He considered the problem for the rest of the morning, during which time his secretary proved barely capable of common civility. She appeared briefly throughout the day to dump dockets on his desk, and at one point when he glanced up at her looked as if she was about to file a harassment suit against him. Michael felt the ground shifting fast beneath him. As he was leaving the building that evening, the doorman grumpily revealed that his parking space had been switched to a smaller, more awkward stall further away from the main doors.
* * *
Marla already sounded bored with the topic of conversation. They had washed up the dinner things together. Now she had turned back to the sink and was wiping down surfaces unnecessarily; the cleaning lady was due first thing tomorrow. Eventually aware that he had asked her a question, she sighed and faced him. “I just don’t know, Michael. These things happen. There’s no point in getting paranoid. Nobody’s out to get you.”
“Well, it certainly feels like they are,” he complained, digging a bottle of Scotch from the cupboard and pouring himself a generous measure.
His wife made a face: disbelief, dissatisfaction, he couldn’t read which. “You know,” she said slowly, “maybe you’re just experiencing the real world for a change.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
She gestured vaguely about her. “You know what you’re like. You’ve always had this kind of – aura of perfection surrounding you. People go out of their way to make things easy for you. Perhaps they’re not doing it this once, and you’ve simply noticed for the first time.”
He drained the glass and set it down on the kitchen table. “Marla, that’s ridiculous and you know it.”
“Is it? You glide through life in a golden haze expecting people to move out of your way just because you’re you.” She fell silent for a moment, then turned back to the sink. “It was something I noticed about you the day we met. A quality very few men ever possess. It’s something you normally only find in very pretty girls, and then just for a couple of years. Doors automatically open. No one has ever found me special like that, only you. The rest of us trail in your wake. Well, maybe it’s our turn in the sun for a while.”
It seemed to Michael that he was being presented with a day of revelations, that he was somehow seeing himself clearly for the first time, from above, perhaps, or from a distance.
He rose and moved to his wife’s side, gently placing his hands upon her hips. “I can’t understand why you’ve never talked to me about this before,” he said softly, “why you couldn’t have been more honest with me.”
“What’s the point when you’re not prepared to be honest about yourself?” she asked, coolly removing his hands. “If you want complete candour, then I’ll tell you. I really don’t think I can bear you touching me any more.”
The room fell silent and remained so. Sean would not come down to kiss him goodnight and hid behind his mother’s skirt until she took him up to bed.
* * *
He didn’t think the situation could get any worse, but it did.
Marla would not talk about her refusal to allow his touch. At night she kept to the far side of the bed and took to sleeping in a T-shirt and pants. In the mornings she was up and dressed before him. She had usually washed and fed her son by the time he arose, so that the pair of them presented his sleepy form with a smart united front.
Although she refused to be drawn on the subject of their halted sex life, she conceded that no one else was stealing her affection from him. It was simply something that had finally, and perhaps inevitably, occurred. Frozen out of his own home, he increased his hours in the office.
But there the situation was just as bad. The Trowerbridge case had been lost and everyone now regarded him with suspicion, as if he’d been caught stealing office supplies and let off with a warning. Sometimes members of staff insulted him just out of earshot. At the very least, they ignored him. Michael became aware that parties and dinners were being arranged behind his back and that he had become the butt of cheap, stupid jokes. Much of the time no one seemed to notice him at all. If he joined a group at the coffee machine and struck up a conversation, they would glance over his shoulder, noting something or someone that interested them more. If he tried to make a social arrangement they cried off with transparently feeble excuses, not even bothering to convince him of their unavailability.
Petty grievances, of a kind that had never occurred before, began to accumulate. He was given the dullest briefs to work on. Someone left a bottle of Listerine on his desk in response to an office perception that he suffered from halitosis. Even the parking attendant had the temerity to suggest that he attend more carefully to his personal hygiene.
At last, at the end of his tether, he asked his secretary to enter his office and to close the door behind her.
“I want you to be honest with me, Michelle,” he said carefully, seating himself and bidding her do the same. “I find everyone’s attitude towards me has changed drastically in the last two weeks, and I’m at a loss to understand why.”
“You want the honest truth?” asked Michelle, pointedly examining her cuticles.
“Please,” pleaded Michael, ready to absorb her reply and analyse it at length.
“Well, it’s the way you treat people, like they’re satellites around your planet. I used to find it exciting, very masculine. I rather fancied you, all that rugged decisiveness. Others did too. Now I wonder how I could have been so blind.” She shifted uncomfortably. “Can I go now?”
“Certainly not!” He snorted, wondered, shook his head in bewilderment. “Explain what you mean. What do the others say about me?”
Michelle stared up at the ceiling and blew the air from her cheeks. “Oh, I think you know. That you’re self-centred, boring, pushy, less clever than you think you are. You’re just not a very likeable man any more.”
“And you can sit there and say this to my face?” he asked.
“I’ve already applied for a transfer,” she answered, rising.
Michael realised then that if he went out and bought a dog it would probably run off, just to be away from him. Seated on a wet bench in the bedraggled little park beneath the office, watching as the pigeons strutted toward his shoes and then veered away, he became seized with the idea that someone had placed a curse on him. Not your usual get-boils-and-die curse, but something subtler. There was only one wild card to consider, one suspect, and that was Mr Whatever-his-name-was on the bike, the Latin chap he’d knocked over. The more Michael considered it, the clearer it became that his troubles had truly begun after that angry night-time phone call. He remembered the voice on the line: “What’s your biggest fear…? Don’ take much to break a man like you… When you come to find me – an’ you will…” It all began to make sense. Could there be a rational explanation for what was happening to him? Was the guy some kind of shaman in touch with the supernatural, a malevolent hypnotist, or just someone with the power of suggestion? Wasn’t that how voodoo worked? He was determined to take positive action.
It was dark by the time he finally got out of the office. Nosing the car back toward the intersection where the accident had occurred, he remembered the cyclist’s response to his offer of a lift. “I just live over there.”