Starting Out in the Evening Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

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  Keep Reading for a Sample from FLORENCE GORDON

  Buy the Book

  About the Author

  Copyright © 1998 by Brian Morton

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduaced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhco.com

  First published by Crown Publishers, 1998.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Morton, Brian, 1955—

  Starting out in the evening/Brian Morton.—1st Harvest ed.

  p. cm.

  1. Novelists—Fiction. 2. Women graduate students—Fiction. 3. Authors and readers—Fiction. 4. Fame—Psychological aspects—Fiction. 5. Psychological fiction. I. Title.

  PS3563.O88186S73 2007

  813'54—dc22 2007024181

  ISBN 978-0-15-603341-1

  eISBN 978-0-547-45159-6

  v3.0814

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, organizations, and events are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  1

  Heather was wearing the wrong dress. It had seemed like a good idea in the morning—it was a tight little black thing; she’d looked fantastic in the mirror—but now she was thinking that she should have worn something demure. This was a foolish dress to meet your intellectual hero in.

  Waiting in the coffee shop for the great man to arrive, Heather was squirming with nervousness, and she began to wonder why she was here—why she had gone to such lengths to meet this man, when she knew he couldn’t possibly be as interesting in person as he was in his books. She had a wild urge to flee—to scribble a note of apology, leave it with the waiter, and drive all the way back to Providence. But she stayed where she was. She was nervous; she was a little scared; but she could live with that. Fear of any undertaking, to her way of thinking, was usually a reason to go ahead with it.

  The door opened and a man came in from the cold. He was wearing an enormous coat—a coat that was like a house—and a big, furry, many-flapped hat. He peeled off the hat and stopped for a moment in front of the cash register, stamping off the snow. He was wearing galoshes.

  They had never met, but he picked her out instantly, and he came toward her, smiling. Old, fat, bald, leaning awkwardly on a cane. The man of her dreams.

  2

  “I can’t believe it’s you,” she said, as he pressed her hand and sat heavily across from her.

  What she wanted to say was: You’ve been dear to me since I was a girl. You were one of my life-teachers. You understood me; you helped me understand myself. If reading a book is a naked encounter between two people, I have known you nakedly for years.

  She wanted to say wild things to him, but here he was, struggling out of his coat, and he seemed terribly old and terribly frail, and above all terribly unfamiliar, and she suddenly felt shy. When she read his work, it was as if he poured his soul directly into hers, and they mixed. Now there were bodies in the way.

  She felt as if she were in the middle of an earthquake. The furniture in her mind was sliding around. Reading his work, she had always thought of him as a contemporary. In fact—as she’d known, of course, with her rational mind—he was closer to her grandparents’ age. And though she’d entertained many imaginary pictures of him over the years, it had never occurred to her that he might be fat. To her mind, genius was gaunt.

  He was older and larger than she’d imagined, and somehow both softer and harder. His hand was soft when she shook it; his face was saggy, like a poached egg. In his eyes, though, there was something chilly and ironic. He was an odd combination of the soft and the shrewd. He looked like a gangster’s uncle.

  “I can’t believe it’s me either,” Schiller said—breathing heavily, looking for a place to rest his cane.

  3

  Heather ordered a salad, a BLT, and coffee; Schiller asked for a baked potato—no butter, no sour cream—and tea. “I’m on the Pritikin diet,” he said to her after the waiter left. “I had a heart attack last year, and the year before that. I’m not allowed to put butter on anything anymore.”

  “That must have been very scary,” she said, trying to sound like the most sympathetic woman ever born.

  “They do tend to concentrate the mind.”

  This was a literary reference, but she couldn’t remember from where. Her mind was reeling. She was sitting across from him! He was here! He was here, but he was dying. She felt thankful that she had come to him in time.

  The waiter returned with her salad, his potato, her coffee and his tea, and in the momentary confusion of platters she tried to bring herself down to earth.

  “Are you working on a new novel?” she said.

  “I’m working on a novel, yes. But I’ve been working on it so long I’m not sure you could call it new.” He sipped his tea, with, she thought, a notable delicacy.

  Remember the way he drinks his tea. Remember the softness of his hands. Remember the way he looks down at the table when he speaks. Remember.

  He asked her a few questions about herself: where she was born, where she’d gone to school, whether she liked New York. It struck her as odd that she should have to tell him these things. Didn’t he know her? During the years she’d been reading his work, he had so often helped her understand herself that she’d sometimes felt as if he cared about her.

  “So,” he said finally, “you’ve embarked on a project of questionable merit. You’re working on a study. Of me.” He shook his big head sadly.

