The Reflection (20 page)

I was wandering down a typical midtown street—largely empty, save for pockets of activity around the occasional bar or restaurant. In my shock and tiredness, colors had taken on a hallucinatory quality and the scene seemed secondhand. I hadn’t grown up in Manhattan. Even after years of living and working there, it remained mythical. I’d be walking along, I’d look up at a famous facade, and it would remind me of a movie I’d seen, a postcard I’d sent, a book I’d read. Behind the iconography was the real New York, whose secret life I’d never know.

Under the haze of a streetlight I took out my wallet photo of Marie. The old one from before the war, where she looked so much younger, with different hair, in a thirties style. You could almost imagine that it was someone else. It actually brought back memories of the hospital, rather than of Marie herself, as the photo had sat on my bedside table the whole time I’d been there. But I stared at it for quite a while, all the way to my station, trying to work out exactly what my emotions were. The sadness that had pierced me the moment I knew Marie was lost, the feeling that she was the one I really wanted—all that was already subsiding. It was a remnant of Manne’s way of thinking, his sense of romantic tragedy, of only wanting what you can’t have. Smith would take a more pragmatic attitude. He’d be upset by events, no doubt, and yet aware that life moves on. That there were plenty of other opportunities for a man like him, in a city like New York. That even tonight, if he wanted, he could go to a bar and find
someone to share his bed. Manne and Smith were both passionate and both cold—but in very different ways.

I didn’t want to go home, didn’t want to be alone in that room, not yet. I found myself at the Public Library, half by accident, half on purpose. Climbing the stairs to the imposing entrance brought to mind the last time I’d been there, some years before. It had been when I was researching the patient who had obsessively drawn pictures of a cityscape he’d claimed had come to him in visions. And then, frustratingly, I’d frightened him off with my heavy-handed tactics before I’d worked out whether he was truly delusional—before, in fact, I’d been able to help him at all. It was an unresolved case, like so many others, but the one I’d always found peculiarly poignant. I could still see the drawings in my mind’s eye, of a city unvisited and yet intimately known, perfect in its way.

That wasn’t what had brought me to the library this time, though. For some reason I’d wanted to see the paper Manne had written on Miss Fregoli. It was the first case history I’d had published, and perhaps the only piece I’d ever really been happy with. If there were some key to Manne, I reasoned, perhaps I’d find it there. I flipped through the cards in the catalogue until I came to “Manne, David.” Disappointingly, there was no record of the Fregoli article. Although I must have published at least a couple of dozen case histories, the library listed only one. I went to the stacks and found it, in an obscure university publication. I had no recall at all of writing this particular piece, although I certainly remembered the case. A married man had left his family and had gone missing for three months, only to return home one day, unable to remember where he’d been or what he’d done in the intervening months. But after a month of intense therapy, I’d managed to coax the details out of him. The fugue had been triggered by the discovery of his wife’s infidelity. He hadn’t gone far; he’d
been living in a fleapit hotel only a few blocks from his house. By day, he’d keep watch on his family home. Sometimes he’d see his wife’s lover enter or leave the house. Little by little, it seemed the lover was insinuating himself into the household, even to the extent of taking the kids to school occasionally. My patient told me that he’d felt he was peeking into some sort of alternative world, as he saw his wife and her lover arm in arm, off to eat at a favorite local restaurant.

I’d counted that case a success on my part, as I’d reached the root of the trauma and had banished the amnesia, but where had that left the patient? Had he reconciled with his wife? Was he any happier on account of my intervention? I didn’t know, and perhaps had never known what had happened to him, nor was there any hint in the paper I’d written. It was a disturbing experience, reading a piece I couldn’t even remember writing, and to my mind the author came off as pompous and obtuse. This was Manne as he’d presented himself to his academic audience, perhaps to his patients as well. It was a performance. Just one in a whole constellation of tiny performances that had made up his life. Wasn’t that what anyone’s life was, after all? A repertoire of roles, with no single guiding principle. There was also the Manne who had married Abby, for instance—surely a different creature. Now I was thinking about those early days after Abby’s departure. The despair of returning to the unchanged apartment. The futility of washing up after a meal, or even cooking it in the first place. With no witnesses, you weren’t really there at all.

I had another idea. I put the journal with my article back in the stack and went to the catalogue cards to look up Peter Untermeyer. No doubt he must have published something down the years. But when I checked, his record seemed almost as threadbare as Manne’s. There was a longish article
summarizing the works of the Viennese psychologist, Otto Rank. But only one paper of original work. It had been published soon after the war, at around the time I must have bumped into him in Murray Hill. I could feel a mounting excitement as I found the piece in the bound copies of
Psychiatry Today
, a prestigious journal that had never accepted a piece of mine. I sat down to read it, but was quickly disappointed. What Untermeyer was proclaiming to be a “revolutionary new treatment method” for personality disorders seemed to me merely an eccentric patchwork of notions, old and new, taking in transference techniques, therapeutic identities, and even at one point the “electromagnetic stimulation of the brain.” I was surprised that a reputable journal published the piece, and skipped ahead to the concluding paragraphs. The real shock was the biographical note tacked on to the end: “Dr. Untermeyer fought with the Twelfth Infantry Regiment in Europe, and subsequently headed a denazification unit in occupied Germany. Since his return to the United States, he has worked with the Stevens Institute in New York.”

