The Reflection (4 page)

A minute or so later, it was all over. By the time I’d turned the corner, they were nowhere to be seen. I sprinted ahead, scanning the sidewalks. Had they seen me? Gone into another building? Gotten into a car? I was flummoxed, furious with
myself. I couldn’t believe how quickly I’d managed to lose them. I hung about feeling stupid, then slowly made my way back to Esterhazy’s road—my heart still hammering against my ribcage, my thoughts racing. I replayed in my mind the scene of the two men leaving Esterhazy’s building. Had one of them hesitated over the broken step? I thought he had, but perhaps even this early on, only minutes after the event, I was already elaborating on my memories.

I thought about Esterhazy’s wife. Would she be alone in the apartment now? If I wanted to see her, I just about had a legitimate excuse. After all, even if her husband was now under some other doctor’s charge, he was ultimately my responsibility, since I’d signed his papers. It didn’t make much sense, but I crossed the street anyway, then strode up the three flights of stairs.

No answer. I knocked again. Not a sound. I’d guessed there’d be no one there, but that didn’t stop me from feeling deflated. After a minute or so, I bent down, stared through the keyhole. The same bare room I’d been in last night. A table with nothing on it. Two chairs. A bland picture on the wall. If anything, it looked even emptier in the daylight, so much so that I couldn’t imagine anyone really living there. But what about my own apartment? It was hardly more furnished. I stood up, cocked my head toward the stairwell. Once again, this suspicion that I was being followed. Ridiculous. I’d heard a noise, but obviously it was somebody scraping about behind the door on the other side of the landing. I crossed over, knocked on the other door. I could hear labored breathing coming from the other side, but still no answer until I knocked again, harder.

“What d’you want?”

“I’m looking for Mrs. Esterhazy, from across the landing.”

“Don’t know nobody from across the landing.”

“Mr. and Mrs. Esterhazy. They live on this floor.”

“You mean the door opposite?”

“Yes.”

“Ain’t nobody lives there. Not permanent anyway. People come and go.”

“What do you mean? Could you open the door so we can talk?”

“I mean ain’t nobody lives there. Ain’t opening the door to you or anyone else. Good day to you, mister.”

At some point I had lunch at an automat, and then the afternoon was lost to another restless meander across Manhattan. Without my usual routine, I felt unmoored, drifting through the mass of anonymous bodies, wanting to be alone, yet lonely at the same time. As I turned a corner, a newspaper hawker was yelling out the headline: “Russians have the bomb!” I remembered that piece I’d read on the subway, about Manhattan’s vulnerability to attack. Everything surrounding me—buildings, cars, people—could apparently now be vaporized in seconds. That simple fact seemed to steal some of the city’s reality.

I rarely spent daytime hours in my apartment over the weekend—it was too claustrophobic—but sometimes I’d drop by my office to do paperwork. I considered doing that now, but could come up with no good reason for it. My mood kept jolting from numb sadness when thinking about Abby, to an excited unease when thinking about the Esterhazy case. Later, wandering around the Village, I passed by City Psychiatric, its neogothic gargoyles looming above me on Eleventh. How many people had I signed in to that hospital? How many had never left? I thought back to various occasions when the police had called me in for an opinion. Sometimes a single
glance confirmed that a person was disturbed and dangerous. Other times, it was more borderline. Would I have had Esterhazy committed if I hadn’t been so tired? If I hadn’t felt some obscure pressure?

I’d finally realized something about Mrs. Esterhazy. Physically, she was very like one of my first patients, Miss Fregoli. The same bland good looks, young yet somehow ageless. And the same accent from nowhere. Miss Fregoli had suffered from a long-term melancholic illness, but after three months of therapy, I’d felt she’d made progress. The last time I’d seen her, she’d gone to a good deal of trouble over her appearance: new clothes, hairstyle, makeup. We’d discussed whether she should take a break from treatment. She’d seemed keen, and we’d agreed to suspend our twice-weekly appointments for a month. She’d been the last patient of my day and—unusually for me—I’d stopped for a drink on the way home, at a bar on Columbus Circle. It had been a private celebration of my success with Miss Fregoli, coming at a time when my self-esteem was low on account of Abby’s recent departure. But a few days later, Miss Fregoli’s mother had phoned me. Her daughter had hanged herself.