  This was why she was here. This was why she had worked up the courage to find him, and this was why she had come to New York. She was writing her master’s thesis about Schiller’s novels.

  The thesis, in her mind, was only the first step: her real goal was to write a book about his work. She was twenty-four years old; she hoped to have her thesis written before her twenty-fifth birthday and a book contract in her hands before her twenty-sixth.

  She had grandiose daydreams. Schiller had written four novels, and all of them were out of print. In the 1940s, when most of William Faulkner’s work was out of pri
nt, the critic Malcolm Cowley reintroduced him to the public with a volume called The Portable Faulkner. It was this collection that made American readers see they had a genius in their midst; if not for Cowley, Faulkner might have died in obscurity. Heather was already thinking about a Portable Schiller.

  “I think it’s a very worthy project,” she said, lamely.

  He took off his glasses and polished them slowly with a handkerchief. “I’m flattered by your interest. And if you’re intent on doing this study, I won’t try to talk you out of it. But I’m sorry to have to say that I won’t be able to help you with it either.”

  She tried to take this in. He hadn’t been encouraging on the phone, but neither had he told her flatly that he wouldn’t help.

  “Why?”

  “Ten years ago, it would have made me very happy. But I’m an old man now.”

  “What does being old have to do with it?”

  “I’m trying to finish a novel,” he said. “It will probably be the last novel I write. My only remaining goal in life is to finish it. I’m not in good health, and I need to avoid anything that distracts me from that goal. Your project would be a distraction, Miss Wolfe. A very flattering distraction, but a distraction nonetheless.”

  He sighed. It struck her as a poetic sigh, but she was prepared to find poetry in anything he did.

  She looked at him closely. The folds of skin on his face sagged disastrously; like many old men, he looked strangely like an old woman.

  In a way, what he’d said was what she would have wanted him to say. She thought his devotion to his art was beautiful. He was a hero: a wounded hero, dragging his frail body toward his goal.

  “I understand. And I respect your decision. But I can’t help thinking that you’ve made up your mind too quickly. Maybe the best thing for your health would be to have a fascinating young woman in your life.”

  He’d been about to put his glasses back on, but now he put them down and examined her, with an expression of curiosity and amusement. It was as if he was looking at her for the first time.

  She didn’t look away. It occurred to her that the eyes don’t really age. These were the eyes that his friends and lovers had looked into when he was young.

  With no attempt to hide her scrutiny, she studied his face. What she saw there, what she thought she saw, was strength, pain, loneliness, bitterness, and the struggle against bitterness. And, of course, time. In the slackness of his skin, in his fallen, half-womanly face, she saw the way time breaks the body down.

  For a moment the stare felt like a sexualized encounter. By the time Schiller looked away, she felt as if they had passed beyond sex. She didn’t know what she meant by that, but that was how it felt.

  “Give me a chance, damn it. You’ll be happy you got to know me.”

  She wanted to take things further; she wanted to say something she might regret. She knew what she wanted to say; she just didn’t know if she should say it.

  But whenever Heather felt uncertain about whether to do something, she did it. She had decided long ago that you never learn anything by holding back.

  “Maybe,” she said, “you’ll even fall in love with me.”

  “You’re an odd young woman,” he murmured, with a look of prim disapproval. He was blushing. She had never seen an old man blush.

  4

  Schiller made his way gingerly on the icy sidewalk. She wanted to take his arm, to steady him, but she didn’t know if he’d appreciate being treated like an old man. At four-thirty it was already dark; the air was so cold you had a taste of metal in your mouth. Schiller concentrated on each step. A bunch of kids tumbled out of a pizza place, and he pulled up short. Heather thought of the way he described New York in Two Marriages—the almost sexual pleasure he took in the energy of the street. But that was a long time ago.

  He was taking her to his apartment. She had told him that she didn’t own a copy of The Lost City, and he’d said he might have one at home.

  He wasn’t sure whether he had a copy of one of his own books. This impressed her: it seemed like a mark of a true artist.

  He took her to a building on Broadway and 94th, and they took the elevator to the fifteenth floor.

  Schiller helped Heather off with her coat and laboriously removed his hat and his coat and his galoshes.

  The first thing she noticed about his apartment was the smell. Heavy, airless, slightly sour: the sad smell of an old man living alone.

  The second thing was the books. There were bookshelves against every wall; there were piles of books on every table. Old faded hardcovers and gleaming new paperbacks; triple-decker nineteenth-century novels—one shelf held the complete works of Balzac, another the complete works of Henry James—and slim collections of poetry. One wall seemed to be devoted entirely to politics and history. Another was taken up with literary criticism, from Matthew Arnold to V. S. Pritchett. More books than she had ever seen in one place, outside of a bookstore or library.

