It had grown cool with remarkable speed. The sky was darkly overcast, and I turned my face upward to feel the first drops of rain as I strode home. I ran into my apartment and opened the box, pulling up its lid and pushing aside tissue paper. The third object lay before me on the table. It was a mirror, unadorned, a simple rectangle, without even a frame. Without thinking, I picked it up and examined my face, removing a bit of sleep from the inside corner of my eye, studied my mouth, the line of my chin, and then moved the mirror away to see more. I still can’t understand it, but as I looked I was overcome with nausea and faintness. I sat down, put my head between my knees, and took deep breaths. It’s possible that the dizziness had nothing to do with the mirror. I had had very little to eat that day and the day before. I scrimped on food for cigarettes, trying to keep my expenses down, and it may have been simple hunger, and yet when I think of that mirror now, it disturbs me, as if there were something wrong with it, something sickening.
Still unstable on my feet, I went to my desk and began to make notes. I was writing to myself, typing out questions about Mr. Morning and the project, but I couldn’t put anything together. His remarks about memory, whispering, resurrection, returned to me as scraps of some inscrutable idea, some bizarre plan. And then I thought of the noise of the tapes behind the door, his touch and his slender figure in front of the window. Those letters, I thought, those letters on the page. What did they mean? A name. Her name. I moved the letters around, trying to arrange them into a coherent order. I found mob, boy, dim, and then body. The word coursed through me—a tiny seizure in my nerves. But it was absurd; a man doodles on a paper and I decode his meaningless scribbles. Besides, there were letters that could not be incorporated. I. M. He had circled the M. The suspicion did not leave me, and I began to imagine that rather than hiding, Mr. Morning really wanted to talk, wanted to tell me something, that the letters, the hints were revelations, part of a circuitous confession. “If you know too much, I’ll lose you.” I took my umbrella and went out into the rain.
Within five minutes, I was standing in the entryway of Mr. Morning’s building. I buzzed the super. After a considerable wait, a small, fat man came to the door. He yawned and then raised his eyebrows, an expression apparently intended to replace the question: What do you want?
“I’m looking for an apartment,” I said. “Do you have anything vacant?” This was my first ploy, and to my surprise, the building had one empty apartment.
“Three seventy-five a month.” He raised his brows again.
“I’d like to see it.”
He took me to the third floor and opened the door of a small apartment identical to Mr. Morning’s. I walked through the rooms as if I were inspecting them. The man leaned against the open door with a look of belligerent boredom.
“I was told there was a murder in this building,” I said.
“That was three long years ago, honey. There hasn’t been nothing in that way since.”
I walked toward him. “What was her name?”
“Your umbrella’s dripping on me, sweetheart.”
I moved it away and repeated the question. “Was it Maxine, Maxine Robinson?”
“Hey, hey, hey.” He lifted up his hands and backed away from me. “What’s going on here? The name was Zalewski, Sherri Zalewski. It’s no secret. It was in all the papers.”
Tears were in my eyes.
“What’s the matter, kid?” he said.
“Please, tell me,” I said. “Did they find the person who did it?”
“You got some kind of special interest here?”
“There can’t be any harm in telling me the story,” I said.
He did tell me then. I think he was sorry for me or embarrassed by my emotion. Sherri Zalewski was a nurse who had lived in the building. She was knifed to death on a February night while doing her laundry. No one had seen or heard anything. A woman who moved out shortly afterward had found her the next morning. “Real ugly,” he said. “Real bad.” The woman had vomited in the hallway. The police never found the killer. “They snooped around here for months,” he said. “Nothing came of it. They were after the guy in 4F for a while, a real weirdo, Morning. Even took him down to the station. All the tenants were calling and bitching about him. They let him go. Didn’t have a thing on him.”
“Do you think he killed her?”
“Nah,” he said, “he’s not the type.”
