The Book of Illusions (10 page)

The party began with everyone milling around on the ground floor, wandering in and out of rooms, clustering together for a few minutes and then breaking apart to form new clusters in other rooms. I went from the living room to the dining room to the kitchen to the den, and at some point Greg caught up with me and put a scotch and soda in my hand. I took it without thinking, and because I was anxious and ill at ease, I drank it down in about twenty-four seconds. It was the first drop of alcohol I had had in more than a year. I had succumbed to the temptations of various hotel minibars while doing my research on Hector Mann, but I had sworn off liquor after I’d moved to Brooklyn and started writing the book. I didn’t particularly crave the stuff when it wasn’t around, but I knew that I was only a few weak moments away from creating a bad problem for myself. My behavior after the plane crash had convinced me of that, and if I hadn’t picked myself up and left Vermont when I did, I probably wouldn’t have lived long enough to be attending Greg and Mary’s party—not to speak of being in a position to wonder why the hell I had come back.

After I finished the drink, I went to the bar for a refill, but this time I dispensed with the soda and added only ice to the glass. For the third one, I forgot about the ice and poured it straight.

When dinner was ready, the guests lined up around the dinner table, filled their plates with food, and then scattered into other parts of the house to look for chairs. I wound up on the sofa in the den, wedged between the armrest and Karin Müller, an assistant professor in the German department. My coordination was already a bit wobbly by then, and as I sat there with a plateful of salad and beef stew balanced precariously on my knee, I turned to retrieve my drink from the back of the sofa (where I had placed it before sitting down), and no sooner did I take hold of the glass than it slipped out of my hand. A quadruple shot of Johnnie Walker splashed against Karin’s neck, and then, an instant later, the glass clunked against her spine. She jumped—how could she not jump?—and when she did, she knocked over her own plate of stew and salad, which not only sent my plate crashing to the floor, but landed upside down on my lap.

It was hardly a major catastrophe, but I had drunk too much to know that, and with my pants suddenly drenched in olive oil and my shirt splattered with gravy, I chose to take offense. I don’t remember what I said, but it was something cruel and insulting, an utterly uncalled-for remark.
Clumsy cow
. I think that was it. But it also might have been
stupid cow
, or else
stupid, clumsy cow
. Whatever the words were, they expressed an anger that must never be articulated under any circumstances, least of all when they can be overheard by a roomful of edgy, high-strung college professors. There is probably no need to add that Karin was neither stupid nor clumsy; and far from resembling a cow, she was an attractive, slender woman in her late thirties who taught courses on Goethe and Hölderlin and had never shown anything but the greatest respect and kindness toward me. Just seconds before the accident, she had invited me to give a talk to one of her classes, and I was clearing my throat and getting ready to tell her that I would have to think it over when the drink spilled. It was entirely my fault, and yet I immediately turned around and put the blame on her. It was a disgusting outburst, yet one more proof that I wasn’t fit to be let out of my cage. Karin had made a friendly overture to me, had in fact been giving off tentative, ever so subtle signs that she was available for more intimate conversations on any number of subjects, and I, who had not touched a woman in almost two years, found myself responding to those nearly imperceptible hints and imagining, in the crude and vulgar way of a man with too much alcohol in his blood, what she would look like without any clothes on. Was that why I snapped at her so viciously? Was my self-loathing so great that I had to punish her for awakening a glimmer of sexual arousal in me? Or did I secretly know that she was doing nothing of the kind and that the whole little drama was my own invention, a moment of lust brought on by the nearness of her warm, perfumed body?

To make matters worse, I wasn’t the least bit sorry when she started to cry. We were both standing by then, and when I saw Karin’s lower lip begin to tremble and the corners of her eyes fill with tears, I was glad, almost jubilant over the consternation I had caused. There were six or seven other people in the room just then, and they had all turned in our direction after Karin’s first yelp of surprise. The noise of clattering plates had brought several more guests to the threshold, and when I came out with my obnoxious remark, there were at least a dozen witnesses who heard it. Everything went silent after that. It was a moment of collective shock, and for the next couple of seconds no one knew what to say or do. In that small interval of breathlessness and uncertainty, Karin’s hurt turned to anger.

