The Seventh Candidate (12 page)

They met again a few days after in Room 416.
Again she spoke of Teddy’s progress. For Lorz there’d been no
change whatever and he said so. That was because he wasn’t close
enough to him, she said. She told him to look closely at the pupils
of Teddy’s eyes while she talked to him. With a certain fear, Lorz
drew his chair closer to the other and stared into his eyes. She
said he wasn’t close enough.

He drew an inch closer while she leaned over
and told Teddy that she was going to take him with her to the
mountains as soon as he got better and she’d show him this and
that. She went on and on with the familiar things.

Then she stopped and asked: “Did you
see?”

Lorz finally broke away and leaned back in
his chair.

“Didn’t you see how his pupils sort of
shrink when I say things like that to him? It’s his way of saying
he understands.”

Lorz said: “Perhaps.”

He hadn’t been close enough to see it, she
said.

She broke the long silence by asking him how
his business was doing. She’d already asked that question the last
time.

“Everything went to pieces the moment you
left,” he said.

He stopped apprehensively. His last
statement could have been taken as a reproach. He’d meant it
largely as a compliment. He quickly changed the subject. He asked
about her health, which had always been good. She’d never missed a
day at
Ideal
. Normally
one would have expected her to return the courtesy, asking about
his health, which, notoriously, had always been bad. Instead, she
returned to the bad health of the business. She asked precise
questions about clients, operators, suppliers, credits, debits. She
hadn’t forgotten a thing.

He started explaining, apologetically, for
some reason. She widened her painted eyes in an elaborate mimicry
of disbelief at certain things done or not done. It was quite rude,
he thought. Whatever his errors of commission or omission, wasn’t
she, to a degree, responsible for it all?

“Wait,” she said, “Tell me about it over a
cup of coffee.” Didn’t the remark mean that she couldn’t take what
he was saying without a fortifier? She added: “Unless you’re in a
hurry. Personally I don’t care one way or another. I’ve already had
a cup of coffee.” He assured her he was in no hurry.

As the elevator sank to the cafeteria floor
he hoped she didn’t notice his effort not to breathe in her musky
perfume, like the glandular emission of some nocturnal
carnivore.

He offered to pay for her coffee, sure she’d
refuse pointedly. She refused pointedly and resumed the
cross-examination even before they sat down. Again her painted
eyes, fixed elsewhere, widened offensively. She finished her
coffee, lit up a cigarette (another disagreeable novelty) and
glanced at her watch.

“A minute more. I have a job-interview.”

“Didn’t I understand you to say that you
were working?”

“Till the end of the week. I have half a day
off to look for a new job. I resigned. The salary and hours were
all right. Much better than the job before, God knows.” She paused,
apparently to let this sink in. “But the work was dry as dust. No
creativity. And I don’t accept interference in my private life,”
she added obscurely. Her voice was very loud. She was like an
amateur actress trying to project her voice to the indifferent
audience of the patients and staff at the other tables.

She stood up. So did he.

She didn’t move. She stared at him out of
her expressionless mask for what seemed a minute and then said in
her needlessly projective voice that she had a proposition. Unless
he wasn’t interested. Strictly business. Since in any case she was
looking for work she’d maybe consider coming back to
Ideal
for a strictly limited period
while waiting for something better to come up. A week or two. Or
three at the most. That was, if he agreed to certain
conditions.

Lorz blurted out unconditional acceptance.
He saw bankruptcy staved off, saw her back there in the vast,
windowless office, saw her in fast-motion superimposed activity,
simultaneously sweeping, typing, phoning, pouring out chemicals,
concealing herself behind pillars. He saw her as she’d been on that
identity-photo, for of course – if only for the sake of the clients
– she’d wear something less extreme, tone down the make-up, omit
perfume, junk most of the jewelry, inject a little of the old
sweetness into her discourse.

She sat down again. He sat down too.

