a turn for the worse last week. She passed away early Wednesday morning.”

“Good God.”

“Just wanted to let you know what’d happened. Fill you in on the funeral arrangements. In case you wanted to attend. I found your number in the book. I wanted to check I had the right person, right address …”

“Sure, sure. Look … sorry I was so prickly.”

“Forget it. I understand.”

“Did she … um …”

“It was peaceful, David. There were some hard times. But in the end she passed away in her sleep. I was there, her mother was there. It was all very peaceful.”

“Good. I mean … it’s such a shock. I didn’t even know she was ill.”

“Sorry to give it to you like that.. I just thought that, in spite of everything, you’d probably want to know.”

“I appreciate that.. Not an easy call to make.”

“I’ll send a card with the funeral details. It’s next Tuesday.”

“Okay. I’d like to go.”

“Guess I’ll see you there, then.”

“Guess so. Jeff … I’m awfully sorry to hear this. I really am. My condolences. Thanks for calling.”

I’d been leaning forward, all tensed up and sweating; now I fell back in my chair. For a while I sat there, gazing at the painting on the wall opposite my desk. I picked up the phone again: “Miss Stearn, I’m not feeling so well. Could you please cancel Mr. Stone this afternoon? Maybe fit him in next Tuesday. I think I have a free hour then.”

“Yes, Doctor. Anything I can do for you?”

“No no. Just a little off-color, that’s all. Think I’ll go home and lie down for a bit. I’ll look in at the end of the day.”

I grabbed my hat and coat, and as I crossed the waiting room, my secretary threw me a peculiar look, almost of horror. I was on the verge of saying something else, but surprised by her expression, I looked away and made my way to the door. I walked down the five flights of stairs to the lobby—not so much for the exercise, more to avoid the elevator operator. He always tried to engage me in small talk, usually on something I knew nothing about, like baseball or movie gossip. I wasn’t in the mood for it.

I was going to hail a cab back to my apartment. I stood at the curb, but then changed my mind and started aimlessly wending through the midafternoon throng. It wasn’t particularly cold out, but the air was crisp. Long fingers of creamy light slipped between the buildings, slanting their way across Park Avenue. Gigantic cloud formations clotted the sky. I walked on, block after block. It was the first time in years that I’d simply wandered the streets on a weekday, without purpose. In a daze, as if I’d just been fired or something.

Many blocks on, I pulled out of my introspection and looked up. I was somewhere in the East Fifties, not far from my apartment. I remembered a nearby café-bar where Abby and I used to meet up. Run by a Frenchman, it had a long zinc bar top and had felt like a Paris café—or at least our idea of
one. We’d probably thought we were the height of sophistication drinking there.

Although I lived close by, I hadn’t walked down this street since Abby had left. Strange to see how little had changed. There was the jeweler’s store where I’d once bought Abby a necklace. Opposite, a man was hawking the afternoon papers, next to a cobbler bent over his work. Exactly as I’d left them, as if they’d only just snapped back into action. And yet when I came to where the French café used to be, it had vanished. In its place was an anonymous-looking bar and grill, such as you might find anywhere in the city.

Simply walking through its doors sent a chill of alienation through me—everything inside felt simultaneously familiar and strange. The zinc bar top had been ripped out and replaced with a bland, laminated counter. Chairs, tables, and decor had all been replaced; the clientele was different. I’d thought Abby and I had first talked about getting married here, but now I wasn’t so sure.

“What’ll it be?”

“Give me a beer.”

As a rule I never drank during the day, but I downed the beer the bartender put before me and quickly ordered another. I gazed through the glass front into the streetscape, washed in the somber colors of a fall afternoon.

As I drank, my thoughts drifted back. I was remembering my freshman year at Columbia, it must have been 1936. That second semester, when I’d joined a college theater group, out of sheer loneliness. One day in the rehearsal room, I’d felt someone watching me, and had looked up. Abby. I could still feel the erotic jolt, so disturbing now that I knew she was dead. I’d met her gaze and then let my eyes run down her body, taking
in her hips and breasts under the flimsy stage gown. A few minutes later, she’d left in the company of a short, intense-looking man, years older than me. I’d made enquiries the next day, and discovered who she was. A Barnard girl. A fine arts undergraduate who wanted to be an actress, and who apparently had the talent for it too.