You have no right to talk to me like that, David, she said. Who do you think you are?

Fortunately, Mary was one of the people who had come to the doorway, and before I could do any further damage, she rushed into the room and took hold of my arm.

David didn’t mean it, she said to Karin. Did you, David? It was just one of those things that come flying out on the spur of the moment.

I wanted to say something harsh and contradictory, something that would prove I’d meant every word I’d said, but I held my tongue. It took all my powers of self-control to do that, but Mary had gone out of her way to act as peacemaker, and a part of me knew that I would regret causing her any more trouble. Even so, I didn’t apologize, and I didn’t try to make nice. Rather than say the thing I wanted to say, I freed my arm from her grasp and left the room, walking out of the den and across the living room as my former colleagues looked on and said nothing.

I went straight upstairs to Greg and Mary’s bedroom. My plan was to grab my things and leave, but my parka was buried under a massive pile of coats on the bed, and I couldn’t find it. After digging around for a little while, I started tossing the coats onto the floor, eliminating possibilities in order to simplify my search. Just when I had come to the halfway point—more coats off the bed than on—Mary walked into the room. She was a short, round-faced woman with blond frizzy hair and reddish cheeks, and as she stood in the doorway with her hands on her hips, I immediately understood that she’d had it with me. I felt like a child about to be scolded by his mother.

What are you doing? she said.

Looking for my coat.

It’s in the downstairs closet. Don’t you remember?

I thought it was here.

It’s downstairs. Greg put it in the closet when you came. You were the one who found the hanger for him.

All right, I’ll look for it downstairs.

But Mary wasn’t about to let me off so easily. She took a few more steps into the room, bent down for a coat, and flung it angrily onto the bed. Then she picked up another coat and threw that one onto the bed as well. She went on collecting coats, and each time she thwacked another one down on the bed, she interrupted what she was saying in mid-sentence. The coats were like punctuation marks—sudden dashes, hasty ellipses, violent exclamation points—and each one broke through her words like an axe.

When you go downstairs, she said, I want you to … make up with Karin … I don’t care if you have to get down on your knees … and beg for her forgiveness … Everyone’s talking about it … and if you don’t do this for me now, David … I’m never going to invite you to this house again.

I didn’t want to come in the first place, I answered. If you hadn’t twisted my arm, I never would have been here to insult your guests. You could have had the same dull and insipid party you always have.

You need help, David … I’m not forgetting what you’ve been through … but patience lasts just so long … Go and see a doctor before you ruin your life.

I live the life that’s possible for me. It doesn’t include going to parties at your house.

Mary threw the last coat onto the bed, and then, for no discernible reason, she abruptly sat down and began to cry.

Listen, fuckhead, she said in a quiet voice. I loved her, too. You might have been married to her, but Helen was my best friend.

No she wasn’t. She was my best friend. And I was hers. This has nothing to do with you, Mary.

That put an end to the conversation. I had been so hard on her, so absolute in my rejection of her feelings that she couldn’t think of anything more to say. When I left the room, she was sitting with her back to me, shaking her head back and forth and looking down at the coats.

T
wo days after the party, word came from the University of Pennsylvania Press that they wanted to publish my book. I was almost a hundred pages into the Chateaubriand translation at that point, and when
The Silent World of Hector Mann
was released a year later, I had another twelve hundred pages behind me. If I kept working at that pace, I would have a completed draft in seven or eight more months. Add on some extra time for revisions and changes of heart, and in less than a year I would be delivering a finished manuscript to Alex.

