Starting Out in the Evening Read online

  It hadn’t precisely been a sexual experience for her. How could it have been? She’d been acutely conscious of his body: the old man’s smell; his huge and withered old man’s ears, like jumbo-sized dried apricots; the deadness of his old man’s skin.

  You’re only ripe for a moment. Life made more sense in the Middle Ages, when no one lasted past forty.

  But still, it had been interesting. More than interesting, really.

  She buttoned up her dress—she’d unbuttoned it last night, but she’d never taken it off. She was nervous about what he might expect from her.

  She looked for her shoes, couldn’t find them, and walked barefoot into the kitchen. Her shoes were where she’d left them—now she remembered—near the kitchen door. Schiller was peering into his toaster oven, examining the progress of a slice of toast.

  He looked bad. He was already shaved, showered, and dressed in a jacket and a tie, but somehow he looked undone. He looked as if he hadn’t slept at all.

  A moment after he looked up at her, he seemed transformed. He suddenly didn’t look tired anymore. It was a pleasure to have this effect on someone.

  He had coffee ready for her; he offered to make her something to eat but she told him she never ate breakfast. Moving around his small kitchen, he had an ungainly grace—if such a thing can be.

  He sat across the table from her and watched her drink her coffee, and he seemed to be cherishing her with his gaze: it was as if the night had lasted into the morning.

  On the table next to his coffee cup was a novel by R. K. Narayan. “I love Narayan,” she said. This was stretching it—she’d read only one of his novels, The English Teacher, but she really had loved it.

  “You’ve read him?”

  “Oh my God, yes. He’s incredible. He reminds me of Chekhov. He’s not as tough-minded as Chekhov, I guess, but he has more of a sense of humor.”

  Schiller was smiling at her oddly.

  “What?” she said.

  “It’s nice to know a young person who wants to talk about R. K. Narayan at seven o’clock in the morning.”

  “I’ve always thought that people will still be reading him in a hundred years,” she said. She’d never thought such a thing in her life; she didn’t even know why she’d said it. And then she understood why she’d said it. It was so she could say the next thing.

  “Do you ever wonder whether people will still be reading you in a hundred years?”

  It struck her that this might be a rude question. But she wanted to know. And more than that, she liked the idea of herself as a person who asked rude questions at seven o’clock in the morning.

  He scowled at her as he applied jam to a slice of toast. “What I wonder,” he said, “is whether people will still be reading in a hundred years.”

  “But don’t you think about it? Really.”

  “Why on earth should I?”

  “I don’t think you’re being honest with me,” she said.

  “Maybe I’m not, but if I do think about these things, it would still be unseemly to talk about them. That’s got nothing to do with what the whole enterprise is about.”

  “What is the whole enterprise about? Now that you mention it.”

  “It isn’t something I can put into words. Not at seven o’clock in the morning.”

  “Of course you can.”

  He looked around helplessly, as if he were searching for something to distract her with. He didn’t find anything. “Young lady,” he said. “I’m an old man. I’m an old man trying to eat toast.”

  “To put it bluntly,” she said, “your novels are out of print, and you’ve said that you don’t even know if anyone is going to be interested in publishing the one you’re working on now. So why do you keep going?”

  “Heather, what can I say? Whatever I said would be too much or too little.”

  “But what if I write a book about you someday? What should I say it was that kept you going?”

  “Just say it was the madness of art.” He raised his eyebrows with a meaningful look, as if this explained everything.

  It didn’t explain much. The madness of art. She thought of some of the aspiring artists she’d met since she came to New York—boys with buzz-saw haircuts and great expectations, who were always boasting about the epic poems they were writing or the movies they planned to make. One filmmaker she knew was putting together a film, if it could be called a film, made up entirely of still photographs of his own face. Every morning, first thing in the morning, he took a photograph of himself in the bathroom mirror. The film, which would not be complete until the end of his life but which he intended to show in installments before then, was titled The Progress of Death. He smoked too many cigarettes (Gauloises), drank too much (Jack Daniel’s), and never took off his sunglasses, not even in the darkest bars. He would have been eager to nominate himself as an example of the madness of art, if he’d known the phrase. But Schiller? His work was careful, tender, sometimes breaking into passion, sometimes breaking into song—it was beautiful at its best, but it had little to do with madness, as far as she could see.