Braving the cigarette-smoke, he leaned
toward her and asked her when she could begin. This week? Tomorrow?
She ignored his question and enumerated the conditions.

Strictly forty hours a week. The legal rate
for overtime. An hour off for lunch. No need to give two weeks’
notice. A twenty percent raise …

“More!” he broke in. “I offered you a
twenty-five percent raise, if you remember. That still stands.”

She stood up. If he was still interested he
had her phone number, she said. She told him to sit there for a
while and rest. She went and got another cup of coffee for him and
refused his money pointedly.

He cleaned up the office that weekend. Then
he packed his suitcases and moved back into his apartment. He took
a long, hot bath and slept twenty hours.

***

9

So she returned to
Ideal.
But his gaudy new assistant had nothing in common
with the black-and-white timidly smiling identity-photo that he’d
removed from her desk an hour before her return and had placed, for
want of a better place, in his wallet. At the beginning, each time
he pushed open the door of
Ideal
in the morning, he half expected to see his familiar
assistant there, the crisis over, her old self again, free of the
absurd disguise, timidly smiling as before.

But there was no return to the old
relationship between them. Her face was still radically done up and
she’d made no concessions regarding dress, costume-jewelry and
perfume. She continued to generate cancerous clouds of
cigarette-smoke. Even the position of her desk had changed. It was
the first thing she’d demanded on returning. She refused to let him
help her move it. She waited for a husky operator to come back from
his shift and did it with him. Lorz looked on, faintly
humiliated.

Before, their desks had faced, even though
from opposite ends of the office. Now she had hers moved to a spot
where he could see her only out of the corner of his eye. She
commanded an effortless view of his profile. He also discovered
after a week that a wall-mirror, hanging askew alongside old
calendars and a bulletin board, provided her with a second view of
him. He felt constantly spied on, thanks to that mediating
rectangular surface. Their gazes sometimes met and fled on it. At
such times he thought he read in her face incompatible things,
sometimes what he took for distaste, sometimes concern. But you
couldn’t really tell with that painted mask of hers.

The term he finally found for her attitude
toward him was “cold solicitude,” something he’d never encountered
outside of hospitals. She missed nothing from her strategic
position with her ally, the mirror that outflanked him. It seemed
to him that each time he initiated a movement to get up from his
desk (for example, to go to the toilet) he would hear her new
incisive voice: “What is it you want? I’ll get it for you.” She
never said “Sir” or “Mr Lorz” now.

Apart from business matters and his
candidate, their longest conversations concerned his pills which he
was supposed to take at three. He was lax about it. “It’s five past
three,” she would announce. After he understood what the
announcement was about he would say, “Good” or “Yes” or “Really?”
or nothing at all. A few minutes later she was sure to say: “Don’t
you take your pills at three?” He would reply: “Five minutes more
or less don’t matter.” Never looking up from whatever she was
doing, quick hands never pausing, she would announce the time at
regular intervals. Once she said she wasn’t his nurse.

Most of the time, to avoid the implicit
nagging, he took his pills before three. Sometimes, to provoke the
nagging, which was a kind of exchange anyhow, he’d let three go
by.

On sunny days she suggested he should take a
walk in the square, she’d take care of things. After lunch she
urged the cot upon him. She’d take care of things. Once, he said:
“I’m not an invalid. Do I look that bad?” He was careful to
counterbalance his irritation – which he felt to be the
querulousness of an invalid – with a slight smile. He got no answer
in any case.

Mainly as a gesture of good will he once
inquired about her farm, intending to ask about soup out of
stinging nettles, a trivial enigma which in the solitary months
following her resignation had sometimes briefly occupied his mind.
Once again she used the word “escapism.”

