The Reflection (3 page)

“What did you just call me? That’s not my name. And no, she’s not my wife. Never seen her before today.”

“Darling, don’t be ridiculous.”

“Don’t call me that.” He looked at her blankly. “I’m telling you, I’ve never seen her before today. I don’t know what’s happening to me. I’m here against my will. They’ve drugged me.”

“What year is it, Mr. Esterhazy?”

“I told you, that’s not my name. It’s Smith.”

“What year is it?”

“1949.”

“What month?”

“September.”

“What day?”

“Friday … I think.”

“All right.”

I signaled to Franklin to sit Esterhazy down again, while I ushered D’Angelo and Esterhazy’s wife back through to the other room. The square-jawed man I’d originally mistaken
for Esterhazy was still sitting there in his dark suit, smoking. I couldn’t help but feel threatened by his presence, his silence.

The wife started whimpering. “I’m very sorry, Doctor. I don’t know what’s wrong, I don’t know why he won’t recognize me. It’s horrible. Of course, I can show you photos …”

“That won’t be necessary, Mrs. Esterhazy. Just tell me in your own words what happened.”

She took a moment to pull herself together. “He came home. He was acting strange. He came into the kitchen while I was cooking. He put his arms around my waist. He was talking about some plot against him or something. He started threatening me. Then he hit me …”

Was it a New York accent? Surely not from these parts, anyway, not from the tenements. Like her face, her voice seemed neutral, unplaceable. She talked on tearfully for another minute or so, but I was hardly listening. I noticed how she kept looking over to the square-jawed man, as if silently asking for his approval. For a moment, I wondered whether they were lovers. Psychosis rarely comes out of nowhere; usually there’s some sort of trigger. Perhaps Esterhazy had discovered the affair; perhaps that was the trigger … It was pointless speculation, I knew—I was drifting away from the facts.

The woman had stopped talking. D’Angelo pushed some forms across the table for me to sign and I took out my pen. As I went to sign, I felt some vague affinity with Esterhazy. As if his confusion were in some way mine as well.

“Where are you taking him?”

“Um. Stevens Institute.”

“Stevens Institute?” The name meant something to me, but I couldn’t pin down where I’d heard it. “Why not City Psychiatric?”

“Don’t ask me. That’s what I was told at the station. Stevens Institute.”

I scribbled a note and signature at the bottom of the forms. “I’m signing him in for forty-eight hours. If they want to keep him longer, the doctor in charge will have to send me a report first.”

Minutes later, I stood across the road from the building, keeping well within the shadows. I’d refused D’Angelo’s offer of a lift home—for some reason I’d wanted to watch unobserved as he and Esterhazy came out of the building. But after a good quarter of an hour, there was still no movement. Another wave of tiredness hit me. In a way I was glad of it; I’d be knocked out as soon as I got home, too exhausted to be spooked by my own apartment.

The occasional figure haunted the sidewalk, but it felt preternaturally quiet for Manhattan. I was somewhere on the Lower East Side, a couple of blocks from the water. In the other direction, the shabby street I was on crossed an avenue. I made my way toward it, flagged down a cab.

“Where to, Mac?”

“East Fifty-Sixth, corner of First.”

The driver turned back down where I’d come from and soon we were speeding through an industrial wasteland by the river, its derelict buildings gaping like teeth. I looked at my watch, and was surprised to find that it was not even nine o’clock.

“Going out or going home?”

“Home.”

“Lucky you. Me, I’m on all night.” Silence for a minute or two, then the driver continued: “Trouble is, you never know what the wife’s up to when you work all night, do you? I call her up. Stop the cab, go to a phone booth. Sometimes at one or two in the morning. Nine times out of ten she doesn’t
answer. Says she’s in bed, doesn’t want to get up. But what do I know?”

I couldn’t tell whether it had been a bit of banter or something else, so I made an indistinct noise by way of reply. The driver lapsed into silence again, and a tension reigned in the cab. I found myself thinking about Esterhazy’s wife, visualizing her. The bruise on the cheek, almost too vivid, but no obvious swelling. The slightly robotic way she’d talked, despite the tears. The barely noticeable twitch in her leg, betraying trauma—or perhaps nervousness. I gazed through the window into a mist of drizzle. Then what seemed like moments later, the cab pulled into the curb. I was outside my building again. It was as if an eternity had passed since I’d last been there.