  “The madness of art?” she said.

  Schiller just shrugged, as if he were powerless to explain the idea.

  She kicked him lightly on the shin, in a friendly way. “If I have to ask I’ll never know—is that it?”

  She didn’t, in fact, take the phrase too seriously: she thought he was just putting on airs. He was intoxicated with himself because he’d had a fresh young thing in his bed.

  She put her cup in the sink. “Time to go.”

  Ever since she was in her teens, Heather had considered herself a virtuoso of the abrupt exit. She liked to leave people wanting more.

  Schiller looked disappointed—which was good. She wanted her leaving to be an exclamation mark. She wanted her life to be an exclamation mark.

  She kissed him on the forehead—kissed him directly on a mottled age spot—and got her coat.

  15

  Now that the experience was over, it felt wonderful. She was intoxicated with her own generosity. She felt like a Florence Nightingale of sexual life.

  She was sure that he had loved every minute of their night together. She had no idea that his feelings had been as mixed as hers.

  She walked rapidly downtown. With each step she felt more amazing. She felt perfect, fluent, charmed. It was a nasty day: raw, bitter, grim, gray, grimacing. She didn’t mind it at all. The air was entitled to its rawness; the sky was entitled to be grim. Everything was welcome; everything was entitled to unfold itself. Waiting to cross with the light, she heard bagpipes bleating from a second-story window. The sounds lurched toward her, sought out her ear; the music needed her—to confirm itself, to complete itself, to be.

  She was a giver of life. She gave a dollar to a panhandler, who half-bowed and smiled at her—with a look of ironic recognition, as if the two of them might have been lovers in another life. “Mama,” he said as she passed him, “you’re a poem in the flesh.”

  The air parted to let her by. Manhattan was blessed. She took the subway to Hudson River Park and boarded a ferry to Hoboken; and as the ferry labored across the bucking river she reveled in the stripped stark harshness of the day. Watching the towers of Manhattan tremble in the brooding light, she wanted the skies to crack wide open; she wanted to be assaulted by rain and sleet and hail.

  But the sky didn’t open. By the time she arrived in Hoboken the day had turned warmer and milder, and she was left with a feeling of anticlimax as she stepped onto the pier.

  She stopped at an Italian deli for some groceries, and waited on line behind a bedraggled-looking mother and her son. The boy was making a nuisance of himself, demanding that his mother buy him a pack of Twinkies. In a zombie monotone, he kept repeating, “Roy is a monkey boy; Twinkies and milk for Roy. Roy is a monkey boy; Twinkies and milk for Roy.”

  He was a uniquely unappealing child. As he chanted, he picked his nose with one hand and pawed at his mother’s pocketboo
k with the other.

  “You’ve been asking me for Twinkies all day, and you’re not going to get them,” his mother said. “And if you ask again I’m going to smack you.”

  The child, undeterred, pressed his claim. “Roy is a peepee boy; Twinkies and milk for Roy.” A peepee boy was apparently even more deserving than a monkey boy. Slap him, Heather thought. He needs it. Finally the woman drew her hand back as if to do just that, but then, as if overcome by the understanding that Roy had long ago emerged the victor from their battle of wills and that it would be a pointless gesture to slap him now, she let her hand drop back to her side.

  Wimp, Heather thought. You two deserve each other.

  At home she got under the covers and slept heavily for three hours. When she woke she noticed a curious change. She found it hard to remember the hour she had spent with Schiller on his bed. It was as if it had left no trace.