From there I went to Butler Library to check the papers, but there was little new in them. Sherri Zalewski had grown up in Greenpoint. Her mother was dead; her father was a mailman; she had one sister. A friend, quoted in the Times, called her “an angel of mercy.” Mr. Morning was not mentioned. According to the articles, the police had no suspects. Sherri Zalewski vanished from print for months; her name appeared only once again in a story run by the Times on unsolved murders in New York City. I found a single photograph of her—a grainy block of newsprint that was probably taken from a high school graduation portrait. I stared at the picture, looking for a way in, but it was unusually blank: a girl, neither pretty nor homely, with small eyes and a full mouth.
I carefully attached the chain lock on my door and turned on every light in my apartment before I sat down at the typewriter. I decided to write and record a letter to Mr. Morning. I did describe the mirror briefly, but there was little to say. Its surface was unscratched; it had no discernible odor; it was at the same time a full and empty thing, dense with images in one place, vacant in another. Except for the steady sound of the rain outside, my building and street were uncommonly quiet that night, but the noises I did hear made me jump, and I understood that I was listening for someone, waiting, expecting the sound of an intruder. He was in my head. Fragments of our conversation came back to me: Fern Luce, what he had said about not remembering the girl’s face, the smell of wool and lavender in his mother’s trunk. I wrote, and as I wrote, I saw her body on the floor in the vacant apartment I had visited. I always see it there for some reason—bloodied and torn apart. I see the corpse as in a photograph, black and white, illuminated by a dim light bulb. Even now when it comes to me, I can’t examine it closely. I push it away.
Evening became night. The room turned dusky and a chill made the blond hair on my arms stand up. I wrapped myself in a blanket and wrote one page after another and threw them away. When I finished I had just one page. The mirror lay beside me shining in the lamplight. At around one o’clock in the morning, I spoke the words I had written into the tape recorder but didn’t listen to them. The wind blew over my bed, and I fell into a deep, empty sleep.
• • •
Mr. Morning’s rooms were cool and wet that day. His windows were open for the first time and the wind blew in, ruffling a newspaper that lay on top of a pile. His unusually pale cheeks were rosy and he seemed to be breathing more easily. I am quite sure that he sensed my apprehension immediately, because he said so little to me and in his face there was sorrow and maybe regret. Before I secluded myself in the kitchen, I noticed that there was a tall stack of papers on his desk that looked like a manuscript.
I didn’t close the door to the kitchen; I let it stand open slightly and put my eye to the crack. I watched him as he placed the tape recorder in front of him on the desk and turned it on. He leaned back in his chair, let his arms hang limply at his sides, and closed his eyes. After a brief interval of static from the machine, I heard my voice come from the other room. I listened to the short description of the mirror that I had dutifully whispered onto the tape. Then I heard my full voice and saw Mr. Morning look sharply in my direction. I quickly shut the door. As I listened to the high, childlike voice that must have been mine, I clenched my teeth so tightly that later my jaw was sore.
“I know who she was. Her name was Sherri Zalewski. I wondered for a while if you hadn’t invented her, but now I know that she existed and that she lived and died in your building. A glove, a stained cotton ball, a mirror. Why these things? Where did you find them? You must have known that I would ask these
questions. I suspect that you have invited them, that you knew I would find out about her and about you. You should have told me the story, Mr. Morning. You should have told me directly rather than hinting at it. I do believe that, for you, this project is somehow an attempt to undo what happened that night, that these things are part of some elaborate idea I can’t make out.” There was a pause on the tape, and I listened for a noise from him, but there was nothing. “The things, the tapes, all your talk. I don’t know what to do with them, how to understand them, how to understand you. I do know that the dead do not come back to life.” I heard a loud scraping noise. He must have moved his chair. But the tape was still on. I pressed myself against the door, as if the weight of my body could shut him out. “I know the police questioned you, that they suspected you. I am not saying that you killed her; I’m asking you to tell me the truth. That is all.” It was over. He was walking to the door and I heard him turn the knob on the other side. I stepped back. He was breathing loudly and a wheezing sound seemed to come from deep in his chest. He stood in the open doorway and stared at me, his face flushed. He looked as if he were about to speak, but then he closed his mouth and gained control of his breathing.
