Being Invisible Read Online Free PDF Page B

slightly sallow was finely textured. Her eyes could easily be enlarged with cosmetics.
    He could see Delphine as well, or much of her. She extended her naturally apelike upper lip and took such a deep draft of her cigarette that the glowing ash traveled a third of the length of the paper tube.
    She winked at Mary Alice and said, significantly, “OK.”
    The girl reddened and went back to her own desk. Wagner followed, lurked nearby until she put her things in order for leaving and donned a trench coat in which, when it was belted, she cut another and more lively figure than that afforded by the dun cardigan worn in the office.
    At the elevators, he and she, she not knowing of him of course, came upon the wretched Pascal, waiting for Wagner, who in fact had forgotten about him.
    “Hi there,” Pascal said to Mary Alice. “Say.” This word had no immediate successors. It was Pascal’s means of holding on to someone encountered by chance until he could think of a reason for such detention.
    It failed to ensnare Mary Alice. While she completed her nod a car arrived. She boarded it briskly. Pascal would have been on her heels, but Wagner caught the back of his topcoat and, using both hands, restrained him for a moment. Meanwhile, a number of other people stepped into the car, solipsistically preoccupied, and thus no one seemed to notice the man’s preposterous struggle against his own coat, which was stretched tautly from his shoulders to a point in sheer air.
    Wagner thought he had done enough once Mary Alice was insulated by a double layer of people, and he permitted Pascal to pull away. He was even a bit too quick to open his fingers, and the suddenly liberated Pascal plunged recklessly, clawing, into the front rank of those on board, which earned him abuse from at least one small woman.
    Wagner realized he could not himself board a crowded car without probably bringing about some consternation that would serve no one’s purpose: invisibility would be ineffective when tactile matters were uppermost. Some people, himself included, knew desperation when enclosed in a crowd: suppose they were pressed against a body they could not see, and the unreasonable were added to the existing claustral stresses?
    Nevertheless, Wagner wanted to continue to follow Mary Alice Phillips and thus he dashed to the heavy metal door at the end of the corridor, hurled it open (regardless of consequences, and there were some: two young women from the art department, en route to the elevators, raised their eyebrows and pursed their lips, and one said, “Ghosts”), and plunged down the stairs. If the car stopped at other floors, and it always did, his ETA at the lobby might be competitive, and so it proved, though he fell once, luckily sustaining only a bruised knee, and avoided doing so subsequently by not looking at where his feet were or should have been.
    He burst out onto the ground floor (again providing some spectators with the mystery of a door, in this case a stainless-steel one, that opened violently as if of its own volition (but such phenomena are soon dismissed amidst the distractions of the city), just as the elevator car arrived.
    Naturally, for he had been nearer the front, it was Pascal who was seen first—but a truth soon became apparent to Wagner as the car rapidly was emptied of its passengers. Mary Alice was not amongst them. How could that be possible? Wagner demanded of himself, as if it were an absolutely unanswerable question, whereas the explanation could scarcely be exotic: there were eight whole floors between where he stood now and where he had seen her last. She had stopped off on one of them: yes, even though it had obviously been necessary for half the car to deboard so as to permit her own exit. That Wagner wouldn’t have had the nerve to ask this for himself, had no necessary bearing on what Mary Alice was capable of.
    Did she really have the special interest in him that was suggested by the interchange between