  It was thrilling to be in his apartment. She felt as if she were in a seat of power: not worldly power, but the power of the imagination. Writers are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, and Schiller was the most unacknowledged of them all. She felt as if he were an exiled king, but no less a king for being in exile.

  “If I do have a copy, it should be in my bedroom,” he said. “I’ll be right back. Make yourself at home.”

  She touched his arm. “Do you think I could have a look at the room where you write?” She spoke in an awestruck whisper: hushed, husky, reverent, rapt, and about 49 percent fake. She did want to see his study, and she did think of it as a sort of holy place—but she was also pouring it on thick.

  He seemed unimpressed with her worshipfulness. “First door on the right,” he said. “Don’t touch anything.”

  She examined the room without stepping past the threshold. It was tiny—it must have been meant to be a maid’s room—and stunningly bare. Against the wall was a wooden table with a huge manual typewriter and a stack of paper. Two cardboard boxes full of paper were on the floor. In front of the table was a straight-backed wooden chair. There was nothing on the wall: no photographs, no paintings. It was like a monk’s cell, or a prison cell.

  This wasn’t what she’d expected. She’d expected a room filled with books, with beloved objects, with the disorderly evidence of labor.

  He was still in his bedroom, wherever that was. She drifted into the kitchen; on the table was a shoe box filled with photographs. She sat down and started flipping through them quickly, as if she were looking for something in particular, which she wasn’t.

  Which she was. Except she hadn’t known until she found it: a photo of him as a young man, almost as young as she was now.

  He was handsome; he had a look of arrogance, of sexual challenge, that she found thrilling. He looked like a young athlete.

  Wanting to hold some part of him, to possess him, she found herself pressing the picture against her heart, and then she found herself slipping it into her purse.

  There were footsteps in the hall, rapid and light—not Schiller’s footsteps. Heather quickly stood up, which made her look more awkward and suspicious than she would have looked if she’d stayed in her chair.

  A woman in tights and sneakers came into the room. “Hello,” she said.

  Heather, because her purse had become strangely, distractingly heavy, couldn’t think of a response.

  “Are you a burglar?” the woman said.

  “Not professionally,” she said.

  “Well, it’s good to have a hobby.”

  They stood there, facing each other, and they might have remained like that for a long time if Schiller hadn’t come back.

  “Ariel,” he said.

  Heather felt as if she’d stepped through the looking glass. This was Ariel.

  Heather knew her well. She knew about her difficult birth; she knew about her early wish to be a dancer. This was the girl whose childhood was chronicled in the long last chapter of S
chiller’s second book. This was Schiller’s daughter.

  And here she was, a grown woman—a positively middle-aged woman. She was probably almost forty.

  “To what do I owe the pleasure?” Schiller said.

  “I can only stay a minute. I have a new client on 92nd and I just finished up with her. So I thought I’d drop in and say hi. And have a snack.” She began to take things out of her backpack: peanut butter, honey, brown bread, Marshmallow Fluff, a banana. “I had a yen for a Fluffernutter.”

  Heather was studying her. She was attractive—athletic-looking, with a sort of free-spirited air—but she was a slob. Her leotard was stained and covered with a fine layer of cat hair; her hair needed brushing.

  Schiller introduced them. “Your timing is providential,” he said to his daughter. “Heather is the young woman I told you about. Do you still have that copy of The Lost City?”

  “I haven’t read it yet,” Ariel said.

  “I’d like to lend it to Heather. I can give it back to you after she’s done. Is that all right?”

  “Sure. Sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry,” Schiller said, in a quiet, comforting voice.

  Heather didn’t like this voice: it was too protective, too syrupy.

  “I’ll get it right back to you,” she said to Ariel. “I’ve already read it. I just want to be able to refer to it when I’m writing.”

  “It’s like a sacred text,” Schiller said. “There’s only one copy in the world.”

  Ariel got out a knife and a plate and started to assemble her sandwich. “I didn’t mean to interrupt anything,” she said. “Don’t mind me.”

  “No, it’s all right,” Schiller said. “Heather was about to leave.”

  “Do you mind if I make a phone call?” Heather said.

  She went into the living room. She had no call to make. She was unhappy.

  She could hear Schiller and his daughter talking in the kitchen. “Oprah upset me yesterday,” Ariel said. “She said that any woman who doesn’t have a child by the age of thirty-nine doesn’t really want one, whether she admits it or not.”