Being Invisible Read Free Page B

there. Though actually underweight, he was developing a small paunch: this was due not to an accumulation of fat but rather to the relaxation of abdominal muscles that comes naturally with the years but can be arrested simply enough by regular isometric tensing of the stomach, you don’t even have to work up a sweat. But at this moment Wagner couldn’t do that, either.
    He had assumed, without putting himself to a possibly humiliating test, that he was impotent at this period, but to have lost the command of his body in other respects was too much to endure. He sank, in articulated segments, to the floor, where he reassembled himself into what was supposed to be a rigid unit, and in one supreme effort tried to do one genuine pushup, as opposed to the weak-kneed kind, and failed.
    The only force strong enough to raise Wagner to his feet was the thought that drinking a cup of coffee might give him strength: this would have been the suggestion of his mother had she still been alive and not gone to an early death to which years of caffeine overloading had probably contributed: You’ll feel better after a cup of coffee.
    But only a quarter-teaspoonful of powdered coffee remained in the jar. Babe had been responsible for maintaining the kitchen supplies; Wagner handled the liquor, the garbage, the laundromat run. Babe had done most of the cooking, that is, defrosting, except when he opened the necessary containers and did the stovework for spaghetti, franks & beans, or baked chicken with a coating acquired when shaken in a plastic bag. Babe had suggested the movies; he subscribed to the magazines. Babe had selected many of his ties. After four years all the duties and privileges had been allocated efficiently, at least in the well-managed marriage such as theirs. Babe certainly had not left because of disorder.
    Still naked, Wagner had returned to the bedroom and was once again staring at his body. He wasn’t built all that badly. He was a bit underweight, especially since Babe’s departure. He could have used some sun. His legs looked almost blue behind the dark hair, but they were well shaped and straighter than those of any number of the parenthesis-limbed movie stars so often depicted in bathing trunks and underpants. If only he were able to assume a respectable posture, he could pass, at a distance, for the old Wagner, but alas this was still too extravagant a hope: his most ardent efforts could not correct or compensate for the degenerate slump that began at the bridge of the nose and continued in a broken line to his insteps.
    He must now get himself together and go out for a jar of coffee. Suddenly he wished he could do so invisibly! He startled himself, he who had never been given to the fanciful. That was his father’s way. If a sailboat was hauled by trailer down their street, Dad, seeing only the top of the mast from his dinner-table chair, might say, “What if we lived on a canal, Fred? Go everyplace by water, not blacktop. This very home might be a houseboat. How about that?” Not even as a child had Wagner found such fantasies especially entertaining. If he went along with them it was only for the sake of his father, in whom an infantile streak was prominent. Looking out the window into a thick fog, Dad might say, “Like we’re suspended from a balloon! Scary: what if the cables break and we plunge earthwards at an ever-increasing speed? Can you imagine that, Fred?” Wagner couldn’t, but he usually pretended otherwise, at least until a natural feeling of charity towards his father was exhausted in the middle years of teenhood when most human males surrender to meaner tendencies.
    Dad, no longer living, would have been proud of him now. “What if I were invisible, Dad, and could go everywhere unseen? Wouldn’t that be something?” Play tricks on family members, fool friends & policemen, as the mail-order copy of yore said in touting the instructional manual on ventriloquism.
    How could India-Indian