  She was able to bring back a mental picture of it, but she couldn’t recall it on her senses. The body remembers things in its own way, and her body didn’t remember the experience at all.

  This, when she thought about it, didn’t seem surprising. After all, he hadn’t touched her. When it was happening, when she was in his bed, she was impressed by the way he refrained from touching her: she thought it was the essence of delicacy. And that was true: he couldn’t have been more delicate. But he could have been bolder.

  She started to prepare a bath. She ran her hand experimentally through the stream of water. It was pleasantly warm. She got into the tub, sat down cross-legged under the stream, and turned the hot water knob until the heat was so fierce that it hurt her. Quickly she leaned forward and adjusted it, to make it hotter. The water scalded her arms and her thighs and left them bright red and burning. She leaned forward again to make it hotter.

  16

  During the mornings Heather worked on her thesis. The pages piled up effortlessly. She had decided on a focus for her study: the drama of personal liberation in Schiller’s work. This would allow her to concentrate on what was most alive in his writing; it would give her license to compare him to other writers she loved, other writers whose best work was about breaking away from the dull compulsions of routine; and, though she wasn’t going to write about herself explicitly—this was an academic study, after all—it would give her a way to put her own passions front and center in what she wrote.

  She was at the midpoint of the thesis—she’d written about a hundred pages—when things started to slow down. She’d been moving along at the rate of five pages a day; but now she realized that she’d spent the last two days staring at a single paragraph. She decided to knock off for an hour, and she took a walk around Hoboken in the gorgeous cool day.

  Everything about the day was gorgeous except Hoboken itself. She’d moved here because she’d heard it was a mecca for poor, fledgling artists, but she found it a creepy place. It had the grime of a city but not the excitement; it had the brain-dead aura of the suburbs, but not the green. It reminded her of Dickens’s description of Coketown in Hard Times: “neither city nor country, but either spoiled.” On the weekends college kids from all over Jersey came to party in the bars; at midnight you could see them vomiting into trash cans. In the afternoons big jock high school boys stood across the street from each other chucking footballs. They liked to skim the ball low, just above the heads of passersby.

  The only person she cared for in Hoboken was a dog. When she took her stroll that day she passed him. He was an old, half-blind, dust-colored mutt with a badly scratched nose, as if some alley cat he’d tangled with had gotten the better of him. He was always at his post, just outside a pizza place on Washington Street, lying fatly with his legs splayed out as if he’d decided he’d walked far enough in life. He had a calm, reflective, tolerant demeanor as he watched the passing human show; he seemed like the neighborhood sage. The pizza place was named Benny Tudino’s; Heather didn’t know the dog’s name, but she named him Benny in her mind. She touched his matted flank; he looked at her acceptingly. “Hello, Benny,” she said.

  She returned to her apartment eager to get back to work, but when she sat at her desk the problem was still there.

  It was starting to disturb her. She had a feeling that it wasn’t a literary problem. Maybe it was simply this: that she couldn’t help thinking that something had gone wrong in Schiller’s life.

  She was still puzzled by the way he lived. She knew she never could have lived that way: just sitting at your desk, alone, day after day after day. Is that really the way to nourish your emotions—to nourish your art? Heather had always been a ferocious reader, but she never could have enjoyed a life that consisted only of reading. Part of the joy of reading was talking about what you’d read—in a classroom, in a bar, wherever. She loved solitude, but she also loved being with people, and a life spent entirely in solitude made no sense to her.

  But it wasn’t just his manner of life. What was troubling Heather was that she couldn’t shake the sense that his work had gone dry somehow.

  Of course, Schiller wasn’t the only writer who’d done his best work early in life. She thought of some of the people she’d studied in her American literature classes. Hemingway had faded terribly: by the end of his life he was writing imitations of his early work. You could say something similar about Faulkner, or Sherwood Anderson, or Edith Wharton, or Richard Wright.

  Maybe it’s inevitable. Maybe you only feel things strongly when you’re young.

