And to hell with Ginny.
Even as the thought slipped past his guard, he sighed at it, disappointed to find it there at all.
Ginny is gone, gone, gone, he told himself. Leave her out of it.
He went to the jacket he’d been wearing the night before and dug a business card out of the breast pocket: Carol’s card. Looking at it, he reflected on the fact that designers’ business cards were either very plain (“I’m too busy to design for myself”) or very elaborate (“See what I can do?”) and rarely anything in between. He’d never known it to be an infallible guide to superiority either way, but he felt vaguely pleased that Carol’s was of the first type.
He settled by a phone, dialed her number, and waited through half a dozen rings before it was answered with a simple hello. He opened his mouth to speak, and the breath went out of him as if he’d been punched in the stomach.
“Hello?”
It was unmistakable. Just those two syllables, and it was unmistakable.
Whispering, because he still had no breath, he said, “Ginny?”
“You have the wrong number,” she said, and hung up.
The dial tone was humming in his ear, but he didn’t hear it. He was listening to that voice, wondering if he could be wrong. It didn’t seem possible . . . but of course he had to be wrong.
He pushed the redial button; this time the phone was answered after the second ring.
“Hello.”
Hello.
It wasn’t Ginny’s voice. It was nothing like Ginny’s voice.
“Hi,” he said. “Carol? This is Richard Iles.”
“Oh. Hi, Richard. Did you just call here a second ago?”
“No. Why?”
She grunted. “Just a heavy breather, I guess. He caught me washing my hair.”
“Sorry. Would you like me to call back?”
“It’ll keep, it’s all wrapped up in a towel now. What’s up?”
“Well, if you’re open to suggestions for the evening, I have a bunch in mind.”
“I wouldn’t mind flying to California for a bowl of chili at Chasen’s.”
“That was on the list. Suggestion eight, in fact.”
“However, I can’t. I’m expected at a cocktail party this evening. I’m not all that keen on it, but I’ve gotta go.”
“Ah,” he said with a pang of disappointment.
“Would you like to go with me?”
“Well . . .”
“Actually, I almost mentioned it last night, but I didn’t want you to think I was pushy or anything.”
Greg laughed. “I’d love to go with you. I haven’t been to a party in a decade. But will I be welcome?”
“Are you kidding? They’ll shackle you to a radiator. The place’ll be packed with unattached females.”
“Well, I can hardly pass up a chance like that, can I? What time shall I pick you up?”
Later, standing watch over the lake with a Bloody Mary in his hand, Greg wondered how much he was going to have to think about mistaking Carol’s voice for Ginny’s. Even as he posed the question, he recognized its deviousness. He hadn’t “mistaken” Carol’s voice for Ginny’s; if he had, there would be nothing to think about. He had heard Ginny’ s voice.
No mistake.
He could easily imagine what Agnes would say about it: he had dialed Carol’s number, but the person he was really trying to reach was Ginny. Never mind that the voice he expected to hear was Carol’s. The voice he wanted to hear—and had heard in fact—was Ginny’s. It was no use pretending he’d simply made an error. He’d had an aural hallucination.
And what was he going to make of that?
After some thought, he decided to make as little of it as possible. Since he knew very well that he had no intention of doing anything about it, there was nothing to be gained by stewing over it. He went out to lunch at Don the Beachcomber’s and afterwards bought himself a new tie, a festive paisley in rich blues, yellows, browns, and reds.
As far as Greg could see, there were only a handful of un-attached females among the thirty or forty guests at the party, but he’d certainly been made to feel welcome. The hostess, a tall, angular woman with a wide, humorous mouth, had glommed on to him almost the moment he’d stepped in, gracefully separating him from Carol to lead him around the small, elegant Elm Street apartment, introducing him to everyone as if he were the guest of honor.
It was a younger crowd than he’d expected and apparently had no connection with graphic design or publishing in any form. After a little eavesdropping, he concluded that most, if not all, of them were involved in some way with the Goodman School of Drama. It accounted for the trained voices and the occasional larger-than-life gesture.
For Greg, the principal attraction of any party was more in observation than participation, but he wasn’t allowed to follow his inclination for long. He’d shamelessly allowed himself to be introduced as a writer, and it was on this basis that he was drawn into a discussion of Saint Joan. A young man with very thick glasses was asserting that, judging from his introduction, Shaw had misunderstood his own play. The others in the group thought this an impossibility and wanted Greg’s expert opinion. His attempt to evade the question on the grounds that he was unfamiliar with both the play and the introduction was waved away. Was it possible, they wanted to know, for an author to miss the point of his own work?
With a gleeful inner shrug, he obliged them with an opinion he only half believed himself: an author is very much like a parent; he may be too importantly involved with his brainchild to see it for what it is. They scoffed, and he sidetracked them with an irrelevant example. Herman Melville, he said, didn’t really understand what Moby Dick was about when he started writing it; he began by insisting repeatedly that Captain Ahab was a “monomaniac” but stopped using this label entirely around the middle of the book, because he’d seen a greater potential for Ahab if he wasn’t a monomaniac but rather a visionary obsessed with a great truth. Greg’s listeners were outraged by what they took to be a slur on this great literary genius, and he proceeded to outrage them some more by telling them that if Melville had seen himself as anything more than a writer of adventure stories, he would have rewritten the first half of Moby Dick to bring it into line with the second half.