I scanned the vast reading room. Dozens of men, and a few women, were crouched over their books, scribbling notes, each in their own particular kingdom of exile. I glanced at the big clock suspended above: it was now past ten o’clock in the evening. Somehow, hours had passed by in the library. I was not quite ready to go: galvanized by my discovery of the Untermeyer article and the biographical note, I opened the latest issue of
Psychiatry Today
. I was wondering whether Dr. Peters might have written about me, as I’d once suspected. Almost at the same time as I had that idea, I noticed his name in the contents list. It was difficult to shake off the powerful sensation that I’d willed it there myself, by merely thinking of it. I found the page reference and ran my eye quickly over the piece, until I came to this:

There was quite a bit more, mostly theorizing, but I stopped reading at that point—an immense fatigue had invaded me, and I was too tired to concentrate. I contemplated tearing out Dr. Peters’s article and taking it with me, but then I realized that I had no need to read any of it again. The case history was much as I might have expected; I could have practically written it myself. Dr. Peters had disappointed me: he’d gone with the grain, offering up a story that fit too smoothly with prevailing psychiatric practice—like a jigsaw piece sliding perfectly into its place.

Back on the street, I picked my way through the drifting snow. The cold had revived me a little. I mentally put Dr. Peters’s piece of fiction to one side, although I knew I’d have to examine its ramifications later. I was thinking about Mrs. Esterhazy, as I still called her in my mind. I conjured up some of the shadowy world in which I assumed she existed. She was a refugee, perhaps, like Marie. She was making a buck in any way she knew how. A little modeling work when it came her way. Maybe some bit-part acting too. And she wasn’t averse to being taken out for a meal and a drink sometimes, maybe more—after all, that’s how Marie had probably met Stevenson. Then one day, through a demimonde contact, she’d
heard of a nice little job, earning her a hundred dollars for just a couple of hours’ work. All she had to do was pretend to be someone’s wife. She’d be given some kind of backstory, and told precisely what to say. It was all aboveboard. There’d even be a couple of cops there to prove it.

I played out that scene in my mind, and it seemed plausible enough. I thought about Untermeyer. That thumbnail biography linking him to the Stevens Institute was a cornerstone on which I could build the edifice of the Esterhazy case. I was sure that Dr. Peters had told me that the Stevens Institute didn’t exist; I’d now found printed reference to it for the second time since my discharge. If I hadn’t yet understood what had happened to Manne, at least it now seemed that an explanation was possible. At the same time, I suspected that once everything was clear to me, it would actually resolve nothing at all. That if I shone a light on that side of the problem, it would merely cast shadows on the other.

Once I reached home I was ready to collapse, nearly too exhausted to sleep. On the bed sat a scribbled note: “Miss Dora Morel called,” and under that a number. The handwriting wasn’t familiar, and for a minute or two I was flummoxed as to how this note could have found its way onto my bed. It seemed folded into a greater mystery, namely that of how Marie had known the name Dora Morel in the first place, before even I had learned the surname, and how she’d tied it in with me. In my tiredness it took me too long to arrive at the obvious, that the two mysteries dissolved when combined.

In the subway, I’d come to the conclusion that Marie must have known Dora Morel—perhaps they both moved in the same expatriate circles—and that, more improbably, Marie must have guessed a connection with me. Now I could clearly see that this was nonsense. Instead, Marie had come home, found the note shoved under my door, and put it on the
mattress. There was a phone in the hallway and the old lady—the one I’d never seen—must have taken the call and written the note. The corroborating evidence for this was that Marie’s things—her clothes and makeup—were all gone. She’d necessarily been here while I was out. Already, before I’d arrived at Stevenson’s apartment, she’d made her decision to leave me. Whether it had been to do with the Dora Morel note, or whether it had been around the corner anyway, there was no way of knowing. Why then, I wondered, had she been initially prepared to have sex with me on my arrival? I dismissed the question almost as soon as I’d formulated it. Behavior is never more unstable than at the point of heightened emotion. The most important thing was that Marie was always going to leave. Faced with that inevitability, it was as if the affair had never really happened in the first place.

I stretched out on the bed. My throbbing shoulder prevented me from sleeping, for the moment at least. I could hear the faint sound of barrel-organ music, drifting in from somewhere—it was a funny hour for it. I was thinking not so much of Marie now, and more about the Dora note. How two mysteries could come together, and in so doing, annihilate each other. Something like that was about to happen in the Esterhazy case, what with the reappearance of Mrs. Esterhazy and the proof of the Stevens Institute. The question was at what cost. Would its resolution kill off Smith, entombing me within Manne? I was determined that it would not.

There was one place to which I hadn’t returned, not since the day I heard about Abby. I hadn’t even so much as walked down Park Avenue since my discharge from the hospital. The idea of taking a look at my old office had come to me as I lay on my mattress, staring at the Rigaut photo pinned to the wall, unable to settle into anything else. I’d spent a feverish morning trying to speak to Dora Morel, calling her number at half-hourly intervals. No doubt she was out for the day, working, which meant there was no point in calling until the evening. But I couldn’t stop myself obsessively dialing the number, and I knew that if I continued like that, my nerves would be completely shot by the end of the day. I had to get myself out of the apartment.