Months had gone by. We’d attended rehearsals together. We’d even been in a play together—her in a leading role, me with a bit part. But we’d barely exchanged a dozen words. Then came a production of
The Winter’s Tale
. Someone had pulled out at the last minute, and I’d landed a more substantial part this time around, much of it in dialogue with Abby. We’d had two weeks of rehearsal for a six-night run. But as opening night had drawn nearer, I’d felt increasingly ill at ease and out of my depth. Abby had suggested we go through our scenes on our own, away from the rest of the cast. She’d been sharing a room in a college dorm: that was where we’d practiced, while her roommate was in class. And that was where everything had started, on two narrow beds hastily pushed together.

I remembered being on stage not long after that, for the third or fourth performance of
The Winter’s Tale
. The nerves had finally gone and the words had flowed effortlessly. I’d felt the magic of becoming someone else, if only for an hour or two. Afterward there’d been drinks, and then later Abby had smuggled me into her dorm through the laundry window, her roommate conveniently away for the weekend. An entire night had stretched out before us, when all we’d had before was the odd snatched moment. It had felt like the greatest luxury to watch Abby as she’d undressed without hurry. I could see her vividly now. My hand on her breast, her hand on my hand, her mouth to my ear, a line from the play that had become a secret code. Everything seemed to resolve to this frozen moment of expectation.

How to grieve for someone you haven’t seen in over a decade? It felt absurd. But in a way, Abby had never entirely disappeared. Every now and then I’d catch her looking out from a billboard or a newspaper ad for some Broadway show. She’d never become a star or gone to Hollywood—her face wasn’t right—but she’d managed to carve out a career in the theater nonetheless. It had only been a year ago that I’d last looked up to see her image on a poster outside the Century, for a show she was in with the Lunts. The poster had stayed up a couple of months, and I must have walked past it a good half-dozen times. I remembered thinking she’d aged a bit in the past few years, but perhaps she was already ill then. Before her death, weeks might go by without my giving her a single thought—and yet I’d known she was there, still watching over me. Now, I could feel myself fragmenting without the glue of that gaze.

I looked up from my glass. Only a few others were in the bar, most of them sitting by themselves. It was foreign to me, this world where you idled away your weekday afternoons drinking. The man to my left perched uncertainly on a stool nursing a whiskey, talking to an imaginary companion. Even if he hadn’t been mumbling, I could tell from his eyes that he was in the grip of delusion; I’d seen it so often before. His scarred face even reminded me of a former patient, one of my earliest. A curious fellow who, years after I’d stopped seeing him, had developed the delusion that he was really a psychiatrist, by the name of Dr. David Manne, with an office on Park Avenue. It must have been a convincing performance, because every now and then some perplexed nurse or doctor would call me up to check the story.

Eventually a trickle of office workers started to come into the bar, just ahead of rush hour. The two worlds—that of the drifters and that of the workers—momentarily overlapped. I drank up, paid up, and wandered onto the street with no clear
agenda. The thought of going home filled me with anguish. It was, after all, the same one-bedroom walk-up that Abby and I had briefly shared after we’d married. I’d stayed put after she’d left, and was somehow still there, a decade later. The rent was so cheap, I’d always reasoned, that it was the only way I could afford my expensive office. But as I made my way up Sixth Avenue, I knew that something had shifted inside me, that I’d never again feel comfortable in my apartment. I was finished with it.

Passing by a phone booth I stopped for a moment. I felt a compulsion to call up Jeff Speelman, to apologize again for my rudeness, to quiz him about Abby’s life of the past ten years, of which I knew virtually nothing. The solitary existence I’d been leading meant that, if not for Speelman, I might never have found out about her death. The thought shocked me. For a long time after Abby had left me for him, I’d nurtured a corrosive bitterness toward Speelman. Now I felt almost grateful. Of course, I couldn’t phone him since I didn’t know his number. And I wondered how he’d gotten mine. He’d told me he’d looked me up in the phone book, but that had been a blatant lie. Both my office and home numbers were unlisted.