This had happened at “Old Joe’s.” The band there makes such a racket that you can talk about your business without danger of being overheard by indiscreet ears. Sometimes the problem is actually to make yourself heard by the person you are talking to, whose face you get as close to as you can. At our table, there was also, at first, the go-between who calls himself Ben-Saïd, who as usual said nothing in the presence of the man whom we all more or less regard as the boss. But when Frank got up and walked toward the men’s room (or, more likely, the telephone), Ben-Saïd told me right away that I was being followed and that he wanted to warn me. I pretended to be surprised and asked if he knew why.
“There are so many informers,” he answered, “it’s only natural to be careful.” He added that in his opinion, moreover, almost all the active agents were watched.
“Then why tell me about it—me in particular?”
“Oh, just so you’ll know.”
I looked at the people at the other tables around us, and I said: “So my shadow is here tonight? You should tell me which one he is!”
“No,” he answered without even turning his head to make sure, “here it’s no use, there are almost no men here except our own. Besides, I think it’s actually your house that’s being watched.”
“Why my house?”
“They think you’re not living there alone.”
“Yes I am,” I say after a moment’s thought, “I’m living alone there now.”
“Maybe you are, but they don’t seem to think so.”
“They better let me know what they do think,” I say calmly, to put an end to this conversation.
Frank was just coming back from the men’s room. Passing by one of the tables, he said something to a man who immediately stood up and walked over to get his raincoat, hanging on a peg. Frank, who had continued on his way, then reached his chair. He sat down and said curtly to Ben-Saïd that everything was set, he should be on his way there now. Ben-Saïd left without asking for another word of information, even forgetting to say good-by to me. It was right after he left that Frank spoke to me about Laura. I listened without answering. When he finished: “That’s it, you take it from there,” I finished my Bloody Mary and went out.
In the street, just in front of the door, there were two homosexuals, walking arm in arm with their little dog on a leash. The taller one turned around and stared at me with an insistence I couldn’t explain. Then he whispered something into his friend’s ear, while they continued their stroll, walking with tiny steps. I thought that maybe I had a speck of dirt somewhere on my face. But when I rubbed the back of my hand over my cheeks, all I could feel were the hairs of my beard.
At the first shopwindow I came to, I stopped to examine my face in the glass. At the same time I took advantage of the occasion to glance back and I glimpsed Frank coming out of “Old Joe’s.” He was accompanied by Ben-Saïd, I am ready to swear to it, though the latter had already left at least three-quarters of an hour before. They were walking in the opposite direction from mine, but I was afraid one or the other would turn around, and I pressed up closer against the glass, as if the contents of the shopwindow were enormously interesting to me. It was only the wig-and-mask shop, though, whose display I have been familiar with for a long time.
The masks here are made out of some soft plastic material, very realistically fashioned, and bear no relation to those crude papier-mâché faces children wear at Halloween. The models are made to measure according to the customer’s specifications. In the middle of the objects exhibited in the window, there is a large placard imitating hurriedly daubed-on graffiti: “If you don’t like your hair, try ours. Feel like jumping out of your skin? Jump into ours!” They also sell foam-rubber gloves which completely replace the appearance of your hands—shape, color, etc.—by a new external aspect selected from a catalogue.
Framing the central slogan on all four sides, are neatly lined up the heads of some twenty presidents of the United States. One of them (I forget his name, but it’s not Lincoln) is shown at the moment of his assassination, with the blood streaming down his face from a wound just over the brow ridge; but despite this detail, the facial expression is the calm smiling one which has been popularized by countless reproductions of every kind. These masks, even the ones without a bullet hole in them, must be on display only to indicate the extreme skill of the establishment (so that passers-by can discover the lifelike character of the resemblance to familiar features, including those of the president in office who is seen every day on the television screen); they are certainly not often used here in town, contrary to the anonymous faces which constitute the lower row, each accompanied by a brief caption to indicate its use and merits to the shop’s clientele, for instance: “Psychoanalyst, about fifty, distinguished and intelligent; attentive expression despite the signs of fatigue which are the mark of study and hard work; worn preferably with glasses.” And next to it: “Businessman, forty to forty-five, bold but serious; the shape of the nose indicates shrewdness as well as honesty; an attractive mouth, with or without mustache.”
The wigs—for both sexes, but particularly for women—are set in the upper part of the window; in the middle, a long cascade of blond hair dangles in silky curls down to the forehead of one of the presidents. Finally, at the very bottom, paired on a strip of black velvet laid flat, false breasts (of all sizes, curves and hues, with various nipples and aureoles) are set out for—so it seems—at least two functions. As a matter of fact, a little diagram on one side shows the way of attaching them to the chest (with a variant for male bodies), as well as the way of keeping the edges imperceptible, for only this delicate point can betray the device, so perfect is the imitation of the flesh as well as of the texture of the skin. And elsewhere, however, one of these objects—which also belongs to a pair, the second breast being intact—has been riddled with many needles of various sizes, to show that it can also be used as a pincushion. All the facsimiles exhibited here are so lifelike that it is surprising not to see forming, on the pearly surface of this last one, tiny ruby drops.
The hands are scattered all over the shopwindow. Some are arranged so as to form anecdotal elements in contact with some other article: a woman’s hand on the mouth of the old “avant-garde artist,” two hands parting a mass of auburn hair, a very black hand—a man’s hand—squeezing a pale pink breast, two powerful hands clutching the neck of the “movie starlet.” But most of the hands soar through the air, agile and diaphanous. It even seems to me that there are a lot more of them tonight than on other days. They move gracefully, hanging on invisible threads; they open their fingers, turn over, revolve, close. They really look like the hands of lovely women recently severed—several of them, moreover, have blood still dripping from the wrist, chopped off on the block with one stroke of a well-sharpened axe.
And the decapitated heads too—I had not noticed it at first—are bleeding profusely, those of the assassinated presidents, but all the rest even more: the lawyer’s head, the psychoanalyst’s, the car salesman’s, Johnson’s, the waitress’s, Ben-Saïd’s, the trumpet-player at “Old Joe’s” this week, and the head of the sophisticated nurse who receives patients for Doctor Morgan in the corridors of the subway station of the line I then take to get back home.
On my way upstairs, as I reach the second-floor landing, I happen to drop my keys, which ring against the iron bars of the banister before falling on the last step. It is then that Laura, at the end of the corridor, begins screaming. Luckily, her door is never locked. I walk into her room, where I find her half-naked, crouching in terror on her rumpled bed. I calm her by the usual methods.
Then she asks me to tell her about my day. I tell her about the example of arson which has destroyed a whole building on One Hundred and Twenty-third Street. But since she soon starts asking too many questions, I change the subject by telling her the story—I saw it myself only a little while later—of that ordinary couple who visited the mask-maker on