Through the iron gates and up two flights of stairs. My front door opened onto a corridor and a small kitchen. An archway led through to the living room, which looked out over a courtyard, and because the building opposite had no windows, it felt very private. A tiny refuge in the vastness of the city. The bedroom was hardly bigger than the double bed, over which hung a painting of a nude that Abby had left there. That was it, as far as decorations went. I hadn’t felt like homemaking after Abby had gone, and then after a while I’d grown to prefer the starkness. A girlfriend I’d once invited over had been shocked by this emptiness—as if I’d only just moved in, although I’d been there years. On these rare occasions when someone visited I realized what a strange place it was for a Park Avenue doctor to end up in. That, in turn, discouraged me from inviting people over.

I looked about the living room. Everything different, everything the same. I remembered how soul destroying it had been, in those first weeks after Abby had gone, to be forever coming back home to find everything exactly as I’d left it.
Around the small table were two chairs, the same design but each slightly different. Abby had always sat in one particular chair and I in the other. Even now, ten years on, I used the same one and left the other empty. Similarly with the bed: I always slept on the same side. Once a year or so, I’d have a powerfully erotic dream about Abby—I hoped to God that was finished with now. Eventually I found a couple of sleeping pills in the kitchen cupboard, and chased them down with some whiskey from a dusty bottle I hadn’t touched in months. Even if I was dead tired, I wanted to be sure.

Saturday morning. I lay in bed an hour longer that usual, feeling neither tired nor well rested, wondering what to do with the day. If my workweek was tightly scheduled, weekends were generally free-form—in theory at least. Actually, it occurred to me now, they were no less scripted than my professional life. The day would start with breakfast over the
Times
, always at the same diner on the corner. In the afternoon I’d go to the Park with a novel, if it was fine, or visit a gallery, if it wasn’t. Occasionally I’d have an evening engagement; otherwise I’d go to the movies, or listen to music at home. And that was how it always went. The thought of doing it all over again today and tomorrow—and then next weekend and the one after—filled me with a sense of futility. The weekend routine: that too, it now seemed, was over.

My thoughts kept circling around Esterhazy and his wife, picking over little details from the night before. D’Angelo appearing at my office. The open door of the apartment. The too-neat, almost coquettish rip in the woman’s dress. The
broken bottle, with no broken glass. A half-dozen other incongruities. The more I brooded, the odder the events of the evening seemed. I continued in this vein for a while, dreaming up hypotheses, before finally pulling myself out of it. I was overthinking things again. If I drew back a little, broadened my perspective, I could see that nothing about last night was as strange as all that. I recognized within me that desire to enter into the patient’s fantasy, and resisted it. If I were leading the life of a normal man, I reasoned, I wouldn’t be fretting over minutiae like this. I’d simply be getting on with things. Taking my son to the game, perhaps. Or a date out to lunch. Or playing a round of golf with an old college buddy. And yet, that wasn’t the whole of it either. That wasn’t the only reason I was creating these complications for myself. There was Abby. I was using the Esterhazy case to avoid thinking about her.

Finally I got out of bed. I was ravenously hungry; with everything that had happened yesterday, I’d skipped dinner. As I shaved, I stared at my face in the mirror with more curiosity than usual. For a moment or two, under the intensity of my own gaze, it began to look strange. As if, instead, I were staring at a wax model of myself. It was that same sensation of the unreality of things that had struck me the day before, wandering around Manhattan. But then, in a blink, everything was normal again. The face was mine.

It was still fairly early, but the street was already mobbed with Saturday shoppers. Stopping outside the diner where I ritually had my breakfast, I felt like an actor hitting his spots. I ordered the same thing every morning, yet each time the waitress would make a point of giving me a menu before taking my order. An awkward charade, but it had always been like that and could never now be different. I’d never developed the kind of bantering, flirtatious relationship that the waitress had with several other male customers. I peered inside,
without entering. There she was, chatting to another regular. I must have seen him in there hundreds of times. I even knew quite a bit about him, from overheard conversations. I knew that he lived on Sutton Place, just around the corner from my apartment. I knew that he worked in insurance, that he had a son, and that his son was blond-haired. I knew that he was separated from his wife, who lived somewhere in Brooklyn. I knew a dozen other facts—trivial or otherwise—without ever having exchanged a word with him. I wondered how I’d spent so many hours in that diner.