  That was a scary thought.

  But as she thought about it over the next couple of days, she came to the conclusion that it didn’t have to be true. Certain writers managed to stay fresh, even in old age. Yeats, for instance, grew younger as he grew older: his work grew stronger and more muscular as he aged. George Eliot got steadily better: more intelligent, more original, more daring. D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf may not have gotten better, but they continued to experiment restlessly as long as they lived.

  So you can keep going. You can stay young. There’s no inevitable law of diminishment: everyone who fades fades for his own reasons. Certainly it was easier to peter out than to keep going; certainly the loss of sheer animal vitality must have a great deal to do with it. But there was more to it. There had to be more.

  It was a question, she was aware, that could be applied to any area of life. How many marriages, for example, remained creative, remained interesting to both partners? Probably few. What differentiated the few that remain creative from the many that sink into routine?

  Precisely because she was just getting started in life, these questions seemed urgent to her. She had the sense that her first steps might determine everything to come.

  It wasn’t as if she did nothing in life but think about Schiller. She worked hard during the day, and in the evening she usually explored New York.

  She’d been going to fiction or poetry readings almost every week. It seemed like a good way to meet people, to find her place in the city. That was how she’d met the woman from Bomb. A few days after her night at Schiller’s, she went to a reading in the East Village sponsored by The Village Voice.

  Ever since her junior year of high school, Heather had bought the Voice every week and studied it with a devotion that was part scholarly, part religious. She’d thought of it as a lifeline to sophistication, to freedom, to New York.

  After the reading was over, she went up to the woman who’d introduced the readers. “My name is Heather Wolfe,” she said. “You rejected two of my book reviews.”

  The woman, Sandra Bennett, was in her mid-forties; she was slender, tall, with long black hair and enviable cheekbones. From the podium she’d radiated a sense of calm authority. She had, Heather thought, a certain stateliness—a word she never would have applied to anyone before.

  “Heather Wolfe. I can’t say I remember them. I guess they weren’t very good.”

  Heather was unfazed by this. “I just wanted to tell you I loved the article you wrote last spring about Max’s Kan
sas City. I loved the autobiographical parts the most. I think you should be writing your memoirs.”

  Each word of this was true, and yet it was pure flattery. Heather had only seconds to impress herself on Sandra’s brain, and a few words of well-chosen flattery seemed like the best way to achieve that end.

  Heather was a student of flattery—which is a subtle art. There’s a fine line between effective flattery, which makes some important person feel that you’ve perceptively appreciated his work, and cringing flattery, which makes the person think you’re a groupie—someone to be ignored, or used, but certainly not taken seriously.

  “Thanks, I guess,” Sandra said. “I hope I’m a little young for my memoirs.”

  “But I also thought you weren’t saying everything you knew about Lou Reed. That part could have been better. You kept hinting at something and then not saying it.”

  The criticism was just as calculated as the praise. She wanted to seem independent-minded and shrewd. But again, she was also speaking the truth: there was something off about the way Sandra had written about Lou Reed. It made Heather wonder if Sandra had had an affair with him.

  Sandra looked at her with a skeptical, amused expression, and Heather had the impression that Sandra was bringing her into focus, putting her on file in her memory. She also had the impression that Sandra knew exactly what she was doing with this two-step of praise and critique.

  “Maybe I do remember those reviews,” Sandra said. “You’re a graduate student somewhere, aren’t you?”

  “I was. At Brown. I finished my course work. Now I’m writing my thesis and living here.”

  “The young woman from the provinces, ready to make a name for herself in the city. I love it.” Sandra seemed to be teasing her, but maybe not. It was hard to tell.

  Now that she had Sandra’s attention, she started telling her about her thesis—as usual, she placed her emphasis on the idea that she had a good shot at turning it into a book. Heather couldn’t tell whether Sandra had ever heard of Schiller: when she mentioned his name, Sandra nodded, but in a vague way.