He said, “What is there to say? You expect me to confess, don’t you, to fall down before you and tell you that I murdered her. But that isn’t going to happen. It can’t happen.
“What are you saying?” My voice was choked.
“I have already explained everything to you.” He looked past me and pressed his lips together in a spasm of emotion. “There is nothing more to say. The story is yours, not mine.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that you’ve invented the story yourself. It belongs to you, not to me. You’ve already chosen, an ending, a way out. I suppose it’s inevitable that you want satisfaction.” He looked at me. “ ‘The evil wizard turned to stone.’ ‘The king and queen lived happily ever after.’ ‘He died in prison, a broken man.’ Whatever. What you’ve forgotten is that some things are unspeakable. That’s what you’ve left out. Words may cover it up for a while, but then it comes howling back. A storm. A plague. Only half remembered. The difference between you and me is that I know I’ve forgotten. You don’t.” He turned around and faced the other room.
I spoke to his back. “That’s what you have to say to me? I ask you to tell me the truth and you tell me that?”
“Yes,” he said.
“I don’t understand you. I don’t understand you at all. Tell me that you didn’t kill her.” My voice was shrill.
“No,” he said.
Mr. Morning walked toward his desk, and I heard the blinds rattle. There was a gust of wind from outside, and the papers on the desk were whipped into the air—hundreds of white pages flapped noisily against the bookshelves and walls, blew over the chairs and stacks of newspapers, sliding across the wood floor. Mr. Morning scrambled to retrieve them.
“Listen, Iris,” he said. “I know things have changed, but I don’t want to lose you. I want you to stay with me and do some more work. I want you to talk with me the way you’ve done these last two weeks. You will stay, won’t you?”
I said yes to him. I thought to myself that if I did one more description, I could press him again, that he would tell me the truth, but now I wonder if that was really the reason.
He opened the desk drawer and took out another small white box. He held it out to me with both hands. “For tomorrow. Tomorrow at two.” He gave me the tape recorder, and then after explaining he was short of cash, he wrote out a check to Iris Davidsen.
“I can’t accept it,” I said.
“Please, I insist.”
I took it, knowing I could never cash it. I walked to the door, picking my way among the fallen pages. He walked beside me.
At the door he took my hand in both of his. “There’s one last thing. Before you go, I want you to leave me something of yours.” His eyes were shining.
“No.”
“Why not?”
I released my hand from his grip. “No.”
“One small thing.” He leaned closer to me, and in the opening of his shirt I saw the cleft of his collarbone. There was a vague scent of cologne.
I opened my bag and began to search it, roughly pushing aside books, envelopes, and keys until I found an old green eraser, blackened with lead smudges, and thrust it into his hand, saying that I had to leave for an appointment.
I imagine that he stood in the doorway and watched me rush to the stairs and that he continued to stand there as I ran down one flight after another, because I never heard the door close.
I ran into the street and began to walk toward Broadway. When I reached the corner, I paused. It had stopped raining and the sky was breaking into vast, blank holes of blue. I watched the clouds move and then looked into the street. The sidewalk, buildings, and people had been given a fierce clarity in the new light; each thing was radically distinct, as though my eyesight had suddenly been sharpened. It was then I decided to get rid of the things. I opened my bag, took out the check, ripped it to pieces and threw it into a large trash bin. Then I threw away the tape recorder and the unopened box. I can still see the small black machine lying askew on the garbage heap and the smaller box as it tumbled farther into the bin. It upset a Styrofoam cup as it fell, and I turned away just as a stream of pale brown coffee dregs ran over its lid. My memory of those discarded objects, lying among the other waste, is vivid but silent, as if I had been standing in the noiseless city of a movie or a dream. I saw them for only an instant, and then I ran from those things as if they were about to rise up and pursue me.
I didn’t think that would be the end of it. Mr. Morning had my telephone number, after all, and there was nothing to prevent him from finding me. I waited for months, but I never heard from him. When the telephone rang, it was always someone else.