Hoping for some respite from my own mind, I ducked into a movie theater. When the mood struck, I could sit in the dark for hours on end, as one feature melded into the next, in a loop of endless narrative. The more generic the movie, the more absurd, the more removed from anything realistic or artistic, the more I liked it. I bought my ticket and settled down to watch a romantic picture with an even more ridiculous plot than usual: a showgirl falls in love with a returned war veteran suffering from amnesia. Characters flickered by in ghostly fashion—thoughts still circled me, just beyond my grasp, as if they were emanating from somewhere else. After an hour or so, well before the
end of the movie, I stood up and wandered out into twilit streets.

I was thinking of Miss Fregoli again as I ordered my hamburger and coffee in a near-empty drugstore. In my mind’s eye, her face had now merged with Mrs. Esterhazy’s until they’d become indistinguishable. Miss Fregoli’s death had been a huge blow. But it had also triggered my sporadic writing career, as she’d been the subject of my first paper. For months after her suicide, I’d tormented myself with the fact that she’d killed herself just when I’d thought she was improving. Then walking home from my office one evening, I’d had an idea. In the depths of depression, people cannot summon up the energy or courage for suicide. It’s only when they get better that they can do it. The danger period is not when the depression is at its worst, I realized, but when the patient is pulling out of it. Throughout the night, I’d feverishly written up the case history and my conclusions. Journal after journal had turned the paper down, always finding it “interesting,” but lacking the necessary “clinical rigor.” Eventually, a small journal published by some Midwestern university had accepted the piece.

It was getting late when I finally returned home, but I wasn’t tired. I felt dizzily on the verge of something, but I didn’t know what. An odor of cigarettes was in the sitting room, although I rarely smoked at home, and hadn’t for weeks. I picked up a coin from the table, flicked it into the air, caught it, then put it down again. Heads or tails? Abby and I had often played this game to decide what to what to do with our evenings. For the second night running, I poured myself a large whiskey, downed it, then poured myself another. By nature, I was an abstemious type—I’d drunk more in the past couple of days than I normally would in a month.

I eyed the gramophone in the corner of the room. Beside
it, the dozen or so records I owned. All Beethoven. All piano sonatas and string quartets. It was this music, more than anything else, which filled the emotional space that had long ago opened up within me. I took a record out of its sleeve, dropped the needle onto it. The grooves were worn down through overplaying now, although to my ears the accentuated crackles only added further meaning, overlaying the music with intimations of its own obsolescence. It sometimes felt as though the whole of a life had been lived within those tolling tones of the slow movement of the “Appassionata.” Other music imposed a mood, but this soaked up one’s own mood, reached to the essence of it, and ultimately to the end of it.

Again I lay in bed longer than usual. Feeling at a loose end, I flicked through my address book. D’Angelo’s home number was there, although I couldn’t recall his giving it to me. Even as I was dialing it I was wondering why—as though I were observing myself from a distance, with no access to my own motives. But once his wife had handed him the phone, I bluntly cut through the first few awkward exchanges.

“Something I didn’t tell you the other day. If I seemed in a peculiar mood, it was because I’d had a bit of a shock. Remember my ex-wife?”

“Yeah. Abby, is it?”

“She died a few days ago. Cancer. I’d only just found out that afternoon.”

“Ah. I’m sorry to hear that.”

I could hear the slight hesitation. She wasn’t my wife any more, after all, and it wasn’t immediately clear whether condolences were due.

“It threw me, that’s all. I’d had a few drinks. I’m concerned
because I really shouldn’t have gone to see Esterhazy. Wasn’t in a fit state to give an opinion.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“I mean it, George.”

“Listen. You sound like someone who could do with some company. It’s going to be a fine day. Me and Maureen, we’re going to set up the grill in the yard, cook some steak. Why don’t you come over? We’re in Howard Beach, not so far. Get the train from Penn Station. When you get in, call me and I’ll pick you up.”