Sometimes he found her attitude almost
insulting. But he was careful to say nothing that risked imperiling
his business. It was convalescent and needed her care. She could
quit the job any moment. She made that clear by often leaving her
new extremist paper on her desk, open on the help-wanted section.
Certain ads were underlined. It even happened that she openly made
calls in answer to them. She scrupulously placed coins in the
cash-box for these as well as for other more private calls,
signaled by a swivel of her chair, which gave him a mirror-view of
the back of her absurd hairdo, by a lowered voice and sometimes by
soft exclusive laughter. All he overheard was, once, “It’s not
forever. I’m still looking,” and, another time, “Jobs aren’t that
easy to find. But soon, I promise.”

He knew who it was, of course. Her new
extremist woman-friend called her up at least once a day. When it
was the director who picked up the receiver he was able to identify
her by the click and buzz that cut his “hello” in two. Once, the
matter must have been too urgent and she condescended to
communicate with him. Without the bourgeois hypocrisy of “hello” or
“please”, her metallic voice commanded: “Dorothea.” The director
obeyed. He didn’t dare make an issue of it. Any more than he dared
make an issue of the extremist literature that invaded the office.
Twice he even found a leaflet on his desk. This was going too far
and on both occasions he didn’t hesitate, during her absence, to
ball the hysterical thing up and shoot it into the wastepaper
basket.

They went on visiting his candidate,
separately. One Sunday afternoon he stood in the corridor before
the closed door and caught fragments of what she was saying to the
other. He pieced them together into the things she’d told him,
Lorz, for years but not anymore. He guessed she was inches from his
candidate’s face, looking into his eyes and imagining miniscule
acknowledgement of three blue peaks, beech woods, the pond and the
orchard.

He himself had much less to say to his
candidate. He’d sit down facing him, not nearly as close, and
sometimes observe that the boy’s polo shirt was a different color.
That was the only change he ever noticed in him until his last
visit there.

At first there was no basic change either in
what Lorz said to him. He would say his name and say that they’d
known each other and ask him what his name was. He said it over and
over monotonously. Sometimes he’d switch the sentences around or
rephrase them.

After a few weeks he realized that it was
absurd to hope for words. He reduced his expectations and asked him
over and over to make a sign with his hand. His candidate’s hands
remained palms upward and limp on his lap. It was absurd to hope
for movement. Lorz would also take his glasses off and repeat the
irrational weaving approach and retreat. What sharpened into focus
with approach was always the stunned brutality of his candidate’s
present face.

Lorz didn’t dare imitate his assistant and
peer for signs of comprehension in the boy’s eyes until 3:10 in the
afternoon of September 2 which (but he didn’t know it at the time)
was his last visit before his candidate vanished again.

He glanced at the door to make sure it was
closed. He took the pillow off the bed and placed it alongside the
wheelchair, then tugged his trousers up slightly to spare the
crease and kneeled. He took his glasses off, reached across his
candidate’s torso and gripped the further armrest for support.

With the microscopic vision of uncorrected
myopia, he was able to approach his face toward the dark blue eyes
far closer than she’d done. The boy’s eyes filled his field of
vision completely. He could hear his shallow irregular breathing.
He became aware of the odor of his body beneath her flowers.

He recited the formula over and over. Who
are you? Do you remember me? He found himself imploring
response.

Suddenly he got response, not a tiny
shrinking of the pupil but a tremendous sign of recognition, which,
for a second he reacted to with joy. The dead eyes awoke with
intelligence and the boy’s face pressed against his.

But now fear as the great torso toppled
forward like a wall against him. His hands fended off the heavy
weight and he was thrown off balance.

He fell on his back and saw the other
foreshortened above him, slumped forward in the armchair. His eyes,
empty again, stared down at him. He was still slack-jawed. In his
lap his left hand was still limp but his right hand was clenched
into a fist now.

The mannish head-nurse with the hacked iron
hair was filling out sheets in her office. She looked up briefly as
he told her about the sudden movement, intelligence in his eyes,
the fist. He imposed calm on his voice.

“Spasms,” she said gruffly, returning to her
sheets.