Greg’s eccentric literary views won him the swooning attention of a smoky-eyed brunette, who spent the next hour being languidly fascinating while he told her absurd tales of growing up in Laos, the son of missionaries ultimately slain by Communist guerrillas.
“You ought to write a book about that,” she told him earnestly.
“Maybe someday,” he replied. “I’m too close to it now.”
Face by face, the group around him changed, but it was always there, and, oddly, he always seemed to be the center of it. It was an unusual and flattering experience, and he wondered if his superior age intrigued them or whether a man who carries three thousand dollars in his pocket as spending money carries a special aura with him as well.
Around midnight he began to look around for Carol. Even with her back to him, she was impossible to miss, and he excused himself to walk across the room to join her. He picked up a fresh drink and stood at her side to catch the drift of the conversation. After a few moments he glanced down at her, and, as if sensing his attention, she looked up and smiled.
Greg’s heart plummeted, and his glass slipped through his fingers unnoticed. His mouth suddenly dry, he stared at her and croaked, “Ginny?”
For there wasn’t the slightest doubt of it: the woman looking up at him was Ginny, not Carol.
Her smile faltered, withered, and was replaced by blank bafflement.
“Ginny,” he repeated, “what are you doing here?”
She glanced doubtfully at her friends, as if one of them might explain what was going on. A few of them shrugged; others kept amused eyes on Greg, tensely awaiting the punch line of the joke.
“Ginny, come on. Stop it.”
“‘Ginny,’” she repe
ated with a thoughtful frown. “Someone called this morning and asked for Ginny. It was you.”
“Ginny, please. For God’s sake.”
Shuddering as if his relentless gaze had touched her physically, she drew back a pace. “Are you crazy or something?”
Greg stared down at her, a feeble half-smile frozen on his lips. He felt helpless to move, to resolve the situation.
She sent a wild eye around her circle of friends. “Look, somebody tell this guy my name, okay?”
“Ginny . . .” he pleaded.
Suddenly her face blazed into life. “What the hell’s the matter with you? Can’t you remember it? It’s Carol. Carol! C-A-R-O-L!”
He laughed uneasily. No matter how hard he looked, it was Ginny standing there, Ginny glaring at him, Ginny telling him that her name was Carol. He turned to the now silent group around them and met stares that were puzzled, worried, hostile.
“Come on,” he said, appealing to them weakly, “you can see this isn’t Carol. What’s going on here?”
The woman who wasn’t Carol turned abruptly and marched off toward the bedroom where coats had been left.
The entire room was silent now, as everyone turned toward the center of the drama. Greg picked out the face of the hostess and said, “Look, you saw who I was with when I arrived. That was Carol.”
She shook her head and frowned down at her shoes.
He turned to the smoky-eyed brunette and asked her if she knew Carol. She nodded.
“Well, was that Carol I was just talking to just now, for God’s sake?”
She studied him gravely and said, “Yes, as a matter of fact, it was.”
He started to protest, but at that moment Ginny/Carol emerged from the bedroom and headed for the door.
“Wait,” Greg said, catching her by the arm.
She stopped and peered down at his hand. Then she looked around and said, “Will somebody get this guy off me?”
Two men separated themselves from the crowd and moved toward Greg.
One of them said, “Gently now,” as if soothing an alarmed horse.
Greg dropped her arm but started after her as she once again made for the door. The two men interposed themselves, and one of them said, very politely, “I have the impression she wants to be by herself. Okay?”
Sagging, Greg watched her leave.
There was a long silence, then someone muttered, “Where the hell did he come from?” He was answered with a few nervous laughs, and conversations were gradually resumed in a hushed murmur.
Greg, still confronting the two men, said, “Is it all right if I leave now?”
They exchanged a glance.
“Let’s give her a few minutes, okay?”
Haying no choice, he nodded.
They let him go after ten minutes, and he walked out, his back stiff with a dignity he didn’t feel.
XXXVII
GREG HAD ONCE TOLD GINNY he’d spent an unforgettable night with a friend who was going round the paranoid bend.
His name was Larry Fielding, and he and Greg had shared courses as graduate students at the University of Chicago. Greg had taken to him for his unflagging good humor, his refusal to take anything too seriously or to let anyone spoil his gracious style or his evident enjoyment of life. As they’d become closer, Greg envied him his almost uncanny ability to put people and events into perspective. Larry was younger than Greg, but he seemed infinitely more poised, more comfortable with himself— more finely balanced than Greg, with his doubts, awkwardness, wild swings of emotion, and ready sense of guilt.
They gradually lost touch when Greg left the university. Then one night Larry showed up at Greg’s apartment and said he needed someone to talk to. This in itself was puzzling, because Greg had always had the impression that Larry was well endowed with friends; later he understood why their doors were no longer open to him.