TWO
George was Stephen’s friend first, and I suppose that was part of the problem. I had known Stephen for eight months, and even though we were often together, our love affair was fitful and uneasy. Stephen was secretive. He enjoyed withholding information—the identity of a caller, the place of an appointment, the name of an old friend, even a book title. I should have known that he was lost to me from the very beginning, but his body was magic then, and it drove me on. One look at his neck, his hands, his mouth, brought on a shudder of sexual memory, a pleasure that became a torment, because Stephen rationed his body, too, holding it back for days, even weeks, and I lived in a state of constant longing. Yet it always happened that just when I couldn’t stand it anymore and had decided to leave him, he would come to me transformed: passionate, confiding, irresistible. Our harmony was brief. Usually it was a matter of hours before Stephen would retreat again. Sometimes I could see the signs of withdrawal in his face. His eyes became unfocused, his jaw rigid, and he pressed his lips together. But the truth was that even when I had Stephen in my bed, I often had the impression that he wasn’t fully there, wasn’t solid, and that if I wanted to, I could pass my hand right through him. I can’t account for this feeling, but I’m certain that it bears on what happened later and is somehow tied up with that damned photograph.
I first saw them together on a cold day in early April. I had just left Butler Library and had stopped on the steps to button my coat, when I saw Stephen standing several yards away in deep conversation with another young man. They didn’t see me, and I watched them for a few seconds before I approached. Stephen moved close to the young man, put his hand on his shoulder and whispered to him. The intimacy of this gesture sent a tiny shock through my body. Yet another person he has kept hidden from me, I thought. When he heard me say his name, Stephen turned suddenly and smiled, but I thought I detected a slight blush across his cheeks and forehead. The other young man didn’t smile, however. He gave me a look so penetrating, so laden with significance that I had to suppress a laugh. “Iris,” Stephen said. “This is George,” and at that moment it began to rain. The three of u
s huddled under my umbrella and walked to the Hungarian Pastry Shop on Amsterdam Avenue. I remember that George’s shoulder touched mine and that Stephen put his hand into the pocket of my coat and through the layers of cloth moved his fingers up and down the hollow of my hipbone. I turned my face to Stephen’s neck and saw him glance at George. He seemed to want to catch his friend’s eye, but George was staring straight ahead.
We sat at a table near the back of the pastry shop and drank coffee. Stephen introduced George as an artist who took photographs, not as a photographer. The difference was apparently a crucial one, because he emphasized it. Most of what we said has escaped me, but the conversation was lively, and George, who had been dour, brightened. When he spoke, I heard a slight accent that I couldn’t place, and his words came more slowly than most people’s, which gave his speech unusual weight. I was glib, even witty, or at least that’s how I imagined myself. It may have been because Stephen and George appeared to listen to me with such rapt attention I was deluded into thinking that what I was saying had captivated them. Not until later did it occur to me that something else was at work, that George’s presence had an effect on me and on Stephen, and that without the coffee with George, Stephen might never have taken me home with him that afternoon, and we wouldn’t have made love the way we did, urgently, fiercely, as soon as the door was closed behind us.
I asked Stephen about George that same day as we lay in bed listening to the rain on the fire escape outside his bedroom window. Was he an old friend? Where had they met? What were his photographs like? But Stephen was reticent. No, he hadn’t known George very long. They had met downtown at a party. The photographs were ingenious. That was the word he used. There was much he left unsaid, but it was impossible for me to know whether he was silent out of habit or whether George was a person he had reason to hide.
George began to call me. He invited me for coffee, lunch, dinner, and I went. We had long talks, and soon he knew my story, or at least most of it. George inspired telling. He was so easy in his manner, so kind and understanding, it was hard not to confide in him. But there was something else, too, something more important. George had a way of talking to me as if he knew me better than I knew myself, and in George this presumption was a kind of wizardry that turned loose thoughts and memories I had never spoken of to anyone before. I told him about Stephen. Perhaps that was my first mistake, but I was lonely at the time, lonely with Stephen too, and tired of worrying every sentence, of feeling that I had said more than I should have.