Megabride
The letter was three weeks old. It still bore a trace of perfume. Merkouros put it to his nose and let his eyes linger over the intimacies of Margie’s unmade bed. So that was why such a photograph had been found among things that Ida had left behind. And it was this woman, then, this unprincipled, opportunistic, polymorphous sexual charmer that was his, Merkouros’s, rival. But why, then, did Margie break off their liaison? The other papers were irrelevant and unrevealing. The magazines, copies of Unreal City and The Hopeless Maze, had probably been given to Margie by Pompas, because each one contained a story by him. Merkouros proceeded to rummage around in the polished black drawers of the desk. There he found a volume covered in red leather printed with a gold swirl that said “My Diary.” He flipped it open. There were almost no words in it. There were indeed some “entries,” the first dating a few months back, but they consisted largely of … things! One of the first consisted of two chewed pencil stubs taped to the page with an identifying note scrawled beneath: “He’s been working on a new story with these.” Next was a page adorned with three gold-tipped cigarette butts. Penned below was the following commentary: “He loves to smoke these when he’s writing. He said—Margie these help me concentrate. Today he also said—you really do a great job Margie.” The following entry was a note from the master’s own pen—scribbled instructions for what he wanted done in the apartment that day. The last entry, exactly one week old, brought Merkouros’s amazement to something of a climax. Safety-pinned to the page were a pair of scruffy white ankle socks with holes in them. The adoring caption read, “When CK gives himself up to creative ecstasy he paces up and down in slippers and wears out these socks—these are his own cast off in his trashpail—and he never even looks at me, O when will he know I’m alive?”
He was now forced to revise his conclusion about the presence of Margie’s blatant photo in the apartment. Quite obviously, Ida would not have left such an intimate remembrance behind. (What an extraordinary body! thought Merkouros. How extraordinary that Ida, whose embrace he remembered with thumping heart, could be roused by a twin image of her own delectable femininity, as though in the confusion of this dimension all were permitted and there were no boundaries to the anarchy of desire …) How clear it all was! The poor smitten housekeeper had planted that seductive photo in order to induce in her blockheaded employer a twinge of lust. And amazingly, she failed! The self-centered fool did not know what he was missing! To loll in this satin bed among the undulations of those satiny limbs, limbs that like his own knew the snakings and slippages of Ida’s …
That he need not be bound by the strictures of Plane 1 seemed totally obvious to Merkouros as he surrendered, thrillingly, to an irresistible urge, undressed totally, and forced himself into the lacy black panties and black bra that had been left for him on the bed. Slipping under the bedsheet, he convulsively embraced the satin pillows—pillows that had once borne the odor and imprint of Ida’s own body.
After a while, emerging as from a cloud of rapture, Merkouros took stock of himself and felt utterly ridiculous. He feared, also, that at any moment Margie might return. Back in his own clothes again, he smirked and snorted at having become, for one mad moment, a … transvectite? Before leaving, he remembered his original purpose and made one last stab at discovering any manuscript drafts of Pompas’s that might have been hidden in Margie’s desk or bureau drawers, but evidently that sort of goods lacked interest for a woman of such invincibly concrete orientation to reality. Whatever the two women had exchanged, he could not believe that it included anything so impersonal as manuscripts. Besides, he was dead sure that Ida had never had a rendezvous with any Herman Q. Silver.
Merkouros was hooked, embedded beyond recall in the thickening mystery of this mutual charge of plagiarism, and he hungered to get to the tantalizing bottom of things. If one of the two writers had more reason to be lying, he felt it had to be Pompas—who had so much to lose if he couldn’t protect himself. Besides, Silver was such a naive idiot as to forewarn Pompas before engaging a private detective, allowing Pompas plenty of time to cover his tracks. On the other hand, the mysterious Silver did all his business with Merkouros by mail, through a post-office box number, never letting slip his address. Why such reclusiveness?
In the evenings, Merkouros knew, Pompas dined out at a Colombian restaurant in the nineties that was decorated with shrunken human heads. He could find out that very night if the author was hiding anything. He would telephone first to be sure Pompas had left and then let himself in with a key he had once unobtrusively borrowed from Ida. If this didn’t pan out, he would then track down the temporarily invisible Silver.