Greg learned that, in the time since they’d been close, Larry had dropped out of graduate school, done a little undergraduate tutoring and term paper writing, and finally drifted away from education. For a while he’d sold encyclopedias, then worked in a men’s shop. After that he’d managed an adult bookstore. Greg was astonished to hear that he was now a process server and general errand runner for a firm of court reporters, but it seemed that even this rather shabby job was in jeopardy. Someone in the office was arranging for him to be given instructions that were just far enough off to make him look like a blunderer, and because it was always done by phone there was no way to prove it, no way to defend himself against it.
Greg asked why anyone would want to do this, and Larry, with obvious reluctance, explained that while managing the adult bookstore he’d accidentally learned some things about a child pornography ring, things that were not healthy for an out-sider to know. The result was that a handful of very unpleasant people wanted to drive him out of the city. They were persistent, well connected, and had all the time in the world to make Larry’s life miserable. They would, for example, run in ringers for the people he was supposed to be serving papers on. They would bribe receptionists to send him on wild goose chases all around the city, while his target was sitting right there in the office.
But surely, Greg said, that must happen to process servers all the time. Larry agreed with a weary smile; this was different. After pulling stunts like that, they’d call to let him know they’d done it.
They didn’t stop with petty annoyances. They visited his apartment when he was gone and rearranged things just enough to let him know they’d been there. Once, by intercepting a check he’d sent and subsequent warnings that payment was overdue, they’d contrived to have his electricity turned off. He managed to put up with these things pretty well, but lately they’d started increasing the pressure. He was being followed much of the time. He came home to find men lurking in the hallways of his apartment building.
Their threats were becoming more overt. Just recently, his boss had asked him to run a supposed client out to the airport. Out on the expressway, with Larry driving sixty miles an hour, the client had reached over the back seat and slipped some chloral hydrate into the coffee Larry was drinking.
Unbelievably, it wasn’t until Greg had heard this absurd tale that the penny dropped. Larry had told it with such composure and conviction—even laughing ruefully at “their” cunning and his own helplessness—that he’d accepted it all without a qualm. Feeling stunned and immensely sorry for his friend, Greg said, “Larry, you’ve got to realize that that didn’t happen. No one—no one at all—is going to risk knocking out the driver of the car he’s riding it at sixty miles an hour.”
Larry had given him a wounded, discouraged smile. “That’s what makes it so goddamned infuriating. They do these completely grotesque things deliberately, knowing that no one will believe me.”
“Larry, you’re missing the point. No one’s going to go that far—no one’s going to risk his life just to discredit you. It doesn’t make any sense.”
In the end, Larry had talked cogently and calmly about committing himself for psychiatric treatment. “Everyone seems to think I ought to, including you. Right?”
“Yes, I really think so, Larry.”
“It’s harder than you think, Greg. I understand what you’re saying. I know it all sounds completely fantastic, I really do. But I saw it happen, just the way I see you sitting there. How do you go about denying the reality of your own experience? What would you do if people started telling you that the things you were seeing and hearing weren’t real?”
Greg had no very good answer for him at the time.
And he still didn’t.
One thing Larry had made abundantly clear: he felt completely sane, as sane as he’d ever felt in his life.
Just as Greg did now.
He never found out what happened to Larry Fielding. Like Larry’s other friends, he’d closed the door on him with a shudder of relief, telling himself he’d done all he could do. He’d given Larry his best advice, the only advice it w
as possible to give under the circumstances. Wise advice, offered in the kindliest spirit. Seek help.
The question now was: was he going to take that advice himself?
Larry had probably answered it the same way: no.
Not yet.
In the hours following the fiasco at the Elm Street apartment, he’d framed a bargain with himself. He even wrote it out to prove his sincerity.
He would go to Carol’s apartment in the morning and knock on her door. If Carol answered, he would make an abject apology and that would be the end of it. That’s what he hoped would happen. He would never see Carol again—would never want or dare to see her again. He might even leave Chicago, settle far away. Wyoming. Take up ranching. Anything. But if Ginny answered the door, he would turn around, come home, pack a bag, and go back to Kentucky for treatment. No more stalling, no more excuses, no more tests.
That was the bargain. When he went to bed at three in the morning, he was sure—reasonably sure—that he’d keep it.
But seven hours later, dragging himself step by step toward the actual moment of confrontation, he wavered, paused, and decided that a small revision in the bargain was permissible. There was no reason why he had to come face-to-face with whoever might answer the door of Carol’s apartment; humiliating himself wasn’t part of the bargain and would serve no purpose. He could just as well learn what had to be learned by keeping watch on the building from the coffee shop across the street. Eventually she’d make an appearance at a window or on the street, and he’d know the truth.
There was, after all, no great hurry. Whichever way it went, a few hours weren’t going to matter.
He installed himself in a booth by a window that gave him an unobstructed view of Carol’s apartment, laid a hundred dollar bill on the table, and told the waitress he was renting it for the day; anything left over from the hundred after lunch, dinner, and the occasional cup of coffee was hers. Her eyes popped as if she were having hallucinations of her own, but she gathered up the bill and folded it into a pocket quickly enough.