Being Invisible Read Online Free PDF Page A

words.”
    This was surely an accidental echoing of the very statement Babe had made on leaving—with reference to his novel—but it was no less cruel for that, and he was unmanned all over again, to the degree that he actually left his cubicle and accompanied Pascal to the soda-dispensing machine in the corridor on the route to the restrooms.
    Over their cans of what proved to be grape soda—this late in the day everything else was gone—Pascal tried to gossip, but as he never had the real goods on anybody, he spoke in fantasy.
    “I tell you Mary Alice is a lez if ever I saw one. Anybody looks like that and never dates.” He was referring to their youngest colleague, a deep-breasted sallow-skinned brunette newly out of college. Wagner was helping her to learn to write catalogue copy but had identified in Mary Alice very little potential for this sort of work. Some of her efforts were memorably inept. He had started her on certain novelty items whose appeal would be only to a limited market so far as buyers went, but which might well amuse those who scanned catalogues, inducing them to linger here and there throughout the pages and maybe eventually come across a gadget they would wish to order.
    There was a breast-pocket handkerchief for the jacket of a business suit, which when removed and shaken out of its folds appeared to be rather a pair of lace-trimmed underpants. There was a miniature version of a loving cup, inscribed with a mildly insulting title, e.g., “World’s Champion Bullshooter.” There was one of the classics in this tradition, the nutcrackers in the shape of a woman’s legs. Mary Alice actually seemed not to get the feeble jokes of these infantile amusements. In her copy the fake panties were simply an “elegant lace-trimmed handkerchief” and the little loving cup was a “thoughtful award for prowess in some area which might ordinarily go unrecognized.” The nutcracker was called simply that, and the text pointed out that it was also functional with lobster-and crab-shells.
    Mary Alice Phillips had off-white skin and small dark eyes. She was not the type of female to whom Wagner was erotically attracted, despite her prominent breasts or perhaps because of them as well as her tender age. He was never altogether at ease with unseasoned women. Mary Alice still lived with her parents. He doubted that Pascal had any evidence she was lesbian. The man was usually wrong.
    “How’s Carla?” Pascal now asked, with an intimate intonation, as if he were a close friend of the family. He had encountered Babe but once, two years before, and that was certainly an accident. In those days the Wagners were on the town once or twice a week, prowling to obscure restaurants not yet assessed by food critics, then on to postprandial entertainments: penny arcades (Babe was good at machine games; Wagner excelled at the electronic-eye gun which if aimed accurately would reverse the little moving bear) or the movies: Babe liked narratives of contemporary life, the give and take between persons of opposing sexes, whereas Wagner’s favorites were the cinematic nightmares in which the routine is hideously transformed, owing usually to excessive radiation: Uncle Ralph suddenly becomes an eater of human flesh or a common mosquito grows to the size of a dirigible. As ill luck would have it, on the evening in question they were emerging from a restaurant when who should be the only passerby but Pascal. For the instant before taking note of Wagner, he wore quite a different expression from that of the office. There, his nervous eyes were quick to focus on whatever they were directed towards. Among his tiresome traits was an insistence on noticing all petty phenomena in his vicinity—“there goes Irene for more coffee,” “that pigeon almost landed on the sill but thought better of it, went to the steeple over there,” “are you getting a pimple on your ear? ...sorry, it was the way the light was falling”—but as