the more readily you could see through all dodges and rationalizations back to the cold, harsh, unfathomable reality of the mood itself.
Being with Marcia could fix him up, he told himself, as the dark facades crept slowly by. She at least couldn’t ever become a stranger. There was too much between them. Once with her, he would snap back to normal.
But he had forgotten her face.
A trivial thing. It is always easy momentarily to forget a face, no matter how familiar. Like a name, or the place where you’ve put something for safe-keeping. And the more you try to remember it, the more the precise details elude you.
Carr tried. A hundred faces blinked and faded in his mind, some hauntingly suggestive of Marcia, some grotesquely dissimilar. Girls he had know in college, job applicants of months ago whom he had never thought of since, pictures in magazines, faces glimpsed for a moment in a crowded street, others with no source-tag at all.
Light from a first-story window spilled on the face of a girl in a blue slicker just as she passed him. His heart pounded as he walked on. He had almost grabbed her and said, “Marcia!” And she hadn’t been Marcia’s type at all.
He walked faster. The apartment tower where Marcia lived edged into view, grew threateningly tall.
He hurried up the flagstone walk flanked by shrubbery. The lobby was a long useless room furnished in some supposedly Spanish style, with lots of carved wood and red leather. He stopped at the desk. The clerk was at the back of the cubicle, talking to someone over the phone. Carr waited, but the clerk seemed determined to prolong the conversation. Carr cleared his throat. The clerk yawned and languorously flexed the arm that held the receiver, as if to call attention to the gold seal-ring and cuff-linked wrist.
The automatic elevator was waiting, the door open, the cage dark. Carr delayed no longer. He stepped in and pushed the seven button.
Nothing happened.
After jabbing the button a couple of more times, he decided he’d better tell the clerk it was out of order.
But just then the door closed, the light blinked on, and the cage started upward.
It was a small cage. Vermillion panels, brass fittings, a carpet of darkest red. A small placard said that it could safely carry 1,500 pounds. The vermillion was darkened where people had learned, and worn spots showed where packages had been rested on the brass rail and things stuck behind it.
The cage stopped at seven. The door opened. A fat man in a thick overcoat took his finger off the outside button and stepped inside without waiting. Carr squeezed past his paunch, turned around as soon as he was through the door and snapped, “I beg your pardon!” But the door was already closing and the boorish fat man made no rejoinder.
Carr walked down the red-carpeted hall. In front of Marcia’s door he hesitated. She mightn’t like him barging in this way. But who could be expected always to wait the pleasure of that prissy clerk?
Behind him he heard the cage stop at the ground floor.
He noticed that the door he faced was ajar.
He pushed it open a few inches.
“Marcia,” he called. “Marcia?” His voice came out huskily.
He stepped inside, into the living room. The reading lamp with its white, tufted shade showed dull pearl walls, white bookcase, blue over-stuffed sofa with a coat and yellow silk scarf tossed across it, and a faint curl of cigarette smoke from somewhere.
Marcia wouldn’t go off and leave the door like that.
The bedroom door was open. He crossed to it, his footsteps soundless on the thick carpet. He stopped.
Marcia was sitting on an upholstered stool before a big-mirrored dressing table. Over a chair to one side a gray silk dressing gown was thrown. She was wearing absolutely nothing. A squashed cigarette was smoldering in a tiny silver ash tray. She was lacquering her nails.
That was all. But to Carr it seemed that he had blundered into one of those elaborately realistic department
Etgar Keret, Nathan Englander, Miriam Shlesinger, Sondra Silverston