As it turned out, that year lasted only three months. I pushed on for another two hundred fifty pages, reaching the chapter about the fall of Napoleon in the twenty-third book (
miseries and wonders are twins, they are born together
), and then, one damp and blustery afternoon at the beginning of summer, I found Frieda Spelling’s letter in my mailbox. I admit that I was thrown by it at first, but once I had sent off my response and given the matter a little thought, I managed to persuade myself that it was a hoax. That didn’t mean it had been wrong to answer her, but now that I had covered my bets, I assumed that our correspondence would end there.

Nine days later, I heard from her again. She used a full sheet of paper this time, and at the top of the page there was a block of blue embossed type that bore her name and address. I realized how simple it was to produce false personal stationery, but why would anyone go to the trouble of trying to impersonate someone I had never heard of? The name Frieda Spelling meant nothing to me. She might have been Hector Mann’s wife, and she might have been a crazy person who lived alone in a desert shack, but it no longer made sense to deny that she was real.

Dear Professor
, she wrote.
Your doubts are perfectly understandable,
and I am not at all surprised that you are reluctant
to believe me. The only way to learn the truth is to accept the
invitation I made to you in my last letter. Fly to Tierra del Sueño
 
and meet Hector. If I told you that he wrote and directed a
number of feature films after leaving Hollywood in 1929—and
that he is willing to screen them for you here at the ranch—perhaps that will entice you to come. Hector is almost ninety
years old and in failing health. His will instructs me to destroy
the films and the negatives of those films within twenty-four
hours of his death, and I don’t know how much longer he will
last. Please contact me soon. Looking forward to your reply, I
remain very truly yours, Frieda Spelling (Mrs. Hector Mann)
.

Again, I didn’t allow myself to get carried away. My response was concise, formal, perhaps even a bit rude, but before I committed myself to anything, I had to know that she could be trusted.
I want to believe you
, I wrote,
but I must have
proof. If you expect me to go all the way to New Mexico, I need
to know that your statements are credible and that Hector Mann
is indeed alive. Once my doubts have been removed, I will go to
the ranch. But I must warn you that I don’t travel by plane.
Sincerely yours, D. Z
.

There was no question that she would be back in touch—unless I had scared her off. If I had done that, then she would be tacitly admitting that she had deceived me, and the story would be over. I didn’t think that was the case, but whatever she was or wasn’t up to, it wasn’t going to take long for me to find out the truth. The tone of her second letter had been urgent, almost imploring, and if in fact she was who she said she was, she wasn’t going to waste any time before writing to me again. Silence would mean that I had called her bluff, but if she answered—and I was fully expecting her to answer—the letter would come quickly. It had taken nine days for the last one to reach me. All things being equal (no delays, no bungles by the post office), I figured the next one would come even faster than that.

I did my best to stay calm, to stick to my routine and forge ahead with the
Memoirs
, but it was no use. I was too distracted, too keyed up to give them the proper attention, and after struggling to meet my quotas for several days in a row, I finally declared a moratorium on the project. Bright and early the next morning, I crawled into the closet in the spare bedroom and pulled out my old research files on Hector, which I had packed away in cardboard boxes after finishing the book. There were six cartons in all. Five of them held the notes, outlines, and drafts of my own manuscript, but the other one was crammed with all sorts of precious material: clippings, photos, microfilmed documents, xeroxed articles, squibs from ancient gossip columns, every scrap of print I had been able to lay my fingers on that referred to Hector Mann. I hadn’t looked at those papers in a long time, and with nothing to do now but wait for Frieda Spelling to contact me again, I carried the box into my study and spent the rest of the week combing through it. I don’t think I was expecting to learn anything I didn’t already know, but the contents of the file had become rather dim to me by then, and I felt that it deserved another look. Most of the information I had collected was unreliable: articles from the tabloid press, junk from the fan magazines, bits of movie reportage rife with hyperbole, erroneous suppositions, and out-and-out falsehoods. Still, as long as I remembered not to believe what I read, I didn’t see how the exercise could do any harm.