A couple of hours later I was in D’Angelo’s car. We were pulling into the drive of a neat, clapboard bungalow on a long, wide avenue of more-or-less identical clapboard bungalows. It had been so long since I’d been out of Manhattan that the quiet suburban streets felt like a foreign country. I hadn’t been angling for an invitation, not consciously anyway, but had nonetheless jumped at D’Angelo’s offer. After the past couple of days, I was surely in need of a perspective other than my own. And this felt like the kind of thing that people should be doing on a weekend. A family man invites an old friend over for a barbecue. What could be more normal than that? But on the train down, it started to seem less clear-cut. I wasn’t really a friend of D’Angelo’s, was I? Not since school, anyway. Why would he invite me over? It wasn’t as if he’d ever done it before.

The weather had changed; the warm, hazy air felt more like August than late September. D’Angelo’s wife was setting a table in the backyard. Although we’d only met once, she greeted me warmly with a kiss on the cheek. It was the first physical contact I’d had with a woman in months, and it sent a tiny shock through me. D’Angelo got us beers; their six-year-old
boy was driving a toy truck across the lawn. The setup seemed so conventional, almost too ordinary, like some magazine advertisement portraying suburban life. I took a long gulp of cold beer that went right to my head—I’d skipped breakfast and was drinking on an empty stomach, I realized.

“Do you like comic books?”

Excited at having a guest for lunch, the boy had come and sat beside me while his parents got the meal ready.

“There weren’t too many of them around when I was a kid. Do you like them?”

“Yes. My favorite character’s The Shapemaker. Do you know The Shapemaker?”

“Afraid not.”

“He’s this man, his real name’s Mike Brown, and one day he took some bad medicine, so now he can change shapes, and he has a friend who’s a police officer like Dad, and sometimes he calls The Shapemaker, and The Shapemaker changes into other people, and helps him catch criminals …”

The boy’s eyes shone with enthusiasm. We talked more about comic books then suddenly he jumped up and shouted: “Try and catch me!” We ran around the garden for a while until I brought him down with a playful tackle. Stimulated by the beer and physical exertion, I was invaded by a brief feeling of euphoria. Was this what it was like to have a wife, a child? I glanced at Maureen. She wasn’t wildly attractive, but she had a nice, gentle face. She’d put on weight since I’d first met her, and I could see that she’d end up plump, but right now she had a beautifully voluptuous figure. It felt good to be walking to the table, holding hands with the boy, looking over to his smiling mother. For a moment, I was living in a parallel world—this was my house, my son, my wife, and we were about to have lunch outside on a sunny fall afternoon.

D’Angelo took me aside before we sat down. “There’s
something inside I want to show you first.” We went through to a spotless living room. A photo album sat on a coffee table. D’Angelo picked it up, flicked through it, took out a photograph. “Here, I found this.” He handed it to me. A picnic scene: a young Abby staring straight out of the photo; me looking furtively to one side.

“Wherever did this come from?”

“Don’t you remember that time you invited me to a picnic? In Central Park? I found it this morning. I want you to have it.”

I nodded, shoved the photo into my pocket, and walked back out to the garden.

The steaks were good. An atmosphere of easy conviviality descended across the table as we chatted about everything and nothing. D’Angelo was in an expansive mood, talking about the boat he was going to buy for weekend outings. He put his hand on my back: “What the heck are you still doing in Manhattan? Why not get out? There’s space here, there’s air here. There’s water. We can go for a swim after lunch. I’ll lend you some trunks. Probably the last time this season.” I nodded—the woozy sense of euphoria still lingered. Why indeed was I still in Manhattan? Why did life have to be so difficult, anguished? Surely it was all here. As simple as having lunch in the garden. Or watching a boy lying on the grass, laughing.

At one point Maureen turned to me: “George never told me how you two became friends.”

“We were at school together. I don’t really remember exactly how we …”

D’Angelo butted in: “David was the smart kid, the popular kid. I was the loner. Truth is I was being bullied. David stuck up for me and got the bullying stopped. No idea why he saw fit to befriend me, but thank God he did.”

The response mystified me—that wasn’t how things had
been—but I let it pass. After lunch, I helped wash the dishes, then D’Angelo and I drank some more beer and played a game of chess in the garden. It was hot, but cooling gusts of wind were coming in off the bay, shaking the already browning leaves onto the lawn. After the game, we sat out in deckchairs for a while, mostly in silence. But when I started talking about Esterhazy, I could sense D’Angelo stiffen, his face darken.