A few blocks later, I grabbed a couple of hot dogs from a street vendor and wolfed them down as I walked along, unsure of where I was going or what I was doing. I picked up a copy of the
Times
, then found myself drifting down into the subway on Fifty-Seventh, boarding a train heading downtown. It, too, was full of Saturday shoppers, but I managed to find a seat and leafed through the newspaper. The front page was given over to Truman’s announcement that the Russians had detonated an atom bomb. Inside, a morbid opinion piece said that lower Manhattan, with its tall buildings crammed into such a small area, was now a perfect target. I turned to the back of the paper, and scanned down the list of names in the obituary column. Seeing her name in black and white might have changed things, but there was no mention of Abby.

I’d had a half-formed plan to go down to the Village, but when I finally looked up from the paper, I realized I’d missed the stop. Eventually I got off at East Broadway. Not a neighborhood I knew, but as soon as I emerged onto the street, I realized why I’d ended up there. It was near where I’d been last night. God knows why I was retracing my steps, but that was what I seemed to be doing.

I walked down to Manhattan Bridge to orient myself. Then
after an hour or so of wandering about, I found Esterhazy’s street. At first, I wasn’t sure I had the right place. It was bustling and animated, filled with stalls and street peddlers, whereas last night it had been deserted, sinister—another feeling altogether. It puzzled me, but finding Esterhazy’s building settled the question. The broken stair on the stoop: I’d almost fallen over it the night before. And there it was again.

I hung about opposite, smoking a cigarette, at a loss as to what I was doing there. I was watching Esterhazy’s building, but I was thinking about Abby. Just as at home, in the apartment I’d briefly shared with Abby, I’d been thinking about Esterhazy. What shook me was the thought that in all these years, I could have simply picked up the phone and asked her to meet me for a drink. She’d have said yes, I was sure of it. I could imagine it so easily now. The initial surprise in her voice when she picks up my call. The coolness. Then finally a cautious agreement to meet me for an hour, no more, somewhere on the Upper West Side where she lived. We meet. It’s awkward. But once she understands that I’m calm, that I don’t want anything from her, we both relax a bit. Talk about our lives. She shows some interest in my work. Says she’ll send me tickets to her current show. I shake my head, say: “It’s nice of you to offer, but …” and then before I know it, the hour is up. After the first few difficult minutes, it had gone by so quickly. “I have to go now,” she says. We get out of our booth. Outside the bar, we stand looking at each other for a long moment. Finally I say, “I’m glad you came. Give my regards to Jeff.” She nods, says: “I’m glad I came too.” I say: “I’ll always want the best for you.” She nods, kisses me on the cheek, and that’s that. I won’t see her again, not ever again, unless by accident. But I’ll be able to go on. I’ll no longer be stuck in this state of suspension.

I stood there on the street corner, lost in my fantasy, almost
in tears. Missed opportunities: they were so peculiarly desolating. Even if I’d phoned her and she’d rebuffed me, I could have written her a note. Saying that I wanted nothing from her, only the best for her. And even if she hadn’t responded to that, I could have been secure in the knowledge that at least she’d read it. Instead, our last contacts dated back to the months after her departure, when I’d behaved abominably. Pestering her, stalking her, calling her up at ridiculous hours of the night … the thought was too much to bear. Then there was Speelman. Yesterday I’d felt grateful toward him. Now I felt angry. Why had he waited until it was too late? Why hadn’t he given me an opportunity to make my peace with her?

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a couple of men come out of Esterhazy’s building. One of them well groomed, elegantly dressed, quite out of place given the surroundings. The other was the square-jawed man from last night, I was almost certain, the one who’d sat at the table smoking. I noticed that he was still in his dark suit of the night before, and that settled it in my mind. The two of them turned north, walking at a fair pace in the direction of Chinatown. Without thinking, I tossed my cigarette into the gutter and set off after them. They were in deep conversation, and the smooth-looking one was wagging his finger at the square-jawed one, but whether he was doing it aggressively or simply to illustrate a point, I couldn’t tell. Within seconds of seeing them, I was inventing little scenarios as to what they were up to, what the relationship between the two might be. The adrenaline flushed through my body as they rounded a corner, and I quickened my pace.